Since my first introduction to the Atlantic Provinces Education Foundation (APEF) and its documents relating to English language arts curriculum, I have found several of its themes and controversial directions interesting to explore in both my teaching and my research. Media literacy or cultural studies, critical literacy, and, especially, the integration of technology in all aspects of English language arts curricula continue to be my areas of research interest. In this article I will talk about and illustrate these issues in relation to the preparation of English education students here at Memorial University.

I am an advocate of the new English language arts curriculum. I approve of its six strands and its six essential graduation learnings. This does not mean that I de-emphasize the importance of reading and writing, but rather that I believe these abilities can be taught and practiced in relation to different texts and literacies. If I were to point out a weakness in the APEF English language arts curriculum, it would be its attention to critical literacy, and it is thus the point on which I will focus.

Although I am relatively new to the Newfoundland/Labrador context, I understand the fear of de-emphasizing reading and writing, the traditional literacy. Nonetheless, I will argue that it is important to expand our notions of texts and literacies, in both cases broadening our meanings of the terms to include a wide variety of forms and new media. And it is equally important to build on the cultural strengths Newfoundlanders and Labradorians do have – like a strong oral tradition. What I will attempt to demonstrate is that there is an inter-linking of these texts and literacies that will continue to support the acquisition and practice of traditional literacy while offering additional abilities important for students entering a new century.

To return for a moment to the teaching of education students: I often remind them and myself that they’re learning for the long term – possibly 35 years in the teaching profession. I need to get them to look forward to new curricula and trends in English language arts learning rather than back to their own literacy learning experiences (although I encourage this kind of reflection for a different reason). The same holds true with school children. We hear a lot about lifelong learning, and of course that’s true of all education – we apply the knowledge and literacies and abilities we acquire in all kinds of situations throughout our lives, and, in those situations, learn new knowledge and further develop and diversify our abilities. I believe the APEF document provides a framework and encourages the acquisition of a variety of literacies that will provide a solid base from which to learn new technologies in a future that promises to continue to change at a rapid rate.

One of the foundational assumptions of the APEF documents, in my view, is the expanding of notions and definitions of literacy. No longer are we to emphasize the reading and writing of only print texts at the expense of media and other texts. In response to new information technologies and computer mediated communications – to changes in both media and messages – as well as to the altering entertainment preferences of the students we teach, most new curricula (for example, the APEF, the Western Canadian Protocol, and British and Australian curricular documents,) are re-defining literacy for the English language arts (ELA) classroom. The APEF, for example, tells us that:

Although I do not particularly endorse the role of schools as preparing students to “function … in the workplace,” I do believe that reading the world is as important as reading the word, to paraphrase Freire (Freire and Macedo, 1987, pp. 30-32) and believe it is important to prepare students to be informed citizens who read media and other texts competently and critically, for social and political purposes.

Trend (1997) highlights the importance of incorporating other literacies when he says, “Young people are alienated by the disparity between the type of literacies sanctioned in school and the literacies they practice in their daily lives” (p. 139). New curricular documents are redefining literacy, texts, and goals. They have recognized that media and technology figure ever more prominently in the lives of students we teach, and that the nature of English language arts instruction and curricula needs to expand to incorporate the forms, genres, conventions, and structures of a wider variety of texts.

As members of a global society at the end of the twentieth century, we have come to expect that information will be shared with us through a wide variety of media –billboards and bus boards, television programmes of all kinds, vanity license plates, computer programmes, Web pages and other Internet sites and technologies, newspapers and magazines, memos, tabloids, graffiti, digital signboards, and on and on. The impact of new technologies on mass communication media is highly familiar to us as citizens. In response, curricular foundation documents also expand definitions of texts. The APEF, quite explicitly, notes:

Curricular documents, as should be expected when our North American world runs on technology, indicate that our students should learn to use technology “to meet their own information needs” (APEF, p. 40). The APEF describes a series of competencies for information retrieval and processing (p. 40) and provides examples of Technological Competence, one of six Essential Graduation Learnings (p. 9). In the Western Canadian Protocol (WCP), grade 9 students will “prepare and use a plan to access, gather, and evaluate ideas and information from a variety of human, print, and electronic sources (p. 36). Just as instruction and learning in reading and writing does not end when we learn to decode and encode meanings in words, so are there conventions and rules and competencies we may acquire with greater fluency and discrimination in relation to other forms of literacy. These are defined in the APEF documents as speaking and listening, viewing and other ways of representing, in addition to reading and writing. I advocate the use of computer technologies as production tools that assist students in discovering and understanding some of the conventions and techniques that define the craft of other creators of texts. Just as we learn and teach literary conventions, we can analyze and reproduce the conventions of other kinds of texts. Thus I argue that, within a critical pedagogy, a variety of computer technologies can be used to achieve some of the outcomes defined in the APEF documents. Thus, at this point, I think I should comment a little more on critical literacy and pedagogy.

