Popular Culture in the Classroom: Teaching and Researching Critical Media Literacy (IRA's Literacy Studies Series) - Softcover

Alvermann, Donna E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872072452 ISBN 13: 9780872072459

Publisher: Routledge, 2002

Synopsis

This book is written for teachers, researchers, and theorists who have grown up in a world radically different from that of the students they teach and study. It considers the possibilities involved in teaching critical media literacy using popular culture, and explore what such teaching might look like in your classroom.
Published by International Reading Association

About this title

About the Author:

Donna E. Alvermann is a Research Professor of Reading Education at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA.

Jennifer S. Moon is a graduate student and instructor at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA.

Margaret C. Hagood is a graduate student and instructor at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From Chapter 1

"Popular Culture in the Classroom: Teaching and Researching Critical Media Literacy" is a book written for teachers, researchers, and theorists who have grown up in a world radically different from that of the students they teach, study, and theorize about. Carmen Luke (1997) wrote that there is an "urgent need for educators to engage constructively with media, popular and youth culture to better understand how these discourses structure childhood, adolescence, and students' knowledge" (p.45). As literacy educators, we believe there is a special need to understand how cultural and political contexts influence the questions that teachers and researchers ask about popular media texts (for example, who produces these texts, for what purposes , and for whose consumption). It is toward such understandings that we developed this book.

What is Critical Media Literacy The term "critical media literacy," a concept best defined by taking into account some of the work being done in sociology and the interdisciplinary area known as cultural studies, has to do with providing individuals access to understanding how the print and non-print texts that are part of everyday life help to construct their knowledge of the world and the various social, economic, and political positions they occupy within it (Baker & Luke, 1991; Christian-Smith, 1997; Luke, 1997). Critical media literacy is also about creating communities of active readers and writers who can be expected to exercise some degree of agency in deciding what textual positions they will assume or resist as they interact in complex social and cultural contexts (Buckingham, 1998; Hilton, 1996; Luke, 1998).

This conception of critical media literacy follows up on what Allan Luke and Peter Freebody (1997b) have referred to as the move away from psychological and personal growth models of reading toward the view that reading is a social and cultural practice. In their words, "This move is significant in terms of how we see differences and diversity in the classroom... In so far as we view literacy as a psychological phenomenon, we will tend to define classroom problems in terms of student lack... Instead, a sociological approach focuses on the kinds of discourses, language, and practices that students have had access s to and practice with. These are the products of participation and membership in particular interpretive communities, not of simple individual difference. They are the resources of cultural practice, not of innate intelligence, natural ability, or developmental stages. (p. 208)"

Finally, it is important to consider that our conceptions of critical media literacy do not deny the psychological or cognitive aspects of reading, writing, and speaking; instead, we see them as attendant processes in a much larger social context -- one in which "literacy is always already political" (Green, 1997, p. 241) and relations of power are at stake in people's daily interactions around popular culture forms. We also acknowledge that issues of gender, race, class, age, and other identity markers are historically part of these everyday interactions (Luke & Freebody, 1997a).

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0872072452
• ISBN 13: 9780872072459
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 170