This course provides teachers opportunities for advanced analyses of advertising and the economic structure of mass media industries, including billboards, magazines, newspapers, broadcasting and cable television. The course will explore how media literacy concepts enrich both our understandings of advertising and the media business and the study of language arts, social studies, science and math, and the visual and performing arts in grades K-12.
Teachers play multiple roles around advertising.
They are interested consumers, frustrated shoppers, watchful parents and over-taxed teachers. Billerica teachers see television advertising in their classrooms on Channel One every day. While the controversy over Channel One continues in many school districts, Billerica teachers have daily opportunities to confront concerns in their classrooms, and this course will help them do so from a number of different perspectives. Children and teachers encounter advertising not only through television but through a variety of media and strategies. Advertising messages are artifacts which denote cultural constructs.