ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief introductory overview of the two major approaches to critical literacy: critical pedagogy and critical text analysis. It shows that critical pedagogy raises the very practical pedagogical and curriculum question of the relationship between representation and truth, objectivity, reality, facticity and lived experience. The concept of ideology sits at the foundation of approaches to critical pedagogy, critical literacy, and, indeed, critical educational theories. Critical literacy approaches view language, texts, and discourses as the principal means for representing and reshaping possible worlds. As a cultural and linguistic practice, then, critical literacy entails an understanding of how increasingly sophisticated texts and discourses can be manipulated to represent and, indeed, alter the world. Later models of critical literacy developed in Australia and the UK – conceptually and practically differentiated from critical pedagogy – attempt to come to grips with the key theoretical and practical issues.
