Hello everyone,

For your interest/information, I wanted to share a paragraph I wrote on photonovels and critical pedagogy.

When drawing on the voices of participants in the creation of a health material like a photonovel there is referencing of learners social meaning and worlds.  Health literacy is not autonomous of social context.  For example, a poststructuralist model concedes that language is not a neutral medium of communication, but that it is situated in the language learner’s larger social world.  Freire also notes that for literacy to be meaningful it has to be situated within a theory of cultural production and perceived as an integral part of the way in which people produce, transform, and reproduce meaning.  In this sense, literacy becomes a political phenomenon, and it must be analyzed within the context of theory of power relations and an understanding of social and cultural reproduction and production.  Because the process of creating a photonovel involves problem-posing education, it provides opportunity for this necessary critical reflection of the larger power structures that often constrain the conditions under which people speak their voice.  A photonovel is thus not only a multimodal text that references the social worlds of learners, but also it becomes a tool for critical pedagogy or critical health literacy.

Cheers,
Laura
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Laura Nimmon 
Ph.D Student
Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow
Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Senior Graduate Trainee 
www.photonovel.ca

Language and Literacy Education
University of British Columbia
2125 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6T 1Z4