critical literacy on education

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Enhancing educators' theoretical and practical understandings of critical literacy.

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"Critical Literacy's Ongoing Importance for Education" by Hilary Janks ( Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy , 2014)

The dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice require a critical reading of both the word and the world, along with the ability to imagine something better. Presenting a critical literacy framework based on the relation between language and power, Janks argues that educators must ground literacy instruction in practices that begin with prompting students to interrogate the role of language in creating disparities in society and then invite them to imagine possibilities for creating a more just world. Through a detailed example based on life in South Africa, Janks introduces five praxes for teachers to build a critical literacy practice. Teachers striving to meet the moment in which we are living will find inspiration for centering critical literacy practices in their classrooms.

— Reviewed by Emily S. Yerkes, University of Colorado Boulder

Janks, H. (2014). Critical literacy's ongoing importance for education. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57 (5), 349–356. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.260

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Critical Literacy

• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 01 January 2016
• Cite this living reference work entry

• Yvonne Foley 4  

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Language and Education ((ELE))

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Historically, the term “literacy” was defined as the ability to read and write. However, this limited definition of literacy has been challenged through the emergence of social theories, where it was recognized that literacy is more complex than traditional perspectives allow The New London Group (Harv Educ Rev 66(1):60–93, 1996). A body of work associated with the term new literacy studies (NLS) views literacy as a set of socially and culturally situated practices, rather than simply as a range of technical academic skills that operate at an individual level (Gee, Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses, critical perspectives on literacy and education . Falmer, London, 1990) (Heath 1983 ; Street 1984 ). This shift in perspective has embraced the plural and discursive nature of literacy and integrates ways of being and doing in the world (Luke, Genres of power? Literacy education and the production of capital. In Hasan R, Williams, G (eds) Literacy in society . Longman, London, 1995; Gee, An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. Routledge, Abingdon, 2005).

Critical approaches to literacy recognize the link between meaning making, power, and identity (Janks, Literacy and power . Routledge, Abingdon, 2010). While there are a number of orientations associated with critical literacy, all share the perspective that “human action is mediated by language and other symbol systems within particular cultural contexts” (Lewis et al. Reframing sociocultural research on literacy . Routledge, Abingdon, 2009, p. 5). Language therefore plays a key role in how we make sense of the world in which we live. Below is a brief review of some of the existing literature related to the history of critical literacy and some of its distinct orientations within the field of education. An account of the ways in which critical approaches to literacy have influenced teacher education programs and been instrumental in shaping teacher identity is considered. Finally, challenges associated with critical approaches to literacy are foregrounded and linked to future possibilities.

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Critical-Literacy Education: “The Supremely Educational Event”

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Yvonne Foley

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Foley, Y. (2015). Critical Literacy. In: Street, B., May, S. (eds) Literacies and Language Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02321-2_11-1

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Critical Literacy in Early Elementary Grades

Using a form of literary criticism in tandem with drama activities helps young students think deeply about how stories are constructed.

From the back of her class, I watched as one of my favorite colleagues read to her second-grade students. While reading, she paused, allowed for turn and talks, and asked students to make predictions.

When she had finished reading, my colleague asked questions about the plot, setting, and character traits. In many respects, the lesson was a success—the students had participated eagerly. However, my colleague told me that she wanted more from her read-aloud time. Having seen my students engage in drama-related literacy activities, she was curious about how she could weave those ideas into her literacy lessons, so I shared the nine-day critical literacy and drama framework described below.

What Is Critical literacy?

Although there is no set definition of critical literacy, it essentially involves examining the relationship between language and power in a text. This work is responsive and thoughtful in nature. The chosen text, students’ comfort and familiarity with the text, and the lesson goals all have an effect on what happens in the classroom.

Using the four dimensions of critical literacy —disrupting the commonplace, considering multiple viewpoints, focusing on the sociopolitical, and taking action—as a springboard, I focus on how purposeful questioning, discussion, and improvised drama might influence how students engage with literacy lessons.

Setting the Stage

The first step is selecting a strong mentor text, one with multiple narratives, in which alternate stories are told between the lines and within the illustrations. A worthwhile text should serve to launch counternarratives or conversations about identity and social issues, or about differences in power and privilege. Children should be able to see themselves and learn about the lives of others through the text. Examples include: A Chair for My Mother by Vera Williams, Islandborn by Junot Díaz, Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson, The Remember Balloons by Jessie Oliveros, and Another by Christian Robinson.

Here is my nine-day plan for discussing the text Boy by Phil Cummings.

Day 1. Introduce and discuss: First I reveal the cover and ask students to make predictions and share reflections. Then I read the book to the students, pausing for partner discussions. After the reading and discussion, I ask questions such as:

• Whose voice do you notice most in this story? Whose voice is missing?
• What do you think Boy wished the villagers knew about him?
• Can you tell the story of what the villagers thought as Boy approached the battle?
• How did the dragon discover the village? Does the dragon have a family?
• How is your life like or different from Boy’s life? How can we use this story to see our world differently?

Days 2 and 3. Review and set up the drama activities: The intention of drama activities is to draw deeper meaning from a story. The drama offers more than a performance—it’s a way of learning . In each drama activity, students volunteer to become characters from the text.

If the class is focused on giving a voice to an oppressed character or uncovering motive, I may choose to hot seat, meaning that students interview a character. With Boy , my students chose to interview the dragon, Boy, and the townspeople.

Perhaps students want to encourage a character at a pivotal moment. If so, I might carry out a corridor of voices, where students line a hallway and express what was left unsaid in the text. Sometimes, student opinions are clearly divided—in these situations, a town hall meeting allows deliberation on important issues from the book. While exploring Boy , for instance, students participated in a town hall meeting to decide if the dragon should stay in the town.

Finally, when we speculate about a character’s history, I sometimes have students create flashbacks to shed new light on the story, or imagine future scenes to push the focus beyond the end of the book.

Day 4. Shared writing: As a group, we author a piece of writing. I bring in linked texts, model my thinking, and ask for student input. The piece can be a letter to a community member, the author, or a character from the story. It might also take on the form of a journal entry as a character or a part of the story told from an alternate perspective.

Based on the reading, discussion, and drama activities, students discuss the possible writing forms (e.g., poem, letter, comic, diary entry), and participate in peer conferences so they can brainstorm and gain feedback.

Days 5, 6, and 7. Writing: Students need time to create meaningful works. Throughout, they write and then revise their work. I engage in writing conferences with students (one-to-one or small group) to support and nudge each of them.

Days 8 and 9. Sharing their work: Sharing writing and creating action plans are integral to this process. The action plans are student-led and ongoing.

Examples include arranging fundraisers, partnering with community organizations, or engaging in service projects. Over the years, I’ve seen this action take on many forms including, performing skits at senior citizen homes, volunteering to stock shelves at shelters, and supporting local Special Olympics groups. Making space and time to support action plans makes a difference in the type and quality of work students engage in.

Later in the semester, I found myself at the back of my colleague’s classroom again. This time, I watched as she hosted a talk show to interview characters. The student input had come a long way, and when I asked how she felt about the lesson, she said, “Now that I’ve done it this way, I can never go back!”

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Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices in Development Education

Finding the 'Historically Possible': Contexts, Limits and Possibilities in Development Education

Abstract:  This article explores the idea of critical literacy in development education, used here also with reference to global education and global citizenship education, recognising multiple orientations, theories and practices of critical engagement within these related fields.  Critical literacy, as defined in this text, emphasises the need for a careful examination of different ‘root’ narratives as a practice of responsible intellectual engagement across all sectors.  In the first part of this article, I review the idea of critical literacy in the context of development education offering examples of my own academic and pedagogical practice in this area.  In the second part I expand on the idea of soft and critical approaches to global citizenship and development education by presenting a new conceptual cartography with four different ‘root narratives’ as a critical literacy stimulus for dialogue and analyses that may open new possibilities of thinking and practice in development education.

Key words:  Critical Literacy; Global Citizenship; Development Education; Power; Postcolonialism.

Critical literacy in global citizenship and development education

Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices  is the title of an academic open access journal I founded with Lynn Mario de Souza in 2006.  When we first started the journal we were aware that different groups in education used the term in different ways, which is evident in the wide variety of articles we have received and published so far.  Therefore, as an editor, I have used a very open and general definition of the term as ‘an educational practice that emphasises the connections between language, knowledge, power and subjectivities’.  Authors have traced the origins of the term to different sources and associated critical literacy with different traditions, including critical pedagogy (e.g. Paulo Freire), the New/Multi-Literacies groups (e.g. Brian Street), discourse analysis (e.g. Norman Fairclough), and poststructuralism and postcolonial studies (e.g. Michel Foucault and Edward Said).  The way I use critical literacy in my own work has been informed by the latter.  In this article, I intend to outline some of the ways I have used this concept in research and teacher education related to global citizenship and development education as a strategy of examining the politics of knowledge production and the limits and possibilities of different knowledge systems.

            In the article ‘Soft versus Critical Global Citizenship Education’ (2006), drawing on the works of Dobson (2006) and Spivak (2004; see also Andreotti, 2007, 2011, 2012), I stated that there were at least two common trends in educational initiatives that promoted concern for others (especially distant others).  The first was based on the idea of a common humanity.  I represented it as a ‘soft’ approach to global citizenship and development education.  The second was based on the idea of justice and complicity in harm.  I represented it as a critical approach to global citizenship and development education.  I argued that ‘soft’ approaches based on a modernist understanding of linear time, progress and development, although productive in certain contexts, tended to close down the possibility of more critical approaches, particularly of approaches that offered alternative ways to conceptualise development, knowledge and solutions from the perspective of historically subjugated peoples (see also Bryan and Bracken, 2011; Bourn, 2011; Martin, 2011; Andreotti and Pashby, 2013).  I asserted that ‘critical literacy’ as an educational practice that critically examines origins and implications of assumptions as well as other possibilities for signification, could be a viable way to address this problem.

            The conceptualisation of critical literacy I used in that article combines questions within two orientations.  The first orientation challenges imbalances in power and representation.  This can be illustrated in questions such as: who decides (something is true or ideal), in whose name and for whose benefit?  The second orientation challenges the notion that meaning is objective and self-evident.  It emphasises the social, cultural and historical ‘construction’ of realities and highlights the limits and blind edges of any system of signification, promoting openness to suppressed knowledges and subjectivities and to what is unknown.  This orientation is illustrated in questions such as: where is this understanding coming from (in terms of collective ‘root’ narratives), where is it leading to (in terms of social, cultural, political and environmental implications), and how can this be thought ‘otherwise’ (what possibilities of signification have been ‘forgotten’ in this context)?

            Within the multiplicity of critical literacy traditions, this approach differs slightly from critical engagements based on other orientations.  Cervetti, Pardales and Damico (2001), for example, establish a distinction between traditional reading, critical reading and critical literacy, emphasising that each orientation of ‘reading critically’ will result in different questions being asked.  Using their framework, I illustrate these differences through the scenario of a teacher and a student in a classroom, where the teacher is telling the student that s/he needs schooling in order to ‘be somebody in life’.  Within the framework proposed by Cervetti et al., a traditional form of reading would enable ‘decoding’ questions such as: what did the teacher say, how did she substantiate her arguments, is what she said true or false?  A critical form of reading would look further into the context and political framework of the scenario: where was this school, when did it happen, what was the socio-economic situation of the teacher and student, what was the motivation and political orientation of the teacher, what power relations are reproduced in the teacher’s statement, how did the teacher’s views affect the student and his/her family?  A critical literacy approach would focus on the production of knowledge/power and enable questions like: who decides what ‘being somebody’ means, in whose name, for whose benefit then, and now, how do we come to think about the ways we do, who makes choices about understandings of reality, whose interests are represented in these choices, who benefits or loses with them, what choices are forgotten, how do people in different contexts understand the idea of ‘being somebody’?

            When introducing critical literacy in development education, I choose scenarios that make evident dominant (taken for granted) perspectives about the benevolence of progress, charity and schooling in international engagements.  One of the scenarios I use is a poster with pictures of children in need with the title ‘education for all can solve all problems’.  I use the idea of ‘critical reading’ to explore the context of production of that poster: what is the purpose of the poster, who created it and with what motives, where was it placed and why, how and why were pictures and words chosen, how is the reader manipulated through the language?  I use the idea of ‘critical literacy’ to start to open up questions related to complicity in harm at a very basic level, such as: who decides what problems and solutions are (in the poster, historically and in ‘our’ context), what assumptions inform these decisions, how are unequal relationships between donors and recipients reproduced through these significations, what other conceptualisations of problems and solutions could be designed by communities that have been historically subjugated in these relationships, and so on.

            I also usually emphasise a strategic distinction between reflexivity and reflection in the practice of critical literacy in teacher education.  ‘Reflection on practice’ in teacher education has been mainstreamed as a form of thinking that looks at individual processes of meaning and decision making in order to improve educational practice amongst teachers.  I suggest the term self-reflexivity to contrast the practice of reflection (thinking about individual journeys, assumptions and decisions), to the practice of tracing individual assumptions to collective socially, culturally and historically situated ‘stories’ with specific ontological and epistemological assumptions that define what is real, ideal and knowable (i.e. ‘root narratives’).  This highlights that possibilities for thinking available to individuals, and individual ‘choices’ are never completely ‘free’, ‘neutral’ or only ‘individual’, as the things we say, think and do are conditioned (but not necessarily determined) by our individual  and  collective contexts and histories (see Andreotti, 2010a; 2010b).  Self-reflexivity also challenges the assumption of the self-evident subject - the idea that there is a direct correlation between what we say, what we think and what we do.  It draws attention to the complex constitution of subjectivities, to the interdependence of knowledge and power, and to what is sub- or un-conscious in our relationships with the world.

            I have used the metaphor of a three-layered cake (Figure 1) to illustrate these differences.  At the top layer there is what we say, what we think and what we do, which are generally perceived to be directly related.  A ‘Cartesian’ understanding of subjects states that we say exactly what we think and that we can describe objectively exactly what we do.  However, our capacity to describe what we think is limited by what can be said: what is appropriate and intelligible to both ourselves and to others (e.g. we can think things that are not appropriate to say in specific contexts, or that we cannot articulate, acknowledge, or make sense of).  Our capacity to describe what we do is limited by what we can notice and by what we want to present to others (e.g. we can say we are open and flexible, but fail to notice that we act in a contradictory way).  This recognition of the limits of language is part of critical literacy practices. 

Figure 1. Awareness, reflection and reflexivity

The second layer of the cake is that of individual experiences.  It acknowledges that what we say, think and do are based on our individual journeys in multiple contexts. They are rooted in our unique ‘baggage’ of concepts and traumatic, inspiring and ordinary learning experiences, and dependent upon what we have been exposed to.  The third layer of the cake recognises that our experiencing and interpretation of these experiences are conditioned by collective referents grounded in the languages we have inherited to make sense of reality and communicate with others.  These languages have specific criteria for what counts as real (ontology), what can be known and how (epistemology), what is ideal and how to get there (methodology).  These collective criteria are socially, culturally and historically ‘situated’ - they depend on a group’s social, cultural and historical background and therefore they change (slowly) over time, as contexts change and criteria of different groups intersect and contradict each other.  Therefore, there is always diversity within a group of same criteria, as things are never static, but there is also always a dominant set of criteria that represents the ‘common sense’ of a group or groups.  I suggest that an analysis of the first layer could be named ‘self-awareness’, an analysis of the second layer ‘self-reflection’ and an analysis of the third, ‘self-reflexivity’.  All three are important for development education.

            In order to address some of the pedagogical challenges of introducing this conceptualisation of critical literacy in the classroom context in my work as a teacher educator, I created a matrix of the relationship between knowledge, power, the construction of realities in the classroom, and ideas about the control of pedagogical outcomes (see Andreotti, 2008).  I illustrate this matrix with examples from development education, as the practice of critical literacy in this area is sometimes accused of either ‘indoctrinating’ or ‘paralysing’ learners (see Vare and Scott, 2007 for a similar discussion on Education for Sustainable Development).  Critical literacy is perceived to indoctrinate learners when a specific critical analysis of injustice and position on justice are presented as the only morally justifiable path.  Critical literacy is perceived as paralysing learners in questioning everything, when it emphasises a multiplicity of perspectives, the limits of knowledge and the complexity and context dependency of positions on justice.  Thus, the matrix helps think through these issues and present these perceived problems as part of a more general discussion on the role of education.  This matrix combines two ways of thinking about education (i.e. ‘think as I do and do as I say’ and ‘think for yourself and choose responsibly what to do’) and two ways of thinking about knowledge (i.e. ‘there is one right answer independent of context’ and ‘answers are socially constructed and context dependent’).

