Information for teachers

Material:

Download material is offered in the ACCENT material corner for this edition.

Context and application

English and social sience:

This special edition of the ACCENT Global Change Magazine is designed for classroom use related to media education. This means teaching about media. Climate change and sustainability are topics we come to know nowadays in school education but afterwards primarily via mass media. The way the information is transported has an influence on how the citizens will behave in the future.
This edition discusses, based on a study, different approaches of how information is spread in the climate debate. It discusses also relations between the how people are addressed and potential impacts on their action.

What will the students learn?

1. Students will understand how mass media such as TV, film, radio and journals give meaning in the climate debate, how they stimulate action and how to read and interpret them in a reasonable way.
2. Students will also think about how media contributions can be designed in a way so that they stimulate positive reactions in terms of sustainability.
3. They will become active and write texts or design ads themselves. They take the role of the information provider or advertisers. In this way the understanding of the role of sales promoters is more deeply understood.
4. The borders between information, motivation and manipulation will be discussed.

Further ideas

Pupils should experience media by themselves. 2 – 3 weeks before the topic is discussed in classes, you may ask the students to gather newspaper articles and to make notes about impressions from radio and TV concerning the environmental discussion.

As a teacher you may gather some newspaper articles yourself and discuss with the students how the content is presented. Discuss also how the content may change if adopted to other media.

Flow chart for application in classes:

Media education is recommended to be taught in English classes at Key Stage 4 since English is both a subject and a medium of instruction for other subjects. However, we strongly encourage English teachers to also contact other colleagues and to try to teach media in particular with this material in a cross-curricular approach.