MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS ACTIVITY:
This activity is meant to get students thinking about stereotypes and how we passively accept them. This can work for any media representation, but I will use moms for my activity. I will tell each student to draw a picture of a mom; they won't have to put their name on it so it will stay anonymous. They will crumple up these pictures and toss them in a pile on the floor or into a hat if the students go too crazy throwing paper. The teacher will then unfold each drawing and make a list of the attributes on the picture. For example, if the mother is wearing a skirt, the teacher will write skirt on the board and put a tally mark beneath it. If another picture has the mother wearing a skirt, the teacher will put another tally mark there. The teacher can do this with as many or as few categories as she wishes. At the end of this assignment, there will most likely be a lot of tally marks in a category. The teacher will then ask students to think of the mothers they know and think about whether they fit into this category or not. The teacher will then ask where these stereotypical images appear. The students will then free write about the differences and similarities between real mothers and media-created mothers.
I'm very envious that you somehow got the VoiceThread thing to actually work. :) Nice job; you had some really great examples there of the widely disparate portrayals of motherhood we see in popular media. I think many of the points you raised were pretty interesting, too. Being a childless male, I sometimes fail to recognize the manipulative ways that the media judges and critiques mothers, and how rather specific criteria are used in those judgments. I enjoyed your analyses; quite entertaining in an educational sort of way... :)
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