            Therefore, there are (at least) four different possibilities for thinking and action.  The first possibility is ‘think as I do, do as I say, there is only one right answer’.  The example from development education I use is a quote from a teacher: ‘I teach my students that people in poorer countries lack technology, education and proper work habits.  I make sure my students understand that we have a moral obligation to help them by providing assistance through charity and expertise.’  The second possibility is ‘think for yourself and choose responsibly what to do, but there is only one right answer’, which is illustrated in the quote: ‘I teach my students that they need to be critical thinkers – to separate facts from opinions and to search for impartial, objective information to construct their arguments.  I believe rational and scientific reasoning is the only way to achieve a just and prosperous society.’ 

            The third possibility is ‘answers are context dependent, but in my class (i.e. in this context), you should think as I do and do as I say’, illustrated in: ‘I teach my students that textbook history is always told from the point of view of the winners and that the perspective of the oppressed peoples are seldom promoted. I teach my students the perspective of the oppressed because I want them to be willing to fight for social justice.’  Last, the fourth possibility is ‘answers are context dependent, you should learn to think for yourself and choose responsibly what to do’, exemplified in: ‘I teach my students that there are always different perspectives on any issue, that these are grounded in social, cultural and historical processes, and that whatever choice they make will have systemic implications.  My job is to create spaces for students to engage with the ethics of global challenges, processes and dilemmas in ways that create a sense of interdependence and responsibility for themselves and towards the world.’  I emphasise that decisions about possibilities are also context dependent (a teacher may legitimately choose the first under certain circumstances), but that the fourth possibility has not been common in formal Western schooling where the first and second possibilities have been dominant and also imposed or exported all over the world.

            In terms of engagements with historically subjugated communities who may offer alternative perspectives on international development issues, in the Through Other Eyes Initiative (TOE), Lynn Mario de Souza and I developed a resource and framework of a critical literacy practice based on Spivak’s ideas of learning to unlearn, learning to learn, learning to listen and learning to reach out (see Andreotti, 2011a; Andreotti and Souza, 2008; Souza and Andreotti, 2009).  I also framed this kind of practice of critical literacy as a response to increasing complexity, uncertainty, diversity and inequality in contemporary societies related to two different conceptualisations of the ‘post-’ in postmodernism (i.e. post- as ‘after’, and post- as questioning) that could prompt an educational process to enable students to move from the desire for absolute certainties, fixed identities/communities, and predictable and consensual futures towards being comfortable with contingent and provisional certainties, complex and hybrid identities/communities and open co-created futures in the context of global education (Andreotti, 2010b).

            I have used insights from postcolonial theory both to articulate a critique of soft approaches to development and global education and to tentatively propose possibilities for more ethical educational possibilities that (Andreotti, 2011b). It is important to note that it is theoretically contradictory to expect a clear set of normative values or ethical principles from a postcolonial critique where the benevolence of every attempt to ‘make things better’ is suspect of reproducing unexamined colonial practices. However, it is precisely this suspicion of the benevolence of benevolence (see Jefferess, 2008) that can create the possibility of self-reflexivity, humility and openness that ground ethical forms of solidarity ‘before will’ (Spivak, 2004), where historical imbalances related to distribution of resources, value and knowledge production are kept firmly on the table. Postcolonial theory subtly implies a set of ethical practices that render it impossible to turn our back to difficult issues, such as our complicity in systemic harm, the persistence of relations of dominance, complexities and paradoxes of crossing borders, the gap between what we say and what we do, or our own sanctioned ignorances.

            If one is looking for a ‘feel good’ recipe for how to make things better, postcolonial theory is not the place to search for it.  Looking at one’s own historical and systemic legacy of oppression might involve a stage of guilt – of realizing that one’s positive self-image does not hold when looked at from the perspective of those more severely affected by the systemic violence that we benefit from. However, guilt is only an issue when we are attached to specific desires which are constantly emphasized in the architecture of modernity. Three of these modern collective desires are key to the inequalities in North-South relations that are constantly reproduced in education: 1) the desire for seamless progress in linear time epitomized in science, technology and middle-class metropolitan lifestyles; 2) the desire for this progress to be achieved through innocent human protagonism (human agency focusing on solutions and forgetting how it is part of the problem); and 3) the desire for totalizing forms of knowledge production grounding this process (i.e. knowing the world in order to control it). (Andreotti, 2014). In North-South encounters, these desires translate into patterns of engagement, flows and representation that are:

• Hegemonic (justifying superiority and supporting domination);
• Ethnocentric (projecting one view, one ‘forward’, as universal);
• Ahistorical (forgetting historical legacies and complicities);
• Depoliticised (disregarding power inequalities and ideological roots of analyses and proposals);
• Salvationist (framing help as the burden of the fittest);
• Un-complicated (offering easy solutions that do not require systemic change);
• Paternalistic (seeking affirmation of superiority through the provision of help) (Andreotti, 2012a: 2).

The first letter of each pattern makes up the acronym ‘HEADS UP’. I have put together a checklist of questions to help to identify each pattern in education (see Andreotti, 2012a) and also a list of questions that complicate further common/easy solutions for each of the patterns (see Andreotti, 2012b).  At the heart of this work is the idea that education is about preparing myself and those I work with to enlarge possibilities for thinking and living together in a finite planet that sustains complex, plural, uncertain, inter-dependent and, unfortunately, deeply unequal societies.  In order to do this, perhaps what is needed is an attitude of sceptical optimism or hopeful scepticism (rather than naïve hope or dismissive scepticism) in order to expand our inherited frameworks in terms of four educational priorities.  First, it is necessary to understand and learn from repeated historical patterns of mistakes, in order to open the possibilities for new mistakes to be made.  Second, we need to recognise how we are implicated or complicit in the problems we are trying to address.  Third, we need to learn to enlarge our referents for reality and knowledge, acknowledging the gifts and limitations of every knowledge system and moving beyond polarised antagonisms towards agonistic solidarities (Andreotti, 2011a, 2014).  Fourth, we must engage with more complex social analyses acknowledging that if we understand the problems and the reasons behind them in simplistic ways, we may do more harm than good.

            In relation to the latter, it is also important for the field that these analyses are accessible and available to different discursive communities (e.g. academics, non-governmental organisation (NGO) practitioners, teachers and students).  Therefore, work that translates and synthetises discussions in different fields (e.g. politics, development, sociology, social movements) can be very useful and important in moving the debate in the field forward in a more organic way (see for example Andreotti, 2011b).  The downside of translations and syntheses is that they simplify complex discussions and can create seemly fixed distinctions that are always more complex and fluid than their representations.  Nevertheless, if used as a starting point for discussion (that is also open to critique), they are necessary tools in the creation of a tradition of responsible, non-exclusive, critical intellectual engagement in the field (see also Evans, Ingram, McDonald and Webber, 2009; Khoo, 2008, Marshall, 2011; Richardson, 2008).  It is in this spirit that, in the second part of this article, I offer a new conceptual cartography which represents a revision of the popular distinction between soft and critical approaches to global citizenship education (Andreotti, 2006).

Mapping narratives as a key critical literacy exercise

Tracing individual or institutional narratives to collective ‘root’ narratives (or meta-narratives) is a central exercise of the kind of critical literacy I advocate in this article.  As an intellectual exercise, mapping discourses helps people clarify their own positions by making evident the ambivalence of signification (the fact that words mean different things in different contexts), and by promoting the productive identification of inherent assumptions, patterns, trends, differences, similarities, paradoxes, and contradictions between and within different worldviews.  Mapping exercises can also help people to explore the problem spaces that generated the questions they are seeking answers for in order to check if they are still relevant or if questions have already changed (Scott, 1999). However, each mapping exercise is not neutral or transparent: as all interpretations are socially, culturally and historically situated, so is the ‘picture’ presented in a map by a map-maker. Therefore, it is important to remember that maps are useful as long as they are not taken to be the territory that they represent and are used critically as a starting point of discussion.

            The mapping exercise I present below establishes distinctions between a) technicist instrumentalist, b) liberal humanist, c) critical and postcritical, and d) ‘Other’ narratives of society, education, development and diversity. Root-narratives a, b, and c reproduce similar characteristics of privileging: anthropocentrism (putting ‘mankind’ at the centre); teleology (aiming for a predefined outcome in terms of progress); dialectics (expecting a linear progression towards a synthesis); universal reason (the idea of one rationality); and the Cartesian subject (who believes that he can know himself and everything else objectively).  I propose that these basic characteristics should not be seen as all good or all bad, but as historically situated, and potentially restrictive if  universalised   as a single story  through social, political or educational projects, as they prevent the imagination of other possibilities.

            The technicist instrumentalist root-narrative frames  social engineering as economic rationalisation decided by experts . This narrative can be seen at work in educational and development initiatives concerned with the creation of human capital for national economic growth in knowledge societies.  From this perspective education is perceived as a way to maximise the performance of individuals in global markets driven by services and innovation, in order to improve their employability or entrepreneurial capacity with a view to contribute to their country’s competitiveness in global economies.  Economic growth is associated with the acquisition and accumulation of universal knowledge (in contrast, for example, to the explanation that economic growth is based on hegemonic control of means of production) and poverty is defined as an individual or a country’s or an individual’s deficit of knowledge, competencies and skills to participate in the global economy.  The rationale for education is presented as a business case, as an individual responsibility of lifelong learning and adaptation to ever-changing economic contexts.  From this perspective, global/development education, often associated with ideas of ‘social responsibility’ involves the export of expertise from those heading the way in terms of economic development to those lagging behind.  Engagements with other cultures are defined in relation to national interests, such as the protection of national labour markets, the expansion of consumer markets, and the perceived threat of unwanted immigration, creating a need for controlled and market oriented internationalisation based on nationally defined objectives.

            The root-narrative of liberal humanism frames social engineering as  human progress decided by national representatives .  From this perspective, education serves as enculturation into a national culture defined by its political or intellectual representatives, as well as an international culture perceived as an encounter between nationally defined groups of individuals primarily concerned with a combination of individual, national and humanitarian interests. What human progress looks like is decided by national representatives in supranational governance institutions like the United Nations, through a process of international consensus on key universal aims to be delivered by nation states, generally focusing on human rights, substantial freedoms or human capabilities. From this perspective, education should disseminate the international consensus on universal human progress defined in terms of access to education, healthcare, democracy and economic development.  In this sense, obstacles to human progress become the focus of government agreed targets (such as the Millennium Development Goals), campaigns (like Education for All), and other charitable and humanitarian interventions which generally define help as the moral responsibility of those who are ahead in terms of international development. 

            Poverty is explained as a deficit in terms of human progress, thus education becomes a vehicle for poverty eradication through partnerships between donors/dispensers and receivers of aid, knowledge, education, resources (e.g. books, computers, etc.), technical assistance, human rights, or volunteer labour.  From this perspective, education is a means to prepare world leaders to bring order and progress for all (generally through education itself).  Engagements with difference are also defined in national or ethnic terms: global learners are encouraged to acquire knowledge about different cultures/nationalities, including different perspectives, in order to be able to work with diverse populations towards common/consensual goals (predefined by national or supranational governance institutions).  Therefore, different perspectives and critical engagement are welcome within pre-defined frameworks (i.e. as long as there is acceptance of specific ideas of development, progress, human rights, governance, etc.).

            Critical and postcritical root-narratives frame  social engineering as fair distribution done by ordinary people  (rather than experts or representatives).  These perspectives are based on a critique of both technicist instrumentalist and liberal humanist root-narratives highlighting injustices and inequalities created or maintained by their ideals and means of implementation.  In terms of state governance, critical and postcritical narratives emphasise the complicity of initiatives based on economic or humanist ideals in the creation and maintenance of poverty and marginalisation in order to sustain exponential compound economic growth and/or improvements in quality of life that benefit only small sections of the world population.  A critical narrative (still drawing on humanism) focuses its critique on the primacy of economic growth imperatives in nation state agendas, as well as the erosion of autonomy and accountability of governments to their own populations due to lobbying and increasingly closer relationships with corporations.  This type of critical humanism attempts to expand the notion of consensual human progress to include the rights of those who have historically been marginalised working against patriarchy, sexism, class divisions, racism, ableism and/or hetero-normativity.

            Post-critical narratives claim that the consensus on human progress, based on modern development, is manufactured by elites and imposed around the world as a form of imperialism that eliminates other conceptualisations and possibilities of progress and development, therefore, they challenge the idea of social engineering.  Post-critical narratives will tend to focus on relationality, complex subjectivities, difficulties of representation (of hybrid and fluid communities/identities), intersectional violence, and agonism (rather than antagonism) in politics.  Education, from critical and postcritical perspectives, is concerned with the transformation of society and the creation of a new social order more inclusive of or led by those who have been silenced or exploited by the current dominant system - it involves an emphasis on critical social analyses of unequal power relations, distributions of labour and wealth (emphasised in critical narratives) and the politics of representation and knowledge production (emphasised in post-critical narratives).

            Education, therefore, from this perspective, is about the creation of a critical mass of people who could see and imagine beyond the limitations and oppression of the current system in order to bring a different reality into being.  Engagement with difference involves listening to and empowering those who have been marginalised and insisting on the need for spaces of dissent where other alternatives can emerge.  The World Social Forum, the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Idle No More Movement in Canada, and the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens are examples of initiatives based on critical narratives in civil society.  Several educational initiatives inspired by anti-colonial, feminist and anti-oppressive movements since the 1960s also enact critical humanist ideals.

            Through education in contemporary metropolitan and industrialised societies people are exposed to different degrees to the three configurations of thinking described so far.  The common theme of social change as social engineering in the three configurations is also not a coincidence.  All these narratives can be traced to common roots in the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the Reformation, European colonialism and resistance to colonialism, and, particularly, the European Enlightenment. However, since these cultural, social and economic transitions have framed our ideas of what is good, ideal and normal, it is important to acknowledge our constitutive blindness (Santos, 2007) to other forms of seeing, knowing and being in the world that do not fit what we can recognise through the frames of references we have become used to.

            For this reason, I presented the fourth option ‘Other(s)’ as a question mark: non-anthropocentric, non-teleological, non-dialectical, non-universal and non-Cartesian possibilities.  For people over-socialised in the first three options (i.e. most of us who have been schooled), these possibilities would be extremely difficult to even begin to identify or to experience.  Thus, it may be more useful to present them as absences rather than categories.  The closest and most intelligible example that I have of an ‘Other’ narrative is that of a global education centre in Pincheq, a tiny village between Pisac and Cuzco in Peru (see below).  Even though their principles for global education may seem self-evident and understandable, a deeper experiential cognitive-relational engagement with the metaphoric ontologies of that region would be necessary to unlock contingent meanings that are not obvious in what we can represent in writing (see Andreotti, Ahenakew and Cooper 2011, 2012).  I use this here to illustrate the limited nature of our interpretations (that always rely on inherited concepts) and the complexity and difficulty of translating and representing these worldviews outside of their contexts (e.g. if you think you ‘understand’ this, think again), both of these preoccupations are key to critical literacy.

