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If this skittish generation is ever going to embrace risk-taking in the classroom, then risk-taking

needs to be introduced consciously, deliberately.

"The solution of mankind's most vexing problem will not be found in renouncing technical civilization," he writes, "but in attaining some degree of independence of it.

What better way to prepare for developing intimacy from without—with one another, with learning—than from within?

, students "learn how to read the world and their lives critically and relatedly...and, most importantly, it points to forms of social action and collective struggle" (132).

We are what we say and do. The way we speak and are spoken to help shape us into the people we become. Through words and other actions, we build ourselves in a world that is building us. That world addresses us to produce the different identities we carry forward in life: men are addressed differently than are women, people of color differently than whites, elite students differently than those from working families. Yet, though language is fateful in teaching us what kind of people to become and what kind of society to make, discourse is not destiny. We can redefine ourselves and remake society, if we choose, through alternative rhetoric and dissident projects. This is where critical literacy begins, for questioning power relations, discourses, and identities in a world not yet finished, just, or humane. Critical literacy thus challenges the status quo in an effort to discover alternative paths for self and social development. This kind of literacy--words rethinking worlds, self dissenting in society--connects the political and the personal, the public and the private, the global and the local, the economic and the pedagogical, for rethinking our lives and for promoting justice in place of inequity. Critical literacy, then, is an attitude towards history, as Kenneth Burke (1984) might have said, or a dream of a new society against the power now in power, as Paulo Freire proposed (Shor and Freire, 1987), or an insurrection of subjugated knowledges, in the ideas of Michel Foucault (1980), or a counter-hegemonic structure of feeling, as Raymond Williams (1977) theorized, or a multicultural resistance invented on the borders of crossing identities, as Gloria Anzaldua (1990) imagined, or language used against fitting unexceptionably into the status quo, as Adrienne Rich (1979) declared.

From this perspective, literacy is understood as social action through language use that develops us as agents inside a larger culture, while critical literacy is understood as "learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one's experience as historically constructed within specific power relations" (Anderson and Irvine, 82). Consequently, my opening question, "What is critical literacy?," leads me to ask, "How have we been shaped by the words we use and encounter? If language use is one social force constructing us (‘symbolic action’ as Kenneth Burke, 1966, argued), how can we use and teach oppositional discourses so as to remake ourselves and our culture?"

Essentially, then, critical literacy is language use that questions the social construction of the self.