“Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom”

            As I read Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s case study, the thought that kept coming to my mind was the importance of really knowing and understanding my students.  I need to know and understand their background and the things they experience on a daily basis, because I can utilize that information to enhance their learning process.  In many English classes, students struggle to be engaged learners, because they find the literature they are assigned to read and write about as boring and irrelevant.  Duncan-Andrade and Morrell discovered the importance of combining the classics with popular cultural texts that their students found relevant to engage their students and help them acquire the necessary skills to help them communicate effectively outside of the classroom.  By creating a “cross-cultural literary study,” students can recognize the similarities as well as the differences between cultures and experiences, which helps them make deeper connections by relating it to themselves.  I also appreciated the point that traditionally our public school system in its “industrialized” form has branded forms of culture that are not traditional or main-stream as undesirable and that needs to change.  Students need to be exposed to different views to expand the way they think and perceive the world around them.  I also see the value in offering students the opportunity to explore literature relatable to their lives, like the use of rap music in a poetry unit, because it involves a medium that they are interested in and they feel comfortable with it.  Utilizing relatable material with more traditional forms of literature helps students see that they are connected and relatable. This familiarity makes classical literature less scary for students and it might motivate them to engage in these texts.