The Apu Chupaqpata Global Education Centre’s ‘Global Education Principles’ (2012) are:

• The entire planet Earth (i.e. Pachamama) is my home and country, my country is my mother and my mother knows no borders.
• We are all brothers and sisters: humans, rocks, plants, animals and all others.
• Pachamama is a mother pregnant of another generation of non-predatory children who can cultivate, nurse, and balance forces and flows, and who know that any harm done to the planet is harm done to oneself.
• The answers are in each one of us, but it is difficult to listen when we are not in balance, we hear too many different voices, especially in the cities.
• The priority for life and education is balance: to act with wisdom, to balance material consumption, to learn to focus on sacred spiritual relationships, to work together with the different gifts of each one of us, with a sense of oneness. Our purpose is to learn, learn and learn again (in many lives) to become better beings.
• There is no complete knowledge, we all teach, learn and keep changing: it is a path without an end.  There is knowledge that can be known and described, there is knowledge that can be known, but not described and there is knowledge that cannot be known or described.
• Our teachers are the Apus (the mountains-ancestors), Pachamama, the plants, what we live day by day and what has been lived before, the animals, our children, our parents, the spirits, our history, our ancestors, the fire, the water, the wind, all the different elements around us.
• The serpent, the puma and the condor are symbols of material and non-material dimensions, of that which can be known, of that which cannot be known or determined, and of the connections between all things.
• The traditional teachings of generosity, of gratitude, and of living in balance that are being lost are very important for our children – it is necessary to recover them.
• The world is changed through love, patience, enthusiasm, respect, courage, humility and living life in balance.  The world cannot be changed through wars, conflicts, racism, anger, arrogance, divisions and borders.  The world cannot be changed without sacred spiritual connections.

I started this article with an overview of the ways I have used critical literacy in global citizenship and development education, particularly in the context of teacher education.  I offered examples of how critical literacy may trigger new questions and directions in relation to global and development education in terms of how we can move beyond repeated problematic patterns of thinking and engagements and how we can start to approach increasing complexity, uncertainty, plurality and inequality in contemporary societies.  I emphasised the importance of intellectual depth, of multiple and complex social analyses and of making these analyses accessible to different communities in order to build a strong foundation for the field.  In the second part of the paper, I presented a new conceptual cartography that traces assumptions in three common sets of narratives in education and that frames a fourth set of narratives as a question mark, something that the related fields of global and development education could further engage with to pluralise knowledge in the present in order to pluralise the future.

Andreotti, V (2006) ‘Soft versus critical global citizenship education’,  Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review , Vol. 3, Autumn, pp. 40-51.

Andreotti, V (2007) ‘An ethical engagement with the Other: Gayatri Spivak on education’,  Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices , Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 69-79.

Andreotti, V (2010a) ‘Global education in the 21st century: Two different perspectives on the “post-” of postmodernism’,  International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning , Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 5-22.

Andreotti, V (2010b) ‘Glimpses of a postcolonial and post-critical global citizenship education’ in G Elliott, C Fourali and S Issler (eds.)  Education for Social Change , London: Continuum.

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Andreotti, V (2011b) ‘Engaging the (geo)political economy of knowledge construction: Towards decoloniality and diversality in global citizenship education’, Globalization, Society and Education Journal , Vol. 9, No. 3-4, pp. 381-397.

Andreotti, V (2012a) ‘HEADS UP: editor’s preface’,  Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices,  Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 3-5.

Andreotti, V (2012b) ‘Education, knowledge and the righting of wrongs’,  Other Education: the Journal of Educational Alternatives , Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 19-31.

Andreotti, V (2014) ‘Conflicting epistemic demands in poststructuralist and postcolonial engagements with questions of complicity in systemic harm’,  Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association , Vol. 50, No. 4, pp. 378-397.

Andreotti, V, Ahenakew, C and Cooper, G (2011) ‘Epistemological pluralism: challenges for higher education’,  AlterNative Journal , Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 40-50.

Andreotti, V, Ahenakew, C and Cooper, G (2012) ‘Towards global citizenship education “otherwise”’ in V de Oliveira Andreotti and L de Souza (eds.)  Postcolonial Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education , New York: Routledge.

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Cervetti, G, Pardales, M, and Damico, J (2001) ‘A tale of differences: Comparing the traditions, perspectives, and educational goals of critical reading and critical literacy’,  Reading Online , Vol. 4, No. 9, available:  http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/cervetti/index.html  (accessed 15 May 2014).

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Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti  is Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, at the Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  She has extensive experience working across sectors internationally in areas of education related to international development, global citizenship, indigeneity and social accountability.  Her work combines poststructuralist and postcolonial concerns in examining educational discourses and designing viable pedagogical pathways to address problematic patterns of international engagements, flows and representations of inequality and difference in education. Many of her publications are available at: https://ubc.academia.edu/VanessadeOliveiraAndreotti .

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Article contents

Critical media literacy in teacher education, theory, and practice.

• Jeff Share , Jeff Share University of California Los Angeles
• Tatevik Mamikonyan Tatevik Mamikonyan School of Education, University of California Los Angeles
• , and  Eduardo Lopez Eduardo Lopez University of California Los Angeles
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1404
• Published online: 30 September 2019
• This version: 20 September 2023
• Previous version

Democracy in the digital networked age of “fake news” and “alternative facts” requires new literacy skills and critical awareness to read, write, and use media and technology to empower civic participation and social transformation. Unfortunately, not many educators have been prepared to teach students how to think critically with and about the media and technology that engulf us. Across the globe there is a growing movement to develop media and information literacy curriculum (UNESCO) and train teachers in media education (e-Media Education Lab), but these attempts are limited and in danger of co-optation by the faster growing, better financed, and less critical education and information technology corporations. It is essential to develop a critical response to the new information communication technologies, artificial intelligence, and algorithms that are embedded in all aspects of society. The possibilities and limitations are vast for teaching educators to enter K-12 classrooms and teach their students to use various media, critically question all types of texts, challenge problematic representations, and create alternative messages. Through applying a critical media literacy framework that has evolved from cultural studies and critical pedagogy, students at all grade levels can learn to critically analyze the messages and create their own alternative media. The voices of teachers engaging in this work can provide pragmatic insight into the potential and challenges of putting the theory into practice in K-12 public schools.

• critical literacy
• critical pedagogy
• media education
• media literacy
• critical media literacy
• social justice
• politics of representation
• cultural studies
• teacher education

Updated in this version

The authors made minor revisions to this text to reflect more recent scholarship. The reference list and further readings have similarly been updated.

Introduction

It is a formidable challenge to prepare critical educators to work inside a system in which every brick in the wall has been laid to transmit the information, skills, and ideas necessary to reproduce the social norms, inequities, ideologies, and alienation that are undermining the quality and sustainability of life on this planet. However, education can be a powerful tool to challenge these problems and create opportunities for students to work in solidarity with others to create a more socially and environmentally just world. To support these changes, we need teachers ready to engage students in critical inquiry by posing questions about systemic and structural issues of power, hierarchies of oppression, and social injustice. In the current media and information age, information communication technologies (ICTs) are available to either continue the control and degradation or to deconstruct the systems of oppression and reconstruct a more just and sustainable society.

Digital technology is opening opportunities for individual participation and alternative points of view, while at the same time a handful of enormous media and technology corporations have become the dominant storytellers, often repeating the same story at the expense of countless different perspectives and creative ways of thinking. Many of these storytellers are actually story-sellers, more interested in peddling ideas and products than informing, enlightening, inspiring, or challenging. While young people are using more media, they are also being used more by media companies. Giant transnational corporations are targeting youth as one of the most valuable markets for building brand loyalty and selling to advertisers. Researchers found 8- to 18-year-olds in the United States spend well over 10 hours a day interacting with various forms of media, such as music, computers, video games, television, film, and print ( Rideout et al., 2011 ). Another investigation discovered that 95% of American 13- to 17-year-olds have access to a smartphone and 97% say they are online daily and 46% use it constantly ( Vogels et al., 2022 ).

Not only is the amount of time with media increasing but the quality of that engagement is also changing by becoming more commercial and rarely critical. Researchers at Stanford University administered six tasks to 3,466 high schools across 14 states in the US to judge their ability to assess online information. In one task, students were asked to evaluate the credibility of a website that claimed to “disseminate factual reports” and 96% failed to learn about the site’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. In a different task, over half of students believed an anonymously posted video purporting to show voter fraud in the US was real, even though it was filmed in Russia ( Breakstone et al., 2021 ). In another study, Vosoughi et al. (2018) examined approximately 126,000 stories tweeted over 4.5 million times between 2006 and 2017 . The researchers were interested in understanding what accounted for the differential diffusion of verified true and false news stories. They found that false news stories spread “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it” (p. 5). In analyzing the tweets, the authors concluded, false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted because people found them not only more novel but the stories also inspired emotional responses of fear, disgust, or surprise.

The concern about “fake news” has encouraged many people to recognize the need for critical readers and writers of media. Some have suggested that we simply need better cognitive skills to determine truth from lies. However, making sense of the media and our information society is far more complicated than a reductionist idea of simply finding the truth. Rather than judging information as either true or false, students need to learn to search for multiple sources, different perspectives, and various types of evidence to triangulate and evaluate findings. In order to best evaluate and understand the information, they also need to question the influence of media in shaping the message and positioning the audience. Since all knowledge is an interpretation ( Kincheloe, 2007 ), interpreting the meaning of a message is a complex process that requires skills to probe empirical evidence, evaluate subjective biases, analyze the medium and construction of the text, and explore the social contexts.

This is an opportunity for educators to guide their students to think critically with and about the ICTs and media that surround them. Morrell et al. (2013) argue that the technology itself will not bring about transformative educational change. “That change will only come through teachers who draw on critical frameworks to create learning communities where the use of these tools becomes an empowering enterprise” (p. 14). Therefore, the changes in media, technology, and society require critical media literacy (CML) that can support teachers and students to question and create with and about the very tools that can empower or oppress, entertain or distract, inform or mislead, and buy or sell everything from lifestyles to politicians. Now more than ever, teachers should encourage students to be reading, viewing, listening to, interacting with, and creating a multitude of texts, from digital podcasts to multimedia productions.

Teacher Education

Even though youth are immersed in a world in which media and technology have entered all aspects of their lives and society, few teacher education programs are preparing teachers to help their students to critically understand the potential and limitations of these changes. It is crucial that new teachers learn how to teach their K-12 students to critically read and write everything, from academic texts to social media.

This means that schools of education responsible for training the new wave of teachers must be up to date, not just with the latest technology, but more importantly, with critical media literacy (CML) theory and pedagogy in order to prepare teachers and students to think and act critically with and about media and technology. In Canada, where media literacy is mandatory in every grade from 1 to 12, most new teachers are not receiving media literacy training in their preservice programs ( Wilson & Duncan, 2009 ). Researchers investigating media education in the United Kingdom and the US have found that many teachers are unprepared to teach media education and that professional learning opportunities are limited ( Butler, 2020 ; Kirwan et al., 2003 ). The progress has been slow, especially considering that inclusion of media literacy in formal public education has a history dating back to the 1980s in Australia, Britain, and Canada. However, nonformal media education has been occurring in many parts of the world for decades ( Hart, 1998 ; Kaplún, 1998 ; Kubey, 1997 ; Pegurer Caprino & Martínez-Cerdá, 2016 ; Prinsloo & Criticos, 1991 ).

While it is difficult to know for sure who is and who is not teaching critically about media and technology ( Mihailidis, 2008 ), there seems to be an increased interest in media literacy in the United States. In 2022 , the National Council of Teachers of English published a position statement recommending implementation of media education in English Language Arts along with two special issue journal publications ( Lynch, 2021 ; Kist & Christel, 2022 ) devoted to critical media literacy, arguing that “media education must be an essential component of the professional identity of teachers” ( National Council of Teachers of English, 2022 ).

As technology and media continue to evolve and increasingly enter public and private spaces, more educators are recognizing the need for training new teachers about media literacy ( Domine, 2011 ; Goetze et al., 2005 ; Hobbs, 2007a ) and some are even addressing the need to teach about CML ( Flores-Koulish et al., 2011 ; Funk et al., 2016 ; Robertson & Hughes, 2011 ; Trust et al., 2022 ). Researchers Tiede et al. (2015) studied 64 universities or colleges of teacher education in Germany and 316 U.S. public educational institutions that provide teacher training and graduate studies, concluding that very few offer more than media didactics (basic educational technology that teaches with media, not about media). From their data in the United States, they report, “media education, with emphasis on the instructional practices associated with the critical evaluation of media, culture, and society, were scarce, representing only 2% of all study programs in teacher training programs” (pp. 540−541). In Germany, the percentage increases to 25%, but “media didactics tends to be emphasized to the disadvantage of media education in both countries” (p. 542).

In 2011 , the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published a curriculum guide online in 11 languages for training teachers in media education ( Grizzle & Wilson, 2011 ), declaring that “teacher training in media and information literacy will be a major challenge for the global education system at least for the next decade” ( Pérez-Tornero & Tayie, 2012 , p. 11). 1 In Europe, Ranieri and Bruni (2018) analyzed the successes and challenges of training preservice and in-service teachers about media and digital literacy. An initiative called e-Media Educational Lab, funded by the European Commission, provided blended training to 279 preservice teachers and 81 in-service teachers in six countries. Based on surveys and fieldnotes, Ranieri and Bruni (2018) reported that the preservice and in-service teachers found critical media analysis and media production to be very important; they described their intent to transfer their media competency to their classrooms and expressed a desire to learn more practical ways to help their students develop media competencies.

UNESCO’s approach to media education combines media and information literacy (MIL) to include many competencies, from learning about and using information communication technologies to thinking critically about ethics and democracy. Carolyn Wilson (2012) explains, “MIL is both a content area and way of teaching and learning; it is not only about the acquisition of technical skills, but the development of a critical framework and approaches” (p. 16).

Combining information technology with media-cultural studies is essential, but still infrequent. Within the current wave of educational reform that prioritizes the newest technology and career readiness over civic engagement and critical inquiry, schools are more likely to adopt only information technology or information literacy and not critical media education. In the United States, few universities offer more than a single course in media literacy and most do not even offer that ( Goetze et al., 2005 ; Meehan et al., 2015 ).

Schwarz (2001) asserts that because of the power of emerging literacies, “teacher education needs media literacy as an essential tool and an essential topic in the new millennium” (pp. 111−112). She calls for integrating media literacy across all subject areas of teacher education, “from methods courses and educational psychology to foundational courses and student teaching” (p. 118). This interdisciplinary approach for media education could be easier now for K-12 teachers in the United States since the Common Core State Standards require literacy to be taught and technology to be used across the curriculum ( California Common Core State Standards, 2013 ; Moore & Bonilla, 2014 ; Trust et al., 2022 ).

Two studies with a total of 31 preservice teachers found a discrepancy between their positive attitudes for teaching media literacy and the lack of attention and support in their teacher education programs to prepare them to teach MIL ( Gretter & Yadav, 2018 ). Based on interviews with these preservice teachers, Gretter and Yadav (2018) report that they associated MIL with critical thinking skills and expressed concerns about not knowing how to teach MIL because their teacher preparation program encouraged “teaching with technology and not necessarily about technology” (p. 115). These preservice teachers complained about “a lack of preparation to help them transfer their knowledge of digital media to MIL pedagogies that would benefit students” (p. 111). This highlights the importance of preparing educators with the theory and conceptual understandings as well as the pedagogy and practical applications for how to teach their students to critically analyze and create media.

Teaching Teachers Critical Media Literacy

Transforming education to critically use media, technology, and popular culture for social and environmental justice is the overarching goal of a critical media literacy (CML) course in the teacher education program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The authors of this article have been involved in designing and teaching this course to in-service and preservice teachers. Through combining theory from cultural studies and critical pedagogy with practical classroom applications of digital media and technology, this course prepares K-12 educators to teach their students how to critically analyze and create all types of media. In 2011 , this four-unit course on CML was officially approved and became a required class for all students working on their teaching credential at UCLA.

The teacher education program at UCLA is primarily a two-year master’s and credential program that accepts about 130 candidates annually. The program is committed to developing social justice educators to work with and improve the schooling conditions of California’s ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse children. While most of the students go through the two-year program, additional pathways for earning a teaching credential and master’s degree have been offered, such as a master’s-only program for in-service teachers with two years or more of full-time teaching experience.

The CML class is taught in separate sections, usually divided by subjects, with 25−50 students per section. Most of the candidates taking the class are student teaching at the same time, except for the master’s-only candidates, who were teaching full-time while attending the class once a week in the evening. The class includes lectures, discussions, and activities interwoven into each session during the 10-week quarter.

