Mandating and Standardizing the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills: A Cautionary Tale

Abstract

In this article, I critique a component of the highly structured Open Court Reading curriculum designed to teach elementary children “inquiry and higher-order thinking” skills. The intended outcome of this component is, I argue, the production of critically literate and informed consumers of information. However, both the critical thinking skills the inquiry process purports to engender and the potential for critical literacy development it advertises are lost in the standardized, step-by-step implementation characteristic of the entire language arts curriculum itself. The article ends with implications and descriptions of promising alternatives that promote both critical thinking skills and critical literacy practices.

Notes

1. I enclose the term “Inquiry” in quotation marks when I discuss it as a component of the Open Court Reading program to distinguish the prepackaged version from other, less commodified, methods of inquiry.

2. To protect the anonymity of research subjects, all names used in this article are pseudonyms.

3. This designation mirrors the scores of Lucas (and his peers) on the California English Language Development Test (CELDT), a test of oral and written English proficiency administered annually to any child whose parents list a language other than English on their home language survey form upon enrollment in a public school. There are five levels of scores on the CELDT: beginner, early intermediate, intermediate, early advanced, and advanced. Students who pass the CELDT (and show progress on other academic and linguistic measures) are eventually reclassified as Fluent English Proficient speakers, or FEP'd in common parlance.

4. See Vasquez (2001) for a discussion of the ways control issues can arise in the midst of critical literacy activities.