1. 21st Century Literacies Pedagogy
to Change the World
Locke High School, Los Angeles
Jerica Coffey, Kathleen Hicks
2. • Discuss lingering questions and teaching implications
from our two-year inquiry into critical multi-literacies
pedagogy
• Give you time to network with each other and share your
projects and how you plan to share your learning with
others at your schools
Session Goals
3. Addressing ALL student needs
Assets
Bilingual
Bicultural
Resilient
Belief in potential of
education
Desire to connect with
others
Needs
Academic
• Below grade level
Social-Political
• Poverty level three times below
state average (US Census)
• Police Brutality
• Deportation Threats
• Lack of access to basic health
needs
• Crime average in Watts 300%
higher than County (LA Crime
Index)
Social, Emotional, Psychological
• Clinical Services at Locke
Cluster, 2010-2011: 645
referrals, 518 serviced.
• An approach to literacy that
engages 21st century tools and
empowers students to transform
their community by developing
the capacity to critically analyze
the world.
4. Addressing ALL student needs
Assets
Bilingual
Bicultural
Resilient
Belief in potential of
education
Desire to connect with
others
Needs
Academic
• Below grade level
Social-Political
• Poverty level three times below
state average (US Census)
• Police Brutality
• Deportation Threats
• Lack of access to basic health
needs
• Crime average in Watts 300%
higher than County (LA Crime
Index)
Social, Emotional, Psychological
• Clinical Services at Locke
Cluster, 2010-2011: 645
referrals, 518 serviced.
Rigorous + Humanizing +
Transformative Literacy Practices?
• An approach to literacy that
engages 21st century tools and
empowers students to transform
their community by developing
the capacity to critically analyze
the world.
5. Inquiry Process for Collaboration
Bi-weekly
meetings
Non-evaluative
space
Our work mirrors
type of inquiry
asked of our
students
6. Inquiry Questions
How dowedevelop multi-literacy pedagogy where youth
can…
examine their own struggles with oppression?
confront the injustices that plague their communities?
cultivate spaces that provide internal/external healing?
8. Critical Reading With and Against the Grain:
Random Family by Nicole leBlanc
Model of 10-year research
project written in narrative
form
Problematizes “outsider”
perspective of
communities of color
9. Purpose of Counterstories
"Counterstories can build
community among those at
the margins of society...they
bring a human and familiar
face to empirical
research...can open new
realities...and address
society's margins as places of
possibility and resistance."
12. Engaging community through technology
Digital Presentation of
Research
• Storyboard
• Layering of media:
audio
narrative, images, musi
c
Presentation of Learning at
Community Exhibition
13.
14. Learnings
Research and counter-
storytelling create a sense of
agency while learning rigorous
literacy skills
Counterstorytelling is a tool to
transform collective and
individual identities from deficit
to empowered
Rigor increases with authentic
purpose and audience for
student work and when
students’ learning is guided by
their own questions
15. Networking
Discussion Questions:
Briefly, describe the key features of your project (purpose,
innovative/creative aspects, format etc…) and your school.
What impact do you hope to have on student learning?
What resources will you be accessing?
How will you share your learning with others at your school?
16. SAT
Benchmark 1
Benchmark 2
Benchmark 3
Benchmark 4
CAHSEE
ACT
AP
AWPE
EPT
Community College
Placement Exams
CELDT
Benchmark 1
Benchmark 2
Benchmark 3
Benchmark 4
CAHSEE
PSAT
CST
SAT
ACT
AP
EAP
CELDT
Benchmark 1
Benchmark 2
Benchmark 3
Benchmark 4
Mock CAHSEE 1
PSAT
CST
Mock CAHSEE 2
CAHSEE ELA
CELDT
Benchmark 1
Benchmark 2
Benchmark 3
Benchmark 4
Mock CAHSEE
PSAT
CST
CELDT
SRI
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse:
Wake Up and Teach Already
Literature The 41 Tests We Take
ME
Our goal? Access
to new worlds.
Some we will break
into, others we will
create ourselves.
17. Survival Tip 1: Space
“...if we acknowledge the
centrality of language to
our development as
raced, gendered, and
classed, beings, then we
must also consider the
possibilities for English
education to create
spaces for the
development of resistant
and empowered
identities”
-Critical Race and Urban
Youth
Where are
you?
What spaces
are you
creating?
18. Anyon’s Research on Class and
Schooling
Survival Tip 2: Zombies are made, not born.
19. Tip 3: Zombies Hide Where
You Least Expect Them
An excerpt from
Kozol’sSavage Inequalties
A wealthy student says,
“someone else can’t want
a good life for you, you
have to want it yourself
…Then she adds, however, “I
agree that everyone
should have a chance at
taking the same courses…”
I ask her if she think it fair to
pay more taxes so that this
was possible. “I don’t see
how that benefits me” she
says.
