A New Favorite Definition of Critical Pedagogy

This is my new favorite definition of critical pedagogy as stated by Henry Giroux in his article, "Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education is Being Taken Over by the Mega Rich:"

"Freire is one of the most mportant educators of the 20th century and is considered one of the most important theorists of "critical pedagogy"- the educational movement guided by both passion and principle to help students develop a consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, empower the imagination, connect knowledge and truth to power and learn to read both the word and the world as part of a broader struggle for agency, justice, and democracy."

The Journey: This is What it Means to be a Man...a new series o...

This was posted on the blog site "The Journey: Discussions on the Construction of Masculinity in America" and I thought it would be relevant here as well. This is a news clip regarding a young 14 year old man who stands up for a teacher in a local high school who spoke out against bullying. Click the link below and it will take you to the full post and video.  

The Journey: This is What it Means to be a Man...a new series o...: "As our class and many academics and social scientist out there strive to envision an alternative definition to manhood than the current trad..."

We Need Critical Pedagogy Now More Than Ever

We need critical pedagogy now more than ever.  As public education falls under the control of the elite, as more and more public services, including public education, become privatized, and as standards in education become strategically crafted to serve the needs of the market, critical pedagogy and the lessons that can be gleaned from the work of Paulo Freire are extremely pertinent.  It is clear that public education is no longer a priority or a pillar of democracy worth preserving amongst our government, as Henry Giroux writes in the article "Lessons to be Learned from Paulo Freire as Education is Being Taken Over by the Mega Rich":  


"The profound disdain for public education is evident not only in Obama's test-driven, privatized and charter school reform movement, but also in the hostile takeover of public education now taking place among the ultra-rich and hedge fund zombies, who get massive tax breaks from gaining control of charter schools. The public in education has now become the enemy of educational reform."

The view rest of the article on www.truthout.org follow the link below:
What We Can Learn From Paulo Freire

Some great critical pedagogy links:

http://mingo.info-science.uiowa.edu/~stevens/critped/index.htm


and:


http://radicalteacherblog.wordpress.com/

All Dissident Intellectuals to the Polls!

I was re-reading the last chapter of bell hooks book "Teaching Community," one of my favorite books on education.  In the last chapter she discusses the difference between public intellectuals and what Noam Chomsky has defined as "dissident intellectuals," or those who are "defenders of freedom."  Dissident intellectuals are critical of the status quo and they dare to make their voices heard on behalf of justice.  Upon re-reading this, I decided to look up the interview where this came from, you can see the full interview here.  In the interview, when asked what the role of the intellectual was when dealing with imperialism and if he thought intellectuals were doing their job, Chomsky said,

"Unfortunately, intellectuals are doing their historic job. The historic role of intellectuals if you look, unfortunately, as far back as you can go, has been to support power systems and to justify their atrocities. So the article you read in the National Post for the production of vulgar Stalinist connoisseurs, that's what intellectuals usually do as far back as you go. 

If you go back to the Bible, there's a category of people who were called prophets, a translation of an obscure word, they were intellectuals, they were what we would call dissident intellectuals; criticising the evil king, giving geopolitical analysis, calling for the moral treatment of orphans, decent behaviour. They were dissident intellectuals. Were they treated well? They were prisoned and driven into the dessert and so on, they were the fringe. The people who were treated well were the ones who centuries later, like in the gospel, were called false prophets. So it goes through history. The actual role of the intellectual has been supportive of power." 

It is interesting to consider this definition of "intellectual," on election day, November 2nd, 2010. I had never considered that there might be different qualifiers for different types of intellectuals.  It makes sense, but I had never thought about teasing it out in quite that way.  Shamefully, I will confess that I considered anyone who is actually an intellectual would only speak on behalf of justice, challenge the status quo...it never occurred to me that anyone who put any sort of thought and intention and research into understanding the world would actually side with dominant ideologies and oppressive power systems...naive of me....I know.  

However, here we are on election day and I woke up this morning thinking about how we categorize and label who is patriotic and who is not.  As I had just finished voting at ten after six this morning, I drove away from the polls feeling very patriotic and proud of myself for participating in what we happen to call a democracy.  I thought about all the times I have been criticized by conservative friends and family members for not being patriotic, for being too critical, too political, too Left, too opinionated, too idealistic, too young...Why is it that persistent dedication to holding our nation to its true potential for greatness and for "liberty and justice for all" has been seen as "fringe"? This is an easy one to analyze...preservation of power and privilege and white supremacist capitalist ideology...when you have the best tickets to the show you certainly don't want to give them up or share your seat...blah, blah, blah...However, I refuse to believe that that is really what my loving family members are so fervently holding onto when they share with me their definition of patriotism, or poke fun at me idealistic politics.  Furthermore, I don't want to believe that that is what they are doing when they choose to vote for people and policy that drastically effects the quality of life of those who are different and have less privilege and power than they do.  Is it lack of critical pedagogy, of engaged teaching and learning in our schools, is it fear, is it religion, is it "just the way they have always been?"  I don't care what your politics are, but why are we supporting ideology in our educational institutions that says that critical=political?  Or critical=irresponsible?  Or critical=wrong/un-american? What about democracy?  What about "liberty and justice for all"?

