Competing priorities: Singaporean teachers’ perspectives on critical literacy (original) (raw)
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Critical Literacy and the Importance of Reading With and Against a Text
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2019
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This study examined how the socio-political and socio-cultural backgrounds of Lebanese university students affected their critical engagement with texts and how these students reacted to critical reading. It also investigated the effect of critical reading instruction on the participants’ performance in critical text analysis. It was a part of a broader research that employed the mixed research method. Twenty one participants majoring in Teaching English to Elementary Students at a university in Lebanon received instruction based on a critical reading model for three months. All the participants filled out a questionnaire. Eleven participants were interviewed, before which they filled out a survey. Also some class interaction was documented. Moreover, the One-group, Post-test Pre-test design was employed. The data showed how the participants’ socio-political and religious backgrounds affected their critical engagement with texts. Some participants were less critical or more critical depending on their ideological positions towards the topics of the texts. Interestingly, most participants said that they enjoyed questioning the texts’ assumptions although it annoyed them that this questioning made them contemplate their long-held beliefs. In addition, T-test and Mann-whitney test showed a significant improvement in critical text analysis at the end of the course. However, a few participants resisted critical reading.
Reading From Different Interpretive Stances: In Search of a Critical Perspective
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2012
Much has been written about the need for readers to adopt a critical stance to understand how various texts are working to position them as citizens and consumers in an increasingly globalized world. As Janks (2010) bluntly put it, "Texts have designs on us.... Critical reading, in combination with an ethic of social justice, is fundamental in order to protect our own rights and the rights of others" (p. 98). Similarly, in their discussion of how adolescent literacy might be reinvented, Moje, Young, Readence, and Moore (2000) suggested that students who become aware of how texts manipulate them "can become critical consumers and producers of text who challenge dominant meanings and realize that there is more than one way to read texts and their world" (p. 408). A critical approach to literacy instruction can be traced back to Freire (1970), who argued in favor of teaching oppressed people to "read the word and the world." Freire thought this type of reading would enable the oppressed to advocate for their own interests instead of encouraging them to accept the views of more powerful others as "neutral and natural" (Morrell, 2008, p. 114). Freire (1970) also called attention to "banking education," a model that positions students as passive empty vessels that teachers fill up with socially sanctioned knowledge. In the banking model, reading is seen as simple decoding without paying attention to the interests of authors and how texts are often written to support those interests. In a move that challenges recent efforts to standardize literacy education and silence voices of dissent, Morrell (2009) called for studies that attempt to translate critical pedagogy into K-12 literacy practice and offer "a model of pedagogy that privileges attention to critique and to social justice as much as it does the development of sanctioned academic skills" (p. 99). What does a critical stance look like and how will we know if our students are achieving one? Delbridge (2008) provided an example in her description of a student who read "against an author" (p. 164) she perceived to be stereotyping the residents of a community where she once lived. This student used her knowledge While critical thinking is a common language arts goal, it is not easily achieved. Encouraging readers to talk back to texts is one approach that shows promise.
Freire's Cultural Action for Freedom (1970), which explains the ideas that underpin his critical approach to education in general and literacy pedagogy in particular, was first published in English over thirty years ago. Since then, critical literacy, a tradition of language and literacy education that takes seriously the relationship between language, literacy and power, has built upon his work in relation to developments in the field of language and literacy education, in relation to the possibilities and constraints in different contexts, and in relation to new technologies. Editorial: Critical literacy revisited: Writing as critique English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Public education in post-industrial societies has been restructured based on a human capital model that prioritizes the economic value of citizens for the benefit of globally competitive national economies. In a policy-as-numbers climate (Lingard, 2011), school administrators and teachers struggle to 'produce results' and 'close gaps' within accountability systems built on standardized measures of learning. What possibilities exist for critical literacy as viable classroom pedagogy in such an environment? This article offers a contextual-empirical analysis of efforts to implement critical literacy in mainstream secondary classes in Singapore. Drawing on Freire's notion of generative themes, it identifies key political-policy constraints, showing how they impacted the pedagogical enactment of critical literacy tenets and pinpointing a focal direction for critical literacy in Singapore's English education. More generally, the article argues that critical literacy, more than ever, must be a localized practice responding to exigencies emerging at the global-local nexus.
Changing student demographics, globalization, and flows of people resulting in classrooms where students have variable linguistic repertoire, in combination with new technologies, has resulted in new definitions of what it means to be literate and how to teach literacy. Today, more than ever, we need frameworks for literacy teaching and learning that can withstand such shifting conditions across time, space, place, and circumstance, and thrive in challenging conditions. Critical literacy is a theoretical and practical framework that can readily take on such challenges creating spaces for literacy work that can contribute to creating a more critically informed and just world. It begins with the roots of critical literacy and the Frankfurt School from the 1920s along with the work of Paulo Freire in the late 1940s (McLaren, 1999; Morrell, 2008) and ends with new directions in the field of critical literacy including finding new ways to engage with multimodalities and new technologies, engaging with spatiality- and place-based pedagogies, and working across the curriculum in the content areas in multilingual settings. Theoretical orientations and critical literacy practices are used around the globe along with models that have been adopted in various state jurisdictions such as Ontario, in Canada, and Queensland, in Australia.