Teaching Literature in a Post-Truth World: Three Strategies for Integrating Critical Media Epistemology into Literature Curricula

Purpose This qualitative research study examines classroom observations and transcripts, teacher and student interviews and student writing to investigate how white English teachers can cultivate students’ critical literacies regarding race and oppression through classroom literature. As research and practice in the field of critical literacy has yet to effectively center black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) lives and histories, this study aims to expand on existing critical literacy research by examining how literature teachers disrupt the perpetuation of whiteness through literature instruction that explicitly grapples with race and structures of oppression. Design/methodology/approach This research examines the pedagogical practices of two white English teachers through a yearlong investigation of classroom instruction and curriculum in an urban high school in a large Northeastern city. The overarching question of this study asks, how do white English teachers cultivate students’ critical literacies regarding race and social justice through classroom literature? Additional questions that guided this study are: How do students in these classes learn about structures of oppression? What language is used in these classrooms to discuss ideas about power? What texts and materials do these teachers use to engage students in critical literacy practices? Findings The findings of this study provide insight as to how white English teachers can foster students’ critical literacy development regarding race and oppression through their pedagogy and curriculum. The two teachers’ introduction of critical language and frameworks in the classroom supported students’ ability to critically engage with classroom literature and with their own social worlds. In addition, these teachers’ practices emphasize the need for white teachers to decenter their own knowledge and identities to effectively foster students' critical and sociopolitical development. Originality/value This research responds to McLean et al.’s (2021) call for a disruption of the “perpetuation of Eurocentric, hegemonic perspectives by white scholars” in the field by centering race in approaches to critical literacy development in the classroom. By analyzing data from classrooms in the same school with distinct curricular approaches, this study examines not only what but also how educators are teaching in classrooms designed to cultivate students’ critical and sociopolitical development through English Language Arts. This study offers hope for developing critical and culturally sustaining pedagogies among non-BIPOC educators who teach Black and Latinx populations.

This study investigated the ways in which six Chinese university students, who were studying English as a compulsory component of their degrees, used the Internet in their everyday lives. The focus was on how their online activities contributed to the development of their critical literacy capabilities. The notion of critical web literacy provides the study’s conceptual framework. It draws on a range of theoretical resources associated with the New Literacy Studies, critical literacy theories and the traditions of critical thinking in China. Although there are some tensions between the ways of seeing and producing knowledge integral to these resources, together they proved most useful to illuminate and explain the findings. The research employed a qualitative case-study approach with an ethnographic orientation that extended over 15 months. The site for the project was a Chinese university with a focus on six students, three male and three female, in their second and third years of study. The main data sources were observations, interviews, online communications and blog writings. Discourse analysis techniques, based on Gee’s D/discourse theories, were adopted to analyse the data. The study’s findings suggest that the students’ proficiency with English, as the lingua franca of the Internet, together with their mastery of digital technologies, influenced their critical web literacy development in important ways. For several of the participants, their critical engagement with web discussions and activities motivated them to enhance their foreign language facility, especially English. The findings also suggest that the students’ national identity influenced their critical thinking when they engaged in web literacy practices, in particular, when they encountered ideological conflicts between China and the west. By taking account of Confucian scholarship and the traditional heritage of Chinese culture, as well as the political and social context of contemporary China, the study explored the challenges of importing notions of critical literacy from the west. It concludes that, at least for the present, there is not much space for the application of such critical literacy approaches in Chinese higher education. However, the Internet opened a new window for the Chinese young people who participated in the study to engage with broader social and political activities across geographical barriers. The study also provides English language teachers in Chinese universities with a new lens through which to consider young people’s everyday digital literacy practices. As the students’ online activities outside of the classroom proved to be useful in developing both their language learning and critical thinking, teachers might explore the possibilities for including critical approaches mediated by the use of digital technologies in their programs.

