There are a number of problems with this school board member’s assumptions about literacy, problems related to limited notions of “literacy” and “texts.” This school board member assumes that “reading” is a “high-level skill,” while viewing is a “low-level skill” unrelated to teaching reading. He is presupposing that “reading” of print texts is not related to “viewing” media texts. However, in reading texts, readers are employing a range of “reading“ practices — comprehending messages, defining links, critiquing assumptions, etc., that viewers also employ in viewing media texts.

There is also the assumption that there’s clear distinction between print and non-print texts and that schooling should be focused on teaching students to learn to “read” print texts. However, many texts could now be described as “hybrid texts” (Stroupe, 2000). Many texts — web pages, magazine articles, CNN news broadcasts, computer games, etc., combine images and print, along with sound and digital clips. Responding to these “hybrid texts” requires a new set of literacies associated with learning to respond to and create these texts.

A broader definition of literacy recognizes that students acquire a range of different literacies through their active participation with interactive media that involve acquiring a range of “new literacies” or digital literacies, to be discussed in more detail in Module 2.

Visual literacy. One central set of literacies revolves around the ability to understand the meaning of visual images. Visual images consist of signs, icon, or symbols that assume symbolic meanings operating in certain cultures, meanings relating to power, status, sexuality, death, etc. The meaning of signs depends on the relationships between the signifier (the image, word, object, or practice), the signified (the implied meaning), and the referent (what the image, word, object, or practice refers to) (Scholes, 1982). A yellow yield sign is a signifier that conveys the meaning — the signified, to yield to other cars. The referent is the actions referred to, in this case, yielding to other cars. People learn that the colors red and green as signifiers have certain signified meanings — stop and go, with the referent being stopping and starting a car on the street based on a set of cultural codes and conventions (Peim, 1993). The meaning of images of beauty as portrayed in romance novels, soap operas, romantic comedies, or song lyrics are constituted by what Linda Christian-Smith (1990) describes as “codes of beautification” — that being physically attractive contributes to building a love relationship with a male. These codes specify what it means to be beautiful as defined by the cosmetics, fashion, and hair-product “beauty industry” and represented in teenage magazine advice columns and articles on ways to attract males (MacRobbie, 1990).

In responding to texts, readers draw on their cultural knowledge of codes to define the meanings of signs. Students most readily understand this sign/code relationship by constructing collages of images from magazine ads and then inferring the code system constituting the meaning of the images. For examples, advertising images of SUVs in remote, open spaces are based on a code system of individualism and “freedom” from constraints associated with SUVs. Students can then identity the code systems operating in literary texts.

The images employed in advertising and the media can be a powerful force in a society. J. Francis Davis argues that images assume a powerful role in the culture by perpetuating certain myths.

MYTH #1. The world is a dangerous place and we need guns, police and military to protect us.
But graphic reports of crime and terror on the news probably have a greater influence in creating our feeling that the world is unsafe.
 
MYTH #2. Leave it to the experts (who are usually white men).
The authority figures we see presenting the national news are white, middle-aged men … the views of women, persons of color and representatives of alternate voices of all kinds are customarily absent.
 
MYTH #3. The good life consists of buying possessions that cost lots of money.
Living well is synonymous with wealth, according to the pictures and advertisements we see of homes and yards and cars.
 
MYTH#4. Happiness, satisfaction and sex appeal, just to name a few, are imminent — and available with the next consumer purchase.
A whole group of images imply that we are on the verge of being happy. These images are largely advertisements. For example, Hope perfume. Joy dishwashing detergent, or “Oh what a feeling — Toyota!” People in these advertisements are gleefully happy, surrounded by lovers, leaping into the air in rapturous joy.
 
MYTH #5. Your body is not good enough.
Many — if not most — of the women and men we see in the media are slim, muscular, and good-looking. We, on the other hand, are always too fat, out-of-shape, and smelly — though our friends don’t always tell us so forthrightly.
 
MYTH #6. Businesses and corporations are concerned for the public welfare.

Given the power of images to shape people’s lives, it is important that students learn to critically analyze these images and how they are being used to influence perceptions of the world.

