Professional Documents
Culture Documents
When I was in fourth grade, my teacher said something which forever changed the way I
would read. None of the words on the page, she would tell us, got there on their own or at
random. Someone, somewhere, put pen to paper and chose exactly those words in exactly that
order to say something. This statement was the first time I saw books as not just a product which
was handled to me to consume, but as a process of choices shepherded by the mind of the author.
From then on, I began to ask myself as I read: why these words and not those? Why this order
and not another? What is the author saying? What is the author not saying? I didnt know it at the
time, but this was my start with critical literacy.
A critical approach to literacy means being able to interpret and evaluate bias, point of
view and language usage, and to take action based on what one has read and considered
(DeVries, 2015, p. 186). Developing these critical faculties requires that students go beyond
literal interpretations and their initial impressions of text to wrestle with the text and determine
what it means not only in the abstract, but what it means to them in their lives. Nieto quite rightly
points out that literacy education without training in critical literacy is a partial and biased
education, because students who are unprepared to make and defend their own judgments about
text have no recourse but to fall on those given them by their teacher, shaped by the biases and
partialities of the teacher (cited in DeVries, 2015, p. 186).
Critical literacy as described by Ciardiello and Soares & Wood, revolves around six
themes: recognizing and deconstructing social barriers, exploring differing perspectives on
historical events, evaluating how culture influences language use, comparing and contrasting
texts, identifying and overcoming bias, and finding ways to take action based on ones reading
(cited in DeVries, 2015, p. 186).