Discussing Critical Pedagogy-2

*Viewing the shorter video is sufficient for this module. I provided the longer video for historical context.

Freire and Critical Pedagogy

What is Critical Pedagogy

Critical Pedagogy Critical pedagogy (CP) is a philosophy of education described by Henry Giroux as an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action." What is Critical Pedagogy and how will CSM operationalize it? Traditionally marginalized students are routinely limited with regard to available identities. As a result the ability for them to re-create and actualize (Freire & Macedo, 1987) themselves and in so doing develop positive academic identities is constrained. Self-actualization is a hallmark of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy is vitally concerned with equipping students with the necessary analytic tools so that they interrogate, critically, the new and emerging technologies that exercise pedagogical influence over them (Giroux, 2011).

Likewise, according to Giroux, Critical Pedagogy is a language of hope, struggle, and possibility; and, as such, it must teach students to negotiate difference and make the mission of making knowledge relevant, meaningful, and transformative. Precisely because unlike mainstream students, whose cultural and linguistic repertoires are consistent with schooling culture, inner-city, poor students are largely thought to come from a cultures that are purportedly antithetical to scholastic success. This erroneous thinking lends itself to deficit model thinking, which results in low educational expectations and inequitable educational outcomes.

Freire and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed

In his book entitled, Literacy: reading the word and the world, Paulo Freire (1985) argues that “Literacy becomes a meaningful construct to the degree that it is viewed as a set of practices that functions to either empower or dis-empower people (pp.155)”. He goes on to write that, “In the larger sense, literacy is analyzed according to whether it serves to reproduce existing social formations or serves a set of cultural practices that promotes democratic and emancipatory change (pp.156).” The primary tenet of his argument is that critical literacy should be predicated on critical pedagogy; and, therefore must be a tool used for the construction of critical world-making and, which should be the ontological vocation of an emancipatory education. He also argues that for traditionally marginalized, or in his words “oppressed” students, critical literacy can only be fully developed once their respective languages and cultures have currency within the educational spaces that they inhabit (Freire, 1987).

According to Freire (and many others) schools are a battle ground of sorts where the quest for and subsequent denial of personhood, of agency, plays out over and over again. Schools functioned as political sites in which class, gender, and racial inequities were both produced and reproduced. In essence, the colonial educational structure served to inculcate the African natives with myths and beliefs that denied and belittled their lived experiences, their history, their culture, and their language […] The schools were seen as purifying fountains where Africans could be saves from their deep-rooted ignorance, their savage culture, and their bastardized language, which according to some Portuguese scholars, was a corrupted form of Portuguese without grammatical rules (pp.156). What Freire (1987) describes in the above quote is not limited to Brazil; in truth, this very same phenomenon exists here in the United States as well. And, just as in the abovementioned Brazilian context, our educational current system, with its overreliance and insistence on Standardized English (Charity Hudley & Mallinson, 2011) especially for linguistic minorities, “reproduce[s] in children and youth the profile that the colonial ideology itself had created for them, namely that of inferior beings, lacking in all ability (pp.158).”

To be clear, Frieire’s conception of literacy is not limited to language arts education; rather, it is applicable irrespective of discipline. Frieire is interested in a critical education that takes into account student’s subjectivities, life experience as an a priori knowledge, while simultaneously stoking their ingenuous curiosity and transforming it into epistemological curiosity (Freire, 1996). What is more, Freire (1985) argues that the only way to extricate marginalized, oppressed students from an education that systematically disallows them from reaching their ontological vocation, i.e., to become more fully human, is to provide a radically emancipatory education, predicated on critical pedagogy, which will equip them to create and re-create their world through it. For Freire, emancipatory education must include, incorporate, and perhaps most importantly, welcome the language and culture of the oppressed students.

Freirian Educational Philosophy

Freire’s (1971) prescription for both potential liberation fighters and leaders of the people is as follows: their impetus must be love; they must see themselves as one with the oppressed, not one who is outside, no matter how benevolent their intent. This is true of educators as well. The teacher must eschew the role cast on her by the banking model of education, she must abdicate the lofty throne of the (all) knower, and the student can no longer be viewed as merely a blank slate that requires a deposit; on the contrary, the student and the teacher, the (former) oppressor and the oppressed, respectively, must work together in order to better the student’s quest to become more fully human. And, in so doing the educator will find her or his humanity more full as well (Freire, 1971). (All quotes below are attributed to Paulo Freire.)

“… Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle…”
“No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.”
“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

Friere argues that the implementation of a critical, emancipatory education is one of the primary ways that the oppressed can begin to experience liberation. And, because this is so important, Freire argues that “radical” action is necessary: Educators must develop radical pedagogical structures that provide students with the opportunity to use their own reality as a basis for literacy. This includes, obviously, the language they bring to the classroom. To do otherwise is to deny students the rights that lie at the core of an emancipatory literacy (pp. 166).

What Freire is arguing for is a decolonization of the mind (Memmi, 1978); that is, a critical education that encourages the oppressed to cast of the psychological shackles that torment and imprison them. Like I mentioned above, Friere (1985) argues that any pedagogy that seeks to be critical must incorporate the oppressed’s worldview, and in order to do this it must incorporate their language. To this point he cautions, "The failure to base a literacy program on the native language means that oppositional forces can neutralize the efforts of educators and political leaders to achieve decolonization of the mind." Educatorsmust recognize that “language is inevitably one of the major preoccupations of a society, which, liberating itself from colonialism and refusing to be drawn into neo-colonialism searches for its own recreation. In the struggle to re-create a society, the re-conquest by the people of their own world becomes a fundamental factor (pp.166).

He goes on to write, “It is of tantamount importance that the incorporation of the students’ language [and culture] as the primary language [mode] of instruction in literacy be given top priority. It is through their own language that they will be able to reconstruct their history and their culture (pp. 166).” Furthermore, Freire argues that “the students’ language is the only means by which they can develop their own voice, a prerequisite to the development of positive self-worth (pp. 167). Student’s language, in this context, is not simply that which they speak at home; rather, it incorporates and accounts for the variegated discourse communities that our scholars participate in (digital language, Hip Hop Nation Language, Standardized English, AAVE, STEM language, etc.). Next Freire quotes Giroux, who argues that the students’ voice “is the discursive means to make themselves ‘heard’ and define themselves as active authors of their world.

The authorship of ones’ own world which would also imply one’s own language means what Mikhail Bakhtin defines as “retelling a story in one’s own words (pp. 167).” The space to tell one’s own story is important for human beings, writ large; however, I would argue that it takes on a special meaning for oppressed groups who have been effectively silenced, primarily because of their perceived distance from what is considered to be the standard. The voice that they develop will also allow them to see themselves iteratively. That is to say, they will be able to see themselves as more than the stereotypes that they are often reduced to.

Questions:

1. How have you seen critical pedagogy enacted in classrooms that you've been a part of?

2. How will you implement critical pedagogy in your classroom?