Mill Valley Herald

Students enthusiastically create their own hidden images.

JOSHUA SABATINI
Editor

A group of students at one Mill Valley school are enrolled in an inventive course teaching them the first lines of defense against advertisers’ ever-resourceful campaigns, of which they often find themselves a target.

Instead of allowing its students to become unwitting victims
of the media, Ring Mountain Day School, a preschool-through-eighth-grade private school, decided this year to call in Just Think, an independently run organization formed in 1995 to teach children to think critically about media: television, radio, film, print media, electronic games and the Internet.

On this Wednesday, the fifth and sixth grade classes at Ring Mountain Day School’s Mill Valley campus were engaged in a 45-minute course, led by Just Think’s program director Erica Deiparine-Sugars.

The 10 students were busy on the computers using the program Adobe Photoshop. Deiparine-Sugars patiently instructed the students on how to use the computer program’s tools—such as filters and layers—to change the appearance of images. The students then split up into small groups and enthusiastically got to work.

Tammy Long, Ring Mountains’s elementary and middle school director, gave the Just Think program high marks. “I think [Just Think] has done a tremendous job in raising consciousness,” said Long. She said that the course, held every Wednesday at the school this fall, teaches children to ask the basic question: “What is the message behind the message?” This question goes a long way in ensuring that the students will no longer be victims of the barrage of messages aimed at them every day.

Long feels that nowadays the messages targeting children are at such a high volume and so increasingly effective that media literacy should be as much a part of public schools’ curricula as history or English. “This is something we need to be proactive about and teach young people about because there is a type of brainwashing and indoctrination that happens that as adults we have the maturity and experience to question; they [the children] don’t,” said Long. “It is incumbent on adults to recognize…media literacy as just as important as teaching about manners, math, science and all the subjects. It is not something we have ever thought about, but there it is necessary because of the impact and pervasiveness of the media.”

For this Wednesday’s classroom work, the children were asked to take digital pictures of themselves, think of three words to describe themselves, think of three additional words that others would use to describe them, and then to combine these elements and create one central image using Photoshop.

The studens will finish their projects, one definitive image promoting a message after the Thanksgiving holiday. This project’s purpose was to teach children how manipulating picures in certain ways will create different messages.

Just Think offers schools a variety of workshops headed by their staff for a fee. The workshops are geared in one way or another to provide young people with the ability to “understand, evaluate, and create media messages.”

On another day, the students were asked to bring in magazine advertisements and then spent time analyzing the points of the ads, such as whom the ad was targeting and whether it had a hidden message. The class was a crash course in media analysis.

Ring Mountain Day School was established in 1976 as an independent preschool and elementary school. It recently expanded to include grades six through eight. The Ring Mountain Day School’s elementary campus is located at 104 Tiburon Blvd. in Mill Valley, and the pre-school campus is located at 215A Blackfield Drive in Tiburon. The pre-school leases property from Congregation Kol Shofar and has been at this site since 1985. Its student body is about 140, while the elementary school’s is 58.

Director of the school since 1999, Nancy Diamonti said Just Think’s workshop fits perfectly with the school’s mission. “Part of our curriculum is to teach the use of technology and the Just Think program ties into the fact that we are a school in which we teach kids to problem-solve and be critical thinkers. Influence of media and technology is a natural combination of things. We not only want to teach children how to use technology and be proficient in it, but also to use it critically.”

The school was referred to the program by a student’s parent. Diamonti said that Just Think offers reasonably priced workshops, and she plans to include them in the school’s curriculum in years to come.

The Conprehensive Health Education Foundation, an entrepreneurial and collaborative group based in Seattle, Washington, sent a crew late last month to include the school’s efforts in a video series it is producing.

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