Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Contemporary Critical Perspectives

James D. Kirylo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350117174
• eBook ISBN: 9781350117204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Since its publication in 1968 Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed has maintained its relevance well into the 21st century. This book showcases the multitude of ways in which Freire's most celebrated work is being reinvented by contemporary, educators, activists, teachers, and researchers. The chapters cover topics such as: spirituality, teacher identity and education, critical race theory, post-truth, academic tenure, prison education, LGBTQ educators, critical pedagogy, posthumanism and indigenous education. There are also chapters which explore Freire's work in relation to W.E.B Du Bois, Myles Horton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Simone de Beauvoir. Written by leading first and second-generation Freirean scholars, the book includes a foreword by Ira Shor and an afterword by Antonia Darder.

Part One

The Criticality of Teacher Preparation

1

Preparing Foundational Phase Educators: Reading the Word and World through Transect Walks

Deidre Geduld, Ivor Baatjes, and Heloise Sathorar

Introduction

Public schooling in post-apartheid South Africa is in perpetual and deepening crisis, characterized by poor throughput and high dropout rates; large student-to-teacher ratio; an increase in race and gender violence; a decline in teacher morale; weakened teacher unions; and conflict and protests.¹ In addition to the above, privatization of education is rising while our public schools are stripped of resources, aligning them to the whims of the market, which furthers inequality as reflected in a national quintile system.

The decline in public education challenges critical pedagogues inside and outside the academy to continuously pursue pedagogical approaches vital to building educated resistance and reflective praxis in concert with student-teachers, community activists, and social movements to the neoliberal attack on our public institutions. As university-based scholars, therefore, our intellectual project is the development of a cadre of critical foundation phase² pedagogues committed to education for liberation and the struggle for substantive democracy. That is, we believe in the necessity of curricula toward shaping critical consciousness and transformative practices in public education.

This chapter argues for greater use of participatory teacher preparation practices drawn from the theory and practice of Community Participatory Action Research (CPAR). We propose the use of transect walks as an instrument within a larger philosophical and methodological repository that encourages critical consciousness and the enhancement of student-teachers’ ability to “reading the word and the world” (Freire & Macedo, 1987). While more on transect walks will be discussed later, in brief, they are systematic walks along defined routes across a community together with the local people to explore socioeconomic conditions by observing, asking, listening, looking, and producing educational responses that could assist in responding to socioeconomic realities. We believe that such methodological approaches are important to foster awareness and liberating praxis.

Background to teacher preparation in South Africa

Teacher preparation (TP) in post-apartheid South Africa has been the focus of ongoing restructuring. It has been the subject of rationalization; improved resource utilization; ongoing efforts to upgrade teacher qualifications; quality assurance, and efforts toward addressing the vast discrepancies in “race”-based participation in education (Mncube & Madikizela-Madiya, 2013). Various initiatives to address the challenges facing teacher education (TE) include the introduction of norms and standards for TE, policies, qualifications frameworks, and curriculum review (DHET, 2011).

Universities in South Africa are compelled to engage with and respond to policy directives. The Nelson Mandela University—an institution borne out of a merger process of three historically advantaged and two disadvantaged institutions with different historical and cultural traditions—adopted humanizing pedagogy as its philosophical, methodological, and ethic orientation in TE (Geduld & Sathorar, 2016). A significant challenge for academics was the transition from modernist paradigms and fundamental pedagogics (Cullen & Hill, 2013; Morrow, 2007) to a humanizing pedagogical approach as a new framing philosophical paradigm that underpinned TP. It required an internal educative process that encouraged academic consciousness oriented toward educational practices for progressive outcomes in education. Embracing humanizing pedagogy requires critical examination and reflection on how academics consider the larger determinants of education, the purpose of education in the South African context, how we perceive our students, and how we teach and learn with them as collective agents of change.

