Media treasure box: A media literacy workshop for primary school pupils

Abstract

In the current medialized world, it has become of great importance for citizens to know how to deal with the media accordingly. Understanding and having a critical attitude towards the media content that we “consume” and being able to work with media devices and platforms has become as important as learning to read and write. Sound and Vision, thé institute of media in the Netherlands therefore wants to offer a product for children in group 7/8 (Dutch education system, age 10-12) that can be used in the classroom, to make them more media literate. My context mapping research with several groups of children throughout the Netherlands, showed that children use many different media devices and are very active on social media. They are competent in accessing information and creating their own media content. Among these children, YouTube is the most popular platform on which countless hours of influencer videos are watched. However, children are very influenceable in this stage of their lives and take the information provided by the influencers often as the truth. The children have too little analytical skills and have to improve their ‘analyze’ competence: understanding a media message through textual and contextual analysis. Additionally, interviews with several teachers gave insights in appropriate teaching methods for this age group and in this context. In group 7/8, children learn best by doing and experimenting. They prefer to work together and with theme that is connected to their personal life. Based on these insights, the workshop ‘de media schatkist’ was designed. The workshop’s learning objective is ‘critical examination and viewing comprehension’. The children will take a better look at media content and think about missing or misleading information. In the workshop examples of earlier and recent influencer advertisement videos are used. These videos are short and easy to compare for the children because they always contain the same elements and structure. The elements serve as subthemes in the workshop: the setting, the sound and the actor in the advertisement. The children discover these themes in three parts. The first part contains analytical questions about the original audiovisual content from the Sound and Vision archive. In the second part, they discover the effects of content alteration of the original content. In the last part, the children are invited and supported to create media content themselves and to create a visual story. In the museum of Sound and Vision, the visitors are taken into a media world with all kinds of installations. To also bring this experience to the school, the classroom will be transformed into several small media environments. The children will receive boxes that through opening will create the environment, see figure 1. In the boxes, the children find products and attributes for their playfull active and coorperative media production assignment. Every theme has its own environment: a film set, a sound studio and the actors dressing room