In the Philippine secondary school, an excellent example of critical literacies pedagogy is having Junior High School English or Araling Panlipunan students analyze local media and social media posts regarding controversial community issues, such as the jeepney modernization program or localized environmental concerns (Garinto & Valdez, 2019).

Instead of just checking if students can read the words, the teacher guides them to "read against the text" by asking: Who owns this news source? Whose voices are missing? Who stands to benefit, and who gets marginalized? (Durante, 2025).

Quick Outline of the Practice

Source Material: Students collect real-world texts (Facebook posts, TikTok news videos, and local news articles) regarding a socio-political issue (Garinto & Valdez, 2019).
Deconstruction: In groups, students actively dissect the material to map out hidden biases, socio-economic motives, or underlying stereotypes (Durante, 2025).
Social Action: Students apply "critical vocabulary" to create their own multimodal infographics or counter-narratives that speak back to power and present a balanced community perspective (Garinto & Valdez, 2019; Parba, 2021).

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths:

Combats Post-Truth Manipulation: In a landscape heavily affected by online disinformation, this approach builds a defensive layer by training students to question source intent (Garinto & Valdez, 2019).
Boosts Engagement and Confidence: Academic data shows that shifting from passive reading to critical questioning significantly boosts student reading ownership, switching them from "frustrated" readers to independent thinkers (Valdez, 2023).

Weaknesses:

System and Resource Constraints: Public schools face massive class sizes and heavily packed, rigid curriculums. Deep, open-ended dialogues are difficult to execute in a 45-minute period with 50 students (Durante, 2025; Manuel, 2025).
Administrative and Social Pushback: Culturally, challenging institutional authority or mainstream narratives can be viewed as rebellious or politically risky within certain traditional school systems (Durante, 2025).

Comparison: Critical vs. Functional Literacy

To understand this shift, it helps to contrast it with functional literacy, which is the baseline approach historically measured by the Department of Education (DepEd) via tools like the Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) (Manuel, 2025).

Feature	Functional Literacy Pedagogy	Critical Literacy Pedagogy
Core Goal	Teach basic cognitive skills (decoding, reading instructions, filling out forms) for societal utility (Manuel, 2025; Owada et al., 2019).	Teach students to analyze power relations, dismantle biases, and promote social justice (Durante, 2025).
Student Role	Passive Consumer: Absorbs the text to follow directions or find stated facts (Quimsing, 2023).	Active Investigator: interrogates the text's motives and context (Durante, 2025).
Definition of Text	Standard textbooks, instruction manuals, and traditional literature.	Anything from a political speech to a localized community billboard or viral tweet (Garinto & Valdez, 2019).

Similarities

Both pedagogies recognize that comprehension is an essential life skill. You cannot achieve critical literacy without foundational functional literacy; a student must first know basic grammar and vocabulary (functional) before they can deconstruct a complex political argument (critical) (Manuel, 2025). Both aim to prepare students for real-world participation beyond the classroom walls (Manuel, 2025; Quimsing, 2023).

Differences

The fundamental difference is intent. Functional literacy treats text as neutral truth, focusing on helping the student fit into the existing socio-economic system (Owada et al., 2019). Critical literacy views text as inherently biased and aims to empower the student to transform that system by challenging inequalities (Durante, 2025; Parba, 2021).

References

Durante, P. G. C. (2025). Advancing critical literacy through critical literature pedagogy-based principles of literary education. Problems of Education in the 21st Century, 83(2), 196-217.

Garinto, L. A. B., & Valdez, P. N. M. (2019). Critical pedagogy and multimodality in the Philippines: Engaging learners in a post-truth era. 2018 International Conference on Bilingual Learning and Teaching.

Manuel, J. P. G. (2025). Multilingual reading interventionists for junior high school: A response to the Philippines' functional literacy gap. Frontiers in Education, 10.

Owada, K., Nielsen, M., Lau, C. L., Yakob, L., Clements, A. C. A., Leonardo, L., & Soares Magalhães, R. J. (2019). Determinants of spatial heterogeneity of functional illiteracy among school-aged children in the Philippines: An ecological study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(1), 137. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16010137

Parba, J. (2021). Teaching critical vocabulary to Filipino heritage language learners. Education Sciences, 11(6), 260. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11060260

Quimsing, M. J. D. (2023). Technology-based reading application on improving reading literacy level among students. Pedagogy: Journal of English Language Teaching, 11(2).

Valdez, M. G. (2023). Freire’s critical pedagogy: Step towards inclusive classroom literacy. Philippine EJournals, 4(1).

CRITICAL LITERACY PEDAGOGIES