This paper lays the foundation for experiential learning to be identified as an innovative practice in student learning. Additionally, the inclusion of certain components of experiential learning bring about the natural settings in which a Freirian hope exists for teachers and students alike during and after the learning process. We draw upon these five common approaches to experiential learning: active learning, problem-based learning, project-based learning, service-learning, and place-based learning. We explore how these experiential learning approaches develop innovative thinking in students and teachers, bringing about hope for improvement in education. Specifically, we provide an analysis of the strengths of three specific components common to all of these approaches: roles of teachers and students, inquiry, and reflection. We acknowledge oppositions to our arguments by offering counter-arguments and solutions to these points of view that point towards a better system of accountability for public education. We share current research supporting experiential learning in order to make the connection between innovation and Freire’s idea of radical hope. With innovative practices in student learning comes the development of innovative thinkers, and this results in a more hopeful future for education and society overall because the students of today solve the societal and environmental problems of today and tomorrow. Our hope as authors is that readers will be aware of their own state of unfinishedness as they consider our suggestions.
In recent years, scholars, journalists, and citizens have turned to Hannah Arendt’s writings to make sense of human plurality and resist right-wing nationalist movements around the globe. This article discusses Arendt’s ideas of plurality, narratives, and politics and describes how these ideas can help critical literacy theory focus on both social groups and unique persons. For Arendt, the human world is a world of plurality because it includes not only diverse social groups, but also human selves living unique versions of group lives. This latter kind of plurality is difficult to see in some approaches to critical literacy. Arendt argues the plurality of unique persons becomes visible when people tell life narratives in particular ways. Given this view of plurality and narratives, the political question of who counts as members of a public is, in part, a question of whose stories are told. Arendt insists this is not only a question of a person telling her own story; it is also a question of a person hearing her story told by others. These arguments can add new dimensions to critical literacy’s view of diversity and the politics of reading, writing, speaking, thinking, and listening.
This paper positions public mass gun violence (PMGV) as an intergenerational consequence of the violence of colonization, coloniality, and slavery in the United States. I map how the shooter’s white privilege, alongside his white/male fragility, combined with a national consciousness built on an ethos of colonization and coloniality, leads him to believe he has unearned “rights” to the social riches of the center. I proffer that most of us who benefit from capitalist, neo-liberal, patriarchal state and social institutions are complicit in co-creating the conditions that produce PMGV’s gunboys and gunmen because in order to benefit from these institutions, we perpetuate a system of insiders and outsiders. As illustrated, some possibilities for allaying violence are grounded in practicing critical self-reflection and pedagogies of discomfort.
Allies would be in strikethrough in the title. This paper explores the phenomenon of pre-service teachers becoming accomplices for racial justice. Using hermeneutic phenomenology, we examine the experiences of three white, female pre-service teachers navigating this terrain. A framework we are naming autoethnography as praxis emerged from this inquiry. Our research interrogates the notion of white allies and the intersection of critical dialogue and action in pre-service teacher education. Building off of perspectives in critical race and critical whiteness studies, this work is grounded in the reality of the material permanence of white supremacy that white teachers must acknowledge and develop tools to dismantle. Autoethnography as praxis moves students from simply analyzing and reporting their experiences (including their emerging understanding of white privilege) through autoethnography to examining how their experiences have shaped and will continue to shape their identities and practices as teachers. By reframing autoethnography as a dialogue between researcher and her texts, we hope to push beyond reflection to action. Autoethnography as praxis also addresses the flaw of white teachers acting as benevolent allies who set their own agenda and position people of color as “needing their assistance.” It pushes participants to engage their action in reflection, moving them past their own experiences.
This paper positions public mass gun violence (PMGV) as an intergenerational consequence of the violence of colonization, coloniality, and slavery in the United States. I map how the shooter’s white privilege, alongside his white/male fragility, combined with a national consciousness built on an ethos of colonization and coloniality, leads him to believe he has unearned “rights” to the social riches of the center. I proffer that most of us who benefit from capitalist, neo-liberal, patriarchal state and social institutions are complicit in co-creating the conditions that produce PMGV’s gunboys and gunmen because in order to benefit from these institutions, we perpetuate a system of insiders and outsiders. As illustrated, some possibilities for allaying violence are grounded in practicing critical self-reflection and pedagogies of discomfort.
