The first thing that struck me as interesting about the work of Nicholas Burbules and Rupert Burk on critical thinking and critical pedagogy is that I never had a teacher at the elementary or secondary school level who practiced critical pedagogy. Perhaps this is not an uncommon experience, but I thought it interesting because the article states that critical pedagogy has featured prominently in educational thinking in the past decades. Of course, literature and research don’t always translate into practice, but from my experience it was never the intention of instruction to undermine an “unjust status quo” in any way. The only social injustices that ever came up were in the past, such as slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. These events could have been used as background to examine current issues, but they were typically just left in the past. Since my experiences in college have not been much different, I feel that I don’t have any practical tools with which to evaluate the arguments made for critical pedagogy as a teaching method.
As critical pedagogy is a new idea to me, however, I would like to think about how I could possibly use it in my future classroom, as I plan on teaching either English or social studies at the high school level. I feel I would have to go about teaching students to recognize social injustices by starting with an exploration of what exactly that means to different people in a variety of contexts. This could easily be done through topics found in literature, history, cultural studies, or several other topics. Once this initial discussion has taken place, however, there is the question of how to infuse students with the feeling that they should be actors against social inequalities. As cited in the article, Freire would say that recognizing one’s own place in an unjust system leads to action. He is talking about teaching a group of people to recognize that they themselves are being oppressed in some way, and if I were to work this into my classroom I would probably start with a discussion of the rights of students in an American high school. I would ask questions about whether or not they were ever informed of their rights as students, whether or not they have ever felt those rights to have been violated and under what circumstances, and what they have the ability to do when they feel their rights are being compromised. This entire discussion could be linked to other topics of injustice in society, and the action of analyzing their own experiences should help students understand the need to act using their knowledge about power systems and basic rights.
