Critical Literacy and the Resident Expert Project: Inspired by Ira Shore and a quality TED Talk

I wanted to take a moment and share we are as a class and some of the readings and experiences that have led me to be in this particular space and time with my students. As I am spending this Georgia State semester considering and reconsidering Critical Pedagogy, I have come to understand the heart of my study of voice is really a quest for a Critical Pedagogy, and specifically, a Critical Literacy, in our classroom.  As a first grade teacher who works with open-minded six and seven-year olds and as a Liberal Arts College educated woman who was taught to challenge the “is” for the “what could be,” I see the core of Critical Pedagogy in Critical Literacy. Ira Shore writes that Critical Literacy is founded in the reality that

“we are what we say and do. The way we speak and are spoken to help shape us into the people we become. Through words and other actions, we build ourselves in a world that is building us. . . Yet, though language is fateful in teaching us what kind of people to become and what kind of society to make, discourse is not destiny. We can redefine ourselves and remake society, if we choose, through alternative rhetoric and dissident projects. This is where critical literacy begins, for questioning power relations, discourses, and identities in a world not yet finished, just, or humane”  (1). 

Shore’s words resonate with the critical teacher that I am working to become and call into question the ways I am setting kids up to become the people they truly are and desire to be, rather than becoming what the  sweeping systems of accountability and cut-and-dry standards  say they should be.  While I believe that the public school system can work against Critical Literacy in difficult and iron-gripping ways, I also believe that the vision and heartbeat of my charter school community and leadership “to give voice, courage, and  hope to refugee, immigrant, and local children” leave space for Critical Literacy to take root and push up beyond the ground in spite of deafening accountability measures. To put it simply, I have space to rethink what I am doing with my students in my classroom on a day to day basis.  As I have explored what Critical Literacy is and what Critical Literacy means for my context as an educator in a unique, charter school setting, I have found vivid anecdotes in A Critical Inquiry Framework for K-12 Teachers.  The opening pages by editor JoBeth Allen explain that “critical literacy. . . is a central curricular manifestation of critical pedagogy. Reading and writing must be for “something that children need and that we too need,” noted Freire (1998, p.24); literacy must be meaningful to students and serve a purpose in their lives” (7).  

So, I found myself considering how I can provide “dissident projects” and literacy that is “meaningful to students and serve a purpose in their lives.”  With this in my head and heart, I had the opportunity to watch a TED Talk that was shared with me by my former roommate entitled “Build a School in the Cloud” by Sugata Mitra.  Mitra shares his experience of putting computers with high level concepts (i.e. Biochemistry) in English into walls in slums and rural villages of India (where children do not speak English) and finding that students not only learned English, but also learned the high-level concepts described in English.  I encourage you to watch the video to really understand his experience and argument, but he closes declaring that perhaps we need to shift from a school system that produces similar children as if for parts of a machine to “learning as the process of self-organizing,” for, “it’s not about making learning happen, but setting opportunities up and then standing back and watching children learn with admiration.”  Check out the video here: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

     With thoughts about Critical Pedagogy and Critical Literacy swirling around in my head, and with the inspiration of this TED Talk, I thought back to a project I had seen before when observing in a high income public school about two years ago called “The Resident Expert Project.” I realized that my work with a small group of students was inspiring me to rethink my during-the-day curriculum structures and that this project might be a way to do so. In this project,  students choose a topic they are interested in and then pursued understanding of this topic and selected a way in which to share their learning. They were now the “resident expert” of their classroom in their chosen topic.  I saw them give oral presentations and show posters.  What if I proposed this same project in my classroom and integrated our first  science standards about the basic needs of animals by setting kids up to select any animal to become an expert on? What if instead of just making posters and doing oral reports they could do sculpture, write poetry and songs, create T.V. commercials or puppet shows, build habitats, create new board games, make books, or share their information in any way they could think of. So, I tried this. I knew that this was a project that would matter to them and that integrated reading (especially non-fiction texts) and writing and inquiry and science and collaboration.  I set them up by providing texts about different animals and modeling how to read a non-fiction texts, mark facts that are interesting, and write them in your own words. Then, I sat back and “watched in admiration” as students curled up in corners and composed songs about wild horses and created board games about lions with cards that say, “Your pride (family group) is in danger, move back 2 spaces” or “You just caught a zebra for dinner, move forward 3 spaces.”  At first the project was individual, but students began to pair up or even form groups of three. A group of girls kept their original topics but decided to make one nature show about both chameleons and wild horses.  How beautiful that I didn’t tell them what to do and that they came up with ideas far more creative than I could have offered them. How much they are learning about the pouches of marsupials, the ears of polar bears, or the cold-blood of alligators!  In this way, with this student engagement (that we engaged in everyday and carried over a couple of weeks) I was able to see the power of student voice and self-expression. We were accomplishing standards, but we were doing so in a way much less controlled by the teachers and much more controlled by the students themselves.  I got to sit back and provide scraps of material or popsicle sticks or index cards or whatever it was that the particular child needed to communicate their particular animal expertise with the world.