Speaking the Lower Frequencies: Students and Media Literacy

by Walter R. Jacobs

Shows how using texts from popular culture in the classroom can help young people to become critical consumers of media without losing the pleasure they derive from it.

Speaking the Lower Frequencies demonstrates how students can be critical consumers of media while retaining the pleasure they derive from it. In Walter R. Jacobs's classes on media and society, students use the instructor's experiences as a model for investigating their own histories. By creating new social contexts and meanings, the students learn to "speak the lower frequencies." Jacobs looks at the students' reception and critique of pop culture texts like the movie I Like It Like That and the television show The X-Files to provide evidence for the effects of alternative pedagogy on critical literacy. He shows that when students are encouraged to be more than just passive receptors of the media they learn to develop active, critical voices that they use both inside and outside the classroom. Jacobs also explains how students can become more aware and active in attempts to create democratic possibilities for themselves and others.

"This boldly imaginative work takes discourse on teaching, race, whiteness, critical pedagogy, and the classroom to a new level. There is much to be learned here, especially that the classroom is a sacred site, as well as a place of danger where students and teachers take risks. Jacobs shows us how to have meaningful conversations about race, self, and democracy in this special place. For this, a great debt is owed." — Norman K. Denzin, author of Performance Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture

169 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2005

About the author

Dean of the College of Social Sciences at San José State University.