Avila, JuliAnna, Jessica Zacher Pandya. "Traveling, Textual Authority, and Transformation: An Introduction to Critical Digital Literacies." Critical Digital Literacies as Social Praxis: Intersection and Challenges. Ed. JuliAnna Avila, Ed. Jessica Zacher Pandya. New York, 2013. 1-12.
APA Citation:
Avila, J., & Pandya, J.Z. (2013). Traveling, textual authority, and transformation: an introduction to critical digital literacies. In J. Avila & J.Z. Pandya (eds.), Critical digital literacies as social praxis: Intersection and challenges (1-12). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Reflection:
What I got out of the article was that in our society's increasingly participatory culture, our education has to reflect that. Students want to experience and participate, not just sit with their mouths open waiting for the professor to vomit information and knowledge into their mouths. It's not a very pretty image, but that form of education and teaching is not very pretty. When I was a teacher, I always tried to do what they recommend in the article, which they call "an inversion of authority" (2013). That was an APA in-text citation, by the way. I would take on the form of student so my students could be experts in something they felt passionate or confident in.
Coming from a special education background, I found a lot of information very similar to things I had experienced and learned from my experience teaching. For example, Avila and Pandya said, "The main, underlying goal of critical literacies praxis is twofold: to investigate manifestations of power relations in texts, and to design, and in some cases redesign, texts in ways that serve other, less powerful interests" (2). By the way, the in text citation that I just used was MLA. (Author Page number) - MLA; (Author, year published) - APA.
What is that talking about? I think the quote is talking about the fact that all texts have an audience. The fact that there is an audience - author relationship means there is a power relationship. Does the author write from a perspective of expertise? If so, that's power. Coming from a special education perspective, I read the second part of that sentence and saw modifying curriculums for students. In special education, I was required to modify curriculums and assignments so as to help them succeed in school. But what it's recommending in this is that one of the goals of critical literacy is to redesign so as to reduce the power relationship between the author and the audience. However, I could be wrong, so if you have
Questions to Think About:
1. What are the pros and cons of questioning everything?
