10 -- Ernest Morrell and concluding thoughts

Critical Literacy and Urban Youth, by Ernest Morrell, is one of my favorites of the whole semester, and a good choice to close the semester, because it is upbeat and optimistic that teachers have the power to change many of the things wrong with American education that we have studied all semester.

Morrell talks about Critical Literacy, by which be means that rather than just read and "appreciate" literature and take the authors technique at face value, we should approach works like a critic. We should analyze and deconstruct the way the text is using language. We shouldn't teach students to not just passively read and accept literature for its own sake, but to question its structure, its arguments, and its methods. This idea does not seem to me as that subversive, maybe because historians in my curriculum do this sort of thing all the time with secondary sources.

Morrell also advocates the use of pop culture and other media to teach critical literacy. One example is the The Godfather/Odyssey lesson plan. This lesson introduces the Odyssey as an epic, by showing that the epic is alive and well in modern movies. It gives an ancient poem like the Odyssey a new relevancy and moves it into the present.

This assignment has given me a greater appreciation for blogging and bloggers. I realize now that the blogosphere is not just crackpot conspiracy theorists barking about the president's birth certificate. It is also a legitimate form of communication.

It was difficult to tie the theme of technology to many of the posts. I was really impressed by the articles about Web 2.0 and the ideas of James Gee and I wanted to say more, but its hard to tie all the ideas together. I'm also sure that I did not discuss and quote from the readings enough, but I felt that we discussed the readings in class, and in the online discussions, and I wanted the blog entries to be more a collection of my own thoughts and feelings about the issues raised in the materials.

I'm not sure that I will continue the blog right now. I am just beginning the teaching curriculum and my ideas are still developing. It is too hard right now to put it all together into a coherent and well reasoned pedagogical philosophy. Maybe after I've started teaching.