Researchers have increasingly called for a framework that critically engages Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED). From the dual lenses of an education technology leadership and a critical media studies scholar, we analyze the challenges faced in education with the exponential uses of AI through a critical digital media literacy lens to create a Critical Media AI Framework. We provide an analysis of the current landscape of challenges in understanding layered bias in AI and strategic approaches to overcome these hurdles through a conceptual framework for AIED practices. Our framework provides conceptual understandings of AI and aligned critical questions. As our purpose is to offer a framework for scholars, instructors, and students to examine AI through a critical media studies lens, we bring together major concepts from seminal frameworks in our respective fields with novel guiding questions to reflect major overarching concepts that students must grasp about the non-neutrality of media as well as the layers of bias and elements of AI that make it unique from other types of media. Through critical questioning and understanding of these biases, we show that students can be empowered to be critical engagers and to reimagine the ways in which AI can be used.

In Indonesia’s diverse sociocultural landscape, English language teaching (ELT) is crucial in shaping students’ understanding of multicultural perspectives. However, ELT materials often lack cultural inclusivity and fail to encourage critical engagement with diverse narratives. This conceptual paper explores the integration of the Critical Literacy Approach in ELT to promote multicultural awareness among secondary school students. Using James A. Banks’ Dimensions of Multicultural Education as the analytical framework, this study examines how ELT materials and pedagogical strategies can foster students' ability to question biases, challenge stereotypes, and engage with diverse cultural perspectives. Through a critical review of Indonesian curriculum guidelines, ELT textbooks, and relevant literature, this study identifies how ELT content aligns with content integration, knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and school empowerment—the five dimensions outlined by Banks. The analysis highlights key gaps in representation and suggests strategies for integrating critical literacy-based teaching practices, such as selecting diverse texts, encouraging dialogic discussions, and implementing equity-focused instructional methods. This paper contributes to ongoing discussions on multicultural education in ELT. It offers pedagogical insights for teachers, curriculum designers, and policymakers to create more inclusive and critically engaging English learning environments.

Critical Literature Pedagogy (CLP) is a teaching and assessment approach that promotes reading against the text and critically examining biases, norms, and stereotypes in literature. As literature teachers have limited knowledge of the use of CLP as an educational approach to teaching and assessment of literature, this practical action research explored changes in pre-service English teachers' knowledge of CLP following an educational intervention at a state-operated teacher education college in the Philippines. The quasi-experimental study involved 69 third-year pre-service English language teachers in a teacher education college in Central Luzon, Philippines. Results showed a significant increase in CLP knowledge, with participants' mean scores rising from 2.87 (Knowledgeable) to 3.73 (Very Knowledgeable). The improved CLP knowledge was further analyzed through factor analysis using PCA with a rotated component matrix, identifying four key components for developing CLP-based principles for literary education. Qualitative findings reinforced these results, highlighting CLP’s impact on content and pedagogical knowledge while also revealing challenges related to teachers, students, and administration. Strategies for addressing these barriers were grouped into three categories: Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge. The study’s results provide valuable insights for enhancing practices and curriculum design in literature education. Keywords: critical language pedagogy, critical literature pedagogy, teaching of literature, critical literacy

Recently, the debate around critical literacy has dissipated as literacy education agendas and attendant policies shift to embrace more hybrid approaches to the teaching of senior English. This paper reports on orientations towards critical literacy as expressed by four teachers of senior English who teach culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Teachers’ understandings of critical literacy are important given the emphasis on Critical and Creative Thinking as well as Literacy as General Capabilities underpinning the Australian Curriculum. Using critical discourse analysis and Janks’ (2010) Synthesis Model of Critical Literacy, interview and classroom data from four teachers of English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) learners in two high schools were analysed for the ways these teachers constructed critical literacy in their talk and practice. While all four teachers indicated significant commitment to critical literacy as an approach to English language teaching, their understandings varied. These ranged from providing access to powerful genres, to rationalist approaches to interrogating text, with less emphasis on multimodal design and drawing on learner diversity. This has significant implications for what kind of learning is being offered to EAL/D learners in the name of English teaching, for syllabus design, and for teacher professional development.

