Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Promising Practices

Promising Practices

The first session I went to was with Marco McWilliams, The media made me do it. His presentation was based on a slide show. He started off the presentation with a slide based up statistics. A few things I found interesting were:

97% of American children 6 & under own products based on characters from TV shows or movies.

Also children aged 2-5 watch an average of 32 hours of television a week.

I found this to be interesting because it shows how much the media impacts children as well as adults. The amount of television children watch is equivalent to almost a full time job. He explored throughout the presentation how media constructs reality. It shapes our attitudes and behaviors about the world. Media messages are given to gain power and the sell products. In reality the commodity bought and sold is the audience because media presents the products to relate to the consumer.

Another thing McWilliams said that really caught my attention was when he said representation truly means re-present because advertisements do not shape what is real but what the audience sees is real. One example that was shown was a model before and after a photo shoot. You could not even recognize her after with the computer enhancements.

Media also gives messages which often portray women as objects. It shows male dominance. McWilliams showed us an advertisement for Dolche and Gabbana. The picture was basically portrayed the woman as a sex object. She was being straddled by a shirtless guy with other males half naked in the background. It reduces the woman to the object because they made the woman the object.

One of the last topics shown was the incident with Taylor Swift and Kanye West. McWilliams shows us several tweets from Twitter. Every tweet shown related to Kayne West as a “nigger.” Somehow the media turned this incident into racism.

This session reminded me of Christensen because there are hidden messages behind media much similar to the Disney movies. Overall, I was not aware of how much the media influences us. It’s interesting to me to see how the media sends us messages throughout pretty much everything.

The next session I went to was A.L.L.I.E.D. I only picked this because of Tara. I found out that A.L.L.I.E.D stands for advanced learning and leadership initiative for educational diversity. It is a group that provides academic support and advising. They develop identities around a difference.

They are a group that is not the majority but prefer not to be presented as the minority but as underrepresented. My favorite part of this session was the identity poems. Each student in A.L.L.I.E.D. wrote a poem based on who they are and who they are not. Throughout these poems I literally had tears in my eyes. I seriously felt for every one of the group members. I was shocked to hear about stories even from our school’s professors. Some students even had to drop classes because they were uncomfortable with the terms the other students in the class were using.

I thought throughout this entire session how wonderful it is that RIC has a group like this. I learned so much from this meeting that I can’t even describe. I have even thought about how it would be if I was in A.L.L.I.E.D. I think that it’s great that they all support one another and don’t just “feel bad for each other.” They go beyond just listening, they take action and “have each other’s backs.” This session defiantly related to Carlson because many of the gay and lesbian students had dealt with segregation.

The last part of the conference was the speech by Tricia Rose. I felt she had several good points which related to practically everything in class. One part that stuck with me was when she told the story about how her student could not get her laptop to work. In a nervous moment she said “my computer’s acting so gay!” This was said in a class on gender and sexuality. She mentioned how she didn’t ignore it. She made it part of a lesson the following week.

I believe that Tricia Rose had a good presentation. She defiantly knows her stuff although I did find the other sessions to be far more interesting.

This was my first conference so I had no idea what to expect. Everything corresponded well with class and I learned a lot. Overall, I left with a better expectation then I thought coming in there. I’m actually glad that I did take part in this.

1 comment:

  1. Glad you learned so much from your first conference! Hope you will go again next year!!

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