4. With Communities
Communities share common ways of life, customs, and traditions. These shared norms allow communities to be present with one another across different ideas, preferences, or backgrounds. Communities exist all around us, including the neighborhoods, schools, churches, libraries, sports teams, and other organizations we observe daily.
Communities today do not depend on physical spaces alone. Today, online communities are as or more common in our lives than physical ones. In online spaces, a different set of social norms guides our engagement with others. Digital communities offer the affordances of connectivity, durability, and spreadability. However, they can also be invasive and lack the human presence necessary to build trust and care. In digital spaces, we rely on the digitally constructed identities of our peers as they exist online.
Whether in digital or lived environments, the ways in which we envision being with others in these spaces influences the norms that guide us online and in the world. How we use media to be engaged in communities can define the health and strength of the community spaces we inhabit.
Questions to Consider For Community-Driven Media Literacy Practice
- How can media be used to build stronger, better, and more connected communities?
- What ways can media help us connect more directly and with purpose in our proximal environments?
- How can we build community solidarity through and with media across our differences?
Exploring Community - Three Approaches
1. Learning About Communities
A lot of times in media literacy education, we look at communities through the media. We distance ourselves from communities and explore their norms through how they are portrayed. However, we forgo the necessary work of understanding how communities exist in the first place.
a. For this portion of the field guide, select a community. For example, it could be an online advocacy group, a local neighborhood group, or an after-school organization. Find something that you or your students are familiar with or can learn about.
b. After you select that organization, create a map about the community. Think about spaces, resources, and other interesting information, like population, diversity, age, and so on. Draw or Construct a map that represents the community as an inclusive group.
c. Think about how these maps work. Think about how they reflect diverse people, places, ideas and issues.
2. Media And Communities
Communities often have multiple identities. The ways in which communities practice in person versus how they are understood online can change how we understand and engage with communities themselves. For this activity, we’ll be exploring how media represents communities, and can distort the human elements of communities.
Take your community map and review what you’ve identified to answer the following questions:
Media Representation
- How is the community represented by the media? Or is it represented at all?
- How might the community represent itself in the media?
- What ways do media accurately represent this community?
- How do media representations uphold or challenge stereotypes about the community?
Media and Community
Next, think about how media can bring communities together by answering the following questions about your community map:
- How can media bring communities together?
- What can communities do with media to bring people together across differences?
- What types of media do we need to support strong physical communities?
3. With (and not for) Communities
Being an active listener is difficult, but important. Creating a collaborative environment means using media to be with your community and not to speak for the community.
What do we mean by with (and not for)? It is a way of reframing our thinking as practitioners from a preset standard of outcomes we wish to meet to a more process-based way of building relationships within a community.
Now that you have your community map and some ideas about the media representation and uses of the community, it is time to take the next steps and listen to the community.
Hearing Diverse Voices
Design a community spaces (can be physical and/or mediated), where community members can connect to act together to support positive change, community connections, or just to bring people together in fun and interesting ways.
In designing this space, consider who should be there, what types of people should be included, what ideas and what skills, and how these spaces can connect people in different ways.
Reflect on these designs and think about how media can help us, and sometimes hurt, the ways in which we strive to be together in community spaces.
Using Community in Your Media Literacy Learning Environment [Template]
IT'S YOUR TURN!
Using the template here, create your own media literacy learning experiences around the following learning goals:
- How can we use community-based approaches to help learners recognize the diversity of their physical environments?
- How can we use community-based approaches to help learners develop the mindsets to support more inclusive community based engagement?
- How can we build more community-driven media literacy learning environments through an emphasis on connection, belonging and solidarity?
Template for Your With Communities Workshop
Time Needed:
Materials Needed:
Part One: Introducing With Community Exercise
Part Two: Core Activities [use from above or create your own!]
Part Three: Debrief [what questions do you want your learners to reflect on after this experience]
Part Four: Educator Reflection