Overview of Chapter 5

            by Jeff Sapp

    Maxine Greene once said that a teacher in search of her or his own freedom might be the only kind of teacher that can arouse other people to go in search of their freedom. (1)  Chapter five takes an innovative approach to teaching reading by looking at critical literacy.  Like critical theory, critical literacy is concerned with empowering the powerless.  The tool for liberation lies in the power of language.  How can educators have nutritive power and work along with students?  Paulo Freire once stated:

        This is a great discovery; education is politics!  When a teacher discovers that he or she

        is a politician, too, the teacher has to ask, “What kind of politics am I doing in the 

        classroom?  That is, in favor of whom am I being a teacher?”  The teacher works in favor

        of something and against something.  Because of that, he or she will have another great

        question:  How to be consistent in my teaching practice with my political choice?  I 

        cannot proclaim my liberating dream and in the next day be authoritarian in my

        relationship with the students. (2)

    Consequently, the articles in this chapter look at ways to have congruency between the political task of being an educator and the loving task of empowering children.  Language has to be relevant to students’ lives.  There is not an educator alive who wants to hear, “What does what we learn today have to do with the real world?”  Joan Wink answers for us:  “Pedagogy is to good interactive teaching and learning in the classroom as critical pedagogy is to good interactive teaching and learning in the classroom and in the real world.” (3)

    Barbara Comber defines critical literacy as “the opportunity to use language in powerful ways to get things done in the world.” (4)  Her article explores what critical literacy might look like in an elementary school classroom.

    Rebecca Powell, Susan Cantrell, and Sandra Adams explore the connection between democracy, literacy, and power.  They ask the question:  What can teachers do to challenge inequities that exist along lines of race, class, and gender?  The children in their rural Kentucky classroomm answer this question in how they discovered that words matter.

    Deborah Rowe, Joanne Fitch, and Alyson Bass examine how issues of power and identity are embedded within the culture of a first-grade classroom.  Do educators frame literacy in ways that socially construct positions of power and priviledge for some and disempower others?  This yearlong study looks at how to negotiate literate identities and social positioning.

    The last article in this chapter considers how a fourth-grade teacher used literacy to aid students in reflecting critically on the injustices in their lives.  Penny Silvers learned that teachers and their students become more aware of social inequalities by working together to explore those issues that connect with their own lives.

ENDNOTES:

• 1. Maxine Greene, Dialectic of Freedom (New York:  Teachers College Press, 1988).
• 2. Ira Shore, Freire for the Classroom:  A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching (Portsmouth, N. H.:  Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1987).
• 3. Joan Wink, Critical Pedagogy:  Notes from the Real World (New York:  Longman, 2000).
• 4. Barbara Comber, “Negotiating Critical Literacies,” National Council of Teachers of English 6, no. 3 (2001).

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