Critical Literacy

Critical literacy is a response to injustice and the production of illiteracy in which students and teachers work together to become influential members of the community.  I think in order for someone to be truly literate, they should be well rounded in both academics and “real-world” applications.  Our education system recently has been more focused on “cramming” students with information rather than teaching them true skills that will be useful to them in their daily lives.  According to Frieire in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, students are being turned “into ‘containers’, into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher” (1997, p. 53). 

            I feel that part of our duties as teachers is to create young people who are going to have positive impacts on our society.  I understand that we need to teach the essential standards given to us by the State Education Department but we can have such a bigger role than that in our students’ lives.  Many times teachers spend more time with a child than their own parents.  This means we have a responsibility to be more than people who give the information.  We need to be role models to these kids. 

            Unfortunately, not all education is created equal.  Schools do not have the same access to good technology, effective teachers, essential resources, etc. Because of this, a gap exists between schools based on the economic status of the community the school is in.  Students in poorer areas not only receive less of the materials they need, they also have a stigma attached to them that they cannot perform as well as students in richer areas.  I think these lower expectations that people place on these students impacts their success greatly.  Students in these communities are not going to respond well to lessons that consist of teachers basically lecturing for the whole day.  We need to find different ways to get students to learn the necessary information while at the same time, create critical learners.

            In “Algebra and Civil Rights”, Robert Moses writes about how mathematical literacy has become a civil rights issue for poor, minority students.  As we have read throughout this whole semester, students who are non-White and come from poorer communities usually perform significantly lower than students who are from wealthier communities.  Over the years it has become acceptable for students to fail in math but with so many colleges and jobs focusing on math and technology, we have to stop having this frame of mind that “we don’t need math”.  In order to reach the students who are consistently failing in math, we need to find ways to differentiate our instruction.  Creating lessons that show students skills that will benefit them in the ‘real-world’ is a good way to get students engaged. 

Robert Moses started the Algebra Project that teaches math with a lot of hands-on experiences.  Students are learning by doing as well as teaching each other the skills they learn.  This type of teaching is something that could and should be used in every content area.  Looking at numbers like dropout rates, number of students going to college, number of students getting good jobs we can see that what we are traditionally doing is not working.  We need to give students skills that make them become more than just students in a classroom.  We are always learning even when we are not in school but how we learn and decide to apply this newly acquired knowledge makes the difference in where our path goes in life.