Humanizing pedagogy demands from both the teacher-educator and student-teacher a commitment and dedication to contemplate larger meta and meso-theoretical frameworks, such as the political economy, political sociology, and eco-pedagogy, rather than a narrow focus on technocratic rationality. Therefore, pedagogy should translate into the re-thinking of TE—a process integral to building a new vision of democratic schooling and the development of critical citizenship. This requires the adoption of a critical approach to curriculum implementation (Sathorar, 2018) that encourages the development of self-empowerment and self-identity of students as active, responsible, and moral citizens of a community. To be sure, this approach to TP should involve teachers and students in a process of ongoing critical analysis in order for them to act collectively to change oppressive systems and structures in society, adopt methodologies that are participatory, and provide students with critical self-knowledge that allows them to “read the world” and to incorporate a greater variety of educational techniques into TP.

Challenging the dominant discourse

Critical pedagogical practices—“people’s education for people’s power”—in the South African context have their own historical roots born out of struggle during the apartheid era (Motala & Vally, 2002, p. 179). While critical pedagogics is practiced in South Africa, it hasn’t gained the necessary traction as the desired philosophical, methodological, and ethical orientation in education. South Africa has been trapped in more than two decades of neoliberal development which undermines emancipatory education by harnessing education to the dictates of formal labor markets and by embracing human capital approaches into education. Neoliberalism further reinforces the university as the “ivory tower,” thus making less relevant the addressing of pressing socioeconomic issues. Freire reminds us that “a university that is beyond and above the social and political system of the society where it exists is unfeasible” (Escobar, Fernandez, Guevara-Niebla & Freire, 1994, p. 136).

A number of scholars in South Africa have argued for new conceptions of the university as sites of advancing critical citizenship and the adoption of critical engaged forms of scholarship (Badat, 2007; Motala & Baatjes, 2013). Swartz (2006) suggests a conception of universities as institutions that are more firmly and deeply embedded within society and that universities inter alia, need to respond to societal demands; effectively engage within their immediate habitat; and reconfigure their curricula, research, internal organization, and ways of processing “the intermediations of knowledge and the social” (p. 141).

Fundamental to this conceptual argument is the need for universities to recognize how they are implicated in crises of the poor and working class and that “universities [do] not stand ‘outside’ of the social and, reflect the characteristics of their environment” (Swartz, p. 140). We argue that universities are indeed integral parts of the local, social, political, cultural, and economic life of the communities in which it is located. When critical engaged scholarship is responsive to pressing social issues such as the crisis in education, the possibilities for a genuinely democratic and caring society are enhanced.

Critical pedagogues involved in TE have an important role to play in advancing critically engaged scholarship in literacy education. There are three key aspects to highlight. First, central to our vocation is Freire’s concept of conscientization which has been the theme of much scholarly work (Darder, 2017; Roberts, 2013). For Freire, conscientization is a requirement of our human condition and has ontological, epistemological, ethical, and educational dimensions.

The dialectical relationship between “reading the word” and “reading the world” and its relationship to conscientization are a nonlinear and ever-changing and continuous process of cognition, reflection, and actions. This takes place through critical dialogical education with teachers fostering a better understanding of the “self” in relation to “others” and “society,” enhancing a deeper awareness of ourselves and the world as “unfinished.” In a society of incessant change, conscientization demands of us to remain restless, probing and inquiring, open-minded, curious, and to know that there is always more to learn.

A second important role for critical pedagogues is the challenge to resist techno-bureaucratic techniques and the ideological demands of the cult of efficiency (Collins, 1991; Giroux, 2009). Collins (1991) offers a stern warning to educators about the “technicist obsession” in pedagogical practice which reduces learning to “situations managed by technical formulations, such as standardized pre-packaged curricula and preconceived needs assessment instruments” put together by experts (p. 5). Collins further warns that such deficit practices—the technical planning by competency-strategists and packaging of instruction based on simplistic behavioral objectives—get in the way of individual learners’ ability to think critically, and to evaluate everyday experiences on their own account.

All of the latter aforementioned serve to usurp “independent, reflective thought on the part of the individual learner” and to “subvert critical powers of insight and imagination” (Giroux, 2013, p. 5). One of the main problems with the technicist approach is its portrayal of teaching as a value-free, objective activity whose problems are solvable through the application of the rigorous procedures of scientific methods. Thus, choices of method, curriculum, language of instruction, and the timing and the location of classes might appear on the surface to be purely technical, but are in fact profoundly influenced by the political and economic context in which they take place (Youngman, 1990).

