Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classrooms

The first thing within the reading for this week that I really connected to was when the text says "while we respected and honored much of the current literary canon and encouraged our students to gain a mastery of it, we also recognized that the canon can be limiting in ways that were problematic and ultimately disempowering to our students." This was a section that makes so much sense to me because so often, even in college, the texts that some may choose to read are condemned because they do not hold enough literary merit. But why does my favorite book have to be something by Hemmingway or Austen? In this section, the author says that it doesn't because in the new media wave that we live in so many of the texts that students are reading are condemned and excluded because they don't hold enough merit. But isn't the goal to get our students to read? Then shouldn't we introduce them to texts they will connect to and actually read? There is a very strong pedagogical potential of "tapping into young people's everyday experiences. These experience need to be found in texts that were not written over a hundred years ago they are found in current texts.
In order to include "popular culture" into the classroom, they have "developed classroom units that coupled the study of film, newspapers, magazines, and music with the study of traditional novels, poems, and plays. Continuing on the Paulo Freire reading this reading touched on the banking metaphor that I thought was similar to the direction of this reading. There must be a "real exchange of ideas between students and teachers. When thinking about my unit plan it is important that I also design my unit with the problem-posing way of teaching in mind where there is a lot of dialogue.
Overall, this reading has a lot of great information for me to consider as I am creating my own unit lesson plan.