Abstract
This is a multiple case study exploring five high school English teachers’ perceived supports and challenges to enacting critical literacy pedagogy, and their experiences navigating the challenges. Through a structure/culture/agency framework, I sought to understand how these five teachers’ leveraging of supports and sense of agency in the face of challenges impacted the critical literacy choices they made in their classrooms. In order to understand how participants’ pedagogical challenges, supports, and agency all intersected to impact their critical literacy teaching, I used critical narrative analysis to explore the presence and/or absence of grammatical and framing agency in their narratives. The analysis found that participants mostly experienced challenges at the local (school) and institution level contexts, and navigated these challenges differently depending on the level of agency they saw themselves having in their schools.
Introduction
Critical literacy—which I define as a lens for reading, interpreting, and creating texts that suggests that no text is neutral, no person is neutral, and therefore the reading and writing of texts are never neutral activities (Brannon et al., 2010; Vasquez et al., 2019)—is important in that it allows students to be more conscious and informed when it comes to the multitude of text types they consume and produce on a daily basis. Specifically, critical literacy has the power to help those students with institutionally marginalized identities to fully understand their positions within historically created power hierarchies in order to take meaningful action against oppression and inequality (Freire, 1972). It also equips students holding historically dominant identities with the knowledge and skills to be allies and accomplices in the ongoing fight for justice. In these ways, critical literacy is closely tied to the goals of social justice education (Adams & Bell, 2016).
As a high school English teacher, the idea of critical literacy as a pedagogical opportunity never crossed my path, despite the fact that it was both exactly what I was looking for and exactly what my students needed. I have vague memories of a professor in my master’s program assigning Freire’s (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but in reality, it took 5 years in the classroom, some self-sought professional development, and a PhD for me to fully understand the possibilities of critical literacy as not just a theoretical idea, but a pedagogical possibility.
Like other methods of doing social justice work in education, enacting critical literacy into practice is met with several challenges. First, there are, by design, few models for how to “do” it because it requires an attitude towards learning, texts, and the world that is contextually dependent and inherently non-prescriptive (Luke, 2014; Vasquez et al., 2019). Second, literacy education remains steeped in normative literacy traditions that are embedded within a larger racist and classist education system, as was made apparent most recently by the rampant surge of book banning that began in the United States in 2021 that primarily targeted books about Black and LGBTQ people. The result of these challenges is that, as my teaching experience suggests, critical literacy remains largely relegated to theoretical spaces and infrequently makes its way into K-12 teacher education and classrooms.
Though experiences like mine are typical, they are not exclusive. There are talented educators across both the United States and the broader global context using critical literacy in their classrooms every day, and we have much to learn from them (Pandya et al., 2021). Specifically, understanding where these educators perceive challenges and supports to their critical literacy pedagogy can help inform how we prepare other pre-service and in-service teachers to enact critical literacy in practice, in turn helping move critical literacy from a theoretical point of interest to a pedagogical point of action. In order to contribute to this goal, in this study I sought to answer two questions:
What supports and/or challenges do self-identifying critical literacy educators face when implementing critical literacy pedagogy? How, if at all, do these teachers navigate challenges to enact critical literacy pedagogy in their classrooms?
Relevant Literature
Currently, research knows a little about what influences educators to adopt a critical mindset, and how their critical approaches translate into pedagogy. This research tells us that in the United States, an 80%–85% white, native-English-speaking teaching workforce represents a vast spectrum of beliefs and abilities when it comes to social justice and other critical approaches to education such as critical literacy (Taie & Goldring, 2018). Some novice teachers enter their classrooms committed to critical practice (Wessel-Powell & Bentley, 2021), while others find the work entirely overwhelming or outside the bounds of their responsibility as educators (Pollock et al., 2016). More often, however, teachers fall somewhere in the middle, recognizing the value of critical work thanks to personal experiences or program preparation (Ahmed, 2020), but still feeling unprepared or unable to actually incorporate social justice and critical literacy into practice (Ajayi, 2017). Overall, few studies seek to explore the spectrum of supports and challenges teachers face when implementing critical pedagogies, and none do so specifically with critical literacy. This study aims to address these gaps.
