Skinner | Writing Workshop
Meets Critical Media Literacy
Emily Skinner
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Writing Workshop Meets Critical
Media Literacy: Using Magazines
and Movies as Mentor Texts
Something that I like to do is read magazines. Mostly fashion magazines. I like seeing what is out, and what is in
concerning fashion. Like what prints, fabrics, and colors are in for the season. And I like to see what the celebrities
are wearing. I could sit for the whole day reading Vogue.
—Raquel, seventh grade
R
aquel (all names pseudonyms), a
13-year-old African American
girl, wrote this notebook entry in
an after-school writing/popular culture
club named “Teenage Addiction,” so
named by its participants because of its
attention to popular culture texts that,
according to the seventh-grade girls in the
club, “teenagers are addicted to.”
As her writer’s notebook entry denotes and a literacy ethnography that she made for Teenage Addiction revealed, Raquel, specifically, devoted
much of her free time to reading fashion and entertainment magazines such as Vogue, Vibe, and The
Source. She also enjoyed viewing the popular television shows America’s Top Model (Mok, Banks, &
Dominici, 2003–2007), Cribs (Lazin & Sirulnick,
2000–2007), and 106 & Park (2000–2007). She was
also fond of watching movies that featured adolescent characters and issues, such as She’s All That
(Iscove, 1999) and Love Don’t Cost a Thing (Beyer,
2003).
In this article, I describe how, within the context of a voluntary seventh-grade after-school writing/popular culture club, Raquel drew upon
movies and fashion magazines as cultural resources
for what Freire & Macedo (1987) describe as
“reading the world”—reading not only words (and
images) in texts, but also critically interpreting the
ideologies that underlie the words and images
(Luke & Freebody, 1997). I will then share an excerpt from Raquel’s writing to demonstrate how
she approached her use of adolescent movies as
mentors—texts that students select with the explicit
intention of learning something about writing
(Calkins, 1994; Ray, 1999). Raquel’s writing illustrates how she drew upon her popular culture
mentor texts for writing with a critical lens in order to construct a realistic short story that critiqued
the construct of adolescent popularity as dependent upon social class.
“Teenage Addiction”:
Conceptualizing a Hybrid
Popular Culture/Writing Club
The purpose of Teenage Addiction was to create
a venue in which Raquel and her eight Black,
Latina, and White/Native American female adolescent peers from poor and working-class backgrounds could explore with me what and how they
learned about writing when drawing upon popular culture texts, such as the fashion magazines,
television shows, and movies that Raquel found
so engaging, as cultural resources for writing. In
this club, I aimed to expand upon the current writing workshop practice of using literature as mentor texts to include using popular culture texts.
The curricular framework of the club, which met
for two hours 2–3 times a week over a 10-week
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period, focused on merging writing workshop
practices (Atwell, 1998; Calkins, 1994;) and critical media literacy pedagogy (Alvermann, Moon,
& Hagood, 1999).
Moreover, Teenage Addiction was conceptualized as a hybrid context that would combine
some of the participants’ cultural resources—their
engagements with popular culture texts in and out
of school—with their academic literacy practices
learned during their in-school writing workshop
under the guidance of their language arts teacher,
Heather Benson, who is also my colleague at
Teachers College. My objective in bringing these
two different pedagogies together grew out of my
own experiences as a writing workshop teacher and
staff developer, my doctoral studies of the significance of multimodalities in literacy learning
(Siegel, 2006), and recent literature about
reconceptualizing adolescent literacy to incorporate the evolvement of “new literacies” (e.g.,
Alvermann, Hinchman, Moore, Phelps, & Waff,
1998; Alvermann, 2002; Gee, 2004; Lankshear &
Knobel, 2003; Mahiri, 2004).
In constructing the after-school club, I hoped
to create a space that validated and capitalized
upon both the girls’ academic literacies and their
new literacies in ways that were meaningful, relevant, and significant to their lives. My ongoing
agenda in facilitating Teenage Addiction meetings
was to engage Raquel and her peers in critical readings of popular culture texts while also encouraging them to use popular culture texts in their
writing for their own purposes and pleasures
(Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999). Although
I do not have space within the parameters of this
article to describe all of the critical media literacy
or writing workshop activities in which Raquel and
her Teenage Addiction peers engaged, Figure 1
provides an overview of some of the activities included in the club curriculum.
