Media Literacy Teen Council

Shifting the Landscape of Literacy at High School

I’ve been thinking lately about what media literacy in school must look like through the eyes of teens. I’ve decided that, with the exception of segregated units in Health classes, the primary function of media texts in education is as rainy day fillers [the movie version of Chapter 22 of Wuthering Heights” (Wyler, 1939)] or vehicles for substitute teacher lesson plans [Grammar Rock (Warburton, 1995)]. Media literacy is not viewed as essential to literacy instruction.

Media systems provide the majority of texts through which students view themselves. Modern communications media include television, cinema, video, radio, photography, advertising, newspapers, magazines, recorded music, video games, and the Internet. “Children have gained power, not merely as citizens but also as consumers; and indeed the two may have become impossible to separate,” argues Buckingham (2003). Yet most public school classrooms do not interrogate media texts, even though all fifty American states incorporate media standards into frameworks.

How might media literacy evolve in schools across the United States? Maybe it needs to come from the teens themselves. All too often, teachers experience discomfort when called upon to use new technologies, which go hand-in-hand with new literacies. Maybe the teens could teach the teachers.

I’ve decided to propose a Media Literacy Teen Council (MLTC) at my high school for the 2008-2009 school year. If accepted, the project will invite youth interns to learn media production, media literacy education, peer teaching, and entrepreneurial skills during the first term and then share their learning during the remainder of the 08/09 year with other students, faculty, and governmental institutions.

The MLTC project will enrich the curriculum through student exposure to tools to analyze messages in media texts and to understand how structural features -- such as media ownership --- mythologize the world. Students will be encouraged to solve as well as to pose problems. Freire (1992) refers to “critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action” (p. 52) as essential to engaged learning, so the MLTC will respond in authentic ways when engaged in inquiry. The MLTC will become skillful creators and producers of media messages to facilitate understanding as to the strengths and limitations of each medium.

“There’s always something decentred about the medium of culture, about language, textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evades the attempt to link it, directly and immediately, with other structures,” argues Hall (2003). By transforming media consumption into an active process, the MLTC will gain critical distance from the pervasive texts of their lives in order to acknowledge reasons for enjoyment, potential for persuasion through symbolic representations, and media’s ability to re-create the world in fictional and non-fictional ways.

The MLTC will offer guidance to students and teachers about ways that media in the classroom make space for conversations as a means to build relationships, negotiate learning and teaching, and analyze processes and strategies.

Project Description: Who will participate? Students will learn of the project during a publicity drive in June 2007. Each of the 100+ staff persons will be asked to nominate two students. Of particular interest will be students who may not achieve academic distinctions but who may have keen interest in media texts and who could benefit from belongingness that will emerge from participation in the project. The MLTC can be a place for students to have voices.


While 20-30 students will participate on the MLTC, the larger impact is on the students and staff members who will be invited to attend workshops, improvisations, simulations, and seminars led by the MLTC after initial leadership training.


What will the teachers and students do? The following are sample activities:

Leadership Essentials. Come to this workshop to explore essential skills of leadership: really listening to others and finding effective ways to talk with peers to get things done. Learn aspects of civics responsibility; outreach techniques through phone calls, mailings, presentations and public speaking; work with other school leadership groups and committees See how a teen council model could work for you.

Acting Out Against Big Media. What is the impact of advertising? How does it influence us? In this workshop we will find answers through exciting theater improvisation games. Be prepared for an extremely interactive workshop, seeking to educate, empower and inspire people to become leaders for positive change!
Spam. Spam. Spam. Do you feel like you live in a spam culture? Learn how teens can oppose corporate efforts to dangle an ad in front of our eyes at every moment. Corporations claim the right to pester us with marketing, telemarketing, spam, ad creep, etc. Fight for the right to be let alone.

"That's so Gay." Come talk about how to make your school a safer place for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning students, staff, and families. Analyze media representations of heterosexuality and homosexuality. This workshop breaks down the myths & stereotypes of LGBTQQ people & really gets at the root of what homophobia is & what we can ALL do about it. Be prepared to move around, participate and believe it or not, laugh.

Drumming toward Teamwork through Music. Come hear what it takes to make music from western and other cultures with 20 strangers. Definitely a hands-on workshop! Conducted in cooperation with the Music Department.

Media "News" on the War in Iraq. How does the media convey the news of the war in Iraq? Whose voices are heard and whose are silenced? We will screen a short film about independent media in time of war and discuss this important topic.

Anti-Racism & Institutional Oppression. Defining institutional racism, sharing your own heritage, understanding white privilege, describing lateral oppression as bullying and finding ways to take action are the core of this workshop. Interrogate media texts for hidden signification. Interactive exercises help us focus on topics that can often be hard to talk about.

Food Activism. When eating lunch, you are absorbing more than just the food on your plate. Your consumption is related to the foods and beverages you see depicted on screens. Come learn how students can make their cafeteria dining experience more sustainable.

