Critical Literacy

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.

"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

• Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Critical literacy as political intervention: Three variations on a theme Kevin Harris2 Informing critical literacy with ethnography Gary L. Anderson and Patricia Irvine3 Critical literacy and the politics of gender Barbara Bee4 The challenge of popular education in the Grenada revolution Didacus Jules5 Words to a life-land: Literacy, the imagination, and Palestine CHRIS SEARLE6 Between moral regulation and democracy: The cultural contradictions of the text Michael W. Apple7 Literacy and urban school reform: Beyond vulgar pragmatism Dennis Carlson8 Literacy, pedagogy, and English studies: Postmodern connections James A. Berlin9 Postmodernism and literacies James Paul Gee10 Reading and writing the media: Critical media literacy and postmodernism David Sholle and Stan Denski11 Feminist literacies: Toward emancipatory possibilities of solidarity Jeanne Brady and Adriana Hernandez12 (Dis)connecting literacy and sexuality: Speaking the unspeakable in the classroom Kathleen Rockhill13 Literacy and the politics of difference Henry Giroux14 Critical literacy and the postmodern turn Peter L. McLaren and Colin LankshearPostscript to "Critical literacy and the postmodern turn" Contributors Author Index Subject Index