Abstract
This paper provides an overview of what literacy and critical literacy are and why they are important
to teachers and students. The definitions of literacy and critical literacy are highlighted by seeing
literacy as the ability, confidence and willingness to engage with language to acquire, construct and
communicate meaning in all aspects of daily living and from different modes of communication. Critical
literacy on its part views readers as active participants in the reading process which invites them to
move beyond passively accepting the text’s message to question, examining, or disputing the power
relations that exist between readers and authors. These insights help to assess the background
knowledge that students may have in relation to critical literacy teaching and learning. The paper also
provides discussions in the areas of: teaching literacy with young children and school-age children;
importance of using critical literacy in the classroom, how critical literacy could be used to change the
world, and the gains of critical literacy as sustainable educational development. The discussion
establishes the need to guide students to get the best from critical literacy lessons and to facilitate
planning for making teachers become efficient in their teaching. The paper ends with conclusion and
recommendations on the way forward in promoting critical literacy in students in order to help them
read between the lines and also think out of the box.

Introduction
Critical literacy is one of those terms that at first seems straightforward, but asking people to define it deceptively suggests simplicity, but instead opens up a world of complexity. Because there are so many different ways people think about literacy, it is worthwhile to examine some ideas associated with it. For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2009-2014) has
discussed literacy not just in reference to teaching practices in schools but in reference to the meaning of literacy across the world. Two key components to their description are that literacy is a fundamental human right and that it is the foundation for lifelong learning.
One will not really begin to appreciate literacy as a fundamental human right until he/she started working in schools. This will give many opportunities to observe students who had developed extraordinarily high levels of literacy, and also many students who had not (Abednia, & Izadinia, 2013). As part of the job, you will work with teams to find out those students who were struggling with learning disabilities in literacy areas, such as reading, listening comprehension, oral expression, and written expression. You would rather be surprised that a large number of students who were having trouble developing literacy skills did not necessarily have learning disabilities (Abednia, & Izadinia, 2013). This goes to say that most teachers simply cling to teaching what they love, regardless of the effects on students.
Believing that students who were having difficulty learning how to read must have something wrong with them, and that it is part of a school, the classroom teacher’s job to figure out what was wrong with the child should be disregarded (Edelsky, & Cherland, 2016). This is because majority of students who struggled with reading could learn to read quite well, but the trick is focusing on the kind of instruction students needed rather than focusing on what was wrong with students. In other words, practice should shift from seeking explanations of literacy problems based on fixed factors within the child, to seeking
solutions within the instructional environment. Developing Critical Literacy on the other hand should rather ensure that all forms of communication are social and political acts that can be used to influence students and can lead them to social change (Comber & Simpson, 2001). According to Freire (1997), students are active participants in the reading process so
Critical literacy should encourage students to question, explore, or challenge the power relationships that exist between authors and readers. It should examine issues of power and promote reflection, transformative change, and action. Reading from a critical perspective should involve thinking beyond the text to understand issues such as why the author wrote about a particular topic, wrote from a particular
perspective, or chose to include some ideas about the topic and exclude others (Gainer, 2017). It is at this juncture that one should begin to conceptualize critical literacy in the same way that UNESCO discussed it – as a fundamental human right, foundation for lifelong learning. It is this point that has led to this study, since what teachers do will have a major influence on what the students know and can do, not only in the
classroom, but for the rest of their lives.

Literacy
Literacy refers to a wide range of skills and abilities related to reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and performing, along with an array of perspectives that situate literacy within a socio cultural context (National Governors Association & Council of Chief State School Officers [NGA & CCSSO], 2010). While traditional definitions of literacy have centered mostly on the ability to read and write, contemporary definitions include social practices, such as those associated with culture and power that are interwoven among all literacy practices, including teaching, learning, and using literacy (Freire & Macedo, 1987). Furthermore, the digital age has brought forth innovative changes in how people make meaning, so the term literacy also includes making meaning from different modes of communication. Literacy is critical in helping students make sense of our world. From the time we wake up to the time we go to sleep, we are constantly making meaning of the world around us. Literacy has traditionally been thought of as reading and writing. Although these are essential components of literacy, today our understanding of literacy encompasses much more. Literacy is therefore the ability, confidence and willingness to engage with language to acquire, construct and communicate meaning in all aspects of daily living (Janks, 2010).

Literacy with Young Children
From the moment a child is born, his or her literacy journey begins. Children’s literacy abilities are nurtured through their families and communities (Hayik, 2011). Examples are that: the child smiling or crying to communicate his/her needs to a parent; the child forming his/her first words; the child interpreting the symbols around him/her; the child singing a song, and; the parent and child laughing over a story.

