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BRINGING CRITICAL THINKING AND SOCIAL JUSTICE INTO THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM



BRINGING CRITICAL THINKING AND SOCIAL JUSTICE INTO THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM
What is literature? Why do we teach literature?Literature was accorded the status of being a window to world s different from one own.
Unfortnately reading for pleasure wasn’t mentioned by any of them. It was important for me to Point  that literature isn’t necessarily written it includes a variety of oral forms.
During the activity wherein participants were required to think about how they would work with Vietnamese poet ‘THICH NHAT HANH poem call me by my true names”in their classroom ,I decided to show this video clip featuring folk singer “Prahlad tipanya singing the bhajan “tu ka tu” attributed to the 15th century Indian poet kabir.
It is excerpt from Shabnam virmani Air in America.What followed was a delicious conversation around itself,identity ,compassion.my objective in this art of the workshop was to get the teachers to shift their focus from explaining a poem to opening up a poem for students to enter.
Unfortnately a lot of language teachers in India diminish the joy of experiencing poetry by using poetic text to teach vocabulary and dictionary skills.
Later in the day ,I facilitated a guided meditation that required them to imagine themselves hgging a tree before they would explore Gieve Patel poem  on killing a tree . The debriefing after the meditation brought forth so many wonderful sharings from the teachers who had hugged apple, neem,banyan,mango trees during the brief exercise.
I love working with participants who take responsibility for their learning and inspire me to offer my best

Comments

  1. ladybugMay 2, 2019 at 10:18 AM

    It's really an awesome article about teaching literature

    ReplyDelete

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