Skip to main content

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Schools should create social responsibility to drive change?

Why Schools should create social responsibility to drive change? A school plays a vital role in the child’s development. Children get their formal education in a school. Schools need to promote the education which is meaningful and has to be fit into the framework of the society. Today’s children will grow up and become future adults of our society. Hence if today’s children are not made aware of their social responsibility towards the community then the social issues or problem will grow more and more. There is an urgent need to foster strong mental and social health amongst today’s children so that they can connect with their peers, their elders, the community, the environment, etc. School education must empower children to be active citizens, caring, responsible and compassionate human beings. As the children spend most of the time in school, hence schools must promote the activities to sensitize children towards social responsibility to bring positive change in the soci...
12 comments
Read more

mlearning: An Innovative Pedagogical Tool

Blog write up by Mrs Suman Purohit Das mlearning: An Innovative Pedagogical Tool With the advancement of educational technology, our teaching-learning process has faced the utmost changing trends. The classroom technology trends are changing so swiftly and speedily that the teachers and educators have to keep themselves equipped to meet the expectations of a diverse classroom for optimum learning. 21st century Gen Z is born with technology in hand, that’s why these children are known as “Digital Natives”. If we do not bring innovative technology to the classrooms then our classrooms will be dull, boring and it will be difficult to engage and excite children for learning in future. Teachers have to embed technology into their innovative instructional planning. Around 5 years back on the name of educational technology, most of the schools had started changing their chalk & black boards into digital/interactive boards so called “Smart Boards”. But that also got out dat...
7 comments
Read more

Preparedness: Development of Disaster Management Skills in students 

Preparedness: Development of Disaster Management Skills in students  Education is not only assimilation of information and imparting bookish knowledge to students but that information and knowledge must be applied either for earning livelihood or saving life from any unforeseen disaster. Our curriculum covers all areas of learning through skilful education. With this purpose a textbook on disaster management, “Together towards safer India Part-III” is applied in class X course. We teach all kinds of drills such as fire evacuation, earthquake evacuation, flood evacuation etc. We explain and demonstrate all survival skills, safe construction practices, communication during disasters and sharing responsibilities. Schools are giving emphasis on practical drills while teaching such content. In past we have witnessed many unforeseen fire tragedies where the children were being involved, like the fire tragedy of Kumbakonam in which 93 children charred to death, Dabwali fire acc...
10 comments
Read more