Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Tune In: Introduction to culture jamming

15 minutes

Part B: STOP The Coward Punch

20 minutes

Part C: Challenging Aggressive Masculinity

40 minutes

Part D: Create Your Own Culture Jamming Message

5 minutes

Reflection

Tune In: Introduction to culture jamming

Step 1

Ask your students if they have ever heard of culture jamming. Allow them an opportunity to share their thoughts or examples. You might like them to conduct an online image search to check out some examples using “culture jamming”.

Step 2

Show slides 2-3 in the Culture Jamming Presentation. Explain to students that culture jamming is where media creators or social change activists take preexisting logos, symbols or cultural memes and transform them to create a new message for social change.

Step 3

Show slides 4-5 in the Culture Jamming Presentation.

Step 4

Explain to students how STOP the Coward Punch is a successful Australian example of how to bring about change through culture jamming. It uses a well-known Australian symbol, the STOP sign, to challenge violence. Tell the class that the campaign was developed by ex-boxer, Danny Green, who was concerned at the growing number of one punch deaths in Australian young men.

Step 5

Show slides 6-7 in the Culture Jamming Presentation. Lead a discussion with the students about the following statistics and how the STOP the Coward Punch campaign aims to challenge these using culture jamming.

Over 234 Australians have lost their lives to a one punch assault between 2990-2020.
Every one of these deaths are entirely preventable.
The age of those who died ranged between 18-71 with a median age of 44.
Almost exclusively males were involved in one punch assaults as both the perpetrator(98.6%) and victim (89%).
There has been a decreasing trend in one punch assaults since the start of the Coward Punch campaign.

Source: Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and Monash University research report (2019), An analysis of offence patterns and legal response to one-punch fatalities in Australia (2025).

Note: You can find the 2019 report here: https://www.vifm.org/wp-content/uploads/Cowards-Punch-Research-Update-2019.pdf

Discussion questions:

Why is this message important?
Who is the target audience for this campaign?
Does media and advertising help feed the issues that lead to coward punches? What are some examples?
How could you use culture jamming to challenge violence and aggressive attitudes in society?

Find Out: Challenging aggressive masculinity

Step 1

Explain that you are going to show a worked example of using a logo to challenge aggressive masculinity shown in advertising.

Play this video (also on slide 8 of the Culture Jamming Presentation):

How to Kill Hunger And Thirst All at Once Ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAplMuyiAKg)

Step 2

Lead a discussion about the OAK advertisement.

Some key points are:

The actor is set against a background of a carnival at night (this is typically considered a ‘creepy’ environment)
He refers to his brother being locked in a basement for being stupid (a put down)
The man looks over to see a carnival worker in a dress with a full beard (irony)
He goes on to talk about wishing his son had been fed more OAK (subtext - that he had been more masculine, unlike being a real estate agent)
“Kill hungry thirsty dead” is an aggressive sentence
The entire scene is set up to be threatening, although satirical.

Ask students what they think about this advertisement and in what way the humour or satire is disturbing, especially considering the messages we learned about STOP the Coward Punch.

Step 3

Share the culture jamming examples we have created on slide 9 of the Culture Jamming Presentation. Discuss how they use the OAK logo to challenge the messages in the advertisement they just watched.

Note: These images were created in Canva as examples of the kinds of images students could create with limited graphic design skills.

Step 4

Show slide 10 of the Culture Jamming Presentation as a more sophisticated example of culture jamming using a social meme.

Allow students some time to discuss how the Banksy artwork challenges aggressive masculinity and violence.

Image by Jez on Flickr

Take Action: Create your own culture jamming message

Step 1

Show slides 11-12 of the Culture Jamming Presentation (optional).

Explain to students that they are to create their own culture jamming message using an existing symbol, logo or meme and editing it to challenge thinking around aggressive masculinity or violence. Students can use a visual editing platform of their choice, e.g. Photoshop, PowerPoint or Canva.

Steps for success for students:

Decide on your message
Search for a logo, meme or symbol to use as a basis for your culture jam
Edit your image using your favourite editing platform to create your culture jamming product.

Learning extension: Posters designed by the class are placed on a central noticeboard in the school so that their messages on either violence or masculinity are given more emphasis by the wider school community.

Students might like to film an anti-violence advertisement for television using an existing advertising campaign from Australian television. They can apply the principles of culture jamming to their video. You could provide this Coward Punch advertisement as an example: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ywMKNJuCPlg.

Note: This example uses the ‘gestus’ of the Tinder app to ‘swipe out violence’. This popular dating ‘meme’ sends a strong message that violent behaviours aren’t attractive to prospective girlfriends.

Learning support: Teachers can simplify the final task by asking a student to create a new social message using a stop sign symbol. This would be more accessible to some students who may experience difficulty finding logos to manipulate from advertising, or may not have strong digital editing skills. You could provide them with a stop sign outline (digital or printed) for them to design on. Discuss with the student what they would like to see stopped in our society. Then support the student to either draw the design on paper or to use their device.

Reflection

Invite students to complete the following sentence starters as a reflection activity on the lesson:

Three things I learned:
Two questions I have:
One challenge I faced with the task:
What I might do differently next time:

Coward Punch - Culture Jamming

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