Background
Young people continue to remain at high risk of developing skin cancer later in life. Despite high levels of cognitive awareness, young people demonstrate high-risk behaviours, in terms of sun protective practices, long periods of exposure to UV radiation, incidence of sunburn and holding positive views about sun tanning.
Last summer, the Cancer Council NSW decided to give young people the opportunity to talk and engage about skin cancer in their own tone, and environment using social media and entertainment rather than conducting a campaign.
Research and Objectives
Cancer Council NSW is continually exploring creative ways to communicate with young people about skin cancer in a way that resonates with their culture, language and lifestyle.
Over the last few years, Cancer Council NSW has commissioned research to inform ways to improve sun protection practices in teenagers. This includes ethnographic research where the researchers hung out with young people during outdoor activities to explore their feelings and actions towards sun protection and skin cancer prevention.
Key insights from these studies are:
- Young people have high levels of skin cancer awareness and knowledge.
- Sun protection has low salience among young people.
- Peer to peer, rather than authoritative messages have highest potential for impact and engagement with young people.
- Young people prefer to discover things themselves rather than be told what to do.
- Sun protection feels like a hassle that gets in the way of fun and spontaneous times.
In late 2008, “A Beautiful Day for Cancer” was released online and widely promoted in the media. The music video aims to engage young people inthinking about sun protection and to improve social norms related to sun protection. The clip features young Australian hip hop artist ‘Al Bino’ and makes heavy use of irony and dark, subversive humour to fit with youth culture. The concept for the music clip rated positively in focus testing for its potential to engage the target audience in a way that feels relevant, motivational and on their ‘wavelength’.
The aim of the Al Bino WebQuest is to be an innovative, relevant resource that supports teachers to deliver the Stage 5 English syllabus outcomes as well as continue to address an important health issue for young people – skin cancer.
Duration of the WebQuest
Expected duration: 5 weeks
The WebQuest can be completed both as an in-class and at-home activity.
NB: This is based on 40 minute lessons, 6 times a fortnight.
Educational Objectives
For students to:
- Increase Visual Literacy / increase confidence in Visual Literacy interpretation and application.
- Transfer skills & knowledge into new and different contexts.
- Choose an appropriate visual medium in which to create their own responses to the Al Bino film clip/message.
- Express their choices in visual, written and oral formats.
- Increase awareness of the five forms of sun protection.
NSW Board of Studies, Stage 5 Syllabus Outcomes:
- Responds to and composes increasingly sophisticated and sustained texts for understanding, interpretation, critical analysis and pleasure.
- Uses and critically assesses a range of processes for responding and composing.
- Selects, uses, describes and explains how different technologies affect and shape meaning.
- Selects and uses language forms and features, and structures of texts according to different purposes, audiences and contexts, and describes and explains their effects on meaning.
- Transfers understanding of language concepts into new and different contexts.
- Experiments with different ways of imaginatively and interpretively transforming experiences, information and ideas into texts.
- Thinks critically and interpretively using information, ideas and increasingly complex arguments to respond to and compose texts in a range of contexts.
- A student investigates the relationships between and among texts.
- A student demonstrates understanding of the ways texts reflect personal and public worlds.
- A student uses, reflects on, assesses and adapts their individual and collaborative skills for learning with increasing independence and effectiveness.
The Process
This WebQuest is designed as a self-directed learning experience for students, with the teacher acting as a guide/support throughout the learning experience. The WebQuest provides students with scaffolds and resources embedded into the Process stage.
For teachers who can not access the WebQuest online it is suggested that you:
- Download worksheets prior to lessons
- Save video files and playing files to a computer/DVD as media files
- Allocate online work to be completed by students as home tasks
Want to learn more about teacher / student conferencing?