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1. GOOD AFTERNOON, CTE
Prepared by:
Rachelle Gonzales
Angelo Vargas
Krish Ann D. Villoria

2. CRITICAL
LITERACY

3. The concept of critical literacy is theoretically
diverse and combines ideas from various critical
theories, such as critical linguistics, feminist theory,
critical race theory, as well reader response theory
and cultural and media studies (Luke et al., 2009).
Critical literacy is a central thinking skill that involves
the questioning and examination of ideas, and
requires one to synthesize, analyze, interpret,
evaluate, and respond to the texts read or listened
to (University of Melbourne, 2018).

4. Critical literacy uses texts and print skills in
ways that enable students to examine the
politics of daily life within contemporary
society with a view to understanding what it
means to locate and actively seek out
contradictions within modes of life, theories,
and substantive intellectual positions (Bishop.
2014).

5. Particular group or text, critical literacy seeks
to examine the historical and
contemporaneous privileging of and exclusion
of groups of people and ideas from
mainstream narratives (Lankshear &
McLaren, 1993). It is a kind of literacy about
structures, structural violence, and power
systems

6. Since the 1990s, critical literacy theorists have
outlined emancipatory theories of learning
(Freire & Macedo, 1987) that addressed the
complex relations of language and power
through social critique, advocacy, and cultural
transformation (Knoblauch & Brannon, 1993).
Educational researchers discuss critical literacy
as a theory of social practice, as the negotiation
of and the creation of meaning for social justice
(Greene, 2008).

7. While there is no single model of critical
literacy (as there is no single model of youth
organizing), the emphasis on Freire’s (1970)
action-reflection cycle of “praxis” has offered
participants a concept through which to
construct meanings that support their literacy
for civic engagement (Lankshear & McClaren,
1993).

8. HISTORY OF CRITICAL
LITERACY

9. Much of the earliest scholarship on critical
literacy is grounded in Freirian pedagogy. In
1987, Freire and Macedo published their
expansive volume on literacy and critical
pedagogy. In it, they argued that those who are
critically literate can understand not only how
meaning is socially constructed within texts, but
also the political and economic contexts in which
those tex were created and embedded (Freire &
Macedo, 1987).

10. While Freire and Macedo were perhaps the first
to initiate a dialogue around the idea of critical
literacy in their collection, it was not until 1993
that Lankshear and McLaren issued what was to
become the seminal text devoted to the topic.

11. In it, they stated that literacy is more complex
than the traditionally defined skills of reading
and writing. Rather, they argued that such a
traditional definition of literacy is ideologically
aligned with particular postures of normative
socio-political consciousness that are inherently
exploitative.

12. By contrast, critical literacy emphasized the
social construction of reading, writing, and text
production within political contexts of inequitable
economic, cultural, political, and institutional
structures. Lankshear and McLaren argued for
critically reflective teaching and research
focused on both the forms that literate skills take
as social practices and the uses to which those
skilled are employed

13. The authors identified three forms of educational
practice that critical literacy can take on, varying
by their commitment to inquiry and action: liberal
education, pluralism, and transformative praxis.
Liberal education here means an approach to
disciplinary knowledge where intellectual
freedom exists and where disparate
interpretations are considered, but inevitably
contradiction is avoided and rational
argumentation wins out..

14. In pluralism, there is an emphasis on reading to
evaluate principles that support a loose
conception of tolerance. Tolerance here is
aligned with a notion of diversity that is
grounded on benevolence toward those who are
not mainstream (and in the process Maintains
the mainstream). Against these approaches, the
authors forwarded “transformative praxis” as that
which takes the radical potential of critical
literacy into direct emancipatory action in the
world..

