The Understanding and Making of Reality Television in the Classroom

1Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014

Thematic Inquiry Unit:

The Understanding and Creating of Reality TV in the Classroom

Amy R. Raney

University of Texas at El Paso


Summary of Proposed Thematic Inquiry Unit

This unit came about simply because reality television has

become a kind of thorn in my side, a nemesis almost. Honestly, as

I entered this graduate program, I all but removed television

from my schedule and did not miss it one bit. I was especially

glad to be on a TV fast when programs like Honey Boo Boo, Toddlers

and Tiaras, and Duck Dynasty took over the airways and the Facebook

posts of all my friends/viewers. I sat down a year or so ago and

watched part of an episode of Toddlers and Tiaras, but I got so angry

that I had to walk away. I am officially not allowed to rant

about the show according to both of my daughters. I have never

watched Honey Boo Boo, but when I heard from others about the

blatant classism, the hideous behavior of the overweight mother

and pudgy white, blond little girl who were hailed as trailer

trash, every nerve in my body stood on end. I resented the

implied statement: anyone who is poor and white and lives in a

trailer park is like this. Yes, it hit me in my past, but that is

another research project. So, I did not even count television,

3Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014much less reality television, as a valuable mode for education

when we began this class. However, in reading chapter two of

Renee Hobbs’ book Digital and Media Literacy (2011), I began to realize

that I might be able to use the genre of reality television

against itself in my classroom; and then I reluctantly admitted

that if I was going to follow the multiliteracies pedagogy

outlined by the New London Group (2000) that we have been

learning about this semester, I would have to present the

selections of reality shows to my students, guide the questions

so that they can look critically at the content and production,

and then allow them to come to their own conclusions about the

value of the shows. I did not want to be one of those teachers

who “position themselves as more knowledgeable about the meanings

adolescents make of popular culture, and assume they already know

what those meanings will be. When this happens, adults stabilize

the meaning of the text, according to their own perceptions and

experiences of it, foreclosing other possible meanings of and

uses for texts that adolescents might create on their own”

(Hobbs, 2011, p. 33). After all, the point of critical framing

4Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014according to the New London Group is to help the students

“denaturalize and make strange again what they have learned and

mastered” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 34), not just have them

regurgitate my views.

So, with all this in mind, this unit plan will offer

students the opportunity to think critically about the content,

design, and production of some of the reality television shows

that they watch most often, and allow them to put to practice

what they learn by creating an episode of a reality show that

they design. I will begin with situated practice, guiding my

students to share their “previous and current experiences, as

well as their extra-school communities and discourses” (Cope &

Kalantzis, 2000, p. 33) by asking them to share with the class

what reality shows they are aware of and/or watch and why they

like them. Students will complete a blog assignment based on this

discussion. After sharing their previous knowledge and gaining

new perspectives from their classmates, students will gain overt

instruction and practice critical framing when they work in a

group to analyze their favorite reality show based on criteria

5Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014they create and present their analysis to the class in a the mode

of their choice (written, verbal, web page, or video).In the

final project, students will transform knowledge through the

creation of a digital video episode of a reality show concept

their group designs. In order to ensure reflection on how they

are being influenced and on their experience of the process

during the show production, each student will be asked to

document the experience in a “confessional” video at least three

times.

Literature Review

Television and Education

The last two generations of Americans have grown up under

the influence of television from the time they were born. For

those young people from homes of busy working parents, the

television became not only the evening entertainment and time

filler but often the babysitter, the best friend, the counselor

and the role model. It comes as no surprise that television

6Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014programming “plays a highly relevant role in the construction of

young people's identity,” (Samaniego & Pascual, 2007, p. 9;

Freedman & Schuler, 2003, p. 21). The unique influence that

television has on adolescents, and, in fact, all viewers, lies in

the properties of the medium itself. By its very presence,

television “reorients the household space it physically inhabits

into the space it covers or represents” because “television’s

claims to liveness and immediacy create a sense of spatially and

temporally ‘being there’ . . . through which we have direct

access to the witnessing of events ‘out there’” (Skaggs & Wood,

2008, p. 559).