Critical literacy scholars have noted that current school curricula are normative, and that existing literacy initiatives do not examine ideologies or acknowledge the inherently political and politicized nature of texts (McLean et al., 2021). The field’s reluctance to adopt a prescriptive “how to” guide for critical literacy education, coupled with its absence from standards, curricula, and preparation programs (Brannon et al., 2010), results in a large burden of responsibility on teachers to take up and execute this important work in classrooms themselves. This work is ongoing, rigorous, and time-consuming for teachers who already feel pressed for time and resources, and the ongoing politicization of literacy education can make adopting critical approaches challenging at best and professionally risky at worst.
Although we know that critical literacy has the ability to counter the harm induced by standardized measures and dominant literacy traditions (Ávila & Moore, 2012), many teachers are still operating within the confines of standardization, which has the potential to present challenges between what is expected and what teachers feel is actually best for their students. For example, in a study of 20 veteran, justice-oriented social studies teachers, Dover et al. (2016) found that participants “were vocal about the ways the accountability climate inhibited their work by limiting the scope of available curricular resources, increasing the emphasis on standardized testing, and undermining their authority and autonomy in the classroom” (p. 464). These findings, along with the known challenges of learning and un-learning entire ways of thinking and teaching, place the challenges to critical literacy across several contextual levels as follows: at the personal level as teachers work to develop their own pedagogical tools, at the school level as they face administrative preferences, and at the broader systems level that leverages hurdles like prescribed curricula and standardized assessments.
On a positive note, critical literacy research does suggest that there are supports that can be put in place to help blossoming critical literacy educators on their pedagogical journeys. The earliest form of teacher support comes in the form of preservice preparation. Saunders (2012) explored how novice student teachers’ placements can foster the creation of critical literacy practices. Saunders spent several months of one school year in a “regular” class with a student-teacher, Ms. Morgan, and a cooperating teacher, Ms. Bacon, who shared a commitment to progressive teaching and critical approaches. These two teachers were marginalized from the rest of the English department due to their teaching beliefs, but despite what was happening elsewhere in the building, Ms. Morgan was able to practice critical literacy pedagogy because she had a like-minded, critically-oriented cooperating teacher (Saunders, 2012). Because cooperating teachers and other teacher preparation mentors can significantly impact the thinking and practice of their mentees (Clarke et al., 2014), Ms. Morgan’s critical literacy pedagogy was solidified and then reinforced under the mentorship of Ms. Bacon in ways that would have looked different with another mentor teacher even within the same school.
The coursework side of teacher preparation can also serve as a valuable site for critical literacy support, as evidenced in Wolfe (2010). In that study, 14 preservice teachers were instructed to plan and implement a unit focusing on critical literacy in their student teaching placements. With the support of coursework, an instructor, guided reflection, and each other, all were able to plan and 13/14 successfully implement units featuring student identity negotiation, student ownership, critical perspectives, and resistant reading (Wolfe, 2010). Additionally, even when not required to use critical literacy the following semester, over half still included elements of critical literacy pedagogy in their teaching, indicating that exposure and support help teachers successfully implement critical literacy lenses in their classrooms.
Finally, support is also important for in-service teachers to continue to evolve their critical literacy practice. Rogers et al. (2021) developed a cohort-based professional development pathway to critical literacy leadership for 30 educators in one school district and found that the place-conscious approach that the single, district-based cohort model offered a unique level of understanding that allowed for an authentic deepening of critical literacy knowledge and practice. Similarly, Riley (2015) developed an adolescent literacy education study group consisting of five teachers from five different schools across one city in order to create and better understand in-service critical literacy support. The group met bi-monthly for a year and used an inquiry process to talk about everything from beliefs and classroom vision to text selection to pedagogical choices, and throughout the process they were constantly working on their own positionality and identities (Riley, 2015).
Theoretical Framing
This study uses the sociological framework of structure, culture, and agency to examine participants’ critical literacy pedagogy. This framework suggests that structure, culture, and agency are co-constructed, and that in the “agency of individuals we see structure and culture operating” (Datnow et al., 2002, p. 16). Within the context of education, this framing suggests that teachers’ perceived pedagogical agency is affected by the structures and cultures in which they are teaching. I define structure as the values, mandates, and requirements of education as an institution, and culture as the more local values and practices in participants’ schools (Archer, 2003). At the intersection of these two contexts lies teachers’ agency, or their socioculturally mediated understanding of their position in their classroom, school, and system to enact critical literacy pedagogy (Chisholm et al., 2019). According to this formula, it is important to understand how literacy teachers see themselves positioned within the bounds of the larger structures and cultures of education—and where they perceive supports and challenges to that positioning—in order to understand the ways they are able to agentively enact critical literacy pedagogy.
