Teaching analytical frameworks.

Abstract

This article explains the rationale for integrating critical media literacy across the curriculum. To illustrate this discussion, the author utilizes analytical frameworks.

Introduction

Educators and parents admit reluctantly that the lives of today's adolescents are filled with massive volumes of text. Learning to read and write the printed word is still essential, but is no longer sufficient in a world where television, radio, movies, videos, DVDs, magazines, and the World Wide Web have collectively become powerful and pervasive sites for information, public education, and literacy. Whether we like it or not, adolescents are actively involved in the new literacies of emerging technologies and are savvy with the new languages of media. How can teachers and students acquire a critical understanding of these new literacies?

Research shows that increasing numbers of adolescents have access to the Internet at home--47.9% of all 12- to 17-year-olds in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001). Youngsters also attend school in classrooms that are among the 98% of K-12 classrooms that have access to the Interact (Cattagini & Farris, 2001). For many adolescents, the Internet is the tool of choice when researching information. Research for completing school assignments accounts for 30.7% of children's Internet use, and e-mail is the next most common use at 22.2% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001). What role can teachers play in helping students understand the new ways of constructing knowledge and disseminating information? Where can they find the pedagogical tools to interrogate these electronic texts?

In response to these questions, I address a topic that is on the minds of many classroom teachers but a subject that often lacks practical ways of application. I respond by discussing the need for teaching critical media literacy as a process of curriculum inquiry that permeates the entire school curriculum to address the new languages of media and the Internet. The rationale for this inquiry-based learning approach is that with the recent developments in technology, the definition of reading has changed to include Web sites, e-books, e-mail, discussion boards, chat rooms, instant messaging, and listservs. Equally, the notion of "text" has expanded beyond a verbal or written artifact. These open accesses to networks, such as the Internet, permit anyone to publish anything. With open access, information is much more widely available from people who have strong political, economic, religious, or ideological stances that profoundly influence the nature of the information they present to others. As a result, impressionable minds can easily be swayed for better or worse.

The new literacies ushered in classrooms and homes by the Internet and the pedagogical implications thereof almost make it imperative to develop new strategies to assist students to strengthen their critical thinking skills, more so now than ever before, to deal with the reality of virtual texts. It becomes imperative to establish within the curriculum pedagogical sites that provide students with analytical skills to evaluate stereotypes, biases, distortions, and media spectacles manipulated to dupe them for the sake of entertainment or instant gratification. The questions remain: How do you teach students to become critical consumers of the information they encounter? How can teachers teach critical thinking within the constraints of an already overcrowded curriculum that is loaded with high-stakes testing? Advocates of critical media literacy suggest that critical viewing, critical reading, and critical thinking ought to be integrated across the curriculum. There is consensus that media literacy simply cannot be parlayed into yet another subject teachers need to teach in American public schools. Supporting this view, David Cousidine and Gail Haley (1992), insist that such "integration attempts to unify a fragmented curriculum by stressing the common themes and competencies among subjects" thereby integrating "the world of the classroom with the world of the child and society as a 'whole'" (p. 29).

Teaching Adolescents Critical Thinking

I teach methods courses to pre-service teachers preparing to teach adolescent literature in middle-level schools and high schools. We often visit the local high school and some of our students participate in teaching with a cooperative teacher and mentor through our university's professional development schools program. These pre-service teachers often disclose their hesitance to include in their classroom discussions of critical texts to confront difficult or sensitive issues like war, race, terrorism, homophobia, interracial dating, domestic violence, alcohol addiction, human sexuality, and patriotism in the time-heightened security. They know students need to read, write, and talk about these relevant issues, but they worry that parents, colleagues, or the principal will condemn their choice of such topics, and they might consequently lose their chance to find jobs. To address this dilemma in my class, I seek out creative ways to address such controversial topics by using materials and discussion strategies that build on students' mental habits of questioning texts and critical thinking. For our purposes, thinking critically includes:

* an ability to raise important questions and expose alternatives;

* a keen sense of what is missing or needed to solve a problem;

* an ability to deal with complexity and to form hypotheses;

* a sensitivity to the background of an issue;

* a knack for separating important information from material that is peripheral or less relevant;

* a healthy skepticism and a corresponding ability and willingness to test one's theories and explore one's feelings;

* a willingness to challenge and be challenged; and

* an ear for what others are saying and an ability to step into another person's shoes.

These competencies seem sensible but they are challenging to many students. The challenge comes from the fact that critical thinking habits are not part of the students' everyday practice, nor were these habits rewarded or encouraged in the lower grades. Field studies of large samples of secondary schools have revealed that teachers use a very restricted range of pedagogical options, and these are mainly the ones that require looking up answers and recalling information. There was little emphasis on the evaluation of knowledge or the promotion of intellectual curiosity, with most of the time available for discussion dominated by teacher talk. Even more challenging is the societal pressure to conform and to shy away from critical thinking because it is not "polite" or "nice" (Win, 2004).

