Audience Description
The workshops we have created are directly geared toward teachers from various disciplines, teaching at the early high school grade levels. These teachers vary in age, race, and gender as our goal is to have all current teachers integrate what is being shown in these workshops into their classroom lessons. The final three workshops divide these teachers into their specific focuses of Information Technology teachers, Social Studies teachers and English Language Arts teachers, these three areas are therefore the focus of our workshops.
The workshops also serve an indirect audience. This audience consists of the students that will be the ones to benefit from what the workshops teach the teachers involved. Part of the goal of the workshop is to improve the delivery of the curriculum currently being used to incorporate more media education so students will be more aware and more capable of critical analysis of the media around them. This goal is reached indirectly through what the teacher’s are being taught and are encouraged to go and integrate in their classes so students can benefit.
Our research has been based around effective ways in which media education can be integrated into the curriculum. Since teachers are the ones that are charged with the responsibility to teach media education as outlined in the BC education curriculum, their relationship to this research topic and their importance for its implementation are clear.
One of the greatest challenges faced through this audience is the number of teachers that have already established class outlines and materials that they use from year to year. With the push towards integrating more media education into the classroom, there is also a need to change the current lesson plans being used. The extra work involved in changing these lesson plans and finding new materials that do in fact integrate media education, is part of the challenge. This is in part why the importance of media education is stressed in the first workshop to give teachers more of a desire to act.
The fact that our audience does vary so greatly with respect to age, race and gender, does pose a challenge in the ways our workshop will be accepted. A younger teacher just starting out putting together lesson plans and developing a teaching style, would be more likely to incorporate what is being learned in our workshops into these plans. As mentioned earlier, teachers who have been around a long time will have to be more motivated to make the necessary changes and change their lesson plans. Furthermore the varying backgrounds of the teachers may cause different perceptions as to what we are presenting.
Past attempts at media education that, to the teacher, appeared unsuccessful could discourage the teacher to put in the effort to integrate new media education activities that may appear to them as unproductive. The differences in background and education for each of the teachers also means different perspectives on what will or will not work or their perception of how important media education actually is will likely vary. Part of our goal therefore, is to help our audience understand the importance of media education for the students they teach, despite their own personal backgrounds and current understanding of media education.
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