ABSTRACT
In teacher education, students need to reflect on and critique educational practices. This chapter focuses on a ‘blog critique’ assessment task and how critique manifests in academic discourse. The literacy teaching draws on the concept of ‘semantic gravity’ in Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to investigate what students need to write about and critique. Additionally, genre theory, from Systemic Functional Linguistics, an approach often used alongside LCT, is used to examine language choices for managing multiple points of view and what this means for the organization of the critique. Examples illustrate how these complementary perspectives make crucial features of ‘successful’ blog critiques visible to students. Findings challenge assumptions that this type of assessment task may be more accessible than traditional assessments. The chapter concludes with a possible pathway for cumulatively teaching key features of critique across a Bachelor of Education program.
