Where do Critical Literacies come in?
Heydon & Wang, 2006, p. 33)
A multiliteracies approach to teaching and learning, can allow our students to become skeptical. As educators, this is one of the greatest gifts we can give them . “Reading needs to be a catalyst for developing a curious and skeptical mind. It allows us to investigate and solve problems, understand ideologies, understand texts and understand that world.” (Luke, 2013). I might even take this perspective from Luke a little further to include literacy as a whole, as is seen through multiple subjects and across learning environments that students experience throughout the day. What we are actually looking for our students to do, it to approach a text or a situation with vigor and skepticism that will allow them to question and approach the text from varied perspectives.
To do this, we have to reconsider our approach as educators. As we are all reminded of our ever-growing obligations to the classroom and to our teaching district, there is also something to be said for what Stein (2001) calls the "cult of efficiency " as the antithesis of ethical ECE" (as cited in Heydon & Wang, 2006). We are expending time and extreme amount of effort ensuring that the written curriculum and school expectations *work* that the classroom may actually become the antithesis of literacy experiences that are truly critical in nature.
Figure 1
Heydon and Wang (2006) offer the Continuum of Curricular Paradigms and Opportunities for Efficiency and Ethics (Fig. 1). This continuum and research of Heydon and Wang suggest that to be more ethical teachers, we need to move towards a more emergent curriculum that is truly rooted in the context of students' worlds. Scripted and mandated, one-size-fits-all programs are not suitable. When were are working from a place where students are curricular informants, that have choice and can influence the direction of the curriculum, we can more to a position of deeply thinking...being critically literate in the classroom.
We need to consider as well, that critical literacies has a place for even our youngest learners. “Before emergent literacy, there was this notion that children needed to attain either some specific chronological or mental age or a certain knowledge base before they could start to learn to read. Now we know that s absolutely not true” (Turner, 2018, p. 176). Children and the ability to be critical and skeptical and to analyze their immediate surroundings and communities to build understandings that are relevant and necessary for their growth as thinkers and learners. However, the relevance is of utmost importance; “...when it comes to an analysis of language and power, young children have greatest investments in situations and texts that arise in their immediate social classroom worlds” (Comber, 2013, p. 590). Getting to know our students and pulling content from their lives is essential.
Offering ample opportunity for students to engage is critical literacies across subject areas, and being truly responsive in the building of these opportunities can be statements of an ethical approach to teaching and learning. Inviting "learner readers to interrogate, to examine, and to compare other texts and their own knowledge, to dare to question the authority of the text” (Comber, 2013, p. 592). This is where the beauty of multiliteracies and the capitalizing on the diversity of students and their perspectives can deepen conversations and become a way for great questioning to take place.
Figure 2
This visual representation (Fig. 2) note that these three facets of designing quality teaching and learning with an ethical approach. All three work together, are mediated by multimodal+ multicontextual approaches:
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Critical Literacies - recognising the social dynamic at play in each text and forms of communication
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Recognising that the curriculum can be emergent and arises from seeking to help students design their learning from diverse access points to classroom content
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Being responsive to the needs and knowledge that students are already being brought to the classroom
“Critical literacy is as much about acquiring a disposition towards texts, a learned skepticism, as it is a formal element of curriculum” (Garcia, Luke & Seglem, 2018, p. 77). This learned skepticism is essential for our students be be 'literate', far beyond decoding, phonemic awareness and being comprehension-question-savvy.
As so much of educational debate is in the media, we are made aware of the many tensions that are conflicting and vying for the spotlight and the celebratory nod of being 'best practice' (for the current time). Whole word, digital, project-based, direct-instruction, inquiry approach...and the list goes on and on. “The pedagogy of multiliteracies was actually an attempt to reconcile those different tensions by making the case for immersion in practice, for explicit instruction, for critique and deconstruction, and for social, civic and semiotic action” (p. 76).