Introduction

The Critical Literacy pedagogy celebrated by this volume is designed to encourage teachers and their students to identify voices relegated to the margins of society, and through literacy, to creatively negotiate visibility and power for those voices within the social discourse. Why is this an important pedagogy for teachers and teacher educators? First, teachers must have tools to address the powerful messages about the reform of public education that convey its purposes as purely economic. President Obama (2014) recently addressed graduates at an award winning technical high school in my home city Worcester, MA. The central message of his talk promoted an education focused solely on the imperatives of the labor market.