Doing Critical Literacy

Compelling and highly engaging, this text shows teachers at all levels how to do critical literacy in the classroom and provides models for practice that can be adapted to any context. Integrating social theory and classroom practice, it brings critical literacy to life as a socio-cultural orientation to the teaching of literacy that takes seriously the relationship between language and power and orients readers to the social effects of texts. Students and teachers are drawn into the key questions critical readers need to pose of texts: Whose interests are served, who benefits, who is disadvantaged; who is included and who is excluded? The practical activities help readers grasp complex issues. Extending the theoretical framework in Hilary Janks’ Literacy and Power with a rich range of completely new, up-to-date activities that translate theory into practice, Doing Critical Literacy is powerful, relevant, and useful for both pre- and in-service teacher education and for use in schools.

During World War II, a young German girl's curiosity leads her to discover something far more terrible than the day-to-day hardships and privations that she and her neighbors have experienced.

Critical Literacy and Urban Youth offers an interrogation of critical theory developed from the author’s work with young people in classrooms, neighborhoods, and institutions of power. Through cases, an articulated process, and a theory of literacy education and social change, Morrell extends the conversation among literacy educators about what constitutes critical literacy while also examining implications for practice in secondary and postsecondary American educational contexts. This book is distinguished by its weaving together of theory and practice. Morrell begins by arguing for a broader definition of the "critical" in critical literacy – one that encapsulates the entire Western philosophical tradition as well as several important "Othered" traditions ranging from postcolonialism to the African-American tradition. Next, he looks at four cases of critical literacy pedagogy with urban youth: teaching popular culture in a high school English classroom; conducting community-based critical research; engaging in cyber-activism; and doing critical media literacy education. Lastly, he returns to theory, first considering two areas of critical literacy pedagogy that are still relatively unexplored: the importance of critical reading and writing in constituting and reconstituting the self, and critical writing that is not just about coming to a critical understanding of the world but that plays an explicit and self-referential role in changing the world. Morrell concludes by outlining a grounded theory of critical literacy pedagogy and considering its implications for literacy research, teacher education, classroom practice, and advocacy work for social change.

Hilary Janks addresses key questions about literacy and power in this landmark text that is both engaging and accessible. Her central argument is that competing orientations to critical literacy education − domination (power), access, diversity, design − foreground one over the other, but are crucially interdependent and need to work together to create possibilities for redesign and social action that serve a social justice agenda. She examines the theory underpinning each orientation, and develops new theory in the argument for interdependence and integration. Sitting at the interface between theory and practice, constantly moving from one to the other, the text is rich with examples of how to use these orientations in real teaching contexts, and how to use them to counterbalance one another. In the groundbreaking final chapter Janks considers how the rationalist underpinning of critical literacy tends to exclude the non-rational shows ways of working ‘beyond reason’ − pleasure and play, desire and the unconscious − and makes the case that these need to be taken seriously given their power to cut across the work of critical literacy educators working from any orientation.

This book describes and documents an exciting new approach to educating literacy teachers. The authors show how to help teachers develop their own critical literacy, while also preparing them to accelerate the literacy learning of struggling readers. The text takes readers inside a literacy lab in a high-poverty urban elementary school, reveals the instructional approach in action, and provides many excellent examples of critically responsive teaching. Featuring a synthesis of several fields of theory and research, this book: illustrates teacher preparation and development as personal and social transformation - demonstrating that this process requires changing the ways teachers think about students, language, culture, literacy, learning, and themselves as educators; provides pedagogical tools - including the history of the innovative literacy lab, the context of the instructional interactions, and the transition from a university-based to a school-based project; and combines critical and accelerative literacy instruction, showing how teachers can accelerate the slowest developing readers in their classrooms and also build a sense of engagement for students with the social world.

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.

Reading from a critical stance is a natural part of comprehension. It involves making connections between the text and the world, questioning the author and the text's purpose, and understanding how we are influenced by the text. In this clear, easy-to-use resource, the authors present a sound instructional framework that is based on the latest theory and research and brought to life through a variety of theme-based classroom lessons for the primary, intermediate, and middle school grades. For use with Grades 1-8.

Taking the pulse of current efforts to do—and, in some cases, undo—critical literacy, this volume explores and critiques its implementation in learning contexts around the globe. An impressive set of international authors offer examples of productive critical literacy practices in and out of schools, address the tensions and gaps between these practices and educational policies, and attempt to forecast the future for critical literacy as a movement in the changing global educational policy landscape. This collection is unique in presenting the recent work of luminaries such as Allan Luke and Hilary Janks alongside relative newcomers who use innovative approaches and arguments to reinvigorate and redefine critical practice. It is time for this cutting-edge inquiry into the state of critical literacy—not only because is it a complex and ever-evolving field, but perhaps more important, because it offers a reaction to, and powerful reworking of, standardization and high-stakes accountability measures in educational contexts around the globe.