Critical Awareness for Literacy Teachers and Educators in Troubling Times

The field of literacy remains assailed by a persisting discrepancy between an increasing body of literacy research that honors the diversity in students’ practices juxtaposed against a persistent system of schooling and high-stakes assessment that has not been designed to draw from underrepresented students’ literate assets. This discrepancy has created a situation where teachers often receive well-intentioned instruction from literacy educators about how to address diverse literacy needs, but then, struggle to enact this instruction in the high-stakes testing environment of classrooms and schools where they have little autonomy. We argue in this essay that critical multilingual, critical multicultural and critical racial awareness on the part of literacy teachers and educators can serve as a basis for enhancing cultural and linguistic responsiveness in literacy classrooms. We invite the field to use these forms of awareness to engage with the racial, linguistic, and cultural predispositions of the self as a basis for engaging in responsiveness to and with the Other