I'm currently taking an AQ (additional qualification) course at OISE/UT on reading. Our first big assignment was to find an article of interest associated with reading. We were to analyse the text and reflect on how the ideas inform our personal teaching practice. I'm interested in critical literacy and decided to write a response to Allan Luke's Critical Literacies: a Primer. I thought I'd share it on this blog rather than leave it mouldering on my desktop.
Reading Part 1
Erin Hawkins
Professional Article Response - Critical Literacies in Schools: A Primer
Copyright National Council of Teachers of English, Dec. 2009
Allan Luke, Annette Woods, Douglas Fisher, Joyce Bruett, and Lisa Fink.
Back when I was in my early twenties studying journalism at Centennial College, I found myself at the mystery book store, The Sleuth of Baker Street one rainy autumn evening. I was interviewing the proprietors for a feature story that would run in the East York Observer. This was my first experience writing for a real community paper. Not only would my story be read by the citizens of East York, it was also a required component of my feature writing course. I had to do a good job.
Clutching my microcassette recorder, I came armed with questions about the store and those who frequented it. The interview went smoothly, but just before I was set to leave, I decided to ask an impromptu question: “Do you feel you are doing your part to combat the problem of literacy?” The owner looked baffled. “You mean illiteracy.” I looked at him and tried rephrasing my question. “Literacy is a huge problem these days, especially with younger people. Don’t you - ” The owner cut me off. “The word is illiteracy. You used the wrong word. Trust me.”
I took the bus ride of shame home that night, but I never forgot the difference between literacy and illiteracy. Almost twenty years later, I’m now teaching in an electronic age of persuasion and once again, I find myself taking a close look at the word literacy. According to the Ontario Ministry of Education document Literacy for Learning, literacy is defined as, “the ability to use language and images in rich and varied forms to read, write, listen, speak, view, represent, and think critically about ideas.” (ix). Although critical literacy is not a new idea, the importance of using critical thinking as part of a reading comprehension framework has been stressed to teachers in recent years as children and teenagers increasingly find themselves trying to make sense of the media texts that bombarded them each day. What exactly is critical literacy though?
In A Guide to Effective Literacy Instruction Grades 4 to 8: Volume One - Foundations of Literacy Instruction for the Junior Learner, critical literacy is a higher level thinking skill that goes, “beyond conventional critical thinking because it asks students to question the authority of texts and to explore issues of bias, perspective, and social justice” (63).
In the article Critical Literacies in Schools: A Primer (2009), Allan Luke et al state that the groundwork in the area of critical literacy that started with the late educator/theorist Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), must continue to expand in our ever-evolving electronic age. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire suggested that traditional methods of teaching relied on a banking model in which the role of the all-knowing teacher was to fill the minds of students as if you were filling up a new car with gasoline for the first time. In this model, the teacher is in a position of privilege and power while the student takes a subservient role.
Main Argument
In Critical Literacies in Schools: A Primer, Luke first provides an overview of the history of critical literacy, referencing the work of British academics Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams who examined the effects of the “power of postwar mass culture in the formation of ideology and hegemony,” for the working-class of Great Britain. Returning to Freire, Luke explains Freire’s banking model in the following way: “Freire’s work begins from a classical view of ideology, that is, ruling class dominates what counts as school knowledge. By this view, approaches to school literacy are represented as expressions of dominant ideology that succeed in creating a principally ‘receptive’ literacy. Being literate, then, involves uncritical transmission, decoding, and reproduction of dominant and potentially distorted views of the world. The alternative is to begin from the learners’ key problems, worldviews, and ‘namings’ of the phenomenal world, in effect turning learners into teachers and inventors of the curriculum.” Luke notes that the large body of research that supports Freire’s ideas is referred to as “critical pedagogy.”
In order for this shift in roles to occur, Luke argues that a democratic classroom climate must exist in the first place and that students must be free to approach “dominant cultural texts,” with a critical eye and be able to voice their opinion. As well, the authors of this article note that there is a body of research in the areas of cultural, cognitive and linguistic aspects of literacy that call into question certain aspects of critical pedagogy, specifically how “teachers and students can engage with the complex structures of texts.” Luke suggest that a more useful approach - and one that meets the complexities of current media literacy - is a text analysis approach. In this method, students use both Freire’s critique of underlying bias in “dominant cultural texts,” as well as consider the way in which texts work “ideologically.” The text analysis approach puts more power in the hands of students by highlighting the way different texts and aspects of language within texts (e.g. the photos and lead stories that appear on the home page of Yahoo Canada as opposed to the photos and lead stories on the front page of the Globe and Mail) are constructed and the meaning we make of these messages. “Critical literacy - by this account - entails the developmental engagement with the major texts, discourses, and modes of information in the culture,” writes Luke. “It attempts to attend to the ideological and hegemonic functions of texts, just as in critical pedagogy models, but it augments this by providing students with technical resources for analyzing how texts work...”
