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Critical literacy and social justice theories are both related to the exploration of power and privilege. This entry focusses on how critical literacy has been taken up by teachers in primary and secondary schooling to engage students and educators to think deeply about–and contest–unequal power relations. We frame our discussion using Nancy Fraser's tripartite model of social justice that addresses parity of participation through redistribution, recognition and representation. We contend that understanding social justice as a multidimensional concept allows educators to take up critical literacy in ways that seek to reveal and challenge complex social injustices.

As part of this special issue on 'Literacy for social justice', and at this moment of post-pandemic transitions in education, we invited Professor Barbara Comber to reflect on the needs for and trends in critical literacy education, both in her local context, in Australia, and internationally. In September 2022, we met with Barbara online to discuss her thoughts about what critical literacy educators need, how scholars and educators can work together to produce change, and where we can see hope in critical literacy and social justice education right now, as part of promising anti-racist, decolonizing, and intersectional literacy frameworks and practices.

The structures, procedures and relationships within schools both constrain and enable the ways that children and teachers can engage with the everyday ‘business’ of literacy learning. In schools and classrooms, the resources available to children, the spaces in which they work and how adults interact with them are often decided upon by others, including their teachers. In this chapter, we focus specifically on access to mobile digital resources and important spaces in the school, arguing that opportunities for children to be critical consumers and producers of text can be provided when children are afforded some control of decisions about how, where and when people, materials, tools and texts are used. Drawing from data collected as part of a larger study of learning to write in the early years of schooling, at two different schools in different Australian states, we examine two cases of ‘disruption’ negotiated by children and their teachers. We explore the potential of mobile technologies in children’s hands as key elements in changing the socio-spatial power relations around text production that usually hold in schools. These instances are explicit opportunities to study what is possible when young children and teachers work to change children’s relationships to materials, spaces and people in productive and provocative ways. We analyse the digital texts produced and the work of teachers and children to foreground digital literacies as a way to influence what goes on in their schools.

This article considers what it means to teach and learn in places of poverty through the narratives of front-line workers – particularly students and teachers. What is the work of teaching and learning in places of poverty in current times? How has this changed? What can be learned from both the haunting and hopeful narratives of front-line workers? Is it possible to continue to educate in these times and in ways that allow for critique, imagination and optimism? These questions are addressed by drawing from studies conducted over three decades in schools located in high poverty neighborhoods. Literacy education is considered as a particular case. Educational researchers need to remain on the front-line with teachers and students in places of poverty because that is where some of the hardest work gets done. Reinvigorated democratic research communities would include teachers, school leaders, policy workers and young people. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper argues for the need for critical reading comprehension in an era of accountability that often promotes reading comprehension as readily assessable through students answering multiple choice questions of unseen texts. Based upon a 1 year study investigating literacy in Years 4–9 the ways strong-performing primary schools develop serious and in-depth reading for learning are explored. School and teacher features which allow for the development of sophisticated pedagogical repertoires and space for critical reading comprehension, without losing the complexity of curriculum offerings, are outlined. How one experienced middle primary teacher operates strategically, ethically and critically in supporting her ESL students to learn to read is illustrated. The teacher’s work is situated within the complex accountability demands faced by classroom teachers. This was accomplished by a teacher whose pedagogical repertoire has been assembled across a career teaching in low-SES high ESL communities in a school with a balanced literacy program and high level of collegial support. Risks for schools and teachers whose circumstances work against their capacities for prioritisation and strategic decision-making are identified and discussed. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Given the global escalation of gaps between rich and poor, contemporary work in critical literacy needs to overtly question the politics of poverty. How and where is poverty produced, by what means, by whom and for whom and how are educational systems stratified to provide different kinds of education to the rich and the poor? Yet rather than critical literacy, international educational reform movements stress performative standards on basic literacy. In this context literacy researchers need to ask policy-makers hard questions about taken-for-granted rhetoric that surrounds poverty, literacy and education. At school, regional and state levels, educational leaders need to argue for fair resourcing and decision-making for their communities and students. In classrooms teachers need to weave critical questioning and inclusive learning interactions into the fabric of everyday life. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Given the impact of standardization and high-stakes testing on literacy education policy internationally, it is encouraging to read fresh accounts of critical literacy in practice being enacted in many different educational contexts. Critical Literacy Practice: Applications of Critical Theory in Diverse Settings delivers what its title promises, namely, serious scholarly accounts of educators working to practice critical literacy and address the complexity that it entails. Importantly, the contributors include both recognized and emerging researchers in critical literacy studies. Critical literacy needs input from culturally diverse and new scholars to address crucial and unfamiliar issues as well as perennial injustices relating to poverty, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and location.

The work of early childhood educators in facilitating young children's literacy acquisition has never received more attention than in the new millennium. Media hype about literacy crises, falling standards, teacher quality and government promises of minimum standards for all children have simultaneously increased the ‘visibility’ of literacy and the stakes for school performance. Indeed the last two decades could be seen as an age of pronouncements with respect to literacy, with politicians internationally promising to cure supposed low literacy with standardized tests and mandated programmes. As the rhetoric around literacy intensifies many late-capitalist economies are experiencing shifts that have increased the gaps between rich and poor, changed the very nature of work, and fundamentally altered the cultural mix of their populations. More and more children attending schools where English is the language of instruction speak it as a second or third language. Many children have experienced the effects of war, terrorism, migration and poverty. Many live in fractured, fragmented and changing families. Teacher populations are changing too. In some places aging teacher workforces mean that there is already a shortage of qualified teachers. Literacy is also changing as the impact of digital technologies on global and local communication, economies and knowledges begins to bite in everyday and working lives. It is challenging to think about how spaces for the emergence and sustenance of critical literacy in early childhood education might be created.

Critical theory is typically referred to in the singular, but the term refers to multiple theories coming from different disciplinary traditions, which compete with each other for dominance and engage in debates about their relative explanatory power. Keywords: research methods in applied linguistics; literacy; sociocultural language studies

In this article, the author have considered the school as a place that brings together a diverse community of people with distinctive histories, roles, and resources. Together they co-create the school as a particular kind of meeting place that produces its own affordances for learning. She have provided a snapshot of pedagogies that allow children to experience active, agentic participation in the processes of community development and change to the built environment. Schools represent microcosms of the wider power-geometries in which places are related. Wells's school is located in the poor and multicultural western suburbs of Adelaide, which are gradually in the process of being gentrified. The new superschool is hoping to attract new families buying homes in the area, people who are likely to be more affluent than the public housing residents whom they will replace. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

2004

In a study of socioeconomically disadvantaged children's acquisition of school literacies, a university research team investigated how a group of teachers negotiated critical literacies and explored notions of social power with elementary children in a suburban school located in an area of high poverty. Here we focus on a grade 2/3 classroom where the teacher and children became involved in a local urban renewal project and on how in the process the children wrote about place and power. Using the students' concerns about their neighborhood, the teacher engaged her class in a critical literacy project that not only involved a complex set of literate practices but also taught the children about power and the possibilities for local civic action. In particular, we discuss examples of children's drawing and writing about their neighborhoods and their lives. We explore how children's writing and drawing might be key elements in developing "critical literacies" in elementary school settings. We consider how such classroom writing can be a mediator of emotions, intellectual and academic learning, social practice, and political activism.