Critical literacy is the application of critical social theory to literacy. Critical literacy finds embedded discrimination in media by analyzing the messages promoting prejudiced power relationships found naturally in media and written material that go unnoticed otherwise by reading beyond the author's words and examining the manner in which the author has conveyed their ideas about society's norms to determine whether these ideas contain racial or gender inequality. There are several different theoretical perspectives on critical literacy that have produced different pedagogical approaches. These approaches share the basic premise that literacy requires consumers of text to adopt a critical and questioning approach.
When students examine the writer's message for bias, they are practicing critical literacy. This skill of actively engaging with the text can be used to help students become more perceptive and socially aware people who do not receive the messages around them from media, books, and images without first taking apart the text and relating its messages back to their own personal life experiences.
Critical literacy has become a popular approach to teaching English to students in some English speaking-countries, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.
For post-structuralist practitioners of critical literacy, the definition of this practice can be quite malleable, but usually involves a search for discourses and representations, and reasons why certain discourses are included in or omitted from a text.
Two major theoretical perspectives within the field of critical literacy are the Neo-Marxist/Freirean and the Australian. These approaches overlap in many ways and they do not necessarily represent competing views, but they do approach the subject matter differently
Relationship to critical thinking
While critical literacy and critical thinking involve similar steps and may overlap, they are not interchangeable. Critical thinking is done when one troubleshoots problems and solves them through a process involving logic and mental analysis. Thus, critical thinking attempts to understand the outside world and recognize that there are other arguments beyond one's own by evaluating their reasoning for such arguments, but critical thinking does not go further beyond revealing a loaded claim. In his 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes that individuals who are oppressed by those in positions of power are initially afraid to have freedom since they have internalized the rules of their oppressors and the consequences of not abiding by these rules. Thus, despite their internal desire for freedom, they continue to live in what Freire calls the "fear of freedom", following a pre-set prescription of behaviors that meet their oppressors' approval. From this emerges critical literacy, which states that by working to comprehend the way in which texts are written and presented, one may understand the political, social, and economic environments in which the text was formed as well as be able to identify hidden ideologies within such texts.
Factors
Freire includes several basic factors in his formation of critical literacy. The first step of critical literacy involves bringing awareness, or "consciousness" as Freire terms it, to those who are mistreated and to those who bring about this mistreatment through promoting unfair ideologies via politics and other positions of power, such as schools and government. Able to be tailored to work with diverse ideas relating to feminism or neo-Marxism, critical literacy presents students with different ways of thinking about their self-development by challenging them to consider differing perspectives about issues rather than settle with the cultural norms and status quo. This in turn allows students to provide more evidence and theories behind the information.
Student skills
Critical literacy allows students to develop their ability to understand the messages found in online articles and other sources of media such as news stations or journalism through careful analysis of the text and how the text is presented.