Readin', Rappin', and Teachin'
Department
Secondary and Middle Grades Education
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2006
Abstract
I teach English methods courses to undergraduate education majors who are predominantly white, middle class women from the South skilled in the conventions of Standard American English and who self-identify as heterosexual and Christian. They often come to my courses expecting to receive the top ten recipes for teaching high school English. Instead, I ask them to do difficult autobiographical explorations that often result in redefinitions and remakings of their imagined selves. I choose texts that invariably trouble students' taken-for-granted assumptions about teachers, curriculum, schooling, and education. In choosing these texts, I hope to facilitate an examination of pedagogy as a relational process impacting and impacted by race, class, language, sexuality, location, generation, and gender tensions in the larger society. My intent is to help my students to read, question, and understand themselves (and the world) in more complex ways so that they can then teach their own students to do the same.