12623 CE: Critical Media Pedagogy: Teaching for Achievement in City Schools

Organizer: Jorge Lopez
Presenter: Jorge Lopez, Veronica Garcia, Rudy Dueñas
Discussant: Ernest Morrell

This session addresses the power of new media literacies in the lives of urban adolescents and how a critical media education can be implemented in secondary curriculum to raise achievement and social responsibility. Presenters will share innovative lessons and units as well as samples of student work, some which will be presented by youth.

Students attending schools in the United States need to be made more explicitly aware of their relationships with the media. Youth need an education that imparts the skills they need to powerfully consume and produce new media. We are calling this set of skills a critical media pedagogy, which will foster academic literacy development, academic achievement, and civic engagement in city schools. This session addresses the power of new media in the lives of urban adolescents and how a critical media education can be implemented in a K12 standards-based curriculum and school community.

Critical media education teaches critical reasoning skills to decode and analyze texts produced across many genres including but not limited to: television, film, music, the Internet, print media, magazines, murals, posters, t-shirts, billboards, social networking sites, and mobile media content. A critical media perspective also enlightens students to the potential that they have, as media producers, to shape the world they live in and to help to turn it into the world they imagine inside and outside the classroom.

This session will describe the applications of critical media pedagogy across English and Social Studies classrooms. Two Social Studies teachers and one English teacher will share curriculum units and projects that were created from a critical media perspective and philosophy. We will also offer rich examples of critical media education in the third space, collective spaces outside the formal classroom setting such as after school clubs, or programs where students are empowered and learn critical advocacy. An education professor will describe the work of youth who engaged in participatory action research using a critical media curriculum.

Educators, youth, and participants will have the opportunity to dialogue about issues related to the implementation of critical media education in their own schools, such as media literacy across content areas, resources for media production, teachers as media producers, and advocacy.