Now that I've read a good portion of Prof. Vasquez book, Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children I feel like I have a much better handle on how critical literacy unfolds in a practical setting. I'm really surprised at the topics she goes into with children ages 3-5. When reading the experiences of the children in her class, their dialogue, their control over the classroom agenda and their curiosity it makes me reflect on my own education, especially as a young child. It was certainly nothing like that. We were generally not asked to think about texts, or anything else for that matter, critically. I don't mean to be hard on my teachers, they did their best and many of them were caring and professional. However, in the long run, the message I recieved (loud and clear) was that it was the grades that mattered. I think this stamped out a lot of my natural curiosity about things. Everything that had to do with school was work, and everything else was what I really wanted to be doing, and I never mixed the two. I ended up doing well in school, but I've had a lot of difficulty choosing my path of study and concentrating on one discipline even as I reach the end of my masters degree. I think this has a lot to do with the how I was taught to learn, namely passively, and that the ultimate goal of learning is how you are evaluated by the teacher, mostly in a quantitative nature.
I like Vivian's example so much particularly because her students are learning to be independent inquirers and the skills they are learning, writing, math, etc are skills they need immediately to complete a project or activity that is important to them. They are learning to be critical, they are learning about certain topic areas, but most importantly they are learning how to learn, and how to find out about what they don't already know.
That's why I think it could be very valuable for students in the critical literacy classroom to explore the way the school works and how their success is evaluated. What do grades mean? (Whoa, whoa, whoa...I'm not saying we should do away with grades) Students should explore different notions of success in learning and should explore what "the school's" goals for them are. I think that examining my own learning and other people's expectations for me academically at a young age would have had an impact on my approach to learning even into adulthood.
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3 comments:
Erin,
I agree with your evaluation on the kind of education you received growing up. I think we all experienced a similar one with grades being the main focus. I can't even imagine what it most be like now with the No Child Left Behind act, where the main focus seems to be teaching for the test. Imagine what it would have been like to be in a classroom such as the one Dr. Vasquez's describes in her book. To have such critical awareness skills fostered at such a young age, I think would have given us a completely different education. Instead, I find that we are repeating history with our teachers being told to focus on the outcomes, rather than on the process.
-Kristina
It really is difficult to imagine a DCPS classroom that allows for the amount of flexibility that Dr. Vasquez describes in her book... I mean, we are required to have standards on our boards, are pressured to work towards standardized testing review, bombarded by daily interruptions and inconsistent schedules, etc...
I do my best to advocate critical thinking in my classroom all the while trying my best to get through the exhaustive curriculum demands and that is the best I can do at the moment.
I really wish all our kids (and myself) could have attended a pre-k class as described in the book. I wonder how those kids are doing now?
-DOOM
I wish I had kept in contact with the kids I write about in the book. I was able to keep in touch with some of them up until a few years later. At that time those who kept in touch had continued to advocate for their beliefs and advocate for equity. One of them even set up an audit trail at home with his mom.
I too had a mandated curriculum to follow so what I did was to make sure I knew what was being asked of me so that I could articulate the ways in which our critical literacy curriculum, in fact, surpassed anything that had been mandated. I also made sure I knew the community in which I worked, my colleagues and so forth.
What I learned is that once you are able to create some space for CL it becomes much easier to create more and more spaces.
I'm very much enjoying reading these posts and comments.
Thanks everyone!
vivian
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