This critical qualitative research study explored the possibility of drawing on critical literacy in the Intensive English Program (IEP) classroom, specifically using ESL reading texts as learning materials for its practices. Five ESL participants recruited from the IEP at a major US Midwestern university engaged in critical literacy practices, which consisted of eight group discussion sessions about the content and points of view of selected ESL texts. Audio and video recorded discussion data were analyzed through the four dimensions model, used as both conceptual and analytical frameworks for this study. Based on the findings, this research study offers ESL/IEP educators a variety of effective strategies to promote ESL students’ critical engagement with their texts, specifically to help them disrupt the commonplace.
In this paper, the authors utilize a Freirean utopian pedagogy to envision a mathematics education for the future of humanity. To begin, the authors investigate how mathematics and its education correlate to particular dominate social norms and institutions that play a significant role in perpetuating our present shared social reality. Utilizing the work of ecofeminist and ecojustice scholars, the authors explain how mathematics’ and its education perpetuates a “logic of domination.” Next, the authors explore how mathematics and its education could be envisioned and practiced in ways that directly counteract its previous uses and offer alternative pedagogy and curricula choices for fostering a utopian vision where the human race that live in balance with the ecosystem. Drawing from the work of Bateson and philosophers of mathematics, aesthetic aspects of mathematics are shown to be essential aspects of a new form of mathematics. Last, the authors turn to the work of Bookchin to help understand how mathematics can be envisioned to better serve a utopian world marked by anarchist concepts of usufruct, complementarity and “irreducible minimum.” The authors conclude with suggestions to implement an onto-epistemological mathematics education curricula and pedagogy in the classroom.
This article explores the critical reflections of a doctoral candidate and her advisor on the design and implementation of the candidate’s study, how space was created for such scholarship, and the challenges and catalysts for successfully navigating and shifting trenchant epistemological and methodological positions. Adopting an autoethnographic stance, we examine our navigation of the conceptual, structural and interpersonal tensions of doing critical research in a mainstream institution. The results highlight our experiences in a) re-conceptualizing the purpose of research by moving beyond doing “hit-and-run” research to research as praxis in marginalized communities, b) re-conceptualizing data gathering and analysis as justice-oriented rather than as “methodolatry” and c) understanding reflexively the tensions caused in the final stages of the dissertation as the novice advisor privileged a product-orientation over a person-orientation in her mentoring stance. This study underscores the importance of ensuring that humanizing pedagogy is employed consistently and unambiguously through the doctoral advising process. Keywords : doctoral advising, justice-oriented research, critical doctoral research, critical reflection, critical pedagogy/advising
This article, acknowledging the variety of interpretations and applications of critical pedagogy, delves into the thought and politics of Paulo Freire to review theoretical and political foundations, along with a consideration of common criticisms and responses from critical theorists. Informed by recent literature, I highlight the theory of critical pedagogy as dialectic, and examine the inherent political nature of critical pedagogy as non-sectarian, anti-neoliberal, radical-progressive, democratic, and humanist. After reviewing the theoretical and political foundations of critical pedagogy, I consider criticisms in the literature related to its emphasis on theory as abstract, potential inherent sexism and cultural invasiveness. As I aim to show, these criticisms, while not without some merit, are based primarily on a strawman portrayal of critical pedagogy as inherently liberating without serious interrogation of the intentions of the teacher. Noteworthy criticisms which may help the field of critical pedagogy to evolve beyond a myopic view of democracy originate from Indigenous scholars’ approach to integration and critique of critical pedagogy. The significance of this article pertains to clarification and reconsideration of critical principles in an era where schooling serves as a battleground between liberal and conservative forces. In an era of polarization, critical pedagogy contributes an underrepresented perspective in this debate, as it critiques both Right and Left, offering a critically nuanced rather than a sectarian assessment.
This article examines how graduate students in a semester-long research course, a capstone experience in a master’s program in teaching and learning, came to redefine what counts as educational research. The students were challenged to conduct a research project, while also exploring how their ideas about teaching and research delimited their work. This inquiry revealed a central paradox in education research—that by calling for more teacher voice in research we may liberate teachers and students to do their work differently, while also perpetuating narrow colonial conceptions of what it means to be a teacher and conduct teacher research. The author argues that in order to decolonize teaching and research, students need opportunities to develop a political analysis that will help expose the contradictions that abound in schools, universities, and society.
