Blog Post #6: Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

In this article by authors Jeff Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell, they talk specifically about different theorists and important scholars. They talk about how the proponents of critical pedagogy drawn upon these important scholars and theorists (1). There is an argument for an "approach to education that is rooted in the existential experiences of marginalized peoples" (1). Or, trying to find a way to teach all students from all areas with use of critical pedagogy.

Our authors also talk about how they have been "investigating classroom interventions that are built upon the core principles of critical pedagogy" (1). The different tasks and lessons that they have used in urban high school english classrooms. One example is the curriculum that they taught to students at East Bay High school which has a diverse population (5). Their curriculum had texts such as Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, The Odyssey, Romantic poetry, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Our authors stated that they believe "literacy educators could encourage a multicultural reading of any text even if the text is several thousand years old (5).

I really liked reading what Duncan-Andrade and Morrell had to say about critical pedagogy and I also liked that they talked about other scholars and theorists and not just Freire. When they talked about the lessons they taught to students they had differing and varying reasons as to why they chose the texts they did and why they decided to teach these texts as lessons. This reading also made critical pedagogy easier to understand not only from the way Freire describes it but having it relate to new media helped a lot. It also helped understanding critical pedagogy in a different way.