Talking with Fish: An Arts-based Retrospective of Media Literacy in Teacher Identity and Pedagogy

Abstract

“We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish.” This adage, long attributed to media scholar Marshall McLuhan, invites us to consider worlds shaped by media as invisible environments. Fully immersed from dawn to dusk, we may struggle to identify or clarify the boundaries between the physical and the digital. In media literacy, we employ McLuhan’s adage to invite learners to see media as constructed environments and to engage in ecological thinking about the messages we consume, create, and share. With the fish as an animal guide, my article offers an arts-based research retrospective composed of original visual works, or a/r/tography, that chronicles my investigation into the multiple and complex dimensions of media literacy teacher identity and pedagogy. My work has implications for those interested in media literacy educator identity, media literacy pedagogy, and arts-based research methods.

Keywords

Media Literacy, Teacher Identity, Arts-Based Research, Visual Journaling, A-r-tography

Introduction: Talking with Fish

My purpose in preparing this retrospective was to represent the process of one media literacy educator grappling with her experiences of teacher identity and pedagogy across twenty years. To narrate my journey, I employ the fish as an animal companion or guide along with related symbols, such as water and swimming. Each section provides art imagery with a brief academic explanation punctuated by fish-related phrases or language. 

In harmony with the fish as a symbolic or metaphoric animal guide, I use arts-based research (ABR) methods, specifically visual journaling through found poetry and blackout poetry. Found poetry and blackout poetry are related methods of recombining words from existing source materials in order to create something new. Found poetry generally involves highlighting, shuffling, and reordering words or phrases to create a fresh piece of prose, while blackout poetry typically involves redacting words from an original source text– using a black pen, marker, or paint– so that the words left behind and visible create new meaning. Both methods are popular in visual journaling and expressive arts (Redmond, 2024). 

As source material, I used published works I have authored about my research examining media literacy in curriculum and pedagogy. Figure 1 shows the physical process of cutting up printed copies of my articles in order to create images that comprise the new data generated for this article.

Through the creation of found and blackout poems, I distilled my understanding of what it means to be a media educator. I talk with fish.

Painting Fish

My experiences in public education span teaching visual arts and media studies across early elementary school, middle school, high school, and college/university. Throughout each phase of my career, I have used visual journaling as a method in order to brainstorm, plan, develop, process, and reflect on curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment decisions aimed at advancing teaching and learning experiences for my students. In this way, I engaged in arts-based research (ABR) long before I knew it was a methodology. 

Arts-based research (ABR) is a field of qualitative methods that integrates visual arts and artistic practice into research, thus expanding both research process and representations (Leavy, 2015). While traditional forms of research may limit the nature of inquiry, interpretation, and representation, ABR cultivates “ways of knowing that directly involve the student, researcher, group, or person in some form of direct artmaking as the primary mode of systematic inquiry” (McNiff, 2011, p. 385). As both an educator and an artist, I have found that ABR allows my research to be expressed through non-alphabetic language, enabling deeper construction of understanding and meaningful, nuanced engagement with audiences. “To appreciate how artistic experience can inform educational research requires an understanding of how making art is both a process of inquiry and a process of creating meaningful forms” (Leavy, 2015, p. 253). This article features the interconnected processes of inquiry and creation of visual works. In this way, the work also exemplifies a/r/tography, “a form of practice-based research within the arts and education… a research methodology, a creative practice, and a performative pedagogy that lives in the rhizomatic practices of the liminal in-between” (Irwin, 2013, p. 199). Unlike traditional research pieces that strive to establish static meanings, this article exemplifies a “living inquiry” about, with, and through practice (Leavy, 2012, p. 8).

Visual journaling is both an arts-based research and a/r/tography practice that uses a sketchbook, art journal, or other diary as a creative space where one may blend and combine combinations of images and words from a variety of sources– paintings, drawings, doodling, magazines, newspaper clippings, articles, found materials, and more– to create imagery. Visual journaling is a strategy for recording, documenting, processing, and interpreting experience (Redmond, 2024). I use visual journaling as my primary method of art-making and think about my journal as a reflective, generative space for active meaning-making. It produces a graphic personal and professional record that facilitates my scholarly teaching. 

