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Wednesday, April 09, 2003

By Caroline Abels, Post-Gazette Cultural Arts Writer

First, Teresa Foley plays a snippet of a familiar movie or television program for the young people in her media literacy workshops. Then she asks them, "How would you describe what you just saw as if you were describing it to a blind person?"

	Teresa Foley, left, instructs Shane Levin, 15, of the Hill District while Brian McFarland, 15, of Northview Heights works on an animated character during an animation class sponsored by Pittsburgh Filmmakers at Manchester Craftsmen's Guild. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette photos)

It's then that teenagers often squirm, because they're forced to explain what's really going on in those movies and television shows they've come to love. And often, it's not pretty.

African Americans are shown in dark, filthy, broken-down conditions on the Fox and WB animated comedy series "The PJs," whereas the white characters on "The Simpsons" inhabit clean, bright spaces. American Indians in the classic Disney film "Peter Pan" are shown with grossly exaggerated lips and noses, each one looking nearly identical to the other.

And on episodes of the Comedy Central cartoon show "South Park," a black chef sometimes doles out graphic sexual information about women's bodies to children.

For some students, describing these images aloud makes them conscious of stereotypes they previously only laughed at.

"It's a really eye-opening experience for them," Foley says. "Students tell me they never look at things the same way again."

That is Foley's goal as head of the Media Literacy Arts Education program at Pittsburgh Filmmakers -- to encourage young people to carefully analyze visual media so that they no longer absorb it passively and risk perpetuating the stereotypes that are embedded in popular entertainment.

Foley's goal of making kids more "media literate" requires her to help them find the broader

Brian McFarland's animated character, "Stiggy," will be part of a video of 60 minutes or less that will include up to 900 individual movements.

themes in a film, cartoon or video, and to explain the source of a work's ideas. It also means getting kids to create their own works of media, so that they understand the process and become empowered to be professional media artists themselves.

"It's amazing that we teach our young people to read literature and analyze it, but we never invite them to analyze film or images, which they see all the time," Foley says.

The concept of media literacy, which was born in the 1970s but really took off in the 1990s, "has got to be one of the most undernourished, underdeveloped concepts in our field," says Charlie Humphrey, executive director of Filmmakers, a film and photography school in Oakland.

Media literacy programs are not well-funded at most media arts centers in the United States, Humphrey says, and at Filmmakers there is no major underwriting for the program, although the Grable Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation have provided $32,000 for specific programs.

"People are predisposed to run away from these issues as opposed to running at them," Humphrey says. "But our philosophy here is to dive into these things to better understand them. It comes from an absolute love of media and from recognizing that sometimes it's a troubled love because it's often used in ways that are hurtful or culturally retroactive."

In addition to offering animation and video classes at Filmmakers that teach both hands-on production and media analysis, Foley often works with other institutions to reach a diverse array of young people, most of whom sign up for the workshops voluntarily.

Foley has overseen programs at Hosanna House in Wilkinsburg and at Steel Valley High School, helping students create video works. She speaks at school assemblies throughout the region and leads professional development workshops for teachers. And this fall, she will teach a media literacy class at Filmmakers for adults, focusing on analysis and hands-on video projects.

Last month, a group of local high schoolers made their own animated work in one of Foley's "Race in Animated Media" workshops at Manchester Craftsmen's Guild.

To raise their awareness, Foley -- a spirited 37-year-old who is passionate about pop culture issues and knows how to talk to teenagers -- showed them a few excerpts from Disney movies and cartoon shows, as well as a documentary about African-American stereotypes called "Ethnic Notions."

The students were then asked to develop characters for their own cartoon. Nick Sero, a sophomore at Schenley High School, invented a character oblivious to stereotypes.

"If he sees two people fighting, he takes the dorky kid's side because he can't tell the difference," Sero says. "Then he changes people's minds about the dorky kid."

Tamisha Singletary, a Peabody High School senior, dreamed up an American Indian woman who can see pain and can change people's points of view if she touches them.

"People see things and just assume it's the truth," Singletary says. "But if you want to see the truth, you have to look so hard that sometimes you just give up."

So that kids don't give up, Foley shows them positive examples of animation and video, such as "Kirikou and the Sorceress," an animated film about a child who has special powers and saves his West African village, and "Little Bill," an animation series by Bill Cosby for preschoolers. Foley doesn't watch a lot of mainstream media, instead preferring to spend her time viewing independent works and depending on the kids in her workshops to tell her what's currently popular.

It is Foley's belief that too many media literacy programs engage in "media-bashing." That is why, when she launched the Filmmakers program in 1997, she made sure it also celebrated media by allowing students to have fun creating it.

Humphrey says many teachers haven't heard of media literacy, and most high school media classes are limited to students making documentary films about high school events such as homecoming and graduation. He says schools should consider letting students use video to explain their inner worlds or react to what they learn in class by creating a video instead of writing a paper.

"Media is so ubiquitous," he said. "You have children consuming it voraciously without any understanding of its composition. So if you can raise a generation of teachers to use media as a tool in all curricula, you'd have a truly modern pedagogy."

Foley, a Duquesne University English major who can quote philosophers and novelists and then tell you what happened on "Joe Millionaire," dismisses the potential argument that her work takes pop culture too seriously.

"I've had students say, 'Aren't we looking at this too closely? Isn't this over-analysis?'" she says. "But these things are constructed in an extraordinarily sophisticated manner, so why isn't it appropriate to explore them in a sophisticated manner?

"I laugh out loud at 'South Park,' " she added, "but when I think of kids just sitting there, not understanding it, and grandmothers buying 'South Park' T-shirts for their grandkids, I think, wow, this is really fascinating."

Foley was a film student at Filmmakers in the early 1990s and has made a few video works, including one in which she dressed and bathed a female blow-up doll to criticize society's embrace of the passive female. She also has led workshops around the country and has been a consultant to the Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Pittsburgh Public Schools.

Does she ever get depressed by having to pore over so much disturbing work?

"Sometimes ... profoundly," she says. But she stays in the field because she has a nearly unquenchable thirst to understand pop culture. So far, though, she doesn't have cable.

"I have to break down and get it. But if I do, I might become really, really depressed."