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:

          … what it means to be literate will continue to change as visual and
     electronic media become more and more dominant as forms of
     expression and communication.  As recently as one hundred years
     ago, literacy meant the ability to recall and recite from familiar texts
     and to write signatures.  Even twenty years ago, definitions of literacy
     were linked almost exclusively to print materials.  The vast spread of
     technology and media has broadened our concept of literacy.  To
     participate fully in today’s society and function competently in the
     workplace, students need to read and use a range of texts (p. 1).

 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:
 

          In this document, the term text is used to describe any language event,
     whether oral, written, or visual.  In this sense, a conversation, a poem,
     a novel, a poster, a music video, a television program, and a
     multimedia production, for example, are all texts (p. 1).

 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...":
 

           •    critically examine different experiences and perspectives within
        social and cultural contexts

           •    examine ways in which language and images are able to create,
        reinforce, and perpetuate gender, cultural and other forms of
        stereotyping and biases

           •    use their own voices to understand, shape and share their worlds …
        (p. 42)

 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.                            

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