Urban Literacy Education: Poetry, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, and the Struggle to Teach for Social Justice

• In Event: 49.088 - Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: 49.088-26 - Teacher Research: Critical Literacy Across the Grades

Abstract

As practitioner research, this study attempts to offer an example of reflective teaching that illustrates a knowledge-of-practice. The questions framing this research are: 1. How are the students engaged in multiple ways of knowing and multiple forms of literacy learning?
2. (How) can I challenge the positioning of an entire class/grade as struggling students? By inquiring into my own practice, I attempt to document in greater detail the learning taking place in an eleventh grade English class in a large urban school district, while at the same time working to challenge my own assumptions about teaching poetry and rethinking what worked for me in the past.

Author

• Christopher B. Crowley, Wayne State University