Literacy and Power (Language, Culture, and Teaching Series)

Literacy and Power (Language, Culture, and Teaching Series)

<P>Hilary Janks addresses key questions about literacy and power in this landmark text that is both engaging and accessible.</P> <P></P> <P>Her central argument is that competing orientations to critical literacy education - domination (power), access, diversity, design - foreground one over the other, but are crucially interdependent and need to work together to create possibilities for redesign and social action that serve a social justice agenda. She examines the theory underpinning each orientation, and develops new theory in the argument for interdependence and integration.</P> <P></P> <P>Sitting at the interface between theory and practice, constantly moving from one to the other, the text is rich with examples of how to <U>use</U> these orientations in real teaching contexts, and how to use them to counterbalance one another. </P> <P></P> <P>In the groundbreaking final chapter Janks considers how the rationalist underpinning of critical literacy tends to exclude the non-rational shows ways of working ‘beyond reason’ - pleasure and play, desire and the unconscious - and makes the case that these need to be taken seriously given their power to cut across the work of critical literacy educators working from any orientation.</P>