Introduction to Critical Literacy

Critical literacy is the term used to refer to a particular aspect of critical thinking.

• Critical literacy involves looking beyond the literal meaning of a text to determine what is present and what is missing, in order to analyse and evaluate the text’s complete meaning and the author’s intent.
• Critical literacy is concerned with issues related to fairness, equity, and social justice.

Critically literate students adopt a critical stance, asking what view of the world the text advances and whether they find this view acceptable, who benefits from the text, and how the reader is influenced.  (Ontario Ministry of Education, n.d.)

• points of view (e.g., those of people from various cultures);
• context (e.g., the beliefs and practices of the time and place in which a text was created and those in which it is being read or viewed);
• the background of the person who is interacting with the text (e.g., upbringing, friends, communities, education, experiences/positionality);
• intertextuality (e.g., information that a reader or viewer brings to a text from other texts experienced previously);
• gaps in the text (e.g., information that is left out and that the reader or viewer must fill in);
• silences in the text (e.g., the absence of the voices of certain people or groups).

(Ontario Ministry of Education, n.d.)

Critical Indigenous Literacy:

• Think about:
  • Authorship and identity in relation to the stories and teachings we trust as reader- Own Voices
  • Character/content representation
  • Misinformation
  • Historical representations