Critical Literacy

It's such a big umbrella to talk about because I feel that so many components fit under the term "critical literacy".   I'm in an elementary school also, and have been developing ways of helping students become information literate since I started in the Library/LC.  I think that even small steps to creating awareness of how to interpret and use information is the beginning place for teaching this.  How to navigate the physical space of a library, how to find information and access it using the OPAC, how to learn about parts of a book/Ebook, nonfiction text features, learning about authors and how to choose one resource over another etc...  It all builds on itself eventually requiring higher thinking skills such as critique and evaluation.

I was at the grocery store the other day and ran into a friend of mine who is a high school English teacher.  I asker her what she wished grade 8 students were more capable of doing because I am working with a grade 7 teacher who needs help teaching those research skills. She said she wished students were better able to be able to navigate and evaluate websites to determine whether they are good sources of information for research purposes. So that is what I have set out to do with them.  

We used thedogisland.com as an example of a website that is fictitious and we compared it to a current event that was discussed on the BBC website about the situation in North Korea.  We used a modified version of the CRAP test to determine whether these ere trustworthy sources.  One failed obviously.  The students seemed to get it as we spent a lot of time just exploring the fictional website and slowly as they explored, certain parts began to unravel  and expose themselves as fake.  The links took us to an unrelated website or back to the home page, the contact emails didn't work, no author claimed ownership - aside from the fact that the entire concept seemed unbelievable.

One picture book that I have seen teachers use is The True Story of the Three Little Pigs which I think would be a good way to examine point of view or bias. I am looking forward to hearing other examples though.