Everyone probably knows that the National Conference on Media Reform (Robert McChesney! Dan Rather! Amy Goodman! Bill Moyers! Naomi Klein!) will be held here in Minneapolis June 6-8.

But, did you know that the day before, on June 5, Minneapolis is also host to the Action Coalition for Media Education Summit? Media Education 2.0: A One-Day Teach-In is designed to sharpen media education and technological skills to help turn citizens into media reform activists.

Of special interest is Using Big Media’s Exploitation of Children to Motivate Parents and Others Toward Media Reform with Josh Golin, associate director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood:

A media system designed to serve advertiser’s interests and not the public interest is bad for everyone, but it takes a particularly hard toll on children. Corporate marketing is a factor in many of the key problems facing children today, including childhood obesity, eating disorders, youth violence, precocious irresponsible sexuality, rampant materialism, and the erosion of children’s creative play.

In this workshop, we’ll examine how a combination of deregulation and new technologies has given corporations unfettered access to children and the latest techniques used by marketers to make an end-run around parents to sell children on anything and everything. We’ll then explore ways of mobilizing parents, not only to fight back against their children’s corporate abusers, but to become activists for policy change and media reform.

Program and registration information.

And then the following evening, June 6, is the opening night reception for Project Girl: A Multimedia Exhibition and Guide to Un-Mediafying Your Life presented by Intermedia Arts. Project Girl is a national touring visual arts exhibition and series of hands-on art-based workshops designed to defend adolescent girls from the harmful effects of media messages. The project co-creators, Kelly Parks Snider and Jane Bartell, will attend and Lyn Mikel Brown, author of Packaging Girlhood and co-creator of Hardy Girls Healthy Women, will speak.

Intermedia Arts may also be able to offer summer workshops for girls featuring the Project Girl media literacy curriculum, and media literacy curriculum training may be available for educators, parents, artists, activists, policy makers, and others if the program is adequately funded.

It would be a great opportunity for those who work with girls and need “to become better equipped to deal with the significant challenges resulting from the transformation of children into America’s number one marketing demographic.” Please consider donating to Project Girl.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28, 2008 at 6:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.