"We need to talk about Brazil": Critical Literacy & the use of images

Anyone who is not yet aware of the protests and police violence of the past few days in Brazil, notably in São Paulo, Rio and Brasília... is obviously living on another planet and has no internet connection or TV/Radio... so they probably aren't reading this blog either. The picture above was taken in Germany, just one of several European cities where public attention is being drawn to a complex set of issues that I'd like to discuss in this post.

For a very brief account of what happened during Saturday's inaugural game of football for the Confederations Cup, held at the new and absurdly expensive National Stadium (the most expensive ever built, anywhere in the world), click here.

After seeing images of shocking police brutality against completely unarmed and largely peaceful protestors, (who were trying to raise awareness of the corruption and inadmissible use of public funds to pay for stadiums and other preparations for large sporting events, like the Olympics and FIFA world cup), I was shocked to find that early this morning, on a local news programme, the largest and most influential TV station in Brazil, GLOBO, was being pimped out to the local governor, Agnelo, for the transmission of blatant lies and cynical self-promoting propaganda.

Peaceful Protests in Brasilia

Police firing rubber bullets into the crowd

Agnelo claimed that police had merely 'accompanied' the protests (from a distance!) in order to 'protect' citizens... and that they only acted when protestors tried to break into the the stadium. This is a blatant lie, but fortunately, images (especially video) do not lie... and there is no shortage of footage showing excessive use of force by police on peaceful demonstrators. 

So where am I going with this? 

Well, in addition to simply venting my anger at the way the whole incident was handled by the police (first) then by the press... and expressing my intense disgust at how the Brazilian government can spend billions on building stadiums (not to mention the millions that we all know have been diverted to assorted pockets in and out of government circles), my other aim with this post is to draw attention to the importance of developing critical literacy in our students.

As educators, we have a responsibility to ensure that 'the news' is not taken at face value, without judgment or critical analysis about where the opinions expressed and 'versions' of the truth are coming from.. and why!

A lot has been written about Critical Literacy in ELT and during my stint as Director of English for the British Council in Brazil (2007-2011), I was fortunate enough to have close contact with a number of scholars in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, who have become specialists in this topic, but for a brief intro, see this definition and explanation of the concept, with downloadable materials at http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/file-share/critical-literacy-elt

One way to help our learners (or trainee teachers, for that matter) to access different versions of  'the truth' is by the use of powerful images, like the ones in this post, but there are thousands more to be found on the web.

Upon putting-together a training session recently, I delved into some of the possible ways of exploiting images (and reasons for doing so) in connection with another interesting movement in our field... that of 'high-demand ELT' (Scrivener & Underhill, 2013).

Jim Scrivener asks the following questions:

Are our learners capable of more, much more?

Have the tasks and techniques we use in class become rituals and ends in themselves?

How can we stop “covering material” and start focusing on the potential for deep learning?

What small tweaks and adjustments can we make to shift the whole focus of our teaching towards getting that engine of learning going?

I would like to suggest that a great way of doing this is through the use of images, followed-up by asking the right questions and creating a space (and conducive environment) for learners to truly interact and share their personal views/feelings on a particular topic. The kind of feedback the teacher (and peers) give is also key... we should strive for more challenging, meaningful feedback after truly LISTENING to each other, rather than simply producing a generic and standardised 'Very good!' after every student utterance.

On the topic of images, Hancock McDonald has THIS to say:

“A picture is a text without words. This is what makes them invaluable for the language classroom. They provide rich and immediate content, but they leave it up to the student how to put that into words. They can’t ‘cut and paste’ as they can from a text. It doesn’t put words in their mouths”.

Here are some ways in which images can be exploited in the classroom:

Single frame: Spot mistakes (T describes an image, but includes erroneous detail);  Role-play (based on a scene with 2 or more people interacting); Opinions (especially if image has a controversial topic); Detective work (narration); 

Picture-pairs: Spot the difference; Find the difference (Ss describe in pairs); Invent a connection (random pics);

Multiframes: Identify; Matching; Sequencing; Predicting; Invent an order; Continue story; Stop-gap etc.

Source: Hancock, M. (2012) Using Pictures in ELT - http://hancockmcdonald.com/ideas/using-pictures-elt

For an excellent blogpost on Images in the classroom, which rather serendipitously appeared in my feed only this morning, after I'd already decided to write these ideas here... please look at this blog post by my dear friend and colleague, Carla Arena, who is also First Vice-President of Braz-Tesol Brasilia and will therefore take-over the role of President from me in 2015.

I look forward to hearing about your experiences with the use of images, whether controversial or consensual, current or vintage... so please do post your comments below.