Critical Literacy Practices Research Articles

Race talk in preschool classrooms: Academic readiness and participation during shared-book reading

Reading literature to engage young children in critical discussions about race – and how it impacts their daily lives – is a promising practice. This study examined how two teachers and eight young children talked about skin colour as they read books about racial diversity, and the extent to which participation structures and conversational topics influenced how teachers and children constructed, resisted, and/or reproduced discourses of race and racial injustice during shared-book readings. We draw on critical perspectives on classroom discourse to understand the identities (i.e. teacher and learner) and discourses (i.e. early childhood literacy) that the children and teachers co-constructed. We suggest that teachers used shared-book reading time to enact a discourse of literacy readiness and treated the activity as an opportunity to teach academic skills (e.g. classification and colour vocabulary) through teacher recitation. During these shared-book reading experiences, we argue that teachers and children constructed skin colour as politically neutral, without acknowledging the word ‘race’ or its deeply embedded meanings in the U.S. Based on this analysis, we discuss implications for teacher educators in terms of critical literacy practice in early childhood.

Critical Literacy Practices in EFL Reading Classroom -An Experimental Study towards Chinese University Students

English as a world language is more than a way to exchange information but a means to solidify certain social hierarchy and represent certain social interests. English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers should instruct critical awareness to empower students to transform social injustice and fulfill responsibilities as global citizens. This experimental study aims to investigate how Chinese EFL reading classes integrate with critical practice, whether critical literacy practice (CLP) contributes to achievements of language proficiency, how critical literacy practice shapes and is reshaped by students’ identities, and what contributions critical literacy practice can make to Chinese EFL reading classes. The experimental study throws light on EFL teaching.

A Discourse Analysis of Students’ Reflections in a Critical Literacy Picturebook Read-Aloud Class

This study is based on a read-aloud class picture book focusing on achieving critical awareness. It was conducted over the course of one month at an elementary school in Korea and analyzed how sixth-grade students responded to texts which raised questions about multiple perspectives, gender roles, and the status of marginalized minorities. The research was conducted on twenty sixth-graders in an elementary school in Gyeonggi-do. The read-aloud class was organized based on Four Resources Model of Reading and consisted of two sessions. During the first two-week session, students read a text on the basis of code-breaking and meaning-making practices, and during the second session that was conducted in the last two weeks, they read the texts through the prism of text-using and text-analyzing practices. In order to investigate whether critical literacy instruction developed critical awareness in the students, the students’ discourses in their written reflections on the texts were analyzed using Fariclough’s Three-Dimensional Model of Discourse Analysis. The results indicated that the read-aloud critical literacy class enhanced students’ engagement with the texts by enabling them to question the issues that were in play. In addition, six out of the twenty students demonstrated their critical awareness in their reflections. They produced critical literacy-oriented discourses including perspective-challenging discourses that questioned the authors’ points of view, individual-difference discourses, and positive-discrimination discourses, rather than conventional, conservative discourses. Therefore, the results of this study suggest that it would serve elementory school instructors well to employ critical literacy practices in their reading classes. However, further research is required in order to gain more information regarding the applicability of critical literacy instruction in the EFL context. The results of the study and their pedagogical implications will be discussed in detail in this paper.

Complicating canons: a critical literacy challenge to common core assessment

AbstractThe widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards in the US has prioritized rigorous reading of complex texts. The emphasis on text complexity has led to instructional and assessment materials that constrain critical literacy practices by emphasizing quantitative features of text, such as sentence length, and a static list of text exemplars over the critical lens of the reader. Assessments like the PARCC, designed to align with nationalized standards, create the impression that complex texts are synonymous with a homogenized literary canon. A critical analysis of the texts and questions included in the first administration of the PARCC assessment reveals that the PARCC excludes both diverse authors and critical, rigorous reading practices. Research demonstrates that many literary curricula and classroom activities are strongly influenced by standardized tests; therefore, I argue for a definition of rigorous reading that supports critical literacy pedagogy and opposes the narrowing definitions of rigor and complexity that are asserted by the Common Core and PARCC.

