Study Notes for students, Study notes of Psychomotor education

Download Study Notes for students and more Study notes Psychomotor education in PDF only on Docsity! CHAPTER 8 Critical Literacy OBJECTIVES At the end of this chapter, you should be able to: •characterize critical literacy; •discuss a brief background of critical literacy theory; and • apply principles of critical literacy in designing lessons and classroom activities. The concept of critical literacy is theoretically diverse and combines ideas from various critical theories, such as critical linguistics, feminist theory, critical race theory, as well as reader response theory and cultural and media studies (Luke et al., 2009). Critical literacy is a central thinking skill that involves the questioning and examination of ideas, and requires one to synthesize, analyze, interpret, evaluate, and respond to the texts read or listened to (University of Melbourne, 2018). Critical literacy uses texts and print skills in ways that enable students to examine the politics of daily life within contemporary society with a view to understanding what it means to locate and actively seek out contradictions within modes of life, theories, and substantive intellectual positions (Bishop, 2014). Rather than promoting any particular reading of any particular group or text, critical literacy seeks to examine the historical. and contemporaneous privileging of and exclusion of groups of people and Ideas i from mainstream narratives (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993). It s a kind of literacy about structures, structural violence, and power systems. Since the 1990s, critical literacy theorists have outlined emancipatory theories of learning (Freire & Macedo, 1987) that addressed the complex relations of language and power through social critique, advocacy, and cultural transformation (Knoblauch & Brannon, 1993). Educational researchers discuss critical literacy as a theory of social practice, as the negotiation of and the creation of meaning for social justice (Greene, 2008). While there is no single model of critical literacy (as there is no single model of youth organizing), the emphasis on Freire's (1970) action-reflection cycle of "praxis" has offered participants a concept through which to construct meanings that support their literacy for civic engagement (Lankshear & McClaren, 1993). History of Critical Literacy Theory Much of the earliest scholarship on critical literacy is grounded in Freirian pedagogy. In 1987, Freire and Macedo published their expansive volume on literacy and critical pedagogy. In it, they argued that those who are critically literate can understand not only how meaning is socially constructed within texts, but also the political and economic contexts in which those texts were created and embedded (Freire & Macedo, 1987). While Freire and Macedo were perhaps the first to initiate a dialogue around the idea of critical literacy in their collection, it was not until 1993 that Lankshear and McLaren issued what was to become the seminal text devoted to the topic. In it, they stated that literacy is more complex than the traditionally defined skills of reading and writing. Rather, they argued that such a traditional definition of literacy is ideologically aligned with particular postures of normative socio-political consciousness that are inherently exploitative. By contrast, critical literacy emphasized the social construction of reading, writing, and text production within political contexts of inequitable economic, cultural, political, and institutional structures. Lankshear and McLaren argued for critically reflective teaching and research focused on both the forms that literate skills take as social practices and the uses to which those skills are employed. The authors identified three forms of educational practice that critical literacy can take on, varying by their commitment to inquiry and action: liberal education, pluralism, and transformative praxis. Liberal education here means an approach to disciplinary knowledge where intellectual freedom exists and where disparate interpretations are considered, but inevitably contradiction is avoided and rational argumentation wins out. In pluralism, there is an emphasis on reading to evaluate principles that support a loose conception of tolerance. Tolerance here is aligned with a notion of diversity that is grounded on benevolence toward those who are not mainstream (and in the process maintains the mainstream). Against these approaches, the authors forwarded "transformative praxis" as that which takes the radical potential of critical literacy into direct emancipatory action in the world. Praxis is here defined through the Freirian (1970) process of naming the conditions of oppression and struggling collectively with others in a cycle of action-reflection-action against such oppression. Lankshear and McLaren argued that a guiding principle behind the processes of he informative critical literacy praxis involves an analysis "attempting to understand how agents working within established structures of power participate in the social construction of literacies, revealing their political implications". Critical literacy praxis, which Lankshear and McLaren also called "political and social literacies," involves textual studies that are analyzed at the discursive level in which the texts were created and in which they are sustained. While the authors understood that this move might lead to such literacies being seen as "potentially subversive," they forwarded a key distinction centering on the difference between political indoctrination and the development of a critical consciousness-or what Freire (1970) called "conscientization." At the turn of the millennium, just before the 2001 re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as the controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), Janks (2000) posited four possible orientations for future approaches to critical literacy education based on different perspectives on the relationship between language and power: (a) to understand how language maintains social and political forms of domination; (b) to provide access to dominant forms of language without compromising the integrity of non-dominant. forms; (c) to promote a diversity which requires attention to the way that uses of language create social identities; and (d) to bring a design perspective that emphasizes the need to use and select from a wide range of available cultural sign