School of Education

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    Critical literacy: Beyond reason.
    (2002) Janks, Hilary
    In this paper, I argue that critical literacy is essentially a rationalist activity that does not sufficiently address the non-rational investments that readers bring with them to texts and tasks. I begin by looking at playful advertising texts that work with humans and the transgressive in order to consider the role of pleasure rather than reason. Then I examine the force of powerful identifications in relation to reason to show that educational inventions cannot ignore them. Finally, I tentatively suggest that we may need to find ways to combine socio-cultural and psycho-analytic theory in order to imagine new directions for pedagogy in the critical literacy classroom.
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    Games go abroad.
    (2006) Janks, Hilary
    The research that is reported in this paper is part of an on going collaboration between two universities and two schools on two continents. It began in 2001 as a small scale literacy study: Critical literacy, social action and children’s representations of ‘place’. Fun and games is a book produced by Grade 4 children at Phepo school, a poor school in Atteridgeville, an African township outside of Pretoria for students at Ridley Grove, a poor school in Adelaide, South Australia. The challenge for the teacher was to support young children who speak different African languages and who are learning through the medium of Setswana to show and explain their games to children in an English medium school, living in Australia. Multiple forms of semiosis - words, drawings, photographs, models, video - were essential resources for meeting this challenge as was the use of children's multilingual repertoires for the production of an English text. This classroom project on children's games is theorised in relation to the use of out-of-school literacies in education, multilingualism as a pedagogic resource and multimodal literacies. The extent to which this work on games contributes to the overarching critical literacy project is considered with reference to the interlocking dimensions of power, diversity, access and design, enlivened by children's pleasure when the worlds that they enjoy are embraced by their schools.
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    The importance of critical literacy
    (2012) Janks, Hilary
    This paper is divided into three parts. It begins by making an argument for the on going importance of critical literacy at a moment when there are mutterings about its being passé. The second part of the paper formulates the argument with the use of illustrative texts. It concludes with examples of critical literacy activities that I argue, are still necessary in classrooms around the world.
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    District Nine and constructions of other: Implications for heterogeneous classrooms.
    (2011) Janks, Hilary; Adegoke, Roseline
    Culturally responsive research and pedagogy are a challenge in classrooms that are increasingly heterogeneous. I start from the premise that culture is dynamic not static, that difference is a resource for new ways of doing, thinking and believing, that identity is hybrid. The challenge for teachers is how to harness the productive potential of diverse classrooms for pedagogy. John Thompson (1990) argues that discourses of “unification” which construct an “us”, and discourses of “fragmentation” which construct a “them”, produce and maintain relations of power. Us/them discourse will be explored in the South African context in relation to both apartheid’s racial othering and post-apartheid’s xenophobic othering. The South African film, District Nine, which can be interpreted as both forms of othering, is presented as a case for considering these ideas.