No Ifs, Ands, Or Butts

Mix media literacy with an anti-smoking crusade, and you get a
program that has students battling the tobacco industry with tools
of their own.

Debra Cline's 6th grade students tumble into her classroom like 6th
graders everywhere—in a chaotic knot of noise and commotion. Then
the bell rings, and something odd happens. Very quickly, the 25
children settle quietly into their seats. Cline, a computer graphics
teacher at the Manatee School for the Arts in Palmetto, Florida, has
the floor, and everybody is paying attention.

It isn't her demeanor that keeps the kids in line. Cline, at 45, is
slight of build and soft-spoken. She doesn't threaten or cajole.
Occasionally she reprimands, albeit gently, but what 6th grade teacher
doesn't?

And it isn't that Manatee is a bastion of rigid discipline. The
grades 6 through 9 arts charter school is housed in what used to be a
bowling alley. Walk in the front door, and you're greeted by office
staff from behind a semicircular desk where, years ago, you would have
rented bowling shoes. The school has three dance studios and a theater.
In one classroom, an illustrator who used to work at Disney World is
teaching students how cartoons are made. In another, a kid is wailing
away on an electric guitar. Creative endeavor, not conformity, governs
this place.

It certainly can't be the subject matter that has Cline's students
rapt with attention. Today's lesson, in fact the topic for a whole
quarter, is tobacco. Smoking is bad. Smoking causes cancer. Smoking is
expensive. Could anything be more boring?

So it must be the curriculum. Cline is making use of a program
called "Artful Truth," which, unlike many anti-tobacco curricula,
doesn't preach about deleterious health effects. Instead, it teaches
kids how to decode the advertisements they're bombarded with every day.
What is it about ads that makes them persuasive? How do advertisers use
"created realities" to manipulate their audiences? What goes into ads,
and more importantly in the case of tobacco, what gets left out?

Once students learn the basics of this visual "language," they
create ads and marketing tools themselves. In the three years that
Cline has been using Artful Truth, her students have made everything
from posters to CD cases to bumper stickers.

"Inside the
curriculum packages are reproductions of advertisements that
teachers help students analyze and deconstruct.
—Courtesy of www.Adbusters.com

Right now, they're working on doorknob hangers, the kind that say "Do
Not Disturb" in hotels. Here, they convey anti-tobacco messages. The
boys in the class seem to be into before-and-after themes: a healthy
kid vs. a skull and crossbones, a majestic lion vs. a pile of fur and
bones. The girls, on the other hand, are personalizing their messages:
"If you smoke, stay out of my room."

Some approaches defy categorization. Twelve-year-old Chris Hunt, for
example, has emblazoned his doorknob hanger with a rocket ship piloted
by a hip-looking alien. What is the tobacco connection exactly? "He
[the alien] went to outer space, his parents smoked, and they died
since he was gone," Chris explains. "Now he is back, and he's worried."
Fair enough.

After Cline finishes the first part of her lesson, the students drag
chairs to classroom computers and log on to Adobe Illustrator, a
graphic-design program widely used in the advertising and publishing
industries. The room, suddenly, is completely silent except for the
clicking of mice and the mood music playing through Cline's computer.
"It is phenomenal," she says while watching the students work. "I am
teaching something they didn't think about before."

Artful Truth is just one component of Florida's groundbreaking
anti-tobacco effort, which began several years ago and, in one
respect—evident in the jarring "Truth" ads seen on TV screens
across the country—has gone national. But these are lean economic
times, so implementation of the program is no longer supported by the
grants offered a year or two ago. Next year, in fact, the state plans
only to print extra copies of the curriculum. Some teachers, like
Cline, however, are committed to Artful Truth, even if it means
scrounging for resources at the local level. Why? Because media
literacy is one of the program's benefits, but even more importantly,
it has prevented many kids from giving tobacco a try.

