An Analysis of Critical Literacy in Featured Manuscripts Appearing in Two Major Literacy Journals (2011-2020)

Literacy journals provide an important resource for teachers’ professional development. Although school districts offer in-service education for their faculty and teachers often attend conferences and workshops sponsored by professional teaching organizations, journal reading remains an important source of information for teachers’ ongoing learning. In this study we examined what elementary teachers would learn about teaching critical literacy from reading major journals in literacy education. Critical literacy served as our focus because of the increasing importance of readers knowing how to recognize political, social and cultural perspectives embedded in the texts that they read. Content analysis served as our research method in which all volumes of The Reading Teacher and Language Arts published between 2011 and 2020 were examined. Results yielded 20 manuscripts meeting our criteria, and these clustered into two categories: (1) manuscripts describing effective critical literacy projects in elementary classrooms; (2) manuscripts discussing the use of children’s literature for teaching critical literacy. Given recent national events relating to racial and ethnic injustice throughout the country, we recommend that literacy journals place greater emphasis in publishing manuscripts that help teachers include a critical literacy lens into the lessons they teach children.