Critical Literature Pedagogy

This article introduces a Critical Literacy Pedagogy (CLP), a pedagogical framework for merging goals of critical literacy with canonical literature instruction.For one reason or another, certain texts (e.g., The Great Gatsby , To Kill a Mockingbird ) have become staples of the secondary literacy classroom and constitute what we refer to as the "high school canon".Although this group of texts evolves over time and some texts are not taught in certain contexts, this corpus of literature prevails as dominant (Applebee, 1993 ;Stallworth Morrell, 2009 ; Luken addi-tion to equipping students with skills and strategies for traditional textual analysis and production, a critical literacy approach also teaches students to read and write against texts: to identify and understand that language and texts are not neutral and always ideological.Therefore, critical literacies consist not only of academic literacies associated with reading and writing texts for traditional purposes but also practices associated with reading and writing tional curricula in school and dominant popular culture, multimedia, and other texts students encounter outside of school.Critical literacy has roots in critical social theory of the Frankfurt School (Habermas, 1975 ), which might be described as a broad, interdisciplinary, neo-Marxist approach to criticism and critique of society with a commitment to social change.Critical social theory posits that all knowledge is constructed and