Critical Literacy Pedagogy

Yeah. We do teach it. Is there a problem?

Paulo Freire. Stanley Aronowitz. Michael Apple. Henry Giroux. These modern knights have fought the good fight and are winning the literacy pedagogy wars. In this post, let's learn about the primary literacy pedagogies used throughout the world’s schools. Then, let's look at what a few of the luminaries mentioned above have to say about the conception of critical literacy pedagogy.

The Wars (or how best to teach)

In their work Literacies, Dr. Mary Kalantzis and Dr. Bill Cope of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign cleverly describe and analyze the reasoning underlying four central literacy teaching and learning paradigms that have emerged since the beginning of modern schooling (1950+). They begin, first, discussing the arrival of literacy (in this case, meaning writing/reading) only a few thousand years ago and how our species has come to know meaning systems—from artistic impressions of bison painted on walls with red ochre, to YouTube, in the present day.

The Kish tablet from Sumer, with pictographic writing. This may be the earliest known writing, 3500 BCE.

Since the rise of mass, compulsory, and institutional schooling, the purpose for literacy learning changed significantly to encompass a plural conception—literacies. For example:

• Reading and writing literacy

• Numerical literacy (numeracy)

• Digital literacy #digilit

• Health literacy

• Financial literacy

• Media literacy

• Cultural literacy

• Emotional literacy

• Physical literacy

So, though most still refer to reading and writing in a dominant modern world language when using "literacy," the word has come to have a broader definition among education scholars in the present tense. Whereas "literacy" is primarily viewed as the ability to read and write, it is now also conceived as competence or knowledge in a specified area.

So with this broader definition of literacy, we can consider a few variant paradigms for developing literacies in schools. For example, American schooling has predominantly taken a didactic approach to literacy development for the past several centuries (right on up to the present day). Through didactic pedagogy, students learn the formal rules of official or standard versions of the national language, read texts to comprehend what selected authors impart, and learn to appreciate the high-cultural literary canon.

There is a grind to the acculturation process, regardless of whether you are native to a land or an immigrant citizen. MANY concepts MUST be explained. Children will not discover the idea of mathematical exponents on their own as they explore their environment. No. They've got to be shown it, hear it, discuss it, practice it…all made possible by a teacher explaining (clearly and effectively, of course).

In response to centuries of this didactic literacy pedagogy, which was very effective in the wake of the Industrial Revolution (what, with the need to train laborers or specialists), sometime around the late 19th, going into the early 20th century, an impulse was taking hold in modern education toward a model of human development versus industrial development. This impulse, championed by Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner, and John Dewey, became known, generally, as a progressive educational philosophy, a modernizing education philosophy, if you will.

Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori was an Italian physician and educator. The Montessori method of education is an approach to classroom learning that emphasizes independence and choice.

The idea was to combat the dullness that the pre-1950s public education system had caused in American youth; the nation would take on a more authentic literacy pedagogy in classrooms. Learners would focus on their meanings. Learners would engage with texts relevant to them in their daily lives. This new authentic literacy pedagogy supports a process of natural language growth that begins when a child learns to speak.

But with the A Nation at Risk report of 1983, America's public education ethos slipped into a back-to-basics, didactic literacy pedagogy to calm the ire of the landed gentry. Perhaps as a point of progress, the fear was abated with the burgeoning of functional literacy pedagogy, wherein students deconstruct and reconstruct textual genres of education success and social power.

US Secretary of Education Terrel Howard Bell and Ronald Reagan displaying their open letter to the nation… 1983

So there you had it—the four sides of the Literacy Pedagogy Wars.

1. Didactic literacy pedagogy

2. Authentic literacy pedagogy

3. Functional literacy pedagogy

4. …

That's right. There's that fourth one…

Critical Literacy Pedagogy

To think critically is to process from multiple perspectives. To think critically is not to assume that what is expressed is necessarily accurate or accurately understood. To think critically is to learn to question texts and consider the sources of such texts. So this fourth player in the Literacy Pedagogy Wars, that of critical literacy pedagogy, is merely one that the educator considers while designing learning experiences and ways in which students can practice their criticality. It is an approach to literacy development that recognizes the front-and-center role of a learner's identity, voice, engagement, and agency in the classroom.

When working with an emphasis on critical literacy development, the pedagogue is razor-focused on the social relationships of the learners concerning specific knowledge processes (e.g., analysis, application, etc.). Further, the educator is constantly in a state of introspection to determine what adjustment, if any, needs to be made at all junctures for each learner.

