Critical Literacy in the Classroom

The Art of the Possible

Wendy Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415142489
• eBook ISBN: 9781134765768
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Critical literacy investigates how forms of knowledge, and the power they bring, are created in language and taken up by those who use texts. It asks how language might be put to different, more equitable uses, and how texts might be recreated in a way that would tell a different story. This book is a carefully documented and critically analysed example of the growing emphasis on critical literacy in syllabuses, government reports and the like. It: * bridges the gap between academics' theorizing and teachers' work * describes how secondary teachers have planned and implemented critical literacy curricula on a range of topics, from Shakespeare to the workplace * listens to teachers reflecting on their teaching and analyses classroom talk * extrapolates from present practice to a future critical literacy in a digitised, hypermedia world. Teachers and students of education, critical literacy advocates and theorists of literacy and schooling can learn much more from this book, which shows how critical literacy teachers, and their students are contributing to the ongoing reinvention of English education as critical literacy.

Chapter 1
Mapping the terrain of critical literacy

Language, society and schooling

DISCOURSES OF ENGLISH: A GEOGRAPHY

A history is a story that purports to be true. But ‘the’ history of English as a school subject, and of critical literacy within that discipline, cannot so easily be told. For there are always competing histories, trundling a barrow or taking the lead with a band wagon, coming from somewhere and going to somewhere. So I would situate my account in this chapter within another discipline, of geography. Not that one can evade history – mine and others’ pervade these pages. And not that a particular form of knowledge can claim to be the only bearer of ultimate truth. Different disciplines of knowledge offer different ways of ‘reading’ the world. Nonetheless, to talk of a ‘geography of English’ and a ‘map of critical literacy’ is to make the metaphor more salient: to remind us that this account offers viewpoints from various topographical sites rather than ‘the’ historical overview. (For sometimes controversial and always partial histories see for example Dixon 1967, Meek and Miller 1984, Hunter 1988, Doyle 1989, Elbow 1990, Goodson and Medway 1990, Willinsky 1990, B. Green 1993, B. Green and Beavis 1996.) Here then is a first quick ‘mud map’ of the terrain, as I see it, to be critiqued and redrawn, with greater detail, in this and subsequent chapters.

Critical theories of literacy derive from critical social theory and its interest in matters of class, gender and ethnicity. Both share the view that society is in a constant state of conflict, for the possession of knowledge (hence power), status and material resources is always open to contest. Struggles to define the world and claim its goods are carried out by unequally matched contestants, for certain social groups have historically controlled the ideologies, institutions and practices of their society, thereby maintaining their dominant position. But since these are socially and historically constructed, they can be reconstructed. One of the chief means of such re/construction is language. Therefore critical literacy critics and teachers focus on the cultural and ideological assumptions that underwrite texts, they investigate the politics of representation, and they interrogate the inequitable, cultural positioning of speakers and readers within discourses. They ask who constructs the texts whose representations are dominant in a particular culture at a particular time; how readers come to be complicit with the persuasive ideologies of texts; whose interests are served by such representations and such readings; and when such texts and readings are inequitable in their effects, how these could be constructed otherwise. They seek to promote the conditions for a different textual practice and therefore different political relations than present social, economic and political inequalities as these are generated and preserved by literacy practices within and beyond formal education. (For more comprehensive accounts of critical literacy see Gee 1990, Fairclough 1989, 1992a, 1992b, Lankshear 1994, Lankshear and McLaren 1993, A. Luke 1993.) Critical literacy, as practised in schools in Australia and elsewhere, is sometimes represented as being one of a number of competing or complementary versions of English teaching (e.g. Christie et al. 1991). Thus before filling in some of the features of this sketch and drawing a larger map of the areas that border it, we need to consider that notion of ‘models’. This familiar term is flawed if it suggests a normative, even exemplary schema for English education and a predetermined form of practice, both of which exist apart from the person who teaches according to that ‘model’. A preferable term is discourse, with its suggestions of interactive, negotiated conversations – those characteristic ways of talking and writing, hence thinking and being which are common to members of a particular sociocultural group. These convey ideologies and thus enable members of the discourse group to make a particular sense of their experience and the world. Within any broad discursive field, such as that of English education, there will be a number of related discourses. These include those which advocate teaching the cultural heritage or functional literacy and so on. (The implications and applications of this theory of discourse will be taken up more fully in chapter three.) A number of poststructuralist and sociolinguistic writers (e.g. Foucault 1972, 1980, Macdonell 1986, Gee 1990, Fairclough 1992b, Lemke 1995, Weedon 1987) have given the term ‘discourse’ a broader scope than the linguistic: they argue that the ways of talking which are characteristic of a social or cultural group have a bearing on more than just the language dimensions of people’s lives. Particular uses of language (as discourses) do not just arise out of an ideology or social practice but help to constitute it. Thus people’s thinking (both their ideologies and their argumentation), their social actions and attitudes and even their very sense of self are shaped by discourses. With some simplification, though it will serve present purposes, ‘discourse’ in this extended sense can be summed up in four points, each of which has bearing on English education and critical literacy.

