Critical Literacy

Critical Literacy is generally defined as the adoption of critical perspectives towards text and it encourages active analyzing of texts. However, I feel that this definition is both useless and meaningless, if we as teachers don’t know how to incorporate critical literacy in our classrooms.

I would personally define critical literacy with the words: thoughtful, reflective, and active, participation involving texts.

First though, the term “text” should be addressed. To say that we should encourage students to think critically about texts, what types of things do we mean? Previously, I believe the answer to this would be books and the other written words. However, the term “text” has now expanded to include a variety of other things. Taking a critical perspective of texts could mean, a piece of art work, listening to a story or a podcast, a video, images and texts on a computer screen, and even a piece of music. Critically literacy to me, involves taking any of these forms of text, reflecting on your own thoughts about it, sharing your ideas with others, and then taking a critical perspective on others’ thoughts.

As an example, think for a minute that you are teaching science to third graders. It is likely that there will be topics in the science curriculum that either the students have preconceived notions about or have misconceptions about. From a critical literacy approach, the teacher could first allow time for class/partner discussion about the topic. After sharing their opinions, the class could then read trade books to learn important facts about the topic. Being that we’re talking about the science content area, it would be easy from that point, to actually perform experiments and investigate the topic from an authentic point of view. Further discussion after the experiments should be offered so the students can think critically about the previous aspects of their learning and how their original thoughts about the topic were either correct or have changed.

All in all, this simple example of critical literacy in the classroom is a great way to take literacy to the next level. The students will have thought critically about text, examined their thoughts and put reasoning behind them, and then shared and participated in discourse in an authentic and meaningful way.