Engaging Children’s Televisual Media: A Critical Bicultural Pedagogy Approach

• In Event: Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: Darder’s Culture and Power in the Classroom: Forging a Critical Bicultural Praxis—Stories From the Field

Abstract

(1) The purpose of this paper exemplifies Antonia Darder’s critical bicultural pedagogy as a new critical media literacy approach that centers bicultural experiences. (2) Theoretically, critical bicultural pedagogy connects other canons of work such as cultural studies, border theory, and borderlands epistemologies. In her revolutionary book, Culture and Power in the Classroom: A Critical Foundation for Bicultural Education, Darder calls for a pedagogy that reflects students’ lives in ways that assist them to negotiate social relationships of difference, where they are bound to be challenged solely on the basis of their language, the color of their skin, or their community of origin (this includes U.S. born children). Critical bicultural pedagogy holds possibilities for addressing the academic needs of Latina/o children, who are negatively affected by anti-bilingual/bicultural and anti-immigrant legislations. Additionally, critical bicultural pedagogy can be used to decipher and interrogate these cartoons in the classroom and equip students to decipher other media representations that surround them daily. As a result, critical media literacy can be used within a critical bicultural pedagogy to further the interrogation of children’s pop culture which is filled with different meanings and (re)presentations that target them daily. (3) Methodologically I employ a critical discourse analysis that is influenced by a critical bicultural pedagogy approach. An Indigenous methodology is sought out in this study, which can effectively be used in media studies, thus the author found that critical bicultural pedagogy is best suited for this attempt. (4) The author chose to study different episodes of a popular acclaimed bicultural and bilingual cartoon, Dora the Explorer. After viewing 115 episodes of Dora the Explorer the author has chosen to focus on two episodes that exemplify the bilingualism and biculturalism in the cartoon. (5) It is crucial then to know that the major reward with critical bicultural pedagogy is the consciousness of both the ethnic and non-ethnic child. Both can enable their own liberation and learn from the process in order to create a more democratic society. Policy makers, media, schools, families, and communities, need to work together to decipher and become conscious of what the market-economy is doing to our children and our selves as citizens and consumers. Bicultural and bilingual cartoons must be questioned in order to dig deeper into the ideologies and power dynamics that inform them. This is an ongoing struggle, which requires us to open this conversation and interrogate how cartoons such as these can inspire an emancipatory and democratic life rather than the perpetuating of abstracted stereotypes that ultimately distort the realities of Latina and Latino children as well other cultures. (6) While interrogating and deciphering this animated cartoon, this analysis will also offer a pedagogy of possibility in order to inform families, educators, and communities that children are cultural, social, and political beings. This work is interdisciplinary that attempts to forge different fields: Chicana Chicano Studies, Education, Latina Latino Studies, Media studies, Border Theory and Studies, and Immigration studies.

Author

• Judith Estrada, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign