A critical approach to literacy: Improving outcomes for students from
lower socio-economic backgrounds/ ESL students
Eve Mayes
Condell Park High School
Abstract
Aims of the study1
As Australia moves towards implementation of a National Curriculum for English, there is an
acknowledgement that some students are “disenfranchised from full citizenship” by not
leaving school with the language capabilities needed in a complex world (National
Curriculum Board, 2008, p. 2). English as a Second Language (ESL) students “are overrepresented in the[se] lower achievement levels in literacy assessments” (2008, p.3), as well
as students from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. In the recent battle between
the federal government and the Australian Education Union (Patty, Feneley & Harrison,
2010, May 8-9), both groups have invoked the desire to improve the outcomes of
disadvantaged students in their discourse about the worth of standardised testing and the
MySchool website.
A critical approach to literacy aims to empower students through literacy to read the “word”
and the “world” (Freire & Macedo, 1987). Its practices include encouraging students to
identify texts as constructed, encouraging them to analyse and problematise the texts that they
encounter.
In travelling to England and New York, I desired to explore how a critical approach to
literacy in and beyond the classroom could lead to improved student engagement and
outcomes. I was also interested in how England’s and New York’s experiences of government
intervention in educational reform were received and how Australia could benefit from their
experiences.
Critically examining students’ home and street literacies
Amongst progressive researchers and teachers there is an awareness that teachers must be
ethnographers before and in the process of teaching students. In East London, Eve Gregory’s
ethnographic research has investigated the “treasure trove” that students from bi/multilingual
backgrounds bring to the classroom (2003). Rather than considering students’ knowledge and
experiences from a deficit standpoint, the focus has been on students’ ability to syncretise
home and school literacies, informing and changing the other into a “dynamic whole”
(Gregory, 2003, p.203).
Beyond the knowledge and experience that students bring with them from their cultural
backgrounds, there are also skills that come from the texts that they engage with on the
‘street’. David E. Kirkland’s observations in the United States of a group of three young
African American men over three years led to his conclusion that “[t]hey read, but they read
in ways we English teachers sometimes fail to value, respect and acknowledge” (2008, p.69).
1
This study was undertaken with the support of the Premier’s English Scholarship.
Educators in the United Kingdom and United States are concerned about the disjunction
between the skills and experiences that students from multilingual backgrounds bring with
them to school and the skills that are valued and examined in English classrooms and
standardised tests. Students from bi/multilingual backgrounds are frequently marginalised in
English curriculums that privilege Standard English and white European canonic texts. While
each student comes to school with “equal but different knowledges, narratives and interests”
(Thomson, 2002, p.2), those brought by ESL and low socio-economic students “are not those
that are important for school success. It is not the children who are disadvantaged but rather it
is the school that does the disadvantaging” (Thomson, 2002, p.4). David E. Kirkland has
observed that urban students in the US “fail to engage with (read and write about) traditional
classroom texts, either because such texts lack relevance to them (Ladson-Billings, 1996) or
because such texts promote perspectives and interests that are threatening to them” (2007,
p.131).
Yet, the literacies that students bring with them but are sidelined in the English classroom
may, ironically, be the literacies that they need. Carey Jewitt contends that “school literacy
needs to be expanded to reflect the semiotic systems that young people use” (2005, p.330).
Brian Street (2003, pp.139-140) asserts from a New Literacy perspective that:
[c]hildren are indeed being socialised into a multilingual world […] [T]hat world also
involves hybrid use of communicative modes, visual, three-dimensional, linguistic
and non-linguistic. [… This] will require of teachers and their pupils more critical
reflexivity about these languages and modes themselves.
Thus, neglecting to acknowledge and value students’ home and street literacies is not only
culturally insensitive, but also fails to prepare them for the world.
Improving results in the classroom through a critical approach to literacy
Integrating multilingual strategies
Teachers in the UK and US who are achieving success with students from ESL and low
socio-economic backgrounds are critically aware of their own pedagogy. In New York, Ofelia
Garcia has advocated the development of teachers’ multilingual awareness, advocating
understanding of “‘the social, political and economic struggles surrounding the use of the two
languages” (2008, p.387-388). Reflective teachers are aware of their own use of language in
the classroom as well as the strengths that students bring to the classroom: “In an
ethnographic approach to classroom instruction, teachers observe ‘in a systematic way the
strengths, abilities and needs of [the] students as a prerequisite to effective planning and
teaching’” (Duffy, 2001, p.138, cited by Pradl, 2002, p.527).