What's Gender Got to Do With it? Ever wonder why girls wear pink & boys wear blue? This workshop focuses on exactly WHAT gender is & more importantly, what YOU can do with it, about it & to it. Be prepared to cross the gender line, more than once in fun, interactive activities that get you up and moving around!

Alcohol Laws 101. What are images of alcohol in excess like in media texts? What really happens when the cops bust up a party? This workshop will highlight the laws around alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, but more importantly, will explain in an honest and straightforward fashion what really can (and does) happen in our community.


Community Assessment and Evaluation. Be part of a Youth Survey. Learn how to construct and use surveys to find out where teens hang out on media. It's like a big scavenger hunt. Afterward, come back and do presentations on you’ve they've found as a way to inform faculty about possibilities for inclusion in the curriculum.


Politics. Travel to the state capital to advocate for enhanced media literacy in our state’s public schools. Send the message that there's a great constituency in youth and that politicians should represent them. Show them that media is an important part of literacy instruction.

What are the expected learning outcomes? Outcomes in the realm of worldview --- cognition and affect--- are likely to occur. If participation in media literacy curricula allows individuals to learn something new or something more about media messages, practices, processes, institutions, or influence, then important cognitive development will have occurred. Outcomes point to increased knowledge of key concepts or terms used in the study of media and increased awareness of media persuasion, conventions, and ubiquity.

Some examples might include knowledge of strategies used in advertising to encourage favorable responses; awareness of the ways that violence is shown in the media that make it look cool; media strategies that glamorize risk-taking behaviors; or attention to roles that women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups are given in the media. Participation might contribute to a student's approval of some media messages, practices, processes, institutions, or influence and the disapproval of others.

Overall, if a student develops the ability to deconstruct, or break down components of and closely analyze media messages, then media literacy has been effective and student are becoming critical thinkers about the media.

How will they be assessed? Outcomes will be assessed in formative and summative ways: reactions to individual workshops as well as products created by the Council members. After the project is completed, a qualitative data analysis will be completed. Results will be written and submitted to an educational journal for consideration for publication.

Conclusion What are your ideas about the ways media literacy, or a teen council, or a public school could enhance teens’ deconstruction of the pervasive media texts of their lives?


Resources

Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: Literacy, learning, and contemporary culture. Malden, MA: Polity.

Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.

Green Mountain Peer Project, 180 Flynn Avenue, Greenhouse Bldg. 4&5, Burlington, VT. 05401,
http://gmppvt.org/print.php?name=workshops&ID=

Hall, S. (2003). Encoding and decoding. In S. During (Ed.), The cultural studies reader (pp. 507-517). New York: Routledge.


Warburton, T. (Writer) (1995). Grammar Rock, Schoolhouse Rock. United States: ABC/ Disney.


Wyler, W. (Writer) (1939). Wuthering heights. US: Samuel Goldwin Company.

Obstacles to critical thinking in the classroom

When I announce to the senior honors class that today’s learning event is to analyze a clip of the film, La Cage aux Folles (Molinaro, 1979), Larry asks, “Will we be graded on this?”

I also taught Larry four years earlier at a heterogeneous eighth grade level, and he was keenly innovative, clever, and distinguished from other students in his thinking. Even when I respond “no” to his question as to whether I will assign a grade to the lesson, he and other students react to this humorous French film in a constrained and muted manner: short giggles, some blurted-out chuckles, a few out-and-out roars. It makes no matter whether humor is based on double entendres, socio-cultural comparisons, sexual binaries, or pratfalls. The class of students consciously muffles their responses.

Larry and other high-tracked students recognize that explicit communication about learning (Sambell & MacDowell, 1998 ) --- taking academic risks---- is distinct from embodied subtexts about high-status curriculum. They do not want to jeopardize their chances for admission to prestigious universities (Rogers & Oakes, 2005) or alienate themselves from their peers in that mysterious world of adolescence, in which identifying with adults is, in and or itself, an isolating activity.

My expectations for success differ from my contemporaries’ and may not sit easily with current department, district, or even state pedagogical philosophical ties to conferring content knowledge and passing of examinations (Davies, 2006). This plays out in ways that fall on a continuum from the merely startling [the teacher in the adjacent classroom asks, “What were you watching early today in class?” after she heard Cantonese exclusively spoken during House of Flying Daggers (Zhang, 2005)], to an outright professionally frightening [after a third summons to the principal’s office, I requested a union representative to accompany me as witness to the hegemonic discussion of what instruction for the public sector should look like].

I help students synthesize their own experiences, identify suppositions, trace inferential clues, and reflect on their own thinking, among an infinite number of ways to define how humans actually think. Reflection, however, is particularly important, as reflecting on assumptions, stereotypes, and other embedded notions before, during, and after literacy events helps students to process their feelings and experiences (Wade, 1997).

Thinking about thinking is important for students to make meaning in a symbol-saturated contemporary world.

Risks for both teachers and students come when we together seek answers to hard questions. Risks are the norm because interest, enjoyment, and challenge in immediate experience to arouse student development (Dewey, 1898) receive less emphasis in the current instructional climate than does pedagogy toward cultural transmission. Dewey’s 1939 observation holds true today: “…there is much information about which (students’) judgment is not called upon to respond” (p. 41).

