By Armanda Stroia and Josianne Block
Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you’ve put a huge Jenga tower in the middle of your class. Each of the blocks in the tower is labelled with something like ‘Boys shouldn’t cry’, ‘Asians are good at Math’, ‘Immigrants are uneducated’, or ‘Girls can’t be good at Science’. As the students pull each block out, they get to discuss the stereotype – so instead of the teacher lecturing on these common themes, we give the students the tools they need to deconstruct, think and question beliefs by simply encouraging them to pull out the Jenga blocks one by one and watch how the tower of stereotypes begins to sway.
As organizational psychologist and researcher Adam Grant (2021) highlights in his seminal book Think again, “Stereotypes don’t have the structural integrity of a carefully built ship. They’re more like a tower in the game of Jenga – teetering in a small number of blocks, with some key supports missing. To knock it over, sometimes all we need to do is give it a poke” (p. 138). This article explores how teachers can offer such ‘pokes’ in the ELT classroom by using a stereotype toolkit grounded in critical media literacy (CML) to guide learners in deconstructing stereotypes, such as gender and racial stereotypes, embedded in media advertisements. This toolkit, which is easily adaptable to learners of different ages, levels, and cultures, can empower individuals to critically analyse and evaluate the information they consume across various media platforms, becoming active and informed participants in a digital society that knows how to question.
Deconstructing stereotypes: An integral part of stereotype literacy
In our chapter for the book ‘Sustainability in English Language Teaching’ we propose a three-stage approach to help teachers integrate stereotype awareness into their teaching practices through activities that promote the understanding of stereotypes (phase 1), their deconstruction (phase 2), and the creation of alternative scenarios (phase 3) (Block & Stroia, 2026). Therefore, the ability to question and critically analyse stereotypes is an integral part of a broader and more holistic stereotype literacy framework, which encourages learners to ask who is being represented, how they are being portrayed, and whose interests that portrayal serves.
The toolkit we propose in this article for stage 2 (the deconstruction phase) is conceptually grounded in the work of critical media scholars Kellner and Share (2019). The toolkit is designed around six conceptual areas, and guiding questions are provided for each area in order to support learners as they unpack the hidden layers of meaning behind media messages.
The first question addresses the idea of authorship. It is essential to make our learners aware that all media messages are co-constructed by individuals or groups of people or companies, or nowadays even by non-human agents. Therefore, they are never neutral.
After our learners reflect on who created the message, the next step is to guide them to think about the format: How is the media message built to grab our attention? What techniques are used to make it appealing? How do sound, colour, layout, and editing shape our emotions and perceptions of what is being presented to us? Slow motion, upbeat music, bright colours… In media messages, nothing is accidental and every stylistic choice is designed with the target audience in mind.
Once our learners understand how the message is engineered to grab their attention, they can ask, Whose attention is it trying to grab? This can trigger our learners’ curiosity to reflect on the audience and on what the content is actually implying. Here, a powerful question which might shift learners’ mindset and broaden their perspective is: How could this message be understood in a different way by different audiences? Moreover, what values, ideas, and points of view are represented or missing?
For example, an advert featuring strong male athletes, excluding women and disabled athletes, might simply reinforce a very narrow idea of what ‘real athletes’ look like. The choices in representation usually point to the message’s deeper purpose, and this leads us into production aims: the commercial, political, or ideological reasons behind the creation of the message.
More importantly, whose interests does the message serve? Such questions allow learners to reflect on the concept of social justice and examine who benefits from the message, who is harmed, and how media can reinforce or challenge inequality. The full toolkit, including guiding questions for all six conceptual areas, is summarised in Figure 1. The next section will look at two example media messages and how these can be deconstructed in the English classroom.
Students as stereotype detectives: Breaking down stereotypes in media messages
Case 1: Philadelphia cheese ad
The TV advert for the Philadelphia cream cheese was the first ad banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) as a result of complaints from the public for reinforcing harmful and limiting gender stereotypes (Sweney, 2019). It depicts two new dads distracted by food and leaving a baby on a restaurant conveyor belt, portraying men as incompetent or incapable caregivers. For this media message, learners work in teams and use the toolkit which guides their understanding and deconstruction process. Even if initially the ad seems harmless, especially because of the light-hearted intent, learners soon become aware of how deeply ingrained in our society are certain gender stereotypes. From simply noticing that this ad shows two fathers repeatedly distracted by the appealing food being promoted, they can move towards putting on the marketer’s hat to convey a more positive image of men involved in active childcare. However, when they then switch to the perspective of those who complained to the ASA, they are able to see the harmful gender stereotype suggested. Finally, this leads to understanding why the message was banned. Learners can rewatch the ad multiple times in order to discuss it and craft their responses together in a collaborative analysis rubric.
