Critical Literacy and the Case for it in the Early Years of School

Abstract

Debate continues about literacy: how to teach it, how to measure it, whether standards of it are falling, whether we are better or worse at it than our neighbours in other parts of the world. Less debated is what counts as literacy, whom it serves, and whether we encourage the best literacy for the age we live in. Often the assumption is that everyone shares the same meaning of the word 'literacy', that it is a unitary phenomenon, a neutral skill that is quantifiable. The notion that there are different and diverse literacies is rarely considered by policy makers or in media reports though it is increasingly acknowledged in the theoretical literature. This paper explores the relatively new concept of critical literacy and seeks, in particular, to assess its validity for the early years of the primary school. The theoretical research base for the paper is largely that associated with post-structuralism, it sees consciousness as socially produced in language and sees language and consciousness as sites of struggle and potential change (Weedon, 1987). The paper is an exploratory, theoretical study that reaches tentative, rather than conclusive, answers, and it beckons a theme that is ready for debate and ripe for research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.