Critical literacy: power and pleasure with language in the early years.

Comber, Barbara

In Australia, critical literacy enjoys a new prominence in most state curriculum frameworks. Internationally it is being explored by a joint Critical Literacy Task Force (an International Reading Association and National Council of Teachers of English working group). Many teachers are now familiar with the Chalkface Press materials (Mellor et al. 1987), the Critical Language Awareness materials produced in South Africa (Janks 1993), and the recent book published by the Primary English Teachers' Association (Knobel & Healy 1998). State education departments have produced broadsheets (e.g. Comber & Simpson 1995, Department of Education and Children's Services, South Australia 1995, Kimber et al. 2000) and guides for teachers on critical literacy in the classroom (Education Queensland 2000), especially emphasising the text analysis role of the reader as devised by Peter Freebody and Allan Luke (1990, 1999). Teacher researchers such as Jennifer O'Brien (1994, 1998, 2001) and Vivian Vasquez (1994, 2001) have documented their practices in early childhood classrooms, illustrating what this teaching might sound like and what different children make of it. The New London Group (1996), including international literacy educators and researchers, expanded the concept of critical literacy to `multiliteracies', emphasising the plurality of literacies and the need for curriculum design to respond to changing socio-economic conditions, populations and communication practices associated with globalisation.

After a decade of intense activity, publication and authorisation about critical literacy, what is there left to say? Despite this attention, in early childhood classrooms critical literacy may still be somewhat unfamiliar. Why this is so relates to the fundamental assumptions that critical literacy calls into question. How does critical literacy fit with, contradict or alter other key practices and beliefs about early childhood pedagogy and early literacy? How does it fit with, contradict or alter what we think we know about young children? Is it compatible with these ways of thinking about early childhood literacy development or does it require a major shift? In this paper I explore some of these questions.

One reason why `critical literacy' may still seem strange is that it does require a shift in thinking about literacy. In the past, educators have believed that teaching literacy could be improved if we studied it `scientifically' (Luke & Freebody 1997), but as Luke and Freebody (1999) point out literacy teaching involves `moral, political and cultural decisions', not simply the selection and application of best methods and techniques (see also Powell 1999). Children learn to become expert in particular literate practices (McNaughton 1995) and become particular kinds of literate citizens. Recognising that literacy teaching and learning is political may be troubling to teachers, especially so perhaps for early childhood teachers, who are typically given the lion's share of responsibility in helping children acquire literacy. Whereas literacy had been understood as an unquestioned good--a skill to be accomplished--now it sounds almost dangerous. On what criteria do literacy teachers now base their practices? How do we decide where we stand? What kinds of practices should children have access to? The non-neutrality of literate practices represents a considerable challenge to early childhood teachers--perhaps even a shift in professional identity. It changes the way we think about the job.

Yet critical literacy is congruous with a great deal of what we know about young children's language development. For decades, linguists and developmental psychologists have been fascinated and delighted by the incredible achievement of young children in acquiring language and in some cases, languages. That young children should also be able to acquire critical language practices should therefore be no surprise to early childhood educators. It is not cognitively, nor linguistically `beyond them'; text analysis is a dimension of the practice, not an added layer. Just as we have held high expectations for all children to learn language, in the same way we need to credit them with the competence for understanding the specific effects of language use in specific sites.

However, early childhood education has also been inflected with other discourses which work to preserve the view of the young child as innocent, naive and in need of protection, which Pat Shannon (2001) describes as the `politics of niceness'. We like to think of young children as purely motivated and as unaware of the power relations at work in the world that produce injustice. This is despite the fact that most young children world-wide are only too aware of what's fair, what's different, who gets the best deal, long before they start school. They learn these lessons about power from everyday life. They acquire language(s) in the contexts of power relations within families, peer groups, communities and wider cultural formations. So what can early childhood teachers do to build on this knowledge? In what follows, I offer a way of thinking about critical literacy where early childhood teachers draw on three complementary resources to construct `critical literacies' in classrooms.

