This guide helps educators foster critical conversations in secondary schools to support the grassroots activism many students are currently engaged in and support students who may not be familiar with these issues to understand their complexity and how to participate in change beyond school. It offers a framework for facilitating critical conversations that focus on building knowledge about power, privilege, and oppression; creating a space for students' perspectives; and developing talk moves that begin and sustain critical discussions. It provides examples from critical conversations from six English language arts teachers' classrooms, lesson ideas, suggested readings, and critical discussion of theories and related research, focusing on social class, race and racism, sexism, and patriarchy. It addresses theories that support critical conversations, the tensions the teachers experienced, and how critical conversations are generative in English language arts classrooms; how to prepare for critical conversations by building knowledge about power and engaging a critical learner stance; how practices related to racial literacy and other strategies like telling stories and reading literature support the work of engaging this stance; approaches and structures to create a critical classroom space that promotes risk taking and vulnerability; how critical pedagogies help students enter and maintain critical conversations; critical talk moves like posing questions, disrupting talk, and inviting new perspectives; and strategies for forming teacher inquiry groups and studying the critical conversations that take place in classrooms to concentrate on their social dynamics. Annotation ©2020 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
