Teaching Critically

If there is one thing in this class that I know I will come away with, it is knowing that I have the confidence to be critical of multiple mediums of texts. I know that the ways that teaching has been done are not always going to speak to students in a productive day, no student is the same and therefore they are not all going to interpret and understand lessons in the same way. This is definitely going to happen in multilingual, multicultural students in the classroom. There are many issues that can be seen in texts and it is important as the teacher to address these issues that are seen in the texts.

Therefore, in order to help our students become critical of the texts we present to them, we must be critical of the lessons that we present to them in class. Take for instance, the social issue of economic class and the possible role that that could play in classrooms, especially those in urban settings. We have to be critical as teachers and think how our students will react to the situations that we present. Therefore if we are going to teach in a low socioeconomic setting do we only teach texts that they can relate to or do we introduce them to different socioeconomic situations? I believe that in order to be critical of texts teachers have to introduce to their students multiple genres of texts.  Through our ENG 408 discussions I have learned that being critical of a text is one way to better understand that text that the class is studying.