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8. CRITICAL LITERACIES AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION: GLOBAL

AND LOCAL PERSPECTIVES

Brian Morgan and Vaidehi Ramanathan

Increasingly aware of the “critical” turn in our disciplines, we offer a partial survey
of scholarship in two key realms—English for academic purposes (EAP) and
globalization—where the term “critical literacy” has particular relevance. We begin
by addressing some key concepts and ideological tensions latent beneath the term
“critical.” We then address the pedagogical priorities that arise from this
conceptualization, in particular, the use of texts to distance individual and group
identities from powerful discourses. Next, we review studies that demonstrate how
different teachers and researchers have engaged in unraveling and cross-questioning
the rhetorical influences of various texts types, including multimodal ones. In the
final section, we discuss the intertwined processes of homogenization and
diversification arising from the economic, cultural, and political strains of
globalization with particular emphasis on their implications for critical literacies and
language education.

It is prudent practice to begin a review of this type by forewarning readers of

the plurality and complexity of the field in question. The notion of critical literacy
certainly fits this seemingly unmanageable profile. Still, for researchers, teachers,
teacher educators, or policy makers, key unifying themes emerge around our topic.
Although a meeting place of many disciplines (e.g., cultural anthropology, cognitive
psychology, applied linguistics, literary studies, to name a few), literacy is
increasingly conceptualized as a social practice. This sociality does not ignore the
cognitive and semiotic processes involved in the production and reception of texts.
Instead, it is recognition that literacy practices deemed basic, functional, or of a
higher-order—or that stand as emblematic of nation or ethnicity—are at root social
arrangements, embedded in and constitutive of issues relating to unequal
distributions of power within communities and institutions (e.g., Carr, 2003; Gee,
2002; Lewis, 2001; Luke & Elkins, 2002; Nieto, 2002; Rassool, 1999; Reder &
Davila, this volume). In this respect, literacy can be seen as doing the work of
discourse and power/knowledge (cf. Foucault, cited in Pennycook, 2001). Through
schooling, a prominent site we address, literacy practices provide the textual means

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by which dominant values and identities (e.g., avid consumers, obedient workers,
patriotic citizens) are normalized and, at times, resisted. Because this topic is vast
with several intertwining strands, this chapter will selectively focus on (1)
delineating some key aspects and conceptual underpinnings latent beneath the term
“critical,” and (2) offer a partial survey of research in two key sites—EAP and
globalization—where critical literacy has particular resonance.

Laying the Groundwork: Critical Literacy and Its Conceptual Underpinnings

By underscoring the power-related aspects of literacy, critical educators seek

to understand meaning making within wider contextual domains: the ideological
antecedents and disjunctures of the existing order and transformations in
representational technologies that have facilitated histories, imagined and real. As
we begin the 21st century, the threats posed and opportunities created by way of
political, economic, and cultural globalization present a world context of intense
debate, parts of which we will summarize. It is also a contextual domain in which
the future of schools, work, and public life—or traditional definitions of literacy and
orality—are reconceptualized in light of new digital capacities (e.g., image
manipulation, multimedia, and hypermedia) and global information systems (i.e., the
Internet) that challenge our perceptions of reality, locality, and community (Darley,
2000; Kramsch, 2000; Kramsch & Thorne, 2002; Warnick, 2002; Warschauer,
2004). Critical educators, in response, advocate a pluralized notion of literacies and
multiliteracies to help students negotiate a broader range of text-types and modes of
persuasion, not only via print, but also sound, images, gestures, spaces, and their
multimodal integration (e.g., Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Hunter & Morgan, 2001;
Jewitt & Kress, 2003; Kress, 2003; Lotherington, 2001, 2003; Norton &
Vanderheyden, 2004; Quinlisk, 2003; Stein, 2004).

