Media Framing Interactive Teaching Plan

Media Framing

Interactive Teaching Plan for Media Framing: Identifying Current Trends in Chinese Culture

Keeping the curriculum relevant and timely are well established needs in today's classroom. Moreover, many students bring with them valuable computer skills that can be readily applied to the learning experience. These issues suggest that providing students with a variety of learning opportunities that use these skills represents a good use of resources which are by definition scarce. Furthermore, more and more classrooms are being equipped for computer-based learning, making such interactive learning initiatives all the more important. To this end, this project provides an overview of how students can learn about current issues that affect their everyday lives such as media framing through an interactive learning environment provided by a Webquest. The objectives of the exercise will include a description of what factors can be used to analyze media content. A description of how students can use interactive tools to investigate these issues and provide their own input as well. The materials and estimated time required for completion are also discussed. Finally, student assessment considerations and some suggested procedures for administering the lesson are followed by a discussion of how these techniques can be amplified and used for other teaching purposes.

Connections to the Curriculum.

Social studies, journalism, current events

Objectives of the Exercise:

After completing this exercise, students will be able to analyze print media content according to:

Contextual framing,

Visual framing, and Operational framing,

These terms are defined and described further below.

Analytic Skills.

Students will be required to analyze various popular print media content concerning Chinese cultural issues using the three media framing functions described further below:

Contextual Framing. For the purposes of this study, this term will follow the definition provided by Nelson (1996). In this regard, contextual framing describes how completely the background of an event is developed and through which interpretive lens this information is filtered; the term also refers to the use of techniques such as:

Equalizing. Nelson states this means, "How puffed up or deflated are the sides in terms of their implicit strength or importance, especially when contrasted with one another" (p. 170);

Excising. This term means what types of information are left in or taken out of news coverage and why;

Demonizing. This refers to the extent of the use of "good vs. evil" categorizing language and images that elevate or deflate particular individuals, organizations, movements, ideas, or nations);

Personalizing. This term refers to the extent to which the protagonists in an given event are developed and portrayed as being "others" or "like us";

Ordering. This term refers to how the narrative is organized in an effort to favor one side or the other;

Sanitizing. This term refers to the degree to which the event is censored to avoid reporting negative information concerning the actual costs in damaged lives and social devastation; and,

Timing. Finally, this term refers to the extent to which attention is given to a particular agenda, issue, or group compared to other events of the day (Nelson, 1996).

Visual Framing. This concept will be examined following the methodology described by Gitlin; frames in general are "persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, or selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual" (p. 7). Visual framing devices can be regarded in this view as frameworks that condition the target audience's reactions to particular news events, information, or entertainment media programming.

Operational Framing. According to Peterson, the overriding mandate for journalists today is to obtain the most current news from a variety of sources that carry with them diverse, and sometimes mutually exclusive interests, with a number of actors involved: "Most news stories are negotiated in defined social contexts among many different actors," Peterson advises, "including sources, journalists, editors and press agents" (2001, p. 201). This degree of media coverage, in fact, would likely provide a worthwhile goal for all responsible journalism; to this end, operational framing would provide a comprehensive and balanced analysis of the event without resorting to rhetoric or base appeals to emotion (Peterson, 2001). Therefore, throughout this exercise, this term will refer to completely objective news reporting that is absent of any discernible contextual framing efforts as defined above on the part of the reviewer.

Materials Required

Computers with Internet access (one for every three students); free online survey accounts for each team.

Suggested Procedure.

Opening. Students' interest will be gained by describing a current event that affects their lives as well such as the incidence of cell phone or Internet usage among young Chinese people today, drug use, or the profound environmental issues facing emerging nations that threaten everyone through global warming or otherwise, for example. In this lesson, students will learn how to analyze the content of such media accounts to discern any instances of the three types of media framing described above.

Development. Students will be divided into groups of three and assigned a computer and an online survey account using a service such as SurveyMonkey.com for this purpose. All groups will be required to visit a series of links to preselected timely online articles concerning Chinese culture and discuss these articles amongst themselves to identify any instances of these three types of media framing. Each team will then visit their online survey account and complete the related survey for each news story. Upon completion of the student analysis and online surveys, an aggregate comparison of the results will be conducted and the results reviewed by the teacher and students to identify any significant discrepancies in how the respective news accounts differed and how they were similar from each team's perspective according to the media framing factors described above.

Closing.

Students will be asked to describe any other examples of these types of media framing that they can recall, as well as being requested to keep these issues in mind when they watch television, read the newspaper and other popular print media to ensure that they recognize that media framing does in fact take place and can significantly influence how people - particularly young people - perceive the events in the world around them.