Amanda Coan_Commentary #4 During these four weeks of Issues and Trends in Curriculum, I have had the opportunity to expand my knowledge about critical literacy, digital literacy, and ultimately making sure to honor my students' identities, histories, and experiences within the classroom. I was able to participate in a book study over Gerald Campano's I mmigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering . During the course of the four weeks, we broke up the text into three parts, we created three critical thinking questions, discussed weekly a question from each person making connections, and ended with a multimodal book review culminating everything we had learned. Prior to our book studies, we were asked to create a mindmap which centered on our current understandings of curriculum. We were asked to reflect on the following subtopics: student roles, student learning, how curriculum is determined, and curriculum design. Figure 1 As you can se
Response to Our Common Text, Negotiating Critical Literacies with Teachers Prior to starting this course, I had thought that I would be only looking at common trends within our country's curriculum with our discussions focused on some of the common issues. Although we have talked about critical literacy in previous classes, it hadn't crossed my mind that it would be a focus of this class. So when I got the text for this class I was a little surprised by the title, Negotiating Critical Literacies with Teachers: Theoretical Foundations and Pedagogical Resources for Pre-service and In-service Contexts (Vasquez, Tate, & Harste, 2013). Even then, I thought I would get an overview of critical literacy with a few references to other resources. As cynical as it was, I was definitely proven wrong. This book (and class) was so much more than I had thought. I now feel like I have a deeper understanding of critical literacy and understand its importance in the classroom. Now I thin