11/26

I thoroughly enjoyed all of the articles this week on critical literacy. I think they were all very interesting and supported what I would like my future classroom to look like as a Language Arts teacher. I am a strong believer in how powerful literature can be, and I think employing a critical lens to reading in the classroom can have a very powerful effect on adolescents.

            I loved the idea of reading all of these texts that represent different aspects of our society and lived experiences and giving our students the opportunity to explore the social consequences and implications in these texts. I think as young adults they will become empowered and enlightened by this new knowledge and new way of understanding our culture, which will prepare them for higher education and help them flourish as intellectual adults.

I love the quote by Fehring & Green that Molden uses to end her article, "Critical lit- eracy has the potential to give students the opportunity to read the word so that they can read the world”. I think this is very important in the context of “urban education” because our students need to be able to critique and analyze the worlds they live in. They need to understand the greater social systems and histories that influence and motivate even the smallest aspects in our society and this why I also really enjoyed the article by Marshall, Staples, and Gibson.

Sometimes it is really odd reading these articles because I see myself in a lot of the adolescents these writers and researchers are discussing. I think that is why this endeavor into teaching in urban schools is so important to me. I am that student, and so is my sister, my brother, my boyfriend, my best friend, and a slew of other people that I know and love.  I was definitely the young Black girl reading The Coldest Winter Ever and Flyy Girl, I’ve actually read a great deal of books by Omar Tyree that me and my friends would share with each other my freshman year of high school. I actually loved those books because like the authors stress the plots were very interesting and that is something most of us look for when choosing a novel to read. I also loved them because they represented a world that I was living in. I could relate to the characters and so could my friends. After school we would have long conversations about the characters and how we would react similarly or differently to certain situations they were involved in. I would have loved if we could have had classroom discussions about those books with a teacher who helped us go beyond what we were thinking and critique the greater social implications of those very heavy texts. I was also motivated by the sex in these texts. The main character in Flyy Girl, like myself ,was being pursued by a lot of boys at school as well as men in her neighborhood and  I was interested in how she handled herself in those situations. I like many teenagers was curious about sex, what it actually was, and what one actually did. I think this aspect scares a lot of people but in my world teenage sex was a huge reality and I think it is much more useful for us to talk about it especially in secondary classrooms than to pretend it’s not happening. When the main character in Flyy Girl lost her virginity, I wasn’t at all compelled to do the same. I actually became even more mortified at the thought of sex because the consequences that came after for her were not experiences I was interested in.

All in all, I think looking critically at literature is very important and as a teacher I’m not interested in reading anything if my students and I will not be looking at the text with a critical lens. Even if we’re writing creatively, I think it’s important to look at each piece critically because there is too much to be learned from each other about the society we live in.

As for my fieldwork experience, it is still going about the same. I was able to visit Mrs. Kelt and San Miguel’s classrooms, but it happened to be on a day where neither of them was in a position to show what the class looks like on a normal basis because of sudden changes in their personal plans. However, I am looking forward to next semester and hopefully having a more meaningful and happy field experience