The following thread from @Jess5th on Twitter (otherwise known as Jessica Lifshitz, an American elementary school teacher) is a great example of rich discussion, excellent scaffolding, and critical thinking. Although Jess did not necessarily create this as a “media lesson”, it incorporates several key concepts for media literacy.

• All media are constructions
• The media construct reality
• Audiences negotiate meaning in the media
• Media contain ideological and value messages
• Media have social and political implications

Although Jess uses American examples, the lessons are easily transferrable to a Canadian context.

The Association for Media Literacy would like to thank Jess for allowing us to share her text. We’ve deliberately maintained her message as a series of tweets because of two other key media concepts.

• Form and content are closely related in the media
• Each medium has a unique aesthetic form

If you want to read more from Jess, her blog is https://crawlingoutoftheclassroom.wordpress.com/

How entering into a text with a bias about American history affects our understanding of that text. I began by modeling for my students how I would understand a text about the first Thanksgiving with the bias that American history is a story of people all working together: pic.twitter.com/8Nxj0IhQkw

— Jess (@Jess5th) April 29, 2018

In this first reading, I modeled how I accepted the simplified version I was presented with. Then, we widened our perspective by reading two additional texts from @Tolerance_org that shared a more complex explanation of the relationship between white settlers & Native Americans. pic.twitter.com/eqP278diDw

— Jess (@Jess5th) April 29, 2018

And with this widened perspective, I thought out loud about how these additional texts shifted my bias. So then I went back and modeled reading that original text with a new bias. pic.twitter.com/FiT8pir9Y3

— Jess (@Jess5th) April 29, 2018

Then I asked my students to track their own changes in thinking upon returning to the original text, but now with the additional knowledge gained from the @Tolerance_org texts. Here are some of the things they wrote: pic.twitter.com/qIh62sPT5L

— Jess (@Jess5th) April 29, 2018

This led to a discussion about our responsibility as readers of history to make sure that we are reading multiple perspectives and multiple sources so that we can read critically and express skepticism and question what we are told. pic.twitter.com/omD2LcDW14

— Jess (@Jess5th) April 29, 2018

And today, the kids’ brilliance continued to blow me away. Now that they understand the idea of how our limited perspectives create bias that affects the way we read about and understand history, we shifted our focus to study on the Civil Rights Movement.

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

We started by taking the one figure they have all learned about since they were in Kindergarten, Martin Luther King Jr. I wanted to help them to see how one set of information has been told to them over and over again while other information has been kept hidden.

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

I wanted them to be aware of this before we began our work learning about the Civil Rights Movement. So I had them read this VERY simplified biography of MLK: pic.twitter.com/RElL2xtsfu

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

We talked about how this simplified text matched what they knew about MLK and what they had been taught in the past. And then…

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

I introduced to them excerpts from four other texts that show the much more complex, and angry, human that was Martin Luther King Jr. As we read them together, I asked them to highlight any information that was new or surprising or made them see MLK in a new way.

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

Here were the texts that we looked at: https://t.co/zW707EnRZP

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

After each text, we stopped to talk about how their understanding was changing. And they were, again, amazing! They shared how they now saw that MLK was angry. We talked about how much he had to be angry about. They shared how they were starting to understand that+

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

our own government targeted him and how people saw him as a “dangerous troublemaker.” They shared how they had no idea that he was so unpopular while he was doing the work he became known for. They saw how the media portrayed him in an negative light.

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

And we started to talk about why all of this information was kept from them and they shared so much brilliance about how adults don’t trust kids to know all of the information, especially when it involves anger and mistakes of our country.

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

They talked about how they think adults used MLK’s life to try and tell kids that they should behave and be peaceful and they ended up taking away all the lessons they could have learned about justice and the need to fight against injustice.

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

And they also, so brilliantly, noted that understanding how the media misrepresented MLK can help us to be more aware of how the media can misrepresent people in today’s world who will be seen as heroes in the future.

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

Again, we have so far to go, but I was just BLOWN AWAY by my fifth graders today and how quickly they are willing to rethink all that they thought that they knew. I am so grateful to be a teacher and to have the privilege to do this work.

— Jess (@Jess5th) May 2, 2018

(These ideas can be adapted to both secondary and elementary classrooms – ed.)