"Seventeen, Self-Image, and Stereotypes"

Being a middle school teacher I find that a lot of my students struggle with self-image. Because of this,  I was drawn to the chapter called "Seventeen, Self-Image, and Stereotypes" in the textbook "Rethinking Popular Culture and Media".  
Not only was the information useful to bring to the classroom but the points served as a good reminder to myself too and echoed some of the ideas discussed during class.

This chapter is written by Bakari Chavanu, a former high school English teacher who also had a class in popular culture and media. It describes how he taught a unit on advertising and its effects on the students in the class.

Students are walking advertisements and consumers of media. "They will have seen 350,000 television commercials by the age of 17" (p 22). They are more influenced by popular culture/media than the articles, books, and textbooks we often use to teach them in our classrooms.  Media literacy is important and a great way for students/people to becoming critically literate and critical consumers.  Companies do not want people to think critically about their advertisement in fear of losing consumers of their product.  These ads are obviously still working though or they wouldn't be spending the money they do on making them.

To start the unit he had students made satirical skits using the resource "What's Wrong with Advertising?" which is a fantastic list of things that advertising does in order to convey certain values or ideas that push a narrowed point of view often aligned with S.C.W.A.A.M.P. from earlier in our class. You can see this resource on page 25 of "Rethinking Popular Culture and Media". These values and ideas often perpetuate stereotypes and negatively impact peoples self-image.

Students critiqued commercials by dissecting how they were constructed, analyzed the messages they conveyed, and explored techniques companies use when creating their commercials to help sell their products, similar to the lesson shared with our class on Friday by Brittany Ahnrud.  Students also used magazines to look at advertisements and found it often challenging to differentiate them from the articles themselves.

While many students were reluctant to admit that advertising effects them and their decisions as consumers, "This assignment led one student to do a class reading from her journal about her statistical analysis, which showed that Seventeen lacked the racial diversity found in Vibe, another popular teen magazine." (p 27). Even if the lesson only reaches a few, it is successful.