(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
knowledge as image-makers, and contribute their diverse perspectives in the school community
setting at the precise point in time that the 2010 Winter Olympics unfolded in their own locality.
Media Education Case Study: The Vancouver Olympics as a Teachable Moment for
Vancouver Youth
In the context of such a unique and extraordinary moment as the Vancouver 2010 Winter
Olympics, a special opportunity presents itself for schools and students to take part in a global
media event as an immersive learning experience. As an independent scholar and media
educator, I was fortunate on this occasion to be able to collaborate with a curious and
opinionated Grade 8 class of 13-year old teens and their Socials Studies teacher, as well as their
student teacher. I designed the curriculum to parallel their study of historic social issues with
present-day social issues surrounding the Olympic Games. The teacher and student teacher were
valuable in helping to bridge that content and act as additional instructors while I took the role as
lead facilitator for the media education project. The project took place during the same period on
alternating days over the span of approximately one month. In this section I will describe the
project implementation, process, and parameters.
To begin, I conducted a series of capacity-building workshops to enhance the students’ existing
skills in critical thinking, media literacy, and production theory. Starting with their experiences,
we discussed their roles in the media-saturated landscape – specifically, the nature of their
participation in accessing, using, making, editing, sharing, and judging media texts. With my
guidance, we established a collective definition of ‘media literacy’ as our anchor point through
the entire project – a definition that takes into account the value of production and analysis.
There are two aspects to this definition: (1) To understand the complexity of, and question the
nature of, our relationship to the media; (2) To be an active participant of mainstream and usergenerated
media, with a keen awareness of the power and responsibility of that participation.
With this foundation, we practiced deconstructing a variety of media texts, including news
images, advertisements, and international youth-produced videos. I adopted Buckingham’s
(2003) student-centered approach to facilitating critical analysis in media education: “Critical
analysis is seen here as a process of dialogue, rather than a matter of arriving at an agreed or
predetermined position” (p. 14). I encouraged open discussion and interpretation of these texts,
challenging students further with questions about access, participation, circulation, distribution,
representation, and messaging (Buckingham, 2003). These were endeavours in “making the
familiar strange” (Buckingham, 2003, p. 71), to unpack the various elements of media and
understand them as constructions, which may otherwise seem ‘normal’ or ‘natural’.
To provide students the opportunity to examine a variety of dynamics between form and content,
many of the media texts covered a range of social topics and mediums. However, a certain
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