“At-Risk” Adolescents: Redefining Competence Through the Multiliteracies of Intermediality, Visual Arts, and Representation

David O’Brien

This work on exploring multiliteracies as a way to reposition at-risk adolescents is the result of a 4-year study with high school students and two school-based colleagues at Jefferson High School in Lafayette, Indiana, USA. The project has come to be called the Literacy Lab. While I worked with my school-based colleagues, Dave and Rebecca, in constructing and studying the project-based curriculum, I wrote field notes, videotaped student collaborators while they planned and produced electronic media, and talked with them daily as they worked. I transcribed selected lessons, collected student work, transcribed selected portions of videotapes, and collected digital versions of students’ multimedia productions. The field notes and taped records allowed me to document the activities the students engaged in. My colleagues and I also constructed academic and life histories of many of the students.

My conclusion from this work is that these adolescents are capable and literate if we view them from the perspective of multiliteracies in new times (Luke & Elkins, 1998). The negative way in which they are currently positioned is relative to a restrictive, singular view of literacy that privileges print. As our notions of what counts as literacy and text evolve, so should our conception of the value of working in media projects.

Within this broad multiliteracies perspective I focus on two views that recast literacies by foregrounding the ability to use and construct electronic media:

1. Intermediality (Semali & Pailliotet, 1999), the ability to read and write media that depends on facility in the use of a range of symbol systems (not just print)
2. The use of art and representation in which these adolescents’ media productions are viewed as public art which highlights their ability, insights, and innovation in representing and re-representating their world through media.

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Intermediality

Semali and Pailliotet (1999) define intermediality as the ability to work with diverse symbol systems in an active way where meanings are received and produced. This literate practice involves the ability to understand the power of media as well as the ability to explore the connections between one’s personal life and media. The at-risk adolescents with whom I have worked, kids who are characterized as “struggling” with print, are challenged by decoding and encoding; they have limited word-recognition ability and use poor metacognitive strategies; they are not strategic. But they can master intermediality. They do so as a response to the way we typically position them as incompetent. And they do so naturally by embracing practices that enable them to define and assert their place in the mediasphere and show how they can use media to construct their own and others’ worlds.

The literate practices they embrace require facility with a variety of symbol systems and privilege no single medium -- although the kids prefer visual forms, particularly scanned images and video. Their ineptness with print literacies and their “deficits,” learning disabilities, and processing “disorders” are often minimized or subordinated to the substance and intent of their expressions, their finely tuned sense of audience, and their abilities to link their personal lives and feelings to the media and audience. In the rest of this piece, I will augment my thesis with descriptions of the media production examples of some of the Literacy Lab kids. The first example focuses on intermediality.

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The Case of Dan and His Diary of a Madman

Dan fit the typical profile of “struggling reader” in the Literacy Lab. He fell within the lowest 8 percent of reading ability in Jefferson High School’s 2200 students. At the time of this study, his reading level, as assessed by the statewide standardized achievement system, was about second grade, at least 7 years below where the state said it ought to have been. He had trouble decoding words and had little facility with word recognition; he read with frequent miscues that disrupted meaning and he made few corrections, indicating low comprehending patterns and poor silent reading comprehension. He understood little from his reading. In terms of “affective dimensions,” his interest in reading waned after the primary grades, and his engagement with reading decreased early in school. At the time he first started in the Literacy Lab, he had a positive attitude toward school as a place to socialize and meet friends, but a negative attitude toward academics, having failed at school for so many years.

And yet, Dan was able to craft a multimedia documentary about heavy metal artist Ozzy Osbourne in which he juxtaposed Osbourne’s mad musical image with a profile of a family man who struggled with person tragedies and triumphs. Dan constructed the documentary not knowing what a documentary was, and included scanned images of Osbourne album covers, an MTV interview with Ozzy, text from a variety of sources including Rolling Stone and Modern Guitar, and his own running narrative to accompany the images.

In contrast to his relative incompetence with print texts and print literacies, Dan was very competent, creative, and artistic with media literacies. He was adept at taking his ideas and feelings and representing them through authoring choices that indicated a keen perspectives on the audience and a genuine, contagious enthusiasm for a popular music and how he could re-represent it through existing media about it. It is apparent through his documentary that Dan, who was positioned as incompetent in terms of a traditional definition of literacy that privileges print, is articulate, creative, and even masterful with media literacies. He writes his world and experiences of heavy metal music, conveys his enthusiasm, and offers his critique.

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Art and Representation

In addition to being competent in the realm of intermediality, “at-risk” adolescents can be artistic, creative, innovative, and daring at using a variety of popular media. They use a variety of media texts, including video, images, and print, to represent themselves and their world intelligently (Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 1994); they are skillful and creative at constructing and interpreting a range of media texts, whether electronic, visual, oral, or cultural, using a variety of symbols and signs for conveying and communicating (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Hobbs, 1997; Semali & Pailliotet, 1999).

My perspective on art and representation comes from Becker (1997), an art educator, who draws on the work of Said (1994). Becker explores Said’s notion of artists as public intellectuals -- people with a vocation for the art of representing (or re-representing) reality through images. At the risk of contriving, I use art and representation as another position for defining the adolescents with whom I have worked for two reasons. First, like the stereotype of the artist as bohemian struggling to be heard, at-risk students, as marginalized persons within their school community, are longing to be read. Having failed with print media and narrow definitions of literacy, they have found new voice in the multiliteracies of representation through a variety of media texts. The roots of this longing can be traced backed to these adolescents’ typical positioning as failures, as “special” yet outside the school community, as striving to be accepted and acknowledged. Second, at-risk adolescents can be viewed as public intellectuals in our new times, as astute visual artists who are using creative approaches to address the complexity of their world and are solving problems that they pose through a visual medium -- whatever that medium my be. An example of this is the Violence Project.

