The Critical Minds Project

By Author: Elizabeth
Total Articles: 95
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In the fall of 2007 I received a call from two teachers whom I had worked with on prior projects. Both were now working at the same school, a large metropolitan high school that served an almost exclusively Chicano population. These teachers, while experiencing some success, both complained about student engagement and student achievement. One of these teachers, Miss Rodriguez (pseudonym), was in her first year of teaching at the high school level. She was assigned a group of ninth graders who were identified as having low literacy levels. This class Vibram Five Fingers met for 2 hours instead of the traditional 50-minute periods. The class met in the 2-hour block following lunch, out in a group of bungalows that were separated from the rest of the school by a football field. Miss Rodriguez wanted to know what she could do to get her students, her boys especially, more interested in literacy learning and more prolific in academic reading and writing.

I attended her class, and we held a meeting afterward to discuss a strategy for moving forward. I asked her what the ...
... students were interested in and she mentioned that they loved to talk about life in their neighborhood. I mentioned that we should develop a unit that allowed them to write about a day in the life of their neighborhood, from the time they awoke until the time they went to bed; and with that the Critical Minds Project was born. The students took to the project immediately. In addition to writing drafts of essays, the students collected digital photographs, created artwork, and put together a short film of their work, which they presented at my university in the late autumn. During the spring semester the students revisited their narratives. They read works in sociology and educational research as well as hip-hop texts and fictional narratives to provide a context for analyzing their experiences. These students added a social analysis to their narratives and created final works, several of which were published in an online journal. They also returned to the university where they put on a presentation for an audience of 300 that included students from other schools, university students, teachers, administrators, university faculty, and community organizers. In their presentations the students drew upon their narratives and the social theory that they had accessed to critique their own experiences as well as the schools and other social institutions within which these experiences were framed. In this way Vibram FiveFinger Discount they became social theorists and scholars in their own right who were able to move from translating their own experiences to making statements about the role of schools in promoting social inequality.

The students were also able to talk about the spaces inside of their lives where they encountered humanizing pedagogy and the support they needed to develop as writers, thinkers, and citizens. In interviews and in their narratives the students described how the process of writing the narratives helped them as students and in their presentations the students talked about recommendations they had for how English should be taught.