Adolescent Students As Media Fictional Characters: Preventing and Repairing Poor Engagements Between Teenagers and School through Media Literacy.

When economical and professional future has turn in Spain into such a difficult subject for youth, Education has to struggle with serious difficulties of presentism and early school leaving among adolescents: many teenagers are losing the hope in future and the will of learning. Together with a number of prevention programs that face this problem, Sociology of Art faces an important question: while looking for reference models to build up their own identity, which portrait of themselves is found (and chosen) by adolescent in films or series? How do these narrations represent their life as students and the importance, purposes and difficulties of their Education?

Media fictional narrations on adolescents as characters and target are used by teenage audiences when looking for references for their identity building. As a starting point for Media Literacy activities to help teenage students in this process, this research focuses on the representations of adolescent students proposed by different kinds of media fictional narrations. Three European narrations have been chosen in order to analyse and compare different genres, codes and values: the television series «Física o Química» and the films «Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix» and «The Class». A classic narrative analysis approach has been applied in order to encourage teachers to use this kind of Media Literacy activities by employing methodologies that they are familiar with. The results show that such a methodology could facilitate the comparative analysis of important coincidences between these examples (such as the importance of friendships and couple relationships) and also underlines meaningful differences (like orientation to the future). The study -done in Secondary Schools of Madrid during 2013 and 2014- shows the viability of the proposal in order to be applied with adolescents, even in disadvantaged or multicultural contexts.