3.1: Reading Self-Reflexively: An Introduction

Literacy as Freedom

In the article you read from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, you learned about the power of literacy–how it can be a doorway to freedom and a tool for emancipation. It was after a slave rebellion led by Nat Turner that the people in power recognized the potential of literacy to be used in transformative ways; thus, they enacted laws denying the people enslaved the right to become literate.

Accordingly, Nat Turner was known for being an intelligent and deeply religious man; he learned how to read and write at a young age. Nat was often seen praying, fasting, and reading the Bible. Because Nat was enslaved, he experienced and witnessed the brutalities of slavery firsthand. He felt called upon by God to organize and lead both enslaved and free blacks in a rebellion against the slave owners. Nat’s desire was to put an end to the unjust cruelties and inhumanities of slavery. Nat planned a rebellion and communicated the plan to others in writing. After the insurrection, slave owners and politicians realized how writing was utilized in the plan for retaliation against them. Fear of literate slaves planning future uprisings or forging travel passes for the purpose of escaping to freedom led those in power to enact laws making it a crime to teach slaves how to read in all slave states except for the three. As a result, any person enslaved who was caught reading or writing, as well as those who taught them, were severely punished by fines, imprisonments, or whippings.

In spite of laws forbidding the teaching of reading to people enslaved, multiple slave narratives recount how those people who were enslaved enacted critical processes and became educated. Some learned to read from other literate slaves, and others learned from a master or mistress willing to teach in defiance of the laws. Young children who were enslaved would listen from the outside of school houses where their masters’ children were inside learning– all of these people took profound risks. They were enacting critical literacy by reading their world: they could see and name the ways in which they were being oppressed and prohibited from learning and they sought out ways to learn.

In this section we’ll look a little deeper into literacy and critical literacy, including their origins and their potential to support freedom, opportunity, and social justice for all.

Literacy and Critical Literacy

One way to gain a deeper understanding of a word or concept such as literacy is to look at its etymology. Etymologies are resources that provide facts about the origin and changes or development of a word or concept. Throughout the guidebook, we will examine words and concepts and learn about the various meanings associated with them as well as look at their histories and origins. Within those etymons or word stories, there is rich information about the past and the present that will support you in learning and remembering words and concepts.

For instance, looking into the etymology of the word literacy, we discover that it derived from the word “literate.” In the 1400s, the word literate entered the English language from the Latin root word litera and had a sense and meaning of “being educated” or “having knowledge of alphabetic letters.” By 1894, the sense and meaning of the word literate evolved to include one of its present-day meanings - “one who can read and write” (Harper 1). Thus, a person who is literate has the ability to read and write the written word. Being literate also has a sense of being educated. Many English words are polysemous - that means they can have more than one sense and meaning.

Basic Literacy

The creation of the written word is a relatively new invention. About 3,000 years ago, it is believed that the Phoenicians invented the first alphabet. There were other forms of written communication such as cave drawings, cuneiforms, and hieroglyphics, but this was the first alphabetic writing system. The Phoenicians interacted and traded goods and products with the Greeks and the Romans. The Greeks and the Romans began to adapt the Phoenician alphabet to their languages, thus bringing forth both the Greek and the Roman/ Latin alphabets.

Once there were alphabet systems, people began using the alphabetic letters to represent their thoughts and ideas through writing. This was also the beginning of literacy instruction – teaching people how to read and write using the alphabet. In the earliest days of literacy instruction, it was primarily the rich and the upper classes who had the leisure time to learn how to read and write. But as the Puritans and Protestants left England to gain religious freedom and began arriving on North American lands and forming colonies, they wanted people to have the ability to read the Bible. So young children went to school to learn how to read and write English. After the colonists fought and won their independence from England, the new nation – America–began forming a democracy; thus, there were new and additional reasons for learning to read and write. As an independent country, Americans no longer pledged allegiance to England. Schools continued to teach literacy to support reading the Bible, but schools also began including history lessons and readings to develop patriotic citizens that could participate in the democratic process.