Methodology
This is a multiple case study that focuses on the pedagogical experiences, supports, and challenges of five high school critical literacy teachers. I used the multiple case study process as outlined in Yin (2018) in order to examine participants’ navigation of pedagogical supports and challenges at both the intra- and inter-case levels.
Sampling and Participants
I used purposive criterion sampling to recruit for this study, with two criteria required for participation (Patton, 2002). The first criterion was self-identifying as a critical literacy educator which participants did by agreeing with the following definition of “critical literacy educator” derived from Freirian ideas of critical literacy (Freire, 1972): “I am someone who values teaching students to read and write texts with the purpose of evaluating multiple perspectives and critiquing power.” The second criterion involved participants agreeing that they center all of the following common traits of critical literacy education derived from Behrman’s (2006) review of critical literacy classroom practices in their everyday teaching and planning that includes using multimodal and multicultural texts, using narratives and counternarratives, using student choice in research projects, centering social action as an instructional goal, and presenting resistance and/or non-dominant perspectives to students. In total, 16 potential participants were recruited through personal and peer teacher networks and social media, seven began data collection, and five completed the data collection process.
At the time of data collection, the five participants in this study were English Language Arts teachers teaching in classrooms and schools that either predominantly or entirely served communities, families, and children of Color in five different cities and states across the United States. Although all five participants identified as critical literacy educators per the sampling criteria for the study, only one teacher, the youngest one in her first year, had received any formal training in critical literacy theory or pedagogy in her teacher preparation. Table 1 provides a snapshot of each participant’s basic demographic and teaching placement information at the time of data collection.
Participant Basic Demographic and Teaching Information.
Data
Data for this study included a survey, three interviews with each participant conducted using Seidman’s (2006) phenomenological approach to in-depth interviewing as a guide, and teaching artifacts. Prior to interviewing, each participant completed a 36-question Google Form survey featuring demographic and education history questions and five short-response questions about education and critical literacy beliefs. These survey responses were used as points of reference for the interview process. After a participant submitted their initial survey, a series of three semi-structured interviews were conducted remotely over Zoom; interviews consisted of questions about participants’ education histories and experiences, beliefs and philosophies, current contexts, and pedagogical choices/thinking. Finally, between interviews two and three, participants submitted teaching artifacts from at least two units of study, including teaching materials, unit/lesson plans, and student work samples. These artifacts were discussed during interview three.
Data Analysis
I used critical narrative analysis (CNA) because of its focus on “exploring the linkages between micro-level narratives and macro-level institutional discourses” (Souto-Manning, 2019, p. 8). Within the lens of a structure, culture, and agency framework, CNA allowed me to evaluate participants’ personal stories about navigating teaching challenges to enact critical literacy pedagogy (the agentive micro-level) both within and as responses to the institution- and systems-level challenges (the structural and cultural macro-levels).
Before coding, I first isolated and re-read teachers’ stories about perceived challenges to critical literacy implementation to re-familiarize myself with their stories, their contexts, and their perceived pedagogical supports and challenges. I then identified examples of how participants grammatically and agentively framed themselves (Souto-Manning, 2014, 2019) in comparison to their students, colleagues, administrators, and districts by looking at the subject and active verb choices and judgment alignments that arose in their narratives. Next, I used these grammar and judgment alignments to determine how participants positioned themselves as agentive or non-agentive beings in their narratives about leveraging pedagogical supports and navigating pedagogical challenges. Finally, I looked for descriptions of pedagogy within and around these stories and compared them to teachers’ statements about their pedagogical beliefs, priorities, and goals in order to determine how pedagogical supports and/or agency did or did not allow participants to overcome their perceived challenges.