Critical literacy
“can help students
discuss the
relationship
between literature
texts and the ideals
and values of the
dominant
society…”
Morrell’s Critical
Literacy and
Urban Youth
20. Tip 4: There are only skinny
survivors—you’d better hurry.
21. Tip 5: Be willing to
learn new things to
survive.
•The transition to common core
demands that we offer
richer, more complex literacy
opportunities to our students.
• Our local writing projects
encourage our students to
address real world issues and are
offering incentives their efforts.
•Canonical and new literature
itself screams for a critical eye—
why would we train our students
to be mini-psychologists or
historians or use other lenses
before they know themselves and
their own histories?
22.
23. Results
Having language to describe what I need
from my students makes me feel sane
Being surrounded by like-minded teachers
helps me continue teaching
84% of my students maintained or
improved over the last 3 years
Significant increase in AP pass rates
24. Healing Self, Healing Community
Using Inquiry and Dialogue to Foster Critical Thought and Social Change
25. Lingering questions AND challenges
___
School and district support
Teacher turn-over
How do we assess transformative curriculum?
How do we make this sustainable?
How can we get support from our schools and districts?
26. Developing more humanizing pedagogy
Duncan-Andrade’s “Note to
Educators: Hope Required when
Growing Roses in Concrete”
“Socratic hope requires both
teachers and students to painfully
examine our lives and actions
within an unjust society and to
share the sensibility that pain may
pave the path to justice.”
“The solidarity to share in others’
suffering, to sacrifice self so that
other roses may bloom, to
collectively struggle to replace the
concrete completely with a rose
garden is what I call audacious
hope.”
“Too many of us try to create
classroom spaces that are safe from
righteous rage, or, worse, we design
plans to weed out children who display
it. The question we should be grappling
with is not how to manage students
with these emotions, but how to help
students channel them.”
27. Designing Transformative Curriculum
Timeline Academic Transformative
Week 1: Models of Persuasive
Writing as Healing Dialogue
and Social Change
• Annotate three real letters
about injustice
• Explore Writing and
Research process
Week 2-3: Plan and
implement research
• Develop inquiry focus:
topic, target audience
• Research credible sources:
interviews, articles, personal
experience
• Source write-ups
Week 3-4: Write Persuasive
Letter
• Multiple drafts
• Revise based on peer
editing, individual
conference feedback
Week 5-6: Plan and
perform/facilitate Multimedia
presentation at Community
Showcase
• Plan, develop and practice
engaging presentations
•How can we create
more dialogue
around injustice in
our community?
• How can dialogue
lead to healing –
personally and
collectively?
•How can we use
inquiry to affect
change in our
community?
28. Authentic Models of Writing as
Healing Dialogue
Persuasive Letter Models
• Presente.Org letter from
Widow of Anastasio
Hernandez-Rojas
• Open letter to UC Davis
Chancellor Katehi
• My letter to Kaiser
Permanente Doctors after
pregnancy loss
Skills
• Persuasive writing elements
• Citing research
• Vulnerability of sharing pain
• Power of risk-taking and
honesty
• Validating experience and
need for healing and
accountability
29. Developing Authentic Assessments
Choice as Agency and
Ownership
• Variety of topics
• Audience:
perpetrator, fellow
victims, or general
community
• Presentation format as
vehicle for creativity
30. Developing Authentic Assessments
Community Showcase as
Collective Dialogue
• Students engaged in
dialogue with
community members
• Validating experiences
and ideas
• Immediate feedback
and reflection
31. Response to
Alienation
•Writing is the process of
becoming yourself in a
world that alienates
you
Authentic
Audience
•“It is through writing for
others…that we come
to know and love
ourselves, that we
come to be
empowered over our
own texts, and
ultimately, our own
lives.”
Self-Healing
•“Critical writing …
plays an explicit and
self-referential role in
self-healing and self-
definition for urban
youth.”
Implications for Teaching:
Writing/Speaking as Healing Dialogue
32. “… how to
communicate
better and
stand up for
what I believe!”
“… we have a
voice and we
need to speak
up before it’s
too LATE!”
“…when we
give students a
place/chance
to speak they
have really
important
things to say!”
“The youth
have an
amazing
potential to
empower”
“ … to listen
to my children,
give them a
voice, and to
be an
advocate for
them.”
“…about
police brutality
and domestic
violence. I
learned how it
effects my
community, an
d how we need
to step up and
take action
with dialogue.”