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The Violence Project

In The Violence Project, students in the Literacy Lab collaborated to construct projects organized around a common theme: everyone was required to show how media portrayed violence that affected adolescents, and the students had to use a variety of media to show the impact. These students struggled with printed text. However, they articulately referred to images from a video to evaluate critically the power of the media to influence violent behavior in kids, while using their visual examples as one way to criticize the press. For example, they used their own media, juxtaposed against popular press pieces, to critique the press’s portrayal of the MTV cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-Head. They used images, sound clips, and print to critique popular films and music. In essence, they used media to critique media in reference to how it affected them. The media texts they drew from and created were among the most relevant and important in their lives.

Most of the students who worked on the Violence Project were similar to Dan. They had had little success with school-based literacy. Most struggled with word recognition and comprehension, and with writing tasks that required them to synthesize ideas. They often had difficulty with the process of inquiry in preparing for project construction and presentation, and with organizing ideas in print and writing using schooled grammatical forms. Yet these students were adept at crafting representations through their selection and juxtaposition of images from a variety of sources that targeted their audience very well. Their projects showed that they still struggled with print, but that they overcame some of the struggles when print served as one media text among many. And their discourse during planning, constructing, and critiquing worked to cement their ideas while it lifted up their confidence and sense of agency (Moore & Cunningham, 1998) in representing their ideas through this media art form.

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The Significance for Literacy and Media Education

I hope that sharing this work in the Literacy Lab will improve the quality of at-risk adolescents’ literacy engagement, self-positioning, self-esteem, and achievement motivation by beckoning teachers and researchers to question dominant beliefs and practices that privilege certain forms of literacy and print text in schooled literacy tasks (Barton, 1994; Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; O’Brien, 1998). Further, I invite teachers to question the implicit notion within school culture that media literacy, particularly critical media literacy that draws upon popular youth cultural texts, is antithetical to students’ academic growth and school-sponsored preparation for adult life. With these at-risk students, the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary.

Finally, through work such as this, and because of some educators’ willingness to explore electronic media curricula, I believe that we will see that socially and culturally mediated perspectives, rather than marginalizing these adolescents, can invite them to participate as capable and expert literate consultants. But we need to continue to encourage them to draw on their experiences and to participate within a community of peers in exploring those experiences if they are to help us construct a relevant curriculum (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 1994; Luke, 1997).

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References

Alvermann, D.E., Moon, J.S., & Hagood, M.C. (1999). Popular culture in the classroom: Teaching and researching critical media literacy. Newark, DE, and Chicago, IL: International Reading Association and the National Reading Conference.
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Alvermann, D.E., Hinchman, K.A., Moore, D.W., Phelps, S.F., & Waff, D.R. (Eds.). (1998). Reconceptualizing the literacies in adolescents’ lives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Barton, D. (1994). Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
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Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (2000). Literacy practices. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated literacies (pp. 7-15). London: Routledge.
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Becker, C. (1997). The artist as public intellectual. In H.A. Giroux & P. Shannon (Eds.), Education and cultural studies: Toward a performative practice (pp. 13-24). New York: Routledge.
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Buckingham, D., & Sefton-Green, J. (1994). Cultural studies goes to school. London: Taylor & Francis.
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Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2000). Multiliteracies: The beginning of an idea. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 3-8). London: Routledge.
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Dillon, D.R., O’Brien, D.G., Wellinski, S.A., Springs, R., & Stith, D. (1996). Engaging “at-risk” high school students: The creation of an innovative program. In D.J. Leu, C.K. Kinzer, & K.A. Hinchman (Eds.), Literacies for the 21st century: Research and practice (45th of the National Reading Conference, pp. 232-244). Chicago, IL: National Reading Conference.
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Hobbs, R. (1997). Literacy for an information age. In J. Flood, S.B. Heath, & D. Lapp (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts (pp. 7-14). New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan.
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Luke, A., & Elkins, J. (1998). Reinventing literacy in “new times”. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 42, 4-7.
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Luke, C. (1997). Media literacy and cultural studies. In S. Muspratt, A. Luke, & P. Freebody (Eds.), Constructing critical literacies: Teaching and learning textual practice (pp. 19-49). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
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Moore, D.W., & Cunningham, J.W. (1998). Agency and adolescent literacy. In D.E. Alvermann, K.A. Hinchman, D.W. Moore, S.F. Phelps, & D.R. Waff (Eds.), Reconceptualizing the literacies in adolescents’ lives (pp. 283-302). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
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New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92.
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O’Brien, D.G. (1998). Multiple literacies in a high school program for “at-risk” adolescents. In D.E. Alvermann, K.A. Hinchman, D.W. Moore, S.F. Phelps, & D.R. Waff (Eds.), Reconceptualizing the literacies in adolescents’ lives (pp. 27-49). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Said, E.S. (1994). Representations of the intellectual. New York: Vintage.
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Semali, L., & Pailliotet, A.W. (Eds.). (1999). Intermediality: The teachers’ handbook of critical media literacy. Boulder, CO: Westview.
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About the Author

David O’Brien has been a junior high reading teacher, a Title I teacher and project director, and a high school teacher-researcher with at-risk students. He is currently a professor of literacy and language education at Purdue University, where he teaches classes in adolescent literacy, qualitative research methodology, and technology in reading and writing instruction. He can be contacted at 1442 LAEB, School of Education, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1442, USA, or by e-mail at obrien@purdue.edu. Back to top

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Citation: O’Brien, D. (2001, June). “At-risk” adolescents: Redefining competence through the multiliteracies of intermediality, visual arts, and representation. Reading Online, 4(11). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/obrien/index.html

Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted June 2001
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232