Connecting kids' lives to the books they read

Reading Vasquez’s book forced me to think about ways I can include critical literacy in my high school classroom. Since my students read at different levels, I intend to use a variety of books such as Yo, Yolanda, Lost Boys of Sudan, First Jobs: Life After High School, Hip Hop Heroes, for my lower level readers and books like Derek Jeter, The Greatest: Mohammed Ali, Speak, Gloria Estefan, Esperanza Rising, Monster, and Slam! for my higher level readers. These are books that are written by a variety of women and men from various socio-economic and racial backgrounds about issues that are relevant to my students’ lives or their community. I hope to use these texts to help my students connect their individual experiences, knowledge, and perspectives to the social and political issues addressed in those texts. Since a large majority of my students are struggling readers, I have to use various teaching materials that represent the perspectives of individuals that relate to my students’ lives.

Negociating Critical Literacies with Young Children

As I was reading Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children, the two most significant words I encountered were "social justice" and "equity." Although the text is primarily geared towards elementary and middle school students, as a high school teacher, I believe that critical literacy is vital for all grade levels, especially because majority of the students we teach have not been overtly exposed to it. This advisory in my reading class, I have made a concerted effort to incorporate elements of social justice and equity in my unit. My students are exploring the various facets of leadership by forming their interpretations and constructing their definitions of what a leader is. In order to give help them acquire a better understanding of leadership, we read texts documenting the achievements of world-renowned individuals like Rigoberta Menchu, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mohandas Gandhi. None of my students had ever heard of any of these individuals except Martin Luther King Jr. However, giving my students the opportunity to read about the monumental changes Rigoberta Menchu, a Nobel Laureate from Guatemala, made for her people enabled me to expose my students to various political, social, and economic inequities that exist in the text as well as in the larger society in which they live in. I was also able to intertwine critical literacy into the leadership unit I am currently teaching by having my students read about the accomplishments of Mohandas Gandhi in “Gandhi’s Forgotten Legacy,” which documents his peaceful struggle to attain Indian independence from British rule. Critical literacy is not an obscure concept, but a tool that can be effectively implemented at all grade levels to help our students achieve.

Why is the Dropout rate so high?

According to the “Four Resources Model” article, “it remains our position that literacy was never a matter of deficit but principally an issue of economic and social access to the cultural institutions charged with literacy education and practice. It is no mere coincidence that the graduation rate for African-American high school students is 59 percent in Washington D.C. and 95 percent in Loudoun County, Virginia, which is only about an hour from the district. These dropouts often carry familial, financial, and social burdens that hinder their ability to obtain sufficient “access to the cultural institutions” that can help them lift some of these burdens. The distribution and maintenance of literacy on the surface is available to all; however, African-American and Hispanic students have a difficult time acquiring as much literacy as their White counterparts. Often, literacy education and practice in many inner-city public schools disproportionately represent the perspective of one dominant racial group. This is sometimes due to the fact that those who write and teach the texts these students read are completely out of touch with the demographic the texts are created for. For example, one can visit any “under-achieving” high school and find that many of the texts the students read are obsolete, unrepresentative of the student body, and most importantly, irrelevant to their lives. It is absolutely ridiculous to open a 9th grade English textbook with a few poems tucked in the middle written by some African-American authors, an exert from Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club, and a poem from Sandra Cisneros. The dropout rate among inner-city school minority students can begin to decline with a multicultural literacy education that celebrates the unique multiculturalism of the students. In practice, teachers need to begin by evaluating the texts their students read in order to ensure that there is no dominant voice. Othello, Antigone, and Weathering Heights are good novels, but considering the demographic most of us teach, we should also include Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and Joy Harjo ever once in a while.