15. Praxis is here defined through the Freirian
(1970) process of naming the conditions of
oppression and struggling collectively Lankshear
and McLaren argued that a guiding principle
behind the processes of transformative critical
literacy praxis involves an analysis “attempting
to understand how agents working within
established structures of power participate in the
social construction of literacies, revealing their
political implications”

16. Critical literacy praxis, which Lankshear and McLaren
also called “political and social literacies,” involves
textual studies that are analyzed at the discursive
level in which the texts were created and in which
they are sustained. While the authors understood that
this move might lead to such literacies being seen as
“potentially subversive,” they forwarded a key
distinction centering on the difference between
political indoctrination and the development of a
crifical consciousness-or what Freire (1970) called
“conscientization”

17. At the turn of the millennium, just before the
2001 re-authorization of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as the
controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
Janks (2000) posited four possible orientations
for future approaches to critical literacy
education based on perspectives on the
relationship between language and power:

18. A.) To understand how language maintains social and
political forms of domination.
B.) And to provide access to dominant forms of
language without compromising the integrity of non-
dominant forms.
C.) And to promote a diversity which requires
attention to the way that social identities. Uses of
language create
D.) And to bring a design perspective that
emphasizes the need to use and select from a wide
range of available cultural sign systems

19. Although frequently taken in isolation, Janks
argued that it is through the interdependence of
these approaches that learners can most fully
engage theories and pedagogies of critical
literacy.

20. CRITICAL
LITERACY
AND THE
ARTS

21. The creation of artistic products by an individual
and the perception and rejection upon others’
artworks showcase the power of critical literacies
at work within Arts contexts.
Luke (2000) argues that the primary aims of
critical literacy are:

22. 1. Allow students to see how texts work to
construct their worlds, their cultures, and their
identities in powerful, often overtly ideological
ways; and
2. understand how they use texts as social tools
in ways that allow for a reconstruction of these
same worlds.

23. The arts, literacies, and reality are dynamically linked
and the understanding attained by critically reading
aesthetic texts involves perceiving the relationship
between the art, its creator, and its context, Both the
practice and Indeed, critical literacy makes possible a
more adequate reading of the world, on the basis of
which people can enter into ‘rewriting the world into a
formation in which their Interests, identities, and
legitimate aspirations are more fully present and
present more equally (Lankshear and Mclaren 1993

24. Freebody and Luke (cited in Luke, 2000) developed a
four-tiered approach to early reading instruction that
has now been widely adapted across Australian
schools. These approaches are necessary but not
sufficient sets of social practices requisite for critical
literacy. A recent version of the model offered the
following descriptions (Freebody, 1992: Luke &
Freebody. 1997):

25. Coding Practices: Developing Resources as a Code
Breaker – How do I crack this text? How does it work?
What are its patterns and conventions? How do the
sounds and the marks relate, singly and in
combinations?
Text-meaning Practices: Developing Resources as a
Text Participant – How do the ideas represented in the
text string together? What cultural resources can be
brought to bear on the text? What are the cultural
meanings and possible reading that can be constructed
from this text?

26. Pragmatic Practices: Developing Resources as Text
User – How do the uses of this text shape its
composition? What do I do with this text, here and
now? What will others do with it? What are my options
and alternatives?
Critical Practices: Developing Practices as Text
Analyst and Critic – What kind of person, with what
interests and values, could both write and read this
naively and without any problem with it? What is this
text trying to do to me? In whose interests? Which
positions, voices, and interests are at play? Which are
silent and absent?

27. D. Textual Analysis
Textual analysis can be guided by asking the learners
to make their way systematically through a list of
questions such as the following:

28. What is the subject or topic of this text?
Why might the author have written it?
Who is it written for? How do you know?
What values does the author assume the reader holds? How do you
know?
What knowledge does the reader need to bring to the text in order to
understand it?
Who would feel ‘left out’ in this text and why? Who would feel that the
claims made in the text clash with their own values, beliefs, or
experiences?
• How is the reader ‘positioned’ in relation to the author (e.g. as a
friend, as an opponent, as someone who needs to be persuaded,
as invisible, as someone who agrees with the author’s views)?

29. Approach for analyzing texts in to use
check such as CARS (Credibility,
Accuracy. Reasonableness, Support),
which was originally develop for use
evaluating websites.

30. CREDIBILITY Evidence of
authenticity and
reliability is very
important.

31. ACCURACY
Information
needs to be up
to date, factual,
detailed, exact
and
comprehensive.

32. REASONABLENESS
It involves
examining the
information for
fairness,
objectivity, and
moderateness.

33. TEXT CLUSTERING
Text clustering involves confronting students with
texts which obviously contradict each other. The
task is to use whatever evidence they can find by
to make judgements about where the truth actually
lies. Sometimes these judgments are relatively
easy. News reports, fairy tales, everyday texts are
good materials for text clustering.

34. THANK YOU