Reading Through Alternative Perspectives

Texts:

• "Critical Literacy" by Heather Coffey

• "Socializing with the Ghosts of Our Racial Past: Embracing Traumatic Teaching and Learning in Literacy Education" by Justin Grinage

• "Critical Literacy: Foundational Notes" by Allan Luke

I am only going to discuss the Coffey and Grinage articles in this reflection because I got a lot out of them and there is a lot there.

Starting with the Grinage article. The poem that Grinage starts the article off with, for one, gives me chills every time I read it or hear it in any format because it is just so powerful and still so insanely relevant. It helps paint Grinage's main point, which is that rather than ignore the haunting of past racial traumas in education, we should embrace these hauntings to help us engage with the complex racial history that exists in the United States, and how it plays a role in the current racial climate today.

"English and literacy education can play a key role in this endeavor through engaging with trauma novels (Balaev, 2008) that expose how racial violence impacts American society," (Grinage).

I really like this idea of using critical literacy, specifically through the reading of trauma novels, to interact with the past in order to understand where the U.S. is now, and where it should go. However, what scares me about this is I don't feel qualified to teach about these racially violent and traumatizing texts as a white woman. But maybe that is exactly the problem. I just need to own what I don't know, allow my students to critique me, and tackle it head on because that is exactly what Grinage says: we can't avoid the past and ignore these texts. We have to embrace them and interact with them (criticize, bring a new perspective, connect secondary readings) to understand why these texts exist and how we can grow and learn from them. That is what I hope to do when bringing these really heavy racially charged texts into my classroom, and I really hope I can foster discussion, open conversation about how we feel about these texts and what we want to get out of them.

"If educators are unwilling to teach about racial violence and U.S. curriculum has largely buried this history, how do we teach students about racism? (Grinage).

The next text that I want to discuss is the Coffey article. There was a lot in this article that grabbed my attention and that I hope to utilize in my future classroom. To make it easy on myself, I am just going to write a list of all the points that I liked from this article because there were a lot...hope that's cool :)

Critical Literacy Points to Keep in Mind

1. Using critical pedagogical methods, teachers can create spaces where they can be learners and the students can be teachers so everyone is analyzing each other's theories of knowledge (2).

2. "Teachers can help empower students by providing opportunities for them to find their voices," (Coffey 3).

3. Developing lessons based on student interests and needs can help invite students into a larger community dialogue (3).

4. Encourage students to examine the given text from other perspectives and re-write them from the marginalized point of view to see where the power lies in the text (4).

5. Bring in supplementary texts to allow students the opportunity to make connections with the content being studied (4).

6. Utilize songs and media to make connections between popular media and political issues (5).

7. Give students choice in what they read and bring together the common themes of the various books students are reading to examine the different voices and experiences of the authors (6).

8. Have students practice reading a text from a resistant perspective to gain understanding of how representative groups would read a text (6).

That is a lot to keep in mind when thinking about critical literacy in the classroom, but it all feels so important and crucial to helping my students be successful in and out of school. I especially like the aspect of student choice and doing a book club style discussion groups and bringing their ideas on their book to the whole class and comparing different books with similar themes and breaking them down and analyzing them from different perspectives.

That's all I got for now. My brain hurts.