The movie Crash as an available design for learning English: reflecting about identities, power relations and violence with High School students on Padlet

Resumo

The main goal of this article is to present a research frame (Fonseca, 2024), bringing up alternatives to critical linguistc education (Pennycook, 2018) in order to reflect about identities, power relations and violence, using the movie Crash as a starting point for high school students’ discussion on Padlet at a federal technical school. The study goes beyond recognizing diversity because it brings up questions regarding social and cultural tensions in the movie dialogues and scenes through the critical (Monte Mór, 2015;2018) and visual (Ferraz, 2017;2019) literacies perspective along with multiliteracies pedagogy (Kalantzis; Cope; Pinheiro, 2022). The movie discussion tackling conflict dialogues on Padlet creates opportunities for social engagement as well as agency, questioning dominant systems and tension in cultural identities (Hall, 2014; Woodward, 2014) in a movement that encourages sharing voices and listening to others while constructing meaning on the digital board. In order to understand the students’ perceptions, data was collected through field notes, posts on the digital mural and semistructured interviews, observing the experience with the film and critical dialogues in the English class through a qualitative analysis based on interpretation. The research, then, is carried out as a collaborative action research (Tripp, 2005; Duboc, 2012; Thiollent, 2011) for the film activity development (Ferraz; Tomizuca, 2021; Monte Mór, 2018) in collaboration with the teacher and the students. The analysis of meaning construction during the movie activity points out that the students not only receive well the critical visual literacy proposal, but expand the discussion in a significant way, bringing up new questioning and active participation in group work.