A critical literacy class: beyond English learning and teaching in Higher Education

4.1 Research paradigm

This research is based on a “descriptive case study” (Berg 2009: 327), which follows an interpretivist paradigm and aims to understand “the world of human experience” (Cohen and Manion 1994: 36), suggesting that “reality is socially constructed” (Mertens 2005: 12). It tends to rely upon the viewpoints of participants of the situation being studied (Creswell 2009) while recognizing the impact on the research of their own background and experiences. The research adopts a relativist ontology, acknowledging multiple realities, and a subjectivist epistemology in which the researcher can co-construct meanings and the participants can co-create understandings.

4.2 Research participants

This case study took place in an SFL class in a state university in Istanbul, Turkey. The research class was based on a purposive sampling, more specifically it was a typical case sampling (TCS). When the research class is a TCS it is possible to set the bar of what is standard and choose the case simply because there is nothing unusual about it (Palys 2008). Due to the researcher’s knowledge of the institution, acquaintance with colleagues and experience with similar students for many years, the researcher was able to employ TCS. Furthermore, the participants were chosen based on their likelihood of behaving like every other student/teacher at Preparatory School. In accordance with the case study approach, the in-depth research concentrated on one class of 18 students who were of intermediate level (B1 according to CEFR) and 2 teachers.

The student participants are from different school backgrounds yet have a similar level of English. They were given information about the research, and the various data collection methods, and were asked for their consent.

The teachers were SFL English instructors who volunteered for the research. They were enthusiastic about professional development and open to new teaching strategies and gaining a more critical perspective. Both teachers were informed about the analytical framework of Alma Flor Ada, that is, the creative reading methodology. The choice of textbook topics, how the CL phases would be implemented and which strategies would be developed were left to their own understanding, experience and critical literacy readings.

Due to the interpretivist outlook, the language classroom is understood as having a socially constructed and dynamic nature and is open to all perceptions and creation of multiple meanings. Hence, all participants’ interpretations are equally valid and legitimate and act as a crucial element in understanding the practice of CL. Thus, it needs to be established that the data that the researcher has captured only represents the views of the participants at one particular moment in time and within a certain context.

4.3 Data collection and analysis

The two main sources of data were in the form of semi-structured interviews and field notes. Two sets of interviews, that is pre- and post-semi structured interviews, were conducted for both teachers and students. In the interviews, a number of questions were raised in order to grasp the participants’ reflections on the materials used, their perspectives and perceptions regarding their experiences in class, their interactions with their peers. The field notes were collected from numerous sources, namely, the researcher’s class recordings and in-class notes as the observant participant, teacher reflections and student diaries. Students’ personal diaries were voluntary and free-style, they were asked to write their reflections and (re)constructions during the term which included both personal thoughts about being in and out of the CL classroom.

Besides the pre- and post-semi-structured interviews and field notes, background information questionnaires were also provided for both the teachers and the students. For the purpose of data analysis, participants were assigned pseudonyms of their choice, i.e. false names for the excerpts, and affiliations to institutions and textbooks were removed to provide anonymity. The participant excerpts were proofread only for the flow of the article.

This research employed an inductive thematic analysis since there were multiple data sources and multiple meanings. Moreover, the research questions evolved through the coding process, which is suggested by Braun and Clarke (2006) as a connection to the inductive approach. Following Braun and Clark (2006), all the data were transcribed, thematized and cross-checked by triangulation of the researcher’s own field notes and the data gathered from the participants’ interviews, their own personal field notes and documents.

5.1 Descriptive phase: the topic of the day

The descriptive phase engaged the class in warm-up activities, skimming and scanning, as well as reading the text for the gist. Pair work was preferred for the general questions that were asked at first as in “what is leisure”, or “what is success”? Students were given some time to answer the comprehension questions of the texts, and the unknown vocabulary in the passages was explained by the teacher practically all the time.

The students followed the instructions in the descriptive phase without any unexpected responses since this phase is not so different from what students expect from a regular English class. The researcher also observed that the teachers “deal with the themes in a similar respect to what they did in their regular classes beforehand” (RO, Mod1 & 2) In addition, it can be inferred from the researcher’s notes that some students were bored, and at times distracted as seen in the following examples: “Muhittin is sleeping-not interested and Kenan is talking with Hanzade. They are giggling” (RO, Mod4). The students usually copied the vocabulary into their notebooks and were kept busy finding answers the author of the text had asked for. Hatice, one of the teachers, explained how this phase went in one of her reflections as:

In the first hour I asked them to read the text, answer some comprehension questions and work on vocabulary. They were not very active in this phase. It was a typical class hour when students usually work on their own, do some pair work to compare their answers and finally share their answers open class (Hatice, TR, Mod1).