Below is an example of my analysis process using an interview excerpt where Amelia was describing unfair administrative demands. Evidence of grammatical agency is bolded, and framing agency is underlined:
These instances of grammatical and framing agency establish an “us versus them” dynamic between staff and administration, which is evidence of a local (school) context challenge that Amelia was agentively able to overcome because of her self-positioning as an “experienced teacher” and a “professional” and also as someone with the support of like-minded and equally professional colleagues (the repeated “we”).
Findings
Supports and Challenges to Critical Literacy Pedagogy
The supports and challenges to enacting critical literacy pedagogy that participants described belonged to one of three contexts that mapped onto the structure, culture, and agency framework. There were challenges and supports at the personal level (participants’ selves and classrooms where they had the most agency), the local culture level (participants’ school sites), and the structural, institution level (the broader education context). Table 2 offers a summary of participants’ major stated supports and challenges to critical literacy implementation mapped onto these three contextual levels.
A Contextual Model of Participants’ Stated Critical Literacy Pedagogy Supports and Challenges.
This manifested as a “personal” challenge, but is actually the byproduct of institution-level (teacher preparation) failures.
Supports: A Local Experience
The five participants were unified when it came to three supports that helped them enact critical literacy pedagogy: their students, curricular freedom, and self-selected professional development. All the participants demonstrated unending regard and respect for their students, and their students were described as being pedagogical supports and inspirations. For example, Ellen noted that the first group of students she ever taught was impactful because “their curiosity made learning exciting … and [they] had such powerful conversations.” Over time, the conversation protocols she created and piloted with that first group of students turned into a weekly cornerstone of her critical literacy pedagogy. Further, all five participants mentioned making curricular choices based on their students’ interests, both because it was important for students to see themselves in the curriculum (Amelia), and because student-directed content was more engaging (Ayana).
In addition to students, all five participants also cited curricular flexibility as instrumental support in enacting critical literacy pedagogy. Ayana named curricular flexibility as one of the primary things she was looking for when she applied for jobs, noting that one of the biggest benefits to her ability to enact critical literacy was that she was treated like a professional and that “there was never a set curriculum, never a, ‘you have to teach this, you have to teach that.’” Amelia also explained the benefits of this kind of flexibility when I asked if she had curriculum requirements at her school. She replied no, and that this was important because of “how adaptable you have to be, how flexible you have to be [to teach with a critical literacy lens]; it taught me so much professionally … I can put in all these cool things that [students] want to learn about.”
Finally, all five participants described themselves as active, lifelong learners, committed to continuing their own ongoing professional development to support their critical literacy pedagogy. For Ellen and Amelia who found critical literacy through social justice activism, this meant joining grassroots, social media-based educator communities doing social justice literacy work. Ayana and Sofia—who both found critical literacy mid-career in more formal professional development/program spaces—reported continuing their learning through formalized opportunities through their school districts, like an “emerging leaders for social justice” workshop series to which Ayana had to apply and was one of only fourteen accepted participants. In Chloe’s case, ongoing learning meant continuing to work with the same college advisor that introduced her to critical literacy in the first place, and continuing to read critical literacy research and literature. What is also important to note is that all five participants reflectively described their critical literacy identities as being works-in-progress, and actively sought their own continuing education opportunities to support their own ongoing growth.
Challenges: A Higher Context Problem
The one pattern that existed across participants’ challenges to enacting critical literacy pedagogy is that the challenges existed entirely at the local and institution level contexts. Ayana was the only person to mention a personal-level challenge—not yet having enough experience or knowledge to do critical literacy work—but even this challenge had direct ties to institution-level roots: Ayana was never taught about critical literacy in her teacher preparation, which was a reality she was having to work hard to undo. Otherwise, unlike with supports, there were fewer commonalities across participants when it came to perceived challenges to critical literacy pedagogy.
Because her critical literacy journey was newer and self-directed, Ayana’s biggest challenge was knowledge-based; she was still figuring out how to move the idea of critical literacy from being something she felt strongly about to something she could enact in practice. In contrast, Chloe—who was academically prepared for critical literacy work through her teacher preparation and knew exactly what she wanted to do to move her critical literacy beliefs into practice—found her practice primarily curtailed by her novice teacher status. Ellen and Amelia’s paths through social justice pedagogy to find critical literacy resulted in them both having a large amount of critical literacy work they wanted to enact, meaning that finding planning and preparation time to do all the work was a challenge. Finally, Ellen and Sofia were both strong critical literacy educators with a combined 24 years in the classroom, but their status as public school teachers led them both to cite required standardized testing as a hurdle because of the class time it takes up that they would prefer to spend on doing critical literacy work.
