Double Entry Journal #3

•  Do students, parents, and teachers want schools to create a politicized citizenry capable of fighting responsibly for various forms of public life, equality, and social justice?   (Semali, 2001)

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 Gosh! I often think about this when teaching. I really make an effort to stay away from politicized points of view,  but sometimes I wonder if I go to such an extreme that I am not doing my job effectively.  I often wonder if the non-politicized school is what we want as a society. I went to a college that was very open about teaching a "liberal education" and as a result, I feel like I got a great education. Not, just because it had a focus on social justice and non-commercialism, but because I was taught about how to spot corporate bias.... I could also spot anti-corporate bias. It's interesting to me because it seems like as parents and teachers get more politicized, they want a less politicized school system. I'm not sure if we are doing our students justice though.

I found our reading assignment this week to be very hard, and dense to get through. I had a hard time understanding a lot of it because it was crouched in academic speech. I understood, I suppose, the larger gist of it - that new literacies encompasses many different previously defined literacies that goes beyond print form, and that it should be defined in a way that that makes a student recognize the construction of media and asks why it was constructed that way. 

1. New literacies in this article refers to the overlapping and intertwining of computer literacy, information literacy (examing when more information is needed etc.); media literacy (where, how and why media is presented to us - and in what form); visual literacy (how images are constructed and presented).  Knowing when to ask a question, or delve deeper into an issue is "part of the world of knowing and learning" (Semali, 2001) . Being literate in today's age, means being able to both know how to "read" the media, when to "read" the media, where to go to learn more, and how to create media themselves. A crazy (off the top of my head) concrete example of how it could be used in the classroom  - while studying the constitution, students could watch commercials that use concepts of freedom and nationalism as a selling point (maybe a Made in America ad, or Domestic car commercial); deconstruct it to see how it is actually using patriotism, partisanship, classism or other dividing "isms" to sell something. Students could then make a commercial for the constitution, using the values of freedom, togetherness and self-governance as selling points, and reflecting the "melting pot" of America today. Furthermore, students could also make a commercial (or maybe a old-timey print ad?) that "markets" itself to the white, land-owning, males that the constitution initially concerned itself with.


2. hmmm...... that the mass media is using media images and entertainment as a way of separating a citizenry from democratic practice, and we should recognize that capitalism is the major factor for this. That our freedom to participate and help lead the direction of our society is severely limited because of capitalistic, greedy intentions. In over-simplistic terms: rich people are getting richer by tricking the general public into believing media is entertainment, while actually they are using media as a way of controlling our buying habits and making us more politicized, more polarized and therefore "dividing and conquering" society for corporate, capitalistic gain. It was also saying that media uses quick symbols and stereotypes, which reinforces those stereotypes and homogenizes our thought processes about differences.

3. An unengaged, uncritical citizenry without the ability to "read" the media and question what is being fed to them and why.

4. Literacy is ever-evolving, especially in today's media age. It is crazy to think that a "definitive" definition of literacy is possible. It is also because new literacy is dependent on individual interpretation.

5. This author advocates for the individual to question, interpret and critique visual media, not just be able to interpret the symbols used in a piece of media. He advocates for determining the motives behind the representations - ex. Why did that Alltel commercial choose humor as its selling/entertaining point. I agree that this is a critical distinction to make - what is the bias, and what is the motive - because our world is saturated in advertisements and corporate interest. We need to understand that we are being manipulated by others in order to control the amount of manipulation and power corporate interests have in our society.

Additional Resource

http://www.nais.org/publications/ismagazinearticle.cfm?ItemNumber=146228

This article gives some concrete ways of teaching new literacies into the classroom while still focusing on current curriculum. This is very helpful to me, to see how teaching new literacies might actually work within an existing curriculum.

Citations:

Semali, L. (2001, November). Defining new literacies in curricular practice. Reading Online, 5(4). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=semali1/index.html