Name : Sinta Muchlis
NPM : 22178026
LANGUAGE, POWER, AND PEDAGOGY
Overview
In one classroom concerned with language and power, you might see students
redesigning a sexist advertisement, and in another one, constructing a linguistic
profile of the class or figuring out how the word perhaps changes the meaning of a
statement. Students might be calculating their own ecological footprints after
watching Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or discussing how to address the problem of
bullying in their grade.
Underpinning the work in these different classrooms are different approaches
towards teaching students the relationship between language and power; language,
identity and difference; language and the differential access to social goods. This
sociocultural approach to language education is referred to by different names: critical
literacy (Freire, 1972a, 1972b), critical linguistics (Fowler & Kress, 1979), critical
language awareness (Clark et al., 1987; Fairclough, 1992), and critical applied
linguistics (Pennycook, 2001).
Critical literacy resists definition because power manifests itself differently in
different contexts and at different historical moments; it is affected by changing
technologies and different conditions of possibility. What remain constant, however,
is its social justice agenda and its commitment to social action, however small it be,
that makes a difference.
Research: A History of Theorised Practice
Critical literacy is more a set of theorised practices that constitute a pedagogy
than an approach to research or a set of research methods. The theories that inform
this approach see language and literacy as social practices that produce effects.
A History of Theory and Practice
Critical literacy: Reading the word and the world
Paulo Freire was the first to challenge our assumptions about literacy as simply
teaching students the skills necessary for reading and he helps us to understand that
reading the word cannot be separated from reading the world. His two seminal books,
Cultural Action for Freedom (1972a) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972b), show
how in the process of learning how to read both the word and the world critically,
adult literacy learners regain their sense of themselves as agents who can act to
transform the social situations in which they find themselves. He used literacy as a
means of breaking the ‘culture of silence’ of the poor and dispossessed.
Recognising that a situation is less than ideal and naming what is wrong as a
problem are the first step in transformative social action. Freire’s approach to literacy
as social action is based on neo-marxist views of power as relations of domination and
oppression that are maintained by either coercion or consent (Gramsci, 1971).
Vivian Vasquez shows with great clarity how it is possible to create a critical
literacy curriculum out of the issues and problems that emerge spontaneously in
classrooms (Vasquez, 2004). Vasquez’s skill is in taking her students’ everyday
concerns seriously and helping them to ‘name’ them as problems in order to imagine
possible courses of enquiry and action. She also has the ability to stay with a topic and
to explore it from a number of different angles, following the suggestions made by the
students. For example, when her students expressed concern that Anthony, one of
their classmates, was unable to eat the hot dogs and burgers at the school barbecue
because he is a vegetarian, Vasquez used this as an opportunity to problematise
exclusionary practices. They began by reading the fl yer announcing the barbecue
with a critical eye. ‘Join us for our Annual School Barbeque’ is the first line of
the flyer. Melanie, one of the students, says:
The invitation says our but doesn’t really mean Anthony so it’s yours and
mine (pointing to the other children who are not vegetarian and herself ) but
not his (pointing to Anthony) and that’s not fair. (Vasquez, 2004: 104)
She was able to do this because Vasquez had spent time in previous lessons
discussing with the students how pronouns can work to include and exclude people.
The students agreed that one of the girls would write a letter to the chair of the
barbecue committee, which she did after consulting with other children on the
wording. They chose to use the pronoun ‘we’ and imperatives like ‘have to’ to state
their case strongly: that in future there should be food that vegetarians can eat. When
they received no reply, they re-read their letter to see if they should change the
wording in a more polite follow-up letter. This time the chair replied and invited them
to come and talk to her about the matter.
The students decided to read up about vegetarianism in order to prepare for the
meeting, only to discover that there were no books about vegetarians in the library.
Undaunted they wrote to the librarian to say that all children should be able to find
books about people like them in the library. By allowing the problem to run its course,
Vasquez teaches her students to follow an issue to its resolution. When they finally
received assurances that their school would cater to the dietary needs of vegetarians at
future functions, one child wondered if other schools could benefit from their
experience. This led the students to conduct a survey to see if neighbouring schools
catered to the needs of their vegetarian students. Notice how much purposeful reading
and writing, initiated by the students themselves, are taking place. Notice how
students learn to pay attention to words and to deal with setbacks. Notice how
Vasquez constructs her students as agents of change on a bigger platform than the
specific needs of Anthony. This is not difficult for teachers to do. After all, Vasquez
did it with a class of 4-year-olds and she is not alone.
In this examples of literacy as social action, we see students reading texts to see
how they are positioned and positioning, naming their world, writing letters, taking
care to establish their authority and to use words so as to position the reader to
respond favourably, conducting surveys, and working with developers to put their
own stamp on a local park. All these literacy practices contribute to solving a problem
that the students identified and preparing them for socially responsible active
citizenship.