Students can be mostly silent, reluctant, and possibly demotivated when the central point of the lesson is only reading the text and answering the questions. The students explained the reasons of such attitude. Eda and Öznur talked about the need for “real things”:

It must be something that draws my attention. I don’t speak unless there is something related to real life issues. Real things (Eda, SPreI).

Some topics, they are so discouraging, demotivating. I wish there were topics that would interest us, topics that relate to our lives (Öznur, SPreI).

This phase introduces the topic that can be mostly emphasized as mainstream and commonplace. If the lesson started and ended with this phase, it would resemble a typical language classroom of preparatory schools, an area which research has shown needs curriculum development (Coşkun 2013). In CL, however, this phase is used by the teachers as a start off point for critical discussions and analyses that would take place in the other phases. In other words, teachers try some opinion questions on the issues. For example, “Have you heard the term slow food?” changes to “What about fast food?” when students’ answers are negative. This strategy enables a lead-in activity for the personal interpretive phase.

5.2 Personal interpretive phase: whose language?

The teachers of the research confirmed the idea in their reflection notes that most of the texts they used lacked genuineness because there was no local experience attached to them, and these texts had no contextual tie to the lives of the students. These “commercial textbooks” as Richards (1998: 128) calls them “represent no personal investment on the part of the teacher” and thus “they can be easily replaced if a more interesting textbook comes along.” This is why the teachers felt the need to bring in some of their own real-life examples so that they could extend the discussions. They felt the textbook was repetitive and insufficient, so they made use of alternative materials. These alternative materials created an opportunity for them to discover CL strategies such as alternative perspectives. “Alternative perspectives” enable the viewpoints of different characters in a story or different people in a real-life situation. The alternative perspectives include alternative texts, juxtapositioning, mind and alternative mind portraits, and theme-based focus groups (McLaughlin and DeVoogd 2004: 46).

The teachers employed not only alternative perspectives but also problem posing strategies such as “The Rest of the Story” (McLauglin and Devoogd 2004: 49) that enables students to use their background knowledge to inspect what is missing or under-represented in a text. In the module on education the focal point was different Englishes around the world and the students were asked to use their background knowledge and other resources to understand that missing perspective. When the students were ready, they would present it to the class and start a critical discussion. By doing this, they were encouraged to develop an understanding of author and text bias.

One of the teachers wrote some concepts, such as Standard English, World Englishes, colonization on the board to stimulate discussion for the personal interpretive phase. She utilized the critical words as a source to support the discussion. One student, Öznur, analyzed the situation as such:

We were talking about Standard English, why and how it becomes standard. And then Göze gave the example of how she enjoyed Indian English. I do remember that. And I thought that is what happened to Turkish, we have Istanbul Turkish, and we actually have other Turkishes but people simply ignore them, look down on them. Istanbul Turkish is the one that is taught everywhere (Öznur, SPostI).

Here it is interesting to see how the student perceived the language varieties and how she associated different Englishes with the language situation in her own country. Another student was not in class that day and the topic was passed on by her class friends. It is unexpected to encounter such pass-on occasions for topics that are discussed in class. However, this was a discussion with many variables and the discussion went beyond the class walls. Melissa expressed her ideas profoundly in the following excerpt:

I was not in class when they covered the module on education. But my friends told me all about it afterwards. They shared what they did in class because they were impressed to learn about different Englishes. What is meant with that discussion is that English was once spread with colonization. And it was like the world was forced to use American or British English. Quite like how English is taught to us. In fact, we have same kind of a colonization mind in Turkey. It used to be that in Turkey Kurdish people were forced to speak only Turkish and no Kurdish. Similarly, British forced people of different countries to speak their English accent for years (Melissa, SPostI).

It is significant to note that Critical Literacy can provide the link between the outer experience to the inner one. The above quotation of the student came from this kind of connection. Students found the discussion significant enough to pass it on to the student that was not in class that day who then analyzed the situation and drew a similarity between how languages are learned in countries; she also pointed to the possible language hierarchies and impositions of languages.

The way the teachers elaborated on the personal interpretive phase enabled the students to perceive their own realities by means of other realities. Moreover, the in-class narratives and dialogues that analyzed their own lives and experiences created genuine learning practices.

