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Media and theory through the writing process.

Article Excerpt
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 the manner of the bulimic. Utilizing concepts from Levi-Strauss, Whorf, Bahktin, Kristeva, Foucault, and Roland Barthes, this essay theorizes about an applied pedagogy that moves students from the 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 the 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. The results of the large-scale National Writing Test attest to this outcome. The results of the test, administered to a representative sample of 19,000 twelfth-grade students by the 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 the 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 the decline in writing. The 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 the work that's expected of them," according to Gaston Caperton, the president of The College Board.

Designed to develop the latent writing and critical skills of students, I offer up an educational exercise that refocuses the relationship between media and critical theory. Although I work in sociology and criminology, these basic principles apply across the 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 shapes 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, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that language "shapes" perception. The stronger form claims that language constitutes the ground for how we perceive "the real." For example, Whorf reports that the Inuit of Alaska have twenty-one...

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