Children are surrounded – and targeted – by advertisements: on television, the computer, even on their journeys to and from school. Children need specific strategies for reading and talking about advertisements and their impact.
Reading Ads with a Social Justice Lens is a series of 13 multidisciplinary mini-lessons that provide such strategies and build critical literacy. The lessons are designed for students in grades K-5 and include suggestions for simple adaptations.
These lessons open up important conversations about the relationship between advertisements and social justice. Children will see that they have the power to decide how media will influence them. They will also engage in social justice projects that address some of the unfair messages they find in advertising.
Overarching Objectives
Some of the key social justice concepts addressed by these lessons include
Some of the key language arts skills addressed by these lessons include
Essential Questions
Each lesson addresses three specific essential questions. In addition to these, the series asks students
Mini-Lessons
Part One: Introduction
Lesson 1: What’s for Sale? [1]
Students discuss the purpose of advertisements and their relationship to social justice.
Lesson 2: Reading Advertisements [2]
Students construct strategies for reading advertisements critically to use in other lessons.
Part Two: Advertising and Stereotypes
Lesson 3: Stereotypes in Advertising [3]
Students learn about stereotypes and examine how advertising can influence them.
Lesson 4: How Advertising Perpetuates Stereotypes [4]
Students analyze advertisements that perpetuate stereotypes.
Lesson 5: How Advertising Fights Stereotypes [5]
Students will create advertisements that fight against commonly held stereotypes.
Part Three: The Issue of Representation
Lesson 6: Representation in Advertising [6]
Students discus representation and why it matters in advertisements.
Students analyze how some groups are over-represented in advertisements (and how some are excluded).
Lesson 8: How Are We ‘Supposed’ to Be [8]
Students consider how advertisements represent families.
Lesson 9: Showing More of Us [9]
Students debate diversity in advertisements.
Part Four: Bias in Advertising
Lesson 10: The Impact of Bias in Advertising [10]
Students examine the messages advertisements send about people who are different.
Lesson 11: Minimizing the Impact of Biases [11]
Students develop strategies to view advertisements without succumbing to biased messages.
Part Five: Advertising Activism
Students write letters to advertisers.
Lesson 13: Advertisements of Our Own [13]
Students design and create a social justice advertising campaign.
Standards
Activities address the following Common Core Anchor Standards for Language Arts [14]
1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
2. Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.
3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.
5. Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole.
6. Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.
7. Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.1
8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.
9. Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.
Links:
[1] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/what-s-sale
[2] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/reading-advertisements
[3] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/stereotypes-advertising
[4] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/how-advertising-perpetuates-stereotypes
[5] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/how-advertising-breaks-down-stereotypes
[6] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/representation-advertising
[7] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/who-there
[8] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/how-are-we-supposed-be
[9] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/showing-more-us
[10] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/impact-bias-advertising
[11] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/minimizing-impact-biases
[12] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/talking-back
[13] http://www.tolerance.org/activity/advertisements-our-own
[14] http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards/english-language-arts-standards/anchor-standards/college-and-career-readiness-anchor-standards-for-reading/