Monday morning a child brings a stray dog into the classroom.
The traditional teacher sees that it is removed immediately.
The progressive teacher builds on the students’ interest; perhaps measures and weighs the animal with the children, has the children draw and write about the dog, and eventually calls the humane society.
The Freirian teacher does what the progressive teacher does but more. She asks questions, using the dog as the object of reflection. “Why are there so many stray dogs in our neighborhood?” “Why are there more here than in the rich suburbs?” “Why do people have dogs?” “Why doesn’t the city allocate enough money to clean up after the dogs and care for the strays?”
While accepting stray animals into a classroom isn’t the bellwether mark of an elementary Freiran [sic] teacher, engaging children in reflective dialogue on topics of their interest is. (Peterson, R. E. (2009). Teaching how to read the world and change it: Critical pedagogy in the intermediate grades. In A. Darder, M. P. Baltodano, & R. D. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (2nd ed., pp. 305-323). Routledge.)
You must understand that your idea of being educated is exactly what Paulo Freire denounced. Freire didn't want students to fit in and succeed in the current system because he was a marxist who thought the current system was oppressive and dehumanizing. He saw education - and the knowledge that it signified - as a form of private property that oppressive classes used to maintain their control over society. Education, in this view, was just a means of certifying someone's ability to fit into the system and reproduce its oppressive structure.
The academics who added marxist theories of culture, race, sex, and gender to their teaching methods and practices see education in the same way. They think the very idea of being proficient in reading, writing, and math is wrong because those things - as they are currently taught - serve to reproduce social injustice. For instance, Culturally Relevant Teachers think all knowledge is socially constructed and culturally contingent. Culturally Relevant Teachers think all cultures have their "own ways of knowing, doing, and being" in the world. Therefore, to hold children accountable to "Western mathematics" in schools serves to reproduce the ideology of white supremacy. That is to say, Culturally Relevant Teachers think there isn't a right or wrong way to do mathematics. They think the only reason we all think math is universal is because we have been ideologically indoctrinated to think so. "Western math," in this view, is a product and tool of white supremacy. Therefore, Culturally Relevant Teachers don't care whether or not a student is actually proficient in mathematics. They only care that students learn to see and "read" mathematics through a marxist sociopolitical lens for purposes of inspiring activism and radical social change.
Critical Pedagogy is a marxist teaching method that works by hijacking classroom instruction and forcing political conversations into lessons. The point of Critical Pedagogy isn't to teach kids to read, write, and do math. The point is to lead kids to activism by programing them to "read" and see oppression, power, racism, and sexism in everything.
1. Generate themes
2. Codify
3. Problematize
4. Decodify
5. Activism
1. Teachers select themes that are (or can easily be made) politically charged to begin their lesson planning.
Examples:
2. Teachers "codify" the theme they've chosen. That is to say, teacher's couch their politically charged theme into an otherwise neutral lessons to make it "engaging" and "relevant" to their learners.
In this step, the teacher's goal is to "make oppression real." That is, the point is to make sure their lesson is structured in a way that coerces students to "read" social injustice, privilege, inequality, racism, and sexism into it. Thus, the lesson becomes less about what the students should be learning to do - read, write, etc. - and more about discussing politically charged issues.
"Codifying" a lesson usually involves representing "oppression" via pictures, charts, videos, or literary works. The point is to coerce and shock the learner into seeing oppression represented in concrete form.
Examples:
3. Teacher's help students "read oppression" into the lesson they've developed. That is to say, teachers use Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, and Queer Theory as the analytical lens through which they guide their students through the lesson. In this stage, the teacher's primary goal is to begin to politicize the students and program them to see "structural" and "systemic" problems that can't be ignored.
Examples:
Teachers convince students that they are the "oppressed." In this step, teacher's convince students to "read" themselves into a historical and political context by identifying with the oppressed identity group in question. The goal of this stage is to help students develop their own critical consciousness; to help them realize they are responsible for analyzing and deconstructing the "structural" and "systemic" oppression in their lives and in society writ large.
Examples:
The final step is to convince students that they are morally responsible for changing the world to reflect the prescriptions of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, and Queer Theory. In this stage, educators push students to become activists personally and collectively.
Examples:
REFERENCES:
1. Peterson, R. E. (2009). Teaching how to read the world and change it: Critical pedagogy in the intermediate grades. In A. Darder, M. P. Baltodano, & R. D. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (2nd ed., pp. 305-323). Routledge.
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