Entry 1: Critical Writing

For my first entry here this semester I wanted to write a bit about the piece that stuck out the most to me, which was the Heffernan & Lewison piece regarding Culturally Relevant Writing. Over the course of our, well, courses last semester we talked extensively about Critical Literacy and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, and for whatever reason it did not even cross my mind to think that these same concepts could be applied to teaching writing and composition. The examples shown in the article showed just how powerful this exercise could be, and how this practice goes hand in hand with critical literacy. It is asked in the beginning of the article: “Could critical literacy practices shake up the writer’s workshop?” The answer, as it seems that they have found out, is absolutely. These practices can serve as an extension of critical literacy exercises, or even as a precursor to critical literacy itself.
As illustrated in the article, going through the necessary steps that the teacher did with the students in order to get them to understand the critical aspect of their writing, they were able to construct pieces that were culturally relevant to their current lived experience. Even though many of the students went back to writing fiction, they were able to tell stories and articulate points and scenarios that they faced in their everyday lives. Seeing the stories the kids were writing about bullying, and how the playgrounds were lawless adult-free zones, we can see the early onset of purposeful writing that is representative of the time & environment that these kids are living in. To be able to teach this at an early age is a pretty cool thing.
As far as a question, I’d like to ask, specifically regarding the part of this article where we see the students writing from other’s perspectives, i.e. a young boy tries to write from a girl’s perspective - are there any potential problems with this approach? Or is there only room to grow?

(For a resource, I want firstly to state that "bullying.org" as mentioned in the article is not a real website yet, so I'd like to direct you all to Lee Heffernan's Twitter: https://twitter.com/lee_heffernan. It's fun to follow educators on Twitter, and I think it's helpful for avid Twitter users as myself to continue to get something applicable out of an otherwise brainwashing social-media experience.)

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