Critical Literacies and Young Learners

Connecting Classroom Practice to the Common Core

Ken Winograd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317802600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Alfabetizzazione

Many pre-service and beginning early childhood teachers question if critical literacy is do-able with young children, particularly in the current top-down educational climate. Critical Literacies and Young Learners shows how it is possible, even in the context of the mandates and pressures so many teachers experience, and honors the sophisticated and complex social theorists that young children are. Featuring a mix of groundbreaking work by iconic researchers and teachers and original contributions by emerging scholars and educators in the field, the text illustrates a range of approaches to doing critical literacy with young children and, at the same time, addresses the Common Core Standards.

Part I provides several orienting frameworks on critical literacy, giving specific attention to its relationship to the Common Core Standards. Part II features chapters describing critical literacy in practice, grouped in 4 thematic clusters: using texts from popular culture and everyday life; focusing on issues-oriented texts and cultural identity; functional linguistic analysis of texts; interdisciplinary that engage young learners in critical social action projects. Part III addresses the micro-political contexts of teaching critical literacy.

Part I
Overview of Critical Literacy and Common Core Standards

1
Critical Literacy, Common Core Standards and Young Learners

Imagining a Synthesis of Educational Approaches

Ken Winograd

This chapter provides an overview of critical literacy and the Common Core Standards. My position here is that the teaching of critical literacy to young children is reasonable and, like any approach to teaching, can be framed in ways that are developmentally appropriate.

As you begin reading this book, reflect on your own beliefs about young children and the kinds of thinking they are capable of. Are young children ready for critical analysis of text and, perhaps more challenging, controversial topics? And how ready are you to teach children critical analysis, controversial subjects, and even lead social actions in the community?

Critical Literacies and Young Learners: Connecting Practice to the Common Core is a book for teachers of young children on doing critical literacy in the classroom. This book is for teachers who believe that effective reader/citizens have the skills and dispositions to question, challenge, and think deeply about all kinds of texts and all experience, in order to more effectively participate in inclusive and democratic communities. The book is also for teachers who may not be so certain about this (critical) conception of literacy but who are interested in learning more about this provocative and high-engagement approach to teaching. The readings in this book provide descriptions of teachers and students engaging in forms of critical literacy in early childhood settings, from preschool to third grade while, at the same time, attending to the Common Core Standards (CCS).

Teaching critical literacy to young children in the Age of the Common Core … Whew! In 13 words, I have convened two discourses and an audience that appear, on surface, to be incompatible and contradictory. The Common Core can be reasonably described as a corporate model of curriculum. Critical literacy can be reasonably described as a democratizing, social justice (and anti-corporate) model of curriculum. And with our most precious audience of all, young children, most early childhood teachers and researchers agree, as I may have 15 years ago when I taught first grade, that both the CCS and critical literacy are (heads up: harsh language warning!) developmentally inappropriate!

The quintessential task for this book is to bring these three concepts in some kind of balance or alignment: How can we imagine the teaching of critical literacy with young children and also use the CCS, in part, to help organize the teaching of these skills and strategic knowledge reflected in the English Language Arts Standards? I say, imagine, since the onus is on you, the teacher, in connecting the stories and descriptions of critical literacy in this book to your own particular teaching situation. My burden, my challenge for this book, has been to provide enough thick description of teachers doing this kind of work so you can reasonably imagine and adapt what you read here.

Defining Critical Literacy

There are many definitions of critical literacy, and here are three that get at my meaning of this approach to literacy:

Reflecting Dewey’s (1997) vision of democracy, I would argue that within critical literacy

[E]ach (person) has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own … equivalent to breaking down those barriers of class, race, and national territory which (has) kept men (and women) from perceiving the full import of their activity.

(p. 87)

Dewey’s vision of democracy (and schools) emphasizes the free flow of ideas, inclusion, the absence of exclusionary or discriminatory social structures, and the interdependent relationship between personal fulfillment and communal responsibility. Critical literacy clearly serves Dewey’s conception of democracy.

