I received my PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington in June 2017. Currently, I am an instructor in the department of English at Tennessee Technological University. My research focuses on Africana women’s literature, critical and feminist pedagogies, social justice, and pedagogies of empowerment. My courses have focused on contemporary transnational literature, women of color and black feminisms, Hurricane Katrina, and comedy as social and cultural critique. I am currently at work on a book manuscript that weds contemporary Africana women’s literatures to feminist affect studies.

In “Critical Media Literacy as Transformative Pedagogy” (2016), Steven Funk, Douglas Kellner, and Jeff Share illustrate how new media impacts the world-views of students. In their conceptualization of critical media literacy (CML), the authors advance a pedagogical framework for enabling undergraduates with the critical capacities to critique new media, especially social media. With Funk, Kellner, and Share’s CML as a frame, I discuss how students’ engagement with social media may be re-shaped in the English classroom. As evidence, I share how some former students reported being able to transfer critical close-reading practices, rhetorical sensitivity, and inquiry development cultivated in my courses to scrutinizing social media in informal settings. These students’ insights suggest that by incorporating social media platforms into the curriculum, we may offer both teachers and students another pathway for advancing information literacy beyond the classroom. Thus, I conclude that if we wish for students to cultivate the kinds of critical close-reading and critical thinking skills we purport to teach, we will need to consider to what extent we incorporate multiple kinds of information into our classroom and to what extent this information enables students with not just a critical literacy, but, indeed, a critical media literacy, a pliable framework that explicitly teaches students how to “recontextualize” (Nowacek 2011) close-reading and critical thinking skills from the classroom to the dorm room.

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