Children come to school with rich resources for critical analysis. The trick for teachers is to mobilise those resources in school tasks, whilst at the same time making available new `ways with words' (Heath 1983) or new discourses (Gee 1990) that the children have not yet learned. Developing a critical approach to literacy learning in classrooms doesn't signify one set of practices. Teachers who take a critical standpoint will always be concerned with issues of power and justice, but how they pursue that in their curriculum and teaching may vary greatly. My collaborative inquiries with teacher researchers and my observations in the longitudinal studies with which I have been involved suggests that there are at least three different pedagogical moves going on in `critical' early childhood classrooms. These involve:

1. identifying and mobilising children's analytic resources

2. examining critical texts, and

3. offering children new discursive resources.

Identifying and mobilising children's analytic resources

Children come to school with experience about what's fair and what isn't, acquired from family and community life (in churches, malls, sporting clubs, daycare and so on). They also come with rich repertoires of narrative resources from everyday life, popular culture, sport, and so on--stories that deal with who/what's powerful, who/what's cool, who the good/bad guys are. In other words, five years of living has provided them with significant material where they can examine real and imaginary worlds, actual environments and constructed representations in terms of how relations of power work. Their early play with peers and siblings, as well as solitary role-plays, demonstrate what young children make of status, authority, force and power. Such performances, as they rehearse parts of scripts and take on the roles of most popular characters, indicate that children have an ear for powerful language use (Dyson 1997, Marsh 2000a).

For well over a decade Dyson (1989, 1997, 1999) has demonstrated how young children appropriate representational resources from what they know of and from the languages of popular culture and everyday life. Through powerful and memorable portrayals of particular children in classrooms she shows how children reconstruct for their own purposes hybrid discourses from the talk (and images) of radio, television, videos, movies and more. Dyson (1999) convincingly argues that children do not simply replicate what they hear but selectively take up and play with words, rhythms, discourses and reconstitute them for school and social purposes. Dyson's analyses indicates young children's sophistication in hearing how power is exercised through language. They know the refrains with status, the roles with powerful attributes and a great deal of their play is about the negotiation of power and identity through language. Dyson's work is relevant here because the discourses of early childhood education sometimes assume a less `media-savvy' critical analytical language user than Dyson's Jameel, Sammy and Tina prove to be. Importantly, as Dyson notes, for this material to count in the classroom and be a bridge to school literacies, teachers need to allow its use.

Children's television and video viewing, rather than being seen as an evil, can be seen as rich material that early childhood teachers can exploit (see Kavanagh 1997 and Marsh2000b for accounts of how such work is proceeding in early childhood classrooms). For instance children can re-enact favourite commercials and analyse how they work. They can design new commercials for other products or re-write existing commercials in ways that they think are more honest, effective, dramatic, humorous (Kavanagh 1997). However, it is important to understand that in using popular culture as part of a critical literacy curriculum, the object is not to enlighten children that commercial and popular texts are manipulative; rather the aim is to see how such texts work and consider their possible effects. Critical literacy is about assisting children to acquire the discursive resources for appreciation, analysis and action; it is not the repetition of `spot-the-gender-stereotype-on-this-page' activities. To stop at this would under-estimate what children can do.

Thinking analytically about power and pleasure, listening to and producing powerful texts are not unfamiliar practices to children. The task for teachers is to help children to develop a meta-awareness and a meta-language for what they can already do and to assist them in applying these resources to the texts and situations of school life. Their peers' different views and ways of thinking are important resources as well, and teachers may need to mediate so that children's different practices become part of a collective capacity to solve problems and approach possibilities rather than a source of conflict or exclusion.

