Media literacy Education for Secondary Schools: why and how to do

Abstract

Although the  media learning is not a properly new subject, it has now getting relevance within Brazilian educational system. Internationally speaking, the promotion of media literacy is so old practice as  the media production itself. However, the fast increasing of the new media has changed

Educational paradigms and teaching materials, requesting new concepts and policies for the curriculum. According to this context, this paper presents a work proposal considering the British media literacy education approach (Hall, Whannel, Buckingham, Kress) and the so called digital culture. Departing from cinema trailers available on Youtube, we produced educational activities for the Secondary Schools, inside the area called “Codes, Languages and their Technologies”, testing educational activities 20 pupils of a public school of Bauru city, São Paulo State. The methodology consists of selecting four trailers of popular movies from three different genres and creating activities to explore the language and the narratives arranged to fufill the public expectations. Results suggest that the focus on systematic analysis of the language is a particularly productive way to reflect about questions of representation, identity, quality and taste. The experience also brought about structural difficulties within schools culture to achieve such activities.