Figure 2 is an example of a visual journaling spread that I created using torn photocopies of pages from Fiore and McLuhan’s (1967) book, The Medium is the Massage, and Patricia Leavy’s (2015) book, Method Meets Art: Arts-based Research Practice. I also included collage elements and painted into the spread, adding imagery such as a fish, planet earth, a smartphone, and a question within a speech bubble. Selected text from McLuhan describes “the poet, the artist, the sleuth” as those who “sharpen our perception” and “confront environments.” This spread hints at the primary role of the media literacy educator as one who illuminates media and technology as invisible environments, as one who swims against currents of passive consumption in order to cultivate active, critical thinking, inquiry, engagement, and creative expression about, with, and through media. The idea of the media studies teacher as swimming against something– curriculum, pedagogy, institutional context, professional training, popular culture, or some other invisible current– is noted in Buckingham’s (2014) work investigating the identities of media educators and is an important component of understanding media literacy and media literacy teacher identity. I paint fish.

A Fish Out of Water

Buckingham (2014) documented that media teachers have been relatively marginalized within their professional work environments. He defines three dimensions that impact their professional identity: personal, institutional, and subject-related. These categories offer a useful lens for understanding the forms of dissociation I experienced as a media literacy educator. The multifaceted and hybrid nature of my identity is further compounded by my artist identity. Figure 3 provides a found poem from a chapter in which I delve into this complexity, investigating both the professional value and abundance of interconnected expertise alongside the discordant experience that has unfolded throughout my career, including the tension of simultaneously belonging and not belonging (Redmond, 2024). 

To elaborate, I began my teaching career as a middle and high school art teacher where I integrated media literacy as part of the standards-based visual arts curriculum. Unlike most media educators, I had received formal training in media literacy (Buckingham, 2014) and my media literacy program is chronicled in Considine (2004), which examines the question of who studies media literacy and why. Yet as an art teacher trained in media literacy education, my success was mixed due to questions of subject-related context. When engaged in media literacy learning, I felt like students were not getting enough art curriculum. When fully focused on the arts, I knew media literacy was unlikely to show up elsewhere in their schooling. Although the two fields are interconnected, the silo-ed nature of K-12 curriculum created a situation in which neither subject area received full attention.

Later, upon moving into a university faculty role, I was responsible for a standalone media literacy course and experienced a new kind of dislocation. Within my Department of Curriculum and Instruction, media literacy had little presence in programs, coursework, or faculty expertise. While there was a single educational technology course requirement for pre-service teachers, the prevailing philosophy emphasized technical skills (i.e., computer literacy) rather than the critical, theoretical questions that define media literacy– specifically, questions about constructedness, representation, audiences, power and profit. This left me without a clear scholarly community and reflected both a subject-related and institutional separation.

My sense of isolation deepened as my teaching load shifted to media studies and communications courses populated almost entirely by communications majors rather than pre-service education students. My communications students—studying Advertising, Public Relations, Journalism, and related fields—were housed in the Communications Department. This was not only a different department, but also an entirely different college, reinforcing another layer of institutional distance. At the same time, although I continued to identify as an artist, I had no affiliation with the Art Department and limited opportunities to teach or collaborate with art faculty. This added a dimension of personal separation. In these ways, I’ve embodied a hybrid academic identity as a media educator and experienced marginalization in all three areas identified by Buckingham (2012). 

Returning to ABR, I came to employ visual journaling not only as a research method, but also as an identity management strategy with the potential to bring harmony to the multiple and intricate positionalities and identities in my professional work. The video provided in Figure 4 features a timelapse video of a journaling spread where I explore identity further.

This spread offers an example of how visual journaling became an identity management strategy for puzzling out how my position and placement within the profession impacted my experience as a media literacy teacher– with implications for teaching, research, and service. Although subtle, notice that the spread begins with a magazine clipping of the word “invisibility.” I then work with a poem by Mary Oliver titled “Dreams,” emphasizing selected words to create the phrase, “buds of dreams leap awake to a sense of your imagination and how it feels when all the locks click open.” I follow the poem by layering in the green mountains of Western North Carolina’s “lost province” to represent geography as compounding isolation. I also apply a photographic image transfer of a tree to represent growth. The spread concludes with the found text, “How She Overcame.” I am a fish out of water.

Guiding a School of Fish

Alongside my own interest in recording experiences and processing my thinking visually via journaling, media literacy is a field that also attends to multimodality. Media literacy scholars have routinely created content that includes not only written and printed words, but also non-alphabetic, multiple modes of communication like photographs, comics, video, audio, and web-based materials. Moreover, media literacy involves teaching, building, practicing, and refining the skills of accessing, analyzing, and evaluating media alongside the skills of creating and communicating in all forms of media. Incorporating digital media production– or media making– into my curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment was always an aspect of my work. However, when I was assigned my first dedicated media literacy class, I wrestled with how to incorporate creative expression into my pedagogy in a sustainable, meaningful way (Redmond, 2022a). Figure 5 describes this challenge, recognizing the technical hindrances alongside issues related to prior knowledge and the time required for production projects. I guide a school of fish.