Using Analytical Frameworks

In the media literacy class that I teach every semester, I challenge students to use a web of analytical frameworks to read texts critically, to view images from advertising and clips from television shows. The students use digital cameras and Adobe Photoshop to construct ad busters and alternative messages and images to "talk back" to popular media. The assumption is that the use of one text and one framework to analyze a social situation will not get at the deeper meaning of texts to uncover bias, values, oppression, injustice, or pockets of resistance underlying a given context. I impress upon the students to look at media messages as constructions, just as authors' points of view are conveyed through writing and reflect the economic, social, political, historical, and aesthetic contexts in which they arise. The mass media, like textbooks and trade books, are produced by large corporations; their content, format, and availability are largely determined by marketing and profit motives. All texts must be scrutinized carefully for content, bias, relevance, timeliness, accuracy, and omissions. I propose that such scrutiny ought to take place within the lesson planning of each unit, where reading, writing, viewing, listening, and thinking take place. Such an integrated approach of curriculum and instruction can bridge the gaps of a fragmented curriculum (Bean, 1997; Bellack & Kliebard, 1971).

We begin the semester by undertaking a personal media awareness survey. Students examine their habits of viewing, listening, reading, and Internet browsing. Through daily journal entries, they document these habits for a period of four weeks. Later on, the data from the journals become the baseline data for comparison with their acquired levels of awareness at the end of 15 weeks of the course. For some students, the change is profoundly insightful. Next, I introduce students to methods of creating and using existing analytical frameworks to question texts. Analytical frameworks use processes or structural elements in a systematic way within an easily identifiable, unvarying organizational pattern. Some of the frameworks we use include:

* The Deep Viewing framework--dissects texts (1) on a literal level using a variety of responses, including talk, writing, and pictures; (2) through interpretation, including exploring and constructing multiple meanings; and (3) through synthesis, in which participants synthesize, extend, evaluate, and apply information and interpretations made explicit in previous levels to their own social context (Pailliotet, 2001).

* Lester's (1995) framework--provides a list of questions that probe six levels of analysis: personal, historical, technical, ethical, cultural, and critical.

* Narrative Analysis framework--focuses on how the visual or printed story is told (e.g., order of events, production, history, circulation, consumption, motives, values and so on) (Boje, 2001).

To enable students to scrutinize media texts carefully for content, bias, stereotypes, manipulations, relevance, timeliness, accuracy, and omissions, these analytical frameworks provide systematic mental processes to unpack underlying cultural practices embedded in a text. We examine the context as well, particularly, in how the context relates to the structure of domination and the forces of resistance presented to us by texts that surround us in multiple forms--print, visual, and electronic--and social struggles for a more democratic and egalitarian society. History and social contexts that include power and identify are important. For example, reading Shakespeare without dealing with where he was born, his milieu, contemporaries and the social order that gave rise to the writing of his plays would be missing a big part of understanding the Shakespearean works.

To initiate this analytical process, I find it useful to start with visual texts. I present several ads found in popular print magazines and at commercial Web sites as artifacts for analysis. These visual texts are selected as part of a theme aligned with the school district's reading guidelines and state standards. Examples of themes that students have explored include identity, stereotypes, racism/prejudice, women's rights, and others. Adolescent texts that have been often cited as accompanying these as well as other themes include The Giver, Gatsby, Monster (Water Dean Myers), and First Part Last (Angela Johnson). Using a list of questions borrowed from the Narrative Analysis Framework, I encourage students to examine the picture or text carefully to begin to unravel not only its aesthetic qualities but the bias and global values portrayed, whether intended or unintended. The guiding questions for such analysis include:

* What characters, motifs, symbols, products, effects, and persuasive devices are used in this picture?

* What values do these elements represent?

* What is your interpretation of messages they are sending?

* Who is pictured as a role model? Who is excluded?

* Who is being targeted as an audience?

* What are the creators really selling?

Because of space constraints, I will not discuss in detail each of these questions. In the classroom, however, students are divided into small groups, and each group selects one of these questions for discussion and writes a paragraph summarizing theft response. After their initial analysis, the students come together to compare theft responses. Next, I ask them to think of some action to take in light of the biases, values, or injustices revealed by their study of the text. Some of them may choose to create a new slogan, print advertisement, collage, drawing, a poem, or script using heroes (local or national) who reflect positive values. These activities generally generate insightful debates and considerable discussion. At the end of the exercise, students usually remark that they will never see ads the same way again. The important lesson to take from this exercise is that we are surrounded by these media presentations every day. We know that media representations of family, interracial relations, and urban youth, for example, are illusions, and yet it's difficult not to compare our own lives with these messages and images or, worse, to let these images define for us what we should believe as truth.