The K12 teaching corps in the U.S. remain majority White, while student demographics are and will continue to be much more racially and ethnically diverse. This discrepancy is linked to lower academic outcomes for students from marginalized groups. Through the application of elements of Critical Race Theory, particularly the concepts of critwalking and of movement building, as well as Critical Whiteness Studies, we have created a professional development exercise for K12 educators. The exercise is focused on the normalization and institutionalization of racism in the U.S. and centers a timeline history that exposes the systemic, historically-rooted, and legalized ways that the nation has, over time, denied access and opportunity to individuals from marginalized groups. In this manuscript, we detail the professional development exercise, focusing on how we consider it to be both pedagogical critwalking and movement building. The timeline exercise intends to help equip educators to not only understand the history that created and supports institutionalized racism and other forms of marginalization in the U.S., but also to challenge it in their classrooms and schools today. That is, we want educators to recognize their role in disrupting Whiteness and the larger system of White supremacy. We do this by first exposing K12 educators to evidence that shows that institutional racism has been normalized in the U.S. and can be demonstrated through a historical review of policies and practices. We then encourage K12 educators to use the knowledge gained from this exercise to challenge traditional, deficit views by linking the historical patterns of a lack of access and opportunity to the disparities they see in their classrooms today and in U.S. society and institutions at large.
This essay troubles notions of critical pedagogy that promote binary and fragmented conceptions of identity and oppression, which tend to be hyper-rational and outward-focused. Socially Engaged Buddhism has much to offer critical pedagogy because it challenges the notion of a separate self, engaging in the work of justice and movement-building. It is as an embodied way of inner knowing that invites dis-identification with a separate self, thereby experiencing the self as interconnected. It also provides insight into the root causes of violence and oppression and a mechanism by which we can purify the root causes to avoid replication in new, subtle, and subversive ways. Critical pedagogy without embodied, contemplative practices create the illusion of systemic and structural change. Without awareness into the ways that our ego mind centers and re-centers a separate self, we unconsciously operate from a place of self-interest and self-protection, furthering individualism at the expense of collective liberation. This essay intentionally engages contemplative personal narrative to model the power of self-awareness in Socially Engaged Buddhism and the practice of calling in the self through insights gained by the author . I call for a more embodied, self-reflective approach to critical pedagogy at the individual level to support deeper and more sustained systemic transformation and movement building.
In this paper, we propose a racial solidarity praxis in mathematics education grounded in Black-, Latinx-, and Indigenous-led scholarship and their respective communities’ joining efforts to combat White supremacy. Increased solidarity across racial groups in mathematics education could illuminate new ways of nourishing and affirming Indigenous, Latinx, and Black students’ racial identities and cultural strengths. We leverage four frameworks: (1) Whiteness as property (a tenet of Critical race theory) and (2) Tribal Critical Race Theory; (3) Latino Critical Theory; and (4) pedagogy of solidarity, to conceptualize the interdependence required for solidarity work and to expose how White supremacy is maintained overtly and covertly in mathematics curriculum, policies and practices. This study outlines the nuances across each community of scholars, drawing on their strengths to combat oppressive educational structures for students. The authors conclude in solidarity, focusing on the ways our communities have sought to challenge White supremacy and deficit framings of our students, families, and communities. Our hope in bringing these bodies of literature together is to invite others within (and outside of) the field of mathematics education to co-imagine how we might engage our work synergistically. It is through a collectivizing of efforts that we imagine a racial solidarity praxis that begins to erode the power of White supremacy in math education because of the unique and unassimilable strengths and priorities of each community engaged.
