Hobbs

Outline

• Children age 18 spend an average of eight hours per day using media
• Mass media messages provide most people with their primary source of information about the world (Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi)
• “Literacy educators no longer “own” the concept of literacy”(16).

Disciplinary Frameworks Shape Priorities For The New Literacies

Visual Literacy
• Aims to demonstrate how genres, codes, conventions and formats shape perceptual and interpretive processes (16).
• Visual literacy privileges the “reading” process of “viewing and interpreting” images more than the “composing process of creating and constructing images (Tyner, 1998).

Information Literacy
• A set of abilities requiring individuals to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate and use it (17).

Media Literacy
• Instructional practices that engage children and young people in critically analyzing mass media messages and popular culture (18).
• Critical: refers to the recognition that visual and electronic messages are constructed text that present particular, distinctive points of view as a result of the economic, political and social contexts in which they circulate
• Pedagogy stresses
o The process of inquiry
o Situated action learning

Critical Literacy
• Emphasizes that identity and power relations are always part of the process of posing and interpreting texts (19).

A Model for Synthesizing Emerging Consensus in Mulitliteracies

• What tenets or principles do the practitioners and scholars advocating new literacies share?
o AA (authors and audiences)
o MM (messages and meanings)
o RR (representations and reality)
• “New literacies have as a central focus the development of students’ engagement with texts and their context for the meaning-making process, the constructed process of authorship, and questions about how texts represent social realities”(21).
• They differ in their “relative emphasis on the reader and the socio-historical and political contexts in which interpretations take place”(22).

Future research should:
• Explore how current uses of film and video in the classroom may be more meaningfully connected to literacy development in elementary- and secondary-education contexts (23)
• Investigate how comparing and contrasting online newspapers and television news media might support literacy development (23)
• Continue to explore why and how teachers decide to implement new literacies instruction (24)

Conclusion
• A central objective for media education: the ability to apply knowledge and skills learned in the classroom to the world of everyday (25)

Comments

Hobbs advocates a pragmatic approach to synthesizing multiple visions of multimedia literacy into an effective navigational system acquired in the classroom for real world use by K-12 schoolchildren awash in a technology-driven, media-based, information-rich popular culture. From academic theorist to educational practitioner to media-saturated learner, classroom-based acquisition and development of communicative competencies in print, visual, electronic and digital media required for full participation in contemporary society is the objective. The difficulty lies in translating theories into practice. Can consensus on K-12 multimedia literacy practices be reached through the integration of competing disciplinary frameworks? Although all four academic multiliteracy models–media, visual, critical and information—can be collapsed into three broad categories to integrate the conceptual tenets of multimedia literacies, disjunctures between ideologies, pedagogies and emphasis remain.

Culture wars rage on. Familiar battle cries resound. To what extent is the selection and choice of texts a significant component of the meaning-making process? How much emphasis should be placed on the social position and lived experience of the individual interacting with the text? What are the appropriate message genres deserving attention? To what extent does popular culture, mass media, and entertainment displace core literary and historical texts? To what extent will literacy practices include a focus on identity and power relations, an examination of inequity related to race, class, gender and sexual orientation when interpreting texts? Will media literacy pedagogy replace the teacher-centered, skill-based, textbook-dependent content-transmitted tradition-bound classroom with a student-centered, inquiry-based, multi-modal, production-ready, socially conscious action-oriented real world-based multi-media classroom?

Luke recognizes the responsibilities of the educational establishment in addressing the changed needs of a student population digitalized since infancy. Access in early childhood for those at risk of falling on the wrong side of the digital divide is also advocated. Luke urges attention be paid to issues of stereotyping, violence, and socialization raised by early childhood immersion in cyberculture. While pressing for curriculum and pedagogy changes from a traditionally print-centric educational establishment, Luke expresses confidence in educators’ abilities “to lead the way in providing balanced perspectives on a range of IT mediated learning and socialization issues.” On what grounds such confidence is based, no evidentiary record is presented. Nor does Luke spell out what curriculum or pedagogy changes in relation to IT she envisions. Somewhat disturbing is her view of crib jockeys engaged in a technological arms race to jobs twenty years away which don’t yet exist: “as parents and educators we cannot do enough to prepare the very young for an uncertain job future.” While the effects of new technologies on new generations of users may always, as Luke points out in her historical review, be subject to unjustified levels of concern, isn’t the mentality that infancy is not too early to begin vocational training for a job two decades away a cause for legitimate concern?

Hobbs is a proponent for determining and disseminating best classroom practices and desired student outcomes in developing a multi-media literacy framework for 21st century learners. He acknowledges the need for systemic changes in the education establishment and in its delivery system in order to facilitate the development of literacy competencies across media platforms, including some not traditionally privileged. He recognizes the difficulties inherent in translating diverse literacy theories with political and social implications from academia into K-12 classroom practices. Hobbs deserves credit for demonstrating the complexity of the issues and the significance of the undertaking.