Finding the Middle in the Curriculum Versus New Literacies Wars

As I begin to make decisions about a framework for the data I’m collecting for my dissertation, I continually question how traditional literacy instruction can meet the world of new literacies. The answer circles back, over and over, to Freire’s (1992) critical pedagogy, in which teachers and students are co-learners. Thus, through critical literacy, students’ and I together recontextualize literacy processes through translation of symbols, analysis of social constructs, and negotiation of meaning.

When my senior classes read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1997), they also sort through intertextual layers and connections: Chinua Achebe’s essay, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1977); the film, Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979); documentary footage of the Vietnam War; articles from the progressive community website, CommonDreams.org on US colonialism; and a Google search using the text keywords to analyze the effect of Conrad’s text on modern American society.

After sifting through a variety of peer-reviewed research sources, students decide which frames of knowing, observing, and interpreting they will incorporate into their final projects. “Frames are powerful not only because we have internalized them from media, but because they have become second nature to us --- they allow us to process information efficiently and get about our lives” (Gilliam, Aubrun, Grady, & Bostrom, 2002, p. 4). The frame is a portrait of trends rather than a particular individual’s identity. The concept of frame is constant as I incorporate a critical literacy framework into the classroom.

Due to the efficacious means of producing, circulating, and exchanging information, popular and media cultures are central ways in which my students can learn about themselves, their relationship to others, and the world beyond their homes (Giroux, H., 1999). I seek to create critical readers who can identify ways that body, power, and gender messages contribute to discourse (Gee, 2003). I want students to “read” their worlds in new and increasingly reflective ways, to add a metacognitive layer to learning, to adopt an outsider perspective in order to become analytical; and to interrogate the media as major political, pedagogical, and social forces (Giroux, H., 1999; Giroux, H. & Simon, 1989).

If my students own these strategies, then my influence will have transcended one school year. I teach students to question textual authority and use reasoning to come to autonomous decisions. Rather than trying to superimpose a particular world view on my students, I attempt to help them to achieve critical distance as they read their worlds in order to make independent and informed decisions as to whether to support or refute messages about identity within economic, social, political, historical, and aesthetic contexts.

For example, a senior honors female related a narrative to me about her maternal influences. “My mother refused to wear a veil on her wedding day,” Kelly Leigh began, “because her mother did, too. My grandmother said it was a sign of being submissive to her husband. She wasn’t having any of that.” A huge smile burst onto her face. “I’ve decided to wear one, anyway.”

Kelly Leigh had constructed “meaning through the integration of existing and new knowledge and the flexible use of strategies to foster, monitor, regulate, and maintain comprehension” (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991). Through a critical literacy classroom, she was able to express and reconcile hegemonic gender messages. She made her own decision in light of evidence and after reflection.

Students like Kelly Leigh who become critically literate will question hegemony in its various forms and have the wherewithal to choose to accept or reject the mythology of the American Dream. It is a critical means to reconcile curriculum and embedded messages of cultural transmission.

Resources
Achebe. (1977). An image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Massachusetts Review, 18, 782-794.
Conrad. (1997). Heart of darkness: Signet Classics.
Coppola (Writer) (1979). Apocalypse now. In Z. Studios (Producer). United States: Paramount.
Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson. (1991). Moving from the old to the new: Research on reading comprehension instruction. Review of Educational Research, 61(2), 239-264.
Freire. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Gee. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Gilliam, Aubrun, Grady, & Bostrom. (2002). Framing public issues. Washington, D.C.
: Frameworks Institute.
Giroux. (1999). The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Giroux, & Simon. (1989). Popular culture as a pedagogy of pleasure and meaning. In H. Giroux & R. Simon (Eds.), Popular culture: Schooling and everyday life. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc.