Katie Vogt

5/18/16
ENG 700
Critical Media Literacy in the Classroom
Introduction: What is Critical Media Literacy?
Over the last fifteen years or so, critical media literacy has become a buzzword among
college composition instructors and researchers who want to make their classes more relevant
and equitable for their students. The conversation has mostly been going on between educators
who subscribe to critical pedagogy and social-constructivist views of meaning-making, but I feel
like that critical media literacy can be useful for all instructors and composition classroom. Using
pop cultural texts and media in the classroom can be a much more effective way to have
students practice academic skills (and transfer them into more academic texts and settings)
than traditional approaches can be. Traditional academic skills like critical reading, thinking, and
writing can be incredibly difficult for even the most privileged students to master, let alone those
students whose home discourse doesnt prepare them with the skills needed to become
academically literate. But critical media literacy can be a bridge between home
discourses/personal experience and the academic skills of critical reading, thinking, and writing;
the analytical skills that students can more easily practice and achieve examining media and
pop culture can be effectively transferred to academic contexts, as long as the instructor
consciously frames critical media literacy skills as academic and facilitates the transfer.
But first, what is critical media literacy, exactly? And what is defined as media? As Paul
Sawyer (2006) points out, when used as a nebulous singular, the phrase [the media] connotes
a whole set of experiences, assumptions, and mythologies which he delineates into two
categories: the news media and popular entertainment. Tisdell and Thomas (2007) break down
media into more specific categories, including the Internet, advertising, television, movies,
CDs, [and] music. Most research focuses on the latter (though Sawyer (2006) himself mostly
uses works of journalism as his articles example texts), although the concept of critical media

literacy applies to both categories. Most researchers conceptions of critical media literacy draws
on the ideas of Paolo Friere and his critical pedagogy, and Henry Giroux and his cultural studies
framework. Robin Fords (2012) literature review provides an extensive framework for defining
literacy and using pop culture: Literacy is the ability to consume and produce and interrogate
texts necessary to students everyday lives and identities. Critical literacy is the ability to take
these skills further so the production and consumption of texts elicits questions about socially
constructed notions of class, race, status and power. And to add onto this, critical media literacy
is using pop culture and other media texts to understand how students themselves are socially,
culturally, and historically situated in order to develop the skills that will allow the students to
challenge cultural norms and biases that affect their lives (Ford, 2012). Through critical media
literacy, students can gain the discourse skills that the academy requires them to acquire to
succeed, while also gaining the skills to critique that same academy. Additionally, as Tisdell and
Thompson (2007) point out in their research papers literature review, because people will
continue to be consumers of popular culture, it is important to teach critical media literacyto
teach how to deconstruct and analyse entertainment media as a form of public pedagogy.
Critical Media Literacy and Critical Thinking/Reading Skills
Pleasure and Engagement
Reading and Critical Thinking are the most easily and effectively transferrable skills
between critical media literacy contexts and academic literacy ones. Reading, both in a textual
and visual sense, and critical thinking are intimately linked skills; reading comprehension is
required in order to begin the analysis required for critical thinking, and critical thinking can bring
about new perspectives about reading. Using pop cultural media in the classroom provides a
pathway into engagement, because pop culture is both a familiar and pleasurable cultural object
that can make a student more comfortable and willing to analyze those objects as texts. In her
dissertation study, Ford (2012) describes how Professor Hardy (the college composition
instructor whose class Ford was observing) uses pop culture in order to have her students feel

more comfortable talking in her classroom, and to help them better understand their more
difficult academic reading. Professor Hardy used Beyonces music video Run the World (Girls)
to try and help her students understand the complex gender politics issues being portrayed in
their department-assigned academic reading for a high stakes composition test that all her
students must pass in order to graduate. The students could not engage with the assigned
texts, two complex essays about the treatment of women, because the texts were written
decades before; they could not relate to the texts, and therefore did not comprehend what they
were trying to convey. The students were not comfortable responding to the texts, and they were
worried about having to write about them, let alone think about what they mean. But using
Beyonces music video (a contemporary piece of pop cultural media that they probably liked or
at least were familiar with) as a lens focusing on gender politics, Professor Hardy got the
students to understand how the gender issues in the academic texts were still very relevant
today and to their demographic (young, mostly female, and mostly Black/Latino). Because they
were engaged by pleasure or at least familiarity with a pop cultural text, the students were more
able to practice their visual reading and critical thinking skills, and were able to then transfer
those ideas and skills to academic textual reading. As an interviewee in Tisdell and Thompsons
(2007) research study commented, as a result of [her students increased] engagement with
the text, and their discussion and writing about their engagement with it...it does indeed
increase their critical media literacy skills as well as their analytic skills about social issues.
Tisdell and Thompsons (2007) study also found that pop cultural media texts elicited
deeper engagement through pleasure, through both identification and providing alternative
choices for understanding the world or other people. People are often interested in television
shows because they identify with one of the main characters, but those characters dont make
the same choices that the identifying viewer does, and those characters may interact with
people who the viewer does not identify with at all or interact with in their own lives, and that can
serve to change viewers perspectives on their own possible choices and their perception (and

