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Toward the Pursuit of Criticality

Our Crowdsourced Summary of Chapter 6 in Cultivating Genius (Muhammad, 2020)

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Quotes That Stand Out

  • “Criticality is not just something that is fun or interesting to do at the end of the semester as a time filler…[It] isn’t taught as an add-on…” (p. 132)
  • “Human race are members of one frame…if thou feels not for others’ misery, thou don’t deserve to be called Human.” (p. 118)
  • “...facts do not capture the full narratives of people…. Truths, in turn are the realities and lived experiences of persons experiencing the moment…” (p. 120)
  • “It is an intellectual practice of studying the state of humanity.” (p. 132)
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“It is impossible to teach students to have a Critical Lens if teachers don’t have one themselves” (p. 131)

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Quotes That Stand Out

  • We should help students “develop a critical sense of the world.”-117
  • Students of color are being taught by “teachers who don’t carry love for their students’ consciousness…”-119
  • Advancing criticality…helps students “protect themselves against wrongdoing.”
  • “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”- 125
  • Criticality teachers need to “assume an active and critical stance in their own lives.”-131
  • Criticality is the capacity to read, write, and think in ways of understanding power, privilege, social justice and oppression, particularly for populations who have been historically marginalized in the world…(p. 120). + Criticality Gives students the tools to respond to injustice in and around schools)
  • “While critical means to think deeply about something, Critical is connected to an understanding of power, entitlement, oppression, and equity.” (p. 120)
  • “What do humanizing practices look like in and outside of the classroom?
  • ”[Our] intentions [as educators] must be deliberately connected to actions”. (p. 118)

Agitation literacies… to upset, disturb, disquiet, and unhinge systemic oppression. (p. 125)

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Quotes That Stand Out

  • The aim is to detect or recognize misrepresentations of deceptiveness in the language of the opponent or those who challenge truths… (p. 116)
  • Advancing critically pushes students to cultivate tools to dismantle deficit ways of the world and to protect themselves against wrongdoing (p. 121)
  • Criticality helps students to tell difference between facts and truths… (p. 120)
  • Truths move toward listening and honoring the voices of the marginalized person. (p. 121)
  • “And whose best interest has education served from 1969 to today?” (p. 130)

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Criticality and Other Literacies (pp. 123-126)

Critical Literacy

Interacting with source material in an active way; being able to question and critique material/authors in order to understand power dynamics, oppression and inequality. Having conversations with sources: interrogating them. How does this connect to social issues.

Racial Literacy

Muhammad defines racial literacy as, “the understanding and enactments of reading, writing, speaking, and thinking of race in regard to its impact on ‘social, economic, political, and educational experiences of individuals and groups.’”

Sealey-Ruiz defines racial literacy as “a skill and practice by which individuals can probe the existence of racism and examine the effects of race and institutionalized systems.” (p.2)

Agitation Literacies

According the Muhammad, agitation literacies are “way so of reading, writing, thinking, and speaking that are connected to the intention and action to upset, disturb, disquiet, and unhinged systemic oppressions.:

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Ideas for Teaching Criticality:

  • Introduce Self Through Critical Texts. (p.127)- Using the questions below the heading I would allow students to bring in, create or select a text from the classroom that reflects them. I would begin my school year with this to create the tone of the classroom and to help students to work to define and develop criticality within their own learning.
  • Interrogation of Media.. (p.129) After selecting a current event topic, together the students and I could research the history of the current event ( what did this issue look like in the past, what was the response of the public then, has the issue evolved or changed throughout history) Using both print and digital resources,we could then use the Atwoodian Table or They Say/I Say routines to further explore where the issue could be debated.
  • Teach about current events and modern day social justice issues and create opportunities for students to develop plans to make change (p 133)
  • Allowing students to speak their truth and have their voice via letters to future generations of youth- Critical Open Letter (p. 130-131)

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Ideas for Teaching Criticality:

Social images/messages,/stories as text to be examined critically. (Think that was from one of the other readings.). Students can learn to read (critically) historical objects, societal expectations, cartoons, aDVERTISEMENTS, EVERYTHING BECOMES A TEXT TO BE READ CRITICALLY)

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Inviting students into their neighborhoods and school communities to identify legible texts.

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Ideas for Teaching Criticality:

  • “Criticality helps students assume responsibility for the ways in which they process information - to avoid being passive consumers of knowledge and information.” (p. 122) To put this into practice, the author suggests we, as teachers, put our criticality literacy skills to the test. The recommendation is to think about the lyrics of song that we heard as a child. “Who allowed us to listen to that song? (especially if our adult self now finds the lyrics inappropriate).” (p. 122) It is also important to think about the medium in which we heard the song. Black FM radio stations in the 1990’s had a different format than Black FM radio stations in the 2000’s. What caused this shift? Tricia Rose offers some wonderful answers to these questions in her book Hip Hop Wars.

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Ideas for Teaching Criticality:

  • Providing students with two different accounts of the same topic/event. Could be any media–text, audio, art. Encouraging students to determine their truth, could present to the class through debate or could have a socratic seminar.
  • “It is impossible to teach students to have a critical lens if teachers don’t have one themselves.”pg 131

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Ideas for Teaching Criticality:

  • Preamble Writing : students create and write their own intentions for why they are in a class/what they intend to do. Various levels of guidance could be given to students depending on level. Teachers could then modify curriculum/lesson plans based on what students have written. Tie lessons into student intention.
  • In US History, this could clearly be tied to the preamble of the Constitution of the United States.
  • After using the Preamble as an example, students would then interrogate it. What critiques do you have? In what ways see this intention contradicted today?

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Example of Restorying Independence Park

(I think “restorying” is an example of criticality because it helps us to challenge and disrupt entrenched narratives that reproduce existing power structures — Trey)

  • Independence Park as an active site of Revolution (disruption of oppressive systems) in progress
    • What oppressive systems were entrenched during the Revolution of ‘76? How have those been disrupted or furthered?

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Example of Restorying Independence Park

(I think “restorying” is an example of criticality because it helps us to challenge and disrupt entrenched narratives that reproduce existing power structures — Trey)

Source

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Independence National Historical Park (INHP) today looks very different than it did before colonization, during the Revolutionary War, and onward. A number of voices and perspectives have shaped the space and have made decisions about which stories are told in the exhibits today.