Examining critical texts

There are many texts which take a critical stance that are readily available in everyday, media and literary worlds that young children can appreciate: from the picture books of writers like Anthony Browne, to explicitly counter-sexist fairy tales and counter-racist new histories, to television spoofs and cartoons. Reading contrasting versions of a story or a historical situation, especially where at least one text takes a critical angle, can help children to understand that texts are constructed with particular motivations by particular people with particular goals and that these are never neutral. Some authors write from a clear political standpoint. Sometimes the politics is evident (only) in the pictures, which allows even very young children to appreciate the point. Many critical texts work with humour to make their case. Being critical doesn't mean that there's no fun or that children become relentlessly negative or bleak. As well, there are local cultural practices such as Speakers' Corners (Vasquez 2001) talk-back radio, television shows, popular music, and so on where children can see contestation around ideas and events and how people work and play with words to make meaning. Vivian Vasquez (1994, 2000) has shown that this analysis of critical discourse in everyday life can be done with preschoolers. Such texts can become the objects of study in classrooms. Children can experiment with such genres in their own composing.

Teachers can develop a library or open-ended archive of texts (including cartoons, comics, birthday cards, jokes, and children's literature) with a critical or feminist standpoint. As a teacher I used to collect cartoons from newspapers, irreverent postcards and birthday cards and other materials to examine with students. In discussing what made these funny, young people frequently demonstrated a sophisticated analysis of the ways in which language works to `hit a target' or make an argument. Teaching in a multi-age early childhood classroom (with Year 1, 2 and 3 children), O'Brien made critical texts the objects of study as well. On one occasion she asked the children to report on their reading of a counter-sexist fairy tale, The Practical Princess (Coles 1983). She invited them to:

1. Draw and label the sort of father Diana Coles showed the king to be in the novel.

2. Draw and label a different sort of father the king could be.

3. Draw and label Princess Arete as she is shown to be in the novel. Make sure you show the things she is interested in.

4. Draw and label the sort of princess that you usually read about in novels.

In this instance the children were examining a counter-sexist text to consider how it had been constructed and how it might have been written differently. O'Brien, a feminist teacher, subjected the feminist text to a critical reading. She invited the children to consider the possibilities for other kinds of kings and fathers. Rather than brainwashing or training in political correctness, O'Brien put the children in the position to examine all texts critically, to think and imagine otherwise. She raised the question of whether this was the only way to re-write tales of princesses, princes and kings and in fact disrupted the politically correct rewriting. In discussion with the children she kept reminding them that someone, Diana Coles, wrote this book and that she had made particular decisions about what to show about particular characters and their activities and what she had the characters say.

The value in using critical, feminist, counter-hegemonic and irreverent texts with children is that in disrupting the usual reader expectations they foreground the decision-making that is involved in crafting a text and the political or interested nature of textual practices. There are many texts that take a critical or humorous angle on teachers, father, mothers, babies, and other matters of everyday life. Exploring how these texts work to be funny can be a useful starting point in developing a critical language awareness approach with young children.

Acquiring and practising new discursive resources

Critical literacies involve people using language to exercise power, to enhance everyday life in schools and communities and to question practices of privilege and injustice. This sounds grand, but often, perhaps usually, it may be in the more mundane and ordinary aspects of daily life in early childhood classrooms that critical literacies are negotiated. Critical literacies involve an ongoing analysis of textual practices. How do particular texts work? What effects do they have? Who has produced the text and in what circumstances, for which readers, hearers, viewers? Who is telling this story? Who else might tell it? What's missing from this account? How could it be told differently? Yet, critical literacy does not simply involve learning an arbitrary collection of clever questions, but also practising the use of language in powerful ways to get things done in the world. Questions, however, can be important catalysts in the process.

In addition to working with what children can already do and with publicly available critical texts, teachers can equip children with ways of thinking about, questioning and interrogating texts that children may not come across in everyday life. Such resources are developed from an understanding of the ways in which language works in specific contexts. When teachers develop their own analytical capacities they are in a position to introduce young children to critical reading practices. Educators in South Australia have found that a critical language awareness approach (Fairclough 1989, 1992, Janks 1993) is accessible to elementary school children (Comber & Simpson 1995, O'Brien 1994). For example, young children can discuss and investigate junk mail, starting with generic questions such as these:

What is being advertised?

How do you know what is being advertised?

How do you know who the products are for?

What do the advertisers want you to think about the products?

