Designing Critical Literacy Education through Critical Discourse Analysis

Pedagogical and Research Tools for Teacher-Researchers

Rebecca Rogers, Melissa Mosley Wetzel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135093044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Uniquely bringing together discourse analysis, critical literacy, and teacher research, this book invites teacher educators, literacy researchers, and discourse analysts to consider how discourse analysis can be used to foster critical literacy education. It is both a guide for conducting critical discourse analysis and a look at how the authors, alongside their teacher education students, used the tools of discourse analysis to inquire into, critique, and design critical literacy practices. Through an intimate look at the workings of a university teacher education course and the discourse analysis tools that teacher-researchers use to understand their classrooms, the book provides examples of both pre-service teachers and teacher educators becoming critically literate. The context-rich examples highlight the ways in which discourse analysis aids teachers' decision making in the moment and reflections on their practice over time. Readers learn to conduct discourse analysis as they read about critical literacy practices at the university level.

Designed to be interactive, each chapter features step-by-step procedures for conducting each kind of discourse analysis (narrative, critically oriented, multimodal), sample analyses, and additional readings and resources. By attending to the micro-interactions as well as processes that unfold across time, the book illustrates the power and potential of discourse analysis as a pedagogical and research tool.

1

DESIGNING CRITICAL LITERACY EDUCATION THROUGH CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Introduction

Critical literacy education is not possible without inquiry into discourse practices: an examination of the relationships between language, power, and identities. In this book we report on a year-long experiment in our teacher education classroom, which began with our exploration about how teaching and learning within a literacy practicum may support the learning and practices of our students, elementary education majors at a Midwestern university. We situated our class in an urban elementary school near the university that would challenge our pre-service teachers to think about their own language, identity, culture, and beliefs as well as provide them with experiences designing literacy practices for African-American students using a variety of pedagogical frameworks. We found, both in the moments of instructional decision making and during the long hours of poring over transcripts together, that discourse analysis was critical in the teacher research model we followed. In fact, we make the case that critical literacy is not possible without discourse analysis. Throughout the book we illustrate how we brought discourse analysis to life within our teaching, learning, and research.

We begin with a vignette from an interaction of three pre-service teachers who are drawing on tools of discourse analysis to think about the text Iggie's House¹ (Blume, 1970). The context is a book club group activity that we, the teacher educators, designed around books that featured White protagonists who in one way or another, were working towards racial justice. The book club group included three participants from our class: Leslie who is White, Tonya who is African-American, and Chelsey who is also White. They are early in their first discussion of the book, and are focused on Winnie, the protagonist, who resists her family and community who are not-so-welcoming to a new neighbor, an African-American family. Leslie raised her eyebrows and peered down at the book. She began:

Leslie: I think, I feel like, especially when the other day, and while I was reading it, I almost feel like I am this little girl.

Tonya: Really?

Leslie: Like, well, because I feel like, um, when she when she talks about like, like um, ok, when she talks about things like people aren't supporting her, when she has these ideas and they're not the same as her parents. I feel like that situation is really similar to me sometimes, if I try to talk to my parents or like friends, like that aren't in the education program about different like social justice type things, they don't really understand it.

Tonya: I think that's interesting.

In this interaction, Leslie engaged in a textual analysis of the book by relating her own experiences of growing up in a family who had different ideas about “social justice type things.” To either bring Leslie's attention to another read of the book orto gain a deeper understanding of her position, Tonya drew on a set of tools that she developed throughout the class, tools that we will refer to as “critical literacy”—the questioning of language, identity, and social practices in events in which print and literacy are involved. Here, she questioned Leslie's identification with a character who is White within a book that re-centers whiteness in an exploration of race and racism (see Rogers & Christian, 2007 for a closer analysis of this book).

In the moments that followed, Leslie continued to look intently at her book and at Tonya, as Tonya offered her narrative of how she had read the story.

Tonya: Um, I think I can see how maybe you could feel that, but I didn't feel that at all.

Leslie: You didn't? What did you feel from the book?

Tonya: I definitely didn't feel like I was in the book.

Leslie: What did you feel like?

Tonya: This little, this book made me upset. I don't like to read books where nothing happens.

Leslie: Right, but she's still, she's still in my mind. She's like a growing activist, but she can't do anything right now so it's a waste of time!

