Critical literacy is a response to injustice and the production of illiteracy in which students and teachers work together to create an inviting environment for diversity. It’s where the rights to equal learning opportunities are held and where the learning necessities of each child are met by putting aside race, religion, and economic status. Critical literacy gives us a chance to teach and learn without being discriminated by the shadows of racism, sexism, stereotypes, and prejudices.
Through the teachings of Critical Literacy students become more independent and assume responsibility for their actions. Students are able to sifter through their choices and act upon their decisions. They are able to take their own education into their hands and act on their own. By becoming a critical thinker students are able to learn and evolve through higher order thinking. Classroom discussions are a great way to engage students and they are asked to think and respond through critical literacy. Students are able to respectfully acknowledge their peers thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. Then, they can build upon that thought and react to their new information by sharing it with the rest of the class. Robert Probst explains that “The teacher’s contribution to the discussion lies in keeping it organized, keeping it flowing, making sure all perspectives are respected…but it’s also to enrich and deepen the discourse. The teacher’s greater breadth of reading will enable her to spot what the students have missed, to raise questions they haven’t thought of, to see connections to other events and other texts that the less mature readers won’t notice, to recognize the need for more evidence here and a stronger logical connection there…so, she will gradually be training students to talk in more sophisticated and intelligent ways” (Delpit 53).
Critical Literacy allows teachers to engage their students to the subject they are teaching by challenging them. Not like the idea of teaching to the test, in which the students are learning skills to take tests and they are expected to memorize a whole bunch of concepts to later regurgitate it in order to pass the State Exams. By solely learning for the test the students are not being challenged, they are not using their thoughts and feelings to learn, they are only memorizing information. And what happens after the test? All of that information that has not been connected to their lives or interests goes out the window and at the end the students have gained nothing. Herbert Kohl states, “We have to become a more literate society and I think literacy will not come through testing and an obsession with standards, but through patient, intelligent and sensitive speaking, reading, and listening” (Delpit 161). Students need to feel a sense of connection with the materials being learned to fully understand what they are being taught. They need to be motivated by getting them involved in controversial classroom discussions and writing about how they can relate to the subject to build from their background knowledge. The learning will be meaningful and the students will see a reason to why the information being taught is valuable to them.
As a society we must break the chains of the Banking education, which keep the oppressed from succeeding in life. In the article, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire it is evident that non-dominant people are being oppressed by the teachings of the Banking education. “Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extend only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits” (Freire 53). This form of education makes students depend on others, by not allowing them to think on their own. As Freire and Gatto battle against the ideology behind the banking education they believe that schools should engage students in the classroom by challenging them to be critical thinkers and to express their own creativity in the classroom. “Banking education (for obvious reasons) attempts, by mythicizing reality, to conceal certain facts which explain the way human beings exist in the world; problem posing education sets itself the task of demythologizing. Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality. Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers” (Freire 64). Through critical literacy the concept of banking education would be decimated forever.
Critical literacy allows every kind of people to succeed and flourish in life without the need to know ones race, religious beliefs, nor gender. Through critical literacy students will be engaged in meaningful learning and teachers will feel a sense of satisfaction for teaching.
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