Critical Literacy Practices in Educational Contexts

Critical literacy practices foreground learners’ active engagement with texts, discourses and multimodal media to interrogate power relations, social identities and cultural assumptions. Rooted in sociocultural and post-structural theories, critical literacy moves beyond decoding to encompass analysis of authorial intent, context, ideology and audience. It encourages students to question whose voices are privileged or marginalised, to recognise the constructed nature of knowledge and to imagine alternative narratives. In diverse educational settings—primary, secondary, higher education and language classrooms—practitioners employ dialogue, inquiry cycles, role-plays and creative redesigns of familiar texts to cultivate reflective and participatory learners. Digital platforms and community-based materials further extend critical engagement beyond the classroom, enabling collaborative analyses of news, social media, advertising and environmental artefacts. Emphasis on culturally sustaining approaches ensures that learners’ linguistic and cultural repertoires are validated and leveraged as resources for critique and transformation. Globally, critical literacy underpins efforts to foster democratic citizenship, social justice and equity, equipping students with the dispositions and competencies to navigate complex sociopolitical landscapes and to contribute ethically to their communities.

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Critical Literacy Practices in Educational Contexts publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in critical literacy practices in educational contexts across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Critical literacy: An educational approach that promotes the examination of texts and media to uncover power dynamics, ideology and social constructs.

Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A teaching framework that validates and builds upon students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds to support critical engagement and learning.

Affective turn: A scholarly emphasis on emotion and embodied experience as integral to critical analysis and meaning-making.

Critical discourse analysis: A methodological approach to study language in use, focusing on how discourse shapes and reflects power relations and social practice.

References

1. Revolutionary Love: Centering the Full Humanity of Children in the Literacy Curriculum. Reading Research Quarterly (2024).
2. Critical literacies, imagination and the affective turn: Postgraduate students’ redesigns of race and gender in South African higher education. Linguistics and Education (2024).
3. Learners’ reading between the signs in the English second language classroom. Reading & Writing (2022).