Sports-based Text Sets: Fostering Critical Literacy at the Intersections of Sport and Society

ABSTRACTSports culture is central to the lives of many students, whether they participate in athletic competitions or sports fandom. Unfortunately, sports culture also reflects many sociopolitical issues and inequities that impinge upon our greater society in the present day (e.g., domestic violence, racism). For those reasons, sports-based text sets—diverse collections of texts about figures, events, and happenings in sports culture—stand to support teachers in honoring students' knowledge of and interests in sports culture while also facilitating critical literacy practices through the investigation of inequities that ail both sport and society. This article introduces the notion of a sports-based text set, addresses the types of texts that might be featured in such a set, and presents ideas for exploring specific texts with students, using the issue of inequitable compensation for male and female athletes as an example.

Leveraging critical literacies for social change: questioning the culture of compliance at an ‘F’ school

This article traces the experiences of two veteran elementary school teachers in the urban Southwest, who are positioned by district and state policy ‘texts’ as insubordinate and failing, and who employ critical literacy practices to reconstruct and redesign these texts as they seek to create more equitable and humane conditions in schools. Stemming from a larger phenomenological study, this article explores how teachers in a ‘failing’ elementary school in the Southwestern US understand and negotiate district, state, and federal policies and examines how these policies shape and inform their identities as professionals. This research has important implications concerning the potential of critical literacy as a mode of resistance, the promise inherent in school/university partnerships for promoting change, and the ways in which the practice of deconstructing/reconstructing dehumanizing texts can foster a re-professionalization of teaching.

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Possibilities and challenges of early critical literacy practices: Bilingual preschoolers’ exploring multiple voices and gender roles

Despite the emphasis on the significance of critical literacy, there has been a startling paucity of studies examining how critical literacy pedagogies can be implemented to preschool bilingual settings. In order to address this gap in the research, this qualitative case study examines the possibilities and challenges of critical literacy in bilingual Korean preschool contexts. Based on Freire’s notion that literacy is inherently political, this study focused on six 4-year-old Korean bilingual children’s reading of picture books during a read-aloud session at the Korean Language School in a Midwestern state. The data were collected for 5 months using multiple collection sources such as audio/video recordings, observational field notes, interviews, children’s artifacts, and an informal notebook, including memos and field jottings. Findings suggest that critical literacy helps young bilingual children to explore multiple perspectives and challenge the dominant gender ideologies. For professionals in early childhood education, the study may contribute to our understanding of the significance of critical literacy conversations with bilingual preschool children.

Blurring Boundaries: Drama as a Critical Multimodal Literacy for Examining 17th‐Century Witch Hunts

AbstractThis article illustrates how critical multimodal literacy practices engage secondary students to further explore differences and similarities between past and present instances of discrimination within a process drama, where students and teachers explore a topic through unscripted role‐play. Data from a classroom‐based ethnography are drawn on to show how students in two grade 9 social studies classes made meaning from their engagements with a process drama about 17th‐century witch hunts. The authors use field notes, interviews, and photographs to reveal some of the complexities of using drama in the classroom, while highlighting the relevance of critical multimodal literacy practices for creating meaningful engagements with curriculum.

Instructional Model of Critical Literacy in an EFL Context: Balancing Conventional and Critical Literacy

This article explores the general patterns of interactions between the teacher and students during the different instructional steps when the teacher attempted to incorporate both conventional skill-based reading and critical literacy in an English as a foreign language (EFL) literacy class in a Korean university. There has been a paucity of EFL research that addresses balancing skill-based functional and critical literacy empirically in school settings. This practitioner qualitative action study was conducted with 29 Korean university students who had not experienced critical literacy practices before, but only worked exclusively on basic reading skills of comprehension. The classroom interaction patterns were investigated with qualitative research methods. The findings included teacher-students interactions for the purposes of decoding and comprehension, of personalizing and socializing with the reading texts, and for critical analysis of underlying assumptions and dominant ideological beliefs. The interactions between teacher and students required unique instructional steps of explicit teacher guidance for successful integration between skill-based and critical literacy practices. While there were moments where the teacher could not address critical literacy to teach skill-based literacy, students started to initiate critical literacy practices as they learned to be critical analysts of ideological constructions of the texts toward the end of the semester. Educational implications have been discussed.

