Transformation and Empowerment through Education

Reconstructing our Relationship with Education

Raqib Chowdhury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367583422
• eBook ISBN: 9780429774812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Transformation and Empowerment through Education challenges the normalisation of Western discourses as the optimal choice for empowering education. The book aims to reconstruct our relationship with education and employs contemporary theories in order to understand some of the most persistent phenomena in contemporary education and its role in our lives.

Written by professionals with experience of a wide range of academic and institutional conventions and traditions, and from diverse ethnocultural backgrounds, this book effectively presents a global perspective on educational practices, both inside and outside the classroom. The range of topics covered includes equity, access, inclusivity, social justice, leadership and the internationalisation of teaching.

This book, based on empirical studies using key methodologies, is ideal for academics and postgraduate researchers interested in critical pedagogy, educational studies and educational linguistics, as well as educators and policymakers around the world.

1
Introduction

Transformation through education in contemporary times: a Freirean reconsideration

Raqib Chowdhury

Introduction

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to ‘fill’ the students with the contents of his narration – contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

Freire (2005, p. 71)

In 2012, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report entitled Equity and quality in education: Supporting disadvantaged students and schools provided recommendations on how to address school failure by reducing inequities in schools, stating that “the highest performing education systems are those that combine equity with quality. They give all children opportunities for a good quality education”. In the same year, Kaur (2012) noted that published scholarly articles that explicitly dealt with issues of social justice and equity in the context of teaching and teacher education had been steadily increasing during the preceding five years, with a Scopus search yielding more than 300 articles relevant to these themes. More recently, a 2015 report by Professor Emeritus Phil Foreman from the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia for the Department of Education & Training, Victoria entitled Social Justice Principles, the Law, and Research, as Bases for Inclusion: An Update, recommends the adoption of a research agenda that focuses on the particular contextual challenges and complexities faced in Australian school settings, while recognising the importance of international directions in identifying evidence-based practices in relation to quality education.

Kaur’s aforementioned study notes, however, that the historical and contextual construction of terminology and systems of nomenclature mean that nominal changes occur over a period of time and themes are codified differently. Part of the objective of this current book is to consider such changes and to look into the emerging discursive patterns of scholarly writing on the themes of transformative education that is occurring in contemporary times.

This book houses studies that explore how, in becoming a vehicle of equity, empowerment and emancipation, education plays a transformative role in our lives in a variety of contexts. It offers ways to reconstruct our relationship with education, allowing the negotiation of sociocultural and sociopolitical frictions; individual, institutional and national tensions; and the various ways in which we seek legitimation of our everyday educational practices. In the selected chapters, faring prominent are the recurring themes of and preoccupation with equity and access, alternative and new pedagogies, as well as new perspectives on pedagogy, critical learning, collaborative pedagogy, the internationalisation of the curriculum and teaching, emerging debates from current teaching and learning practices, school leadership and the politics of international education. The diverse areas under scrutiny and critical consideration also include language teaching methodologies – such as task-based language teaching (TBLT), technology-based pedagogy, counselling, identity, academic writing and leadership in higher education.

This book brings to the forefront of scholarly debate some of the persistent issues in the provision of educational equity and illustrates how education has been the tool for life-changing and emancipatory experiences. While these themes in themselves may not be coherent, nor do they necessarily sit comfortably within specified domains in education, epistemologically they offer similar grounds of critical concern in relation to the transformative power that can be harnessed through education; while there are several underlying theoretical assumptions of the book, conceptually, they are cohesive insofar as their common emphasis is concerned. One of the emerging themes of the book is the notion of usefulness as opposed to relevance. Educators, of course, will always see their practices as relevant and useful; however, often the community is excluded in choosing what is relevant and useful. In investigating the taken-for-granted pedagogical principles and practices often informed by traditional values and ‘common sense’, the case study has been employed as the most appropriate methodology in most of the chapters. Such an approach makes it possible to look into contextual particulars which make these cases unique. While by definition, every case is unique, it allows the scope of and space for transferability, a dimension all the more important given the international nature of the settings that the chapters of this book represent.

From transmission to transformation

No one else has problematised the transformative power of education better than Paulo Freire. Rather than favouring the intuitive preference for reason and logic, he places emphasis on ‘generative’ human subjectivities and their affective engagement in the educational process, as well as the importance of emotion in transformative endeavours. A number of studies in this book draw on Freirean principles to understand how to take action for true and sustainable social change as will be discussed later.

