#6 Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School Classroom

This chapter reminds us as future teachers that while there are required texts that our school districts will require us to teach our students, we are still able to be creative with those texts and teach how they are relevant today.  Regardless as to what kinds of resources that our schools and students have, we can alter our lesson plans to integrate current events and pop culture to make our lessons relevant in today’s culture.

While all schools have students, it doesn’t mean the student culture will be the same in each school or even each class.  Different groups of students listen to different types of music and watch different types of moves/tv.  I can’t see using rap music lyrics to help understand poetry would work with students who listen to country music.  Whatever we choose to bring relevance into our classrooms needs to be relevant to the students in our class.  I really like the idea of letting students choose pop culture items and required curriculum elements to create a presentation of the material where the students are showing their classmates how the two go together and are relevant to their time and culture.

As a former high school student and future high school teacher, I can understand the perspectives of both the teacher and student in making what we are teaching informative and interesting for the students.  Teachers want classroom management to go smoothly, and students want what they are being taught to be boring.  Students may think that if we are only using traditional texts that we don’t care what is going on now, but it is possible to take the traditional texts and add relevancy by comparing the ideas and story plots to media that is accessible to modern students like internet, video clips, music and lyrics.  If teachers can find modern comparisons to old texts, it could be an interesting learning experience for everyone.