Ch 4-6

Chapters 4-6 this week were just as dense with theory as the reading for last week. It seemed like each paragraph or section could have been a term paper, and while reading I visualized myself surfing over a very deep ocean. Chapter four was on “Critical Methodologies and Methods” (philosophies and processes) then moving into specifically qualitative critical methodologies. My new friend Critical Discourse Analysis was in there with language and literacy research and critical ethnography. We saw CRT again (although I don’t any of these sections don’t include one another) and then critical policy analysis. Some of the critiques presented at the end were how critical theorizing needs to be disentangled from the narrow Marxist definition to be applied in education research and how insider/outsider perspectives cannot be essentialized. This moved into another section on insider/outsider perspectives.

The next chapter was “Critically Conscious Language and Literacy Research” which introduced domains of power and how critically conscious researchers use a socio-historical perspective in their research. The first section was on policies and government agencies, laws and critical language and literacy, religion, economics and critical consciousnesses. Then the authors had another larger section about Disciplinary domain of power, including indigenous schools and communities, language, literacy, and culture, and how all these theories could be put into practice by citing several examples of critical lenses in schools and how they worked to uncover formal and informal hegemony.

The section in this chapter on religion took my notice because it pointed out to me how clearly troublesome essentializing can be. My own history with “religion” and those people I know who are very “religious” fall completely out of this category. I think today in a world where not all people are religious and religion is often associated with culture, it would be helpful to both think of religion as a cultural practice and as a culture of its own rather than as a completely separate reflection of culture.

The final chapter focused on “Hegemonic Domain of Power” in critical language and literacy research. They “tackle the domain of power as well as inherent domain levels (83). Because there is no ideology free teaching practice, they define “critical literacy” and “critical pedagogy.” After defining it, the authors analyze critical pedagogy among White students. The researcher’s values reinforced White middle-class norms and found that the students generally adhered to gendered stereotypes in class discussions. They pointed out what seemed to be rather obvious: that taught literature tends to be White and male, therefore White males relate to it more. The next section was on sexual orientation and how literacy norms are generally presented in the dichotomous heterosexual male/female which excludes those who do not fall into that traditional norm. The next section is about studies among students of color and racial/ethnic/cultural identities that emerge and are created in the classroom and in research of language and literacy with the researcher and participants.  Finally, there were many smaller sections about pedagogy, popular culture, agency and student voice, teacher education, and critical media. I found the last section on media and pop culture especially interesting because this is what I have been focusing on in my research projects. In critical media studies, the researcher breaks  down the implicit messages that are being created for race, gender, culture, nationality, sexuality, and just about any marginalized group, with the idea pointed out here that “popular” culture usually means “White” culture.