Getting Started: Immersion in
Popular Culture Texts
Drawing upon Alvermann, Moon, and Hagood’s
(1999) recommendations for critical media literacy
pedagogy and acting in the spirit of Ray’s (1999)
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suggestions for leading group inquiries into
children’s and adolescent literature, I began the
club by facilitating activities that focused on immersing ourselves in the girls’ favorite popular
culture texts. During this time, we engaged in discussions of girls’ preferences for particular popular culture texts, such as television shows, movies,
websites, magazines, and music. Next, we compared, contrasted, and categorized the popular
culture texts that Teenage Addiction members interacted with in their lives, focusing on concepts
of audience and genre, such as sitcom, soap opera, R & B, pop music, etc. When we talked about
audience, we talked about how particular popular
culture texts try to appeal to different audiences
based on demographics
such as age, gender, race, My ongoing agenda in facilisocial class, ethnicity, and tating Teenage Addiction
language.
The girls were en- meetings was to engage
thusiastic about making Raquel and her peers in
connections to the issues
represented in popular critical readings of popular
culture texts, and yet, at culture texts while also
the same time, they were
also adept at critiquing encouraging them to use
those texts’ representa- popular culture texts in their
tions of adolescent girls,
especially when their writing for their own purown lived experiences as poses and pleasures.
Black, Latina, and
White/Native American female adolescents from
poor and working-class backgrounds left them
feeling disconnected from those representations.
As such, the girls’ discussions of popular culture
texts were always intertextual: they critiqued and
evaluated popular culture texts in relation to one
another, dependent upon the racial, social, class,
and other identities the texts presented. For example, Melissa Elliot (35-year-old Black hip hop
artist) was more similar to them than Brittany
Spears (25-year-old White pop artist); the working-class parents on Roseanne were more believable to them than the upper-middle-class parents
on The Cosby Show; and Source, a magazine featuring mostly Black entertainers, was more authen-
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Immersion in Popular Culture Texts (Weeks 1-2)
Popular culture bag activity
Club naming
Popular culture graffiti
Notebook writing
Popular culture text
ethnography
Popular culture social
practice observations
Popular culture text concept
map
I shared a bag filled with some of my favorite popular culture texts that revealed different sociocultural identities (e.g., gender, age, social class, ethnicity, etc.). I gave the participants brown paper
bags on which to write the names of their favorite popular culture texts (e.g., music groups, TV
shows, movie titles, magazines, etc.).
Girls discussed and decided upon the group’s name, since my purpose was to build community and
club identity.
Girls made group graffiti listing their favorite popular culture texts.
Focused on writing from the girls’ lives, with special attention to the popular culture texts and
practices in their lives.
Girls recorded the names of popular culture texts they engaged with, the context (when, where,
with whom) of their engagement, and the purpose of their interactions.
Group discussion of broader practices related to popular culture text engagements.
Distributed a stack of popular culture text titles compiled from the envelope activity to groups of
4–5 girls. The groups collaboratively categorized the titles and then made a concept map that they
shared with the other group.
Critical Media Literacy Activities (Weeks 2–3)
Analyzing websites
Magazine observations
Critical media literacy
questions
Visited network and music group websites and discussed possible audience demographics to which
networks were trying to appeal.
Distributed variety of teen magazines to girls, who then worked in partners going through magazines and noticing characteristics such as content, kinds of texts, advertisements, and audience
appeal.
Adapted Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood’s (1999) critical media literacy questions to frame discussion
of magazine advertisements and sitcom touchstone text.
Planning Writing Projects (Weeks 3–5)
Thinking about mentor texts
Facilitated group discussions of potential mentor texts and asked girls to fill out mentor text
planning sheets.
Engaging with
Facilitated string of minilessons and activities related to group touchstone text (Sister, Sister) that
touchstone text
included:
• Watching touchstone text together
• Responding to touchstone text for pleasure
• Responding to touchstone text critically
•· Thinking about craft in touchstone text
• Naming characteristics of sitcoms
Notebook writing
Led minilessons on using notebook as tool for planning for writing about issues and characters.
Facilitated group discussions of notebook entries.
Drawing upon writing processes Shared excerpts about processes of published popular culture text authors from books and internet
of published authors
websites.
