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"...above all, a work
for young people must not talk down to its audience, because they
can always tell. Kids are tougher than any theatre critic. They
will easily expose a playwright who doesn't deliver a story that
is tight as a trap but also lyrical, focused while being fast-moving,
believable but still fantastic, while it challenges them and makes
them question . . .."
Frumi Cohen
"The nervous system
of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And
if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment,
the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances,
sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness."
Tennessee Williams
"The health of a nation,
a society, can be determined by the art it demands. We have insisted
of television and our movies that they not have anything to do
with anything, that they be our never-never land; and if we demand
this same function of our live theatre, what will be left of the
visual-auditory arts -- save the dance (in which nobody talks)
and music (to which nobody listens)?"
Edward Albee
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Meet
Junius Wright
 Junius
Wright is a National Board Certified teacher who has been teaching
Honors European Literature at the Academic Magnet High School
for the past five years. As a teacher, his goal is to provide
an atmosphere that fosters in students a hunger to acquire knowledge
and a desire to awaken their intelligence so they will be able
to become individual thinkers who can successfully interpret the
world around them.
For the past three years, Junius has been using various forms
of technology to help him develop the Media Literacy Project,
a program dedicated to helping teachers integrate art, film, and
music into the traditional classroom curriculum. He strongly believes
that technology is a tool that should be integrated to support
and enhance teaching practices that have already been proven a
success in the classroom.
Junius Wright's Best Practice Strategy
Use on-line works of art to help improve students' analytical,
writing, and oral presentation skills.
Lesson Plan Overview
Junius Wright started The Media Literacy Project at the Academic
Magnet High School by in 1999 through a mini-teacher grant from
the Charleston Community Foundation. The original objective of
the Media Literacy Project was to integrate famous works of art
into the Honors European Literature curriculum to help students
improve their classification and analytical skills and strengthen
their ability to explain the connections between literature and
events in history. In 2002 an EIA teacher grant helped to make
it feasible to add film and music into the Media Literacy curriculum.
In the same year grants from the South Carolina Arts Commission
and Youth Endowment for the Arts funded the Project's first artist-in-residence,
Cabell Heyward. (Article Link: "Art
as Literature" from The Post and Courier)
The Media Literacy Project is divided into three primary sections:
art, film, and music. An explanation for each area of the program
is explained below.
ART
A different work of art is used to represent each of the six different
literary periods students study in Honors European Literature.
A mounted reproduction of each of these works hangs on the classroom
wall. The students use these art works to help them complete written
assignments, participate in class discussions, and understand
concepts presented in class lectures.
Lesson Plan Links
The Chinese Poetry Project:
Using Chinese Art and Music to Write Poetry
Two Activities Exploring
The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali
Literary Realism and Manet's
A Bar at the Folies-Bergere
Analyzing Art as Literature:
Using On-line Works to Improve Analytical,
Writing, and Oral Presentation Skills
Understanding Renaissance
Humanism through an explication of The Birth of Venus
FILM
Throughout the year students actively view different films to
help them intensify their multidimensional understanding of the
characteristics of the literary periods they study as well as
to provide them with opportunities to practice their skills of
analysis.
Lesson Plan Link
Brother Where Art Thou?:
Using filming Techniques to Study Characterization
MUSIC
The auditory resource of the Media Literacy Project will be five
Compact Disc recordings of musical selections, each of which will
represent one of the five literary periods studied in class during
the academic year. Each of these works will be played during the
study of the literary period which it represents in order to reinforce
student understanding of the literary period's characteristics
as well as to offer students the opportunity to practice skills
of analysis.
Lesson Plan Link
Analyzing Historical and
Literary Characteristics in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
Web Page
Internet Resources
Sample Rubric
Student Handouts
Pictures of Students/Artwork
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