By Don Goble
Bullying in schools has been a problem for many years, and the media especially has seized upon these stories, to share with their viewers, the heartache and loss that bullying has led to. Typically, audiences who watch television newscasts, have simply been consumers of the bullying problem, by witnessing the professional media show images of children becoming violent in schools, or of hearing stories about how young kids have been taking their own lives.
KSDK, the St. Louis, Missouri NBC affiliate, recently decided to take a different approach to bullying. Besides producing their own video stories of character education in schools, and showing personal stories of students who have been bullied, KSDK decided to ask local teenagers to produce and create their own anti-bullying videos, and submit them to their station website, through their “Bullying: Enough is Enough” campaign.
I am a high school broadcast and film instructor, a advocate, and a proud member of the Gateway Media Literacy Partners (GMLP), which empowers citizens to think critically about media messages. Therefore, I have been especially struck in a couple of ways by this KSDK initiative.
First, I am a firm believer that media literacy, and in particular digital media literacy, is as important as writing or reading literacy, to the education of our children. According to the Pew Research Center, “As of May 2011, 71% of online adults reported watching videos on a video-sharing site such as YouTube or Vimeo.” So if almost three-quarters of adults are watching videos online, how many teenagers are actually watching online? Recent studies show that, “87% of U.S. teens aged 12-17 now use the Internet” (MacArthur Foundation). And as educators, if we aren’t teaching our students to critically analyze the media material they are watching, or helping them learn ways to deconstruct the media messages they watch in a productive manner, how will they learn?
My second thought stems from the belief by many that all media is sensationalized, and that the public doesn’t have a voice in the news they watch. Wrong. We are living in a digital age, where the public is not only consumers, but also creators of messages, who have a loud voice. Simply surf over to YouTube to view the millions of hits home videos are garnering, and understand that “…. the latest statistics from YouTube are that 48 hours of content are uploaded every minute to the site and the range of contributions is striking….” (Pew Research).
I applaud KSDK for taking a different approach to news, by recognizing that teenagers have a voice, a big voice. Maybe it will take this collective, passionate effort by kids helping kids to help get rid of bullying at school or online. How great would it be for a teen to positively impact another young person’s life. Thank you KSDK, for taking part in a terrific media literacy lesson for us all.
There is a website at http://CyberCitizen.org that helps students and schools deal with Bullying and Cyberbullying on Facebook and other social networks.
The media can sponsor a city which allws students to make “Anonymous” reports to their schools and to people that monitor the social networks through this service.
We have School Counselors, School Psychologist, Social Workers and a Computer Forensics Investigator on staff to help students, parents and schools.
CyberCitizen.org also offers free on-ine webinars that feature many top speakers on Bullying, Cyberbullying, Character Education and Positive Psychology.