Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture in an Urban Secondary English Classroom - Jeff Duncan- Andrade and Ernest Morrell

First of all I would like to say how greatly I admire John Duncan- Andrade and Ernest Morrell in their commitment to academic excellence while applying the principles of critical pedagogy to their classrooms.  I truly believe that these individual set out to uplift their students who were from a school that had been established as being in a high poverty area, when there were only miles away from another high school that many would consider “rich.”  All of this information helped me to better understand their statement, “One of the core foundational philosophical principles to classroom pedagogy and practice included a belief that multiculturalism was more related to pedagogy than curriculum” (pg 185).

Because of this, I keep being returning to pages 189-191 on the section of Savage Inequalities in urban school under Pedagogical Practices. I personally love the move Stand and Deliver and can easily see why they would want to incorporate it into their curriculum.  What better way for our students to learn with material that they fell they can personally relate to?  However, reading this section made me sad to realize that there are schools out there that struggle with heating classrooms and have equipment that is so old that you have to know the tricks in order to get them to function or the lack of equipment in general.

I also want to applaud them for taking on the discussions about conditions seen in Savage Inequalities and Stand and Deliver.  It made me sad hearing how their students so easily related to the conditions from the text and movie concerning the administration and the teachers.  It would be hard to sit there and listen (and realize) that I was working in a building with colleagues that resembled characters from Stand and Deliver, because there were some that plainly put give teachers and bad name.

Overall, I felt that this section was very uplifting in what they encouraged their students to do.  How awesome is it that several of their students went on to urge city council members to adopt their initiative “Put Children First.”  They also talk about the “stinging backlash” of empowering their students because students began to take more initiative in their school, so when something wasn’t right they would get the bottom of the problem and fix it.  In reality are you really going to be upset if a student feels something is wrong, or are you going to be proud that you made them feel empowered enough to stand up for their own education?owever, reading this section maed