Implications for Teaching: Creating
Opportunities for Dialogue and Empowerment
33. Inquiry Reflection:
Expanding notions of literacy
•Use of technology
•Collaboration
•Navigate complex
literacy environments
•Agency/empowerment
•Critical Inquiry
•Knowledge of
Cultural/Community
History
•Critical Synthesis
Today I will be presenting a final project I did with 9th graders last year at Locke, as a way to show the possibilities of bridging academic rigor with humanizing/transformative curriculum…Explain picture and so, how did we get here?Explain how the year was eye-opening (students developing academically but also sharing struggles/pain…) And each time students would share these things – either through writing, class discussion, or in one on one conversation – I always came to the same conclusion: now what? What do we do with this?
Jerica- use ideas from discussion to transition into session goals (i.e. we also believe that ____ and face the same struggles ... and came together as a group to collaborate around redefining what literacy should look like for our students...- what we learned-why we believe we should teach this way-how they can do it in a feasible way1. Share learnings and lingering questions we’ve gained in developing a critical multi-literacies pedagogy-range of different grade levels-all teachers in urban schools-still have lingering questions
jericanaturally what we experience in the classroom is the manifestation of that dysfunctionality: resistance, defiance, self-destructive behavior, lack of access to academic skills... other piece: our students come to us because of the conditions they face - they come with tremendous resilience, resources that are untapped in schools. how do we utilize these to address the needs of their community?led us to reflect on: what is an appropriate form of literacy that is academically rigorous and humanizing/transformative, given this context?what we are going to share with you today is our look at that...
jericanaturally what we experience in the classroom is the manifestation of that dysfunctionality: resistance, defiance, self-destructive behavior, lack of access to academic skills... other piece: our students come to us because of the conditions they face - they come with tremendous resilience, resources that are untapped in schools. how do we utilize these to address the needs of their community?led us to reflect on: what is an appropriate form of literacy that is academically rigorous and humanizing/transformative, given this context?what we are going to share with you today is our look at that...
Kate- transition to idea that we are professionals (Freire)...We had to create our own space for inquiry because we knew our students needed more...- oveview of inquiry process for collaboration (1 min) (kate)importance of creating supportive space on our own; helps with burn-outmotivation: helpful space to design more engaging curriculumownership over development b/c of district’s inabilitiesaddress disconnect between traditional curriculum and students’ needsexplain process: twice/month; reading critical theory; tuning protocol for feedback;there's a gap between what we're expected to do and what we need to dofinding ways to connect with other educators to continue inquirynot a social justice unit, but how to educate our students for the long termwe meet bimonthly, shared units and projects, if we're asking our students to do real inquiry, we have to deeply look at students' needs and our own practice.
kate-in looking at our students' needs and ourselves in our classrooms, we builts spaces to create this question....first: curriculum is personalized to address students own needs and experiencessecond: what kind of assessments, what kind of assignments, show that they can transform the conditions that produced those experiencesthree: how do we treat students as human beings who are struggling with so many different emotions/pain that inevitably affect their academic achievement?- make distinction between purely academic literacy pedagogy and one that is humanizing and transformative, and directly addresses students’ and community’s needs-looking at our students as humans, not test scores since students are literate in multiple ways, and that only looking at test scores is reading into deficits, instead of assets- traditional pedagogy is decontextualized -> lack of motivation and agency from studentsBased on this question, three of us will present different approaches to developing 21st Century multi-literacy in our classrooms...- Jerica: how to build off of the wealth of students' experiences and communities to produce counter-narratives?Kate: how to teach canonical texts with a critical literacy lens?- me: how to develop a final project that humanizes students but also can lead to spaces of healing?
Today I will be presenting a final project I did with 9th graders last year at Locke, as a way to show the possibilities of bridging academic rigor with humanizing/transformative curriculum…Explain picture and so, how did we get here?Explain how the year was eye-opening (students developing academically but also sharing struggles/pain…) And each time students would share these things – either through writing, class discussion, or in one on one conversation – I always came to the same conclusion: now what? What do we do with this?
