Shawn's 493 Blog

            Kelly Gallagher’s book, Readicide introduces the term as “The systematic killing of a love of reading, often exacerbated by the innate mind-numbing practices found in schools.” (Gallagher 7) Gallagher demonstrates a wealth of causes for this problem, chief among them being the way standardized tests are addressed regarding reading. Gallagher presents this as the overarching problem that acts as the reason for many of the additional problems that lead to readicide. One of the most shocking things that I found regarding the involvement of standardized tests with this problem is that the intense pressures that standardized tests put on schools can cause struggling readers to be swept under the rug within testing data, thus marginalizing them and preventing them from getting a lot of the help that they desperately need. Gallagher points out this issue and explains how this circumstance occurs within the following excerpt ...

            Cris Tovani’s I Read it but I Don’t Get It offers a wealth of reasons why many students struggle with reading, either for pleasure or understanding within school. I myself can identify with many of the reasons that were stated, despite my reputation of being very proficient in both reading and English as a subject. The reason I can identify with many of the students discussed in this text is because when I was in high school I was what Tovani calls a “word caller”. According to Tovani a word caller does understand how to read and also reads for pleasure, but is unable to understand that reading requires thinking. (Tovani 15) I can honestly say that I used to fit this bill perfectly in high school. I could memorize plot details very well which made quizzes on books a breeze, however, I struggled with the idea that texts often said more than the words that were on the page. This made argumentative papers very difficult for me, especially during m...

            Social Justice is an important aspect of education today, especially with the increasingly diverse population of students that are currently enrolled in schools in mind. But what exactly is social justice and why is it so important?             While there are many definitions of what social justice is and many opinions regarding how it can be used in education, I find that the definition and explanation given by the article “Understanding Social Justice for Education” to be the most relevant to the subject of social justice in the classroom. According to the article, social justice in the classroom can be described as “both a process and a goal” with the ultimate aim being “full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs” (Hytten & Bettez 2011) This definition and explanation of social justice as it is use...

Jeff Duncan Andrade and Ernest Morrell’s Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom really drives the point home that as a teacher you need to be aware of the cultures and backgrounds of your students to effectively teach them and make lessons relatable to their lives. Amazingly these two teachers proved that sometimes that is the tool that makes the biggest difference, especially with underprivileged students. Andrade and Morrell proved this during an experiment in which they wanted to focus on introducing critical pedagogy that allowed students to think deeply about the various issues in their school and the world while at the same time introducing English lessons that made use of each students’ culture and backgrounds to educate them. A key example of this occurred when Andrade and Morrell used rap music within a poetry unit as a comparison tool to help students discover the similar themes between classic poetry and the music that they were so fond of. (Andrade a...

            Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed presents the idea that teachers who use the “banking method” e.g. see their students merely as receptacles for depositing knowledge (Freire Ch. 2) are oppressing them by refusing to see them as individual human beings that are capable of intelligent discussion and thoughts and putting themselves at the center of attention as the only one who can distribute knowledge. First off, I agree with his line of thinking wholeheartedly as I had experiences like this with several teachers in high school, particularly within science and math. Now that I look back on it, this may have been a large part of the reason I never excelled in either of these subjects.             However, as a solution to this problem that can benefit both students and teachers, Freire proposes a method known as “Problem posing education.” (Frei...