Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

            This article gave great insight into the many injustices that are experienced by students in their schools and classrooms.  I also felt like this article gave me so many new ideas on how to approach teaching and how to approach creating my lesson plans.  In some ways this article gave me more courage to think outside of the box and create lesson plans that would be more interesting for my students.

            There were many ideas that interested me in the first section of this article.  Andrade and Morrell talked about how they were all for teaching popular cultural texts in the curriculum, even though they still taught the “classics.”  They also went on to say that many teachers interpret teaching multiculturalism with simply giving their students texts written by African American people or where the main characters are African Americans.  Andrade and Morrell talk about how a text isn’t necessarily multicultural just because an African American writes it, and always teaching these texts to show so-called multiculturalism is really oppressing African American students.  Teachers need to think outside the box and figure out what texts are actually multicultural, without being oppressive.  One of my favorite lines from this section of the article was: “Nothing promotes border crossing or tolerance more than helping students to arrive at an implicit understanding of what they have in common with those they have been taught to perceive as different.”

            In the second section of this article, I particularly liked the mention of the movie Stand and Deliver and how it was used in the classroom as a comparison to Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities to study the conditions and ways in which students were able to achieve great things in urban schools.  I remember watching this film many times, one of which was for my educational psychology class, and I remember that I was so inspired to go out of my way to help my students.  I want to make sure my students know that they are not destined to be a high school drop out or to never go to college just because their school doesn’t have the materials they need.  There is always hope.  Every student has the potential to do better.

            Lastly, I just wanted to note that I loved the idea (taken from Paulo Freire) that a pedagogical practice should be centered on dialogue, inquiry, and the real exchange of ideas between teachers and students because they have a great deal to offer one another.  Andrade and Morrell had this idea in mind when they created their unit plans and I plan to keep this idea in mind when I am writing the three-week unit plan for this class.