Northern Ireland

The Irish News Young Readers: The gift of critical literacy

Finbar Burns BEd Celtic student at St Mary's University College, Donna Hazzard principal lecturer and Bronagh McCaughan, students' union president with pupils from Aquinas Diocesan Grammar School and Good Shepherd PS
Finbar Burns BEd Celtic student at St Mary's University College, Donna Hazzard principal lecturer and Bronagh McCaughan, students' union president with pupils from Aquinas Diocesan Grammar School and Good Shepherd PS Finbar Burns BEd Celtic student at St Mary's University College, Donna Hazzard principal lecturer and Bronagh McCaughan, students' union president with pupils from Aquinas Diocesan Grammar School and Good Shepherd PS

The Irish News Young Readers project has brought critical literacy into hundreds of classrooms. Participants have access to a weekly school edition of the newspaper as well as a resource booklet, produced by Donna Hazzard, a principal lecturer in literacy at St Mary's University College. Ms Hazzard received an Effective Practice in Higher Education Award for her work on the booklet. Here she sets out the educational rationale for critical literacy.

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We live in a globalised world where we have never had so much information available to us.

The production of meaning has been democratised with ever more complex forms of text production, reproduction and dissemination.

Consequently, we often become unconscious agents in the distribution and reproduction of powerful discourses that are disseminated not only to us but also through us.

Traditional literacy pedagogy is it seems, not enough for the modern world. In an era of information and disinformation overload, becoming critically literate can help us to negotiate our everyday lives in this complex terrain. Teaching critical literacy has therefore become an educational imperative.

I don't for one moment suggest that critical literacy is an instructional panacea or magic bullet for the social or educational challenges of our times, but teaching and learning should not be just matters of skill acquisition and knowledge transmission. Schools could and should be more vital places.

On any given day we can see the images of oppression, exploitation, marginalisation, cultural imperialism, powerlessness and violence not just in the world's news but everywhere around us. In that context critical literacy educates learners against any form of prejudice and oppression, developing their ability to identify it in its numerous forms. It does this by harnessing the power of what Kincheloe and Weil (2004) term complex critical thinking.

Complex critical thinking from a Freirian perspective, begins with a humility grounded in courage, respect for others, and dispositions of hope and lovingness. Failure to develop pupils as critically literate leaves them in danger of being miseducated. The question for many educationalists will be where and how to begin to enact critical literacy in their teaching.

The consensus is that critical literacy is not a formula, procedure, or specific set of practices. It is a theoretical and practical attitude, a philosophy, a mindset. Nevertheless, teachers need starting points. Freebody and Luke's Four Resources Model (1990), which has been widely circulated and adapted for use by teachers and curriculum developers internationally, identifies the necessary dispositions for the critically literate.

Freebody and Luke's model is the theoretical framework around which the The Irish News Young News Readers Critical Literacy Project is centred. It is not that some literacy teaching models work and others do not. They all work to shape and construct different literate persons, and they all have visible outcomes.

To describe the outcomes critical literacy fosters, Luke (2008) uses the metaphor of a gift, which is very apt. Echoing Paolo Freire, critical literacy is a gift because it is grounded in the lives of learners, critical in its approach to the world, it is hopeful, joyful, kind, visionary, pro-justice, activist, academically engaging, rigorous and culturally competent (Ayers et al. 2009).

What better way to prepare our learners for this complex world, than by giving them the gift of critical literacy?