Beginning with a theoretical overview, the course explores the development of media education that is defined less as a specific body of knowledge or set of skills and more as a framework of conceptual understandings ( Buckingham, 2003 ). Much of the theory behind CML has evolved from cultural studies, a field of critical inquiry that began in the 20th century in Europe and continues to grow with new critiques of media and society. From the 1930s through the 1960s, researchers at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research used critical social theory to analyze how media culture and the new tools of communication technology induce ideology and social control. In the 1960s, researchers at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham added to the earlier concerns of ideology with a more sophisticated understanding of the audience as active constructors of reality, not simply mirrors of an external reality. Kellner (1995) explains that cultural studies has continued to grow and incorporate concepts of semiotics, feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. Incorporating a dialectical understanding of political economy, textual analysis, and audience theory, cultural studies critiques media culture as dynamic discourses that reproduce dominant ideologies as well as entertain, educate, and offer the possibilities for counter-hegemonic alternatives ( Hammer & Kellner, 2009 ).

Critical media literacy includes three dimensions ( Share & Gambino, 2022 ). The first involves the content students learn about systems, structures, and ideologies that reproduce hierarchies of power and knowledge concerning race, gender, class, sexuality and other forms of identity and environmental justice, as well as general understandings about how media and communication function. The second dimension engages the skills to critically think and question media representations and biases, to deconstruct and reconstruct media texts, and use a variety of media to access, analyze, evaluate, and create. The third involves developing a disposition for empathy, critical consciousness, and empowerment to take action to challenge and transform society to be more socially and environmentally just. This third dimension is based on Freire’s (2010) notion of conscientização , a revolutionary critical consciousness that involves perception as well as action against oppression. These three dimensions of critical media literacy pedagogy are supported through an inquiry-based democratic approach that follows ideas of transformative educators like John Dewey and Paulo Freire. We incorporate feminist theory and critical pedagogy to analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power ( Carlson et al., 2013 ; Garcia et al., 2013 ). When we first began teaching the course, we used a simple framework with five core concepts and key questions from the Center for Media Literacy. 2 To emphasize the critical potential of these ideas, while providing an accessible tool for teachers to use in the classroom, the following critical media literacy framework was developed, with six conceptual understandings and questions, as shown in Table 1 ( Kellner & Share, 2019 ).

These six conceptual understandings and questions are referred to regularly and are addressed in all lesson plans. It is important for teachers to understand the concepts and questions because theory should inform practice for all three dimensions. However, it is better for K-12 students to learn to ask the questions rather than memorize the concepts, since the questions, with appropriate guidance, can lead students on a path of inquiry where they are more likely to make meaning themselves, related to the conceptual understandings.

The CML framework is designed to help teachers and their students question the role of power and ideology that socialize and control society through making some people and ideas seem “normal” and “natural” while the rest are “othered” and “marginalized” ( Hall, 2003 ). This critical framing supports teachers and students to deepen their explorations of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, overconsumption, environmental exploitation, and other problematic representations in media. Candidates analyze and discuss current media examples, while also learning how to use various ICTs to create their own media with alternative counter-hegemonic representations. Using an inquiry process and democratic pedagogy, problems are posed to the students to collaboratively wrestle with, unpack, and respond to through media production.

Critical media literacy promotes an expansion of our understanding of literacy to include many types of texts, such as images, sounds, music, video games, social media, advertising, popular culture, and print, as well as a deepening of critical analysis to explore the connections between information and power. In our digital networked media age, it is not enough to teach students how to read and write just with print while their world has moved far beyond letters on a page. Literacy education in the 21st century requires breaking from traditional practices to include all the varied ways people communicate with media, technology, and any tool that facilitates the transfer of information or connects people. This calls for new skills and understandings to decode and analyze as well as to create and produce all types of texts. The California Teaching Performance Expectations also require teacher education programs to expand this view of literacy and integrate media and technology into coursework in order to “deepen teaching and learning to provide students with opportunities to participate in a digital society and economy” ( California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 2016 , p. 9).

Each class starts by reviewing and applying the conceptual understandings and questions. Since one goal of the course is for candidates to understand that literacy includes reading and writing all types of texts, we encourage students to analyze as well as produce media. A series of assignments requires candidates to work together to create various types of media projects such as visual posters, photographs, podcasts, memes, digital stories, and social media. The candidates are also expected to work collaboratively on a CML lesson plan and learning segment that they write up, present a summary of to the whole class, and when possible, also teach it. For a detailed description of this course, see Share (2015) and visit the UCLA Library Critical Media Literacy Research Guide for links to articles, videos, and websites used in the course. 3

Table 1. Critical Media Literacy Framework

From a desire to explore if and how former students are applying the skills and knowledge gained from the critical media literacy (CML) course into their teaching practice, we created an online survey for students who had taken the course. Through purposeful sampling, we sent out the survey to the 738 students who had taken the CML course and ended up with 185 usable responses (25% response rate), 153 preservice and 32 in-service teachers. Of the 185 respondents, 53 taught elementary school and 132 were secondary-level teachers. The breakdown of the middle school and high school teachers was: 38 science, 34 math, 33 social sciences, 28 English, and several reported teaching a combination of subjects as well as some who taught other areas such as music, visual arts, Spanish, English language development, or adult education. The span of experience was wide; some just started teaching and some had been teaching over seven years, yet most of the teachers (52%) had been teaching between two and three years.

The mixed method survey included 20 questions. The first eight sought to identify participants’ teaching background. The remaining 12 questions inquired about their experiences teaching CML skills and concepts to their K-12 students. Ten quantitative questions used a Likert scale with a choice of responses, including very frequently, frequently, occasionally, rarely, and never, as well as an option to choose not applicable. The final two qualitative questions were open-ended in which respondents could type their thoughts about any “memorable moment(s) teaching critical media literacy” and “any additional comments.” During the analysis phase, we found it helpful to combine the categories very frequently and frequently and refer to them as VF/F.

Voices From the Field

Using mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative data, we analyzed the survey responses to explore teachers’ ideas about what they had been doing with their students. The overall feedback suggested that the majority of the respondents had brought aspects of media literacy education into their K-12 classrooms, and sometimes even incorporated CML. One of the most recurring patterns we noticed was that these teachers had been expanding the traditional concept of literacy by engaging their students with various types of media.

Teaching With Media

In reply to the first question, most of the respondents reported having integrated media into their class activities: 64% VF/F, 30% occasionally, 6% rarely, and no one responded never ( N = 185). The responses to Question 1 were very similar for elementary and secondary teachers, with only a 1% to 5% difference. Where we saw greater variation was when comparing the subject matter of secondary teachers. The English and science teachers had the highest percentages (75% and 76%) of VF/F responses to Question 1 about integrating media into class activities. Math teachers, by contrast, reported the lowest percentage, with 44% reporting VF/F and 15% rarely integrating media into the curriculum (see Figure 1 ).

Figure 1. Responses from secondary teachers to Question 1 about how often they integrated media into class activities.

While these responses demonstrated an overall high amount of media integration, it was not clear how the teachers integrated media and what students were doing with the media. The responses from Question 5 (“my students have created the following media”) provided more information about the students’ interactions with media, showing that the vast majority of respondents (92%) had their students create some type of media (see Figure 2 for a list of the various media students created).

Since the question only asked teachers to check the box for the type of media their students created, we did not know how often this occurred or with what degree of analysis. Questions 1 and 5 indicated that teaching with media occurred with over 90% of the respondents.

Figure 2. Responses to Question 5 about the different types of media that all 185 respondents report their students have created. They were asked to choose all that apply.

Teaching About Media

The second question tried to find out more about those interactions with media by asking respondents to rate how often they had given their “students opportunities to engage in media analysis.” For Question 2, about one-third of all 185 respondents, 32%, reported VF/F, 43% occasionally, 21% rarely, and 4% never. When comparing responses from Questions 1 and 2, the respondents seemed to have been doing more teaching with media (Question 1) than teaching about media (Question 2) (see Figure 3 ). A similar finding was mentioned in the research conducted in Germany and the United States by Tiede et al. (2015) .

Figure 3. Comparing all responses from Question 1 about integrating media into class activities (teaching with media) with Question 2 about engaging in media analysis (teaching about media).

A more nuanced perspective of Question 2 is possible when comparing the responses about media analysis from different content area secondary teachers. In response to Question 2, the teachers who reported VF/F were the following: 63% of English teachers reported giving the most opportunities for their students to engage in media analysis, as compared to almost half as often by 32% of science teachers and about five times less often by 12% of math teachers (see Figure 4 ). Since literacy is a primary goal of English instruction, it is not surprising that English teachers reported the highest levels of media analysis ( Hobbs, 2007b ).

It is important to recognize that teaching about media can be a highly complex and multifaceted undertaking, especially when done through a CML lens. For example, the second conceptual understanding encourages students to analyze the codes and conventions of the media text and the medium through which they travel by asking how the text was constructed and delivered or accessed. This, in itself, can have many layers and yet is just one of six questions intended to help students think critically about media. Livingstone (2018) asserts, “media literacy is needed not only to engage with the media but to engage with society through the media .” As Luke and Freebody (1997) argue, it is not enough to only have a psychological approach to literacy, as if reading and writing is just an individual cognitive process. We need to also bring a sociological lens into the process of questioning the contexts, the dominant ideologies, and the systems that make some things seem “natural” or “normal.” The CML framework is a holistic tool for thinking about and questioning the dynamic role media play in our relationships with ourselves, each other, and society. Responses and comments to other questions in the survey provide more insight into how some teachers have engaged their students in various types of media analysis.

Figure 4. Comparing responses from different content areas about Question 2 regarding how often secondary teachers gave their students opportunities to engage in media analysis.

Evaluating Information and Advertising

In the qualitative responses to Questions 11 and 12, teachers mentioned embracing basic media literacy principles in the ways students were evaluating the credibility of information and advertising as well as creating different types of media. The popularity of the term “fake news” and the growing amount of disinformation have increased the challenge to distinguish misinformation and propaganda from journalism and scientifically researched facts ( Rogow, 2018 ). An elementary teacher who reported “frequently” integrating media into the classroom, asserted:

Though my students are younger and some of these concepts are more difficult to teach than others, I find it important to bring up especially in terms of making sure they don’t believe every YouYube video they watch. We’ve had many meaningful discussions about what can be created for a video shouldn’t just be accepted as the truth. For example, the ‘mermaid’ documentary that came out a few years ago had all of my students convinced that they had found a mermaid. It led to an interesting discussion on hoaxes and further reading about Bigfoo[t] and other such stories.

Since all media contain bias because they are created by subjective humans, it is important for teachers to help their students to recognize the bias and also be able to judge the credibility of information. A high school math teacher wrote:

It has not happened until this school year, when I began teaching Statistics. I introduced some pictographs for students to analyze and an article for students to read about how a website stated that if polls were unskewed, Trump would be leading the polls for election. I had students read and discuss about the validity and why/why not it is trustable.

Several respondents mentioned having their students study political advertising, and since all U.S. elections are now multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns (e.g., Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign won the top prizes at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards), there is little distinction between selling products, ideas, and political candidates.

Analyzing advertising is an important aspect of media education because advertising is the motor that drives commercial media and has become so common in our lives that there are few spaces that are completely ad-free ( Jhally, 2003 ). Several respondents reported about their students investigating advertisements for false health messages, misleading packaging, political campaigns, tobacco, alcohol, and different perspectives. One secondary English teacher wrote, “My students took pictures of advertisements that surrounded their neighborhood and we analyzed them for patterns, themes, and purposes.” A high school science teacher reported, “I had many times this past year where students were able to reflect on marketing strategies and how they affect the viewer’s perspective of their life and themselves. Students made great connections.”

During the critical media literacy (CML) class, students scrutinize consumer culture and the role advertising plays in creating anxieties, shaping desires, and normalizing representations about all things, from consumption to gender, race, and class. Candidates in the CML class learn about these ideas through readings, by analyzing advertisements, and also by creating ads for different target audiences. When asked about the media their students had created, one third reported their students created advertisements.

Creating Different Types of Media

When students are taught print literacy, they are instructed how to decode letters on a page and how to write with those letters to construct words, sentences, and paragraphs. The same process of teaching reading and writing should be applied to visual images, movies, songs, video games, social media, and all the various multimedia texts that students are encountering daily. In responses from the survey, teachers reported about having their students write and create many different types of texts beyond print (see Figure 2 ).

One English teacher wrote that having students create media was “very successful. They loved being able to create memes, posters, Prezis, etc. to present their work.” An elementary teacher shared about students “creating podcasts/npr style news stories regarding UN sustainability goals.” Several respondents commented on their students designing commercials or challenging ads by producing spoofs that parody the ads. One middle school teacher shared, “students analyzed ads for nicotine and alcohol products, then used the practice with critical media skills to create ‘anti-ads’ with Google drawings.”

During the first year of teaching, a high school science teacher reported about a memorable moment when “creating a multi-lingual, easy-to-understand and scientifically supported pamphlet on the hazards in LA’s environment.” A high school Spanish teacher wrote about his students creating critical memes in Spanish, like the ones they created in the critical media literacy (CML) class. During the session exploring racism and media, candidates challenge racist representations through creating racial myth-busting memes. As a strategy to demonstrate the value of media production, the CML class has students create various media in almost every session, and these activities are often the favorite lessons mentioned in the end of course evaluations.

Increasing Engagement

While engagement is not a learning objective, all teaching benefits from students being engaged in their learning. One of the patterns that emerged from the responses was teachers’ observations that student engagement increased. An eighth-grade English teacher wrote that after incorporating media literacy, the students’ “entire attitude toward learning shifted. Especially the hard to reach students.” An elementary teacher reported, “Media literacy has made great contributions in my class with science research in the past. The simple act of using google images, google maps and finding credible sources has sparked learning and interest in my class.” Another elementary teacher shared about using critical media literacy (CML) to analyze food justice issues: “They were instantly engaged and students who had a difficult time writing and with critical thinking then did not.”

A secondary science teacher reported, “Students spent the entire class engaged in discussion when I intended for it to only be an introduction to the unit.” Another high school science teacher wrote, “When I did teach a class specifically geared towards media literacy, it was great because students were engaged. They were quick at analyzing images and creating their own.” A third science teacher wrote, “using critical media literacy made engaging my students in abstract chemistry concepts more meaningful and engaging.” Engagement tends to increase when students are genuinely interested and intrinsically motivated, something that often comes out of personal connection, a sense of meaningfulness, and an authentic belief in the value of the learning ( Dewey, 1963 ). These are all elements of good CML pedagogy. A high school science teacher described the feelings of students and their parents as they responded to their CML work: “My favorite moments are students exuding pride and passion over the work they are creating that speaks to their perspectives and experiences; parents proud of their students’ media creations.” Feelings of pride and passion are important for all students to experience; they help lower students’ affective filters for learning ( Krashen, 1995 ) and increase intrinsic motivation to want to learn.

Critical Media Literacy

As we analyzed teachers’ written responses, we saw a number of comments in which they were taking basic media literacy concepts to deeper levels of criticality. Several mentioned how useful the class was to understanding critical theory and be able to see how it can be enacted in their K-12 classroom. Similar findings were mentioned after Joanou (2017) analyzed data about a critical media literacy (CML) class taught to master’s-level practicing K-12 educators. Joanou (2017) reported, “critical media literacy helps bridge the gap between theory and practice” (p. 40). The use of media texts and popular culture can provide relevant examples for entry into abstract concepts that are often politically and emotionally charged, and sometimes too sensitive or too distant to begin discussing on a personal level.

Teaching about the connections between information and power reflects a key goal of CML ( Kellner & Share, 2007 ) and our respondents demonstrated this through their qualitative comments about recreating counter-narratives, analyzing the politics of representation, making critical connections between history and current events with media texts, and engaging in political, social, and environmental media activism. Questions 3 and 4 attempted to assess the frequency in which teachers were bringing critical aspects of media education to their students.

