Wednesday, October 15, 2008

A 3(D) Guide to Making Responsible Media Choices

Brett Kunkle:
Media dominates our students' lives. Teens average more than 6 hours of screen time per day. That means hundreds or even thousands of messages are directed at youth every single day. If we are not intentionally training them to discern and evaluate those messages, then they are passively absorbing them. So how can you be intentional?

The Center for Parent/Youth Understanding has put together some excellent tool for parents, youth workers and teachers. The end goal is to get students thinking for themselves about media choices:

While many of us mistakenly continue to “think for” students as they pass through the teenage years on the road to adulthood, the 3(D) Guide enables you to “think with” students about their media so that they will be equipped to launch into adulthood with the ability to “think for themselves” about media in faithful, obedient, and God-honoring ways.

There's a free leader's booklet to use with the 3-D Guide. There's a free media survey that will give you a handle on how much media your student actually uses. And there are even reviews of the most recent movies, music, tv shows and more, all using the 3-D Guide's format.

I just put together a brand new talk on this, entitled "Mind Games: How Media Messes With Your Mind," because this is such an important area of life for students to apply worldview thinking. Cultural messages are aggressively promoted through all forms of media. If you do nothing to train your students in this area then you've handed them over to the culture for 6 more hours of training every single day. Scary.