ABSTRACT
Critical literacy focuses on socially just readings of the world and offers space for articulating hopeful alternatives in contemporary classrooms constrained by narrowing, conservative agendas. However, critical literacy remains the object of ideological tussle and obfuscation in education policy, and teachers struggle to shift away from long-held perceptions of critical thinking with a focus on reliable sources and detecting bias. Critical literacy risks losing its transformational place in education unless it can be re-imagined in ways that educators can mobilise amid contemporary, competing demands of education. This chapter presents analysis of teachers’ agency in legitimising critical literacy. Drawing on Priestley, Biesta and Robinson’s model of teacher agency that draws attention to three interactive dimensions of agency: iterational (the teachers’ past life and professional experiences), projective (creative configurations of future goals) and practical-evaluative (present judgements amid contextual constraints), the chapter explores the agency of three school teachers in Australia and Sweden, through classroom observations, interviews and artefacts. Insights are provided into the conditions of agency that enabled the mobilisation of critical literacy within the current, neo-conservative climate. Two of the three teachers were able to exercise agency at the chalkface to promote critical literacy, offering classroom narratives of resistance and hope. Crucially, the practical-evaluative and the projective aspects of agency appear to be firmly rooted in the teachers’ iterational experiences. All elements of agency need to be considered urgently by teachers and teacher education for critical literacy to remain relevant in reimagined ways.
