A contextual critique of critical literacy: Freirean ‘generative themes’ and their impact on pedagogic practice

ABSTRACT

Public education in post-industrial societies has been restructured based on a human capital model that prioritizes the economic value of citizens for the benefit of globally competitive national economies. In a policy-as-numbers climate [Lingard, B. (2011). Policy as numbers: Ac/counting for educational research. The Australian Educational Researcher, 38(4), 355–382], school administrators and teachers struggle to ‘produce results’ and ‘close gaps’ within accountability systems built on standardized measures of learning. What possibilities exist for critical literacy as viable classroom pedagogy in such an environment? This article offers a contextual–empirical analysis of efforts to implement critical literacy in mainstream secondary classes in Singapore. Drawing on Freire’s notion of generative themes, it identifies key political-policy constraints, showing how they impacted the pedagogical enactment of critical literacy tenets and pinpointing a focal direction for critical literacy in Singapore’s English education. More generally, the article argues that critical literacy, more than ever, must be a localized practice responding to exigencies emerging at the global–local nexus.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical literacy
• pedagogy
• media literacy
• Freire
• neoliberalism
• Singapore

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Warren Liew for his feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. The views expressed in this paper are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of NIE.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ‘SG50’ was the common abbreviation for ‘Singapore 50’: a year of commemorative celebrations leading up to the actual anniversary in August 2015.

2 This is in contrast to the term ‘foreign talent’ which is reserved for highly educated professionals of non-Singaporean nationality working in Singapore.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Education Research Funding Programme, National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore [project number OER 50/12 CW].