Bibliographic Information
Title: More Than the Basics: Teaching Critical Reading in High School
Author: Nancy Zimmet
Year: 1987
Citation
Zimmet, N (1987). More Than the Basics: Teaching Critical Reading in High School. In Shor, I. (Ed.). (1987). Freire for the classroom: A sourcebook for liberatory teaching (1st. ed, pp. 122-128). Boynton/Cook.
Realms of Application
Summary
Zimmet describes the design and experience of guiding one of her classes through a critical lesson on their relationship with school.
Zimmet starts her piece with an analysis of her students’ Context. She identifies class as an important difference between the “Curriculum Ones”, students in her school expected to go to University, and the “Curriculum Twos” that she teaches, those in the lower achievement program. In recognizing the distinction between these two groups as economic, but also as a difference in the local social hierarchy of the school, and as an important aspect in the self-perception of her students, she identifies an opportunity for intervening with a critical lesson that will address some of these perception issues.
Zimmer identifies the main goal of the Lessons she describes as building self-confidence, as a first step towards her students taking more active roles in school. She decides to focus her lessons on school itself, and the relationship that the students have with it, which she previously identified as a key issue with her students. Then, she describes the exercises she and her students conduct:
- First, she has students write and discuss their memories about their first day of school. They record themselves talking about their experiences in the previous school year, and they interview other students outside of class. They create a photo essay about life at school. Then, they discuss the commonalities the students had observed across all the stories: eagerness, vulnerability, lack of confidence, fear. She concludes that at the center of these fears is a difficulty with reading.
- Second, they do reading exercises. Because she has identified reading as a core element of her Lesson, she incorporates Herber’s model for reading competency as a Methodology tool to structure her interventions to address multiple levels of reading comprehension:
- At the literal level, she has her students read and answer basic reading comprehension questions. They discuss their answers in small groups, so that all students get to talk about their work. Now, they are all prepared to talk to the whole class.
- At the interpretive level, they pick out statements that correctly describe the relationships in the text. They continue to discuss their answers among themselves, but Zimmer asks that they consider also their own experiences this time.
- At the applied level, they are asked to respond to a new set of statements from their own thoughts and experience. During the discussion, Zimmer notices that they are more willing to talk publicly about their experiences, and she concentrates on discussing what they see as limiting factors to becoming the people they want to be.
- Finally, she asks them to think critically about problems they have had before, to analyze how they solved them, and what challenges they have faced. Now, all students discuss their experience openly with each other.
She reflects on the relative success of her Lessons. Though the students are more willing to talk to each other now, not everything can be solved overnight. She trusts that they have gained some confidence, though, and that they can take this outside of the classroom.
Zimmer’s article is uncharacteristically focused on a single set of lessons, and as such presents the process of guiding her students through them in much greater detail than others usually do. Yet, it is ever clear how her lesson design flows from her construction and analysis of her students’ context, and how she links skills development to the acquisition of a critical understanding of the students’ situations. In short, she is modeling for the students Freire’s reading the word and the world, highlighting how one serves as a catalyst for the other.
Her use of Herbert’s framework as a Methodology tool for the structure of a single lesson also stands out. Here, her tool is not focused on the overall design of a course or an agenda, but on a very particular intervention whose goals and interests were derived from Context analysis, not method. Yet, she exemplifies how these support tools can serve to further refine the pedagogic goal into specific, actionable exercises that build on each other.