Which words and pictures tell you that? How?

Who produces these advertisements?

Depending on what was being advertised teachers devise specific questions which interrogate the representations of people and things and the relationships constituted in the text (Luke et al. 1994). Teachers need to have a strong knowledge of theories of language and textual practices in order to help children acquire new discursive practices. There are now many models of critical readings of everyday literary and factual texts available (Department for Education and Children's Services 1995, Education Queensland 2000). Yet if teachers have internalised their own analytic approaches and have an understanding of language, they will be able to demonstrate for children how to read critically as a part of everyday practice rather than as a special assignment or lesson. In such cases critical literacy would become the norm rather than the exception.

Further, when teachers' practices are designed around social justice principles, community events and situations may also become the objects of study. We have documented a project where young children and their teachers researched and became advocates for better environmental conditions in their neighbourhood (Comber et al. 2001). As they investigated the condition of trees in their local area, six-, seven- and eight-year-old children--many of whom were also learning English as a second or third language--were supported in learning to read maps, using a legend to record on a map, designing surveys and analysing the results, sending faxes to local government authorities and designing new recreational facilities and streets. In the business of learning about a topic of importance, the children began to acquire crucial textual practices for accessing information and services in the contemporary world.

Critical literacy is not a finite set of practices. Helping children acquire, practise and invent critical literacies means teachers make the time for children to take analytical stances, to research how things are, how they got to be that way and how they might be changed and to produce texts that represent the under-represented. It's about assisting young people to assemble many discursive tactics and strategies that they do not already have. They can get these from each other, from teachers, from published writers, web-designers, film-makers, linguists, journalists and so on, but it has to involve more than `literary appreciation'. They need to focus on the workings of language in specific situations.

Critically literate teachers

The most urgent challenge facing the profession in terms of literacy education is the unequal outcomes of poor, Indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse children (Alloway & Gilbert 1997, Hill et al. 1998, LoBianco & Freebody 1997, Masters & Forster 1997). These children need to be offered (and re-offered) the very best that our schools can deliver and to be provided with supplementary support in order to take it up. Part of that literate repertoire must be a critical dimension. Children need to see from an early age how literate practices can work for them (and, on occasions, against them). Part of the investment to do the work that literate practices entails comes from seeing its effects, recognising its satisfaction. If the literacy curriculum on offer to young children is not in their interests (in both senses of this term) then why would they bother to work at it? Designing critical and multi-literacies curricula for today's young people is contingent upon teachers' knowledge and also upon high quality curriculum support materials and advice. In order to put together a critical literacy curriculum which is responsive and inclusive, teachers' own knowledges need to be extensive. Teachers need sociological knowledge about the communities where they work, their economic and cultural histories, conditions and aspirations. They need to be knowledgeable about popular and consumer culture designed for children (and that designed for adults which children appropriate). They need to be knowledgeable about changing and multiple language and textual practices in a range of media.

Teachers need the interpretive resources to understand children's lifeworlds and cultural diversity, without assuming deficits and lacks. Recent studies have shown that many children from culturally diverse and poor communities do engage in complex language and literate practices (Gregory & Williams 2000, McNaughton 1995) and have rich funds of knowledge and community practices that the curriculum can build upon (Moll 1992). Other researchers (Dyson 1997, Marsh 2000a, 2000b) and educators (Kavanagh 1997) demonstrate convincingly that children's knowledge of and appreciation of popular culture (including radio, television, cartoons, movies, video games) can be an important resource for building literacy lessons. Yet this will only be the case if teachers admit it into the classroom and count it as valuable rather than setting it up in opposition to literature and literacy. Teachers need to know about popular and consumer culture that is designed for children, not so that they can be toxicity monitors and ban this material as soon as it appears, but so that they can understand what and who it is that children are talking about, drawing, role-playing, re-composing in their stories and games.

Beyond critical: What about the pleasures of literacy?