Linguistic approaches to critical literacy: Critical linguistics, critical discourse
analysis, critical language awareness and critical applied linguistics
“Power” is signalled by the use of the word critical. Critical linguistics focuses
on linguistic choices in speech and writing and their effects; critical discourse
analysis focuses on how these choices are affected by the processes and the social
conditions in which texts are received and produced; critical language awareness is a
classroom application of these theories to teaching and critical applied linguistics
questions the normative assumptions of the whole applied field of linguistics as well
as the consequences of these assumptions. Each of these approaches is discussed in
more detail in what follows.
Rooted in an understanding of grammar and lexis, these approaches have been
developed by linguists. The old adage that ‘sticks and stones may break our bones, but
words can never harm us’ is simply not true. Halliday (1985) sees grammar and words
as ‘meaning potential’. In selecting from the range of possible options when we speak
or write, we realise that potential for good or ill.
When people use language to speak or write, they constantly have to make
choices. Not only do they have to decide what words to use, they have to decide
whether to be defi nite or tentative, approving or disapproving, inclusive or exclusive.
They have to choose between the present, the past and the future tense; between
quoted and reported speech; between active or passive voice. Multilingual speakers
have to decide which of their languages to use, when and with whom. For example,
the choice of the present continuous tense in ‘Rising temperatures are causing climate
change’ is more authoritative than ‘Temperatures may be rising and may be causing
climate change’ because the modals ‘can’ and ‘may’ introduce uncertainty.
Multimodal critical literacy
While a critical applied linguistics approach to critical literacy questions the
discursive practices of applied linguistics itself, the multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis,
2000) approach to literacy asks us to re-examine meaning-making in an age of the
visual sign. Kress’ work on multimodality (Kress, 2003) argues that the verbal is just
one of many modalities for making meaning and that it has been privileged in the
teaching of literacy.
New digital technologies have changed the processes of text production; desktop
computers have made it easy to include images, movement, sound, spatiality, gesture.
To be literate now requires us to read across a range of modes and to understand the
effects of their interplay when they work in concert. Multimodality presents a difficult
challenge for critical work as different modes have different ways of naturalising their
representations. Photography, for example, is a realistic medium and we have to
remind ourselves that cameras do lie, particularly in an age of digital morphing. The
work of Kress and van Leeuwen (1990, 2001) has led the way in providing strategies
for reading images critically.
One’s ability to read texts produced with new digital technologies is easier if one
has hands-on experience with these technologies. In Australia, Helen Grant uses film-
making as a means of teaching English and multimodal literacies to recently arrived
immigrant and refugee children (Comber, 2006). Decisions about what stories to tell
in their films, and how to construct these stories semiotically, led students to explore
the politics of representation. Like Moll (1992), Grant encourages her students to
draw on their linguistic and cultural funds of knowledge.
Her aim is to counteract negative representations of immigrants in the media; in
the process her students acquire the kind of critical multimodal literacy that enables
them to read against media texts and to construct alternative discourses.
Not all teachers have the know-how or the equipment to make videos with
students. Fortunately, a great deal can be done just with printed images and they can
be found everywhere. Students can bring images from newspapers and magazines to
class. They can use disposable cameras and photograph visual texts on the street.
They can collect and analyse food packaging. There are many activities that help
students to deconstruct visual texts.
Pahl and Rowsell’s (2006) Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies sits at the
interface between New Literacy Studies (Barton et al., 2000; Gee, 1990; Street, 1984)
and multimodality. It includes studies of young children’s digital literacy practices at
home, an adolescent’s email correspondence on the subject of rap, Wiccan websites,
weblogs, alphabet books produced by children in different contexts, de Bono’s
‘thinking hats’ as represented on the internet and in classrooms. Here we see the
importance of and the challenge for critical literacy in a digital world, where students
who are connected can enter new spaces and use their literacies to communicate with
real audiences in an entirely new landscape of local, global and virtual communities.
Space and place in critical literacy
Lefebvre (1991a, 1991b) asks us to recognise that just as everything occurs in
time, everything also occurs in space and that this is a vital part of our lived
experience. Sociality occurs in space (Lefebvre, 1991a). Where many cultural
geographers use the word ‘place’, Lefebvre captures the concreteness, the immediacy
and the cultural attachments to place in his combined use of ‘everyday life’ and ‘lived
space’ (Soja, 1996: 40). Views of literacy as a social practice have to pay attention to
both time and space.
