This website is to give ideas and suggestions
on how to bring cultural and media literacy
into the university- and college-level IESL classroom.
Why do we IESL teachers need Mad?
There are two main reasons why we IESL teachers need to use Mad Magazine and other forms of satire in our classrooms:
Reason #1:
Over and over again, we hear how we need to incorporate culture into our lessons.
Reason #1:
Over and over again, we hear how we need to incorporate culture into our lessons.
The Iceberg Concept of Culture image above (http://www.echospace.org/articles/395/sections/1207.html) shows the difference between "surface culture" and "deep culture." Surface culture is what most IESL classes and textbooks focus on (basic things like food, dress, music, etc.). But, as you can see in the "deep culture" section, there is so much more to our culture. Mad Magazine not only touches on all areas of "deep culture," but it does it in such a way to make these sensitive areas fun and humorous.
Reason #2:
It takes little to no effort to incorporate a great lesson on American culture into your curriculum.
As I stated in Reason #1, we hear over and over again how we need to incorporate culture into our lessons. Books and articles and experts tell us to use stories and photos and maps to help make our students culturally literate, and these ideas are great. But, let's face it, we teachers are really stretched thin in terms of time, and to hunt and peck and search for resources to use can be time-consuming and overwhelming. Therefore, we need to have something at our disposal that is ready to go. Enter Mad Magazine.
I'll give you an example. In one of my Advanced classes, we were going to be reading about and discussing American government the next day. So, for homework the night before, I gave them the following image from Mad Magazine and asked them to look at the last set of emojis and try to figure out what they meant. That was it. I gave them no additional information:
The students shocked me when they came in the next day and had a ton of information about Obamacare. I wanted them to just know and understand what Obamacare was, but they were so interested in finding out the background behind the icons. They did extra work of their own volition because it was fun and it was an alternate presentation of the information. And, the research that they did on their own turned our discussion from "surface culture" to "deep culture."
