Doctoral Student Publishes in Leading Journal on Media Literacy Education

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Seth French, a Distinguished Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, published "Media Literacy and American Education: An Exploration with Detournement," in the Journal of Media Literacy Education. The article exemplifies and argues for the use of detournement, a digital film composition technique that places and news and other clips together in a way that hijacks or subverts the original message, ultimately creating a nuanced argument.

Together with co-author Jacob Campbell, French created a video detournement and then created the article that acts to both explain the in-depth process of video composition and provides rationale and guidance for adopting similar techniques in middle, high school, or college classrooms.

The idea started as a project for Representations of American Education in Popular Film, a graduate course taught by French's adviser, Christian Goering.

"To see what Seth and his co-author Jacob Campbell were able to create was astounding. The detournement was complex and nuanced in the ways it challenged the commonly held misbeliefs about education and sophisticated in its digital composition," Goering said.

French is finishing his third year of doctoral studies at the University of Arkansas.

"It represents my entry into one of the dominant discourses surrounding critical media literacy education, an area I anticipate much of my professional work will be devoted to in the years to come," he said. "The fact that this was a collaborative project with a former preservice teacher in the MAT program gives me hope that I can continue to work collaboratively with preservice teachers in practice as well as the publishing realm.

"The support I received from my advisor to see this project through from idea to publication can't be overstated; I'm indebted to the direction and encouragement he has provided throughout my time here at the University of Arkansas."

The Journal of Media Literacy Education is published by the National Association for Media Literacy Education and is edited by Professor Renee Hobbs, an internationally regarded expert on the subject. The journal is used by scholars and teachers around the world, boasting nearly 50,000 unique article downloads during the previous year.

The original detournement project is available to view here and the article is available at this permanent link.