Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

           I absolutely loved this text because it talked about popular culture being integrated in the classroom. I feel like education is focused on preparing students for college, placement tests, ACT’s, SAT’s, etc. It’s stressful not only for the teachers, but for the students as well because they must compete with other students, and measure up to what their teachers/parents want them to be. Having students apply their life to the texts they are reading in class, helps them better understand the characters point of view, especially with oppressed texts. High school is a detrimental time in a young adult’s life, they are going through hormones, issues at home, peer pressure, and oppression as well. We, as teachers, can integrate multiculturalism in our lessons by having “students pay close attention to the treatment of those who [are] distinguished as cultural “Others” (5). When I was in high school, I hated reading classics. This included Old Man and the Sea, Poison Wood Bible, Romeo and Juliet, Fahrenheit 451, etc. They are boring, and I always felt the teacher rushed through it, so she could move on to the next thing that the state required her to do. To this day, I don’t remember any of those texts because multiculturalism was never applied. I remember reading the oppressive text, The Secret Life of Bees, and I will never forget that book. Why? Because my teacher made sure we, as members of society, recognized and understood racism. There is a difference between “reading the world and reading the word, where readings of the word informed readings of the world in a dialectic cycle” (9). Our teacher made us do both because you can’t have one without the other. She did this by creating a wailing wall for us to stick our prayers on, and she also made us kneel on grits so we knew what punishment the characters went through. I will never forget that book, or that lesson because it put me in the characters’ shoes.