“As English educators, we have a major responsibility to help future English teachers to redefine literacy instruction in a manner that is culturally and socially relevant, empowering, and meaningful to students who must navigate a diverse and rapidly changing world.” (Morrell 158) Yeeeeeeeeeesssssssss Pleeeeeaaaaasssseeeeee!!!
Do you ever get so excited about something that you can’t sleep? That is exactly how I feel about teaching daily, especially when I have an amazing new idea on how to approach a specific lesson in a unique and engaging way. I cannot wait to present this new way of learning to my students to see how they respond. I get even more excited if my kids come to class with their own brilliant ideas on creating an approach to a lesson. The learning is then in their hands and I am merely the facilitator. That is the way I believe truly effective education should be. “You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need” (Jerry Gillies) I originally heard this quote from a spoken-word poem I always share with my kids for a Journal prompt called “The American’T Dream(The Purse Suit Of Happyness)”(Suli Breaks 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzcxOl4b7IA
He is only one of the many spoken word artists that I share with my kids…My favs are Rudy Francisco, Marshall Soulful Jones, Team Nuyorican, Brave New Voices, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and too many more to give credit to for helping me motivate and inspire my kids with new perspectives on studying literature. My kids get so focused and passionate when they can have the freedom to use variant mediums to demonstrate their understanding and acquired knowledge of difficult texts in class. They create short movies and trailers with their phones based on Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. They design storyboards, graphic novels, comics, and bitstrips on Google Slide Show Presentations to illustrate their genius in analyzing and interpreting classical literature and poetry. They research song lyrics, animals, and pictures of inanimate objects to symbolize their character analyses from Lady Macbeth to Star in The Hate U Give. Teachers CAN enact classroom curricula and pedagogies that simultaneously empower students culturally and adhere to state and national literacy standards as this study suggests. I see it happen daily.
The essence of this article is that English educators need to consider moving toward multimedia theme-based units that incorporate poems, film, music, and the Internet and allow students to express their ideas through essays, e-mails, Websites, videos, and drama. English studies will only remain relevant to the extent that students develop the conceptual and methodological tools to critically interrogate multiple streams of information. (Morrell 169) Advances in technology are transforming what it means to be literate (Cushman, Kingten, Kroll, & Rose, 2001; Kress, 2003)