First, discourses constitute and are constituted by social practices and institutions. In compulsory public education, for example, a dominant or ‘commonsense’ discourse about schooling in literacy and literature inheres in the official channels of policy directives, syllabi, curricula and assessment instruments; through preservice and inservice training; through the lore of the staffroom and the example of teachers at work. This and other discourses and hence practices of English convey a sense of what teachers value, how they act, what knowledge and competence are most important in teachers and students and how these can be measured.Through these means certain kinds of students and teachers are formed. Each discourse of English teaching has a coherence in the language, beliefs and practice of its proponents; but there are also incoherences. Indeed, any teacher – like any of us – is also internally inconsistent, since each of us participates in a number of discourses. In a certain context one discourse may be to the fore which is not congruent with another which in turn may shape our actions in a different situation.

Second, therefore: discourses ‘converse’ or ‘argue’ with one another. Any discourse tends to work in relation to others and in distinction from them, offering alternatives to what other discourses offer. Within the field of English, for example, the discourse of a humanist, progressive education (these days most often encompassed by the Whole Language Movement) promotes one kind of reading practice to ‘develop’ and ‘encourage’ one kind of reader, whereas in the discourse of critical literacy the aim of teaching is to ‘produce’ a different kind of reading and reader. But, as just noted, no teacher is circumscribed entirely by one discourse. Not only are there seepages between analogous discourses of English, but also we all have various political and religious and ethnic affiliations, belong to different interest groups and the like. Hence no one exemplifies a discourse in a ‘pure’ form, for no such purity exists in practice. Some of those conversations or arguments may take place within as well as between individuals and groups; the friction between them is what makes possible a metalevel understanding and the possibility of changing the balance of our affiliations to this discourse or that.

My third point is that discourses do political work. Any ideology organises the knowledge, beliefs and desires, the conscious and unconscious thoughts and attitudes of a group in such a way as to shape and maintain certain social and cultural arrangements. Therefore a discourse is always involved in circulating and promoting a certain ideology in preference to another, hence advancing the interests of a particular social group. It may do so all the more effectively if the knowledge and form of life so promoted are taken for granted as commonsense, having become so natural as to be invisible. For instance, it has been argued that a progressive education, so ‘natural’ to middle-class teachers, has profited the middle-class children who found its practices most congenial, most comfortably at one with home language and literacy practices:

With its stress on ownership and voice, its preoccupation with children selecting their own topics, its reluctance to intervene positively and constructively during conferencing, and its complete mystification of what has to be learned for children to reproduce effective written products, it is currently promoting a situation in which only the brightest middle class children can possibly learn what is needed. Conferencing is used not to teach but to obscure. This kind of refusal to teach helps reinforce the success of ruling-class children in education; through an insidious benevolence other children are supportively encouraged to fail.

(Martin 1985: 61)

This argument is quoted not so much as a self-evident truth – though it may hold some – as evidence of the politics at work in a discourse about the political nature of discourses in English education. If this view wins out, the power of its proponents to direct funding its way, establish preservice and inservice training programmes and the like is greatly enhanced. That is, the political work of any discourses in promoting an ideology is bound up with the differential and inequitable access which different social groups have to social status and material goods.

