Literacy and language development is a central aspect of educational theory and practice. One area of literacy and rowlanguage research that has had a lot of attention is dialogic teaching (Bakhtin, 1984;Freire, 1970; Murphey, Wilkinson, Soter, Hennessey, & Alexander, 2009;Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013 Keywords: dialogic teaching, exploratory talk, literacy, adolescents, argumentation, Socratic circlesAlexis Carmela Brown is a PhD student in the department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Victoria, with a focus is in Language and Literacy. She is also a high school teacher and has worked in urban, rural and alternative classroom settings. Her research topics of interest include dialogic pedagogy, socio-cultural theory, critical literacies, and content-area literacy instruction for adolescents and marginalized youth. AcknowledgementsI would like to express my sincere gratitude to the editors and peer reviewers who provided insightful and constructive feedback, opened up a dialogue, and encouraged me throughout the revising process. I would also like to thank Deborah Begoray and Sylvia Pantaleo who provided me with invaluable feedback as I worked through this manuscript. Finally, I would like to acknowledge and thank Wolff-Michael Roth for his endless support and encouragement during the analysis and writing process.

The purpose of this paper is to present the experiences of Indigenous youth when a critical literacies/Indigenous knowledges (IK) approach was used in a graphic novel creation project. We conducted research over a six-week period in two alternative high schools in British Columbia. In this paper, we look primarily at research findings from the Indigenous program. We analyzed classroom observations, the graphic novels, and transcripts of semi-structured interviews according to four principles of critical literacy: understanding power, control, and equity of information; collaboration using multiple perspectives; authentic and multimodal learning; and enacting social change and civic engagement.

In this paper, we examine how Indigenous and non-Indigenous adolescents identify media influences as health/wellness related. We conducted research over a six-week period in two alternative high school settings: a culture-based Indigenous education program at one school and an arts-based program at another school, both in the same small, Western Canadian city. We taught students from both programs the principles of critical media health literacy. Small groups of students from the Indigenous program wrote narratives. Then small groups of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in an arts-based education program converted these stories into graphic novel/comic book format. Findings indicated a broad range of health/wellness topics discussed, media stereotypes challenged, and varying levels of comprehension about media's impact on health. These levels ranged from misunderstanding or confusion through developing general understanding and, at the highest level, specific understanding.

No abstract

Editorial