Globalisation, the evolution of artificial intelligence, and information and communication technology are rapidly changing social and workforce landscapes. As a result, pre-service and in-service teacher education providers must prepare teachers to meet the needs of their students’ futures. This chapter argues for teacher education to reshape teachers’ epistemic cognition and epistemic reflection (i.e., key components of teachers’ identities) to deeply engage with the 21st century capability of self-regulated learning (SRL). We propose that epistemic reflexivity is a key process underpinning teachers’ decisions about whether and how to explicitly teach strategies for SRL. We introduce a new process–model of epistemic reflexivity and provide examples of how pre-service and in-service teacher educators can ‘upgrade’ professional learning communities to incorporate epistemic reflexivity as a core educative process. Additionally, we provide practical examples of implementing professional education for epistemic cognition and reflection.

This paper reports on an instrumental case study exploring what migrant and refugee-background youth in Australia make of the critical media literacy they learn in school, and what critical media practices they use out of school. It addresses the perennial question of the relationship between school literacy learning and everyday literate lives, paying deliberate attention to the experiences of youth whose diversity is underrepresented in research. Interviews with two English teachers and focus groups with culturally and linguistically diverse Year 10 students were analysed using content analysis and the concept of recontextualization. Findings are that these youth see significant value in their critical literacy learning at school, and they report utilising the types of critical reading/viewing skills they experience at school but for different purposes. They frequently use five main strategies for critical reading/viewing out of school: 1. using awareness of myriad multimodal semiotic features to examine representations of products and information; 2. evaluating trustworthiness; 3. fact checking; 4. doing further research; 5. identifying attempts at positioning. This research brings in-school and out-of-school domains together to understand the connections between critical literacy practices undertaken in school, and those reshaped by immigrant youth, who are still learning English, out of school.

As the new communication technologies have become an integral part of our daily transactions and one of the founding stones of modern social systems, the “way” we are engaged with them has become more of an issue. The Internet, which has unlimited potentials for construction of a better world (more equal, more democratic, more liberating and more just), can also turn into a tool for various authoritarian and totalitarian phantasies. “Critical New Media Literacy: Four Arts” will interrogate the role that could be played by critical new media literacy in transforming the society and the web. The four arts are critical for equipping citizens and collectivities with weapons that will help them to be a part political processes: the art of deconstruction, the art of defense, the art of connective action, and the art of emancipation. In short, the four arts will play vital role in realizing the ideal of active, participatory citizenship. Active citizenship stand as one of the most revolutionary ideas of our neo-liberal times which imposes the ideas, “democracy, but not too much”, “politics but not too much”, and “security, very much”. The neoliberal understanding of politics curb citizens’ will to have an influence on their and others’ lives. Critical new media literacy as an art of deconstruction is about contextualizing, deconstructing and problematizing the supposed naturalness and transparency of media texts. The main question here is “to whose interest?”. This has two dimensions. On the one hand it is a discursive, semiological and ideological critique of media texts; which insists on the social construction of reality (as opposed to essentialist readings of the social) and the role of the media therein. Second, the critical new media literacy problematizes the political economy of the new media and focuses on the economic structure, labor processes and relations of exploitation in production of new media messages. Not only material labor, but also immaterial labor will be a major topic for critical new media literacy. Critical new media literacy as an art of defense aims at equipping the citizens with skills to defend themselves from techniques of surveillance, monitoring and censorship. In authoritarian settings such as Turkey this skill is indispensable for increasing autonomy of individual citizens and of social movements. These technologies of course are not only owned and promoted by the state, also companies monitor and profile the citizens on the net for profit. Critical new media literacy as an art of defense, in this sense will be the weapon of the weak. Critical new media literacy as an art of connective action equips citizens with insights to better organize, collaborate, act together, and organize in and through the net. It also pushes citizens to develop their creative and productive capacities through a focus on new media production strategies. As it was the case in many other settings, Turkey, during Gezi Protests realized the importance of the connective and creative potentialities of new media technologies. The mobile phones for instance has turned into alternative media outlets in the hands of citizen journalists. Social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter were actively used by protestors as conduits of organizing, deliberating and collective framing. Critical new media literacy as an art of connective action focuses on enriching this potential of new media technologies. Finally, critical new media literacy as an art of emancipation stress the liberating potential and agenda of new media literacy. Thus, what we are dealing is not a pedagogical issue, put primarily a political one. Critical new media literacy is not something to be ‘thought’ by a ‘knowing’ teacher; but an emancipating intellectual journey in which the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ (with reference to Jacques Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and The Emancipated Spectator) will act, transform, challenge, be challenged, and learn with/from the ‘students’. The life itself, the real new media users and new media spaces are where the traces of an emancipatory strategy (for critical new media literacies) can be found and followed. Breaking the pedagogical relationship and replacing it with a radical, revolutionary perspective will lie at the heart of critical new media literacy. The four arts, their relevance for and place in a restricted internet setting (Turkey) will be discussed in details. In other words, the four arts of critical new media literacy are designed and thought specifically for Turkey setting. The major political goal of the four arts outlook is to contribute to halting the authoritarian turn in Turkish politics –keeping in mind the Internet is one of the prominent targets of authoritarian measures.

