Children reread and rewrite their local neighbourhoods : critical literacies and identity work
Date
2004
Authors
Comber, B.
Nixon, H.
Editors
Evans, J.
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Book chapter
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Source details - Title: Literacy Moves On: Using Popular Culture, New Technologies and Critical Literacy in the Primary Classroon, 2004 / Evans, J. (ed./s), Ch.7, pp.115-132
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Abstract
Critical literacy, as a concept, has a long history, most notably from Paolo Freire’s (1970) political work with poor communities in South America. However, in terms of primary school literacy curriculum and policy its emergence is relatively recent. Critical literacy involves teachers exploring with children how texts work to have particular effects in particular situations. Teachers who take a critical approach to literacy understand that language and images involve power relations; that writers, producers, advertisers and everyday conversationalists use particular words and images and not others. Their products – texts – can exclude and include and position listeners, readers and viewers in different ways. When teachers assist children to become critically literate, they encourage them to question taken-forgranted aspects of storybook worlds, ‘the news’, so-called ‘factual texts’ and so on, and to be aware of the effects that their own decisions as producers of texts might have on their readers, listeners or viewers. A critical approach might direct children’s attention to authors’ and illustrators’ decisions about representation, advertisers’ claims, and contested versions of a contemporary or historical event. In other words, a critical literacy approach invites children not only to crack the code, make meaning and use texts, but also to analyse texts (following Luke & Freebody 1999) – considering both how they work and what work they do in the world. A further aim, on which we focus here, is to reposition children as ‘active designers and agents’ in shaping social futures (Luke 2000: 449).
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Copyright David Fulton Publishers 2004. Copyright for individual chapters resides with the original contributors.