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A teacher models a think-aloud to prompt students to consider the unique relationship between critical and disciplinary literacies.
In early spring 2021, my phone buzzed with a Snapchat alert from Shaun, a magnetic and much-beloved former student who I had taught in my twelfth-grade English language arts (ELA) class several years back. He was asking me for the source of a quote about "how reading is the best and worst thing to happen to you" (see Figure 1). When I saw his name, I felt the familiar and bittersweet twinge that connecting with students who are now (somehow) adults always seems to elicit.
I knew the quote he'd referenced immediately. When I taught Shaun's Advanced Placement literature class at Southeast Raleigh Magnet High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, we read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. As we read, we paused to ruminate over Douglass's reflection that learning to read, a skill the then-enslaved Douglass subversively acquired despite risk of death, "had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy" (40). Douglass's ideas speak to a truth many teachers intimately know: an indelible sinew connects power, literacy, and agency. Only opportunities to exercise agency can fully appease the "eternal wakefulness" (Douglass and Garrison 40) that literacy ignites.
Literacy awakened Douglass's consciousness, inspired a passionate resolve to resist mental or physical breakage, and incited a fervor to agitate. To agitate, a person must persist, resist, and insist. Jailed eighty-seven times, civil rights activist Golden Finks earned the title "The Great Agitator" in pursuit of the fight for racial equality. Agitating, in the best sense of the word, connotes an unyielding commitment to provoking thought that effects change. Gholnecsar Muhammad writes that agitation literacies are "ways of reading, writing, thinking, and speaking that are connected to the intention and action to upset, disturb, disquiet, and unhinge systemic oppression" (352). Muhammad's take on literacy as a preferred tool of agitation aligns with my own and inspires my thinking. As a teacher, I believe it's important that my students see my unrelenting, unapologetic commitment to naming and dismantling oppression. I smiled as I typed my response to Shaun, thinking Douglass would be pleased to know...