5.3 Critical analysis phase: a different angle

When the voices of the students were heard and when their narratives were valued, the teachers lead the discussions towards the critical analysis phase. The teachers made use of a variety of controversial texts, media and videos, which gave students the chance to pose problems in the mainstream texts they had read.

The “success” module focused on gender issues. “Switching” was the strategy the teacher used. In this strategy, after reading the text, the student responds to selected questions, such as ‘What gender is represented in the text?’ The student can imagine “an alternative version of the story by switching genders, critically analyzing the author’s emphasis on one gender and how the message would change if the other gender were emphasized” (McLaughlin and DeVoogd 2004: 47). The way the teacher led the class to the heart of discussion was by asking one critical question: “What does the cover picture of the ‘Success’ module tell us? Who is this person?” The excitement and fulfillment of the teacher can be read in her reflection notes:

Finally, I asked them to look at the cover page of the module about success and describe the person to me. They said he was happy and successful etc. No one at first realized that he was a white European man with blue eyes and blond hair. But the reality suddenly hit them. Success was associated with this man. All of them and I think the girls even more were really surprised and bewildered. I asked them to look at some other pictures in the book. They were shocked to see that women were associated with leisure, fitness, and cooking while men were associated with technology, heroes, science and success (Hatice, TR, Mod1).

The teacher, content with her discovery of such an important issue, in fact posed a problem. Her problem posing brings “interactive participation and critical inquiry into the existing curriculum” and it also extends it to “reflect the curriculum of the students’ lives” (Wink 2005: 51).

Öznur, a student, explained how she became engaged and the reactions within the class during the module:

I was stupefied at first when we got involved I mean when I really got involved I was not like that anymore, I got aware of what we were doing, what it was all about. We, I mean, our group that worked on gender got angry first to the reactions coming from some of the boys in class. So we really worked hard to show how serious this issue was. It was a nice work. And now I mean yesterday there was a discussion on the same issue and I could see that one of the boys gave a much more mindful answer. He must have thought about the project and all the discussions during the project. He was looking from a different angle. He seemed to be gentler and more aware (Öznur, SPostI).

As Wink (2005: 47) states, “the hidden curriculum can be seen in schools when little boys are called on more than girls, when Eurocentric histories are taught, when teenage girls are socialized to believe that they are not good in math and sciences, when heroes but not heroines are taught, and when counselors track nonwhites to classes that prepare them to serve”. This can explain the reason why some boys in the class associate success with being a man and why some girls that are encouraged to question are bothered about it. It serves the purpose of the hidden curriculum. The students are already familiar with the idea “when heroes but not heroines are taught” and success is linked with heroes. The hidden curriculum is the perpetuation of the dominant culture through institutional processes, through textbooks. With Critical Literacy students learn to ask: Whose knowledge? Whose history? Whose perspective? Whose language? This phase aims to pose these questions.

The module based on technology was carried out with the teacher asking questions: “What are the benefits of technology and science? How do we benefit from them? What are the criteria for mobile phones? Who benefits from them?” After some time, the teacher started receiving the answers from the groups and putting them up on the board. She led them into the discussion at a slow pace, making sure they were really thinking about the questions. She asked “for whom?” Students said “people”. The teacher asked “which people?” Students said “rich people”. At this point the teacher continued with the concept ‘fair trade’ and explained fighting for fair wages. It was the first time the students had heard about this term. One student immediately asked a word in Turkish to be translated into English. And the teacher said “union” and wrote it on the board. Then the teacher asked “Why is something cheap? What makes it cheap?” The answers from the students were “low wages and exploitation of minerals in third world countries”. She went on to detail how third world countries could not afford the products they produced and suffered under bad working conditions and people suffered because they were poor and were exploited on top of it.

Here is what one student wrote in his diary afterwards:

We watched a video on technology. But before that the teacher had written new vocabulary on board about the working conditions of young children. Müge teacher is an activist and she made us activists. We discussed about how the mobile phones are manufactured, how the working conditions could be improved. I read an article on the issue two months after the in-class discussion. I read it simply because I was interested. I was interested because of what we did in class (Muhittin, SD).

Muhittin discovered his interest as he discovered the world in the eyes of CL which acknowledges that “reading does not take place in a vacuum; reading encompasses the whole social, cultural, political, and historical context. It includes reading the world.” (Wink 2005: 48).

