Creating Critical Classrooms

Reading and Writing with an Edge

Mitzi Lewison, Christine Leland, Jerome C. Harste

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317814900
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

This popular text articulates a powerful theory of critical literacy—in all its complexity. Critical literacy practices encourage students to use language to question the everyday world, interrogate the relationship between language and power, analyze popular culture and media, understand how power relationships are socially constructed, and consider actions that can be taken to promote social justice. By providing both a model for critical literacy instruction and many examples of how critical practices can be enacted in daily school life in elementary and middle school classrooms, Creating Critical Classrooms meets a huge need for a practical, theoretically based text on this topic.

Pedagogical features in each chapter

• Teacher-researcher Vignette

• Theories that Inform Practice

• Critical Literacy Chart

• Thought Piece

• Invitations for Disruption

• Lingering Questions

New in the Second Edition

• End-of-chapter "Voices from the Field"

• More upper elementary-grade examples

• New text sets drawn from "Classroom Resources"

• Streamlined, restructured, revised, and updated throughout

• Expanded Companion Website now includes annotated Classroom Resources; Text Sets; Resources by Chapter; Invitations for Students; Literacy Strategies; Additional Resources

Chapter 1
Overview

Why Do We Need an Instructional Theory of Critical Literacy?

Vignette

Morning Meeting: Contradictions and Possibilities^*

Lee Heffernan

Morning meeting is a time for building classroom community, an opportunity to address important personal as well as political issues. Though I shared this vision with my students, many still saw morning meeting as a type of show and tell. The meeting sometimes evolved into a consumerist forum as kids brought in prized possessions and the rest of the class looked on with envy. We sat watching as classmates displayed and described trendy artifacts, rare baseball cards, trip souvenirs.

This year, I made the decision to transform morning meeting. I explained to my students that morning meeting was not a time for show and tell but rather was a time to share information that was of value and concern to all present. One day, as a contributor and participant in these meetings, I announced that I had received a notice from the principal that students in all grades were required to sit in assigned seats while in the cafeteria because of rowdiness (food fights and too much yelling). In this lunchroom, students normally could sit wherever they wanted, usually with friends. The kids’ first reaction to the announcement was to protest the unfairness of assigned seats since the students claimed they were not causing any problems. I had no idea if this was true. As we began to discuss possible configurations for assigned seating, one kid groaned, “Boy–girl, right?” The general negative reaction to the possibility of a mixed-gender seating arrangement led to a discussion about student perceptions of a mandated boy–girl configuration as punishment. The kids discussed the risks of sitting boy–girl; if a girl and boy sat together they could count on being teased. But sitting with friends was also problematic. Often kids saved seats so students could not always sit where they wanted to anyway. There were a lot of complex issues coming to the surface—the lunchroom was definitely a place of contestation and conflict.

I introduced the idea of co-researching the lunchroom-seating rule. As co-researchers, we would spend time during morning meeting investigating the interactions of a commonplace site, our lunchroom. We talked about the situation in the lunchroom and audiotaped our conversations. As we listened to our tapes, we made a chart of topics that evoked a strong emotional reaction to the issue. We crafted the topics into inquiry questions.

Research Questions

• What causes food throwing? Is this a problem? What causes “no trash-backs?”
• What happens when people save seats? How many people save seats?
• What makes the lunchroom loud? What is too loud?
• How does a chain reaction happen? What is a chain reaction?
• What do people like about the lunchroom?
• What do people not like about this space?

