Stanford Group C Video Conference with AUC Egypt
Our group thoroughly enjoyed meeting and sharing ideas with Hollie and Nesma from AUC Egypt during our Cross-Cultural Rhetoric video conference earlier today. Our assignment was to jointly create a lesson plan for a future Cross-Cultural Rhetoric session with the objective of effectively promoting dialogue and cross-cultural communication. Below you will find the lesson plan we created:
Lesson Plan Group C
Topic: Media
Objective: How the media is representative of the country
as a whole -
Countries: US, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, UK
Texts: Various sources from the media
Technology: Internet -
Format: Open discussion
Questions:
1) How is women's position in society portrayed?
2) What are some of the stereotypes that are portrayed in the media? Are
people seen as individuals with their own identities, or are they all grouped?
How are different groups seen by others in their own society, and how are
societies as a whole seen by other countries?
3) What are some stereotypes that people have about others in their own
country?
During our discussion with Hollie and Nesma, we talked a lot about the media as a device for understanding other cultures, since media portrayals often represent people's primary exposure to other cultures. We talked about the differences between freedom of expression in the media, and a media censored by the government. An example of the former is the media coverage of the upcoming United States presidential election. To some Americans, this bombardment of media reporting and candidates' statements is simply an annoyance, but we need to stop and remember how lucky we are to have all of this information accessible to us.
We also talked about how media coverage can perpetuate stereotypes (often negative ones) about various cultures. Even within a single culture or country, the media often tends to disregard individuals and their unique identities, and instead groups them into subcultures in order to make generalizations and judgments about them. We were interested in this dynamic, and about getting the perspectives of people in other countries about how accurately their cultures are portrayed by the media. This is why our lesson plan involves analyzing a variety of media texts, such as news shows, music videos, and Internet sites. We wanted our lesson plan to take the format of an open discussion among people from various countries rather than a debate, because we feel that valuable exchanges of ideas can still take place with respectful differences of opinion, and without highly charged emotions.
Thank you again, Hollie and Nesma, for sharing with us and teaching us!
-Johnny, Judy, and Jill