The Handbook of Critical Literacies

Jessica Zacher Pandya, Raúl Alberto Mora, Jennifer Helen Alford, Noah Asher Golden, Roberto Santiago de Roock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000430899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Handbook of Critical Literacies aims to answer the timely question: what are the social responsibilities of critical literacy academics, researchers, and teachers in today's world? Critical literacies are classically understood as ways to interrogate texts and contexts to address injustices and they are an essential literacy practice. Organized into thematic and regional sections, this handbook provides substantive definitions of critical literacies across fields and geographies, surveys of critical literacy work in over 23 countries and regions, and overviews of research, practice, and conceptual connections to established and emerging theoretical frameworks. The chapters on global critical literacy practices include research on language acquisition, the teaching of literature and English language arts, Youth Participatory Action Research, environmental justice movements, and more.

This pivotal handbook enables new and established researchers to position their studies within highly relevant directions in the field and engage, organize, disrupt, and build as we work for more sustainable social and material relations. A groundbreaking text, this handbook is a definitive resource and an essential companion for students, researchers, and scholars in the field.

Introduction to Area 1

Jessica Zacher Pandya

DOI: 10.4324/9781003023425-1

In Area 1, authors—delve into the antecedents and current configurations of critical literacy work. The area begins with the editors’ introduction (Chapter 1), which outlines the history of this collection and lays out some of our editorial hopes, fears, and dreams. Lina Trigos-Carrillo, Rebecca Rogers, and Miriam Jorge begin their exegesis of the global histories and antecedents of critical literacy in Chapter 2 with autobiographical poems that invite their readers to think creatively and with emotion about these deeply theoretical constructs. Like many chapters, this one ends with questions to push our own work in this field further, but authors also ask us to consider how we contribute to inequalities in the publishing and grant writing industries, perhaps at the cost of doing our own social justice work. In Chapter 3, Rohit Mehta, Csilla Weninger, and David Martínez-Prieto methodically lay out connections between neoliberalism, ethnonationalism, and transnationalism, arguing that critical literacies are the antithesis of neoliberal literacies. They ask us to examine the impact of neoliberalism on literacy education, especially as it influences transnational flows of people, ideas, and literacy practices in online and in person spaces.

Four chapters in this area take up issues of pedagogy and teaching directly. The first of these is Chapter 4, in which Chris K. Chang-Bacon, Nihal Khote, Robin Schell, and Graham V. Crookes take up the relationship between English language teaching (ELT) and critical literacies. They ask readers to consider two purposes for criticality in ELT, a pedagogical one to promote critical engagement with texts and lifeworlds in language classrooms and a larger one about English itself. They interrogate the global nature of English language teaching and ask us to ask: Why English? And, whose English? Betina Hsieh and Susan Cridland-Hughes describe the evolution of critical literacy work in teacher education and in K–12 classrooms in Chapter 6, discussing dispositions of teachers and teacher educators, then moving on to examples of critical literacy in practice. They ask us to reflect on the roles of our local school districts and partners, as well as teacher education programs, in making critical literacy practices not only sustainable but also more central to language arts education. Chapter 8 focuses our attention on queer critical literacies. Navan Govender and Grant Andrews draw on a dense body of past work to offer a pedagogical tool: a framework for queering and queer critical literacy. In Chapter 9, Anwar Ahmed and Saskia Van Viegen address the rich history of the relationship between writing and critical literacy. They argue that creating and maintaining a critical writing pedagogy can further critical literacy and move us toward equity and justice in classrooms around the world.

Another three chapters focus on youth experiences of and with critical literacy. In Chapter 5, Robert Petrone, Nicole Mirra, Steve Goodman, and Antero Garcia outline the intersections of critical literacy work, youth activism, and civic participation. They define key terms, offer citations of landmark and more recent YPAR-related work, and ask us to question the boundaries and benefits of YPAR for youth and their communities. Chapter 7 describes past and present work in critical literacies from an embodiment perspective, considering the ways children’s and youth’s bodies as social texts are written and performed. Elisabeth Johnson, Grace Enriquez, and Stavroula Kontovourki review work on children remaking selves, engaging critically in their social worlds, and press readers to remember how much bodies and representations still matter in an increasingly post-humanist world. The last chapter in Area 1, Chapter 10, reviews work at the nexus of critical literacies and critical media production or critical media literacies. Olivia G. Stewart, Cassandra Scharber, Jeff Share, and Anne Crampton argue that as academics we need to continually teach criticality in media spaces and suggest that academics must do this as they create their own media and as they create spaces for children and youth to critically create and consume media.

1.1
Introduction to the Handbook of Critical Literacies

The Current State of Critical Literacy Around the World

Jessica Zacher Pandya, Raúl Alberto Mora, Jennifer Helen Alford, Noah Asher Golden, and Roberto Santiago de Roock

DOI: 10.4324/9781003023425-2

This is an expansive handbook on the past, present, and future of critical literacies on a transnational scale. Critical literacies, as they are classically conceived, offer people ways of interrogating texts and contexts and of writing and rewriting texts and realities to address injustices. They are, or ought to be, a key skill in any literate individual’s repertoire of literacy practices (cf. Comber & Simpson, 2001; Janks, 2010; Luke, 2014; Vasquez, 2005). We define them in this Handbook as literate practices individuals need in order to survive and thrive in the world, foregrounding the concept that information and texts are never neutral; they afford the ability to produce powerful texts that address injustices in our lived worlds. This formulation is sometimes known by other names in the Global South, particularly in Latin America and Africa. As chapters in Area 2 of the Handbook will show, it can be seen in research on language acquisition, the teaching of literature and English language arts, Youth Participatory Action Research, environmental justice movements, and more. As the notion of “critical” has become increasingly commonplace, we as editors fear that, without reflexivity, the term has sometimes become too diluted or misconstrued to mean much at all, especially as terms like “critical thinking” become part of the neoliberal educational vocabulary. We are also concerned that the deeply contextualized meanings of critical literacy in different places and spaces around the globe may be lost even before coming to light. In the Handbook, we intentionally draw on multiple critical epistemologies, including European, Black, and Indigenous thinkers from the Global South and the Global North. At a time when post-truth paradigms influence the ways education is understood and enacted, and misinformation and disinformation increasingly shape unfolding events and evolving structures of power, critical literacies feel more relevant and crucial than ever.

