Critical Literacy

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Critical Literacy
EDFN 440 June 28, 2006
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Two Working Definition
"critical literacy would make clear the
connection between knowledge and power. It would
present knowledge as a social construction linked
to norms and values, and it would demonstrate
modes of critique that illuminate how, in some
cases, knowledge serves very specific economic,
political and social interests. Moreover,
critical literacy would function as a theoretical
tool to help students and others develop a
critical relationship to their own knowledge.
(Aranowitz Giroux, 1985)
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Habits of thought, reading, writing, and
speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first
impressions, dominant myths, official
pronouncements, traditional clichés, received
wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep
meaning, root causes, social context, ideology,
and personal consequences of any action, event,
object, process, organization, experience, text,
subject matter, policy, mass media, or
discourse. (Shor, Empowering Education, p. 129)
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The Four Resources Model
By Allan Luke
Coding Practices - Developing Resources as a Code
Breaker
How do I crack this text? How does it work?
Text Meaning Practices Dev. Resources as a Text
Participant
How do the ideas represented in the text string
together? What are the cultural meanings and
possible readings that could be constructed from
this text?
Pragmatic Practices Dev. Resources as a Text User
What do I do with this text, here and now? What
will others do with it? What are my options and
alternatives?
Critical Practices Dev. Resources as a Text
Analyst and Critic
What is this text trying to do to me? In whose
interests? Which positions, voices, and interests
are at play? Which are silent and absent?
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Critical Reading of Texts An Example
The Sick Rose By William Blake O Rose thou art
sick The invisible worm That flies in the
night Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy And
its dark secret love Does thy life destroy.
Reading within the lines
What is the text saying? What is its literal
meaning?
Reading between the lines
What is the text saying beyond its literal
meaning? What are the authors intentions?
Reading beyond the lines
What messages are conveyed beyond the authors
intentions? What cultural elements are manifest
through the text? What implicit assumptions are
present in the text?
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Towards a Critical Literacy Freire Macedo,
The Illiteracy of Literacy in the U.S.
Macedos Question Is it possible to develop a
critical literacy program within the
institutional space, which contradicts and
neutralizes the fundamental task required by the
dominant power of the schools? (p. 126)
Freires response

• Working assumptions
• educational systems serve to reproduce dominant
  ideologies (ways of seeing, speaking, values,
  norms, etc.) (p. 126)
• language, in its broadest sense, is packed with
  ideology, (p. 128).

 Educators must assume a political posture that
renounces the myth of pedagogical neutrality,
(p. 126). These educators cannot reduce
themselves to being pure education specialists,
(p. 126).
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Critical Consciousness Critically Reading the
Word and the World
Frei Bettos Clothesline of Information
metaphor (p. 130)
Critical Literacy
as a form of relational analysis, as drawing
out relations between different pieces of
information on the clothesline.
Whether we work at the university level or in
adult education literacy, whether involved in the
pure sensibility of facts or in the pursuit of a
more rigorous comprehension of facts, one of the
difficulties in the critical treatment of the
different pieces of information on the
clothesline is that there are always obstacles
that obfuscate political clarity. If it were not
for these ideological obstacles, how could we
explain the ease with which we accept President
Reagans pronouncements that a weak and poor
country like Grenada poses a threat to the
gigantic power of the United States? (p. 131)
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