When the computer revolution hit the classroom, "media literacy" seemed to mean teaching our students how to use the technology, then it evolved into more emphasis on how to integrate technology into the curriculum. Now we need to provide our students with tools for reading media language and images as critically as they read a poem, an essay, or a novel. Children are learning on their own, at increasingly early ages, how to manipulate all kinds of technology. Now the more pressing issue is to teach our students how to keep technology in all kinds of media from manipulating them.

We live in a world in which sound bites and visual images communicate information and ideas. Visual images bombard us in staggering numbers throughout our waking hours. In Killing Us Softly 3 (2000), Jean Kilbourne estimated that we see 3,000 ads every day and that we will spend an average of three years of our lives watching television commercials. Kilbourne wasn't even looking at the innumerable pop-up ads we encounter every time we go on-line today. With some notable exceptions, however, the academic world has not yet embraced the idea that we have a whole new discipline out there that we all must learn and we all must teach, not just in one department or to one age group, but across the curriculum.

My interest in media literacy began during a trimester course on the nature and uses of language. Starting with the foundation of Hayakawa's theories about classification and naming, the course explores how various kinds of classification systems shape our experiences and perceptions of all the information we encounter in the world around us. The surprise to me, in working with very bright and experientially sophisticated students, was discovering that they had almost no conscious awareness of propaganda techniques and bias in language, but seemed totally confident that they themselves were immune to such effects. Perhaps what is worse, they offered the idea that less educated and less sophisticated people might be vulnerable to such tactics, but assumed that the educated were not. As I looked for ways to break through their complacency, they showed me that they were just as susceptible as any other demographic group in how they absorb advertising and other visual media, but that they were educable. I also ran into Bob McCannon, who had recently launched the New Mexico Media Literacy Program at Albuquerque Academy, so I found a place to start looking for how to pursue media issues in my curriculum.

The good news is that it is not really all that difficult to figure out how to teach students to deconstruct visual language, and the better news is that there are some wonderful resources available to help us, as well as our students, learn how to do it. The best news is that once we turn to hands-on exercises in which our students go out into their worlds and discover the examples and evidence for themselves, their initial resistance disappears, and enthusiasm escalates. I learned in attending a media conference at Albuquerque Academy that this is definitely a cross-disciplinary issue; I saw outstanding presentations not only in English and history, but also in science, and for all age groups of students. The message was clear: acquiring methods for resisting the incessant consumerism pounding at us is not enough; we need to provide our students with a whole toolkit for ideological self-defense.

Teens become most interested when they realize that ads sell more than products: ads sell promises, with ideas and values as a subtext. Since teens dislike being manipulated, they also realize quickly that, along with the designer label or the beverage, the ads are sending them messages about how they should look and act, even who they are supposed to be. They notice immediately that sex is a sales gimmick for any kind of product and that right along with the sales power of sex come the images of appearances and behaviors that define what it means to be male (powerful and dominant) and female (seductive and submissive). If any are still resisting the concept at that point, the girls in the class will typically ignite fiery discussions that make it nearly impossible for the boys to continue to resist the concepts. Lest boys feel neglected, the Jackson Katz video Tough Guise (1999) will be an eye opener for them as well as for the girls.

Though the task of figuring out how to find and bring these ideas into the classroom may seem daunting, numerous resources are available. Materials are out there, in various price ranges, targeted toward age groups from pre-K through 12. Once you begin looking at the resources, you are going to find it even more exciting to create exercises suitable to your own classes and age groups. You will be surprised at how much you can achieve with just a few deceptively simple assignments. The discussions generated will take you and your students into much deeper considerations.

Currently, five or six of us teach Nature and Uses of Language; although none of us does the media literacy component in exactly the same way, we all find lively interest and positive responses from our students. In the remainder of this article I will provide suggestions for some ways to get started, some resources available on-line and in VHS/DVD format, and some descriptions of exercises that have worked for me.

Start with helping your students see that ads sell promises and ideas. As Bill Bryson noted, the modern discovery that anxiety sells products was a world-changing moment: make people feel insecure about themselves, and then offer them the product that will correct the problem (427). It still works - watch prime-time television on any commercial channel, and look at the ads in popular magazines. Ads present problems, with products as the solutions. The nature of the problems and solutions, though, also sells a message of expectations and norms.

Look at the ads in any of the magazines that come into your home. What kinds of images of people of color do you find? In what context? Look for messages about masculine and feminine roles. Which are the most prominently displayed in groups of people, males or females? One of my students discovered in a teen soccer magazine that all the male players were close to the camera and involved in vigorous action--moving the ball, kicking goals. Players in stories about females seemed smaller because they were further from the camera, and they were often running while looking back over their shoulders--the classic image of a woman trying to escape something threatening. Nowhere in the magazine were these two patterns ever reversed.

