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.
HI Rieley,
ReplyDeleteGreat quotes from the article! I think that--all too often--science is presented as an "objective" discipline with no bias. I like how you are thinking of ways to get students to look at counter-claims and to have a VOICE. That will help students to see that science is a discipline that has been constructed by human beings who make mistakes and who revise hypotheses as more information becomes available. Thanks for your posting!
I'm with the prof. on this one! Scientists are always arguing stuff all the dang time. For instance, Dr Gilbertson on the Logan campus is always tying his lectures back to his study on taste buds. Not that I, really have much of a say as to what is the proper debate tactics in the sciences. I personally am glad to be done with the stuff. I reckon I'll go listen to the "voice" of any documentaries on Netflix for my science fix. :P
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