More handpicked essays just for you.
Reflective essay on critically literacy
Reflection about critical literacy
Reflection about critical literacy
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Summary
Lisa Simon outlines her three main goals of this article as: 1. To demonstrate the importance of constantly questioning what has been left out of historical texts used in classrooms, 2. To inspire educators to critique class texts and incorporate marginalized perspectives into their teaching, and 3. Offer specific steps for educators and students to follow to find these marginalized perspectives. In this article, Simon explores the limitations of using Karen Hesse’s free verse novel Out of the Dust to portray the Oklahoma Dustbowl experience. She argues that like many classroom texts and textbooks this novel is told only from the white perspective, marginalizing the experiences of Oklahomans of color during that time period as well
…show more content…
Simon’s stance is that “not noticing race is an act of social injustice, as is not addressing the absence of race.” The author outlines the framework that she used to uncover the “silenced” stories of Native Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans living in the Oklahoma Panhandle during the time period of the novel. The framework that Simon used is a five step process that she calls the Critical Literacy Process and she encourages the use of this process to challenge “the inequalities of historical depictions”. The five steps are: 1. Ask whose experiences have been depicted and whose are absent; 2. Search the internet, print, images, and music for the absent stories; 3. Organize the found information; 4. Analyze the gaps in the information found using primary sources; and 5. Create a new text to share the counternarratives uncovered. While looking into the absent stories from races during this time period, the author found that there were “gradations of marginalization” in these untold stories. She found that it was much easier to obtain information on what life was like for African American and Native Americans in Oklahoma during this time. Mexican American and female perspectives in those cultures were much more difficult
My book was Gone by Lisa Gardner. It is a story about an ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy and his estranged wife, Rainie Conners. The story takes place in Oregon. The story begins with the profiler finding an empty car on the highway. After doing some investigating, he figured out that it was Rainies car. Thus begins the searching for Rainie. Unknown to Pierce, Rainie had been kidnapped. She is beaten, tortured, and thrown into a dark and cold basement. She stays there and tries to escape many times. Eventually, the kidnapper throws down another victim. Rainie was horrified to realize that it was a small boy. Now she can’t escape herself, she has to help the boy escape. With every failed escape, she is beaten even worse. The kidnapper finally had enough and decided to kill them. He fills the basement with water until he thought that they were dead. Fortunately, Rainie and the little boy escaped. The boy ran past the attacker while Rainie threw the attacker into the basements. They
In her Fire in a Canebrake, Laura Wexler describes an important event in mid-twentieth century American race relations, long ago relegated to the closet of American consciousness. In so doing, Wexler not only skillfully describes the event—the Moore’s Ford lynching of 1946—but incorporates it into our understanding of the present world and past by retaining the complexities of doubt and deception that surrounded the event when it occurred, and which still confound it in historical records. By skillfully navigating these currents of deceit, too, Wexler is not only able to portray them to the reader in full form, but also historicize this muddled record in the context of certain larger historical truths. In this fashion, and by refusing to cede to a desire for closure by drawing easy but inherently flawed conclusions regarding the individuals directly responsible for the 1946 lynching, Wexler demonstrates that she is more interested in a larger historical picture than the single event to which she dedicates her text. And, in so doing, she rebukes the doubts of those who question the importance of “bringing up” the lynching, lending powerful motivation and purpose to her writing that sustains her narrative, and the audience’s attention to it.
In the book Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina, education, and the lack there of, plays one of the largest roles in the character's lives. At this time in West Virginia, where the book is set, many children had to leave school and actually go into the coalmines, as Rondal Lloyd did, or work on the family farm. Racial ignorance is also a key element Giardina confronts in the novel. The characters, chief and secondary, equally cultural and racially bland, pass on their beliefs and therefore help to maintain the continuous circle of inequality that carries on even today. Political knowledge, at least on the national and state level, is also lacking within the little town of Annadel. With this knowledge coupled with her own experiences from growing up as an immigrants daughter in the same coalfields as her novels characters, Denise Giardina tries to explain the function of education and ignorance in not only the coalfields of West Virginia, but throughout the entire world.
Can you imagine living in harsh dust, losing your mother and brother, and barely recognizing the man, sitting in front of you, is your father? In the novel, Out of the Dust, the author, Karen Hesse, reveals the theme of the novel is loss and grief. Karen Hesse unfolds the theme by using messages throughout the book to emphasize the hardship and power of the Dust Bowl.
Steinbeck’s book garnered acclaim both from critics and from the American public. The story struck a chord with the American people because Steinbeck truly captured the angst and heartbreak of those directly impacted by the Dust Bowl disaster. To truly comprehend the havoc the Dust Bowl wreaked, one must first understand how and why the Dust Bowl took place and who it affected the most. The Dust Bowl was the result of a conglomeration of weather, falling crop prices, and government policies. The Dust Bowl, a tragic era lasting from 1930 to 1939, was characterized by blinding dust storms.
The main character is completely alienated from the world around him. He is a black man living in a white world, a man who was born in the South but is now living in the North, and his only form of companionship is his dying wife, Laura, whom he is desperate to save. He is unable to work since he has no birth certificate—no official identity. Without a job he is unable to make his mark in the world, and if his wife dies, not only would he lose his lover but also any evidence that he ever existed. As the story progresses he loses his own awareness of his identity—“somehow he had forgotten his own name.” The author emphasizes the main character’s mistreatment in life by white society during a vivid recollection of an event in his childhood when he was chased by a train filled with “white people laughing as he ran screaming,” a hallucination which was triggered by his exploration of the “old scars” on his body. This connection between alienation and oppression highlight Ellison’s central idea.
