Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

This article had a lot of good information and I think it pairs well with our other reading from Freire.  The authors’ point with the article and research was, through incorporating student interests and knowledge into a curriculum, student motivation and, in turn, student engagement is more likely to increase.  Also, if students are interested, motivated, and engaged, their academic and career success will be strengthened.  They went into depth about different units they did with their classes over the course of the year; I liked how they were diligent about being aware of student interests and backgrounds in their units.  For example, my favorite was: “The unit opened with a collective viewing of A Time to Kill (Schumacher, 1996) and ended with a classroom court trial to decide the fate of Bigger Thomas.  It is important to state up front that we watched film not merely as entertainment but as an intellectual activity” (18-19).  I liked this activity because not only is it interactive for the students and they are in charge of the trial, but I also did something similar while I was in high school.  During my ninth-grade year, we read Of Mice and Men; after reading the book, the class was divided assigned parts: judge, prosecution, defense, and jury, and we were conducting George’s trial for the murder of Lenny.  I was the prosecuting attorney, so my team and I decided we wanted to prove premeditated murder in the first degree (we went all out).  At the time, it just seemed like a fun project and we didn’t have to take a test, but now being a teacher, I can see how simulating a trial gives the students the ability to both show me their understanding of the text through the evidence the teams present at trial and find their own motivation towards the project depending on their assignment (prosecution for a conviction, defense for justice, etc.).  So, I can see the court trial simulation being used effectively with different texts across different grade levels.

While I agreed with most of what the authors were discussing in their article, there was one quote that stuck out to me as not agreeing with it.  They were talking about a poetry unit: “Each student was required to choose at least one poem [they wrote themselves] to read in front of the class” (18).  I don’t necessarily agree with this because I don’t always believe in making students do things that make them very uncomfortable; I do believe in challenging my students to push themselves to be uncomfortable and to push themselves further than they have before.  But reading something personal such as a poem to peers might be too much for some students.  I have a couple students with social anxiety, and we did a writing assignment where they had to write about a personal photo and recreate the scene.  These students started freaking out a bit, even before they began the assignment because of the nature of the assignment: they thought they were going to have to read their paper out loud to the class.  So, I reassured them that I was the only one who was going to reading them and they weren’t going to be reading them allow.  They immediately settled down.  This interaction made me realize that requiring students to share certain things might not be a good idea because they might shut down and not even do the assignment out of fear of reading in front of the class.