Critical Literacy Strategies

Critical literacy is clearly a very important component in our classrooms that will give students agency to analyze, question, discovery, and look through many different lenses they may have not noticed the first time around. After reading Ira Shor's piece on critical literacy, I was reminded of the time when my cooperating teacher taught a lesson completely around the idea of critical literacy. She did this by creating a powerpoint of 'thought provoking' images with several pop culture references including Facebook and the zombie-like connection many people have to their devices. (see below).

Presenting students with images like this one, allows students to analyze many different aspects of the photo through a multitude of lenses. Guiding questions like: "Why is Facebook depicted as a box of cereal/food?, Why is the word EGO on the  bowl? Why did they choose a bowl? What is the image trying to convey to the audience? 

Again another image that really captures our everyday reality of the addiction/obsession with our phones, more specifically Facebook. 

This image speaks volumes of what it looks like to live in our society.  This speaks to the dehumanization of people (in this case mice) and how our media will focus on these tragedies making the headlines versus actually recognizing the ultimate issue and tragedy with whatever has happened.

Beginning a lesson with these kinds of thought provoking images creates a space for the students to activate prior knowledge with topics they may be somewhat familiar with. They start a conversation that can be transitioned into a much deeper lesson. An example that I had come up with would be to present them with images of women in the media from early 1940s/50's to the present day representation of women. Using these images you begin to scaffold their own ideas and can use them to create a conversation around why women are portrayed this way, why there are more adds about diets/beach bodies, why women are presented as objects, and the list goes on and on.  

 

Taking a step further in this scaffolding strategy, I would then reinforce their own ideas and concepts with an incredible documentary called Miss Representation (which can be found on Netflix if you are interested). This documentary dives right into these concepts of how woman have been portrayed in the media and why they seem to continue in our present day. In scaffolding this information, you allow students to ease into the material and have their own thoughts and opinions before showing them a more concrete and factual documentary. Adding the documentary also gives them a moment to recognize things they may have never considered until watching the film. After watching the film, you could also have either an exit slip containing a small self reflection of the film or again, lead it into a writing assignment on how they defy these stereotypes or why these representations are false. I find that scaffolding is a great way to introduce ideas in a way that gives students the authority and creates an environment that they are able to discover gradually through the lesson, rather than receiving the information all at once. 

"Teachers should guide without dictating, and participate without dominating". 

- C. B. Neblette