Third, Giroux (2013) draws attention to the connection between technocratic rationality and the deskilling of teachers that accompanies the adoption of management-type pedagogies. This management-type paradigm, he argues, seeks to “improve” education by “teacher-proofing” it. Teachers are then relegated to semi-skilled, low-paid workers in the massification of education (Giroux, 2009, p. 442). Giroux (2013) additionally argues that neoconservatives “wants public schools and colleges to focus on ‘practical’ methods in order to prepare teachers for an ‘outcome-based’ education system, which is code for pedagogical methods that are as anti-intellectual as they are politically conservative” (p. 5). Reed and Anthony (1992) contribute to this point by indicating that “all too often, the educational community has retreated into a narrow vocationalism which crowds out any sustained concern with the social, moral, political and ideological ingredients of education work” (p. 601).

Pedagogy is therefore reduced to teaching of methods and data-driven performance indicators that allegedly measure scholastic ability and improve student achievement. The deskilling of teachers and the emphasis placed on instrumental rationality pose a serious threat to education as democratizing force, the advancement of critical and analytical thinking, and the development of critical inquiry and engaged citizenship.

The university as an institution occupies an elite position within society and has the power to guide public opinion. In their status, therefore, universities have both a responsibility and an obligation to provide insight and guidance on matters that pertain to public life. Student-teachers are part of this elite, and make up the few in society that are privileged enough to access this level of education. They are society’s role models, by both the virtue of their societal position and their influence on the youth within schooling communities. Accepting this, Alexander (2008) argues that it is within the university that student-teachers need to reclaim the meaning and purpose of education. It is within universities that students should learn how to mediate critically between democratic values and the demands of a capitalist society. Thus, universities need to politicize TE within the broader relations of power to raise awareness and inform actions to address how such relations perpetuate inequalities.

Transect walks

Three areas of importance are applied to TP and their relationship with the use of participatory techniques. First, the preparation of student-teachers in relation to the theory and practice of literacy education; secondly, the connection between literacy and “reading the word”; and finally, building networks of solidarity in advancing the struggle for emancipatory practices against the interconnected forms of oppression in society.

Students in foundation phase education are encouraged to engage with epistemological curiosity of Freire’s construct of “reading the word and the world.” Returning to this Freirean construct has significance in a context of neoliberalism, the ever-increasing vocationalism of the curriculum, an obsession with technocratic rationality and the cult of efficiency, and an embrace of technical and mechanical approaches to the teaching and learning of literacy.

Freire (2001) insists that we resist neoliberal inevitability and argues that “teacher preparation should never be reduced to a form of training. Rather, teacher preparation should go beyond the technical preparation of teachers and be rooted in the ethical formation both of selves and of history” (p. 23). He further stressed the important relationship between literacy and politics and argues that (critical) literacy involves critical perception, interpretation, and reflection. Freire’s critical literacy is committed to a vocation of all human beings to become humanized (Roberts, 2013).

The second key theme is the development of “reading the world” which is dialectically related to “reading the word.” Freire suggests that student-teachers should be encouraged to develop a critical analysis of their historical and contemporary experiences. Freire’s emphasis in “reading the world” involves stimulating critical learning approaches that foster students’ interest, curiosity, and appreciation of the contextual antecedent causes of their personal circumstances in the world as well as those of others.

Freirean pedagogy encourages an exploration of the broader context in which schooling takes place together with an investigation of the immediate environment in which education of students is provided. For many student-teachers who are placed within school...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Foreword On the Road to Social Justice: Reinventing Paulo Freire
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Enduring Legacy of Paulo Freire
• Part 1 The Criticality of Teacher Preparation
• Part 2 Pedagogy and Practice
• Part 3 The Intersection of Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Simone de Beauvoir
• Part 4 Policy, the Environment, and Liberation Theology
• Part 5 Reflections, Experiences, and Considerations
• Paulo Freire Fifty Years Later: An Afterword
• Index
• Imprint