Artifact # 3
This is a project that I did in a group where we found how Media influenced students at Mabel Elementary School.
Context:
The purpose of the media and literacy ethnography project was to determine how media influenced and affected elementary students. I was in a group with two other interns and we took a poll with the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th graders on what their favorite tennis shoes were, the book bags the kids wore and the types of lunch boxes and foods that they ate. We then presented our results through a power point presentation using Microsoft Office. We took pictures using a digital camera to represent how media is used in the school. We used Adobe Photoshop to crop the pictures to size and place them on our power point slides.
Impact:
The ethnography project made me realize how much media influenced children’s lives and how much commercialism is displayed in schools. This project has made me aware of the pressure that I have as a teacher to make sure that my students are not ridiculed for not wearing the “popular” attire. I found that media in the classroom can really affect a child’s self-esteem.
Alignment:
The media ethnography project was a combination of surveying students in order to collect our data for our project, taking pictures to prove if our question was correct and communicating with the students to see how they feel about how media is represented and if it affects their own lives (Tech. Comp. IV B). The ethnography project was a reflection of how we saw media being represented in Mabel Elementary School (Tech. Comp. V B). By presenting a power point presentation to my class and after the project was completed placing it on the Internet allows for the rest of my class and other teachers to be aware of the influence media has on children at school (Tech. Comp. V D). When putting our project together, my group made sure that we took pictures of other brands of shoes and book bags and not just the most popular brands in order to make sure every child felt special and not ashamed of what they had. We also made sure that when we were making our slides for our power point presentation that we also included the articles that were not name brand to promote the positive and negative sides of media (Tech. Comp.VI D).
The media ethnography project has made me become
aware of the media issues in the schools and the major impact it has on
the students. As a teacher, I want to obtain a relationship with
my colleagues, parents and the community to promote more equality in the
schools in order to support my students’ learning and well-being in the
classroom. (INTASC 10).