societys perception at large) of others. This prompts in viewers both self-reflection and refocalizing people different from themselves as also being relatable, creating a heuristic frame for
critical thinking about themselves, others, and how they view others, all facilitated by
pleasurable engagement. Donna Alvermann and Margaret Hagood (2000) concur that pleasure
and identification can increase engagement and therefore increase inquiry, though their article
focused on music rather than television shows. They found that using fandom of popular
cultural texts such as music to explore these multiple meanings may be a way to get students
interested in school literacy practices while providing teachers with insight into students' out-ofschool lives (Alvermann and Hagood, 2000). But they also view pleasure as an aspect itself for
students to critically analyze, because people, consciously or not, use judgments about cultural
tastes to legitimate social class distinctions (Alvermann and Hagood, 2000). Pleasure of pop
culture as judgement can provide a new perspective on something that students often dont
think to question, and can be fruitful ground for building both critical media literacy and
academic critical thinking.
However, using pop culture and pleasure as engagement comes with a risk, especially if
the students dont get any say in what pop culture gets used in the classroom. Tisdell and
Thompson (2007) note that pleasure can sometimes get in the way of being critical, either
because viewers dont want to have to analyze something they view solely for entertainment or
because pleasure blinds viewers to the flaws of the media text. Ford (2012) takes a different
approach to critiquing pleasure as a means of engagement; she observed that Professor Hardy
was the primary decider of what pop cultural and media artifacts were brought into the
classroom, and that when choosing what artifacts would be most engaging and pleasurable
sometimes Professor Hardy made assumptions about her students based on their
demographics instead of their actual personal preferences. Referring back to the Beyonce
example, Beatrice, a female black student, was not engaged at all with Professor Hardys
choice of media artifact, because she did not like hip-hop music. When asked why she thought

Professor Hardy thought everyone in the class would be engaged by hip-hop and Beyonce,
Beatrice responded, Because were Black, well mostly, and young. Its a stereotype, all Black or
urban youth like rap and hip-hop, and wear Rocawear. She thinks shes down but shes just
stereotyping like everyone else (Ford, 2012). Professor Hardys assumption backfired on her
and actually caused disengagement, because she did not use her own critical thinking when
considering all the implications of her assumptions. Ford (2012) also notes that some students
disengage because their chosen pop cultural media gets used on the classroom space without
their permission, when they want their media to remain pure pleasure and entertainment, and
outside of the analytical sphere. Fords observations demonstrate that while engagement and
pleasure are highly useful tools in transferring skills, instructors need to seek permission from
their students and make them more active in selecting what media they want to cover in the
classroom. Pop culture media can be cultural capital in the classroom that can give students
confidence and power in the classroom, but only if instructors allow students to have full control
over that cultural capital themselves. Respecting students agency and identity is key if
instructors want to use critical media literacy in the classroom, otherwise resistance will be
inevitable and prevent any skill-building, let alone skill transfer.
Media as a Lens for Better Understanding Academic Reading
Ive already mentioned Fords example of using Beyonce to understand academic
essays about feminism, but there are other types of lenses that media can serve as for better
understanding academic subject matter and building reading skills. Pop culture and visual
narrative media can illustrate complicated concepts in a more digestible and memorable way.
Jessie Daniels (2012) found in her observation of a sociology class that using documentaries in
the classroom provided concrete examples of abstract sociological concepts from the textbook
and other academic readings. Students found the engaging emotional narrative and visual
structure of the documentary to be an easier entry point into the topics rather than their dense
academic readings, and it helped them better understand and then retain sociological concepts

from the readings. The documentaries themselves also provide a chance for classes to discuss
rhetoric and flex their critical media literacy muscles, which better improves their analytical skills
overall, including for the academic reading.
Media can also serve as historical or cultural background that can recontextualize
seemingly universal themes or ideas in academic texts. Daniels (2012) touches on this in her
article, commenting that documentaries on unfamiliar sociological concepts or populations can
strengthen basic understanding about basic sociological concepts such as ethnocentrism, as
well as about religion as an institution. In this way, students without much life experience can
draw on examples from the films to both grasp and illustrate sociological concepts. But Paul
Sawyer (2006), in his article about his own pedagogy in his freshman composition classes,
primarily focuses on the power of pairing texts with media in order to facilitate critical thinking
and reading through comparing and contrasting different representations of the same theme or
historical event. For example, he pairs a two pieces of news media about war zones, one on
an alternative journalists perspective of the Vietnam War, and the other a journalists stitching
together and commenting on interviews with people who live in the poverty war zone of the
Bronx. His method involves linking rhetorical readings to political meanings through showing
how rhetoric can hide and/or highlight power structures and beliefs, and through contrasting two
different kinds of textual rhetoric and mediums about the same kind of concept, trope, or topic
Sawyer (2006) helps students recognize how much effect rhetoric has on meaning in their
critical reading. Sawyer (2006) advocates for cultural and critical awareness, and I think those
two skills are the key to transferring media literacy into academic literacy through critical reading
and thinking.
Writing
Although there is less direct research and explanation of how critical media literacy can
transfer into writing skills, there are still some examples of successful applications of one onto
the other. Vanessa Domines 2007 article about her classroom media project on the American