By now one of the phrases that has become common in English language arts circles and in the APEF document is “reading the word and the world.” Freire’s phrase, as it is often translated into practice, means that students are challenged to read the texts around them as well as print texts, that they bring their own experiences to bear on the more formal texts with which they engage, and that they engage in a critical examination of their own oppressions. The objective is to resist cultural reproduction and to bring “students’ cultural capital – i.e. their life experience, history, and language’’ to canonical and popular texts, so that they are “able to engage in thorough critical reflection, regarding their own practical experience and the ends that motivate them in order, in the end, to organize the findings and thus replace mere opinion about facts with increasingly rigorous understanding of their significance” (Freire and Macedo, 1987, p. 148).

These conceptions of critical literacy developed, for me, from Louise M. Rosenblatt’s work (1938, 1970). With others, she argued for reader response, for replacing the customary model of literature study which features teacher-directed discussion of specific "revealing" passages in the literary text and privileged meanings, with activities that encourage students’ exploration of their own responses to the text. This rejection of “new criticism” approaches de-emphasizes the author's intention and craft; it also mitigates against teaching strategies that intend to get at the meaning to focus attention, rather, on the life experiences and cultural knowledge and beliefs that students bring to the text and which give rise to their individual and shared responses.

Such discussions can lead into different kinds of critical investigations. On the one hand, students might further investigate how their identities, relationships, goals, beliefs, and values are represented in their responses, and further, how these identities and values are constructed in the texts they read or consume in school and other social venues. This can lead into the kinds of activities commonly undertaken in media literacy and cultural studies. The APEF uses the phrase “writing and other ways of representing” to suggest, among other meanings, that a variety of technologies and kinds of texts can be created to convey ideas, responses, knowledge, and understandings; in fact, to represent identities, meanings, values, experiences, ideologies, and cultures. And our engagement with others’ texts is, in effect, a process of understanding their representations and making them meaningful to ourselves. In critical literacy, we are helping students to question those representations, to dig into them to uncover seemingly hidden meanings and ideologies; to make explicit the assumptions and beliefs that underlie the surface meanings of both the texts they create and the texts they read and view. To accomplish these ends, we may acquaint students with the conventions of various media as I have just suggested; involve them in semiotic analyses of signs and their iconic, indexical and symbolic meanings; engage them in intense hermeneutic readings; and challenge them with deep viewing of television programmes and commercials, to name a few possibilities.

A second sense of critical literacy is often found in the writing of British and Australian educators who use conventional, even canonical texts, as well as new media texts, to explore with students the ways in which texts themselves position us to accept and reproduce particular meanings (Peim, 1994; Morgan, 1997). Thus the work with students involves examining texts to see how particular genres, narrative modes, literary devices and styles themselves encode meanings. It also involves encouraging resistant readings and investigating the gaps and silences in texts that we are positioned to fill in culturally ordained ways. In a moment, I will show some texts produced by education students to demonstrate this kind of work.

Critical literacy and pedagogy, however, “incorporates both critical thought and critical action” (Myers, Hammett, and McKillop, 1998, p. 77), as readers of the world and the word develop and act on critical projects that are transformative, emancipatory, and democratic (Freire and Macedo, 1987). If we take seriously the APEF outcome that includes citizenship (see page 6), we will recognize the role of critical literacy in the preparation of informed, active citizens. The APEF English Language Arts document urges that students “use their own voices to understand, shape and share their worlds” (p. 42). Freire and his interpreters argue that literacy learners should be offered opportunity and assistance in reading, discussing, and writing their own worlds and lived experiences, as I said earlier. In addition, however, the political goal of conscientization is important. It is achieved as learners, collaboratively and individually, recognize oppressions and as they acquire and use literacies to name the world, that is, to write and thus transform it (Freire, 1970). In classrooms, we may engage students in discussion, in “critical and liberating dialogue” (Freire, 1970, p. 52) about histories and representations that may not on the surface seem to oppress them, but which do so in leading to the oppression of others. The construction of particular versions of masculinity and femininity are examples of such oppressions, but they can include other racial, class, and ethnic prejudices, as well. We can encourage them to publish texts that use writing and other ways of representing to explore representations and to share personal histories and cultural and other identities. Lewis (1995) provides us with another fine example. His students at Jimmy Sandy Memorial School in the “isolated sub-Arctic” (p. 30) community of Kawawachikamach, Quebec, used Internet, multimedia, and other technologies to collect and audio record, write, illustrate, and publish community legends and stories, thus preserving Neskapi traditions and cultures. Not only do such activities preserve culture, they also open up histories for examination. Students who have engaged in these activities can, I think, begin to “understand the connections between their identity formation and subjectivities and their positioning in sociohistorical discourses,” and, further, can “envisage and work toward preferred futures (Singh and Moran, 1997, p. 126). Furthermore, they can articulate these preferred futures and begin to take steps toward their realization through projects of possibility (Simon, 1987). In venues like the Internet, students can publish their points of view and advocate kinds of social action that they deem appropriate in the given situation. It is important that they not feel powerless and frustrated to influence their worlds, but that they learn to act in socially just and appropriate ways to bring about change. This challenge is a radical and dangerous-sounding one; it does not have to be. It can involve creating informational Web sites, writing letters and electronic communications to those with institutionalized power, creating alternative and changed images with the same technologies that originated them, and so on. Which leads me to the uses of technologies in doing English language arts.

