Choose Your Own Adventure Video Project: Deconstructing Disney Princess Films

Do you remember the choose your own adventure books when you were back in elementary school? The reader gets to choose what will happen next.  The CYOA video project is the same idea, the viewer gets to choose what he or she would like to view next by clicking on a link embedded on the video.

In my media literacy elective, Media Savvy Kids, I have my students watch Disney animated films to learn and understand critical theories of gender, race, class, and age.  As a culminating project I decided to have my students create a Choose Your Own Adventure video project to highlight their understanding of critical theory by applying one of the critical theories to Disney’s princess films.  The idea of a Choose Your Own Adventure Project was inspired by  Greg Kulowiec’s high school social studies CYOA video project  that was shared with me at a recent ed tech conference.

First, we watched Tangled in class. Afterwards, I presented my reading of the movie introducing and applying each critical theory to the film.  I defined the critical theories for my students and showed examples how the critical theories can be applied to the movie.  The following week, we watched Brave together in class.  The idea behind these two movies was that they are the most recent Disney princess films and are suppose to present a more updated and feminist princess.  But is she really?  That was one of the guiding questions for this unit of study.  Students had to apply the critical theories and pull put specific examples in the movie Brave.  For the assessment project I selected the student partnerships and each group chose the critical theory they would present in the video.  Students were required to offer three to four specific examples from the movie to support their claim and critical reading of the movies.  Students were also allowed to bring in additional examples from other Disney princess films.  Students collaborated writing their scripts and then we went into production filming the videos.

Here is what the project looked like on paper in the planning stage:

 

Media Savvy Kids CYOA Video Project from theteachingfactor

Here is the rubric I created for the project:

Media Savvy Kids Choose Your Own Adventure Video Project Rubric from theteachingfactor

Here is the final project:

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