Last week was the final screening for this year’s Intergenerational Media Literacy (IML) program, a partnership between The LAMP, OATS and WNET. In the program, seniors and teens come together to deconstruct ageist media stereotypes by breaking commercials and other media; this year, participants also started an awareness campaign about age discrimination. But, as you can see in this documentary created during the program, a lot of other learning and inspiration happened on the way to talking back to discriminatory media. Some of it even happened on a skateboard! Take a look:
Also in attendance was Born Allah, an alumni of the first IML program we ran during late 2012. We’ve made some changes to the program structure since then, but Born had some powerful words reflecting on what he learned in 2012, and on what he saw in the documentary:
“I really liked the narrative because it took you along. Like in the last session we framed it through the participants, and it was more on the ageism and discrimination on the seniors that we called ‘seasoned citizens.’ But this year it focused on both groups, the seasoned citizens and the teens, and looking at it from both ways and both angles and seeing the stereotypes and discriminatory images projected in the media. It’s little noticed…To see both groups recognize that it effects both of us in terms of our ages is really great for me, because I participated when we were dealing with seniors [in the media], and now we’re dealing with both [seniors and teens], and we really dug down, as the young man said, that even though there may be forces beyond our control that want to keep us divided, and not share our common interests and goals and objectives, this process brings us together…I really enjoyed it, you all did a great job.”
Funding for this program was led by the Mozilla Hive NYC Learning Network.