Frank Baker (the wizard behind the
Media Literacy Clearinghouse) posted this
interesting website created by the Advertising, Educational Foundation. The site claims to be an "interdisciplinary curriculum for advertising in society, culture and history." After looking through it I would not really call it a curriculum as there are no lesson plans, objectives, guiding questions or classroom ready materials - BUT there are lots of wonderful images, videos, movie stills and primary source documents organized around some interesting essays about advertising. To me the site reads like a great interactive book loaded with ideas that could be adapted into a curriculum.
The site covers topics like:
What is Advertising
The Management of Brands
"Subliminal" Advertising
A Brief History of Advertising in America
Representations of Masculinity and Femininity in Advertising
and the section I spent some time with
High Culture/Low Culture: Advertising in Literature, Art, Film, and...
The strength of these "chapters" is that they are loaded with examples you can integrate into your curriculum. In fact, this chapter spends some time looking at the relationship between Charles Dickens, Henry James, James Joyce and advertising. The Dickens section is very interesting.
Additionally, as you scroll down this chapter, you'll see they've gone to the trouble of pulling a lot of video clips and still images that you can teach with.
If you deal with advertising and media literacy, this is sure to give you a lot of ideas that you can craft into lessons. And of course if you're doing an entire class on
Mad Men - this is the supplemental website for you:)