Self-building: Need for critical literacy discourse

The concept of 'self-building' is usually missing in critical literacy discourse of Bangladesh secondary curriculum. According to Coffee, a literacy theorist, critical literacy is the ability to read texts in an active, reflective manner in order to better understand power, inequality and injustice in human relationships. The purpose of critical literacy text is to create awareness about inequalities and injustices, and it has components of actions for social change. Critical literacy is defined by another writer Robinson as a "vehicle through which individuals communicate with one another using the codes and conventions of society". Accordingly, songs, novels, conversations, pictures, movies are all considered texts of critical literacy.
Critical literacy skill enables people to interpret messages in the modern world through a critical lens and challenge the power relations within those messages. Teachers who facilitate the development of critical literacy encourage students to interrogate societal issues like family, poverty, education, equity and equality in order to critique the structures that serve as norms as well as to demonstrate how these norms affect the members of the society.
The term critical literacy was developed by social critical theorists concerned with the dismantling social injustice and inequalities. These critical theorists contend that unequal power relationships are prevalent, and those in power are the ones who generally choose what truths are to be privileged. Through institutions like schools, these ideologies are supported, thereby perpetuating the status quo. Within schools, only particular knowledge is legitimised, thus excluding groups who are unable to contribute to the process of the authentication of that knowledge. Critical education and its critical pedagogy helps students to understand how society represents inequality and justice.
Paulo Freire, a Brazilian critical educator, provides an example of how critical literacy is developed in an educational context. Freire proposes a system in which students become more socially aware through critique of multiple forms of injustice. This awareness cannot be achieved if students are not given the opportunity to explore and construct knowledge. Freire describes a traditional type of education as the "banking concept of education." This model of education is characterised by instruction that "turns [students] into 'containers,' into 'receptacles' to be 'filled' by the teacher." Freire notes that in these classrooms, "knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing." In this role, the teacher does not necessarily challenge the students to think authentically or value students' own "funds of knowledge".
In opposition to the banking model, teachers who recognise the possible value of developing critical literacy do not view their students as vessels to be filled, and instead create experiences that offer students opportunities to actively construct knowledge. In this model, schools become spaces where students question social conditions through dialogue about issues significantly relevant to their lives. Teachers engaged in critical literacy serve less as instructors and more as facilitators of conversations. Friere asserts that "Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world of their own with the world beyond." Using critical pedagogical methods, Bangladeshi teachers could be trained how to create spaces where they can be learners and students can be teachers, thus providing a context for everyone to construct and interrogate theories of societal relationships in various shapes and hues.
The development of critical literacy encourages students to question the issues of power - explicitly disparities within social contexts like socio-economic status, race, class, gender, sexual orientation etc. Becoming critically literate means that students have mastered the ability to read and critique messages in texts in order to better understand whose knowledge is being privileged. Essentially, secondary teachers can use critical pedagogy to demonstrate how to evaluate the function language plays in the social construction of the self.
Facilitating the development of critical literacy promotes the examination and reform of social situations and exposes students to the biases and hidden agendas within texts. Thus, in order to become critically literate, one must learn to "read" in a reflective manner; "read" in this connotation means to give meaning to messages of all kinds, instead of just looking at the words on a page and comprehending the meaning. In Bangladesh, critical literacy development is highly relevant in the context of the marginalisation of a growing number of indigenous and secular and madrasa students who may or may not be members of the culturally dominant group of Bengali middle-class youths.
There is often an activist component in the critical literacy education, where the teachers serve as the facilitators of social change. In addition to teaching students functional skills, the teacher must also provide different conceptual tools that are necessary to critique and engage society to learn more about inequalities and injustices. Furthermore, with the activist potential in critical literacy education, students will learn how to envision a world in which all people have access and opportunity. When students learn to use the tools of critical literacy, they can expose, discuss and attempt to solve social injustices within their own lives. This is a critical skill for the under-privileged, minorities as well as indigenous communities all over the world.
When engaging in the development of critical literacy skills, students learn to acknowledge the unfair privileging of certain dominant discourses in which society engages. Students participate in conversations about the injustices of privileging one group or ideal over another because of skin colour or socio-economic status, and teachers can help to empower students by providing opportunities for them to find their voices. Thus secondary teachers can be engaged in methods that support critical literacy. They can teach students that they can prevent a mechanism that alienates them and pushes them down the bottom rung of the social and economic ladder.
By developing lessons based on dialogue, parents, teachers and other stakeholders in the community get to know better about the needs and interests of the students. Educators can invite students to take part in a larger community discourse that attempts to solve problems and create alternatives to oppressive situations. So students are in a position to see the relations between curriculum and the world beyond the classroom. Essentially, this way students will learn to restructure their knowledge base and challenge accepted societal norms in order to transform institutions that are not in harmony with sustainable social progress.
Critical literacy is a key tool to generate thinking citizens of a community and nation. It is an approach that can assure social justice among the indigenous youths and minorities all over the world, including adolescents in Bangladesh's secondary education.  
The writer is a doctoral candidate and researcher of the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada. [email protected]