Artful Truth was paid for by cigarette companies—not
willingly, of course. In 1994, the Florida Legislature passed a law
enabling the state to sue the tobacco industry in order to recover
state Medicaid money spent caring for sick smokers. After signing the
law, then- governor Lawton Chiles told reporters: "For decades now,
tobacco companies have turned an enormous profit—while their
victims have turned to taxpayers for treatment. It's time that those
responsible are made to pay."

The companies fought back, managing to get the law repealed in 1995.
But Chiles vetoed the repeal, and the state sued to recover Medicaid
money that same year. The case was settled out of court in August 1997
for $11.3 billion; subsequent negotiations raised the total to $13
billion, to be paid over a period of more than two decades. The
companies also agreed to remove vending machines from places where kids
could get to them and to stop advertising outdoors and on public
transportation. In fact, all marketing aimed at children was abolished.
It was up to the state, itself, to determine how much money, if any, it
wanted to use for education.

With some of the settlement funds, Chiles created the Florida
Tobacco Pilot Program, operating under the auspices of his office. His
first step was to set up a Summit on Tobacco Education, which in March
1998 drew 600 teenagers from across the state to discuss effective ways
of spreading anti-tobacco messages. He then formed Students Working
Against Tobacco, a front-line organization charged with putting into
place the plans hatched at the summit.

If kids can
read propaganda, the theory goes, they're less likely to
be manipulated by it.

Chuck Wolfe, who worked in the governor's office, supervised the FTPP
as it got off the ground. Back then, he recalls, critics thought
focusing so heavily on students was a mistake. "When we started our
program, nobody had reduced youth tobacco usage rates anywhere," he
explains. But giving kids the opportunity to help run an anti-tobacco
campaign proved prophetic. For one thing, the students helped create
the Truth ad campaign, which began in Florida and went national after
Wolfe joined the Washington, D.C.-based American Legacy Foundation, an
anti-tobacco group funded by the 1998 multibillion-dollar settlement
between tobacco companies and 46 states. (Four states, including
Florida, settled separately.)

Truth is an edgy TV, print, radio, and billboard campaign that
purports to turn the tables on Big Tobacco. Its slogan is "Their brand
is lies. Our brand is Truth." And the overall message is that tobacco
companies are manipulative, dishonest, and uncaring. One TV ad called,
appropriately enough, "Dog Poop" notes that cigarettes and canine
feces, placed in piles on the sidewalk in the spot, share a common
ingredient, ammonia-the name of which is written on little flags stuck
in the piles. "Something smells like truth," a voice deadpans.

"It was new and unique stuff," Wolfe says of the ads when they first
appeared in Florida. "People have been doing tobacco campaigns forever,
but basically all they said was that tobacco was bad. Everybody already
knows that."

The other groundbreaking component of Florida's pilot program was
Artful Truth. But instead of offering an in-your-face campaign, the
goal was to develop a curriculum that would teach students in grades 4
through 6 the visual language of advertising. If kids can "read"
propaganda, the theory goes, they're less likely to be manipulated by
it.

Of course, to learn any language, you need help from those who are
fluent in it. As it happens, one of the country's most comprehensive
collections of propaganda art is located at Florida International
University's Wolfsonian Museum. And the experts there are the folks
Wolfe and his team asked to design Artful Truth.

Housed in a renovated warehouse in Miami Beach, the Wolfsonian is
seven stories of artifacts and exhibits displaying, as a placard puts
it, "the arts of reform and persuasion" from 1885 to 1945. Collections
include furniture, sculpture, paintings, ceramics, and appliances. Each
contributes to the central idea that design is deliberate, pervasive,
and, often, persuasive.

Kate Rawlinson, a 49-year-old woman with a bright, almost
mischievous, smile, is the museum's educational programs manager. She
worked with teachers throughout the state, as well as colleagues at the
Wolfsonian, to create Artful Truth in 1998. She's both artist and
educator: She holds a master's of fine arts degree, she's taught art at
the high school and college levels, and her specialty is graphic arts.
"I've loved developing the curriculum," she says, "because I get to
work with teachers and students. I don't think art is a mystery. It can
be taught."

