Critical Literacy and Diversity in Higher Education: A Case Study of a Multilingual Learner

UNESCO (2004a) speaks of the importance of critical literacy (Street, 1995; Wagner, Venezky, Street., 1999; Robinson, 2003) in an age where symbolic violence and oppression of diverse views threaten democratic civic life. This paper reports the findings of a post-modern qualitative research which examined a postgraduate student’s voice and experiences in terms of a pedagogy committed to building critical literacy for multilingual students through a Critical Literacy Awareness (CLA) Perspective and Method. The paper qualitatively examined the postgraduate student’s talk and reflective logs as a point of entry into her negotiations of plural, intersecting and/or conflicting identities and discourses and in relation to ideological perspectives on literacy and contested ways of knowing (Wallace, 1988; Lankshear McLaren, 1993; Kress, 2003; Koo, 2008a). The findings indicate that for it to be empowering of learner diversity, teacher talk and interventions have to engage with student’s unequally valued language and multicultural resources in context and to work with the competing and dominant discourses which are recognised as legitimate in education and the workplace (Luke, 1993)