Three Pedagogical Moves for Enacting Critical Literacy Pedagogy

Critical literacy pedagogy (CLP) is instruction that brings critical theory to life in the classroom. CLP helps students use literacy to understand how power operates in the world, to imagine how the world might be made more just, and to affect needed change.

Enacting CLP is challenging, even more so without a theory- and research-informed plan for implementation. Below, I provide three pedagogical moves–or intentional decisions–teachers can make to enact CLP.

Pedagogical Move 1: Teach the Traditional Literary Canon Critically

The literary canon mostly includes works written by White men (and some women). Though some canonical texts are so problematic they should be removed from curricula in secondary schools, many can be repurposed by critical theory-informed teachers to become effective tools for critical literacy, sociopolitical consciousness raising, and transformation.

To teach a canonical text, like Romeo and Juliet, critically requires teachers to take two steps. First, make the unit of study a conceptual one, not a text-based unit. A conceptual unit is based on big ideas, concerns and issues, and themes (e.g., coming of age, civic responsibility, identity, the individual in society, and power and privilege; see Smagorinsky, 2018). Conceptual units, unlike text-based ones, are not solely focused on teaching the plot, characters, conflicts, symbols, and themes of one text. Therefore, conceptual units invite inquiry as students and the teacher explore the big ideas of the unit together through questioning, researching, and open-minded curiosity. Conceptual units decenter the canonical text and invite students to problematize, question, and challenge the canon.

Second, decide what the guiding inquiry question(s) will be. To ensure that the conceptual unit advances the goals of critical literacy pedagogy, teachers must pose critical inquiry questions. When a critical inquiry question guides a unit, the canonical text becomes a tool for CHANGE.

Examples

Steiss (2020) supported his students in critically reading Homer’s The Odyssey to problematize the dehumanizing messages contained in the epic and to counter toxic masculinity. Steiss used these inquiry questions to engage students in critical literacy: “What voices are privileged, and which are left out?”, “What stereotypes are perpetuated?”, and “How can we redress these problems? How can we use this analysis to create more justice or equity?” (p. 436).

Shelton (2017) used critical readings and discussions of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to unpack issues surrounding racism, sexism, homophobia, and Islamophobia because bullying was a serious problem in her school. Shelton and her students studied other texts as well, like editorials and essays, to inquire into these issues.

Dallacqua and Sheahan (2020) decentered Shakespeare’s Hamlet by pairing it with a graphic novel about gangs in Chicago, Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty by Gregory Neri. To investigate the workings of power and privilege in texts, one of their unit’s inquiry questions was “How does an understanding of how privilege operates change our perception of characters across multiple texts?” (p. 69).

Pedagogical Move 2: Create New Units that Center Diverse Texts and Interrogate Issues of Power

While some canonical texts can be used critically as tools for transformation, not all should be, and students deserve to study diverse and inclusive literature. Therefore, teachers likely need to create new units that replace canonical texts with ones that are more diverse and inclusive in terms of authorship, characters, topics and concerns, and themes. Also, these new units should feature texts that support students in interrogating issues of power and expanding their sociopolitical consciousness (i.e., their awareness of the ways power shapes the social, political, and economic workings of the world and of students’ agency in enacting needed change in the world).

Examples

In my book Teaching for CHANGE in the ELA Classroom: Integrating Social Justice and Critical Literacy for Grades 9-12 (Stockwell, 2025), I outlined a unit on the young adult novel American Street by Ibi Zoboi to replace To Kill a Mockingbird as well as a unit on the novel Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena María Viramontes to replace Of Mice and Men.

American Street by Ibi Zoboi follows sixteen-year-old Fabiola Toussaint, who arrives in Detroit from Haiti and is separated from her mother when her mother is detained by Immigration. As Fabiola lives with her aunt and cousins, she navigates cultural differences, family relationships, questions about her identity, loss, romance, and resilience, all while holding onto hope that she will be reunited with her mother. Because Haiti’s culture and history are often silenced in U.S. schooling, the unit objective is for students to learn key aspects of Haitian culture and history as a starting point for further research into other events or cultures that have been silenced.

Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus is set in California’s Central Valley and centers the experiences of Mexican American migrant farmworkers. The novel follows Estrella, as she enters adolescence while her family moves from farm to farm in search of agricultural work. The novel focuses on Estrella’s coming of age and the development of her critical consciousness. Her awakening occurs when Alejo, a fellow teenage farmworker who is romantically interested in Estrella, is poisoned by pesticides sprayed prematurely in the fields. As Estrella realizes Alejo will not receive the medical care he needs, she comes to understand how racialized and marginalized migrant workers are treated as disposable so that the privileged can remain insulated from the dangerous labor that sustains their comfort. The unit’s guiding inquiry question is, “How are some of the injustices in the novel still happening today, and what can we do about it?”

Pedagogical Move 3: Design Projects that Extend Beyond the Unit and the Walls of the Classroom

CLP emphasizes agency and action–action to change the world. But teachers often work in restrictive environments, and every teacher is beholden to the limits of the academic school year. Sometimes, to accomplish all that is expected of them, teachers must move on with their curriculum, even though there is more they could explore within a unit. To address this restriction, teachers can design projects that extend beyond the official study of a unit and that go beyond the walls of the classroom. To uphold the aims of CLP, these extension projects should be focused on justice and transformation.  

Examples

After a unit or instruction on argumentative writing, teachers could ask students to share their final draft with a relevant audience–like the principal, the school improvement council, or community leaders–and then reflect on how their writing was received. As all teachers of writing know, considering audience is an essential rhetorical technique, so this extension project supports students’ growth as writers and gives them the opportunity to see how their words can make a difference beyond the classroom.

In a chapter I wrote for the upcoming book Identity, Criticality, and Advocacy in Young Adult Literature: Training Teachers to Empower Students in the ELA Classroom (Stockwell, in press), I discuss an extension project for a unit on the young adult novel We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds. As I share in the chapter, We Deserve Monuments follows Avery Anderson, a biracial queer high school senior, who moves from Washington, D.C. to a small (fictional) town in Georgia and confronts her family’s history, the town’s unresolved racism, and her own emerging sense of justice as she imagines a more equitable future.

Because the novel’s themes (and title) raise questions about who deserves monuments and public recognition, the extension project, which could be implemented even after the class moves on to study other content, invites students to conduct school- and community-based research by collecting, recording, and digitally publishing stories from people they know who are often overlooked. This extension project empowers students to see themselves and their communities as worthy of recognition and capable of speaking back to power. As I wrote in my chapter, “Words can be monuments, too.”

Closing Suggestion

If you’re interested in implementing CLP but feel “new” to this approach, I suggest you begin by adjusting a unit you’re already planning on teaching that features a canonical text and teach it critically (Pedagogical Move 1). After you gain practice with CLP using Pedagogical Move 1, you’ll be ready for Moves 2 and 3. You may even come up with your own!

References

·      Dallacqua, A. K., & Sheahan, A. (2020). Making space: Complicating a canonical text through critical multimodal work in a secondary language arts classroom. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 64(1), 67–77.

·      Shelton, S. A. (2017). A narrative reflection on examining text and world for social justice: Combatting bullying and harassment with Shakespeare. Journal of Language & Literacy Education, 13(1), 1–14.

·      Smagorinsky, P. (2018). Teaching English by design: How to create and carry out instructional units (2nd ed.). Heinem

ann Educational Books.

·      Steiss, J. (2020). Dismantling winning stories: Lessons from applying critical literature pedagogy to The Odyssey. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63(4), 433–441.

·      Stockwell, D. (2025). Teaching for CHANGE in the ELA classroom: Integrating social justice and critical literacy for grades 9-12. Routledge.

·      Stockwell, D. (in press). What do students deserve in secondary ELA classrooms? Promoting criticality with We Deserve Monuments. In S. C. Maher & A. Hays (Eds.), Identity, criticality, and advocacy in young adult literature: Training teachers to empower students in the ELA classroom. Routledge.

Literature Cited

·      Hammonds, J. (2022). We deserve monuments. Roaring Brook Press.

·      Neri, G. (2010). Yummy: The last days of a Southside shorty (R. DuBurke, Illus.). Lee & Low.

·      Viramontes, H. M. (1996). Under the feet of Jesus. Plume.

·      Zoboi, I. (2017). American street. Balzer + Bray.