Laying the Groundwork: Critical Literacy and Its Conceptual Underpinnings

By underscoring the power-related aspects of literacy, critical educators seek to understand meaning making within wider contextual domains: the ideological antecedents and disjunctures of the existing order and transformations in representational technologies that have facilitated histories, imagined and real. As we begin the 21st century, the threats posed and opportunities created by way of political, economic, and cultural globalization present a world context of intense debate, parts of which we will summarize. It is also a contextual domain in which the future of schools, work, and public life—or traditional definitions of literacy and orality—are reconceptualized in light of new digital capacities (e.g., image manipulation, multimedia, and hypermedia) and global information systems (i.e., the Internet) that challenge our perceptions of reality, locality, and community (Darley, 2000; Kramsch, 2000; Kramsch & Thorne, 2002; Warnick, 2002; Warschauer, 2004). Critical educators, in response, advocate a pluralized notion of literacies and multiliteracies to help students negotiate a broader range of text-types and modes of persuasion, not only via print, but also sound, images, gestures, spaces, and their multimodal integration (e.g., Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Hunter & Morgan, 2001; Jewitt & Kress, 2003; Kress, 2003; Lotherington, 2001, 2003; Norton & Vanderheyden, 2004; Quinlisk, 2003; Stein, 2004).

Arguably, such skills are not just options but necessities, if not forms of self-defense against the intrusiveness of corporate advertising, the growing sameness of cultural products and information from global media empires, and the expansion of sophisticated forms of surveillance and data sharing employed in the name of security (e.g., McChesney, 1999; Rutherford, 2000). Although one could make the argument that such concerns are irrelevant for applied linguists and language teacher education because they have little to do with actual reading and writing, critical literacy practitioners are likely to maintain that multiple texts, modalities, and technologies are crucial to the literacy setting because our job as educators partially entails cultivating a citizenry that is able to negotiate and critically engage with the numerous texts, modalities, and technologies coming at learners, and because we now collectively occupy globalized, interconnected spaces that insist on such critical engagement. Latent beneath such debates, of course, is how we understand the notion of “critical” and how this understanding circumscribes our engagement with the local and global power relations in which texts circulate and acquire their rhetorical potency. The following excerpt from Luke (2004) succinctly sums up some of what the term entails:

Critical literacies, informed by the previous passage, presuppose fluid and emergent notions of identity that bridge Cartesian dichotomies of mind/body, reason/emotion, and subject/object. Neither the thought processes of the mind nor the self-contained properties of page or screen provide independent foci for an adequate understanding of meaning making. The primary unit of analysis—and the pedagogical interventions it supports—is the “subject-in-discourse,” a conceptual unity illuminated through the lens of various postmodern theories (e.g., feminist poststructuralism, social constructivism, performativity, queer theory, and community of practice models). Individual and collective understandings, in this perspective, do not preexist their linguistic expression but are, instead, created and contested through dominant and subversive language practices (Canagarajah, 2004a; Norton, 2000). Similarly, the possibilities for human agency, following Luke, do not preexist discourse, but arise from within and as an effect of its particularities.

By extension, we may think of texts (i.e., oral, written, imaged, or embodied) as multidimensional—not only informational or genre-specific, but also person-formative. In understanding how subjects are discursively formed or positioned, we need to conceive of texts as conveying a dual materiality. On the one hand, texts both carry and address the “rules of exchange” of the social milieu in which they circulate (cf. intertextuality, Bazerman, 2004). Through implicit and explicit reference, and elements of style and genre, texts give voice to the tensions of their times—the antagonistic, class-based materiality conceived by Marx and running through the heteroglossia of Bakhtin, the multiaccentual, ideological sign of Volosinov, the cultural and symbolic capital of Bourdieu, and the dialogism of Freire. On the other hand, materiality also refers to the specific textual modality used. Whether we speak or write, take a photograph, produce a play, or create a website, each communicative vehicle will offer specialized compositional choices whose particular carrying capacities or affordances (Kress, 2003) shape what we can mean and how the experience of those meanings will be understood and retained over time (e.g., Goldstein, 2003; Kramsch, 2000). When addressing “subjects-in-discourse,” then, critical practitioners attend to both shifts in meaning potential across semiotic modes but also to their fundamental integration. As sites of practice, literacies, texts, even grammars, are conceived holistically, in the post-Cartesian sense of integrating a full range of emotive, sensorial, and experiential meanings and not just as discrete, rational systems (e.g., Kress, 2000, 2003; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Lemke, 2002; Morgan 2004a, 2004b; Stein, 2004).

