Critical reading

Critical pedagogy
Major works
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Theorists
Paulo Freire · John Dewey Henry Giroux · Peter McLaren Joe Kincheloe · Shirley Steinberg
Pedagogy
Anti-oppressive education Anti-bias curriculum Anti-racist mathematics Multicultural education Curriculum studies Teaching for social justice Inclusion (education) Humanitarian education Student-centred learning Popular education Feminist composition · Ecopedagogy Queer pedagogy · Critical literacy Critical reading Critical consciousness
Concepts
Praxis · Hidden curriculum Consciousness raising Poisonous pedagogy
Related
Reconstructivism · Critical theory Frankfurt School Political consciousness
v · skepticism that does not take a text at face value, but involves an examination of claims put forward in the text as well as implicit bias in the texts framing and selection of the information presented. The ability to read critically is an ability assumed to be present in scholars and to be learned in academic institutions. "...a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. " John Steinbeck, The Winter of our Discontent Levels of understanding Understanding of Single words Single sentences (grammar) Text Compositions, rhetorics and genres Revealing ideological influences There is no simple relations between these levels. As the hermeneutics have shown (see "the hermeneutic circle") are the understanding of the single words depending on the understanding of the text as a whole (as well as the culture in which the text is produced) and vice versa: You cannot understand a text if you do not understand the words in the text. The critical reading of a given text thus implies a critical examination of the concepts used as well as of the soundness of the arguments and the value and relevance of the assumptions and the traditions on which the text is based. "Reading between the lines" is the ability to uncover implicit messages and bias. Symptomatic reading Thurston (1993, p. 638) introduces the concept of "symptomatic reading": "Symptomatic reading is used in literary criticism as a means of analysing the presence of ideology in literary texts. French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser develops the technique of symptomatic reading in Reading Capital" The reciprocal nature of reading and writing When you read, you have to seek information, and you are confronted with different views, which forces you to consider your own position. In this process, the reader is converted to a "writer", whether or not he writes or publishes his own ideas. Reading and writing are thus reciprocal processes, reading is an active process, and the best way to learn critical reading is probably by training academic writing. Bazerman (1994) writes about the active role of the reader, and remarks (p. 23): "The cure for real boredom is to find a more advanced book on the subject; the only cure for pseudo-boredom is to become fully and personally involved in the book already in front of you". Bazerman's book is informed by an advanced theoretical knowledge of scholarly research, documents and their composition. For example, chapter 6 is about "Recognizing the many voices in a text". The practical advises given are based on textual theory (Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva). Chapter 8 is titled "Evaluating the book as a whole: The book review", and the first heading is "books as tools". Epistemological issues Basically critical reading is related to epistemological issues. Hermeneutics (e.g., the version developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer) has demonstrated that the way we read and interpret texts is dependent on our "pre-understanding" and "prejudices". Human knowledge is always an interpretative clarification of the world, not a pure, interest-free theory. Hermeneutics may thus be understood as a theory about critical reading. This field was until recently associated with the humanities, not with science. This situation changed when Thomas Samuel Kuhn published his book (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which can be seen as an hermeneutic interpretation of the sciences because it conceives the scientists as governed by assumptions which are historically embedded and linguistically mediated activities organized around paradigms that direct the conceptualization and investigation of their studies. Scientific revolutions imply that one paradigm replaces another and introduces a new set of theories, approaches and definitions. According to Mallery; Hurwitz & Duffy (1992) the notion of a paradigm-centered scientific community is analogous to Gadamer's notion of a linguistically encoded social tradition. In this way hermeneutics challenge the positivist view that science can cumulate objective facts. Observations are always made on the background of theoretical assumptions: they are theory dependent. By conclusion is critical reading not just something that any scholar is able to do. The way we read is partly determined by the intellectual traditions, which have formed our beliefs and thinking. Generally we read papers within our own culture or tradition less critically compared to our reading of papers from other traditions or "paradigms". A famous example The psychologist Cyril Burt is known for his studies on the effect of heredity on intelligence. Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance and intelligence came into disrepute after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data. Tucker's paper (1994) is illuminative on both how "critical reading" was performed in the discovery of the falsified data as well as in many famous psychologists "non-critical reading" of Burt's papers. Tucker shows that the recognized experts within the field of intelligence research blindly accepted Cyril Burt's research even though it was without scientific value and probably directly faked: They wanted to believe that IQ is hereditary and considered uncritically empirical claims supporting this view. This paper thus demonstrates how critical reading (and the opposite) may be related to beliefs as well as to interests and power structures. Literature Althusser, Louis & Balibar, Etienne (1970). Reading Capital. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books. Bazerman, Charles (1994). The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines. 5 edition. Houghton Mifflin Company. Brody, Roberta (2008). The Problem of Information Naïveté. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(7), 1124–1127. Eco, Umberto (1992). Interpretation and overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ekegren, P. (1999). The Reading of Theoretical Texts. A Critique of Criticism in the Social Sciences. London: Routledge. (Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, 19). Halpern, D.F. (2003), Thought & Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking, 4th ed., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. Kuhn, T. S. (1962, 1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mallery, J. C.; Hurwitz, R. & Duffy, G. (1992). Hermeneutics. IN: Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence. Vol. 1-2. 2nd ed. Ed. by S.C. Shapiro (Vol 1, pp. 596-611). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Riegelman, Richard K. (2004). Studying a Study and Testing a Test: How to Read the Medical Evidence. 5th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Slife, Brent D. & Williams, R. N. (1995). What's behind the research? Discovering hidden assumptions in the behavioral sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ("A Consumers Guide to the Behavioral Sciences"). Thurston, John (1993). Symptomatic reading. IN: Encyclopedia of contemporary literary theory: Approaches, scholars, terms. Ed. by Irena R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (P. 638). Tucker, William H. (1994). Facts and fiction in the discovery of Sir Cyril Burt's flaws. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 30, 335-347. See also Critical literacy Critical thinking Exegesis Information literacy Source criticism External links Lye, John (1997). CRITICAL READING: A GUIDE What Is Critical Reading? Wikimedia Foundation. 2010. Игры ⚽ Нужно решить контрольную? Rizzardo IV da Camino Himalayan Aviation Look at other dictionaries: Critical literacy — Critical pedagogy Major works Pedagogy of the Oppressed …   Wikipedia Critical consciousness — Critical pedagogy Major works Pedagogy of the Oppressed …   Wikipedia Critical pedagogy — Major works Pedagogy of the Oppressed …   Wikipedia Reading skills acquisition — is the process of acquiring the basic skills necessary for learning to read; that is, the ability to acquire meaning from print.According to the report by the US National Reading Panel (NRP) in 2000, the skills required for proficient reading are …   Wikipedia Critical thinking — is the process or method of thinking that questions assumptions. It is a way of deciding whether a claim is true, false, or sometimes true and sometimes false, or partly true and partly false. The origins of critical thinking can be traced in… …   Wikipedia Critical legal studies — is a movement in legal thought that applied methods similar to those of critical theory (the Frankfurt School) to law. The abbreviations CLS and Crit are sometimes used to refer to the movement and its adherents. Contents 1 History 2 Themes 3… …   Wikipedia Critical discourse analysis — (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social and political domination are visible in text and talk.[1] Since Norman Fairclough s Language and… …   Wikipedia Critical ethnography — applies a critical theory based approach to ethnography. It focuses on the implicit values expressed within ethnographic studies and, therefore, on the unacknowledged biases that may result from such implicit values.[1] It has been called… …   Wikipedia Critical chain project management — Critical Chain redirects here. For the novel, see Critical Chain (novel). Critical chain project management (CCPM) is a method of planning and managing projects that puts the main emphasis on the resources required to execute project tasks. It… …   Wikipedia Critical rationalism — is an epistemological philosophy advanced by Karl Popper. Popper wrote about critical rationalism in his works, The Open Society and its Enemies Volume 2, and Conjectures and Refutations. Contents 1 Criticism, not support 2 Not justificationism …   Wikipedia 18+ © Academic, 2000-2025 Contact us: Technical Support, Advertising Dictionaries export, created on PHP, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, MODx. Mark and share Search through all dictionaries Translate… Search Internet Share the article and excerpts Direct link … Do a right-click on the link above and select “Copy Link”