Learning how to read and write is a language process – that means the same areas of the brain that facilitate our ability to speak and understand speech enable us to read and write; however, unlike language, which is learned naturally through exposure and experience with listening and speaking with others, learning to read and write does not usually occur naturally. For most people, it’s a learned skill. And like any skill, such as playing a sport or an instrument, some people readily pick it up almost seamlessly, while others need explicit lessons. Regardless of whether you experienced ease or difficulty in learning to read, gaining knowledge about how the English writing system (orthography) works will improve your spelling, vocabulary skills, and reading and writing abilities – all of which help you to communicate and understand.

Thus, reading and writing are meaning-making processes. For example, when you read a book or an article, you, as the reader, are involved in an interaction between yourself and the reading material (the book or article). Someone wrote this material and you are trying to make sense of what it means. To do that, you need to figure out what those groups of letters forming words say (that is decoding) AND you need to determine what those words you just decoded mean (that is vocabulary). You also need to gain an overall understanding of the entire message–that is comprehension. Having the ability to decode and comprehend is only basic literacy. In a democracy, citizens elect other people to represent their interests and ideas. Democracies thrive when educated citizens listen to and read about the candidates running for office to determine what their positions are and what ideas they represent and support. Gaining this valuable knowledge allows us as citizens to make knowledgeable decisions about who would best serve the people and the country. Thus, as citizens, we must read at a deeper level than basic literacy– we must acquire critical literacy abilities.

Critical Literacy

Critical readers understand that there is no such thing as neutral reading material; every author writes from a position or perspective and is trying to convey a message. So, critical readers try to figure out the author’s position and message. Critical readers also notice positions that are absent and they think about how those other perspectives, if included, might change the message. For instance, in the classic fairy tale “The Three Little Pigs,” the story is usually told from the pigs’ point of view; by contrast, the wolf is depicted as “big and bad.” But Jon Scieszka tells the “true” story when he retells it from the wolf’s point of view. In Scieszka’s story, the wolf claims that he was only going to the pigs’ houses to borrow some sugar. It was his granny’s birthday, and he wanted to bake her a cake. Unfortunately, the wolf had a bad cold that caused him to sneeze repeatedly. The wolf insists his story is the true story and that he was framed by the pigs. Now, this is a silly and humorous version of the story, but it’s also a fitting story to show that there are many sides to a story, and in most narratives, we probably do not have a complete picture. Have you ever considered that the wolf might have had a logical reason for his actions? Prior to reading Scieszka’s story, we had never thought or wondered, “What is the wolf’s side of the story?” Thinking about other perspectives and accounts is part of taking a critical stance.

Critical literacy encourages us to think about ideas and perspectives that we might not otherwise consider, and it also encourages us to reconsider ourselves and our reading practices–a process that is called reading self-reflexively.

Critical literacy is an active, continual process that requires reading the world– seeing or noticing problems or issues. As problems or issues are identified, it is important to understand the consequences, especially the way that issues or problems prioritize or privilege some people over others. Once a problem or issue is identified and investigated, the tools of literacy (e.g. reading and writing) can be utilized to make people aware of the problem/issue or enact change and transform situations in ways that bring about equity and fairness.

Paulo Freire was a critical theorist and educator who worked with people living in poverty in Brazil. Many of the Brazilian people were not literate and did not have the right to vote. Freire supported the people by seeing and naming the problem and the consequences of illiteracy. Freire educated the people to become literate so they could then educate others. In addition, they worked towards attaining voting rights. All of these changes empowered the people living in Brazil. Freire advocated for these kinds of problem posing and problem solving teaching methods.

Freire critiqued the American education system for not fostering critical thinking. Instead of a problem solving curriculum, Freire explained how US schools used a “banking concept” for teaching. According to Freire, the banking concept of teaching includes an “all-knowing” teacher who makes deposits of knowledge into students’ minds. Students aren’t invited to create learning experiences, nor are the students taught to question and analyze whose knowledge was being studied; instead, students are expected to passively accept, memorize, and recite back the information on a test. Freire believed that this type of instruction stifled student motivation and creativity. Freire advocated for a critical, problem-posing curriculum where students and teachers notice and question everything in their surroundings. Learning to be inquisitive can lead to identifying inequalities, problems, or issues in their lives and communities. Together, students and teachers investigate the issues to determine consequences and then explore new possibilities. According to Freire, unjust societies are characterized by economic disparities between those living in wealth–the “oppressors” –and those living in poverty– “the oppressed.”

