ABSTRACT
This chapter will detail the values and value systems that guide our approach to transformative media pedagogy. Transformative media pedagogies embrace and build on the development of power through designing experiences that embraces standpoint—an individual-orienting philosophy born from the realization of a structurally enforced shared social location, defined by empathy for others and a focus on what bell hooks calls transgression. Teaching to transgress focuses on learners’ understanding their social, cultural, and political spaces in the world and utilizing their immediate resources—human and technology—to transform or reform situations of oppression. This approach also embraces the Freirean concept of critical consciousness, which focuses on reforming a “banker model” of education as transmission in favor of pedagogies that help those under the control of power structures to produce an effect, to have influence, and to make a difference. This chapter will use these approaches to outline the contours of transformation and locate them within media pedagogies. In this shift, we will apply the notion of critical consciousness not simply to enacting human capacity to challenge power structures, but more so how that young people’s experiences with media environments and infrastructures can lead to critical consciousness.