Television, or television programming online, is on in most

American homes an average of seven hours each day (Freedman &

Schuler, 2003, p. 16); likewise, students spend eight hours a day

at least 180 days a year in school. “It is important to remember

that there are two institutions which are, in our society,

privileged domains for discourse, namely the mass media and

educational institutions” (Samaniego & Pascual, 2007, p. 17).

While many teachers bemoan the lack of values, common sense, and

7Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014knowledge in television programming aimed at adolescents

Samaniego and Pascual, based on their 2007 study on the influence

of the content, the medium, and the language of television, posit

that “teachers need to be convinced that it is possible to work

on values through the medium of television contents, rather than

viewing television as their enemy” (Samaniego & Pascual, 2007, p.

16). These researchers created a questionnaire (based on the

Schwartz and Bilsky model) that codifies values and behaviors

that students perceive in television programming and asks

students to connect those values to their own (Samaniego &

Pascual, 2007, p. 5). These researchers claim that in using this

tool, teachers can in fact use television programming as a source

of discourse with students. “Why do professionals in the field

of education not try to turn television viewing into an

opportunity for studying the values and counter-values that are

explicitly or implicitly conveyed? If we want to deal with the

values and counter-values transmitted in a systematic way, it is

important to amplify the positive messages and try to "turn" the

negative ones around” (Samaniego & Pascual, 2007, p. 7). From the

8Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014content and values, to the language used, to the functions of the

medium itself, television offers varied aspects from which to

educate students about the world and provide them new experiences

and perspectives on life.

Why reality television?

Students know fiction when it looks like fiction but they

“think of television as a window to the world when it comes to

issues of identity and their own social life” (Freedman &

Schuler, 2003, p. 21). In fact, reality TV producers bank on this

confusion and work to blur the line between fact and fiction so

that audiences feel a connection to the people in the show and

become “psychologically involved in the lives and experiences of

the characters . . . the realism of the relationships and the

emotions combines with the sensational and melodramatic to create

a powerful emotional brew” (Hobbs, 2011, p. 32; Skeggs & Woods,

2008, p. 570). According to Hobbs, students must be aware of this

“constructedness” in media and realize that reality shows, like

other media, must be “actively read, and are not unproblematic,

9Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014self-explanatory reflections of external reality . . . the media

are actively involved in processes of constructing or

representing ‘reality’ rather than simply transmitting or

reflecting it” (Hobbs, 2011, p. 55).

According to Freedman and Schuler (2003), it is the element

of “photographic imagery” in television that causes the confusion

between fact and fiction (p. 21); Skeggs agrees, stating that

reality television, in particular, traffics in this “hybridity”

of imagery and audio messages, creating a “a new form of

‘televisuality’,” an “environment, where viewers, participants

and producers are less invested in absolute truth and

representational ethics and more interested in the space that

exists between reality and fiction, in which new levels of

representational play and reflexivity are visualized,” (Skeggs,

2010, p. 68). This new kinship that audience members feel with

the characters of reality shows paradoxically includes “both

judgment and self-placement” (Skeggs & Woods, 2008, p. 570). So,

when students are seeing themselves as connected to the

characters on reality shows, and in fact using the relationships

10Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014and situations as models for their own lives and identities, but

are unable to distinguish between what is real and what has been

constructed for entertainment value, “The context of viewing,

including the age of the viewer, is an important issue when

considering the influence of television and ways to teach about

and through it” (Freedman & Schuler, 2003, p. 18). Reality

television offers content that students will already be invested

in because they see the connections to their own lives, and

because it is such an influence in their lives, it becomes very

important that teachers use the genre to help students understand

the influence as well as the constructs before they use the

programs as models for their lives.