In this course, we will be examining the different literacies involved in understanding and producing these different types of media texts. By understanding these different literacies, you can then develop instruction to help students acquire these literacies (see Module 2 on planning instruction).

Another important set of literacies involves uses of e-mail or computer chat. There are two kinds of computer-based exchange formats: synchronous—which is chat in real time, and asynchronous—which involves responding to bulletin board messages.

Another advantage of computer exchanges is that students can exchange with not only a partner, but also with a different audiences, including students in other schools. For example, students in the classrooms of Melissa Borgman of North High School in Minneapolis, and Joy Hanson of Eastview High School in Apple Valley, Minnesota, were both studying Their Eyes Were Watching God. Because the students in these schools were from very different worlds — the students at North High School were largely urban African-American students and the students from Apple Valley were largely suburban white students — these two teachers wanted their students to mutually wrestle with issues of racism portrayed in the novel. Students initially shared background information about themselves — their interests, hobbies, extracurricular activities, family, friends, etc. They then exchanged responses to the novel, specifying the topic in the subject line. Students were instructed on ways of replying to responses, perhaps one of the most important elements of fostering exchanges. They were told to first greet their partners and then to respond to specific lines in their partner’s message that they cut and paste into their own message. They were also asked to note if they agree or disagree with their partners’ responses and to give reasons for their agreements or disagreements.

Through engaging in on-line peer interactions, students are acquiring a range of different literacies. Analysis of these interactions by Choi and Ho (2003) found evidence of:

• Their own thinking (ideas, opinions, and processes)
  

• Their own learning (style, preferences, and processes)
  

• Their own personal, social, and professional stories and experiences, hopes and ideas, and reflective thinking
  

• Issues of personal relevance that range from personal to social to professional

• Issues concerning all aspects of teaching, and how these have affected, were affecting, and might affect them personally and professionally

Writing in readingonline.org, David O’Brien argues for the need to juxtapose more traditional school literacies with media literacies to address the issue of adolescents who disengage from print texts in schools.

Based on his research with disengaged high school students’ high levels of engagement in a high school media literacy project, O’Brien argues that adolescents often use media texts — Internet chat rooms, web-pages, computer games, film/video, music — to construct their own identities as people with high levels of competence in using these media texts:

The content and form of popular media culture also implicitly coaches us on how to act and assume role identities — how to behave like boys and girls, for example, or men and women (Luke, 1997). Hence, one of the key issues in looking at kids’ use of media is to find out what they are learning from media outside of school, to understand how they view their identities as constructions of this cultural pedagogy and how this understanding relates to their school lives. A relatively underdeveloped aspect of this identity work is how the use of media can reframe the way students usually positioned as incompetent modify their identities of competence — their abilities to tackle challenging tasks, and to persevere in engaging in future similar tasks.

He begins with literacies involved in print literacies and uses those to make the transition to media/digital literacies.

Print literacies:

• Critical reading
  Evaluating the source of information and judging authors’ motivations and purposes.

• “Higher level” comprehension skills and strategies
  Drawing inferences from texts.

• Evaluating audiences
  Thinking about how readers, as writers, judge the audience in composing a text.

• Levels of reading and text structure
  Reading the text for literal understanding vs. reading the subtext (the text that isn’t explicit or that holds the meaning “behind” the text).

• Writing with an audience in mind
  Targeting an audience or anticipating an audience’s choices in pursuing a narrative structure or selecting types of information.

Moving from Print Literacies to Media/Digital Literacies:

• Critical literacy
  “Reading” and writing as cultural practice. The ability to explore subcultural identities as portrayed in media, the ability to critique and re-represent the representation.

• Mediacy, the ability to create media texts (e.g., Semali & Watts Pailliotet, 1999)
  Awareness and critique of how youth, as users and consumers of media, contribute to the construction of their own identities and develop agency in deciding which positions to assume (e.g., Alvermann et al., 1999).

• Media studies
  The ability to critique the media by engaging in literate activities to make sense of media texts and, hence, the world we live in (e.g., Livingstone, 2002); for example, how do TV or the Web portray adolescents? How do the respective media’s delivery methods and attention-getting capabilities work to shape the way the audience responds? What are our roles as audience and users of digital media?

