Seven. How do teachers teach critical media literacy with English learners?
Ok, so whose idea was it to host a project blog??! They require constant upkeep, like an old “colonial-style” house that needs repairing and painting, or an academic’s CV that is only as good as its latest publication!
I’ve let the ball drop on this but that means I’ve been busy doing many other project-related things, and I’ve moved to Griffith University, Institute of Education Research! This is a great fit for me and my work and I’m thrilled to be here. Come join us in doing research!
So where is the project at? I’m now in Year 3 and have completed the first 3 phases. I could not have done it without the generous commitment of the state high school teachers and students I’ve been working with. They have been amazing.
The Year 10 English teachers I’ve been talking with and observing are using a range of strategies to teach critical media literacy with EAL learners in units on ‘Advertising’ and ‘Fake News’. This table shows a number of the pedagogic strategies they regularly deploy:
15 types of critical reading/viewing scaffolding strategies used by the teachers:
Explicit teaching of language and concepts & definitions of critical literacy terms such as gaps/silences, inclusions/exclusions, voice, perspective, target audience, stereotypes, mis/representation, misinformation, bias, source reliability, clickbait, agendas etc.
Explaining vocabulary/building glossaries- looking at synonyms, implied and inferred meanings and connotations, with illustrations.
Using QAR Question-Answer Relationship reading strategy: Literal questions; Think and Search; Author and You; On my Own.
Eliciting personal emotional/social responses to a clip, image, text.
Drawing out their students own experiences/background knowledge.
Analysing multimodal elements of print advertisements for representations of people/issues.
Talking about images to explore discourses e.g., of discrimination, privilege, diversity.
Analysing news/fake news stories/scams and their images for reliability.
Exploring (through talk) author's purpose; point of view/perspective; cultural backgrounds; cultural assumptions; agendas.
Examining inclusions/exclusions, assumptions, target audience, stereotypes.
Explicit questioning re. gaps and silences in texts and writing to fill in the gaps: Who speaks? Who doesn’t speak? Why? What might they say? What is missing?
Exploring “Who is favoured in this text, who comes out of this well/ who doesn't come out of this well?”.
Building confidence to express personal opinions.
Using their first languages to express their opinions in journal writing.
Drawing pictures that show alternative ways of advertising products.
One thing I notice from this list of strategies is the presence of rich talk in “talking about”; “exploring”; “examining” ; “explicit questioning”. We know a focus on oral language is an essential aspect of learning to read/view and write/produce text in any language and these teachers are making good use of conversations to unpack the complex and abstract ideas involved in being critically literate. There is also an emphasis on multimodal analysis and expression (drawing) to explore textual elements, and use of home languages to express opinions. Is there anything here you notice that you already do or that might be useful in your teaching?
I’ve also been talking with Yr 10 young people from migrant and refugee-backgrounds about their critical reading out of school. What exactly do they do? Does any of their school learning get applied to TikTok? Stay tuned for Blog 8….:)
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash