Critical Pedagogy Movement - Essay Example

Education: A Vehicle for Maintaining the Status Quo and f Force for Social Change Education has been used over and over again to refer to academics, basic skills, discipline, citizenship, and technical knowledge among many other things. In addition knowledge is used as a vehicle for maintaining status quo in the society and also as a force of change according to critical pedagogy. The central aspects of critical pedagogy suggest that there is an imbalanced social stratification in the society, which is based on race, gender, and class (Luke & Gore 1992). Critical pedagogy is basically concerned with comprehending the relationship between knowledge and power. Knowledge is totally rooted in power relations and also socially constructed according to critical pedagogy. It asks why and how knowledge is constructed the manner it does and the reason why some reality constructions are justified by the dominant culture while other construction are not. Critical pedagogy inquires about the social meanings of knowledge (Windschitl & Joseph 2000). According to the critical pedagogy perspective, the people in high status and power are normally at the top of society and have power over the rest of the society and education is used to perpetuate this. Critical pedagogy focuses on the function that school play in up keeping societal social stratification and the chance for social change through the academic institutions. Progressive teachers adopt this approach to get rid of disparities on the basis of social class (Texeira 2001). In some societies, the critical pedagogy perspective is applicable and education is used by those in power to maintain status quo and bring about social change. The approach brought about a wide range of anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and anti-sexist policy initiatives and classroom based curricula, which indicate that education was used as a tool for maintaining status quo and discriminating certain groups in the society. Critical pedagogy focuses on the most important and forth knowledge. It also enquires on the knowledge that should be taught and the way the school structure contribute to the social stratification in the society. The purpose of school and its role in guaranteeing democracy and maintaining status quo and supporting big business is also examined in critical pedagogy. Shor (1992) argued that when curricular policy and pedagogy mirror democratic goals, educators accomplish what education can because they use desocialization to counter socialization; they pick critical perception over commercial perception; they favor societal transformation over inequality reproduction; they study authoritarianism and endorse democracy through practicing it; they also challenge withdrawal of students using participatory courses; they shed light on the myths that support the privileged societal hierarchy; they hamper with the pedagogic disabling of scholars using a significant literacy program; they raise attentiveness about the language and thought that is articulated in daily life; they distribute censored information and research skills which is important for investigating policy and power in the society; they also request students to think socially on their conditions and to think about overcoming limits. In any level of schooling, teachers of education curriculum or programs have to reflect on promoting equality in the society. Shor (1992) argued that once people accept the role of education as challenging myths and inequality as opposed to socializing students into their status quo, they will have a base required to formulate practical methods. There is a need to embrace critical pedagogy raising awareness and societal critique (Acker 1988). This approach values the voices of students, honors the needs of students, and also individuality which allow students to be really participatory society members who can create and re-create the society in addition to belonging to the society; this increases their freedom. For years, most teachers have sought to develop curriculum that bring greater justice and equity. This resulted from the fear that the tradition curriculum led to planned inequality, racial, and gender discrimination as well as also environmental pollution. Critical pedagogy offers perspectives for the relationship between the society and school. The perspective provides a framework for understanding what exists or mediates institutions and every day activities. In his theoretical framework, Freire shed light on the link between theory and practice. This illuminated the way vested interests bring about the formation of interests. He assists people to view the way knowledge has a practical as well as a political content. When contending interests compete for the legality of specific types of knowledge, those in positions of power maintain that their knowledge is scientifically validated and is thus more valid compared to other types of knowledge. In education, the kind of competition between people who hold on to a quantitative approach to research and those who opt for a qualitative approach is evident (Harding 1998). The quantitative approach is often borrowed from the hard sciences and thus the voices of its supporters are mostly the ones that are heard. Critical pedagogists and theorists argue that the society is both oppressive and exploitative, however it can be changed. They lay emphasis on social transformation, individual empowerment and the need to increase critical awareness in students. There is a need to differentiate politically determined social conditions and those determined by natural requirement and then to take actions that are just and possible. Most teachers in the wealthy nations have Freire’s ideas valuable. They aim to empower students to build a just and equal society that is at peace with other countries, the environment and other nations. The teachers need to ask students to examine setbacks and structure their investigation of these issues. In her study, Barakett (1999) illustrated the way the school administrators