Being a “math” person I was easily attracted to the chapter titled, Math and Media: Students Who Use Math to Track Media Bias in Rethinking Popular Culture and Media.  It was a short read that talked about how math can be used to analyze and address social problems.  The author of the chapter, Bob Peterson, gave some examples of ways that math can be used as a tool for studying discrimination and stereotypes and for researching bias in the media.




One of the activities, titled “Photo Fairness” was derived from the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) media watchdog group.  After this group examined front-page photos for a month in three major daily newspapers, it was found that women were “dramatically slighted.”  For example, in the Washington Post, only 13% of front-page photos were women. In terms of race, people of color “seemed to fit neat stereotypes.”  Thirty percent of all men of color in front-page photos were athletes.  Fourteen percent were criminals.  

Peterson suggested that students can monitor newspapers and magazines in a similar way.  They could keep track of their findings and utilize a variety of math skills to demonstrate their own findings.  He even suggested that students could then take action with their findings by writing to the newspapers or magazines about the inequities.  


Another activity suggested by Peterson was related to researching bias in newspapers by keeping track of whose perspective (government officials, celebrities, etc) is being printed in the newspapers.  This would enable students to analyze perspectives to help them see biases, and then utilize math skills to analyze and communicate their findings.  Peterson suggested that students could focus on different categories, such as:


  •  Who are the people speaking? (government officials, celebrities, men, women, etc.)

  • What are they speaking about? (violence, crime, people working for peace and justice)

  • How many times are people of color portrayed positively vs. negatively?


The activities he suggested were a nice departure from using language (reading and writing) to analyze social issues.  The activities could also be tailored to a wide range in grade levels.  Students would be able apply their targeted math skill, whether it be basic computation, percentages, fractions, decimals, statistics, graphing, etc, to real-world information and it would be a powerful way to integrate mathematics into other areas of the curriculum.  As a third grade teacher and thinking about the work we do with fractions, I can see how I would be able to incorporate these activities to help deepen their understanding of fractions and also make the concept more meaningful to them.  










Comments

  1. Christina CJuly 3, 2020 at 7:15 AM

    Hi Leigh, the strategies you outlined from the chapter are great ways to bring both ELA and social justice concepts into the math curriculum. Thank you for highlighting this excellent information in your blog!

    ReplyDelete
  2. LesleyJuly 5, 2020 at 9:04 PM

    Sounds like this could be a fun way to engage the fraction unit and get at some media literacy at the same time! Excellent.

    ReplyDelete

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