Arguably, such skills are not just options but necessities, if not forms of self-
defense against the intrusiveness of corporate advertising, the growing sameness of
cultural products and information from global media empires, and the expansion of
sophisticated forms of surveillance and data sharing employed in the name of
security (e.g., McChesney, 1999; Rutherford, 2000). Although one could make the
argument that such concerns are irrelevant for applied linguists and language teacher
education because they have little to do with actual reading and writing, critical
literacy practitioners are likely to maintain that multiple texts, modalities, and
technologies are crucial to the literacy setting because our job as educators partially
entails cultivating a citizenry that is able to negotiate and critically engage with the
numerous texts, modalities, and technologies coming at learners, and because we
now collectively occupy globalized, interconnected spaces that insist on such critical
engagement. Latent beneath such debates, of course, is how we understand the
notion of “critical” and how this understanding circumscribes our engagement with
the local and global power relations in which texts circulate and acquire their
rhetorical potency. The following excerpt from Luke (2004) succinctly sums up
some of what the term entails:
 CRITICAL LITERACIES AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION 153

To be critical is to call up for scrutiny, whether through

embodied action or discourse practice, the rules of exchange within
a social field. To do so requires an analytic move to self-position
oneself as Other even in a market or field that might not necessarily
construe or structurally position one as Other . . . . This doubling
and positioning of the self from dominant text and discourse can be
cognate, analytic, expository, and hypothetical, and it can, indeed,
be already lived, narrated, embodied, and experienced. (Luke, 2004,
p. 26)

Critical literacies, informed by the previous passage, presuppose fluid and

emergent notions of identity that bridge Cartesian dichotomies of mind/body,
reason/emotion, and subject/object. Neither the thought processes of the mind nor
the self-contained properties of page or screen provide independent foci for an
adequate understanding of meaning making. The primary unit of analysis—and the
pedagogical interventions it supports—is the “subject-in-discourse,” a conceptual
unity illuminated through the lens of various postmodern theories (e.g., feminist
poststructuralism, social constructivism, performativity, queer theory, and
community of practice models). Individual and collective understandings, in this
perspective, do not preexist their linguistic expression but are, instead, created and
contested through dominant and subversive language practices (Canagarajah, 2004a;
Norton, 2000). Similarly, the possibilities for human agency, following Luke, do not
preexist discourse, but arise from within and as an effect of its particularities.

By extension, we may think of texts (i.e., oral, written, imaged, or

embodied) as multidimensional—not only informational or genre-specific, but also
person-formative. In understanding how subjects are discursively formed or
positioned, we need to conceive of texts as conveying a dual materiality. On the one
hand, texts both carry and address the “rules of exchange” of the social milieu in
which they circulate (cf. intertextuality, Bazerman, 2004). Through implicit and
explicit reference, and elements of style and genre, texts give voice to the tensions of
their times—the antagonistic, class-based materiality conceived by Marx and running
through the heteroglossia of Bakhtin, the multiaccentual, ideological sign of
Volosinov, the cultural and symbolic capital of Bourdieu, and the dialogism of
Freire. On the other hand, materiality also refers to the specific textual modality
used. Whether we speak or write, take a photograph, produce a play, or create a
website, each communicative vehicle will offer specialized compositional choices
whose particular carrying capacities or affordances (Kress, 2003) shape what we can
mean and how the experience of those meanings will be understood and retained
over time (e.g., Goldstein, 2003; Kramsch, 2000). When addressing “subjects-in-
discourse,” then, critical practitioners attend to both shifts in meaning potential
across semiotic modes but also to their fundamental integration. As sites of practice,
literacies, texts, even grammars, are conceived holistically, in the post-Cartesian
sense of integrating a full range of emotive, sensorial, and experiential meanings and
not just as discrete, rational systems (e.g., Kress, 2000, 2003; Kress & van Leeuwen,
1996; Lemke, 2002; Morgan 2004a, 2004b; Stein, 2004).
154 BRIAN MORGAN AND VAIDEHI RAMANATHAN

In sum, Luke’s passage invokes a longstanding critical tradition whereby

self-awareness precedes and facilitates effective social action; that is, to “read the
word and the world” (cf. Freire, 1997) we must begin to “read” ourselves and
uncover our complicity in the commonsensical maintenance of social inequalities (cf.
hegemony, Gramsci). Toward this end, and through the strategic deployment of
texts, pedagogy becomes a process of unlearning internalized and habitual ways of
seeing and being, naming the world and imagining social futures. Yet the
achievement of “uncommon” sense through dialogue and critical consciousness
(Freire, 1997), meta-awareness (Ramanathan, 2002), reflexivity (Canagarajah, 1999;
Morgan, in press) or problematizing practices (Benesch, 2001; Pennycook, 2001) is
no straightforward matter in classrooms, and key tensions arise in offering guidelines
for critical literacies.