Students are not being invited to draw education, experience, knowing, and thinking into ways of assessing their identities within a democracy. But how can we as an educational community state that we create life-long learners if we do not actively insist on the varied process of thinking that stimulate real abilities to think about, interrogate, and know their worlds?

How do students’ thinking, reading, knowing, and learning rise from a backdrop of American enculturation? Does the ability to analyse one text transfer to another? To what degree are students able to discern communicative messages at each phase of the study? What levels of metacognition lead to student meaning making? How is student cognition related to hegemonic structures? These are the questions I am addressing with my own students this year in a teacher-researcher study.

I turn it over to you now: as a teacher or learner, how do you best accommodate new structures for thinking in this symbol-saturated world? I’d love to hear your comments.

Resources
Davies. (2006). Global citizenship: Abstraction or framework for action? . Educational Review, 58(1), 5-25.
Dewey. (1898). The primary education fetish Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Dewey. (1939). Freedom and culture. New York: Prometheus Books.
Molinaro (Writer) (1979). La cage aux folles. In L. P. A. A. Da Ma Produzione (Producer): MGM.
Rogers, & Oakes. (2005). John Dewey speaks to Brown: Research, democratic social movement strategies, and the struggle for education on equal terms. Teachers College Record, 107(9), 2178-2203.
Sambell, & MacDowell. (1998 ). The construction of the hidden curriculum: Messages and meanings in the assessment of student learning. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 23(4), 391-413.
Wade. (1997). Service. In R. Wade (Ed.), Community service learning: A guide to including service in the public school curriculum (pp. 66). Albany, NY: State University of New York.
Zhang (Writer) (2005). House of flying daggers: Sony.

Why should a teacher conduct qualitative research?

In 2006, I was awarded a grant from the SMARTer Kids Foundation to conduct a mixed methods study called, “Look! Johnny and Janey Can Read: Enhancing the Literate Lives of Teens through SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard Technology.” Of interest was students’ discourse around literacy issues and students’ final design products after intensive visual literacy instruction. How did communicative messages and socio-cultural contexts link to social networks and meaning making in a high school English classroom?

Year 2007 state standardized testing results were returned in late autumn 2007. Literacy levels of the participant group, which had been lower in grade eight testing, were higher than the control group in grade ten testing.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods draw on the empirical process, or understandings based on observations or experiences. However, it was the qualitative data that I collected for the SMARTer Kids Foundation --- student artifacts and case study narratives--- that unveiled richness of discourse upon which students drew to describe images and create critical interpretations about their own products. Data analysis utilized social semiotic and social discourse theories. Through analysis of multimodality in this context, qualitative research encouraged perspectives denied students in “traditional research paradigms” (Bogad, 2002). Qualitative methodology revealed insights into students’ culture, literacies, and identities; qualitative methodology helped me heuristically as a researcher.

Modern qualitative research typically falls within several categories. Phenomenology occurs when a researcher attempts to understand how one or more individuals experience a particular phenomenon. Narrative analysis is story construction, a process of creating reality in a systematic way on common patterns of behavior and relationships by people in their own societies. Ethnography describes the culture of a group of people. Case study research focuses on a detailed account or one or more cases, or a single event or occurrence. Grounded theory attempts to generate and develop theory as result of data collected. Historical research looks to past events and attempts to understand them.

Whatever the type of qualitative research, the goals are to explore, describe, predict, and/or influence. Qualitative researchers experience joy from generating ideas, creating characterizations, showing why and how, anticipating trends, and/ or extending applications that might impact communities, cultures, societies, or even the world.

My rationale for qualitative research

In the 1960s and early 1970s, action research by teachers was typically carried out in collaboration with consultants, partly in response to critique that action research was not scientifically valid. Qualitative researchers today face an increasingly hostile research climate in which definitions of research are narrowing, often casting qualitative inquiry as a poor imitation of real science. As a result, American federal funding for qualitative inquiry is dwindling as researchers must struggle to articulate the legitimacy of their practices and findings (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005). “Conspicuous by their absence from the literature of research on teaching are the voices of teachers themselves—the questions and problems teachers pose, the frameworks they use to interpret and improve their practice, and the ways teachers themselves define and understand their work lives,” according to Lytle & Cochran-Smith (1990, p. 83). Teacher research has the potential for application beyond that of a heuristic role for an individual teacher: it should be valued a role in the formation of the knowledge base for teaching.

My work is based in the tradition of qualitative research (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003). I function as a participant-observer in the context of my position as a public school teacher. I define teacher research as systematic, intentional inquiry by teachers. Qualitative research design involves the use of data such as analysis of documents and participant observation to understand and explain social phenomena. According to Seigel (2005), “A main task of qualitative research is an explication of the ways in which persons in a particular setting understand, account for, take action, and manage their day-to-day situations” (p. 341).