Perceived Harm of Reality Television

Critics of reality television name its vices as classism and

sexism in the self-help style shows, the creation of a spectacle

oriented society in the performance shows, and the detriment of

11Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014children involved, as well as the society watching, in the slice

of life shows. Skaggs and Wood claim that the domestic reality

shows target women in order to “impose bourgeois standards of

domesticity and self-governance” and “deride” the working class

(Skeggs & Woods, 2008, p. 570). Everyday people are told they

can do better by “television’s expert mediators, the new cultural

intermediaries of self,” (Moorti, 2004, p. 206). The middle class

is established as the goal to be sought (Skeggs & Woods, 2008, p.

561), and conflict occurs because “one group’s standards are

found lacking and in need of improvement” (Skaggs, 2010, p. 69).

Students need to have a mediator who can point out the ploys of

the producers in these instances and make sure that students are

able to keep a healthy view and appreciation for their own

backgrounds and cultures.

In some of the newest, most popular reality shows, critics

note the element of “schadenfreude – feeling pleasure at another

person’s misfortune” (Hobbs, 2011, p. 134). Moorti and Ross

describe these types of reality television shows as promoting the

spectacular (2004, p. 207), even when that spectacle is a

12Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014figurative train wreck. These shows feature people who “do not

know how to behave and provide a spectacle of subjectivity turned

sour . . . an ethnographic display of unmediated, unknowing, bad

choice culture is displayed,” (Moorti & Ross, 2004, p. 207).

These shows can actually encourage racism and classism by

implying that some groups of people possess all the unwanted

characteristics of that group and employing “disparaging humor”

in order to let audience members “gain a feeling of superiority”

to those on display (Hobbs, 2011, p. 134). For example, one of

the researchers against reality television said that “reality

programming elevates undeserving individuals to public notice,

squandering attention on the unworthy, and suggesting that their

actions deserve respect,” (Royal, 2010, p. 451). If reality

television is teaching students to deride other cultures and

classes, teachers need to make sure that students know that is

what the programming is doing.

Shows that involve children in the cast are a particular

target of those who worry that the children will be harmed by

their participation. Royal claims that allowing children to be

13Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014involved in reality programming is a human rights issue because

it invades their privacy. “It places children under a giant

microscope, often at the most vulnerable times in their lives,

while involving them in ridiculous and often dehumanizing

experiences for ratings and profit” (2010, p. 440). He also

claims that allowing children to be in the shows harms society

because it allows the commercialization of childhood when a child

should be “defined exclusively as an object of sentiment and not

as an agent of production” (Royal, 2010, p. 441). Another problem

with allowing children to act in reality television is that they

are being asked to spend their years of development in a role

that is “scripted” which can hinder their identity development

(Royal, 2010, p. 443). “In place of privacy, children in reality

programming receive nationally televised personas, which do not

always depict them in a positive light. Programs often highlight

children’s deficiencies for entertainment purposes. ’Their worst

childhood moments, their fits, their tantrums have been

immortalized’. This could damage their self-image and how others

perceive them,” (Royal, 2010, p. 444-446). Since students are

14Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014themselves children with a sense of privacy and fairness, it only

makes sense to allow them to have this discourse in order to

decide what they feel constitutes exploitation.

Hope for Reality TV?

Contrary to the researchers who find only fault with the

genre, Ouellette (2010) finds positive aspects in reality TV. She

disagrees that reality TV draws the attention of “passive

audiences from the serious operations of democracy and public

life” (68). Instead she posits that reality TV offers audience

members “instructions, resources, and scripts for the navigating

the changing expectations and demands of citizenship,”

(Ouellette, 2010, p. 68). She claims that the benefits of

“citizen training” found in documentaries are still seen in

reality TV, but have just been transformed to meet the new

citizenry. The researcher believes that reality TV is

“potentially useful to new strategies of ‘governing at a

distance’ that deemphasize public oversight and require

15Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014enterprising individuals to manage their own health, prosperity,

and

well-being” (Ouellette, 2010, p. 68). Reality entertainment,

according to Ouellette, promotes a “’can-do attitude’”

(Ouellette, 2010, p. 69) and provides examples of “the truth

about class and wealth in the current era,” (Ouellette, 2010, p.

