Abstract
Adolescents in the 21st century engage with popular media in a variety of ways. Adolescent students' interactions with video games, videos, social media, and other forms of popular media have become a growing topic of study among academics interested in popular media's role in in-school literacies. To complicate matters, secondary classroom teachers continue to grapple with state and national standards that address traditional reading and writing skills. This systematic literature review focuses on what articles from practitioner journals reveal about adolescent participation in popular media, and how media skills are addressed. The analysis provided here is based on a random sample of 35 articles focusing on popular media and in-school literacies.
TopIntroduction
“Miss, I loved your class. It’s the only one I remember from middle school.”
This comment came from a former student of a 7th grade English language arts teacher. Her student, Raymond (pseudonym), approached her while attending a high school football game. His remark on how memorable her class had been made her reflect on the particular academic year he was her student. She referred to it as the year she “went rogue.”
In many states, seventh grade is a year when students take the state mandated writing assessment. The teacher reflected on how she and her colleagues often found themselves using materials and curriculum that focused on highly structured, skills-based reading and writing instruction. Opportunities for authentic reading and writing, along with allowing students choice in writing topics and content, became a yearly challenge.
The year that Raymond was in this teacher’s class, however, was the year she decided to integrate popular media into her reading and writing instruction. She utilized short video clips from SpongeBob Square Pants and Phineas and Ferb to develop student understanding of plot and literary elements. Her students were also encouraged to use their experiences with popular culture and media as mentor texts in their creative narrative writing. Her students were intrinsically motivated each day to engage in reading and writing task. They would excitedly sit with friends to begin working on their newest drafts. This was the year this teacher discovered how using popular media could transform her teaching and her students’ learning.
Adolescents in the twenty-first century engage with popular media in a variety of ways. Their interactions with video games, online videos, social media, and other forms of popular media has become a growing topic of study among academics interested in popular media’s role in in-school literacies (Petrone, 2013). To complicate matters, secondary classroom teachers often focus on state and national standards that fail to address diverse student needs, cultures, and lived experiences (Brandt, 200; Zoch, 2017). The analysis presented here explores articles from practitioner journals and what they reveal about the use of popular media and its relation to secondary student literacy.
TopNew Literacies
In recent years, there has been a closer relationship between what is perceived as traditional literacy, the reading and writing of written texts, and the interactions that individuals have with digital media, video games, and other forms of popular media and technologies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2013). As people interact with these new technologies, which continue to evolve, individuals act not only as the consumers but also the producers of these new texts. Therefore the concept “new literacies” was created to allow people to focus less on the technology and more on the development of skills and abilities related to how we communicate and interact with our world (Buckingham, 2000; Lankshear & Knobel, 2013). The new literacies focus on how individuals communicate, often through the use of digital technologies (New London Group, 1996).
The multicultural nature of the world students find themselves in creates new challenges. Students encounter increasingly high numbers of media texts, often of the digital variety, making use of various modes of representation. Education needs to draw on the experiences that many students have outside of the classroom, to help them better contextualize learning and language, and increase their abilities to be effective communicators and creators of knowledge through writing in this culturally diverse world (Kalantzis & Cope, 2000; Leu et al., 2017; Wagner, 2016). Multiliteracies take into consideration the varieties of languages that exists in both private and public domains (Kalantzis & Cope, 2000; McGrail, E. & Behizadeh, N., 2017). The various forms of communication and information now make use of numerous languages and dialects, and an individual’s ability to make meaning from these messages relies on his or her ability to cross into the cultures addressed in and through these messages (Kalantzis & Cope, 2000).
Key Terms in this Chapter
New Media Skills: According to Henry Jenkins (2008), new media skills describe the ways that people interact with various forms of media. These skills are play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation.
Multiliteracies: A literacy pedagogy that includes linguistic diversity and multimodal forms of communication (New London Group, 1996).
Multimodal: Meaning making and representation that takes on more than one mode, which may include written text, visual images, and audio. Multimodal texts are often associated with technology applications (Kress, 2009).
Participatory Culture: A culture of creativity, sharing, and knowledge building. Participatory culture typically utilizes online technologies as a means of creating new knowledge among individuals who share common interests or goals (Jenkins, 2008).
New Literacies: A term that refers to new ways of meaning making that include reading, writing, and digital forms of Communication (New London Group, 1996).