She has a museum full of teaching materials at her disposal, but one
of the best visual aids, at least for Artful Truth, is the Wolfsonian's
extensive collection of vintage propaganda posters and ads.
Reproductions of these items are included in the curriculum package and
illustrate effective uses of logos, fonts, slogans, and brands.

"These images are constructed to send a message, be it from a
government, a corporation, a politician, whatever," Rawlinson says,
pointing to a 1941 poster printed by the Canadian National Film Board.
In the image, two arms cradle a factory drawn in silhouette against an
orange sky. One of the arms is bare, muscled, and glistening with the
sweat of hard work. The other is clothed in a conservative suit sleeve,
a crisp starched cuff emerging at the wrist. The caption reads: "This
is our great strength, labour and management."

Nearby is a poster from 1900, selling sunny Florida to freezing
Northerners. Published by the Ocean Steamship Company, it shows, in the
upper right-hand corner, a woman in a wool jacket huddled against wind
and snow. Near the center is a large image of a steamship, orange
blossoms, and an elegant lady in a white cotton dress carrying a
parasol. The caption reads: "To Florida and the South."

Admiring the poster, Rawlinson says: "It's put together in a way
that makes you want to go. It's really a nice piece of design
work."

The Artful Truth curriculum is packaged in a flip-top box that
resembles a gargantuan pack of smokes. (It's also available at www.artfultruth.org.) The top is blue,
the bottom a mesmerizing orange-swirl pattern. In the center, like a
target, is a red circle with the Artful Truth logo printed in a font
that mimics a brand of cigarettes; it's hard to say which one, but the
inspiration is clear. In the lower left-hand corner, where you'd
normally find the surgeon general's warning, is the message: "WARNING:
This pack contains materials that will expand student perceptions of
art, advertising, and contemporary culture."

Each package contains a teacher's manual, an interactive CD-ROM, 20
student workbooks, a supplemental booklet with work sheets and
assessment forms, and four sets of cards that are reproductions of
posters and cigarette ads from the Wolfsonian collection. The
curriculum offers 12 lessons, and each takes about an hour, including
time to work on projects. "Blast from the future" is the overarching
theme, and students are charged with helping Dezel Kewl, a grade
schooler living 200 years hence, do his homework. Dezel is a clever kid
who's created a computer program that allows him to travel backward in
time via the Internet. His assignment is to study Artful Truth "because
it changed the way kids thought about advertising and tobacco use."

"Mock Ads like this
one show how certain techniques can be used against
advertisers.
—Courtesy of www.Adbusters.com

Dezel shares information about life in the future while probing
students for details of the past. His world is even more
message-saturated than our own: Pink ad blimps sail by his window as he
eats breakfast, traffic signs float in the air, and gigantic silver
spirals identify "McGalactic's." In Lesson One, Dezel wants to get to
know his friends from the past, so he asks each one to create a "True
Pic," a self-portrait collage of words and images collected from
newspapers, magazines, photos, and ads. The objective is to demonstrate
that, just like text, images carry a message, one that can be
manipulated by the designer.

Lesson Two, titled "You're a Living Target," emphasizes the
ubiquitous nature of advertising. What ads do kids see while getting
ready in the morning? While traveling to school? Do these ads tell them
about something, identify something, or persuade them to think or act
in a certain way?

The next nine lessons build on the idea that messages are
everywhere, many of them designed to sell a product. The student
workbooks offer chapters on logos, persuasion, how words and fonts work
together, constructed reality, and deception. As part of the final
lesson, students design postcards that are supposed to have a positive
influence on their peers. Examples from Debra Cline's 6th graders in
Palmetto include a cooked turkey on a platter accompanied by the words
"Smoke a turkey, not a cigarette"; the Superman logo linked to the
message "Be brave, don't smoke!"; and a piggy bank in chains under the
headline "If you smoke, you will live like this."

