Reconsidering Primary Literacy

Enabling Children to Become Critically Literate

Kelly Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138671904
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317205654
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is an accessible guide to critical literacy, a process in which learners are encouraged to challenge and critique language and social practices and actively transform what they see as unjust or unfair.

Crucial critical literacy concepts such as access, power, reconstruction and transformation are explored in respect of both the wider literature and as they relate to the experiences and practices of those educators who feature in the book. The key practice areas for developing children's criticality are also covered, including the use of toys, children's literature, comic books and graphic novels, photographs and new technologies. Threaded throughout the book are the intersecting social justice issues of gender, race, disability, displacement and social class. Material is drawn primarily from educators' own narratives about transformative change in their practice – including their struggles to understand and enact critical literacy – alongside examples of their pedagogies for social change.

The author identifies a number of clear directions for educators interested in using a critical pedagogical approach in their work with children and young people – helping them to understand what critical literacy is; how they can weave it into their own practices; with which ages, stages and grades critical literacy can be used; and how they can get started using critical literacy in their classrooms.

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INTRODUCTION

This book is about critical literacy, which I have come to see as fundamental to the development of empathetic, compassionate children who are committed – and encouraged – to enact social change for themselves and others. People I have encountered along the way, that I have had the privilege to meet and talk to, have had a profound effect on the way I understand critical literacy and how it is shaping up in their classrooms and contexts. Their stories are at the heart of this book, and I thank them for helping to create it. Critical literacy is exciting, challenging and transformative; I have seen first-hand its power to make children want to read and talk about books and other texts, and to take action to change injustices or inequalities as a direct result of engagement with the issues raised.

What is critical literacy?

David Wray, Emeritus Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Warwick, has defined critical literacy succinctly as being ‘about transforming taken-for-granted social and language practices or assumptions for the good of as many people as possible’ (2004: 4).

This definition has been central to my understanding of critical literacy as challenge and critique of language and social practices and action for transformation when those practices are seen as unjust or unfair.

In order to understand the emergence of critical literacy as a distinct area of focus in research and practice, let us now turn to a brief overview of themes and models of literacy over the past century or so.

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Theories of reading: the New Criticism, Reader Response Theories and Transactional Theory

The New Criticism was the dominant school of thought about textual interaction in the early to mid-twentieth century, which held that the text was an entity in itself, requiring close analysis to reveal the truth or meaning within. Neither the author’s intention nor the reader’s response was foregrounded. Within this theoretical framework, the reader is a passive recipient of the text’s ultimate meaning.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Reader Response Criticism emerged (Fish, 1990), foregrounding the importance of the reader’s active engagement with the text in order to make meaning. The possibility of multiple meanings rather than one correct understanding of the text is a feature of Reader Response Theories; without a reader a text holds no meaning.

Similarly, Rosenblatt’s Transactional Theory (1994) can be seen as a reaction against the New Criticism; it holds that texts are nothing more than their physical markings until a reader makes meanings of those texts, with their unique perspective and background helping to shape or construct that meaning. This reciprocal relationship between reader and text defines Transactional Theory. Rosenblatt ‘emphasized the contribution of literature to a democratic society, making explicit the broad social role of literature’ (McDaniel, 2006: 30). The shift in dominance from the New Criticism to Reader Response Theory and Transactional Theory represents a change in understanding literacy practices as active, rather than passive. These theories inform issues of access, as they challenge the notion of one authoritative reading of a text and instead posit that multiple interpretations are possible, and are grounded in the reader’s unique social, cultural and historical position. Over time our notion of what a text is has widened, particularly with the recognition of what is commonly termed ‘multiliteracies’.

Multiliteracies

In 1996 the ten scholars who formed the New London Group wrote A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures, addressing the need to reform literacy pedagogies in response to rapidly changing technology, as well as multiple cultural and linguistic influences and perspectives. Access and engagement were the two key tenets of the pedagogy of multiliteracies, in terms of creating spaces for texts and textual practices which were meaningful to children in schools, and in fostering critical engagement with the texts, with a view to giving children the skills to imagine and design what their futures might hold. The four components of the pedagogy, as originally conceptualised by the New London Group, were:

• Situated practice: immersion in experience and simulations of the structures and relationships which might be found in the wider world of work and public spaces.