It's not better than didactic literacy pedagogy. It allows for deviation from formality; it encourages active participation more than disciplined compliance. It's looking at school as an institution of education, not training. The postmodern educator, one in fights against the drive for schools to be social reproduction engines and for them as mechanisms for personal and social transformation.

Postmodern Philosophy

Much is made in some media circles regarding the conception of Postmodernism. The word 'postmodern' has of late come to be the new 'liberal'.

Completely inaccurate. But hey, if Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan say so, I guess it must be true…

Postmodernism holds that there is no single way of being human and no universal truth. There is just a wide range of perspectives based on different life experiences, histories, cultures, and interests. That's not to say that there aren't facts. That's a clever little linguistic trick the trolls of the world play when they come at critical literacy pedagogy. Postmodernism is about human sciences and language. Not about physics.

Postmodern philosophy reduces formal theories of knowledge to their core components, mechanisms, and frameworks, as a scientifically-sound way to determine if the ideas of knowledge are corrupted or not; our course of action toward such theories is beneficial, effective, etc.

One of the most influential early postmodern philosophers was Jean Baudrillard

The postmodern philosophy is uncertain about progress with social matters. Unlike its older counterpart, Modernism, Postmodernism does not invest much capital in the notion that social progress is spawned and maintained by private enterprise. The old American ideal was that individual freedom and equality in which individuals are treated the same way is now trumped by what science has borne out through hundreds of psychological research analyses—that all people are fundamentally different and are driven simultaneously by group identities (e.g., ethnicity, gender).

The old Americans valued the greats of the Western literary and cultural canon. But the postmodern American gets that knowledge is a matter of perspectives, not fixed truths or defined facts. So, the main driver of the curriculum should be relevant to individual learners (i.e., accessible enough so they can connect the content to their personal lives and experiences). The postmodern educator not only embraces the insights of taking on an authentic pedagogy but one that also values the curriculum as an active thing in the hands of students, driven forward by their innovation.

This requires a radical release of curriculum control: no pre-set curriculum. Students and teachers have the final authority in making curriculum decisions. No requirements from the community/State. Students plan their studies while teachers persuade them to look here or wander there.

Perhaps we need to stop teaching the Great Books. Perhaps literacy, in the present tense, is just a medium for elitism and tracking, an icon marking as separate those deemed worthy of being the inheritors of higher education and higher culture.

In the final analysis, a critical literacy pedagogy doesn't have to be mumbo-jumbo academic talk about criticality. We can be VERY specific regarding what it entails. It's an approach that:

• addresses issues and problems in pursuit of developing criticality

• focuses on learner identities

• addresses discriminations and disadvantage

• uses popular culture and new media

• gives the student agency and voice

• requires learners to be producers of media

Critical literacy pedagogy has its roots in authentic pedagogy (e.g., Dewey). It adopts the basic assumptions of authentic literacy pedagogy, such as the need for student activity. But unlike the work of John Dewey, who emphasized the importance of a distinct culture of industrial modernity, the critical literacy pedagogue focuses instead on differences, discontinuity, and irreversible cultural and linguistic fragmentation. Society has become too complex to shape or predict. Modern people will benefit most from listening to one another, seeking first to understand.

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer.

Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, two professors I've admired for years, use a great phrase I've adopted—" the decay of master narratives." The grand narratives of the progressive set (of whom I proudly counted myself a part) are no longer valid. They reject the idea that the whole world is heading in one direction towards the one preferred future of economic development, private enterprise Capitalism, and social freedom in which all individuals should be treated the same way. Instead, they see enormous social and environmental problems arising from our current, outdated economic models.

Stanley Aronowitz (deceased, last year) and Henry Giroux

We are seeing now that Western Culture has lost its place as the heart of the idea of progress and economic success. Western culture's meta-discourse is no longer heard across the world as a force of liberation for oppressed societies. With this critical literacy pedagogy, we are learning that all ways of speaking and thinking can be beneficial. There is no one correct way of being or speaking or one correct interpretation of a text. It's all a matter of perspective.

Critical literacy is a tool for taking control of one's life and investigating challenging social issues and moral dilemmas to explore human differences and social justice.

If this topic of postmodern education interests you, check out Aronowitz and Giroux's 1991 text, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism.