Media and Theory Through the Writing Process

Abstract Fostering critical and literate habits of thought requires that teachers move beyond using learning strategies that compel students to binge and purge information in manner of bulimic. Utilizing concepts from Levi-Strauss, Whorf, Bahktin, Kristeva, Foucault, and Roland Barthes, this essay theorizes about an applied pedagogy that moves students from position of subjugated vassal and passive knowledge vessel to an active and engaged intertextual creator. As an application of theory, a discussion of a media-based assignment follows. Background Often, educational practices emphasize due deference and imitation. From an early age, many students are taught not to love learning for its own sake, but primarily for externally defined rewards. Students are exhorted to make straight As and to exhibit appropriate masks of docility. Educational strategies that exclusively stress these qualities are focused primarily on social control. While developing a type of tractability, though, teachers, students, parents, school boards, and even politicians frequently mistake short-term memorization for ability to create, apply and learn. By overemphasizing standards based on recitation and recognition, we have produced a generation of college students who may be obedient but poorly equipped educational consumers. results of large-scale National Writing Test attest to this outcome. results of test, administered to a representative sample of 19,000 twelfth-grade students by National Center of Education, tells us that twenty-six percent of twelfth-grade students do not write at a basic level of competency. Fifty-one percent write at minimal basic level of competence, while only twenty-four percent are rated as proficient or advanced. Not surprisingly, twelfth-grade scores in reading, math and science have fallen in tandem with decline in writing. conclusion of educational professionals is unsurprising: The twelfth grade scores are a real indication that students aren't ready to go to college and do work that's expected of them, according to Gaston Caperton, president of College Board. Designed to develop latent writing and critical skills of students, I offer up an educational exercise that refocuses relationship between media and critical theory. Although I work in sociology and criminology, these basic principles apply across curriculum. Theories and Tactics I begin by showing students that language does not function as a clear pane of glass to an objective, taken-for-granted world. Rather, language how people perceive and react to their world. To illustrate, I draw on Benjamin Lee Whorf's linguistic analysis of non-Western cultures. In its weaker form, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that language shapes perception. stronger form claims that language constitutes ground for how we perceive the real. For example, Whorf reports that Inuit of Alaska have twenty-one words for types of snowflakes, as well as other words for wet and powdery snow and snow with different crystalline patterns. Conversely, Whorf shows that Hopi language has no word for denoting a separate self, an I. Instead, Hopi self is part of an ongoing and non-linear temporal event. Enlightenment idea of the individual who is uniquely endowed with choice--a notion central idea to postmodern capitalist democracies--is alien to Hopi language, perception, thought, and action (216). Students, then, apply this insight to their own language by asking questions about how local discourses shape what is seeable, speakable and doable. process should lead them to ask how they have come to know what they know, and how discourses simultaneously enable and constrain thought and behavior. activity is an unannounced exercise in epistemological reflexivity. In S/Z, Roland Barthes discusses how, when a denotation fixes a dominant or primary meaning, result is often ruse or even fraud. …

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