Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

Jeff Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell

This article shares some of the applications of critical pedagogy that are needed in urban high schools around our country. I am not sure exactly what to think about this article though because there are parts that seem like they would be useful in a classroom and really catch my interest, but there are also parts that seem to go against certain teaching strategies that I have read in other texts such as Chris Tovani’s I Read It But I Don’t Get It or Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide. For example, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell say that they “developed vocabulary units and units that prepared for the SAT and ACT exams.” This is contrary to what Gallagher says in his book which suggests focusing less on massive test preparation and more on students’ actual thinking process and comprehension of a certain text. Another example of a perplexing difference I found between these two texts in when Duncan-Andrade and Morrell suggest that when reading a book, “One common format was to divide a major work into sections or themes and divide the class into groups of five or six.” In Readicide, Gallagher has a whole section devoted to the misuse of “The Chop-Chop Curriculum” which breaks the reading apart and overanalyzes it to the point where a student might despise that reading in the end. There are a number of clashing ideas between this article and Gallagher’s book that I have left out, but there are also interesting similarities within. The two similarities that I found to be true in both texts were the use of a 50/50 approach to text selections. This means that a student will read 50 percent academic books and 50 percent recreational books. I also found that both texts highly advocate critical thinking with their students. Gallagher’s book is overflowing with examples of critical pedagogy and this article spends some time not only explaining how they got their students to think in this way, but also the effects that it had on the school and the students’ lives. Duncan-Andrade and Morrell share how their students were able to research school spending policies and interview administrators which led them to feel “empowered to challenge conditions that were seemingly innate and immutable” within their school. These students were able to think critically by questioning their own circumstances in their school and then being active in trying to do something about it. Both texts lead to encouraging methods of critical pedagogy in one way or another but I lean more towards the strategies used and the supporting evidence behind those strategies in Gallagher’s Readicide.  I think that unlike Gallagher’s work, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s work lacks overall clarity in their application of critical pedagogy.