The Artful Truth curriculum was first made available during the
1998-99 school year when, with tobacco-settlement money, the state
covered the cost of printing 500 packages, at about $60 a pop. In
addition to the curriculum, 188 educators in public and private
schools, after-school facilities, and arts institutions received state
grants to create anti-smoking projects. Teachers in all subjects, not
just art, were eligible.

Judi Bludworth, an art teacher at H.L. Johnson Elementary School in
Royal Palm Beach, got $3,000 for a project called "Leaders Lift Us."
Her students created portraits of people they admired, then wrote
letters asking them if they'd ever smoked. The students' heroes
included TV personalities, sports figures, and Florida governor Jeb
Bush, brother of George W. "Most of them were very honest," Bludworth
says of the responses. (And, yes, Gov. Bush admitted that he used to
smoke.) Bludworth used the money to buy a computer, a flatbed scanner,
and a digital camera.

Timothy McNamara, a drama teacher at South Miami Elementary Arts
Magnet School, was given $15,000 to stage a play titled Do You Mind
If I Smoke? McNamara says he put the money into set design and a
laptop computer that helped pull the production together. "It was a
good experience," he recalls. "The kids got an awful lot out of it.
Being an ex-smoker, I feel I funded it in part."

What ads do kids see while getting ready in the morning? Do these
ads tell them to think or act in a certain way?

In fact, the state provided anti-tobacco grants for three years, and a
show at the end of each school year was testimony to just how creative
teachers and their students can be, given a little time and a nice
chunk of money. The first year's projects, exhibited at the Wolfsonian
in June 1999, included "Trash Cigarettes," a life-size plaster
sculpture of two elementary-age kids throwing smokes in the trash;
"Buttheads," a collection of fired-clay busts with snubbed- out
cigarettes for hair; and "Smoke Yourself to Death," a series of
X-raylike images depicting a smoker's damaged heart, lungs, brain, and
arteries.

Year two, displayed at the Tampa Museum of Art in June 2000, was
more creative still, featuring everything from music videos to puppet
shows. "Diablos" was a three-foot-tall metal cigarette pack that
proclaimed "I'm going to kill you!" at the press of a button. In
"Tobacco Town-Where Beauty Becomes Polluted," images from art and
cigarette ads were used to depict the residents of a cigarette-box
city. And the painting "Holy Smokes" showed the Marlboro Man's hat
resting at the gates of heaven.

In year three, the display went on the Artful Truth Web site,
featuring 33 exhibits ranging from a "Smoking Lung" made of
papier-mâché to photos of a dance performance to a claymation
video called "No Smoking in Our Neighborhood."

Not all of it was "art," admits Rawlinson. But the emphasis was on
the process, not the product. "As an art teacher, I feel the quality of
the student productions wasn't always as high as I would have liked,"
she says. "However, we worked with a lot of teachers who were not art
teachers."

Evaluations of Artful Truth, conducted by an independent consulting
firm in 2000 and 2001, showed that the program was effective in
increasing students' "visual literacy" and in changing their attitudes
about tobacco. The evaluations were based on student surveys conducted
before and after the curriculum was put into use. Two surveys were
distributed; one focused on tobacco consumption, the other on media
literacy. The former is a modified version of one already used by the
Florida Department of Health to gauge student habits. The media survey
was developed by the staff at the Wolfsonian. It had students look at
tobacco ads and answer open-ended questions such as: "What is going on
in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that?"

The first evaluation, taken from a survey of 3,000 students who used
the Artful Truth curriculum during the 1999-2000 school year, showed
dramatic results. Fifty- three percent of those who'd used tobacco at
the beginning of the year reported quitting by year's end. And only 4
percent said they'd sampled tobacco while participating in the program.
The evaluation also noted a "statistically significant" increase in
visual literacy skills, especially among those students who'd completed
all 12 of the curriculum's lessons.

The next year, a survey of 1,300 Artful Truth participants indicated
that 42 percent of those students who were using tobacco when the
program began had quit by the time it ended. Less than 1 percent of the
group took up smoking during the program. In both evaluations, the
consultant concluded that Artful Truth should receive more state
funding so as to increase the number of students who can
participate.