As “subjects-in-discourse,” for example, both students and teachers are

differentially positioned—gendered, racialized, marked as immigrants or nonnative
speakers—in multiple and often contradictory ways that belie simple binaries of
oppressor and oppressed. Further complexity arises in the textual forging of
schooled voices, the merging—to various degrees of success—of cultural memories
and prior forms of language socialization with conscious and unconscious strategies
of imitation, accommodation, or opposition to the dominant norms of the academic
discourse community (Canagarajah, 2002, 2004b; Casanave, 2002; Bayley &
Schecter, 2003). Then there is the unmistakable diversity of English language
teaching (ELT) sites and contexts of practice. Across the privileged confines of
universities, English in the workplace programs (Goldstein, 2001; Katz, 2000) or in
rural village literacy programs (Egbo, 2004; Purcell-Gates & Waterman, 2000;
Sahni, 2001), universal methods and conceptions of power may certainly be
inappropriate, as widely acknowledged (Kumaravadivelu, 2003a), but local
specificities indiscernible or of marginal relevance to the diversity of life stories
unfolding across the globe. Indeed, as Janks (2001) observed in a racially mixed,
South African classroom, the pedagogical distancing of self from dominant text may
be resented when such texts serve to unify fragile and threatened solidarities.

Other key tensions, paradigmatic in nature, concern assumptions about the

world we are empowered to read. Is it a world whose ontological “truths” can be
represented or revealed scientifically (cf. emancipatory modernism, Pennycook,
2001), or, is “reality” a textualized illusion (cf., nihilistic deconstructive
postmodernism, Shea, 1998) always open to new discursive readings and always
dangerous in terms of the new subjectivities and forms of power/knowledge that
result? Or, is it something metaphorically in between—a recursive world both real
and mediated? Paradigmatic assumptions of these sorts shape how critical literacies
unfold. They can influence what teachers accept or reject as valid, emancipatory
outcomes of dialogue, for example, or they can contribute to forms of epistemic
skepticism in which teachers, newly conscious of the partiality of their knowledge,
fear to act. As “subjects-in-discourse” we are each (students, teachers, researchers,
scholars in ELT) in positions where we can turn the critical lens on ourselves to
where we hold everything about our professional lives to the light: our teaching,
choice of pedagogic materials, discipline’s orientations, valued genres, socialization
 CRITICAL LITERACIES AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION 155

practices. A justification of such self-critical analyses is partially this: By taking

deliberate steps to create contexts for ourselves and our learners whereby we begin to
critically distance ourselves and analytically reflect on our numerous participations
(in hallways, in student conferences, in writing proposals and papers, in conference
presentations) we will eventually be in a better position to change aspects of our
social and disciplinary worlds that we deem necessary.

Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms: Pedagogical Priorities

In a world imagined through postmodernism, where new orthodoxies of

contingency, indeterminacy, and hybridity command our attention, there is strong
consensus against prescribed, transmission-oriented methods of critique as well as
strong concern for the ideological complacency and paternalism that can arise from
such assumptions (e.g., Clarke, 2003, Ch. 6; Johnston, 2003, Ch. 3). Reflecting the
interpretive and experiential dynamics that mediate knowledge, transformative
practitioners focus on creating possibilities rather than certainties. Critical distancing
is not guaranteed through any one specific form of literacy, but arises from
articulated practices (Lin & Luk, 2002), when critical moments and memories briefly
align in novel ways, and when even seemingly mundane or compulsory
reading/writing tasks can be recontextualized and invigorated with an empowering
potential, opening up new identity options and new opportunities to subvert or
transform institutional power relations (cf. rights analyses, Benesch, 2001; the
praxicum, Pennycook, 2004a). In this respect, the preferred goal of critical literacies
is to create space for the agency of others and not to determine if or how that agency
will be realized. The space that a teacher might create will vary across educational
domains, subject to the application of standardized curricula and high-stakes testing
and the relative autonomy afforded local administrators and educators.

