This paper describes a teacher-researcher collaboration aimed at teaching students strategies for inquiry into the constructed nature of lived and text worlds – a pedagogical objective consistent with goals of media literacy. As an introduction to these strategies, students were asked to engage in a commonly used media literacy tool – a blog – to explore the socially and culturally constructed aspects of their own lived worlds. As students blogged, they were also asked to examine the represented worlds in a literary text – To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee 1960). Research discussed in this paper examines the specific affordances of blogs for helping students acquire these new strategies for critical inquiry.

Read and discuss the article on the JMLE blog.