ppt

1. Language Teacher Education:
Critical Pedagogy
Presented by: Ooi Wooi Yee

2. WHAT IS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY?
• Critical pedagogy is an educational theory in which teaching and
learning tools are used to make learners aware of the autocracy of
social conditions.
• In the classroom environment,critical pedagogy pushes for a
student/teacher relationship in which the teacher feeds the student
information and the students are the passive beneficiary of the
teachers information.
• The political goal of critical pedagogy is to create a more egalitarian
society which can happen through identifying the unfairness of social
inequalities,and that change can happen through education.The fact
that educators can change society through education is key to the
critical pedagogy theory
.

3. CONT.
• Critical Pedagogy focuses on changing the education system,
identifying social inequalities with a push for change, and the
oppressive power struggle.
• Changing the education system can occur when educational
relations and practices are changed,and teacher also need to
energize students to think critically about the world around them.
• Flexible curriculum and discussing experiences and opinions are
important components of this theory.Students will be able to
share their thoughts and experience a wide range of experiences
through sharing.

4. CONT.
• Critical thinking = Critical Pedagogy
.
• When students think critically
,they solve problems and think at
a higher level using their acquired skills.
• The teacher does not feed the students the information, instead
the teacher gives students problem solving skills and allows the
students to think of their own responses and interpretation of
information.
• The advocates for critical pedagogy would like students to
challenge and question anything that is objective.Students must
be able to have a voice and envision a better world with the
information presented.

5. CONT.
• is a philosophy of education and social movement that
combines education with critical theory
.
• First described by Freire, it has since been developed by
Henry Giroux and others as a praxis-oriented
“educational movement,guided by passion and principle to
help students develop consciousness of freedom,recognize
authoritarian tendencies,and connect knowledge of power
and the ability to take constructive action.
”

6. CONT.
• It is a continuous process of what they call
unlearning learning relearning reflection
• the effect that these actions have on the students,in particular
students whom they believe have been disenfranchised by
“traditional schooling.”
• Postmodern, anti-racist, feminist,postcolonial and queer
theories have influenced contemporary interpretations of
Freire’s ideas,shifting its focus from social class to issues
including gender
,race,and other identities.
evaluation

8. Paulo Freire
• Freire came up with a idea called the banking concept of education which
supported the critical pedagogy theory .
• "According to Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, education is
traditionally framed as "an act of depositing, in which the students are the
depositories and the teacher is the depositor."
• Freire's issue with banking was that students didn't have freedom of
thought, the students were fed information from the teacher without and
thoughts. He felt as if teachers were brainwashing student to think like the
teachers which meant the students in poverty would never escape their
social class.
• Critical pedagogy explores the idea of students actually being able to create
their own thoughts and views of the world.

9. Critical Pedagogy and Levels of Consciousness
🠶 Freire (1973) distinguished three stages or levels of consciousness
Intransitive
• the individuals accept their lives as they are and the change that might happen in
their lives seem to be the result of magic or miracles. They do not make any attempt to
change their life conditions and injustices done to them.
Semi transitive
• people with this kind of consciousness are aware of their problems and can learn to
change one thing at a moment. They cannot make any connection with outside
world and they consider their problems as something normal or accidental. Actions
that are taken with this kind of consciousness are often short-sighted.
Critical consciousness
• people with this kind pf consciousness view their problems as structural problems. They
can make connections between their problems and the social context in which these
problems are embedded. People with this consciousness can interpret the problems
and analyze reality.

10. Henry Giroux
• In the late 1970s and early 1980s, radical
educational scholarship had fallen victim to a
reductionistic determinism that maintained that
schools were hopelessly subordinate to the dictates
of social, politic, and economic power.
• While correcting liberal educational analysts who
simplistically celebrated the democratic functions of
schooling, Giroux chastised the radicals for reducing
schooling to its oppressive functions in a capitalist
society.

