Module 4: Critical Approaches to
Responding to Media Texts
One of the basic goals of media literacy is to help students
adopt a critical stance in responding to media texts. As noted in Module 1,
there are a number of different assumptions about teaching media, resulting
in the uses of different critical approaches. For example, critical pedagogy
advocates often promote a focus on ideological or economic aspects of media.
In this module, you will learn about a number of different critical approaches
or lenses for responding critically to media texts.
You will be using these different approaches throughout this course to respond
to and analyze media texts. For example, in the module on analyzing media representations,
you need to know how to apply critical discourse analysis to analyze the underlying
beliefs and attitudes inherent in how, for example, gender, race, class, or
age is represented in the media. Or, in the module on media ethnography, you
need to know how to apply rhetorical analysis in order to examine how audiences
respond to media texts.
You will also be considering ways of teaching students to using these approaches.
For some grade levels, these approaches may be too sophisticated, requiring
that you to clarify or simplify an approach, or simply not employing that approach.
There is no easy distinction between these different approaches. In some cases,
you will combine the different approaches and in other cases, you may use only
one approach. These activities in this module are designed to help you learn
to apply these approaches to different media texts.
This module only scratches the surface in terms of describing different critical
theories. For more in-depth discussion of these different approaches see Julian
Wolfreys, Introducing Literary Theories (Edinburgh University Press, 2001),
and as used in secondary classrooms, see Deborah Appleman, Critical Encounters
In High School English: Teaching Literary Theory To Adolescents (New York: Teachers
College Press, 2000) ; Alan Carey-Webb, Literature & Lives: A Response-Based,
Cultural Studies Approach To Teaching English (NCTE, 2001). For the application
of different critical approaches in media, see Arthur Berger, Media Analysis
Techniques (Sage, 1998).