Transnational issues of literacy are central to the resurgence of authoritarian forces and thus critical approaches have never been more important. As we write, we are experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, whose ravages highlight the very inequalities and power arrangements that critical literacies research highlights. The pandemic’s death toll is exacerbated by years of intensifying ethno-racialized notions of citizenship and nationhood across the world, which some among us see as resurgent fascisms. This has included strong anti-science discourses and right-wing populist support, all based on broad-based consumption of misinformation and disinformation (often called “fake news”) spurred on by the architecture of and people’s use of social media. Additionally, existential threats due to climate genocide and nuclear proliferation are increasingly pressing, with significant repercussions for our biosocial and material worlds. Within education, we are also seeing increasingly narrow conceptualizations of literacy serving the interests of standardization, measurability, and accountability (Pandya, 2011) and a concomitant rise of edu-businesses that profit from literacy education. At the same time, the nature of texts and textual flows are rapidly transforming via media manipulation and the algorithms underlying digital platforms, altering the ways humans and nonhumans interact, produce, and consume knowledge, experience text(s), and experience racism (Benjamin, 2019; de Roock, 2021). If not for the everyday and collective resistance that is ongoing and necessary, such as the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, or the recent protests taking place across Latin America or Asia, to name two regions, for the past two years, it would be easy to feel that critical literacies educators are losing the battle.

In response to this complex confluence of change driving humanity toward homogenization in the name of control and profit, this Handbook provides a heterogeneity of current interpretations and applications of critical literacy by scholars from across the globe. We seek to demonstrate the diversity of uptake within critical literacy research communities; to strengthen our critical literacies praxis and international collaborations; and to present a stronger collective and heteroglossic front. We see a strong need for collaborations across borders and foresee the generative possibilities of such collaborations. As oppressive discourses, institutions, and forces are increasingly transnational, and as socioeconomic injustices grow and inequities widen, research and organizing that responds to oppression must also grow and diversify. We purposefully use the term “transnational” to signal our own perspectives on our places in the world and our own lived realities. Transnationalism as a term “came into existence at that moment in time when successful nation-state building ‘contributed to the creation of large numbers of people’ out of place-—that is, crossing over the national boundaries erected in the last two centuries” (Roudometof, 2005, p. 119). Attention has shifted “from state and macro-actors to the micro-level of globalization and to civil society movements” (Duscha, Klein-Zimmer, Klemm, & Spiegel, 2018, p. 3) creating opportunities for refocusing the loci of voice and power. The Handbook is an attempt to capture disparate voices about critical literacy as a kind of collective civil movement.

This Handbook grew out of the Transnational Critical Literacies Network (TCLN), which was named to reflect our senses of being transnational academics and teachers, both in and out of place, and our awareness that our positionings allow us to decenter our own ways of knowing. As part of this commitment, we sought to highlight what counts as critical literacy work in diverse sociocultural contexts to counter the often-Eurocentric foundations of its academic lineage. In each of the chapters that follows, regardless of topic, area, or theme, we have asked authors to write about their social responsibilities as critical literacy researchers in this world. We decided early on that ideally no one person should write a chapter on their own, and that no one could write more than one. In the end, only three chapters are single-authored. Some authors knew each other before they began writing, while others were total strangers, connected through the TCLN and through their desire to write about this work. We took this approach to diversify the voices in these pages and to ensure that we had authors engaged in dialogue as they wrote. We have all reached far beyond our comfort zones to ask each other uncomfortable questions about whose voices should structure each section and how we should make decisions about inclusion and exclusion. One of our major preoccupations has been the languages we would use in this Handbook. We were not allowed to publish chapters in two languages—such as the authors’ preferred language and English—but as readers will see as they read the Handbook, we succeeded in arguing that many varieties of English were welcome. Readers will also encounter a wide variety within the structures we created; some authors chose to focus more on their home or adopted countries in a chapter on a geographic region, and some authors chose to focus on emerging instead of canonical work. Additionally, we have not required certain terms or acronyms (e.g., readers will see both “multilingual learner” and “emergent bilingual” in use in different places). The variation readers will encounter is intentional and reflects our vision for this Handbook as a space for diversity of experimentation, change, and intellectual rigor.

Form and Structure of the Handbook

As we hinted in the Preface, the Handbook is laid out in three Areas, allowing us to engage in three related projects mirrored in its areas: the antecedents and current state of critical literacies in Area 1; a global survey of critical literacy in praxis, examining work in 23 countries and geographical regions in Area 2; and finally, the chapters in Area 3 highlighting work that has pushed and continues to push the boundaries of critical literacies. We describe below some of the key concepts, theoretical frameworks, and areas of research in the three areas.

Area 1: Critical Lit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to Area 1
• Introduction to Area 2
• Introduction to Area 3
• List of Contributors
• Index