1. Alverman argues that we should "look on young people as having expertise in areas that have to do with their particular situations and the particular places and spaces they occupy." What areas would we consider young people to have expertise in, and how would we incorporate this expertise into our classrooms?
2. Silverblatt talks about understanding of photography/film/visual art in a definition of media literacy. In Brit Lit 8th to the 18th Century, we often looked at different paintings, tapestries, etc. and analyzed them in the same way we analyzed the written texts of the period. Should we be teaching our students how to analyze and understand visual media, whether past or present?Would this include advertisements? If so, to what purpose? What would we tell our students if they asked us why this was important?
3. Christel and Sullivan ask in their introduction, "Aren't schools supposed to be about preparing students for the "real world"? (xvii-xviii) What is the purpose of public education, or more specifically, what is the point of teaching English Language Arts? This question may seem overwhelming, but it is one I had to ask myself this summer after a conversation with a student. As part of the Reading is Fun program at Sidney Migrant Education we give students their selection of free books twice during the summer school period. One night the high school boys swiped a few books off the table without even looking at the titles. Being a lover of books myself, I was appalled that they didn't even spend a second looking at the books I had poured over earlier while setting them up. When I asked one of the boys why he didn't care what book he picked he turned to me and said, "I'm a migrant worker. What do I need a book for? Why don't you give us something we really need." In a time when his family was struggling for work, food, a house, I didn't know what to say. I tried to come up with a response about the importance of reading and writing, but he didn't buy it. So, fellow teachers, what should I have said? Why does a 17 year old migrant worker from Texas need to know anything about Shakespeare?
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It's hard to think about a response to the question about why your student might need a book that doesn't sound trite. Because we need stories in the same ways that we need food and shelter? Because stories are all we have? Because you're a migrant worker from Texas? I'm not sure he does need Shakespeare (not sure I need Shakespeare) but what about Tomas Rivera ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him? What about a biography of Cesar Chavez?
ReplyDeleteEducation--literacy--has often been about maintaining a status quo. Public education creates consumers and producers in a capitalist market. Teaching media literacy, helping students see how media manipulates and how to question and resist harmful messages, has the potential to disrupt power structures. To me it seems to parallel past movements where "the masses" gained access through learning to read and write...
Drawing on my experiences with adolescents, they are experts on themselves! (and their friends and all the gossip that might be flying around school at the moment) I think harnessing some of that energy toward the social facet of being in school by constructing assignments that mirror their out of classroom behavior, such as writing notes to their friends or drawing grafitti on the bathroom walls. Structuring classroom activities that allowed for social interactions was a great way to incorporate what my students already liked to do.
ReplyDeleteI think analyzing images and other forms of media is important for every student. I think it's freeing and useful for students who have troubles reading or have a hard time focusing on a text to be able to link the same ideas you find in literature with art or a picture. Although I agree with Silverblatt's point that media like pictures only show a very small and constructed fragment of the full story.
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