Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

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In this week’s reading, I most enjoyed the section describing the seven-week poetry unit they developed. In the unit, teachers paired together a traditionally taught poem with a hip-hop song. Students were divided into groups and asked to create a lesson plan to present to the class that analyzed, compared, and contrasted the poem and rap assigned to them. In the weeks that they were preparing these lessons, students learned about different elements of poetry and were encouraged to bring in song lyrics that they recognized these units of poetry in. The article also states that students were expected to produce an analysis of the other poem-rap-duos in order to be prepared to fully participate in class. “We worked hard all year on developing a classroom culture where student participation in dialogues about literacy themes was normalized” (17).  I liked this section of the text because I feel that it embodied what it means to teach in underfunded, lower-income schools. This section made me think back to our class discussion last week about things that may prevent us from teaching certain subjects or in certain ways. At the end of the discussion, we were all in agreement that these things should be looked at as hurdles, not preventions. Teaching in lower income schools will be more difficult than teaching in well-funded schools because of the lack of resources described. Students in lower income schools often have much bigger issues in their life than school and cannot always prioritize school or schoolwork. A lot of students will have jobs, younger siblings or even their children to take care of, or just flat out not care about doing well in school because they do not believe it will take them anywhere. All of these were thing I witnessed at my low-income high school. As a teacher, finding things to teach that peak the interest of students will always be difficult. I think this unit, as the article said, perfectly combines students’ interests with what they need to be learning.  

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