Literacy with School-age Children
As children enter the school system, there is a strong focus on the development of reading and writing skills. Children engage in learning opportunities that have them interacting with many different forms of text, in print and digital forms, using words, visuals and graphics.According to (Jeyaraj, & Harland, 2014), students begin to learn: the rules of language; how to acquire information, evaluate it, and ethically use it; how to construct meaning from various kinds of text and, how to communicate effectively.
As students move through the school system, they continue to refine all of their foundational skills as they explore a wider variety of texts and technologies. The vast amounts of information that are available through both print and the internet and the ability to communicate with wide and varied audiences around the globe have expanded the ways our students read and communicate (Jeyaraj, & Harland, 2014).
Literacy for our students today also means preparing them to be critical and ethical consumers of information.

Where literacy instruction takes place
Literacy development does not take place in just the Language classroom. It is a shared responsibility among all educators. Although specific knowledge and skills are taught primarily in Language classes, every subject area teacher is responsible for further developing,strengthening and enhancing literacy (Jeyaraj, & Harland, 2014). Every subject area has its own unique literacy demands. Content area teachers
know their subject matter and their programs of study. They are aware of the literacy requirements of their subject and understand that it is through literacy that meaning is made within their subject area content. Students need to be taught how to read different kinds of text, write and express themselves in the formats associated with each subject, and use content-specific vocabulary (Jeyaraj, & Harland, 2014).
Literacy development occurs not only in school but in every aspect of daily life. We interact with others when we have a conversation. We read maps, advertisements, newspapers, recipes, manuals and websites. We analyse and interpret vast amount of media information. We write poems, songs, reports, blogs, and emails. Literacy opens the door to the world.

Critical literacy
Although there is no set definition of critical literacy, it essentially involves examining the relationship between language and power in a text. This examination is responsive and thoughtful in nature. The chosen text, students’ comfort and familiarity with the text, and the lesson goals all have an effect on what happens in the classroom (Akbari, 2018).
Using the four dimensions of critical literacy – disrupting the commonplace, considering multiple viewpoints, focusing on the socio-political, and taking action – as a springboard, this work focuses on how purposeful questioning, discussion, and improvised drama might influence how students engage with critical literacy lessons. This is because critical literacy is a learning approach where students are expected
to examine various texts to understand the relationship between language and the power it can hold. Students critically analyse and evaluate the meaning of texts as they relate to topics on equity, power and social justice (Bourn, 2011). These texts are then used to equip students with a critical stance, response or action towards an issue.

Critical literacy sees to the process of becoming aware of one’s experience relative to power relations, often realized through reading and writing. Critical literacy takes place in various learning environments and cultural contexts (Bourn, 2011). The reading and writing-based learning process encourages students to accept, reject or reconstruct ideologies presented in texts. Critical literacy perfects the way of thinking about curriculum, literacies, and the lived experiences of our students. It is the ability to read texts in an
active, reflective manner in order to better understand power, inequality, and injustice in human relationships (Burnett, & Merchant, 2014). (Bourn, 2011) added that critical literacy views readers as active participants in the reading process and invites them to move beyond passively accepting the text’s message to question, examine, or dispute the power relations that exist between readers and authors. It focuses on issues of power and promotes reflection, transformation, and action.

The Importance of Critical Literacy
Choo, & Singha, 2015 stated that critical literacy is essential in our everyday life because it helps: to establish equal status in the reader-author relationship; to understand the motivation the author had for writing the text and how the author uses the text to make us understand in a particular way; to understand that the author’s perspective is not the only perspective; and to become active users of the information in texts to develop independent perspectives, as opposed to being passive reproducers of the ideas in texts.
Critical literacy helps us to read texts in deeper, more meaningful ways, by encouraging readers of all ages to become more actively engaged and use their power to construct understanding and not used by the text to fulfil the intentions of the author.
Critical literacy helps us to move beyond passive acceptance to take an active role in the reader-author relationship by questioning issues such as who wrote the text, what the author wanted us to believe, and what information the author chose to include or exclude in the text. The development of critical literacy skills enables students to look at the world through a critical lens and challenge the power relations within the messages being communicated Comber, & Simpson, 2001).
Critical teaching allows students to actively work out their learning and problem solving, by providing an outlet, a source of action or social justice. Critical teaching allows students to better connect classroom practice with the social realms they engage in outside of school, providing a connection between the home, school, and social realms.
In the opinion of (Choo, & Singha, 2015), the practice of critical literacy engages students and allows them to use their previous experiences, providing classroom literacies more similar to literacies used outside of the classroom. Using critical literacy as a frame through which the teacher and students design curricula and use literacies in the classroom, helps students view literacy as connected to their personal experiences and as a tool to use effectively to explore and effect change in their lives.

