Negotiating Identities in the Market Economy: An Analysis of Critical Literacy and Media Production

• In Event: Critical Digital Literacies as Social Praxis: Intersections and Challenges

Abstract

Media theorists have argued that media production must be at the center of any critical media curriculum in order to foster perspectives that cannot be developed through analysis alone (cf. Kellner, 2004). Vasudevan and Hill (2008), however, point out that it is important to attend to the particular conditions and contexts that shape how media producers resolve tensions between social reproduction and critique.
In an effort to understand how students as media producers resolve these tensions, our research examines media practices in an urban English class as students partnered with a multinational firm to use media content to market their own school. Trained by the marketing firm, the students produced promotional videos, news broadcasts, logos, and newsletters, all of which were published via a Ning. The study focuses on student investment in media production and on critical literacy negotiated across competing discourses of market economy, pedagogy, and institutional/student identities.
We draw on work in sociology, linguistics, and media studies focusing on critical media literacy, and globalization. In a globalizing world marked by increased “flows” (Appadurai, 2000), everyday classroom practices operate within what Blommaert (2006) calls “scale-levels.” Informed by this view of classrooms as relocalized spaces (Pennycook, 2010), we were interested in what it meant to create media content for a promotional purpose that is tied to individual and institutional identities and shaped by glocal ideologies: those of a (local) classroom steeped in critical pedagogy and a (global) corporation that views institutional identity as constituted in market economy.
This research is a close qualitative examination of a one-month unit in a racially and ethnically diverse class focused on digital media analysis and production (drawn from a larger study focused on learning through the use of evolving digital media). For this unit, we served as participant-observers in the class three times weekly for four weeks. Data sources included corporate documents, fieldnotes, recordings of classroom interactions, interviews with focal students, and informal conversations with students as they produced media content. We used iterative coding procedures to identify themes, followed by discourse analysis to examine the alignments and disjunctures between macro structures and classroom patterns of identity construction and meaning-making.
Although students had engaged in highly critical analyses and production of media content throughout the year, content for this school promotion project did not reflect the same level of critique. We attribute this first to an active negotiation of identities and purposes between the competing discourses of doing school and performing media competency according to marketing goals. Second, given the authentic audience and expanded visibility of the media content, students were concerned about their reception. Because they were often ascribed identities of underachievers, this media production event offered opportunities to perform competency for their local and metropolitan communities. The students’ focus on performing media literate identities rather than producing critical media content highlights the need for researchers to attend to identities made possible in a given situation, and how identity affordances may trump and transform educational objectives related to critical media processes and products.

Authors

• Cynthia J. Lewis, University of Minnesota

• Candance Marie Doerr-Stevens, University of Minnesota

• Jessica Dockter Tierney, University of Minnesota