The metaphor of bricolage might aptly describe the context-sensitive,

improvisational strategies suggested here, but there is also recognition that critical
literacies need explicit support through the provision of text-analytic tools—a
metalanguage—for print, visual, and multimedia (e.g., Bazerman & Prior, 2004;
Cooke, 2004; Cope & Kalantsis, 2000; Corbett, 2003, Ch. 6; Cummins, 2001, Ch. 5;
Kress & van Leeuven, 1996; New London Group, 1996; Rutherford, 2000, Ch. 1) as
well as the thick description of case studies from which practitioners might adapt
their own critical pedagogies (e.g., Comber & Simpson, 2001; Edelsky & Johnson,
2004; Toohey, 2000).

Still, as Wallace (2001) notes, “there is little consensus about what kind of
metalinguistic knowledge is facilitative of enhanced critical awareness” (p. 213,
italics in original). A “politics of access”(cf. Pennycook, 2001)—the modeling of
powerful genres and texts—on its own, may presume a degree of disciplinary
stability and textual uniformity at variance with the co-constructed dynamics
observed in discourse communities (e.g., Ramanathan, 2002; Casanave, 2002).
Furthermore, as Toohey and Waterstone (2004) observe, power does not inhere to
text types, alone, but obtains, as well, from the social and institutional status of text
users. On the other hand, a “politics of voice” (cf. Pennycook, 2001)—the
156 BRIAN MORGAN AND VAIDEHI RAMANATHAN

affirmation of minority literacies and vernaculars in schools—on its own, may be

irresponsible preparation for a world in which textual chauvinism often provides a
defensible justification for racial and ethnic discrimination. Many researchers
suggest that we combine elements of access and voice by encouraging critical
negotiation of identities and literacies within institutional hierarchies and by
providing analytic tools that link the micro features of texts with powerful, local and
global discourses (Canagarajah, 2002, 2004a; Carr, 2003; Cooke, 2004; Lin & Luk,
2002). In support, researchers also recommend that we openly discuss systemic
forms of discrimination and validate students’ experiences and forms of resistance
within syllabus design (e.g., Benesch, 2001; Canagarajah, 2004b; Kubota, 2004;
Goldstein, 2003).

Such discussions are themselves, distancing or Othering, following Luke, in

that they illuminate how we language our realities into existence—how discourses
and power/knowledge operate on and through our micro-interactions with students,
and how the labels we assign them (e.g., nonnative speaker, low achiever) are also
systemic and discriminatory, functioning, in effect, to produce the social and
educational margins that they name (e.g., Harklau, 2003).

Critical Literacies in English for Academic Purposes: A “Tool-Kit” in Action

The rules of a social field both limit and create their possible transgressions.
In the field of EAP, one of the central rules of instruction is to help students manage
unfamiliar disciplinary content and text types. Situated within these cognitive
demands, critical EAP develops as an embedded, co-occurring literacy strategy—to
raise students’ awareness of how academic content “manages” them, in the person-
formative sense stated earlier, shaping their desires, world views, and life chances
beyond the school. So conceived, critical EAP literacies invigorate, rather than
replace, conventional academic skill sets, as convincingly argued by many
researchers (Benesch, 2001; Cummins, 2001; Schleppegrell & Colombi, 2002;
Starfield, 2004). Through distancing strategies that denaturalize and demystify
disciplinary content, “subjects-in-discourse” become aware of the partiality—hence
contestability—of the dominant knowledge claims in their chosen fields of study.
Moreover, through literacy acts of reading, writing, interpreting, and debating
concepts, subjects/students become aware of their integral role in the practices that
(re)constitute the academic discourse communities to which they seek membership
(Canagarajah, 2002; Ramanathan, 2002; Varghese, 2004).

The following set of points capture both some distancing practices in EAP
and some general purposes they are intended to serve, as well as an abbreviated sense
of a critical literacy “tool-kit” in action:

1. The use of narratives/autobiographies to link personal experiences with

sociohistorical and institutional power relations.

