“Nobody Knows the . . . Amount of a Person”: Elementary Students Critiquing Dehumanization through Organic Critical Literacies
Abstract
This article draws on a four-year practitioner research study of a university partnership with an all-boys public elementary school to analyze students’ socially situated literacy practices thatoccurred on the margins of a curriculum driven by high-stakes testing. We bring together critical literacy (Freire, 2007; Janks, 2010; Luke, 2000), realist theory (Alcoff, 2006; Mohanty, 1997;Moya, 2001), and Gramsci’s (1971) conception of the organic intellectual to provide a layered framework for understanding how students at our research site mobilized their cultural identitiesfor critical ends, what we define as “organic critical literacies.” Through illustrative examples of third- and fourth-grade African American boys’ interactions with fiction and nonfiction texts,we examine how students critiqued common ideologies that devalued them, their school, and their city, and enacted more humanizing visions. The elementary students whose work we featurewere realizing their capacities as emerging organic intellectuals, translating their singular critical insights and observations into a broader dialogue that had more universal resonance. Weconclude by discussing the educational, epistemological, and ethical implications of our study.
- Journal
- Research in the Teaching of English
- Published
- 2013-08-01
- DOI
- 10.58680/rte201324161
- CompPile
- Search in CompPile ↗
- Open Access
- Closed
- Topics
- Export
- BibTeX RIS
Citation Context
Cited by in this index (2)
-
Filipiak (2024)Research in the Teaching of English
-
LeBlanc (2015)Written Communication
References (0)
No references on file for this article.
Related Articles
-
Pedagogy Apr 2025modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism african american rhetorics cultural rhetorics first-year composition writing pedagogy basic writing graduate education two-year college teacher development writing centers technical communication professional writing labor and working conditions digital rhetoric multimodality social media literacy studies race and writing gender and writing community literacy literary studies editorial matter
-
Literacy in Composition Studies Dec 2024Rachael Shah
-
Pedagogy Oct 2024rhetorical criticism first-year composition writing pedagogy basic writing writing across the curriculum graduate education two-year college service learning teacher development revision argument collaborative writing assessment writing program administration multimodality multilingual writers literacy studies race and writing disability studies community literacy editorial matter
-
Pedagogy Jan 2024
-
Research in the Teaching of English Nov 2022Laura C. Chávez-Moreno