Empowering Education
By Ira Shor
Underlying Questions
• How can we provide students with a different kind of learning that is
critical and democratic?
• What kind of learning process can empower students to perform at their
best?
• Why do conditions in school and society limit our students’ development?
How can this be changed?
• What helps students become critical thinkers and strong users of
language?
• What education can develop students as active students and as citizens
concerned with public life?
• How can I promote critical and democratic development among students
who have learned to expect little from intellectual work and from politics?
“Education is the contested terrain where people are
socialized and the future of society is at stake.”
On the one hand:
• Education is a socializing
activity organized, funded,
and regulated by authorities
who set a curriculum
managed (or changed) in
the classroom by teachers.
On the other hand:
• Education is a social
experience for tens of
millions of students who
come to class with their
own dreams and agendas,
sometimes cooperating
with and sometimes
resisting the intentions of
the school and the teacher.
Phases of Shor’s Third Idiom
“a self-evolving, non-standardized process”
1. Problem-posing
1. Generative – from the students’ culture
2. Topical – a social issue raised by teacher
3. Academic – from the body of knowledge
2. Reflect (think/write)
3. “Literacy Development/Skills Exercise”
•
Read-aloud, self-edit, peer review, etc.
4. Group reports/ discussion (w/teacher notes &
coaching)
5. Synthesize & re-present
6. 2nd round – Literacy exercise
Phases of Shor’s Third Idiom
“a self-evolving, non-standardized process”
7. 2nd round – Group reports/discussion
8. Material integration – teacher input
9. Interim class evaluation
10. Dialogic lecture by teacher
11. Student response to lecture
12. Solutions, alternatives and projects
To socialize students:
• Education tries to teach them the shape of
knowledge and current society, the meaning of
past events, the possibilities for the future, and
their place in the world they live in.
• Teachers can present knowledge:
1. as a celebration of the existing society
2. as a falsely neutral avoidance of problems
rooted in the system
3. or as a critical inquiry into power and
knowledge as they relate to student
experience
Agenda of values for
empowering education
1.
2.
3.
4.
Participatory – student involvement
Affective – build syllabus from student responses
Problem-posing – as opposed to problem solving dialogue
Situated - listen to students, marry critical thought to
everyday life by examining daily themes, social issues and
academic lores
5. Multicultural – using the language and perceptions of
students, their diverse cultures are built into the study
6. Dialogic – mutual discussion which is a student centered,
teacher directed process to develop critical thought and
democratic participation.
7. Desocializing –
A. In school from routine teacher-talk and student passivity
to mutual discussion and student engagement
B. Outside of school from the mass culture absorbed from
mass media and daily life. Ex. Racism, sexism, excessive
consumerism, homophobia, class prejudice
8. Democratic – uses a problem-posing method that frontloads
student thought and backloads teacher commentary
9. Researching –
A. Teachers research student learning in the classroom
B. Students develop critical judgment in thinking
examinations
10.Interdisciplinary – drawing on themes and texts that cross the
curriculum
11.Activist – critical pedagogy questions the status quo, includes
participatory methods, and insists that knowledge is changing
and not fixed
Student Obstacles to Critical Teaching
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Zero paradigm
Knowledge in a one way discourse
Passive role for students
Top-down control
Stifled curiosity
Silence in the classroom
Misbehavior
Sabotaging the curriculum
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Student resistance
Uneven levels of development
Vocationalism
Short time in class and on campus in an
unattractive setting
• Family life
• Health and Nutrition
Student Resources for Empowering
Education
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Extra abilities hidden by their performance strike
Speech
Life and Work Experience
Desire for Self Esteem
Curiosity
Democratic Attitudes
Racism
Sexism
Business attitudes
Humor and Emotional Tone
Teacher Obstacles to Empowering
Education
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Traditional training
Publish or perish
Departmental limits
Teacher burnout
Teaching to the tests
Fear of freedom
Larger classes, rushed schedule
Teacher Resources for Empowering
Education
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Articulateness
Thinking skills
Love of learning
Authority
Conviviality
Training in research
Deviance credits
Institutional clout
Resources
• Shor, Ira. Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for
Social Change
• Shor, Ira. Audio recording
• Pay Attention
• Savage Inequalities: East St. Louis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mdlYaCjf2I
• Children in America’s Schools, Jon Kozol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leysFIU2w60&fe
ature=player_embedded
• Rethinking Our Classrooms ????
• Rethinking Mathematics ????
Ira Shor – Quotable Quotes
• “No curriculum can be neutral.”
• “Students…inhabit classrooms where teachers
give answers to questions nobody asked…”
• “Participatory classes respect and rescue the
curiosity of students.”
“There are so many things that you can
atone for later on…
…but there is no way to atone for
the theft of childhood.”
Jon Kozul