I know this is a bit of a rant, but I will conclude with saying that I hope that here in Arizona, the folks voted into office are the folks that will preserve the Raza Studies/Ethnic Studies program of Tucson, AZ, and revoke HB 2281.  I hope that the new crew in the capital building will support the good work of educators who, through critical pedagogy and democratic teaching, are facilitating the process of helping young people grow into their roles as "dissident intellectuals," who will passionately hold our nation to its full potential, to it's own said standards...liberty and justice for all.  

Pedagogy and Pop Culture #3

So....we have been talking about the use of pop-culture in the classroom.  I just came across Willow Smith's music video for her song "I Whip My Hair,"  it isn't demonstrating critical pedagogy in the classroom but the music video itself, starring Willow (a tough as nails and clearly creative 9 year old), is about learning to access and honor your true self.  The beginning of the video shows a very sterile and homogenous school environment and then Willow comes in and shakes things up.  I believe that she is not only making a call for people to be themselves, but I also believe that in more ways than one, she is making a call for ethnic studies, for critical pedagogy, and for democratic education.  What do you all think?

Paulo Freire, Coffee, and Critical Chemistry

Today in our critical dialogues group we are discussing the very famous, very influential, chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  I thought I would post a quote from the chapter and a video that I believe epitomizes what Paulo Freire is calling for in his book.

"Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other." 

Below you will find a slide show on a high school chemistry class that has really taken the ideas of problem-posing education and critical inquiry that Paulo Freire discusses in his book and has put them into action.  

Educational Philosophy

As I sit here attempting to verbalize my educational philosophy I am overwhelmed with words and phrases that would describe my ideal teacher and system of learning. I feel that my answer could be different in a mere few minutes, but for now this is it:

I believe that the relationships that students develop with school and learning is vital to their lives as a whole. School is a place that must teach students how to learn first and foremost. It can not be a place of simple rote memorization of facts, figures, and formulas- while those are arguably important, I feel that school must be a place where inquiry is key so that students leave with the ability and desire to seek information rather than simply filled with information. Further, the information being received and the knowledge acquired must be meaningful and have real world applications for any of it to stick or truly be learned. I would hope that the students in my class not only see but also make connections between the content in the school room and their lives around them. I want them to question everything- authority, rules, facts, history, current events, systematic oppression, social norms, religion, etc. This questioning terrifies many and is a driving force behind a very controlled education system, but I argue that this questioning and inquiry skills in addition to the facts, figures, and formulas empowers students to be fully contributing members of society. Lastly, education and school should be dynamic in that it can never truly be defined or unexamined because it is constantly changing with a fast-paced, ever changing world.

Philosophy

Although federal, state and local districts restrict curriculum taught and guide materials used, they've left teachers with some wiggle room for applying the craft of teaching. Classroom management and the methodology used is still, thankfully, up to the individual teacher. Within this wiggle room of teaching, my goal is to create an environment where every child finds success, feels empowered to take chances and isn't afraid to fail, values the actions that lead to discovery and critical thinking, and understands the importance of working diligently to achieve a goal. Part of creating this environment involves teaching the importance of each child's part in the classroom, demanding responsibility for actions, and modeling respect for all. When I began teaching, the emphasis was on "teacher as facilitator" and thirteen years later, I continue to see this role as valuable, but I feel more like a "conductor" who, after being handed the musical score, is left to orchastrate the beauty in performance.

Educational philosophy

I think that education is a community effort, it takes a village to educate a child. We further our students' education by bringing to the table as many resources as possible to get them down their paths. We can not be effective as teachers if we work in isolation. I feel that we should not only be involving parents, grandparents and other staff members; we should try to pull the community into our schools to move students as far as we can help them get on their educational journeys.

I want to give as much information as I can to help students academically and socially so as to maximize their potential. If other services are necessary, I need to make every effort to bring those services to the child or their care giver. I was trained to teach as an individual rather than in a cooperative group. I've learned that I accomplish more in a team than I do as a soloist.

