ABSTRACT
Introduction This essay explores the idea of critical literacy in development education, used in this article also with reference to global and global citizenship education recognizing multiple orientations, theories and practices of critical engagement within these related fields. Critical literacy, as defined in this text, emphasizes the need for a careful examination of different ‘root’ narratives as a practice of responsible intellectual engagement across all sectors. In the first part of this chapter, I review the idea of critical literacy in the context of development education offering examples of my own academic and pedagogical practice in this area. In the second part I expand on the idea of soft and critical approaches to global citizenship and development education by presenting a new heuristic with four different ‘root’ narratives as a critical literacy stimulus for dialogue and analyses that may open new possibilities of signification.
