Deficient "disadvantaged students" or media savvy meaning makers? Engaging new metaphors for redesigning classrooms and pedagogies
Date
2003
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Thomson, P.
Comber, B.
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McGill Journal of Education, 2003; 38(2):168-181
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Abstract
Students in disadvantaged schools are often perceived as lacking appropriate abilities, motivation, and academic gifts. As part of a university-practitioner collaborative project focused on literacy, information and communications technology, and disadvantaged school environments, student researchers made several short films about new technologies used in schools. We analyze the positive metaphors their short films elicited: apprentice theorists, wordplayers, novice film producers, novice researchers, and global communicators. Each metaphor illustrates ways in which students can meaningfully engage in learning. Understanding pedagogy as learning to produce knowledge is one way to disrupt the deficit discourse. We also propose two metaphors for the rooms where such learning might take place: as multimedia labs and as hyper-studios. All of these metaphors encourage us to believe that, like our film project, engaged learning occurs when young people's lives, knowledge, interests, bodies, and energies are at the heart of the classroom and the school.
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Copyright McGill University