71).

Pedagogy

Problem Based Learning

Reality television not only offers content for the English

language arts classroom; it also offers a model of methods. Many

of the most popular shows are organized such that problem-based

learning is incorporated into the task that contestants have to

complete in order to stay on the show. Problem-based learning is

a teaching method where “teachers carefully craft a problem for

students to explore. In small groups, students decide on ways to

“solve” this problem. In many cases, the teacher, or a group of

“experts,” acts as facilitators and assist groups with their

16Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014endeavors. In other words, the point is not necessarily to find

the “right” answer but for classmates to work together with their

various knowledge, resources, and experiences to create these

‘solutions’,” (Bach, 2008, p. 43-44). Researchers in teacher

education have been experimenting with merging this PBL strategy

with a reality show concept to increase interest and motivation

for the team who is working to create innovative and interesting

lesson plans for their future students. If this combination of

PBL and reality show challenge can be used to inspire future

educators, it only makes sense that secondary teachers could

incorporate the same strategies, as well as other elements of

reality shows to foster creativity.

Why use DV in the classroom?

Teachers incorporating multiliteracies into their classroom

need to remember that the goal is not just to have students

consume knowledge, but to have them reshape and transform it into

something valuable and memorable for their own lives. Digital

video creation offers students access to technology that they

17Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014need to understand in their futures as well as “an authentic,

high-status, social and media practice with powerful attention-

getting qualities and expert models in the real world,” (Albers &

Sanders, 2010, p. 258). Digital video gives kid choices they

don’t have when just writing a paper, gains them status with

peers, connects to their life worlds, and requires them to

Redesign (Albers and Sanders, 2010, p. 258). The creation of a

reality show episode of their own design will ensure that the

students truly “analyze the televised environment” so that they

can “create similar environments” and “help them to understand

the fictional quality of these environments and the power of

images presented in conjunction with texts and sounds in making

these environments seem real. Having the students develop, act

out, and tape their own television like scenarios will help them

understand the ways in which such fictions are created” (Albers

and Sander, 2010, p. 24). Digital video helps teachers

incorporate situated practice because it “allows students to

bring to the digital composing task their media and community

experiences” (Albers, 2010, p. 261). Producing digital video

18Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014requires that teachers incorporate overt direction by taking the

time to “create tasks and let students take on real life roles,

collaborative teams” (Albers, 2010, p. 263). Finally, the making

of their own reality episode and the confessionals that go along

with the task will ask students to engage in critical framing and

transformation as they reflect on the process and people, events,

situations they have encountered during the assignments (Albers,

2010, p. 266).

Rationale

As teachers of multimodal literacies, we must be aware of

the modalities that our students use frequently as well as the

literacies that they already navigate each day. As websites like

Netflix and Hulu offer more and more online programming, young

people switch modes of viewing from the television to the

computer, but they are still using the same set of literacy

skills. Even though most of our students have been watching TV

since they were babies, they still often lack the knowledge to

view critically. In fact, many adults often may just sit down and

19Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014watch something they don’t have to analyze just the relax;

however, when we do think about what we are watching, we are

hopefully aware of the message that the producers are promoting

and the different methods they are using. Unless they have been

taught to recognize these purposes and methods, our students need

that education, and we, their teachers, realizing their need and

being in possession of the knowledge, are responsible for

educating them (Samaniego, 2007, p. 11). Because of the influence

that television wields over adolescents, and the likelihood that

they will in some way use television as a model to learn how to

maneuver in their personal lives, it is important that they

realize that the producers of their favorite shows often deal in

more “reflexive” and “associative” modes of communication rather

than focusing on rational thinking (Samaniego, 2007, p. 7).

