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Practical Exercises: Equal but different: boys, girls and minorities

FORMAT

60 minute Practical Exercise in story development

TOPIC / SUBJECT / THEME

Diversity issues and children

PURPOSE (Journalistic and children’s rights messages you hope to communicate)

to raise awareness about gender and equal opportunities issues
to encourage lateral thinking about story/feature ideas
to encourage group work
to encourage an appreciation of how it might feel when personal stories enter the public domain.

OUTCOME / RESULT (What you expect the students to have learned)

How the ordinary can be converted into a ‘human interest’ story
How the media creates ‘messages’ by telling stories
The key elements of human interest stories (unusual personal experiences which offer message to audiences, based on interviews and observation)
How to write succinctly
To remind themselves of how powerful some childhood experiences can be

ASSESSMENT/EVALUATION (Measuring success, for you and for the students)

· Tutors will be able to observe students’ appreciation of news values, story structure and writing ability.

· They will also be able to observe how well students can work co-operatively and make decisions and write quickly.

· The exercise will also demonstrate whether students can convert ‘experiences’ into ‘messages’ and construct and explain cogent ‘human interest’ stories.

RESOURCES (Equipment and materials needed for implementation)

Students will need notepads etc
HANDOUT: Interviewing people with disabilities (See RESOURCES)
Slips of paper containing problematic ‘imaginary headlines’, for example :

1. Children are invisible to the media

2. Life is harder for teenage boys than girls

3. Sex is more of problem for boys than girls

4. Adults expect more of girls than boys

5. Advertising: girls get the message but boys get the goods

6. Personal freedom means power for boys, responsibility for girls

7. Girls know their rights, but boys always come out on top

8. Girls need more protection than boys

9. Equality still a myth for girls - in school, workplace, politics and the home

10. Minority groups always get the worst deal

11. If you don’t mention it, children won’t become homosexual

12. Being deaf is worse than being blind

13. Depression affects children as well as adults

14. Taking drugs is an act of rebellion

15. Smoking is cool

16. If you don’t beat children they will never learn how to behave

17. Poverty is a way of life

IMPLEMENTATION (How the session will be delivered)

1. Break the students into small groups (some all female, some all male, some mixed; maximum 5 in each group).

2. Distribute the imaginary headlines (assertions) at random (turn them face down and allow each group to choose one). The groups MUST NOT show their topic to others.

3. Explain that these are not real headlines – but the sort of assertions that sometime appear in newspapers and magazines.

4. Ask each group to discuss among themselves for 10 minutes incidents FROM THEIR OWN DIRECT PERSONAL EXPERIENCE which might JUSTIFY or CONTRADICT their headlines. The group has 10 minutes in which to select ONE example to turn into a short ‘human interest’ story (maximum 250 words)

5. Allow them no more than 20 minutes to write the story – based on an interview with the person whose story was chosen. Tell them the story should contain quotes but NOT the words that appear in the ‘headline’, and may have to be handed in for marking. It should contain the names of the group members and the ‘headline’.

6. As soon as the majority have completed their story, ask 3 or 4 groups to read theirs out loud WITHOUT MENTIONING THE HEADLINE.

7. After each has finished, ask other students to say what they think the headline or message was. Then get the group to say what their headline was.

8. Encourage discussion about why it was or was not guessed correctly, and whether they think the ‘headline message’ is valid.

Collect in the remaining stories for marking.

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