In community of practice and feminist poststructural thought, self-writing evokes an

experiential authenticity that has rhetorical potency for counter-discourse (e.g.,
 CRITICAL LITERACIES AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION 157

Granger, 2004; Kanno, 2003; Pavlenko, 2004). Vandrick (1999), for example,
explores the common threads of cultural and linguistic superiority and paternalism
running through her missionary past to her current role as an ESL scholar and
teacher, indicating “the possibility of a ‘colonial shadow’ over our profession” (p.
63). Wihak’s (2004) personal narrative, a reflection on her teaching experiences with
the Inuit in Nunavut, becomes a vehicle to examine white privilege and systemic
racism in Canadian society. In Pavlenko’s (2003) language teacher education course,
autobiographical assignments provide the means for reimagined life chances,
whereby nonnative speaking students come to reflect on and recognize the
intercultural and bilingual expertise they bring to their future profession. In
Casanave and Vandrick’s (2003) edited collection, contributors reveal the often-
perilous road toward scholarly publishing through personalized accounts that
encourage new scholars to persevere.

2. The juxtaposition of texts in ways that question and subvert received disciplinary
knowledge.

As conceptualized by Benesch (1998, 2001), EAP classes are not subservient to

the functional language needs of more prestigious disciplines in the university. In a
linked, undergraduate EAP-psychology course she taught, Benesch used readings
and essay assignments in ways that problematize the topic of anorexia, presenting its
source as gendered and socialized—linked to impossible images of feminine
beauty—and not simply as an individualized pathology as often foregrounded in
psychological discourse.

Teacher talk, itself, is a text and an immediate resource for juxtaposing

classroom materials in ways that encourage multiple meanings or oppositional
readings. As Wallace (2001) both argues and demonstrates, strategic interventions
by teachers bring about the kinds of revisions and recontextualizations that are
essential to the reading process and a key component to critical literacies. Even at
the primary school level, as Dyson (2001) observed, teacher talk can have a crucial,
mediating effect on the reception (or rejection) of dominant gender norms as
conveyed through children’s stories and popular culture.

3. The pluralization and denaturalization of dominant cultural codes and historical

representations.

In an EAP workshop, Thompson (2002) introduced visiting students to one

of Australia’s most contentious issues: aboriginal land claims. Four short texts on
the origins of aboriginals—of distinctive historical genres, and two by indigenous
authors—were closely analyzed in ways that support critical evaluation of academic
research materials. Yet through this analysis, and as a cumulative effect of the
workshop structure, participants were encouraged to reflect on their own cultural
biases and the politics of representation—how textual choices shape our judgment of
historical truth and, consequently, our willingness to rectify past injustices.
158 BRIAN MORGAN AND VAIDEHI RAMANATHAN

Toward comparable objectives, Kubota (2001) introduced a unit on World

Englishes to a group of U.S. high school students, native speakers of English, with
several related goals: to raise students awareness of the global spread of English, the
linguistic features and varieties of English, and of their shared responsibility in
negotiating cross-cultural communication with speakers of limited English
proficiency and nonstandard varieties. As Kubota argues, prejudice against
nonstandard varieties is challenged, and the status and confidence of their users
enhanced, when these varieties become the focus of classroom instruction, a crucial
point that similarly underscores a participatory curriculum on Cape Verdean
language, culture and history for U.S. immigrants from the former Portuguese colony
(Brito, Lima, & Auerbach, 2004). In the Cape Verdean program, as in the critical
approaches used by Thompson and Kubota, the foregrounding of linguistic
differences is only a starting point from which colonial histories, attitudes, and their
persistence are examined and from which power relations within and between
communities are potentially transformed.

4. Use of multimodal, semiotic strategies.

The use of visual, digital, and embodied texts for distancing and
repositioning “subjects-in-discourse:” Multimodal, semiotic theories invigorate
critical literacies and multiliteracies in fundamental ways. The conceptualization of
“reading” as an active process of sign-making, and not just information retrieval,
supports both creative and oppositional meaning making. Semiotic analyses expand
our metalinguistic tool-kit in that they apply across spoken, written, visual, and
spatial modalities, also drawing attention to the unique capacities of modes in
isolation and on the shifts in meaning potential that occur across modes or in their
combination (cf. synaesthesia, Kress, 2000, 2003). Thus, when critical practitioners
choose or combine materials from among books, audiotapes, photographs, a play, or
a website, they do so not just for variety purposes, but also in the expectation that
each text type will engage identities and the imagination in provocative ways unmet
through other textual resources.