Most of my research in using new technologies for knowledge construction and literacy learning, including media literacy, has been with secondary English education students at The Pennsylvania State University. There, my colleagues and I asked our students to consider the usefulness of computer technologies in teaching English language arts by experiencing those possibilities themselves. Here at Memorial University, Dr. Barrie Barrell and I have continued that approach.

One of the obvious uses of technology is to have students discuss texts, issues, and ideas on electronic bulletin boards or asynchronous Web conferences or through email. Web conferences generally involve a student raising a question or issue for discussion with some explanatory comment, and other participants contributing to any particular thread of conversation that appeals to them.In high schools, such conversations might be initiated in relation to media or other texts students are studying as individuals, small groups, or as a class.One common text or multiple texts with similar themes or other commonalties might form the basis for the Web conference/discussion. One grade 12 teacher with whom we were working had each student present speech on a topic of interest to her or himself. Fellow students each wrote and emailed a response to the speech, with discussion of points raised as well as other kinds of comments; the speaker responded to each student and then provided the class with a composite of the important ideas raised by classmates. These activities use technology to satisfy some of the instructional demands set out in the speaking and listening strands. They also require reading, writing, and synthesis or précis. My colleagues and I have asked students to compose Web pages that represent knowledge, ideas, readings of texts, and challenges to an Internet audience. These Web pages, as well as sharing students’ perspectives, invited debate and response from others, thus stimulating further reflection.

We also asked students to compose several different hypermedia projects. Students were able to learn quickly how to digitize audio, video, and images; how to create movies from scanned images and digitized audio; how to replace the soundtrack of a digitized video clip with a different audio track; how to manipulate and change existing images; and how to combine any and all of these products with print text in a hypertext programme or Web site. The hypermedia were composed to represent readings of and reactions to text sets (a variety of books on related themes read by individuals or small groups); to explore critique representations of race, gender, and so on in the media; and to represent meanings of classic texts like Shakepeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In hypermedia, not only can a number of different media be combined in one space or window, but also hyperlinks between spaces can take reader/viewers instantly to related sites.Several spaces can be kept open on the computer screen so that several different texts can be viewed together. This juxtaposing of texts invites discussion of the questions, challenges, and conflicting views they represent individually and in relation to one another.

In addition to the computer technologies discussed above, there are other technologies already familiar to teachers in schools: cassette recorders, school PA systems, radio broadcasting booths, video cameras and VCRs, and computer desk top publishing programmes that produce newspapers, brochures, and magazines.All of these media permit students to represent and share ideas, knowledge, and identities. And all of them can be used within a critical pedagogy to achieve the outcomes envisioned in the ELA curricula.

Let me talk a bit more about the Romeo and Juliet hypermedia. By gathering together a variety of media culture texts on related themes (suicide, first love, parent-child conflicts, despair, etc.) the students were constructing knowledge about those themes and about Shakespeare’s play. Hypermedia, which allows several texts to be available or open on one screen, makes explicit the connections between ideas and texts. Rosenblatt (1978) declares, “We are not usually aware of the organizing or constructive process – the fitting together and interpretation of visual clues – which results in the act of perception” (p. 50). Similarly, we are not always concretely aware of the previous readings, events, and experiences that we bring to a “new” text in order to make meaning of it. This intertextuality is made explicit in hypermedia when several windows are open on the monitor screen; in each space or window, too, several different texts can be displayed: print text (the Wordsworth sonnet, the student’s personal reflection (M.A.M), an introduction to the Styx song “Babe,” and the quicktime movie that shows scenes of ninth grade students reading Romeo and Juliet. The soundtrack is the Styx song: “Babe I’m leaving / I must be on my way … / I’ll be missing you” (Styx, 1987).These textual explorations of various moments of despair can lead the students to a deeper understanding of the Shakespeare text. Although, in composing hypermedia, they start with the Shakespeare text and bring in the media culture texts to illustrate it, in reading Romeo and Juliet they, rather, bring understandings formed in multiple experiences with media culture to the classic text.

