inspire

Artifact: Avatar film study guide

 

In ETEC 531 Curriculum Issues in Cultural and New Media Studies, I co-created with Jeremy Inscho and Jhodi Leong a media study guide for the popular film Avatar which is a cross-curricular set of lessons that meet the expectations of Social Studies and English Media expectations in BC and Ontario. The fictitious film presents the controversial issue of land rights of First Nations peoples  and the marginalization of one culture by another for reasons of colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. The media representation of individual and groups, and political, social and cultural issues is also explored through the lesson set.

 

Reflection:

 

The purpose of this task was to create a course publication that contained all of our media study guides that were developed for this course assignment. Each pair or group chose a different film or media study topic to develop into a meaningful lesson set, and we all benefited from the peer collaboration by receiving the compiled publication. This type of collaboration could be used by classroom teachers to get students to create a useful product that would then be shared with the group. The collaborative aspect of this assignment rendered a better final result than if we had worked alone. The sharing of ideas led to a higher quality final product. Such experiences are valuable in education because even if problems arise during the process, the resolving of those problems are an important part of the learning.