Innovative analyses and practices integrating film (Mackie, 2003),

advertising (Corbett, 2003; Quinlisk, 2003), video games (Gee, 2001), rap and hip
hop music (Ibrahim, 2003), teen magazines (Young, 2002), and comic books (Norton
& Vanderheyden, 2004) seek to develop critical engagement with these multimedia
while building on the cognitive skills that arise from students’ investments in popular
cultural forms. Dramaturgical texts have also been innovatively adapted. In a
multilingual, English medium high school, where racial tensions over Chinese
students’ use of L1 was prevalent, Goldstein’s (2003) play, Hong Kong, Canada,
became a pedagogical resource for “represent[ing] everyday dilemmas and tensions
in ways that allow performers and spectators to participate more fully in the
emotional process of resolving conflicts” (p. 39). Through Goldstein’s
encouragement, students wrote and performed their own plays, these “performed
ethnographies” giving public voice to the experiences of otherwise marginalized
students at the school. Nelson (2002a) similarly used the theatrical medium as a
forum to express subjugated identities in ESL. Inspired by queer theory, Nelson’s
 CRITICAL LITERACIES AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION 159

script goes beyond issues of inclusion for gay and lesbian students, engaging both
actors and audience in collaborative reflection on the social construction of all
sexualities, and on heteronormativity as a powerful discourse in our lives.

Conceived by Nelson and Goldstein, a play serves as both public spectacle

and as a vehicle for identity negotiation, in the performative sense theorized by
Judith Butler (e.g., Nelson, 2002b; Pennycook, 2004b). As communicative medium,
the dual effectiveness of a play can be attributed, in part, to its multimodal,
embodied, and interactive affordances—the interanimation of sounds, spaces,
movements, and spontaneous reactions that contingently shape the force of words
and their reception. This holistic and dynamic conceptualization of performance
aptly describes Stein’s (2004) examination of storytelling and Morgan’s (2004b)
discussion of teacher identity as pedagogy, both studies exploring the notion of the
body as text, as an effect of discourse, but also as a multimodal source of agency.

Embodied experiences of intimacy, community, and reality are displaced

and reconfigured by way of digital texts and information systems, a point that makes
computer-mediated communication (CMC) a promising tool for distancing practices
in second and foreign language education. Linked CMC classes facilitate global
conversations or virtual “contact zones” that create the appropriate conditions for
seeing oneself in “strange” ways. Still, this technological achievement does not
ensure intercultural understanding, as Kramsch and Thorne’s (2002) study clearly
shows. The ease of global communication, in fact, may inadvertently create
conditions by which presumed commonalities (i.e., a global youth culture) are
ruptured, exposing and exacerbating nationalistic ideologies that prevent dialogue
from progressing.

A critical literacies tool-kit is enhanced by way of digital technologies

(Warnick, 2002; Warschauer, 2004). Through the Internet, subjects-in-discourse
have access to an expanded range of oppositional texts not available through mass
media. Through various synchronous and asynchronous environments,
students/citizens also gain access to virtual discourse communities mobilized in
service of global environmental and social justice initiatives (Rassool, 1999).
Kramsch and Thorne’s study, however, offers a countervailing microperspective on
the tensions that pervade globalization processes and the technoscapes and
mediascapes (cf. Appadurai, 1996; Warschauer, 2004) that seem both unifying and
divisive in ways unforeseen. The appearance or promise of commonality—a linked
CMC class, for example—can, in effect, be polarizing. Conversely, the appearance
of diversity can, in effect, be superficial and assimilative. The thousand-channel,
digital universe, for example, is meaningless if the majority of programming reflects
the same cultural formulae. We examine these types of tensions and their
implications for critical literacies in the following section on globalization.

