What is Critical Literacy? (...to me...)

What does critical literacy mean to you?

Critical literacy is about awareness. It is about being aware of your own mental framework that you come to a text with: your own attitudes, biases, predispositions, preferences, and ideas. It is being aware of the context of a text: the society in which it is being viewed, the culture in which it was written, and the time period in which it takes place. It is being aware of the subtleties of a text: what messages does the text convey, explicitly or implicitly? It is being aware of the culture and society that you live in. Why is a text controversial? What social norms does a text contain? Are we happy with things the way they are, or are there things we can do to change them, or raise a dialogue about them?

Critical literacy is about questions. It is about being able to ask questions of a text. The idea of asking a text questions is bizarre to someone who has never thought of approaching a text this way. You must not take a text at face value. You must ask, what is this text saying blatantly? What assumptions was this text built from? What messages does this text send? And why?

Critical literacy is about being able to take anything you encounter and reading it as a text. An example of all of these things- awareness, questioning, and finding texts everywhere- is the example that Professor Vasquez shared with us on one of our first class meetings: her young students questioning the poster featuring only male Mounties. They approached this poster as a text, and identified the underlying message that being a Mountie was considered a primarily masculine career.

When you are young, it is easy to accept things that you read and take them at face value. If you are young and presented with a book, you assume that the person writing the book knows more than you, and you don't think to criticize or question what is being presented. I remember getting to high school and being asked to critically analyze readings, and I didn't really know how. I didn't understand the idea of critiquing because I had never been taught or told to look at assumptions, biases, or points of view implied in a text. I like the idea of introducing children to these skills early because it empowers them. When students are shown that they can challenge texts, they take an active role in constructing their understanding of the world around them.

So much of education as we know it involves teachers and books imparting knowledge into children and children accepting and practicing what we teach them. Critical literacy allows students to build their own knowledge through inquiry. Critical literacy also allows students to conceptualize themselves as active members of the global community. They too can engage in dialogue about issues in texts, and they can engineer ways to change things they do not agree with. Giving students the power to disagree and the confidence to initiate change is one of the strongest elements of critical literacy.

Critical literacy is about courage. I think it takes a brave teacher to implement a curriculum of critical literacy. Critical literacy involves a lot of work on behalf of the teacher in exposing her students to texts that tackle diverse, often complicated issues. Critical literacy also involves a leap of faith, in that the teacher must relinquish some control to the students: she is not teaching them what to think but how to think, and she must work with what the students give back to her as a result. However, for a teacher that is willing to attempt these challenges, I think that integrating elements of critical literacy into a classroom is one of the best ways a teacher can empower her students and truly develop the critical thinkers our world needs.