In sum, Luke's passage invokes a longstanding critical tradition whereby self-awareness precedes and facilitates effective social action; that is, to “read the word and the world” (cf. Freire, 1997) we must begin to “read” ourselves and uncover our complicity in the commonsensical maintenance of social inequalities (cf. hegemony, Gramsci). Toward this end, and through the strategic deployment of texts, pedagogy becomes a process of unlearning internalized and habitual ways of seeing and being, naming the world and imagining social futures. Yet the achievement of “uncommon” sense through dialogue and critical consciousness(Freire, 1997), meta-awareness (Ramanathan, 2002), reflexivity (Canagarajah, 1999; Morgan, in press) or problematizing practices (Benesch, 2001; Pennycook, 2001) is no straightforward matter in classrooms, and key tensions arise in offering guidelines for critical literacies.

As “subjects-in-discourse,” for example, both students and teachers are differentially positioned—gendered, racialized, marked as immigrants or nonnative speakers—in multiple and often contradictory ways that belie simple binaries of oppressor and oppressed. Further complexity arises in the textual forging of schooled voices, the merging—to various degrees of success—of cultural memories and prior forms of language socialization with conscious and unconscious strategies of imitation, accommodation, or opposition to the dominant norms of the academic discourse community (Canagarajah, 2002, 2004b; Casanave, 2002; Bayley & Schecter, 2003). Then there is the unmistakable diversity of English language teaching (ELT) sites and contexts of practice. Across the privileged confines of universities, English in the workplace programs (Goldstein, 2001; Katz, 2000) or in rural village literacy programs (Egbo, 2004; Purcell-Gates & Waterman, 2000; Sahni, 2001), universal methods and conceptions of power may certainly be inappropriate, as widely acknowledged (Kumaravadivelu, 2003a), but local specificities indiscernible or of marginal relevance to the diversity of life stories unfolding across the globe. Indeed, as Janks (2001) observed in a racially mixed, South African classroom, the pedagogical distancing of self from dominant text may be resented when such texts serve to unify fragile and threatened solidarities.

Other key tensions, paradigmatic in nature, concern assumptions about the world we are empowered to read. Is it a world whose ontological “truths” can be represented or revealed scientifically (cf. emancipatory modernism, Pennycook, 2001), or, is “reality” a textualized illusion (cf., nihilistic deconstructive postmodernism, Shea, 1998) always open to new discursive readings and always dangerous in terms of the new subjectivities and forms of power/knowledge that result? Or, is it something metaphorically in between—a recursive world both real and mediated? Paradigmatic assumptions of these sorts shape how critical literacies unfold. They can influence what teachers accept or reject as valid, emancipatory outcomes of dialogue, for example, or they can contribute to forms of epistemic skepticism in which teachers, newly conscious of the partiality of their knowledge, fear to act. As “subjects-in-discourse” we are each (students, teachers, researchers, scholars in ELT) in positions where we can turn the critical lens on ourselves to where we hold everything about our professional lives to the light: our teaching, choice of pedagogic materials, discipline's orientations, valued genres, socialization practices. A justification of such self-critical analyses is partially this: By taking deliberate steps to create contexts for ourselves and our learners whereby we begin to critically distance ourselves and analytically reflect on our numerous participations (in hallways, in student conferences, in writing proposals and papers, in conference presentations) we will eventually be in a better position to change aspects of our social and disciplinary worlds that we deem necessary.

Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms: Pedagogical Priorities

In a world imagined through postmodernism, where new orthodoxies of contingency, indeterminacy, and hybridity command our attention, there is strong consensus against prescribed, transmission-oriented methods of critique as well as strong concern for the ideological complacency and paternalism that can arise from such assumptions (e.g., Clarke, 2003, Ch. 6; Johnston, 2003, Ch. 3). Reflecting the interpretive and experiential dynamics that mediate knowledge, transformative practitioners focus on creating possibilities rather than certainties. Critical distancing is not guaranteed through any one specific form of literacy, but arises from articulated practices (Lin & Luk, 2002), when critical moments and memories briefly align in novel ways, and when even seemingly mundane or compulsory reading/writing tasks can be recontextualized and invigorated with an empowering potential, opening up new identity options and new opportunities to subvert or transform institutional power relations (cf. rights analyses, Benesch, 2001; the praxicum, Pennycook, 2004a). In this respect, the preferred goal of critical literacies is to create space for the agency of others and not to determine if or how that agency will be realized. The space that a teacher might create will vary across educational domains, subject to the application of standardized curricula and high-stakes testing and the relative autonomy afforded local administrators and educators.

