ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how teachers’ collaborative inquiry into Critical Media Literacy (CML) pedagogies can lead to reconceptualizations of what it means to teach and learn literacies in middle school contexts. A team of three teachers from a Chicago public middle school and a university researcher met biweekly during one school year to study CML through individual and collaborative action research inquiry projects. In presenting snapshots of our group discussions and classroom activities, we describe how collaboration mediated competing goals, values, and practices—creating opportunities for learning as we tried to implement CML in teachers’ classrooms. Stemming from our collaborative inquiry into the complex commitments of critical literacy, tensions between critical deconstruction and creative production as goals for literacy practices were central to our group discussions and teachers’ classroom projects. We argue that the collaborative negotiation of such tensions served as spaces for learning in which teachers developed new conceptual resources for changing their teaching in ways that led to more humanizing pedagogies.