We also went into the field to observe lunchroom behaviors and interactions. Students were divided into randomly assigned research teams and were asked to report back on specific research questions. We viewed the Teaching Tolerance website (http://www.tolerance.org), where we read information about a Mix It Up action project. Mix It Up is a national project that provides information to students and teachers about the importance of reaching across borders and reconfiguring social groupings in school cafeterias. My students were surprised to learn that high schoolers also had lunchroom problems. We wrote in our notebooks about the ideal lunchroom, spent a week planning a Mix It Up lunch of our own, and participated in this lunch in our classroom. One of the prominent features of our Mix It Up lunch was the procedure of students coming into the room and picking a stick with a random table number designating where they were to sit. The children also wrote plays about the lunchroom issue and presented them in readers’ theater format to other classes. The plays focused on different lunchroom problems the students uncovered in their inquiries—gendered teasing about where kids sit, “boys’ tables and girls’ tables,” popularity and the lunchroom, and wanting to escape the lunchroom to go outside. It was pretty amazing to see the kids problematizing the gendered practice of sitting with friends. This was what they had most passionately protested being taken away from them after I first read the principal’s announcement. Now they were interrogating the practice and trying to change it.

Our morning meetings have evolved, but there is still work to do. Recently, during one of our meetings, I noticed that all the boys sat on one side of the circle, and all the girls sat on the other side. When I commented on the contradiction between our talk about mixing it up and how we sat at morning meeting, the kids started laughing and scurrying to new spots in the circle. Kamler (1999, p. 212) believes that these contradictions are important moments in classroom research: “Contradictions are a sign of struggle and struggles are ultimately hopeful; they indicate discourse in flux, shifting subjectivities and hence enable us to imagine the possibilities of change.”

Morning meetings provide opportunities for bringing real events into the classroom. They can also be sites where groups can act as co-researchers into the norms of the social institutions they inhabit. It is a place of possibilities, where the contradictions and tensions between the personal and the social can be addressed and reimagined.

* Adapted from L. Heffernan (2003). Morning meeting: Contradictions and possibilities. School Talk. Copyright July 2003, 8, by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.

Despite national efforts to homogenize the elementary literacy curriculum and to reduce it to a set of skills to be learned, Lee Heffernan and other teachers across the country and internationally are resisting pressures to conform to top-down instructional mandates and are courageously incorporating critical practices into their teaching. Lee’s description of morning meeting in her third grade classroom is a good example of what critical literacy in action looks like.

What Is Critical Literacy?

In the past, Mitzi Lewison and Chris Leland facilitated two study groups of elementary teachers who met regularly to support each other in their efforts to infuse critical approaches into their curriculum. Lee had been a long-time group member. One question that came up repeatedly in early meetings was, “What is critical literacy?” From our perspective, critical literacy practices encourage students to use language to question the everyday world, to interrogate the relationship between language and power, to analyze popular culture and media, to understand how power relationships are socially constructed, and to consider actions that can be taken to promote social justice. Lee’s morning meeting vignette highlights many of these practices. She, like other study group teachers, encourages students to analyze spoken, written, visual, and real-life texts (e.g., the lunchroom) to uncover whose interests are served and whose are being marginalized. These practices are substantively different from what are commonly referred to as critical thinking approaches. Although critical thinking approaches have focused more on logic and comprehension, critical literacies have focused on identifying social practices that keep dominant ways of understanding the world and unequal power relationships in place.

Critical literacies are rooted in principles of democracy and justice, of questioning and analysis, of resistance and action (Edelsky, 1999, 2004)—all uncommon in traditional pedagogies that define a teacher as a transmitter of knowledge. It is interesting that even though democratic principles are highly touted in textbooks and political rhetoric, they are often not taken up in classroom routines (Giroux, 1994). The work that Lee and her students engaged in with the lunchroom project is an inspiring example of how critical practices can be enacted in daily school life.

TABLE 1.1 Kinds of Citizens

Personally Responsible Citizen	Participatory Citizen Description	Justice-Oriented Citizen
Acts responsibly in his or her community Works and pays taxes Obeys laws Recycles, gives blood Volunteers to lend a hand in times of crisis	Active member of community organizations or improvement efforts Organizes community efforts to care for those in need, to promote economic development, or to clean up environment Knows how government agencies work Knows strategies for accomplishing collective tasks	Critically assesses social, political, and economic structures to see beyond surface causes Seeks out and addresses areas of injustice Knows about democratic social movements and how to effect systemic change
Sample Action
Contributes food to a food drive	Helps to organize a food drive	Explores why people are hungry and acts to solve root causes
Core Assumptions
To solve social problems and improve society, citizens must have good character; they must be honest, responsible, and law abiding members of the community.	To solve social problems and improve society, citizens must actively participate and take leadership positions within established systems and community structures.	To solve social problems and improve society, citizens must question, debate, and change established systems and structures when they reproduce patterns of injustice over time.

