Access and Awareness
Another goal of the grant was to have students explore the theme of violence and violence prevention by producing their own media messages. According to Arts Endowment Chairman Bill Ivey, "the arts are tools enabling young people to respond creatively and non-violently to those messages, helping them better understand themselves and the world in which they live." As a final project each year, SMARTArt students work in teams to produce a 30-second animated public service announcement related to the Project's theme. In Years 1 and 2, the theme concentrated on violence and violence prevention.

The children attending Leo Politi Elementary School are no strangers to violence. It's all around them in the big city of Los Angeles. The school itself is situated in two of L.A.'s high-crime drug-infested neighborhoods, Pico Union and Koreatown. When it was built 13 years ago, barricades were set up to block the exit routes on both sides of the school to keep out drug traffickers and help prevent violence. Although crime rates have since diminished, parents have since voted to keep the barriers.

An "Ah-ha" Moment
A "teachable moment" during Project SMARTArt's first year helped students become aware of the effects of media violence in their daily lives. MCED artist/educator Amy Santo was showing kindergarten students an Afro-Brazilian martial art and dance called capoeira. "Its martial arts movements are not used as attack," Santo explains. "It's more like playing a game." But when the children did a front-kick movement, one of them suddenly looked frightened and said, "I've seen that before...in a movie."

Santo stopped to let the children talk about it. "What do you do in your house when you see something on TV that scares you?" she asked. "I go in the other room," and "I go to the neighbors," were the children's first responses. They proceeded to discuss that usually they are not the ones at home who get to choose what to watch on TV. Then they began problem-solving about what they could do to make their homes free from violent images. "A whole wonderful conversation started about how to assert their power at home over the images presented in their living rooms," Santo says. "It helped the children think more deeply and strategize about how to deal with those representations of violence." Then it was back to the dance.

"I think what really works here," says CML President and CEO Tessa Jolls, "is a combination of the head and the heart. I look at the critical thinking part of media literacy as the head at work, but the arts and self-expression are the heart. So from the students' standpoint, the Project provides a way for them to look critically at violence in the media and at the same time be able to express their emotions about the way violence plays out in their own lives."

Media as Communication
"One of the ways people perceive the world is through their physical selves," Santo observes. "That's why the movement in that dance-kick communicated the fear the child experienced in seeing that film."

Santo thinks media should be defined broadly. "If you define media as communication, then dance and the arts are part of it, in addition to what we normally think of as media, such as TV, sounds, and images."

Collect and Comprehend
To identify the many forms of print and nonprint media they already know, SMARTArt teacher Lorena Mendoza has her second-grade students use "thinking maps." Inside a circle in the center of the diagram the children print the word Media. Then they draw lines branching out to list various forms, such as books, CDs, TV, and more.

Next, the children cut out and collect magazine images of the various media listed on their thinking maps and make a colorful collage by pasting the images onto construction paper. Afterward, they write a paragraph about what they learned.

Next Steps
Increasing children's awareness that media can affect them and helping students recognize the different forms of media they can access to find information are first steps in helping students become media literate.

Next steps involve students in analyzing messages and in evaluating and reflecting on their form and meaning. That's where the Five Key Questions in the CML MediaLit Kit™ come into play.