Embedded Files
The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
--James Baldwin
Most students do not naturally embrace ambiguity. When they work independently, they like to reply concisely, and don’t often recognize multiple possible responses that come from deeper thinking. They also lack strong research skills because they are used to typing questions into a search bar and clicking on the first few links that appear, results that are given to them by an algorithm whose chief concern is not the pursuit of truth and impartiality. For students with learning disabilities or Multilingual Learners, decoding nuances in language is an even more complicated endeavor.
I want students to see the beauty of the world, but also to be able to approach it with a healthy degree of skepticism. In recent years, I have urgently felt the need to teach media literacy, and to teach it well. Now more than ever, it is essential that students bring a critical lens to bear on the media that they encounter every day. I was inspired by an article I read two summers ago about teachers integrating Harry Potter into their academic curricula, and I reached out to Paul Anomaly, a teacher in Mantua County in Virginia, who taught a course for gifted students called “Defense Against the Dark Arts” as an entry point into critical reading skills. Starting with this concept, I designed my own micro curriculum for the diverse group of learners in my classes. The students know when the music plays and I don a witch's hat and address them by their last names that they are in an alternate universe. By engaging with them through play, I hope to make subjects that are difficult more accessible: we compare shape-shifting boggarts to computerized algorithms, talk about ‘occlumency’ to protect against the viral capacity of memes and the more insidious variety of web ephemera, and discuss the Imperius Curse as an invocation of the rhetorical triangle.
I was able to share this work with colleagues from across the United States at a conference called Teaching in Trying Times at Columbia University’s Teachers College last spring. While Harry Potter currently suits me and my students, I can foresee the translation of this material through many different thematic lenses, depending on what individual teachers and groups of children are passionate about. For example, a teacher approached me after the conference about using the Marvel universe as a hook, and it sounded brilliant.
I love this curriculum because it is an application of one of my core pedagogical beliefs -- that reading fiction helps us to live better in the world by allowing us to imaginatively rehearse the parts of the people we want to be. While popular fiction has traditionally been excluded from the classroom in favor of canonical texts, we believe there is an untapped power in using stories that students already cherish as tools for transformative learning.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse