By: Elizabeth Rowland

As an elementary teacher at a school with a high population of students with low socio-economic status, I became aware of the struggle’s students had in reading and their lack of multicultural and global understanding. I noticed students’ attitude towards each other as very negative in thoughts and acceptance of others. In the article, Critical Literacy and Social Justice (2015), Barbara Comber states, “This is not to subscribe to a deficit discourse, but to note that poverty and place do impact on whether young people come to school and sometimes how they arrive in terms of their physical and mental well-being. Literacy has become the problem and the solution to educational inequalities.” (p. 364) This was very eye opening as I realized my students’ issues of poverty every day, I knew I had to make a change to better equip their academic capability and social awareness. I began to wonder how using multicultural texts effects student’s empathy, humility, and critical reading skills. Knowing how essential critical thinking and reading skills are today, it is imperative that literacy lessons promote critical understanding in order to enable students to acquire the skills that they can apply to social phenomena. In the article Critical Encounters in a Middle School English Language Arts Classroom: Using Graphic Novels to Teach Critical Thinking and Reading for Peace Education (2017), Lina Sun suggests, “Taking a critical stance in reading practice, I address social justice issues relevant to my participants’ lives, ask critical questions, and conduct critical discussions of stories to urge students to critique the characters and their own social practices, while also questioning stereotypical behaviors. Hopefully, that will result eventually in raising students’ awareness of social justice issues.” (p. 23) As I truly aspire and would love to cultivate an environment where my students think critically about the texts, participate in meaningful discourse around the underlying themes of a text, and take into consideration how the texts relate to their own experiences and relationships, I also believe this will better prepare students for success in today’s increasingly complex and interconnected world. My hope is that through this study there will be a positive effect in students critical reading skills, as well as, their empathy and humility of others.