There are still positions to be defended: An account of the road travelled by the Critical Literacy project

Abstract

Critical Literacy is a Project that belongs to the Division of Educology in the National University of Costa Rica, comprised by an interdisciplinary team since its beginnings in 2004. Critical pedagogy, sociology of education, and more recently, reflections surrounding interculturalism and decolonial pedagogies, among other related branches of knowledge such as social psychology, have nurtured its work which is politically committed. This project has gone through four different stages, which focused on junctural issues of the education system, projecting itself towards a fifth stage between 2019-2021. Critical Literacy’s path starts off with the acknowlegment of a crisis in secondary education, and the subsequent dispute over the adequate reading of its signs. Taking a stance over the new educational projects that should be erected, in response to the exhaustion of the traditional model, has required a critical approach of the official media discourse that reveals a neoliberalizing agenda, inconsistent with the recognition of students as political and epistemological subjects. Departing from this logic, Critical Literacy has placed its stakes in participatory-action research in the educational field. In this paper, I offer a brief walk through the Project’s most important moments, since it’s beginnings to present day, as seen through its academic production.