Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms

Barbara Comber, Anne Simpson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135650100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms brings together accounts of educators who have sought to make a difference in the lives of their students through literacy education--from university classrooms in the United States, England, and South Africa, to policy and curriculum development in Singapore and Australia. Each chapter represents the results of extended research on classroom practice. The authors in this collection write as teachers. The literacy classrooms they explore range from the early years of schooling, to primary and secondary education, through to community and university sites. Although the volume is organized around different levels of education, clearly overlapping themes emerge across the chapters, including identity formation and textual practices, politicizing curriculum and textbook production, and changing the power relations in classroom talk around text. An overarching theme of this collection is the belief that there is no one generic, universal critical literacy--in theory or in practice. Rather, the authors reveal how a range of theories can serve as productive starting points for educators working on social justice agendas through the literacy curriculum, and, equally important, how particular critical literacy theories or pedagogies must be worked out in specific locations. In each of these accounts, educators explain how they have taken a body of theory and worked with and on it in classrooms. Their rich portrayals and narratives of classroom realities illustrate the unanticipated effects of pedagogies that emerge in specific contexts. Experiences from the classrooms have led them to revise theories that are central to critical literacy, including constructs such as "empowerment, " "resistance, " and "multiple readings." This collection documents what occurs when educators confront the difficult ethical and political issues that evolve in particular classroom situations. Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms is appropriate as a text for courses in language and literacy education, and will be of broad interest to educational researchers, practitioners, and theorists. The practical classroom focus makes this book accessible and of interest to a wide range of teachers and an excellent resource for professional development. The international scope will appeal to a global educational readership.

IV
Tertiary Education as a Site for Critical Literacies

13
Critical Literacy in the Second Language Classroom: Power and Control

Catherine Wallace
University of London

In this chapter I offer an account of a course on critical reading, which I taught to students of different nationalities at one of Britain’s new universities. The course took a critical language awareness approach, to be more fully described later. My discussion centers around the issue of power and empowerment in teaching critical literacy, in particular the nature of the power exercised by the teacher in the adjudication of students’ interpretations of texts, within what I refer to, with echoes of Fish (1980), as an interpretative community. As I argue previously (Wallace, 1992), “the longer a class is together the more of a community it becomes and the more it begins to exchange communicative resources” (p. 64). I look at some key aspects of the teacher’s role in one segment or episode of the class, in which the students report back to the whole group, their small group analyses of specific texts. First, however, I address some of the wider issues that underpinned this classroom study.

WHAT IS CRITICAL LITERACY?

What do we mean by critical literacy? As Lankshear (1994) said, “critical goes into battle without any clear meaning but with a lot of work to do” (p. 5). Thus we need to ask in what ways is critical literacy different from orthodox literacy or mainstream literacy. As Rothery (1996) put it, “is critical literacy the exclusive province of schooling or is it inextricably linked to everyday worlds, commonplace forms of experiences with print and other media that come under the ever-wider umbrella term of literacy?” (p. 118). One aspect we are likely to agree about in principle is that critical literacy is concerned with relations of power and thus with the manner in which power circulates both in the real world and within particular texts. Certainly critical discourse analysis, which has close links with critical language awareness and in turn with critical literacy, is centrally concerned with the exercise of power as it emerges in the discourses of specific texts. Critical discourse analysts, such as Fairclough (1989) and Kress (1985), have drawn on the Foucauldian view of discourse to refer to the taken-for-granted manner in which particular ways of perceiving and talking about the world systematically work to the advantage of those with social and political power, at the same time as marginalizing other groups. It is the ideological implications of this unequal distribution of power, operating for much of the time below the surface of consciousness, which critical discourse analysis aims to bring to awareness.