Globalization, Critical Literacy, and Language Education

The multiplicity and breadth of textual practices in the previous section

reflect, in part, a pervasive assumption characteristic of postmodern inclinations.
160 BRIAN MORGAN AND VAIDEHI RAMANATHAN

Specifically, because our realities are so very different, if not incommensurable, by

default critical literacies must always be provisional, emerging from new contexts of
struggle. Globalization, and the preeminence of English flowing through it,
however, complicates such assumptions. Our divergent realities are in fact closely
intertwined in ways that elude categorical explanation. Indeed, ELT debates on
whether the globalization-English nexus encourages heterogeneity or casts a
homogenizing blanket over divergent realities are themselves literacy acts, “semiotic
struggle[s] to control the definition of reality” (Hassan, 2003, p. 437). These
definitions, when reified in policy, reflect the performative work (cf. Butler) we do as
applied linguistics. Languaged into existence, such debates invite the same critical
examination as other semiotic signs, not only for their veracity but also for the self-
interests they serve, particularly in a profession prone toward lingua-centric
remedies.

One recurrent theme that seems to resonate through the literature relates the
learning of languages—English in particular—to market-oriented concerns, with
education viewed as being constructed within and by capitalist social relations
(Atkinson, 2002; Corson, 2002). The capitalistic push toward viewing our world as a
“shrinking global village” given the numerous ways in which landscapes (Appadurai,
1996) are being connected through global forms of communication and mass media
seems to highlight the homogenizing and diffusing tendencies of globalization,
where borders and boundaries between realities collapse. When the scene is
languaged in this way, schools run the risk of being rendered as powerless agents in
effecting change, relegated to the provision of human “capital” for a global
marketplace, where the quality of something is decided according to the price it can
fetch” (Corson, 2002, pp. 5–6), and where notions of equality and freedom are
narrowly equated with “equality of opportunity” and “freedom to consume” (Spring
2001, p. 12).

Threaded through this subnarrative (of the capitalistic tendencies around the
globalization and English nexus) are the implications for what this means for
literacy. Atkinson (2002), for instance, suggests that market-based practices are
latent beneath L2 compositional practices, where our collective emphasis on “clear
writing” might be seen “as part of a functional system in which efficiency and speed
of delivery are central—in which knowledge is defined as a movable, transposable,
commercial phenomenon—literacy as commodity” (p. 52). If “effective, clear”
communication is the new norm for literacy, then we as language educators have to
consider not only the extent to which stressing particular ways of speaking, teaching,
and interacting with texts are a part of capitalistic tendencies (Block & Cameron,
2002; Cameron, 2002) that we can and need to critically address and pull back from,
but also ways in which we are collectively contributing to this focus by our writing
and speaking of it in particular ways. This self-conscious examination of how we are
simultaneously both subjects and agents, of how these “realities” are both perceived
by us and construct us in turn is crucial, especially if we wish to keep from both
perpetuating the profession’s “McCommunication” tendencies, a term Block (2002)
uses for the instrumental, utilitarian approaches typically advocated in “negotiation
 CRITICAL LITERACIES AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION 161

of meaning” research, whose primary focus has been the enhancement of speaking
skills.

These globalizing/capitalizing tendencies also seem to have wrought a

change in how literacy, especially English language literacy (because narratives
about globalization assume English as their undertow) is perceived with a decided
shift away from a generally “universalist” position that tended to stress the norms of
grammatical and phonological accuracy to a “differentialist” one where English is
viewed as plural (“Englishes”) with diverse and local ways in which it is entrenched,
learned, and appropriated (Kramsch, 2000; Kumaravadivelu, 2002, 2003b;
Pennycook, 2003; Toohey, 2000). Such a view of English literacies not only opens
up the possibility of viewing English as a language that is simultaneously a syncretic
language that makes room for vernacular codes in local varieties, but also as a
language that binds “diverse periphery and centre communities together” getting
remolded for a variety of purposes (Wallace, 2002, p. 112). In the realm of language
teaching, this has meant forays into ways in which ELT can be decolonized: that we
go beyond “teaching methods” to “decentering the authority Western interests have
over the ELT industry” by partially “restoring agency to professionals in the
periphery communities” (Kumaravadivelu, 2003b, p. 540), to recognizing and
valuing local vernacular modes of learning and teaching (Canagarajah, 1999, 2004a),
of the continuing vernacularization of English in postcolonial contexts (Ramanathan,
2004, 2005), and of uncovering the politics beneath the ELT textbook industry
(Gray, 2002). In each of these cases, the authors are arguing for a self-conscious,
critical examination of the Western-based ELT practices by turning the critical lens
on the profession itself, even its historical propensity toward wholesale change in the
name of progress, a point that is picked up by Morgan (2004b, p. 540) who speaks of
the need to “expand the knowledge base and interdisciplinary scope of our
profession—but in an intradisciplinary way, grounded in familiar contexts of
language research and practice” (p. 174).

