Tag: blog

July 17, 2020

Striking a Chord: Using Media to Protest the Critical Issues of Our Time

Today – Friday, July 17, 2020 – marks the 100th week of school strikes led by Greta Thunberg to protest inaction with respect to Climate Change.  The persistent and dedicated actions by this young teen have brought the issue front and center, energizing a generation of young people to take up the cause.  Greta’s use of media – in both...

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June 29, 2020

Pride and Protest

June is Pride Month, a month typically marked by parades and rallies, uplifting concerts and inspiring speeches, commemorating the 1969 Stonewall riots and celebrating the accomplishments of LGBTQ individuals and the cause of gay liberation.  This year, of course, LGBTQ Pride has been overshadowed by the dual moral imperatives of anti-racism protests and the ongoing health crises related to COVID-19. ...

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June 19, 2020

It’s Different This Time

Today is Juneteenth.  I’ve been trying to write a new blog post for several weeks now, and just when I think I’ve found something meaningful to say about media literacy in light of recent events, everything changes.  In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and its accompanying “infodemic” of disinformation, the horrifying and unexplainable murder of George Floyd and the...

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May 12, 2020

Teaching Critical Thinking and Protecting the Science

At Project Look Sharp, many of our lessons focus on scientific issues and content – especially related to environmental issues and sustainability – and the broader issues related to credibility of information in today’s complex and multifaceted media world.  A key focus for us has always been epistemology – how do we know what we know?  In designing lessons to...

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April 22, 2020

Honoring Earth Day and Green Media Literacy

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, an annual event that was started as a bi-partisan initiative of Senators Gaylord Nelson (D) and Pete McCloskey (R).  Inspired by the anti-war movement on college campuses, they hired young activist Denis Hayes to organize campus teach-ins about conservation and the environment.  The first Earth Day was promoted widely in the news media and inspired more than 20 million Americans...

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March 31, 2020

Cultivating Resilience in a Time of Uncertainty

Today our blog is by Sox Sperry, Project Look Sharp’s main curriculum writer.        “There is little time to think about anything other than physical safety and survival. We have stepped out into a world forever altered.” Audre Lorde wrote these words in 1989 after emerging from her St. Croix home following Hurricane Hugo which leveled much of her beloved island. Her...

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March 24, 2020

Using Project Look Sharp’s Free Resources and Lessons for Online Learning

My last blog was posted 2 weeks and a lifetime ago.  For those of us in education, the radical shift in every aspect of our personal lives is compounded by an equally radical shift in the ways we teach and interact with our students.  For most of us, this has meant scrambling to find challenging and engaging ways to teach online –...

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March 10, 2020

Why We Need to Think Critically about the Facts – and the Factcheckers

When the U.S. went to war against Iraq in March 2003, my college students were jittery.  In one of my psychology classes, a troubled student raised her hand and said, “I don’t understand what’s going on. Can you just tell me the one place to go to get the simple facts?”  As much as I wanted to comfort and reassure her, my...

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March 3, 2020

Girls and Women: History, HerStory, a Movement Forward – and We’re Not There Yet

March is Women’s History Month, designed to increase awareness and knowledge about women’s history and to celebrate the contributions of notable and ordinary women (past and present).  This year’s theme is “Valiant Women of the Vote” – honoring those whose decades of activism and commitment culminated in women’s suffrage 100 years ago, and to highlight the work that women continue...

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February 25, 2020

Now’s the Time for Media Literacy: Politics, Polls and Debates

As anyone who has reads or watches news – or follows social media knows, we are in the midst of presidential election fever.  At Project Look Sharp we have been following media coverage of the presidential campaigns (and related stories) with an eye towards ways in which media literacy approaches – especially our constructivist media decoding (CMD) pedagogy – can encourage students to analyze and...

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