Reviews

REVIEW of McLaughlin, Maureen, & DeVoogd, Glenn (2004) Critical Literacy: Enhancing students’ comprehension of text.

October 16, 2007

Dr. Wendy Morgan

McLaughlin, Maureen, & DeVoogd, Glenn (2004) Critical Literacy: Enhancing students’ comprehension of text. New York, Toronto, London: Scholastic.

ISBN 0-439-62804-0

 

Reviewed by:

 

Dr. Wendy Morgan

Adjunct scholar, Faculty of Education

Queensland University of Technology

Brisbane, Australia

 

 

The subtitle, “Enhancing students’ comprehension of text” may have been judiciously chosen by the authors or publishers, in order to allay the fears of conservative teachers. It suggests that “comprehension” is an unproblematic concept that refers to a skill we all practise (and in the same way). And teachers’ work consists of “enhancing” this skill that students already have to some degree. Someone picking up this book at a book display might think therefore that critical literacy is not very different from “critical thinking”. To use a term familiar to critical literacy advocates, these terms might “naturalise” the concept and the practice of reading.

 

But in fact critical literacy offers a radically different way of understanding readers’ work and texts’ meanings, and a new pedagogy of reading. As the readers define it, “critical literacy views readers as active participants in the reading process and invites them to move beyond passively accepting the text’s message to question, examine or dispute the power relations that exist between readers and authors. It focuses on issues of power and promotes reflection, transformation, and action” (p. 14). Thus readers are taught to question who’s written the text, what the author wants us to believe, and what information the author has chosen to include in or exclude from the text.

 

The book is organized into two parts. In the first, McLaughlin and DeVoogd describe the theoretical underpinnings of critical literacy (or rather, one version of it). From research they derive principles, frameworks and strategies for teaching critical literacy in Grades K-8. And they indicate how critical literacy fits with current thinking about literacy and state-determined standards and protocols. In the second part, classroom teachers describe a range of theme-based critical literacy lessons and demonstrate the outcomes of their students’ work. This part is organized into chapters that focus on several key critical literacy approaches: Challenging the Text, Exploring Identities, Seeing Beyond the Bias, and Reading a Whole New World. I’ll say more about these parts shortly.

 

But first, in good critical literacy fashion, I must locate myself and declare my position in relation to critical literacy, so you can see where I’m coming from, what barrow I’m pushing, and what authority I lay claim to in writing this review. As a secondary English teacher and then a teacher educator in Australia I’ve practiced and preached the cause of critical literacy for twenty years. In my teaching and writing I’ve been committed to making literary and critical theory accessible and practicable in English classrooms. From this engagement with critical literacy came several books, including Critical Literacy in the Classroom: The art of the possible (Routledge, 1997) and (with Ray Misson) Critical Literacy and the Aesthetic: Transforming the English classroom (NCTE, 2006).

 

That latter book raises concerns about the theory and practice of critical literacy as it’s developed in Australia that my co-author and I had become troubled by. Among other things, we were concerned that students’ aesthetic responses to texts (imaginative fiction, poetry, feature films, documentaries, computer games and so on) were being ignored by critical literacy teachers, certainly not fostered, and perhaps even denigrated. It has seemed to such teachers that when students are engaged with these texts, and giving themselves up to the pleasures on offer, they’re the more likely to be taken in by the texts’ suspect ideologies. Many critical literacy teachers conceived of their work therefore as developing students’ suspicion of texts’ “messages”. Political critique was what mattered.

 

This could be valuable, we thought, but it was insufficient: critical literacy in theory and practice needed to understand and work with (not just against) those textual, aesthetic pleasures. And it needed to engage with creativity in writing (and reading), not just critique in reading (and writing). Writing, incidentally, is an aspect of literacy neglected by the critical literacy movement at large. Indeed, any imaginative writing students do within this regime is pressed into service for a different purpose, of better understanding how texts work. That is also the case with the book under review (cf. p. 37). It mentions pleasure and creativity, but only in passing (e.g. on p. 37). And when the authors come to mention the aesthetic (p. 22), it’s only in relation to Rosenblatt’s Aesthetic-Efferent Continuum, and the effect of their discussion is to suggest that the aesthetic is a different reading stance from the critical stance, rather than being crucially entwined with it.

 

McLaughlin and DeVoogd never tackle head-on the question of why students should bother to read novels if aesthetic pleasure and engagement in the narrative are never acknowledged, validated, even fostered in the classroom. Instead we’re shown almost unremitting analytical and critical scrutiny. The students in the lessons we’re shown evidently take pleasure in imaginative writing, role plays and the like – but this goes unremarked, uncelebrated.

