Curriculum Materials

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Need ideas, inspiration, or curriculum materials to incorporate climate, ecojustice, and environmental topics into your media classes? This site features curated educational resources to support media educators who want to “green” their teaching. Don’t know where to start? “Bringing Ecomedia Literacy into the Classroom” and “Ecomedia Literacy: Principles and Practices” are short articles that offer some ideas.

Use the following filters to browse materials:

  • “Learning activities” are specific lessons, including those produced by ecomedialiteracy.org.*
  • “Lesson plans” link to external websites where you can find and download teaching materials.
  • If you are looking for materials to screen in class, select “video” to browse our curated selection.
  • If you are building a lesson, click the tag to match what you are looking for. For example, try “discourse” to build a lesson on environmental discourses, or select “pastoral” if you are focusing on one type of environmental discourses.
 
* The level for students indicated in each activity is basic (accessible to any level, including elementary/primary), intermediate (appropriate for middle school, high school/secondary, or college), and advanced (college or post-graduate level)
Topics
activism (5) advertising (19) agribusiness (4) animals (2) animation (7) anthropocentricism (2) art (4) climate (6) conservationism (8) consumerism (9) cryptocurrency (2) discourse (22) disinformation (4) documentary (9) e-waste (2) eco-ethics (3) eco-Utopia (2) ecocinema (2) ecojustice (4) electric vehicles (EV) (5) energy (2) environmental ideology (24) environmental literacy (3) fast food (2) film (3) food (7) footprint (5) gender (3) greenwashing (10) humor (4) Indigenous (5) media literacy (4) nature (6) news (4) pastoral (4) production chain (2) race (2) science (3) science fiction (2) sustainability (7) traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) (2) transformative (4) unrestrained utilitarianism (4) value driven (3) wilderness (3)
Recently added learning activities and lesson plans
Curriculum Materials
  • What About Bottled Water?
    Media literacy and critical thinking lesson analyzing videos and TV commercials to discern messages about decisions to purchase or not purchase bottled water.
  • Corporate Greenwashing? Exxon and Greenpeace
    This is a media literacy and critical thinking activity in which students decode an ExxonMobil commercial and an environmental advocacy video for conflicting messages about corporate advertising credibility and about human impact on the environment.
  • Consumerism and Sustainability
    Media literacy and critical thinking lesson asking students to consider their own consumer decisions relating to sustainability through a process of decoding TV commercials and videos about bottled water.
  • Student Media Research Project on Sustainability
    Media literacy and critical thinking lesson in which students will complete and present a quantitative research project on media representation of sustainability.
  • Nature Images: Constructing “nature” in Visual Culture and Ads
    This activity involves students in a two-part exploration of “nature” imagery. Initially, they analyze and discuss their associations with nature images, followed by an examination of how these same concepts are employed in advertisements.
Recently added videos, audio, multimedia
Audiovisual Materials
  • Animation of the Environmental Impact of Gadgets
    https://youtu.be/JUbFJwqzP1Q A short stop motion animation exploring the human and environmental impacts of our smartphones and devices. It shows how the production chain impacts ecosystems and human health through the extraction of conflict minerals, exploited labor, fossil fuel emissions to power server farms, and e-waste. Accessible for all ages.
  • Chobani Ad: Dear Alice
    This short animated Choboni ad about the future of food production can be useful for exploring different environmental discourses, including pastoral, food, and sustainability. It can be used to generate a discussion about food, agriculture, eco-modernism, and mechanism.
  • Avatar/Pocahontas Mash-up
    The video of the trailer for Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) is combined with audio from Avatar (2009). It demonstrates how these films have common environmental discourses and genre conventions.
  • Keep America Beautiful: The Crying Indian (1970)
    This is a great media example for discussing environmental discourses and ideology. It utilizes the eco-utopian discourse (often represented by indigenous and First Nations peoples) to promote conservationist environmentalism, which aligns with anthropocentric environmental ideology.
  • Why Bitcoin is so Bad for the Planet
    A short video presentation from the Guardian’s UK technology editor Alex Hern, who examines how exactly bitcoin uses electricity and if the environmental cost is too high.

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