“I Knew He Was Black!” Omar’s Embodied Critical Literacy Performance in a High School English Classroom

• In Event: Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Issues of Race, Class, and Gender in the Classroom

Abstract

How are critical literacy practices and pedagogies constructed by a student teacher and his students in an urban high school English classroom? Sociocultural theory, critical literacy, and theories of embodiment and performance frame this ethnographic study on the construction of critical literacy by a student teacher and his students. Through interviews with the focal student teacher, classroom fieldwork, and document analysis, I honed my analysis in on the movement, gestures and speech that characterized critical embodied performances of literacy practices by both students and teacher. I then take a close look at one student—Omar—and the ways in which his movement and performance constituted critical engagement while simultaneously complicating the construction of critical literacy legitimated by the student teacher.

Author

• Erin Beeman Stutelberg, University of Minnesota