I’m starting a unit with my Gr. 9 class that will focus around different commentaries on society – editorials, blogs, and lyrics to name a few. I kicked it off with a 2-day lesson that allows students to work with terms like perspective, bias, and opinion.

Once again, the Media Awareness Network (MAN) provided me with a great start to this lesson. I used ideas from both their Bias Lesson and a related Bias in the News Lesson, but started everything off by reading the wonderful Voices in the Park. (If you’re not familiar with this picture book, it presents the same event through four different voices, with corresponding changes in art.)

After talking about the concept of perspective and how important it is to telling a story, we compared three headlines related to Tuesday’s federal budget. From there we used the Sir Sam / Hughes handouts, with students creating very different descriptions of the central character of the story based on the version of the handout that they have.

Finally, students found articles, columns, and editorials that they felt presented a judgment on a topic, and circled the value-laden words. As a class we talked about those articles and created a chart showing which type of article was more blatantly opinionated.

What I liked

• Students really enjoyed Voices in the Park – particularly the way the art portrayed the feelings of the different characters – and understood the value of perspective in telling a story.
• Comparing several headlines from a current story connected with students. By seeing the three versions side-by-side, they realized that bias is real and it’s part of storytelling.
• The different descriptions of Sam Hughes that emerged from student readings were entertaining and led to a friendly debate, reinforcing the concept that bias on the part of the writer can easily lead to bias on the part of the reader.
• Finally, having students identify judgment present in different articles helped us all to visualize the varying degrees of bias or opinion that exist in these articles types.

What needs work

• While the Sir Sam Hughes case study worked brilliantly, I’d really like to update this with two conflicting perspectives on a more current character. Perhaps Mr. Mulroney?

This one’s a keeper. It’s a great lead-in to reading and creating opinion pieces and other forms of commentary.