Sierra Students Studying the Media’s Influence on Their Lives
by Mike Cook
Las Cruces Public Schools, Sept. 23, 2005

LAS CRUCES – Through television, the internet and other media, teenagers in New Mexico and across the United States are bombarded with advertising for a huge array of products, some of which are harmful to their health. Sixth- and seventh-grade media magnet students are getting a week-long course on “the techniques advertisers are using to target them for products that are harmful to them,” said Sierra Media teacher Joshua Silver. The students learn “how advertising affects them so they can make better choices. It’s a great opportunity for students to start thinking critically about all the media messages they are seeing on a daily basis,” Silver said.

His classes are being led this week by Christie McAuley, who is charge of curriculum development for the New Mexico Media Literacy Project (NMMLP). Silver said Sierra is the only school in Las Cruces Public Schools where the media- and nutrition-awareness course is being taught.

The course is funded in part by a TUPAC (Tobacco Use Prevention and Control) grant, said LCPS Health and Nutrition Specialist Barbara Berger. She helped bring the NMMLP course to Sierra. The course is “an important and effective way to teach kids that tobacco and all advertising is manipulative,” Burger said. She said it helps students learn to “think about their choices and be smart about them.”

Seventh-grader Ines Aguirre said the course has taught her that “companies don’t really care about people’s health. They just care that their products get sold.” She said the course is making her pay more attention to “the facts about products before you buy them.”

Alyssa Nuñez, also a seventh-grader, said slides shown during the course about tobacco and some food products has changed her thinking. Putting Vaseline on a hamburger “to make it shiny and juicy,” for example. “That’s nasty,” she said. “It makes you feel uncomfortable. It makes you want to stay healthy.”

McAuley’s presentation included a list of 24 techniques used by “media makers … to persuade you to believe or do something.” They include everything from inducing fear (“if we don’t buy what is being sold, something really bad will happen to us or to our families or friends”) to “card stacking” – when an advertiser “only picks out some of the information about a product to talk about, and ignores other facts that makes their product seem less valuable.”

In addition to the classroom lectures, Silver said Sierra also gets media resources through the NMMLP course that will be available to students in classrooms and the school library.

NMMLP is part of Albuquerque Academy. Since 1993, it “has brought the media literacy message to hundreds of thousands of children and adults across New Mexico and the nation,” according to http://www.nmmlp.org/. NMMLA defines media literacy as “the ability to critically consume and create media, an essential skill in today’s world. Media literate individuals are better able to decipher the complex messages they receive from television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, billboards and signs, packaging and marketing materials, video games, and the Internet. Media literacy skills can help one understand not only the surface content of media messages but the deeper and often more important meanings beneath the surface.”
For more information, contact Silver at (505) 527-9640 or .

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