In the early 1970s, Paulo Freire (2005) had a profound effect on our thinking about literacy when he argued that literacy and power were inextricably linked: Language does shape and influence power relations in society. He maintained that reading is not at all a technical matter but, instead, is a political act in which the reader is ‘reading the world’ as well as rewriting that world.

Lewison, Flint, and Van Sluys (2002, p. 382) synthesized 30 years of critical literacy research, and they formulated a four-dimensional definition: “disrupting the commonplace, interrogating multiple viewpoints, focusing on sociopolitical issues and taking action and promoting social justice.” By sociopolitical issues, Lewison et al. mean that no social practices are ever neutral but, instead, these practices reflect (unequal) power relations in society which are given life, in part, by and through language.

Reflecting Dewey, Freire, and Lewison/Flint/Van Sluys, here is my working definition of critical literacy: the practice of analysis and questioning texts for their (authors’) biases, and the practice of using language to engage in civic life that has as its goal, equity and democracy. The relationship between power and language is central to critical literacy: i.e., language can be used to dominate, and language can lead to empowerment and equity. Students also engage in critical literacy when they produce texts (written, oral, artistic, digitalized, etc.) to disrupt inequitable relations and, instead, promote more equitable relations … in their schools, communities and world.

Critical Literacy: Assumptions, Frameworks, and Approaches

I think broadly about the meaning of texts. Texts include print like books, articles, short stories, and poems written on the papered page. Texts are also visual and oral like television and radio, paintings, cartoons, conversation, and lectures. And there are texts that dominant young people’s school experience: textbooks. As problematic as they are, textbooks are a staple, still, in US schools. Therefore, they represent another text that should be subject to critical examination by students and teachers.

A key assumption underlying critical literacy is that there are no neutral texts (Freire, 2005; Luke, 1988; McLaren, 2009). All texts reflect the biases of its authors which, in turn, reflect the authors’ social location in society. Ultimately, our biases reflect our larger beliefs, or ideologies, about the world (e.g., justice or freedom, assimilationism or cultural pluralism; meritocracy or a fair playing field for all), and they also reflect more individual, particular interests (brand of toothpaste, favorite sports, television shows, food). The critical question about bias asks the following: Does a particular bias influence good or bad outcomes, like the exclusion of certain groups of people or the pollution of the air? How might our biases result in a more equitable society or a more unequal society?

Texts can position or shape the stance of the reader, often without the reader even realizing it. Texts reflect particular ideological perspectives, even the most seemingly innocuous warning label on an aspirin bottle (Gee, 2011). Perhaps all texts are dangerous in terms of their power to position the reader, often unwittingly, to believe in or acquiesce to the position of the authors of those texts. However, if the individual reads the text with critical consciousness, with her eyes wide open, she is less susceptible to being ‘taken in’ by the text, and she is more apt to challenge the text, challenge the author, reconsider the text from her own ideological position and, even, multiple positions.

Every choice (by the author) foregrounds what was selected and hides, silences, or backgrounds what was not selected. Awareness of this prepares the reader to ask critical questions: why did the writer or speaker make these choices? Whose interests do they serve? Who is empowered or dis-empowered by the language used?

(Janks, 1993, p. iii)

Critical literacy provides students with the tools to be conscious of the knowledge/power relationship, and then to be skilled at raising problems and taking some action in response to this analysis. In other words, “critical literacy involves questioning received knowledge and immediate experience with the goal of challenging inequality and developing activist citizenry” (Shor, 2009, p. 290). School literacy can help students develop more critical ways of thinking and, similarly, an inclination to engage in civic life. However, if not enacted through a critical lens, school literacy can instead lead to a citizenry that is passive and unengaged. Unfortunately, literacy in general and school literacy in particular,

has been used, in age after age, to solidify the social hierarchy, empower elites and ensure that people lower on the hierarchy accept the values, norms, and beliefs of the elites, even when it is not in their interest to do so

(Gee, 2011, p. 57)

Reflecting on Critical Literacy: Frameworks

There are several frameworks for how we might think about critical literacy. I will use these concepts, in part, to help inform my commentary on each of the chapters. I invite you to use these ideas and also your own experience as teachers to make sense of and also criticize the readings.

