Disrupting Hegemonic Preconceptions: Teaching for Critical Media Literacy While Contesting the Corporate-Dominated Press

• In Event: Teaching for Outrage and Empathy: Challenging Preservice Teachers’ Hegemonic Perspectives and Practices

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: The purpose of this presentation is to examine the effects of an activity designed to help prospective teachers develop and refine their skills of critical media literacy, as they critique hegemonic narratives found in the corporate media. Hegemony takes many subtle and insidious forms. Though many of the presenter’s students claim they are aware that the dominant or mainstream press is not objective, unbiased, equitable or fair, most of them “consume” media as if it is, and have little understanding of how media biases, distortions, and omissions have shaped their own worldviews. The activity is designed to promote prospective teachers’ abilities to identify and critique how mechanisms of power work through the media to normalize or naturalize racial and class hierarchies without their conscious awareness, drawing attention to how two mechanisms of power, standardization and homogenization, shape the lenses through which we understand culture, politics, fairness and justice.

Theoretical frameworks: This work is grounded in critical pedagogy, critical literacy, and anti-hegemonic theory: Foucault (1977), Freire & Macedo (1987), McChesney, (2008, 2011).

Methods, techniques, modes of inquiry: Teachers benefit from critically analyzing corporate media in contrast to independent media to learn how race, class, poverty, classism, are framed differently within the two perspectives. Unraveling their notions of objectivity, neutrality, and fairness in media are critical aspects of understanding how hegemony works. Beyond standardization of the dominant media, it is easy to see how corporate media classifies and controls what is presented as major ‘news’, locally, nationally and globally.

Data sources, evidence, objects, materials: Using corporate news stories, in mainstream papers as well as in the independent media, students learn how to critically analyze whose points of view are most often presented, why, what is framed as ‘news’ and what is omitted, and in what ways corporate news differs from independent media sources.

Results and substantiated conclusions: The presentation will clarify how students discover the subjective nature of corporate media , even though it is framed as ‘objective’ or ‘neutral,” develop a comprehensive list of corporate media techniques, and have a greater understanding of the mechanisms of power, such as standardization, classification and surveillance, as reflected in the corporate media. It will also convey how teachers can promote understanding of how print and visual media reproduce the hegemonies of race and class in themselves, especially colorblindness, working class invisibility, and poverty, and how inequities are reproduced, often by exclusion/omission. These lessons are used to develop critical media literacy lessons for their students to better be able to ‘read the word to read the world.”

Scientific or scholarly significance: As pre-service social justice teachers, it is imperative that we promote students’ understanding of the role of corporate media within capitalism, both how to ‘read’ it, and how to work against its hegemonic control towards a more democratic, fair and equitable representation of our daily lives.

Author

• Roberta Ahlquist, San José State University