Eight

Blog 7 was about what the teachers are doing… but what are the kids doing out of school?

• The full story:

Jennifer Alford (26 Oct 2023): Exploring critical media literacy with culturally and linguistically diverse youth in Australia: recontextualisation of school learning in home environments, English in Education, https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2023.2268643 (Open access)

• A snapshot:

  I ran focus groups with 10 Year 10 refugee-background and migrant students in two metropolitan Brisbane high schools. We had a good chat about what they were learning in school re. critical literacy; what they thought of it; and how they ‘apply’ critical literacy ideas out of school in their everyday reading/viewing/literacies, which are mostly online.

  My analysis found that they frequently use five main strategies for critical reading/viewing out of school: 1. using awareness of myriad multimodal semiotic features to examine representations of products and information; 2. evaluating trustworthiness; 3. fact checking; 4. doing further research; 5. identifying attempts at positioning. This research brings in-school and out-of-school domains together to understand the connections between critical literacy practices undertaken in school, and those reshaped by immigrant youth, who are still learning English, out of school. There were doing some amazing and complex things all while learning EAL.

• One of the key features of their out of school critical reading was focussing on the multimodal features to examine representations:

  ·      Checks if the post got a big brand and they copied it, or just from the internet.

  ·      Checks the colour and size (in the reviews as opposed to what’s on offer).

  ·      Looking closely at the “Pictures, words and numbers and stuff”

  ·      Scrutinises the images - “because in the pictures they make it look really good so they can convince you to buy it”.

  ·      Checks out how it looks in real life, in the pictures the people took and posted.

  ·      Looks at words, phrases and images etc - when they use shocking images about a war or that kind of topic.

  ·      Looks at high modality language. “Like words that make it look more important.

  ·      Looks at the backgrounds, animations and colours.

  ·      Looks at when they just keep repeating the word of that product they are selling.

  ·      Looks at the sentence structure, punctuation (e.g., exclamation marks!), word choice, font.

  The young people said they wanted more exposure in class to analysing the kinds of complex multimodal texts they encounter out of school. One student suggested a task where they design a website full of misrepresentations, untrustworthy information etc etc that other students have to navigate in a quest-like journey and identify the traps. What a great idea!

  More reading: (Contact me if you can’t access any of these….j.alford@griffith.edu.au )

• Alvermann, D. (2017). Social media texts and critical inquiry in a post-factual era. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 6, 3, 335-338

• Bacalja, A., Aguilera, E., Castrillon-Angel, E. F. (2022). Critical Digital Literacy. In Pandya, J. Z., Mora, R., Alford, J.H., Golden, N., de Roock, R. (Eds) The Handbook of Critical Literacies. Pp. 373-380.  Routledge.

• Lim, F.V., & Unsworth, L. (2023). Multimodal composing in the English classroom: recontextualising the curriculum to learning, English in Education, 57(2), 102-119. https://doi.10.1080/04250494.2023.2187696

• McCarthey, S., Duke, N. K., Bloome, D., Faust, S., García-Sánchez, I. M., Stornaiuolo, A., & Alvermann, D. (2020). How Can We Study Children's/Youth's Out of School Experiences to Inform Classroom Practices? Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 69(1), 58-78.