An outstanding example of classroom practice that works critically with spatial
literacies, ‘ways of thinking about and representing the production of space’ (Comber
et al., 2006: 228), is the collaborative project Urban renewal from the inside out. Staff
and students in the fields of literacy education, architecture, communication and
journalism at the University of South Australia worked with Marg Wells, a Grade 3/4
teacher, and a Grade 5/6 teacher, Ruth Trimboli, to provide students with the
conceptual resources and skills needed to redesign an unused, uncared for, and
unnamed space in the school grounds. Building on Wells’ work on neighbourhood
action, discussed earlier, this project asked students to create ‘a belonging space’
based on their own re-visioning of lived school space.
In their discussion of this dynamic and multi-layered school project, Comber et
al. locate their work in all of the approaches to critical literacy discussed: Freirean
reading of the world; access to new discourses; the acquisition of the linguistic
vocabularies and design discourses necessary for the critical analysis of designs and
for participation in design decisions; an ability to work with a wide range of semiotic
resources for designing and redesigning space. The students needed to assemble a
range of resources in order to participate in the production, not just the consumption,
of their lived space.
Research Findings
This survey of both the theoretical literature that underpins critical approaches to
literacy and the research on critical literacy as practised in classrooms shows that the
history of the field provides an ever-growing repertoire for practice. Although theory
is a contested site, and new theories challenge and even displace earlier ones, yet the
ongoing addition of new dimensions to literacy, new understandings of power, new
semiotic grammars, and new forms of analysis serve to increase the possibilities for
critical literacy work. In relation to pedagogy, the history of ideas continues into the
present, offering a number of ways of enabling students to become critically literate.
Janks (2000) has argued that a critical literacy education has to take seriously the
ways in which meaning systems are implicated in reproducing relations of power and
it has to provide access to dominant languages and literacies while simultaneously
using diversity as a productive resource for redesigning social futures and for
changing the ‘horizon of possibility’ (Simon, 1992). This includes both changing
dominant discourses as well as changing which discourses are dominant. Any one of
power, diversity, access or design/redesign without the others creates a problematic
imbalance. Views of language acquisition that negate creativity work to bolster the
variety of native speakers; deconstruction without reconstruction or redesign reduces
human agency; diversity without access ghettoises students. Without difference and
diversity we lose the alternative points of view that rupture the taken-for-granted and
enable us to challenge the status quo. The need for change motivates redesign.
Relevance for Classroom Practice
In describing the critical literacy teachers whose work in classrooms she admires,
Comber (2006) suggests that they have both a ‘critical habitus’ and a ‘critical
repertoire’. The repertoire is given its critical edge when it is put to work to produce a
more just society. Critical literacy educators teach their students both how to engage
with the ways in which meaning is produced and how to resist meanings that benefit
some at the expense of others. In their classrooms, reading, writing and designing are
put to work to make a difference by being linked to ways of being, doing and valuing
that serve the interests of all.
Conclusion
This chapter has suggested ways of working critically with both the consumption
and the production of meaning by tracing the evolution of pedagogies that enable
students to understand the little-p, big-P, politics of meaning. As an example of little-
p politics, Figure 2.6 provides some of the linguistic options from which we can
choose when asking someone to do the household chores. Differences in power,
between a speaker and the person spoken to, affect decisions on how direct or indirect
to be. When we speak to people with more power, we tend to be more hesitant, more
indirect, less sure.
The choice of mode (statement, question or command), the choice of speech act
(suggestion, request, hint, instruction), the choice of tense or modality (seemed,
supposed, I’m sure), as well as the choice of positive and negative constructions (Is it
your turn? Isn’t it your turn?), are all tied to the amount of authority one can
command in any situation.
In learning to read, the brain’s plasticity enables new neural pathways to establish
themselves. These pathways have to be developed to the point where processing text
is so fast that readers have enough time to reflect on what they are reading while they
are reading. The sustained reading of a book is different from the ways in which
readers scroll through and read digital texts. Because, as yet, we do not know what
new pathways for reading these new practices will develop, Wolf (2007) argues that
we should not allow the new reading pathways to replace the existing pathways for
reading; rather they need to be established in addition to the old pathways.
Suggestions for further reading
Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children by Vivian Vasquez is an
awardwinning account of building a critical curriculum around young children’s
concerns.
Multimodal Pedagogies in Diverse Classrooms by Pippa Stein is a moving
account of how harnessing multiple literacies can give marginalised children the
resources to claim their place in a democratic society.
Critical Reading in Language Education by Catherine Wallace explores different
strategies for teaching critical reading to learners for whom English is an additional
language.
Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies edited by Kate Pahl and Jennifer
Rowsell combines work in New Literacy Studies and multimodality with examples of
practice from around the world.
Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms edited by Barbara Comber and
Anne Simpson includes articles by critical literacy teachers working at all levels of
education in a range of different contexts each of which has different conditions of
possibility.
