Critical Literacy

Context, Research, and Practice in the K-12 Classroom

Lisa Patel Stevens, Thomas W. Bean

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781452236414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Méthodes pédagogiques pour la lecture

"This is an excellent text. I particularly liked how the authors share examples of critical literacy throughout the book, especially with digital and multimedia texts."

—Peter McDermott, The Sage Colleges

"Through realistic discussion of how text shapes us and is shaped by us, Critical Literacy provides pre- and in-service teachers with concrete ways to engage in critical literacy practices with children from elementary through high school."

—Cheryl A. Kreutter, St. John Fisher College

…a unique, practical critical literacy text with concrete examples and theoretical tools for pre- and in-service teachers

Authors Lisa Patel Stevens and Thomas W. Bean explore the historical and political foundations of critical literacy and present a comprehensive examination of its uses for K-12 classroom practice.

Key Features:

· Focuses on the nexus of critical literacy theory and practice through real classroom examples, vignettes, and conversations among teachers and teacher educators

· Illustrates how critical literacy practices are enacted in the classroom at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.

· Offers step-by-step teaching strategies for implementing critical literacy in K-12 classrooms at different paces, depending on existing curriculum

Intended Audience:

This is an excellent supplemental text for a variety of advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in education departments on how to teach reading and writing. This text will also appeal to instructors and students exploring issues of representation, linguistics, and critical deconstruction.

CHAPTER 1

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Redefining Literacy

A Text-Saturated World

In this chapter we explore varying definitions of literacy, comparing how reading, text, and literacy have come to include different components both in schooling and in society at large. One of the key components that have necessitated revisiting more traditional definitions of literacy is the increase of digital texts in everyday life. Even though print-based texts can be considered multimodal, by varying format and genre, the multitudes of texts produced digitally have pushed new definitions to the forefront of literacy research and practice.

Reflect on your day’s activities. Try to recall every instance in which you were interacting with text, written, spoken, or visual. In other words, try to quantify the moments in your day spent conveying or constructing meaning through text.

As you were thinking about the various literacy events that comprise your day, you may or may not have been surprised by the fact that text (spoken, written, visual, printed, electronic) permeates most aspects of our lives. Even when we are engaged in activities that have other than cognitive goals, such as exercising, we often find ourselves dealing with text, such as listening to a portable radio or watching TV. In essence, we are constantly engaged in making meaning from semiotic, or signifying, systems, including words, images, and sounds. A semiotic is any type of sign or symbol used to represent an entity. So, anything from letters put together to form a word to corporate logos are semiotics. As consumers and producers of texts, we rely upon these semiotics as a foundation to making meaning. These meaning-making processes help us to read both the word and the world (Freire, 1970). Because of the exponential growth of mass-mediated and textually driven conduits such as the Internet, we are constantly bombarded by text. And while this simple observation seems to drive home the point that the information age is in full swing, reading and literacy education in the United States often falls short of contending with the far-reaching implications of this expanded definition and confluence of text.

Historically, literacy pedagogy in the United States has followed two strong trends. First, it has focused on the early years of literacy development, implicitly and explicitly conveying the shortsighted notion that learning to read skills and processes are the most pivotal aspects of literacy pedagogy. Second, literacy pedagogy has also tended to vacillate between poles of epistemological grounding, lurching from paradigm to paradigm. Simply put, the field of literacy, like many fields in education, swings from one paradigm to another oppositionally posed paradigm. Quintessentially and overly simplistically depicted through the juxtaposition of synthetic phonics-based instruction versus holistic whole language approaches, this vacillation has resulted in the artificial and detrimental segmentation of concurrently complex and codependent literacy skills, processes, and practices. Throughout the Clinton and Bush administrations, presidential federal policies guiding funding opportunities to support reading instruction in the United States have been written and implemented to have all students reading by the end of third grade. Undergirding this policy is a narrow definition of reading that focuses strongly on oral reading fluency and automaticity of word calling (Stevens, 2001). This approach to literacy, one that is first limited to decoding and then further focused on oral reading fluency, reflects a dated concept of learning and denies an e-business globalized economy, one largely mediated through semiotics and textual exchanges (Luke & Luke, 2001). Becoming skilled at decoding the text, while irrefutably essential for any reader to become fluent, is sorely insufficient when not married with other demands necessary for negotiating today’s text-saturated world. The assumption that fast decoding will free attention resources for comprehension denies the necessarily complex and concurrent use of these resources. Such an approach also falls short of negotiating the highly complex and deliberately explicit attention required for dynamic comprehension at factual, affective, and critical levels. For example, being a fluent decoder of text would not, in any way, help a novice user of Internet search engines quickly and strategically move through hundreds of search results, sorting the sources, validity of information, and possible connecting texts. While certainly an essential component to this literacy practice, it is far from being the exclusive or even most important skill.