Question 3 asks teachers to rate how often: “My students have engaged in media analysis by exploring media representations of ideology, race, class, gender, sexuality, environmentalism, and/or other social justice issues.” Elementary and secondary teachers reported almost identical frequencies in response to Question 3: 22% in both groups reported VF/F while 42% (elementary) and 45% (secondary) stated occasionally. When asked Question 4 about making connections between information and power, the differences increased: 39% of the secondary teachers responded doing this VF/F while just 23% of the elementary teachers reported doing this VF/F.

In-service teachers reported higher frequencies for Question 3: 54% of in-service teachers reported VF/F while preservice teachers reported 14% VF/F. For Question 4: 56% of in-service teachers reported VF/F compared with 30% of preservice teachers who reported VF/F.

When comparing responses separated by subject matter with secondary teachers, 33% of English teachers and 30% of social science teachers reported VF/F for engaging in critical media analysis, as seen in Question 3 about exploring media representations. This is considerably higher than the 16% of science teachers and 9% of math teachers reporting VF/F. The math and science teachers reported the highest percentages for rarely or never having their students explore media representations of social justice issues (see Figure 5 ). The literature supports similar findings. Garii and Rule (2009) reported that student teachers had a difficult time integrating social justice into math and science content due to several factors. In their research with novice elementary teachers, Garii and Rule discovered that the candidates were not confident in their ability to teach math and science and had limited and unsophisticated knowledge of the content. They also viewed math and science “to be a set of routinized, algorithmic practices that lead to a single, correct answer and neither science nor mathematics are assumed to be closely connected to real-world issues and concerns” (p. 491). Given that they are struggling to learn and understand the content, math and science candidates turned to classroom textbooks to guide instructional practices. Incorporating nontraditional practices or making connections to students’ lives becomes a challenge because they disconnect social justice from their teaching and focus on teaching to the content ( Garii & Rule, 2009 ).

Figure 5. Responses to Question 3 from secondary teachers about how often they engaged their students in critical “media analysis by exploring media representations of ideology, race, class, gender, sexuality, environmentalism, and/or other social justice issues.”

One of the more significant findings of the study is the number of respondents reporting they “noticed that using critical media literacy encourages critical thinking among students” (Question 9). Of the preservice respondents, 61% reported VF/F, and for the in-service teachers, the percentages jump to 81% who reported VF/F. In both cases, the majority of respondents expressed their feelings that CML promotes critical thinking most of the time (see Figure 6 ). A middle school social science teacher wrote that after teaching CML, “students were deeper thinkers and our discussions were so much richer. Students were highly engaged and more invested in the classroom.” When comparing grade levels for Question 9, we see 78% of elementary teachers reported that using CML VF/F encourages critical thinking, and 61% of secondary teachers reported VF/F. This large percentage of elementary teachers reporting about CML encouraging critical thinking shows great promise for the potential of CML in the early grades.

Figure 6. Comparison of preservice and in-service teachers’ responses to Question 9 about how often they have noticed CML encourages critical thinking among their students.

Creating Counter Narratives and Supporting Students’ Voices

Many of the responses regarding transformative education centered on guiding students to create counternarratives and supporting student ideas and voices. Respondents mentioned activities that enabled their students to recreate media texts with a critical lens. These counternarratives included recreating superhero comic books, news, advertisements, digital storytelling, national holiday observances, and poems. A high school English teacher noted, “after analyzing recent and popular superhero comic books, my students used the comic medium to tell an autobiographical story wherein they exhibited power in the face of oppression.” A middle school English teacher reported:

The most memorable lesson I’ve taught involving critical media literacy was a unit based on perseverance and the power of the human spirit in regards to power structures and oppression. After analyzing multiple types of media, students created their own VoiceThread using spoken word in order to share their own messages of perseverance. It was incredibly powerful to hear their messages.

For most respondents, the notion of enabling their students to share personal stories using multimedia tools meant that they were integrating critical media pedagogy into their teaching practice. Traditionally, personal and experiential knowledge as a form of literacy is not often valued; thus, it is a critical pedagogical orientation to encourage students to recreate media texts that reflect their intersecting realities and challenge the pervasive dominant ideologies. Students’ personal histories become scholarly pursuits when digital storytelling encompasses media production skills taught through a critical media literacy (CML) framework. Vasquez (2017) asserts, “students learn best when what they are learning has importance in their lives, using the topics, issues, and questions that they raise should therefore be an important part of creating the classroom curriculum” (p. 8). A middle school math and technology teacher commented about incorporating CML into her master’s inquiry project:

The project we ultimately created was a digital storytelling project, in which students interviewed their parents or someone they admire and created some sort of media project around that story to tell counter-narratives to the dominant story told in media about people of color.

Guiding students to create counternarratives can be an empowering instructional strategy that nurtures their personal realities and supports their voice. Considering the context of urban education, it becomes particularly important for low-income students and students of color, who have been historically denied the power to be heard, to engage in their learning as empowered subjects through creating digital counter-narratives.

Politics of Representation

A major difference between critical media literacy (CML) and the more common media literacy practiced in the United States is the rigorous examination of the politics of representation; an analysis of how historically disenfranchised social groups are represented in media ( Funk et al., 2016 ). Many of the respondents discussed analyzing issues related to representations of different identities with their students. A high school visual arts teacher reported that through “using current events in the media, students created headline news with people of color perspective.” The majority of the responses highlighted engaging in discussions related to gender and a few responses about race. One elementary teacher noted:

My grade level did a Critical Media Literacy unit and after it was over, a week later, a student showed me a box of Chips Ahoy cookies and said that it was made to be sold to boys and girls. She compared it to a rainbow pop tarts box made for girls and a basketball cereal box made for boys that we had discussed during the CML unit.

A high school social science teacher reported:

My 11th and 12th grade Sociology class created representation boards. Each group was assigned an identity (‘white male,’ ‘Asian male,’ ‘black female,’ etc.). When each group was done, we compared the images and discussed the similarities between representations of race and gender. It really opened their eyes.

The politics of representation explores the complexities and intersections of identity markers, such as ethnicity, culture, gender, class, sexual orientation, religion, and ableism. Several candidates alluded to the intersectionality between race and gender in their responses, mostly engaging their students in discussions related to the unequal representation and socialization of gender roles. They also noted that discussing stereotypical gender roles challenged their students’ internalized notions of gender. Responses such as the following highlight the shift in their students’ perspectives about gender: An elementary teacher wrote, “We’ve had some successful discussions around gender stereotypes and I’ve heard the language change in the classroom and students be more thoughtful about others’ choices.” Another elementary teacher reported, “My students showed greater acceptance. After teaching a lesson invoking gender all my male students felt accepted to choose any color paper—the favorite was pink for the rest of the year.”

Making Critical Connections

In response to the open-ended questions, an array of items was mentioned that demonstrate critical engagement, from teaching about racism and whitewashing, to numerous examples of analyzing gender and sexism, as well as projects on environmental justice and climate change at all grade levels. Some respondents discussed their transformative practice through the way their students analyzed and created media to make critical connections between historical and current events.

A high school social science teacher stated, “I had students create videos explaining the situation in Ukraine and relating it to the Cold War. In United States history, I often had students look at political cartoons and think about current examples of imperialism and how they’re represented in media.” Similarly, another social science teacher described a memorable moment of teaching critical media literacy (CML) as: “When students could make the connection between yellow journalism in Spanish-American War and media sensationalism during the War on Terror.” An elementary school teacher wrote:

My students began to think critically about history after showing them the spoken word poem ‘History Textbooks,’ which talked about world history being American Propaganda. Through this poem, they began questioning: who gets to write history and whose stories are told? It was a really powerful lesson we returned to over and over again throughout my course.

Analyzing media texts by acknowledging their historical continuity is vital because marginalization and exploitation are historically bound. Discovering these historical connections helps teachers and students learn how dominance and ideology are perpetuated, transcending time and space. Bridging the gap between the past and the present enables students to identify the common thread of hegemony across various spheres of social life. This instructional approach of CML promotes critical thinking with a social justice emphasis.

Another topic on which respondents commented was using CML to teach about environmental issues, especially the climate crisis. This is an important area for CML, since so many media messages about climate change distort the scientific evidence and mislead the public ( Beach et al., 2017 ; Share & Beach, 2022 ). A high school science teacher reported, “My class analyzed the politics behind climate change denial and how climate change is represented in the media. It was very easy for my students to see the connection between the message and its creators.” Exploring the connection between media ownership and media messages, another high school science teacher commented that a memorable moment was having a “discussion with students about where they were getting their information about environmental issues, and talking about who owns and controls Univision.”

In addition to becoming more aware, being engaged in critical analysis and creating counternarratives, some respondents noted that their students had engaged in political, environmental, and social media activism. A high school science teacher mentioned:

My class was looking at environmental justice and one student took that information and used it for an English project she was working on and that project transformed into a petition to the city council to plant more trees as her contribution to offsetting pollution in the inner city.

Another science teacher reported about how his “students created social media campaigns to raise awareness about animals affected by climate change. Different groups created the ‘Puffin Dance’ and #peekatmypika to help their campaigns get going.” A kindergarten teacher wrote about her students creating a video with opinion posters for change they shared with their school community.

Activism can be enacted in multiple ways; some efforts are more explicit, like petitions and protests, while others are more subtle, such as creating alternative media. Teacher responses reflect their students’ activism related to social, environmental, and political issues materialized through local and issue-specific efforts.

In analyzing the responses, we found many encouraging and hopeful comments about how critical media literacy (CML) has helped teachers rethink their pedagogy and increase student engagement. However, the responses also highlight challenges for implementing CML, such as limited resources, support, and clarity about how to integrate it into the curriculum. An elementary teacher wrote about the scarcity of technology at the school and how that “makes it difficult to do anything around critical media.” From the answers to Question 7 (incorporating CML into my teaching is difficult), secondary teachers reported more difficulty teaching CML (35% VF/F) than elementary teachers (26% VF/F). This is another place where the potential for CML in the lower grades surfaced, since they seem to have less difficulty incorporating it than secondary teachers. The design of most elementary classrooms, which requires the same teacher to cover all subject matter to the same group of students throughout the day, opens the potential for integrating CML pedagogy through thematic teaching, project-based learning, or problem-posing pedagogy.

A first-year middle school social science teacher shared wanting to use more CML, but had little departmental and administrative support. An elementary teacher shared about an administrator who “is reluctant to have me teach how to be critical of all media.” Three responses focused on wanting more resources, instructional strategies, and school-appropriate material in order to be able to implement CML in their classrooms. These qualitative statements of lack of support can be seen in the quantitative responses to Question 10 in which respondents rated the statement: “I feel supported by people at my school when teaching critical media literacy”: 36% VF/F, 24% occasionally, 18% rarely, 6% never felt supported, and 17% not applicable.

The group that shared the most challenges for implementing CML consisted of five teachers who taught secondary math and science. Their qualitative responses broadly discussed the difficulty of integrating CML into their content and finding only limited application. One of these responses from a high school math teacher mentioned:

I remember how when I was in the [CML] class, it seemed all over the place. I was unable to fully find the purpose of the class and how we can use it in a math class. In a traditional math class, such as Pre-Calculus or Calculus, it was rather difficult to find ways to incorporate the idea of CML.

This same person also commented that once he began teaching statistics, he was able to find ways to integrate CML. Of the 34 math teachers who answered Question 7, 59% of them reported that incorporating CML into their teaching was difficult VF/F. This is about double the VF/F responses from the other subjects.

A high school math teacher saw the value in teaching students CML but limited its application to challenging students’ misinformation about math and who is or is not a mathematician:

Critical Media Literacy is pretty important for students, especially in an age where they’re exposed to various forms of media, a lot of which is very skewed in one way or the other, and usually takes a reductionist viewpoint of the issues it addresses. I try to use CML to help students understand the misinformation about mathematics, the nature of mathematics, and challenge stereotypes of who is or isn’t a mathematician (examples: Not all mathematicians are white or Asian, there are Latino and African/African American mathematicians, there are mathematicians from faith backgrounds, mathematics isn’t just about calculations, etc.).

Two additional respondents also acknowledged the benefits of CML but felt challenged by the additional work needed to integrate it into the curriculum. A high school science teacher shared:

When I took the Critical Media Literacy class, it felt like it was more geared towards the humanities and not necessarily for the sciences. While it would be great to come up with lessons that connect chemistry and critical media literacy, it is immensely time-consuming when I can’t find other people to brainstorm with.

Another secondary science teacher also felt CML was important but struggled to find ways to integrate it into the classroom:

It was a great shared learning space and I got a ton of inspiration from taking the class; however, it has been difficult to use CML when direct instruction does focus on the explanation of scientific concepts. That’s not to say it is impossible, it just does take one more step of planning and student buy in.

Researchers in Canada found that after teaching CML concepts and skills in a Language Arts methods course, their preservice teachers felt enthusiastic about teaching media literacy, but challenged when designing CML lessons ( Robertson & Hughes, 2011 , p. 51). Robertson and Hughes (2011) list five reasons why teaching CML was so challenging for their students: (1) when these preservice teachers were K-12 students, most did not experience CML lessons; (2) the majority of their mentor teachers did not teach CML or know much about it; (3) critical analysis practices are not easy; (4) few resources are available; and (5) some schools have little technology and technical support. These are many of the same challenges that our teachers reported.

Intent and Importance of Incorporating Critical Media Literacy

Numerous teachers wrote about how meaningful, vital, transformative, and important this class was for them. A high school science teacher shared that the critical media literacy (CML) class, “was transformative! I’m still working on ways to fully integrate what I learned, but I have had my students creating media ever since.” A middle school English teacher commented about how the CML class “gave us techniques, projects, lessons that we can incorporate in our classrooms. Teaching students how to be critical of information related through the media is highly important because student[s] gain that critical awareness necessary for a technology-based society!”

A desire to bring more CML into the classroom surfaced throughout many of the qualitative responses. When asked to indicate any additional comments, 16 out of 64 respondents (25%) expressed their intention to integrate concepts related to media literacy or CML. A high school math teacher who wrote about having students create ads to represent data in graphs stated, “I wish I could incorporate more. I’ll keep trying.” A kindergarten teacher commented, “I wish I had more time to engage my students in this topic. As I grow in experience and expertise, I incorporate it more and more. Teaching in urban areas is a challenge but I do find the ideas of the course to be valuable in the classroom.”

The data and voices of these teachers raise practical, theoretical, and policy implications for future work in supporting teachers in adopting a pedagogical approach that can ignite engagement, make learning relevant, and deepen critical thinking with media, technology, and all information. In order for this to happen, teacher education programs need to address some of the challenges and limitations highlighted in the study.

The teachers surveyed reported challenges for implementing critical media literacy (CML) such as limited access to resources, lack of support, and a struggle to understand how to integrate it into the curriculum. This was especially evident for the math and science teachers. CML courses need to help teachers in all content areas rethink the silo approach to separate subject matter instruction and recognize the ways literacy is used in all areas and how information is connected to students’ lives through issues of power, privilege, and pleasure. To help teachers integrate CML into the curriculum, it is important for them to see content and grade-level examples while also receiving ongoing support and resources.

One way to support teachers in various subject matter is to create groups or projects modeled after the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) or the Center X professional development projects. 4 The SHEG is a research and development group that provides free online resources and lesson plans for history teachers to support students in developing historical thinking skills. In a similar way, the Center X projects provide resources, lesson ideas, and professional development to support working teachers and administrators, while also creating curriculum, providing trainings, and engaging in research. The creation of a CML project or research and development group could provide ongoing professional development for new and experienced teachers in order to sustain CML implementation and support the growth of CML as an important field of investigation.

In-service teachers in our survey reported higher rates of integration of CML, perhaps because experienced teachers have figured out issues of classroom management, lesson planning, and how to balance work and life expectations. As a result, they are better situated to build and expand their curricula and teaching practices to bring CML into their classrooms. While creating a site modeled after the SHEG or Center X projects will require a significant investment of time and money, a more immediate and economical way to provide support for preservice teachers could be through integrating CML across various teacher preparation courses, especially in methods classes. This integration would require working with teacher educators to explore the CML theoretical framework and co-construct new practices and curricula for integrating these ideas throughout different content areas.

Despite the challenges reported by our teachers, the data also suggest promising possibilities for CML. While we do not claim causality between their teaching and the CML course, the data provide a window into how our preservice and in-service teachers have supported critical engagement with the information, entertainment, and social media embedded in the lives of students.

