In education, and not least in literature education, there is always the potential for critical moments, where critical can be understood as something burning and urgent, challenging, and transforming. This study centers around critical literacy (Freire, 1970/1996; Vasquez, 2016) and its focus on transformative aspects of reading—on reading as taking action and seeing oneself as an agent with self-empowering potential.
The paper reports on an ethnographically inspired field study of a literature project at a special residential home for incarcerated youth. With its theoretical base in critical literacy, and as a case where issues about empowerment and marginalization is brought to its head, the purpose of the study is to explore the ways that versions of “the critical” in relation to reading are performed in observations and interviews with students and teachers within the framework of a literature project for young people in custody.
Anne Wilson (2005; 2007, cf Bhaba, 1994) uses the concept “third space” in her ethnographic studies on literacy in prisons to refer to an "in-between" cultural space that bridges the gap between the outside world and the world of prison. Prison education can act as such a third space, in which imprisoned people might redefine themselves as students (Wilson 2005).
The overall research questions are: How is reading/non-reading performed? In what relations is “the critical” produced? Can the critical be understood as a third space?
Critical literacy studies address and problematize the ways in which literary and literacy education can reproduce oppressive and marginalizing structures of literacy and reading (Janks, 2010; Vasquez, 2016) and what counts as language. However, at the same time, there is an idea within critical literacy that reading can function to transform the lives of students and empower them to stand up to oppressive structures (Freire, 1970/1993; Janks, 2010; Luke & Freebody, 1997). More specifically the study aims at investigating this inherent tension in critical literacy between a critical position towards on the one hand a view of reading as a cure and as enlightenment and on the other hand a view of reading as being able to develop, empower and transform students. In both society in general and the field of education in particular, there seem to be an unquestioned truth that reading literature does good, and even makes us better persons. Historically education, and in particular literacy, has been regarded as key to individual, societal, and moral improvement (cf Graff, 1979). Literacy education currently finds itself within a regime of competitive educational assessments, which fuels worried debates about the civic and moral problems connected to low literacy in and out of school (Edwards, Ivanič, and Mannion, 2009, Larson, 2007). Literacy is seen as transferable goods in the human resource model of education (Hamilton, 2016; Wahlström, 2016), accordingly used as a measurement of and a surety for economic development and individual prosperity, as well as for the most fundamental social abilities, democratic citizenry, and intellectual growth. Policies and standardized curricula to enhance literacy nationally and globally are hence often mired in discourses of adolescent deficit and family failure (Franzak, 2006; Vasudevan and Campano, 2009). Imprisoned people tend to be conceptualized as being at the bottom of the literacy deficiency pile (Wilson, 2007).
An earlier study on reading projects at detention homes (Author, 2017a) shows that when reading is turned into policy, there are always marginalizing effects involved, and power relations are frequently obscured. The present study explores the multiplicity, complexity, and ambiguity that are produced in practice: how lacks and needs and strengths and capabilities are sometimes created together.