How Do We Learn?
Start by asking students: How do you make a good paper airplane?
Let them discuss for a minute or so without giving feedback. If your students do not have much experience making paper airplanes, you can try an alternative such as making snowballs or cootie catchers, playing hopscotch, jumping rope, etc.
Now ask: How can you learn to make a good paper airplane (or your alternate activity)?
Let students discuss for a few minutes and list answers on the board.
The following ways of learning are likely to come up:
Somebody (like a teacher, a parent/guardian, or another student) teaches you
You watch somebody else do it
You figure it out yourself and practice until you get better
Now ask students to name things that enjoy doing with media (favourite TV shows, movies, games, books, etc.)
When they have listed a few examples, ask: Is it possible to learn from media?
- If they need prompting, ask:
- Has anyone ever watched a YouTube or Tiktok video to learn something?
- Has anyone ever watched a TV show that taught them something?
- Have you, or another teacher, ever shown them an educational video?
Discuss:
How is learning from media similar to the other kinds of learning you discussed earlier?
How is it different?
Is there a difference between when you are using media to learn by yourself and when someone is using it to teach you (like a parent/guardian or teacher reading you a book, or showing you a video and talking about it with you)?
Write the following words on the board and ask students if they know what they mean:
Make sure students understand these basic definitions:
Documentary: A media work that tries to represent something in the real world as accurately as possible
Educational video: A media work that tries to teach a specific thing to its audience
Reality show: A media work that uses footage of real people to entertain its audience
How-to video: A media work that demonstrates how to do a particular thing
Feature film: A full-length video that does not claim to represent the real world and tries to entertain its audience
Action movie: A feature film whose story is about heroic characters who solve problems through physical feats, including violence
Encourage students to give examples of each category from media that they or their family enjoy
Next, have students access the student chapter Fantasy or Reality? or display it on a screen or digital whiteboard.
Prompt student thinking by asking them to consider both the content and the purpose of a work:
How “real” do we consider an educational animated show that is made with puppets (like Sesame Street) or is animated?
Both documentaries and reality shows are made with unscripted video, but documentaries are made to inform while reality shows are made to entertain.
- How does that affect where we place them?
- How does that affect how much you can trust them as a source of information?
Where would you place a feature film that is “based on a true story” or on a historical event?
- What specific things about that film would affect where you placed it?
Although documentaries generally only include things that really happened, the people who make them carefully choose what to include. In fact, a two-hour documentary is typically edited down from four hundred hours of footage. Does that change where on the spectrum you would place a documentary?
Now ask: could a media work be perfectly real and accurate? Could one be totally unreal?
As an example of an almost totally unreal work, you might have students watch the film Boogie Doodle, which animator Norman McLaren made by drawing directly on film.
Point out that while it is almost completely abstract, it has shapes (like a heart and the lines that resemble bass strings) that mean something to us and that we can’t help feeling as though the shapes on the screen have some relationship to one another.
For an example of the opposite end of the spectrum, you might have students watch part of the Canadian documentary Tripping the Rideau Canal, which is a three-hour documentary which shows a continuous point-of-view shot of a boat traveling along the Rideau Canal in Ontario. Encourage students to skip to several points along the video to confirm that we are only ever seeing what the camera operator saw from the boat.
Point out that even here, though, we are only seeing what the film-maker wants us to see (the canal) during a specific time period in which they filmed.
In other words, no media work can ever be completely real or accurate because they are always framed by their makers’ choices.
A media work that tries to represent something in the real world as accurately as possible
A media work that tries to teach a specific thing to its audience
A media work that uses footage of real people to entertain its audienc
A media work that demonstrates how to do a particular thing
A full-length video that does not claim to represent the real world and tries to entertain its audience
A feature film whose story is about heroic characters who solve problems through physical feats, including violence