Learning From Each Other: Justice Work With Ninth-Grade Urban English Students

• In Event: 56.081 - Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: 56.081-16 - Daring to Disagree: Dialogic, Critical, and Social Justice Approaches

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore how critical literacy informed the teaching and learning of teacher-students and students-teachers (Freire, 1971) in a 9th grade English I class. Data are drawn from a larger, ongoing ethnography of a novel partnership between an urban high school labeled as “persistently failing” and a research university that has been approved as an Educational Partnership Organization (EPO). Using an analytics of power, we found that power produced generative frictions that animated culture change in general and changes in power relations in this classroom in particular. This study contributes to research on critical literacy by illustrating how critical literacy can be implemented under intense scrutiny and constraining curricular mandates.

Authors

• Joanne C. Larson, University of Rochester

• Christopher Bethmann, East High School

• James Fitta, East High School

• Eugene Domiano, East High School