Qualitative research utilizes the inductive method to observe and to search for patterns in that world. It is a “bottom up” method that is refreshing for me as a public school teacher. Generally, teachers are immersed in a standards-based, accountability climate where numbers, not stories, reveal explanations about learning. In qualitative research, research spirals, much like the nature of teaching: one stage leads to the next, deepens with each stage, and returns to the beginning with new ideas and ways to seek further meanings. Freire calls this praxis, where, through reflection and action, people discover themselves as the world as “permanent re-creators” (1992, p. 56).

The fit of qualitative methodology to critical literacy praxis

I became interested in popular culture in the public school classroom through my academic studies as a public school teacher inspired by the literature around literacy, learning, and media. Over my career in “Taylor” at both the middle and high school levels, I came to know my own students, many of their siblings, and have kept in contact with several former students who went onto college, careers, and/or adult responsibilities.

Epistemologies refer to researchers’ broad philosophical orientations concerning knowledge and how people come to have knowledge. To some degree, then, my interest lies in the relationship between culture and social structure but also the ways in which individual youth biographies evolve out of questions of how teens know their own worlds in what might be called sociology of youth. Thus, qualitative research, where behavior is seen as fluid, dynamic, situational, contextual, and personal, is the best choice for my research.

Thought and study alone did not produce my teacher-research of how privilege collides with critical pedagogy; it is rooted in concrete situations and describes the reactions of tracked students and upper-middle class families whom I have observed directly during the course of my work. “Critical theory… is critical of social organizations that privilege some at the expense of others.. critical theorists who do qualitative research are very interested in issues of gender, race, and class because they consider these the prime means for differentiating power in society,,” according to Bogdan & Biklen (2003, p. 21).

Narrative approach to qualitative research

Narrative research is an approach located within a long tradition of qualitative interpretation and currently pushes boundaries of scholarship in education, law, and medicine with storied accounts of individuals’ lives. Indeed, narrative inquiry is grounded in notions of experience drawn from John Dewey, the American educational reformer, philosopher, and epistemologist. Dewey was a leading proponent of the American school of thought known as pragmatism, a view that rejected dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern philosophy. He favored a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active adaptation of the human organism to its environment. Dewey saw inquiry as an active rather than passive process. He argues that “education is neither a process of unfolding from within nor is it a training of faculties resident in mind itself… Education proceeds taken in a strictly literal sense, a building into the mind from without” (1963, p. 69). Dewey reminds that consciously formulated methods underestimate the necessary ingredient in learning of “vital, unconscious attitudes” (p. 71).

Narration as opportunity for story constellations

My research is based in the meanings that my students make through the institutional context in which those meanings are created. As Bogdan and Biklen (2002) state, “Meaning and process are crucial in understanding human behavior” (p. 50). Of particular interest to me in qualitative research using a narrative approach are story constellations. Craig (2007, p. 63) explains: “Story constellations seek to make visible the complexities that shape school landscapes, influence the nature of educators’ experiences, and determine who knows and what is known both within, and about, the educational enterprise.”

To study students in their community school is to study behavior in a natural environment and in the context in which behavior occurs. The research is descriptive, exploratory, and full of discovery because shifts in school landscapes can be constructed and reconstructed alongside individual and collective accounts of evolution. The story constellation approach is consistent with the deep-angle methodology I use to examine the depth of phenomenon. Reality is constructed in subjective, personal, and social ways.

Instruments and tools of qualitative research

Among the instruments and tools I utilize as a teacher-researcher are a digital audio recorder, digital video recorder, and laptop computer. However, my most important data collection device is my teacher journal. A journal becomes an account of classroom life where I record our dialogic discourse, note observations, chronicle lessons, and recreate conversations. Outside the classroom, I analyze the totality of experiences and reflect on and interpret dialogic interactions over time. Similar in some ways to ethnographic field notes, a journal captures the immediacy of teaching through praxis: “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1992, p. 36). Moreover, because my teacher journal becomes a permanent, written record of practice, it provides me with a vehicle to revisit experiences over time and in relation to broader frames of reference. It invites interpretive perspectives through construction and reconstruction of data from my classroom.

Through dialogic meaning-making, teachers and students can engage in critical thinking: “ thinking which discerns an invisible solidarity between the world and men and admits of no dichotomy between them --- ---thinking which does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved,” according to Freire (1992, p. 81). I capture these words in my teacher journal and mold them into categories. Data analysis becomes a search for patterns, themes, and holistic features.

Those who have come before me

Authors of narrative are expected to tell an engaging tale as well as express arguments about the field. Many researchers have relied on qualitative methodology including a narrative approach to conduct research. Rist (1970) explored teachers’ expectations toward certain kinds of children and portrayed how these attitudes were translated into daily interactions with them. Kozol (1967) attempted to capture the quality of children in the inner city. Lesko (1988) studied gender as constructed from a feminist perspective. Hankins (2003) wrote narratives about children about whom she worried in her classroom. Finders (1997) focused on the literacy experiences of girls in middle school, and Smith & Wilhelm (2002) focused on the literacy experiences of boys in a private secondary school. Currie (1999) explored discourses of femininity and consumption in teen magazines and how adolescent girls negotiate them.

I think of education as observing selves in the making.