Critical Pedagogy in Pop Culture #2

I was having a hard time finding clips of critical pedagogy in pop-culture so instead I decided to post a clip of bad teaching in pop-culture.  This video clip is painful and hilarious to watch, it is the absolute antithesis to critical pedagogy.  I'll keep searching for CP in pop-culture and hopefully I will have something for you next week.

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Roses in Concrete

Check out this video of Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade giving a keynote presentation at Harvard School of Education this last April. It is a very inspiring video to watch if you are an educator. Skip the first 12 minutes or so as they are having technical difficulties and he doesn't actually start his presentation until after that. He speaks a lot about social toxins...racism, patriarchy, poverty amongst so much wealth, sexism, violence, trauma, etc. that get in the way of a young person's ability to learn. He is asking educators to quit focusing on the dysfunction, low test scores etc. of these students and rather focus on how...despite the "concrete" / social toxins, these young people still come to school to "reach for the sun". He also problematizes Obama's use of the word "Hope" and reframes it in a way that serves the lives of people who need hope the most. It is a beautiful presentation and definitely worth the two hours it will take to watch it.


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Precious Knowledge Coming Soon!

This is a new documentary about the ethnic studies program in Tucson, AZ that is coming out. It looks amazing! Check out the trailer.

Precious Knowledge Trailer from Ari Palos on Vimeo.

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Critical Pedagogy in Pop-Culture Week #1

Every week we will post something on critical pedagogy happening in pop-culture. This week is the first of our series and I have chosen a clip from the movie Dead Poets Society (1989), starring Robin Williams, Ethan Hawke, and Robert Sean Leonard. Dead Poets Society was directed by Peter Weir. Enjoy!

Challenge #1- What is Your Teaching Philosophy

Our first charge as a group is to write our own personal philosophy of teaching. It needs to be clear and concise so that it can become something that we can remember, share with our students, and remind ourselves of when we encounter challenging teaching situations. It should also be something that is open to change because as said by many many great thinkers, "without change there can be no progress." We are taking this challenge from Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade's book, "What a Coach Can Teach a Teacher". Each of our philosophies will be different as we each come from different backgrounds and work with very different populations and ages of students.

Courtney's First Attempt at her Teaching Philosophy (likely to change in the near future)
I see teaching as a process of facilitating democracy. In the classroom my role is to help my students practice democracy, articulate and voice their opinions and perspectives, and think critically. Through problematizing constructs of knowledge, systems of power, and institutions of learning, I will encourage my students see more clearly that truth and reality are not stagnant, are not neutral, and often privilege the most powerful in society. Through challenging institutionalized power structures in education with creatively critical curriculum and dialogically dynamic classroom communities, I see education as a way to protect true democracy and enact radical equality.

Critical Dialogues Meeting Time and Place

It's official! The Critical Dialogues Group will be meeting every Tuesday from 6 to 7:30 pm at the Prescott College Crossroads Center, Room 206. The group will begin meeting on Tuesday, September 21st. Light snacks and refreshments will be provided. Prescott Unified School District is sponsoring the group and local educators can receive professional development credits for participating in the group. For more information please post a comment to this blog entry or email Courtney Osterfelt at costerfelt@gmail.com.

Critical Pedagogy 101

Critical pedagogy is a form of education that is grounded in critical theory, is student centered, democratic, liberatory, and seeks to challenge systems of domination and oppression. Critical educators empower their students to question traditional forms of knowledge, academia, social systems, and dominant paradigms through the process of problematizing knowledge and educational inquiries. Critical educators incorporate these objectives into any and all subject matter their students study as well as in their personal role in the classroom and the overall learning culture of the learning community. In a democratic classroom that implements critical pedagogy, the students and the teachers are both learners and co-creators of the curriculum, and rather than an environment of hierarchy, the classroom is a space of dialogic discovery where everyone, teacher and students, are participants. Critical pedagogy requires a dedication to personal reflection, not only from the students but also from the teacher. No matter where an individual is in their journey to become critically conscious, all forms of knowledge are susceptible to ideological contamination, one must be committed to a critical praxis that problematizes every level of our realities. Critical pedagogists demonstrate a willingness to constantly reevaluate ones own work to ensure it continues to be student-centered, student-engaging, honest, critical and liberatory.

Critical pedagogy has its roots in the Frankfurt School and has been most notably used and theorized by Paulo Freire. Critical pedagogy has always been a methodology whose purpose is to liberate on both an intellectual level and a truly physical level, as one cannot implement critical pedagogy without incorporating action into the learning process. What I find most compelling about critical pedagogy is that it demands educators to restructure their classrooms in ways that are in direct resistance to oppressive systems. With critical pedagogy one can deconstruct very radical topics with their students or use it to address some of the more traditional canons of academia like math or science, but because critical pedagogy is more than content or curriculum, one can explore science with their students and simultaneously teach them to operate in society in truly democratic ways that reject the subversive patriarchal, white supremacist, hierarchy of modern day society. Educators can talk to their students about democracy, equality, respect, and compassion throughout all the lessons they teach, but in my opinion, radical change will never happen if our teaching doesn’t model for our students ways to behave that demonstrate democracy, equality, respect, and compassion.

