The purpose of critical pedagogy is to provide the students in your care with a liberatory education. A liberatory education requires an excellent standard of care. That standard of care sits on a foundation of trusting relationships forged in the daily interactions of the classroom space (and for adults, the professional learning space). Critical pedagogy is grounded in the understanding that to do school is to share knowledge. Sharing knowledge in a liberatory classroom space is freeing and enacts a pedagogy that sounds like the sharing of stories, sharing experiences and actively listening to gain new knowledge and insights into the world through the eyes of your peers and teacher.
Critical pedagogy invites story into the classroom. Inviting stories provide the opportunity for children to go far beyond the taught curriculum and enrich their learning. I was enriched by my students daily as I created the time to hear from them. Sometimes we threw away the lesson plans because we needed to just be in the classroom space together.
If I were in the classroom today or leading a professional learning conversation with adults, the recent murders of Asian women in Atlanta and the violence meted out to the AAPI community would warrant throwing away lesson plans, or simply shifting an essential question that I may have written for our learning. That slight shift sends a powerful message of solidarity to students who are members of the AAPI community, but also to those who possess the privilege not to think about the violence because it is not directed at them.
Critical pedagogy requires the teacher to prepare content that is rich and ripe for students to find themselves in. When a student can see themselves - that is when the curriculum content (the what) centers the lives, experiences and stories of people and issues that matter to them - they feel free to bring their own stories into the classroom. This type of curriculum content is counter the traditional curriculum provided by the school district powers that be. It goes against what is expected, the status quo. The traditional curriculum is devoid of culturally relevant content that will aid the teacher to critically self-reflect on how the content harms or enhances the learning of the students in their care. If you think the written curriculum will provide the space for students stories to enter the classroom you are right, if all the students in the class are living in a white dominant bubble and they never venture out into the real world.
A liberatory education requires a certain standard of care met by the conscious choice of the teacher or professional learning developer to engage in critical pedagogy. Kevin Kumashiro says…
A formidable barrier to anti-oppressive education is the unconscious desire repetition and the psychic resistance to change.
Refusing to change, to shift, or consider what can be done differently, schools suck the agency and life right out of children as early as elementary school. I have witnessed the life being sucked out of adults as well.
I’ll leave you with this quote:
“If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time… But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
~Lilla Watson
#AntiRacistEd Reflection/Action: Critical pedagogy invites stories into the classroom. Whose story or stories do you favor?
Angela Ward, “Critical Pedagogy is Liberatory”, As originally published on 2ward Equity Blog, April 3, 2021.
Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash
