Hilary Janks is professor emerita in the school of education at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her teaching and research are committed to a search for equity and social justice in contexts of poverty. She can be contacted at hilary.
Barbara Comber is a research professor in the school of education at the University of South Australia. She can be contacted at Barbara. Comber unisa. Critical literacy should be viewed as a lens, frame, or perspective for teaching throughout the day, across the curriculum, and perhaps beyond, rather than as a topic to be covered or unit to be studied.
What this means is that critical literacy involves having an ingrained critical perspective or way of being that provides us with an ongoing critical orientation to texts and practices. Inviting students to write down the messages that they see in public transport, to take photographs of graffiti or billboards, to cut out advertisements from magazines, or to collect sweet wrappers to bring to class helps them to read the everyday texts they encounter critically.
Inviting children to bring culturally meaningful artifacts to school enables meaningful discussions about and understanding of things that matter to different communities. Students learn best when what they are learning has importance in their lives; as such, using the topics, issues, and questions that they raise should be central to creating an inclusive critical curriculum.
It is our job to show them how to assume agency and act to make a difference, however small. Texts are socially constructed from particular perspectives; they are never neutral. All texts are created from a particular perspective with the intention of conveying particular messages.
So far, so vague. We know how important critical literacy is, but it is too often left to the individual teacher without a sense of policy or purpose. With all of the pressure of getting students through their GCSEs, it is easy for critical literacy to fall by the wayside, or for students not to realise that all of those analytical skills which they learned for An Inspector Calls can also be applied to the latest viral TikTok video.
This is also about so much more than GCSEs. Aggressive targeted advertising means that everyone who is online is exposed to algorithms trying to push purchasing at all costs. As teachers, we have a responsibility to arm our students with the tools to navigate this landscape — and this can be difficult given that many adults struggle with the concept of critical literacy. So, how can we enable our students to develop the skills required to be critically literate, conscious consumers of information?
A report from the Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy stresses that this burden should not fall on individual teachers but should be combatted schoolwide, with clear objectives and guidance written into a policy.
Teachers across departments should be given training and encouraged to develop a cross-curricular approach. Furthermore, digital giants like Facebook and Google have a role to play in stopping the spread of misinformation to the best of their ability.
Developing this ability to analyse with precise focus is truly a skill for life. Asking questions about texts is at the centre of all English teaching, but perhaps we need to go further in the questions that we ask: What does this text want from me as a reader?
Why is this text considered to be of value? What biases am I bringing to my understanding of this text? The Four Resources Model , developed by Luke and Freebody, uses a four-stage framework for developing these questions, as we position ourselves and our students as text decoders, text participants, text users and text analysts.
Dr Navan Govender also shares an excellent example of this in practice. However, in asking these questions, we also need to be mindful about the answers we are expecting.
Because the majority of her Salt Lake City students are either Latino, African American, or from refugee families, critical literacy helps her engage and empower students on several levels. They will choose any injustice in the world. It doesn't have to be race. It could be immigration reform, or something with religion or sexuality.
They'll write a research paper. Then they'll create an action plan. So, what are they going to do about it? In most cases, these dynamics are rarely obvious. More often, they are part of many nuanced and interconnected factors that underlie the plots and perspectives of the narratives we consume.
And unless viewed through a critical lens, the inherent biases that are often present can go unnoticed and unquestioned.
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