A Fine Balance: Supporting Students’ Critical Literacy Development in Multitextual Classrooms

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  In Roundtable Session: Engaging With Power: Learning From Children’s Early Composing Processes

Abstract

This paper, drawn from a qualitative case study, examines three teachers’ understandings of, and pedagogical responses to, their students’ emergent critical literacy practices in digital times. As the three teachers worked to develop dispositions, knowledge, and skills needed in 21st century English language arts classrooms, their students challenged conceptions of singular critical readings and content area standards. Such challenges required that the teachers strike a fine balance to both support and contest their students’ emergent print and screen-based engagements; developing critical ways of knowing and being in a textually saturated world that is increasingly diverse yet interconnected.

Author

• James Lorne Nahachewsky, University of Victoria