Sunday, November 1, 2015

Protection and Empowerment

Three things I learned about storytelling are that children are easily influenced by the stories that they hear/view, we gain a greater understanding of things when we have more than a single story, and that it is easy to fall into the trap of a single story, but the most important thing I learned is that it is dangerous to have only a single story for reference, as nothing in life, no place, person, or event, is that simple.

“Once they got started, Mrs. Jenkins found herself not fully understanding what children were saying. She had to ask clarifying questions of the students to elicit more details and context in order to fully understand the ideas and information they were sharing. As she asked these questions more and more hands were in the air. Students were clearly energized by the process of sharing their knowledge.
I think that the strategy of connecting your lessons with something that the students are familiar with is a great way to get the students engaged. Asking the clarifying questions helps the students put more thought into the answers that they give, and will allow them to make even more connections. When students are engaged and excited about the lesson more meaningful learning occurs.

“We talked about the need to empathize with the people who were experiencing loss and to honor those who made efforts to help. We talked about how media messages about the disaster and its aftermath of two wars were shaping our own sense of national identity and the fresh fears we had as adults about how people around the world perceived our country, the world’s largest superpower.”
Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feeling of another, is in my opinion one of the most important qualities that we as people have. Now so more than ever communication is a large portion of our lives. We are in constant contact of the world around us, and being able to relate to and understand other people intellectually and emotionally is more important than ever.

“Some educators attempt to disrupt students’ pleasure with advertising and media culture by demonstrating how advertising promotes “a sense of inadequacy anxiety, shame, yearning, envy and contempt for the self or the other.” Because the values of consumer culture are so deeply woven into the fabric of our society, providing students with a disruptive, alternative interpretation of advertising may create a shock to the system that moves students toward critical distance.”

More and more we are bombarded by advertising, a necessary evil in my opinion that allows creators of digital media to create stories of a higher quality, and our students having the ability to objectively view media messages of advertising, among other things, and understand the meaning and purpose of them is incredibly important. 

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