Infusing Critical Media Literacy into Pecha Kucha Presentations in an Undergraduate Education Course

In 2003, Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham conceptualized a presentational method called “pecha kucha,” which in Japanese means “chit chat” or the “sound of conversation” (Gries and Brooke). The presentation comprises 20 PowerPoint slides, with each slide displaying for 20 seconds, resulting in a 6 minute and 40 second presentation. My proposal is about incorporating an adaptation of the pecha kucha (it is shorter and takes a video form) as the culminating critical media literacy project in an undergraduate Education course, and what the results have been from my and the students’ perspectives. The course—“Screen Education: Exploring Representations of Education in Popular Culture”—involves students in critically analyzing how Education, broadly conceptualized, has been represented in a wide range of media texts, such as “school films” (fictional films), school documentaries, television dramas and comedies, music videos, news coverage, television commercials, children’s programming, animation, graphic novels, comics, and podcasts. The theoretical grounding and interpretive framework for our critical media analyses derive from Stuart Hall’s (1997) work on representation and his theorization of preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings (Hall, 1980). The final project requires students (1) to critically analyze their choice of a popular culture media text, (2) to create a 5-minute narrated video that follows a “15 slides/20 seconds per slide” format, (3) to embed an audio narration of their critical analysis, (4) to performatively present their pecha kucha to the class (with the audio muted), and (5) to draw upon academic literature to write an accompanying critical analysis