Crticial Literacy

This article argues that critical literacy is important in a digital age because "good social studies and history teaching equals literacy," the nature of history and social studies demands a large amount of literacy, and since students are confronted with more information than ever because of the Internet, critical literacy is necessary for students to make sense of the past and present. While the article does not go on to do a very good job arguing for the need for critical literacy, it does suggest useful practical steps for teaching students to think critically about sources. The article encourages teachers to require students to ask questions about the source of their material as well as content of their text. For example, what does this source not tell me? Also, the article reinforces the need for students to learn to compare and contrast historical perspectives. While the body of the article does not go into depth about how critical literacy is important in our technological age, as the title suggests it will, the concepts about how to promote critical literacy in the classroom are reasonably transferable from print texts to online texts.