Deconstructing+the+Text

From the assignment sheet- "** Part 1: ** The first part involves unpacking the selected text, considering a range of questions, such as the following: What are the major themes and ideas of the book? What images of teachers and teaching are represented? What are the images of students? How does the book help us rethink what counts as literacy? How does it help us consider what it means to take a critical stance in the classroom? The idea is not to review or report on the book, but to use it as platform to inquire into issues related to critical literacy."

Respond, please!


 * Part 1: Big themes and ideas from the text (Vasquez, 2004)**

** Teacher-research inquiry: Concerning ** **  critical literacy in early childhood : ** what are the possibilities? Limitations? ** Real world applications: ** Makes curriculum important to students by discussing issues that they care directly about. Critical literacy discussions lead to students taking social action. ** Audit trail / learning wall: ** “A tool for generating and circulating meaning” (p. 3). An audit wall helps make theoretical connections visible for young learners using “artifacts.” This enables students to revisit, reread, analyze and re-imagine possibilities for living a critically literate life. Also, it can be used as a tool for building curriculum. ** Negotiated curriculum: ** “...using the issues from the social lives of children to construct and sustain a critical curriculum” (p. 3) ||
 * ** A critical perspective: ** Deliberately exposes inequity in the classroom & wider society. Critical literacy is a way of looking at the world that cannot just be taught in isolated lessons but needs to be lived, by the teacher and the students.


 * What images of teachers and teaching are represented?**

First, there is the idea that teachers and the way they think and live can influence students. Vasquez strongly holds the belief that teachers need to "walk the walk." If you are going to teach your students critical literacy, then you need to live it in your own life. She looks down on the idea that some teachers hold that students are just doing things on their own without being influenced by their teacher. All students are using the discourses they observe and learn for interacting with the world, and many of those discourses are learned by watching their teacher.

Teachers need to live and think the way they want their students to live and think. They are also people who pay close attention to their students and are always searching for opportunities to ask the right questions, and present the right texts, to get their students fired up about something. Their role is to guide and support student learning, not to entirely control or dictate it. They are flexible and ready to capitalize on situations that arise that offer learning opportunities. Their planning has less to do with content (since that will depend largely on the students) and more to do with the strategies/skills that they want their students to learn.


 * What are the images of students?**

Students don't just come to school to learn in a way that's separate from their lives. They bring their own lives and personal concerns into school with them, spend a good part of their school day on work related to those concerns, and to the concerns of their peers, and then bring home what they have learned in school to continue to think about and apply on the evenings and weekends. This relates back to the description of perspective in Jones (2006)-everyone brings their own perspective to the table of learning.

Much of what students learn takes place socially, and when they learn something that is especially important, they never stop at knowing but always think about how they can take action to make a situation better or to teach others.


 * How does the book help us rethink what counts as literacy?**

These students are too young to be able to read or write much on their own, and yet they are clearly engaged in high-level literacy activities all year long. They read events (like the French Café), book and articles (with the help of their teacher), TV programs, songs, and so on. Literacy is how they think about, understand, and act on these things, rather than how well they can decode them. This doesn't mean that decoding won't be an important part of helping them be independently literate as they become older, though.


 * How does it help us consider what it means to take a critical stance in the classroom?**

Taking a critical stance in the classroom can be difficult, and can feel uncomfortable. It is about asking students what they could do, asking them how a situation could be otherwise, and gathering many different perspectives within the classroom. To help students further develop their world views teachers need to then bring in outside materials that will promote additional perspectives, and make students fully explore the social inequities and assumptions that go into the issues that affect their daily lives. Since these inequities and assumptions are affecting all of us all the time, we don't have to find special issues to showcase them. Any issue relevant to students will guide us to an opportunity to critically examine the world.