Monnin, Katie. “Developing and Envisioning a Critical Literacy Perspective in a New Media Age.” The NERA Journal 44.1 (2008): 39-46. Web. 15 January 2014.
The article looks at English Language Arts (6-12) and its place in critical literacy studies. Monnin gives a history of critical literacy in the ELA classroom. She introduces the Great Books movement, intended to show students how great people thought and encourage them to think that way, too (40). Then NCTE advocated for a wider range of readings (41). She then moves through the New Critics and reader response theorists. She argues that critical literacy in ELA is multimodal (42). Then she suggests an assignment, which is describing character development in a new media composition. Her second assignment is to infer themes. Basically she says to treat new media as if it were old media and let the students read/watch it and write the same sorts of compositions they were writing.
Since I know that character development is not taught or learned well, due to the large number of searches on TCE for this information, I am skeptical of the first assignment and as she does not develop any new media centric assignments, even as simple as show how the music contributes to whatever or examine the costumes for xxx…, I would say this is neither useful nor credible. Thankfully my blog is self-published, so null findings still go up.
RrNm