Critical Literacy

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What is Critical Literacy?

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Critical literacy involves many topics, ideas, and concepts, and in its purest form, is a way of looking deeper at a literary text. The focus that I will have on critical literacy in these posts is seeing how critical literacy can be used in an elementary K-5 classroom as a way for students to comprehend social issues and apply them to their lives. Books are not just meaningless stories, but are vehicles for peoples’ successes and challenges to be told, and the chances are high that others will relate to the characters in the story. Critical literacy “shows how people can begin to take action on important social issues” (Leland, Harse, & Ociepka, 1999), and can be a call to action for some students, moving beyond the classroom. If texts are chosen with the students in mind, the students will be able to comprehend them and see the social issues in them, even with grades as young as kindergarten. Critical literacy makes reading applicable to the lives of every student, and it helps them understand that others struggle with different things than they do. Critical literacy is an important concept for children to learn, and it should be implemented in every classroom.

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Critical literacy should not be an add-on but a frame through which to participate in the world.

(Vasquez, 2010, p. 2)

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Common Core State Standards

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Critical literacy is deeply integrated into the CCSS, and it is easy to see reading, speaking, and listening standards in every grade level that are fulfilled by learning critical literacy skills in the classroom. This may be an incentive to some teachers, because it brings the unofficial and official curriculum together (Evans, 2005, p. 89). All of these following standards are found in the CommonCore app under Language Arts standards.

Kindergarten: RL.K.9 With prompting and support, compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in familiar stories.

1st Grade: SL.1.5Add drawings or other visual displays to descriptions when appropriate to clarify ideas, thoughts, and feelings.

2nd Grade: SL.2.3 Ask and answer questions about what a speaker says in order to clarify comprehension, gather additional information, or deepen understanding of a topic or issue.

3rd Grade: RL.3.6 Distinguish their own point of view from that of the narrator or those of the characters.

4th Grade: SL.4.4 Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience in an organized manner, using appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details to support main ideas or themes; speak clearly at an understandable pace.

5th Grade: RL.5.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text.

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There are a large number of issues that can be discussed through critically looking at texts. Especially for young students, some of these topics can be bullying, poverty, gender roles, and racism. Critical literacy helps students learn more about those issues while applying them to their lives in ways they never had before.

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Benefits

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Critical literacy has numerous benefits in the classroom. One of the benefits is that students learn to know how to find the main points of a piece of literature. The Reading Teacher October 2014 issue refers to this as finding the MVP, or “most valuable phrase within a text” (Strom, p. 108). This strategy is more for experienced readers, but it can also be something that students who have stories read to them can do. Another benefit to critical literacy is the implementation of multicultural books and discussions on race in the classroom. Leland, Harse, & Ociepka, (1999), believe that “a diversity-and-difference model of education serves a multilingual and multicultural society such as our own far better than the conformity-and-consensus model of learning”, because it helps the ELL and multicultural students in the classroom to feel included and represented in the literature of the classroom. Reading books that have deeper concepts helps students to “use language as a tool for interrogating and critiquing the difficult things that happen in the world around them” (Leland et al., 2003). This is especially useful for students who have never been able to comprehend deeper issues in their live, because sometimes the literature can bring things to light. Critical literacy has many more benefits than just these three, making it a meaningful and important concept to integrate into the classroom.

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"It became clear to me that not only could the students talk about tough issues but also that they were ready and willing to do so."

(Heffernan, 2004, p. 7)

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Example Texts

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From Slave Ship to Freedom Road (Lester, 1998)

                 - Slavery, separation of families, Underground Railroad

Sarah, Plain and Tall (MacLachlan, 1987)

                 - Women’s work, marriage, freedom to choose

The Bobbin Girl (McCully, 1996)

                 - Child labor, gender issues, speaking in public

One More Border (Kaplan & Tanaka, 1998)

                 - Religious oppression, being forced to flee

Just Juice (Hesse, 1998)

                 - Poverty, literacy, ways of learning

(Heffernan, 2004, p. 2)

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Application

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I have a part time student teaching placement in fourth grade next semester, so this is the grade age that I am thinking about when planning how to teach critical literacy in the classroom. Leland, Harste, & Ociepka, (1999), agree that “the best teachers think about curriculum in terms of what conversations they want their students to be engaged in, not in terms of what concepts they want to introduce”, and this is the approach I would have in my classroom. I would know my students, and know what their interests are, so as to know what social issues they would connect to and want to pursue learning more about. This is something that Evans (2005) emphasizes, telling of just how important it is to be “constantly listening to what children are talking about; their passions, their interests, and using these to build curriculum” (p. 85). My students will be known, and they will be the reason that I choose the curriculum I do.

In order to apply this in my classroom, first I would decide upon a book to introduce my class to based upon their interests and what I want my classroom to comprehend better. I would adopt the 6 lesson approach that Heffernan (2004) mentions in his book, so my first lesson would be reading the book aloud to my fourth grade class. The second lesson will be having students meet in pairs to complete a response sheet with questions about the book. For the third lesson, students will be grouped into triads to discuss the questions they had come up with on the response sheets, and pull out the deeper questions that provided more discussion for them. The fourth lesson would involve the whole class discussing those questions. For lesson five, the class would find a way to remember their thinking about this book with a picture or other visual representation. The sixth and final lesson would be where students get to write a page or two about the discussion questions in their notebooks. I can do these six lessons a number of times with all different books, like the examples given above. My biggest focus in these lessons and teaching my students critical literacy is to really allow them the opportunity to dive into the text and see how it applies to them.

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Critical literacy supports the kind of conversations we cannot afford to ignore.

(Leland, Harste, & Ociepka, 1999)

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References

Collins, Greg. 2011. Critical-Literacy - home. Retrieved from http://quest-critical-literacy.wikispaces.com/file/view/Screen_shot_2011-10-16_at_3.28.34_PM.png/265254282/Screen_shot_2011-10-16_at_3.28.34_PM.png

Evans, J. (2005). Creating opportunities for critical literacy with young children. In Literacy moves on: Popular culture, new technologies, and critical literacy in the elementary classroom (pp. 83-105). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Heffernan, L. (2004). Critical literacy and writer's workshop: Bringing purpose and passion to student writing. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Leland, C. H., Harste, J. C., Davis, A., Haas, C., McDaniel, K., Parsons, M., & Strawmyer, M. (2003). "It Made Me Hurt Inside": Exploring Tough Social Issues through Critical Literacy. Journal Of Reading Education, 28(2), 7-15.

Leland, C. H., Harste, J., & Ociepka, A. (1999). Exploring critical literacy: you can hear a pin drop. Language Arts, 77(1), 70-73.

MasteryConnect. (2010). CommonCore [Mobile application software]. Retrieved from http://itunes.apple.com

Mount, Jane. 2012. Ideal Bookshelf 488: Kids. Retrieved from http://www.meganpeterfineart.com/blog/2013/10/22/an-artful-gift-artist-jane-mount-and-the-ideal-bookshelf

Strom, C. (2014). Designating the MVP: Facilitating classroom discussion about texts. The Reading Teacher, 68(2), 108-112.

Vasquez, V. (2010). Getting beyond "I like the book": Creating space for critical literacy in K-6 classrooms (2nd ed.). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.