The similarities between elementary and secondary teachers suggest that CML can be just as appropriate for lower grades as it is commonly assumed to be for older students. The work in critical literacy by Comber (2013) and Vasquez (2014) offers support for the notion that young children can engage deeply in critical thinking and social justice education. The elementary teachers in our study demonstrate these ideas through the work they have done to engage their young students with media analysis and critical media production from kindergarten on up. While some teachers reported deep levels of critical analysis more often than others, many expressed their belief in the importance of CML and their desire to teach about social justice. Vasquez (2017) reminds us that critical literacy should not be a topic to teach: “Instead it should be looked on as a lens, frame, or perspective for teaching throughout the day, across the curriculum, and perhaps beyond. What this means is that critical literacy involves having a critical perspective or way of being” (p. 8). Developing social justice educators who internalize a critical way of looking at the world and questioning systems of power is the project for which CML provides a pragmatic framework and pedagogy.

It is impressive to see the majority of teachers reporting that using CML encourages critical thinking, something more important than ever in the age of fake news and alternative facts. There is hope in the teachers’ voices as they describe the activities they have been doing with their students, the successes they have encountered, and the challenges they have struggled to overcome. The comments about their intentions to teach CML and the importance they attribute to teaching these concepts provide encouragement for teacher educators to embrace CML. More than anything, the data demonstrate the potential for teaching CML in elementary and secondary settings with preservice and in-service teachers and in all content areas, even though some are more challenging than others. The use of media and technology offers opportunities for teachers to build on students’ prior knowledge, create a bridge to connect the outside world with school learning, and provide the raw material to examine everyday experiences of power, marginalization, and resistance.

Simply integrating media into the curriculum is not enough to develop critical literacies given the changing and multiple literacies associated with new digital information and communication technologies and practices. In the contemporary moment, there is a pressing pedagogical need to navigate the increasingly consequential artificial intelligence (AI) systems that collect, collate, process, predict and disseminate information determined by algorithms. Data from the survey suggest that our teachers are teaching more with media than critically analyzing it. Further studies are needed in order to better understand how to develop teachers’ CML frameworks and support more implementation.

Preparing educators to teach CML is not easy, and unfortunately, few institutes of higher education are attempting the challenge. However, it is possible, and in fact, it can be highly rewarding. By listening to the voices of teachers who have taken a CML course, we see the potential. As one high school science teacher commented, “CML changed me, changed my teaching, continues to change my students.”

While information communication technologies are integrating into all aspects of our lives, we are also witnessing increasing divisions between the haves and have nots, out-of-control climate change, and the weaponization of information and media. In order to create a socially just democratic society and sustainable planet, we must have people who can critically read and write the word and the world ( Freire & Macedo, 1987 ). The need for CML has never been greater. A high school English teacher wrote, “there is no literacy without media literacy. There is not critical pedagogy without critical media literacy.” It is our hope that this article serves as a resource to continue exploring the potential that CML offers to transform students, schools, and society.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following educators who helped us design and teach this critical media literacy course: Shani Byard, Peter Carlson, Steven Funk, Antero Garcia, Mark Gomez, Clifford Lee, Elexia Reyes-McGovern, and Martin Romero. We are grateful to Megan Franke for her guidance with the creation of the survey. We also appreciate the assistance of Jarod Kawasaki, Jose-Felipe Martinez, and Brandon McMillan with helping to organize the survey data.

Further Reading

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1. The UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Curriculum can be found at the following location.

2. These can be found at the Center for Media Literacy website .

3. See The UCLA Library Critical Media Literacy Research Guide .

4. The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) and the Center X site is at UCLA CENTER X PREPARES & SUPPORTS EDUCATORS .

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Critical Literacy & Critical Literacy Pedagogy: From Theory to Practice

Different approaches to critical literacy have led to educators and researchers on different pedagogies and practices. Critical literacy gives emphasis on understanding and acting upon issues and problems of global world as democratic values. Apart from this general aim of critical literacy, it also aims to active and participatory education through personal and social transformation embodied with real experiences of individuals in educational settings. It is also about becoming social activist and becoming aware of them in the world for reasons which are perhaps sometimes transformative in the sense of being political agent who can be an active citizen. On the contrary, the issue of formal, rule-bounded literacies, critical literacy emphasizes the meaning-making process via texts, media or multi-literacies and lead people to make connection between literacy from different perspectives and people’s lives. In this respect, critical literacy should be implemented in classroom settings to make students critically literate and hopefully take action toward global issues such as injustice, oppression and so on.

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This case study explored how the involvement of two ESL instructors in critical literacy research, including master's thesis, made them experience different challenges, ideological conflicts and successes. One of them was teaching ESL in secondary classes when she carried out her thesis about critical literacy. She also cooperated with the researcher in a critical literacy study after she had finished data collection for her thesis. The other participant taught ESL in elementary classes and is currently teaching at universities. The study, which took place in Lebanon, revealed how the varied ideological positions, views and contexts of the two instructors made them go through different transformations. The data suggests that involving teachers and masters' students in critical literacy research constitutes and important platform to train them in the various complex dimensions of critical literacy, particularly in settings where this approach faces significant resistance. Keywords critical literacy and professional development, critical literacy: challenges and transformations of novice and experienced teachers, ideological conflicts in ESL critical literacy classes

Vivian Maria Vasquez

Changing student demographics, globalization, and flows of people resulting in classrooms where students have variable linguistic repertoire, in combination with new technologies, has resulted in new definitions of what it means to be literate and how to teach literacy. Today, more than ever, we need frameworks for literacy teaching and learning that can withstand such shifting conditions across time, space, place, and circumstance, and thrive in challenging conditions. Critical literacy is a theoretical and practical framework that can readily take on such challenges creating spaces for literacy work that can contribute to creating a more critically informed and just world. It begins with the roots of critical literacy and the Frankfurt School from the 1920s along with the work of Paulo Freire in the late 1940s (McLaren, 1999; Morrell, 2008) and ends with new directions in the field of critical literacy including finding new ways to engage with multimodalities and new technologies, engaging with spatiality- and place-based pedagogies, and working across the curriculum in the content areas in multilingual settings. Theoretical orientations and critical literacy practices are used around the globe along with models that have been adopted in various state jurisdictions such as Ontario, in Canada, and Queensland, in Australia.

English Teaching Practice and Critique

hilary janks

Education Inquiry

Journal of Curriculum Theorizing

Elizabeth Bishop

Roseli Grubert

This paper is divided into three parts. It begins by making an argument for the ongoing importance of critical literacy at a moment when there are mutterings about its being passé. The second part of the paper formulates the argument with the use of illustrative texts. It concludes with examples of critical literacy activities that I argue, are still necessary in classrooms around the world.

Nettie Boivin

Language Arts

Multidisciplinary journal of educational research

Ali K. Taskoh

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Critical literacy in early childhood education: Questions that prompt critical conversations

Shu-yen law new zealand tertiary college, practitioner research： vol 6, no 3 - may 2020.

This article proposes the use of questioning as a strategy to foster and provoke children’s critical thinking through the medium of literacy. The art of questioning includes adults both asking questions in purposeful ways and eliciting children’s responses and questions. This strategy prompts children to make connections to prior knowledge and experiences, share perspectives, reflect on ideas and explore possible responses. This article is informed by both the author’s own research and a range of literature. Examples of questions and conversations are provided to demonstrate how critical thinking can be fostered in early childhood education settings. In this article, picture books are viewed as a valuable resource for teachers to nurture critical thinking as they can portray concepts and ideas that are meaningful and relevant for children.

Introduction

When children engage in shared reading with educators, they develop an understanding of the story and meaning of the world around them. This understanding can be deepened by supporting children to develop a critical stance so that they become confident to engage in critical discussions on current and meaningful topics that touch their lives. Picture book reading is not just about what children can see and hear, but also how it makes them feel, think and how these ideas might be applied to their lives. This comprises engagement in critical literacy: a learning journey where children are encouraged to think critically and reflect on meanings presented in texts. This article draws on findings from my own studies in China (Law & Zheng, 2013) and New Zealand (Law, 2012) to explore the ways in which teachers can use picture books to support the development of children’s critical thinking.

What is critical literacy and why is it important in early childhood education?

The origins of critical literacy can be traced to domains such as feminism, multiculturalism, critical theory, anti-racism, and post-structuralism, each presenting different perspectives on the influence of power dynamics in society (Janks, 2000). Comber (1999) clarifies that despite the different orientations, the starting point of these viewpoints are:

…about shaping young people who can analyse what is going on; who will ask why things are the way they are; who will question who benefits from the ways things are and who can imagine how things might be different and who can act to make things more equitable (p. 4).

Based on a literature review spanning thirty years, Lewison, Flint and van Sluys (2002) found that critical literacy provides educators with the opportunity to explore social issues and discuss ways children can contribute to positive change in the community (cited in Norris, Lucas, & Prudhoe, 2012). It is vital to encourage children to be open to different perspectives and explore challenging concepts presented in texts, such as diversity, divorce, stereotypes, bullying, disability, and poverty as these are issues relevant to people of all ages, including children in the early years (Lewison et el., 2002; Mankiw & Strasser, 2013). The objective of the discussion therefore does not stop at the analysis of text but includes reflection on one’s own experiences, which promotes social awareness and positive actions.

One might question how relevant social issues are to children in early childhood education. Ayers, Connolly, Harper and Bonnano (cited in Hawkins, 2014) point out that “children as young as three have the capability to develop negative attitudes and prejudices towards particular groups” (p. 725). The New Zealand Early Childhood Curriculum Te Whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa (Te Whāriki) (MoE, 2017) supports the cultivation of social justice. The strand contribution voices the aspiration that children will demonstrate “confidence to stand up for themselves and others against biased ideas and discriminatory behaviour” (p. 37). Teachers can achieve this through creating opportunities for children to “discuss bias and to challenge prejudice and discriminatory attitudes” (p. 39). Therefore, young children can be involved in critical literacy through meaning making, perspective sharing, and reflecting on the social justice concepts presented in picture books.

Picture book reading

Picture book reading is an interactive, sociocultural experience, where adults and children can engage in collaborative learning (Helming & Reid, 2017; Norris et al., 2012). Picture books make great teaching tools as they bring in fresh perspectives on social issues, prompting children to explore concepts and  consider how this might influence their actions (Robertson, 2018). When children’s perspectives broaden through critical discussions, positive attitudes towards others in society are also likely to take shape (Kim, 2016). Picture book reading also supports the development of oral language needed for critical thinking and discussion (Education Review Office [ERO], 2017). Shared picture book reading enables meaningful, shared conversations and the introduction of a wide vocabulary, while children ask questions and share their understandings and experiences (ERO, 2017). An example of this was evident in my study when children were asked during a reading session using the children’s book Don’t Panic Annika (Bell & Morris, 2011):

“What does that mean when you say ‘panic’? When did you feel scared?” to which a child responded: “When I was four or even three, every morning, I was scared and I could not even see my mum or my dad; I thought it was a monster”, while another expressed, “When I was trying to peel the potatoes, I thought I was going to hit my finger. I know what panicky means. You scream, crying and like stomping your feet” (Law, 2012, p. 66).

This question supported the children to connect a new word to their real life experiences, which helped them “make sense of learning, literacy, life and themselves” (MoE, 2009, p. 23). When teachers support children to learn new words through making connections to prior knowledge and experiences, children will then have the vocabulary needed to engage in further conversations around the topic.

The art of questioning

Questioning is defined by how adults ask questions meaningfully and how adults elicit children’s questions through strategies such as probing, listening, commenting, and modelling thinking out loud. Open-ended questions foster a good balance between a hands-on and hands-off approach to teaching as they provoke thinking while accepting individual unique perspectives. Open-ended questions promote open-mindedness and endless possibilities. A child-centred approach allows children to bring their own cultural perspectives and understanding of the world to the table, enabling them to make connections and form their own working theories (Peters & Kelly, 2011). These abilities to make meanings and connections, ask questions, consider multiple perspectives, and make predictions are also learning dispositions beneficial for success in reading (Whyte, 2019). 

In addition to teacher questioning, children should be encouraged to be proactive at asking questions as well. It is vital to strike a balance between teacher questioning and child questioning where both engage in active listening and exchanging of thoughts, opinions, and wonderings based on personal experiences and feelings (Mackey & de Vocht-van Alphen, 2016). This can be achieved by moving away from the commonly used ‘teacher-question, student-answer, and teacher-reaction‘ pattern which can inhibit learning if used improperly, as it can cause excessive attention to guessing what is in the teacher’s mind rather than being creative in exploring more in-depth about the texts  (MoE, 2003). Levy (2016) supports this noting the importance of creating learning environments where children are encouraged to ask questions and explore dominant discourses in texts, while teachers’ open-ended questions welcome individual opinions and model critical thinking. Te Whāriki (MoE, 2017)aspires for children to be active questioners and thinkers on issues in life that are relevant to them. Supporting this goal, children should be encouraged to inquire, reflect, challenge ideas and make meanings, which support engagement in critical literacy. These opportunities for children to express opinions and ask questions are a way to advocate for their own and others’ rights (Luff, Kanyal, Shehu, & Brewis, 2016), contributing both to social justice and creating an equitable learning environment. 

Examples of questions

Some examples of questions will be shared and discussed in this section to show how they can be used in purposeful ways to promote engagement in critical literacy. This includes making connections to prior knowledge and experiences; sharing perspectives and reflecting on ideas in the story to explore possible responses. It is worth noting that the proposed practices are not hierarchical in importance or sequential, but rather implemented according to both the content and storyline of the books, and the children’s sociocultural context. This includes taking into consideration factors such as families’ beliefs and values, development appropriateness, and the intended outcomes for the children.

Prompts for making connections to prior knowledge and experiences

What happened in the story? What does this [picture/word] say? How do you know? Have you [done/seen] this before? Tell me about it. Can you remember …? What happened? How is [the character] feeling? Why is [the character] feeling this way?

When teachers actively support children to make meaning through connecting to their prior knowledge experiences, children are supported in developing a critical stance towards text (Mackey & de Vocht-van Alphen, 2016). When being read a story about Alfie and the Big Boys (Hughes, 2007) a group of five-year-old children were asked, “Why is Ian [a big boy in the story] not talking to the little kids?” Although the story portrays Ian as happy playing with another little girl, the children offered their own interpretations suggesting; “He may be angry at them” and “He doesn’t know their names”. This story was purposefully selected for the children who had just transitioned from early childhood centres into new entrant classrooms. By eliciting the children’s voice, the teacher was able to understand the challenges the children were facing and the thoughts that were guiding their actions, and was able to introduce strategies to support their sense of belonging and social competence (Law, 2012).

Books such as Mum and Dad Glue (Gray, 2009) and No Ordinary Family (Krause, 2013) convey messages around the different family structures; the first a narrative about a child’s feelings over his parents’ separation and the latter looking at children’s experience of being in a blended family. These books resonate with many children nowadays and present opportunities for teachers to use them as a tool to support children to help clarify misconceptions or provide reassurance for the anxiety they may be feeling. Questions like “Who do you live with now?”, “What do you do when you are with [Mum/Dad]?” or “Do you like sharing your room with your [half/step siblings]? Why?” provokes children to talk about their own experience or opinions which could then lead to further discussions around fairness and family diversity.

Prompts for sharing perspectives

What do you think [the character] could do? What else?  What is going to happen next? Are these pictures the same or different? Teachers need to also allow time for children to respond to images before starting to read. Prompt or model thinking out loud if needed, for example: “What can you see?”, “I wonder how [the character] is feeling?”

Empowerment is one of the principles that drives the vision for children at the heart of Te Whāriki (MoE, 2017). Effective questioning and giving time for children to respond to what they see, can empower them to create stories in different ways according to their own views and interests. Questions like “What is going to happen next?” prompt children to make predictions about the story and form questions based on their knowledge of the world, understanding that their voice and opinion are valid while realising that others can bring in their own perspectives too.

