A critical read on critical literacy: From critique to dialogue as an ideal for literacy education

Educational Theory

Volumn 51, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 401-413

  Endres, Benjamin ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 2542519878     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2001.00401.x     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1993).
2. Ludo Verheoeven, Functional Literacy/Theoretical Issues and Educational implications (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994).
3. For an example of how functional literacy tends to frame literacy in economic terms consider the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) statement that goals motivating "functional literacy" are "to mobilize, train and educate still insufficiently utilized manpower, to make it more productive and more useful to itself and society." UNESCO, Practical Guide to Functional Literacy /A Method of Training for Development (Paris: UNESCO, 19731, 9.
4. For evidence of the sometimes specific political objectives that Freire connected with literacy see the selections from his "literacy notebooks"; Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1987), 65.
5. Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren, "Introduction" In Critical Pedagogy, the State, and Cultural Struggle, ed. Henry A. Ciroux and Peter McLaren (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989) xxi.
6. Henry, Giroux, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 42.
7. James Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses (1990; Reprint, London: Taylor and Francis This book will be cited as SLL in the text for all subsequent references, 1996). .
8. Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (New York: The New Press, 1995).
9. Colin Lankshear, "Meanings of Literacy in Contemporary Educational Reform Proposals" Educational Theory 48, no. 3 (1998): 351-72.
10. James Paul Gee, Michele Knobel, and Chris Searle, Changing Literacies (Buckingham, U.K.: Open UniversityPress, 1997). This book will be cited as CL in the text for all subsequent references. Colin Lankshear with
11. A similar account of critical literacy is provided by C.H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon in Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy (Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook Publishers, ), csp. chap. 7, 147-76.1993
12. Shirley Brice Heath, Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
13. Gee is concerned with critique of entire discourses whereas Lankshear's example involves a specific text within a discourse. The two approaches to critique are mutually supportive, but it is important to note that a critical understanding of a text is not the same as the critical understanding of an entire discourse, which requires a broader perspective on a set of social and communicative practices (in the example above, the discourse might be that of the news media).
14. Freire, Pe Jagogy of the Oppressed, 77.
15. I believe there is evidence that because Freire did not explicitly consider dialogue with texts there are instances in which he fell back on didactic, nondialogical approaches to them. See, for example, selections from his literacy notebooks which seem to fail to open a space in the text, where the learners may distinguish their own reactions from the message that the text is trying to send. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1987), 65.
16. Jürgen Habermas, Especially, Theory of Communicative Action trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason 1987 2).
17. Of course, the time and space differences in personal correspondence serve as less of a limitation to dialogue than the reading and writing of published texts, especially when we consider electronic mail and "real-time chat" on the Internet. There is then a continuum of distance between the reader and writer, and I want to make the case that reading and writing, even in the most extreme cases of distance can be dialogical. Therefore, I will confine most of my comments to the reading and writing of published texts.
18. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy/The Technologizing of the Word(New York: Routledge, 1982).
19. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans, and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. reprint, New York: Crossroad, 1989) 385, Gadamer's emphasis. Marshall (1975;