In this postmodern era, thinking becomes linked with “responses to experiences in the shifting, multifaceted world that are more widely shared than ever before” (Greene, 1993, p. 213). I watch students as they create meanings and form identities through dialogue and narrative. I listen to their stories and come to realize that I am moved to decipher their metaphors and discover their possibilities. Qualitative research will allow me those lenses into students’ literacy identities.

Resources

Bogad, L. (2002). Feed your mind: A qualitative study of youth, power and privilege: Syracuse University.
Bogdan, R., & Biklen, S. (2003). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theories and methods. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Clandinin, D. J. (2007). Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology Thousand Oaks: Sage Publishing.
Craig, C. (2007). Narrative inquiries of geographically close schools: Stories given, lived, and told. Teachers College Press, 109(1), 160-191.
Currie, D. (1999). Girl talk: Adolescent magazines and their readers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Dewey, J. (1963). Experience and education. New York: Touchstone Press.
Finders, M. (1997). Just girls: Hidden literacies and life in junior high school. New York: Teachers College Press.
Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company.
Greene, M. (1993). Diversity and inclusion. Teachers College Record, 95(2), 211-221.
Hankins, K. H. (2003). Teaching through the storm: A journal of hope. New York: Teachers College Press.
Hayes Jacobs, H. (1997). Mapping the big picture: Integrating curriculum & assessment K-12. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Kamberelis, G., & Dimitriadis, G. (2005). On qualitative inquiry: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Kozol, J. (1967). Death at an early age. New York, NY: Bantam.
Lesko, N. (1988). Symbolizing society: Rites and structure in a Catholic high school. London: Falmer Press.
Lytle, S., & Cochran-Smith, M. (1990). Learning from teacher research: A working typology. Teachers College Press, 92(1), 83=103.
Rist, R. (1970). Student social class and teacher expectations: The self-fulfilling prophecy in ghetto education. Harvard Educational Review, 40, 411-451.
Seigel, C. (2005). Implementing a research model of cooperative learning. Journal of Educational Research, 98(6), 330-349.
Smith, & Wilhelm, J. (2002). Reading don’t fix no Chevies: Literacy in the lives of young men. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Tesch, R. (1990). Qualitative research: Analysis types and software tools. New York: Falmer Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Summer reading or reality?

Our high school has a mandated summer reading policy for its students. Freshmen and sophomores, no matter the track, read one title. Juniors and seniors, no matter the track, read the other title.

The summer reading texts this year asked my sophomore students to read Breaking Through by Jiminez and senior students to read Ceremony by Silko. Each text was selected to be one part of an annual task to increase understanding of diversity among the Taylor student body, due to our lack of racial diversity. This year, the target geographic area on which to focus is The Americas; the Jiminez text looks at the experiences of a male adolescent migrant farm worker, and the Silko text moves the native American narrative to the 20th century by looking at the effects of war on an individual who lives outside the white mainstream culture.

What is “culture” about to students did I will teach? Hall (2003)says,

Certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed--- the effect of an articulation between sign and referent – but to be ‘naturally’ given (p. 511).

What, then, was the effect of mandated summer reading on my upcoming students? Did they marvel at the ways that other adolescents or young adults negotiate their lives? Did they scrutinize how society affected Others differently because they were not of the white mainstream? Did striking social-economic differences emerge within coming of age events and prevent my students from appreciating the universality of shared experience?

The students I teach are imbued, as a general rule, with high self-esteem. About 2 percent each year so far have been part of families who receive state or federal assistance in the form of reduced or free lunch, Medicare, or public assisted housing. Thus, most of their experiences have not rested with the need to help support the family financially, as did the protagonist in Breaking Through. They have not been asked to acknowledge that their race implies secondary status as an American citizen. They have been surrounded by the discourse of war, however, and yet their impressions seem to rest, largely, on a patriotic sense of protecting their loved ones. How do they react to a narrative where the protagonist is tortured by the memories of death and pain he saw when a soldier in World War I?

Summer reading lessons take significant prior knowledge building to help students to know their worlds beyond that of the immediate and of personal experience. It requires allowing students to articulate their own definitions as well as to slowly help them to tear away what those definitions might imply for their social interactions as adults in the next few years.

Summer reading can inspire moments of explosion, and they are necessary moments to grow as readers, thinkers, and learners. Unfortunately, in my school district, summer reading was a farce, known to all students and most faculty. A core of us --- teachers and students both --- read and took notes and came ready to the first day of school to be learners. The remainder remembered that previous journals had not been graded; that many teachers were not familiar with the texts; that new students emerged who had not read.

Additionally, there was a significant lack of prior knowledge building: were the teachers and students to focus on the America we know, or were we to extend to other parts of the Americas, like the Canadian provinces or Mexican states or independent native American nations?

Summer reading was a farce. Journals were collected, and data was compiled as to how many total students read. Teachers were not surveyed anonymously as to their participation or vision. A core group of professional status teachers spoke up and asked for change.