Finally, discourses help constitute not only the objects spoken and written about but also the speaking, writing subjects and their sense of self – their subjectivity (for we are subject to, and subject ourselves to, the discourses to which we give our affiliation). Discursive practices have a purchase on us which extends deeper than official institutions and the making of knowledge ‘out there’ in the world. As Weedon puts it (1987: 108): ‘Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the “nature” of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life [of people subject to them]’. Even if not all that shapes us is accessible to our conscious scrutiny, we may see traces at work in and between people. For example, suppose I as a teacher adopt the discourse of life as a moral journey. This would provide me with an interpretative framework for my own experiences and those of others – students, characters in texts – and hence for my customary attitude and actions in the world. It would help mobilise my desires as a reader: I will want to participate in the challenges of fictional characters. It could even help sculpt my teaching and my relationships with my student readers. I would not of course be alone in this view; I am not a self-sufficient individual whose ideas and views originate with myself. I would be participating in a dialogue about moral development in humanist progressive teaching; I would be ‘spoken into being’ by the ways I am spoken or written about within such a discourse and thus the ways I speak and think about myself. And by such means I would be given an identity. It could be said that discourses about texts, reading, teaching and educational outcomes were having a conversation with each other through me. But by participation in that discourse I may also help to reshape it, particularly if I have access to other related or opposing discourses. And so I may be an agent of change in education, as well as subject to its discourses. For both of these aspects – subjectivity and agency – are crucial to critical literacy.

THE BORDER LANDS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY

As well as gesturing towards my geographical metaphor, the title of this section alludes to expressions favoured among advocates of radical pedagogy. Consider two book titles: Between Borders (Giroux and McLaren 1994) and Border Crossings (Giroux 1992). In others there is talk of ‘border narratives’ (McLaren 1995) and ‘border pedagogy’ (Aronowitz and Giroux 1991). Following postcolonial and postmodern emphases on difference, they define their term thus:

Borders signal in the metaphorical and literal sense how power is inscribed differently on the body, culture, history, space, land, and psyche. When literacy is defined in monolithic terms, from the centre, within a linear logic that erases uncertainty, it only recognises the borders of privilege and domination.

(Giroux 1991: x)

The expression might also suggest that they roam the frontiers in their educational work, that they are pioneers and scouts in advance of the main party in penetrating new terrain, and that they find themselves in company there with those who are deemed ‘other’ and consigned to the margins of the dominant socioeconomic and cultural order. This is one of a number of terms which the mostly American proponents of this discourse use to differentiate themselves from the mainstream of education – terms such as ‘radical’, ‘critical’, ‘Freirean’, ‘liberation’ or ‘postcolonial’ pedagogy.

These border lands are watered by other tributaries than those emanating from North and Latin America; still waters that run deep with perhaps less eclat. These arise in the springs of British and Australian cultural studies and in the critical sociolinguistic approaches of Norman Fairclough (1989, 1992a, 1992b), Gee (1990) and others.

The legacy of Freire

First to the New World and the innovative work of Paulo Freire in Brazil, as reported in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Freire, teaching literacy to peasants there, came to condemn the ‘banking’ model of education, which consisted of ‘depositing’ tokens of learning in the vaults of passive students’ minds. Instead, he advocated a collectivist, student-centred method in which learning emerges out of a joint negotiation of needs and interests, and blooms in a critical consciousness. This pedagogy has two aspects: first, students learn to perceive social, economic and political contradictions in what they know and what they are told. Second, they learn to take action against the oppressive and dominant elements within those contradictory situations.

Following Freire’s lead, North American advocates such as Shor (1980, 1987), Giroux (1983, 1988), Aronowitz and Giroux (1985, 1991) and McLaren (1995) have taken up and developed its key concepts and projects in a number of works (cf. also Lankshear and McLaren 1993). The abbreviated account of critical literacy which follows here might therefore seem redundant, but I have two purposes. First, I want to indicate that this too is an evolving discourse in its dynamic relations with other discourses and practices. Second, by representing the ideal of critical pedagogy we shall be in a better position to see how its realisation in Australian curricular and classroom practice fits that ideal: what is taken up, what is modified, what ignored.