For Rawlinson, these statistics are proof that teaching media
literacy is an effective way to get students to question tobacco use.
"We've empowered young people to decode the advertising that persuades
them to think or feel or act in a certain way," she explains. "The
tobacco companies are incredible manipulators of that language, but now
the students can turn it around, take it apart, see how to respond. Is
it truthful or not?"

Media literacy has proved effective in other states, too, notes
Dearell Niemeyer of the Tobacco Technical Assistance Consortium. "We
know the strategy of saying 'the tobacco industry is manipulating you'
works with young people," he says. "It gives power back to [students]
rather than telling them not to do something. These are great skills,
no matter whether you are buying soap or cigarettes."

"Artful Truth is not
designed solely for art classes, so some of the projects students
have produced may not be aesthetically pleasing. But they do make
their point. "Smokin' Lung" is one good example.
—Courtesy The Wolfsonian

The consortium, affiliated with Emory University in Atlanta, is a
clearinghouse of information on states' anti-tobacco efforts. Media
literacy as a tactic has been around for about eight years, says
Niemeyer, and it's been incorporated in two other commonly used
curriculums: Project TNT, or Toward No Tobacco Use, and Life Skills
Training.

Project TNT is a 10-lesson, two-week curriculum for 7th graders that
emphasizes the course of tobacco addiction and disease and teaches
coping skills so kids don't get hooked. Its media literacy component
identifies how tobacco ads influence teens. Life Skills Training is for
6th through 9th graders and features 10 lessons the first year with
follow-up lessons the remaining years. As with Project TNT, showing how
advertisers manipulate consumers is an aspect of the curriculum.

Other states are following Florida's lead in creating regional
anti-tobacco media campaigns similar to Truth. Ohio, for example,
recently launched "Stand," which is aimed at reducing tobacco use among
11- to 15-year-olds.

Although the Truth campaign has gone national and been imitated,
Artful Truth has yet to leave Florida. "I don't know of anybody doing a
propaganda art program in any other state," says Chuck Wolfe, who's now
a private consultant.

Even within the Sunshine State, the program may be destined for
obscurity. Funding for all of Florida's anti-tobacco efforts has been
cut significantly since Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, died of a heart
attack in office in 1998. The Florida Tobacco Pilot Program (now called
the Division of Health Awareness and Tobacco and operating under the
state's department of health) had a first-year budget of $70.5 million.
Under Republican Jeb Bush, the program's budget was reduced to $38.7
million in 1999, and this year, due to a budget shortfall, it amounts
to just $28.7 million.

From the beginning, Artful Truth was conceived as a three-year
project. Its budget, during 1998-99, started at $1.4 million, then
dropped to $675,000 the second year, and $350,000 the third. Any
schools making use of the curriculum this year have had to fund
tobacco-related projects themselves. Ironically, the state plans to
cover the cost of printing 1,300 Artful Truth packages next year,
enough for at least one in every elementary school in the state. But
there isn't any money in the budget for teacher training or
support.

Wolfe, for one, is saddened by these developments. "It is
disappointing to see a state that made such great strides give it all
up," he says.

Money or no money, Debra Cline is still sold on Artful Truth. As her
6th graders click away on their computers, she circles the room,
quietly critiquing their work with the trained eye of a former
ad-agency creative director. "Think about your visual hierarchy," she
says to one girl working on a doorknob hanger that reads: "If you
smoke, don't disturb the princess."

It's obvious that these kids are creatively engaged. And for Cline,
that's about as good as it gets.

"This is what I love about my job," she says. "When I was a creative
director and I had people under me, it was like pulling teeth to get
them to come up with ideas. They would say, 'Tell me what to do, tell
me what to do.' Here I say, 'Go,' and they go."

Bob Whitby is a free-lance writer who lives with his family in
Plantation, Florida.

Science, Tobacco, and You
is a program created for K-12 students that studies the health effects
of tobacco while teaching media literacy and science. View some of the
content of
the program, such as the Ad Smart
lesson.

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