One problem with critical literacy is perhaps the connotations of the label. The word `critical' sometimes elicits fears in teachers, fears that such a curriculum will produce negative, sceptical, cynical, even antisocial children without joy or hope. There are several responses to this concern. Firstly we need to be very concerned about the children schooling produces. An absence of analytical capacities is dangerous. Apathy and complacency is dangerous too. If our political rhetoric proclaims democracy, then children need to learn what it means to be democratic citizens. Part of this means caring about what happens, believing they can influence it and knowing how to do this. Critical analysis of texts, from the texts of everyday life to the formal discourses of contemporary institutions, is a necessary capability for full participation as a citizen. Also necessary is that children can produce texts which do critical work. We have seen young children design petitions, write letters about educational funding reductions, fax council members about matters of local interest (Comber et al. 2001, Kimber et al. 2000, Vasquez 2001). Critical literacy is just as much about positive local action and information clarification as it is asking questions of texts. Both need to happen. These productive projects demonstrate to children that reading, writing, faxing, speaking and so on can be put to work in their immediate lives.

A related concern teachers may have is that a critical curriculum will spoil things for children and that it very definitely won't be fun. Teachers may worry that asking critical questions about whose interests are served by the actions of their favourite literary characters, or, focussing children's attention on how the female characters are depicted in a talking book, television advertisement or cartoon may interrupt children's enjoyment of the text. However, early childhood teachers who have opened up the talk around texts to such conversations have found young children eager to share their observations and different readings of a familiar story (O'Brien 1998, 2001). Critical questions give them more scope than the common invitation to select their favourite page and explain why they chose it. For example when O'Brien (1998) discussed a supermarket picture book featuring Smurfette (the sexy, yet generic, only female Smurf character) with young children, her question, `Are you surprised that all these people want to marry this girl?', generated a buzz of simultaneous conversation, with children taking up `various stances in relation to the text and its meaning(s)' (p. 122).

Rather than O'Brien offering one ideologically correct position, the children were able to work out what this text (and related television cartoon texts) was doing and where they stood in relation to it. The level of engagement in the classroom was high. Many children were speaking at once. In observing O'Brien and other early childhood teachers who have engaged children in critical analysis of texts, I have noticed a heightened sense of energy and pleasure (see also Comber et al. 2001, Kavanagh 1997, Kimber et al. 2000). Because children are invited to look closely at how the text works their attention is focussed. Their job is not simply to give impressions and opinions but understand the work of the text and how it is accomplished. O'Brien didn't spoil the children's pleasure in sharing this text. In fact they enjoyed having one up on her, owing to their greater knowledge of the world of Smurfs! But she did demonstrate that it was possible to have many responses to Smurfette and the assumed universal desire to marry her was just that--an assumption. For their part the children enjoyed being inter-textual knowers. They could predict when something funny was about to happen because many of them had seen an animated version of this text or one in the same genre. Critical literacy is serious and important business, but it can also be fun as children discover how texts have been crafted and how people read them differently. Even though O'Brien questioned the ideology informing the texts she did not dent (nor did she intend to) children's pleasure in this book. Yet her questions and her resistant reading interrupted their taken-for-granted responses to the book and destabilised the scenarios depicted there.

Which literacies for which children?

As a profession, we have taken a limiting and binary view of literacy for many decades. Literacy was either good for people because literature was civilising and a part of ruling class culture and/or literacy was good because it was necessary for efficient managing in everyday and working life (including its centrality to the practices of schooling and the delivery of the wider curriculum). The practices which children learn at school have significance beyond the school gates, or they should. In acquiring repertoires of literacies, children are also acquiring aesthetic, ethical, cultural, moral stances, views about knowledge, ways of working, organising, thinking and interacting. It is hard to say where the `literacy' begins and ends. Recently my colleagues and I have spent a great deal of time in classrooms conducting longitudinal case studies of children's literacy development in early childhood and primary school year levels (Comber & Hill 2000, Comber et al. 2001, Hill et al. 1998). These studies indicated that most children gradually become more proficient in making meaning with texts, but there were several worrying signs.

