Title: Caring Critical Literacy: The Most Radical Pedagogy You Can Offer Your Students
Abstract: As a first-year teacher in Baltimore City in 2001, I heard stories from my students that overwhelmed me. Care was often sidelined in their personal lives even as external and structural factors placed them in the position of care-giving for others. Many of my students juggled child-care responsibilities for younger brothers and sisters as their parents worked two and three shifts; my students navigated unstable home and family situations, violence in the streets, police brutality, and the complications that came from raised in the heart of the drug trade in Baltimore City. As I found myself buckling under the weight of students' challenges, a veteran teacher told me that the most important thing I could do for my students was to teach them as if their lives depended on it.After that conversation, I started fighting back against the challenges my students faced through my pedagogy, making transparent the externally imposed hierarchies through critical engagement with text and big ideas. my veteran teacher friend did not tell me, however, was that the teaching of critical thought and reflection had to come from a place of care-I learned that the hard way. Although I taught my students as if their lives depended on it, it was not until I centered care in my curriculum and teaching that they flourished as intellectuals. Because I cared for my students and wanted to honor their experiences, I taught with passion, with analytical thought, and with a focus on critical literacy.Care and Critical as Joint Pillars of Classroom CommunitiesIn her 2010 book, Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research and Practice, Geneva Gay argues for the concept of multicultural teaching as caring-in- (51). Caring-in- action is an articulation of care that highlights the act of engaging with another human around the idea of learning and making meaning through activism. Among other things, the recommendations for a mode of teaching that centers care include being academically demanding but personally supportive and encouraging and creating of inquiry, a sense of criticalness, and a moral edit among students to care for self and others (Gay 52). Caring, in this context, becomes the foundation upon which learning builds and through which interactions flow. In Gay's perspective, caring is not added to a class or discipline; rather, caring is the nexus of education. This reconceptualization of the classroom is infinitely bigger than shifting who determines the focus of education. Instead, this shifts the of education. If not to support the development of whole people, then why do we teach?Shifting attention to research in critical literacy, definitions of the term often revolve around the notion of critical literacy as action. One of the commonly cited definitions of critical literacy describes it as habits of thought, reading, writing and speaking which go beneath surface meaning . . . to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any (Shor, Empowering 129). In this understanding of critical literacy, Ira Shor emphasizes the act of engaging critically with not only the act of interpreting but also with the active implications of that interpretation. Critical literacy has primarily been a conceptualization of literacy that emphasizes literacy within activism (Shor, What 284; Cridland-Hughes, African American 112, Literacy 195) and as the engagement with, and critique of, content. Using definitions such as this, we look to critical literacy to frame radical critique and action, to describe spaces where youth push back against oppressive structures and unwelcoming pedagogiesThe goal of exploring critically literate communities has been to document both the process of supporting critically literate adolescents and to argue for the connection between literacy and power. However, less attention is paid to the context in which critical literacy flourishes and how supportive relationships form the basis for hard conversations and reflection. …
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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