Theory and Practice
As a student in the Inner City Option at OISE three years ago, I was introduced to the work of both Freire and Luke and the thinking of both educators had a huge influence on the way I was beginning to view my role as a teacher. When I was growing up, school texts were more or less limited to books, magazines, and cassettes. And while critical thinking was not necessarily discouraged, teachers didn’t actively encourage it. The term “critical thinking” was not commonly used - at least not in class. Media texts were different too. Like children of today, I was surrounded by media texts, but not to the extent that children of today are. Nowadays, you can’t walk down the street without noticing messages in public spaces such as garbage cans and steps inside subway stations. I counted 15 signs on the window of my local convenience store this week, most of which were advertising sweets and frozen treats. The store also has an LED “ticker” sign at the lottery counter telling customers how big this week’s 649 jackpot is. Back in the seventies and eighties, TV commercials would typically last thirty seconds or more. Now, commercials have been pruned down to five-to ten second blips to target the short attention span video game generation. Personally, I find most commercials so quick and interchangeable that I don’t remember the product that was being advertised.
Strangely enough, the only commercial that my grade five students talked about in class this year was the Slap Chop commercial, which is a much longer commercial. Students talked about how phony pitchman Vince came across on TV. One student told the class that the commercial convinced his mother to buy a Slap Chop, but when they bought it, the gadget fell apart after a few days. We watched the commercial on YouTube as a class and talked about techniques that were used in the commercial to sell the product: the way Vince was dressed in an apron to look like a chef, the way he demonstrated the product to make it look so easy to use, and things he said to convince people they had to have a Slap Chop in their kitchen.
Current Realities in the TDSB
Teaching critical literacy skills is important on many levels - especially in TDSB schools which are filled with students from a diverse range of social, economical, and cultural backgrounds. Returning to the article, I can see how the legacy of Freire’s work can be seen in the formation of Toronto’s first Africentric school which opened this past school year. Although the decision to create such a school was controversial, the final decision to go ahead seemed to stem from a deep need for African Canadian children to learn about African culture in a way that would be unbiased and free from the “dominant cultural texts” that did not tell the whole story.
Teachers in the TDSB are also encouraged by the board’s Equitable and Inclusive Schools to consider educator James Banks’ four stage Model for the Development of Meaningful Equity/Human Rights in their planning and teaching. In the first two stages (Contributions and Additive), the role of the student is passive and the role of the teacher is the provider of information. In the third stage (Transformation), the structure of the curriculum is altered to assist students and ideas and issues are examined from diverse groups. In the fourth stage (Social/Action), students are encouraged to act on important issues and to make decisions for themselves. These students are agents of social change. In both the third and fourth stage, students are active learners and the role of teachers is that of a facilitator of learning opportunities for students to explore multiple perspectives.
I saw this model play out during the Haiti earthquake this past winter at my school. Our class took a critical look at the coverage of the earthquake in the Toronto Star. Earlier in the year, we had come to the conclusion that the purpose of the cover of a newspaper is to sell papers. As pictures of suffering Haitians filled the front page of the paper, we asked some very difficult questions, such as why these pictures would want to make someone buy a newspaper. The children in my class believed that in this particular case, the purpose was to show people in Toronto just how dire the situation was. Our class decided to spearhead a fundraiser in which everyone in the school would make a clothes peg worry doll to be sold on Literacy Night and at recess. In other words, students were able to be text analysists and deconstruct the messages presented to them. They were also able to evaluate the situation for themselves: “This is really bad. We need to help the people of Haiti.”
Just as best practices of ecological awareness have filtered into the new Science curriculum, approaching reading using critical literacy skills plays a significant part in the Language curriculum, especially the emphasis on point of view (“Whose voice is missing?”). The Ministry of Education has endorsed Luke and Freebody’s “Four Resources Model,” which we’ve already examined in Reading Part 1. In this model, the literate learner must be able to make sense of the text he/she is reading, decode the features of the text, apply information from the text in practical contexts, and critique texts for bias.
I agree with Luke that critical literacy goes beyond scrutinizing text for bias and as teachers we must give students the tools and strategies they need to approach the vast array of texts they encounter on a daily basis. Whether it’s a 13-year-old boy who can see beyond the pretty face on the cover of a magazine, a 10-year-old, who’s skeptical of the tactics used by Vince from Slap Chop, or a kindergarten child who understands why sugary cereals have cartoon characters on the box - all children can be text analysers and critical thinkers.
Copyright Erin Hawkins 2010
Loomis (I thought it was De Serres???) is now selling off beautiful scrapbook paper for .25 a sheet. I bought this lovely squash-coloured paper to mount photos of my class in the fall.
They had all kinds of funky patterns, including cowhide and pirates. The store I went to is at Woodbine/Danforth in east Toronto.
At Value Village, they had bundled bags of activity books by the cashier for $2.99. Each bag had three books in it.
I wouldn't use these extensively in my class, but some of the sheets are good for practise at word study areas and there are general reading passages you could use for higher level thinking questions, so it's all in how you use them.