The critical discourse analysts tend to assume malign effects of power, which begs the question as to circumstances in which we might wish to look favorably at power. Firstly is the assertion of power always unjustified? Do not parents and teachers, for instance, exercise legitimate kinds of power? Just what might constitute legitimate power is discussed later in this chapter in connection with the teacher’s role. Moreover, while we deplore the presence of unchallenged power in the hands of dominant groups, we talk freely of empowering our students, although, as a number of writers have pointed out (e.g., Andersen, 1988) it is not always made clear who or what is doing the empowering, or quite what our students will be empowered to do or become. Luke (1996) noted the tendency to reify power: “power is treated as something which can be identified, transmitted and possessed” (p. 321). We tend to assume that power can be handed to students unproblematically rather than being constantly exercised and resisted in all our activities (cf. Andersen, 1988). With overuse, the idea of empowerment may be weakened to become merely an instrumental concept as in, for instance, the power to do a particular task or to get a job. Such a reductive view of power might lead in turn to a view of literacy instruction in terms of sets of competencies or skills, one that sees forms of knowledge not as being constructed collaboratively in classrooms but as delivered to students. Or, as Freire (1972) critiqued, deposited within them in banking style, often in piecemeal and fragmented kinds of ways.

It is clearly possible to address specific needs without taking such a narrow competency oriented view of empowerment. Thus, Auerbach and Wallerstein (1987), in their work with adult migrants in the United States, have a clear and explicit agenda for forms of action that arise out of the classroom work with their materials. This agenda might take shape in quite modest ways, through, for instance, helping parents to be more assertive and confident in talking through a child’s school report; or it may relate to the need to take action in the workplace because of poor trade union organization or neglect of worker health. Auerbach and Wallerstein were careful, however, to present the situations in their material as codes, in the Freirean sense. That is, the texts are selected as likely to resonate experientially with their students but not to simply reflect back day-to-day experience. Indeed such a problematizing stance is the essence of a problem posing as opposed to a problem-solving approach.

However, frequently it is not appropriate or feasible to take the empowerment as action view. We then need to develop a wider agenda and it is here that problems are raised with localized accounts of critical literacy that see empowerment within specific settings. We may have overemphasized difference and contingency, exemplified in a view of literacy which is defined by reference to particular social contexts, while neglecting commonalities of experience and values. Although it has become fashionable to challenge the feasibility of grand narratives, understandably in view of the Eurocentric emphasis they tended to embody, there is a strong case, as McCarthy (1994) argued, for reinstating some sense of the wider picture, the need for common ground within multiple perspectives. As Young (1992) put it “in our present global problem of resource limitation and world pollution we must, for the first time, establish this common ground between different cultures. This is universalisation” (p. 3). In a multinational group of students such as that in this study, it was the tension between commonalities and differences that became a fruitful focus of scrutiny. Students may become more aware of culture specific aspects of identity and social practice, including literacy practice, by locating them within a wider understanding of values and practices that resonate universally. Yukako, a Japanese student in the group, expressed it thus, in the course of an interview with me 3 months after the course:

Y: when you get down to the bottom line it’s just the same thing we’re saying, like human rights, about racism, things like that. I thought we shared our opinion I thought. But I can’t explain to you, well, but it does—we did have cultural differences I think yes

CW: there was a cultural difference but also there was some kind of shared

Y: Yes, aha, I think so. For example, I think it was the French girl—I can’t remember her name—but she was studying British

CW: British National Party*

Y: National Party, yes BNP, BNP, it wasn’t about her country, because she was from France, but she was so against it, and then, for example, for me, Japanese, I do understand Nazism and things like that, but it wasn’t so, how d’you say, close to me at all so until she showed her consideration and she take it so seriously.

A wish to reclaim a role for the wider picture does not mean abandoning an interest in context: On the contrary, it involves seeing contexts and identities as complex and multilayered. It means offering a richer understanding of contexts and cultures so that both are seen by teacher and students as shifting and overlapping. An overlocalized, situationalized view of learning and behavior risks stereotyping, especially in a world where we cannot hope to predict what our learners’ specific futures will be. We need a view of critical literacy that cuts across the grain of the everyday, the localized and the immediate.

In making a case for a critical literacy that embraces a range of specific social settings, we may wish to rethink the use of the now generally preferred plural form; it may be appropriate to reinstate critical literacy as a mass noun. Auerbach (1992) pointed out a potential problem with the contextualized use of the term, signalled by its plurality: The danger is that we may trivialize the concept in a reductive manner, as witnessed by the fact that, much as we have lists or sets of competencies, we now come across lists of literacies, forming in many cases a disparate and incongruous set. I would prefer to see critical literacy, much as Lankshear (1997) talked of powerful literacy, as a use of literacy—what you do with a text. In short, one does not so much have critical literacy as one of a set of aptitudes, as perform it.

