Writing to Change the World: Creating Critical and Relevant Texts in Secondary English Classrooms (original) (raw)

Adolescents as Agents of Change

The Journal of Teaching and Learning, 2013

This article chronicles a research study in two middle schools in Canada where teachers and learners were engaged to create and integrate digital texts representative of social justice issues into the school curriculum. The article illustrates through samples of digital texts the tacit skills of students that are not readily seen in schools. Centred within a multiliteracies pedagogy (New London Group, 1996; Cope & Kalantzis, 2000), young adolescents were exposed to global issues through critical readings of children’s social justice picture books and young adult novels (Freire & Macedo, 1987, Christenson, 2000) . The adolescents’ critical reading and writing of digital and print texts raised understanding of the nexus between socio-political and economic injustice, hence showing them as critical agents of change within their school communities.

Feel these Words: writing in the lives of urban youth

English in Education, 2012

Daveadolescents from Chicago whose out-of-school literacy practices Susan Weinstein explores in her book Feel These Words: Writing in the Lives of Urban Youth. In this two-year ethnographic study conducted in school hallways, online chat rooms, homes, and in one case, a street corner, Weinstein examines these adolescents' writings which were created in spaces outside of the classroom. Noting that each of her participants is either African-American or Latina/o, comes from low-income families, and struggles with using standard English in conversation and schoolwork, Weinstein interrogates those all too common representations by politicians, the media, and those within the school system that these qualities are somehow preventing these adolescents from achieving middle-class status. Their writings exhibit their love of language and intellectual pursuitswritings, which are themselves marginalized in much the same way The Writers find themselves. Weinstein's book provides another way of reading their words by illuminating their complex relationships with their identities, their communities, and society at large. Organized into eight chapters, whose titles are taken from her participants' words and hers, Weinstein deftly moves back and forth between close examinations of The Writers' discourse practices and the larger context which frames them. After introducing readers to each of her nine participants (four of them, Jig, Mekanism, Crazy, and TeTe, have formed their own rap crew-The Maniacs, and Weinstein sometimes refers to them as a separate group), Weinstein conducts the tremendous work of documenting not only their worlds but also the outside forces that have influenced the schools and communities in which they live. Weinstein's relationship to her participants is a multilayered oneshe is their teacher at La Juventud, an alternative school which encourages a more informal, but no less challenging, relationship between students and teachers. She is a researcher who records and writes up her field notes constantly and is rarely without her tape recorder. She is a writer, and while she admittedly identifies more so with academic writers, she experiences exhilaration when she reads a poem of hers aloud at a poetry reading at a local bar. She reflects in her first chapter titled "I am me, but what am I?," "I enjoyed the individual writing of my poem, yes, but even more, I liked the performance, the response, and the thrill of jumping in" (12) as she begins to experience some of what The Writers share. Before she returns to The Writers, she first examines in the second chapter "You never let me speak: power, language, and learning," the larger system(s) in which her participants negotiate. She speaks first to the US educational system's attempts to recognize, control, and change their language; she analyzes the Ebonics debate

Competing Stories of School and Community "Improvement”: Youth of Color's critical literacies and storytelling practices in a high school writing class

2019

COMPETING STORIES OF SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENT: YOUTH OF COLOR’S CRITICAL LITERACIES AND STORYTELLING PRACTICES IN A HIGH SCHOOL WRITING CLASS Kelly Mershon DeLuca This practitioner research study uses qualitative data collection and analysis methods to explore student engagement with critical and multimodal literacy curriculum in the context of a writing course focused on storytelling. This research addresses the issue of deficit framing in schools serving Youths of Color and the negative characterizations that lead to assumptions about their learning capability based upon their racialized identity. As a result of these deficit discourses, Youths of Color are often positioned as at risk by educators, an assumption which often results in schools that lack intellectually robust and culturally relevant learning opportunities. In an effort to surface and disrupt deficit discourses, I looked to literacy theories such as critical, multimodal, and community literacies, which seek t...

What's the purpose?: How urban adolescents of color interpret and respond to noble and ignoble purposes constructed in media texts

Journal of Urban Learning, Teaching, and …, 2010

Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) offers the promise of increased success for underserved students in urban schools. This qualitative case study examines a middle school reading teacher's understandings and implementation of CRP and the researcher's supportive role over a three-semester collaboration. Two categories of results are described: evidence of the teacher's increasing CRP and tensions in the collaboration. Increased CRP was evidenced by the teacher's enhanced emphasis on high expectations, metacognitive strategies, critical literacy, and units connected to students' cultures. Tensions included sporadic meetings, overlooked prerequisite instruction, ignored supportive materials, and problematic classroom management. Implications are included.

From Youth Activism to Youth-Powered Curriculum

Berkeley Review of Education, 2022

How do youth move in an uprising? Members of YoUthROC, a BIPOC-centered, youth-led research group with young people from both the university and the community, reflect on creating a youthpowered curriculum that processes years of activism and inspires young people to use teaching as a way to create change in their communities. To ensure the relevance of their curriculum to the current needs, strengths, and curiosities of young people, the YoUthROC team wrote and collected autoethnographies, cataloged historical artifacts, analyzed social media, and conducted public focus groups and Instagram spotlight interviews during a year of uprising and unrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Results from this research include the following themes: the centrality of collectivism, internal and collective self-determination, and young people's already-existing commitment to analysis and change. Educators, adult activists, and youth need to see that young people are central to social movements and are already contributing profoundly to anti-racist, antioppression work. This reflection and YoUthROC's ongoing work is for young people eager to engage in activism, teachers looking to create authentic student-centered classrooms, and adult researchers ready to learn from and create with youth researchers.