What the participants did have in common when it came to challenges was that they all viewed critical literacy pedagogy as being at odds with institution-level aspects of education like prescribed curricula and standardized testing: all five participants cited curricular freedom as a major support to their critical literacy pedagogy, and standardized testing as a major challenge. The notable exception to institution-level challenges was prescribed standards. All five participants were beholden to some form of teaching standards (the Common Core 1 , a set of state standards, or both), but none found the standards to be a challenge to their pedagogy, or even much of a point of interest at all. This was best evidenced when I asked Sofia about whether or not her required use of the Common Core standards to be a hindrance to her critical literacy pedagogy, and she laughed while saying: “No … like, you know, one of the standards of learning for 11th grade is like, make sure your kids understand plot and theme (rolled eyes). And it’s like, okay … those are the bare minimum.”
Navigating Challenges to Enact Critical Literacy Pedagogy
The Role of Agency
Participants’ perceived agency to enact critical literacy pedagogy looked different depending on the context level of the challenge they were navigating. Across the five participants, evidence of strong grammatical and positioning agency in the face of challenges to critical literacy pedagogy was connected to both how much pedagogical freedom participants felt they had within their schools (which was directly connected to how long they had been in their schools), and how strongly they identify as critical literacy educators (which was connected to how long they had been practicing critical literacy pedagogy). For these participants, low amounts of either pedagogical freedom or experience as a critical literacy educator resulted in low evidence of perceived agency in at least one of the contextual levels, while high amounts of both translated into high amounts of perceived agency across contextual levels. The relationship between these factors is illustrated in Table 3, and is explored below.
The Impact of School Experience and Critical Literacy Knowledge on Pedagogical Agency.
Based on the length of time participants have been identifying as critical literary educators as compared to the other participants.
Based on participants’ responses to four Likert-style survey questions about how much control they felt they had over their curricula, texts, assessments, and day-to-day lessons (a little or none at all, some, total, or almost total).
The relationship between these five participants’ critical literacy knowledge, pedagogical freedom, and agency at each context level is best demonstrated through a few comparative examples. Example one is a comparison of Ellen and Sofia. Although Sofia had been an educator for twice as long as Ellen at the time of interviews and both women exhibited high levels of agency at the personal and local context levels, Sofia had not identified as a critical literacy teacher for as long as Ellen. Accordingly, Sofia displayed less perceived agency at the institutional context level than Ellen. One example of this in action was their two different approaches when faced with standardized testing. Although both educators articulated a strong distaste for the required standardized exams their students had to take and stated that these exams detracted from their critical literacy practice, when talking about the idea of exam preparation, Sofia’s response was “whenever there’s some kind of [required] standardized test, that really takes away from my instruction because no matter what level I’m teaching, right, there has to be instruction that’s based around [the tests] … this is my responsibility … I have to show them examples.” The verbs Sofia chose in this description of standardized testing are absolute: she twice says that she has to prepare students and show them examples, and describes exam preparation as a “requirement.” She also uses the word “responsibility,” which places her at the center of a power hierarchy in which she and her students are trapped without agency: students must take the test, therefore she must prepare them for the test. In turn, doing the preparation to meet the requirements takes away from her ability to implement other, more important literacy goals like critical literacy instruction.
By comparison, when I asked Ellen about standardized testing at her school, her response was “we’re not doing PARCC 2 prep. I just kind of ignore the PARCC training, you know, sign in, sign out, close my door and go back to class … we just keep doing what we’re going to do.” In stories such as this one, about what she saw as harmful institutional requirements, Ellen frequently constructed a literal “us versus them,” dynamic, positioning administration and others responsible for implementing dominant institutional norms as “they/them,” while she and her students formed an “I/we” combative alliance. Ellen, the “I,” identified the harmful dominant norms, and then linked herself to her students (“this is something we have to do” and “we keep doing what we’re going to do”) as collective co-conspirators against an oppressive system. When faced with the same institution-level challenge, the strength of Ellen’s critical literacy beliefs and preparation gave her stronger agency to resist a practice that she felt is harmful for her students than Sofia, who shared the same feelings but not the same agency to say “no.”
