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Philadelphia Students Explore Flash Mobs to Build Digital and Media Literacy Skills

The group of Philadelphia children were gathered in a classroom watching a short local TV news segment in which their own class had been featured regarding their media literacy summer program. Only days before, this group of 9-11-year-old African-American children had been thrilled when a camera person from the local station arrived at the school to interview them and their teacher, John Landis, who was helping them to explore the topic of flash mob through video game production.

The class chose this topic in light of a series of flash mob occurrences in the spring of 2010: a number of raucous, spontaneous and sometimes aggressive gathering of hundreds of teenagers had converged downtown, causing consternation among ordinary citizens as well as business, government and community leaders. The children in Mr. Landis’ class had heard stories about the events from family members at home and were eager to discuss the topic and learn more about it.

But as they viewed the TV news segment, the children’s mood began to change from delight to frustration as they listened to the broadcast voiceover which accompanied images of the children themselves in their classroom.

“That’s not the only reason why we made our video games!” exclaimed one student, as another chimed in, “…and we’re not at Temple University, we’re at Russell Byers Charter School!” At this point, children had been exploring this topic for nearly a month by reading and analyzing news stories and composing short video interactives to discover that flash mob participants, observers and even police officers all make choices about their actions and all experience the consequences of those choices. Now the students were ascertaining how the choices and consequences of another group, those of TV news producers, can shape our understanding of our communities, our neighbors and the world around us.

This article was written by Renee Hobbs and reprinted with permission from Spot.Us. Read Renee's entire article about the children's participation in Powerful Voices for Kids, the K-6 media literacy summer program partnered by The Media Education Lab at Temple University and the Russell Byers Charter School.