UNIT 7: A class newspaper

Understanding media by producing media

All over the world, the presence and impact of media has increased over the last few years. The more complex and interdependent our lives become, the more we all rely on information to understand the influences and developments that affect us. For any piece of information on matters beyond our range of personal experience and immediate perception, we must rely on a medium of information.

However, individual access to different media varies widely. This affects a person’s level of information and his potential to exercise influence and power. A further important aspect is the issue of censorship and the problem of misinformation by parties, governments and powerful lobbies. Conflict, including social change or warfare, gives rise to monopolised and distorted information.

Although these interrelationships, to name but a few, will not be explicitly addressed in this unit on media, the students will discover elements of them when they compare the print media of their country or their region and judge them by specific criteria.

The approach to media education in this unit is different. By producing their own wall newspaper, the students will gain some insight into newspaper production and thus learn something about the reality of media “from within”. Teaching experience has shown that this approach gives students a form of direct access to print media that is more remote from their daily lives. The students will view this type of media critically and will also evaluate electronic media, and their own use of these different kinds of media, from a new perspective. They will develop media literacy.

Finally, one practical hint: this unit, in particular, demands and offers potential for cross-curricular teaching and co-operation. Writing and revising texts could take place as part of language teaching, while designing the layout might be a task in art class. In some cases, a class may have to start on its own, with an additional input by an editing team of students who are particularly interested.

The wall newspaper may have to be present in school life for some time before other teachers will be sufficiently convinced of its worth to join in.

Learning for Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights

Media literacy is one of the keys to an overall objective in human rights and civic education – the active, participating citizen. Here is a summary of the most important aspects of media literacy:

1. Competence of communication refers to the general manner in which human beings interact with each other. Social reality does not exist as such. Rather, it is jointly defined by humans through social interaction, which means it is created by acts of communication. This general communicative competence begins with learning our mother tongue and is developed further by using this competence in public.
2. Every human being has this communicative competence from birth. We are endowed with this competence by nature, but it needs to be educated, practised and refined.
3. Media literacy is included in the overarching concept of communicative competence. It refers to the complex multitude of media, the use of which needs to be learned and practised through, for example, being set as a task for students. Print media, including the wall newspaper, are important means of everyday communication, which students should be familiar with. However, they are no more than one element within the overall goal of media literacy.

UNIT 7: A class newspaper

Understanding media by producing media