International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 1 | страница 4

International Journal of Indonesian Studies, Vol 1 2013
Critical literacy is the use of texts to analyse and transform relations of cultural, social and political
power… to address social, economic and cultural injustice and inequality… it views texts – print
and multimodal, paper-based and digital - and their codes and discourses as human technologies
for representing and reshaping possible worlds. Texts are not taken as part of a canonical
curriculum tradition or received wisdom that is beyond criticism (Luke & Dooley, 2011, 1, my italics).

Within this framework, critical literacy is viewed as empowering students to be able to
develop their own critical stance or ideological standpoint while learning a language, to
challenge the taken-for-granted point of views, and to discover hidden ideologies
embedded in texts. Texts in critical literacy are not limited to printed and digital texts
presented in words but also audio, visual images and representations, toys, video
games, comics, advertisement, television shows, comics and many more (Gee, 2010).
There are a number of existing critical literacy pedagogies such as Janks (2000) on a
synthesis of critical literacy education, Luke and Freebody (1997) on the four resource
model, Lewison and colleagues (2002) on four dimensions of critical literacy. Each
model describes ways to understand critical literacy practices for students, teachers,
teacher educators and researchers. In designing, implementing as well as analysing
critical literacy in this study, I used the four dimensions of critical literacy (Lewison,
Leland, & Harste, 2008). This theory was chosen as it emphasises a link between
personal and cultural resources in critical literacy instruction. Lewison, Leland et al.
(2008) believe that it is ―a transaction among the personal and cultural resources we
use, the critical social practices we enact, and the critical stance that we and our
students take on in classrooms and in the world‖ (5). From this point of view, they also
see a connection between critical literacy in the classroom and as a way to understand
the world.
This framework divides critical literacy practices into four dimensions (1) disrupting the
commonplace, (2) considering multiple viewpoints, (3) focusing on socio political issue
and (4) taking actions.
The first dimension of this framework is disrupting the commonplace which suggests
investigating widely held beliefs using a new lens (Van Sluys, 2005). This dimension
may also involve an analysis of how media represents people as in television, video
games, toys (Marsh, 2006; Shannon, 1995; Vasquez, 2000). Considering texts and
experience from different points of view is the core of the second dimension. This
dimension also requires readers to identify marginalised voices in the texts (Harste et

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