Critical Literacy and Media

Team-Teaching and Sharing Resources with Peers: Critical Literacy and Media

Critical literacy and media will encourage students to think about the source of information and the purpose of messages. Examples will examine advertising and various types of media. The focus will be on the language and cultural skills outlined in the Georgian English Language Curriculum.

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What is critical literacy?

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

Henry Peter Brougham, 1828

Critical literacy is the ability to read texts in an active, reflective manner in order to better understand power, inequality, and injustice in human relationships. For the purposes of critical literacy, text is defined as a “vehicle through which individuals communicate with one another using the codes and conventions of society”.

Accordingly, songs, novels, conversations, pictures, movies, etc. are all considered texts.

Robinson, E., & Robinson, S. (2003). What does it mean? Discourse, Text, Culture: An Introduction. Sydney: McGraw-Hill Book Company, p. 3.