Blog Post #3: The Language of Critical Pedagogy
Blog Post #3
The Language of Critical Pedagogy. Read chapter 2 of the Wink text and respond to the prompts:
· Describe your initial response to what you read. What surprised you? What stuck out to you? What questions do you have?
· In chapter 3, Dr. Wink shares the definitions of terms essential to understanding critical pedagogy. First, define the following terms in your OWN language: Critical, Pedagogy, Critical Pedagogy. Next, pick 3 additional terms to define using your OWN language
Response Title: Where’s My Dictionary?
My initial response, which based on last week’s blog is probably a common response among my peers, is that I NEED SOME DEFINITIONS! Examples are great and lovely and wonderful but I need the stability of a good, old-fashioned definition to help me make sense and extract meaning from an example. Wink even points out her own frustration that her professors used to give her books to read to answer her questions about definitions. I trust that her method of providing limited definitions and seemingly unlimited examples and additional texts will help us construct our own understanding of critical pedagogy and the language of critical pedagogy, but that trust is sprinkled with my frustration that she isn’t just telling me what I need to know – she is making me find it myself. Much harder, but also more rewarding.
Some of the examples that she presents are pretty shocking to me. To hear teachers label students as “a terrible problem,” to say that a student “doesn’t know anything” and shouldn’t be tested for a gifted program because his primary language is not English, or to compare “normal” students with the “stupid or crazy…kids” in the next classroom. I want to go up to these teachers and shake them and say, “Don’t you understand that the words you say and the decisions you make will affect these students for the rest of their lives?!?!” My blood is boiling! But I find myself thinking back over my experiences and finding times that I have made these same types of judgments about fellow students. It is painful to me to think of instances where I was the one calling students “normal” or going along with what seemed to be the generally accepted labels for students around me.
I feel like I need more time with this material, to soak in these definitions and maybe look into some of the resources Wink gives to start internalizing these terms and critically examining my experience to make the language of critical pedagogy make more sense and allow me to better understand how it affects the children in my classroom.
Now, for some definitions.
Critical: To be critical is to look at something, a text or a situation, and to be honest about how it makes you feel or think. A critic tells about the good and bad in equal measure. Someone who is criticizing me is pointing out how something I have done or said or some part of who I am does not fit with their vision of reality. Anytime I think of the word critical I always think back to my years of working in the writing center on my college campus, helping students learn to revise their papers by being critical and asking questions about their meaning, word choice, or sentence structure. I feel that asking questions, finding out the why behind something, is an essential part of being critical.
Pedagogy: I have always thought of pedagogy as being the teacher’s part in education. The teacher does or says this with the desired outcome of student learning. Until now, I never really linked teaching and learning together as pedagogy, although it now seems a pretty basic connection to make. How can we do pedagogy by looking only at the teacher and teaching methods, with the students being only a secondary concern? As a teacher, I hope that I never say, “I think this teaching method will work for me” instead of “I think this teaching method is a great way for my students to learn.”
Critical Pedagogy: Critical pedagogy is an honest and ongoing evaluation of how a teacher is teaching and how a student is learning. The teacher and other supporting faculty must be critical, and point out improvements that need to be made, assumptions that need to be reevaluated, and knowledge that must be made more accessible. Students are a key part of this criticizing process, because without discovering how the students are responding to ideas or methods in the classroom, true improvements can never be made. Critical pedagogy is understanding that there is more to the student/teacher relationship than just figuring out the best teaching method for each lesson or unit, that society and culture influence classrooms in substantial ways and that we must find ways to accept our students for who they are, rather than who we want them to be, and deciding how that affects our teaching.
Dialogue & Discourse: Dialogue and discourse are two of the words that I spent the most time with, because I have obviously never noticed the difference in these two terms. When thinking about dialogue, I have always thought about reading lines from a play. Dialogue to me was simply the words that were being said or written. Dialogue, however, is much richer than this. Dialogue is true communication. It might be between two people, where both parties are not just talking at each other, with ideas going in one ear and out the other, but rather both parties are honestly listening to and evaluating each other and figuring out how the opinion of the other changes their opinion of the topic/idea at hand. It might be between a reader and a text, where the reader does not passively scan the words, but looks over the text critically and figuring out how it relates to their current sense of reality. In a dialogue, the learner encounters the information, rewords it, internalizes it, lives with it, and decides what to do with it. In my previous understanding, I would have called these dialogues rather than discourses. A discourse, as I have come to understand (for right now, at least!), is a group of words that exhibit the thoughts and ideas of a group or class of people. Those who are most familiar with the word of a particular group are the ones who have the most power. They are the experts on what it means to be a part of that group. Again, I draw on my experience in the writing center. Students who came to me for help with learning parts of speech and sentence patterns sought my help because I was familiar with the words. I held the power in this situation. I was knowledgeable in the discourse of grammar, and so these students sought my help.
