In a number of classrooms recently, in Australia and elsewhere, English teachers have been redefining their teaching and inventing new ways of 'doing' it. This is no longer a matter of drilling students in grammatical skills, instructing them in turning out five-paragraph essays, responding appreciatively to novels, plays and poems or creating their own in a like manner. Instead, teachers are finding ways to help their students understand and act on critical literacy theories. According to these ideas, English in its forms and uses can never be a matter of neutral communication of factual knowledge. Critical literacy investigates how forms of knowledge, and the power they bring, are created in language and taken up by those who use such texts. It asks how language might be put to different, more equitable uses, and how texts might be recreated in a way that would tell a different story. This book is a carefully documented and critically analysed example of the growing emphasis on critical literacy in syllabuses, government reports and the like. This book: * bridges the gap between academics' theorizing and teachers' work * describes how secondary teachers have planned and implemented critical literacy curricula on a range of topics, from Shakespeare to the workplace * listens to teachers reflecting on their teaching and analyses classroom talk * extrapolates from present practice to a future critical literacy in a digitised, hypermedia world. Teachers and students of education, critical literacy advocates and theorists of literacy and schooling can learn much more from this book, which shows how critical literacy teachers, and their students, are contributing to the ongoing reinvention of English education as critical literacy. Wendy Morgan is Senior Lecturer in Language and Literacy Education at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She has taught secondary English for many years, and published several books on critical literacy education.