Extending a Critical Lens into Our Classrooms

This chapter focuses on ongoing inquiry by the Worlds of Words community around critical content analysis as a research methodology, along with our current focus on the implications for teaching in university and school classrooms. Three main areas of work in classrooms have emerged around the use of critical theory as a frame for our teacher education courses, the significance of the sociohistorical and cultural contexts within which to read a book, and the need for a toolbox of strategies as a critical reader of visual images. We identify the analytical tools most useful in analysis of visual images within our research, ones that seem relevant to meaning-making by readers in university and school classrooms, to consider how we might integrate these into our teaching. This chapter reflects our initial explorations of bringing a critical lens into our teaching, sharing examples of this early work as well as our goals for continuing this work.