5. Ontario Curriculum
✤What does the Curriculum
say about Media Literacy?
✤What are the Overall
Expectations?
✤What are your grade’s specific
expectations?
7. “Media literacy” is the result of study of the art and
messaging of various forms of media texts. Media
texts can be understood to include any work,
object, or event that communicates meaning to an audience.
Most media texts use words, graphics, sounds, and/or
images, in print, oral, visual, or electronic form, to
communicate information and ideas to
their audience.
Whereas traditional literacy may be seen to focus primarily on
the understanding of the word, media literacy focuses on the
construction of meaning through the
combination of several media “languages” – images, sounds,
graphics, and words.
8. Media literacy explores the impact and influence of mass
media and popular culture by examining texts such as
films, songs, video games, action figures, advertisements,
CD covers, clothing, billboards, television shows,
magazines, newspapers, photographs, and websites.
These texts abound in our electronic information age, and
the messages they convey, both overt and implied, can
have a significant influence on students’ lives.
For this reason, critical thinking as it applies to media
products and messages assumes a special significance.
9. Understanding how media texts are constructed and
why they are produced enables students to respond to
them intelligently and responsibly.
Students must be able to:
✓differentiate between fact and opinion
✓evaluate the credibility of sources
✓recognize bias
✓be attuned to discriminatory portrayals of
individuals and groups, including women and
minorities
✓question depictions of violence and crime.
10. Overall Expectations
1. demonstrate an understanding of a variety of
media texts;
2. identify some media forms and explain how the
conventions and techniques associated with them
are used to create meaning;
3. create a variety of media texts for different purposes and
audiences, using appropriate forms, conventions, and techniques;
4. reflect on and identify their strengths, areas for improvement,
and the strategies they found most helpful in understanding and
creating media texts.
17. Questions to Guide Children:
Deconstruction
• What is this? How is this text put together?
• What do I see and hear? Smell? Touch or Taste? What do I like
or dislike about this text?
• What do I think and feel about this? What might other people
think and feel about this?
• What does this tell me about how other people like and
believe? Is anything or anyone left out?
• Is this trying to sell me something? Is this trying to tell me
something?
18.
19. 5 Critical Questions for
Constructing Text
• What am I making? How do I put it together?
• What does it look, sound, smell, feel or taste like? What do I like or
dislike about this?
• Who do I want to get this? What might other people think or feel
about this?
• What am I sharing about how people live and believe? Have I left
anything out or anyone out?
• What am I telling? What am I selling?
20. Deepening our Students Thinking:
Expanding Questions
• How might different individuals interpret this message differently?
• What reasons might an individual have for being interested in this
message?
• How have economic decisions influenced the construction of this
message?
• What conventions of storytelling or symbolism are used in this
message?
• Whose point of view is presented?
• How does this message fit in with your life experiences?
21. Essential Questions for
Educators
• Am I trying to tell students what the message is? Or am I giving
students the skills to determine what they think the message(s) might
be?
• Have I let students know that I am open to accept their interpretation,
as long as it is well substantiated, or have I conveyed the message that
only my interpretation is the only correct view?
• At the end of the lesson, are students likely to be more analytical? Or
more cynical?
Faith Rogow, Ph. D
