A defence of Critical Literacy

By Lindsay Williams

Introductory comment: This was originally written in order counter claims made by Kevin Donnelly, Luke Slattery and others, and was published in English Matters, the newsletter of the English Teachers Association of Queensland Inc. Issues addressed include: Critical Literacy, “suspect” French theories and Queensland English; cultural relativism; the nature of truth; basic literacy undermined. Readers are welcome to adapt the document for use in their own school communities.

Recently, writers in The Australian have questioned the legitimacy of Critical Literacy. This has culminated in the Queensland Education Minister vowing to rid the Senior English syllabus of “mumbo jumbo”.

While public discussion of curriculum is welcome, dissemination of misinformation and misrepresentation is the cause of serious concern for me, a teacher who has been actively promoting Critical Literacy for over ten years.

The discussion should bring a different perspective to the debate.

Issue 1: Critical Literacy, “suspect” French theories and Queensland English
Over the course of The Australian’s reporting, Luke Slattery conflated the terms post-modernism, post-structuralism and Critical Literacy, using them interchangeably.

Indeed, Slattery damned Critical Literacy for being post-modernist, but he was wrong in his basic assumption. Critical Literacy practitioners and theorists certainly do borrow strategically from other intellectual movements.

However, these movements are distinct and separate. More to the point, the Critical Literacy we practice in Australia has its origins mainly in the work of Paolo Freire and Norman Fairclough, neither of whom is French. Furthermore, Critical Literacy is not a monolithic movement. It is a label that captures some broad ways of thinking about the use of language shared by a range of different theorists.

However, if you have a strong linguistics background (as I do) you’ll practise Critical Literacy differently from people who don’t. If, like black South Africans under Apartheid, you are oppressed by racist views and laws, and live in poverty, the sort of Critical Literacy you practise will be different from that practised in a middle class, all-boys Church School in central Brisbane.

Finally, our Queensland syllabuses are not Critical Literacy syllabuses. They certainly incorporate some Critical Literacy understandings into the coherent Language Framework that lies at the heart of the syllabus, but this Framework also draws selectively on a range of other approaches and theories – including traditional (and Functional) grammar, cultural heritage and personal growth.

Issue 2: Cultural relativism
Accusations that Critical Literacy is culturally relativistic are wrong. In fact, Critical Literacy is very much based on values of freedom, equity, fairness, care and concern for others, and hope – values that are core to liberal democracies and very much aligned to the values of State and (the vast majority of) independent schools.

Issue 3: Truth
Critical Literacy does not promote the idea that truth is “just a matter of opinion”. Neither would I agree with Luke Slattery that “there is truth and there is falsehood” – at least in terms of portrayals of the world found in newspaper articles, novels, films, poems, computer games and so on.

While we could have long, philosophical discussions about whether there is an “objective truth”, most scientists are agnostic because they know that even supposedly long-established, objective scientific fact can be overturned in quite extraordinary ways.

What Critical Literacy theorists argue, quite uncontroversially I would have thought, is that no single text can ever capture the whole “truth” of any situation.

What is included in any piece of writing or talked about in a conversation etc will only ever be partial – there will always be new information and other people’s views to consider. Consequently, Critical theorists encourage a disposition of “strategic skepticism” – “strategic” because if we never believed anything we were told, it would be impossible to operate in any sane manner in the world.

However, we should always have one part of our brain that maintains skepticism, that is always open to modifying what it believes base on new information that might come to mind.

Issue 4: Basic literacy undermined
One university lecturer quoted on July 23-24 claimed that: “The critical literacy theorists are asking them [i.e. the students] to run a hurdle before they walk with ease.” In other words, he asserts that “theorists” encourage teachers to promote the critical at the expense of the development of basic literacy skills.

Based on the spurious assumption that you can teach either functional literacy or Critical Literacy, this assertion is not supported by the facts. Indeed, Queensland syllabuses are balanced documents that draw selectively on a range of approaches to understanding literacy and fostering students’ capacities to use language.

