Victoria Vernacchio
Sustainability Education 4000
Annotation 4: Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy
1. Full citation?
Giroux, H. A. (2010, January 01).Rethinking education as the practice of freedom: Paulo freire and the promise of critical pedagogy. Truthout. Retrieved from http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/87456:rethinking-education-as-the-practice-of-freedom-paulo-freire-and-the-promise-of-critical-pedagogy
2. Where are the author/s located, what are their backgrounds and what kinds of expertise do they have?
The author of this piece, Henry Giroux, has an extensive and varied background as far as location and profession. He taught social studies in Rhode Island for six years before earning his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University. Since then, he has held positions at many universities around the country and eventually in Toronto, Ontario. He has expertise in a variety of related fields, including critical pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, and media studies.
3. List of at least three details or examples from the text that point to something important about culture, education and/or the challenge of environmental sustainability in the United States.
1. Political figures may feel directly threatened by critical pedagogy
The ideas explored in critical pedagogy aim to educate students to become critical agents who actively question and negotiate the relationships between critical analysis and common sense and learning and social change. While we think of the only relationship of education and politics is those of policies and standards, we must also consider this dynamic when arguing for social change.
2. An important part of education is political engagement
Like we saw in Galston’s piece, Giroux reiterates the ideas that the civic portion of education is directly correlated to political actions. “Critical pedagogy opens up a space where students should be able to come to terms with their own power as critically engaged citizens; it provides a sphere where the unconditional freedom to question and assert is central to the purpose…”
3. The current trajectory of the education system ultimately contradicts its true purpose
Giroux argues that pedagogy is now a narrow coupling of teaching to the test and disciplinary control, which mutually reinforce each other. He claims teachers are being “deskilled” and the corporatization of education becomes a way of taming students and invoking modes of corporate governance. These details are important to understanding the current status of public education and determining how to approach the change we want to being about in that system.
4. What three quotes capture the critical import of the text?
“What Paulo made clear in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," his most influential work, is that pedagogy at its best is about neither training, teaching methods nor political indoctrination. For Freire, pedagogy is not a method or an a priori technique to be imposed on all students, but a political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills and social relations that enable students to expand the possibilities of what it means to be critical citizens, while expanding and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive democracy.”
“Critical pedagogy attempts to understand how power works through the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge within particular institutional contexts and seeks to constitute students as informed subjects and social agents. In this instance, the issue of how identities, values and desires are shaped in the classroom is the grounds of politics. Critical pedagogy is thus invested in both the practice of self-criticism about the values that inform teaching and a critical self-consciousness regarding what it means to equip students with analytical skills to be self-reflective about the knowledge and values they confront in classrooms.”
“Education is not neutral. It is always directive in its attempt to teach students to inhabit a particular mode of agency; enable them to understand the larger world and one's role in it in a specific way; define their relationship, if not responsibility, to diverse others and to presuppose through what is taught and experienced in the classroom some sort of understanding of a more just, imaginative, and democratic life. Pedagogy is by definition directive, but that does not mean it is merely a form of indoctrination.”
5. What is the main argument of the text?
The text worked to inform the reader about the life, principles, and work of Paulo Friere and the implications of studying and understanding critical pedagogy. Beyond Giroux’s descriptions of Friere’s life and work, he criticizes the current trajectory of public education and strives to argue a different definition, approach, and criteria that public education should serve. Giroux argues the negative effects of the political atmosphere surrounding education and its fear of teaching students to think critically and in the context of changing established systems in society.
6. Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported.
1. Reference to a well-known and established text
Throughout the bulk of this piece, Giroux references, describes, and builds upon the ideas of Paulo Freire. By explaining and referring to his friend and colleague’s work, he is able to further support his own argument. Part of Giroux’s argument lies in Freire’s approach to life and the embodiment of his own principles, which the references contribute to.
2. Personal detail and experience
Giroux does not take an objective approach to his topic. He brings in plenty of personal details, feelings, and experiences to further support his argument that education cannot be reduced into an emotionless, opinion-less endeavor where the only goal is to pass a test.
3. Thorough analysis of ideas and concepts
Instead of working to prove his ideas through solid facts, Giroux explores a lot of concepts and ideas about the meaning of education. Deviating away from analyzing facts and statistics about education allows for a motivation to improve it through a different means than just to boost the numbers.
7. What parts of the argument did you find most and least persuasive, and why?
The part that I found most persuasive was Giroux’s discussion of how both education and pedagogy are both directive, not neutral. He sums up his main argument that “education as a practice for freedom must attempt to expand the capacities necessary for human agency and, hence the possibilities for democracy itself.” I felt that this point was driven home by the supporting details and context before it. It gives a convincing and powerful message about the capabilities of an education.
The part that I found least persuasive were some of the extraneous details about Paulo Freire’s life. While I understand that building a person behind the text is important and necessary, I didn’t think that adding a few paragraphs or so about their friendship was adding much to the argument after already discussing it previously.
8. What kinds of corrective action are suggested by the text (either overt or implied)?
The corrective action that I interpreted from the text was primarily targeted towards intellectuals who “must match their call for making the pedagogical more political.” Giroux encourages people in these positions to keep making an effort to build coalitions, affiliations, and social movements capable of mobilizing real power and promoting substantive social change. Giroux implies that this action is necessary to preserve democracy in its most basic sense.
9. Explain how the argument and evidence in the text relates to our effort to conceptualize, design and deliver EcoEd?
The argument in this text, I think, applies a lot to the conceptualizing and designing phase of creating curriculum in EcoEd. Essentially, Giroux is calling out to people in our position to work against “a time when education has become one of the official sites of conformity, disempowerment and uncompromising modes of punishment.” We are not fully employed as educators, but we have a special kind of access to the children’s education system through Tamarac and the Research Program. We can use this less-restrained position to really emphasize the aspects of political empowerment and non-neutrality in our curriculum that full-time teachers may not be able to put forth.
10. What additional information has this text compelled you to seek out? (Describe what you learned in a couple of sentences, providing at least two supporting references).
This text compelled me to seek out more information on how politics has affected the educational system. I read an article arguing to depoliticize education because party politics are preventing useful legislation from being passed and/or reducing the effectiveness of either party’s education platforms. Kevin Chavous argues that we need to take our political allegiance out of our plans to improve education in America.
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-p-chavous/education-politics_b_2080845.html
Another article that I read focused on how most politicians have no experience in the classroom and are ill-prepared to formulate policies about the education system. Because the lawmakers have no feelings towards education that are personal, bureaucracy essentially dehumanizes the policies made for the education systems. A memorable quote was “Successful teaching and good school cultures don’t have a formula.”
Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/politics-and-education-dont-mix/256303/