Textual resources in the classroom: the challenge of integrating critical approaches

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on teachers’ and students’ use of textual resources offline and online in two Grade 6 classrooms. Using analysis of video recordings, the paper presents the ways in which the textual resources are used, and what critical approaches emerge within the teachers’ and students’ repertoires of teaching and learning. We then investigate what characterizes these repertoires and discuss consequences and possibilities for students’ own learning talk in relation to critical approaches and with regard to diversity and participation. The analysis reveals that it is when students ask authentic questions or respond to their teachers’ or peers’ reflections, that critical approaches appear in relation to content, the surrounding world and themselves. Drawing on the results, we argue that these critical approaches can be deepened in relation to ethical issues, source criticism and redesign, and regardless of whether textual resources are online or offline. Since Swedish national curriculum standards have contributed towards a greater focus on knowledge outcomes, we are concerned that processes of meaning making and criticality might be downplayed. We believe that one of the biggest challenges for future education is how criticality can be linked to teaching and learning in dialogic ways.