The metaphor of bricolage might aptly describe the context-sensitive, improvisational strategies suggested here, but there is also recognition that critical literacies need explicit support through the provision of text-analytic tools—a metalanguage—for print, visual, and multimedia (e.g., Bazerman & Prior, 2004; Cooke, 2004; Cope & Kalantsis, 2000; Corbett, 2003, Ch. 6; Cummins, 2001, Ch. 5; Kress & van Leeuven, 1996; New London Group, 1996; Rutherford, 2000, Ch. 1) as well as the thick description of case studies from which practitioners might adapt their own critical pedagogies (e.g., Comber & Simpson, 2001; Edelsky & Johnson, 2004; Toohey, 2000).

Still, as Wallace (2001) notes, “there is little consensus about what kind of metalinguistic knowledge is facilitative of enhanced critical awareness” (p. 213, italics in original). A “politics of access”(cf. Pennycook, 2001)—the modeling of powerful genres and texts—on its own, may presume a degree of disciplinary stability and textual uniformity at variance with the co-constructed dynamics observed in discourse communities (e.g., Ramanathan, 2002; Casanave, 2002). Furthermore, as Toohey and Waterstone (2004) observe, power does not inhere to text types, alone, but obtains, as well, from the social and institutional status of text users. On the other hand, a “politics of voice” (cf. Pennycook, 2001)—the affirmation of minority literacies and vernaculars in schools—on its own, may be irresponsible preparation for a world in which textual chauvinism often provides a defensible justification for racial and ethnic discrimination. Many researchers suggest that we combine elements of access and voice by encouraging critical negotiation of identities and literacies within institutional hierarchies and by providing analytic tools that link the micro features of texts with powerful, local and global discourses (Canagarajah, 2002, 2004a; Carr, 2003; Cooke, 2004; Lin & Luk, 2002). In support, researchers also recommend that we openly discuss systemic forms of discrimination and validate students' experiences and forms of resistance within syllabus design (e.g., Benesch, 2001; Canagarajah, 2004b; Kubota, 2004; Goldstein, 2003).

Such discussions are themselves, distancing or Othering, following Luke, in that they illuminate how we language our realities into existence—how discourses and power/knowledge operate on and through our micro-interactions with students, and how the labels we assign them (e.g., nonnative speaker, low achiever) are also systemic and discriminatory, functioning, in effect, to produce the social and educational margins that they name (e.g., Harklau, 2003).

Critical Literacies in English for Academic Purposes: A “Tool-Kit” in Action

The rules of a social field both limit and create their possible transgressions. In the field of EAP, one of the central rules of instruction is to help students manage unfamiliar disciplinary content and text types. Situated within these cognitive demands, critical EAP develops as an embedded, co-occurring literacy strategy—to raise students' awareness of how academic content “manages” them, in the person-formative sense stated earlier, shaping their desires, world views, and life chances beyond the school. So conceived, critical EAP literacies invigorate, rather than replace, conventional academic skill sets, as convincingly argued by many researchers (Benesch, 2001; Cummins, 2001; Schleppegrell & Colombi, 2002; Starfield, 2004). Through distancing strategies that denaturalize and demystify disciplinary content, “subjects-in-discourse” become aware of the partiality—hence contestability—of the dominant knowledge claims in their chosen fields of study. Moreover, through literacy acts of reading, writing, interpreting, and debating concepts, subjects/students become aware of their integral role in the practices that (re)constitute the academic discourse communities to which they seek membership (Canagarajah, 2002; Ramanathan, 2002; Varghese, 2004).

The following set of points capture both some distancing practices in EAP and some general purposes they are intended to serve, as well as an abbreviated sense of a critical literacy “tool-kit” in action:

Globalization, Critical Literacy, and Language Education

The multiplicity and breadth of textual practices in the previous section reflect, in part, a pervasive assumption characteristic of postmodern inclinations.

Specifically, because our realities are so very different, if not incommensurable, by default critical literacies must always be provisional, emerging from new contexts of struggle. Globalization, and the preeminence of English flowing through it, however, complicates such assumptions. Our divergent realities are in fact closely intertwined in ways that elude categorical explanation. Indeed, ELT debates on whether the globalization-English nexus encourages heterogeneity or casts a homogenizing blanket over divergent realities are themselves literacy acts, “semiotic struggle[s] to control the definition of reality” (Hassan, 2003, p. 437). These definitions, when reified in policy, reflect the performative work (cf. Butler) we do as applied linguistics. Languaged into existence, such debates invite the same critical examination as other semiotic signs, not only for their veracity but also for the self-interests they serve, particularly in a profession prone toward lingua-centric remedies.