This approach results in pedagogy where teachers draw from students’ cultural and linguistic
experiences. In contexts where there is a language common to the majority of students,
teachers constantly draw from the students’ language, explicitly recognising students’
identities, making connections to their cultural knowledge and building metalinguistic
awareness. Students need not abandon their cultural backgrounds when they enter the
classroom; there is a “‘contact zone’ – wherein opposing cultures come to struggle with and
negotiate meanings” (Pradl, 2002, p.526, citing Pratt, 1991). This “dialogue across cultures”
energises learning, honours all students, meaning that, “cultural capital grows out of acts of
mutual barter” (Pradl, 2002, p.526).
Indeed, this valuing of students’ languages and cultures has been shown to improve student
results. Multilingual and bi-dialectical approaches to classroom instruction have helped
African American students increase writing proficiency, by using multilingual expressions to
scaffold students towards an academic writing voice (Harris-Wright, 1999; Taylor, 1989).
A critical approach to culturally responsive texts
Using texts written by authors from the same cultural background as students has also been
shown to improve student engagement and outcomes. When this happens, “[s]tudents
professed to be amazed and excited by the fact that people like themselves wrote stories and
books that spoke to their own life circumstances” (Gandara, 1998, p.149, cited by Pradl,
2002, p.532). The use of culturally responsive texts is most effective when used in a
classroom that values students’ opinions and questions about the text.
At New Design High School in New York City, a four-year old high school with a majority of
students from a Latino or African American background, this approach is at the centre of all
literacy teaching. In one classroom that I visited, students’ desks were assembled into an
inward-facing circle, reading Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This text
was chosen for its literacy merit (winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2008) as well as its cultural
responsiveness (a significant number of students were from a Latino background).
As the teacher read from the novel, students read along, stopping to scribble on post it notes.
The teacher stumbled over a Spanish word and asked students to correct her pronunciation
and translate the word for the class. She then stopped and asked what students had written on
their post it notes. They had written literal (in the text), interpretive (between the lines of the
text) and applied (beyond the text) questions for discussion. Students’ questions shaped the
classroom discussion, reversing the usual ‘English classroom’ trend for comprehension
questions, passively answered by disengaged students.
The remarkable part of this practice at this school is that it is not confined to the one teacher
interested in inquiry-based learning; every teacher uses the same approach with all students,
from 9th to 12th Grade. In particular, students are well equipped to critique race, class and
gender discourses in texts. By graduation, students are thoroughly independent learners with
opinions, able to articulate and defend their positions on how they have been positioned by
texts.
A critical approach to culturally relevant texts – hip hop pedagogy
While language and culture are significant factors, the texts that students engage with on a
daily basis on the ‘street’ are central to students’ identity formation. There is an awareness in
the UK and US that teachers need to make “explicit connections between students’ everyday
knowledge and the demands of subject-matter learning” (Lee, Spencer &Harpalani, 2003,
p.7) in a culturally relevant way that can “positively contribute to student confidence,
curricular engagement and teacher-student relationships” (Hill, 2009, p.8).
Hip hop texts have been used beyond and in the classroom to improve students’ futures.
Urban Word in New York City is a community organisation that “believes that free selfexpression - matured in an enhanced critical literacy environment - improves self-confidence
and strengthens educational achievement for NYC’s inner city youth” (Urban Word, 2008).
Urban Word offers free workshops for students and its work has resulted in “heightened inschool performance, and greater interest in pursuing higher education” (Urban Word, 2008).
Hip hop texts have also been used in classrooms in North Philadelphia by Marc Lamont Hill
not as “gimmicks to entice students to be compliant and cooperate” but for their expression of
“enduring and comprehensive themes” (Ladson-Billings, 2009, p.ix). It has been found that
when students have official opportunities to engage in the critical study of hip hop, their
performance on official literacy tasks improves dramatically (Richardson, 2003, pp.68-72).
