Abstract
In this chapter, we look at critical literacy at MediaClub, a programme of afterschool media production activities for 9- to 12-year-olds. MediaClub was part of the URLearning (URL) research project (2010–2014), which was conducted in a high-diversity, high-poverty elementary school in the state of Queensland, Australia. The Club was designed to skill interested young people up as digital media experts for the literate practices of their homes, communities and classrooms. We anticipated that it would be a space where the receptive and expressive dimensions of critical literacy flourished. Here we look at what happened in practice, drawing implications for literacy education at a time of increasingly prescriptive, if not scripted, pedagogies.
It’s November of 2012, and it’s been another warm day in late Spring. It’s an hour and a half past the end of the school day, yet a dozen or so students are hanging out in the computer lab under the supervision of a small group of research personnel, working on the video games they are creating. Two of the adults and three students are outside, engaged in an interview about their experience of MediaClub this term. Drawing on a wry sense of humour when interview questions verge on being a tad too serious, the students try to convince the interviewers that the major attraction of MediaClub is the spread of sandwiches and fresh fruit offered up as afternoon tea. After some shared laughter and a bit of friendly banter, one lad goes on to say, ‘Lately we’ve been working on Scratch, making our own games and using different stuff, motion like and sensing and making the sprite move and all that….’ He then beckons to his buddy who continues: ‘Um, so far we’ve been using Scratch, the computer, where we make our own video game, or, you can basically create whatever you want on it… Now we’re practising on a game called Pong. It’s an old school game…We’re learning, we’re watching [tutorials] on video, online, and it was pretty fun’.
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Acknowledgments
In this chapter, we report data produced as part of an Australian Research Council-funded project. We owe a debt of gratitude to the MediaClub students and families, volunteers, assistants (Mary Buto and Katherine Doyle), artists and teachers. We also thank the teachers, students and administrators at the school and the parents and Indigenous elders. We acknowledge the work of our research colleagues on the project: Vinesh Chandra, John Davis, Michael Dezuanni, Amanda Levido, Allan Luke, Kathy Mills, Wendy Mott, Diana Sesay and Annette Woods of Queensland University of Technology and John McCollow and Lesley MacFarlane of the Queensland Teachers Union.
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Dooley, K., Exley, B. (2015). Afterschool MediaClub: Critical Literacy in a High-Diversity, High-Poverty Urban Setting. In: Yoon, B., Sharif, R. (eds) Critical Literacy Practice. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-567-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-567-9_4
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