Drafting and Revising Writing Projects (Weeks 5–9)
Drafting
Strategy lessons for
particular genre
Participating in conferences
Sharing plans
Minilessons on character
and change
Girls chose topics and genres for writing and then drafted in and out of the club.
Worked with small groups noticing and discussing characteristics of particular genre (e.g., television
scripts).
Individualized instruction addressing participants’ writing agendas.
Checked in with participants at each meeting by facilitating discussions of girls’ daily writing plans.
Led minilessons that were responsive to girls’ focus on adolescent female characters in popular
culture texts.
Publishing and Reflecting upon Writing Projects (Weeks 9–10)
Deciding upon group
publishing project
Writing/typing final
draft for magazine
Writing “About the Authors”
Publishing party
Facilitated group discussion and decision making of possible formats for group publishing project
that included girls’ individual writing projects.
Provided time for writing/word processing final drafts of writing projects during club meetings.
Discussed role of “About the Authors” as complementary texts to girls’ writing projects.
Distributed Teenage Addiction magazine to participants, who autographed one another’s copies
during pizza party.
Figure 1. “Teenage Addiction” enacted curricular framework
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tic than Seventeen magazine, which presents mostly
White models and explores issues that the girls
referred to as representative of upper-middle-class
White girls. Situating the concept of audience
within the group, we also talked about how even
within similar demographics, people had particular popular culture tastes—for example, Raquel,
who had a high-school-aged sister and was most
interested in fashion, was the only girl in the group
who read Vogue magazine.
At the same time, as we immersed ourselves
in the popular culture texts during club meetings,
I further familiarized myself with their popular
culture texts at home. I watched their TV shows,
listened to their music, read their magazines, and
searched for information (usually in magazines and
on the Internet) about the girls’ favorite television characters, celebrities, and bands. As a White
upper-middle-class 30-year-old woman, some of
the girls’ favorite texts were familiar to me (e.g.,
The Cosby Show, American Idol), but many of them
were not (e.g., Lizzie McGuire; Sister, Sister; Melissa Elliot; Source; Vibe), which reflected our cultural differences in relation to age, race, and social
class.
Critical Media Literacy:
Analyzing Fashion Images
Presented in Magazines
Having validated the girls’ textual preferences
through celebrating their popular culture texts
first, I next began to weave critical analysis of popular culture texts into our curriculum and pedagogy.
The inclusion of a critical element in the club was
necessary for my research because I not only
wanted to see how the girls appropriated and
recontextualized (Dyson, 1997, 1999, 2003) popular culture mentor texts in their own writing, but
I also wanted to see how they transformed them. I
was sensitive about the tension that can arise in
asking students to critique the very texts they enjoy, and I didn’t want to hijack their fun
(Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Alvermann
& Hagood, 2000; Buckingham & Sefton-Green,
1994; Finders, 2000; Luke, 2000). At the same
time, I wanted to encourage their critical con-
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Critical Media Literacy Questions
1. What beliefs or messages are being presented in this
text?
2. Do you agree with these beliefs or messages? Why or
why not?
3. What are some of the other beliefs on this issue?
4. Who benefits from the beliefs presented in this text?
5. Who is marginalized (gets left out) by the beliefs
presented in this text?
6. If you were going to write your own text addressing
these issues, which beliefs would you take up and
which beliefs would you resist?
Figure 2. Critical media literacy questions
sumption of popular culture texts. In an effort to
balance these two goals, I did not jump right into
critiquing the texts they had introduced. Instead,
I adapted Alvermann, Moon, and Hagood’s (1999)
critical media literacy questions and brought in
magazine advertisements to introduce them to
some questions and concepts (product, audience,
and message) that could guide them in thinking
about popular culture texts from a critical media
literacy perspective (see Figure 2).
I began the critique of magazine advertisements by focusing the girls on the first five questions, and then in a subsequent discussion, I
highlighted three of the advertisements to discuss
the sixth question in greater depth. The purpose
of this question was to prepare the girls to think
about transforming mentor texts in their own writing. Figure 3 depicts the messages the girls recognized when they critiqued Steve Madden, Baby
Phat, and Coach advertisements.