CRITICAL LITERACY AND SCHOOLING

I argue that critical literacy is a practice that finds its distinctive place within educational as opposed to everyday contexts. In this sense we might want to say that critical literacy is, in Bernstein’s (1996) terms, part of vertical discourse in that it is intertextually constructed and scaffolded, across disciplinary areas within schools. Horizontal discourses are segmental and the competencies or literacies which constitute them (Bernstein used the terms competence and literacy interchangeably here) are “embedded in ongoing practices and directed towards specific goals” (p. 179). The acquisition of “segmental competencies or literacies is likely to be tacit with reduced or condensed linguistic elaboration” (p. 179). Segmental, contextualized literacies are evoked by contexts whose reading is unproblematic. Vertical discourse, with which I associate critical literacy, as typically more characteristic of the school setting, is explicit and elabo rated. It is this feature of explicitness and elaboration that I claim as a defining feature of critical literacy. Critical literacy awareness and use is dependent on the exercise of certain kinds of metalevel awareness that are not so much acquired naturalistically in a day-to-day sense, as developed in educational settings. They are abilities that are learned rather than acquired. Lankshear (1997) drew on this distinction in his account of powerful literacy, which is close to my understanding of critical literacy. Although acquisition, said Lankshear, is a fairly unconscious process, learning is a process of “gaining conscious knowledge via explanation, analysis and similar teaching processes” (p. 71). It is this process that Lankshear claimed is empowering.

Gee (1990) talked rather dismissively of schooling as offering opportunities for “expository talk in contrived situations” (p. 42). Classrooms are necessarily and properly contrived settings, and a specific goal within such a contrived setting is the development of critical literacy in explicit kinds of ways to include, I argue, the development of expository talk, one feature of which is the need to make explicit grounds of argument in ways that may be atypical of day-today conversation. However, although there is some agreement in principle about the metalinguistic characterisation of critical literacy, there is little consensus about what kind of metalinguistic knowledge is facilitative of enhanced critical awareness. A further dilemma relates to the teacher’s role in the mediation of knowledge construction. As Luke (1996) pointed out, the recognition of the need to be explicit does not necessarily presuppose a transmission pedagogy, a problem that has arisen with some interpretations of genre, as Luke noted. One assumption behind the genre movement, an assumption that I broadly support, is that explicitness of linguistic description must be matched by explicitness of pedagogy. However it is in principle possible to make both the content of instruction and learning and teaching processes transparent without opting for a transmission pedagogy. Indeed I argue later and more fully in Wallace (1998) that a critical pedagogy, which is required for the development of critical literacy, presupposes construction of knowledge and understanding in which all class members play an active role.

POWER AND CONTROL: THE ROLE OF THE TEACHER

If we accept that students will be empowered in cases in which content is explicit and classroom learning processes transparent, what are the implications for the teacher’s role? As a convenience, and at the risk of overpolarizing, we might take as metaphors the terms power and control, to signal that although control, as a justifiable exercise of authority, empowers students, power represents an abuse of that role. In practice it may be difficult to determine the point at which legitimate control, which scaffolds and facilitates learning, slips into a form of power that dominates and that disenfranchises students from making full entry into the interpretative community. Even then the term full entry requires some qualification if we accept that teacher and students, although partners in enquiry, do not have equality of rights, even in a class of adults. Any such supposed or feigned parity may work to the disadvantage of students. Indeed Bernstein (1996) implied that what he called invisible practice is more tyrannical than apparently authoritarian visible pedagogy in which the sources of power are strongly in evidence and not readily open to dispute. Invisible practice, associated with progressivist pedagogy, may, more insidiously, disguise the sources of power. Consistency would recommend that just as we make our teaching explicit, sources for authority should be equally so.

