Critical Literacy in Australia

Abstract

What happens when a ‘radical’ educational idea moves from the political outlands to become a key concept in state curriculum? Postcolonial, feminist and sociological theory of the last two decades proposes a critical educational project as a key step in challenging and transforming dominant discourses and ideologies in postindustrial economies. Yet at the same time there has been heated dialogue at IRA conferences and events about US state and school-board controversies when literacy educators take public stances around issues of the recognition of difference and “social justice” (Young, 1995). What happens when a radical approach to literacy education moves into the tent of a secular state education system? Does it lose its critical edge? Is it a matter of appropriation, repressive tolerance and ‘selling out’? These are the central questions – perhaps obsessions – in this article. This article is an introduction to theories and practices of critical literacy (Muspratt, Luke & Freebody, 1997; Lankshear, 1997; Walton, 1996). It also asks an unresolved question about educational reform in New Times: about the sustainability of a socially-critical, discourse/text based approach to literacy in an conservative educational climate, one characterised not only by moral uncertainty and cultural redefinition, new and renewed forms of economic exclusion and disadvantage, but also by tight-fisted, managerialist responses to diminishing government resources (Apple, 1999; Luke, in press). The unwritten subtitle of this article, then, should probably be something like: Is critical literacy in a state-based educational system an oxymoron? Or: Is that really ‘critical literacy’ or just a watered down version of educational progressivism? Or, for those educational reformers who suddenly find themselves handed the keys to the car: We have we met the enemy and it is us. First, some cautionary advice about the lineage of this article. It is distinctively Australian, a broad outline of the moves to develop critical literacy as an educational project over the past 15 years. Many of us learned a costly lesson from the centre/margin relationships of international educational research: that it is dangerous to generalize any educational approach from one national/regional and cultural context to another. So I’m not proposing the extension of what we’ve done in Australia to other national, regional or local school systems. That is for you to decide, if indeed there are points of convergence and possibility with the cultural practices and textual work of your institutions, and with your normative beliefs about what should count as literacy. A key lesson from the history and sociology of literacy is that literacy education is always a situated response to particular political economies of education (Baker & Luke, 1991). By political economies, I refer to the institutional and governmental arrangements, and the distribution of discourse, material and spatial resources within societies that govern educational reform. In terms of literacy education, we can view our work in state schools as a