What will 2008-2009 summer reading look like? Most likely, it will be more of the same, for Taylor schools are emblematic of the difficulties in schools across America. Change costs money. Teacher need to be paid to prepare new texts. Authors need to be reimbursed for site visits. Families who can’t afford books need to have scholarships.

And a vison as to what summer reading should accomplish --- whether within the mandates of diversity or outside --- need to be precisely delineated so that all participants know real expectations for learning and performance.

Hall, S. (2003). Encoding and decoding. In S. During (Ed.), The cultural studies reader (pp. 507-517). New York: Routledge.

Media is the message

“Stepping into the 21st century with critical media literacy”

Scenario One: Twenty students are seated in desks that are lined in five rows and pointed at a white board. A teacher stands behind a podium and lectures about a text from the Western canon while students, using pens, fill in blanks on Xeroxed worksheets. They are studying for a multiple-choice test with an essay component.

Scenario Two: Twenty students are divided into five groups of four around a bank of computers. Each group has access to the Internet and software for audio, video, graphic, and still photography editing. Together, they are creating a ten-minute documentary, drawing from themes across a variety of texts and genres comprising high and low culture. Their products will be posted on a classroom blog for celebration.

Linking technology to instruction is just one way that teachers can incorporate new literacies in the classroom. Public schools rarely integrate semiotic knowledge into pedagogies around literacy and student engagement. Yet, literacy is tied inextricably to personal, relational experiences formed through multi-modal text experiences. Interconnections among language, literacy, and culture are becoming stronger. Literacy by achievement test is a narrow window to assess students’ learning. In an era of emerging technology and media and varied cultural practices, is reading and knowledge of Western print texts the sole, accurate, and appropriate gauge of students’ literacies? Can defining literacy in new ways enhance equity in education? Would students be more engaged and critical learners in a classroom where media and popular culture texts are constant components of instruction and dialogue?

Media education as reform

Media literacy is an expanded conceptualization of literacy. It is a process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and creating messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres, and forms. Additionally, drawing from Freire’s (1992) model of critical pedagogy, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, critical media literacy is inquiry-based instruction that encourages students to ask questions and dialogue with a teacher about what they watch, see, and read. Freire (1992) refers to “critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action” (p. 52) as essential to engaged learning, because students respond in authentic ways when involved in inquiry. Freire argues that “dialogue is indispensable to the act of cognition that unveils reality” (p. 71) and is companion to problem posing.

Critical media literacy education provides tools to help students analyze messages in media texts and to understand how structural features -- such as media ownership and political powers --- influence messages. Conversations with students demythologize the media world while encouraging students to solve as well as to pose problems. Critical media literacy also aims to enable students to be skillful creators and producers of media messages, both to facilitate understanding as to the strengths and limitations of each medium, as well as to create independent media.

“There’s always something decentred about the medium of culture, about language, textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evades the attempt to link it, directly and immediately, with other structures,” argues Hall (2003, p. 105), in Decoding and Encoding. By transforming media consumption into an active process, students gain critical distance from the pervasive texts of their lives in order to acknowledge their reasons for enjoyment, the potential for persuasion through symbolic representations, and media’s ability to re-create the world in fictional and non-fictional ways.

How do you incorporate critical media literacy into the classroom? Do you see media literacy education as separate from the remainder of the curriculum? Are you comfortable leaving behind the teacher-as-authority role and becoming a co-learner in what Freire (1992) calls praxis?

Leave a comment and share in the conversation.

Studying Melville's Billy Budd and students' reactions to justice and morality

I teach in “Taylor,” a northeastern suburban community approximately 40 miles southwest of the state capital with a population of 29,500. Its citizens are, on the whole, white, European-American, and upper-middle class. I’m conducting a study with a segment of my classes. The population comprises three rosters, or 66 tracked (Oakes, 2005) English subject area high school senior honors students. In the tradition of qualitative research (Bogdan & Biklen, 2003), I will function as a teacher-researcher, which allows me to collect data that emerges from critical literacy pedagogy.

I am required to incorporate mandated texts into instruction. Tracked classes are different due to number and complexity of text assignments. The study population’s required texts include Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Potek’s The Chosen, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Albee’s American Dream and The Zoo Story, Shakespeare’s Othello, Zeale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Wilder’s Our Town, and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Ghosts; and, Melville’s Billy Budd. At Taylor High School (THS), tracking appears to be individualistic when it is, according to Oakes (2005), founded on an “intergenerational transfer of social, economic, and political status” (p. 248).

Because tracking academic ability-based but, rather, linked to family privilege, traditional whole-class instruction at THS does not meet the needs of all learners. Alternative approaches are necessary. Instruction that requires metacognitive awareness, social justice responsiveness, questioning through critical lenses, and dialogic interactions invites new meanings to the study population. Known as critical literacy, this praxis extends beyond decoding print texts and creates literate consumers who approach and discuss various meanings of the text with others. Keene and Zimmermann (1997) state literacy and life learning require that we as readers “reorganize and create our own explanations for what we are learning, our own definitions of our lives at any particular juncture” (p. 183). Critical literacy praxis grounded within postmodern theory allows a variety of learners to decode and encode an archaic text like Melville’s Billy Budd.

