“free online resources for teaching gender and media

Message from Karen Ross and Claudia Padovani

Hello colleagues – we hope that you are finding ways to manage this new and troubling normal as we each navigate  routes through our fears and uncertainties. For most of us, we continue to work with our students and our colleagues as their lives and ours cannot simply stop mid-semester, mid-exams, mid-assessment. In many of our universities, colleagues are on a very steep learning curve as we move our teaching online and develop new ways of engaging and supporting the learning process.

So, we thought this would be a timely moment to remind you about the resources we have developed as part of the Advancing Gender Equality in Media Industries (AGEMI) project, which you can find here.  All the resources are free to download and repurpose as you wish, integrating aspects into your existing teaching or incorporating them into new material you are developing.

First of all, there are a set of learning units which together comprise a self-contained course on teaching about gender and media which includes mini-lectures, interviews, tasks for learners to complete and relevant resources. These units cover different aspects of gender and news media that you may consider discussing in your courses, from representation to working conditions, from violence against women journalists to relevant policy developments, and a range of other topics.

The platform also hosts a Resources Bank of Good Practices with lots of examples of ways in which gender equality in the media is being and has been supported in different ways; and interviews with a variety of media practitioners, policy-makers and civil society organisations discussing some of the problems and some creative solutions to addressing gender inequalities. Both the good practices and the interviews can be useful ice-breakers for class discussion or starting points for creative activities to be carried out by students online. All the AGEMI resources are free to stream or download although the learning units require a one-time registration which is basically your email address.

In the spirit of collegiality and sharing good practices, we have also set up a shared online space – a Padlet blackboard – which is accessible to anyone and which we have started to populate with some useful links, including to AGEMI. It would be great if you could add your own useful resources, weblinks, TED Talks, YouTube video links and other online resources of relevance. In this way, we can collectively crowd-source a repository of interesting and diverse teaching materials to draw from in the design and delivery of online courses.

Anyway, we hope that you can find something of use and interest among the AGEMI resources and that using them releases time to devote to other things.  We have spent many months bringing these resources together in one place and it would be brilliant to imagine that we have provided something of real value to our academic colleagues.  If you do use them, it would be nice if you would credit AGEMI and send us a line of feedback.

Thinking of all our colleagues who are doing their best to survive, create and look forward to the light at the end of this darkness.

Karen and Claudia