The floor; culturally relevant pedagogy

One of the best snippets from the “Where’s the floor?” article really seems to sum up the overall lessons to be learned from studying literacy and language socialization in the child/adolescent classroom: Schools must recognize that they are not the “sole educative force” in a child’s life (p. 118); schools (meaning teachers, really) must take into consideration the types of things children learn at home - and how they learn those things - when designing instruction and dealing with classroom management. It seems that adult education has the potential to acknowledge the other outside influences that students bring with them to the classroom, but even in those settings, there are often numerous problems teachers encounter when working to implement departmental objectives and curriculum, which can preclude implementing other, more critical objectives. This, I think, is the real challenge of the critical educator. Those challenges are affected exponentially when we add the politics of hiring into the mix - do I dare to challenge the status quo when I’m on a semester-to-semester contract? This can become quite a difficult balance to maintain. I think if I can systematically check off individual objectives as I progress throughout a semester (not that I necessarily like that approach, but there is room for creativity in that checking-off), then there are ways to incorporate critical lessons into language education. I suggested one last week - to include lessons on critical reading skills, especially bias detection, within the scope of other elements that go into discussions of strategies for reading expository text. I anticipate that another way to incorporate critical education into my Fall classrooms will be to address expository reading skills with the use of news articles (rather than relying solely on the “culture” textbook)… not a new strategy by any means, but considering that I am sure to have many Persian students in my classes, the material related to the Iranian elections will be good for critical lessons. We also use a novel written by a Korean-American woman, so including news items related to the political situation in/with North Korea will also add to my “culturally relevant pedagogy” (and perhaps you thought it was just the same ole “current events” lessons!)