Set in the late eighteenth century aboard an English warship, the novella focuses on a young, handsome, and innocent sailor who, eventually, is executed. As the final text of Melville’s life, Billy Budd has aroused much interest on the author’s views on justice, morality, and religion. Readings of Billy Budd often describe an allegory of good versus evil; an examination of nature and innocence; or, analysis of Christianity in opposition to an emerging industrialized society. A non-traditional reading of Billy Budd, however, can offer insights into why leaders fail to choose justice in times of crisis.

In the novella, Captain Vere presides over a court martial. He interprets maritime rule of law in the most severe manner possible and condemns Billy to hang. In doing so, Vere deliberately distorts applicable substantive and procedural law. Billy Budd is relevant to today’s society. During times of crisis, leaders make sacrifices in the name of security, ones that future generations often question. After September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration curtailed civil liberties in many ways. Similarly, Herman Melville's Billy Budd chronicles sacrifice in the name of security and is fodder for contemporary thought about rebellion, patriotism, loyalty, camaraderie, and modern definitions of morality.

Aims, objectives, or rationale of the project
I am interested how students respond to explicit socio-cultural instruction during a curriculum-mandated study of Melville’s Billy Budd. High school students in 2007-2008 have a unique opportunity to reflect on the times in which they live. Heightened security measures, pervasive media stories of terrorism, and a looming Presidential election present many prospects to critique American society and culture.

This study will analyze students’ discourses in a final research poster presentation in which they incorporate textual and academic sources to critically analyze Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. Fairclough (2003) argues that texts are elements of social events and “bring about changes” (p. 8). Will students recapitulate and create arguments through literary and historical lenses? Or will they create personal meanings and draw linkages to today’s world through socio-cultural constructs?

Results achieved or progress done work in this previously
Preliminary pilot data foreshadow three themes that are consistent with literature on critical literacy classrooms. Each theme accounts for a degree to which students exhibit anxiety or flow in academic performance (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). While the following occurrences have led to my current research questions, my study will, in all likelihood, reveal additional themes or replace the ones I have observed so far.

“Welcome to my world” group: First, a group of students acquires the ability to identify and evaluate assumptions embedded in text messages. They thrive in an academic climate where literacies of power (Macedo, 2006) are deconstructed. Their real, literate lives are finally celebrated in an academic forum.

“Academic standing is all” group: Second, a group of students acquiesces to what one student, Jerrie, called my “political” approach to instruction. They comply so as to maintain Grade Point Average (GPA) and class rank. This group is or is not influenced to make personal meaning through critical literacy praxis.

“I’ve got the power” group: Third, a group of students rebels against critical literacy praxis. This group embraces the dominant codes of society that has enculturated them. Perhaps this group possesses family values that conflict with Marxist ideology (Chandler, 2002). Or, because critical literacy praxis requires students to demonstrate new and higher levels of thinkings, this group experiences and expresses angst.

Procedures to be followed
1. Receive Human Subjects in Research approval
2. Collect Student Release and Student Assent Forms
3. Create sequential and scaffolding instruction
a. Background for reading: Social, cultural, historical, literary
b. Allusions in text, research and collaboration
c. Syntax versus semantics explicit instruction
d. Study guide questions for class discussions
e. Six academic, peer-reviewed journal articles
f. Socratic Seminar
g. Research poster presentations
4. Conduct qualitative research
a. Teacher journal
b. Audio recordings
c. Artifact analysis
5. Analyse data and draw conclusions

Most teachers do not conduct research as means for advancing educational reform.
Teachers typically approach Melville’s Billy Budd through a New Criticism approach in which close reading and attention to texts are sole means to garner implicit author messages. Teachers who adhere to a New Criticism approach reject criticism based on extra-textual sources. Vocabulary instruction, narrative identifications, quizzes on names/ dates/ places, five paragraph essays, and author research are the norm.

My research study regarding Melville’s Billy Budd is not merely a comment on traditional instruction. It is a rejection of cultural transmission approach to pedagogy (Hirsch, 1987). I contend that an ethnocentric presentation of Western civilization creates an Us versus Them binary in which European-Americans students feel superior and non-European Americans feel inferior. More importantly, though, as Linn (1996) argues, “the Great White Story” also means “misogyny and slavery.” He states that postmodern theory informs us “it is also related to who has the money and power” (p. 136).

As I remind students that Billy Budd was one of thousands of impressed sailors, I also relate stories about how today many inner city students, no matter how hard working and intellectually talented, fight impoverishment, racial stereotyping, and fewer opportunities for dominant majority successes. I broaden out to connect “prejudice, race, gender, the media’s presentation of the Other, color symbolism” (Linn, 1996, p. 137), their own discourses, definitions of physical appearance, and dominant societal structures to Melville’s text. Responding to contextual relationships among levels of texts (Fiske, 1987) is constant.

