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20
Angeles area of southern California. The school is situated a few blocks away from a
major street full of strip malls and fast food chains and a few blocks north of a large
public recreation area. The school is designated as a Title I school, which indicates
that most of the students it serves come from low-income families. In order to
accommodate the large student body of more than two thousand students, the school
is divided into small learning communities (SLCs). The teachers who with whom I
worked were faculty members of the Communication and Technology House, a SLC
with a focus on supporting student achievement through the use of technology.
Through extended participant observation, I have been able to understand the
context in which the students with whom I worked developed literacy and production
skills in a way that would be impossible with short-term exposure or different
methods. My extended participation in the school community, as well as my
relationships with the students and teachers in the classrooms in which I observed,
have yielded rich information about the political, cultural, and social aspects of
teaching media literacy—what Buckingham and Sefton-Green describe as the
“messiness” of the classroom setting.33 The description and analysis yielded by this
data allows me to present a more complex picture of teaching and learning through
media education at this particular historical moment to complicate the binary of
technological determinism and cultural populism that exists in much of the existing
media literacy literature.
Object Description
| Title | Kids as cultural producers: consumption, literacy, and participation |
| Author | Stephenson, Rebecca Herr |
| Author email | rherr@usc.edu; bhs@hri.uci.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Communication |
| School | Annenberg School for Communication |
| Date defended/completed | 2008-08-25 |
| Date submitted | 2008 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2008-10-17 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Banet-Weiser, Sarah |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Gross, Larry Seiter, Ellen |
| Abstract | This dissertation looks closely at the practice of digital media production within a group of special education students and their teachers. Using ethnographic methods of extended participant observation and semi-structured interviews with students, teachers, and parents, along with textual analysis of students' media projects, this work examines the types of learning that emerge from making media at school and the ways in which that learning relates to media and technology use in everyday life. Over the course of one school year (2005-2006), the students who are the focus of this dissertation undertook eight different multimedia production projects, ranging from designing PowerPoint presentations to digital video production and stop-motion animation. Through media production, the students found opportunities to practice traditional and digital literacy skills as well as to explore issues of identity and self-expression.; This dissertation provides empirical support for recommendations made by several media literacy scholars to include media production as part of critical media literacy curricula and contributes a unique case study -- one situated in special education -- to a growing body of work on digital literacy. Three interdisciplinary themes--consumption, literacy, and participation -- are used to organize the description and analysis of the students' media production activities. These themes connect the specific production that took place in the classroom to larger discourses about youth, media, technology, education, and access, working to complicate existing constructions of young people as either helpless victims of manipulative media or naturally savvy media and technology users. Instead, this research emphasizes that the relationships kids have with media and technology are complex, dynamic, intrinsically linked to their identities as consumers and participants in society. Media literacy is thus theorized as a tool for understanding and controlling consumption, participation, and the construction of young people as both current and future citizens. |
| Keyword | media literacy; media production; special education; middle school; digital media |
| Geographic subject (city or populated place) | Los Angeles |
| Coverage date | 2005/2006 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m1674 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Stephenson, Rebecca Herr |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Stephenson-2393 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume29/etd-Stephenson-2393.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 25 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 20 Angeles area of southern California. The school is situated a few blocks away from a major street full of strip malls and fast food chains and a few blocks north of a large public recreation area. The school is designated as a Title I school, which indicates that most of the students it serves come from low-income families. In order to accommodate the large student body of more than two thousand students, the school is divided into small learning communities (SLCs). The teachers who with whom I worked were faculty members of the Communication and Technology House, a SLC with a focus on supporting student achievement through the use of technology. Through extended participant observation, I have been able to understand the context in which the students with whom I worked developed literacy and production skills in a way that would be impossible with short-term exposure or different methods. My extended participation in the school community, as well as my relationships with the students and teachers in the classrooms in which I observed, have yielded rich information about the political, cultural, and social aspects of teaching media literacy—what Buckingham and Sefton-Green describe as the “messiness” of the classroom setting.33 The description and analysis yielded by this data allows me to present a more complex picture of teaching and learning through media education at this particular historical moment to complicate the binary of technological determinism and cultural populism that exists in much of the existing media literacy literature. |