Interpretation of media messages and communication are very

important pieces of our teaching objectives: “Students use

comprehension skills to analyze how words, images, graphics, and

sounds work together in various forms to impact meaning” (Texas

Essential Knowledge and Skills). It is important that teachers

20Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014educate students in how to think critically about what that they

see on television and “become good mediators between the values

conveyed by television narratives and those reconstructed by

students,” (Samaniego, 2007, p. 15; Freedman & Schuler, 2003, p.

22). In particular, reality television needs monitors able to

help students recognize the messages (explicit and implied), the

different perspectives, and the methods the medium employs

(Freedman &Schuler, 2003, p. 19). “Because media representations

stand in for my lack of direct experience, they can truly be said

to ‘create the world’,” (Hobbs, 2011, p. 59). Students may see

relationships, actions, and effects on reality TV that they “have

never previously imagined,” (Skeggs, 2010, p.74-75). When

students address these new situations and values for the first

time, teachers who take a proactive stance can be there to answer

questions, explain contexts, and guide students to see the values

modeled in the television shows and the value choices available

to them (Samaniego, 2007, p. 8-10). So my research question for

this unit became: How can I use reality TV that may seem to

21Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014decrease morals to get students to think critically about real

life issues, including the purposes and biases of the producers?

My interest in the unit stems from personal viewing

preference and a desire to open my students’ eyes to how they are

influenced by mass media. My students will be interested in the

unit, in part, because of the novelty of getting to watch what

they see as non-educational television at school. They will also

be interested in the unit because of the acting element, the use

of digital video, and the use of blogs. However, the biggest

appeal is actually built into the content itself. Reality

television draws people in several ways, as noted in the

literature review.

Students will also enjoy this unit because it addresses

their educational needs. The state mandated objectives requiring

students to analyze, critique, and create media are covered, but

students will also be learning and practicing multimodal

literacies that will prepare them for the 21st century world they

will live and work in: redesign through collaboration with a

22Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014group, online communication through blogs, digital video

production incorporating linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural,

and audio designs (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 212-216). Possibly,

most importantly, students will practice self-reflection and

transformation beginning with their own “life worlds” and then

generate new perspectives through “guidance and scaffolding . . .

that focus the learners attention in a reflective and meta-aware

way” on the “superficial appearances” and “underlying realities”

of the genre of reality television. They will also learn how to

“transform” the genre and “innovate” it “for their own social and

political purposes” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 66-68).

I will gather several types of data throughout the project

in order to analyze how well the students met the objectives

discussed above. First, I will keep video/audio records of the

class discussions as well as the viewing/discussion of the video

clips from the shows. I want to do this in order to make

transcripts for analysis of the students’ beginning attitudes and

perceptions of the shows and their attitudes toward their

beginning group.


After I introduce Kist’s’ “Ground Rules for Blogging” (2010,

p. 55), I will read the students’ blog entries to see if they are

respecting each other and if they are sharing situated knowledge

and critiquing their own or other people’s perceptions of the

shows. Before the students watch the episodes and begin their

analysis, I will have them complete the Values and Television

Questionnaire (Samaniego & Pascual, 2007, p. 18) and then have

them complete the survey again after the analysis of the program

in order to see how their perceptions might have changed.

My overt instruction will include posing the questions that

Hobbs calls essential for students to ask of any form of media

that they interact with (Hobbs, 2011, p. 37, 57, 136-137). I will

assess how well students learn these questions by asking them to

use the question aloud in our classroom discussions of the clips

from the shows as well as having students explain how they have

answered these questions about their own digital video in the

making of the production. The rubric I will provide students for

the digital video projects will be a way for me to assess if they

have understood how producers use technical elements to influence

24Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014their audiences as well as if they have learned not just to

recognize these techniques but how to create digital video while

keeping these purposes in mind. Finally, I expect the

confessional videos to reveal most about any transformation that

the student undergoes throughout the unit.

Sample Lesson Plans and Associated materials

Day 1

Situated Practice

I will make sure I begin the lesson on a day after a show

has viewed that I know many of the students watch (Duck Dynasty, The

Voice, Sixteen and Pregnant, etc.) I will have watched the show and

will begin an impromptu discussion of what happened on the show.

