Critical literacy, cultural literacy, and the English school curriculum in Australia

Graeme Turner

pp. 158-170

in: Sue Owen (ed), Richard Hoggart and cultural studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

In this chapter I want to reflect on the contemporary currency of what Richard Hoggart has called "critical literacy" through a discussion of a series of debates about a very different formation of "critical literacies' in the senior school English curriculum in Australia. Among the ramifications of these debates is the complicated political and pedagogical alignments it has created: a cultural studies scholar such as myself finds that he is located on the same side of the debate as those who would entirely disapprove of cultural studies, while arguing for the importance of categories of experience — such as the literary text — that cultural studies has often set aside. Implicit in that location is a sense of the continuing and enabling importance of Hoggart's original notion of critical literacy even as well as it has been taken up and modified over the history of cultural studies.