Empowerment Spiral
The Empowerment Spiral gives students a way to go about making choices, through Awareness, Analysis, Reflection and Action. Each lesson features steps in the Empowerment Spiral; labeling these steps helps students connect to why they are engaged in a particular activity during the lesson. You will find that each segment of the lesson refers to the skills in the empowerment spiral that are used in that particular segment.
As you use the Empowerment Spiral model and the Five Key Questions, refer to them and label them for students so that a new ―habit of mind‖ starts forming for the class. With practice, students become accustomed to labeling the question(s) as ―# 1‖ or ―# 5‖ as they come across media messages. Studentsmay also learn that before making a choice, being conscious of awareness, analysis or reflection can be beneficial in their decision-making process before taking action (or not).
Lesson Outline for 10 Lessons Activate, Disseminate, Participate!
The goal of this curriculum is to increase awareness of media violence and its negative effects by encouraging students to engage the subject critically using media literacy tools. A basic premise of this curriculum is that, by increasing critical thinking skills, students will begin to make wiser personal choices in terms of their engagement with media.
This curriculum contains ten lessons, each of about one class period (45-55 minutes), providing an exploration of violence and media. Each lesson uses the Empowerment Spiral (see description above) as a foundation for organizing the lesson, so that students acquire skills for gaining awareness, conducting analysis, engaging in reflection and taking action.
The first three lessons provide a background on media and violence and on what the problem for our society is: that media violence has four demonstrated effects on people who engage with it:
Acting aggressively
Being more afraid of the outside world
Being less willing to help someone in trouble
Desiring more and more media violence
The next five lessons provide students with a methodology for critical analysis of media and violence, using the Five Key Questions of Media Literacy as a tool for understanding and analysis. The last two lessons give students a chance to practice using all Five Key Questions during a close analysis of a media clip, as well as a chance to examine their personal media ―diet‖ and choices, and constructing their own message(s) about media and violence.
Download de Educator Guide
Download de Student Guide
Source Educator Guide © 2010 Center for Media Literacy / www.medialit.com 20