Contexts, Curriculum, Visual Texts and Literacy in Picturing a Writing Process
In our urban setting and in many others around the United States, where high school dropout rates regularly exceed 50% and the majority of adolescents are living in poverty, youths’ criticisms of school and their disengagement from traditional pedagogies suggest a void in the traditional high school curriculum (which many students perceive as irrelevant to their lives) and a reasonable but often deterministic perspective on school (Bridgeland, Dilulio, & Morison, 2006; Orfield, 2004). Literacy seems critical. Recent research reports confirm that waning middle grades literacy achievement is a predictor of these students’ later choices to drop out of high school (Children’s Defense Fund, 2005). Moreover, in urban communities such as ours, with a history of high dropout rates, poor schools, and traditional literacy curriculum, school failure spans generations, creating what would seem the new “normal” (Anyon, 2005). TSE allowed us to explore our students’ relationships to school and school literacy and to reconsider our pedagogical and curricular practices.
“New” literacy theorists have reclassified the notion of “literacy,” expanding it to embrace many texts with which youth are familiar, including Cartier Replica Watches cultural media and visual, electronic, and musical structures (Street, 2003). Some investigators have illustrated how teachers might incorporate these aptitudes into their English teaching practices (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2004), but such considerations remain the exception rather than the rule (Brozo & Hargis, 2003). These perspectives on literacy indicate that youths’ expertise with visual texts—including photographic images— might provide new angles on adolescents’ connections to school, as well as foundations for teaching methods that advance their appreciation for literacy activities (Marquez-Zenkov & Harmon, 2007). We posited that if these explorations of students’ relationships to school were conducted by adolescents themselves, using visual media with which they were familiar, they might inform our English teaching practices.
Current research reveals that visually based research techniques provide data not available via language-centered procedures (Raggl & Schratz, 2004). The photo evaluation approach has been employed to engage students in analyses of classroom realities, providing insights into youths’ perspectives on their schooling and life experiences (Marquez-Zenkov, 2007).
Photovoice calls on subjects to take and Cartier Replica react to images in response to relevant social concerns; popularized by programs like the Oscar-winning documentary Born Into Brothels, about children of sex workers in India (Ewald, 2001), this technique has roots in “photo elicitation” efforts around the world (Harper, 2005). This visual studies literature reveals connections between image-based elicitation techniques and traditional literacy skills (Hibbing & Rankin-Erickson, 2003). Relevant visual texts—particularly those produced by students—motivate youth to engage in reading and writing tasks, and adolescents’ proficiencies with these texts promotes their sense of writing and reading efficacy (Van Horn, 2008).
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