This section of Rick Shepherd's article: "Elementary Media Education: The Perfect Curriculum" describes a Canadian pilot project in the early 1990's to promote and support media literacy in elementary schools.

In North York's Elementary Media Literacy Pilot Project, a resource teacher of media literacy (with a secondary background) was teamed with a number of elementary support staff to provide a project support team. In each of two years, approximately 25 teachers of grades 4, 5, and 6 from ten schools were selected by their principals for the project. The objectives were to produce a group of media-literate teachers, and to explore and develop strategies and curriculum. The teachers were provided with three-and-a-half days of in-service training, spread over the first half of the school year, as well as five two-hour after-school sessions.

The project team was determined to resist the tendency to give teachers "recipes" rather than ideas, and sessions thus involved basic theoretical concepts, discussion and modeling of strategies, production training, and sharing sessions in which teachers reported on successful approaches they had tried. We emphasized the necessity of continually moving back and forth between analytical activities and production, and we returned to the framework again and again in the sessions. In-class support was also given by the support team, particularly when production activities were being attempted.

The responses, although varied, were encouraging. A few of the teachers had previously done some "pioneer" work on their own, so providing them with a framework to work in, which freed them to move ahead very quickly. They and a few others who were quick to start often worked ahead of the project, introducing topics to their classes before we had discussed them with the group. A larger group worked more or less at the pace of the project, moving from the theoretical concepts presented in the initial sessions to implementation in various forms as the project developed. A third group expressed interest and commitment, but chose to hold off on implementation. During the year, many of them expressed views such as: "This is very new. I won't be ready to implement it until I see the end of the project." At the end of the year, many said, "Now I've got some sort of an overall picture, I'm ready to implement this on my own." A small number of teachers, perhaps 10 per cent, did no implementation.

A few other factors appeared to influence readiness to implement. In the first year, we noted that progress was greatest in schools where two or more teachers were involved in the project. This was not surprising - peer support is obviously important in developing and implementing new curriculum. Recognizing this, in the second year of the project we attempted to recruit at least two teachers from each school we worked with - though this was not always possible, particularly with small schools. We also noted that, although relatively new teachers appeared to be quicker in grasping the theoretical concepts, teachers with more experience were generally quicker to actually implement the ideas in their classrooms. For many of the teachers, in-class support played an important role in implementation. Few teachers have any experience dealing critically with visual material in class, and seeing this modeled by an experienced resource person seemed to give many teachers the confidence to move ahead themselves.

Perhaps the most exciting point in the project was the day when some of the teachers presented reports of classroom activities to others in a "carousel" format. The teachers who were presenting - four to eight - set up their display materials on tables placed around the perimeter of a large room, and all gave simultaneous 10-15 minute presentations to whichever audience members selected their presentation. The audience could choose to view several different presentations, which were repeated three or four times. This format was low-threat for teachers who were unused to presenting, and it allowed others to sample a variety of approaches.

Much of what was presented was work-in-progress, dealing with such things as image analysis, advertising, student production work, and various activities linking student writing with media literacy activities. Those who had begun to implement and made presentations were encouraged by the positive responses of others; those who had not yet begun to implement were encouraged to do so by the many possibilities, and by the success stories of those who had. The project leadership faded into the background; the project belonged to the teachers.

Equally encouraging were the reported responses of students to media literacy work. Virtually all teachers commented on the enthusiasm and degree of focus that students brought to their classroom activities. Interestingly, many teachers reported that the students who normally tended to play the most active roles in traditional classroom discussions were replaced by a different group of students: kids who usually contributed very little to discussions, or who tended to be disruptive, now played leading roles in discussions and activities. Special education students, in particular, seemed to excel at this work, remaining focused for longer than usual, working more cooperatively with others, and displaying considerable creativity.

Many teachers also reported a change in student discussions of television, and the development of more critical attitudes to the media in general. (It is important that balance be maintained in this area - we should not be bringing the media into the classroom to kick them. Helping kids to develop critical thinking skills about the media is essential; teaching them that the media they enjoy are "bad" is a dead-end approach.) Another very notable response from teachers was that the quality and quantity of student writing improved when they were writing about the media or for media production purposes. This is particularly important, since teachers and parents concerned about traditional literacy skills are often concerned about time spent on media literacy.

One of the original objectives of the project was the production of curriculum materials for the junior division. However, we realized midway through the second year that we were not yet ready to write definitive curriculum in the area. Our general feeling was that we simply needed more time to explore what has been, until now, unexplored territory in North American education. Although we had a lot of ideas and many useful strategies, we still had questions about sequencing, dealing with various genres, and developing concepts. Although we had hoped to bring a third group of teachers into the project in 1992-93, a cut in support staff made this impossible. However, interested teachers from the first two years (roughly half of the 50) have opted to continue work in a phase two project, which we hope will extend the work further.