Critical Literacy in the classroom
Some of the most commonly used practices that support critical literacy included: reading supplementary texts; reading multiple texts; reading from a resistant perspective; producing counter-texts; having students conduct research about topics of personal interest; and challenging students to take social action. It requires thinking beyond the text to understand issues such as why the author wrote about a particular topic, wrote from a particular perspective, or chose to include some ideas about the topic and exclude others (Lee, & Runyan, 2013). Teachers who facilitate the development of critical literacy encourage students to interrogate societal issues and institutions like family, poverty, education, equity, and equality in order to critique the structures that serve as norms, and to demonstrate how these norms are not experienced by all members of society. (Lewison, Flint, & van Sluys, 2017) asserted that by matching our teaching with the specific talents and needs of our students, and by considering our students’ points of views in early childhood literary teaching, we are able to speak to children’s identities and empower them.
We must use texts in our classrooms with which students will identify, and reflect the lives and experiences of our students, as well validate them. The books we read with our students should address issues that affect the lives of our students in important ways. We must also engage students in meaningful class discussions and conversations about these books, crossing lines of culture, gender, race, and class, as well as providing students with opportunities to critically examine the world around them (Masuda, 2019). Critical literacy does not end in discussion, rather it leads to action.

Using critical literacy to change the world
In most cases, students feel a need to channel their legitimate concerns into action. As educators, we know that figuring out how to support young people in their desire to drive change can be challenging. For one thing, it can be easy to ignore that many young people yearn to participate around the most urgent issues of the time (Haydey, Kostiuk, & Phillips, 2007). For another, creating age-appropriate opportunities for young people to engage and lead on big issues is not as clear-cut as other school activities. That said, educators and other adults can learn how to promote a sense of urgency and empower young people rather than stand on their way. Some possible ways according to (Kincheloe, 2014), include:
Help youth organizers to strategize: Encourage students to take on a big issue by starting with a defined and specific goal. This could be a campaign that targets a specific policy, corporation, or politician, or is the aim to build community knowledge and power to address an issue through a collective plan for direct action.
Ask young people to analyse who touch their lives: Who is the god-fathers who have managed
to get local politicians in their pockets? Who is directly affected for example, by climate justice issues? Which corporations are successfully pushing back against environmental regulations and polluting the environment without any accountability? Who should be at the decision making table about new environmental policies?
Helping young people educate themselves on these topics does not have to take the form of a one-sided lecture or reading (Mazdaee, & Maftoon, 2012). Creating skits, songs, paintings, poetry, art exhibits and interactive research activities to explore the root causes of social issues can allow young people to analyse their everyday experiences to yield new ways of thinking about their world in the areas suggested by (Oakes, & Lipton, 2013), as in:
Build skills: Effectively organizing may require new skills, for example, talking to journalists, publicizing campaign events, conducting research, understanding how to negotiate with stakeholders and navigate
institutions, drafting petitions or letters to elected officials or other collective action to change policies and institutional practices. Educators are well placed to assist with these activities.
Forge mentoring and youth-adult partnerships: Educators can help youths contribute their viewpoints and ideas by providing structured, supportive spaces. They should also resist assuming that youths are inferior to adults in terms of their needs, concerns, and abilities. Teachers can engage young people in
planning an advocacy work as important stakeholders with both agency and real-world experiences.
Help them identify and truly understand issues: The students are aware of the cases of religious and tribal crises, unknown gunmen attacks, terrorists’ attacks and kidnappers in the country and are fully aware of the destructions, deaths, and evacuations resulting from such cases. Indeed, for some years in the country, several dozen homes have been destroyed, more than 100,000 people have died, and over 300,000 people have been displaced from their homes and were housed in IDP camps. Many students know of families who have hosted relatives in their homes because of crises displacement and related
outages. Teachers can be advocates and allies with young people by ensuring that youths perspectives, analysis, and ideas are integrated into intergenerational partnerships for change (Oakes, & Lipton, 2013).

