CI 414/504: Disciplinary Literacies Spring 2024

For the longest time, ever since I can remember really, I’ve been very curious about society and the world and have shown a lack of complacency. I would get in trouble sometimes with parents, teachers and other people with authority over my many, sometimes difficult to answer, questions. I would often wonder if there was something wrong with me, having so many questions and criticisms about the world and society, it wasn’t until a professor later reassured me that it wasn’t bad to ask questions, to push back. While reading A Talk to to Teachers by James Baldwin, those moments in my life came back to me. In the reading Baldwin explains the paradox that teachers face wen educating students. Parents have an obligation to ensure that their children are educated and society has the desire to see schools produce subservient citizens who agree and believe in whatever society tells them. The entire purpose of education, according to Baldwin, is to help create a person who can make their own de...

  In his essay, a Talk to Teachers Baldwin optimistically reflects on the transformative power of educators and the educated and engaged citizen. Baldwin begins his essay by acknowledging that “we are living through a very dangerous time”(Baldwin 17) and there is a universal uneasiness about the state of our world. He states that those who identify themself as a responsible citizen of their country, especially educators, should be prepared to “go for broke”(Baldwin, 17). He extrapolates this idea by asserting that education is curated along a framework that “perpetuates the aims of society”; to create a subservient citizen that obeys the law. Within this social structure, Baldwin contends that it is the obligation and responsibility of educators and the educated, engaged citizen to examine and challenge the harm exhibited by an authoritarian society. In this struggle, those who confront social institutions will be met with “...the most fantastic, the most brutal, and the most deter...

The readings for this week provided a platform for how we, as future educators, can promote civic engagement within the classroom. In one of the first articles we read, James Baldwin's "A Talk for Teachers," Baldwin states that the purpose of educations is to "create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black and this is white" (Baldwin, 18). As educators, we should not strive to indoctrinate our own beliefs in the curriculum we are teaching, but instead, promote several perspectives to show that there is a diversity of opinion on every issue. As we are aware, not everyone agrees on everything. Although we might have an opinion on a particular issue, it is not our job to emphasize that opinion in the classroom. Instead, we should be trying to assist our students in developing their own critical conscious that affords them the ability to think for themselves without being influenced by othe...