Editor: Viv Edwards (University of Reading, UK)
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Volume: 15 Number: 1 Page: 14–32
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Importing Critical Literacy Pedagogy: Does it Have to Fail?
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Anneliese Kramer-Dahl
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While critical literacy or literacy as empowerment have become key notions in current reading and writing programmes (Clark, 1992; Lillis, 1997), what counts as 'critical' and as 'empowering' has been contested.
As this paper shows, these notions also have to be constantly redefined as teachers accommodate to the particularities of the cultural and institutional sites where they are being used. Focusing on one
particular site, the paper describes and evaluates an undergraduate course in reading and writing-across-the-curriculum at a university in Singapore, whose agenda was shaped by discourses on critical pedagogy
and critical language awareness. Rather than merely socialising the students into their particular academic discourse communities, the course sought to invite them to interrogate the textual practices of
these communities and to construct alternative texts. This was to be achieved through such principles of critical literacy instruction as (1) positioning students as researchers of academic language practices;
(2) respecting their resistance to academic ways of knowing and writing, and exploring alternative constructions of academic writing; and (3) problematising classroom and public texts (Comber, 1994). The
students' own work and words demonstrate the benefits as well as the limitations of such a critical reading and writing programme.
© Multilingual Matters 2001
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