Abstract
This chapter reports on a multi-year project that the author conducted using a children's picture book titled The Tantrum that Saved the World. Published in 2017 by World Saving Books, the e-version with its 64 colorfully illustrated pages tells of a little girl who stares down a pending climate crisis by channeling her tantrum power into strategies for saving the world. In the first study, the storybook's words and illustrations were analyzed using a Foucauldian genealogy to show how power circulates and why acquiring only that knowledge stops short of what a critical media literacy (CML) filter might reveal. Two additional studies, one focused on an analysis of critical literacy outside its comfort zone, and the other, a critical post-humanist analysis of digital remixing in a licensed Creative Commons website provided a basis for connecting the multi-year project to the research literature on digital citizenship and ethics.
“I live in the actual world, I participate, I act—but one eye gazes toward a world that could be but is not yet. I am armed with an imagination, a hope, a passion and willingness to choose. Look for me in the whirlwind.” --Maxine Greene (1988)
TopAim Of This Chapter
The purpose of this chapter, which integrates findings from three different but related projects that Alvermann was involved in between 2017 and 2022, is focused on seeking connections between her findings and those of researchers currently working within a paradigm that addresses digital citizenship and ethics. Research framed within this new paradigm is intended to address issues of civic importance that accelerated during COVID-19, were fast forwarded by advances in instructional technologies, and now appear in the form of generative artificial technologies (e.g., Chat GPT) that are raising questions among teachers, teacher educators, and students about how reading, writing instruction, and even self-sponsored composition may be impacted (Robinson, 2022).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Institutional Ethnography: A method of inquiry developed by Marxist, feminist scholar Dorothy E. Smith to initially study the everyday social networking relations among women (but later extended to people in general). Smith fostered inquiry that begins from the standpoint of people, rather than from objectified, discursively constructed positions ( Carroll, 2010 ).
Relations of Power: A concept French philosopher Michel Foucault views as not something that is acquired, seized, shared—something that one holds on to or allows to slip away. Instead, power circulates and is constantly at play both in non-egalitarian and mobile relations ( Foucault, 1990 /1976).
Critical Posthumanism: Argues that new fields of transdisciplinary knowledge, sometimes referred to as critical posthumanities, are emerging from convergences along a spectrum that includes cognitive capitalism, critical post-humanities, and post-anthropocentrism. Analytically, this spectrum is thought to range from a critique of the humanist ‘ideal’ to critiques of hierarchies in various species (e.g., human exceptionalism) ( Braidotti, 2018 ).
Posthuman World: Designates a society where arguments in favor of the materiality of digital devices has become more convincing with the rise of social media, such that embodied digital practices of their users extend and maintain social relationships—rather than simply displace them ( Bolter, 2016 ).
Foucauldian Genealogy: Invokes French philosopher Michel Foucault’s approach to analyzing historical materials for purposes of writing critical history in ways aimed at bringing about a revaluing of values in the present day ( Garland, 2014 ).
Critical Literacy: Refers to the use of technologies of print and nonprint media as forms of human communication that need analyzing for purposes of critiquing and transforming normative structures, ruling systems, and everyday practices that govern how people live and interpret their lives and the lives of others ( Luke, 2012 ).
Textual Analysis: A method for analyzing texts (both print and non-print media) in institutionally-located contexts that come with implied instructions for reading and establishing authorization. When texts self-constitute as factual, then differences (e.g., contrary viewpoints) are said to add up to a micro politics ( Stanley, 2018 ).
Critical Media Literacy (CML): S eeks to understand how the meanings that audiences make of various media texts (both print and nonprint) are negotiated in relation to one’s different situations and positionings (e.g., adult, child, teenager, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and cultural contexts). In this way, CML pushes back on assumptions about consumerism such as who or what controls how humans act ( Alvermann & Hagood, 2000 ).
Climate Change: Attributes the warming of planet Earth to human activities in the so-called Anthropocene Era that continue to contribute to changes in wind and air currents, rainfall patterns, droughts, storms, melting ice, and the resultant rise in sea level ( Herbert & Mann, 2017 ).