In other words teacher-learner interaction is inherently and generically an unequal encounter. However it can be mitigated in particular ways. Optional features of the lesson genre that offer space for students and teacher to behave in atypical ways can point the way forward to more productive exchanges in the building of knowledge and to longer term change in the classroom culture. A key question—central to critical analysis and critical pedagogy—is how might things be different? Although the domain of schooling will necessarily exercise behavioral and linguistic constraints what unaccustomed spaces can be opened up to facilitate critical enquiry around texts? How may we challenge what is taken for granted, what is seen as natural and inevitable?

Critical literacy itself is an unnatural practice. Its distinctiveness lies exactly in this characteristic. We may want to say that in the classroom we are not so much reading texts as using them, in the terms of Eco (1992), using them, that is, for critical resistant purposes, consciously adopting a stance eschewed in day-to-day cooperative reading. The original text, along with its original envisaged reader, is recontextualized in the classroom. Although critical literacy approaches may build on students’ experiential knowledge and existing cultural and linguistic resources, these are then reshaped and reevaluated in the light of closer scrutiny of texts in the classroom setting, sometimes in ways that take both teacher and student by surprise. Lankshear’s (1994) characterization of critical literacy as consisting of three objects of critique offered a useful way of thinking about the progression of a practical pedagogy. Lankshear described the progression thus. Critical literacy might involve:

1. Knowing literacy (or various literacies) critically, that is having a critical perspective on literacy/literacies generally.
2. Having a critical/evaluative perspective on particular texts.
3. Having a critical perspective on—that is, being able to make critical readings of—wider social practices, arrangements, relations, allocations, procedures etc. which are mediated by, made possible by and partially sustained through the reading of texts. (p. 10)

PRINCIPLES IN COURSE DESIGN

The course took a critical language awareness approach that means aiming for breadth and depth in two major ways. First we can think of awareness in terms of two levels, which I shall call micro and macro. Secondly, we can see critical literacy and critical talk as twin and complementary aspects of critical language awareness. I deal with each in turn.

Macrolevels and Microlevels of Awareness

Among current and recent exponents of critical language awareness it is possible to identify two strands. The first looks at language practices, that is the way in which language varieties are used in different contexts of use. The second, indebted very much to critical discourse analysis, is process oriented, inviting attention to the processes at play in the production and reception of the meanings embedded within specific texts. Language awareness at the first, macrolevel, has been the concern of scholars in the fields of anthropology and ethnography. One application of critical language awareness at this level is represented by work carried out by Barro, Byram, Grimm, Morgan, and Roberts (1993) at Thames Valley University. First-year university students were asked to carry out home ethnographies prior to doing similar observations of the foreign cultural setting during a period of study abroad. The kind of observations involved any situation mediated by spoken or written language—pretty well any social setting in other words. The aim was that by gaining greater distance on their everyday, taken-for-granted language and literacy practices, the strange and unfamiliar in the foreign language setting would be viewed as less exceptional or exotic. This cross-cultural dimension to critical language awareness work was seen as an important element of the critical reading course.

The macrolevel of awareness can be related to Lankshear’s (1994, p. 10) first stage in a literacy awareness program: knowing literacy (or literacies) critically, that is having a critical perspective on literacy or literacies generally. The gaining of this wider sociocultural perspective can be seen as preparatory and complementary to the second level, which involves critical language analysis of particular texts and draws on specific linguistic tools for the purpose. In the case of this class, those selected were drawn from Halliday’s (1985) systemic and functional grammar. Such tools are part of the resources that students can put to use in the scrutiny of particular texts, more specifically in making judgments regarding the manner in which and the degree to which linguistic choices in texts, ideationally, interpersonally, or textually, challenge or confirm prevailing ideologies.

Critical Literacy and Critical Talk

Critical literacy comes into play, not just in the awareness and interpretation of written texts but in talk around texts. Such talk may create the opportunities for either multiple, differentiated readings or consensual interpretations of texts. We can check out our own preferred readings against those of others and, in the interpretative community of the classroom, adjust, defend, or abandon them. A view of literacy as critical practice sees talk arou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• I Critical From the Start: Examining Relations of Power in Textual Practices
• II Exploring Critical Literacies in Primary Schooling: Unresolved Questions
• III Critical Literacies and Questions of Identity
• IV Tertiary Education as a Site for Critical Literacies