Approaches to teaching the A Level AQA content - 2019 Assessment
Some lessons may, as deemed appropriate by your judgement of pace and current learning, be sub divided and extended to cover two sessions.
At A Level, the requirement for the AQA examination differentiates itself from the other boards in what are termed Close Study Products – a series of media products that students are required to study in detail.
Like the Edusites Core Units that deal with teaching the Media Framework, the work here involves exploring:
- The role and manipulation of media language
- The representations in these products
- Issues of audience
- Institutional issues such as genre, branding, regulation
- How the media creates or represents attitudes, behaviours and beliefs
The work and ideas in this unit, like those of the subsequent Set Product units, are designed to build on the learning acquired in each term’s Edusites Core Unit. Each of the Set units tackles the prescribed products from one of the five sections of the two Component Papers.
This second AQA Set Product Unit (Edusites Unit 8) focuses on the products in Component 1 Section B.
In the Core Unit 7: Media Language+ studied in the first term we focus on developing the toolkit for tackling close readings of media products. The work there assumes some GCSE experience but provides detailed links to the Edusites GCSE Units 1-5 that allow inexperienced students to add to their knowledge and learning.
All of these skills are key in the set products selected for this initial AQA unit.
Later in the course the expectation is for teachers and students to be revisiting these Section B products in order to add levels of depth and breadth to their understanding as knowledge and learning of the Advanced Level Media Framework evolves.
Close Study Products:
- The Surgery on Radio One
- War of the Worlds
- The Daily Mail
- The i newspaper
- Chicken (independent film)
