After personalizing the unit, we dive into historical background that includes redlining, real estate covenants that didn’t allow people of color to live in certain sections of the city

17Critical Literacy and Our Students’ Lives■ Christensenhistory, language, culture, and especially the lives of the students and families in my neighborhood. Then I overcorrected. Instead of an all-white lineup, I taught almost all African American literature, which was an improvement, but still problematic. When one student in class tallied up all of the races in class and suggested I teach by the percentages present, I realized I had once again erred. As an Asian American, she wanted to be included. And then there was the graduate who returned and chided me for not preparing her with any “traditional” literature. Over the years students taught me that teaching language arts doesn’t mean diving into data to locate the discrete reading or writing skills a student needs to learn, and it doesn’t mean looking at the sea of students and neatly matching novels to their race or heritage, nor does it mean creating a mathematical formula to represent the diversity in the room. Dirk Tyler taught me this. After reading an excerpt from Carlos Bulosan’s memoir America Is in the Heart about the struggles of Filipinos, Dirk, a student in a class I cotaught with history teacher Bill Bigelow, said, “I didn’t realize that other people went through the same things we [African Americans] did.” His comment helped fuel another breakthrough. Bill and I didn’t have any Filipinos in the classroom, but we had students whose families had struggled to find meaningful work, who experienced economic exploitation, who fought with others for better lives. Dirk and his classmates didn’t care just about themselves, their neighborhood, and their city, they cared about other people’s lives too. And when they saw how their lives and stories intersected with the struggles of other people, they became more adept at making connections across cultures, races, and time periods. The “disadvantaged” label that the newspaper had placed on my students didn’t recognize their eagerness to learn, their drive to be intellectuals, to know more about the world. When I started paying attention to the larger themes that brought the world into our classroom, my students (mostly) stopped rebelling. Dirk—and others—taught me that teaching language arts means plumbing my students’ lives to bring their stories and voices into the classroom as we examine racial injustice, class exploitation, gender expectations, sexual identity, gentrification, solidarity, and more. Creating the Classroom of My Imagination These days I attempt to teach a critical literacy that equips students to “read” power relationships at the same time it imparts academic skills. I try to make my literacy work a sustained argument against inequality and injustice. I want my students to be able to “talk back” when they encounter anything that glorifies one race, one culture, one social class, one gender, one language over another: texts, museums, commercials, classes, rules that hide or disguise domination. A critical literacy means that students probe who benefits and who suffers, how did it come to be this way, what are the alternatives, and how can we make things more just?This kind of work takes time. We can’t race through a half-dozen novels. I’m forced to make difficult choices about what I include and what I leave out. Often one novel will provide the center, or core, and I’ll sur

But I was the one who had applied, pulled together a résumé with the help of my colleagues, and apparently answered their questions in the right way

Over the years my curriculum has become a sancocho composed of key pieces: a question that provokes the examination of historical, literary, social “texts”; the study and involvement of students’ lives through poetry and narrative; an essay that allows students to create a passionate response to their learning; and a final project that opens the possibility for students to act on their knowledge—create historical fiction or write and teach lessons about the topic to others. It’s big and it’s

connections across cultures, races, and time periods. The “disadvantaged” label that the newspaper had placed on my students didn’t recognize their eagerness to learn, their drive to be intellectuals, to know more about the world.

17Critical Literacy and Our Students’ Lives■ Christensenhistory, language, culture, and especially the lives of the students and families in my neighborhood. Then I overcorrected. Instead of an all-white lineup, I taught almost all African American literature, which was an improvement, but still problematic.

17Critical Literacy and Our Students’ Lives■ Christensenhistory, language, culture, and especially the lives of the students and families in my neighborhood.

I became curious about what I didn’t know

there is no telling my mama to be “quiet,”she don’t know “quiet.”her voice is one size better fit alland you best not tell her to hush,she waited too many years for her voice to arriveto be told it needed house keeping. (lines 10–15

My error—and the error of the department that hired me—was to see these students as “disadvantaged” instead of seeing their brilliance

And yet “these kids” could out argue me about everything under the sun: the inherent problems with school policies, the merits of long lunches, why we should hold class outside, and about local issues that reverberated through the building like desegregation and school closures. When they wrote, they had spelling errors and grammar issues, despite—or because of—the Warriner drills or my lack of knowledge about African American Vernacular English, but their logic and evidence spun circles around me.

taught high school students syllabic patterns because, according to test scores, they didn’t know how to decode

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