In fact, strides in literacy research in the past 20 to 30 years should now help educators to better understand not only why some children struggle to succeed with school-sanctioned literacies but also what types of literacy skills, processes, and practices should be included as part of our curricula and pedagogy. One significant finding has been the intertextual nature of reading the world through words, including the processes of writing and oral communication. In other words, we construct meaning from the printed word based on our understanding of the world, and these meanings are intertwined among multiples sources of text: books, CDs, conversations, movies, Web sites, video games, pamphlets, TV shows, magazines, and so on (New London Group, 1999).

Another key advance from the 20th century is the debunking of the myth that students spend their elementary years learning to read and then reading to learn in their secondary years. Substantive evidence, found significantly within the field of content area literacy, supports the premise that learning to read is a complex array of skills and processes, modified by the reader to meet the particular content and purpose of a literacy task (e.g., Bean, 2001). This topic is also treated cogently in the International Reading Association’s Adolescent Literacy Position Statement (Moore, Bean, Birdyshaw, & Rycik, 1999).

However, arguably the single most salient point that can be drawn from the qualitative research agendas of the latter 20th century and thus far in the 21st century is the highly contextual and relative nature of reading and literacy. Landmark studies such as Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) Ways With Words brought home the elegantly simple concept that different communities embrace the negotiation of text in compelling but often wholly different ways. Understanding language and literacy as social practices has helped recent generations of researchers and teachers understand their students as competent meaning makers and has compelled them to find ways to make connections between particular, contextually understood literate practices (e.g., Lewis, 2002; Michaels, 1981; Moje, 2000). Other scholars, such as James Paul Gee, have pointed to the highly contextual nature of discourses, the ways of being, doing, and acting, according to particular situations and participants. At the same time, the electronic age has resulted in a veritable explosion of texts, many of which are conveyed in multiple groups through the media. Mastering the basic skills of decoding falls well short of the demands beckoned through these times. To that end, being a proficient reader can no longer be equated with being able to rapidly decode words in a classroom setting.

Paradoxically, concurrent with this emphasis on code-based definitions of reading, schoolwide programs that rely on repeated readings of decodable text, choral responses, and timed oral reading exercises have grown in popularity. While these trends are alarming for a number of reasons, one of the most basic areas of concern is how reading is defined in these policies.

If reading is defined as an ability to decode text, a skill that can be acquired by the end of third grade, it follows that this performance objective is a rather teleological process based on mastery and rote skill—one in which students gain input from text without engaging in critical stances. Such a unitary definition of reading, easily quantified through a precise list of cumulative skills, strategies, and behaviors, has long been critiqued for leading to a deficit view of children and their meaning-making abilities. However, this type of restricted definition also places students, especially those who struggle with school-sanctioned literacies, at a particular disadvantage in a world that is increasingly driven by digital technologies, media saturation, and worldwide marketplaces that rely upon economies of attention (Gee, 1996; New London Group, 1999). Such a definition of reading also erroneously sequences the parallel functions that proficient readers use concurrently to create meaning and critique texts.

It is our contention that we can no longer regard reading as a rudimentary sequence of skills. While the basic skills of decoding, comprehension, and appropriate use of texts have the same essential nature that they have always held, today’s hypermediated world demands that we expand our definition of basic skills in reading to include interrelated processes that fit better under the term literacy. Also necessary is a revision of our view of what a proficient reader does. While proficient readers certainly are able to orally decode at a fluent rate, they also must be able to comprehend, use text pragmatically, and actively question texts that they encounter.

In particular, the goals of critical literacy, being able to tease out various agendas, purposes, and interests represented in texts, are necessary for all of our students, not simply defined as higher-order thinking skills and reserved for those students whom we deem proficient at decoding, and only then if time allows. Instead, aspects of critical literacy must become part and parcel of the definition of comprehension. In essence, by including critical literacy as part of several processes included in literacy, teachers, students, and teacher educators can begin to redraft their literacy instruction to more closely match the highly sophisticated demands of today’s world.

GENEALOGY OF THE CRITICAL: PAULO FREIRE

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As interest in critical literacy has grown over the past few decades, to varying effects, in different parts of the world, a relevant and appropriately critical question is, Whose theories and perspectives are informing critical literacy? As with other large theoretical frameworks available to support our thinking about learning and cognition, critical theory has several historical trajectories, situated meanings, and manifestations.

