MediaRelate Teaching Materials

The media education project Understanding Media Images of Love, Sex and Relationships (or 'MediaRelate') is an effort to produce and evaluate teaching materials about the representation of love, sex, and relationships in the media.

Project partners (the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media at the Institute of Education; the English and Media Centre, London; the Netherlands Education-Entertainment Foundation; and the Department of Communications at the Autonomous University of Barcelona) understand media education to be based around a framework of key concepts or aspects of study rather than a body of knowledge about the media. The aim is to introduce students to open-ended, hands-on activities simulating media production processes, in an effort to enable them to understand how meaning is created and specific audiences addressed.

These approaches are reflected in the MediaRelate teaching materials, which consist of an A4 softbound book (covering 4 modules with teachers' notes and student handouts) and a DVD (including interviews with media professionals from television and teenage magazines, a drama storyline, and colour reproductions of advertisements).

The book's modules were piloted in a range of schools before publication; their purpose is to stimulate debate and reflection on the messages and values suggested by media texts among youth ages 12 to 15. They include:

• Researching Media Images asks students to keep a scrapbook in which they explore the range of media messages about sex that they encounter daily. They then read each other's work and use it as the basis of a debate about sex in the media on a fictional radio station.
• Magazine Messages includes an exercise in which students take on roles representing a spectrum of opinions about teenage magazines. Students make a collage from the magazines to illustrate these views - often using the same material for different perspectives.
• The TV Drama unit includes an edited storyline from the Phil Redmond / BBC series Grange Hill that raises questions about the importance of communication in relationships, resisting pressure, the role of the peer group, and where to go for help and support, as well as about the age of consent. The aim of these classroom exercises is to help develop empathy; for instance, students can track characters' thoughts and feelings, with girls mapping those of male characters and vice versa.
• Selling Messages asks students to create their own campaign for young people (on issues such as condom use, support for gay youth, chlamydia, and family communication). Students learn by researching the issues, but also reflect on themselves as audiences and consider media practices such as cost-effective ways to reach teenagers.