Raising awareness about media representation and gender equity 

Recommendations for teachers

Media education approach can help considerably with questioning our biases and noticing how a very complex matter like gender is often pictured in very black and white terms, which belittles or limits the female or male characteristics to some very abusive generalizations. These very generalizations maintain the prejudice that we learn in our family, at school and may hamper us to perceive gender in more equitable terms. And media education helps children and young people to contextualize the media representations and practices of gender. 

During the eMERGE project, we worked on several levels of intervention in a co-design and experimentation process with teachers and more than 2000 secondary school students during which teachers and trainers have identified good practices and guidelines to use media literacy education for better gender equity at school. 

Here, we propose a set of recommendations that rounds up the entire eMerge process  and which, we hope, will help educators teach about gender representations in the media and popular culture without being afraid of possible implications of dealing with a sensitive topic in the classroom, caring for gender equity and open debate. Librarians and other educators interested in the topic could very well use the eMerge resources to self-train and be able to adapt activities in their contexts. 

These recommendations are accompanied by some of the students’ media productions created during the experimentation phase. To have access to a full gallery of media production, please sign in.