Critical Literacy in Canada: A Systematic Review of Curricula and Literature

Abstract

Critical literacy is a pedagogy that serves to mediate social justice issues and educate for transformative social action. We present a systematic review of how critical literacy has been incorporated in Canada’s provincial/territorial curriculum documents since the late 1990s and integrated in K-12 classrooms in the last decade. Our analysis shows that critical literacy has been addressed with varying degrees of explicitness in curricula, and there is an imbalance of studies on critical literacies among provinces and territories. We discuss implications and encourage stakeholders in education to explicitly embed critical literacy into curricula and promote critical literacy practices in the classroom.

Critical and Creative Literacy in Argumentative Writing Course: Students’ Needs

“…CCL is defined as the ability to read and write critically and creatively about sociocultural, political, and social action issues (Luke, 2000(Luke, , 2012. Kaya et al, (2022) confirmed that critical literacy is an educational service to facilitate social justice issues mapping and transform them into social action. Their analysis of critical literacy in Canada recommends integrating critical literacy across curricula.…”