From Tonya's view, this was a book in which “nothing happens.” Her textual analysis identified the kinds of anti-racist work that Blume (1970) portrayed in the character of Winnie. Tonya emphasized that Winnie was a small child who was beginning to construct tools to work for racial justice but who, at this point in the book, had not yet taken action. Leslie continued to lean towards Tonya, and gave her her full attention, carefully thinking about Tonya's idea. In the next set of interactions, we heard Leslie's use of agreement, for example, the phrase “mmmhmmm,” to indicate she was listening to Tonya's read of the text:

Tonya: To explore, well not a waste of time, like I had reflhected on that too, but it was interesting to have the author explore her emotions [Leslie: mmmhmmm] about the subject, but what about the African-American family? [Leslie: mmmm] I don't think that's fair at all. Because they were the ones that were suffering, the signs got placed in their yard [Leslie: right]. There are no Black people around. How do they feel? And it was all about, “Winnie this, and Winnie this, and she has to go through this, and she did this,” and very descriptive about her bushy hair [hands go up to hair], and the way she dressed, and the way she played, and she chews two wads of gum at a time [Leslie: laughs] and it was like, you can identify with that character [Leslie: right] but if you have to identify with one of the Black characters, you really couldn't [Leslie: mmmm].

Leslie indicated through her close attention to Tonya's read of the story that she was using inquiry into language to build multiple perspectives when reading, a tool of the community of practice that we will further describe in this book, a community built around common engagement with narratives, cultural knowledge, beliefs about literacy teaching and equity, and positions around social action. This is but one example of how our teacher education students engaged in the critical reading of narratives (their own, those in literature and class narratives) and how we, in turn, critically analyzed their learning using discourse analysis, an iterative process we will demonstrate throughout the book.²

Leslie and Tonya were two of fourteen participants in our teacher education class. These students spent a year with us in an urban elementary school where we located two of their literacy courses. The participants were mostly White, middle-class to upper-middle-class women, with the exception of two male students and one African-American female student. The participants were either in an undergraduate degree program, double majoring in elementary education and one other major, or post-baccalaureate students in a Master's program in elementary education. The context of the study was an elementary school in an urban neighborhood in a large, Midwestern city where we held our literacy classes and practicum during the year when the study took place. The elementary school served a mostly African-American population and was not far from the university, a private university with high research activity and high academic standards. We were fortunate to have students from different geographical locations and backgrounds in our program, as well as students who had a range of educational experiences (e.g., urban, rural, private, and public).

Critical Literacy: Roots and Recent Work

Critical literacy refers to approaches to literacy instruction that place an emphasis on helping people develop agency so that they can accomplish goals they deem important and resist the coercive effects of literacy (Dozier, Johnston, & Rogers, 2006; Freire, 1973; Janks, 2002; Luke, 2012; Rogers, Mosley, & Kramer, 2009). Critical literacy educators use analysis, cultural critique, and social action to dismantle unjust practices and to construct agentic narratives alongside their students (Rogers, Mosley, & Folkes, 2010). Critical literacy has deep roots in community and adult education around the world. Indeed, the instructional practices of many literacy campaigns in postcolonial countries were rooted in critical literacy (e.g., Abendroth, 2009; Freire, 1973; Kozol, 1978; Weber, 2001). In the United States, the citizenship schools organized by Septima Clark and Myles Horton from the Highlander Center used methods of popular education, an early precursor to critical literacy, to teach African-American adults to read and write in order to pass the voter registration test (Horton, 1998). An important reminder from these literacy campaigns is that literacy education is always a response to particular social and political conditions.

Critical literacy in contemporary contexts sprang from critical pedagogy, the educational manifestation of critical social theory (e.g., Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Callinicos, 1995). In the 1980s, scholars such as Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Ira Shor, and Paulo Freire created a bridge between critical pedagogy and critical literacy education (e.g., Giroux, 1988; McLaren, 1988; Shor & Freire, 1987). And in adult education there continues to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Designing Critical Literacy Education through Critical Discourse Analysis
• 2 Inside the Design of our Teaching and Research
• 3 Narrating Literacy, Identity, and Culture
• 4 Inquiry into Linguistic Diversity
• 5 Practicing Racial Literacy
• 6 Performing Literacy
• 7 Conclusions
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Index