The group believes that fostering and developing children’s critical capacity is vitally important at all ages, especially given current representations, constructions and challenges of truth both nationally and globally and the related challenges posed by the rise of “fake news”. Critical literacies are needed across educational systems and contexts to highlight and sustain the importance of challenge, critique and transformation through literacy learning and teaching. The group supports open conversations about the challenges as well as the many possibilities critical literacy can afford, and aims to develop educators’ confidence to become transformative. Our aim is to establish a network of critical literacy educators who share and discuss successes, problems and possibilities.
Our group has four main aims:
To provide a forum for members to explore the concept of critical literacies and to challenge and critique policy and our own and wider educational practices
To encourage members to share experiences and enactments of critical literacies and what they (can) look like in different contexts
To encourage open discussions about the challenges associated with taking up activist, transformative identities and positions as educators
To promote the work of the SIG and its members, with the aim of publishing in different fora to reach wider audiences new to and interested in developing critical literacies in their contexts.
The Critical Literacy special interest group is co-convened by Kelly Stone at the University of Edinburgh and Jennifer Farrar at the University of Glasgow.
If you would like to know more about the work of the group please email Kelly at k21stone@gmail.com, Jennifer at jennifer.farrar@glasgow.ac.uk, or Navan at navan.govender@strath.ac.uk.
You can watch Dr Jennifer Farrar & Dr Navan Govender in this video talk about ways in which they stumbled into Critical Literacy, and new understandings that have profoundly influenced their work.