Indeed, at New Design High School in New York, hip hop texts are used to explicitly prepare
students for statewide testing, contextualising test preparation in the realities and interests of
students.
Hip hop based pedagogy could be adapted to work in Australian classrooms. Whilst there
could be some questions of the cultural relevance of using texts originating within American,
Caribbean and African diasporic traditions in Australia, it is true that “hip hop has been
consumed and refashioned in ways that respond to the experiences, traditions, imaginations,
and desires of young people throughout the world” (Hill, 2009, p.1).
Scaffolding students to independent analysis of texts
Using texts that are culturally responsive and relevant allows teachers to scaffold students
towards independent analysis of texts. I discussed this approach with Gordon Pradl, retired
Professor of English Education at New York University. When ‘fresh’ texts are used, teachers
are able to explicitly expose to students their “primary acts of reading.” These are the
“reading events in which readers are working their way though a text for the first time, with
all the gold or dross, insights or false starts, that might entail” (Pradl, 1987, p.67). These
events contrast with “secondary acts of reading”- “publicly reporting on the results of a
previous encounter with a text”, where lessons involve pre-packaged questions and
deconstructions of literary techniques, presented by the ‘expert’ to the uninitiated (p.67).
Using texts that a teacher may not be familiar with allows them to expose their mistakes in
interpretation to students as they collectively work through an unfamiliar text. Pradl, as an
early career teacher confronted by a poem on the back of a Rolling Stones album in his
classroom, desired to voice his “interior monologue”, allowing students to “eavesdrop” on his
primary acts of reading, in order to “demystify the anxiety” surrounding interpretation of
poetry and thus allow each student to own the text “in a primary way, because there are no
previous meanings to inhibit us” (1987, pp.68-69). Indeed, there is a richness of classroom
interaction that is opened up when students become the ‘authority’ in the classroom and when
a teacher collectively unveils acts of interpretation with students.
The outworking of critical literacy – student voice in the classroom and at a
whole school level
Indeed, these strategies to improve student outcomes all privilege students’ voices in the
classroom. Over the course of my study tour, I came to apprehend student voice as a key
feature and consequence of a critical approach to literacy. When students are given texts that
are culturally responsive and relevant and they are able to express their viewpoints in a way
that resonates with them, true engagement and results can follow. This is only possible in an
educational context where student voice is central not just in the classroom, but also the
broader school setting.
The Student Voice movement has aimed to share and distribute leadership in the school by
“encouraging all members of the school to be active ‘inquirers’ into the life and work of the
school” (Bragg & Fielding, 2005, p.205). It “seeks to involve, not merely to use, young
people, viewing them not just as recipients or targets, but as resources and producers of
knowledge” (Bragg & Fielding, 2005, p.111). This resonates with Paolo Freire’s critique of
the ‘banking model’ of education (1970). In Student Voice initiatives, students may be
involved in collaborative enquiry about teaching, learning and structures in the school.
Valuing students’ voices at whole school and classroom levels can have a positive impact on
student engagement and students’ results. Cook-Sather has asserted that “[t]alking about good
teaching inspires students to become better students” (2006, p.353); students become “more
engaged, critically aware, and able to speak and take action within their schools and lives”
(p.352). Students are able to develop “useful new skills” “in a context where they are relevant
and meaningful” (Bragg & Fielding, 2005, p.115).
This movement centres on “respect”, which “requires acknowledgement of the autonomy of
others, of their inevitable unknowability, and their apprehended distinctiveness, through the
activity and enactment of mutual engagement” (Sennett, 2003, paraphrased by Fielding, 2006,
p.309). This is the outworking of a critical approach to literacy – a literacy that allows
students to question, articulate their differences, not only about texts in the classroom but
beyond texts and beyond the classroom.
The Student Voice movement is well established in the UK, mandated for schools in the
Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) school inspection process and supported
through bodies including the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT). While this has
been critiqued as leading to tokenistic inclusion of students when mandated by OFSTED
standards in the United Kingdom (Thomson, 2008, p.18), it has become an integrated part of
the school system in the United Kingdom.
