From Critical Literacy to Critical Pedagogy in English Language Teaching - Using Teacher-made Materials in Difficult Contexts

With a Foreword by Hugh Starkey and Audrey Osler, and Afterwords by Graham Crookes, Hilary Janks and Allan Luke, this book promotes critical language education and illustrates how a critical agenda can be enacted in English language education in real classrooms. It presents four cases located in primary and secondary schools in the province of Buenos Aires in Argentina in contexts that can be characterised as vulnerable or difficult. It describes the possibilities, challenges and limitations of this critical agenda using students' drawings, posters, leaflets, artwork, classroom activities and conversational data as foundation, and including the voices of local teachers in their classrooms. Importantly, these teachers used teacher-made, locally produced, critical post-method materials, described by the author of those materials in one of the chapters. In this way, the book offers a unique balance of researcher, teacher and materials writer voices. These materials are included in the book and can help language teachers around the world to introduce critical perspectives in their specific contexts. The book is appealing to researchers, classroom teachers, teacher educators, and materials writers and developers interested in critical language education. 

Melina Porto is a researcher at the National Research Council in Argentina (CONICET) in Argentina, Professor at Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina), Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in UK (2019-2024). She was Visiting Academic at UEA (2012-2018). She holds an MA in English Language Teaching from Essex University, a PhD in Sciences of Education from Universidad Nacional de La Plata, and a postdoctoral degree in Humanities and Social Sciences from Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her current research interests include intercultural citizenship in the language classroom, critical pedagogies, and teacher education, among others.