Case 2: Racist Laundry Detergent
The controversial 2016 Qiaobi laundry detergent advertisement from China is a stark example of overt racial bias in the media. The commercial shows a young Chinese woman encountering a dark-skinned man wearing a white T-shirt. The woman then proceeds to forcibly push a detergent capsule into his mouth and shove him head-first into a running washing machine. After the cycle is complete, a fair-skinned Asian man emerges, clean and smiling. The ad’s narrative is unmistakable: it portrays the man’s skin colour as a form of dirt or stain that needs to be literally washed away, equating Blackness with undesirability and presenting the transformation to a lighter-skinned, conventionally attractive Asian man as the desired and ‘clean’ outcome.
Company employee Xu Chunyan claimed that “[w]e did this for some sensational effect. If we just show laundry like all the other advertisements, ours will not stand out” (Graham-Harrison, 2016).
However, harmful ideology is embedded in this advertisement. The advertisement reflects and validates systemic bias that privileges light skin tones: its ideology is not just about cleaning clothes but also about social cleansing, suggesting to viewers which demographic is desirable or preferred within the social hierarchy. The narrative relies on simple symbols (portraying the dark-skinned man as ‘dirty’ and the Asian man as ‘clean’) to sell a product and maximise profit; thereby normalising and trivialising a racial trope while dismissing any ethical considerations. Although the ad clearly disadvantaged people of African descent by associating their identity with inferiority, in China it was met with considerable public indifference, which may be attributed to the restricted nature of open debate on racism within the country (Graham-Harrison, 2016). On the other hand, the global backlash it received underscores the importance of empowering audiences to challenge media that reinforces inequality and to demand accountability from institutions that profit from racial and cultural insensitivity. CML toolkits may therefore help learners deconstruct such seemingly simple narratives, enabling them to move beyond apathy and resist media that perpetuates inequality.
Conclusion
Our work in the area of stereotype literacy so far has taught us that this critical skill cannot be developed by simply dictating to our learners what to think, but by offering them the tools to understand, question, and reframe the messages they are exposed to on a daily basis. Too often, our learners absorb digital fast food (content that is designed to be consumed quickly, effortlessly, and habitually) without a deeper processing and unpacking of the content, since it is often commercially packaged in appealing ways through humour, catchy slogans, or relatable experiences.
For us, the tower of stereotypes remains intact only when biased content is left unquestioned. We believe that teaching English cannot be reduced to only linguistic accuracy. It is also about those creative and deeply transformative ways in which we shape identities and values, along with developing competent language users.
Thus, by regularly including critical media analysis in our lessons through the use of the CML toolkit, we hope to empower our learners to poke the Jenga tower of their unquestioned beliefs or ingrained stereotypes. To do this, we need to create spaces in our classrooms where critical inquiry becomes a habit, not a unique isolated moment.
References
Block, J., & Stroia, A. (2026). Restorying the self: Building social sustainability through stereotype literacy. In D. Xerri, A. Popovski, & C. Graham (Eds.), Sustainability in English language teaching. IBU Press.
Grant, A. (2021). Think again: The power of knowing what you don’t know. Viking.
Graham-Harrison, E. (2016, May 28). Black man is washed whiter in China’s racist detergent advert. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/28/china-racist-detergent-advert-outrage
Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2019). The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education. Brill.
Sweney, M. (2019, August 14). First ads banned for contravening UK gender stereotyping rules. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/aug/14/first-ads-banned-for-contravening-gender-stereotyping-rules
Banned Philadelphia TV Commercial June 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWet1bkZqgE
Biographies
Armanda Stroia holds a Ph.D. in Philology and has over 15 years of teaching experience. Her current research work explores the intersection of language learning, media and global agency, with a focus on stereotype literacy, atomic language habits, multimodality and task-based language teaching. She regularly delivers talks and workshops at various international conferences and has authored publications on these topics. She also contributes to the global ELT community as a member of the IATEFL Materials Writing SIG committee.
Josianne Block teaches academic literacies at the University of Malta, from where she also obtained an M.A. in Applied Linguistics and TESOL. Her research interests include multilingual dynamics, professional learning, and classroom research. She has presented at multiple local and international conferences and contributed to publications on these topics. Josianne is the co-editor of the IATEFL Research SIG newsletter. www.josianneblock.com
