Ummmm, where are our books? After the initial assignment, I like to use a teaching philosophy called “Critical Literacy” where students themselves bring in the texts we will read and write about.
Critical Literacy
What is it? Critical Literacy is a teaching approach that makes students partners in choosing texts and topics on which to write in a writing class because people write more effectively when they care about the issues on which they write. It is an approach that tries to give students more power than they typically have in their own education, including the power to bring in texts to write about rather than pay exorbitant publishing company prices for anthologies or collections of writing topics.
Writing about this topic, author and teacher Ira Shor explains,
This is where critical literacy begins, for questioning power relations, discourses, and identities in a world not yet finished, just, or humane. Critical literacy thus challenges the status quo in an effort to discover alternative paths for self and social development. This kind of literacy--words rethinking worlds, self dissenting in society--connects the political and the personal, the public and the private, the global and the local, the economic and the pedagogical, for rethinking our lives and for promoting justice in place of inequity. (Critical Literacy in Action)
So, this is studying language and its power in the world—to create and alter a world-- through the uses and kinds of language that we see every day rather than just the uses and kinds that we normally see in the classroom.
Why do you use it? Because it just makes good sense. To John Dewey, one of the founders of American education, as children we are born language users, naturally and eagerly talking about the things we do and are interested in:
But when there are no vital interests appealed to in the school, when language is used simply for the repetition of lessons, it is not surprising that one of the chief difficulties of school work has come to be instruction in the mother tongue. Since the language taught is unnatural, not growing out of the real desire to communicate vital impressions and convictions, the freedom of people in its use gradually disappears .(School and Society)
How does it work? After the first assignment final draft students bring in topics and texts that they want to write about and we vote as a class on the top 3. For the next essay, everyone in the class will write on one of these three texts. For the final essay, you will be able to choose from one of the three texts the class chooses or from a text of your own choosing.
What is the biggest danger in using the Critical Literacy approach? The biggest danger is when you do not respond constructively your peers’ texts; while you may not like their selections, they are of great value to your peers and treating others’ ideas as you would like your own ideas to be treated will make this work much more successful and meaningful.
What is the biggest danger in NOT using this approach? The biggest danger in NOT having students generate their own texts and topics is both an entire course and countless student papers that are written “for the teacher” only, with little connection to or value for student writers themselves. Writing with little connection to or value for the writer is usually quite bad writing, which the course is designed to eradicate!