Hilary Janks states: "What is important to remember for reading the world critically is that any re-presentation of the world is a version of the world". Janks hyphenates 're-presentation' "to emphasize that the world presents itself to us, and we present it again in the act of representation".

It is a lens through which teachers and learners can investigate different types of media, and it offers rich possibilities for teaching both language and culture in ESL classrooms at all levels. The practice of it developed out of the social justice pedagogy of Paulo Freire, an educator in Brazil in the late 1960s.

Katherine Hayles states: "Now it is time to rethink what reading is and how it works in the rich mixtures of words and images, sounds and animations, graphics and letters that constitute the environments of twenty-first-century literacies".

Central to Freire's teaching methods was the idea that language is never neutral. His book Literacy: Reading the Word and the World reconstructs the idea of literacy as something beyond learning to read and write. In Freire, reading a word is linked to reading the world.