11. Cont.
• Giroux sought an avenue out of determinism by illustrating how
schooling can be forced for both domination and emancipation. In the
spirit of a democratic pedagogy, Giroux searches for those instances in
classroom, when conscientization is possible.
• Thus, the critical pedagogy Giroux establishes is a discourse of
educational possibility.

12. Kincheloe (2005)
• According to Kincheloe (2005), critical pedagogy is concerned with
transforming relations of power which are oppressive and which lead
to the oppression of people.
• It tries humanize and empower learners. It is most associated with
the Brazilian educator and activist Paulo Freire using the principles of
critical theory of the Frankfurt school as its main source.
• Critical theory is concerned with the idea of a just society in which
people have political, economic, and cultural control of their lives.

14. FUNDAMENTALASPECTS
OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY

15. Fundamental
Aspect of
Critical
Pedagogy
🠶Traditional education presumes leaners as empty
agents who receive knowledge from teachers.
🠶Minority marginalization is due to the power imbalance
in society.
🠶Educational institutions are part of societies with
uneven distribution of power, are political sites, and are
not neutral, therefore tend to reflect and reproduce
societal power imbalance.
🠶Through education, learners can overcome
unfavourable life situation by raising awareness of the
power relations embedded in society.

17. Principles of
Critical
Pedagogy
🠶Education produces political subjectivities
🠶Ethics is central to education
🠶Need to understand difference in identity formation
🠶Need to understand how different types of knowledge are given
priority in schools
🠶Should pursue new forms of culture and knowledge
🠶Claims to objective knowledge should be challenged
🠶Must include a vision of a better world
🠶Teachers should be ‘transformative intellectuals’
🠶Students need a critically conscious ‘voice’

18. Why critical
pedagogy is
important
🠶to liberate people from social and cultural hegemony, not to
capture political power
🠶motivated illiterate peasants to break their silenced culture.
🠶different interactive teaching strategies to enhance students’
critical awareness
🠶Freire wanted a society where every person had equal rights
and opportunities.
🠶Mahmoudi et al. (2014) say that schools should be
considered as places for social change and evolution.
Schools should not only foster critical thinking, but they
should also teach how to change the surrounding
environments.

19. ESL CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
• Language is not simply a means of expression or communication;rather
,it is a
practice that constructs and is constructed by the ways language learners
understand themselves,their social surroundings,their histories,and their
possibilities for the future.
• When the language classroom can be a place where students understand their
own identities and their own society,language learning can be empowering.
• Relationship between language learning and social change is focused.

20. FUNCTIONS
• Materials and approaches should be relevant to the social,political,and cultural
conditions of each group of students.
• Topics should be locally situated and should meet learner needs in the society
which they live in.
• Subject matter should provide meaningful content for lessons.
• Discussion topics such as ecology,gender
,roles,changing social identity
,and
employment equality are valid and appropriate topics for ESL classrooms
• Problem-posing and rights analysis are considered the most crucial aspect of
the syllabus.
• Awareness of the local,social,political issues promotes the participation in
community
,society and politics.

21. WHAT ABOUT EFL?

22. Critical Pedagogy and Educational
System in Iran (EFL)
🠶 Enable EFL learners to develop their speaking skills by focusing on their
real life problems and at the same time to understand and diagnose their
own problems.
🠶 They can be motivated to speak more and more since they are living
with their problems and talking about authentic issues gives students
insights to the nature, origin, and possible solutions to their problems.
🠶 Critical Pedagogy tries to have transformational effects on learners. Aims:
changing the point of view of people through which they are used to
look at different social problems.
🠶 Strongly recommended that this approach be used in EFLclasses.
🠶 Itmotivates students to speak their ideas, that is to say, to develop speaking
skills
🠶 Application of its use leads to transformational activities

24. the purpose of
education is to
develop critical
thinking by
presenting
[students’]
situation to them
as a problem so
that they can
perceive, reflect
and act on it.
the content of
curriculum
derives from the
life situation of
the learners as
expressed in the
themes of their
reality
the learners
produce their
own learning
materials
the task of
planning is first
to organize
generative themes
and second to
organize subject
matter as it
relates to those
themes