Hegemony: Honestly, I chose to focus on this term because of my recent (and first) reading of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. I’m not sure that I had ever even encountered this word up until that point. I never stopped to look up the definition of this unfamiliar word, but as I continued to read, I constructed my own definition that a hegemony is the person or persons that have been chosen (or at least allowed) to occupy a place of power and to exert control over the lives of their “subjects”. This power results in the ruler(s) deciding which knowledge is most important. It allows certain people to be praised for their conformity to the hegemony’s concept of reality and certain people to be marginalized or punished for the nonconformity. It is a dictatorship in which those being ruled over can only succeed if they stick to the status quo.
I am certain that I will be back to read this chapter again at least one more time, to help better understand the discourse of critical pedagogy.
· Donna W.’s comment (three comments, compiled here as one)
I am glad you are shocked by some of the examples she gives. Let me give you another one that ties into this week's reading. Today, my niece's "gifted" class took a field trip to a news station in her home town in Texas. The class has 30 kids. 23 are actually "coded" gifted. The other 7 are not, but are considered "bright enough" to be in the class. My niece is NOT coded gifted. We don't know if she qualifies as gifted or not because she missed the testing period as she was moving schools due to her dad's military relocation. So on today's field trip.... only the 23 coded gifted kids got to go. Now.... does that seem equitable? And why are only the "gifted" kids getting this trip anyway?
I'll climb off my soapbox now.
ah... one more thought. You did a GREAT job with these definitions. I just wanted to add a wee bit more language.
Yes... discourse is really a specialized language owned by a social group. Educators have a discourse. We have a specialized language that includes words like "Common Core" and "Tess" and "Critical Pedagogy". If you know these words, you are an insider. If you do not know these words, then you are made to feel marginalized.
Ooo. I found an earlier definition I wrote for hegemony to share with you.
Hegemony is also a tough word. At root, it means the dominance of one social group over another, often with the dominated groups consent (conscious or unconscious). In schools it means that one social norm is taken as the "norm" to which all students and teachers must comply. Often that social norm is the standard middle class culturally homogeneous idea of what is acceptable and what is not. So those students who do not comply to these behavioral or academic goals are punished or shunned or “left behind”.
The Language of Critical Pedagogy. Read chapter 2 of the Wink text and respond to the prompts:
· Describe your initial response to what you read. What surprised you? What stuck out to you? What questions do you have?
· In chapter 3, Dr. Wink shares the definitions of terms essential to understanding critical pedagogy. First, define the following terms in your OWN language: Critical, Pedagogy, Critical Pedagogy. Next, pick 3 additional terms to define using your OWN language
Response Title: Where’s My Dictionary?
My initial response, which based on last week’s blog is probably a common response among my peers, is that I NEED SOME DEFINITIONS! Examples are great and lovely and wonderful but I need the stability of a good, old-fashioned definition to help me make sense and extract meaning from an example. Wink even points out her own frustration that her professors used to give her books to read to answer her questions about definitions. I trust that her method of providing limited definitions and seemingly unlimited examples and additional texts will help us construct our own understanding of critical pedagogy and the language of critical pedagogy, but that trust is sprinkled with my frustration that she isn’t just telling me what I need to know – she is making me find it myself. Much harder, but also more rewarding.
Some of the examples that she presents are pretty shocking to me. To hear teachers label students as “a terrible problem,” to say that a student “doesn’t know anything” and shouldn’t be tested for a gifted program because his primary language is not English, or to compare “normal” students with the “stupid or crazy…kids” in the next classroom. I want to go up to these teachers and shake them and say, “Don’t you understand that the words you say and the decisions you make will affect these students for the rest of their lives?!?!” My blood is boiling! But I find myself thinking back over my experiences and finding times that I have made these same types of judgments about fellow students. It is painful to me to think of instances where I was the one calling students “normal” or going along with what seemed to be the generally accepted labels for students around me.
I feel like I need more time with this material, to soak in these definitions and maybe look into some of the resources Wink gives to start internalizing these terms and critically examining my experience to make the language of critical pedagogy make more sense and allow me to better understand how it affects the children in my classroom.
Now, for some definitions.
Critical: To be critical is to look at something, a text or a situation, and to be honest about how it makes you feel or think. A critic tells about the good and bad in equal measure. Someone who is criticizing me is pointing out how something I have done or said or some part of who I am does not fit with their vision of reality. Anytime I think of the word critical I always think back to my years of working in the writing center on my college campus, helping students learn to revise their papers by being critical and asking questions about their meaning, word choice, or sentence structure. I feel that asking questions, finding out the why behind something, is an essential part of being critical.