Learning to Swim

Although a complete media literacy curriculum necessitates media making, integrating a comprehensive digital production element takes time, training, resources, and– again– time. Semester after semester, despite an already crowded curriculum, I worked to incorporate counter narrative storytelling and ad-busting via manipulation of source content using Adobe’s Photoshop and Premiere Pro – along with free tools like Adobe Spark (rebranded as Adobe Express) Padlet, Canva, and Anchor (rebranded as Spotify for Creators). Some students were already versed in various technical processes while others were hampered by a lack of prior knowledge and experience. Most of all, the analytical and critical imperatives of the course became overshadowed by a focus on tools, devices, and software. Figure 6 is a precursor to my early research that asked, “How might visual journaling serve as a creative production opportunity for students in a media literacy course?” (Redmond, 2022b). 

The spread used torn pages from Rose’s (2016) Visual methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials collaged with an image of a hand holding up a phone and patterned collage elements. I added in a monochromatic color scheme in orange paint along with large and small spirals and the stamped text: “The MEDIA is YOU.” My hope was that visual journaling would provide learners with a creative, media-making opportunity in which the very act of making would illuminate the power of media. I am learning to swim.

The Sound of Splashing

Initially, I revised the production components of my curriculum to encompass visual journaling as a non-digital media making approach. Beginning with the provision of traditional collage materials (i.e., magazines, scissors, and glue), I invited students to remix readings assigned for homework with images they found in the magazines during class. Figure 7 shares the results of an early visual journaling exercise I conducted with my media literacy students (Luetkemeyer et al., 2021, p. 411). 

The early experience of inviting students to engage in visual journaling as a way of making meaning in the classroom showed me the value of somatic experience. The sounds of my classroom “shifted from the gentle hum of small-group conversations to a concert of noises– crinkling paper, tearing pages, clicking scissors, squeaking pens– and the excited chatter of focused discussions” (Luetkemeyer et al., 2021, p. 417).

Figure 8 shows four examples of visual journaling from my classroom-based practice. I provided time and materials during class, and offered a specific prompt designed to spark students’ engagement, metacognition, and creative thinking. Notice the variety of media, from collage to marker to pen-and-ink. Observe the energy of the pieces, the authenticity of brush stroke, line, and color.I heard the sound of splashing. 

Don’t Stop Swimming

While my research revealed answers about academic identity and media literacy pedagogy, more questions arose – including questions about where opportunities for digital expression would reside in my course, or any media literacy course, and about how my students, increasingly of a digital participatory culture, could express their synthesis of learning more naturally. While visual journaling appealed to many, others were uncomfortable using physical art materials. As a teacher, I sought to create a pluralistic approach to learning that would enable multiple languages, or modes, for student expression. But how? Figure 9 shows a visual journaling spread I created to illustrate what I was learning, namely that expression was vital for learning; that expression brings vitality to human experience, as all people are creative (Hobbs, 2017). 

This journaling spread includes found words and written-in prompts for expression including: “you can sing, write a story, visual poems, comics, photo journal, podcast.” All of these enable “dreaming” and are “brain on” learning strategies. More found text reveals that I had “listened” and “learned.” I had heard the “sound of art.” But what was next? What was needed to be fully inclusive? Don’t stop swimming.

Breathing Under Water

A pivotal turning point in my practice was developing a pedagogy of creative expression called remix journaling. With inspiration from the scholarship of Jenkins and colleagues (2009) on participatory culture, I developed the pedagogical concept of remix journaling (Redmond, 2022b) to open pathways for my digital learners. Remix journaling was simply a reconceptualized version of visual journaling that invited students to create physical and/or digital content, re-combining images, words, popular media, and more, blending infinite materials into original representative works. This approach facilitated access and enhanced opportunities for students to express their learning because it was flexible, adaptable, and personalizable. It enabled not only more authentic expressions of student learning, but also engagement as students expressed heightened interest in seeing what classmates created and how they created them. Figure 10 features examples of students’ remix journaling images, including works created exclusively with digital materials as well as blended works that combined      physical journals with digital photography. Figures 11 and 12 are examples of GIFs that blend digital media and movement, layering complex ideas within a single, moving image.

Not only did students employ a wide range of media forms– from GIFs to photography to digital collage, poetry, emoji, and more – but they also used symbols and metaphors in captivating ways. One student’s algorithmic slot machine effectively showed the exploitive effects of scrolling on our dopamine levels while the “dinner” of media effects demonstrated how various apps might shape particular feelings, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors. These works showcase creative thinking in action. 

The Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) defines creative thinking as “both the capacity to combine or synthesize existing ideas, images, or expertise in original ways and the experience of thinking, reacting, and working in an imaginative way” AAC&U, n.d.). Creative thinking thus is characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking, and risk taking. By incorporating creative thinking into my instructional practice and students’ learning experiences, remix journaling expanded their capacities beyond mere illustration and into the arena of innovation. Students’ remixes showed intellectual risk-taking and an interest in finding novel ways to make connections and, ultimately, to imagine, re-imagine, and communicate through fresh eyes. 

Through my professional practice, I have identified creative thinking skills as vital to a complete media literacy education. Yet a focus on creative expression and maker practice as both purpose and pedagogy in media literacy has weakened since the 1960s – and even then it was narrowly defined as “media production” via film/video (Hobbs & Jensen, 2009). Creative production as a form of assessment is sometimes viewed as non-rigorous, or even superfluous, and is often considered the purview of media arts courses rather than something integrated holistically into teaching and learning in media education. Benjamin (2024) cautions “…writing off artistic interventions as mere spectacle or performative dismisses how creative works can spark counter-imaginaries that have the potential to dream bigger and materialize into concrete changes” (p. 99). I’ve learned that my experience as a media educator may thus not only comprise someone who works at the edges of defined curriculum, but also at the boundaries of pedagogy itself. Buckingham (2014) found this in his interviews as well, describing general perceptions of the media educator as a subversive, a pedagogical guerrilla, or an embattled educational revolutionary (p. 2). We are learning to breathe under water.

Swimming Upstream

From working in K-12 schools to teacher preparation to communications, I have seen media literacy spark inspiration and excitement among communities of learners of all ages, interests, and backgrounds. But I haven’t seen it scaled. I haven’t seen it secure a foothold in education. While many barriers exist, our teacher preparation programs generally lack comprehensive instruction or course work in media literacy, and this gap often follows teacher ed students into their K-12 classrooms (Culver and Redmond, 2019). Consequently, a narrow emphasis on critical thinking aimed at distinguishing fact from fiction may push out the media literacy that cultivates creative thinking, while that narrow approach itself is easily replicated by artificial intelligence. 

Returning to my initial purpose in this process-based a/r/tography illuminates the following question: where in the curriculum or pedagogy do expression and imagination reside? I find this question especially haunting in an age of machine learning and large language models. The work I’ve shared in this retrospective was enacted and generated before AI became a prevalent driver in pedagogical decisions, but I feel it has merit in addressing the current concerns. Benjamin (2024) urges us to consider: “What if imagination is not only a muscle we can stretch and strengthen, or a skill we can practice and hone? What if our imagination is also a sacred space where we can connect with ourselves, our ancestors, even future generations… a place where poetic knowledge can emerge? (p. 131). Will we – as teachers, learners, and scholars alike – become satiated with the synthetic products of artificial intelligence? Or will we feed ourselves something more nourishing, something more sacred?

My final found poem in Figure 13 was created from my chapter close-out for Power Lines: Connecting with Teens in Urban Communities Through Media Literacy (Anderson and Czarnecki, 2022). Along with finding a new poem in the prose, I also dripped acrylic paint between the words by watering down the paint and holding my journal sideways. This may represent the fluid nature of media literacy when aptly applied across the curriculum – or perhaps it symbolizes how media literacy facilitates seeing things from multiple perspectives? Maybe the water I used to loosen my paint points back to the McLuhan adage that opened this piece? Or, just as likely, it simply felt good to play with the paint. If you try it, you might find it playful, sacred, and nourishing. 

My prose ends by suggesting that media literacy cultivates knowledge of three valuable gifts that I name as attention, imagination, and free will. What are the relationships among attention, imagination, and free will? How do they show up in media literacy curriculum and pedagogy? What is their role in contributing to a technologically-just future?

As these new questions emerge, I am reminded that a central aspect of arts-based research and a/r/tography is that “meanings are never static, the pathways of communication among a/r/tographers, readers, and the products of a/r/tography remain open” (Leavy, 2012, p. 8). In this way, my work here has no neat and tidy closing– it remains open. 

In speaking about creativity and art in her book, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert concludes that “What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all” (2015, p. 273). From my experiences over twenty years, I think this may be true with media literacy as well. I have come to believe that media literacy matters tremendously… and it doesn’t matter at all. In any case, to be a media literacy educator is to tread the watery edges of curriculum, to roll in liminal spaces, to undulate in a wide-open sea of blended pedagogies– whether that’s in K-12, higher education, communications, or beyond. To be a media literacy educator is to swim upstream. We are swimming upstream. 

References

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