What has counted as the critical in recent years has focused on how people use texts and discourses to construct and negotiate identity, power, and capital. Critical approaches include political analyses of dominant texts and their social fields, textual production linked to identity politics, and the introduction of students to sophisticated linguistic and aesthetic meta languages for talking about, critiquing, and reconstructing texts and discourses. These various takes on the critical do not share a common political stance. The term and its affiliated approaches have been enlisted on behalf of not only radical redistributions of power and capital, but also for liberal and neoliberal educational agendas to improve individual achievement and thinking, on behalf of postcolonial and ethnonationalist educational projects to recast the character of canonical text, knowledge, and voice in schooling, and to pursue agendas of text deconstruction and critique of master narratives.

As recently as a decade ago, for most language and literacy educators, the term critical referred to higher order reading comprehension and sophisticated personal response to literature. To this day, the term is a stand-in for a diversity of approaches to textual practice, each contingent on particular political and institutional fields where the teaching and learning of language resides. What has come to count as the critical, especially where there was no such marker before, depends on how the state, media, school, church, and other fields of institutional authority enable and disenable what can be said and done about texts and discourses and, as importantly, what can be said and done about identities, histories, and themselves as institutions.