Educators can’t display religious symbols in public schools, but that does not mean religious symbols can never appear in the classroom. So when is it OK?
When this teacher’s classroom of white students identified The Catcher in the Rye protagonist Holden Caulfield as a “typical teenager,” she knew she needed to broaden their idea of what “typical” teenage problems look like.
Ernest Morrell is an associate professor in the Urban Schooling division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (GSE&IS) and Associate Director for Youth Research at the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA) at the University of California at Los Angeles. For more than a decade he has worked with adolescents, drawing on their involvement with popular culture to promote academic literacy development. Morrell is also interested in the applications of critical pedagogy in urban education and working with teens as critical researchers. Morrell previously taught
This strategy provides tools to create questions that help students engage critically with Perspectives central texts and examine them for issues of power and social inequity. The activities suggested here also encourage readers to bring their knowledge and experiences to the reading of a text.
In 1942, “For My People” won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and Margaret Walker became one of the youngest black writers to have published poetry in the 20th century. Her poem makes tangible the African American struggle, yet also brings to the forefront a hope for all people to “rise and take control” during a dark period in American history.