Part D

Rationale for Media Literacy Education:

I chose to use a movie clip for my media analysis. To me, media analysis is watching something that you may watch every day, taking useful information from it and learning from that information in a way that will help you. Since my major is special education, I chose to use a media clip that they would enjoy and would make it easy for them to learn from. Today, everyone watches movies and television so using that sort of media to teach, I think reaches the students at a level that they are already very familiar with. Since the students that I will be working with sometimes have trouble expressing or recognizing emotions, the clip I chose to use was a clip that had easily recognizable emotions in it. I also chose the clip because it is something that they most likely have seen before and will make it easier for them to view. “Kids love movies! This fact is evident when you tell them you’re about to show a clip of a movie, and the noise level in the classroom drops immediately.” This is a quote from one of the 4:2:2 reading we had and I think that it does a great job of explaining why media literacy is so useful. Students love when there are videos or clips of videos shown in the classroom because it is something that they relate to and enjoy using to learn. Another quote that really relates to my lesson plan for the media analysis is,” beyond learning facts and developing students cognitively, adolescent empathy and engagement can also be fostered through movies.” Watching clips do help younger students and students who may have trouble identifying emotions learn more about the emotions, and how to express them. They can relate to the clips better because it is more visual than just sitting down and reading a book explaining something. It uses motions and real life experiences that the students can watch and see how something should be dealt with. It will help with my lesson a lot because the students will be able to watch a situation, see what kind of emotion that it causes, and see how the person dealing with that emotion reacts to it. This will make it so much easier than just reading about what an emotion is inside a book. If they were just reading about the emotion then trying to relay what they were reading to real life it would be much harder than watching someone in a clip. Being able to see someone’s facial expressions and body language is something would also be hard to read about in a book and relay it to real life. For my lesson media literacy is a great way to reach the students I will be teaching, it will help them be able to learn exactly what each emotion is, what causes them to feel that emotion, and how to deal with that emotion, something that would be very hard for them to learn from a book.