Within this writing, there were several ideas and realizations that stood out to me. One of which was when they said that, "it was only with a pedagogy firmly committed to freedom and social change that we were able to motivate students to develop sophisticated academic literacies." (pg.4). With the word freedom being so powerful, this sentence stuck out to me. As an English teacher, I want to give my students as much freedom in the classroom as possible, but I also want them to learn and get their work done. Giving students freedom within assignments, however, can be the most motivating thing you can do. By giving your students the freedom to find their own purpose and topic for their writing, you are giving them something they want to do. I have always loved being able to choose my own topic for my papers, just because then I was more motivated to write them.
Another thing that I found interesting was the realization that multiculturalism in the literature we choose for our students was "simply offering texts written by people of color or featuring people of color as the protagonist." (5). I never really thought about this personally, but now reflecting on all of the multicultural readings I have done, I'm recognizing the fact that our readings were just written by people of color of including at least one protagonist character that was of color. Later on, it says how, "these so-called multicultural texts that were equally, if not more, disempowering of students of color than more traditional less diverse texts. An oppressive rendering of a culturally diverse text is still oppressive." (5). This is something we need to remember as teachers. We need to think about what our students are reading and how it could relate in any way to them. If we are claiming a text is multicultural, it needs to portray that culture, not just be written by someone of that culture. Especially in this day and age, we have to be careful what we are giving our students to read. This relates to our book talks in class and how we present our rationale for each book we discuss about teaching it in the classroom. Having multicultural texts can help our students "arrive at an implicit understanding of what they have in common with those they have been taught to perceive as different." (6). Children are not taught to see people differently based off of their skin or cultural, they just make friends. Why are we not teaching our students throughout the years to continue seeing other skin-tones and cultures as just people rather than 'different' or any other social depiction they might have? Including the multicultural texts and having "cross-cultural literacy study may allow us to see ourselves in others even as we see these others as different in important and extraordinary ways." (6).
On the topic of texts, I liked how it was put on the reasoning behind using literature of other times and places: "they would begin to make connections to their own everyday experiences while gaining an understanding of similarities across time and cultures." (5-6). So instead of having students break down the readings and pick them apart, we can have them draw connections between then and now and understand how things were and how things have changed. This is so interesting to me and different then what I've been doing the last three years. In almost all of our literature classes, we are picking apart and tearing down the readings instead of connecting and finding understanding in them. A connecting idea that was discussed as well is the notion of using popular culture in the classroom. By having pop-culture in the classroom we are giving the students the potential to connect their own everyday experiences to their academic literacies. It also gives students an opportunity to study their own everyday culture and what is in their culture. I do believe this is a great concept, it would be more interesting to see more research on this particular concept and see how you could incorporate it into the classroom.
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