On discursive psychology and the field of critical literacy

So, I am currently working on two research projects in addition to the one I have been writing about for this class. What has become quite interesting, and connected, about these two topics are the ways in which the faculty members I work with are drawing from established critical literacy frameworks in order to inform and concentrate our analysis and findings. The work we are doing for these projects is not a-typical of the types of research I might read in a literacy journal. The one project involves analyzing teacher narratives about their critical literacy approaches to teaching and their classrooms. The other project deals with how pre-service teachers evaluate online sources about climate change. Both are coming from a position that privileges critical literacy frameworks for thinking about what literacy means and by doing so structure our analysis and talk around these frameworks. This, in my pedagogical view, is good. Knowing more about how teachers talk about themselves in terms of critical literacy as critical practitioners can help in supporting new ways of thinking about critical literacy and ways to help students and teachers think about the work of the critical classroom. Considering how people read online sources, and in specific about climate change, from a critical literacy standpoint considers issues of power, access and justice in terms of climate change and how we can read and reconstruct ideas toward that end. These are all good things.

But, and here is where I am really realizing that discourse analysis has become my way of thinking about research, neither of these projects are considering how the discourse of either the data or the discourse within the data continue to re-constitute discourses of critical literacy - in either positive or negative ways. I think this would be hard to do on a few levels, one because so many critical literacy people argue for and practice close language study. This means that in the well-written pieces and the frameworks that are looked at consistently, the tension of the language around critical literacy and what that means is always being revised and reconsidered given social, historical and political contexts. One author in particular, Hilary Janks, is adept at adapting her language and framework to the times. And critical literacy practitioners place their own language, pedagogy and work under the microscope to examine it closely and refine. What I have been thinking about, though, is that this eye to refinement, of course a hallmark of academia (how else would we keep our jobs!?), along with some of the significant tenets of the field (such as drawing from multiple perspectives, focusing on the sociopolitical, redesigning, etc) of course are creating their own discourses of what doing critically literacy means.

What really brought this to the fore for me was the article by you, Jessica, (Lester & Paulus, 2011) this week. I was thinking about my study on climate change and how students wrote responses (not intended to be read by other students) using an online tool designed around a critical literacy framework with the intent of scaffolding specific ways of thinking about a text. What lead me to thinking about the idea of discursive psychology and critical literacy was the fact that the critical literacy framework was taken for granted and not considered as part of the student response. Rather, because of the privileging of this framework, we understand those questions as scaffolds, leading students to specific options and ways for considering evaluation. What I want to know is, apart from a content or knowledge level, is how are the students constructing responses to these questions designed from a critical literacy stance, and what might that mean for what it means to do critical literacy. I wonder this because our initial reading of some of the data included codes such as superficial understanding, does not understand claim, etc. There were more positive analyses too, such as identifies implicit bias or intertextual references, etc. Either way, these are focused on content rather than how students are constructing the work of evaluation in the face of critical literacy frameworks. Further, in follow up interviews as I was listening I immediately noticed moments from critical literacy training where I identified student talk as doing critical literacy (moments of redesign of ideas or reflexivity, for example). But again I wondered what about their talk made these moments of content analysis possible, and what would a DP look at critical literacy need to be. I'm not sure I'm quite able to think my way through that entirely at this point, but I think it is something to consider. And as I move forward in these projects I am hoping to use some of these perspectives to broaden the scope of our work.