As students offer their summaries and opinions of that particular

show, I will transition into asking them questions about what

25Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014other shows they like. I’m hoping that the students will actually

make that transition for me as often happens when we are talking

about a topic of interest to them.

When we’ve heard from as many students as will share about

their preferences in reality TV, I will tell them that they have

actually been teaching my lesson for me because we are about to

study reality TV and in fact, make our own episode. I think

knowing where they are going for the end of the unit will inspire

them to want to get started.

Overt Instruction

Next, I will ask them to complete the survey from Samaniego

and Pascual (2010, p. 17) in order to begin to analyze what

values the students find important and what values they see in

the show they choose to discuss. I will ask students to rank the

values in order of importance and we will make a class chart of

the results in order to incorporate discussion of the values and

why they students feel the way they do.

Critical Framing/Transformation


Finally, I will make a homework assignment that students

must discuss in a blog post the premise, the characters, the

conflict, and the values they see incorporated in their favorite

reality show. They will also have to respond to at least one

other person’s post commenting on what they think of the show and

whether they agree or disagree about the values that the poster

mentioned.

Day 2

Situated Practice

Together we will make a list of all of the reality shows

that the students are familiar with. Next, I will ask them to put

their top three favorite shows from the list on a piece of paper

to turn into me. I will have them watch a short clip of a reality

show while I use their choices to put them into a work group.


Overt Instruction/Critical Framing/Transformation

We will go to the computer lab, and students in a group will

discuss their values surveys and make a list of criteria (values)

that they feel should be incorporated in a reality show in order

for it to be considered beneficial to society. They will create a

chart including the criteria they decide on and a system for

ranking how well the show meets the criteria (e.g. star system,

thumbs up, etc.). Next, they will find at least five clips from

the show, watch the clips, and judge the show based on their

criteria.

Their homework will be to look for clips online and email

themselves the links so the whole group can see the clip in

class. It will probably take them one day to design and make the

chart and a day to find the clips and judge them on the chart.

Day 4

Situated Practice

I will begin the lesson by asking students if they have

noticed ways (other than the stories) that reality show producers

28Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014make the shows so interesting. I hope this will lead to a

discussion of “tricks” the producers incorporate to draw the

audience’s attention to certain people, feelings, situations,

etc. I will have a clip ready to share that incorporates some

production elements that are used to manipulate the audience.

I’ll ask the students what they saw in the clip and let them tell

me what they discovered in watching the clip while they were

thinking critically about how producers get the audience to feel

certain ways.

Overt Instruction

Next, I will engage in overt instruction in order to point

out to students and show examples of some of the methods

producers use such as:

“Inciting shame and guilt” in order to make the

contestants agree to “compliance to potential

transformation. Insecurity has to be generated so that

security can be achieved – a technique borrowed from

advertising,” (Skeggs, 2010, p. 75).


Incorporating “the ‘judgment shot’ as participants are

held to account. Guilt is induced by the intense

attention of the camera, as participants try hard to

explain behaviour that often has no straightforward

justification” (Skeggs, 2010, p. 76).

Promising that following certain rules and regulations

will cause a transformation in the person. “’Rules

offer the behavioural modification approach to

disciplining behaviour (repeated learning by

regulation)’” (Skeggs, 2010, p. 76).

“Character casting, editing, use of music. . . time-

control, . . . the presence of voice-overs to generate

authority, irony and tone, the use of cameras, either

as hand-held, to generate feelings of “reality” and

“authenticity”, or as long-shots held on faces and

bodies at key moments where emotional expression is

incited” (Skeggs, 2010, p. 72).


“Visual semiotics . . . accompanied by discursive

clustering. Adjectives such as noisy, tarty,

selfish . . . attached to one person . . . a humorous

soundtrack that points to contrasts and signals

potential conflict” (Skeggs, 2010, p. 72-73).