Four Resources

Luke and Freebody (1999), Australian literacy theorists, developed a conception of literacy in which critical literacy is just one (crucial) component. Luke and Freebody wanted to help teachers see that the teaching of traditional academic content and critical literacy can be integrated. They envisioned a broad approach to literacy teaching and learning, composed of four interrelated components that can be woven into most school-sponsored literacy activity. They term the four components resources, the kinds of literacy knowledge that readers need in order to fully make sense of text. Luke and Freebody’s model is useful as we think about the critical literacy projects in this book and their attention to all dimensions of literacy, from the critical to the basics.

The first resource is ‘breaking the code’ knowledge, the ability to ‘word call’ with fluency and to be able to comprehend at the most basic level, i.e., literal comprehension. This resource entails what can be referred to as the low-inference knowledge of facts, procedures, and formulas. This resource, of course, is indispensable to more complex forms of literacy. There is near consensus in the reading community that this explicit literacy resource should be taught more or less systematically and explicitly, depending on the needs of learners, in the early years of schooling.

The second resource reflects a psycholinguistic approach to reading: the reader’s ability to infer meaning using background knowledge, to construct meaning from text in the ‘interaction’ of the text and the reader (with all her background knowledge, cultural lenses, geographic location, etc.). This resource was an emphasis of the whole language movement in the 1980s and 1990s, when ‘reader response theory’ (Rosenblatt, 1969) and reading as personal meaning making (Wells, 1985) dominated literacy teaching in schools in the US, Australia, and the UK.

The third resource has to do with the use of texts. When using this resource, the reader understands the relationship between the functions of language and how we shape language to reflect those functions, in school and out of school: i.e., the purposes of text “shape the way texts are structured, their tone, their degree of formality” (Luke & Freebody, 1999). When students use texts effectively, they learn/know that texts need to be crafted in a way that makes sense for particular audience and particular goals.

The fourth resource is the reader’s ability and disposition to “critically analyze and transform texts by acting on knowledge that texts are never ideologically natural or neutral” (Luke & Freebody, 1999). This is critical literacy, the critique of texts for bias as it relates to class, gender, race, age, ideology, worldview, power, everything! It has to do with the reader challenging and questioning texts and the authors of those texts, examining how the texts are shaped and how they reflect larger systems of thinking, power, and structures.

Luke and Freebody argue against the ranking of these four resources. They are all indispensable to being an effective student-reader-citizen. Ideally, the teaching of all four resources is integrated through curricular experience, although the first two resources tend to be the emphasis in most teaching. The teaching of ‘general’ knowledge (i.e., the basics, scientific concepts, core literacy skills) and critical literacy should be approached as complementary resources, as interdependent. Importantly, critical literacy (and social justice education) promotes “students’ learning of the traditional canon, but it also includes teaching pupils to think critically about and challenge the universality of that knowledge” (Cochran-Smith, Barnatt, Lahann, Shakman, & Terrell, 2008, p. 635). Certainly, if we want students to learn to critique, they must have an emerging understanding of topics, content, strategies, and skills with which to critique.

Critical Literacy as Intellectual-Analytic and Productive Processes

Comber, Thomson and Wells (2001), whose critical literacy project is described in this book (Chapter 11), remind us that critical literacy can entail both the intellectual critical analysis of text as well as projects that lead to more direct actions in community. In the first, the intellectual-analytic dimension entails students’ explicit critical analysis of text that is generated by others, like trade books, newspaper articles, videos, or commercials. The intellectual-analytic approach can entail the critical study of grammatical structures; or it can entail analysis of text at a broader conceptual level, such as a consideration of author bias, the study of stereotypes, and questions of power like ‘who has power’ and ‘who doesn’t have power.’ When students interrogate texts like this, they are “reading against the text” and “it implies that readers recognise texts as selective versions of the world; they are not subject to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Overview of Critical Literacy and Common Core Standards
• PART II Teachers and Young Children Doing Critical Literacy
• PART III Understanding the Micro-Political Contexts of Teaching Critical Literacy
• PART IV Bringing It All Together
• Supplemental Resources: An Annotated Short List
• About the Authors
• Index