When we look at television ads, what are the expectations? Impossibly clean houses, impossibly appealing food sans calories or carbs, impossibly thin (female) or buff (male) bodies. Men don't produce shiny floors, dust-free furniture, or remedies for what is causing pain or weakness for anyone--unless it's the man featured in the ad. When is the last time you saw a commercial with a father up at night giving a fever-reducing product to a sick toddler? Women do all these things. On the rare occasions that Dad is feeding the kids, it's more likely to be cereal or fast food, and it's fun. The message? Men play and have fun and take their kids out to eat. Soccer moms figure out how to provide a "home-cooked" meal, even if it requires help from a packaged product from the supermarket.

More insidious are the ads that appeal to images of sexuality - seductive women who are anorexically thin; seductive men who are buff and powerful. Magazines feature a remarkable number of ads for alcohol with images of buff young men surrounded by luscious young women who can't seem to keep their hands off the guys. On the other hand, on TV commercials, the guy chooses the beer over the girl. Think about the messages about the consumption of alcohol here, as well as the images of power, dominance, and exploitation in male-female relationships. Follow the plot lines in the sit-coms that are teen favorites and ask yourself: how many times are the characters involved in sexual relationships? Is there ever any message of STDs? In a country in which teens represent the population group with the fastest growing rate of HIV Aids, what are the ads and the shows teaching young people about sexual behaviors?

The great thing about all this is that you don't have to preach. Just ask questions, and send your students out to find the ads, the commercials, the shows, the movies, for themselves, and they'll tell you. Ask them what makes them watch a particular show, what makes them buy a particular product, what message goes with the show and the product. Send them to look at toy ads in Sunday papers and to cruise toy aisles at Target, Walmart, Toys R Us. They'll come back bubbling about the pink aisle and the action figure aisle, and some will wonder why the images of females are so different in the two places. It won't be a long step from there to asking them how we're educating our children about what to be when they grow up.

Television news is a real eye-opener of the impact of media on how we perceive our world. Ask your students to watch 30 minutes of local, prime time television news. Have them keep a running log of the subjects of the stories, the pictures that go with them, the length of each one, the sequencing of the stories, what is said to keep the viewers from changing the channel during commercials, and the actual order of stories following the commercials. Meanwhile, find a copy of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, and look especially at the chapter entitled "Now... This." This was written twenty years ago, but your students will find evidence that almost nothing has changed since then. Assign them to ask the same questions about national news and CNN, and then have them listen to half an hour of Public Radio news. They'll launch a lively discussion of how boring the radio is, because it doesn't have pictures... and once they realize they've just confirmed Postman's thesis, you'll have eager explorers in your classes.

Though some will continue to resist the message, most of my students tell me that they will never read ads or watch television as entertainment or news or accept information on-line again without seeing how they're being manipulated. Although some of them express a sense of regret for lost innocence, most feel liberated and empowered by what they've learned, and they keep bringing me ads and clippings long after the course is over.

The long-term importance of media literacy studies goes beyond what we buy, the impact on our health, even the prisons some of those messages create for us in selling us social roles. In the 2000 election year, Congress was asked to pass a bill requiring that television provide five minutes daily coverage of issues in the presidential campaign. The bill didn't pass. The media countered with the argument that if they gave away air time they'd lose too much money on political commercials. That same year, a shocking number of people admitted that they were getting most of their election campaign news from late night talk shows - Jay Leno's opening monologues, for instance.

It used to be said that, in a democracy, people get the government they deserve. In our "democracy," it seems that we get the government that has the best ad campaign. We realized years ago that the times demand that we provide our students with skills at complex problem-solving. We can no longer send them out ill equipped to resist the ideas their media sell them every day in every conceivable format. It is not an entertainment industry or an information superhighway out there: it is one big visual advertising campaign. It is time for us as educators to find ways to help our students realize how it works.

Works Cited:
Bryson, Bill. "The Hard Sell: Advertising in America." In Language Awareness, ed. by Paul Eschholz et.al. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005, pp. 423-435. From Bryson's Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (1994).

Hayakawa, S.I. and Hayakawa, Alan R. "Giving Things Names." In Language Awareness, ed. by Paul Eschholz et.al. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005, pp. 611-617.

Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising's Images of Women. Dir. Sut Jhally. Featuring Jean Kilbourne. Videocassette/DVD. Media Education Foundation, 2000.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Penguin Group USA, 1986.

Tough Guise. Dir. Sut Jhally. Featuring Jackson Katz. Videocassette/DVD. Media Education Foundation, 1999.

Recommended starting place websites for resources:
Media Education Foundation-- This site has a wide range of products in VHS and DVD, and they offer free previews.
New Mexico Media Literacy Program -- These are the pioneers, and New Mexico is definitely the enlightened state in this field. Though I would ordinarily not provide free advertising for programs, I can testify first hand to the quality and value of their annual conferences and training programs at Albuquerque Academy and in Taos.

Barbara Graves is a member of the Upper School Faculty at Greenhill School, Addison, Texas, where she has taught sophomores, juniors, and seniors in a variety of courses in English, History, and Integrated Studies for 25 years.

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