Topic and Scope

We will further our understanding of the critical process as a class and begin applying the process started in your proposals. Our aim for this online essay is to create citizens – “practical idealists” – who are engaged, informed, and inspired. Each person will be pursuing a response to the same question or inquiry raised in your Media Literacy Proposals. If your proposal raised any valid questions, consider ways that they may be answered or at least discussed in social spaces.  You should approach this task as both a generous and careful reader. Working in a critical mode doesn’t mean “negative” but instead suggests an engaged, analytic, and evaluative investigation. This is your opportunity to really dig in and research a topic of your choosing related to the course.

 

You will create an online article addressing the issues brought up in your media proposals. In a solo authored report, you will tackle the conversations started in your proposals. Your goal is to take this topic, enhance it with your critical scholar prowess, and then inform a mass audience about your relevant issue. Draw on other academic literature to bolster your position (make sure to cite it properly). While different people will have unique key takeaways, you should also strive to engage with it at a high enough level that, if someone only reads your article, they would get a good general sense of your topic. You will demonstrate your ability to engage the media in a critical fashion and to communicate your criticisms in effective academic prose balanced with audience engagement. This is not a synthesis paper collecting the findings of previously published scholarship. The content of this online essay can be structured like an article found within a trade or industry publication. In text citations are needed and you should mostly be avoiding the first-person perspective. Write toward your intended audience.

The Critical Process:

• Description: Ex. Paying close attention, taking notes, and researching the subject under study. Further identify central characters, conflicts, topics, and themes. Comparing what we have found to other stories on similar topics. Document what we think is missing from these news narratives—the questions, viewpoints, and persons that were not included
• Analysis: Ex. Discovering and focusing on significant patterns that emerges from the description stage. You may chart and organize your results. Critique might spotlight just a few key patterns and differences.
• Interpretation: Ex. Asking and answering “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about one’s findings.
• Evaluation: Ex. Arriving at a judgment about whether something is good, bad, or mediocre, which involves subordinating one’s personal taste to the critical “bigger picture” resulting from the first three stages. Make critical judgments measured against our own frames of reference—what we like and dislike, as well as what seems good or bad or missing.
• Engagement: Ex. Taking some action that connects our critical perspective with our role as citizens to question our media institutions, adding our own. New, blended, and merging cultural phenomena challenge us to reassess and rebuild the standards by which we judge our culture.

 

For more nuanced examples you may want to look at the “Media Literacy and the Critical Process” boxes within each chapter for additional inspiration or guidance. I would also recommend looking ahead to chapters we have yet to cover.

A key factor in this assignment is that you demonstrate a rigorous, scholarly analysis of the subject of your essay. You cannot just be “in your own head” or making broad claims but you must bring evidence to support your arguments by primarily drawing on established academic research. The key is that you find support for your argument in scenarios, research, and cases beyond your own personal experience or opinions. This will also require looking through journals, books on the subject, and seeking solid examples to build and anchor your thesis.

Specifications

1. Your article will extend will be working with a number of short clips (2-3) and interspersing them through your piece – using them as reflection prompts, illustrations, jumping off points in making your argument. The article should be written as an online essay, complete with the embedded videos and any other images, links, etc. you may want to use to illustrate your argument and make for a good presentation. Use the online aspect of your portfolio to full effect. You have the option of creating one piece of media yourself however it still must be backed by creditable and cited information.

 

2. You should engage with (i.e. draw on, meaningfully cite, quote, be in conversation with) from the 3 peer reviewed scholarly articles or books. These sources should be the ones you previously established or discovered in your proposals; however, you are free to expand your scope as long as any new information meets our creditability standards. Our book does can count as a source for this project. It should influence your overall work but should not be your primary focus. Sources should come from your independent literature search.

 

3. You should use APA Style conventions for quoting and citing work. Supplementary materials will be provided to help those needing to be trained in the format. The key is that you do a deep analytic dive, demonstrating your original thinking and application of the concepts we’ve discussed and in conversation with other research on the subject. Give credit where credit is due.

 

4. On or before the due date you will submit your paper to our portfolio system. The paper will be a minimum of 3-5 pages long, plus a reference page of at least 3 sources. The paper will be free from typographical or grammatical errors. Our previous writing standards still apply.