| I initiated a collaborative action research group on critical media literacy at an urban middle school involving three teachers and myself. The group, which met 17 times over the course of one school year, discussed a variety of topics related to teaching and learning in the classroom with media texts. The purpose of the group was to help teachers engage their children in school in more humanizing ways and to develop and study, within the group and teachers' classrooms, critical consciousness. To teach students in more humanizing ways, we engaged critical perspectives on media interaction that problematized and celebrated youth activities with media.;The findings reveal that teachers were able to teach in ways they never had before. They used media, created student-centered and critically oriented curricula, and reflected on their own progress in the classroom with others. All of the teachers and their students did engage in critical consciousness/dialogic action in one way or another. For teachers and students, critical media literacy consisted of some deconstruction of media texts, but mostly was aimed at the design and construction of students' own media texts, including PowerPoints, multimodal books, and multimedia slideshows. According to teachers' curriculum development and what they found most compelling for their students, it was more important for students to produce their own texts than it was to deconstruct others, although de-construction and re-construction went hand-in-hand for the most part.;This study suggests that teacher development must be seen as multi-vectored, and any description of teacher learning must also include unintended learning. From an activity perspective, this study connects the ways in which tensions in teacher learning and classroom life mediate each other across activity settings. It also suggests that critically oriented media pedagogy can be a useful tool for teachers to learn about their own practice as well as to engage historically marginalized students in school. It suggests that time for teacher study groups needs to be built into teachers' work schedules. |