For long, education was seen as a process of one-way ‘transmission’ – from the person who knows (the expert) to those who do not (the novice, or student), as a ‘gift bestowed’. Freire (2005) refers to this as ‘banking’ education, which he argues ‘mirrors an oppressive society’. The banking model, “with its tendency to dichotomise everything”, “resists dialogues… (and) serves the interests of the oppressors… who use their ‘humanitarianism’ to preserve a profitable situation” (p. 75). In such a process, learners are seen as mere empty containers or receptacles to be ‘filled’ with knowledge, and the more completely a teacher fills the receptacles, the better he or she is; and by extension, the more “meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are” (p. 72). Conformity and submission here mark success – as we see is the case in the study by Dastgahian and Khodadady (Chapter 8) in the context of Iran, where understandings of criticality are shaped by institutional discourses and culturally sanctioned student behaviours.

Instead of releasing its transformative power, such process renders education into a mere ‘act of depositing’. Freire explains that the ‘violence’ this causes is the projection of ‘absolute ignorance’ onto others, which characterises an ‘ideology of oppression’ and negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry.

Instead of communicating, the teacher uses communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorise and repeat… the more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would results from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world.

(pp. 72–73)

Such an exercise of oppression involves the action of both institutes and teachers. Freire talks about the ‘fundamentally narrative character’ of the teacher-student relationship, where the teacher is a ‘narrating subject’ and the students are ‘patient listening objects’. Within this metaphor, education suffers from the one-way transmissive nature of ‘narration sickness’. The problem of such narrative education is “the sonority of words, not their transforming power”, as seen manifest in the context of Do’s study (Chapter 6), where an entire generation of would-be professional translators are bestowed with formal qualifications that find little value in the job market.

Freire proposes the ‘problem-posing approach’ as an alternative, which allows the space to empower people into looking at their existence critically; a lens that makes them view reality not as static but as a process of transformation. Most importantly, within the context of teaching and learning, it allows learners to take up agentive positions in negotiating life-changing experiences through critical learning. A number of chapters in this book have referred to this Freirean model (see Shokouhi and Latifi, Chapter 4; Janfada, Chapter 5; Ogisu and Saito, Chapter 13). Participatory learning through dialogue is crucial, because it facilitates better memory and learning compared to one-way transmissive learning, especially when done with peers. This book offers spaces that encourage openness to alternative solutions involving a re distribution of responsibilities and a willingness to try alternative approaches to the planning, designing and provision of education with optimism in the power of transformation.

A problem-posing approach to education rejects a one-way transmissive approach to education – what Freire refers to as ‘communiqués’ (p. 72), and opens up spaces for dialogue and communication, as we see in Janfada’s study involving a dialogic pedagogy. A critical view allows us to position human agents as not just being in the process of becoming but as agents of change and transformation. A critical enquiry orientation creates knowledge and opens channels for dialogue through a consideration of what Freire calls ‘generative themes’.

It is only when the impulses of the banking method of education (Freire, 2005) are resisted that the transformation model can be enacted. The notion of a transformative education – achieved through both action and reflection – praxis – is premised on the belief that it is indeed possible to utilise educational affordances to conceive of, initiate and sustain change in our lives for the better, to which an equitable and just society is foundational. In chapters such as those by Janfada (Chapter 5) and Dastgahian, Turner and Scull (Chapter 7), we see examples of how learners negotiate the nature of their participation in the educational experience to initiate lifelong changes. We also see, in Fernandes’ study (Chapter 11) how the school administration can take steps in transforming a school into a learning organisation through a partly inverted model of transformational leadership.

Transformation through dialogue

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not ‘marginals’, are not living ‘outside’ society. They have always been ‘inside’ the structure which made them ‘beings for others’. The solution is not to ‘integrate’ them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves’.

Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

Freire (2005, p. 74)

