OVERVIEW & PURPOSE

Throughout this telecollaborative project, we seek to cast doubt on children’s assumptions and prejudices towards the established ideas about beauty. Considered as a sociocultural construction, the conceptualisation of beauty embodies controversy because its revisions in various contexts challenge any generalisation that overlooks differences with regard to how bodies should like.

Consequently, this project is aimed at empowering 6th graders to discover to which extent media influences on self-image. Despite being a worldwide topic and a socially relevant problem, we are very aware that beauty is culture-specific and it has greatly changed over time. That is why we want to connect two schools that belong to different cultures, especially in relation to beauty canons. Needless to say, the members of this group are from China and Catalonia, therefore they are more familiar with the education systems and beauty standards respectively.

While Catalan students are immersed in the Western conception of beauty, Chinese students represent the Asian stare of what makes people beautiful. Since we stem from the premise that beauty is a social construct, by choosing two schools in different continents, we claim that beauty can be understood in different senses. By doing so, we set an example of how culture is intertwined with the construction of expectations, body types, preferences, desires, attitudes, values... of women and men.            

With these ideas in mind, we propose a technology-enhanced project-based language learning, in which students are invited to create cooperatively two advertisements that boost body-positivity. The participants from both countries will get involved in the following activities:

• preparation for synchronous meetings;

• research on concepts of beauty over time in Europe and Asia;

• a workshop to deepen on the meaning of body-positivity;

• picture editing to unreveal the filters of media;

• analysis of advertisements;

• brainstorming and recording of a their own commercial.