Assembling critical literacy with high school English language learners: Exploring power in the territory beyond reason

The “territory beyond reason” (Janks, 2010) is an area toward which research into critical literacy is turning its focus internationally (Anwaruddin, 2015; Benesch, 2012; Lau, 2013; Misson, 2012). In doing so, it is contributing to the continual augmentation of critical literacy practices that are made available to and drawn upon by teachers within classroom practice. This paper reports on findings from a critical, instrumental case study in two Australian high schools that identified a focus on emotionality and “critical aesthetics” (Misson & Morgan, 2006) within the teaching of critical literacy with adolescent English language learners (ELLs). Framed by Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2003) and Janks’ Synthesis Model of Critical Literacy (2010), the study investigated the ways in which teachers understood and enacted critical literacy specifically with ELLs. Drawing on data from interviews, documents, and video-recorded classroom practice, this paper presents the practice of one teacher, Celia, who explored Martin Luther King Jr’s “March on Washington” Speech (1963) to show her English language learners how the impassioned, aesthetic qualities of the speech work to produce relations of positive power between the speaker and the hearer of the speech. Her practice enabled her learners from Afghanistan, China, Iraq, Japan, Somalia, Sudan and Vietnam to understand elements of aesthetic textual design while simultaneously reflecting on the power exerted by language choices. Students then designed hortatory speeches utilising aesthetic elements with “critical consciousness” (Friere, 2005) drawing on their own diverse histories and identities. The findings provide evidence of localised, assemblages of critical literacy practice that take into account diverse multiplicities of understandings about teaching language critically with diverse learners. As Janks notes, such practice “confronts the profoundly rationalist underpinnings of critical literacy” (p. 211) which have been a feature of critical literacy practice in high schools in Australia. It can, therefore, add new lines of theoretical and pedagogical transit to that which already exist within critical literacy teaching in this context. Documenting these instances of practice is useful so as to push beyond the problematic disjunction between critical deconstruction of texts and affective engagement with texts. Rationalist critical literacy allows us to see the “powerful interests at work, but it robs us of laughter and play” (Janks, 2010, p. 219). Lack of investment and emotionality can also mean that the emancipatory goals of critical literacy are not realised. Practice that provides a third space can deterritorialise (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) “aesthetics” on the one hand, and “the critical” on the other, by showing how they can be brought together productively