Questions of Canons. Culture. Goals. Environments.

Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture in an Urban Secondary English Classroom

Q: What types of writing are the focus and what skills are we focusing on as teachers of writing and literature? 
(pg.185 persuasive, informative, formal, informal)
From reading this, I feel like our goal as educators for our students is higher education or college. We teach to prepare our students for college. For the SAT and ACT tests because they reflect our work and our school on an “important” level. I think that this teaching “goal” is supported by the Common Core State Standards. We need to realize though that college isn’t for everyone. There are other professions and avenues for students to explore and consider.

I am just wondering if the way we teach is aimed at preparing our students 

for life or for high education.

Q: How do motivate our students to want to be engaged in the literary works we teach from? 
We must connect with our students. We have to make it matter. Not just on the outer most level of mattering but find a way to personally connect them to the works, to the writing, and to the content we are working with. When working with our literary content we need to connect and teach our students to be culturally aware from multiple perspectives and seek levels of justice within the conflicts and solutions that are presented.  

There is so much to be said about urban schools. The idea I stand by and always have stood by with regards to location and the environment a teacher teaches in and students attend has nothing to do with the education or success they should, could, or would achieve. Part of a teachers job is to be creative and overcome barriers or obstacles and provide their students with the best possible education. Location and economics get messy and so influence students greatly, however, it can be worked with and overcome. All students are equally as capable of finding success. Some will just require more work, effort, and teacher support than other.

Q: Is the canon chosen on a basis of what national minds want us to think, hear, and interpret our lives off— if this is our literary “history”? 

The hope of the canon study is to gain a sense of appreciation for the works and western culture of which they came. The hope and the reality of using the canon are different though. The canon leaves out a lot of cultural awareness and justice that are associated with all this talk of being “critical” and thinking “critically”. With the canon use we as teaching are given many different means of learning to help teach the material. Many of the works have been made into films and thus provide students with a visual engagement helping with more understanding.

To teach these canonry pieces I couldn’t agree more than with the statement on pg. 188. The units we teach using the canon works need to be paired with film studies, newspapers, magazines, and with this we need to give our students the opportunities to translate what they have read and connect it with their culture and community. No matter what kind of community or culture it is, they need to connect it or show why and how it is so brutally different. The fact and goal is to connect it with their lives, with their reality. 

Q: Is the Literary Canon simply just a compilation of works that support ideas or political agendas? Do we suggest and teach to the canon because that is what we are supposed to hear, or more so what “they” want us to here?

I don’t want to think this but I do believe that a lot of teachers do not teach intentionally much deeper than surface level. Especially with the canon list. I did a little background research— I feel like teachers agree with teaching the works listed because if they didn’t there wouldn’t be anything to do about it anyways and because it is the norm to teach them. To not teach them would not only against the curriculum most of the time and it would be so unusual to not have a list to work from that you would have to find reasons to teach whatever replacement you could find. We discussed the canon briefly in my Intro to Fiction class last Spring in addition to reading a lot of the works listed. I wasn’t against any of the works and looking at the list from a far, they are all great works but also very old and very, well, … white. Grated it is the “western” canon but I feel like really there is a lot of other culture that could and should be present here especially if it is being taught in our schools.

Students from both personal and observed experience really don’t enjoy the readings they have to do at the time and don’t appreciate them until later on in life if ever. I didn’t appreciate the reads I had to work on at the high school level literally until last year when I started working on my English endorsement and started working with that content. Only then because I didn’t have to reread it to actually do the assignment. Sad, but very truthful. 

Politics, economics, sciences…rights… politics….