In a 21 st century world hinged on lightning-fast information edited into 140-character sound bites, three events that occurred at UNCG in the years 1956, 1960, and 1963 engage current students. This article will show how the authors use the university archives in a first-year class, which explores education as a personal, local, and global question, to allow students to interrogate the place of history in their current educational process. By introducing our campus history and using archival materials that show the events from the perspectives of students, faculty, administration, and the public we encourage students to approach their own education with creativity and imagination- what Emily Dickenson called “the slow fuse of possibility” (in Greene, 2007). History is not merely the static story we believe it to be, but a fluid, challenging narrative that has implications on what and how students learn today. By digging into the past, students can, as Maxine Greene (2007) asks, “break with the ordinary, the given, the taken for granted and open doors to possibility” and think about the present with curiosity and imagination. Education stripped of historical context is just an endless loop of lectures and tests endured by students who wonder what disconnected bits of information have to do with the life they want to live. But when students see themselves as part of a lineage of learners they then have context for what we know and the places in which we learn. Adrienne Rich (1986) said, “I need to understand how a place on a map is also a place in history” as she contemplated her place in the world (p. 212). When we ask students to think about these historical moments, to connect them to current, global events we are reimagining the place of history, archives, and the campus we teach on as relevant to their education. UNCG does not exist only as we see it today, but is built on the stories and legacies of the students and faculty who have come before like Lucille Pugh, who attended what is now UNCG from 1899-1902 and was the first female lawyer in the country to defend an accused murder (Spartan Stories, April 7, 2014) or Virginia Tucker, a 1930 graduate, who was a NACA/NASA pioneer in aeronautics and mechanical engineering (Spartan Stories, March 2, 2015). By exploring the history of the campus, it becomes a living place where the work of today is built on the shoulders of those who came before and their college experience is tangled with the structural oppressions exist in all social institutions. This archival exploration asks students to explore how, when shown the history, they “can open out the structures of resistance, unbind the imagination, and connect what’s been dangerously disconnected” in their education (p. 214).
: Life landscapes is a concept that draws attention to ways in which people, places, and spaces are engaged in continual dialogue, through explicit and hidden curriculum that acts to shape identities, values, and worldviews. Explorations of life, and other social landscapes, offer an approach to Paulo Freire’s liberation education --that is, an approach to reading, and teaching to read, the world . This paper offers an understanding of “the world” as life and social landscapes with curricular dimensions to explore socio-spatial memories and experiences, systems and geographies of inequities, and strategic approaches to social change. Conceptualizing a theoretical and praxis-oriented framework as an approach to liberation education, this paper seeks to bring two critical discourses in conversation with one another: the hidden curriculum in education and spatial analysis in cultural geography. Theorizing a relationship between the hidden curriculum and the production of space, this paper offers curricular-spatial analysis and landscape literacy as two interrelated elements of a theoretical and praxis-oriented framework in service to liberation education to open new possibilities for reading, and teaching to read, the world.
The majority of student bodies in U.S. independent schools come from the elite, wealthier members of society, and the goals of institutions called ‘independent schools’ are largely combinations of elite college admissions success and fostering social connections with other cultural elites. Primitively, the goals of critical pedagogy in the classroom-- using critical pedagogical practices to encourage the transforming of oppressive relations of power in a variety of domains—seem inimical to the objectives of most independent schools. Yet, critical educators working at independent schools are as equally mandated as their public school counterparts to embrace and adapt critical pedagogical methodology in our classrooms, requiring the students belonging to the power group to debate and engage with all students in the classroom. This process limits the power of schools to see students as cultural capital, but rather creates a non-stratified community, so that “social mobility” becomes unnecessary, thus resisting the idea of the role of private school education as a means of becoming more social and economically mobile. Critical pedagogy in independent schools allows for a unique type of praxis that removes all students from the cycle of having to exist as cultural capital.
According to Giroux (2011) we can, through critical pedagogy, engage the world as “an object of critical analysis” and as a place of “hopeful transformation” (p. 14). Giroux’s (2011) approach requires building and maintaining spaces where “the complexity of knowledge, culture, values and social issues can be explored in open and critical dialogue” (p. 124). Through these spaces, he argues, we are able to work to understand and disrupt oppressive power dynamics kept in place by systems of domination and control and move toward struggling for a more socially just world (Giroux, 2011, p. 7). bell hooks’ (2010) understanding that “love matters and that it brings strength and power (pp. 166-167) can contribute to our understanding of these spaces. hooks (2000) contends that “great social movements for freedom and justice” promote “a love ethic”, one in which we “utilize all the dimensions of love-care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge-in our everyday lives” (p. 94). Ascribing to the critical pedagogical view that education should be a “critical practice” (Freire, 2001, p. 30) in which those involved “make ourselves different tomorrow from what we are today” (Shapiro, 2012, p. 50), “transform the world we live in” (hooks, 2010, p. 188) and employ an understanding of the power and ethic of love as integral to “working for a collective good” (hooks, 2000, p. 214), I argue that we should engage critical pedagogy as living-loving praxis in all the places of lives, including the personal and romantic.