Louise Erdrich’s short story “American horse” is a literary piece written by an author whose works emphasize the American experience for a multitude of different people from a plethora of various ethnic backgrounds. While Erdrich utilizes a full arsenal of literary elements to better convey this particular story to the reader, perhaps the two most prominent are theme and point of view. At first glance this story seems to portray the struggle of a mother who has her son ripped from her arms by government authorities; however, if the reader simply steps back to analyze the larger picture, the theme becomes clear. It is important to understand the backgrounds of both the protagonist and antagonists when analyzing theme of this short story. Albetrine, who is the short story’s protagonist, is a Native American woman who characterizes her son Buddy as “the best thing that has ever happened to me”. The antagonist, are westerners who work on behalf of the United States Government. Given this dynamic, the stage is set for a clash between the two forces. The struggle between these two can be viewed as a microcosm for what has occurred throughout history between Native Americans and Caucasians. With all this in mind, the reader can see that the theme of this piece is the battle of Native Americans to maintain their culture and way of life as their homeland is invaded by Caucasians. In addition to the theme, Erdrich’s usage of the third person limited point of view helps the reader understand the short story from several different perspectives while allowing the story to maintain the ambiguity and mysteriousness that was felt by many Natives Americans as they endured similar struggles. These two literary elements help set an underlying atmos...
Williams, A. N. (2006). OUR KIND OF PEOPLE: SOCIAL STATUS AND CLASS AWARENESS IN POST-RECONSTRUCTION AFRICAN AMERICAN FICTION. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent?id=uuid:c9d7fd9d-c5df-4dea-aa22-35820de5878e&ds=DATA_FILE
Stories written in our present time about slavery in the eighteen-hundreds are often accepted as good accounts of history. However, Toni Morrison’s Beloved cannot be used to provide a good chronicle in the history of slavery. While writing about black female slaves and how they were the most oppressed of the most oppressed, Toni Morrison, herself as a female black writer, has a very bias view, as seen by many others. Beloved is written in a completely nonlinear fashion that makes it very difficult to view as a good account of history; the jumping around that it goes through makes it very difficult to place oneself into the story. Due to this jumping around that the book proceeds through, multiple viewpoints are easily created which completely derail the reader from the actual truth of what really happened. In many cases, Beloved does not show sign of what a true history would entail, as understood in the articles and essays of many.
During the nineteen sixties, African Americans experienced an immense amount of changes such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Prior to these changes, African Americans faced racial segregation. Segregation was prevalent in housing, transportation, education, medical care and even in the United States Armed Forces. In the poem, History Lesson, the speaker recalls a memory on a beach in Mississippi regarding segregation with her grandmother in the 1930’s. A comparison of the speaker and her grandmother shows both the belief in segregation in the 1930’s compared to the desegregation in the 1970’s. By utilizing historical criticism, History Lesson by Natasha Trethewey can be analyzed from a historical point of view.
A recurring theme throughout Gaines' fiction is the search for dignity and masculine identity in a hostile, racist environment. Although he consistently celebrates the pride and dignity of African Americans, he has often been critiqued by black writers who feel that his works do not adequately portray the harsh realities of black life. In Ernest J Gaines autobiography “ Miss Jane Pitman” slavery, the civil rights movement, and discrimination are themes portrayed. Gaines listened to adults tell stories and wrote letters for those who could not write. Gaines’s aunt was his inspiration for the character of Miss Jane. Gaine looks at the people, not the issue. In this novel we are exposed to the life of Africans through out the civil war. Gaines is a well-regarded man and is much in demand as a public speaker and correspondent on American life.
Today, blacks are respected very differently in society than they used to be. In “The Help”, we see a shift in focus between what life is like now for the average African American compared to what it was like for them to live in the 1960’s.“The Help” teaches readers the importance of understanding and learning from our history. The novel is a snapshot of the cultural, racial and economic distinctions between blacks and whites in a particularly tumultuous time in American history. “The Help” encourages readers to examine personal prejudices and to strive to foster global equality.
To understand the narrator of the story, one must first explore Ralph Ellison. Ellison grew up during the mid 1900’s in a poverty-stricken household (“Ralph Ellison”). Ellison attended an all black school in which he discovered the beauty of the written word (“Ralph Ellison”). As an African American in a predominantly white country, Ellison began to take an interest in the “black experience” (“Ralph Ellison”). His writings express a pride in the African American race. His work, The Invisible Man, won much critical acclaim from various sources. Ellison’s novel was considered the “most distinguished novel published by an American during the previous twenty years” according to a Book Week poll (“Ralph Ellison”). One may conclude that the Invisible Man is, in a way, the quintessence Ralph Ellison. The Invisible Man has difficulty fitting into a world that does not want to see him for who he is. M...
Native American literature from the Southeastern United States is deeply rooted in the oral traditions of the various tribes that have historically called that region home. While the tribes most integrally associated with the Southeastern U.S. in the American popular mind--the FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole)--were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) from their ancestral territories in the American South, descendents of those tribes have created compelling literary works that have kept alive their tribal identities and histories by incorporating traditional themes and narrative elements. While reflecting profound awareness of the value of the Native American past, these literary works have also revealed knowing perspectives on the meaning of the modern world in the lives of contemporary Native Americans.
...rt-breaking result of racism in the United States and the subject has made its way into the African American literary tradition. Slave narratives such as Douglass’ Narratives and Negro spirituals such as “I feel like my time ain’t long” and “Many Thousands Gone” have made African American literature true to the history that has been recorded. A present day controversial subject in our society is why can’t people, especially African Americans, forget about slavery and the adversity against African Americans? It is believed that African Americans have progressed and made advancement since that time; however, with writers like Elizabeth Alexander, the past just can’t go away forgotten; especially a past that was as gruesome as that of African Americans. Every single bloody lash, death and groaning happened and as she said we have to “say it plain” that it happened.