Critical literacy

Critical literacy is defined as the ability to take apart various texts in media or writing to find any possible discrimination that the author might have embedded in his or her presentation of the world since authors have social and political influence. This is done by analyzing the messages promoting prejudiced power relationships found naturally in media and written material that go unnoticed otherwise by reading beyond the author’s words and examining the manner in which the author has conveyed his or her ideas about society’s norms to determine whether these ideas contain racial or gender inequality.

Critical literacy is an instructional approach, stemming from Marxist critical pedagogy, that advocates the adoption of "critical" perspectives toward text. Critical literacy encourages readers to actively analyze texts and offers strategies for what proponents describe as uncovering underlying messages. There are several different theoretical perspectives on critical literacy that have produced different pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning. All of these approaches share the basic premise that literacy requires the literate consumers of text to adopt a critical and questioning approach.

When students examine the writer’s message for bias, they are practicing critical literacy. This skill of actively engaging with the text can be used to help students become more perceptive and societally aware citizens who do not receive the messages around them from media, books, and images without first taking apart the text and relating its messages back to their own personal life experiences. Thus by getting students to question the power structures in their society, critical literacy teaches them how to dispute these written and oral views regarding issues of equality so that they may combat the social injustices against marginalized groups in their communities.

According to proponents of critical literacy, the practice is not simply a means of attaining literacy in the sense of improving the ability to decode words, syntax, etc. In fact, the ability to read words on paper is not necessarily required in order to engage in a critical discussion of "texts," which can include television, movies, web pages, music, art and other means of expression. The important thing is being able to have a discussion with others about the different meanings a text might have and teaching the potentially critically literate learner how to think flexibly about it.

Critical literacy has become a popular approach to teaching English to students in some English speaking-countries, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

For post-structuralist practitioners of critical literacy, the definition of this literacy practice can be quite malleable, but usually involves a search for discourses and reasons why certain discourses are included or left out of a text.

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Wikipedia