Quotes+from+Vasquez

Here are some quotes I'm pulling out from Vasquez that we can use to ground our discussion about the book and about its application in our classrooms.

Themes


 * The value of a critical perspective:**

"As the classroom teacher, I made sure that I understood what was expected of me through the mandated curriculum in order to demonstrate to parents, colleagues, and administrators that our negotiated curriculum surpassed the required curriculum." (p. 27)

"However, critical literacy does not necessarily involve taking a negative stance; rather, it means looking at an issue or topic in different ways, analyzing it, and hopefully being able to suggest possibilities for change or improvement." (p. 30)

"In fact, having engaged in critical literacies has added a different layer of pleasure and productiveness to my life that is invigorating. I have had to come to an understanding of how I am both privileged and disadvantaged within different contexts and in so doing have found ways to actively participate in interrogating inequities and injustices that arise in my life outside of as well as inside of school." (p. 31)

"However, even a seemingly innocent text can be used alternatively in the classroom when paired with other texts that allow the reader to reinterpret it by asking different questions, such as how it has been constructed and how it might be written in a different way. The experiences we engaged in created spaces for my students to examine the narrowness of representations in certain texts." (p. 114)


 * Social action to teach critical literacy:**

"When Curtis asked his initial question, "Why can't we go?" I could have responded in one of three ways: 1. Explaining that the French Café is only for those children who are taking French... 2. Reposing the question, asking, "Why do you think we aren't invited?" 3. Offering a critical challenge, asking, "What can we do to change the situation?... The third response possibility, offering a critical challenge, treats Curtis' question as an opportunity for taking social action and disrupting inequity." (p. 95)

"Informed by practices demonstrated in the literature on critical literacy, disrupting taken-for-granted normality happened as we engaged with questions like, What kind of things do you learn from analyzing what makes up a Happy meal? Or, What do the toys in the Happy Meals tell you about being a girl or being a boy? In this way, the children are able to begin to make visible new ways of being and acting that involve resisting dominant practices..." (p. 122)

"Through social action, we acted on our critique and analysis reflexively in order to position ourselves differently. For example, issues like the vegetarian issue or the French Café issue contributed to change in particular school conditions. As such, some of our actions resulted in a more socially just and equitable community for us to work in. These kinds of actions, if taken on by more teachers in classrooms across the nation, could "quite productively lead to strategies for... rebuilding institutions." (p. 129)


 * Critical perspective needs to be lived by teacher as well as taught to students:**

"A critical literacy curriculum needs to be lived... As such it cannot be traditionally taught. In other words, as teachers we need to incorporate a critical perspective into our everyday lives in order to find ways to help children understand the social and political issues around them." (p. 1)

"My intent was to be a participant... without implying that I was an innocent or neutral participant... The bottom line is children participate based on the discourses, the ways of being, that have been made available for them, many of these having been introduced at school." (p. 36)


 * Negotiated curriculum/making the children heard:**

"I envision learning as a process of adjusting and reconstructing what we know rather than of accumulating information." (p. 1)

"This newfound curriculum was no longer based on predetermined, prepackaged units of study but on the things that mattered to the children." (p. 28)

"Issues and topics that were taken up in class often began as informal conversation in the yard." (p. 34)

"At this time, the meeting chair circulated among the children to ask if anyone had any items to add to the class meeting agenda..." (p. 35)

"the difference between what happened this year, in your classroom, and what happens in some other places is that these children ask questions that matter." (p. 131)

"Children who learn using curriculum that is based on what matters to them are more likely to feel that what they are learning is important to their lives... How might you use the stories of critical literacy learning in our classroom to inform your teaching and to help you make significant the issues and questions that matter to your students?" (p. 131)


 * Audit trail/connected learning/visible learning:**

"An audit trail is supposed to be visible not only to the people in a classroom community but others in the school community as well." (p. 2)

"people who were not directly involved in our day-to-day curriculum were more supportive because they were able to watch our curriculum take shape and to see the learning that took place through viewing our audit trail and through reading our class newsletters." (p. 32)

"In conjunction with continually revisiting previous day plans, the children often got up from our meeting space and walked over to our audit trail, pointing at various artifacts that had been posted as a way of referring to past events and incidents and as a way of showing connections between events... If you recall from the introduction, I talked about... frustration that in the past I felt unsuccessful at connecting the various critical literacy incidents. The use of the learning wall and the two shared day plans obviously helped to alleviate that concern." (p. 39)


 * Importance of parent communication (but also critical literacy needing to be lived and not just learned in school):**

"If I wanted the critical literacies learned by my students to have an impact beyond the walls of our classroom, I knew that maintaining lines of communication witht he home would be crucial." (p. 42)