ABSTRACT
While my students and I negotiated a critical literacy curriculum, we were not free from curricular mandates and the threat of standardized testing. Our school board dictated specific programs to follow (Fig. 1.1). As the classroom teacher, I made sure that I understood what was expected of me through the mandated curriculum in order to demonstrate to parents, colleagues, and administrators that our negotiated curriculum surpassed the required curriculum (Fig. 1.2). I did this as a way of creating as much space as I could to engage in the literacy work that I felt would offer my students more opportunities for contributing to social change and that would give them access to more powerful literacies-that is, literacies that could make a difference in their lives, for example, as young people, females, or underrepresented minorities. Critical literacy, however, is not new and there are growing accounts of teachers engaging in this practice. In 1995, for example, Lisa Maras and Bill Brummet initiated what they thought would be a generative unit of study on life cycles. However, it was a presidential election year, and so the presidential elections lay foremost in the children’s minds. As a result, the class engaged in a conversation through which a vote was organized regarding whether to return to the life-cycle agenda or to take on the presidential elections as an inquiry project. The vote was apparently one short of unanimous in favor of dropping the life-cycle study.
