Beyond Anne Frank

This chapter addresses the ways in which aesthetic practices provide educators at all levels and across disciplines with practical tools for enhancing critical literacy in pursuit of responsible citizenship. Engaging with aesthetics allows students to create meaning-making experiences and explore their own thinking about a topic and provides students with an opportunity to create meaningful experiences to address social action. Sharing of these processes and creations is often less polarizing than dialogues or debates and allows for inclusion of students with multiple modalities and talents. This curricular approach is more than simply creating an arts-integrated curriculum. Students should be creating, critiquing, and engaging with various forms of aesthetics (e.g. visual, drama, dance, music, etc.).

The Reader, the Text, the Interpretation

No time in history has it been more challenging, and perhaps more important, for people to be able to intelligently process the vast amounts of information available. In response, there has been a resurgence on the emphasis of educating students in the public schools not only to be literate in the sense of decoding words and phrases but also to be able to evaluate the validity, the worth, and the credibility of a text which is the basis of critical literacy instruction. Critical analysis of texts requires that the reader possess a complex set of skills, and with that consideration in mind, readers' responses during their transactions with a text can help guide teachers to facilitate a natural process for students to evaluate the worth and credibility of information.

Expanding the Curriculum With Creativity

Standardized education and narrow curriculum testing reduces students' abilities to critically think and creatively solve real-world problems. Although public policy emphasizes these important and practical skills, they have not adequately manifested in United States classrooms. They are instead filled with shallow prescribed curriculum that fails to inspire and guide students to think creatively. Science education provides a unique opportunity to engage students by solving real problems through flexible co-constructed supportive environment.

Critical Literacy Through Administrative Eyes

This chapter speaks to the way educational leaders, specifically site principals, can support and guide teachers to implement critical literacy strategies into their classrooms. While literacy specifically relates to texts, it can also be identified as discourse as well. However, finding ways for administrators to encourage teachers to allow students the opportunity to develop the ability to express their critical analysis through conversations and presentations as well as through writing can be a challenge. Nonetheless, preparing students for critical literacy and critical discourse is an essential skill in the 21st century and beyond.

Cultivating Visual Analysis and Critical Thinking Skills Through Experiential Art

Employing visual analysis in the production and critique of artwork is an essential task of an art educator. By encouraging the basic principles of Edmund Burke Feldman's Practical Art Criticism in the development of art making and art analysis, art educators can create a learning environment that guides students toward the practice of higher order thinking skills. Examples of immersive art education that activates space and invites participation from the viewer will be cited as systems for inspiring civic engagement in the classroom.

Teaching the Constitution

The Constitution of the United States is the essential document of the American Republic. It not only sets the legal perimeters under which the federal government operates, but it also creates a balance in the political relations between the federal government and the individual states. The Bill of Rights, the initial 10 amendments to the document, ratified in 1791, provide both civil rights, as well as the guarantee of criminal procedures for individual citizens. Therefore, its careful study is critical to produce an educated citizenry capable of making knowledgeable political decisions. This chapter puts forward a mode of study for the document at the heart of our republic.

Engaging Teachers With Students

To motivate struggling and reluctant readers, teachers must first learn about students and their abilities. This knowledge will allow teachers the opportunity to mold units of instruction and present students with texts framed in a manner that will connect their experiences with the material. This chapter provides strategies for engaging with students to learn more about their personalities and reading abilities. Also included are strategies for connecting complex texts with student interests for reluctant readers as well as instructional methods to assist struggling readers.

Creating the Citizen

This chapter presents an approach to civic education that integrates critical literacy with the research-based promising practices of civic education and the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies Standards. The authors present a definition of critical literacy that reflects a broad-based approach to the concept while exploring what critical literacy may look like within a civic education classroom and the ways in which this reflects a particular approach to good citizenship. Perceived connections between critical literacy, the promising practices, and the dimensions of the C3 Framework are illustrated throughout the chapter, and the authors provide a real-world example to demonstrate what integration may look like in practice through either extra-curricular or classroom-based student engagement.

Using Critical Literacy Skills to Support Civic Discourse

A central focus of social studies education is to help students develop into informed and active citizens. Central to the practice of citizenship is the ability to engage in civic dialogue. Informed by the work of Kumashiro and Wolk, this chapter examines the role of critical literacy in moving social studies instruction beyond traditional, teacher-centered approaches to emphasize multiple and conflicting perspectives, inquiry skills, and civic discourse. In order to honor the multiple and conflicting perspectives present in any event, the use of critical literacy examines such questions as who is being represented? and who is speaking for whom? These questions serve to problematize American and Western-centric approaches to social studies education that serve to reinforce the hegemonic discourse too often evident in social studies classrooms to engage students in richer learning experiences and provide them with the skills and dispositions necessary to become active citizens.