It is equally important that teachers take time to listen to children, allowing them to share their ideas and ask questions, thereby recognising that they are active participants (Peters & Kelly, 2011). This facilitation of social interactions amongst children prompts them to be open-minded and become aware that people give meaning to texts in different ways (Bailin, Case, Coombs, & Daniels, 2010). This is crucial to critical literacy as perspective-taking and empathy are two social competencies that enhance the attributes of sharing and caring (Robertson, 2018). The digital book Oat the Goat (MoE, 2018) is a great teaching tool for encouraging perspective-taking and empathy as children are given opportunities to make choices and justify their opinions. This can be done by asking “What would you do if you were the Goat? Why?” in the scene where Amos, a mossy, green, hairy creature, was laughed at and criticised by a few sheep for how he looks, calling him “a weirdo” and “mossy head”. Further probing concepts of bullying or discrimination can be done by modelling thinking out loud, “Look at Amos, I wonder how he’s feeling when the sheep laugh at him?” With this, children are encouraged to reflect on the situation, share their perspectives, while respecting that their peers may hold differing views from their own.

Wordless picture books like Bee & Me (Jay, 2016) is one that facilitates children to use their own unique imagination and prior knowledge to fill in the details, taking away different meanings with them (Law & Zheng, 2013). Throughout the text, children are presented with images that leave them room to question or add their own voice to it. Simple probing questions like, “What can you see?”, “What do you think this picture means?” encourage children’s voice and input, which supports the strand of contribution in Te Whāriki (MoE, 2017) where children become increasingly capable of “recognising and appreciating their own ability to learn” (p. 37).

Prompts to reflect on concepts and exploring actions

What would happen if…?  Is it good or bad to…? Is it ok if/when…? Why or why not? What would you do/feel if you are [a character]? Who do you like in this story? Why?

It is imperative that children recognise how a particular text may affect their feelings, thoughts, or perceptions in order to be active citizens who are able to think about their responsibilities in the environment they live in. The Selfish Crocodile (Charles, 2010) illustrates a self-centered crocodile who initially refuses to share the forest with the other animals but eventually becomes friendly and considerate after being helped by a mouse. Children can be invited to share their thoughts through questions such as “Is it ok to have the whole space to yourself? What will happen if you do that?” or “What can you say to your friends so they play with you?” These questions prompt children to use their comprehension of the story and the images to reflect on issues of equality and inclusion and through a collaborative reading experience, they can develop an awareness of certain positive behaviours in life that promotes social justice.

One example from the book Zoobots (Whatley & Whatley, 2010) shows how children are supported to not only identify key message of the story but also further reflect on their own thoughts about friendship.

Teacher: What do you think this story is about? Child A: Making friends . Teacher: What about making friends? Child A: Like they build a friend and that‘s kind of like people finding friends. At this time, another child, B, added his own point of view about friendship. Child B: You cannot have too many friends. Teacher: But was it ok they (the characters) found another friend? Child B: Yes. Teacher: Did it matter in the end what the friend looked like? Child B: No. (Law, 2012, p. 64)

In this example, the teacher ensures that the main concept in the story connects to the children’s lives and that Child B can form an inclusive view about making friends. Similarly, other social justice issues such as bullying and discrimination can be explored by using books such as Isaac and His Amazing Asperger Superpowers (Walsh, 2016) or Julian Is A Mermaid (Love, 2018) engaging children in further discussions around the message, leading to prompts that support their application to their own experiences. The first book illustrates how a child with Asperger’s syndrome would perceive the world and the second book is about a boy who wants to be a mermaid. Questions such as “If you are Isaac’s [character] friend, what will you do to play with him?” or “Is it okay for boys to play with dolls?” and “Is it okay for girls to be firemen?” can foster positive attitudes in children to matters relevant to their lives and with the growing awareness of equality, empower them to act with kindness and empathy.

Critical literacy in early childhood education is warranted with the increased complexity and diversity of society and the need for children to be socially responsible individuals who can take the lead and make good decisions and actions in life. Critical literacy helps address real life issues through empowering children to make connections, share perspectives, and reflect on ideas and explore possible responses.   This article advocates for the purposeful use of questioning in promoting critical literacy through picture book reading experiences, where there is a balance between teacher questioning and children questioning to promote critical, creative, and reflective conversations. A sociocultural approach has been applied, where children’s prior knowledge and experience are activated and where picture book choices are relevant to matters relating to their lives in order for the learning to be meaningful and impactful. This can be practiced by having reflective teachers who are critical and conscious of their own beliefs, assumptions, and biases, and an environment that ensures children’s views and feelings are valued and that their voices are listened to.

• Bailin, S., Case, R., Coombs, J. R., & Daniels, L. B. (2010). Conceptualizing critical thinking. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 31( 3), 285-302.
• Bell, J. C., & Morris, J. (2011). Don’t panic Annika . Australia: Koala Book Company.
• Charles, F. (2010). The selfish crocodile. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Comber, B. (1999, November). Critical literacies: Negotiating powerful and pleasurable curricula - How do we foster critical literacy through English language arts? Paper presented at the National Council of Teachers of English 89th Annual Convention, Denver, Colorado. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED444183
• Education Review Office (2017). Extending their language - Expanding their world: Children’s oral language (birth - 8 years). Wellington, New Zealand: Author.
• Gray, K. (2009). Mum and Dad glue . London: Hachette Children’s Group.
• Hawkins, K. (2014). Teaching for social justice, social responsibility and social inclusion: a respectful pedagogy for twenty-first century early childhood education. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 22 (5), 723-738.
• Helmling, L. & Reid, R. (2017). Unpacking picture books: Space for complexity? Early Education, Vol. 61, 14-17.  
• Hughes, S. (2007). Alfie and the big boys . United Kingdom: Random House.
• Janks, H. (2000). Domination, access, diversity and design: A synthesis for critical literacy education. Educational Review, 52 (2), 175-186.
• Jay, A. (2016). Bee & me. Denver: Accord Publishing.
• Kim, S. J. (2016). Opening up spaces for early critical literacy: Korean kindergarteners exploring diversity through multicultural picture books. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 39 (2), 176-187.
• Krause, U. (2013). No ordinary family . Germany: North-South Books.
• Law, S. -Y. (2012). Effective strategies for teaching young children critical thinking through picture book reading: A case study in the New Zealand context (Unpublished master’s thesis). Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
• Law, S. –Y. & Zheng, L. (2013). Children’s comprehension of visual texts: A study conducted based on 5-6 year-old children’s oral narration of picture books. Published in Zao³ Qi¹ Jiao⁴ Yu⁴ (Jiao⁴ Ke¹ Yan² Ban³), China. Retrieved from https://ishare.iask.sina.com.cn/f/335ceALmHca.html
• Levy, R. (2016). A historical reflection on literacy, gender and opportunity: implications for the teaching of literacy in early childhood education. International Journal of Early Years Education, 24 (3), 279-293.
• Lewison, M., Flint, A. S., & Van Sluys, K. (2002). Taking on critical literacy: The journey of newcomers and novices. Language Arts, 79 (5), 382-392.
• Love, J. (2018). Julian is a mermaid. Massachusetts: Candlewick Press.
• Luff, P., Kanyal, M., Shehu, M. & Brewis, N. (2016). Educating the youngest citizens - possibilities for early childhood education and care, in England. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 14 (3), 197-219.
• Mackey, G. & de Vocht-van Alphen, L. (2016). Teachers explore how to support young children’s agency for social justice. International Journal of Early Childhood, 48 (3), 353-367.
• Mankiw, S. & Strasser, J. (2013). Tender topics: Exploring sensitive issues with pre-K through first grade children through read-alouds. Young Children, 68( 1), 84-89.
• Ministry of Education. (2003). Effective literacy practice: in Years 1 to 4. Wellington: Learning Media Ltd.
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• Ministry of Education. (2017). Te Whāriki: He Whāriki Mātauranga mō ngā Mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early Childhood Curriculum. Wellington: Learning Media Ltd.
• Ministry of Education. (2018). Oat the goat. Retrieved from https://www.bullyingfree.nz/parents-and-whanau/oat-the-goat/
• Norris, K., Lucas, L., & Prudhoe, C. (2012). Examining critical lteracy: Preparing preservice teachers to use critical lteracy in the early childhood classroom. Multicultural Education, 19 (2), 59–62.
• Peters, S. & Kelly, J. (2011). Exploring children’s perspectives: Multiple ways of seeing and knowing the child. Waikato Journal of Education, 16 (3), 19-30.
• Robertson, R. (January/February 2018). Teaching children to create a better world. Exchange, 8-10. 
• Walsh, M. (2016). Isaac and his amazing Asperger superpowers . Massachusetts: Candlewick Press.
• Whatley, B. & Whatley, B. S. (2010). Zoobots. Australia: Harper Collins.
• Whyte, M. (2019). Soft skills surfacing in collaborative reading practices at home and early childhood centres. Early Education, 65 , 23-28.

How to cite this article

Shu-Yen, L. (2020). Critical literacy in early childhood education: Questions that prompt critical conversations. He Kupu, 6 (3), 26-33.

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Critical Literacy

Critical literacy is a learning approach where students are expected to examine various texts to understand the relationship between language and the power it can hold. Students critically analyze and evaluate the meaning of texts as they relate to topics on equity, power and social justice. These texts are then used to equip students with a critical stance, response or action towards an issue.

Critical literacy refers to the process of becoming aware of one’s experience relative to power relations, often realized through reading and writing. Critical literacy takes place in various learning environments and cultural contexts. This reading and writing-based learning process encourages students to accept, reject or reconstruct ideologies presented in texts.

Product Overview

Teaching resources, more terms starting with c, capstone course.

University Library

• University Library Home
• Washington and Lee University Research Guides

Information Literacy Teaching Toolkit

• Research Assignment Design
• Information Literacy Toolkit
• Information Literacy
• Videos & Tutorials

Designing Effective Research Assignments

• Designing a Research Assignment
• Designing an Information Literacy Curriculum

Below are questions to ask yourself when designing an assignment that promotes information literacy and critical thinking skills.

• What will students learn as a result of completing this assignment?
• What are the information literacy student learning outcomes?
• What are the writing or presentation outcomes?
• What are the discipline-specific outcomes?
• Are these goals clear to students?
• Does our library have these resources? Are they freely and easily available elsewhere?
• Is there a link to the library (or other needed resources) in the assignment and/or syllabus?
• Is there a link to any related student services (peer tutoring, technology help desk, etc.) in the assignment and/or syllabus?
• Does this model a process students can repeat in the future? Is that clear to students?
• Is there space for students to reflect on what they are doing, which strategies are working and which aren’t?
• Does this provide enough time for students to be successful?
• Does it provide time for you to give feedback to students, and for students to revise and/or integrate that feedback into their next piece of work?
• Do you have grading criteria or a rubric to help you score student work? Is this available to students?
• Might you ask past students if you can use their work as a sample, or can you create your own?
• How will students access the sample(s)? Hand out in class, provide in Moodle, etc.?

Source: Greenfield Community College Library.  “Information Literacy Toolkit for Faculty.”  gcc.mass.edu, Greenfield Community College. Accessed 1 Jan. 2021.

Scaffolding and reinforcing information literacy skills and concepts throughout your courses and program, will allow students to develop and master their skill set. Below are a number of questions to think about while creating course and program materials. 

• Is it clear to students how these skills connect to continued study and/or real life?
• What do they already know? Can you assume, or do you need to find out?
• Which information literacy skills do you need to teach, in addition to your course content?
• What can a librarian help teach?
• What needs to be done during class time (for face-to-face classes)?
• What can be done outside of class, as homework?
• What supports does the library already have available (i.e. Moodle plug-ins, videos, handouts, etc.)?
• If you want a librarian to teach, where does that fit in the course schedule?
• If not, what needs to change? Course content, the research assignment, or both?

Greenfield Community College Library.  “Information Literacy Toolkit for Faculty.”  gcc.mass.edu, Greenfield Community College. Accessed 1 Jan. 2021.

Ideas and Examples

• Classic Examples of Research Assignments
• Ideas for Research-related Assignments

Assignments below are linked to documents. Please feel to download and edit for your classroom or context and to remix assignments. A librarian would be happy to tailor a version of an assignment or scaffold research skills into your class.

Example of a short assignment that asks students to think critically about two news sources.

Example of an annotated bibliography assignment that asks students to think critically about their sources.

Example of a research paper abstract assignment that asks students to closely evaluate their topics and sources needed.

Example of an assignment that asks students to brainstorm and evaluate research questions.

Example of an assignment that asks to compare and evaluate various sources.

Example of an assignment that asks students to critically approach source use and paraphrasing.

Example of an assignment that asks students to detail the research process by recording search strategies and resources located.

Example of an assignment that asks students to choose and refine a research topic.

Example of an assignment that asks students to think critically about sources.

Example of an assignment that asks students to crucially evaluate their research topic by evalauting sources.

There are any number of library-related assignments that can be incorporated into a course. Here are a few examples that can be adapted to most subjects (assignments may be repeated across categories).

Critical Evaluations & Comparisons

• Locate a popular magazine article, then find a scholarly article on the same subject. Compare the two articles for content, style, bias, audience, etc.
• Analyze the content, style, and audience of three journals in a given discipline.
• Choose an autobiography of someone related to the course content. Find secondary sources which deal with an idea or event described in the autobiography. Compare and contrast the sources.
• Evaluate a website based on specific criteria.
• Determine the adequacy of a psychological test based on the literature about the test. Then develop a test battery designed for a particular clinical (or other) situation, by using published tests and the literature about them.
• To develop the ability to evaluate sources, students prepare a written criticism of the literature on a particular issue by finding book reviews, by searching citation indexes to see who is quoting the context of the scholarship in a particular field.
• Students use bibliographies, guides to the literature and the Internet to find primary sources on an issue or historical period. They can contrast the treatment in the primary sources with the treatment in secondary sources including their textbook.
• Write a newspaper story describing an event--political, social, cultural, whatever suits the objectives-based on their research. The assignment can be limited to one or two articles, or it can be more extensive. This is a good exercise in critical reading and in summarizing. The assignment gains interest if several people research the same event in different sources and compare the newspaper stories that result.
• Contrast journal articles or editorials from recent publications reflecting conservative and liberal tendencies.
• Write a review of a musical performance. Include reference not only to the performance attended, but to reviews of the composition's premiere, if possible. Place the composition in a historical context using timetables, general histories and memoirs when available, using this information to gain insight into its current presentation.

Fact-Finding Research

• Read an editorial and find facts to support it.
• In biology or health classes, assign each student a 'diagnosis' (can range from jock itch to Parkinson's Disease). Have them act as responsible patients by investigating both the diagnosis and the prescribed treatment. Results presented in a two-page paper should cover: a description of the condition and its symptoms; its etiology; its prognosis; the effectiveness of the prescribed treatment, its side effects and contradictions, along with the evidence; and, finally, a comparison of the relative effectiveness of alternate treatments. This can also be accompanied by oral or visual presentations, slideshow, poster session, etc.
• Students follow a piece of legislation through Congress. This exercise is designed primarily to help them understand the process of government. However it could also be used in something like a 'critical issues' course to follow the politics of a particular issue. (What groups are lobbying for or against a piece of legislation? How does campaign financing affect the final decision? etc.).
• Similar to the above, have students follow a particular foreign policy situation as it develops. Who are the organizations involved? What is the history of the issue? What are the ideological conflicts?
• Nominate someone or a group for the Nobel Peace Prize. Learn about the prize, the jury, etc. Justify the nominations.
• Write an exam on one area; answer some or all of the questions (depending on professor's preference). Turn in an annotated bibliography of source material, and rationale for questions.

Career-Based Research

• Assemble background information on a company or organization in preparation for a hypothetical interview. For those continuing in academia, research prospective colleagues' and professors' backgrounds, publications, current research, etc.
• Ask each student to describe a career they envision themselves in and then research the career choice. What are the leading companies in that area? Why? (If they choose something generic like secretarial or sales, what is the best company in their county of residence to work for? Why?) Choose a company and find out what its employment policies are-flex time, family leave, stock options. If the company is traded publicly, what is its net worth? What is the outlook for this occupation? Expected starting salary? How do the outlook and salaries vary by geography?

