Media

Section 5 - Possible Approaches

This section consists of some examples of production work, from my own teaching and that of my colleagues in Parkside Community College, Cambridge. Students might like to consider:

How they fit into the definitions of media education and media literacy explored elsewhere in this website

What kinds of process have produced these products

What kinds of written commentary might accompany them

How they might evaluate or assess them?

Whether they might consider this kind of work in their own practice; what would the advantages and disadvantages be?

1. Super-hero comicstrip by a Year 8 girl and a Year 8 boy. The task here was to analyse super-hero comics, and design their own front-page.
   
2. Dubble advert. The task was to analyse adverts for chocolate, and produce their own advert for a Fair Trade chocolate bar, Dubble. This project is developed in detail as a resource in the English & Media Centre’s Key Stage 4 media pack.
   
3. Ride - pop video. The task was to write a school song, or college anthem, and to make the video to go with it. These students are in Year 10.
   
4. Bilingual poems - these two poem-videos are by Year 11 girls in an English GCSE class. The interesting feature of this work is that, while it is clearly a form of media production, involving filming and editing, it is not a traditional media production activity, but more rooted in the English, and specifically literature, curriculum. An accompanying article on the moving image in English can be found in English in Education (Burn, A (2003) ‘Two Tongues Occupy my Mouth - poetry, performance and the moving image’, English in Education, Vol. 37, No. 3, Autumn 2003, pp 41-50).