Toward the Resistant Reading of Information: Google, Resistant Spectatorship, and Critical Information Literacy

The theory of resistant spectatorship posits that individuals interacting with media and information may have the agency or power to oppose, reject, or reassemble the message they encounter instead of passively accepting it. This study puts resistant spectatorship in conversation with information literacy and critiques one example of a dominant information discovery system, Google Search, from a “resistant” position. Additionally, this study argues that, within academic libraries, the practice of critical information literacy, a pedagogical approach aligned with the concept of resistant spectatorship, is an ideal mode for encouraging students to become resistant readers of information in its increasingly corporate-mediated forms.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Two Sides of the Same Coin: Preservice Teachers’ Dispositions Towards Critical Pedagogy and Social Justice Concerns in Rural and Urban Teacher Education Contexts

This paper describes preservice teachers’ (PTs) dispositions toward diversity, social justice education, and critical pedagogy (CP). PTs were enrolled in elementary Literacy Methods courses in two geographic locations, one rural and the other urban. We employed CP (Darder et al. in Critical pedagogy: an introduction. In: Darder A, Baltodano MP, Torres RD (eds) The critical pedagogy reader. Routledge, New York, NY, pp 1–20, 2009; Giroux in Theory and resistance in education: a pedagogy for the opposition. Bergin and Garvey, South Hadley, MA, 1983) and concepts such as technical and emancipatory knowledge (Habermas in Knowledge and human interests. Heinemann, London, 1972), field (setting, Bourdieu in The forms of capital. In: Richardson JG (ed) Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. Greenwood, New York, NY, pp 241–258, 1986), and a field-related demographic and epistemological divide (Han in Challenges in implementing critical literacy practices in remote rural teacher education programs. In: Yoon B, Sharif R (eds) Critical literacy practice: applications of critical theory in diverse settings. Springer, New York, NY, 2015) to analyze the qualitative data from both contexts. Findings showed that rural and urban PTs displayed drastically different dispositions to CP and social justice curricula. This study contributes to the CP research and research on PTs’ dispositions in significant ways and implicates issues related to all (rural and urban) teacher educators and teacher education programs as they prepare our teachers, and therefore, our future.

From the Editors

From the Editors

Why does critical literacy hit a snag in the Iranian EFL setting?

This study sought to elucidate the challenges of critical literacy practice in an Iranian context. The objectives were twofold: (a) to find out what challenges teachers and students face in the practice of critical literacy and (b) to explore the state of critical literacy in language education. To this end, a sample of 12 English teachers and 120 students majoring in TEFL took part in the study. Data collection procedure was based on students’ reflective notes, semi-structured interviews, and classroom observations. The analysis of the interviews revealed that factors including a) lack of the teachers' familiarity with the concept and tenets of critical literacy, b) students' poor English proficiency, c) lack of attention to critical literacy in curriculum and d) political issues were the major challenges. Classroom observations and students' reflective notes showed that teachers did not encourage students to become involved in ideologies imbedded in the texts.

The Council of Youth Research: Critical Literacy and Civic Agency in the Digital Age

This article explores the relationship between critical literacy practice, digital media production, and civic agency in the Council of Youth Research, a youth participatory action research program in which Los Angeles high school students conduct research and create dynamic, multimedia presentations as leaders of a growing youth movement for educational justice. We examine theories of critical literacy to articulate a vision of literacy that is tied to societal power structures for the purpose of personal and social transformation. In order to bring critical literacy theory into practice, we explore the ways in which critical pedagogy and participatory digital literacies structure the work of the Council. We use ethnography of communication and visual sociology to analyze literacy events from 1 year of the Council's work to highlight ways in which student digital literacy production manifested powerful civic agency. We conclude by discussing the implications of this work for classrooms and further grounded research in pedagogies of participatory media.

