Promoting 21st-Century Learning in Urban Classrooms: Teachers as Pedagogical Leaders

• In Event: Teachers as Public Intellectuals and Civic Agents: Toward a Grounded Theory of Transformative Teacher Education

Abstract

Within the current educational climate of high-stakes testing and accountability, the definition and purposes of ‘literacy’ have narrowed to refer only to basic reading and writing skills that can be applied to standardized assessments for purely academic purposes. The effects of such politicies are severe - when literacy instruction is conceived in an academic vacuum, apart from the daily lived practices in which it is embedded, it loses both its power and its relationship to real-world outcomes, such as social and political empowerment. In Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, Freire and Macedo (1987) argue that literacy must be situated within a “theory of cultural production” and must be judged according to whether it reproduces social structures or promotes “democratic and emancipatory change” (p. 141-142). In this session, master classroom teachers will discuss practices that they engage in with students that focus on the power of critical literacy as a gateway to civic agency and empowerment. This paper seeks to contribute to a new grounded theory of critical literacy pedagogy (Morrell, 2008) by exploring how the new media products that students create in progressive English and Social Studies classrooms combine traditional academic literacies with a critical civic consciousness that helps students to become literate on a much more powerful level than traditionally expected from educators.

Questions that the teachers on this session will address include: What does it mean to read and write? How do we teach students to decode television commercials, blogs, Internet sites, billboards, and YouTube videos? How do we help them to create their own multimedia texts? What is still relevant from the “old” or traditional literacies as we teach the new ones? How do literacy skills associated with media consumption and production fit within my content area classes? How are students assessed across these new genres of texts?

Teachers will share findings based on their inquiry into these questions, explaining how they utilize curriculum and pedagogical strategies that not only push critical thinking, but also draw upon the multiple literacies of youth. The teachers on this session will explain how they are re-thinking and designing rigorous, standards-based lessons that challenge students to critique the social conditions and influences that misrepresent and stereotype young people and their communities with media, such as music, video, and the internet.

In this session, teachers will share and discuss the results of action research studies conducted in urban high school classrooms that focus on the processes and challenges of incorporating media and critical literacy skills with students. They will share their standards-based curriculum fused with critical media and resulting student work samples. They will show how students developed key literacy skills, but also critical thinking strategies and personal empowerment necessary for becoming civic agents in their schools and communities. The session will include a discussion of the challenges facing the development of a social justice curriculum and next steps in the field for teacher education and literacy instruction across all content areas.

Authors

• Ernest D. Morrell, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Rudy Duenas, Woodrow Wilson High School

• Veronica Garcia, Woodrow Wilson High School

• Antonio Nieves Martinez, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jorge Lopez, UCLA/CNMT, Roosevelt High School