• Overt instruction: systematic and conscious understanding and learning about metalanguages.

• Critical framing: interpreting and critiquing sociocultural contexts, including what is being studied.

• Transformed practice: reflecting on and applying the transformed meaning to work in other sites.

The concept of reconstruction or redesign appeared for the first time in A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996), which Janks later referred to as ‘a pedagogy of reconstruction’ (2010), making it explicit that texts which can be deconstructed can also be reconstructed or transformed. Thus, pedagogies for multiliteracies are engaged and engaging, and not only active but activist; that is, educators who use such approaches aspire to transform as well as critique.

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Four Resources Model

There are two models which advance our understandings of critical literacy, even if critical literacy does not appear by name in these models. The first is Luke and Freebody’s (1999) Four Resources Model, a learning and teaching framework which identifies four key roles in literacy practices – code breaker, text participant, text user and critical analyser – and foregrounds the importance of technical ability, an awareness of the importance of enjoyment of language practices and the application of critical skills. Code-breaking involves recognising and using sounds, letters, spelling and structural patterns. Text participants understand and compose meaningful texts, using their personal meaning systems. Text users know about and act on cultural and social functions that texts perform in and out of schools, with an awareness of how to make meaning from different genres of texts. Critically analysing texts recognises that texts are never ideologically neutral, that certain views are silenced when others are dominant in texts, and that textual practices can be critiqued and reconstructed. The Four Resources Model, then, advances a conceptualisation of critical analytical skills in which social justice concerns are embedded, which I believe is fundamental in any model of critical literacy.

Halliday Plus Model of Language Learning

Shortly after the emergence of the Four Resources Model, Egawa and Harste (2001) developed another model of literacy involving critical capacity: the Halliday Plus Model of Language Learning. Egawa and Harste’s model is similar to Luke and Freebody’s in its emphasis on the importance of teaching children to use language to learn, to learn about and through language and to learn to use language to critique. Learning language relates to using language and semiotic (signs and symbols) systems to make meanings. Learning about language means understanding how texts operate and how they are coded. Learning through language is essentially using texts to learn about the world. Learning to use language to critique involves questioning and challenging assumptions about what seems normal, as well as creating new texts and redesigning existing ones.

Egawa and Harste argue that learning to decode texts teaches children to be good consumers; however they need to learn to critique texts in order to become good citizens. The Halliday Plus Model shows that access to texts in the form of decoding them is insufficient, as children also require access to the language of critique. In this way, they gain greater power to recognise, resist and transform sites of inequality and injustice.

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Janks’ Synthesis Model of Critical Literacy

A key tenet in Janks’ theory of teaching literacy is helping students understand the relationship between language and power, specifically how certain acts of communication have greater or less power in different sites. In her Synthesis Model of Critical Literacy, Janks (2000) theorises the interdependence of four key components of critical literacy: domination, access, diversity and design. Within Janks’ model, domination refers to the ways in which hegemonic language practices are constructed, maintained and challenged. Access is the means by which people gain access to privileged or dominant spaces of power, whether social or language practices or institutions. Diversity foregrounds the importance of recognising and utilising students’ linguistic and cultural knowledge and backgrounds. Design refers to the ways we construct or create texts, including the reconstruction or redesign of texts for transformative purposes.

Janks argues that foregrounding any one component over others limits the opportunities to recognise and understand how language works in powerful ways, and restricts the ways in which we can challenge and subvert damaging enactments of the language/power relationship. Influenced by Janks’ model, power and access are central to my understanding of critical literacy practices for social justice, as is the principle of design or reconstruction, which I refer to as action for transformation in this book. I will return to these key critical literacy concepts, explaining how they apply to different educators’ critical literacy practices and conceptualisations.