Civil War shows how having to produce media in response to other media builds both critical
media literacy and academic writing skills. Her students had to create media presentations
about the Reconstruction by evaluating and using primary documents from the time; students
had to learn critical reading and thinking skills that they would need in other academic contexts,
but they also had to learn to synthesize all those sources and their own opinions about them in
a critical way, while thinking critically about the way themselves were using media in their own
argument. Because students had to use the same kinds of rhetorical techniques as the media
they were using and evaluating, they observed models of rhetoric and structure that they could
use in their own writing. Sawyer (2006) also observed this in his classroom, and he concludes
that because students have to learn how to notice how the corporate news media in America
today manages to manufacture consent by selecting ideologically disturbing elements
according to set of filters, they all will probably make stronger and more ethical rhetorical
choices in their own writing and media production.
The strongest argument that almost all my research makes for how critical media literacy
helps writing has to once again do with engagement. If students are more engaged with a topic,
they take more time and effort to develop their ideas and thinking about that topic, and that
leads to stronger writing overall. A student in Daniels (2012) study remarked that, I believe that
the films were a good way of teaching. The videos helped me because I can use them in my
essays to explain the concepts of sociology and Daniels believes that the development of ideas
and clarity of thinking prompted from the documentaries helped this student understand
sociological concepts well enough so that now s/he feels able to explain them in a critical way
in writing. Ford (2012) also found that the Beyonce conversation, despite its pitfalls, helped her
students better understand and develop their ideas about their midterm reading and therefore
write stronger midterm exams where more people than usual passed. Sawyer (2006) implies
that his students writing is better due to the critical thinking prompted by the engagement of
critical media literacy by using a student writing sample that won a college-wide award. Many of

the instructors that Tisdell and Thompson (2007) interviewed believed that the increased
engagement that critical media literacy brought led to better analytical skills and discussion in
class, and having students write about what they discussed in an engaged way led to better
writing overall. If framed well and put in the power of students, the critical thinking and reading
skills built up from engagement with critical media literacy can easily transition into better idea
development and writing skills; if students care or are interested, theyre more willing to put in
the extra effort that academic writing takes.

Conclusion:
Critical media literacy seems to have fallen somewhat out of style in terms of research
and academic discussion; its hard to find much research on it after 2012. However, critical
media literacy should still be seen as a highly relevant and effective tool for getting students to
see why academic literacy matters, and how the texts and media they already consume in their
everyday lives can have importance and significance in academia and their own learning.
Students feel like composition classes are completely useless and that media texts dont have
any greater impact that simple entertainment, but the whole point of a college education is for
students to recognize how everything, every representation and text and even their own writing,
can and usually does have an impact on society as a whole. From even the little research I did,
its very clear how directly critical media literacy impacts and transfers to academic reading and
thinking skills, but more research needs to be done on how critical media literacy explicitly can
translate into better academic writing and on what that kind of pedagogy would look like in
practice. Despite the lack of objective evidence and explanation for certain academic aspects of
critical media literacy, it is still a tool that all instructors (not just composition instructors) should
at least consider incorporating into their classrooms because if done correctly and with student
agency in mind, it can lead to at the very least a more interested student population and
relevant classroom, and at its best can lead to greatly improved academic skills.

Works Cited
Alvermann, D. E., and Hagood, M. (2000) Fandom and critical cedia literacy. Journal of
Adolescent & Adult Literacy 43(5), 436446.
Daniels, J. (2012) Transforming student engagement through documentary and critical media
literacy. Theory in Action, 5(2), 5-29.
Domine, V. (2007) Doing technology in the classroom: Media literacy as critical pedagogy. In R.
A. Goldstein (Ed.), Useful theory: Making critical education practical. New York: Peter Lang
Publishing.
Ford, R. R. (2012) Expanding spaces: Critical spatial literacy and popular culture in an urban
college composition classroom (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations
Publishing.
Sawyer, P. (2006) Freshman rhetoric and media literacy. In J. Monroe (Ed.), Pitt comp literacy
culture: Local knowledges, local practices: Writing in the disciplines at Cornell. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press.
Tisdell, E. J. and Thompson, P. M. (2007) Seeing from a different angle: the role of pop culture
in teaching for diversity and critical media literacy in adult education. International Journal of
Lifelong Education, 26(6), 651-673.