Comparative example number two involves Chloe and Ayana. Our multiple conversations about designing a curriculum were where Chloe reported experiencing all of her personal challenges to implementing critical literacy pedagogy, and her status as a first teacher served as the primary complicating factor. On one hand, as a new teacher Chloe wanted and sought advice and support from her peers and administration. On the other hand, however, although the administrators offering this support were “super nice” and “[knew] so much,” they represented “different ideas about the purpose of English education” that were irreconcilably at odds with Chloe’s own beliefs, recommending texts like The Odyssey (Homer, 1999) that did not align with Chloe’s vision for her classroom. When I asked her what she did with the suggestions, Chloe described herself “as a baby teacher in a new school” whose status afforded her very little curricular agency. Accordingly, she admitted that she “leaned more towards this year taking their suggestions … [but] maybe next year and in the next couple years I’ll try to be like ‘ok maybe this instead.’ ” In these stories of seeking and receiving administrative guidance, status afforded the principal and department chair suggestion-making power that Chloe did not yet feel agentively able to decline. The result was that although she was arguably more theoretically prepared than the other participants to enact critical literacy pedagogy, her efforts to move her preparation into practice were curtailed by her novice teacher status. As a result, Chloe felt stuck as the “baby teacher” teaching things that “do not align with [her] philosophy” that she otherwise would not have chosen to teach.
By contrast, Ayana—who was comparatively in the early stages of developing her critical literacy practice but was an experienced teacher with a leadership role at her school—did not report experiencing any local context challenges. This gave her the freedom to make on-the-spot changes to incorporate critical literacy elements in her practice. She recalled realizing in the middle of teaching The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925), that “these kids don’t give a shit about Gatsby … so I decided to do a privilege activity and the kids started having all of these discussions about privilege and it felt different.” When that activity succeeded she “tied up Gatsby really quickly and then went into a full-fledged unit [on privilege]. I was supposed to start Macbeth (Shakespeare, 1623) and I didn’t, and that’s when the idea of Born a Crime (Noah, 2016) happened.” Unlike Chloe in the exact same position, Ayana’s agency in her school setting allowed her to pivot her pedagogical choices, ignoring what she was “supposed” to do, and instead choosing a diverse text and a more critical literacy-infused unit to better suit the needs of her students.
Getting Creative
With participants’ challenges primarily existing at the local- and institution-levels, much of the navigation of those challenges to enacting critical literacy pedagogy happened through the use of curricular creativity. A good example of this was Amelia, who expressed mostly having curricular freedom with the exception of a few required texts, including Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Amelia described being “a little nervous” about the selection because the book is “written by a white woman and narrated by a little white girl … and there’s a lot of problematic stuff in it.” To counteract these problems, Amelia surrounded the text with other diverse perspectives, including content from Facing History and Ourselves, and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (2017). Amelia used these supplementary text selections to offer diverse perspectives on a similar theme and to help her students critique representation in To Kill a Mockingbird. For example, she asked her students to look at the portrayal of traditions in both The Hate U Give and To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee, 1960) to complicate the overrepresentation of white traditions in texts, and asked them to critique the fact that “there is one chapter devoted to Black people being together in the whole book (Mockingbird), and it’s not even narrated from the Black perspective.”
Chloe was similarly reliant on getting creative to enact critical literacy into practice in the face of required texts. Though as previously mentioned she was not thrilled about teaching her department chair’s recommendation—The Odyssey—and admitted she would not have personally chosen it, Chloe did her best to make the text experience relevant and critical for her students. She drew thematic connections to modern social events, and had her students discuss whether Syrian refugees were on modern Odysseys. She also made connections to Indigenous American oral stories and gave her students the option of creating and performing their own oral counternarratives. The use of diverse and multimodal, supplemental texts for both readings and assessments was a regular theme across all of Chloe’s teaching, and was creatively deployed to bring elements of critical literacy pedagogy into her classroom even when she did not feel like she could fully control certain elements of her curriculum.
