As was noted in Module 2 on formulating a justification for media literacy, one of the reasons for the marginalization of film/media in the language arts curriculum is that the overall curriculum is often defined in terms of separate components of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing, with priority given on reading and writing instruction given the emphasis on high-stakes reading and writing testing. "Viewing" is also perceived to be lacking intellectual or cognitive rigor associated with analysis of or production of print texts. However, as was argued in Module 2, the nature of the types of texts being analyzed - whether they are print or non-print, does not necessarily mean that such analysis is any less intellectual or cognitive rigorous.

This suggests the need for an alternative curriculum framework that is organized around helping students learn to acquire interpretative strategies employed in responding to and producing both print and non-print texts. Framing the curriculum according to interpretative strategies serves to integrate media texts into the curriculum as requiring the same types of strategies and approaches applied to literary texts. It also assumes the strategies involved in learning to interpret texts are employed in producing those texts. Learning to analyze the ways in which a text positions audiences is also involved in producing texts for those audiences.

This module describes this curriculum design approach in which you think about defining activities around helping students acquire both interpretive strategies for responding to and critiquing media texts and producing strategies for constructing media texts. It uses the example of studying the relationships between literature and film adaptations of literature to illustrate the use of these different interpretive strategies. The module therefore first presents some material on studying film adaptations of literature and theater as background to consider the use of different interpretive strategies.

Framing the curriculum according to interpretative strategies serves to define the goals and learning objectives related to what students should learn to do in understanding and producing texts. As discussed at the end of this module, they are then evaluated in terms of criteria specific to each of the interpretive strategies and critical approaches.

This focus on organizing the curriculum around strategies is consistent with media literacy curriculum development throughout the world. For example, the Atlantic Provinces Education Foundation of the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, in their “Foundation for English Language Arts for the Atlantic Provinces” blueprint for English Language Arts education formulate three basic strands associated with media education:

• Visual Literacy is the ability to understand and interpret the representation and symbolism of a static or moving visual image - how the meanings of the images are organized and constructed to make meaning - and to understand their impact on viewers.

• Media Literacy is the ability to understand how mass media, such as TV, film, radio and magazines, work, produce meanings, and are organized and used wisely.

• Critical Literacy is the ability to understand how all speakers, writers, and producers of visual texts are situated in particular contexts with significant personal, social and cultural aspects.

This blueprint posits that notions of literacy have changed in recent decades:

what it means to be literate will continue to change as visual and electronic media become more and more dominant as forms of expression and communication. As recently as one hundred years ago, literacy meant the ability to recall and recite from familiar texts and to write signatures. Even twenty years ago, definitions of literacy were linked almost exclusively to print materials. The vast spread of technology and media has broadened our concept of literacy. To participate fully in today's society and function competently in the workplace, students need to read and use a range of texts (p. 1).

For other Canadian media literacy curriculum:

Ontario media literacy curriculum [ by grade level ]

British Columbia: Film and Television [ Grades 11/12 ]

Britain has placed considerable emphasis on media education in the past decade, leading to the development of nation-wide Advanced Level examinations in media studies, film studies, and communication studies. All students are required to demonstrate proficiency in analysis of a media text.

The British curriculum [ Roy Stafford (2001) ] is organized around certain concepts of "media language" - properties of texts, "genre," "representation," "institution" (control/ownership of production), and "audience." This leads to questions such as the following:

• How is the meaning produced?

• How might the text be classified as a genre?

• What kinds of representation are found in the text?

• Who produced the text and for whar purpose?

• How might different audiences understand and respond to the text?

• What kinds of skills and understanding are required to produce such a text?

In attempting to formulate a media literary curriculum, Renee Hobbs of Temple University, who has worked on developing the Maryland media literacy curriculum, as well as the "Viewing and Representing" media literacy curriculum for Texas, notes that any media literacy curriculum needs to involve use of reading and critical thinking strategies involved in responding to a range of media texts (Hobbs, 2003).

Technology integration. It is also important to envision any curriculum as involving the understanding and use of new digital technology tools in all areas of the curriculum. By engaging students in uses of analysis of digital texts and producing those texts in math, science, social studies, English, second language, arts, and physical education, students are acquiring essential skills through the use of technology tools.

Technology itself poses a major challenge to traditional school curriculum. Because students now have ready access to a range of digital texts in contexts outside of the classroom, raising questions about the need for teachers to incorporate and integrate these experiences into their curriculum. What you can add to these outside-of-school experiences is a critical perspective that serves to raise critical questions about the perspectives, biases, value assumptions, representations, discourses, and ideological agendas operating in these digital texts.

In the introduction to their book on this topic, Digital Expressions: Media Literacy and English Language Arts, Barrie Barrell and Roberta Hammett argues that digital technologies have also integrated media, necessitating a curriculum focus on uses of and production of media technology as no longer a traditional add-on training topic, but as a tool that serves to help students mediate, construct, create, and create knowledge through the uses of media technology tools:

As analogue technologies lose ground to digital newcomers, the computer monitor and the television screen become one and same, and films and television programs, like music, exist as comfortably on the computer network as in other technologies. Thus, the hypereality of the television and the virtual reality of the computer are blended as seamlessly as Internet and media cultures. The tools of cultural studies, supplementing Internet Computer Technology and traditional English classroom practices, become the necessary mans of critical of the multiple and varied texts surrounding young people in the 21st century. (p. 17)

David Jonasson argues that learning to use technology tools — what he describes as "mindtools" — should become central to learning how to solve problems and construct knowledge.

