Creating critical classrooms: reading and writing with an edge (original) (raw)

2015, Educational Media International

is becoming a popular text linking critical literacy theory to practice. With more upper elementary-grade examples, new text sets drawn from "Classroom Resources," end-of-chapter "Voices from the Field," and an Expanded Companion Website, this theoretical and practical must-have text is restructured and revised throughout. Each one of the 10 chapters features the following: teacher-researcher vignette, theories that inform practice, critical literacy chart, thought piece, invitations for disruption, and lingering questions. Following Linda Christensen's foreword, underlining the importance of reflection in the teaching practice, and the introduction, where the book is presented as a result of the authors' struggle to articulate a theory of critical literacy in all its complexity, Chapters 1 through 9 explain the authors' critical literacy instruction model, which addresses two main issues: I. Moving between the personal and the social; and II. Locate the model in specific contexts. In Chapter 1, the authors describe the various components of their model by visiting the work of a teacher-researcher. In the next three chapters, the numerous personal and cultural resources that teachers and students use in critical classrooms are explored. To be more specific, in Chapter 2, the authors help the readers look into how life experiences can be used as an entrée into critical literacy; in Chapter 3, the readers find out how to use popular culture to promote critical practice; and in Chapter 4, they experience how to use literature for children and young adults to get started with critical literacy. In Chapter 5, the authors enable the readers to explore how critical literacy may be enacted during a visit to the museum, whereas in Chapter 6, the readers discover how critical literacy may be enacted in the context of interrogative multiple viewpoints, through strategies such as role play, inner dialogues, dramatizing bullying scenarios, and creating "I" statements for characters. The authors also stress the need to expand the curriculum with attempts to bring in ideas and people not prominent in the traditional in-school culture. In Chapter 7, the authors focus on sociopolitical issues, supporting that children may become sociopolitically aware through conversations with adults, e.g. teachers and others, who are sociopolitically active, whereas in Chapter 8, they focus on promoting social justice, presenting how to investigate risky topics that surround children's lives in attempts to create a critical curriculum. In Chapter 9, the authors discuss how traditional school curricula may function to welcome or keep out the cultural resources children bring into school and stress how the reflexive stance may enable a teacher-researcher to realize how to move her/his practice forward. Last but not least, in Chapter 10, a series of invitations for students, based on a particular social issue, that can be used in any part of the critical literacy instruction or the curriculum, is provided. With Creating Critical Classrooms: Reading and Writing with an Edge, Mitzi Lewison, Christine Leland and Jerome C. Harste succeed in providing a must-have book in the framework of critical literacy. It is essential for every critical literacy