Ways with Visual Languages: Making the Case for Critical Media Literacy

Teaching is a stressful profession. The causes are many but solutions are available to help the teacher cope. The author offers thirteen practical suggestions to manage stress.     

Critical Literacy,Disciplinary Literacy: Reading the Engineering-Designed World

Globally, many people spend most of their time interacting with the products of engineering design as they wear clothes, drink clean water, use transportation systems, and more. Given the omnipresence of engineering design, whose material results are felt daily in people’s lives, it seems especially important that students learn to recognize and question how certain designs promote the welfare and interests of some while remaining inaccessible to others. In this article, we outline a vision for critical literacy instruction in engineering that simultaneously incorporates and challenges professional standards. We—an associate professor of literacy, an engineer, and a teacher at an engineering-focused high school—illustrate how critical literacy instruction might be enacted in the context of engineering design instruction in high schools. We describe how critical literacy can complement disciplinary literacy instruction in engineering as students use critically-focused, disciplinary lenses to move toward social justice.     

归化、异化与读者反应

近年来,归化与异化在翻译界引起了很大的争论。有人提出翻译应当异化,但也有人认为译文不可避免地要归化。这两种观点在某种程度上都忽视了对读者反应的考虑。读者是一个动态的概念,译者既要使用归化法以迎合读者,也要使用异化法以提高读者。重要的是译者一定要在二者之间找到一个平衡点,以确保译作的最佳效果。     

种族特征、种族意识与族性认同:一个批判性的考察

种族特征作为一种生物学事实和群体性的身体标记,在远古的历史时代便导致排外心理和种族-文化交叠的种族中心论。从19世纪至20世纪上半叶,凭借体质人类学、人类遗传学和优生学的应用与滥用,种族主义成为一种系统的理论体系和行为方式。最近半个多世纪以来,经由文化多样性价值的确立和文化相对主义的广泛传播,则衍生了文化种族主义。尽管个体在其生命时间内无法摆脱种族的属性,但我们从种族特征和种族意识的考察中所获得的教益是,从属于＂人类＂的＂我＂的独特性比种族身份更重要、也更真实。     

Paulo Freire,Critical Literacy,and Indigenous Resistance

Using several case studies drawn from Freire’s cultural context and contemporary Canadian Indigenous resistance movements, this article questions whether a Freirean approach to critical literacy can work with Indigenous literacy needs without reproducing colonial power structures. It also seeks to examine current scholarship in the literacy education of Maritime Aboriginal people in Canada and to illustrate the need for critical pedagogies honoring multiple cultural literacies and ways of knowing among Indigenous youth.     

Visual Literacy and Visual Politics: Photojournalism and the 2004 Presidential Debates

While newspapers use conventional images to accompany reporting on presidential debates, the rhetorical aspect of these images is illustrated through an examination of the 2004 debates. In this essay, the author first establishes oppositional positioning and mirroring as visual literacy conventions that augment those previously identified by Paul Messaris in his examination of advertising images. Second, a critical analysis of the photographs depicting the first 2004 debate, in particular, demonstrates how photo editors deployed visual conventions that either intensified clash or neutralized candidate performance fragments to produce a false symmetry despite a discordant reality. In subsequent debates, however, many editors employed alternate visual conventions that provided an improved visual balance between fairness and accuracy.     

迈向批判性媒介素养:核心理念、争鸣、组织与政策

美国媒介素养教育并不发达,尤其是批判性媒介素养教育。批判性媒介素养有五个核心概念:非透明性原则、编码与规约、受众解码、内容与讯息、动机。目前,美国已有部分州在其教育标准中列入了媒介素养教育,教师培训却未能跟上,在媒介文化无处不在的情况下,美国需要实现批判性媒介素养的培养,以让学生认识媒介、利用媒介并超越媒介,使个体在社会中更好地发展。     

Computer Interfaces and Visual Rhetoric: Looking at the Technology

This article extends the discussion of visual hetoric to the writing spaces and iconic representations of computer interfaces. An examination of the interfaces of a word-processing and a page layout program for desktop publishing reveals the visual nature of the interface. This visual writing space, different from the blank piece of paper, can encourage and foster a writer's consideration of options for integrating visual and verbal elements into a text.     

Supra-Textual Design: The Visual Rhetoric of Whole Documents

Supra-textual design encompasses the global visual language of a document and operates in three modes: textual, spatial, and graphic. The rhetoric of supra-textual design includes structural functions that provide global organization and cohesion and stylistic functions that affect credibility, tone, emphasis, interest, and usability. Supra-textual rhetoric extends to other documents through conventional codes and through sets and series. Because writers may not control the end product of supra-textual design, intention may also be a rhetorical factor.     

Pre-K Music and the Emergent Reader: Promoting Literacy in a Music-Enhanced Environment

Emergent literacy may be nurtured in an early childhood environment that integrates literacy experiences with meaningful music activities in which young children develop skills necessary for success in both areas simultaneously. Early childhood educators can develop the knowledge and skills needed to bring music into the classroom as an engaging and stimulating element of literacy education.     

The Modes of Visual Rhetoric: Circulating Memes as Expressions

The speed, scale, and shape of digital circulation pose numerous challenges for rhetorical analysis that seeks to analyze image-texts in context. This paper develops a framework for the rhetorical analysis of Internet memes through the concept of modes. Analyzing memes requires a shift in focus from the actual (texts and contexts) to the virtual (the capacities for affect and affection structuring an encounter). What makes such memes recognizable and, hence, circulable is a shared, virtual mode structuring all subsequent actualizations. The examination of Fail/Win demonstrates that the analysis of modes can be assisted by a number of rhetorical concepts as long as modes are understood as collective, emergent expressions. It also shows that the Fail/Win mode is better understood not as the representation of specific rhetors but, instead, as an expression of control society that advances both a dystopian view of humans reduced to performing rote operations and a utopian, ideological gesture promising that success remains possible nevertheless.