"Some People Will Post Just Anything": Critical Media Literacy for Immigrant and Refugee Youth

• In Event: Immigration, Identity, and Pedagogy: Toward Asset-Based Approaches to Understanding and Working With Minoritized Students

Abstract

Purposes
Prior to and in the days immediately following the U.S. election, many disparaging comments were made about immigrants and refugees (Berenson, 2016). Amid the current politically charged climate in which acts of aggression toward minoritized individuals such as immigrants and refugees have been widespread (Shear & Cooper, 2017), this study asks: How do immigrant and refugee youth enact, or not, critical media literacy as they interact with and respond to contemporary discourses across mediated spaces?

Perspective(s) or Theoretical Framework
My study uses Mihailidis’s (2014) “5As of Media Literacy” framework. This framework, borne out of a consortium on global exchange and media, is based upon five tenets: access, awareness, assessment, appreciation, action. Mihailidis’s framework also utilizes four sub-domains per tenet (i.e. access- barriers, participatory, digital, ownership) and a series of accompanying core questions (i.e. Where does the information originate?).

Methods
This qualitative case study (Yin, 2013) of immigrant youths’ critical media practices utilizes data collected from a larger study that took place during the 2016-2017 school year at Hallandale High (pseudonym) a Title One school in a mid-sized Midwestern city. This study centers on five focal students, Chula, Antonio, Albarko, Meena, and Leah, all juniors or seniors, who self-identified as immigrants or refugees. In addition to English, the focal students spoke Spanish, Somali, or Arabic.

Data Sources and Data Analysis
Data were collected from semi-structured interviews across the academic year, classroom observations, and artifacts. To protect students, their social media postings were not used as data, but as a multivocal text (Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa, 2009) to stimulate critical reflection. Using Mihailidis’s framework, I analyzed data by grouping them according to the 5A’s, then I regrouped codes according to the sub-domains in alignment with the core questions to generate themes.

Results
My findings revealed that participants called upon transnational media sources, including those found across Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter, to analyze, critique, and reframe public narratives about Muslims and undocumented immigrants. Although youth were more likely to lurk on social media sites than they were to post original content or engage in discussion threads with others, they intentionally friended or followed individuals with views antithetical to their own to gain awareness of opposing values and ideologies. Youth also called upon the languages they spoke other than English to access non-English, especially non-Western, media sites allowing them to compare and assess representations of immigrants and refugees across global contexts.

Scholarly Significance of the Study
Elias (2013) has noted the role of media in the lives of immigrants has received limited research attention. This study demonstrates how immigrant and refugee youth capitalize upon their rich lived experiences and technological acumen to help them meet, navigate, and address the challenges they face in and out of school. The research has implications for teachers and teacher educators who seek to build upon students’ already-present literacy practices (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009). Moreover, in an era of ‘fake news’, this study demonstrates ways to support and build upon students’ critical media literacy practices.

Author

• Matthew R Deroo, University of Miami