Kate – other questions
Use students’ drawing for showcase flyer: how can we do a better job of seeing students as they are? And treating them as such?At the end of the day, these are not just students whose test scores need to go up, they are human beings who are struggling with identity, with pain, with real needs we must do a better job of addressing within the classroom space.Transition to Andrade’s work on hope in the classroom.First quote: can’t ignore students’ stories/struggles/needsSocratic hope = inquiry for the purpose of transforming conditions Audacious hope = solidarity with suffering = I myself had suffered a tremendous loss that year and had to take time to pause, reflect, sit with my loss in order to feel good enough to come back. Knowing students had losses/pains of their own, I knew that we had to come up with a way for them to take the same healing process that I did… dialogue that is honest and creates connections (from me to students; from students to students; from students to community members)Transition to next slide: these ideas are the foundations for designing this final project…
how do we as teachers design curriculum that teaches skills needed for the 21st century – both academic and transformative? Stress importance of not just building academically rigorous curriculum, but curriculum that humanizes students, their experiences, and gives them skills to transform their world.Explain academic side: summative assessments, guiding questions if we are purposeful in scaffolding our students to meet academic demands, we also need to be purposeful in designing curriculum that humanizes students – teaches them how to take the necessary risks, to be vulnerable, to have a sense of agency – that allows them to share their pain with others and in doing so, change the way others see themselves and their world.What I will describe next: 1. how do we model both academic and transformative curriculum?2. how do we develop assessments that not only prepare students for college, but humanize them?
Explain modeling process academically: sharing persuasive letters for sense of purpose of creating change, audience, writing sructure – students annotated models as we read them.Part of what I was grading for this project was students’ personal investment in the topics they chose – this sense of genuine purpose. And I knew that many students may have been reluctant to go there – especially knowing that they would be sharing this to a larger audience… So I took it upon myself to share something very personal with them….Explain reasons for sharing my own loss and letter it is okay to be angry/sad, we deserve to be heard and hold others accountable, but it does take work; explain how to be vulnerable and safe… Explain how students were able to transfer their own sense of purpose and urgency in their own letters…Modeling is especially important to show that the writing process is not just a mental exercise, it takes courage, patience…We have to be vulnerable if we ask students to be vulnerable – and in order to create transformative spaces!
After writing their letters, students then worked on developing their presentations.- Acknowledge struggles of choice, organization, resistance: admit things that didn’t workWanted to utilize the many forms of communication/talents they brought to the table – and so the presentation assessment involved a lot of choice, which I believe led to much more agency/ownership from the students. (caveat: nightmare to manage, but in the end, seems worth it)Showcase was also a final assessment on students ability to use dialogue – this time not in writing, but in public speakingStudents themselves had to engage with dialogue during the showcase: on the spot answer questions
After writing their letters, students then worked on developing their presentations.- Acknowledge struggles of choice, organization, resistance: admit things that didn’t workWanted to utilize the many forms of communication/talents they brought to the table – and so the presentation assessment involved a lot of choice, which I believe led to much more agency/ownership from the students. (caveat: nightmare to manage, but in the end, seems worth it)Showcase was also a final assessment on students ability to use dialogue – this time not in writing, but in public speakingStudents themselves had to engage with dialogue during the showcase: on the spot answer questions
Use slide to explain what students were able to demonstrate, specifically with video clip exampleHow is it healing:- working through and examining pain, instead of ignoring it; self-healing through deep self-reflectionIsolation to solidarity – the idea that we have common struggles fear/shame to sense of agency and empowerment
Share ideas from community dialogue banner- an assessment of what community members were able to get out of the presentationsEmphasize that this is still a learning process: could still do more. Mail letters to people and reflect on responses; invite target audience to showcase, etc. Not all students had an amazing “healing experience” or showed direct personal connection…Share three ideas in circles as examples of successes…
21st century we agree that these are important. yes, students need to know how to use technology and collaborate on project, BUT we believe that we are doing a diservice to our students if we stop there. As disenfranchised and marginalized youth, we know they need to engage literacy tools to understand and change the conditions they face in the community.Collaborate to empower a sense of community-agency and community identity of resistanceUse the tools of technology to effectuate change and solve problemsCritique dominant discourse about their communitySituate literacy learning in real-world context to solve real-world problemsSteph - rubrictoday, we will share curriculum we developed grounded in the research done by these scholars, but before we do so, we would like to share a summary of our learnings about a critical multiliteracies pedagogy. We came to realize that the way 21st century literacies are being framed in our discipline lacks a purpose that serves the needs of our community. We believe that just learning the tools of technology is not enough, but rather that students must engage these tools for the purpose of transforming the conditions they face as disenfranchised youth. So this is our inquiry beginning to craft a definition of a pedagogy that engages 21st century skills in the following ways:1) yes, students need to collaborate, but not for the sake of learning how to function in group settings. Rather, we belive that students hsould collaborate to empower a sneseof community-agency and community identity of resistance to oppression2) learn the tools of technology to effectuate change and solve problems that impact the immediate problems youth face in their communities3) literacy instruction should help students critique dominant discourse about their communitythat tries to align critical literacy practices with academic literacy through cahnge-based assessment4) instruction should be situated in real-world contexts to solve real-world problems.
