Critical Approaches and Social Justice in the AP Classroom

Headnote

A teacher tackled her personal bias about text selection in the AP classroom.

I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests.

-TA-NEHISI COATES, BETWEEN I THE WORLD AND ME (48)

I was idealistic and naive, and I forgot my purpose in the classroom. In my Advanced Placement (AP) English Language and Composition class, my instruction was social justice driven. However, in AP Literature during the 2017-18 academic year, I surmised that since I had taught some of these students already, they learned about how to be better citizens. I had done my job as a social justice educator. But the following incident changed the trajectory of my teaching and I realized that my classroom was a jail for students when I really wanted it to be a library welcoming their interests and perspectives.

Overall, I wanted to teach using culturally responsive approaches. According to Geneva (lav, there are five elements to f be a culturally responsive classroom. She explains:

Five essential elements of culturally responsive teaching are examined: developing a knowledge base about cultural diversity, including ethnic and cultural diversity content in the curriculum, demonstrating caring and building learning communities, communicating with ethnically diverse students, and responding to ethnic diversity in the delivery of instruction. (106)

I wanted to do as Gay suggests: to be more caring and to include ethnic and culturally diverse content. As a result, I became more aware of my students' literary knowledge and addressed my own Anglophile tendencies based on text selection and the impact in my English language arts (ELA) classroom. The ELA teacher can fuel social justice teaching. I learned this when one of my students posted the following note via the school's social media platform:

[T]he Western literary canon is good as is, and even though it mostly includes "White" authors, the vast amount of diversity in thought within the canon is a testament to the fact that a body of works can be "diverse," even if the authors of those works are of the same complexion. Also, YA "literature" isn't real literature.

Stuart (pseudonym), a brilliant young man, was the senior class president of a small South Florida magnet public school. He attended a school...