Li’s Unit Plan( draft)

What Is Success?
What Does Success Mean To Adolescents? 
Grade Level: 11-12
This is a 5-lesson of “What Does Success Mean?” unit, and the five lessons are as the following:
 Week 1: Students will be introduced to the unit and learn the various definition of success.

What is success?

1)      Dictionary definition: a favorable termination of a venture; specify: the attainment [...]

NCTE Blog-Discerning Power Relationships — Toward a Critical Pedagogy

This is a particularly good post for us to review this week. Excellent set of questions to ask of any text, but esp. children’s and YA text constructions. If you haven’t signed up to receive the NCTE blog updates, I recommend that you do.
Those of you who are familiar with Freedman/Johnson’s title, Developing Critical Awareness [...]

Examining Feminism: In texts and in life.

As I have previously alluded to, I think that critical theories are not only important for examining texts in ELA classroom, but they also present a variety of different lenses for critiquing interpreting the our roles as citizens in world in which we live, an argument that both Tyson and Appleman seem to agree with [...]

A Class on Class: Marx and the Politics of Teaching

If the “teaching and reading of literature is always a political act” (Pradl, Mayher) and we as teachers are to help produce functioning members of our current system, it’s necessary that we give our students the tools that will allow them to be critical of our situation as members of a global community, especially given our [...]

The “Politics of Interpretation”

I’m looking forward to Raph and Mandy’s prompts on our upcoming discussions of Marxist and feminist criticism on Tuesday night. Reading the assigned chapters in TYSON and APPLEMAN are important to all of our being able to work w/our facilitators on Tuesday.
I’m especially interested in how adopting new lenses and new languages (other than the [...]