When critical literacy is conceptualized as the active and often resistant engagement with texts, it is derived from and genealogically linked to the work of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher, activist, and educator. Freire, through his work with adult literacy campaigns and efforts in Brazil, brought to bear education as a site for emancipation, empowerment, and social justice. Born and raised in low socioeconomic conditions, Freire earned recognition, acclaim, and even controversial attention for the emancipatory literacy education he conducted with adults in poverty-stricken areas of Brazil. He worked with adults to counter forces that kept them intellectually, culturally, and politically disem-powered, and he did it through literacy education. Freire’s 1987 book with Donaldo Macedo cast a view of literacy as cultural politics. That is, literacy training should not only provide reading, writing, and numeracy, but it should be considered “a set of practices that functions to either empower or disem-power people” (p. 187). Literacy should at all times be analyzed according to whether it serves to “reproduce existing social formations or serves as a set of cultural practices that promote democratic and emancipatory change” (p. viii). Literacy as cultural politics is also related in Freire’s work in emancipatory theory and critical theory of society. Hence, emancipatory literacy “becomes a vehicle by which the oppressed are equipped with the necessary tools to reap-propriate their history, culture, and language practices” (p. 159).

This view of literacy as a tool, process, and product that serves to empower those traditionally held outside of powerful positions, both informal and formal, is what informs the exploration of critical literacy in this book. We subscribe to a view that all texts are representations and that the practice of literacy is potentially a tool for empowerment or disempowerment. In helping students to become literate subjects of the state, we view the ability to critique texts as equally essential as the ability to decode them.

DEFINING CRITICAL LITERACY

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Freebody and Luke (1990) define critical literacy as one of four processes that readers should employ when encountering text. Along with the more familiar practices of code breaker (coding competence), meaning maker (semantic competence), and text user (pragmatic competence), we need to consider the practices of reader as text critic. While each of these four processes marks an area of what it means to be literate, and each has, to varying degrees, been part of literacy pedagogy and curriculum, far less attention has been paid to the fourth process, being a text critic. This fourth dimension forces us to explicitly discuss the ways in which text is mediated as a tool of institutional shaping of discourses and social practices. This positioning is quite different from the traditional stance that text occupies in American educational and political discourse. Typically, texts, namely print-based books, are glorified as gateways to other worlds, keepers of stores of knowledge, and inanimate confidants and friends. In this way, texts are innocuous sources of information and wisdom. And while we can all think of certain texts that have performed those functions for us, to treat reading education in this sole manner belies the highly dialogic nature of classrooms, in which interactions shape knowledge, power, and discourse (Fairclough, 1989). Narrowly defined views of reading also deny the pervasive role that text, both print and visual, plays in shaping our identities, resources, and opportunities (Luke & Freebody, 1999). All four processes, as named by Luke and Freebody, work in conjunction, but the role of critically analyzing and transforming texts is one that is rarely sanctioned in school settings. Helping students to assume critical stances toward texts means supporting them in questioning the voices behind texts, who is represented and who is not, and what positions texts are assuming.

It is important to note that when we are talking about critical literacy, we make a distinction between its philosophical orientation and that of critical reading. Critical reading, arising from the liberal-humanist philosophical tradition, emphasizes such skill-based tasks as distinguishing fact from opinion and, at a more advanced level, recognizing propaganda in texts (Cervetti, Damico, & Pardeles, 2001). At that more advanced level, critical reading begins to edge in the direction of critical literacy, but it is still rooted in a Rationalist view of the world (Cervetti et al., 2001). That is, critical reading rests on the fundamental view expressed by Descartes and others that “knowledge of the world can be attained through reason, that this knowledge is universal...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Redefining Literacy
• Chapter 2: Why We Need Critical Literacy: Dynamic Texts and Identity Formation
• Chapter 3: Critical Literacy and Teacher Education
• Chapter 4: Critical Literacy at the Nexus of Praxis
• Chapter 5: Praxis Point 1: Popular Culture, Fandom, and Boundaries
• Chapter 6: Praxis Point 2: Critical Numeracy Across the Curriculum
• Chapter 7: Praxis Point 3: Cycles of Deconstruction and Reconstruction
• Chapter 8: Critical Literacy and Educational Policy Texts
• Chapter 9: Critical Policy Analysis in Local Contexts
• Glossary
• Index
• About the Authors