Aesthetic and Efferent Readings of Digital News Media in an 11th-Grade English Classroom

• In Event: Expanding Media Literacy Through Critical Digital Aesthetics

Abstract

This paper draws data from a year-long study of an 11th grade English classroom. This study investigated how the students in this class talked about texts, however, this paper particularly focuses on students’ discussions of digital news media. In this focus, it expands current pedagogical recommendations for critical digital literacies (Turner & Hicks, 2015; Hobbs, 2020), which often rely upon true/not true heuristics for evaluation. Although this attention to facts was often represented by the veteran teacher of this classroom, students’ aesthetic responses to the digital news she introduced complicated these heuristics. Ultimately this paper suggests that media literacy pedagogies should be expanded to include students’ varied readings and reimaginings of digital texts.

This analysis draws from Rosenblatt’s paradigm of efferent and aesthetic reading practices. While an efferent reading stance is focused on decoding texts and the factual information they convey, an aesthetic reading practice attends to the words and symbols used, the personal connotations they hold, and the affective resonances they conjure. This analysis also draws from sociocultural theories of critical imagination (Vygotsky, 1978; Stetsenko, 2017; Pelaprat & Cole, 2011; Enciso, 2017) to consider how these two ways of reading digital news did (or did not) open new ways of imagining social worlds.

Data for this paper was drawn from an ethnographic (Blommaert & Jie, 2010) set of recordings and fieldnotes collected in this class four days a week over the course of the school year. Classroom events were selected in which the teacher intentionally incorporated news media (12 total events.) These events were transcribed and analyzed using discourse analytic tools, constructed from the theoretical frames above.

This paper presents four different events that represent larger patterns that emerged across this analysis. In the first two events, students were reading digital news articles (an op-ed critiquing Donald Trump and an article about facial recognition technology.) In discussions of these articles, the classroom teacher reiterated the importance of an efferent reading, focusing on factual realities, while students responded in aesthetic ways to how they felt while reading. In both events, students’ readings proposed alternatives to existing realities while the teachers’ efferent readings remained mired within them, closing down imaginative possibilities. In the second two events students discussed video media. The first, a documentary short, depicted the work of a community of quilters. And the second was a real time live stream of an eagle nest. In their discussions of these texts, students had the space to posit associative, affective aesthetic readings. These readings allowed them to read both these texts and their own lives in innovative, critical ways.

Digital news media is often incorporated into classrooms with an efferent focus on content. However these examples suggest that opening space for aesthetic readings of these texts makes space for youth to imagine their worlds otherwise, a key element of critical media literacy. This finding has implications for both how we teach and study the teaching of such digital texts.

Author

• Beth Krone, Kennesaw State University