Wolf Cries: On Power, Emotions and Critical Literacy in First-Language Teaching in Sweden

Adopting a critical literacy perspective in teaching is about how experiences, social contexts, languages, learning and power relations interact in language development. In this article, we explore how students' critical literacies are enhanced and hindered by emotional power relations in the classroom. We investigate what happens when emotionally charged texts--here texts about wolves in Sweden--are used in lower secondary schools. Drawing on two examples we illustrate different ways of enhancing students' critical approach to the argumentative text type. The article highlights the affective aspects of teaching, and thus the unforeseeable aspects of classroom interaction. Emotionally, the wolf issue became very different objects for the persons occupying the classrooms. It invoked, e.g. homosocial relations, racist accounts and nationalistic outbursts. The article stresses the significance of teacher intervention but argues that to facilitate critical literacy in emotionally charged classrooms, the circulation of emotions, including teachers' emotions must be brought to light.