TO WHAT EXTENT DOES CRITICAL PLACE-BASED LITERACY SUPPORT LITERACY AND INDIGENOUS CONNECTIONS IN THE EARLY CHILDHOOD ELEMENTARY CLASSROOM?
This website is the culmination of my professional development over the course of a four month internship in my third professional semester. For my internship, I taught alongside an experienced teacher mentor in a high needs grade one and two classroom. With the restrictions of COVID-19 in in the classroom, I noticed a need for engaging and purposeful activities that complied with government, AHS, and CBE mandated practices. Usual grade one and two hands on activities were no longer applicable. Local, purposeful, and engaging inquiry based unit became a need in my teaching. With this approach, I quickly noticed how immersive, social, and intuitively critical literacy fits in the early childhood classroom and began to add to my research and application of critical, place-based literacy. |
benefits
"experiential learning, contextual learning, problem-based learning, constructivism, indigenous education… as well as other approaches that are concerned with context and the value of learning from and nurturing specific places, communities, or regions" (Gruenewald, 2003, p. 3).
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Experiences in place, such as out in the local community or exploring the natural world, "help children develop cognitive skills and begin to understand the world around them" (Brillant & Mankiw, 2015, p. 18)
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"Contemporary educators understand that literacy does not consist only of grammar, spelling, and orthography; it is a social practice that binds together communities that construct knowledge and shape the worlds in which they live, work, and play" (Mendoza, 2018, para. 1).
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Through the connection of critical and place-based learning, children are engaged in meaningful and authentic expressions of human, linguistic, digital, ecological, and technological literacies.
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Critical, place-based literacy is valuable because it challenges dominant narratives and works "to bring forth not a rainbow of stereotyped identities but a metissage of voices, each overlapping with the others in different ways" (Mendoza, 2018, para. 20).
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Critical place-based literacy recognizes the unique social contexts of classrooms and schools and brings place into the classroom for students to use their context to "do" literacy in meaningful ways.
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Students use literacy as a tool in their everyday lives, and by connecting with their contexts, place-based resources, and providing critical literacy discussion, students are better able to use their literacy in authentic ways to them. Both of these strands work together to give literacies community meaning and purpose to students, creating "rich learning contexts for literacy development" (Mendoza, 2018, para. 30). Critical, place-based literacy uses student's place-based resources, the local community, and surrounding physical environment to critically explore narratives as a social practice; for children to inquire and even challenge by using their literacies as tools. Understanding how children use literacies, as social practice, to navigate their physical world and understand systems of power and injustice, empowers students to use literacy in ways that are meaningful to them.
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