Critical Pedagogy and Pop Culture

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I really enjoyed reading through the different units that the authors developed for their urban classroom in this weeks reading. I especially enjoyed the sections where they went over their 7-Week Poetry unit and their Race and Justice in Society unit.

I think that the 7-Week Poetry unit really appeals to me because it works to utilize the interests of the students in the unit in order to engage them with the curriculum. An effective teacher needs to know how to engage their students with classical texts and I think that one of the best ways to do that is to relate classical texts with more contemporary ones. I also enjoyed the fact that they used music as a way to engage students in the poetry unit. I actually got to do this in a poetry unit in middle school, and I think that it definitely allowed me to engage with the content I was learning in a way that was interesting and relevant to my own life. I think that it is also important to note that we need to know our students well enough to incorporate their interests into our lesson plans; we need to facilitate a relationship in order to facilitate engagement.

With the Race and Justice in Society unit I thought it was interesting how they used a film text to help their students relate to and understand the classical text better. The authors noted that “students had personal and meaningful transactions with the film that facilitated a healthy dialogic space and the completion of superior academic work” (21). I think that when dealing with these issues, using a film as a text in the classroom can be incredibly beneficial because we interact and react to film in a more visceral way than we usually do with print media. In my own practicum class, my seniors recently finished a unit on Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; during the unit, they watched the movie Apocalypse Now (1979). Although Apocalypse Now is an older piece of contemporary text, I believe that my students were able to relate/analyze the story better with the classical text after watching the film.

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