Libro

MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE
Strategies, Debates and Good Practices
from society, but rather we can proceed from the idea that ‘society inhabits each
individual’” (p.6). Here lies the importance of teaching through pop culture,
connecting theory and practice and the world of the classroom with students’
experiences and lifestyles. Henry Giroux and Roger Simon (1998) maintain, “it
is precisely in the relationship between pedagogy and popular culture that the
important understanding arises of making the pedagogical more political and
the political more pedagogical” (cit. in Giroux; McLaren, 1989, p.238).
Understanding the politics of how meaning is produced and transmitted through
pop culture coincides with a project of civic education where students may think
about their roles as citizens and participants in their political and cultural
spaces.
In political theory, the concept of citizenship is related to membership, rights
and responsibilities in a particular political community. In mediated communities
made available through the Internet, cultural citizenship is related to
membership to both deterritorialized and physical spaces, rights of freedom of
expression and information, shared cross- cultural practices and the
responsibility of being self- reflexive in knowledge production. Hermes (2005)
defines cultural citizenship as “the process of bonding and community building,
and reflection on that bonding, that is implied in partaking of the text- related
practices of reading, consuming, celebrating and criticizing offered in the realm
of (popular) culture” (p.10). The videos presented embody the notion of cultural
citizenship in both the ways they were produced and shared and the responses
they received by the world. As a matter of fact, YouTube often allows people to
both upload and share their cultural artifacts on the Internet and respond to
what is being shown to them. Newark State of Mind, for instance, has been
viewed until today by 457.089 people and has received 1.384 comments.
Reading the comments and critically analyzing what people (citizens of Newark,
visitors or members of the participatory culture) have said about this city allows
us to participate and reflect on that process of bonding and community building
that Hermes locates as the basis of cultural citizenship. Through YouTube,
people worldwide and from different cultural and social backgrounds respond
and comment without restraints of time and space. Their dialogues, sharing of
ideas and experiences are an act of cultural resistance and may mobilize
collective actions to speak differently and creatively about issues in the world
and find solutions to them.
Abowitz’s (2000) definition of ‘resistance as communication’ is in line with our
notion of cultural resistance. “As an impetus of social and political
transformation, resistance communicates; that is, it is a means of signaling,
generating, and building dialogue around particular power imbalances and
inequalities” (p. 878). Effective media literacy strategies must promote dialogue
and critical engagement with learners. We acknowledge that digital divisions,
social struggles, injustices, discrimination and exclusions exist both in offline
and online spaces. We are also aware that valorizing individuals’ lived
experiences, bringing them into the classroom and learning to engage with
difference in a productive way will encourage people to build dialogue around
inequalities and power imbalances. As bell hooks (1994) maintains, “if
experience is already invoked in the classroom as a way of knowing that
coexists in a non- hierarchical way with other ways of knowing, then it lessens
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