• Globalization/marketing
  The ability to engage in multiliteracies connected to new capitalism (Gee, 2002) and the ways new technologies and networks work to shape global economic, political, and cultural life; for example, what types of images of youth do the global media create to commodify kids’ values, beliefs, leisure activities (e.g., Nixon, 1998)? How does marketing cause youth to reshape their own images of themselves to feed the global market?

• Promoting the use of print text to explain or support the understanding of digital media (e.g., writing about pictures, writing about video clips to explain producers’ intentions and how images work to produce certain responses)

• Exploring and critiquing multiple types of representation (juxtaposition of pictures, video, print, using both print and visual representations to convey an idea; e.g., Semali & Watts Pailliotet, 1999)

• Inquiry projects
  Producing presentations from projects in which print text and media texts are used to explore popular culture topics imported into school as part of academic work.
   
  Doing research in the library or media center, doing research on the web.
   
  Planning, storyboarding, and constructing multiple media text presentations that use media to critique media and to show how media constructs who we are.

• Opportunities to position, spatially and in terms of relative cultural importance, print texts in relation to other media texts; for example, promoting books with web-based advertising campaigns, promoting writing that results in web-based publishing.

Rather than using media literacies as an additional tack-on to the curriculum, this suggests the value of integrating media/digital literacies into all aspects of the curriculum. For example, many urban youth engage in literacies associated with hip-hop culture. Ernest Morrell demonstrates how to incorporate the literacies of hip-hop culture with the study of poetry:

Given the social, cultural, and academic relevance of hip-hop music, a colleague and I designed a classroom unit that incorporated hip-hop music and culture into a traditional high school senior English poetry unit. We began the unit with an overview of poetry in general, attempting to redefine poetry and the poet’s role. We emphasized the importance of understanding the historical period in which a poem was written in order to come to a deep interpretation. In the introductory lecture, we laid out all of the historical and literary periods that would be covered in the unit (e.g., the Elizabethan age, the Puritan Revolution in England, the Civil War, and the Post-Industrial Revolution in the United States). We placed hip-hop music and the Post-Industrial Revolution right alongside other historical and literary periods so that students could use a period and genre of poetry they were familiar with as a lens to examine the other literary works. We also wanted to encourage our students to re-evaluate how they view elements of their popular culture.
 
The second major portion of the unit was the group presentation of a poem and a rap song. The groups were asked to prepare a justifiable interpretation of their poem and song with relation to their specific historical and literary periods and to analyze the links between the two. After a week of preparation, each group was given a class period to present its work and have its arguments critiqued by peers. In addition to the group presentations, students were asked to complete an anthology of 10 poems, 5 of which would be presented at a poetry reading. Finally, students were asked to write a five- to seven-page critical essay on a song of their choice.
 

Learning to Critically Examine the New Media:

Much of the hyperbole about the new digital media as transforming the world in positive ways needs to be continually examined and interrogated. The belief that the Web would serve as an information portal has not been fulfilled because much of the web, as was the case with television, which was originally not a commercial medium, has been highly commercialized. Much of the information provided on the Web is mediated by commercial interests who are more interested in financial gains than in providing relevant. valid information. And, when participation in virtual connections replaces actual face-to-face contact may not necessarily foster healthy social development and personal relationships

These information, media, multicultural, and visual literacies are further described in the next module and on the 21st Century Literacies site.

The Learning for the 21st Century Report

Media Literacy as Literacy Education (Winston Emery and Lee Rother, Screen Education)

Activity: List some of the different types of print and non-print media texts that you employ on a regular basis. For each of these media texts, describe the various literacies involved in using these media texts. Then, consider how you would teach students to employ one or more of these literacies based on your own uses of these media texts.

Module 1: Word document

What Does it Mean to Teach Media Literacy?

Justifying Media/Film Study in the Curriculum

Defining the Importance of Media Literacy

What is Literacy? The Need for a New, Broader Definition of Literacy and Texts

Media Education: Different Goals and Approaches

What Students Report About What They Learn from Media Education

Final Task

References