From my upcoming book Critical Literacy and Urban Youth: Pedagogies of Access, Dissent, and Liberation (Published by Routledge)
I have been accused of being a dreamer before (a charge I do not consider an insult) but I teach and write as I imagine a world much different from the one we experience today. I imagine change, true change, complete change, as possible; even as imminent. I imagine the foundational role of critical literacy praxis in the remaking of the world. In fact, I believe that universal critical literacy would be the greatest revolution of all. For universal critical literacy is the prerequisite to the global revolution of indigenous and marginalized peoples. This is an approach to praxis that focuses on the development of a skill set and a stance toward knowledge and the world rather than adherence to any given ideology, party system, or aesthetic. A universal critical literacy would make everyday citizens better consumers and producers of political movements; and that may be the key to the change we so desperately need in our urban centers, and in the world at large.
That to me as a teacher, scholar, writer, activist, and human, is a cause worth living (and dying) for. The road is long and full of challenges. But life is long and full of possibilities. This, I know, is my road and my life. As I look, though, at the vibrant classrooms at East Bay High School with young women and men interrogating academic texts and a world of contradictions. As I reminisce about the teens roaming through the streets of Los Angeles with cameras and notebooks as critical researchers. Or I recall the conversations of youth engaged in sophisticated content analyses of media artifacts. When I imagine the internet-mediated struggles of the Zapatista Liberation army or countless other organizations struggling under the radar screen for social justice. When I imagine hackers, café writers, musicians, filmmakers, teachers, scholars, novelists, critical journalists, artists, and poets, and the people they write for and with, I am reminded that the revolution is not as far off as it sometimes seems. We are too many; we are embattled. We are filled with too much love. The causes are too righteous and too important. Our wills and our texts are simply too strong.
And so I urge us to walk, march, read, write, film, sing, dance, tattoo, and paint with a sense of urgency but with pride, unity, and resolve through the peaks and the valleys, the triumphs and the tragedies with that greatest and self-defining of human characteristics; hope. |
