“They don’t see us otherwise”: A discourse analysis of marginalized students critiquing the local news

Abstract

At the end of the fall semester, a fight broke out at a high school in the southeastern United States, a fight large enough to be covered by the local news. In this article, we analyze two data sources related to this event: one local news report and a discussion of that news report that occurred in an Intensive Reading class at the school. Intensive Reading was a remedial course designed for students who had failed a required standardized literacy assessment. In this article, we draw upon discourse analysis and critical race media literacy to argue the following: 1) the local media representation presented a version of events that used coded language and visual images to create a figured world in which students of color were silenced and a master script was perpetuated; and 2) students, having been taught critical literacy (in the form of multiliteracies pedagogy) and media literacy, resisted the media representation and constructed a counter-story based on their own figured worlds. Our analysis also supports the call for critical race media literacy pedagogy in schools.