Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

"Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom" article gave me a lot of new ideas on activities and also thought me some new things. One of the things I never thought about was teaching multiculturalism by simply having a minority author. The article argues that using a text written by a person of color or having the main character be a person of color might actually be oppressive, because the text might talk about the negative stereotypes. The text will serve as a disservice because students will be left with a negative image of the culture. Instead students should read a text and make connections "while gaining an understanding of similarities across time and cultures".

One of my favorite activities from this article is having students compare rap/hip hop music to poetry. This activity brings in students voice because students like that kind of music and rap is not that much different than poetry. Poetry becomes way more interesting for students because they can make connections with something they like. By the end of the activity students start to write their own poetry. The only problem I see with this activity is that a lot of rap/hip hop songs use bad words, so it might be hard for students to find a song they can use. In high school I actually had a very similar project. My freshman year in high school we had to read a book of our own choosing. After reading the book we had to find three songs which in someway can be connected to the book. After choosing three songs we had to explain how this song relates to the book. This was a cool assignment because it makes you think more about the book and you get to find ideas that are similar to the book, yet they are in the form of music.