 

In our view, it’s all rather less simple. And so critical literacy needs to be less simplistic too – or it risks becoming a new pedagogical orthodoxy, with a set of repetitive techniques for reading applied unthinkingly. My co-author and I have seen this happen in Australia, where teachers have had longer to put such ideas into practice – and are now coming to evaluate the strengths but also limitations of critical literacy. I’m hopeful that this will result in a more nuanced practice and more sophisticated theory of texts, contexts and reading. More, I would have to say, than I find in Critical Literacy: Enhancing students’ comprehension of text – which conveys the zeal of teachers and the enthusiasm of their students discovering a whole new way of reading. There’s no doubt about the authors’ and teachers’ sincerity and commitment – or the success of their teaching in engaging their students in critical activities.

 

– Now at this point, of course, if you’ve read my self-portrait with a critical literacy eye, you’ll recognize that it’s a very selective account, designed with an eye to persuade you of my credentials. It may omit inconvenient details, such as my own earlier naivete, and it silences other voices, such as those of my students. I’ll have more to say about this characteristic reading focus in a moment.   But first, that matter of the authority of the author raises a major concern I have with the book.

 

There are countless references to the author’s “intentions” or the author’s intended “message” as something readers need to determine and question. In this critical literacy (unlike in a more conventional reading practice) readers are encouraged to “interrogate” these intentions. My problem is this. It seems to hark back to an older view that the meaning of a text can be referred to an author who stands behind the text and authorizes it. To determine the meaning of a text, we simply dig out the author’s meaning that he (usually a he) put there and that skilled readers can be trained to retrieve. Now as an author I know I exist, and I know I have intentions, but I also know these don’t govern all the meanings readers may make of what I write.

 

After poststructuralists declared the “death of the author”, I find it no longer possible to accept this older view of a text’s meaning and an author’s intention. For one thing, we can’t be certain we can get at those intentions: they may or may not have been achieved in the text, they may or may not have been consciously determined. For another, any text offers a meaning – or rather, invites readers to make a reading of the text – according to which it makes obvious, common-sense meaning. But a number of plausible (alternative or “resistant”) readings can be made of that text, depending on what knowledge, beliefs and values we bring to it and what aspects of it we pay attention to or “foreground” in our reading.

 

This may seem to be a relatively minor matter, but for me it betrays a rather naďve understanding of texts, authors and meanings and their relationships – which in turn will be communicated to students. Nevertheless, whenever McLaughlin and DeVoogd use the word “author”, you could substitute “text”, and their “problem-posing” questions would make good sense.

 

These questions, designed to challenge the text, are outlined in Part 2, Critical Literacy in Action (pp. 64-65). These are very characteristic of critical literacy:

  • Who are what is in the text?
  • Who or what is missing from the text?
  • What is marginalized?
  • What does the author want you to think?
  • What story might an alternative text tell?
  • How can information from the text be used to promote justice?

Under each of these are further questions, which probe matters of race, class, gender and other forms of difference. Teachers in Australia have come to see that it if these are the only questions that are asked of every text, repeatedly, they will yield the same answers – so that all texts will come to resemble one another and their particularity will be lost. Our students have become very skilled at coming up with the “right” answers, without showing much engagement with the individual text, let alone indignation about social justice issues.

 

For the alternative stories problem posing questions, a number of “switches” are suggested – in gender, theme, body-style, race, setting, dialect and so on. There are inventive possibilities here. But again I must issue a caution: this form of textual “intervention” or “transformation” (as we call it) has become so routine in parts of Australia that students treat it as just one more task which no longer engages their imaginations.

 

In my country students may also be asked to change the genre of the text – and in this way come to know something about the way each text is organized and the means it uses to persuade. In McLaughlin and DeVoogd’s book this strategy seems to be missing – and with it the chance for students to develop an aesthetic and critical appreciation of aspects of form, language and the like. Instead, the understanding students are to reach through their study is of “the issue” (the theme or topic) of the text, not its form or structuring or texturing – or even how matters of such shaping contribute to the position the reader is invited to take towards the text and its represented content.

 

Other key points in the book’s theory and practice also seem to me problematic, based on my experience. In Part 1, for instance, it’s understood that critical literacy teachers will teach from shared ethical principles of equity and social justice. That is, “critical literacy focuses on issues of power and helps subjugated or oppressed groups … to help ‘politicize themselves and engage in action aimed at challenging existing structures of inequality and oppression’” (p. 15). But these principles aren’t “taught” – that is, explicated or debated – in the classroom. Rather, they’re to be “caught” from the activities.

