Critical Literacy

Politics, Praxis, and the Postmodern

Edited by Colin Lankshear & Peter L. McLaren

Subjects: Curriculum
Series: SUNY series, Teacher Empowerment and School Reform
Paperback : 9780791412305, 443 pages, March 1993
Hardcover : 9780791412299, 443 pages, March 1993

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Table of contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Critical literacy as political intervention: Three variations on a theme

Kevin Harris

2 Informing critical literacy with ethnography

Gary L. Anderson and Patricia Irvine

3 Critical literacy and the politics of gender

Barbara Bee

4 The challenge of popular education in the Grenada revolution

Didacus Jules

5 Words to a life-land: Literacy, the imagination, and Palestine

CHRIS SEARLE

6 Between moral regulation and democracy: The cultural contradictions of the text

Michael W. Apple

7 Literacy and urban school reform: Beyond vulgar pragmatism

Dennis Carlson

8 Literacy, pedagogy, and English studies: Postmodern connections

James A. Berlin

9 Postmodernism and literacies

James Paul Gee

10 Reading and writing the media: Critical media literacy and postmodernism

David Sholle and Stan Denski

11 Feminist literacies: Toward emancipatory possibilities of solidarity

Jeanne Brady and Adriana Hernandez

12 (Dis)connecting literacy and sexuality: Speaking the unspeakable in the classroom

Kathleen Rockhill

13 Literacy and the politics of difference

Henry Giroux

14 Critical literacy and the postmodern turn

Peter L. McLaren and Colin Lankshear

Postscript to "Critical literacy and the postmodern turn"

Contributors

Author Index

Subject Index

Colin Lankshear, formerly Senior Lecturer in Education at Auckland University in New Zealand, is an educational consultant and writer. He is the author of several books, including, Freedom and Education, Education and Rights (with Ivan Snook), Going for Gold (with Allan Levett), and Literacy, Schooling, and Revolution. Peter McLaren is Professor and Renowned Scholar in Residence in the School of Education and Allied Professions at Miami University, and co-director of the Center for Education and Cultural Studies. He is the author of numerous books in education, including Life in Schools and Schooling as a Ritual Performance, and editor with Henry Giroux of Critical Pedagogy, the State, and Cultural Struggle, also published by SUNY Press.

Reviews

"Lankshear and McLaren have put together a volume that includes some of the best work presently being done in the area of literacy studies. It is a book that confronts the challenge of literacy in ways that take into account some of the most demanding and urgent debates of our time. It essentially redefines the project of literacy by bringing to light new possibilities for liberation struggles both in and outside of schools. It is a project that undermines the deceit of democracy as many people in Latin America and the West have known it, and charts out the beginnings of a new, radical form of democratic social life. " — Paulo Freire

"Lankshear and McLaren ask the readers of this book to engage with the text in a way that launches them into questioning, into judgement, and into a kind of collective interpretation. The encounter that lies ahead is not intended to be precious, purely private, or hermetically 'intellectual. ' It can be —it ought to be— the kind of encounter that makes readers curious, uneasy, and in some manner hopeful. " — Maxine Greene, Columbia University

"This volume offers a challenge that cuts to the very core of our present social system, uncovering ways in which literacy serves to either silence or liberate. It brings to the forefront ideas and analyses from a new wave of literacy theorists and practitioners whose work signals a rupture in the way literacy is presently understood and defined. " — Donaldo Macedo, University of Massachusetts, Boston