Teaching Students to Critique Screen Media through Election Advertisements
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by Dan Krutka
Our polarized, some would even say calcified, political environment can make it difficult for teachers to encourage student discussion of the 2024 election. Yet, teachers have the benefit of being able to cultivate a classroom environment—alongside students—that is suited for educational, civic dialogue. This involves activities such as creating discussion norms, attending to power dynamics, and centering evidence-based investigations that depart from politicized and culture war narratives. There’s been a lot of great research in the social studies on how to go about this work (see Judith Pace’s work as one example), and this work cannot just be the responsibility of social studies teachers (Mirra & Garcia, 2023). I won’t try to review this extensive work here. However, I’d like to offer one activity which teachers, even those who are hesitant or nervous about delving into politics in the classroom, can implement.
Media Ecology and Figure/Ground Analysis
Politics and news coverage tend to exclusively focus on the messages of media while ignoring the power and influence of the media forms through which they are delivered. As we detail on our Mapping the Media Education Terrain page:
Most educators recognize a need to teach students to think critically about the information they encounter through different types of media. By media, we are referring to any technology that mediates, or represents, information about the world. Books, newspapers, websites, and infographics mediate through the print, images, and their design; Radio and podcasts mediate information through the audio, sound effects and their pace; Television and social media mediate information through complex combinations of audio, visual, and textual information. These media are created by people with different levels of power, influence, and purposes from multinational media corporations to independent bloggers.
In our short 2022 paper, Marie Heath, Cathryn van Kessel and I identified five different media education approaches that accomplish different aims. Here’s how we described what we called an “observe the media” approach that is quite different from analyzing the credibility of a media message:
An observe the media approach to media education encourages students to focus on the medium, or channel, through which information is conveyed. This approach addresses the problem that people do not recognize how the type of media may be more important than the content. In other words, media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out that “the medium is the message.” This means that people who write a book or newspaper article will convey a different message than a professionally produced news broadcast or amateur YouTube video. This approach recognizes that the dominant mediums in society—whether oral storytelling, books or newspapers, or television and social media—significantly shift the meaning of concepts such as community, politics, democracy. However, this approach largely ignores how messages or narratives sway public opinion on important issues that affect people’s lives.
For example, Neil Postman (1985) claimed in Amusing Ourselves to Death that television turned all politics—and everything else—into entertainment. He contended that the election of an actor such as Ronald Reagan is evidence of this shifting politics, but the election of a reality TV star in Donald Trump might be further evidence of how politics are affected by the dominant media forms in society.
Shifting our attention from the figure (media content that we typically focus on) to the ground (or background media environment) is one strategy for better understanding the larger effects of media forms. For example, Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) played with figure/ground both in direct and indirect ways in his famous This is America video. Dancing in the video is the figure in the foreground while the lyrics reference social media trends and culture. The (back)ground of the video shows more chaotic scenes. The video then shocks viewers by bringing gun violence to the foreground. The video could be interpreted to indicate that social media distracts us from confronting anti-Blackness in the U.S.
As we describe on our Figure/Ground Analysis page, “McLuhan and the media theorists he inspired believe that we aren’t able to fully understand the media content we experience as figure unless we first really pay attention to the ground of our media environments. In fact, figure/ground is a useful framing tool for us as we think deeply about the social and cultural effects of technologies. Activities that ask us to reverse what is experienced as figure and ground force us to slow down, perhaps requiring us to engage alternative senses, as familiar situations suddenly feel unfamiliar. By shifting our perception and focusing on what often remains in the background, invisible and ignored, we can see technologies in a new way.”
Analyzing Screen Media through Election Advertisements
I want to acknowledge that analyzing political commercials can feel a bit outdated. Young people, and most of us, encounter information about elections as it bubbles up on our social media feeds. Ellen Middaugh emphasizes the importance of educational experiences that help students examine information as they encounter it, which can include addressing the ground of social media platforms such as proprietary algorithms. However, analyzing political advertisements can still help students gain knowledge about candidates and their positions, gain knowledge about how screen media has changed over time, and develop skills toward analyzing screen media.
Lance Mason (2015a) pointed out that “the sensory stimuli of screens overwhelm the senses, making it extremely difficult to reflect on the content while in the midst of a viewing experience” (p. 105). By breaking apart the media parts (e.g., script, video, audio) before experiencing them all together, students can better reflect on how the fast-moving commercial medium influences us in ways that are difficult to perceive. Students can learn from examining most produced commercials, political ads, or TV shows.
One particularly poignant political ad for this activity is Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Bear in the Woods” presidential campaign commercial because it relies so much on “feel” and so little on specific messaging. Teachers can play the commercial from the Living Room Candidate website so students do not see text which discloses the video title and candidate early. I like for students to try to make sense of the video without any prior information.
1984 Reagan "Bear" advertisement.
There are four steps for this activity. For each of the following steps, teachers can ask students, what is the message?:
Read the transcript of the commercial (see below)
Watch the video (without audio)
Listen to the audio (without video)
Watch the full commercial
After completing these steps, students can go back through each step analyzing the aspects of the commercials using Mason’s (2015) M.I.T.S. questioning framework (see table below). Mason’s framework encourages students to analyze the “main ideas” of media messages in the ad, but the other categories (images, text, sounds) focus on the media form. After analyzing the video, students can learn more about the ad from The Living Room Candidate website. Students can then choose political commercials from the 2024 election to analyze. This activity helps students see that all political candidates use the tricks of audio-visual production from music, lighting, image editing, and more to bypass our rational sense-making about election issues. Students could then consider other ways candidates try to persuade us, bypass our rational sense-making, and amuse us into voting for them.
Lance Mason's M.I.T.S strategy for analyzing screen media from his 2015 article.
This figure/ground analysis of political campaign commercials can allow teachers to start analysis from a place that encourages media literacy skills that can transfer to any audio-visual screen media, including less commercially produced audio-video platforms such as much of what can be found on TikTok and YouTube. I have found that students are often very interested in how media is used to persuade them in ways that go unnoticed. As is always the point in media literacy education, the point is to raise awareness, not encourage cynicism. And, hopefully, this can also allow any wary teachers a way into politics that strays from the messages that often serve as fodder for calcified camps.
References
Mason, L. E. (2015). Media literacy: Analyzing political commercials. Social Studies Research and Practice, 10(2), 73-83.
Mirra, N., & Garcia, A. (2023). Civics for the world to come: Committing to democracy in every classroom. WW Norton & Company.
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. Penguin.