Joy and Justice

Joy and Justice: Teaching Reading and Writing

I have wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember. Being able to make a difference in a child’s life brings me joy, and encouraging students to work for social justice, both in and out of the classroom is exciting and challenging. Linda Christensen, in the introductory chapter of her book Teaching for Joy and Justice, explains a few key steps towards promoting a classroom that is geared towards both joy and justice.

1. Create a curriculum with authors and characters who represent all students and provide a window to the world. This key point reminds me of an article I read on how literature should provide opportunities for windows and mirrors to their lives. Windows allow students to look into the lives of people that are different from them, while mirrors allow them to look into their own lives and relate to the characters that they are reading about. Not only does this theory apply to reading literature, but also to writing. As teachers, we should encourage students to write about topics that explore new ideas and expand their knowledge.  Check out the article here!


2. Create a curriculum that helps students understand the world. This means that lessons should be centered are things that are meaningful to the students. LeGuin, in the article The Operating Instructions states that “Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.” In a sense, the words that we provide our students to read, and the words that the students write themselves allow for an endless world of opportunities for students to learn, discuss, and create.

3. Begin with the belief that all students are capable of brilliance. This statement is extremely important and reminds educators that “Just because students lack skills doesn’t mean that they lack intelligence.” In a Ted Talk by Rita Pierson, she describes how every student deserves to feel that they are capable and a teacher who will support them. Alexander Chee, in The Writing Life, describes a moment when he felt confident in his writing, and he states that “whatever it was that I did when I was writing a story, I wanted to do it again.”. This excitement that Chee has towards writing is exactly what I hope to inspire in the mind of my students. By making sure that each student feels valued in the classroom, and by believing in them and helping them to believe in themselves, students can learn to love both reading and writing.

I love the ideas expressed in the readings for this week and they really made me think about how I can better approach unfamiliar lessons with joy and aim to promote justice in the classroom. I have always been interested in ways to incorporate multicultural perspectives into the classroom, and I was happy to be able to reflect on multiple experiences for teaching writing. It brings me joy to be able to learn from experienced educators and authors, and learning about ways to promote justice in the classroom makes me excited for my future as a teacher.

Comments

  1. What's Up With Welsh?January 28, 2019 at 9:44 AM

    These three points that you bring up, particularly the third one, I agree with. It is critical to consider what sort of literature is being taught, and the types of authors who wrote them. Many schools offer a whitewashed version of literature, with few or no authors who are of different ethnicities. Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" and Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" will offer students insights into the world that cannot be captured or realized in, say, Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," or even Shakespeare. But before considering the type of literature students are exposed to, at a base level educators must believe that all students are capable of brilliance, as Pearson states in her wonderful Ted Talk. If one believes in a child, one enables them, and a child who is enabled can have the world at their fingertips.

    ReplyDelete
  2. CheyenneJanuary 28, 2019 at 12:23 PM

    You break down Christensen’s “Introduction” in her book Teaching for Joy and Justice very effectively. Your second point, “Create a curriculum with authors and characters who represent all students and provide a window to the world,” draws to me especially. Students who feel represented in the literature will feel more encouraged and supported in the classroom. Plus, students should be shown that the world is larger than just what they see in their community. There are far more ethnicities, religions, abilities, sexualities, etc., than just what we see in our towns and classic literature. As teachers, we need to show our students as much of the world as we can and break away from the familiar and worn-out narratives that have always been taught.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Power of Poetry

I was moved to tears reading the poems written by students in Linda Christensen’s class, and it made me realize the power of poetry and how eye-opening it can be. I felt like I was able to learn about the lives of these students, the pain that they had experienced, and the hope that they had. Christensen provided a great framework for teaching different types of poetry, and I would love to be able to use her style of teaching in my future classroom. One of the things that stuck out to me most about this chapter was that Christensen started with a sample text, and she wrote her own. Starting with a sample text is a great way for students to understand the format and style of the specific poem, and it also strengthens both reading and listening skills. In addition, by writing her own poems to share with her students, students were able to learn about her past, and often, they were able to make connections with experiences that they had in their own lives. ...
Read more

Creating a REAL Curriculum

Image
Reading about R.E.A.L teaching reminded about the Culturally Relevant Pedagogy that we discussed earlier this semester. Thinking about the R.E.A.L applications allowed me to understand ways that I can incorporate it into my own teaching. In order to make the curriculum relevant to students’ lives, the students need to determine this, not the teacher. This is something that I think is so important because far too often, teachers make assumptions about students because of where they come from without getting to know them personally. A quote that stuck out to me from this reading was “We convey messages to our students by what we include as well as what we neglect in the curriculum and official classroom activities” . This quote stuck out to me in a number of ways. Firstly, it implies that students pay attention to what is being taught in the classroom. We have already learned about making the curriculum engaging, and from reading Linda Christensen, we have learned about ways to make it ...
Read more

Response to Christensen

Image
I really enjoyed this week's readings and found them very helpful for learning about how to teach essay writing, and they also helped me to learn more about how to improve my own writing. One of the things that I see a lot of students struggle with is finding reliable information to use in their essay writing. When I taught in a 7th grade English class last semester, I saw first hand how the students used a quote journal while they were reading in order to keep track of important lines of text, character descriptions, and pivotal moments during the story. After each quote, the students wrote a few sentences about what it meant. By the time they had to write their essays, they already had access to a wide variety of quotations to use, and it helped make the process much easier and quicker. I loved reading about Christensen's idea of the "Character Silhouettes", and this is something that I think that elementary students would find particularly fun as well. I can im...
Read more