Despite The Australian’s claims, the serious Critical Literacy theorists and practitioners I know are strong advocates for teaching all students to use Standard Australian English, which we very well understand gives students access to power and opportunities in our society. Those who know me well will also know my passion for promoting planned and explicit teaching of the structures and grammar of English.

However, rather than teaching it in the isolated, de-contextualised manner that most of us experienced at school in the 1970s and earlier, Queensland curriculum frameworks provide the mechanisms for helping students to develop deep and rigorous understandings of language, how it is and can be used appropriately, effectively and critically. By that, do I mean that our current English programs are perfect?

Of course not. And at times, I’m as critical as anyone about what we do. However, curriculum is always a work in progress and a professional English teacher evaluates and modifies his/her practises on a continuing basis.

Issue 5: Popular culture v the Classics
Slattery makes the claim that “King Lear is the pedagogical equivalent of King Kong” under Critical Literacy approaches. I think what Slattery is suggesting is that Critical Literacy theorists value popular culture and classics equally, that teachers using Critical Literacy approaches are unable (or unwilling) to discriminate between good and bad literature.

On the surface, there appears to be some truth in his assertion. Certainly from the time I finished Senior in 1979, there are fewer ‘classics’ studied and more ‘popular fiction’. However, this has much more to do with changes in society and the nature of the students we currently teach. It has little to do with Critical Literacy per se.

However, it is also true that Critical Literacy theorists and practitioners consider that it is important to analyse and evaluate popular culture texts, as well as classic novels, poems and plays. The reason for this is fairly obvious – popular culture has a huge impact on students’ evolving sense of ethics and morality. Consequently, it is important that we encourage students to study and reflect on contemporary popular texts as well as literary classics.

The other implication of Slattery’s comment is that teachers are treating King Kong (i.e. popular texts) as if they are of equal merit to King Lear (i.e the classics). Ironically, many of the seminal Critical Literacy theorists are lovers of literature and have credentials in graduate and post-graduate literature studies. However, just because you love something and value its distinctiveness, doesn’t mean that you can’t also recognize its limitations and weaknesses.

For example, I enjoy Macbeth, lose myself in Shakespeare’s facility with the English language and appreciate the lessons about power, greed and ambition that it explores. On reflection, though, I also understand that Shakespeare’s writing is constrained by and produced within the culture in which he lived – the concept of the Divine Right of Kings or the use of “legitimate” violent force (think Macbeth’s beheading) to solve problems are not questioned. Nor would I expect them to be.

However, for a twenty-first century audience, the assumptions underpinning the play do raise some ethical and moral issues that deserve discussion in a contemporary classroom. For example, if the beheading of Macbeth was morally and legally legitimate, what (if anything) might that mean for the invasion of Iraq by the “Coalition of the Willing” to rid the Iraqi people of Saddam Hussein? Finally, as English teachers, Critical Literary theorists and practitioners are passionate about students becoming creators of their own, powerful texts, not just consumers of texts produced by others.

Consequently, exposure to exemplary models of language is crucial. While we don’t want students to write exactly like Shakespeare (I’m not sure how Elizabethan language would go down in an engineering assignment, a modern doctor’s surgery, or on the speaker at a McDonald’s drive-through), we do want them to value elegant and aesthetically pleasing language – and obviously exposure to the classics is one way of promoting this. However, students also need exposure to contemporary examples of exemplary language, including that which is innovative and unorthodox. This balance is recommended, quite explicitly, in our Queensland English syllabuses. Conclusion There is so much more I would like to say. However, I’ll leave it there for the moment.

Hopefully my comments might inspire you to make your own contribution to what needs to be an on-going, professional conversation. Re-reading this in September 2006, the latest example is the downgrading of Pluto from the category of planet.

The term “text” is not used for any sinister, ideological reasons. It’s simply a convenient way of summarizing all the different types of things we read, listen to, view, write and speak – novels, short stories, poems, plays, newspaper articles, speeches, seminar presentations, films, interactive fictions and so the list goes on.

© Lindsay Williams, 2005

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