Critical Global Literacies with Picture Books

I've been participating in the National Writing Project and National Parks Service's Write Out over the past week (it goes for another week, so you should definitely sign up!), and one of the activities I've done is take part in a collaborative annotation of Amy Price Azano's recent article, A Place for Local in Critical Global Literacies (2019).

The article is the educational theory equivalent of a really good mash-up song: Azano merges critical literacies (e.g. Freire, 2009; Freire & Macedo, 1987) with critical place-based pedagogies (Gruenewald, 2003), which in turn is a mash-up of place-based pedagogies (Sobel, 2004) and critical pedagogy (e.g., Giroux, 1988).

Separately, the theories argue that:

1. Place-based education helps students connect their learning to the natural world (Sobel, 2004).
2. Critical pedagogies attend to the ways that power impacts what gets taught and how it gets taught, and what biases are embedded in that (Giroux, 1988).
3. Critical place-based pedagogies consider the ways that power is embedded in both the natural and built worlds (Gruenewald, 2003).
4. Critical literacies focus on thinking critically about the components that make up how we understand the words we read in relationship to the world we inhabit (Freire, 2009).

In merging these theories in critical global literacies, Azano (2019) argues that it's important to pay attention to how place, power, and literacy interact, both in local ways and on a global scale. She then gives some examples of how teachers might engage in critical global literacies in their classroom. For example, students might read novels that examine both local and global place/placelessness and home/homelessness. They might then discuss them in relationship to each other, considering both the particular impact of place/placelessness on individual characters in individual places and also "...the ways that dislocation and dispossession are systematic ways that oppress and marginalize groups" (109).

Azano's discussion of middle/high school novels brought me to think about some of the work that preschool and elementary children are doing in Book to Art this fall. They've been thinking about the theme of one person's impact on a community and have read books that mirror their rural, predominately white, New Hampshire world, like The Little Turtle, and also books that provide windows into different experiences, like Thank You, Omu. (In The Little Turtle, a little turtle wanders all over, getting stuck on a road, and a child brings the turtle back to a pond. In Thank You, Omu, Omu shares her food with all the neighbors, and then they share right back.)

Azano's article helps me realize that an important next step in the children's discussions is to ask them to think about what one person's impact might look like across communities, what might prevent that impact, and how they might both make a positive impact and/or be an ally to others who are trying to make a positive impact.

(It's pretty amazing how much goes into just one book discussion, isn't it?)

Thanks, Amy Price Azano and Write Out!

Giroux, H. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. South Hadley, MA: Bergin Garvey.
Gruenewald, D. The best of both worlds: Critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, vol. 32, no. 4, 2003, pp. 3– 12.
Freire, P. Pedagogy of the oppressed.Translated by Myra Ramos, Continuum, 2009.
Freire, P., and Macedo, D. Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Bergin and Garvey, 1987.
Sobel, D. Place- Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities. 2nd ed., Orion Society, 2004.