Freire didn’t view the oppressed as “unfortunate” people in need of saving; instead, he believed people who were oppressed could regain their humanity by seeing and naming their problems in their communities and then using the tools of literacy to act and gain freedom from oppression. Paulo Freire invited people to read the word and read the world, as he knew the power that literacy had to transform lives. Freire’s ideas for empowering people to challenge the status quo and enact change through voting laws and literacy has been characterized as “radical.” Many powerful people mischaracterize Freire as a “Marxist” who wanted to overturn capitalism and make it communism. A “Marxist” is one who ascribes to the political and economic principles of Karl Marx, a German philosopher who critically theorized capitalism and the tensions between economic classes, especially in regard to power and labor. Why might some people in power fear Paulo Freire and misrepresent his message?

"Paulo Freire" by ch_stencil is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Critical Literacy as Self-Reflexive Reading

Self-reflexivity is “the act of turning back to discover, examine, and critique one’s claims and assumptions in response to an encounter with another idea, text, person, or culture” (Qualley, 1997, p. 104). The key aspect here is that self-reflexivity originates in our engagement with “others.” The term “other” refers to an entity outside oneself, such as another person, text, artifact, etc. Self-reflexivity is not an automatic reflex or response, such as when you put your hand on a hot stove. By contrast, self reflexivity involves consciously investigating what we believe and how we came to hold that belief.

For instance, a few years ago, during one of our literacy tutoring sessions with a college student, we encountered a text - i.e. graphic - that challenged our assumptions and our reading practices. Our student brought an assigned reading from one of her college classes, the preview of which is depicted here. The text, which focuses on immigration, features a picture of a man holding a wooden beam as three silhouettes run across it. As part of our previewing, this image became the focus of our attention. In our initial reading of the visual text, we decisively identified the man in overalls holding the beam as the immigrant. Only after conducting inquiry into the word immigration did we discover from Etymonline that the word originated in 1690 from the Latin root migratus with a denotation or primary/first meaning of “change or move.” By 1897 the connotation and sense of immigration had evolved to include “not just the place of one’s departure, but an impermanent stay or stopping” (Harper). With this new information, we revisited the image. As we reread the image in light of the detonation of “change or move” and the connotation from 1897, we began to question our initial reading, generating these questions: Which individuals in the image were moving? Who was more obviously in motion? Who is the actual immigrant or is it possible that all of the images depict immigrants?

Originally, we wondered if we had misread the image. Though it certainly felt that way at the time, we now see that the value of our questioning wasn’t in its rendering a “correct” or “incorrect” reading. The value wasn’t even in helping us identify which figure was “the immigrant.” Instead, the value exceeded the text itself by leading us to take action as critical self-reflexive readers willing to challenge our own previous assumptions. Moreover, we examined and questioned the role that we play in constructing meaning and the power that we exercise when we label or read someone as “immigrant.” This awareness is the basis of critical literacy and our ability to “read the word and the world” because it begins to reveal how our continual readings of both texts and people serve to secure their position in relation to others.

The readings in this section– as well as in the other 4 sections–provide examples of people enacting critical literacy ideals, like Nat Turner and Paulo Freire. In both Frederick Douglass’ narrative about his life and Frances Ellen Watkins-Harper’s poem, the authors reveal how people who were enslaved acted critically–that is, they used the tools of literacy to bring about transformation and freedom, whether that freedom was in the mind or freedom of the actual body. As you read the selections in this guidebook, we urge you to try and identify how people are able to see and name injustices and how they actively seek ways to resist oppression or injustice and bring about transformation. All of the readings highlight the interrelated aspects of critical literacy and reading the word and the world.