Empowering children as critics or composers of multimodal texts

Whitin, Phyllis, & Whitin, David J. (2012). Empowering children as critics or composers of multimodal texts. Talking Points, 23(2), 4-12.


There’s no doubt about it, texts have power. That power can be used for all kinds of purposes, running the gamut from the most self-serving agendas to agendas that have at least seemingly more altruistic motivations. I say “seemingly”, because after reading what the Whitins had to say here about their work with fifth graders, I found myself questioning the agendas and intentions behind my own words as I wrote them here. That isn’t particularly comfortable for me, but it’s a healthy kind of discomfort that can expand my thinking, as it seems the authors helped the learners they worked with to do.

The Whitins guided two classes of fifth graders and their teachers through activities that prompted them to ask questions about texts, the messages in texts, and how those messages are furthered through the choices made by those who created them. The key point was that texts are a human creation, and thus are subject to human intentions and choices. During the particular four-month period described here, these young learners first were coached to look critically at texts created by others, and then were coached to create texts, and then to analyze the effects of their own choices on those texts. Advertising texts were the focus here, and the focus evolved gradually to center upon the advertising of cereal brands, especially when that advertising was targeted at children. Advertising texts often utilize multiple types of input, and choices among possible options affect the meanings that are conveyed. For example, things like color, font style and size, the presence of animation of various kinds, word choices, and the ways data are categorized and displayed, all came into play as aspects that could affect the meaning in an advertising text and the effects that advertising text might have on readers, listeners, and watchers.

Several questions that were used to shape the inquiry process seemed key to the level of thinking these young learners did. They included questions like “What do advertisers want you to think?” or “What do they mean by _____________?” or “What is missing? What is not said? What is minimized?” These are the kinds of questions that push learners into the highest cognitive levels (whether one thinks in terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy, Depth of Knowledge, or any other scheme for classifying levels of thought). The fifth grade learners here moved from looking at print ads to looking at television ads, to creating their own graphic representations of data, to finally creating their own digital, multimodal texts that communicated their thoughts and ideas. The Whitins’ approach, which they have written about extensively in recent years, centers on having learners actually create intentional texts rather than just consuming them critically. The idea is that creating such texts is more eye-opening, and more empowering, than reading and questioning can be alone. It makes sense. If you have made something yourself, it de-mystifies the process of making that thing and makes you realize that it is a human creation, not something magical. That’s true for any creative process, whether it is writing, or some form of visual art, or building things, or sewing, or jewelry-making, or anything that humans can make. Whether I like the creation or not, and whether I agree or disagree with the creator’s decisions or what he or she was trying to convey is not the point. The point is that human creations can and ought to be open to questions from other humans. That leads to empowerment and engagement, and from those two qualities the true power of texts is realized. Empowered and engaged citizens can make informed and thoughtful choices; this is literacy at its highest level.