Seeing Through Lies: Teaching Ideological Literacy as a Corrective Lens

• In Event: Multivocal, Multilingual, Multimodal, and Multicultural Literacies in Contested Spaces

Abstract

Purposes
Breaking down the social, political, and cultural processes through which race, class, and gender worldviews are established, ideological literacies help students look closely at the intricate, contradictory meanings in texts. The purpose of developing ideological literacies in urban youth is so they become more socially conscious of the communication strategies guiding their identities.
Perspectives
The camera obscura and the retina receive the world upside down, but the human brain resolves this misrepresentation by turning the visual messages right side up. Critical social analysis functions similar to the brain (Marx & Engels, 1964/1976). Ideological literacy can serve as corrective tools for students to re-examine the messages sent to their brains by the ideological state apparatus. This pedagogy reflects the notion that the world is a text made up of multiple texts that shape our worldview (Freire & Macedo, 1987). This requires teaching students to practice oppositional reading (Hall, 1980), where they would resist hegemonic constructs in texts to make sense of ideologies in ways that reflect their actual needs. Giroux (1994) argued that popular culture is a practical site to engage in critical analysis and to unpack ideologies disseminated by mainstream media. Critical pedagogies of popular culture resonate profoundly with communities whose humanity depend on transformative learning the most (Morrell, 2004),.
Methods
How does an ideological literacy in an urban schooling context mediate student learning? This teacher inquiry (Allen, 1999) was designed as a critical participatory action research (CPAR) (Morrell, 2006) intervention that used students’ profound investment in popular culture as a tool for critical inquiry and academic engagement. CPAR calls hierarchical structures in research into question because it validates the authority of those traditionally observed in academic studies to also document and describe the phenomenon they are intervening in.
Data
Video of classroom instruction and activities were used for collecting information, as they captured actual occurrences authentically played out in class. I also analyzed student-produced documents produced (e.g., essays) paying attention to their analysis, the patterns of their ideas, and any content that represented transformative academic and critical thinking development. Interviews allowed students to reflect on their transformational process while providing me information for my in-depth analysis on the importance of engaging ideological literacy practices.
Results
Findings offer insight into the ways ideologies are consumed, re-produced, and often internalized by marginalized youth of color in urban communities, ultimately, offering a teacher-oriented analysis of using ideological literacies as an empowering tool for students to examine issues of privilege, social control, and oppression in U.S. society.
Significance
Being ideological illiterate leaves students stuck in a state of dysconsciousness (King, 1991). Ideological literacy served as a corrective lens for students in this study to take a closer look at the role ideologies played in the texts they were learning from and to encourage others to see the world differently. The discursive effects on people’s identities are naturalized through the reverberations of ideologies to which they are most exposed. It is with the purpose of transforming this in mind that ideological literacy applies.

Author

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco