Blog Post #6: Duncan-Andrade and Morrell's "Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture in an Urban Secondary English Classroom"

I had a lot of mixed feelings as I read through this article. They could have split this article into 3 different articles to make their point, but I gained a lot of good insight to the injustices that students are facing in the classroom. I also learned quite a few new teaching methods that I will definitely be able to utilize in my classroom.

The first section that caught my eye was talking about critical pedagogy that teachers are attempting to find. Teachers are looking to motivate students, develop literacies, and engage their students in finding a fix for educational justices. Motivation for students is always something I'm interested in. I hate being in a classroom where students sit in the very back and talk and are distracted and have no motivation. It's partially on the teacher to figure out what motivates their students and what they can do to improve their teaching. Students also must be engaged in their own learning and teachers can hone in on what it takes to reach that point.

Another section talked about assignments that these teachers used in the classroom. When talking about one of their final assignments, the students were assigned to to present information and take ownership of the knowledge production process. The students that were not presenting were asked to basically interrogate the presenters with positive questions. To pair with the questions, the students were also asked to take a massive amount of notes during the presentations. I loved each of these assignments. It provides a chance for students to take ownership of their work and may actually propel them to take their work more seriously. To coincide with the motivational aspect, taking a large amount of notes can help with deeper understanding. I don't see it as a mindless note taking activity, but more of an interactive knowledge building activity.

Stand and Deliver is one of my favorite movies. The article states that, "we wanted our students to envision themselves as having academic potential, and we wanted to create a curriculum that enabled our students to compete on equal academic footing with their counterparts who were attending the nation's elite schools." I look at this statement as a building block for students who don't find themselves in the best learning conditions.

It's funny that a part of this article talked about a seven week long lesson plan on relating poetry to rap songs because that is similar to what Sarah and I will be doing our three week lesson plan on. I'm definitely going to utilize some of the techniques in this article for our plan.

The last section that I found intriguing was the end section in Race and Justice in Society section. Regardless of the information that was being taught, the authors stated that relevance "leads to a deeper understanding that, in turn, facilitates a more personal and deeper analysis of the themes of race and justice found in the text." The more relevant information that students can interconnect with, the easier it will be for the teacher to get the students engaged and motivated to learn. "As they begin to relate the characters to their own lives, they bring their daily life experiences into their critical interpretation of this text. This idea of creating a relevant curriculum is vital for student involvement. I also really liked the idea of having students connect with new texts and information and using that as a bridge to learn the older canonical texts. There is always room for older texts in my curriculum, but if it takes using newer texts to make the connection, then so be it.

Overall, this article was interesting and useful to me as a student and as a teacher. I plan to use some of the methods and techniques that the teachers and researchers spoke about.