Pedagogy: I have always thought of pedagogy as being the teacher’s part in education. The teacher does or says this with the desired outcome of student learning. Until now, I never really linked teaching and learning together as pedagogy, although it now seems a pretty basic connection to make. How can we do pedagogy by looking only at the teacher and teaching methods, with the students being only a secondary concern? As a teacher, I hope that I never say, “I think this teaching method will work for me” instead of “I think this teaching method is a great way for my students to learn.”
Critical Pedagogy: Critical pedagogy is an honest and ongoing evaluation of how a teacher is teaching and how a student is learning. The teacher and other supporting faculty must be critical, and point out improvements that need to be made, assumptions that need to be reevaluated, and knowledge that must be made more accessible. Students are a key part of this criticizing process, because without discovering how the students are responding to ideas or methods in the classroom, true improvements can never be made. Critical pedagogy is understanding that there is more to the student/teacher relationship than just figuring out the best teaching method for each lesson or unit, that society and culture influence classrooms in substantial ways and that we must find ways to accept our students for who they are, rather than who we want them to be, and deciding how that affects our teaching.
Dialogue & Discourse: Dialogue and discourse are two of the words that I spent the most time with, because I have obviously never noticed the difference in these two terms. When thinking about dialogue, I have always thought about reading lines from a play. Dialogue to me was simply the words that were being said or written. Dialogue, however, is much richer than this. Dialogue is true communication. It might be between two people, where both parties are not just talking at each other, with ideas going in one ear and out the other, but rather both parties are honestly listening to and evaluating each other and figuring out how the opinion of the other changes their opinion of the topic/idea at hand. It might be between a reader and a text, where the reader does not passively scan the words, but looks over the text critically and figuring out how it relates to their current sense of reality. In a dialogue, the learner encounters the information, rewords it, internalizes it, lives with it, and decides what to do with it. In my previous understanding, I would have called these dialogues rather than discourses. A discourse, as I have come to understand (for right now, at least!), is a group of words that exhibit the thoughts and ideas of a group or class of people. Those who are most familiar with the word of a particular group are the ones who have the most power. They are the experts on what it means to be a part of that group. Again, I draw on my experience in the writing center. Students who came to me for help with learning parts of speech and sentence patterns sought my help because I was familiar with the words. I held the power in this situation. I was knowledgeable in the discourse of grammar, and so these students sought my help.
Hegemony: Honestly, I chose to focus on this term because of my recent (and first) reading of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. I’m not sure that I had ever even encountered this word up until that point. I never stopped to look up the definition of this unfamiliar word, but as I continued to read, I constructed my own definition that a hegemony is the person or persons that have been chosen (or at least allowed) to occupy a place of power and to exert control over the lives of their “subjects”. This power results in the ruler(s) deciding which knowledge is most important. It allows certain people to be praised for their conformity to the hegemony’s concept of reality and certain people to be marginalized or punished for the nonconformity. It is a dictatorship in which those being ruled over can only succeed if they stick to the status quo.
I am certain that I will be back to read this chapter again at least one more time, to help better understand the discourse of critical pedagogy.
· Donna W.’s comment (three comments, compiled here as one)
I am glad you are shocked by some of the examples she gives. Let me give you another one that ties into this week's reading. Today, my niece's "gifted" class took a field trip to a news station in her home town in Texas. The class has 30 kids. 23 are actually "coded" gifted. The other 7 are not, but are considered "bright enough" to be in the class. My niece is NOT coded gifted. We don't know if she qualifies as gifted or not because she missed the testing period as she was moving schools due to her dad's military relocation. So on today's field trip.... only the 23 coded gifted kids got to go. Now.... does that seem equitable? And why are only the "gifted" kids getting this trip anyway?
I'll climb off my soapbox now.
ah... one more thought. You did a GREAT job with these definitions. I just wanted to add a wee bit more language.
Yes... discourse is really a specialized language owned by a social group. Educators have a discourse. We have a specialized language that includes words like "Common Core" and "Tess" and "Critical Pedagogy". If you know these words, you are an insider. If you do not know these words, then you are made to feel marginalized.
Ooo. I found an earlier definition I wrote for hegemony to share with you.
Hegemony is also a tough word. At root, it means the dominance of one social group over another, often with the dominated groups consent (conscious or unconscious). In schools it means that one social norm is taken as the "norm" to which all students and teachers must comply. Often that social norm is the standard middle class culturally homogeneous idea of what is acceptable and what is not. So those students who do not comply to these behavioral or academic goals are punished or shunned or “left behind”.