Critical Literacy: Wish I Knew About it Sooner

Thinking about critical literacy can be a frustrating topic for me at times. Not because I find it confusing, but because I wish it was used more while I was in school. So much of what we read in school was from the dominant perspective that enforced false ideas in my peers. Because of these ideas, there were times when school was a living hell for me. I started to feel that something was wrong with me because of my ethnicity. Though we were told “everyone was equal”, it was clear from the characters in our readings and what we studied, that there was a hierarchy where men were above women. If I read the books and saw examples of strong people from a variety of different backgrounds and received historically accurate lessons with supporting resources, my school experience might have been very different.

Thinking back on my years in middle school and high school, I never remember reading a book that was written by someone Latino about a character who “looked like me”. Almost all writers and characters were white people that had very little in common with me. It wasn’t until college that I began reading more diverse works that I wished my high school and middle school peers could have read. I might have felt less of a “freak” if we did.

The kids I went to school with, though they tried to be culturally sensitive, never understood how culturally insensitive and insulting they were being at times. By calling me “the Puerto Rican” they made me feel like less. They didn’t understand that saying “you look so much prettier with straight hair” made me feel ashamed of my curls and feel as if something was wrong with me. They also didn’t understand that just because I’m Puerto Rican...it doesn’t mean I celebrate Cinco de Mayo. I lost count of how many time my peers and adults came up to me and randomly touched my hair saying “ethnic hair is so cool and weird…”

If my peers were given more diverse books that expressed the truth about different cultures, the truth about what men and women can do, and the truth about the LBGTQ community, I feel that more students would have felt accepted and more confident in who they are. At a backstage interview with Lin Manuel Miranda and the cast of In the Heights, he told me and the other girls I was with that in order to change people’s perspectives of a certain group, we must break the stereotype and show them the truth of who we (Latinos) are. It was a message that stayed with me almost ten years later. If I want to teach my student to be more respectful of each other, I must first harness the idea of critical literacy and show them there are more to people than what the dominant ideology tells us. I must take a step to break down those barriers and create a space where students can truly break down walls and think on their own and question the world around them. This is the type of classroom I wish I had when I was younger.

One thing I would do as a teacher to use critical literacy within the classroom is give students a chance to pick a book to read where the character has some form of different background. It could be race, sexuality, or even social class, but a book that is from someone's point of view that is different from theirs. This gives students some voice and choice in their readings but also challenges them to take part in critical literacy and see into the lives of someone else and then reflect on how this may relate to their own lives.