Deconstructing Video Clips in Class

Abstract

Due to the recent decades of rapid digitalization digital multimodal texts have become increasingly common. Almost anyone can also produce, edit and publish texts which have resulted in an increasing neces­sity for critical literacy in order to handle texts in digital domains. The purpose of this article is to explore how students’ critical literacy can be developed through in situ classroom activities. Grounding the study in sociocultural theories of learning and the concept of critical literacy, a design research approach was adopted, and an intervention was jointly designed by the researcher and the teachers. In focus was a class of 14-15-year-olds who were involved in activities of deconstructing a video clip from a popular teenage online series. Through interaction analysis of the classroom observations, it became evident that, by means of a step by step lesson structure, opportunities arise for increasing students’ awareness of how modes function concurrently and carry both separate and interconnected meanings. Through this process, students also discovered that different modes can be contradictory, enabling enhanced critical analysis in their making meaning of the text.

Keywords

• critical literacy
• design research
• digital multimodal texts
• secondary education instruction