Enacting Critical Literacy in English Classrooms

AbstractIn a time of increased standardization and top‐down reform, teachers with democratic and social justice‐oriented perspectives must work to create classroom spaces that value student voice and position them as knowledge holders. This article draws on a critical literacy framework to analyze the case study of one teacher working within a teacher study group on adolescent literacy education in a large urban area. This teacher re‐articulated her values in the context of a constraining school culture, made sense of her practice in order to improve it, and considered how she might negotiate the micropolitical environment of her school. The article concludes with a discussion of how the study group provided structured support for this teacher's inquiry and discusses how teachers can work together to open more space for enacting critical literacy practices within constraining policy environments.

Writing Workshop Revisited

Workshop pedagogy is a staple of writing classrooms at all levels. However, little research has explored the pedagogical moves that can address longstanding critiques of writing workshop, nor the sorts of rhetorical challenges that teachers and students in secondary classrooms can tackle through workshops. This article documents and analyzes the work that two high school educators do to organize a writing workshop around the writing and performance of spoken word poetry. Through a qualitative case study of a four-week spoken word poetry unit, we present features of the unit that both align with tenets of traditional workshop pedagogy and focus that pedagogy on the social and cultural situatedness of literacy. We show that the teachers in this case organized the classroom as a strong discursive community (Matusov, 2007) characterized by collective engagement with a genre, anticipation of a real audience, and renegotiation of classroom authority. We then analyze two discussions that arose during the unit in order to explore how students and teachers grappled with key dilemmas at the heart of writing well: how to shape one’s text and message for an authentic audience, and what role(s) teachers and peers should play in students’ writing. The analysis suggests that engagement with critical literacy practices like spoken word poetry can leverage writing workshop in ways that highlight the cultural and political dimensions of literacy pedagogy. We conclude by discussing how the communicative dilemmas that arose in this classroom relate to common goals of literacy curriculum, teaching, and research more broadly.

Critical health literacy health promotion and people with intellectual disabilities

Health literacy research and scholarship has largely overlooked the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities (ID), though growing concern about the health inequalities they face has increasingly given rise to health promotion interventions for this group. However, these interventions reference a rather limited vision of health literacy and largely fail to offer people with ID opportunities to develop capabilities to interact with health information in a more critical manner or to develop their understandings of how the wider social context impacts on their own experiences of health and health care. In this paper I offer some explanations for why people with ID have been excluded from the critical health literacy field. I suggest ways that a critical health literacy frame can advance understandings of (1) what literacy in general means for people with ID; (2) what it means for them to take part in critical health literacy practices, and (3) the nature of health texts – what they are and what they do for people with ID. I conclude with remarks about what involvement in critical health literacy initiatives might offer people with ID and also what a consideration of the experiences of people with ID can offer critical health literacy theorizing and research.

Extending the Conversation: Reframing Literacy Practices for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students in U.S. Schools

The growing numbers of culturally and linguistically diverse students, including English learners, in US K–12 settings, pose unique challenges and opportunities for English educators. While there have been evolving efforts in policy, research, and classroom practices to support culturally and linguistically diverse learners' development, a broadened understanding of their cultural lives and more global and contextualized perspectives are needed. Building upon a cosmopolitan perspective, this article explores the current policies, research, and practices related to language and literacy education for these students. Promising practices in English education in terms of strategies to promote world Englishes, multiliteracy and critical literacy practices are examined. Finally, recommendations for the development of policy and research that address a broader sociocultural understanding of culturally and linguistically diverse students and English education are also provided.

Critical literacy practices of economically privileged L2 English readers: Literacy education for globalization

With globalization, observation was made for the need to challenge cultural homogeneity and to diversify readers' interpretations, defining this...