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The following paragraphs are from Chapter 16 Teachers who Agitate: Frerian Motivation in the Classroom in my 2009 book

k Literacy with an attitude: Educating workingclass children in their own self-interest, 2009 (2nd ed.). Albany NY: SUNY Press.

[I have assigned a number of articles describing learning activities in what will be described later in this paper as critical literacy.] And so, in come my students, bug-eyed, saying, 'You can't do that; it's too political," or "I'd never get away with it." Of course, taking sides is political. It reflects a position, a point of view. When you make a big fuss over Valentines Day and Mother's Day and ignore International Women's Day, it's political. "Isn't it political," I ask, "to teach the history of European missionaries bringing 'civilization' to Africa and never mention Bishop Tutu's assertion that in the end the Europeans had the land and the Africans had the bibles? "Isn't it political to teach the history of women's suffrage or the abolition of slavery or the civil rights struggle as the work of larger-than-life heroes rather than as the accomplishment of common people who organized and took collective action? "Isn't it political to justify American foreign policy because it brings the benefits of industrialization to the Third World rather than suggest that our foreign policy exploits the people of the Third World and supports dictators?" I point out that what shocks them about Peterson is not that he's political; it's that he's controversial. We engage in dozens of political acts and make dozens of political statements in our class rooms every day that support the status quo. We don't think of them as political because they are not controversial. What "I'd never get away with it" really means is, "If I tried it, I'd get into trouble." I'll go along with that 100 percent, but "I'd get into trouble" is not an ethical reason why a professional does not make a professional decision. I'll agree it is the reason millions of professional decisions are made every day-that's why the status quo is the status quo-but we're talking justice here, not go-along, get-along. "But," they insist, "why should I get into trouble over strikers and war protesters. It's not my job." That's where they and Peterson part company. As a follower of Freire, Peterson believes that it's his job to teach powerful literacy [critical literacy] to his students, and if he is going to succeed, he must get the basic teaching paradigm working in his classroom. The students must want the knowledge he is offering badly enough to cooperate and work hard to get it. He believes he must make his students aware of what's at stake on a conscious, political level, and therefore, he must relate literacy to his students' lives and the lives of their parents. He believes he must run his

classroom in a way that gives his students a reason to engage in explicit, context-independent language and school discourse. Visiting picket lines, joining war protesters, and facilitating cooperative, small-group learning are as much a part of his literacy curriculum as the spelling rule, "i before e except after c." He believes there's no point, in fact, of teaching "i before e except after c" unless he does the rest. Why should they listen?

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