User:Saxophonic and Smooth/The Death of the Author

Applications for Critical Pedagogy
Themes from Roland Barthes's essay have also been applied to research on critical pedagogy. Previous research projects have emphasized foregrounding students' knowledge in literacy practices, and in this way stress Barthes’s central idea of relying on the reader’s impressions for literary study. These studies advocate learning for students that is dialogic in nature, claiming that students should arrive at their own knowledge by exploring and questioning a text's multiple meanings. While the theoretical frameworks, methods, research designs, and audiences of particular studies vary, the central idea across projects, commonly seen in constructivist methods of pedagogy, is to increase a sense of student ownership and autonomy by having them consider multiple forms of knowledge against their own beliefs and values. For example, in one study, a model of information literacy instruction encourages a conversational approach to recommending and locating texts between librarians and students, rather than only suggesting texts by genre or author names. These projects extend one of Barthes's underlying points in his essay in which he emphasizes trusting subjective knowledge over depending on traditional and authoritative bodies of knowledge.

Other research has subverted Barthes's original thesis of disrupting author-centered literary criticism by suggesting collaborative methods of authorship. These studies describe writing models in which multiple authors "co-construct" stories and articles together, inviting writers to contribute their own ideas and knowledge and create a product that resembles an assemblage of voices and perspectives. Although the premise of these models advance the author's position, the collective, peer-based process of how these texts are constructed challenge traditional authority of singular authorship. These studies extend Barthes's initial ideas of how a text contains multiple ideological positions and interpretive possibilities, as well as disputing authorial influence and force, by offering a democratic and pluralistic framework for authorship.