Building & Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

PROF ED 2

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Building & Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

Module 15: Critical Literacy

Introduction:

Critical literacy is a learning approach where students are expected to examine

various texts to understand the relationship between language and the power it can hold.
Students critically analyze and evaluate the meaning of texts as they relate to topics on
equity, power and social justice. These texts are then used to equip students with a critical
stance, response or action towards an issue.

It is a central thinking skill that a tertiary education seeks to develop in students. It

involves the questioning and examination of ideas, and requires you to synthesise, analyse,
interpret, evaluate and respond to the texts you read or listen to.

It helps us to read texts in deeper, more meaningful ways, by encouraging readers

of all ages to become more actively engaged and use their power to construct understanding
and not be used by the text to fulfill the intentions of the author.

Objectives:
At the end of this module the students are expected to:

a. characterize critical literacy

b. discuss a brief background of critical literacy theory

c. apply principles of critical literacy in designing lessons and classroom activities.

Pre-Test:
Identify the term described in each sentence. Choose the letter of
the correct answer.
1. The process of becoming aware of one’s experience relative to power relations, often
realized through reading and writing. Critical literacy takes place in various learning
environments and cultural contexts.
a. critical literacy b. credibility c. cyber literacy d. arts literacy

2. Evidence of authenticity and reliability.

a. critical literacy b. credibility c. accuracy d. reasonableness

3. Information needs to be up to date,factual, detailed, exact, and comprehensive

a. critical literacy b. credibility c. accuracy d. reasonableness

4. Examining the information for fairness, objectivity, and moderateness.

a. critical literacy b. credibility c. accuracy d. reasonableness

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Building & Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

Discussion
Critical literacy refers to the process of becoming aware of one’s experience
relative to power relations, often realized through reading and writing. Critical literacy takes
place in various learning environments and cultural contexts. This reading and writing-based
learning process encourages students to accept, reject or reconstruct ideologies presented
in texts.

A key principle of critical literacy is the notion of “multiple literacies”: that students
need to learn to proficiently analyse, evaluate, and produce meaning in visual, oral, and
alphabetic forms of communication.

History of Critical Literacy

Critical literacy is grounded in Freirian pedagogy. In 1987, Freire and Macedo

published then expansive volume on literacy and critical pedagogy. In it, they argued that
those who are critically literate can understand not only how meaning are socially
constructed within texts, but also the political and economic contexts in which those texts
were created and embedded. Lankshear and McLaren stated that literacy is more complex
that the traditional define skills of reading and writing aligned with a normative socio-
political consciousness. Critical literacy emphasized the social construction of reading,
writing, and text production within political context of inequitable economic, cultural,
political, and institutional structures.. Lankshear and McLaren argued for critically reflective
teaching and research focused on both forms that literate skills take as social practices and
the uses to which those skills are employed.

Three forms of educational practice

Liberal Education is an approach to disciplinary knowledge where intellectual freedom exists

and where disparate interpretations are considered, contradiction is avoided and rational
argumentations wins.

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.

Critical Literacy praxis, also called political and social literacies involves textual studies
that are analysed at the discursive level in which the texts are created and in which they
are sustained.

Critical Literacy and Arts

The creation of artistic products and the perception and rejection upon others’
artworks showcase the power of critical literacies at work within art contexts. The aims:

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Building & Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

1. allow students to see how texts work to construct their worlds, their cultures, and their
identities in powerful, often overtly ideological ways; and

2. understand how they use texts as social tools in ways that allow for a reconstruction of
these same worlds.

The arts, literacies and reality are dynamically linked and the understanding attained
by critically reading aesthetic texts involves perceiving the relationship between the art, its
creator, and its context. The practice and understanding of art forms, and being critically
literate are interconnected.

Four-tiered approach to early reading instruction

1. Coding Practices: Developing Resources as a Code Breaker - How do I crack

this text? How does it work? What are its patterns and convention? How do the sounds and
the marks relate, singly and in combinations?

2. Text-Meaning Practices: Developing Resources as a Text Participant - How do

the ideas represented in the text string together? What cultural resources can be brought
to bear on the text? What are the cultural meanings and possible readings that can be
constructed from this text?

3. Pragmatic Practices: Developing Resources as Text User - How do the uses of

this text shape its composition? What do I do with this text, here and now? What will others
do with it? What are my options and alternatives?

4. Critical Practices: Developing Resources as Text Analyst and Critic - What

kind of person, with what interests and values, could both write and read this naively and
without any problem with it? 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?

Textual Analysis

Textual analysis can be guided by asking the learners to make their way
systematically through a list of questions such as the following:

What is the subject or topic of this text?

Why might the author have written it?
Who is it written for? How do you know?
What values does the author assume the reader holds? How do you know?
What knowledge does the reader need to bring to the text in order to understand it?
Who would feel left out in this text and why? Who would feel that the claims made in the
text clash with their own values, beliefs, or experiences?
How is the reader positioned in relation to the author?

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Building & Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

Checklist CARS (Credibility, Accuracy, Reasonableness, Support)

Credibility

Evidence of authenticity and reliability is very important. Tests that help the reader
judge the credibility of a text include examining the author’s credentials and the quality of
content. It is necessary to look for biographical details on their education, training, and/or
experience in an area relevant to the information by asking “Do they provide contact
information (email or postal address, phone number?) What do you know about the author’s
reputation or previous publications?”

Accuracy

Information needs to be up to date, factual, detailed, exact, and comprehensive.

Things to bear in mind when judging accuracy include timeliness and comprehensiveness.
Take note when the information was created, before deciding whether it is still of value.

Reasonableness

This involves examining the information for fairness, objectivity, and moderateness.
Fairness requires the writer to offer a balanced argument, and to consider, and to consider
claims, made by people with opposing views. A good information text will have a calm,
reasoned tone, arguing or presenting material thoughtfully.

Support

Support for the writer’s argument from other sources strengthens their credibility. It
can take various forms such as writing bibliography and references and corroboration. It is
good idea to triangulate information that is to find at least three texts that agree. If other’s
texts do not agree, further research into the range of opinion or disagreement is needed.

Activity 1
Collect a range of reading materials. Classify by categories (e.g. requests from
charities, public information leaflets).When you have worked out for five or six types,
identify who produced them, for whom they are produced, why the text were produced,
whether each one is relevant to you or not, and why.

Choose one text from each category that particularly appeals to you, either because
of its style or its content.

Reflection
Let us explore your personal literacy histories by recalling and writing your answers
to the following:

1. Your first memories of reading (what, where, with whom?)

2. Favorite reading as a child and as a an adult.

3. The most important book/s or author/s in your life.

4. The main roles and purpose of reading in your life (as a parent, professional, for
pleasure, religious purpose, etc.)

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Building & Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum

Post-Test
Asses your critical literacy skills by answering the following questions with YES or
NO.

1. Do you evaluate your sources before using them in your essay?

2. Do you support your opinions and claims with expert’s ideas?

3. Do you read with a critical eye?

4. Do you manage the vast amount of information you need to read?

5. Do you verify data and information before accepting them?