After first discussing how the Steve Madden
advertisement was created to sell shoes to girls with
the message that wearing the shoes would make
them appeal to boys, we moved to a discussion of
the dog image. Raquel hypothesized, “Maybe that’s
what rich people wear,” which was followed by
Maleeka’s comment, “And the way she holding her
purse [imitating girl in advertisement]. Like Sweet
Valley High,” referring to an adolescent fiction series set in a wealthy White Californian community. Jesenia then commented, “The dog is barking
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to the owner, like, ‘Buy me a crown.’” Interpreted
together, these comments reflect the girls’ critique
of the advertisement as presenting an image of
wealth from which they felt disconnected.
In contrast, when the girls critiqued the Baby
Phat advertisement with Russell Simmons’s wife,
Maleeka interpreted the advertisement as saying,
“You don’t have to be rich to feel rich.” As evidence of this message, Moni pointed out that
Raquel was wearing the Baby Phat label that day
and Raquel wasn’t rich. In this case, the girls’ familiarity with the brand as a clothing line they had
access to altered their reading of an advertisement
that showcased wealth in a more positive light as
both attainable and desirable.
Last, the girls’ discussion of the Coach advertisement was different; at first, they shared a less
critical lens in relation to the economics of the
advertisement, failing to comment on social class,
as they had in other discussions about popular
culture texts. However, when I told them that each
of these accessories would cost upwards of $200,
they were surprised and took on a more critical
lens. I believe that in this case, the girls’ lack of
familiarity with Coach products made it difficult
for them to critique the Coach advertisement with
the same lens on social class that they used with
other advertisements. This is worth noting because
Magazine Critiques
Visual:
Steve Madden advertisement—Skinny, White, lateteens girl with big heels,
small waist, big breasts
and hips, walking a dog
wearing crown and carrying
dainty purse.
Visual:
Russell Simmons’s wife
is holding baby in front
of limo with butler off
to side.
Visual:
Headshot of woman
surrounded by Coach
accessories (e.g.,
scarves, sunglasses,
purses, etc.).
• Pretty girls buy
• Family
• Shoes will make you
pretty things.
look sexy like the girl in • You don’t have to be
• Go out and buy
rich to feel rich.
the ad.
new accessories for
• If you wear the shoes,
Spring.
it’s going to change how
• Buy lots of things.
you look.
• Rich people wear Steve
Madden shoes.
Figure 3. “Teenage Addiction” magazine critiques
it demonstrates that if we want our students to
read the world with a critical lens, we must begin
with familiar images and texts, such as the popular culture texts they often spend “the whole day
reading,” while also introducing them to less familiar texts and opening them up to interpretation.
Planning for Writing: Using
Movie Mentor Texts as Cultural
Resources for Exploring the
Adolescent Issue of Popularity
At the same time that we were engaging in critical
media literacy activities, we were also engaging in
activities around planning to write. As we discussed, interacted with, characterized, and critiqued popular culture texts, it became apparent
to me that, for these girls, one major draw of these
texts (and a key to how the girls defined them)
was their focus on specific issues of immediate interest to them. Throughout the weeks that the club
met, I tried to build upon ideas that seemed significant to the girls, and so in one minilesson, I
asked them to make lists of potential issues from
popular culture texts that they might be interested
in writing about. Raquel’s list included: inner city
teens, popularity, and fashion, all highlighted in
the teen movies Raquel selected for mentor texts—
She’s All That and Love Don’t Cost a Thing.
Raquel initially looked to the movie She’s All
That as a mentor text. She’s All That highlights the
issue of high school popularity and is set in a predominantly wealthy, primarily White, California
high school. Raquel began planning her short story
by appropriating the plot: a wealthy, popular guy,
Zach, makes a bet with his buddy that he can transform Laney Boggs, a working/middle class unpopular girl, into the prom queen. The movie
focused on the romance that developed between
Zack and Laney. Raquel, on the other hand,
planned to center her plot around a popular girl
who bets her girlfriends that she can make an unpopular female classmate popular; a friendship
develops between the two girls as the social status
of each girl shifts in relation to one another. In
constructing her short story, Raquel highlighted
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the unpopular character’s poverty as the root of
her unpopularity.
