Such books, coupled with Clarke and Whitney’s framework, help students to understand, visualize, and empathize with someone else’s struggles.ġ. Multiple-perspective books, which intentionally emphasize different viewpoints, help students develop critical thinking skills and learn how to see beyond their own lives to the world outside.

Clarke and Whitney provide a three-part framework for incorporating critical literacy into the classroom: (1) Students start by digging beyond the surface of a text, deconstructing it, and then analyzing and interrogating the layers of meaning (2) students take what they have learned from analyzing the text to reconstruct it and create new ways of thinking and (3) by taking what they have learned from deconstructing and reconstructing the text, the students can connect to the larger world and even take social action.Though it is an educational buzz word, there is no clear definition of critical literacy, which creates difficulties for teachers who attempt to incorporate deep, critical thinking into their instruction but do not get much guidance from state standards as to how to design instruction. As a result of state standards that require students to engage in critical and analytical thinking related to texts, teachers have been turning toward the notion of critical literacy to address such requirements.

Diary of a fly