Books on the topic of "mindtools":

Dikhstra, S., Jonassen, D., & Sembill, D. (2001). Multimedia learning: Results and perspectives. New York: Peter Lang

Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Moore, J., & Marra, R. (2002). Learning to solve problems with technology: A constructivist perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Jonassen, D., & Stollenwerk, D., (2000). Computers as mindtools for schools : Engaging critical thinking. New York: Pearson.

The Media Workshop

The Integration of Technology Across the Middle School Curriculum

For further reading on curriculum integration of media:

Adans, D. M., & Hamm, M. (2000). Media and literacy: Learning in an electronic Age—Issues, ideas, and teaching strategies. New York: Charles C Thomas.

Alvermann, D. (Ed.). (2002). Adolescents and literacies in a digital world. New York: Peter Lang.

Alvermann, D., Moon, J.S., & Hagood, M.C. (1999). Popular Culture in the Classroom: Teaching and Researching Critical Media Literacy. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Barrell, B. R. C., Hammett, R. F., Mayher, J. S., &. Pradl, G. M. (Eds.). (2003). New traditions in subject English: Cross border perspectives. New York: Teachers College Press.

Barrell, B. R.C. (Ed). (2001). Technology, teaching and learning: Issues in the integration of technology. Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Ltd. (324 pages).

Brunner, C., & Talley, W. (1999). The new media literacy handbook: An educator’s guide to bringing new media into the classroom. New York: Anchor Books.

Buckingham, D. (2003). Media Education: Literacy, Learning, and Contemporary Culture. London: Polity Press.

Buckingham, D., & Sefton-Green, J. (1995). Cultural studies goes to school: Reading and teaching popular media. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis.

Considine, D., & Haley, G. E. (1999). Visual messages: Integrating imagery into instruction: A teacher resource for media and visual literacy. Boulder, CO: Teacher Ideas Press.

Doggett, S., & Montgomery, P. K. (2000). Beyond the book: Technology integration into the secondary school library media curriculum. New York: Libraries Unlimited.

Farmer, L. S. J. (2001). Teaming with opportunity: Media programs, Community constituencies, and technology. New York: Libraries Unlimited.

Fleming, D. (2002). Media Teaching. London: Blackwell Publishers.

Goodwyn, A. (2003). English teaching and the moving image. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis.

Hammett, R. F. & Barrell, B.R.C (Eds). (2002). Digital expressions, Cultural studies and technology. Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Ltd.

Hart, A., & Hicks. A. (2002). Teaching media in the English curriculum. New York: Stylus Publishing.

Kooy, M., Jansen, T., & Watson, K. (Eds.). (1999). Fiction, literature and media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Krueger, E., & Christel, M. (2001). Seeing and believing: How to teach media literacy in the English classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Kubey, R. (Ed.). (2001). Media literacy in the information age: Current perspectives. New York: Transaction Publishers.

Loizeau, E. B., & Fraistat, N. (2002). Reimagning textuality: Textual studies in the late age of print. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Mackay, M. (2002). Literacies across Media: Playing the Text. London: Routledge, 2002.

Mayer, R. (2001). Multimedia learning. Cambridge University Press.

Pailliotet, A., & Mosenthal, P. (Eds.) (2000). Reconceptualizing Literacy in the Media Age. New York: JAI Press.

Richards, J. C., & McKenna, M. C. (Eds.). (2003). Integrating multiple literacies in K-8 classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Ross, J. M. (2001). The groovy little youth media sourcebook: Strategies and techniques from the ListenUp Network. New York: Listen Up!

Semali, L. (2002). Transmediation in the classroom: A semiotics-based media literacy framework. New York: Peter Lang.

Semali, L., Kincheloe, J. L., Steinberg, S. R. (Eds.). (2001). Literacy in multimedia America: Integrating media across the curriculum. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, Inc.

Tyner, K. (1998). Literacy in a digital world: Teaching and learning in the age of information. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Unsworth, L. (2001). Teaching multiliteracies across the curriculum: Changing contexts of text and image in classroom practice. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis.

Module 12: Word document

Drawing on Existing Media Studies Curriculum

Studying Film Adaptations of Literature and Theater

Different Modes of Adaptation

Interpretive Strategies for Organizing Curriculum

Comparing Differences in Experience of Different Reading and Viewing Modes

Defining Narrative Development

Interpreting Characters’ Actions, Beliefs, Agendas, Goals

Contextualizing Texts in Terms of Cultural and Historical Worlds

Defining Intertextual / Hypertextual Connections Between Texts

Adopting Alternative Voices and Discourses

Judging Quality of Literary and Media Texts

Designing Units

Techniques for Developing Units

Evaluation and Assessment of Learning

References

Ideas for Integrating Media into English/Literature Instruction