Underwood & Underwood, Mother, Wife, and Sweetheart Watching Boys of the Seventh Regiment as They Marched Away to War, c. 1917 — the caption tells you who they are and how to feel

Lesson 01: The Four Key Concepts

Media Studies · Unit 1 · Lesson 01 of 16 · L02 →

At a glance

Days	3 — Tue single, Wed double, Fri single
Dates	Tue 2026-09-01 · Wed 09-02 · Fri 09-04
Band/Unit	U1 Introduction (S1 Unit 1)
AO focus	AO2
Deliverable	CS1 analytical paragraph — denotation only, written Friday
Feeds	A1 (denotation discipline is the foundation A1 is marked on)
Homework	Day 1: 24-hour media-use log + blog set-up begun · Day 2: digital-identity mind map · all week: EN/ZH lexicon (≥5 entries by Friday)

Goal

By the end of week 1 you will use Language, Representation, Industry and Audience as working tools, and hold the course’s founding claim — media is a version, not a window — with three historical proofs behind it. You prove it by writing the hardest paragraph in the subject: pure denotation, holding back every interpretive impulse. Describing before meaning is what A1 rewards.

How it runs

Day 1 — Tue 09-01 (single): the opener and the wager

• The opener (~30 min) — introductions, why Media Studies, how the course runs, the two-year map in one slide. Both EN and ZH are legitimate in the room — the shared lexicon starts this week and lives on the wall.
• The wager (~10 min) — the claim on the board: “I’m not impacted by media.” Hands up who agrees; the count is recorded and the vote re-runs in June. Then the homework that will settle it: the media-use log (coursebook §1.1) — every media contact over the next 24 hours, however small, EN or ZH, with platform and minutes.
• Close (~5 min) — CS1 announced: you write it Friday in class, one paragraph, describing only. Blog set-up begins as homework this week (mechanics finish at L07; today just the account).

Day 2 — Wed 09-02 (double): the four tools and the mediation demo

• Starter (10 min) — bring your media-use log; the room’s 24 hours are tallied by platform on the board. Everyone here is an audience before anything else — the first concept named from your own data.
• Teach: the four Key Concepts (20 min) — one shared text read four times through four lenses, applied orally in pairs before anything is written: Language (how it is made to mean), Representation (how people, places and ideas are shown), Industry (who made it, and why), Audience (who it is for, and what they do with it). These board anchors stay up all semester.
• The mediation demo (20 min) — a version, not a window, proven three times over a century before Photoshop:
• Staging — Gardner’s Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter (1863): the soldier’s body was moved and posed for the composition, the rifle propped by the photographer. Arranged before the shutter opened.
• Selection — Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936): one frame chosen from six exposures, cropped, a distracting thumb later retouched away. Every photograph is also the frames not chosen.
• Anchorage — an Underwood & Underwood stereograph (c. 1917): three women watch soldiers march away, and the caption — “Mother, Wife, and Sweetheart…” — tells you who they are and how to feel. The words steer the image.

Alexander Gardner, Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, 1863 — the soldier's body was moved and posed for the composition

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936 — one frame chosen from six exposures, then cropped

Then the live turn: one staged classroom “event” is photographed once, and three pairs re-crop and re-caption it into three different stories on their phones. Same event, three versions, five minutes.

• Card sort (25 min) — the 24 EN/ZH concept cards in threes, every placement justified aloud; some cards are deliberately contestable (“a WeChat sticker”, “the seat you watch from”). Disagreements go on the board.
• Review (15 min) — the contested cards argued out; written exit line: “Media is a version, not a window, because…”
• Homework — WS 1.1, the digital-identity mind map (it feeds the L07 blog); the WS 5.2 body map is the more visual, lower-language alternative. Lexicon entries continue.

Day 3 — Fri 09-04 (single): denotation, and CS1

• Model (15 min) — a denotation-only paragraph written live on the board about Migrant Mother, showing what gets excluded: “a woman, seated, hand at her chin; two children face away, heads on her shoulders” survives — “worried”, “poor”, “desperate” go on a parked list (that list gets its name at L02).
• CS1 (25 min) — a new unseen still, one paragraph, denotation only. Sentence frames available: “The image shows…” / “In the foreground / background…” / “The figure is positioned…” / “The text reads…” — no evaluative adjectives anywhere.
• Exit swap (5 min) — papers trade; each reader circles one smuggled connotation. A paragraph that survives the hunt is the win.

Assessment

Item	Date	What	AO
CS1	Fri 2026-09-04	Analytical paragraph, denotation only, written in class	AO2

CS1 is announced on day 1 (72-hour notice). It is marked for discipline, not polish — zero interpretive claims is the criterion; returned within five working days. See the full register.

These dates may shift when the school publishes its calendar for this period.