One recurrent theme that seems to resonate through the literature relates the learning of languages—English in particular—to market-oriented concerns, with education viewed as being constructed within and by capitalist social relations (Atkinson, 2002; Corson, 2002). The capitalistic push toward viewing our world as a “shrinking global village” given the numerous ways in which landscapes (Appadurai, 1996) are being connected through global forms of communication and mass media seems to highlight the homogenizing and diffusing tendencies of globalization, where borders and boundaries between realities collapse. When the scene is languaged in this way, schools run the risk of being rendered as powerless agents in effecting change, relegated to the provision of human “capital” for a global marketplace, where the quality of something is decided according to the price it can fetch” (Corson, 2002, pp. 5–6), and where notions of equality and freedom are narrowly equated with “equality of opportunity” and “freedom to consume” (Spring 2001, p. 12).

Threaded through this subnarrative (of the capitalistic tendencies around the globalization and English nexus) are the implications for what this means for literacy. Atkinson (2002), for instance, suggests that market-based practices are latent beneath L2 compositional practices, where our collective emphasis on “clear writing” might be seen “as part of a functional system in which efficiency and speed of delivery are central—in which knowledge is defined as a movable, transposable, commercial phenomenon—literacy as commodity” (p. 52). If “effective, clear” communication is the new norm for literacy, then we as language educators have to consider not only the extent to which stressing particular ways of speaking, teaching, and interacting with texts are a part of capitalistic tendencies (Block & Cameron, 2002; Cameron, 2002) that we can and need to critically address and pull back from, but also ways in which we are collectively contributing to this focus by our writing and speaking of it in particular ways. This self-conscious examination of how we are simultaneously both subjects and agents, of how these “realities” are both perceived by us and construct us in turn is crucial, especially if we wish to keep from both perpetuating the profession's “McCommunication” tendencies, a term Block (2002) uses for the instrumental, utilitarian approaches typically advocated in “negotiation of meaning” research, whose primary focus has been the enhancement of speaking skills.

These globalizing/capitalizing tendencies also seem to have wrought a change in how literacy, especially English language literacy (because narratives about globalization assume English as their undertow) is perceived with a decided shift away from a generally “universalist” position that tended to stress the norms of grammatical and phonological accuracy to a “differentialist” one where English is viewed as plural (“Englishes”) with diverse and local ways in which it is entrenched, learned, and appropriated (Kramsch, 2000; Kumaravadivelu, 2002, 2003b; Pennycook, 2003; Toohey, 2000). Such a view of English literacies not only opens up the possibility of viewing English as a language that is simultaneously a syncretic language that makes room for vernacular codes in local varieties, but also as a language that binds “diverse periphery and centre communities together” getting remolded for a variety of purposes (Wallace, 2002, p. 112). In the realm of language teaching, this has meant forays into ways in which ELT can be decolonized: that we go beyond “teaching methods” to “decentering the authority Western interests have over the ELT industry” by partially “restoring agency to professionals in the periphery communities” (Kumaravadivelu, 2003b, p. 540), to recognizing and valuing local vernacular modes of learning and teaching (Canagarajah, 1999, 2004a), of the continuing vernacularization of English in postcolonial contexts (Ramanathan, 2004, 2005), and of uncovering the politics beneath the ELT textbook industry (Gray, 2002). In each of these cases, the authors are arguing for a self-conscious, critical examination of the Western-based ELT practices by turning the critical lens on the profession itself, even its historical propensity toward wholesale change in the name of progress, a point that is picked up by Morgan (2004b, p. 540) who speaks of the need to “expand the knowledge base and interdisciplinary scope of our profession—but in an intradisciplinary way, grounded in familiar contexts of language research and practice” (p. 174).

Language and literacy practices around the globalization-English nexus, then, are key contested sites with anxieties being articulated not just about its homogenizing or heterogenizing tendencies—whether to stress processes of assimilation and monoculturalization (e.g., Mondiano, 2004; Heller, 2003) or to emphasize diffusion and hybridization (as partially evident in phenomena like rap/hip-hop music; Pennycook, 2003)—but about how all of it is being languaged, as well, simultaneously constructing and reifying our realities even as we are in the midst of them. If the globalization currents are, indeed, making us “commodify” language (Harris, Leung, & Rampton, 2002; Heller, 2003), or overstress its communicative “efficiency” (Cameron, 2002), then it is imperative that we language teachers find small ways of countering these discursive processes in our literacy practices.