Source: Westheimer and Kahne (2004, p. 240).

The Role of Theory in Critical Practice

Creating critical citizens is often listed as one of the goals of critical pedagogy. The work of Westheimer and Kahne (2004, p. 240) is useful in helping us to understand how our theories about the world—in this case, citizenship—can make huge differences in the type of social practices we enact in our classrooms. Table 1.1 describes three models of democratic citizenship—personally responsible, participatory, and justice-oriented— and the assumptions that underlie each.

Examining the core assumptions of personally responsible, participatory, and justice-oriented citizens helps us to see how our theories about how to improve society make a difference in the ways we act in the world. The underlying assumptions that lead a teacher to encourage students to contribute to a food drive, help organize a food drive, or explore why people are hungry and act to solve root problems are very different. In critical literacy instruction, our theories and cultural models about what critical literacy is make a difference in the resources we use in the classroom, the social practices we enact, and the stance we take as teachers.

Lee’s underlying assumptions about citizenship and social action were leaning toward Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) justice-oriented category. Students in her classroom questioned established systems and structures (i.e., lunchroom discipline and seating practices), analyzed the current structures to see beyond surface causes, developed research questions, and sent out inquiry teams to find answers. They also gained initial understandings of the historical causes of boy–girl seating in the lunchroom and learned about how others have worked to solve similar problems by researching the Mix It Up website. Finally, the students attempted to change established systems by developing and implementing their own Mix It Up activity and writing and presenting plays to educate other students and teachers in the school. In their plays they depicted the dilemma that every seating arrangement both marginalizes some students and privileges others. It is not an accident that this project moved students toward justice-oriented citizenship. “Any pedagogical choice implies some kind of theory… Neither pedagogical practice nor personal experience can be assumed to be unmediated by theoretical standpoints” (Pennycook, 1999, p. 342).

A Model of Critical Literacy Instruction

After 10 revisions and dozens of conversations, we developed a model of critical literacy instruction. This model is not set in stone, but rather it is our best thinking at this time. We see critical literacy instruction as a transaction among the personal and cultural resources we use, the critical social practices we enact, and the critical stance that we and our students take on in classrooms and in the world. Because of the multi-faceted nature of the model, we can use it as a planning tool and also as a lens from which to examine our teaching. For example, imagine that a teacher decided to read aloud a picture book like Whitewash (Shange, 1997), which depicts racial bullying, verbal and physical violence, and neighborhood kids taking action to protect the victim. Simply reading this book does not guarantee that the teacher is enacting a critical curriculum. Granted, Whitewash does have the potential to be part of critical literacy instruction, but unless the teacher and students are involved in critical social practices and are working from a critical stance, there is no assurance that there will be anything critical about the Whitewash read-aloud. Figure 1.1 is a graphic representation of how we visualize a theory of critical literacy instruction and how the various components of the model interact with each other.

Personal and Cultural Resources

Personal and cultural resources, the outside ring of our model, are what students and teachers draw on to create the content of curriculum. The list of possible resources is endless. It can include personal experience;

FIGURE 1.1 An Instructional Model of Critical Literacy

social issues books; popular culture and media; sites on the World Wide Web; home literacies; textbooks; oral texts; competence in a language other than English; student desires and interests; and community, national, and international issues.

In the case of Lee’s classroom, lunchroom discipline procedures (i.e., boy–girl seating as punishment) became the stuff from which curriculum was built. This is particularly important beca...