Norse gods on Instagram - Developing critical literacy through multimodal text production

Abstract

This article explores how critical literacy can be developed through multimodal text production. The study was conducted with lower secondary school students in Norway, who in a school task were asked to reconstruct the identities of gods from Old Norse mythology in fictitious Instagram posts. The purpose of this task was to improve the students’ critical literacy especially concerning social media, and to increase their understanding of how all representations are constructed. The students' texts were analysed for traces of how they have remade and transformed meaning through reproduction of Instagram’s technical functions and literacy practices, and how they have built on knowledge from both Old Norse mythology and present-day culture. The findings suggest that reproducing social media texts challenged the students to be critical producers of text and to demonstrate linguistic, visual and technological awareness, without using digital technologies.