After they have these notes, I will end by engaging them in

a thorough discussion of the questions from Hobbs designed to

help students look critically at all media, for example: who is

the author, what is the author’s purpose, how will the clip

affect the audience, what is the tone of the clip, etc., (Hobbs,

2011, p. 37, 57, 136-137).

Critical Framing/Transformation

When the students have these notes, we have discussed the

questions and the examples, and students can use the questions

and techniques in the in groups discussion, students will begin

work in their group to analyze their show based on their answers

to the questions and by looking for examples of the producer’s

techniques in the show. This will take several class periods,

31Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014after which students will put their findings into a multimedia

presentation that incorporates at least two multimedia elements.


Annotated Bibliography

Albers, P. and Sanders, J. (2010). Literacies, the arts, and multimodality.

Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Bach, J. (2008). Project teacher: Using reality shows as a

framework for teaching methods courses. Curriculum and Teaching

Dialogue, 10 (1-2), 41-53. Peer reviewed.

In this article, Bach defines problem based learning (PBL)

and discusses how some teacher educators in methods courses are

modeling their lessons for pre-service teachers on reality

television shows. The author discusses the concept that many

reality shows are based on the participants’ attempts to solve a

problem in their field of expertise. In this particular study,

teacher educators used the show Project Runway as a model for

lessons in their methods classes. Even though this article is

actually about teacher educators using reality television as a

base for lessons instead of ELA classroom teachers, it compares

lesson plans made with traditional teacher centered methods, PBL

methods, and methods drawn from Project Runway. The lessons that

33Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014teachers created using the challenge method were more student

centered and considered to be more fun. This leads me to believe

that using the challenge model from reality television not to

create lessons, but as a part of my students’ lessons might, in

fact, prove reality television, or its structure at least, useful

to the teacher and the student.

Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (2000). Multiliteracies. New York:

Routledge.

Freedman, K. & Schuler, K (2003). Please stand by for an

important message: Television in art Education visual Arts Research,

Vol. 28(2), p. 16-26.

In this article, Freedman and Schuler pose that with the

amount of television that students are watching, it is important

for art teachers in particular to spend class time educating the

students to critically analyze what they watch. The authors

analyze in particular how images affect students differently than

traditional texts. In effect, the article posits that television

has more influence than other texts because of the visual imagery

34Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014and that students need an education in thinking critically about

this influential art that is reaching students in a way that no

alphabetic text is. Even though the article is aimed at art

teachers, I want to use the recommended outcomes and methods for

teaching about television and through television.

Hobbs, R. (2011). Digital and media literacy. Thousand Oaks, CA:

Corwin.

Kist, W. (2010). The socially networked classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA:

Corwin.

Moorti, S. & Ross, K. (2004). Reality television: Fairy tale or

feminist nightmare? Feminist Media Studies, 4:2, 203-231. Peer

reviewed.

This article actually includes several articles that the

journal called for in response to the tremendous increase of

reality television shows in 2004. All of the short essays

included in the article look at reality television through a

feminist lens. The one essay that I will use in my research is

also from Skeggs and Wood. In this essay, the authors discuss how

35Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014reality television promotes the idea that everyday life conflicts

are best dealt with through emotional breakdowns. It also refers

to one particular kind of reality show that I have not seen

referenced yet in my research; this is the kind of show which

displays “unmediated, unknowing bad choice culture” and “offers

no possibility of redemption” (Moorti &Ross, 2004, p. 207). I

want to use this because this is the particular kind of reality

show that has offended me personally so much and that first drew

my attention to this research project. The real challenge of the

unit will be to find educational value in these types of shows.

Ouellette, L (2010). Reality TV gives back: On the civic

functions of reality entertainment. Journal of Popular Film and

Television, 38(2), 66-71).

Ouellete argues in this article that reality TV does have

redeeming qualities in that it models citizenship training for a

new society. The author posits that reality TV teaches individual

responsibility and self-management that is a move away from

government micromanaging of the citizenry. She maintains that

36Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014rather than deriding or using the poor and working classes, it

gives them a stage in the public light that they have never

enjoyed before. I will use Ouellete’s article to counter the

massive amount of research I found on the harmful effects of

reality TV on the public.