Value of the project
A great deal is known about how students develop decoding and encoding skills. Literacy progress is indicated in most classrooms by drill sheets, workbook pages, skills instruction, teacher-directed questioning, and ability group discussions (Keene & Zimmermann, 1997; Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 1994; Turner, Parkes, & Meyer, 1996). Most instruction focuses on low-level facts and skills; stresses an ability to follow rules and procedures; emphasizes discipline; and, shares information through seat-work (Oakes, 2005).

In contrast, little is known about how students aged seventeen and eighteen react to critical literacy praxis within postmodern theory or how student-created messages reflect dominant ideologies. As Spiro, et al (1994) note, a dearth of research indicates how students move “from retrieval of intact, rigid, precompiled knowledge structures to assembly of knowledge from different conceptual and precedent case sources” (p. 611).

This project is of great value for a variety of reasons. First, it will offer new information of significance to students, educational policy, and reform. Second, the study will become one chapter of my dissertation. Third, acknowledgment of my teacher-research by the University Graduate Research Grant Committee may foster respect, additional materials, and opportunities for increased awareness from THS administration and faculty. Fourth, and most importantly, students will be awakened to their “white privilege” (McIntosh, 1997) and to their capability as agents of social change in the global community.

Resources

Bogdan, & Biklen. (2003). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theories and methods. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Chandler. (2002). Semiotics: The basics. New York: Routledge.
Csikszentmihalyi. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Fairclough. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. New York, NY: Routledge.
Fiske. (1987). Television culture. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hirsch. (1987). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know. New York, NY.
Keene, & Zimmermann. (1997). Mosaic of thought: Teaching comprehension in a reader's workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Linn. (1996). A teacher's introduction to postmodernism. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Macedo. (2006). Literacies of power. Boulder, CO: Perseus Books.
McIntosh. (1997). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. In Beyond heroes and holidays: A practical guide for K-12 anti-racist, multicultural education and staff (pp. 77 - 80). Washington, D.C.: Teaching for Change.
Oakes. (2005). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson. (1994). Cognitive flexibility theory: Advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-structured domains. In R. Ruddell, M. Ruddell & H. Singer (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Turner, Parkes, & Meyer. (1996). The role of optimal challenge in students' literacy engagement. Reading Research Quarterly, 126-135.

Teaching to instill thinking structures

“I hope to bring an air of authenticity,” Anne Marie begins. She is 64 years old, petite, slightly arthritic, dressed in tasteful patterned tunic jacket over black pants. “This is a reading strategy that works with our students at my high school.”

She describes why we, as thirteen English teachers (three of us are not present, having been required to attend a required Beginning Teachers’ workshop in a different location), are good readers. We visualize; we watch verb tense switches for time flashbacks; we note tags on dialogue to see tensions between speakers. She asks us to teach to the students who can’t even ask a question, as, for them, “Reading is invisible.”

“Real reading is re-reading,” Anne Marie says as her theme to model her workshop topic: The Socratic Seminar. And while some of us refresh our memories about this device to teach close reading and others are exposed to it for the first time, we listen to each other’s thoughts. It was a refreshing time: colleagues in dialogue, using a public sphere to exchange ideas about pedagogy.

At one point in the discussion, we listed “Strategies we use to develop close reading.” It is as follows: ask each other questions to clarify, to allow people to share, and to redefine meaning; Paraphrase; Sentence structure analysis; Access prior knowledge; Denotation versus connotation; Relations between words; Visualize; Create personal responses; Relations between words; Interpret; Place in personal context; Syntax and semantics (mine); Context; Repetition; Define terms; Ideal versus reality: conceptions of the world; Analogize; Synthesize in one sentence; Take another point of view and explain it; Author’s intention; Whose voice is omitted? Power at play.

So much of this is, as Anne Marie suggested, part of who we are as teachers.

After the afternoon break, we, in small group,s are assigned to identify “metaphors of playwrights.” Each group comes up with similar ideas. It's starting to feel a bit too much now like the traditional classroom: content plus content equals learning.

The lack of transition to higher level study at our professional development allowed me time to reflect. And I came back to a constant theme of mine: I’m concerned that we as teachers don’t extend often enough into conversations about teaching students to think.

For me, there is no systematic, linear unveiling of literary techniques. Rather, the students’ own language and questions allow me to lead them toward meaning making. I am a vehicle for Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development, in which young people fill in gaps of knowledge with adult mediation. My primary influence lies in the cognitive domain: I help students synthesize their own experiences, identify assumptions, trace inferential clues, and reflect on their own thinking. The latter component is particularly important within a critical literacy framework, as reflecting on assumptions, stereotypes, and other embedded notions before, during, and after alternative literacy events helps students to process their feelings and experiences (Wade, 1997).

Thinking about thinking is important for students to make meaning in a symbol-saturated contemporary world. So, how do you instill in your students a way to make meaning through thinking in your classroom? Share your thoughts and we’ll develop a dialogue.

In the meantime, be well, happy, and hope-filled. I’ll “talk” to you next week,

Carolyn


Vygotsky. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wade. (1997). Service. In R. Wade (Ed.), Community service learning: A guide to including service in the public school curriculum (pp. 66). Albany, NY: State University of New York.