Critical Literacy
What is critical literacy?
“Critical literacy is the ability to read texts in an active, reflective manner in order to better understand power, inequality, and injustice in human relationships.”
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4437
What are texts?
Texts could refer to any means through which communication takes place by using society’s codes and conventions. So these could include: advertisements, songs, novels, conversations, pictures, movies, newspaper articles, cartoons etc.
What do resistant readers do? How do we become critically literate?
- Critical literacy requires one to learn the skills in order to interpret messages in the modern world through a critical lens and to challenge relations of power within those messages.
- Critical readers should interrogate (question) social issues and institutions such as family, poverty, education, equity, and equality so as to be able to evaluate the structures that serve as norms and to be able to demonstrate how these norms are not experienced by all members of society.
- Question issues of power - especially inequalities within society such as socio-economic status, race, class, gender, sexual orientation.
- Understand whose knowledge is being privileged.
- How does language play a role in the social construction of the self?
- Be aware of bias and hidden agendas within texts.
- Instead of just reading words on a page and understanding the meaning of those words, we have to do so in a reflective way.
- We have to be aware of which groups are marginalized (sidelined).
Adrian Blackledge says that critical literacy emphasizes the potential of written language “to be a tool for people to analyze the division of power and resources in their society and transform discriminatory structures.”
Key Questions
- What does the author want us to know?
- What different interpretations are possible?
- What kind of person and with what kind of interests and values wrote this text?
- What view of the world is being presented?
- How is power used and what effect does power have on others?
- Whose interests are served?
- Who benefits?
- Who is disadvantaged?
- Whose voice is missing and what ways can texts be used to give a voice to the silenced?
https://sites.google.com/site/criticalliteracyinss/critical-literacy-activities
Language is selected/chosen
Take note of all things:
- Lexical - things concerning the words or vocabulary of a language – the diction.
- Grammatical – the language or sentence structure.
- Sequencing – the order of words and phrases (what is put first or last – and why?).
- Choice of pronouns (e.g. inclusive ‘we’ or othering ‘they’).
- Renaming (use of euphemisms) and naming (finding new terms for things).
The choices are motivated
- To have particular meanings
- In particular ways
- To have particular effects
It is important to note:
- What has been selected or omitted?
- What is foregrounded (or put in front).
- quotes, pronouns
- Whose voices are being heard or considered important?
- Who is being quoted? What philosophy do they support?
- Who is being silenced? Whose voices are not being heard?
Positioning
All texts are positioned and are positioning
- They are positioned by the writer’s point of view.
- The linguistic (language) choices of the writer are done to fulfill a specific aim.
- They are designed to position the reader to think in a certain way.
Thus: how does this text position the reader?
Means: What techniques are used by the writer in order to make the reader think in a certain way? and
- In what way does the writer want the reader to think?
- Hailing means to call out to, attract someone’s attention e.g. to hail a cab.
- How do texts attract our attention?
Design
- Texts have designs (to have plans to exploit or somehow take advantage of someone or something) on readers, listeners and viewers.
- They entice us into their way of seeing and understanding the world.
- They entice us into their version of reality.
- They want us to see their version of the world as the norm.
- Assumptions about the way we think or how people are meant to view the world are important to note.
- Naturalisation – is a construction of reality. We are told to believe what is normal and what is aspirational - what should we be aspiring to (wealth, power, love, beauty, a certain physique etc).
- Who is given power and dominance or authority.
- Othering, refers to rendering or making certain groups of people into the ‘out’ groups. Marginalising others – going from the inclusive “we” or “us” to the othering “them” or “they”.
“Othering is a process that identifies those that are thought to be different from oneself or the mainstream, and it can reinforce and reproduce positions of domination and subordination.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15090288
- Legitimation - in the social sciences, legitimation refers to the practice whereby an act, process, or ideology becomes legitimate or legal by its attachment to norms and values within a given society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation
Every text is just one version of reality
- It is just one perspective (view) of reality.
- Language and other signs are used to construct a reality.