For example, when teaching a class about deconstructing patriarchy and it’s relationship to capitalism; if the class is taught utilizing the “banking method,” as Paulo Freire would say, then the students may be downloading new knowledge into their minds, but the teacher is not teaching them to utilize it to seek their own liberation, or even to incorporate it into a new way of viewing and behaving in the world. However, if the same class is taught using critical pedagogy, then students are learning to engage in a process of critical praxis, where suddenly the new knowledge they have been exploring informs their every action in a way that examines their role and relationship to oppression. The same can be said for math, science, history, English, etc.

There are many ways that educators can use critical pedagogy in the classroom. Future posts will focus on different tools and tactics that can be used in the classroom.

bell hooks and a cup of coffee

There's nothing like a little bell hooks and a good cup of coffee to start your day off, both of the following quotes were taken from her book, "Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope".

“There is no better place than the classroom, that setting where we invite students to open their minds and think beyond all boundaries to challenge, confront, and change the hidden trauma of shame. We do this by enacting a politics of affirmation where difference is accorded respect and all voices deemed worthy.” (pg. 103)

“Whenever we love justice and stand on the side of justices we refuse simplistic binaries. We refuse to allow either/or thinking to cloud our judgment. We embrace the logic of both/and. We acknowledge the limits of what we know.” (pg. 10)

Critical Dialogues Group

The objective of the critical dialogues group is to bring together Prescott area educators from middle schools, high schools, and colleges to learn about and discuss critical pedagogy and the ways that it can resist and fight oppressive structures in our communities, both local and global, through education. Many educators already practice critical pedagogy in their classrooms without really knowing it. This group will help educators who are already striving to create democratic classrooms enrich their practice as educators, and produce informed, critical, and creative curriculum, through brainstorming sessions with other educators in our community. The group will provide a space for educators to learn about critical pedagogical theory through weekly group readings, discuss the impact critical pedagogy has in their classrooms, and problem solve around challenges that educators face in implementing critical democratic pedagogy.

The group will meet once a week to discuss relevant readings and creatively collaborate around different strategies. If you would like to be involved in this group please email Courtney Osterfelt at costerfelt@prescott.edu. The group meetings will begin at the end of August, 2010. More information about the day, time, and place will be posted within the next week.

What is Critical Pedagogy?

There is yet to be a consensus on who started critical pedagogy, however most people site Paulo Freire, a Brazillian educator, as the founder of critical pedagogy. Freire was known for his emancipatory methodologies teaching Brazillian farm workers and laborers to read. His approach to helping these people become literate was to begin with what they already know and to construct the curriculum around what his student felt they needed to know to facilitate their own liberation. Freire felt that traditional forms of education were ineffective in transforming oppressive social structures, in response to traditional education he coined the term "banking education" and he positioned his theory around education, "problem-posing education," as the antithesis to banking education. In his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire defines banking education as:

"education becoming the act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits that the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat (72)."

To the contrary, Freire suggest problem-posing education (read: critical pedagogy):

"In problem-posing education people develop the power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world, with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation (83)."

There are many educators who have contributed greatly to foundations of critical pedagogy and there are even more present day theorist and practicioners who are consistently developing new theories around the best ways to address injustice and promote equity in education through the use of critical pedagogy. The following are just a few of the foundational theorist who have deeply influenced my work and the work of so many others:

Paulo Freire, The Frankfurt School, bell hooks, Antonia Darder, Ira Shor, Peter McLaren, and Henry Giroux. Currently, some of the more influential people in the feild of critical pedagogy are, Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade, Ernest Morrell, Michelle Fine, Julio Cammarota, Pedro Noguera, Patrick Camagnian, Dr. K. Wayne Yang, just to name a few.

In Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell's book, "The art of Critical Pedagogy," they define Critical Pedagogues as educators who promote "education that is rooted in the existential experiences of marginalized peoples; that is centered in a critique of structural, economic, and racial oppression; that is focused on dialogue instead of a one-way transmission of knowledge; and that is structured to empower individuals and collectives as agents of social change (49)."

The following video is taken from the "Freire Project". This short 2 minutes video includes many of the foundational and contemporary theorists of critical pedagogy and describes what critical pedagogy is, why we need it, and some of the challenges critical pedagogues face.