Dialectical Journal 2 -Topic A:
What strategies can help improve and support critical thinking skills?
How do critical literacy practices support research?
How can taking a critical perspective help us to better understand the paradox in literacy?
What role does culture have in our studies?
Chapter three of Social Linguistics and Literacies focuses on the literacy crises. Literacy is not just a matter of the ability to read and write, but “…being able to use one’s literacy skills… to produce knowledge…”(Gee, 2015, p. 41). With the rise of neoliberalism, it became more and more important to educate our children with the ability to move beyond reading and writing. What good is fluency without comprehension? What good is writing without the knowledge how to argue a point? Which best the question: how do we teach critical literacy?
Life for a child changes when they walk through the doors of school on their first day and step into their fourth grade classroom. The have officially moved away from the goal of learning how to read and into a new path of learning what to read—learning from what they read and into a new path of learning what to read –learning from what they read in an academic setting. “Reading to learn” is the so often used phrase.
It's interesting to me that history had shown us the gap that occurs between children in poverty and children outside of it. “Children living in high-poverty areas tend to fall further behind, regardless of their initial reading skill level.” (Snow et al 1998:98)
Unfortunately, the poor are more likely to struggle with literacy, and in turn, critical thinking skills. As a result, they are often stuck in a cycle of poverty handed generation to generation. Without critical thinking skills, they are bound to fall victim to the same problems that caused poverty in their ancestors. And so on, and so own.
This becomes worse in children of minorities. A black boy in poverty being taught by and educated white woman is more likely to struggle in school because of the fact that he may be afraid of the possibility of being racially profiled. “…the pervasive culture of inequality that sometimes deskills poor and minority children” (Gee, 2015, p.54) is something that hangs over their heads on a daily basis. It’s no wonder so many minority and impoverished children deal with anger and anxiety.
So how does culture relate to all of this? Well, to start, “different types of texts…call for different types of background knowledge and require different skills to be read meaningfully” (Gee, 2015, p.59). “One has to be socialized into a practice…” (Gee, 2015, p.60)
I’ll use myself as an example. From a very young age, I have attended church services. At my church, we had Sunday School in the mornings, regular service, then children’s church. Sunday School was taught in such a way that educated people would come together and discuss a particular Bible story. Not just read it, but analyze it. Evaluate it. They would break it down to the bare bones from historical context, cultural context, and word choice to original language translations.
In children’s church they taught us the stories and gave us the “moral of the story”. In regular service the pastor gave lectures about the stories. In Sunday School we discussed the stories as a group. We were encouraged to take risks and listen to recordings of what the pastor lectured. We said a mantra at the beginning of every lecture: “This is my Bible, It is the Word of God. I am what it says I am. I can do what it says I can do. I am a believer, and not a doubter. I am a doer, and not just a hearer. My life is the better after having heard the Word of Faith. Faith cometh by hearing and I know that my life will not be the same.”
By the time I reached high school, English was my favorite class. I moved up through the “ranks” to Honors, AP, and senior year I took English I & II at the community college. It wasn’t until my freshman year at college that I made the connection. When I took a British literature course and was asked to analyze a piece of poetry I realized—this is exactly what I used to do at church.
When I talk to people who remember me back when I was ten, twelve, sixteen and attending that church, they remember that I always had either a notebook or a chapter book in my hands. I wrote unending stories and read books as if putting one or both down would be the death of me.
For me, literacy was exactly that. Reading and writing. Getting my thoughts on paper connecting what I read with my own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Sharing stories for others to enjoy and analyze, too.
The NCTE’s Position Statement on writing instructions in school hurt me deeply. Writing as “a gatekeeping device, which contributes to achievement gaps and other inequalities” ( Calhoon-Dillahunt, et. al, 2022, p.1) is the opposite of what I’ve always hoped it would be. But the more I read from the article, the more I knew it rang true. As much as I loved to write, I always hated writing essays in school. Not because I felt I wasn’t good at it, but because I felt my style of writing was no good for academia. I know that “habits of white language” is often exactly what makes children shy away from writing altogether.
Worse, still, as I looked for an article to accompany my readings for the week, was my hope for my students. As I am an ESL teacher, I looked for something that was specific to the population of children I generally serve. What I found was an article from Studies in Educational Evaluations, entitled: “Does explicit teaching of critical thinking improve critical thinking skills of English language learners in higher education? A critical review of causal evidence.” (El Soufi, et al, 2019)
In hindsight, I should have really paid more attention to the abstract, and less attention to the title. In a nutshell, “the evidence is not strong enough to be conclusive” was a phrase that I got tired of reading. ( El Soufi, et al, 2019, p. 141)
The issue was that of over 1794 studies, NONE of them were done properly. The article concluded by saying the following: “In general, we believe that the ability to think critically is a very useful skill and should be taught…” ( El Soufi, et al, 2019, p.152) Thanks, guys. Real helpful. As far as how, well… the only thing that even remotely seemed to be helpful was explicit instruction.
But I have hope. That article I read was in reference to ESL students who are already in college. It’s one of the reasons I prefer to work with littles—their brains are still growing. If I can catch the early, perhaps I can make an impact the way my church family did with me.
So I went back, and I found another article from TEA that was given to us as part of our study in Reading Academy. It had a whole slew of different “scientifically based literacy practices and approaches” (the name of the article) from providing that explicit literacy instruction to using “exemplar texts to support student metacognition of the writing process.” (Texas Reading Academies, 2021, p. 3)
So, maybe, just maybe, if Reading Academies is being taught all over Texas, we can begin to get more data on the most successful strategies to teach critical thinking. So far, my money is on explicit instruction.
Calhoon-Dillahunt, C., Coppola, S., Warrington, A., & Yagelski, R. P. (2022, August 29). Position statement on writing instruction in school. NCTE. Retrieved September 29, 2022, from https://ncte.org/statement/statement-on-writing-instruction-in-school/
Gee, J. (2015). Chapters 1-2. In Social Linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (5th ed., pp. 1–37). essay, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Soufi, N. E., & See, B. H. (2019, January 4). Does explicit teaching of critical thinking improve critical thinking skills of English language learners in higher education? A critical review of causal evidence. Studies in Educational Evaluation. Retrieved September 25, 2022, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191491X18302748?via%3Dihub
Texas Reading Academies. (2021, June). Scientifically Based Literacy Practices and Approaches. Austin.
