Blog 9 Moje Article

I think a really interesting and important aspect of Moje’s article was the idea of critical literacy being used in the classroom. Moje goes through a variety of ways that critical literacy can be used in the classroom and why it should be used.

According to the article, critical literacy is “..an author’s language implicitly or explicitly produces certain meanings that tend to support particular social relations and institutions. Likewise, readers’ responses to texts are informed by their past experiences as people of a particular gender, race, ethnicity, age, and social class. Critical literacy practices, therefore, involve the interrogation of texts to uncover the ideologies operating in them; they also involve the interrogation of the relationship among texts, readers, and the wider society in which ideologies are embedded” (Moje 407).

As a future educator I think that critical literacy is extremely important, not only because it engages students so that they can relate the reading to their own life, but that this may keep students interested and hopefully not bored to death. Allowing students to question things takes them out of the realm of having them point out strictly factual ideas, like perhaps the definitions of the words they are reading, and helps them put together a creative way to approach reading instead of something that seems like a chore. As well as assigned reading, student can choose their own novels, articles, or magazines in which they can analyze the different themes and conflicts in the book. This is also where the idea of book clubs come in, students can either work with others or independently. I think this idea offers personalization for students which is important so they can discover their own interests while also learning from their peers.. Students today have a lot of access to learning about current social issues through the media and I think this is great because they can apply issues going on today to what they are currently reading. With these ideas I think it’s important for educators to remain patient with students because obviously they will have much different ideas than us and other students.