During a writing conference in which Raquel
was planning her story, she noted that one way
she planned to re-contextualize her own short
story was to base it in a neighborhood more like
her own. She’s All That was different from the
majority of the other texts Raquel discussed in the
writing club because it did not focus on Black characters. However, once Raquel began drafting, she
switched her mentor text to the movie Love Don’t
Cost a Thing, another formulaic story of the shift
in a high school popularity hierarchy based largely
on social class; this movie, however, features more
Black and Latina characters.The main character,
Alvin, comes from a working class Black family
and works as a “pool boy” for rich families; he plans
to use his earnings to buy car transmission parts
for an engineering competition that he hopes will
win him a college scholarship. Alvin is infatuated
with Paris, the most beautiful and popular girl at
his school. The plot rolls out as Paris wrecks her
mother’s car and Alvin gives her the money to get
it fixed if she will hang out with him at school functions and in social contexts for two weeks.
Through hanging out with Paris, Alvin hopes he
will become popular.
Raquel drew upon both movies for her short
story, “The Broken Ladder,” by appropriating the
idea that high school popularity hierarchies are
determined by class and performed through image and fashion. In Love Don’t Cost a Thing, the
first thing Paris did to help Alvin transform his
image was hang a name-brand sweatshirt around
his waist for their strut down the school hall together. As Alvin began to gain acceptance with the
popular crowd, he added additional layers of name
brand clothing to his image. At the height of Alvin’s
popularity, he came to school dressed in a pile of
trendy labels and accessorized with a pricey
Burberry backpack. In She’s All That, Laney’s character was presented in a more toned-down manner and did not take up such a literal
demonstration of fashion as representative of her
social climb. Instead, the movie included a
makeover scene prior to the climactic prom where
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Mentor Text:
Genre of your writing project:
What is your writing project about?
• Write a brief synopsis that addresses as many of the
elements on the following list as you have considered
about your story: main events, issues, characters,
setting(s), changes.
• You may write in prose or make a list.
How do you plan to use your mentor text?
What do you plan to do that is different from your mentor
text or other texts in the same genre?
Figure 4. Mentor text planning sheet
Laney was transformed from a klutzy bohemian
whose inattention to fashion was demonstrated by
her baggy clothes and clunky glasses to a magnetic high school beauty in a classic red dress.
While the girls were planning for writing, I
asked them to fill out a sheet describing how they
planned to use their mentor texts (see Figure 4).
This is Raquel’s response to the question,
What is your writing project about?
It’s about a girl named Jazmine. She is very unpopular. She’s at the bottom of the social ladder. She is
also poor. She can’t afford anything but hand-medowns. She has dreams of becoming a model. There
is a popular girl named Raquel. All her friends bet
her that she can’t make Jazmine popular. She takes
up the bet. She succeeded, and while she did they
become friends. Jazmine got popular and started to
diss Raquel. Raquel became unpopular. And Jazmine
became more popular. Raquel comes up with a plan
to sabotage Jazmine’s popularity. It works. Now they
are both unpopular, then they patch up their friendship.
In this description of her writing idea, Raquel
immediately characterized the main character in
her story, Jazmine, as “unpopular” and “at the
bottom of the social ladder,” thereby setting the
stage that Jazmine’s low status on the social ladder was going to be the axis around which her story
rotated. Raquel next stated, “She is also poor,” and,
“She can’t afford anything but hand-me-downs”;
in so doing, Raquel relates Jazmine’s lack of popularity to her poverty, which she depicts through
the image of unfashionable “hand-me-downs.”
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I have focused thus far on Raquel’s plans for
writing; in the next section, I will share an excerpt
of Raquel’s writing to illustrate how she drew upon
her critical reading of both fashion images in
magazines and adolescent issues in movies to construct a short story that connected adolescent
popularity to social class.
Raquel’s Short Story:
“The Broken Ladder”
As Jazmine walked into the corner bodega she saw the
“popular” kids in there. As she ordered her sandwich, she
took out the Benefit card. She heard snickering behind her.
The popular kids, Raquel, Latoya, Sierra, Michelle, Mya,
and Ashanti, were laughing because she was on welfare.
They started eyeballing Jazmine from head to toe. Then
they let out another round of laughs.
“I never noticed how many losers there were today,”
Raquel commented stepping out of the store with her pink
UGG boots. Her posse followed. Jazmine wished she could
chill with them, even though they were stuck up and conceited.