No education is or can be apolitical or neutral. In presenting experiences that move from a transmissive to a transformative mode of education, the book foregrounds the quintessentially political nature of education and exposes ways in which powerful vested interest groups and dominant ideologies have shaped how educational practice are enacted. Some such examples are the religious discourses in Iran, as in Dastgahian and Khodadady (Chapter 8), the politics behind the integration of Asia literacy (Ho, Chapter 10), the hegemonic expansion of US-based international education in Saudi Arabia (Barnawi, Chapter, 12) and the conformity to the top-down imposition of frameworks in Cambodia (Ogisu and Saito, Chapter 13). These studies present examples of how mainstream discourses have positioned learners who are “de-humanised by the system” (Freire, 2005, p. 56), but eventually make choices to appropriate their contextual impositions. Freire placed profound trust and faith in people and in the endless possibilities of creativity he thought they were each endowed with. Along with the importance of authentic, critical thinking in communication, he advocated the need for “dialogical relations – indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object” (pp. 79–80). To adopt a transformative view of education is to accept both human beings and their realities as being incomplete and in the process of constant flux. According to Freire, such unfinished and transformational nature of human beings and reality “necessitate that education be an ongoing activity…. Education is… constantly remade in praxis”. As a ‘liberating praxis’ (p. 86), the agenda set forth by a problem-posing education is that human beings must “fight for the emancipation” from domination of transmissive forms of education. Empowerment through transformative education also leads to teachers taking up roles as lifelong learners who can perpetually strive to improve their expertise through everyday practices.

Contemporary work on transformative themes

Recent edited scholarly volumes have placed heavy emphasis on social justice issues, focussing on inclusive education, equality and equity. In drawing all these themes together into a coherent whole, this book has drawn inspiration from a number of contemporary titles, as it has, at the same time, sought to distinguish itself from these titles. In this section we consider a handful of these titles and explore the enduring concerns that have characterised education research in recent times. Most studies in this current volume are based on smaller case studies which report findings of qualitative fieldwork research that investigate the relationship between the issues of equality and education carried out across all three levels of education – including three each at the primary and secondary, and six at the tertiary levels.

Coles’ Education, Equality and Human Rights: Issues of Gender, ‘Race’, Sexuality, Disability and Social Class (2012) adopted a critical-narrative interpretation method to provide a nuanced understanding of issues around the five titular aspects, and particularly how these five social constructs relate to the broader themes of education. To this aim, stories of people who are affected by the issue of equality individually as well as within the social arena in which they interact are interpreted through a primarily Marxist/socialist lens. Similarly, with social justice as the central issue in higher education, Riseman, Rechter and Warne’s edited book Learning, Teaching and Social Justice in Higher Education (2010) offers innovative ways to tackle challenges related to teaching and learning – including students’ engagement, literacy development and independent learning. Local, indigenous and international education, identity and racism and the importance of feedback in education are among the major themes discussed in this book. This book limits its scope to higher education and, unlike Coles’ aforementioned book, does not investigate themes related to social justice.

Tikly and Barrett’s Education Quality and Social Justice in the Global South: Challenges for Policy, Practice, and Research (2013) consists of a series of research-based studies that link education, policy and international development based on critical interdisciplinary, international and national studies. It focuses on the issue of education quality and social justice and investigates its framing, planning and implementation in five economically disadvantaged countries – Rwanda, Tanzania, Chana, South Africa and Pakistan. In doing so, it takes into account the educational processes of teaching, learning, leadership and policymaking, placing emphasis on the roles teachers play in advancing quality and social justice in schools. Studies in Tikly and Barrett’s book are confined to a small number of developing and low-economic countries and, unlike Riseman, Rechter and Warne, do not explore education equality at the higher education level.

A more recent publication, entitled Chinese Education Models in a Global Age (Chou & Jonathan, 2016), looks into Chinese ‘ideal’ education models from diverse pedagogies to enhance the quality of education. On one hand, the book emphasises the need for integration of global education into local pedagogies, but on the other hand, it calls for policy-based reforms, particularly with reference to local educational, political, historical, theoretical and cultural systems. The joint work among educators, researchers and teachers from a wider community to transform educational practices appears segregated and is marked by a discontinuity between the stakeholders and educational agents, and therefore learners’ voices are relatively limited.

Some studies in this current book focus on examining how discourses across various communities of researchers and disciplines can be consolidated into useful frameworks of understanding. For example, studies by Do (Chapter 6), Fernandes (Chapter 11) and Barnawi (Chapter 12) explore how various stake-holders and their various priorities implicate the co-production of knowledge, and the ways in which this operationalises education.

But how do teaching and learning shape new discourses and understandings of empowerment, as well as processes of societal transformation, and open up spaces for the co-production of knowledge, thought and action? Skinner, Matt, Brown, and Troll’s convincingly written volume Education, Learning and the Transformation of Development (2016) involves researchers representing both the so-called Global No...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: transformation through education in contemporary times: a Freirean reconsideration
• SECTION 1 Education, pedagogy and access
• SECTION 2 Education, pedagogy and learning
• SECTION 3 Education, pedagogy and power
• Index