Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

The article “I See, I Do: Persuasive Messages and Visual Literacy” by Lesley S. J. Farmer that my group and I are presenting on offers a number of strategies for teaching digital literacies, cautioning that the media that surrounds us in the technological age is in large form visual and without the proper tools to deconstruct this form of media, we might find ourselves falling prey to the content of visual material. Farmer writes, “While persuasive images surround students daily, yonng people often overlook the subliminal impact of those messages. Making visual messages an explicit academic inquiry helps students pay more attention to their environment and provides them with skills to respond critically to those visual images” (n.p.). Teaching students how to analyze advertisements and raising awareness to different strategies for telling whether an advertisement has been constructed are interesting and definitely important to the modern students’ education, but I wonder whether its possible to always bring a critical awareness to our new (online) visual landscape as well as to the print images that we observe (and absorb) daily. When taking the time to analyze a select image, perhaps it is possible to pick out where the image’s focus is, and which part of the image appears most prominent (in the article Farmer suggests using principles from visual art to determine the way in which the image is constructed and how the image’s deliberate construction is supposed to appeal to the viewer as consumer), but how about when images are coming at a viewer very quickly and he/she does not have time to dissect the construction of the image and its potential subliminal effects on him/her. This article helpfully sheds light on viewing single images, but does not thoroughly address the wash of images we often get when browsing online landscape or when bombarded with advertisements.

Also – when on my practicum, I did a lesson on analyzing advertisements, and although it was fun and the students really enjoyed it and great discussion came out of it, I’m not sure that the lesson left enough of an impression on students to make analyzing ads in their daily life their new raison-d’être. In hindsight, I should have done a follow-up or assigned an additional take-home part of the project where students had to seek out an ad and analyze it themselves (we did our work in a group), to extend the practice into their daily lives. I’m wondering whether anyone has any other suggestions as to how to bring a classroom practice of analyzing ads into students’ daily life?

By: Ilana Finkleman