I hate my life, she thought as she entered the building
of her high school. She had a new philosophy, she saw that
high school was not only about the grades, but about the
fashion. As she walked through the halls of Theodore
Roosevelt she saw people in Northfaces in every color, Pelles,
Wizams, Harleys and Vansons of every style. And she was
wearing a coat that was as played out as a high top fad. On
their feet Pradas, the latest Jordans, Timberlands, Nikes,
the list goes on and on. They were the ones who were up to
date with fashion, like Raquel. A lot of people don’t know
this but fashion is a drug, like crack. You don’t know how
you got hooked but you can’t get off. There were also the
ones who weren’t. Here’s the social ladder:
- fresh to death at the top
- fresh
- normals
- chickenheads then,
- the bums
Jazmine wished she could climb to the top.
Drawing upon fashion magazines as cultural
resources and her lived experience as a workingclass Black adolescent female “fashionista,” Raquel
dressed her short story characters in ways that
constructed their images and defined their roles
on the popularity hierarchy in their school. For
example, characters who dressed in the latest fashions and trends were labeled “fresh to death” and
as such stood at the top of the social ladder. At the
bottom of the ladder, Raquel dressed her protagonist in oversized hand-me-downs, placing her on
a par with the characters from She’s All That and
Love Don’t Cost a Thing who were invisible and
insignificant to the more popular characters.
The critical media literacy pedagogy of the
writing club encouraged Raquel to explore representations of social class presented in magazines
with her peers. At the same time, writing workshop pedagogy allowed Raquel to explicate the
connections she was making between popular culture texts and her life as an adolescent girl—in
her writer’s notebook, in her mentor text plans,
and during group writing conferences with her
peers. Then, by forefronting fashion images, she
critically constructed the text of her short story to
reflect the relationship between social class and
popularity.
The relationship between popularity and social class in schools is an issue that is not confined
to popular culture texts alone, but has been documented in actual school contexts; research has illustrated the relationship between students’
popularity, their socioeconomic status, and their
presence in positions of power in the intertwined
entities of school-based social circles and activity
structures (Bettie, 2003; Brantlinger, 2003; Finders, 1997). As such, Raquel’s exploration of this
issue reveals meaningful engagement with a topic
that is significant to adolescents.
In order to evaluate Raquel’s literacy learning
in the hybrid writing club, I’d like to consider Luke
and Freebody’s (1997) Four Resources Model of
Reading as well as an adaptation of that work by
Heffernan and Lewison (2003) called Four Resources Model of Writing. The Four Resources
model designates the practices of code breaker,
text participant, text user, and text analyst as necessary components of literacy learning.
To begin with, Raquel acted as a text participant by bringing together her cultural resources
of magazine reading and movie viewing to bear
on the issue of popularity in her short story. Raquel
used code-breaking practices to decode the visual
images presented in fashion magazines and then
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SIDE TRIP: MENTOR TEXTS FOR WRITING CRITICALLY ABOUT POPULARITY AND SOCIAL CLASS
Earlier images of the media in education usually paint a negative picture. Students were often told to “read
the book,” not watch the film. Today, many still regard the media as a negative influence on students’
learning and are adamant that it not be included as an educational resource. However, the current accessibility of technology and the various ways in which it can and is being used to inform students’ learning have
added momentum to the trend; more and more educators are finding that they now have to keep up with
their students’ level of technological competence.
In this article, the author advocates for using critical media literacy to inform students’ writing. We must
teach students to “read the world with a critical lens [and] we must begin with images and texts with which
they are familiar.” Students are fluent in multiple discourses. They are informed by the “popular culture texts,
television shows, movies, websites, magazines, and music” around them. The author posits that teachers
should understand these different dynamics that influence students’ learning and use them to inform their
writing experiences. If we can accept the premise that students have an array of experiences that can
positively inform their learning, then perhaps we can consider and develop “new hybrid teaching and
learning experiences” that empower students as well as ourselves.
Internet Resources
http://mediateacher.squarespace.com/
The purpose of this website is to expand existing views of media, to assist educators in thinking about the
role that media play in contemporary culture, and to highlight the importance of studying media as forms of
communication.
http://www.medialit.org/
The Center for Media Literacy (CML) is a nonprofit educational organization that provides leadership, public
education, professional development, and educational resources nationally.
http://www.pbs.org/
This site by PBS.org, merges online and television media to create and distribute interactive programming
that advances education, culture, and citizenship worldwide.