The critical analysis phase is a step for all the class members to understand the meaning of interrogation from multiple perspectives, reading alternatively, questioning what is made visible and what not. Students became active debaters and critical learners in this critical analysis phase and they became conscious of what is deliberately taught and not taught to them in the school curriculum. Teachers become conscious of alternative materials and multiple voices to bring the issue into light in a critical way.

5.4 Creative action phase: realizing the unrealized

Although the class did a number of readings, tasks and in-class discussions, the creative action phase took it to the next level. Because this was when they were at times judged, questioned, and looked down on by the community they lived in. Students were searching for what was behind the scenes, they were making inquiries.

The module on the environment raised consciousness by interrogation of the work done by municipalities. The teacher gave a group work task to the students to go to different municipalities in order to explore the environmental services provided for the citizens. The real task was to understand whether these services were being provided to everyone equally. Selen details her experience as follows:

When we went to the municipality, we talked to the environmental engineer there. She explained what kind of work they do, how they worked with schools, and how they were doing the recycling by collecting trash from homes at certain times of the day. Yet we searched from social media to see what the citizens were saying about this. They were saying things like “we separate the trash; it is 8 pm but no one has come to pick them up”. Or “there is not even a garbage bin on our street, so we have to put the trash out at some point and there comes the dogs and dirty the street by tearing the trash bags”. So, these comments on social media are valuable, it is like we are conducting an interview outdoors (Selen, SPostI).

Indeed, it can be read from the student’s quote that she felt for the citizens and was trying to voice the multiple truths of the situation.

This last phase of CL especially helped students become engaged, active, critically thinking citizens, that is, subjects who can participate as decision-makers in the organization of their socio-cultural realities (Freire 2000; Freire and Macedo 1987; Giroux 1993). Also, teachers reached the opportunity to challenge the purpose and meaning of the school curriculum by giving students a chance to trespass beyond the classroom borders and gave them the role that they might play as cultural workers so that they could discover and perform new discourses where the principles of human dignity, liberty, and social justice are absolute.

5.5 English finds a new meaning

With CL, new possibilities in English are introduced and acknowledged by both students and teachers. The participants of this research endorse the necessity of such critical projects when they discuss the importance of research-oriented writing. They stress how CL has influenced their English writing and research projects in a constructive way.

I became more self-confident in the second term. I could speak English more fluently and gave clear answers… All these projects contributed to my English. I can speak better. We translated advertisements and I remember saying “Gosh, I translated all these!” and then wrote a long commentary on the subject. And I said to myself “I can do all this in English” (Selen, SPostI).

Once given the chance with CL, students learned the significance of research, and were able to search in detail from manifold perspectives. Hanzade considers the probing aspect of research in her account:

I can talk to the people easier now. I also become more research-oriented. I do not believe everything said so quickly any more. In the example of organic bazaar, I learned the importance of research. Not everything that is written on the Internet or else is true. We need to do more research (Hanzade, SPostI).

Eda seems to be ready for her departmental courses and she expresses her feelings about the work, and the projects she did using the language at all times:

I felt different from other Prep students. While I was working on the computer, figuring out things in English, I faced many surprises and reactions from different people. They asked if I was not studying Prep. I explained what kind of projects we were involved in and people said “wow”. I felt different, good, and I felt I was ready for my department classes. My brain was working, I knew how to approach things. And that we did all these in English. It was so important to me (Eda, SPostI).

‘Real experience’, ‘learning by doing it’, and ‘living it’ are key words from the students’ accounts. The students have not only acknowledge the importance of research but they also did research and fulfilled tasks with their own aspirations.

We watched different videos on English varieties. We learned lots of new vocabulary and made use of this while we were writing to the editor of the book. Such activities helped us learn new words and because we wrote to a real person, what we learned became real (Muhittin, SPostI).

The teacher has also observed the change in her students’ writing samples due to CL. She mentions the significance of research and leaving the floor to students for topic choice. She expresses her experience with CL and writing relationship in the following excerpt:

I have been teaching for about 15 years the same way. But with the prep school I never did something like this… probably the new thing was trying to integrate such a thing into the prep school because prep school syllabus, curricula has always been very rigid, grammar based and academic writing based. But this time the good thing was more investigation. The more you do on a certain topic, the better you can write. And that was it actually the result of their writings … They could choose the topic, reasons for racism, reasons for different things and I left it to them. And you could see the results. They had lots to say about this. CL actually is a large contribution to writing. Before it was “what do you think about the environment?” I mean if you have not read anything about environment what can you say? So it goes more to investigation, they have to do more research and if they do more research, they can write about it. They had lots to say (Müge, TPostI).