I heart jigsaw

Yes, at first I hated you. I felt you were forced upon me by evil professors focused only on their narrow-minded cooperative learning agendas. But! Now I have come to see the beauty and genius that is you. The truth is just this: understanding one thing is easier than understanding a bunch of things. So, here is a specific idea for this week. Although it is an excellent idea for examining gender/sexist stereotypes, it can modified in many ways.

I recycled this lesson plan from some team-teaching I did last semester, which saved me time, but also because at the end of the course the majority of the students claimed this was their favorite activity. And this was from middle school students who wouldn't write more than 4 sentences for the rest of the course. I had each student deconstruct an ad--not in the evil Derridaesque sense of the word--and create a caricature from the point of view of the ad's target audience.

I had them focus on the outrageous, over-the-top claims, etc., that ads tend to make and tell the "story" of the ad, like picture forms of caricatures that students were more familiar with. This enabled me to discuss more traditional aspects of satire, irony, and sarcasm as well as address the underlying political messages, etc. implied by the ads.

I used this in conjunction with creating an advertising campaign with simple arts and crafts materials. For more of a media studies focus, I would connect this to a unit on media literacy and possibly storyboard a commercial or have students create their own commercial/ad campaign/print ad using a bit more advanced technology. Also the film clip from What Women Want, where Mel Gibson's character dresses up in the women's clothes, etc. to "understand" his target audience is particularly relevant. The film itself addresses both gender stereotypes in the media and the importance in advertising of knowing your target audience.

Here's a PDF of the lesson plan. Am v. excited as this is the first one I've actually written and not just converted, as well as the first one I've personally uploaded. This one is really simple, but there were tons of other cool options I could've included in creating it.

If I have time later in the week I'll hunt down my ad and my sample sketch. I also think I have some artifacts that I'm definitely going to try and post ASAP just so you can see what a great job some of the kids did.