Design by David Shulman and Photos by Vanessa Schneider EIGHTH GRADERS at the Boynton Middle School (clockwise from front left) Phillip DeVries, Tyler Helman, Quenna Stewart and Zahra Exantus discuss films of the presidential candidates from the conventions in 2000. The students are learning to decode media messages.

As Cindy Kramer weaved through desks during her fourth period social studies class, students fidgeted back and forth in their plastic chairs.

“Why would you want to ‘look sharp’ at media?” she asked, glancing around at the faces now focused on her.

“Because they can trick you,” said a thin male voice from the corner.

“They lie,” said one girl firmly.

“They’re showing a message,” said another girl in skater shoes.

On this rainy Monday morning eight days before the election, eighth graders at the Boynton Middle School were studying the last presidential election. Using a video by Project Look Sharp, a media literacy initiative at Ithaca College, Kramer played the biographical movies of the presidential candidates that were shown at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 2000.

“What does the message say?” Kramer said.

“He’s a hardworking man,” said a blond, shaggy-haired boy, about George W. Bush. “He can relate to you.”

“It seems like he had this magnificent life,” said another boy in a red track jacket, referring to Al Gore. “To me, it was kind of fairytale-ish.”

Since 1996, Project Look Sharp has taught media literacy—the ability to analyze, critically evaluate and produce media—to teachers in classrooms at all grade levels. The group provides curriculum-based strategies not only to educators in the Ithaca City School District, but also to schools throughout the state.

Cyndy Scheibe, associate professor of psychology and the executive director of Project Look Sharp, said the United States is behind on its media literacy education. Canada, England and Australia have been teaching media literacy as part of public education for nearly 30 years.

Scheibe said media literacy skills should be taught in preschool along with reading and writing fundamentals.

“We pretty much think there is a place for media literacy everywhere,” she said.

The group designs media literacy lessons and then shows teachers how those lessons can be used as supplementary material in classes like English and history.

“It’s not so much about teaching media literacy as a content area,” she said. “It’s using media literacy as an approach to teaching.”

Chris Sperry, director of curriculum and staff development for Project Look Sharp, graduated from Ithaca College in 1979 with his own self-designed major in media literacy. He now teaches media studies and social studies at Ithaca’s Alternative Community School.

Sperry said there are good classes centered on media literacy in schools across the country. But just as skills like reading and writing are reinforced throughout students’ educations, media literacy should be too.

“It’s such a deep component of how we understand the world that it needs to be consistently applied across the curriculum,” he said.

Every summer, the group runs a five-day institute for about 15 teachers, librarians and administrators from across the state.

At the end of the week, after learning media literacy theory and practice, educators develop a plan for a Media Literacy Integration Project. Past projects included how to teach third graders about Africa and how to teach the idea of “hero” to fifth graders. Throughout the following school year, Project Look Sharp mentors the educators on their projects.

Earlier this month, Project Look Sharp released a 430-page “Media Construction of Presidential Campaigns” kit. There are 146 text, image and audio documents used to decode media messages from 26 of the 42 presidential elections in U.S. history. There’s also an audio CD with music, a DVD, worksheets and a PowerPoint CD.

The kit covers campaigns from the early 1800s, when newspaper editorials attacked Thomas Jefferson for being an atheist, to the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush and Al Gore appeared on “Saturday Night Live.”

Before creating the presidential campaign kit, Project Look Sharp created the “Media Construction of War” kit that looks at media coverage during the Vietnam War, Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan.

When work on the kit ended in December 2003, several interested teachers asked for copies. By the end of June, before the group even advertised the kit, Project Look Sharp had already sold about 50.

Sperry, author of the war kit, said that after using the material in his classes, he saw students apply critical questions to coverage of the war in Iraq.

When Sperry gave a series of media literacy presentations to Ithaca College professors and classes in the spring, he also asked them to analyze media coverage of the Iraq war. He said the Ithaca College classes could not decode the information as effectively as the high school students who had discussed media literacy in their classes.

“It’s not that these 10th grade kids are smarter, or more sophisticated, or even more critical thinkers, but that this work can train students to ask reflectively and immediately a series of key questions about any media coverage,” Sperry said.

Sofia Keokosky, a 16-year-old senior, and Audrey Gray, a 16-year-old junior, attend the Alternative Community School. Sperry used the war kit in their Facing History of Ourselves class last spring.

Keokosky, with a curly brown ponytail and lively voice, said the most shocking images in the kit, like the well-known image of the naked Vietnamese girl running down the street, were extremely memorable.

Students in Keokosky’s class discussed how images like that of the Vietnamese girl could be used to influence people’s perceptions of the war.

An equally perceptive Gray, sitting Indian style in loose pants, remembered a magazine with a Gulf War pullout poster that showed state-of-the-art missiles. She said the class talked about how war was advertised like a toy collection.

“And now you can own all five!” Gray said like a commercial announcer.

Keokosky said that these days, instead of a lack of information, there’s just too much.

“Because we’re in such a communication, information-rich age, it’s kind of sad that you need this sort of education,” she said. “You need some way to filter it.”