This article explores the connection between critical reading and Jurgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action. It proposes that Habermas’s criteria used for evaluating validity claims in communicative action can be applied in reading texts critically. Analyses of different types of texts are presented to show how critical reading is done in a Habermasian way. This article ends with a discussion of the application of Habermas’s theory in addressing educational issues.

This paper explores the concept of subjectivity from the perspective of a nonnative-English-speaking teacher educator at a Midwestern university in the USA. It begins with a literature review on the role subjectivity plays in education. It argues that acknowledging the existence of subjectivity allows us to investigate its enabling and disabling potential in relation to our practice. Building on George Herbert Mead’s work, various forms of the teacher educator’s subjectivity are revealed and examined with regard to his teaching and research. (...) It is hoped that this paper would serve as a prompt for more conversations on subjectivity as well as a point of entry into a better understanding of the teacher educators working in a cross-cultural context. (shrink)

The search for the best strategy in literacy education is a lingering phenomenon. From time to time one strategy is claimed to work best, only to be critically challenged and replaced by another. There is always debate about what the best strategy is. The belief that there is supposed to be only one best strategy is not consistent with the fact that there are diverse views on what it should be. This paper argues that the search for the best strategy (...) is not looking for the best among various practices. Instead, it calls for a critical examination of our underlying philosophical beliefs about it. Hence, the discussion of the best strategy is divided into three philosophical phases: objectivist, deconstructivist, and praxis. The search is argued to be taking a journey of philosophical investigations rather than finding a certain practice superior to all others. (shrink)

This article examines constructivism, a paradigm in qualitative research that has been propagated by Egon Guba, Yvonna Lincoln, and Norman Denzin. A distinction is made between whether the basic presuppositions of constructivism are credible compared to those of a competing paradigm and whether constructivism's beliefs are internally consistent. The latter approach, i.e. whether constructivism is internally consistent, is the focus of this article. The issues singled out for discussion are concerned with the constructivist ontology and epistemology. This article shows that (...) constructivism's paradigmatic beliefs are internally in tension. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of the reading assessment, DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), on literacy education through the Habermasian lens. It argues that DIBELS, along with other systemic forces, has surged beyond its domain as a mere assessment and colonized the lifeworld of literacy education by distorting the meaning of the teaching and learning of literacy.This article calls for a critical reflection on the systemized practices in literacy education and for a return to a lifeworld where (...) literacy is considered more than a testable skill. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical analysis of the four dimensions of critical literacy, a framework widely known among the scholars and practitioners in the field of critical literacy....