Critical literacy for sustainable educational development
There are at least two common trends in educational initiatives that promoted concern for others. The first was based on the idea of a common humanity. This was represented as a ‘soft’ approach to global citizenship and sustainable education. The second was based on the idea of justice and complicity in harm. This also was represented as a critical approach to global citizenship and sustainable education
(Rozansky, & Aagesen, 2010). The argument here is that the ‘soft’ approaches based on a modernist
understanding of linear time, progress and development, although productive in certain contexts, tended to close down the possibility of more critical approaches. These are particularly of approaches that offered alternative ways to conceptualise sustainability knowledge and solutions from the perspective of historically subjugated peoples (see also Bryan and Bracken, 2011; Bourn, 2011; Martin, 2011; Andreotti,
2006). Critical literacy as an educational practice that critically examines origins and implications of assumptions as well as other possibilities for signification, could be a viable way to address this problem.
The conceptualisation of critical literacy combines questions within two orientations. The first orientation challenges imbalances in power and representation. This can be illustrated in questions such as: who decides (something is true or ideal), in whose name and for whose benefit?
The second orientation challenges the notion that meaning is Policy & Practice. This emphasises the
social, cultural and historical ‘construction’ of realities and highlights the limits and blind edges of any system of signification, promoting openness to suppressed knowledge and subjectivities and to what is unknown (Sangster, Stone, & Anderson, 2013). This orientation is illustrated in questions such as: where is this understanding coming from (in terms of collective ‘root’ narratives), where is it leading to (in terms
of social, cultural, political and environmental implications), and how can this be thought ‘otherwise’ (what possibilities of signification have been ‘forgotten’ in this context)?
Within the multiplicity of critical literacy traditions, this approach differs slightly from critical engagements based on other orientations. Cervetti, Pardales and Damico (2001), for example, established a distinction between traditional reading, critical reading and critical literacy, emphasising that each orientation of ‘reading critically’ will result in different questions being asked. Using their framework,
illustrates these differences through the scenario of a teacher and a student in a classroom, where the teacher is telling the student that he/she needs schooling in order to ‘be somebody in life’. Within
the framework proposed by Cervetti et al., a traditional form of reading would enable ‘decoding’ questions such as: what did the teacher say, how did she substantiate his/her arguments, is what he/she said true or false? A critical form of reading would look further into the context and political framework of the scenario: where was this school, when did it happen, what was the socio-economic situation of the teacher and student, what was the motivation and political orientation of the teacher, what power relations are reproduced in the teacher’s statement, how did the teacher’s views affect the student and his/her family?
A critical literacy approach would focus on the production of knowledge/power and enable questions like: who decides what ‘being somebody’ means, in whose name, for whose benefit then, and now, how do we come to think about the ways we do, who makes choices about understandings of reality, whose interests are represented in these choices, who benefits or loses with them, what choices are forgotten, how do people in different contexts understand the idea of ‘being somebody’(Pandya, & Avila, 2014)?
It is obvious that when introducing critical literacy in sustainable educational development, teachers should choose scenarios that make evident dominant and perspectives about the benevolence of progress. Scenarios to use could be for example, a poster with pictures of children in need with the title ‘education for all can solve all problems. Then the idea of ‘critical reading’ to explore the context of production of that poster: what is the purpose of the poster, who created it and with what motives, where was it placed and why, how and why were pictures and words chosen, how is the reader manipulated
through the language?
Again, use the idea of ‘critical literacy’ to start and open up questions related to complicity in harm at a very basic level, such as: who decides what problems and solutions are (in the poster, historically and in ‘our’ context), what assumptions inform these decisions, how are unequal relationships between donors and recipients reproduced through these significations, what other conceptualisations of problems and solutions could be designed by communities that have been historically subjugated in these relationships, and so on (Zyngier, & Fialho, 2015). This should also emphasise a strategic distinction between reflexivity and reflection in the practice of critical literacy in teacher education.

Conclusion
The discussions in this work uphold critical literacy as a right and a necessity to every student in school. It is therefore obligatory that teachers’ guidance to students should be towards explicit engagement of students with power relations in texts. This suggests that teachers should not underestimate the capabilities of students in analysing texts using a critical perspective. If teachers and students continue to
believe that literacy entails merely reading words on a page and not critically analysing how those
words shape identities and influence readers perspectives, this will lead to mismatch in learning. Students need teachers who will guide them towards a deeper appreciation of the power of words and other meaning-making modes of words to enable them to change and adjust policies and practices.This entails that using the classroom as a site to examine competing interests between students and their effects on society is a concrete response to encourage students to read the words as well as the world.
Finally, this work suggests that there is a need for teachers to lead students towards a heightened awareness of the presence of power structure at words in the valorization and subordination of varied literacy practices. Such pedagogy will provide both teachers and students with the opportunity to know why certain literacy practices are valued over others. A critical literacy teacher accommodates students’ varied modes of meaning making to recognize their diverse skills and sense of identities. Thus, for teachers who wish to respond to the literacy needs of the time, and teach students about their responsibility towards building a just and humane society, critical literacy is worth teaching for a sustainable educational development.

Recommendation
This work proffered the following recommendations to all the stake holders in education on the need to enhance critical literacy for a sustainable educational development:
1. Teachers should adopt the teaching practices that will guide students towards a deeper appreciation of the power of words and other meaning-making modes of words to enable them to change and adjust policies and practices that affect their lives positively.
2. Students should embrace new skills that will enable them analyse their everyday experiences to yield new ways of thinking critically about the world around them.
3. Government should ensure that school curriculum includes critical literacy activities as the educational practices that will examine origins and implications of assumptions and the possibilities that could be viable ways to address the students’ everyday problems.

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