Royal, D. B. (2010). Jon & Kate plus the state: Why congress

should protect children in reality programming. Akron Law

Review, 43(435), 435-499. Peer reviewed.

The article of this article discusses the effects on

children on being actors employed on reality television shows. It

begins with a section on how children are harmed by being a paid

participant on reality programming. Next, Royal discusses the

current legislation in effect regulating how children may be

employed in the entertainment industry and argues that the laws

on the books are not effectively solving the problem as she sees

it. Finally, Royal calls for national legislation to deal with

the treatment of children in employ of media companies. Royal has

a definite agenda of attempting to change the laws governing how

37Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014children work in entertainment. This article deals directly with

my research question in that many educators, including me, feel

that reality television is detrimental to children as well as

society. My goal is to see how I can use the very problem to

better education my students; therefore, this article will be

helpful to me in that I must know how children and society are

being harmed in order to decide if any of my efforts in the

classroom can counteract that harm.

Samaniego, C.M. & Pascual, A.C. (2007). The teaching and learning

of values through television. International Review of Education, 53(1),

5-21. Peer reviewed.

The authors of this article promote the use of television in

the classroom to teach the values that are prioritized in

education and to counteract those that students may be learning

that are not valued by the education system. The authors

emphasize the importance of the physical presence of the teacher

during the watching of television to guide the students in

questioning the values being presented. These researchers

38Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014developed a tool that measures the values present in youth as

well as the values that youth perceive to be present in

television programs they watch. This measurement tool will

benefit me in that it will show me what values my students have

before and after they watch reality television.

Skeggs, B. (2010). The moral economy of person production: The

class relations of self- performance on reality television.

Sociologia: Revista de Departamento de Sociologia da FLUP, 20, 67-84.

Peer reviewed.

Skeggs focusses this article on the way media uses middle

class people in “reality” television. She points out the many

techniques used by the producers to show the middle class

participants as in need of self-transformation. The author points

out how reality shows intimate that the lower class participants

are lacking due to some fault of their own. The article will be

of value to me in my research because it offers many techniques

used by the television producers that my students are probably

not aware are being used to create stereotypes in their minds. In

39Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014fact, I actually noticed one created view that has worked on me.

I have tended to think of reality show participants as lazy or

someone who’s just out to make a quick buck. This article will be

one I will turn to in order to generate thoughtful questions for

the students to consider when they watch episode.

Skeggs, B. & Wood, H. (2008). The labour of transformation and

circuits of value ‘around’ reality television. Continuum: Journal

of Media & Cultural Studies, 22(4), 559-572. Peer reviewed.

In this article, Skeggs and Wood document the results of

their research project on the effect of reality television on

women viewers in South London. They found that the women showed a

connectedness with the show that the researchers believe stems

from the belief that “a display of affect and emotional labour”

(Skeggs & Wood, 2008 p. 570). However, they also found that the

audience rebelled against the middle class norms being insisted

upon by the programs and defended the contestants, and in doing

so defended themselves from the standards being preached. This

study will inform my unit plan in that it gives me more examples

of ways to teach the students to look for the hidden cultural,

40Amy R RaneyCollege of Education – Teacher EducationFall 2014political or governmental agendas hidden in reality television as

well as providing another example of data collection called the

“text-in-action” method, which is similar to a dialectical

journal where the audience comments are recorded in relation to

the specific lines from the show. I like this method because it

seems to offer specific evidence of the affect the audience

members are feeling.

Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for English Language Arts

and Reading in Texas Administrative Code (TAC), Title 19, Part II (Chapter 110.

Subchapter C. High School) (2001). Retrieved from

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter110/ch110c.html on

April 9, 2013.

The Understanding and Making of Reality Television in the Classroom

Documents

Transcript of The Understanding and Making of Reality Television in the Classroom