Project SMARTArt

Project SMARTArt's media literacy instruction for teachers, artists, and students is based on developing and strengthening participants' abilities to access, analyse, evaluate, and create information. These basic process skills are derived from the four steps of awareness, analysis, reflection, and action that constitute CML's "action learning" strategy. This strategy incorporates such theoretical approaches as experiential education, constructivist learning, critical thinking, and communication paedagogy.

Drawing on this strategy, educators integrate media analysis and production, the arts, and technology into "the basics" of elementary education in an effort to foster critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creative expression. The process involves students in media analysis and production to help them build and apply critical thinking competencies. SMARTArt's classroom activities are developed to ignite students' interests and relate to their everyday lives in ways that boost their natural enthusiasm for learning; specific lesson plans may be accessed by clicking here. To cite just a few examples, "A Tale of Two Schools" is designed to help students recognise the constructed nature of news as they create two school newspapers that report the same stories but tell two very different tales; "Wisdom of the Ages" is an effort to help students think about senior citizens, analyse the way that media portray them, and create their own representations of seniors they admire; and "Heroes and Media Lesson Plan" involves students investigating the idea that various media present many types of heroes for different reasons, and then creating their own 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional heroes in response to that investigation. Dance, music, and theatre are some of the tools used in these creative sessions.

Training is a key strategy in enabling the above-mentioned process. The SMARTArt teaching team receives in-service sessions that focuses on building information process skills, with an eye to helping them use fresh media content while teaching to state standards. These professional development sessions involve such activities such as large-group workshops and direct coaching sessions in which participants practice thinking critically about media messages and plan standards-based, integrated activities for their classrooms (such as students' creation of 30-second animated public service announcements to address violence prevention while learning how to both construct and deconstruct media through self-expression). For more details about the professional development component of SMARTArt, click here.

For additional details about the SMARTArt strategies, activities, and assessments, please click here.

Media Literacy, Children.

Organisers suggest that media literacy programming has been slow to take root in the United States as compared to some other countries; further, little of the media literacy that is being implemented in the USA is at the elementary school level. One of the problems, according to CML, is that there are many different interpretations of media literacy and little consensus about how to teach it. CML's multi-part MediaLit Kit, introduced during the second year of this project, is an effort to advance a clear methodology to provide a framework for teaching media literacy. This Kit provides two books: one on the Five Core Concepts and Five Key Questions of media literacy covering the Theory, and one with 25 additional lesson plans, with 5 lessons on each of the Five Core Concepts/Five Key Questions.

The programme has being implemented at the Leo Politi Elementary School in Los Angeles, California, USA, reaching out to students in kindergarten through grade 5, 80% of whom speak limited English and many of whose families recently immigrated from Mexico and Central America; in addition to English language learners, organisers stress that the SMARTArt strategy may be particularly useful for students with specific learning disabilities.