Resources for Teachers
Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: Literacy, learning, and contemporary culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Cortes, E. C. (2000). The children are watching: How the media teaches about diversity. New York: Teachers
College Press.
Friedland, E. S., Phelps, S., & Hill, P. (2006). How different media affect adolescents’ views of the hero:
Lessons from “Amistad.” Middle School Journal, 38(1), 20–26.
Goodman, S. (2003). Teaching youth media: A critical guide to literacy, video production, & social change. New
York: Teachers College Press.
—Ruth Lowery
utilized printed text in her writing to communicate images of fashion, the latter accomplished
through the inclusion of fashion brands and social hierarchy labels from her own life. In addition, Raquel demonstrated pragmatic practices as
she constructed a short story that was part realis-
tic fiction and part fairy tale satire. Her fluency in
the genre of realistic short story was enhanced by
her participation in in-school reading and writing
workshops where she had numerous experiences
with reading and writing realistic fiction and short
stories. At the same time, she also used pragmatic
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practices in writing the anti-fairy-tale. Raquel’s
movie mentor texts ended “happily ever after” in
that Laney and Alvin rose to popularity and found
romantic fulfillment, even once their peers recognized their social class backgrounds and histories. On the other hand, Raquel ended “The
Broken Ladder” with Jazmine’s fall from grace
once her peers were made aware of her social class
background.
Raquel’s transformation of the fairy-tale quality of her movie mentor texts brings me to Luke
& Freebody’s (1997) final resource, and the one
most often absent from
Teenage Addiction curricu- current literacy instruction in schools: text analum that enabled Raquel to lyst. Throughout, Raquel
demonstrate critical literacy displayed her competency
as a text analyst in adpractices in her writing was dressing the issue of
the time and space we spent popularity with a critical
lens that considered the
engaging in dialogic inquiry. social-class ideologies
undergirding her story’s
social hierarchy. Furthermore, through her resistance to rearticulate the typical fairy-tale ending
of teen popularity movies, Raquel critiqued the
stability of the relationship between popularity and
social class, a critique that both of Raquel’s movie
mentor texts glossed over. Raquel, instead, recognized the status quo of popularity hierarchies as
performing and reproducing social class, and in
her realistic fiction questioned the likelihood of
stabilizing such a shift.
Grounding Curriculum and
Teaching in Dialogic Inquiry
I believe the most essential component of the
Teenage Addiction curriculum that enabled
Raquel to demonstrate critical literacy practices
in her writing was the time and space we spent
engaging in dialogic inquiry (Shor & Freire, 1987).
Shor and Freire (1987) describe dialogic inquiry
as “situated in the culture, language, politics, and
themes of the students” (p. 18). They explain that
engaging students in dialogic inquiry means taking the familiar (in this case, popular culture texts)
and trying to understand it socially and historically so as to transcend the familiar. This practice
forefronts the idea that no text is neutral and that
all texts are undergirded by particular ideologies
(Luke, 2000).
Dialogic inquiry focuses students on going
beyond expressing their personal experiences and
asks them to consider how their written representations of their and others’ experiences convey
particular ideologies that position both authors
and readers of texts. The complex meaning the
girls constructed from popular culture texts and
the possibilities they envisioned for using popular
culture texts as mentors for writing were realized
in our dialogic inquiry during critical media literacy activities and group writing conferences. The
discussions in which the girls shared and
deconstructed their perspectives about popular
culture texts and negotiated their writing plans no
doubt informed Raquel and her peers’ writing.
Acknowledging adolescents’ fluency with
popular culture texts in literacy classrooms is empowering to students because it provides opportunities for both pleasure and critical analysis as
they design their own writing projects to address
topics relevant to their lives (Heffernan &
Lewison, 2003; Jones, 2004). Dialogic inquiry is
empowering to teachers because it enables us to
understand the multiple discourses within which
our students are fluent. Once we have constructed
this understanding of our students’ literacy practices, we can combine these practices with our own
fluency in teaching pedagogies, such as writing
workshop, in order to produce new hybrid teaching and learning experiences that empower both
our students and ourselves.
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Emily Skinner is professor of literacy in the School of Education, Health, and Human Performance at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. She is also Director of Professional Development for the Center for the Advancement of New Literacies in Middle Grades, a grant collaboration
between South Carolina Commission of Higher Education and the College of Charleston.
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