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Literacy and critical literacy: what is the difference?

I’ll start with a very brief answer to this question: nothing. However, it has taken me quite a bit of time and many discussions with colleagues to get to this point of understanding, so I’ll explain my thinking. First of all, looking at the models presented above, it is clear that these integrate critical capacity as part of what it means to be literate. Encouraging children to ask questions about the texts they read, and the social practices they engage in, is an important part of developing critical literacy. This act of challenge is a fundamental part of critique – and again is part of what it means to be critically literate. The other important aspect is action for transformation – taking action to change what we see as unfair or unjust about these texts and/or practices in which we engage. This might be otherwise called deconstruction and reconstruction of the texts which are constructed by others.

If having critical awareness, critical capacity or critical skills – however they are described – is part of what it means to be literate, then why do we need to talk about being ‘critically literate’ at all? One possible answer lies in a discussion I had with Lynne, a university lecturer whose background was in secondary English teaching, and whose views will be explored in more detail throughout this book. Lynne explained to me her view that critical literacy is a distinct area of study because, in the past century, dominant understandings of literacy have not involved critical analytical skills. She expressed her belief that critical capacity is a natural ability which all children have, and which we, as educators, should nurture and foster. The educational community is, therefore, making critical literacy a distinct area of research and teaching, in order that we develop our awareness of, and learn how to foster, critical capacity.

Lynne has worked with a vast number of pre-qualified teachers in her role as lecturer in initial teacher education and with qualified teachers (on continuous professional development courses), and explained some of the issues related to understanding the concept of critical literacy:

One of the problems we get first of all is teachers saying ‘Well, is this something new then? Is this the same as literacy or isn’t it?’ And ‘What age do you do it at?’ – that kind of thing. Without thinking that actually it’s about curiosity and learners, and that children have that curiosity and that ability to question the world. And they do it all the time and it’s something that needs to be nurtured alongside other more conventional understandings of literacy.

Reflecting on Lynne’s words it is clear to see, as literacy and language educators, that the curiosity that we cherish in children as they engage with texts, and the ability to think deeply and ask questions, are at the heart of critical literacy – just as they are at the heart of our core literacy practices. Critical literacy is literacy, although perhaps we have not always thought about it in this way.

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(Critical) literacy as a tool for social justice

Chris Searle, a teacher and champion of critical literacy in the classroom and the community, has written eloquently about the capacity of children and young people to engage in challenge and critique and to produce original works of great beauty, demonstrating social justice. He defines literacy not as the mechanical skills of reading and writing, but as the development of consciousness-raising skills, advancing the argument I made above for critical capacity being embedded in our understandings of literacy. That even very young children can be critical is clear in his claim that they: ‘can never be too young to use their skills-in-acquisition of literacy to confront, criticize, or question, as well as to form their own rational attitudes to issues arising from their own world’ (1993: 171).

He describes how 13-year-old working-class students in Sheffield were encouraged to develop their literacy skills while considering the issue of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The poems which the young people wrote reveal, in Searle’s words:

Such human solidarity and breadth of understanding, clear evidence of a curriculum of extended literacy for young people that fuses the abilities to develop new skills with words, to sharpen human consciousness and stretch the imagination to enter the lives of others in a shared world.

(1993: 189)

Reading their poetry, I was profoundly moved at the ways in which the young poets ‘entered the lives of others’ so eloquently. I believe that such work proves that young people do respond to difficult, contentious themes and issues because they are concerned with social justice, which is central to critical literacy approaches. Although engaging children in issues that reflect their own and local interests is very important, Searle demonstrates that children often have a tremendous capacity to engage with issues of inequality, which extend more widely than their own social worlds.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Reconsidering Primary Literacy
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 My Story
• 3 Caroline’s Story
• 4 Deena’s Story
• 5 Ian’s Story
• 6 Linda’s Story
• 7 Liz’s Story
• 8 Carol’s Story
• 9 Critical Literacy and Social Class
• 10 Critical Literacy and new Technologies
• 11 Final Reflections
• Index