Critical Literacy and Transformative Social Practice: An Ethical Grounding

Abstract

Colin Hearfield and Bob Boughton contend that, over roughly the past seventy‐five years, a number of writers have attempted to underwrite the relationship between critical literacy and transformative social practice with an ethics of freedom and social justice. The first two such writers they address, Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire, draw on a humanist ethics of social freedom, whereas the latter two, Amartya Sen and Jack Mezirow, turn respectively to Immanuel Kant's moral theory of individual freedom and Jürgen Habermas's ethics of communicative interaction. Hearfield and Boughton begin by discussing various shortcomings of the approach each of these writers takes, and then argue that a more adequate grounding can be found in Axel Honneth's ethics of recognition, where the idea of social freedom again comes to prominence. Unlike the others, Honneth, a contemporary German philosopher and former research assistant of Habermas, does not address explicitly the issue of critical literacy, but he does speak of the right to education as an already significant aspect of the modern ethics of recognition. The driving motivation for Hearfield and Boughton's discussion in this article is the situation of many Indigenous Australians who remain unable to read or write Standard Australian English (SAE) and thus cannot participate, or have an effective voice, in deliberations concerning their own and their people's situation in the political landscape of modern Australia.

"Critical statistical literacy", "Social justice statistics", and "Critical statistical consciousness" as higher education imperatives, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa

“…Such embodies the subtle realties that CSL, through its "critical stance", strives to expose. HE's potential for promoting SL is also considered, to the extent that arguments are presented to see CSL as an "HE expectation", given the Covid-19-related SL demands placed on HE (Hearfield and Boughton 2018). Therefore HE, as an education sector, and Covid-19 as a statistically significant phenomenon, are viewed as two sides of the same rationale, with which this article further clarifies CSL as a novel proposition.…”

Critical Literacy and Literacies

“…Despite the existence of various definitions and operationalization of the concept of critical literacy (López, 2020;Lee, 2011;Yoon et al, 2018), and with distinct theoretical influences-which generates misconceptions and ambiguities (Hearfield & Boughton, 2018;Vasquez, 2017;Luke, 2012;Hendrix-Soto, & Mosley Wetzel, 2018), the concept of critical literacy can, overall, be understood as "a theoretical and practical framework that can readily take on such challenges creating spaces for literacy work that can contribute to creating a more critically informed and just world" (Vasquez, 2017, p. 1). Table 1 depicts the main aspects of critical literacy, as proposed by Vasquez (2017).…”

“…2, No. 1, 2020 20 Published by SCHOLINK INC.justice, by (i) criticizing the existing social order, translated into the ideology of the present and its institutions of maintenance of that society; and (2) fostering awareness and the need for change in social power relationships(Lee, 2011;Luke, 2012;Hearfield & Boughton, 2018;Hendrix-Soto & Mosley, 2018). Janks (2018) argues that "Ideal readers read with the text; critical readers read against the text.…”