Introduction
Attacks on the basic rights of the people are invariably couched in innocent language.
Nelson Mandela, to the Constitutional Court of South Africa, 1995.
The starting point for critical literacy education is this: Societies strive toward convergence in the interpretive practices of their members—toward the production of a culture. Socialization entails, among other things, using language as if its relation to material and social realities were innocent and natural—transparently determinable, fixed, singular, and portable (Siegel and Fernandez, 2000). Controlling interpretation, securing both the fact of its determinacy and its particular contents, is thus an ongoing political project, profoundly connecting the individual to public interests. A core concern of critical literacy education is interrupting and naming that project, finding principled, teachable ways of affording a productive ideological appreciation of social organization, human conduct, and language....
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Freebody, P. (2008). Critical Literacy Education: On Living with “Innocent Language”. In: Hornberger, N.H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_39
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