Critical Awareness

Being aware of your own critical lens is a vital part of examining learning. Through ENG 408 I have become much more critically aware of the social issues that could potentially happen in my future classroom. As a participant in this ENG class I've learned that thinking critically about important issues is an important element to a classroom's atmosphere, because without being critical about issues how would we ever figure out proper ways to approach them. Therefore, in my future classroom, I am going to begin each new semester by asking students to think critically about the subjects we approach in the classroom and to look at subjects that are new to them with an open-minded lens.

Through this class I have learned many ways to bring critical awareness into the classroom atmosphere. One of them involves asking students to be open to new ideas and to be considerate of those new ideas when they are brought to the table. However, just because I want students to be considerate doesn't mean that I don't want them to challenge themselves and their peers. This means not being afraid to voice another opinion, one that may not be the normal answer (we don't want normal, we want new and fresh). 

One of my posters I would have in my class might say "Be Critical, No Judgement, Open Mind" 

Through this class I have become less afraid to voice my opinion because I know that my classmates are not looking at me as attacking them, they are interpreting my thoughts with the same critical lens that I am using to interpret their opinions. 

A social view that I would ask my students to be especially critically aware would be gender and social issues that repeatedly come up in texts of different mediums. One way that I would ask students to be critical would be to have students analyze different mediums of the same type of literature and see if that changes how they view that text. For example, have students listen to two different versions of a song, one by a man and one by a woman and see if that changes their interpretation. This would help them begin to see their worlds more critically because I am giving them the opportunity to be critical.