Critical literacy in Australia: affordances, tensions and hybridizations

© 2013 Dr. Amanda GutierrezThis research project investigated Australian curriculum and teacher views on approaches to critical literacy in high school English teaching. Critical literacy has influenced secondary English teaching contexts in Australia for more than twenty years. It is evident in many different forms, but has common goals of promoting social justice and equity through challenging and interrogating textual representations of society. While it has common goals there are many versions of critical literacy discussed in Australian theoretical texts and evident in teacher discourse and enactment. In addition, its appearance in current curriculum documents is arguably a product of its highly politicised nature in current Australian literacy education. This thesis examines the place of critical literacy in Australia in recent times. It does this by; providing a literature review of Australian literacy theoretical texts on critical literacy; analysing how it appears in secondary English curriculum documents from Victoria and Queensland; and analysing representations in teacher discourses from these two states. The overarching research questions are; how has critical literacy been constructed in Australia in curriculum and by high school English teachers? and what is the relationship between theory, curriculum and teacher discourse/practice in relation to critical literacy? The research was underpinned by a postmodern qualitative epistemology with an analytical framework influenced by Bakhtin’s theories concerning meaning and knowledge creation (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986). The findings from the analysis illustrated three major themes: Inclusions and omissions of critical literacy discourses in mandated curriculum documents can permit teacher discourse on critical literacy, or lead to subversive teacher discourse against mandated curriculum; teachers dialogues with critical literacy discourses can influence their ideological becoming as English teachers, and in turn add to the ‘hybridization’ (Bakhtin, 1981) of enacted critical literacy; and teachers demonstrate tension in their ideological becoming between critical literacy and traditional notions of teaching ‘literature’ and valuing the ‘aesthetic’