25. the teacher
participates as a
learner among
learners
the teacher
contributes
his/her ideas,
experiences,
opinions, and
perceptions to
the dialogical
process [of the
course]
the teacher’s
function is one
of posing
problems
the students
possess the
right to and
power of
decision
making

26. Shih.Y. Some critical thinking on Paulo
Freire’s critical pedagogy and its
educational implications. International
Education Studies; Vol.11, no.9.
EJ1189530.pdf

27. The Influence of Life Experiences on Freire’s
Critical Pedagogy
• The situation of Brazil’s society where Freire lived.
• The politics, it was an autocratic dictatorship, where power is concentrated in a small
number of elites.
• Economically, the gap between the rich and the poor was huge.
• Education, the quality and quantity of education were insufficient, the illiteracy rate
was high, and the level of education was low.
• Within this context, Freire hoped to free the oppressed.

28. Thinking on Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy
•Issues of Freedom and
Authority in Education
•Liberation
Education
as the
practice of
freedom

29. Education as the practice of freedom
1. Freire paid attention to issues of freedom and authority in education.
• Seeking a balance of freedom and authority
• “education as the practice of freedom”
• He emphasized the necessity of establishing limits to this freedom.
• Freedom does not mean that there is no limit.
• In terms of education, “freedom” should be its ultimate concern.

30. Cont.
2. Education of Liberation
• Freire’s main concern is how to educate people to emancipate themselves, and to meet
the needs of humanity and to develop a more just society.
• hopes to use this educational method as the basis for helping individuals to awaken
their own critical consciousness, and then take a more critical view of social reality.
• Freire’s liberation of education can change people’s perception of external reality
making individuals more critical and more autonomous.
• Freire rejected the banking method – the students are the depositories and the teacher
is the depositor instead of communicating.

32. Dialogical
method
Connectin
g learning
with real
life
situations
Engaging
students
with out-
of-book
activities
Hands-on
study
activities
Problem-
solving
strategy

33. Teachers’ Reflections
on Critical Pedagogy
in the Classroom
Katz, Leanna

34. • The nine teachers: four men and five women
• 30 to 60 , and 5 to over 25 years of teaching experience.
• Teachers were of different ethnic backgrounds, including Asian, African,
South American, Eastern and Western European.
• focuses on examining the applicability of critical pedagogy among
privileged students and teachers who have not been trained in critical
pedagogy
• based on teachers’ lived experiences

35. 1. Do you incorporate students’ experiences into your teaching? If so, how?
2. How often do you teach your students while they learn as compared to students
teaching their peers and teaching you?
3. In your teaching, to what extent do you openly acknowledge the political nature
of education and the social and historical context that serves as a framework for
the knowledge being taught?
4. Do you incorporate learning about social justice issues in your lessons? If so,
how?
5. Would you like to add anything else about your teaching that is relevant to our
discussion?

36. Results
power and
authority among
students and
teachers
the political
nature of
education
teaching about
social issues in
the classroom.

37. • To me the humanity of the teaching experience is the bottom line…I see the
literary text as secondary and…I see communication with my students as the
primary objective, their humanity and their understanding of life. I see their
understanding of the literary work or the fiction or non-fiction piece as a
prop…The stories are not real, our experiences are.

38. • students are not prepared due to a lack of knowledge and skills.
• But he noted that students are better able to contribute in humanities courses
• This is because students have seen a lot of movies, read a lot of books, and
this input is different from their daily experience

39. • Three teachers strongly agreed with the importance of talking about the
political nature of knowledge.
• Six others seemed uneasy using terms like power, privilege, or politics and
shifted to discussing critical thinking
The curriculum is set up in such a way that doesn’t allow us to
talk about these things [as in social issues like poverty, sexism,
racis)

40. teachers’
hesitation or
opposition to
the theory
Unwillingness to
move away from
oppressive
practices
a lack of
knowledge