Textbook Tasks for Social Change: Instantiation of Development Debates and Interposition of Pedagogical Interventions in Media Literacy Education

Abstract

As materialization of their discursive stance as instructional communicators and media producers, textbook authors instantiate various development debates as well as interpose a wide range of pedagogical interventions for critical reflection and adoption by learners. This qualitative study sought to situate these development debates and the counterpart pedagogical interventions within the context of textbook task design as an application and embodiment of social justice communication. The development debates serve as the proposed contexts for media text analyses, reflective exercises, case studies, and media production, among others. Correspondingly, the interposition of interventions allows students to make sense of and act upon the instantiated development debates. Intrigued by the intricacies of textbook task design, I undertook this media education inquiry to contribute to the goals of foregrounding pressing development and policy issues and applying appropriate critico-creative pedagogies. By employing critical thematic analysis, I was able to extract, code, and interpret the qualitative data that revealed the diverse but interconnected socio-sectoral issues and the dialectical categories of pedagogical interventions. As contextual themes, the following development debates surfaced: poverty-related, governance-related, election-related, migration-related, tourism- and sports-related, women- and gender-related, misrepresentation- and marginalization-related, information- and media-related, and technology-related issues. As forms of intermediation, the interposition of pedagogical interventions to development debates can be classified into the following dialectical categories, namely: traditional versus critical, individual versus collective, isolated versus intersectional, personal versus structural, and academic versus more than academic.