Creating Critically Engaged Classrooms through Community Literacies

Abstract

This commentary argues for the need for creating critically engaged classrooms through community literacies. Community literacies provide teachers and students important opportunities to explore how they and others are shaped by and contribute to the designs and outcomes of their communities, which means classrooms offer the potential for teachers and students to create and live out transformative means for engaging communities. As the COVID pandemic has illustrated, communities are impacted inequitably by ongoing injustices but are also uniquely equipped with vital experiences and epistemic knowledge and resources needed to understand and address these issues. The call in this commentary is for teachers and students to leverage community literacies in ways that appreciate, learn, and reclaim the vast social and cultural knowledges that exist within/outside of the established school spaces of their classrooms.