Reading and Writing for Social Justice: Looking Through a Lens of Justice and Fairness 5

My mom is a professor at Brooklyn College and she teaches students to analyze, break down and think deeply about different types of media literacy such as television, advertisements, internet articles, videos, social media, conversations, and so much more, and I think that this is affecting the world every day. I interviewed her about some of the types of things that she does in her classes:

“What kinds of activities do you do in your classes?”

“We have discussions and sometimes they work in small groups when we do workshop days. Workshop days are when groups work to come up with a research question about whatever topic it is in that class, and gather data to answer the question and support their reasoning. Also, they sometimes do some role play, in which they pretend they are illiterate and can only communicate through talking and hearing.”

“Why do you do these activities? What do they help the students to learn?”

“Having them do these activities puts more responsibility on them for their learning, and it helps them to learn how to gather research and break down media without having me tell them how to do it.”

“What kinds of assignments are your students given? How to do they connect to the activities that you do in class?”

“They do media analysis assignments and they do media research projects, which includes contact analysis, survey analysis, and focus group analysis. These assignments are the culmination of what they learn in the classroom.”

I think that what my mom does affects the world every day because media literacy such as television, the internet, phones, and electronic advertising are such a huge part of this time and by teaching students to analyze and think deeply on what the website, organization, show, song, advertisement, or video is trying to really say, and what is put into it to make it more desirable to the public, is really important. It makes them smarter and more sensible about what they find on the internet, or what they see generally on a screen in their everyday lives, and I think it is important for people to really understand what they are looking at. Overall, what my mom does is really important and affects the world everyday because it allows people to become smarter about modern media.