The 'Tridicity' of It All!: Musings on Critical Pedagogy

Within the first two-three pages of her work, "Pedagogy: Dreaming of Democracy," Ann George makes a convicing and alluring introduction into what critical studies is. We find out that critical pedagogy "reinvents the roles of teachers and students in the classroom and the kind of activities they engage in critiquing the "banking" concept of education, thanks to Freire and his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed where he says, "students are seen as "receptacles" waiting to be filled with the teacher's offical knowledge..." (qtd in George 93).

The oppositional forces of these two statements, I thought, while very valid and exciting, did seem to sound like Cultural Pedagogy, to an extent...Then I turned the page, and lo and behold, it seems Critical Pedagogy is the optimistic answer to those doldrumic pessemistic guys in Cult. Pedagogy (something i had to laugh out loud at, since it feels like we were just discussing this very issue in Monday's class)(94).

One clearly optimistic move is in the role of the school. While cultural studies, thanks to Althusser and many others, define schools as "mechanicms that reproduce dominant culture", Aronwitz and Giroux defend schools saying that "while schools are reproductive, they are not MERELY reproductive...schools are arenas characterized by struggle bt ween competing ideologies, discourses and behaviors" (96).

I really like the inclusion of the community college place in all of these matters, and Ira Shor's argument that community colleges are great places for using critical pedagogy, as they are a institution where everyone is somewhat in tune with where they stand socio-economically (96). No longer are community colleges a " warehouse for surplus workers" but instead they are "[places where]people[are] fighting for their humanity without quite realizing how they might reclaim it" (George 96-97).

Further along, George writes about Freire insisting that a critical teacher must never impose topics or politics on students. I felt this was addressed much more in depth in Ann Berthoff's "Is Teaching Still Possible: Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning." One of my favorite lines from this article was "Assigning topics-the essential strategy of the pedagogy of exhortion-is no substitute for instruction" ( Berthoff 341). Im not sure if its just the way she writes or the meaning, but I just thought it was great. In explaning this, Berthoff writes about research that reports students being good at narrative but not with exposition or arguement and hypothesizing that it must be a developmental issue. But what really should be look at in analyzing the issue is what tasks are assigned to the students. Freire ( or is it Berthoff through Freire) finds that students do fine on all different sorts of essays but terrible on the persausive mode--because they were assigned "euthanasia" as their topic.

I feel this fits well into almost all pedagogy we have learned so far, the idea of not writing about things you are passionLESS about. Here it becomes even more important in Critical Pedagogy, because it is all about the leveling of fields between teacher and student, and what would make a student feel more powerful than chosing their own topic? Likewise, what would make them feel more powerless than being told what to do and write about, something they may feel they have been told their whole life long.

As a side note as I end this post, I am curious about the connection between a pedagogy someone told me about years ago: emancipatory pedagogy and critical pedagogy. Are they the same thing, different name? Or are they different nuanced pedagogies?