UKLA Critical Literacies SIG Forum

Join us online for our second UKLA Critical Literacies SIG Forum when Dr Navan Govender, University of Strathclyde, will lead us in a discussion about critical literacies, decolonial praxis, and harnessing difference as a resource for language and literacy education.

Monumental: Critical Literacies & Decolonial Praxis

In the wake of recent, renewed calls to decolonise the curriculum, English language, literacy, and literature education is called to reimagine itself: from curriculum content to pedagogical practice. In this session, I explore how student teachers in an English teacher education programme engaged as political and pedagogical agents by reading and re-reading place, power, and text. I begin by considering my own scholar-activist position and its influence on the design of a project run with student teachers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Using (multimodal) critical discourse analysis as an analytical and pedagogical framework, the student teachers and I critically analyse an everyday local artifact in Glasgow’s Merchant City through talking, seeing, reading, writing, and (re)designing. These processes of collecting texts, (re)designing texts, and placing them in socio-cultural, historical, and political context enabled us to assert our identities and experiences, our oppressions, and our resistances through intertextuality and intersectionality. Issues of coloniality, empire, class, heteronormativity, heterosexism and cisnormativity, human relationships to the environment, language variety and multimodality, amongst others, were imprinted in the texts the student teachers produced. An analysis of these texts reveals possibilities for critical literacies as a means to mobilise (de)colonial praxis, especially where decoloniality calls for a destabilising of the discourses of sameness toward pluridimensional praxis.

Find more information at https://ukla.org/sigs-networks/critical-literacy-sig/

Please email jennifer.farrar@glasgow.ac.uk for the Zoom link or with any further questions.