Urgent social issues on a global scale such as climate crisis, increasing social inequalities or populist discourses undermining democratic principles need to be addressed with those whom these issues will concern most: Children and young adults. The English language classroom with its focus on enabling global communication lends itself to this aim. However, the educational and didactic challenge is how to engage students in critical thinking without merely presuming a critical stance. (How) Can they be encouraged to think critically within a school system based on hierarchies and assessment (cf. Butler 2014 and other contributions in that volume)? What about resistances to and conflicts while learning to be critical (cf. Bartosch, Derichsweiler & Heidt 2022)? Which role does it play to negotiate critical issues in an unfamiliar language? These questions are relevant both on the level of teacher education and teaching in schools. In this talk, we will look at the paradoxes and potentials of teaching to be critical on a theoretical level and reflect on the practice of doing so.
The practice we refer to is a course on 'Teaching critical cultural and digital literacy' in English teacher education at Bielefeld University (cf. Louloudi, König & Schildhauer 2021). We will provide a short overview of the course which departs from definitions of critical literacy (Luke 2019) and social justice education to then introduce frameworks of integrating these concepts into general teaching practice (e.g. Yoon 2015) and eventually has the teacher students' develop their own teaching suggestions on this basis. As further data to reflect on, we support the students' meta-reflection on this course and issues of critical language teaching as collected in on-going evaluations of the course and in a final students' conference on teaching for social justice (cf. https://teacherstakingaction.wordpress.com/workshops/). The course material, the teacher students' products and their own reflections will be analyzed in terms of the paradoxes and potentials of teaching to be critical.
Bartosch, Roman; Derichsweiler, Sina & Heidt, Irene (2022): Against ‚Values'? Komplexe Konflikte, symbolic power und die Aushandlung von Widerstreit. In: König, Lotta; Schädlich, Birgit & Surkamp (ed.): unterricht_kultur_theorie. Kulturelles Lernen im Fremdsprachenunterricht gemeinsam anders denken. Stuttgart u.a.: Metzler, 73-89.
Butler, Judith (2014). Epilogue. In: Kleiner, Bettina & Rose, Nadine (Hrsg.): (Re-)Produktion von Ungleichheiten im Schulalltag. Judith Butlers Konzept der Subjektivation in der erziehungswissenschaftlichen Forschung. Upladen u.a.: Budrich, 175-180.
Louloudi, Eleni; König, Lotta & Schildhauer, Peter (2021). Developing Critical Cultural and Digital Literacy. From Primary School to Teacher Education and Back. PFLB – PraxisForschungLehrer*innenBildung. 3 (3), 23–38.
Luke, A. (2019). Regrounding critical literacy: Representation, facts and reality. In: D. Alvermann, N. Unrau, M. Sailors, & R. Ruddell (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of literacy (pp. 349-361). Routledge.
Yoon, B. (2015). Critical literacies: Global and multicultural perspectives. Springer.
