Wolf cries: on power, emotions and critical literacy in first-language teaching in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Adopting a critical literacy perspective in teaching is about how experiences, social contexts, languages, learning and power relations interact in language development. In this article, we explore how students’ critical literacies are enhanced and hindered by emotional power relations in the classroom. We investigate what happens when emotionally charged texts – here texts about wolves in Sweden – are used in lower secondary schools. Drawing on two examples we illustrate different ways of enhancing students’ critical approach to the argumentative text type. The article highlights the affective aspects of teaching, and thus the unforeseeable aspects of classroom interaction. Emotionally, the wolf issue became very different objects for the persons occupying the classrooms. It invoked, e.g. homosocial relations, racist accounts and nationalistic outbursts. The article stresses the significance of teacher intervention but argues that to facilitate critical literacy in emotionally charged classrooms, the circulation of emotions, including teachers’ emotions must be brought to light.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical/literary theory
• critical pedagogies
• emotion/affect
• teachers and educators
• ethnography
• secondary education
• literacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Magnus Åberg is an ethnographer and gender scholar at Karlstad University, Sweden. His research centres on power practices in mundane educational settings. Currently, he is researching issues on gender and touch in preschools.

Christina Olin-Scheller holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and is professor of Educational Work at Karlstad University. Her research interest has a focus on reading issues in education and pursues interdisciplinary research relating to the conditions for learning, development and identity creation in formal and informal educational settings. She is currently the research leader of the Centre of Language and Literature Education, CSL and ROSE, Research on Subject-Specific Education. She also heads the national Literacy Network.

ORCID

Magnus Åberg http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8019-2396

Christina Olin-Scheller http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2872-4102

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet: [Grant Number 2011/5540].