Blog Post 5: Teaching Critical Engagement and Social Justice in the Secondary ELA Classroom

  

Hello all!

For my last blog post of this semester, I’m excited to explore the importance of encouraging critical engagement and social justice in the classroom. It is becoming more and more important to make sure students are able to critically engage with the media they consume, especially as our culture continues to become more digital. We as educators must make sure our students are equipped to participate in this digital world (Bomer, 2011, p. 243).

 

How will I teach Students to critically engage with the world—to question the status quo, to participate productively in digital culture, and to stand up for social justice?

In order to equip our students with the knowledge and skills necessary to critically engage with the world and stand up for social justice, they must be digitally literate and able to navigate the happenings of the online world.

 

Demands of the Digital World

As our world continues to become more digital, it is our job to make sure our students are ready and able to engage with the world digitally, we need to help them learn how to find their ways through the plethora of information and stimuli constantly available in this world. Author Randy Bomer discusses the importance of digital literacy in chapter 14 of Building Adolescent Literary in Today’s English Classrooms. He discusses the importance of “new literacies” being developed by students in order for them to successfully and efficiently engage with texts digitally (Bomer, 2011, p. 243). The National Council of Teachers of English shares this belief, stating that readers today must possess specific skills and capabilities including “proficiency with the tools of technology,” the ability to “build relationships with others to solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally,” and the ability to “attend to the ethical responsibilities” involved with “complex environments” such as the internet, as well as other skills relating to evaluating and critiquing different sources of information for reliability (Bomer, 2011, 243).

 

By encouraging our students to become digitally literate and to meet the “new literacy” requirements discussed by the NCTE, we help better equip our students to critically engage with the world and stand up for social justice. Our students, and even ourselves as teachers, are spending greater amounts of time engaging with digital media and receiving important news via digital sources. Because of this, we must teach students the importance of deciphering whether sources, websites, books, social media posts, and more are reliable places to find information that will shape their opinions and thoughts about cultural events and issues. We can model these new literacies as teachers in our classrooms by choosing reliable sources, discussing reliability with students, critiquing and evaluating sources with our students, and by showing students how we can collaborate in these digital spaces and use them as places for social justice and critical engagement.

 

Keeping Social Justice at the Forefront of Our Classrooms

In addition to teaching our students how to develop digital literacies and engage positively and effectively with the digital world, we must always prioritize social justice in our classrooms and be constantly modeling for our students how we stand up for social justice. While digital literacy is necessary for students to navigate digital sources, teaching students how to be digitally literate is not the only important part of teaching them how to critically engage with the world. In order for students to fully understand and engage with the world, digital or otherwise, they must know how to stand up for social justice and recognize situations of injustice.

A major part of encouraging students to stand up for social justice and going against the status quo includes modeling these actions ourselves. This is also important because instances of injustice are still taking place in schools regularly and it is our job to stand up against it. According to the NCTE’s Guidelines for Affirming Gender Diversity through ELA Curriculum and Pedagogy from 2021, transgender and nonbinary students are facing more hostile school environments than their cisgender peers, and cisgender LGBTQ+ students are still facing more hostile school environments in general than their straight cisgender peers.

To stand up against this, the NCTE provides several suggestions for ELA teachers. Examples include challenging gender norms when they come up, showing representation during class of diverse gender identities, studying to experiences of those with diverse gender identities, and explicitly discussing the intersections of identity, including those of gender identity.

In addition to standing up against injustices relating to gender identity and sexual orientation, teachers must also stand up against injustices relating to racism, sexism, and ableism. Teachers can combat these injustices and challenge the status quo in situations of injustice with these issues by discussing them with students, representing students of all genders, races, and abilities in the classroom visually and in media shown in the classroom, and by listening to the experiences of those with diverse identities. While it is important to include diverse stories in our classroom libraries, we must go beyond this and include diverse voices, experiences, and backgrounds in our direct instruction for students to engage regularly with. According to Jessica Lifshitz’s Inclusion Cannot Be Optional: Using LGBTQ Books in All Classrooms, there is always room to include diverse texts and stories in our classrooms. We can use these texts for “read alouds, give book talks about them, use them as mentor texts for writing assignments,” as well as using them to model reading comprehension skills and strategies and using them to tie in to lessons in math, history, and science (Lifshitz, 2019, p. 3).

 

My Experiences and Ideas

In my own classroom, my mentor teacher and I try to ensure that we are always accurately representing our student population and making sure our students are seen in the media we study and consume while also making sure that diverse identities are represented. For example, the majority of my students are Latine and have been always had to read stories focusing mostly on white people in school. My mentor teacher and I combat this by studying texts written by Latine authors and by choosing texts that our students can see themselves in.

In my placement, we have also chosen to study major instances of social injustice as they have arisen throughout the year. For example, when protests broke out in Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini, we finalized our decision to read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Students learned about Iran’s history of revolution and completed assignments where they had to critically engage with sources covering the current events in Iran to form understandings of the content of the book and its relation to the real-life events happening now. This unit encouraged students to recognize and stand up against social injustice, use digital literacy skills to navigate online sources and texts, and critically engage with news and social media sources covering current events.

I think it is very important to ensure that as many of our units as possible in our ELA classrooms help students practice skills in each of these areas so that they are able to critically engage with the world, stand up for social justice, and successfully navigate the digital world.

 

References

Bomer, R. (2011). Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Guidelines for Affirming Gender Diversity through ELA Curriculum and Pedagogy, NCTE, Mar. 2021, https://ncte.org/statement/guidelines-for-affirming-gender-diversity-through-ela-curriculum-and-pedagogy/

 

Lifshitz, J. (2019). Inclusion cannot be optional: Using LGBTQ books in all classrooms. Heinemann Catalog-Journal.