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Possibilities or problems who's to say.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Critical pedagogy is teaching which aims to help students identify and disrupt the social systems which perpetuate inequity. This essay details the experiences of a teacher, school, and community surrounding a critical pedagogy writing assignment for high school seniors. Although the assignment seemed engaging, it was met with resistance. Two significant and related problems surfaced from analysis of the assignment: 1) the teacher's lack of communication aggravated existing distrust between the schools and the community and 2) the African American community and the school proceeded to address the issue in a manner of mutual distrust, squelching what could have been a rich critical pedagogy inquiry.

Introduction: Trust and Critical Literacy

The issue of race is one that few teachers approach. Florio-Ruane et al. (2000) call issues such as this "hot-lava" topic--topics that evoke discomfort and suspicion and are difficult to talk about. And yet the work of opening up, examining, understanding, and challenging difficult issues such as race and class can and should be a component of education. Critical pedagogy is a way of teaching which places questioning and critiquing the inequitable structures and systems of society at the center of instruction.

Critical pedagogy classrooms invite students to construct personal meaning through purposeful talk about issues of social justice. Critical pedagogy teachers work to build trust and respect in the institutions their discourse examines while continuing to deeply examine the injustices perpetuated by these very institutions (Beck, 2005; Lankshear and McLaren, 1993). Through critical pedagogy, students develop critical literacy, which Ciardiello (2004) describes as "a set of literacy practices and civic competencies that help the learner understand that texts represent particular points of view while simultaneously silencing other views" (138). According to McLaren (2003) critical pedagogy

Asks how and why knowledge gets constructed the way it does, and how and why some constructions of reality are legitimated and celebrated by the dominant culture while others clearly are not (p. 196).

Lewison, Flint, and Van Sluys (2002) synthesized critical pedagogy by describing four dimensions: The first, disrupting the commonplace, involves broadening the texts read in classrooms to include popular culture and media. Readers interrogate texts for their ideologies, the ways they position readers, and the ways language and texts are used to reproduce inequity. The second dimension, interrogating multiple view points, involves examining texts from a variety of social, political, economic, cultural, and other perspectives. Through critical pedagogy, individuals interpret texts and the world with a variety of lenses, and identify voices which may have been silenced or marginalized. The third dimension, focusing on sociopolitical issues, involves individuals' abilities to situate themselves, their experiences, and texts they encounter in larger social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Critical literacy is achieved as readers participate as...

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