 

Now when these philosophical, ethical and political beliefs aren’t made explicit, to teachers or students, it may be unclear why one would search for particular alternative perspectives, rather than others. (Why would one search out the views of underdogs, rather than topdogs, which might be equally interesting and politically important?) Students will have to infer through the teaching what’s evidently approved of or “correct”. In this way critical literacy is not “demystified”, as the title of Part 1 asserts – or at least, not in the classroom.

 

Similarly, no clear, explicit distinction is made in “who is missing” questions between those who are simply not in the story and those who have a material interest in the events. The former aren’t necessarily marginalized for politically inequitable reasons – that is, ignored when their voices should be heard, their views and lives and labor honored. (To take an obvious example: Indigenous Australians don’t figure in a novel about the lives of immigrants to America, but it’s not useful to name them in answer to the question, “What race is not present?” How are students to distinguish those who are simply absent from those who are marginalized? How are they to know who these are? This depends on social, economic, and political knowledge about the cultural context of the novel’s events – for which the students are dependent on their teachers.  

 

These matters of implicitness flow through to the stance students are to take towards novels they’re given to read. The critical focus apparently doesn’t extend to all their texts. Some are given unqualified approval (e.g. pp. 17, 55ff.) because they disrupt common understandings of particular events, offer multiple perspectives on those events, explore issues of power in relationships between social groups, or show how social justice can be promoted when protagonists take action. These are no doubt worthy texts – for social justice advocacy purposes. But it won’t necessarily be clear to students why these should be exempt from critical scrutiny – or aesthetic evaluation, if it comes to that (they could be poorly written, or too obvious in their designs on readers).

 

Of course, I’m not suggesting that teachers should attempt to imitate Socrates with their Grade 1 students – but at some teachable points, in some appropriate ways, students need to be let into the secret. In this book, for instance, among the “alternative perspectives” (e.g. of workers or immigrants) students are set to explore, it’s never an option for them to choose the viewpoint of the bosses, bureaucrats or the establishment. Students’ choices, then, are implicitly constrained by unspoken norms and interests. But how are they to know what’s off limits, except by picking up the cues? It’s better I think to be explicit about why we don’t need to explore or validate the lives of the rich and famously exploitative.

 

Some books, it seems, are “biased”, whereas others are apparently more reliable – evidently, because they offer a more “realistic” (p. 54) view – or one that coincides more with the perspective of the oppressed or marginalized. Here too I find such wording problematic, for the views of texts it entails. (This seems contradicted by a later admission, p. 120, that “all texts are biased to some degree because they can only tell one story or a limited range of stories. Emphasizing or foregrounding that story makes them biased. Consequently, bias is a normal, unavoidable part of expression.”) Certainly some texts are more willfully misleading than others; but all novels, like all texts, are necessarily partial – they say some things and not others; they take a particular narrative point of view and not another; they offer a certain perspective on characters and events. That is precisely why readers enjoy novels – for the distinctiveness of their take on the world they represent. So I don’t find it useful to criticize only some novels for their “bias” – it won’t help students understand the purposeful (and enjoyable) selectiveness of all texts. Nor will it help students understand that “truth” is a troublesome term to use of fiction.

 

One last, but by no means unimportant point. Almost without exception, the texts students study are narrative fiction. (Informative texts are occasionally brought into the classroom to supplement what the novels provide.) Poems are marginalized – no, silenced – largely I think because they’re harder to “do” critical literacy work on. And I can only assume that feature films, soap operas, documentaries, computer games, and the myriad forms of electronic text are missing from this book because of the norms of text selection in American English curricula.

 

This has an unfortunate consequence, of making (some) novels bear the full weight of critical scrutiny, when students may more urgently need to interrogate other kinds of texts for their underpinning ideologies and the arguments they mount. But perhaps to do that kind of work would subject teachers to the wrath of conservative interests – as has happened in the last few years in Australia. Here teachers have been accused of every kind of nefariousness, including preaching that all texts are alike in being political, and therefore none are more valuable than others; hence all values are relative and none are to be held dear. (What then of Shakespeare, or patriotism, or the hetero, nuclear family?)

 

If critical literacy teachers are to teach from a soundly theorized position, and be able to defend that; if their enthusiasm isn’t to be misplaced; if they aren’t to become cynical about their beliefs – then writers on behalf of critical literacy need to ensure their advocacy is as unassailable as possible. McLaughlin and DeVoogd’s book makes a start, in offering a clear version of critical literacy and straightforward strategies for its implementation; but it’s not the end of the story. Nor should it be seen as more than provisional, subject to supplementation and correction. Critical literacy praxis demands nothing less.

 

 

This review was originally published in English in Australia, 2007 (Vol 42, No 2), pp. 79-83. It is reproduced here with express permission of the Editor.