Discussion
We know that young teachers are currently being prepared to have progressive and critical viewpoints, but struggle to overcome challenges in connecting their developing progressive pedagogies into practice (Schiera, 2019). Critical literacy is one manifestation of these new progressive pedagogies, and this study revealed that there is much left to learn about how teachers’ contextual realities and senses of agency impact the way they are able to overcome challenges in implementing it.
Critical literacy scholarship is mixed on whether coexistence is possible between critical literacy pedagogy and traditional pedagogical approaches, and, if so, what this coexistence might look like. On one hand, investigations of language arts curricula have been concluding for decades that literacy instruction is full of normative assumptions (Bomer, 2017), wherein the “norm” is curricular whitestreaming (Urrieta, 2010) that is consistently being reinforced through teacher preparation programs (Sleeter, 2017). In this reality, critical literacy is not viable as an approach intentionally taken up or taught by dominant institutions, and the local and institutional challenges that participants in this study faced confirm that concern. Other scholars, however, have argued that it is precisely because Canonical texts make assumptions about power and accepted culture that it is important for teachers to discuss the implications with students through the use of critical literacy approaches (Borsheim–Black et al., 2014). Indeed, applying a critical literacy lens to dominant curricular elements is one way to make sure students learn the dominant practices for which they will be held accountable through assessment, while also being able to critically evaluate those practices through the lens of multiple perspectives and other culturally affirming approaches (Janks, 2000; Morrell, 2008). The way these five participants leveraged the critical literacy supports of curricular flexibility and creativity, student enthusiasm, and self-sought professional development to enact critical literacy practices supports this side of the conversation as well, leaving me encouraged that critical literacy applications do have a path forward, regardless of the contextual challenges that get thrown critical educators’ way. The question, then, becomes how.
Across my conversations with participants, critical literacy was repeatedly actively framed as being at odds with the dominant institutional norms of education. This oppositional relationship manifested across findings: in the fact that all of the named challenges to critical literacy pedagogy had external roots in their local school and/or institutional contexts; in the fact that perceived curricular freedom and external, self-selected professional development were the most commonly cited supports; and in the fact that suggested curricula were always cited as challenges that prevented traits of critical literacy from being enacted in the ways and with the frequency that participants wanted. And all this was in the fall and winter of 2020/2021, after the United States experienced a brief renaissance of social justice awareness but before that same surge of anti-racist activism had triggered an equal and opposite backlash that found critical and social justice literacy initiatives politicized and under attack. It is impossible to know how the months of curricular whitewashing, book banning, and policies about teaching “controversial topics and sensitive issues” may have impacted these participants’ views on institutional challenges, especially Chloe in the hyper-conservative state of Oklahoma, and Sofia in Virginia, the same state where school board meeting battles over Critical Race Theory made national news.
However, at times the very presence of institutional requirements necessitated the use of critical literacy creativity in interesting ways that complicated the perceived dichotomy between critical literacy and institutional norms. Despite their verbal indications that critical literacy and dominant norms are nearly mutually exclusive, participants’ pedagogical examples and artifacts often indicated a creative and complex coexistence. It was in these moments of highly successful coexistence between traditional and new texts/perspectives that confirm that critical literacy is, in fact, a lens that can and should be used to approach any text (Vasquez et al., 2019).
It is in this coexistence that I envision the important next steps for critical literacy’s future. The more that literacy teacher educators can present critical literacy as a lens that can be layered on top of and creatively used to re-envision any provided curricular elements, the more teachers will feel they can work it into their teaching like Chloe and Amelia did, even if they do not yet have the agency to say “no” to institutional requirements the way Ellen did. Further, the more critical literacy can be taught and learned as a skill-in-progress, the more likely teachers may be to self-seek critical literacy support and use their student’s interests as motivation for curricular re-design the way Ayana did. Finally, the more that critical literacy teacher education can present critical literacy within the realistic contextual bounds of things like required standards, the more incoming teachers will have the ability and agency to view critical literacy as a crucial supplement to (instead of a mutually exclusive approach from) the work they are already being asked to do the way Sofia did. Finally, the more that literacy research can acknowledge and investigate all the above challenges and creative approaches to moving critical literacy into practice, the less we will continue to find critical literacy relegated to a largely theoretical shelf.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