Questioning the Text

As I teach and guide students to read critically the myths and biases inscribed in the multimedia texts of the information age, students cannot be content that messages are innocent and harmless; neither should they assume that popular media content is evil and therefore needs to be kept from children. For example, in my class, I use multimedia texts. These texts are juxtaposed to each other to derive multiple meanings, meanings that sometimes critique each other. This process of juxtaposing texts and sign systems is what semioticians call Transmediation. A transmedial instructional approach involving multilevel/multimedia textual analysis takes into account the transfer of meaning from one system (such as spoken or written language) into another (such as music or visual/pictorial representation). It also accounts for meanings generated when two or more signs (e.g., pictures, hypertext, and poems) are juxtaposed side by side. Students can find these transmedial texts while browsing the Internet, or fashion magazines. I find these texts to be suitable pedagogical sites to apply the narrative analysis framework.

Often, students are startled when they are presented with texts juxtaposed with unfamiliar images. For example, while a front-page picture in a newspaper like The Philadelphia Inquirer is seen as straightforward evidence about the world--a simple and objective mirror of reality--it can be in effect, evidence of a much more complex but interesting and consequential reality. It reflects as much about who is behind the lens, from photographers to newspaper editors, and graphic designers to the readers who look--sometimes with different eyes--through the newspaper's institutional lens. A photograph can be seen as a cultural artifact because its makers and readers look at the world with an eye that is not universal or natural, but taught to look for certain cues. It can also be seen as a commodity, because a newspaper is concerned with revenue sales. To challenge my students to read images, I divide them into small groups. I assign each group a different photograph. First, they must describe what is literally occurring in the picture. All situated literacies emerge. Students' comments typically focus on the image itself and not necessarily what it means. In the second stage, I ask them to look for unfamiliar symbols. What might this picture evoke in their minds? I pay attention to the role of prior or background knowledge and how such knowledge is put to use in understanding what is occurring in the picture.

One time I used a front-page picture from The Philadelphia Inquirer. It was published during the United States' intervention in Haiti several years ago. A front-page picture showed a young man trampled by a mob in a looting rampage of a warehouse full of grain in the capital Port-au-Prince. When I picked up this newspaper, I wondered: Do my students know anything of the history of U.S. intervention in the Caribbean--e.g., in Grenada, Panama, and once again Haiti? What preexisting understandings about the United States and the developing world do they hold that allow for their reaction to the picture? What role in forming those understandings was played by the global media, who on this day, as on most others, were uncritical--even celebratory--of American military intervention? I use this picture to question the text with my students. My interest is and has always been in the making and consuming of images of the non-Western world, a topic raising volatile issues of power, race, patriotism, and history. What does popular education tell American youth about who non-Westerners are, what they want, and what our relationship is to them? As any other popular media source in the United States, the news outlets exist in a complex system of artifacts and communication devices: newspapers and magazines, televisions news and special reports, museum and exhibitions, geography and world history textbooks, student exchange programs, travelogues and films (from Rambo and Raiders of the Lost Art to Tarzan). At the end of the exercise, there is always the sigh of disbelief: How could such a simple photograph have such profound meaning?

The photograph was a useful tool to confront difficult or sensitive issues. At a glance, it did not seem to mean much. In the debriefing process, students realize that these diverse contexts are in communication with one another to construct a web of meaning of cultural values, purveying and contesting a limited universe of ideas about cultural difference and how it can or should be interpreted. To use television network news, newspaper photographs, novels, or Web sites as pedagogical sites is to study not a single cultural artifact but a web of meanings--a powerful voice in an ongoing cultural discussion of these issues. The visual structures represented in photographs and the reading of them rendered by audiences can tell us about the cultural, social, and historical contexts that produced them. A study of visual structures leads us to discover the ways in which meanings are offered to us and, in turn, our part in actively making sense of them. It is important to keep in mind that the assumptions we make, what we consider as common knowledge or common sense, "general" knowledge, widespread beliefs, or popular attitudes, are conventions we form as part of our cultural knowledge. My interest in bringing up these examples is to offer a critical perspective on the ways media are constructed, to point out some of the prevailing cultural ideas about others that are portrayed, and to raise questions about what could be done in the classroom and in the curriculum to develop critical thinking.

References

Boje, D. (2001). Narrative methods for organizational and communication research. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Bean, J. (1997). Curriculum integration: Designing he core of democratic education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Bellack, A., & Kliebard, H. (1971). Curriculum for integration of disciplines. In L. C. Deighton (Ed.) The encyclopedia of education (pp. 585-590). New York: Mcmillan.

Cattagini, A., & Farris, E. (2001). Interact access in U.S. public schools and classrooms: 1994-2000. Washington, DC: National Center for Educational Statistics.

Considine, D. & Haley, G. (1992). Visual messages: integrating imagery into instruction. Englewood, Co: Teachers Ideas Press.

Lester, P. M. (1995). Visual communication: Images with messages. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2001). Home computers and Internet use in the United States: August 2000. Retrieved April 4, 2003, from http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p23-207.pdf

Win, I. (2004). The high cost of uncritical teaching. Phi Delta Kappan. (496-497).

Zeichner, K., & Liston, D. (1996). Reflecting teaching. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Ladislaus M. Semali, Penn State University

Semali, Ph.D., is Professor of Education in the College of Education.