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32 Rethinking Models of Collaboration in Critical Pedagogy: A Response to Stonebanks 379

Can we say which of these two behaviors is better suited to support the development
of critical thinking and valuing indigenous and other nonmainstream knowledge
systems? Surely, it depends on how we leverage those experiences.
When I recently addressed the topic of service learning in my undergraduate Social
Studies Methods course, nearly every student had interesting stories to tell about their
community service experiences, including several cases of international development
work. In our current, top-down standards-based system, we tend not, however, to do
a good job of connecting those service experiences to challenging intellectual goals.
How do we leverage these young people’s strengths and their own cultural resources,
rather than falling into a deficit-based critique of their shortcomings or limitations? As
a starting point, I would propose two approaches: a focus on critical media literacy to
promote the issue of critical thinking and a focus on place-based education to promote
the issue of indigenous and other nonmainstream knowledge.
Stonebanks alludes to the role that corporate advertising plays as an influence
on today’s young people and their identity formation. While advertising is certainly
not new, it has reached a new level of sophistication in leveraging both technological
and marketing innovations over the past decade. Youth are typically immersed in
these advertising media but rarely have the opportunity to learn to deconstruct
corporate messages. Critical media literacy, promoted by Goodman (2003) among
others, is grounded in the idea that schools are missing a vital opportunity to engage
students in intellectually challenging and socially valuable activities by critiquing
modern media.
We currently have a substantial disconnect between youth language and commu-
nication, which are media rich, and school language and communication, which
are media poor. However, the engaging media to which youth gravitate are also
predominantly commercial in nature and are aimed at promoting consumerism and
thus need to be critically examined and their messages deconstructed. Critical media
literacy, as I have been practicing it with my preservice teachers, has three main
components: (a) examination of the evolving technologies that promote and facilitate
communication and by extension, promote marketing, and advertising; (b) examina-
tion of marketing and advertising strategies for conveying a message (such as through
the use of emotion) and how these strategies are used in corporate marketing
through the deconstruction of multimedia advertising; and (c) youth production of
media that makes use of both modern technologies and advertising strategies to
promote a message of the students’ choosing on a topic related to social justice/
social change. This critical media literacy can be readily connected to both teacher
education and science learning. I have my preservice teachers produce and dissemi-
nate multimedia advertising to promote a service-learning project in which they are
involved as part of a class assignment. For example, one group of students recently
produced an ad campaign to promote a series of family science workshops for
parents and students they worked with at a local middle school. Such an approach
builds on my preservice teachers’ strengths and acknowledges media as a dominant
feature in their lives but adds a turn that emphasizes and promotes critical thinking.
The second approach I would propose is a focus on place-based education to
promote the value of indigenous and other nonmainstream knowledge. Stonebanks’