The purpose of these researchers is to determine the implementation of reading strategies in the classroom used by English teachers at stage junior high school in kulisusu utara. These researchers use a qualitative design, employing observation and interview instruments. The subject of this research was an English language teacher who has taught English for five years. The researchers' data were analyzed using Miles and Huberman's (2014) qualitative data analysis. The research results show that the English teacher has implemented several reading strategies in class. In the pre-reading, the teacher uses brainstorming, encourages the use of dictionaries and discusses text types. While reading, the teacher uses reading aloud and Jigsaw and uses pictures. Post-reading teachers use evaluating comprehension, in particular, tasks, Clarifying and Justifying Student Answers, Questioning Specific Information, and Reviewing Strategies. The additional benefits include: improved comprehension, increased vocabulary, enhanced critical thinking skills, and improved concentration. This study adopts a qualitative approach, and data collection methods such as observation, interviews, and documentation are employed. Data analysis involves data collection, data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing. Based on the results of research conducted at a stage junior high school in kulisusu utara, the teacher uses a variety of different strategies with the aim of making it easy for students to understand the material. The teacher once taught without using any strategies. Most students are not serious about learning and make a lot of noise. So, the teacher often uses strategies. Using strategi reading is very beneficial for students. Apart from increasing learning concentration, it can also foster students' interest in reading.

This article sets out a framework for a critical digital literacy curriculum derived from the four resources, or reader roles, model of critical literacy developed by Luke and Freebody (1990). We suggest that specific problematics in academic engagement with and curriculum development for digital literacy have occurred through an overly technocratic and acritical framing and that this situation calls for a critical perspective, drawing on theories and pedagogies from critical literacy and media education. The article explores the consonance and dissonance between the forms, scope and requirements of traditional print/media and the current digital environment, emphasising the knowledge and operational dimensions that inform literacy in digital contexts. It offers a re-interpretation of the four resources framed as critical digital literacy (Decoding, Meaning Making, Using and Analysing) and elaborates the model further with a fifth resource (Persona). The article concludes by identifying implications for institutional practice.Keywords: curriculum development; academic development; digital identity(Published: 31 January 2014)Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2014, 21: 21334 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v21.21334

A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller’s <i>Lectures in China</i>

The 2016 presidential election marked the beginning of a so‐called “post‐truth era” in which mis‐ and disinformation have contributed to political polarization and violence, the acceleration of global warming, and thousands of preventable deaths. In this paper, I draw on the results of a 2‐week, practitioner inquiry‐informed case study in an 11th‐grade English language arts (ELA) classroom situated in a small, conservative Midwest town to explore the affordances of integrating two theoretical frameworks, one rooted in media literacy and one in epistemic cognition, in planning and implementing a unit designed to support students' critical engagement with digital media texts related to climate change. The findings point to the need for a new framework that draws on insights from both sociocultural and cognitive approaches to literacy. Implications for classroom practice include the importance of teaching students how to evaluate their positionality using platforms they already engage, creating authentic epistemic environments, leading students in explorations of different ways of knowing, helping them understand knowledge systems and processes, and promoting epistemic virtues and autonomy.

