Circles of Learning

As I began to think about how we as a society can remold the ideologies that currently surround advertisement, I realized that as a little fish in a media pond, I can never compete with these billion dollars advertisement companies. I could stop wearing Dolce& Gabbana and probably get 100 people to boycott companies that use advertising to trick young men and women in accepting false gender roles, but to truly make a change it starts with what we teach our kids. How can we teach little boys who by a young age already have a warped idea of what masculinity looks like and little girls who are forced to accept predestined ideas of beauty and womanhood? The solution, start from the ground up. If children are seeing these images from the moment they wake up, we as a society must be prepared to constantly talk about them. Decompress these complex advertisements, and show children how it is used to form their beliefs.
Although this isn’t a panacea of the self-image problem, it is a way to get children into the conversation that is usually being had without them. If they can ask the questions, “Why don’t they use women who look like my mom?” or “what makes a complete person, and what do these products really offer us?” we could better inform our children on what is being subliminally drilled into their impressionable minds.
Although ads should be changed to feature all types of people and send a better message to our youth, this will only fix the issue on the surface. As an educator, I truly feel the change needs to happen in the classroom. Trying to go challenge companies with counter- ads will ultimately lead to failure, however if we can challenge these warped ideals by giving our children more knowledge and awareness, we can essentially change these long standing advertisements.
So how does this look? How can we incorporate these issues into the school system? The answer to that is “circles”. Circles are a curriculum that we started doing at my school last year; it was a round table discussion setting where children could learn one of the unwritten staples of education, communication. Students and teachers were put into a circle, where the original focus was building community. We spoke with kids about how fights destroyed the learning process and children were able to express how issues like that and teasing affected a class. Students not only began to have their own voice in a school setting but we were even able to talk about a plethora of issues, like how breakfast effected your day to why is sex more socially accepted for men. Although the adults in the room didn’t always have all the answers, the conversation was going on. If we as educators could push this curriculum into all schools at various age levels, we could use these forums to talk about female and male images. Not only as a way to speak on gender roles but to decode these ads that our children are subjected to.