Personal Research

• Locate primary sources from the date of your birth. You may use one type type of material only once, i.e., one newspaper headline of a major event, one quotation, one biography, one census figure, one top musical number, one campus event, etc. Use a minimum of six different sources. Write a short annotation of each source and include the complete bibliographic citation.

Historical Research (for any subject)

• Select a scholar/researcher in a field of study and explore that person's career and ideas. Besides locating biographical information, students prepare a bibliography of writings and analyze the reaction of the scholarly community to the researcher's work.
• Pick a topic and research it in literature from the 60s and 70s. Then research the same topic in the literature of the 80s and 90s. Compare and contrast the topic in a bibliographic essay.
• Write a biographical sketch of a famous person. Use biographical dictionaries, popular press and scholarly sources, and books to find information about the person.
• Everyone becomes an historical figure for a day. Students research the person, time-period, culture, etc. They give an oral presentation in class and answer questions.
• Similar to the above, students adopt a persona and write letters or journal entries that person might have written. The level of research required to complete the assignment can range from minimal to a depth appropriate for advanced classes.
• News conferences offer good opportunities to add depth to research and thus might work particularly well with advanced students. A verbatim transcript of an analytical description of a news conference can serve as a format for simulated interviews with well known people of any period. What questions would contemporaries have asked? What questions would we now, with hindsight, want to ask? How would contemporary answers have differed from those that might be given today? Here students have an opportunity to take a rigorous, analytical approach, both in terms of the questions to be asked and the information contained in the answers.

Biographical Research

(annotated) bibliography variations.

• Prepare an annotated bibliography of books, journal articles, and other sources on a topic. Include evaluative annotations.
• Create a Web page on a narrow topic relevant to the course. Include meta sites, e-journals, discussion lists, and organizations.
• Update an existing bibliography or review of the literature.
• Compile an anthology of readings by one person or on one topic. Include an introduction with biographical information about the authors, and the rationale for including the works [justify with reviews or critical materials].
• Choose a topic of interest and search it on the Internet. Cross reference all search engines and find all websites which discuss the topic. Like a research paper, students will have to narrow and broaden accordingly. The student will then produce an annotated bibliography on the topic, based solely on internet references.
• Create an anthology. The model for this format is the annotated book of readings with which most students are familiar. In this case, however, rather than being given the anthology, they are asked to compile it themselves. The assignment can limit the acceptable content to scholarly articles written within the last ten years, or it can be broadened to include chapters or excerpts from monographs and significant older materials. Students should be asked to write an introduction to the anthology that would display an overall understanding of the subject. In addition, each item should be described, and an explanation given as to why it is included. The assignment could also require a bibliography of items considered for inclusion as well as copies of the items selected. In any subject course in which students would benefit from finding and reading a variety of scholarly, such an assignment would guarantee that they use their library skills to locate the articles, their critical reading skills to make the selections, and a variety of writing skills to produce the introduction, the summaries, and the explanations.

Literature Review Variations

• Each student in the class is given responsibility for dealing with a part of the subject of the course. He or she is then asked to 1) find out what the major reference sources on the subject are; 2) find out "who's doing what where" in the field; 3) list three major unresolved questions about the subject; 4) prepare a 15 minute oral presentation to introduce this aspect of the subject to the class.
• Conduct the research for a paper except for writing the final draft. At various times students are required to turn in 1) their choice of topic; 2) an annotated bibliography; 3) an outline; 4) a thesis statement; 5) an introduction and a conclusion.
• Write a grant proposal addressed to a specific funding agency; include supporting literature review, budget, etc. Have class peer groups review. (Best proposal could be submitted for funding of summer research).

Collins Memorial Library.  “Ideas for Library-Related Assignments.”  Pugetsound.edu, University of Puget Sound. Accessed 1 Jan. 2021.

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Brewton-Parker hosts Amy Denty, Georgia Department of Education director of literacy

MOUNT VERNON, Ga. — On Monday, Sept. 9, Brewton-Parker College was honored to host Amy Denty, Director of Literacy for the Georgia Department of Education. Local educators and BPC Education students had the opportunity to engage with Denty as she discussed the critical role of literacy in K-12 education and shared current strategies and practices used by educators across Georgia.

Denty is a distinguished K-12 educator with a remarkable career dedicated to advancing literacy and instructional quality in Georgia. Her journey began as a classroom science teacher, and she has since held influential roles such as Instructional Specialist for GaDOE’s Office of Rural Education and Innovation, Director of Curriculum and Instruction, and Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning for the Wayne County School System. Throughout her career, Denty has been instrumental in developing and refining literacy initiatives, collaborating on curriculum standards, and serving as a key link between rural districts and the Georgia Department of Education. Notably, she has contributed significantly to the Dyslexia Task Force and played a crucial role in updating the GaDOE’s Dyslexia Informational Handbook.

In her presentation, Denty used the metaphor of honey to convey the complexities and rewards of teaching literacy. Just as honey is a natural soother and its collection can be challenging, so too can reading be both difficult and profoundly gratifying. She highlighted the importance of effective reading instruction and offered practical strategies and personal insights to motivate and support both educators and students. Denty remarked, “If we can ensure that all of our students become proficient readers, it opens up their choices in life.” Her extensive classroom experience and dedication to supporting teachers enriched the session, providing valuable knowledge and encouragement to those present.

Dr. Beverly Faircloth, Assistant Professor of Education and Division Chair of Education, Behavioral Sciences, and Humanities at Brewton-Parker College, expressed her appreciation for Denty’s visit. “Denty’s presentation provided our students with invaluable real-world insights and underscored the vital role of literacy education. Her dedication and experience are truly inspiring as our students prepare for their future careers in education.”

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Introducing the TCEA AI Literacy Framework for Students: Empowering the Next Generation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming every aspect of our lives, from how we work and communicate to how we learn and solve problems. As educators, it’s crucial to prepare our students for the future where AI will play a central role. Just like the need years ago for instruction on how to use the internet and then how to master digital literacy skills, AI literacy is a critical component of a sound education today. That’s why I am thrilled to introduce the TCEA AI Literacy Framework for Students .

This comprehensive document is designed to equip students across all grade levels—K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12—with the knowledge and skills they need to understand and engage with AI safely and effectively. It provides learning opportunities across basic use, ethics, safety and privacy, and future impact.

The TCEA AI Literacy Framework is more than just a guide; it’s a roadmap to integrating AI concepts into your classroom in a meaningful and age-appropriate way. Whether you’re working with young learners in kindergarten or guiding high school students through complex AI projects, this framework offers tailored lesson plans that align with students’ cognitive development and curricular needs. By embracing this framework, you’re not just teaching students about AI; you’re empowering them to become critical thinkers, problem solvers, and innovators in a world increasingly driven by technology.

Tips for Implementing the TCEA AI Literacy Framework

• Start Early and Build Gradually: AI can seem like a complex topic, but with the right approach, even the youngest students can grasp the basics. Begin with simple concepts in the K-2 grade band, such as recognizing patterns and making predictions, and then build on these foundations as students progress through the grades. By the time they reach high school, they’ll be ready to tackle more advanced AI concepts, like machine learning and ethical considerations.
• Incorporate Real-World Examples: To make AI relevant and engaging for students, connect the lessons to real-world applications. For instance, when teaching about AI in the 6-8 grade band, you might discuss how AI is used in everyday tools like voice assistants or for creating recommendation algorithms on social media. This helps students see the practical implications of AI and understand its impact on their lives.
• Encourage Collaboration and Creativity: AI isn’t just about algorithms and data; it’s also about creativity and problem-solving. Use the framework to foster a collaborative learning environment where students work together to explore AI concepts. Encourage them to think creatively about how AI can be used to solve problems in their communities or to improve the world around them.

The TCEA AI Literacy Framework completely free and is your key to preparing students for a future where AI will be an integral part of their personal and professional lives. By integrating this framework into your teaching, you’re helping to shape the innovators and leaders of tomorrow. We invite you to explore the framework, experiment with the lesson plans, and join us in making AI literacy a cornerstone of education.

Lori Gracey

Lori Gracey currently serves as the executive director of the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) and is responsible for training technology directors, administrators, curriculum supervisors, librarians, and teachers across the country. Since 2009, she has led TCEA in membership and revenue growth, helped to pay off their building and purchase a new, larger building, and implemented new conferences, partnerships with other associations, and professional development opportunities for members and non-members. She serves more than 75,000 members and oversees a staff of 20. Lori has served on the board of the Texas Society of Association Executives and SXSWedu, and she has served as the Regional Program Chair for the ISTE 2017 and 2021 Convention in San Antonio. Lori has 28 years of experience in education, with 22 years as a curriculum and technology director.

Storynest.ai: Reshaping Storytelling in Three Quick Ways

Write to learn: creating a districtwide culture of literacy, you may also like, enhance math learning with free math ai tools, leveraging ai for efficient lesson planning: the plan..., five news literacy resources for back-to-school, responsible ai adoption, tcea eles: essential learning expectations, five digital ai tools: tech trends impacting education, understanding and embracing vintage ai, creating a student interactive with claude: it’s easier..., the learns cycle: putting ai in instruction, part....

This is amazing!

Thanks so much, Victoria. I’m glad you’ve found it helpful.

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Newly arrived refugees receive critical digital literacy

Washington’s newcomers continue to receive support in education, community resources, employment opportunities, and healthcare through a simple but powerful service—digital access. The families, youths, and adults we serve continue to receive the laptops and internet access that are integral to life in the U.S. and allow them to access remote services.

In 2023, 72 laptops were distributed, 42 people benefited from digital literacy classes, and a further 150 people benefited from 16 total group digital literacy events. 

One of our female clients, Nadia, who recently resettled in King County from Afghanistan, received a laptop and digital literacy tutoring within the first few months of her arrival in 2023. Over the course of 10 weeks, her digital literacy tutor taught her how to navigate Zoom and other basic computer functions, which enabled her to take online English classes more frequently.

Now that she is learning English, she reports that she has been communicating more successfully with her child’s teachers and feels excited to be able to engage in her child’s educational experience. Nadia told us that she is looking forward to building on her new digital literacy skills professionally and will continue her learning with intermediate level trainings on email and Microsoft Word.

Another client, Henry, received a laptop to participate in IRC-led citizenship classes which are held on Zoom. He was able to successfully pass his test and is now a citizen of the US after 5 years living here.  Congratulations , Henry!

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Re-evaluating recommended optimal sleep duration: a perspective on sleep literacy.

1. Introduction

2. insufficient sleep syndrome (iss), 2.1. diagnostic criteria, 2.2. features, 2.3. prevalence, 2.4. catch-up sleep, 2.5. recent developments, 3. optimal sleep duration, 3.1. optimal sleep duration and habitual sleep duration, 3.2. recommendations for sleep duration, 3.3. methods of estimating osd, 3.4. recent topics, 4. causes of insufficient sleep, 5. potential biological consequences of insufficient sleep, 6. basic data on the impact of sleep deprivation on the developing brain, 7. sleep education for adolescence with sleep debt, 8. conclusions, conflicts of interest.

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Kohyama, J. Re-Evaluating Recommended Optimal Sleep Duration: A Perspective on Sleep Literacy. Children 2024 , 11 , 1098. https://doi.org/10.3390/children11091098

Kohyama J. Re-Evaluating Recommended Optimal Sleep Duration: A Perspective on Sleep Literacy. Children . 2024; 11(9):1098. https://doi.org/10.3390/children11091098

Kohyama, Jun. 2024. "Re-Evaluating Recommended Optimal Sleep Duration: A Perspective on Sleep Literacy" Children 11, no. 9: 1098. https://doi.org/10.3390/children11091098

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At the 2024 commemoration of International Literacy Day by QEDA recently, experts in the education sector called for attitude change to promote and embrace multilingual education by enhancing teachers’ capacity to effectively implement language policies, as well as addressing the issue of identity and the gap between the urban and rural areas and the issue of low literacy. Funmi Ogundare and Kuni Tyessi report

Quality Education Development Associates (QEDA) recently joined the rest of the world to commemorate the 2024 International Literacy Day, set aside every September 8 to highlight the importance and value of literary education for individuals and groups and provide benefits for the wider global culture. With the theme, ‘Youths as Vanguard for Multilingual Education to Achieve Peace and Mutual Understanding’, the organisation brought together stakeholders drawn from the media, influential voices on social media, teachers, policymakers, and youth advocates for a round table discussion.

To promote equitable access to quality education and improve learning outcomes, the discussion centred around the following: What is multilingual education? Multilingual education: Where are we and where do we want to be? Role of Youths and Media in promoting Multilingual Education for peace and Mutual understanding. The stakeholders called for a change in attitudes to promote and embrace multilingual education by enhancing teachers’ capacity to implement language policies effectively. They emphasised that teacher education should focus on developing competence in multilingual pedagogy, creating educational resources such as textbooks and teaching materials, and integrating technology by developing a language app.

They also called for research to generate evidence-based, locally-driven solutions catering to all learners. They explained that these efforts would help children become bilingual, improving their reading skills and career prospects. Earlier in his remarks, QEDA Team Lead and Founder Mr. Nurudeen Lawal, who has been promoting literacy for 25 years, emphasized that Africa’s solutions to its challenges lie within the continent.

Prof. Talatu Musa Garba, an expert in language education, highlighted that Africa’s future depends on its youth, and to make them advocates for education, their interest in multilingual learning must be fostered.

“Youths should take ownership of their education and advocate for policies prioritising multilingual learning environments,” she said.

Garba, who chaired the event, added, “It is important for Nigeria to explore different models of multilingual education.”

The guest speaker and executive chairman of the Abia State Universal Basic Education Board, Mrs. Lydia Onuoha, emphasised the theme’s significance, noting that multilingual education fosters understanding across diverse cultures.

“Supporting multilingual education helps bridge divides between groups, promoting peace and unity. This year’s theme is timely for Nigeria as it will enhance access to education while preserving cultural diversity,” she stated.

Onuoha also stressed that literacy is crucial for human and social development, gender equality, and societal survival. She advocated for improving children’s learning outcomes by starting with familiar languages and integrating technology.

She stated that out of 52 African countries, Nigeria ranks number 35 in literacy level, just as over four million teachers are needed globally to tackle the issue of acute teacher shortage. So far, the chairman noted that it has been discovered that 4.7 million Nigerian children speak pidgin as their first language. She said while the Nigerian educational curriculum favours multilingual language, the challenges, which include survival instinct, rural and urban influence, and socioeconomic vibes, must be addressed.

Reiterating that there are policies surrounding multilingual education, but with poor policy implementation, better terms are needed to describe indigenous languages and help children transition from indigenous languages to English.

She stated, “Nigeria ranks number 35 in Africa regarding literacy level. There is also the issue of teacher shortage. I thought it was just in Nigeria until I saw the paper from the last UN Assembly, where it was stated that it is a global problem. The world right now needs four million teachers to tackle the issue of teacher shortage.

“We have to address the issue of identity as well as the gap between the urban and rural divide and the issue of low literacy. The very big problem in Nigeria right now is the issue of disunity, insecurity and people so divided along several lines, and a good instrument to promote peace right now is our diversity in all the over 500 languages in Nigeria.”

Onuoha added, “We must address all the issues in order for us to change our narratives. There’s also the issue of rural and urban influence, as well as socioeconomic vibes, coming to bear on where they are. So another language other than their indigenous languages overshadows their mother tongue, but again, for economic reasons, the survival instinct plays more role here.”

Similarly, the founder of the African Back2 Basics Edu Initiative, Dr. Olusoji Adeniyi, explained that a national dialogue needs to be held on language policy, noting that with this in place, it becomes imperative to standardise local languages, bearing in mind the power of language over the people.

He stated that the issue of inter-ethnic and multiracial languages has further added to the challenges on the ground. The dialogue that must be kept going will serve as enlightenment to language experts and teachers, a relief in sight.

“The society needs to stratify the implementation. The challenge with the urban setting is that we are so urbanised that a lot of transformation will need to happen,” said Adeniyi. “Now we have multiracial language and with this, children are not getting the recommended access needed to the language of either parent. They are not sure whose language to speak and the situation becomes worse when both parents cannot even communicate in their respective mother tongues.”

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