Over the last three decades, in an atmosphere that is quintessentially super-diversified and hyper-active, teaching culture is being celebrated as the emblem of a state-of-the-art branch of teaching and research. Therefore, social activists are today expediting an extraordinary era of multiculturalism, in which the bottom line is to foster cultural literacy and critical literacy as a capstone for social democracy and academic change. Given its ascendency in literature teaching, the current study endeavors to probe into the effectiveness of using literature for promoting critical cultural literacy by adopting a ‘windows and mirrors’ teaching framework. To fulfill this target, research has invested in pre/post-tests as instruments for data collection and analysis, and opted for 30 participants among second-year English as a Foreign Language learners as target randomized sampling. The study findings have revealed that ‘windows and mirrors’ readings of rhetoric have helped to stimulate learners’ empathy, tolerance, and inclusion in others’ cultures, expanded the breadth of their cultural content knowledge, and sharpened advanced critical level literacy. Keywords: Cultural literacy, empathy, inclusion, tolerance, ‘windows and mirrors’ framework.

Critical literacy, bringing literacy education into a wider socio-cultural context, has become an important focus in literacy studies. The global academia has contributed rich theories and educational models to this field. Recently, although the deficiency in English learners’ critical literacy has caught an increasing attention in Mainland China, the pedagogical solutions to this problem are still in urgent need.&#13;\n&#13;\nDrawing on the Four Resources Model (4RM) and the principles of critical literacy, this thesis seeks to explore how to cultivate English learners’ critical literacy in blended learning. By taking a qualitative action research (AR), this project was designed to include two inter-linked studies (Study 1 and Study 2) in a first-year English class at a university in Central China over a two-semester period. Study 1 investigated the status quo of the research site to map the weaknesses in Chinese English education. It involved 28 students and 5 English teachers. Data were collected through students’ first written reports of English learning experiences and the interviews with the participants. It finds evidence to prove the claim of English learners’ deficiency in critical literacy in China, moreover, extends the boundaries of the current discussion from focusing on this problem at the college-level to involving evidence from students’ pre-tertiary education. Finally, Study 1 offers suggestions to design the following AR process in Study 2.&#13;\n&#13;\nStudy 2 was designed from three aspects that emerged from Study 1: learning materials, learning environment, and pedagogical changes. Participants were the same group of students as in Study 1. Data were collected to examine students’ critical literacy development across time, including their second and third written reports of English learning, classroom observations, interviews, and the data from Moodle activities. Study 2 finds that, by implementing the AR intervention suggested by Study 1, students’ critical literacy was shown to improve with noticeable evidence as follows: 1) more texts were involved from the outside world into English learning in both classroom and Moodle activities, 2) students’ participation and the increase in critical practices in the classroom and Moodle activities, and 3) the process of students’ gradual empowerment developed in shifting from teacher-led, to teacher-facilitated, and finally student-led patterns in the whole-class discussion, group discussion, and textbook learning activities, particularly in student-initiated English Salons.&#13;\n&#13;\nFinally, this project drew on the findings to discuss new insights into the 4RM and blended learning. Moreover, it offered a Confucian model for the process of critical literacy practices to promote the dialogue between theories from China and the world in future research.&#13;\n&#13;\nThis study may contribute to future critical literacy projects in China by highlighting five points: 1) involving multiple learning materials into the process of connecting texts and the outside world; 2) building a blended learning environment to provide more opportunities for critical practices; 3) involving a progression of constant negotiations with multiple texts, viewpoints, and learners’ linguistic and cultural identities; 4) engaging teachers’ bottom-up initiatives for knowledge sharing and policy development; and 5) localising the critical literacy theory and practice from the Chinese socio-cultural perspective.