In the Suicide strand of the hypermedia, clips from several videos and quotations from poems, novels and songs illustrate this: My Darling, My Hamburger (Zindel, 1969), “Wanting to Die (Edmund Vance Cook), “Grind” (Alice in Chains, 1995), Dead Poets Society (Weir, 1989), and several others have provided the students with understandings of suicide.Similarly in the Balcony, First Love, and Parental Conflict strands, popular culture texts demonstrate the variety and number of perspectives on the themes shared in songs and films that students bring to their reading of Shakespeare. What I am saying here is that we do not need to abandon our traditional texts altogether: media texts bring new understandings to those texts; and conversely, those traditional texts bring new perspectives to media texts if we begin with them. To digress and return to my political/citizenship theme for a moment: if a unit of activities begins with representations of a current media controversy, students could go from there to find historical literary protest texts (perhaps with each student finding and linking a different one in a common Web site). This is a useful activity students might well be motivated to undertake. Other follow-up lessons could invite response to and critique of classmates’ texts or even the identification of points of similarity to create additional (internal) links between specific words, and images, etc., in the various texts. Some of these canonical texts would be easily available online. (I am thinking, for example of Milton’s sonnet “To the Lord General Cromwell” or Swift’s satirical essay “A Modest Proposal” about eating Irish babies.)

In another way, hypermedia facilitates knowledge construction. Students may also learn first hand about the construction and manipulation inherent in media texts.Combining scanned images and digitized audio tracks (including their own tape-recorded commentaries), students create movies. They also use image software to scan, crop and manipulate images, including their own digital photographs; they use sound software to digitize, crop, and change audio; and they use video software to work with video clips.In composing the Romeo and Juliet hypermedia, students learned how movie soundtracks affect and change the mood, reactions, and meanings of the visual images and scenes.They experienced the effects they can create in viewers when they replaced, with several different songs, the original soundtrack of the Juliet’s funeral scene in Zefferelli’s (1968) movie version of the play. Alice in Chains’ “Grind” (1995) and “Girlfriend in a Coma” (The Smiths, 1987), when used as soundtracks for the scene, seemed to completely change our reaction to and interpretation of the scene. Our attention was focused on different visual images, and the visual images appeared to be different (movement seemed faster, and so on.) By constructing these effects themselves, students will have a more practical understanding of how professionals achieve the effects that move them as audiences.

These are a few illustrations of the constructivist learning possibilities of hypermedia and other technologies. As others have argued, computer technology supports learning in a variety of ways that empower students as producers of knowledge (Spender, 1995, Jonassen, 1996; Jonassen, Peck, and Wilson, 1999). It can also support learning within a critical perspective used to support the accomplishment of critical literacy objectives laid out in the curricular documents. The APEF, for example, includes a section on Equity and Diversity that tells teachers that "...the curriculum must...":

There are other challenges to teachers within the realm of critical literacy/pedagogy included in the document. Some of the activities I have already described illustrate how computer mediated communications technologies can be used by students to exchange points of view.These same technologies can be used to access diverse viewpoints on a global scale. Additionally, Internet technologies can be used to access, deliberate about, and research multicultural and world literature within a critical pedagogy. My colleague Barrie Barrell and I (Hammett & Barrell, 1999) have also used the possibilities of Internet technologies to encourage secondary English education students to represent their cultural identities and resistant readings of E. Annie Proulx’s (1993) novel The Shipping News. In a site entitled Newfoundlanders Read The Shipping News (http://134.153.160.118/educ4142/index.html), the students shared their reactions – not always favourable – to the novel, interpreted and explained different passages, provided additional information, and represented their own identities, cultures, and communities to illustrate or challenge various themes and ideas in the novel.

Such generative processes as the construction of Web pages in response to readings of other texts does involve students in “critically examin[ing] different experiences and perspectives within social and cultural contexts” (APEF, p. 42).In their Shipping News Web pages the students explored connections between a variety of texts, building an intertext that exposes ideas, representations, readings, and reactions for critique. By publishing their work (and their identities) on the Internet, and by inviting responses, the students are potentially discovering how their texts affect an audience. They are engaging in a unique social and cultural experience.It is social at the point of creation, as the students’ work collaboratively on the class Web site to represent readings that are themselves social engagements (with E. Annie Proulx and her text participants or characters), and at the point of publication, as the students both add their e-mail addresses to invite response and post their pages on the World Wide Web. It is critical in the sense that students adopt agentic rather than objective positions in relation to texts; that they intervene in, interpret, and reinterpret texts; and that they contest the positions and ideologies offered by texts. Students learn that experience is mediated by authors of print and other media texts, and they learn that they, too, can mediate their own and others’ experiences.

These are a few of the possibilities I see in the APEF English Language Arts Foundation document. Studying media and using new technologies should pose no threat to the traditional literacy of reading and writing. As I have demonstrated and as new Canadian curricula have recognized, the study of all these texts and literacies can be integrated to both complement and challenge one another.