This article originally appeared in the January-February 1997 Children's Advocate newsmagazine, published by Action Alliance for Children.

Students as Media Critics

By Jean Tepperman

Educators can help students become more aware of the ways media violence affects us by showing them how to develop skills in observing and evaluating media conflict, "critical viewing" skills. Teachers can work in the classroom with videotapes or assign projects in which students monitor and observe TV coverage. In all these activities, students can use concepts and strategies they learn in conflict-resolution programs; these levels of learning reinforce each other. Some examples:

Clips in the classroom

1. What's missing?: In one lesson of the Beyond Blame curriculum, students watch a video showing several quick, violent scenes: a five-car pileup, two shootings, one man beating up another, etc. None of the scenes show any negative consequences of the violence. After students watch the tape, a series of questions leads them to think about the real consequences the scenes didn't show. Questions include: Who will be sad? Who will pay for the damage? Who will have to go to the hospital? How will this affect their families? Who will be scared to go outside? and If someone dies, who will attend the funeral?

2. Words to fists: Another Beyond Blame movie clip shows escalation from name-calling to fistfight. Questions ask students to identify the steps of escalating conflict: teasing, insults, moving closer, smearing an ice cream cone on the victim's face, etc. Students could then use those techniques to analyze other conflicts they find on TV or in the movies.

3. Selling fear: A current TV ad shows a woman stranded in a broken car by a highway at night. The voice-over describes her growing fears of attack by a passerby. At last we see and hear a man's shoes walking toward her car. The ad is designed to sell car phones, but viewers easily recognize that it's also designed to increase fear. Teenager viewers, reports Rachel Levin, are especially interested to learn that this ad appears with the show Highway Patrol and to discuss the relationship of programming to advertising. Follow-up assignments could have students identify other ads with "mean world" messages.

4. Violence without contact: Violence-prevention expert Deborah Prothrow-Stith speaks about the connection between increasing violence and the growth of a general "culture of meanness." Watching tapes of shows like Married with Children allows students to identify the verbal violence (put-downs, name-calling, power plays, etc.) that feeds physical violence.

5. Finding alternatives: Educators can use any scene of escalating conflict to heighten awareness of alternatives to violence. Students can identify crucial points where the conflict escalated and discuss or role-play alternative actions people could have taken -- not only the direct participants in the conflict, but bystanders as well. To explore stereotypes in media conflict, viewers could try role-playing the conflict but changing the ethnicity or gender of the people involved.

Observing TV

1. Role model encyclopedia: This exercise, from the Beyond Blame curriculum, can be used to analyze a single show or a period of TV watching over time. A simple chart lists groups (men, women, African Americans, Caucasians, Hispanics, etc) then asks the viewer to record the number of times they appear, what they are doing, and what attitudes they express. In discussing the results, viewers examine group stereotypes and their effects.

2. Tracking the news: Viewers can track news shows, recording, for example, the number of stories including violence and the number of times the show starts with a violent story ("If it bleeds, it leads.") The role-model encyclopedia can also be modified for use in news shows. African Americans and Latinos, for example, often charge that TV news about their neighborhoods concentrates on crime and violence.

3. Real heroes vs. media heroes: The Beyond Blame curriculum asks students to contrast specific violent heroes in the medida with heroes in their daily lives. Questions guide students to contrast media heroes' and real heroes' jobs, daily activities, wealth, ethnicity, and violent actions.

4. Family TV diet: Students with their families could follow the steps outlined in Milton Chen's Smart Parents Guide to TV Violence: recording family viewing habits and making decisions together about family TV rules.