The Student Voice principles resonate with the ‘Teachers for a Fair Go’ research findings in
NSW. The Fair Go research and the Student Voice movement share a common understanding
that schools, through their curriculum, pedagogy and assessment practices “convey powerful
messages” that “shape individual perceptions of what they might do, and what they might
become” (McFadden and Munns, 2002, pp. 362-363). Traditionally, students at schools with
a high proportion of students from a low socio-economic background have received deficit
messages about knowledge, ability, control, place and voice. Student voice initiatives are one
way of changing the messages given to students at both a whole school and classroom level.
Students’ critical engagement within and beyond the classroom can lead to engagement and
improved outcomes.
A note on standardised testing and school league tables
Whilst there were examples of innovative teaching in New York and the United Kingdom, the
teachers and academics that I met there were concerned about the impact of increased
standardised testing and government intervention on their classrooms. In both the UK and
US, there has been a strong critique of the trend towards performance-driven education.
The student voice movement has reacted against the “high performance learning
organisation”, desiring to create a “person-centred learning community” (Fielding, 2006,
p.300) instead. In performance-driven organisations, “[t]he significance of both teachers and
students is derivative and rests primarily in their contribution, usually via high stakes testing,
to the public performance of the organisation” (Fielding, 2006, p.304). Robin Alexander’s
Cambridge Primary Review has asserted that it is “teaching, not testing, that drives up
standards” (Alexander, 2009, p.4), questioning the value of standardised testing. Elsewhere, it
has been observed that it is a significant coincidence that “widespread neglect of the needs
and interests of disadvantaged and marginalised youth has corresponded with the
entrenchment in educational policy of accountability and compliance measures, particularly
high stakes testing” (Angus, 2006, p.369).
Indeed, schools that are succeeding in the UK and US are critical of government intervention
and standardised testing. It has been documented that the schools with disadvantaged students
that most successfully “engage their students, keep them at school” are the ones that “treat
them in mature and non-patronising ways that connect with their lives and cultures.”
Typically, “such schools reject currently dominant ‘reform’ trajectories and, instead, create
space for teachers and students to develop good educational practice” (Angus, 2006, p.372).
Thomson has found that successful school leaders use “practical logic” as “active agents”
implementing policy changes in a resistant way, producing “their own variations
incorporating new songs along with the ongoing older justice and equity refrains” (2002,
p.162). In these contexts, school leaders model the resistance that is central to a critical
approach to literacy.
A more inclusive curriculum
When a critical approach to curriculum and pedagogy is taken, it becomes clear that
“achievement gaps” that ESL students and students from low socio-economic backgrounds
experience “may be more accurately characterised as cultural gaps – between them and their
teachers (and the larger society)” (Ladson-Billings, 2009, p. ix). There is a sense in which
teachers need to become “ethnographers in the true sense” (Delpit, 1988, cited by Pradl, 2002,
p. 527), becoming vulnerable enough to allow students’ knowledge to be privileged in
classroom discussion. When students’ languages are valued and texts that are culturally
responsive and culturally relevant are used, students’ voices are unleashed to actively engage
with and beyond texts.
There are positive outcomes for teachers who take an ethnographic approach, use critical
approaches to a range of texts in the classroom and privilege student voice. Teachers who
thus value what students bring to school and listen to students are able to “erect bridges
between student lives and the demands of the common curriculum” and “foster productive
patterns of interaction between teacher and student […] a ‘humanising pedagogy’” (Pradl,
2002, p.527). In this process of honouring students, “cultural capital grows out of acts of
mutual barter” (Pradl, 2002, p.526). Indeed, students are able to reflect on themselves and
their worlds in a vision of English that centres on heterogeneity, “declaring breakthroughs
that allow the recognition of otherness” (hooks, 1991, p.343, cited by Kirkland, 2008, p.72).
A person-centred approach to literacy that privileges students’ voices requires “a more
patient, no less purposeful, no less grounded narrative at the heart of which lie dialogue,
collective reflection and the restless necessity of a permanent provisionality” (Fielding, 2006,
p.310). This approach is essential in an era when the direction of literacy education in
Australia is being contested in the public arena.
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