4. Media have embedded values and points of view.
Elementary School
Middle
School
Key Idea: Authors have a point of view.
Rationale: In elementary school, students must first learn that authors, like all people, have a particular perspective, or point of view. This prepares them to consider how media messages reflect the values, attitudes, and beliefs of media creators.
Sample Instructional Content:
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Students learn to identify statements of opinion versus statements of fact.
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Students practice recognizing bias, opinions, beliefs, and factual information.
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Diverse texts are used in instruction, featuring characters with a wide range of ethnicities, cultures, languages, economic levels, family structures, and abilities.
Related Common Core Learning Standards
CC.1.R.L.5 Craft and Structure: Explain major differences between books that tell stories and books that give information, drawing on a wide reading of a range of text types.
CC.3.R.I.6 Craft and Structure: Distinguish their own point of view from that of the author of a text.
CC.5.R.I.6 Craft and Structure: Analyze multiple accounts of the same event or topic, noting important similarities and differences in the point of view they represent.
Related AASL Standards
1.1.6 Read, view, and listen for information presented in any format (e.g., textual, visual, media, digital) in order to make inferences and gather meaning.
1.1.7 Make sense of information gathered from diverse sources by identifying misconceptions, main and supporting ideas, conflicting information, and point of view or bias.
Key Idea: Media is not neutral; rather, media is created within a particular context.
Rationale: In middle school, students concentrate on understanding how the values expressed in media messages reflect a distinct context. Media messages are created at specific time and place, for a specific audience and purpose, and by a specific creator or group of creators. As such, media messages contain the values and perspectives of that context.
Sample Instructional Content:
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Students compare media from around the world, looking for how the embedded values are similar or dissimilar to their own.
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Students evaluate a variety of sources for bias, credibility, and authority. Librarians and classroom teachers should emphasize that all sources of information have some level of bias, although some are more neutral than others.
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Diverse texts are used in instruction, featuring characters with a wide range of ethnicities, cultures, languages, economic levels, family structures, and abilities.
Related Common Core Learning Standards
CC.6.R.I.6 Craft and Structure: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and explain how it is conveyed in the text.
CC.7.R.I.6 Craft and Structure: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how the author distinguishes his or her position from that of others.
CC.8.R.L.9 Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: Analyze how a modern work of fiction draws on themes, patterns of events, or character types from myths, traditional stories, or religious works such as the Bible, including describing how the material is rendered new.
Related AASL Standards
1.1.5 Evaluate information found in selected sources on the basis of accuracy, validity, appropriateness to needs, importance, and social and cultural context.
1.1.7 Make sense of information gathered from diverse sources by identifying misconceptions, main and supporting ideas, conflicting information, and point of view or bias.
2.2.2 Use both divergent and convergent thinking to formulate alternative conclusions and test them against the evidence.
High
School
Key Idea: Media reflects, reinforces, and creates cultural norms, values, expectations, and assumptions.
Rationale: At the high school level, students grapple with the complexity of culture as it pertains to media, focusing on the power of media messages to reinforce or establish cultural norms. Historically marginalized voices and their contributions to our cultural heritage are emphasized.
Sample Instructional Content:
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Students investigate the nature of culture, as an unspoken, implicit, and complicated phenomenon.
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Students are given examples of how media can be either a positive or negative force for cultural change.
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Students discuss the challenges of recognizing one’s own embedded values and perspectives.
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Diverse texts are used in instruction, featuring characters with a wide range of ethnicities, cultures, languages, economic levels, family structures, and abilities.
Related Common Core Learning Standards
CC.9-10.R.L.6 Craft and Structure: Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature.
CC.9-10.SL.3 Comprehension and Collaboration: Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, identifying any fallacious reasoning or exaggerated or distorted evidence.
CC.11-12.SL.3 Comprehension and Collaboration: Evaluate a speaker's point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, assessing the stance, premises, links among ideas, word choice, points of emphasis, and tone used.
CC.11-12.R.L.6 Craft and Structure: Analyze a case in which grasping point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant (e.g., satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement).
Related AASL Standards
1.1.5 Evaluate information found in selected sources on the basis of accuracy, validity, appropriateness to needs, importance, and social and cultural context.
1.1.7 Make sense of information gathered from diverse sources by identifying misconceptions, main and supporting ideas, conflicting information, and point of view or bias.
2.2.2 Use both divergent and convergent thinking to formulate alternative conclusions and test them against the evidence.
2.2.3 Employ a critical stance in drawing conclusions by demonstrating that the pattern of evidence leads to a decision or conclusion.
An Interactive Pathfinder
for School Librarians and Education Professionals