Current educational systems primarily focus on the verbal and logicomathematical aptitude of students, thus neglecting the cultivation of visual literacy and critical literacy skills, although the ubiquity of images in school textbooks necessitates the inclusion of a 'visual grammar' meta-language in educational practices. The aim of the present paper is to present a teaching intervention for the teaching of literacy in English through the implementation of critical multimodal literacy principles in order to bridge the gap between schooled literacy and out-of-school literacies. The participants in the intervention are eighteen sixth grade students of an EFL classroom in a state primary school in Thessaloniki who managed to 'deconstruct' the depiction of superheroes/heroines in comic books or action movies, in an effort to represent them in a more humane and mundane way, where their superpowers are summoned to the advantage of a society in need. The overall organization of the instructional intervention is built on an introductory phase, a main phase and a follow-up phase. The analysis of the students' compositions relies on the application of the principles of critical visual literacy and the results display that, through the process of scaffolding, the students can reject dominant representations of power and reconstruct cliché identities by re-exploring preexisting roles. The end result, that is the classroom calendar compiled by twelve multimodal texts, manifests the students' skilful utilization of both visual and verbal semiotic resources in a balanced way, with a view to transmitting their social messages taking into account the broader social, cultural and political context within which power relations and social roles constantly evolve and are constructed.
In a world-order articulated by a plethora of scientific/technological data, selfhood remains more elusive than ever. Identity-representation undergoes multiple and often overlapping metamorphoses, while the sense of self seems to be entangled in a constant rite to being, instead of aiming at a definitive crystallization. The aim of this paper is to explore sites of social interaction/control and the environmental liminalities arising at the interstices between subjugation and freedom (exclusion and inclusion). Jimmy Santiago Baca's quasi autobiography Working in the Dark (1992) establishes the unnatural premises of a prison house as the locus for the birth of engaged poetry. This text rethinks the troubled relationship between Humans and Nature, and becomes powerful testimonials of discrimination and prejudice, as well as avowed commitments to an ethnic group's struggle to transgress prescribed modes of existence.
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