One major issue was that children were acquiring vastly different repertoires of practices. Some children were involved in literacies that incorporated design, production, communication, analysis and feedback. Others seemed to be involved in piecemeal recycled literacies of replication and repetition (i.e. copying, filling in blanks, decorating, recounting, saying the words, finishing the sentence). Even in preschool and the earliest years of school children were acquiring different literacies. These differences relate both to what was on offer in different classrooms, but of course they also relate to what children were assembling at home. My point here is that in preschools and early childhood classrooms young children need the very best literacies we can make available, more than old basics, base-line functions or simple introductions. We cannot offer the simplistic and reductive in the early years with the assumption that the complex and sophisticated comes later. The differential distribution of literacies to different groups of children is not new, although it is perhaps more obvious than ever with the move to e-literacies. Yet it is not only a question of proper access to new information and communication technologies that we are concerned about. It is the way children are being taught about learning, about what reading and writing and speaking are for. In other words it is the role school plays in orientating different children to different textual practices and different learning dispositions. The absence of productive and analytical practices from some children's literate repertoires is an urgent equity issue throughout schooling. Early childhood is a crucial site of practice because it is during that period that children form initial relationships with schooling and formal learning; it is there where they are first constituted as learners and there where most children are first constituted as readers.

Another issue noted in the longitudinal studies was that typically there was very little analytical work being done generally. In other words in most classrooms critical literacy remained a special activity or a rare event. There were important exceptions to this, yet our observations indicated that the norm in most early childhood and primary classrooms was not to engage with language practices that require children to analyse, question or be critical. In classrooms where teachers did have a critical orientation, it was not only that particular units of work fostered a critical stance, but that everyday conversations and tasks were inflected with genuine discussion, inquiry and decision-making. Several years ago early childhood teachers may well have asked, `"Critical literacy", what's that?' Now critical literacy is hardly `new' in early childhood educational discourses. We talk about it as though we know what it is. Yet I think we all have a lot of further work to do. We need to build on the pioneering work of a few early childhood educators in listening to and closely examining the classroom discourses of critical literacy classrooms (O'Brien 1994, Vasquez 1994). What are these teachers saying in what situations and with what effects? Critical literacy in early childhood classrooms remains in its infancy. In thinking about what critical literacy curriculum in the early years might look like, I imagine classrooms where children engage with local realities; mobilise their knowledges and practices; research and analyse language practices and their effects; and design texts with political and social intent and real-world effects.

Critical literacy makes children's interests central, because it involves discussing with children how texts work and how they work in the world. It is in all children's individual and collective interests to know that texts are questionable, they are put together in particular ways by particular people hoping for particular effects and they have particular consequences for their readers, producers and users. Such an approach does not treat young people as infants, but with respect and expectation. It is child-centred in the sense that it assumes young people's complex productive and analytical capacities for engagement with what really matters; rather than minimising or restricting them to what is usually considered appropriate or good for children.

Acknowledgements

Recently Vivian Vasquez invited me to write a very short piece for teachers about critical literacy in elementary classrooms for the National Council of Teachers of English newsletter, School Talk (see Comber 2001). It was her invitation that generated many of the ideas developed in this paper. I am grateful to Vivian for our ongoing conversations about critical literacy. I also want to thank two South Australian early childhood educators, Jennifer O'Brien and Marg Wells, from whom I have learnt a great deal about negotiating critical literacies with young children. My thanks also to Pauline Harris and Laurie Makin for their helpful feedback.

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Barbara Comber is Director of the Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures at the University of South Australia. Her research interests include literacy development, poverty and education, teachers' work and critical literacies. She was a researcher in the 100 Children Go to School longitudinal study and also a project with the Department of Education, Training and Employment, South Australia, which documented the literacy development of socio-economically disadvantaged students' literacy development in the middle primary years. She recently co-edited two books: Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms and Critiquing Whole Language and Classroom Inquiry. She has an ongoing commitment to fostering teacher research and collaborative inquiries.

Address: School of Education, Underdale Campus, University of South
Australia
Email: [email protected]