Intertextuality, Music, and Critical Pedagogy

Abstract

AS A TEACHER EDUCATOR WITH A FOCUS On learning, literacy, language, and culture, I am urgently involved with how to help teachers make emotional, intellectual, and cultural connections with students that can make school learning real. By “real” I mean learning that students can use to learn how to live. There is an old Arlo Guthrie song that sticks in my head in which he sings, “And schools are still like prisons, cause you don’t learn how to live / and everybody wants to take and nobody wants to give.” Involved in this kind of work of trying to help make learning real for kids, certain themes emerge that are especially important to what I would call “transformative educators”—that is, educators who are not content to reproduce the social, symbolic, and material orders of our world but would like to reimagine and reconstruct these orders around more equitable, peaceful, and wonderful ways of thinking, creating, acting, and being in relation with one another. Three such themes are (1) making connections between school learning and everyday life; (2) conceptualizing learning as not only the assimilation of new content and skills but also the construction of identities, relationships, and ways of acting, knowing, and becoming in the world; and (3) bringing a critical/creative edge and energy to the literacy practices we engage in as teachers and learners.