WRIT3244W: Critical Literacies: How Words Change the World

This course is focused on understanding and using the insights into language and writing that animate Critical Literacy movements in the United States. Literacy is usually thought of in terms of fundamental abilities to read and write about a reality outside of language. Critical Literacy is an intellectual and social movement that challenges this dominant understanding of literacy. Critical Literacy’s fundamental claim is that texts (and our practices for working with them) invite readers (and writers) to accept particular versions of reality as the Real Truth. Through historical and contemporary models, students will learn how efforts to question and transform dominant ways of using language have played an especially important role in struggles for greater justice by and for oppressed groups. Here, people have used the ideas and methods of Critical Literacy to question how racial, gender, social class, and other privileges structure our language practices and our daily experiences. Students will be invited to apply a critical understanding of literacy to their own writing as they analyze course texts and produce original essays on topics of interest to them.

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