Critical Literacy

The question that I would like to answer during this blog post is: How do you define critical literacy? What ideas do you have for fostering critical literacy among your students after reading the article?

Well when I started to think about what is critical literacy and how can my students become critically literate. I thought that critical literacy is the ability to look at a text and then understand what that text means and be able to analyze the text. I wanted to deepen my understanding of what critical literacy is and I found a website on critical literacy and it had this definition of the website, "Critical literacy is the ability to actively read text in a manner that promotes a deeper understanding of socially constructed concepts; such as power, inequality, and injustice in human relationships. Critical literacy encourages individuals to understand and question the attitudes, values, and beliefs of written texts, visual applications, and spoken words."  The website address is http://thinkcritically.weebly.com/critical-literacy.html. 

Fostering critical literacy in the classroom

The Article that I read is, "Writing Voiced Arguments about Science Topics."  

In the article there were ways to start implementing voiced arguments now and the more I thought about a few of them I thought that you could also apply them to fostering critical literacy among your students.

I quoted these directly from the article. 

1. "Immerse students in an ongoing study of opinion/argumentative “mentor texts” so that they can see how writers of opinion/ argumentative texts advance and substantiate claims as well as address counterclaims and present rebuttals." How this can be applied to fostering critical literacy after reading the article is because then the students will be able to understand the important parts of the article and also what type of voice the author is trying to portray in this article.

2. "Guide students in developing a working definition of voice based on the text exemplars." I think that everything we read has a voice and if the students are able to understand the type of voice the author is trying to portray then they will be better able to understand the article.

3. "To help students appreciate other ways to “voice” or position themselves in their opinion pieces" Also this is the same as the two before with better understanding of the article then they will be able to more deeply understand the topic. 

I think by implementing these things in my classroom that I will be able to help my students in fostering critical literacy.

Digital Text

Well this was an interesting experience. I tried a pinterest account and I tell you what it was a lot of fun and a lot of the material on pinterest was interesting to look at. My grandma is a big pinterest person she has over five hundred different boards, and she is always telling me I need a pinterest account so that I can follow her account. She is always pining different things about science on her account.

https://www.pinterest.com/rieleybrotherso/

That is my account on pinterest but I am still brand new so I only have pinned a few different things for teaching about cells. I love teaching about cells that is probably my favorite thing to learn and teach about. I really enjoyed pinterest. The only thing that I really did not like was how I had to search for different things and how some of the searches pulled up totally unrelated information, but that is the same with any type of digital text.

There were lots of things that I want to apply to my discipline  I really liked some of the worksheets that I found as well as the bell ringer ideas. I have a little bit of difficult time coming up with stuff on my own so it is really nice to see other people's ideas and then use those ideas to form my own plans. I think that students can use pinterest for research of course they will have to verify but this could help students to find a fun way to do an assignment.

The article that I read was the Castek and Beach article. A few things that I learned are that there are science apps now and through those science apps you can do labs that you otherwise could not do in the classroom because of class sizes. For example it talked about the frog app, and you can look at a frog dissection that is interesting. Also it had multiple ways for me as a teacher to learn how to use a digital text.

This assignment was an amazing opportunity to learn more about digital text that I did not know before.