A TALE OF DIFFERENCES: COMPARING THE TRADITIONS, PERSPECTIVES, AND EDUCATIONAL GOALS OF CRITICAL READING AND CRITICAL LITERACY

Classroom literacy practices are necessarily grounded in historical and philosophical traditions, and these traditions provide a lens for distinguishing those practices. Our goal in this article is to examine the assumptions that underlie two pedadogical approaches to literacy -one grounded in liberal humanism, and the other within critical perspectives. We argue that there are fundamental philosophical distinctions between liberal-humanist critical reading and critical literacy, and we hope to demonstrate why educators need to acknowledge and understand these differences. We believe that these two approaches to critical reading are often conflated or mistaken for one another, with the result that practices associated with critical literacy are often inappropriately adopted by individuals who are committed to liberal-humanist forms of critical reading. By tracing the lines of development of these different approaches to literacy, we hope to show that they work within very different, and perhaps incompatible, views on knowledge, reality, authorship, and discourse -and on the goals of education. Along with illuminating philosophical and historical distinctions, we incorporate instructional examples to demonstrate the ways these distinctions play out in classrooms. Related Posting from the Archives • Further Notes on the Four Resources Model by Allan Luke and Peter