Language and literacy practices around the globalization-English nexus,

then, are key contested sites with anxieties being articulated not just about its
homogenizing or heterogenizing tendencies—whether to stress processes of
assimilation and monoculturalization (e.g., Mondiano, 2004; Heller, 2003) or to
emphasize diffusion and hybridization (as partially evident in phenomena like
rap/hip-hop music; Pennycook, 2003)—but about how all of it is being languaged, as
well, simultaneously constructing and reifying our realities even as we are in the
midst of them. If the globalization currents are, indeed, making us “commodify”
language (Harris, Leung, & Rampton, 2002; Heller, 2003), or overstress its
communicative “efficiency” (Cameron, 2002), then it is imperative that we language
teachers find small ways of countering these discursive processes in our literacy
practices.

Conclusion

Given the thick strains of uncertainty that flow through all critical work—
where all “givens” and “default” positions in the field are held up to cross-
162 BRIAN MORGAN AND VAIDEHI RAMANATHAN

examination— we end this piece by raising some fundamental concerns about critical
literacies per se. In an interconnected, transnational world, where theories and their
consequences have expanded reach, critical educators rightfully scrutinize their
actions and responsibilities through a discursive lens. Under this close scrutiny,
advocates of critical literacies have often written about the need to divest them of
their Eurocentric assumptions—to decolonize them in ways more relevant to
postcolonial settings.

Although we certainly support the need for locally relevant pedagogies, we

also wish to draw attention to the paradox that arises in the decolonizing impulse.
That is, the appropriation of critical literacies carries a latent assumption that critical
literacies do not and have not existed in non-Western realities and as such have to be
imported into local contexts. We feel that it would be more pedagogically productive
to suppose that all realities, Western and non-Western, have versions of oppositional
readings, cross-examinations, and self-conscious, self-analytic orientations in them.
While these may not transpire in the same ways as they do in the West—in
classrooms, or in English—or may not get extensively reported in the West—for a
range of socioeconomic and political reasons—they do occur, and we applied
linguists, Western and non-Western alike, need to not only be open to recognizing
and interpreting them as such, but to reflecting on and revising our own assumptions
and practices. By distancing ourselves from “dominant text and discourse,” and by
opening ourselves to new sites and possibilities, we engage in the simultaneous
learning and unraveling that is so central to critical literacy.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Comber, B., & Simpson, A. (Eds.). (2001). Negotiating critical literacy in language
classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Assuming the classroom as its primary site, this volume offers a

diverse array of readings on various aspects around critical literacies: how
they are fostered through classroom interactions, problems and tensions
around them, and the local forms they take in different cultural contexts.

Gee, J. (2001). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New
York: Palgrave.

This volume offers an in depth argument and justification for why

critical visual literacy is so crucial today, and why it is imperative that we
teach children to critically navigate the videogames they play. The book
stresses the fluidity inherent in all literacies and ways in which divergent
images/videogames position us to “read” these “texts” in different ways.

Jewitt, C., & Kress, G. (Eds.). (2003). Multimodal literacy. New York: Peter Lang.
 CRITICAL LITERACIES AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION 163

This anthology presents readings that complicate our takes on

literacy by closely examining how meanings are made, distributed, and
reinterpreted through a variety of signs and modes. Assuming a generally
social semiotic approach, the authors wrestle with issues related to how
readers/viewers make sense of images/texts/signs coming at them, and how
meaning making occurs in the dynamics between viewer-reader and
text/sign/image.

Norton, B., & Toohey, K. (Eds.). (2004). Critical pedagogies and language learning.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This volume offers a wide range of readings on the ways in which

power is embedded in various nooks and crannies of all aspects of
education: in pedagogic practices, in entrenched notions and bodies of
knowledge in the field, in feedback offered by teacher-educators to student-
teachers. The negotiation of identities within and through various textual
practices is a prominent theme in many chapters. Several chapters, as well,
take up a multimodal/multiliteracies framework. A common, underlying
theme across these readings is the pluralistic and transformative powers of
critical literacies.

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