Developing critical literacy in Geography

Paper 3 - Developing critical literacy in Geography

Enquiry based geography is something that all of us are aiming for, I hope, as this means that investigation and analysis is involved at every stage of teaching. It's also included in our exams at GCSE and A level, so it's an important still to hone. 

For paper 3 (EDEXCEL B), also known as the decision making paper, students are given a resource booklet of information, which they must use to answer questions. The final question is a decision that they must make, choosing from the available options, justifying their choice using evidence from the booklet. 

I really like this paper as it looks at modern real life decisions that people and countries have to make everyday, and gets students to think critically about why their choice is the best, taking into account economic development, impact on people and the environment.  

The issue with this paper is that sometimes the use of the resources is missed as their critical literacy is not good enough. Therefore, students aren't assessing the following points correctly:

1. What is the source of information? (photo, article, opinion, infographic, graph - all used to show information in a different way, or manipulate data).
2. What is the purpose of that information?
3. What is the motivation behind the information?
4. Who and who isn't represented in the source?
5. How does the source persuade us? (relies on students being able to infer subtle language)
6. Are there alternative views to this one?

This is a huge skill that they will need in the workplace after school. I definitely needed this in my career prior to teaching and it has led me well into teaching, as I have a need to read a piece of evidence 3 times to believe that it will work - it allows me to analyse everything before i commit. I don't know about you, but i have to answer questions about fake news articles, fake trends of knowledge etc.... all the time.


Critical literacy fits with a constructivist understanding of learning. Learners build on ideas they already have in order to question, understand and internalise new information (Ferretti, 2013, p. 105), interrelating, reinterpreting and trying to understand new experiences and ideas. But what if your students don't have this prior construction? Or can only complete this on certain sources and not others (focus a lot on data in geography, so graphs and maps are easier than text and opinions for most students).

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A model below, developed by Luke and Freebody (1999) suggest that there's a 
structured 

approach that teachers can use in order to develop these skills with our students, 

this is seen below:

1. Text decoder In this role, the reader is interested in how texts are built using sounds,
letters, words, phrases, sentence types, paragraphing structures and so on. It is 
‘code-breaking’ that involves accessing the text itself, before meaning can be made. 

2. Text participant In participating with the text, the reader uses this role to make meaning 
from the codes of the text itself. Therefore, readers working at this level are interested in 
two main things: interpreting the text using their own prior knowledge, and accessing the 
intended meanings of texts by considering what meanings the author/text designer 
was trying to convey. 

3. Text user As a text user, the reader must consider the social function(s) of the text being 

analysed. This is fundamentally connected to genre: the purpose, intended audience, 

form/structure, and function of texts. Genres emerge from ‘traditions of representations’ that 

make assumptions about what intended readers should know, how they think, and what they 

believe. Genre, and whether or not a text adheres to the rules of that genre, contribute toward 

whether or not a reader might find it convincing. 

4. Text analyst Also known as the ‘critical turn’, the text analyst is interested in how the 

components of the text, the meanings available, and the social function of the text all relate to 

issues of power, identity, access, diversity and social impact. Here, the reader asks questions 

about who is included or excluded? Whose interests are served by the text? How might this 

text be used to reproduce or challenge certain social norms?

I had to teach up to level 4 throughout the A Level course, and found this relatively 
easy as everything is analysed, so the skill came quickly and easily to the students 
after a few attempts. However, I believe that we probably only make it to number 2 
the majority of the time with GCSE. Probably not through lack of thought, but maybe 
that students don't need the skill for the exam and the sheer amount of content is 
fairly overwhelming at the best of times. I've therefore looked into strategies to 
increase this in my lessons, as i use a lot of articles, videos, news reports.

Although we'd like to believe these have no political bias, it's definitely there (are we 

making sure to provide neutral information? - I worry about this a lot). Also, geography 

looks at the environment, social and economic links - are we ensuring that everyone is represented/considered? A good example is when opinions or stakeholders are used - 

is that including everyone in the demographics or the scenario? Is there an agenda 

behind the information used? We need to know the answers to these before we present 

them to the students, to make sure we are providing the best quality resources.

Here's something i've used in class before, to help students get to step 4. This can be 

simplified, or shortened to fit into small schemes or be a quick starter task, but it still 

gets students to start being critically literate. You can analyse texts with the questions 

and answers to them in another colour, you can ask specifically one step of the model, 

or you can have a whole lesson based around it, if you're working on the decision 

making part of it. 

It is worth modelling steps 3 and 4 a few times if students are struggling, as i've 

experienced that they genuinely don't understand how to answer the questions or 
where the information might come from, within the source. E.g. I was looking at a 
text on the decline of British farmers, which was written by Farmers Weekly. 
We were looking at how reliable the source was at telling us about modern farming 
and students really struggled to work out how the text would be used, why it would 
be written and who it served/assumptions of knowledge and who is missed out. I had 
to show them what to look for and then practice on a second text, which i had ready.

If anyone has any other great strategies then please feel free to add them here! I think 

it's going to be an increasingly popular skill for students to gain for further study, so 

may as well start somewhere!

Kind Regards,

Miss Cox

References and further reading.

Ferretti, J. (2013) ‘Whatever happened to the enquiry approach in geography?’ in Lambert, D. 
and Jones, M. (eds) Debates in Geography Education, London, Routledge, pp. 103–15 

Luke, A., & Freebody, P. (1999). Further notes on the four resources model. 
Reading online, 3, 1-6.