and teachers can respect the concerns, consciousness, and culture of their learners by creating a pedagogical setting in which the learners can express their understanding and problems of their social environment. Barakett further argued that when teachers reflect on their personal postulations about the behaviors of students, they build an environment where exchange of ideas can take place. The issue of inequality is also evident in the way gender equity is produced and reproduced under a patriarchal system. Schools play a significant role in producing gender stereotypes and class differences (Simon 1987). Critical pedagogists focus on the manner in which patriarchal suppositions define both research in education and school practices which have reproduced both racist assumptions and ideology. The critical pedagogy perspectives attempt to influence the manner in which teachers talk, think and endorse curriculum. The critical pedagogists have similar views about political power, language and knowledge even though each expresses specific concerns under the wide views of multiculturalism-economic structures that produce gaps between the poor and the rich, mass culture that limits group as well as personal identities, blaming of victims by the mass media, men privileged status, color discrimination, and the like. Knowledge is viewed individually and constructed socially according to Bibby and Posterski (1992) though the pedagogists are aware that official knowledge serves the interests of those who are politically powerful. The power of language to influence the manner students view the world is evident in critical pedagogy as it tries to shape group and individual identities. The oppressed are offered more perspectives and chances as they are taught new forms of language. For instance, the conventional classroom dialogue featured recitation, a type of language that promotes passive students, determining who a person can speak to, when, to whom, what should be said. The new form of classroom offer students chances to question and change the present practices in the community and school. Critical pedagogists offer new approaches for raising learners’ awareness of social disparities among advantaged learners, to provide marginal learners choices for official knowledge, and to develop a joint voice against injustice (Freire 1985). There is no neutral education process because education either functions as a tool for facilitating the incorporation of the younger age group in to the present system logic and to bring about compliance to it. It is also a practice of freedom, that is, the manners by which people deal creatively and critically with reality and find out ways of participating in transforming the world. According to Apple, education is not an impartial venture because by its very nature education is a political act in which the educator is part of consciously or unconsciously. He attempted to analyze and comprehend the link between the economic structure and education and the link between power and knowledge. In his analysis, Apple saw the school like an institution. He also focussed on the educator herself or himself and the forms of knowledge. The institution, educator and knowledge are all situated in the societal larger context. Shor (1992) stated that education strongest potential lay in the study of politics and the cultures of students affecting the classroom. He further argued that it is politically naïve or purely technocratic to view the classroom as very different in cases where ideology, inequality and economic policy do not affect learning. The persons in high status and power are normally at the top of the society and as a result control the rest of the society (Giroux 1983). This result in maintenance of unequal circumstances and thus the status quo persists. Critical pedagogy sounds like some kind of dictatorship and in a democratic or free society, it seems like nobody can get away with the implied sort of power and control (Aronowitz & Giroux 1993). Nonetheless, this kind of control is possible and exercised via a tool called hegemony. Under hegemony, the people who are oppressed accept to be oppressed by those who are in dominant political positions. This is an obvious, almost undetectable, form of control in which all persons (including the oppressed and oppressors) view it as the only way, the correct way. Apple argued that hegemony normally saturates people awareness so that the economic, social and educational worlds we live in and relate with become the real world and the only world. In order to make a difference, academic institutions, educators, and administrators have to grapples with the meaning of preparing students for a social world which is evidently unequal – a world in which ethnicity, class, and race mostly determine a person’s options and chances at births and in which these academic institutions tend to produce submissive consumers as opposed to critical citizens and thinkers (McLaren 2001). There is need to make certain changes in the teaching practice and people have to critically and carefully think about the teaching social context-the reality of the school, the social context and other educators within. Thus, critical pedagogical movement can be both a force of social change and a vehicle for maintaining the status quo. References Acker, S 1988, Teachers, gender and resistance, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 9, 307–322. Aronowitz, S & Giroux, H 1993, Education still under siege, London, Bergin and Garvey. 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Shor, I 1992, Empowering education: Critical teaching for social change, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Simon, R 1987, Empowerment as a pedagogy of possibility, Language Arts, 64(4), 370–382. Texeira, E 2001, Schoolteacher's play more than “We Shall Overcome, Los Angeles Times, B6. Windschitl, M., & Joseph, P. (2000). Confronting the dominant order. In P. Joseph, N. Green, S. Bravmann, M. Windschitl, & E. Mikel (Eds.), Cultures of curriculum (pp. 137–161). Mahwah, NJ : Erlbaum . Read More