Critical Literacy GED Academic Writing Pedagogy: Encouraging a Repressive Tolerance?

• In Event: Social Justice in Action

Abstract

With the new General Education Development exam’s focus on academic writing, adult literacy GED programs are more visibly joining a greater conversation about language, inequities, and exclusion; in addition, they are also inheriting unresolved issues and questions about how to conscientiously teach a dominant discourse to students who have been traditionally marginalized by such discourses (Delpit, 1992; Lu, 1992). Because of this, it is crucial for GED programs to better understand how to more effectively integrate critical language activities, allowing adult literacy GED programs to heed Freire’s call for “critical and embodied engagement with the word and the world” (Bernstein, p.86).

Author

• Sasha V. Lotas, University of Washington - Seattle