Response to "No Single Meaning"

"No Single Meaning: Empowering Students to Construct Socially Critical Readings of the Text" by Ann Kempe

“Yet in a world characterized by conflict, oppression, and inequality, students must be given access to a more powerful literacy (or literacies) which requires them to resist textual ideologies and to construct socially critical readings of their texts and their culture” (pg. 41).

I thought this article was really important because it highlights the need to move away from passive acceptance toward a critical lens. I feel like I often accept ideas that I read about without considering the impact of the text on me and my surroundings. I often accept these ideas at face value and then leave them there without tension or challenges, but also without a lot of thought. Some writing is so powerful that it compels the reader to do something. It could be respond critically in a way that will alter their thinking as well as events around them, but it could also just be the reader remembering the text.

According to Kempe, “critical literacy demands that people will actively contribute to changing and re-making their culture, with the aim of building a better world” (pg. 41). I feel like I have seen a lot of critical literacy taking place at school this past month. Teachers are working on personal projects based on justice in the fourth grade classes. The students are discussing justice throughout the curriculum. They are researching topics with injustices they find personally interesting and are going to go into some kind of community service based on what they find during their project research. The students are so engaged in what they are doing because they have a purpose. They want to know about justice. They also want their work to lead them to something that will truly help another person or even animal.

In the section that discusses implications for the future, Kempe mentions that she would like to work toward teacher working more as a facilitator than a dictator of information. I think that the project the fourth graders are working on has done that because they are working on my different topics that limit how much the teacher knows about the project.

Kempe, A. (2001). No single meaning: Empowering students to construct socially critical readings of text. In H. Fehring & P. Green, Critical Literacy: A collection of articles from the Australian Literacy Educators' Association (pp. 40-57). Newark, DE: International Reading Association