ERIC Number: EJ1065115
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015
Pages: 8
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-1918-2902
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Available Date: N/A
Pedagogical Reflections on Internalizing Geopolitical Representations in Print Media
Abdul-Jabbar, Wisam Khalid
Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, v6 n2 Article 4 2015
This essay explores how print media conceals implicit hegemonic texts that common readers unsuspectingly tend to internalize. These geopolitically infused texts are set to appropriate the reader's worldviews by sublimating the kind of perceptions and notions they want to promote. This paper raises questions and awareness about how academia responds to these acts of internalization. These geopolitical texts, which dominate most of the print media and other resources, function at an imperceptible level to legitimize presuppositions and mould the world based on its own political imaginaries. To decode and interpret these largely shrewd texts requires a literacy skill that students need to acquire in different academic disciplines. This essay, therefore, explores how print media, such as newspapers and comics, attempts to legitimize knowledge through reports and stories that work at the subliminal level. Since all readers, students, instructors or researchers are vulnerable observers (Behar, 1996), because of our fallible human nature, the act of internalizing mediascaped knowledge becomes alarmingly simple and crucially effective on the way we are directed to perceive the world. By analogy, geopolitical texts are these id-instigated drives that the superego often suppresses and filters into dreams and fiction and yet they ominously somehow found their way out; they stealthily found expression and now they paint reality with their own biased colors. Can readers in the context be dream catchers?
Descriptors: Printed Materials, Geography, Politics, World Views, Mass Media Effects, Instruction, Higher Education, Literacy, Cartoons, Newspapers
University of Western Ontario and Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Mills Memorial Library Room 504, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON L8S 4L6, Canada. Tel: 905-525-9140; e-mail: info@cjsotl-rcacea.ca; Web site: http://www.cjsotl-rcacea.ca/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
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