Critical Pedagogy
Dialectical theory
• Searches out contradictions e.g.children
from generation poverty (Beegle, 2003)
who face difficulties in school and a
system that aspires to help all students to
attain “full potential”
• Reflects on all elements of social actions:
part and whole; subject and object;
process and product; rhetoric and reality
e.g. a teacher in Ladson-Billing’s study pp. 317 incorporates
home language
Result of dialectical thinking
• As contradictions are discovered
• New constructive thinking and new constructive action (
Moll’s et. al research to discover funds of knowledge)
• Elements are regarded as mutually constitutive, not separate
and distinct (e.g. knowing students’ world as part of teaching
and learning process)
• Contradiction is not paradox
• To speak of contradiction implies a new resolution can be
achieved (reconciling home and school differences and
similarities in classroom teaching and learning contexts :
Julia and Ann legitimate African American culture pp. 316)
• Paradox means two ideas are opposed to one another (Black
English and Standard English)
Dialectical thinking and critical theory
• School is a cultural terrain of student
empowerment and self-transformation as
well as an arena of indoctrination and
socialization (relevance of Carlos’ candy
sale becomes empowering)
• For the critical educator there are many
sides to a problem and often these sides
are linked to class, race, and gender
interests
Classroom instruction
• Teachers are likely to
• emphasize classroom management and behavior
• Highlight efficiency and how to do techniques
• Ignore important question such as “why is this
knowledge being taught in the first place?”
» See how the teacher-researcher used the funds of
knowledge for relevance (Moll et.al)
» See how her research enabled her to connect school
subjects, consumer education, health, math, science,
cross-cultural practices, advertising, and food
production to the lived experiences of her student(s)
Instructional objectives
• Micro-objectives (most classrooms are
engaged in micro-objectives)
• Content bound path of inquiry
• Characterized by a narrowness of purpose
• Concerned with organizational, classification and
mastery of data
• Vietnam war (suggest micro-objectives and macroobjectives)
• Note how micro-objectives tie in with
productive knowledge
Instructional objectives
• Macro-objectives (linked to practical and
emancipatory knowledge)
• help students to make connections between
method, content, and structure of the course
• Allows students to acquire a broad frame of
reference or worldview
• Make the hidden curriculum explicit
• Center on relationship between means and ends –
thus the relationship between the specific event
and the wider social and political implications
• Fosters dialectical mode of inquiry
Social construction of knowledge
Knowledge
1. acquired in school or anywhere is not neutral or
objective
2. is a social construction rooted in the nexus of power
relations (whose knowledge matters Moll et. al)
The world we live in is
1. Constructed symbolically by the mind through social
interactions with others
2. Culture, customs, historical specificity influence the
social interactions
3. There is a referential field that influence the symbols
(language, culture, space, time)
Forms of knowledge
• Productive knowledge – can be measured and quantified
– is evaluated using scores that sort, regulate, and
control students
• Practical knowledge – aims to enlighten individuals so
they can shape their daily actions in the world – it is
gathered through describing and analyzing social
situations historically and developmentally (funds of
knowledge p. 137 Economic lesson)
• Emancipatory knowledge - helps us understand how
social relationships are distorted and manipulated by
relations of power and privilege, it creates the foundation
for social justice, equality, and empowerment
Critical pedagogy inquires
• how and why some constructions of reality
are legitimated and celebrated while
others are not
• how our everyday commonsense
understandings (social constructions) get
produced and lived out
• what are the social functions of knowledge
Critical pedagogy questions
•
•
•
•
Whose interests does certain types of knowledge serve?
Who gets excluded as a result?
Who is marginalized?
What is the relationship between social class and
knowledge taught in school?
• Why do we value scientific knowledge over informal
knowledge?
• Why do teachers have to teach using “standard
English”?
• How does school knowledge reinforce stereotypes about
disadvantaged peoples?
Culture
• A set of practices, ideologies, and values from which
different groups draw to make sense of the world (Carlos
in Moll p. 137, Ladson-Billings p. 313
• Dominant culture – social practices and representations
that affirm central values, interests, and concerns of the
social class in control of material and symbolic wealth of
society see p. 134 Moll et al
• Subordinate culture – groups who live out social
relations in subordination to the dominant culture
• Subculture – individuals who form subcultures often use
distinct symbols and social practices to help foster an
identity outside the dominant culture – punk subculture
Subcultures
Subcultures
• Are negotiated than truly oppositional –
they operate in the arena of leisure
• Offer critique of social order
• Reflect a crisis (not conspiracy) within
dominant society (e.g. hippie movement of
1960s)
Popular culture
• Resistance to dominant culture occurs in the
popular culture
• Prevailing social practices are resisted
• Alternative groups do manage to find different
values and meanings to regulate their lives
• Even in schools sites, exchange, transactions,
and struggle occurs between subordinate
groups and dominant ideology (teachers
resisted when some people wanted to ban Harry
Porter)
Hegemony
• Dominant culture exercises domination
over subordinate classes or groups
through a process known as hegemony
• Hegemony refers to the maintenance of
domination through consensual social
practices, social forms, and social
structures produced in specific sites such
as schools, mass media, the political
system, and the family
Social practices
Social practices are:
• What people say or do
• They are accomplished through words,
gestures, rituals, signs or a combination of
these
* Think of the impact of these words: This is superstitious,
this is rational: What gestures may accomplish this?
Hegemony as a struggle
• The powerful win the consent of the oppressed who
unknowingly participate in their oppression
• The dominant secures hegemony by supplying symbols,
representations, and practices of social life that hide
unequal relations of power and privilege
• Drawing from Beegle (2003), a child from generational
poverty may blame himself for school failure, a failure
that can be attributed to the economic structures and
class based division of labor
Hegemony and common sense
• Hegemony as a cultural encasement of
meanings seeps into popular common sense
and get reproduced
• The ruled subscribes to many of the values and
objectives of the rulers without being aware of
the source of the values and interests which
inform them
• The dominant supply terms of reference
(images, visions, desires, stories, ideals) against
which individuals are expected to live their lives
Social forms and social structures
• Social forms are principles that give
legitimacy to specific social practices such
as school boards, legislature
• Social structures constrains individuals’
control
NCLB (with all its testing rituals) was given legitimacy by the federal
government. Education structure constrains us all, we have no
individual choice in NCLB however opposed we are to the program.
Hegemony and worldview
• Dominant culture tries to ‘fix” the meaning of
signs, symbols, to provide a common worldview
• People are provide “subject positions” which
condition them to react to ideas and opinions in
prescribed ways - subject position such as the –
African, middle-eastern, American, as subject
positions: what are the symbols and signs
associate to these subject positions?