RESEARCH ARTICLE CRITIQUE



Research Article Critique

Research Article Critique

“The writers are getting kind of desperate” makes a case for young adolescents' readiness to engage in critical media literacy activities based on their existing understanding of television programs. Fisherkeller illustrates this readiness through analysis of observations and quotes from her research of middle school students in an urban middle school in New York City. For 18 months in the early 1990s Fisherkeller conducted ethnographic research as a participant observer. She used interviews, observation, surveys, home visits, and work samples to study students' television viewing habits, preferences, and understandings.

Based on this research, Fisherkeller published a dissertation and two other articles (1995, 1997, & 1999) and a book, Growing Up With Television (2002). In this article she uses the data, as well as references to related research, in three ways. First, she asserts that a complete literacy curriculum today requires inclusion of not only print media, but of film, video, and new media; Fisherkeller focuses on television because of its ubiquitous presence in the lives of her informants. Second, she illustrates how young adolescents have an existing rudimentary literacy in television media upon which further understanding can be built. Finally, she makes suggestions for how literacy educators can include media literacy in their instruction.

Fisherkeller's purpose in this article is to persuade her audience, presumably educators and those making decisions about education, that young adolescents both need and are ready for media literacy instruction in order to have functional literacy in society. In reexamining her qualitative data, she seeks to prove that middle schoolers' current understandings of television prepare them for a media literacy curriculum. More fundamentally, she proposes that media literacy is an essential component of modern literacy.

She comes to this study from a number of theoretical perspectives, most prominent of which are cultural studies and social constructivism. Fisherkeller describes her research as akin to early research in print literacy, and suggests that media literacy is part of a natural evolution of such. Indeed, one of the great insights of the article comes in her raising the question that, while many students have at least a basic understanding of the cultural and industrial role of television in our society, are they “making such real-world connections about the role print literacy plays in contemporary life?” This connection between print and new media literacy is carried throughout the article, and supports the idea of building on the understanding that students already have, that exists in their interactions with one another and with their families, to promote new learning in the classroom. There is much to be learned from studying children and the ways that they relate to and understand their culture and its representations. Fisherkeller notes that “literacy is knowing how to participate in the discourses of society.” Television, she states, is one of those societal discourses.

One of Fisherkeller's primary subjectivities, related to her cultural studies lens, is the “Empowerment I.” She views media literacy instruction as a tool for empowerment of young adolescents, ...