In brief, then, the advocates of critical pedagogy define it as a theorised practice of teaching that opposes the dominant ideologies, institutions and material conditions of society which maintain socioeconomic inequality. Within education this radical movement aims to develop students’ critical awareness of those oppressive social forces, including school structures and knowledges. So enlightened, students will be empowered and will demonstrate their emancipation by practising an active citizenship to help right society’s wrongs. Thus individual selves and society at large will be transformed through this language of critique and possibility and through social action. As Lankshear and McLaren put it,

In addressing critical literacy we are concerned with the extent to which, and the ways in which, actual and possible social practices and conceptions of reading and writing enable human subjects to understand and engage the politics of daily life in the quest for a more truly democratic social order. Among other things, critical literacy makes possible a more adequate and accurate ‘reading’ of the world, on the basis of which, as Freire and others put it, people can enter into ‘rewriting’ the world into a formation in which their interests, identities and legitimate aspirations are more fully present and are present more equally.

(Lankshear and McLaren 1993: xviii)

Such an emancipatory pedagogy did not have its sole fount in Freire. It is better described metaphorically as a river with tributaries from various discourses: the ‘new’ sociology of education, and radical neo-Marxist (Gramscian) and more recently feminist and postcolonial arguments for the disempowered and hence for the reconstitution of society. The founding concepts held in common by these positions are sociological. First: knowledge, meaning and truth are not ‘out there’ in some metaphysical realm but are forged in the fires of history. Second: individuals are not bounded and autonomous; rather, they too are formed within the ideologies and practices of society. Third: present societal arrangements are profoundly and systematically inequitable. And finally, such conditions can be changed when people come to understand the causes of those inequities. The influx of another stream, of poststructuralism (or postmodernism: the terms are sometimes used interchangeably), has more recently muddied the waters somewhat in its suspicion of the clarity of a single river of history (Lyotard 1984); but it is confluent with those earlier streams in its emphasis on the sociolinguistic production of meaning and selves.

A schooling for society

There has been disagreement over how far the structures of a society, including its educational systems, determine and reproduce the class, socioeconomic affiliations, culture and subjectivities of its members (e.g. Althusser 1971, Bowles and Gintis 1976, Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), and how far people also produce their culture and may thus transform aspects of it. Certainly writers on critical pedagogy have gone beyond analysis of such systems and structures and beyond resistance to them – from a ‘language of critique’ to a ‘language of possibility’, ‘centred on hope, liberation, and equality. Agency and (raised) consciousness were reinstated on centre stage, albeit this time with structural constraints acknowledged’ (C. Luke 1992: 26).

High among those constraints, according to this discourse of critical pedagogy, is education, which has a massive commitment to maintaining ‘business as usual’. As noted, Freire argued that passive, authoritarian and alienating forms of traditional instruction function to reproduce the material inequities of a hierarchical society. Critical pedagogy writers in the United States have developed a similar argument about the paradoxically dehumanising and antidemocratic effects of a humanist, cultural heritage education and the dysfunctionality of a functionalist literacy programme. Schools stand in urgent need of reform, and they offer therefore an unparalleled opportunity for interrupting repressive ideologies and intervening against the inequalities they bring.

Such repressions and inequalities are not brought about for the most part by coercion in modern societies, according to this view. Education, like other institutions, is one means among many by which the dominant groups in society almost invisibly, almost unconsciously, maintain their hegemony and those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged are persuaded to consent to their inequality. Among the means by which such consensus is achieved are the...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
• CHAPTER 1: MAPPING THE TERRIAN OF CRITICAL LITERARCY
• CHAPTER 2: READING CURRICULA
• CHAPTER 3: SCHOOL WRITING AND TEXUAL SELVES
• CHAPTER 4: BETWEEN AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM
• CHAPTER 5: CLASSROOM TALK
• CHAPTER 6: ‘A DANIEL COME TO JUDGEMENT’
• CHAPTER 7: POSTMODERN CLASSROOMS ON THE BORDERS?
• CODA
• BIBLIOGRAPHY