Critical Literacy in Canada: A Systematic Review of Curricula and Literature

Critical literacy is a pedagogy that serves to mediate social justice issues and educate for transformative social action. We present a systematic review of how critical literacy has been incorporated in Canada's provincial/territorial curriculum documents since the late 1990s and integrated in K-12 classrooms in the last decade. Our analysis shows that critical literacy has been addressed with varying degrees of explicitness in curricula among provinces and territories, and that there is an imbalance in the implementation of critical literacies in studies from the last decade. We discuss implications and encourage stakeholders in education to explicitly embed critical literacy into curricula and promote critical literacy practices in the classroom.