Literacy and Power

by Hilary Janks

Hilary Janks addresses key questions about literacy and power in this landmark text that is both engaging and accessible. Her central argument is that competing orientations to critical literacy education - domination (power), access, diversity, design - foreground one over the other, but are crucially interdependent and need to work together to create possibilities for redesign and social action that serve a social justice agenda. She examines the theory underpinning each orientation, and develops new theory in the argument for interdependence and integration. Sitting at the interface between theory and practice, constantly moving from one to the other, the text is rich with examples of how to use these orientations in real teaching contexts, and how to use them to counterbalance one another. In the groundbreaking final chapter Janks considers how the rationalist underpinning of critical literacy tends to exclude the non-rational shows ways of working ‘beyond reason’ - pleasure and play, desire and the unconscious - and makes the case that these need to be taken seriously given their power to cut across the work of critical literacy educators working from any orientation.

Genres: Academic

268 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2009

Reviews

[Norm · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the end, I could see that the point she made was important. It's true, she uses bad examples in many places, her writing is dense and disorganized, and her comma usage is atrocious. I found that if I could distill her meaning out of the frustrating morass that I agreed with her. So, she's a smart person who brings together some heretofore disparate theories. It just could have been better written.