Ernest Morrell Quotations

Critical Media Pedagogy: Teaching for Achievement in City Schools

Todays youth spend the majority of their waking lives as consumers and producers of media.
This interaction has both positive and potentially harmful effects. On the one hand youth are
acquiring sophisticated media production and distribution skills that could be useful to
transition to academic achievement, professional employment, and civic engagement in the
21st century (Gee, 2003; Hill, 2009; Hobbs, 2007; Kress, 2003; Morrell, 2008) (p. 2).
Youth participation in media production gives them leverage and voice on a historically
unprecedented scale. This media production also facilitates the development of more literate
and thoughtful participants in our democratic process (p. 2).
These media often portray negative images of city youth that influence the beliefs of the larger
public, who then enact or call for hateful and harmful policies against these youth (Giroux,
1996) (p. 3).
By critical media we are calling for an educational process that makes young people aware of
the role that media play, both positively and problematically, in shaping social thought (Kellner
& Share, 2007) (p. 3).
A critical media perspective also enlightens students to the potential that they have, as media
producers, to shape the world they live in and to help to turn it into the world they imagine.
Youth attending secondary school in the United States need to be made more explicitly aware
of their relationships with the media, and they need an education that imparts the skills they
need to powerfully consume and produce new media. We are calling this process a critical
media pedagogy, which will foster academic literacy development, academic achievement, and
civic engagement in city schools (p. 3).
When youth use media tools to investigate media production to inform their own
counter-media production, now thats something (p.5).
The multicultural, multimodal society of the 21st century requires high levels of literacy for
those who want to be civically engaged (Alvermann, 2001) (p. 5).
incorporating education into academic subjects holds the possibility of increasing motivation
and engagement to participate in core academic content (p. 7).

The lives of Americas city youth are saturated with multiple forms of media that include film,
music, television, mobile media apps and video game soles; taken as a whole, youth spend the
majority of their waking lives as consumers and producers of media (Ito et al., 2009) (p. 7).
The power of new media in the lives of young people cannot be denied, and therefore, media
education needs to be more effectively implemented into K-12 curriculum in the United States
(Beach, Campano, & Edmiston, 2010; Kist, 2005) (p. 7).
the democratizing nature of media as facilitating modes of production and distribution of
youth counter-narratives (p. 7).
drawing on new media literacies increases student motivation and engagement and makes
connections between out-of-school literacies and classroom practice (p. 9).
Sociocultural theories of learning:
Learning must be: Active Authentic, Participatory, Empowering (p. 16).
Traditional education often encourages working-class students to participate as uncritical
consumers of state-sanctioned knowledge (Anyon, 1981; Freire, 1970) (p. 17).
Reading in a traditional sense:
Reading email
Reading content on websites
Reading electronic books on tablets
Reading popular culture
Cyberpunk culture/hacking (pp. 18-21)
Infrastructure Design, Programming
Digital filmmaking
Music production
Art production (pp. 24-27)
we were also remided of the generativity and everday brilliance of young people, and of
their power to weave together the narratives of their lives with multimodal threads of texts,
still images, film, and music (p. 27).