paradigm that we spoke about earlier, which is didactic literacy.
So, didactic literacy was about formal rules of language,
learning mechanical skills, becoming a proficient user,
I suppose, learning to read and write in a basic kind of way.
But also behind it was a kind of if you like a kind of a moral or
a set of values around percivity and compliance and we're telling
you things and you're going to do them and you're going to do them the right way.
So we speak, you listen kind of view of the world.
And also, in terms of its underlying politics,
if you like, it's about social reproduction.
It's not rocking the boat, it's about keeping the world the way it is.
Just, you know, you take away these basic skills and be happy for yourself, sort of.
That's a caricature, if you like,
of didactic pedagogy, really from the perspective of critical pedagogy.
How are critical pedagogy and critical literacy different?
Well, as people like, it's underpinned by
democratic values, it's about bringing up real issues in the classroom,
discussing real things in the world that might be of personal concern,
issues of justice, issues of pain and oppression in the world.
It might involve that, but also just maybe things that are just grounded,
things that are relevant, things happening in local communities.
Not things, in didactic pedagogy things often tend to be a bit abstract and
distant and formal, but these are things that are real, and
embodied in people's lives.
It's also about people becoming active in participatory communicators,
learning to write, learning to read in ways which are meaningful for
their lives and it's also about personal and social transformations.
Now the personal transformation is about becoming aware of yourself in the world,
becoming somebody who can communicate effectively in the world for
reasons which are perhaps sometimes transformative.
That might be just becoming more able, getting a better job or
transformative in a sense of being a political agent, someone who can be
an active citizen whereas didactic pedagogy was notionally more neutral.
But in fact you know one could argue that in fact subtly it wasn't that neutral
if it was about passivity and compliance.
So what I've tried to do there is contrast the value sits
of these two pedagogical approaches.
In fact you know as we've kept on saying, there is a role for
some of the moves that are made in indirect pedagogy.
It's not something that's to be dismissed totally out of hand.
What I've really been trying to do here is just build a contrast between these two
traditions within literacy pedagogy.
>> We've been talking a lot about the way in which text,
written and spoken texts make meaning.
But what we need to remember is even when we're using exactly the same words or
even we're engaging with the exact the same text, the meaning can vary for
a whole range of reasons which we're going to explore together.
But I just want to sit back for a minute and remind us that traditional pedagogy
around literacy or what we call didactic literacy, was based on
interpreting words and takes around rules or what we called grammar.
That kind of pedagogy focuses on learning the skills to recognize when something
was a noun or a verb, how words came together
to form a sentence, so those kinds of skills were important in making meaning.
But basically it required the learner to absorb knowledge about these rules and
the formality involved in making texts to be recipients of these texts,
to understand them, to pass them, to talk about them, and
to memorize in order to be able to
respond appropriately to the meaning that the educator was looking for.
So, essentially it was about fitting in, learning to read text in a way
that allowed you to fit in with the dominant culture or
the dominant meanings that were available.
For example if we take something in literature like a fairy tale,
of course it really, students in our school
system understands the power and meaning of fairy tales.
But there in many traditional fairy tales typically have a princess
who is in some kind of need, a prince who comes to save her,
marriage at the end, living happily ever after in a castle.
But nowadays, of course, girls and
boys read those stories in very different kinds of ways.
Is marriage the only option for the princes?
Is a castle the only thing that she might live in or he might live in?
So although we read the stories and engage with them,
where we come from influences the way we think about it.
But it's not just literature,
even if we go to something in science like water for example.
What does water mean to us?
Is water just the scientific components and
the properties of water, for example in our local pond?
How will we understand the meaning of that pond?
What happens for young learners who've never seen a pond, or just live in a city
and a pond is something that is not within their consciousness or their experience?
How do they value what happens in it if it's polluted or if fish are in it or
if it's decorative?
How do we respond to the relationship of water to cleanliness or
drinking or aesthetics?
Again, every learner will come even to something scientific like that with
a set of experiences and perceptions which might effect the way they make meaning.
And of course, if we go to a subject like history or take a topic like Thanksgiving,
for some people when they read the stories of this so
called first meal together or other meals that we might organize and arrange for
our families, these celebrations of a historic moment.
Obviously some people in our history regard the moment of contact between
settlers and native people as a time of mourning not a time of celebration.
So even something significant as Thanksgiving, which is a national holiday,
and it's a historic moment, people will interpret that differently, even though
we're using exactly the same words and perhaps the same stories and images.
So it does really matter that we understand that meaning is made
in the interaction between the intention and the experiences
of the person who utters the meaning or creates the meaning in text.