Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Academic Exchange Quarterly

"Doing Disney" Fosters media literacy in freshmen.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Media-literate citizens understand that cultural productions transmit ideologies and influence private and public life. The Disney assignment sequence uses academic and non-academic sources to engage college freshmen composition students in reading and writing about Disney in order to develop media literacy, helping them become more critical consumers and helping them understand the cognitive dissonance that leads to real learning.

Introduction

Having been avid consumers of media for eighteen years or more, most college freshmen have unconsciously absorbed a worldview which endorses consumerism, validates the most ubiquitous messages of culture, and balks at criticizing the producers of media. Developing an understanding that media productions are ideological and that profit, not social or personal development, is the driving factor behind those productions may help them see that a quite limited range of acceptable emotions, behaviors, and futures are being sold to them in supposedly ideology-free packages.

Developing media literacy in college students also serves my disciplinary goals for freshman composition by reinforcing that writing is inquiry, that writing is a tool for learning and a tool for change. I introduce the students to Kenneth Burke's idea of the parlor, the ongoing conversation. Burke writes

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about.... You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (110-111)

What I want to do is prepare students to join the social construction of our world by becoming media-literate citizens.

Using documentaries and articles, I engage my freshman composition students in critical analysis of Disney films, focusing particularly on images of women and minorities in their most popular animated features. "Doing Disney" while teaching the basic writing strategies of summary, paraphrase, and synthesis allows students to read and write about a topic they already have familiarity and experience with while achieving my larger mission of making students into more critical consumers of the media by helping them see that ideologies inform every public message.

This media literacy project is inspired in part by Henry Giroux's The Mouse that Roared, which recommends examining

how media culture has become a substantial, if not the...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!