A well-documented example of critical literacy pedagogy in practice involves teachers inviting learners to bring everyday texts from their own environments into the classroom advertisements, billboards, food packaging, social media posts and subjecting them to critical interrogation. Inviting students to write down messages they see on public transport, to photograph graffiti or billboards, to cut out advertisements from magazines, or to collect sweet wrappers to bring to class helps them read everyday texts critically. Done consistently, learners develop the habit of "reading" their worlds with a critical eye. Rooted in the social justice pedagogy of Paulo Freire, critical literacy is conceived as a means of empowering populations against oppression, proceeding from a desire to balance social inequities and address problems caused by abuse of power — it is an analysis with an agenda .In practice, learners do not merely decode texts; they ask whose interests the text serves, whose voices are present or absent, and what assumptions about race, gender, and class are being naturalised.

The strengths of this approach are considerable. Critical literacy practices can be transformative students who engage in critical literacy from a young age are prepared to make informed decisions regarding issues of power and control, to engage in democratic citizenship, and to develop an ability to think and act ethically. It is particularly powerful in post-apartheid South African classrooms, where learners encounter racialised, gendered, and class-inflected texts daily and where the ability to read ideology is a genuine survival skill. However, the weaknesses are real. Critical literacy is sometimes accused of either indoctrinating or paralysing learners indoctrinating when a specific analysis of injustice is presented as the only morally justifiable path, and paralysing when it so emphasises the multiplicity of perspectives and complexity that learners are left unable to act .It also demands a high level of teacher confidence and can be inaccessible to learners still developing foundational literacy skills.

Comparing critical literacy with functional literacy pedagogy reveals both meaningful similarities and sharp differences. Both approaches reject the view that reading and writing are neutral, technical skills; both position literacy as fundamentally social and purposeful; and both give learners tools to engage with real-world texts beyond the school. Both can involve learner agency — choosing texts and drawing on lived experiences. The key difference, however, lies in their orientation toward power. Functional literacy pedagogy teaches learners to use the genres and text forms that society values to master the conventions of a report, an argument, a procedure , in order to participate effectively in existing social structures. Critical literacy, by contrast, asks learners to interrogate those very structures: to ask why certain genres carry authority, whose knowledge gets legitimised in a textbook, and what is systematically silenced. Functional literacy leans toward utility, livelihood, and everyday survival, while critical literacy leans toward social transformation, justice, and voice.

Functional literacy hands learners the keys to the existing house; critical literacy asks them to question who designed the house, who was locked out, and whether it ought to be rebuilt altogether and it is this transformative orientation that makes critical literacy both the most radical and the most demanding of the four literacy pedagogies.

Critical literacy in the classroom