Critical Literacy in Practice

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Comment by Jennifer Alford on January 15, 2009 at 10:37pm

I've just joined this discussion group and am keen to know how other teachers are using CL in their teaching practice. I'm actually researching how teachers of ESL (ELLs) use CL in their lessons for my PhD. If anyone is an English language teacher and has ELLs in their classrooms (senior secondary) I'm keen to know what's happeining in the US! In Australia, Crit Lit seems to have had its hey day and is now 'under threat' with a new conservative national curriculum on its way. ESL teachers don't quite know what to do with CL anymore, despite many of us being inspired by it. I have loads of good reading materials about CL if anyone wants them!!!

Comment by dea conrad-curry on January 3, 2009 at 4:29pm

I have been working with bringing critical literacy to the classroom that really engages students through technology and imagery. One of my suggestions includes having students work in Wikipedia by reading through the discussions tab to note the kinds of criticisms those entries are exposed to and then...fix them up or add to the discussion. I have a couple of other ways to engage both teachers in critical literacy that incorporates images from the media that are found daily in the news, on television commercials, and on almost every website we visit.

I lead workshops on this topic and the discussions are lively and sometimes, heated! I find that teachers sometimes come to professional deveopment workshops with a "meeting" attitude, but using critical literacy approaches to learing and teaching gets people looking much more deeply at texts and actions.

Comment by Virginia W Juettner on September 2, 2008 at 3:57pm

I am excited about joining this discussion to help inform my practice and to share some photos of student graduate work completed this summer. I most interested in use of art and theatre to develop critical literacy events. I agree with Vivian, that technology is important to study in this endeavor since so many of our students are using technologies in ways we never learned in school. I will bring in my photos and download an example or two.