Literacy & Power - Hilary Janks

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Janks, Hilary. Literacy and Power. New York: Routledge, 2010.

What New London Group calls “Multiliteracies,” she refers to as “Reconstruction” to acknowledge political/economic connections. She opposes the “literacy wars” approach to either/or stances toward top-down or bottom-up processing and uses Foucault, Gee, and Fairclough in her conceptualizations of “Critical Literacy.” The title of her books is a direct reference to Fairclough's book Language and Power since she studied with him in Australia, but her work is based on her own South African context.

She builds on Street’s “autonomous” vs. “ideological” views of literacy, drawing attention to the ideological nature of all literacy practices. She recommends a cyclical process of starting with constructed texts (recognizing or creating), deconstructing them, and then reconstructing them (based on redesign) Her definition of critical literacy is to be able to engage with and distance oneself from texts (reading with & against; ideal & oppositional readings possible in diverse classrooms). She also draws on Marx and Freire to promote social action. The orientations towards literacy she reports needing to acknowledge to take a critical literacy perspective and approach to teaching are the following:

• domination
• access
• diversity
• design

The stakes of not synthesizing these approaches is provided in the following table, which occurs on pg. 26 of her book:

domination without access	maintains exclusionary force of dominant discourses
domination without diversity	loses ruptures that produce contestation & change
domination without design	removes human agency; desconstructs dominance without reconstructing and redesigning
access without domination	naturalizes powerful discourses without understanding historical processes involved
access without diversity	makes invisible differences in history, identity, and value fundamentally impacting pathways to access
access without design	maintains/reifies dominant forms; does not consider how to transform them
diversity without domination	uncritically celebrates diversity; fails to acknowledge power differences in discourses/genres/languages/literacies
diversity without access	ghettoizes students
diversity without design	given diverse means, ideas, and perspectives, potential reconstruction/transformation is not realized
design without domination	risks unconscious reproduction of dominant forms
design without access	risks whatever designed remaining marginal
design without diversity	privileges dominant forms and fails to draw on diverse resources

This approach to literacy has implications for multimodal composition with direct connections to agency and indirect connections to materiality.  It opens possibilities for transformative composition through practices of redesign, which could be related to ideas of critical translation.

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