The Violence and Media Project is a violence prevention effort directed to middle and high school students.The heart of the project is a curriculum unit developed by Teen Futures' Marilyn Cohen Ph.D. and Jennifer Slack M.Ed., in collaboration with key middle and high school teachers in Seattle.

Using media as the hook to engage students in discussion, this enthusiastically received curriculum provokes students to analyze, evaluate and reflect on the meaning of violence in their own lives, their schools and the broader community. The material engages students in serious deliberations on the topic of violence and leads them to develop their own approach to violence prevention in their schools.

Students and teachers alike welcome the opportunity to work with this critical topic. Several teachers have reported that although they had planned to work with the material for a limited time, their students’ responses have led them to double or triple the time devoted to the topic. Parents have expressed amazement and delight when their usually reluctant students become totally engaged in their work on violence and the media. Students admit that before working with the curriculum they had not noticed violence in the media. After working with the material, they not only recognize media violence, they also understand its purpose in keeping an audience engaged.

View some student work from this project.

The focus of each of the 6 lessons is as follows:

Lesson 1: Defining Violence
Students begin to grapple with the concept of verbal violence and to clarify and discuss their own definitions of violence.

Lesson 2: School Safety
Students look at the effects of violence on people, particularly at how it makes us feel like victims. Students also look at the role media play in making us feel like victims, analyzing their own feelings and behaviors.

Lesson 3: Old Brain vs. New Brain
Students examine the use of violence in engaging an audience for the purpose of marketing products and how that appeals to the ‘Old Brain’. They are also encouraged to consider how the media can appeal to logic and reason and can be used as a tool in contributing to violence prevention.

Lesson 4: Conflict Resolution
Students examine the language of violence prevention and consider how media can help promote that language. They generate ideas that can make them become part of the solution on an individual level.

Lesson 5: Making the Familiar Strange
Students analyze the ways the media hooks the viewer and then they generate ideas that make use of the media as a tool for promoting violence prevention.