Teaching like our lives matter: Critical pedagogy and classroom research

This dissertation confronts the disconnectedness between schools and the challenges facing urban students as they navigate their social conditions, and calls for teachers in urban schools serving students of color to adopt culturally relevant, critical literacy teaching practices that develop youth as community change agents while adhering to state mandated content standards. To complete this task, I conducted critical classroom research (Mertler, 2006; Author, 2006) while teaching at a predominantly African-American (66%) and Latino (33%) South Los Angeles high school with a statewide rank in the lowest percentile. I actively tapped into youth confusion and anger as a way to engage the brilliance of historically marginalized students as readers, writers, and oral communicators; drawing from the very text that was most relevant to them --- their lived experiences. This study asks, how is teaching students to critically read the word and the world transformative for Black and Brown youth in South Los Angeles? I examined this question further by answering the following sub-questions: (1) What impact did sharing cultural narratives have on shaping a unifying classroom community? (2) What did connecting culturally empowering texts to students' lived experiences do to foster their sociocultural analysis? Using critical qualitative ethnographic analysis, critical discourse analysis, and grounded theories of analysis, this dissertation will share data-driven assertions concluded from an examination of field notes, student work and other artifacts, classroom video, and in-depth interviews suggest that the curricular inclusion of students' lived experience fostered a humanizing space, which unified our classroom community, cultivated conditions that heightened transformative thinking, and increased both their academic engagement and achievement.