Rhode Island College Digital Commons @ RIC Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview and Major Papers 4-2010 Making Waves with Critical Literacy Carolyn Fortuna Rhode Island College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/etd Part of the Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Secondary Education and Teaching Commons, and the Social Psychology and Interaction Commons Recommended Citation Fortuna, Carolyn, "Making Waves with Critical Literacy" (2010). Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview. 37. https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/etd/37 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers at Digital Commons @ RIC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ RIC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MAKING WAVES WITH CRITICAL LITERACY: A TEACHER RESEARCHER STUDY AROUND THE TEXTS, CONTEXTS, AND RECONTEXTUALIZATIONS OF AN UPPER MIDDLE CLASS PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL BY CAROLYN FORTUNA A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND AND RHODE ISLAND COLLEGE 2010 ABSTRACT This dissertation is a teacher researcher qualitative study that explores the work of critical literacy in an upper middle class public high school. As a participant and an observer, I studied how a confluence of authority, privilege, curriculum, and pedagogy created context and shaped the meaning and quality of our collective literacy learning experiences. Using the tools of teacher research through narrative inquiry, my study traces school authority figures’ reproduction of dominant ideologies, my struggles as a social justice educator to break through those definitions of “normal” with a privileged student population, and the hope that resulted when my students were able to embrace multimodal, multiliterate, and transcultural learning experiences as conduits for humility and possible equity for all. I conducted the study with five rosters of students in my classroom across the 2007 school year. The data emerged from my descriptive and reflective teacher journal, audiotapes, videotapes, personal communications, and student artifacts. The study reveals how, against a federally-mandated backdrop like NCLB, education can all too easily be reduced to decoding and encoding print-centric, high canonical texts unless teachers infuse sociocultural, multimodal pedagogy around culture and identity. While often experiencing waves of tension, my students were able to challenge the dominant discourses in upper middle class public education only when they recontextualized their own modalities, literacies, and cultures as part of learning experiences. When they did so, youth produced and consumed their own critical youth texts, gained youth power across many dimensions, and began a journey toward awareness of social justice for all. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................... ii TABLE OF CONTENTS.............................................................................. iii CHAPTER 1.....................................................................................................1 INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2...................................................................................................24 REVIEW OF LITERATURE.......................................................................24 CHAPTER 3...................................................................................................51 METHODOLOGY.......................................................................................51 CHAPTER 4...................................................................................................70 FINDINGS ...................................................................................................70 CHAPTER 5.................................................................................................215 CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................215 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................232 iii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION My interest in popular culture in the classroom arose through my career as a public school teacher and became grounded by the literature around literacy, learning, and media. Prior to my doctoral work, I taught for nine years as a middle school English teacher in Taylor, a U.S. northeastern suburban community with a population nearing 29,500 and which was located approximately forty miles southwest of its state capital. At that early point of my career, I was assigned a heterogeneous roster of students as one of four eighth grade English teachers in the district, and we shared the responsibility with our two middle school principals for implementing English Language Arts frameworks that met both state and local standards. I became torn as I saw students struggle --- again and again --- with teacher- centered curriculum as well as stories of power and identity told predominantly by white, Anglo-Saxon males. Those narratives were part of what is often called the western canon: texts comprising a compendium of work that has been influential in shaping western culture. Student voice and discourse around non –dominant persons -- - those whose race, gender, class, religion, heritage, ability, or sexual orientations lay outside dominant western practices --- were generally little more than token occurrences in the Taylor middle school classrooms. Students and non-dominant persons had been Othered in Taylor, or relegated to status of Us versus Them within a binary system. 1 My instructional duties brought me into contact with anywhere from 92-139 students annually, but, as my years of service in the same town accumulated, I became part of a larger system of social and career affiliations. Siblings of my former students often became my students, too, or chose to participate in clubs or grant programs that I facilitated. Additionally, I kept in contact with a number of my former students as they went on to high school, college, and adult lives. All of these youth spoke eagerly and richly about texts, but their texts were not the texts interrogated in the Taylor public schools. In those years prior to the new millennium, the youth I encountered read magazines, played video games, watched television, participated in sports, talked on the family phone, read young adult novels, and exchanged and built knowledge of their worlds through what I later learned was called “discourse.” By the time I was appointed to professional status, I had begun to incorporate media literacy instruction into my public school English language arts classroom. I thought popular culture texts would provide a meeting place where my students and I could share our expertise, create serious academic discourse, and invite voices of Others into academic studies. My choices for instructional materials and learning events included yet transcended the western canon. Moreover, as I deepened my own understanding of the media’s effect on readers, listeners, and viewers, my pedagogy changed, and I asked students to consider ways that popular and media cultures are ubiquitous educational forces that normalize meanings, values, and tastes within a complex of social constructs. I discovered that this pedagogy is called “critical literacy,” in which language becomes a vehicle to analyze how society and culture influence human identity formation. 2 I transferred from the middle school to the high school in Taylor in 2005. At the same time, I was reading Bourdieu (1977), Rist (2004), McIntosh (1997), Anyon (1980), and Greene (1993) as part of my program of studies in the Feinstein Joint Doctoral Program at Rhode Island College and the University of Rhode Island. My major professor also guided me to the world of cultural studies and theorists such as Hall (2003b), Foucault (1972), Fine (2000), and Giroux (P. Freire & Giroux, 1989; Giroux, 1999, 2008b; Giroux & Simon, 1989). As a direct result of my readings and cohort discussions, I expanded the collective and power-laden vocabulary of my public school classroom to include constructs around hegemony, hierarchy, oppression, privilege, resistance, misogyny, and critical consciousness. The reactions of students, their families, and the school administrators to my praxis became of interest to me, and I called those reactions “waves of tension.” I incorporate the metaphor of “waves” throughout this dissertation as a means to analogize the transfer of energy that occurred in my critical literacy classroom and at Taylor High School (THS). As it passes into a new medium, a wave changes speed. Because critical literacy praxis was so different than my students’ previous experiences in their public education, I was a new medium that changed the speed of student reactions. Waves of tension arose in learning events when I required students to engage in constructivist thinking;