Critical Pedagogy in Curriculum Decision Making

Abstract

Critical pedagogy has recently started to have an impact on the field of TESOL—teaching English to speakers of other languages—by introducing some new socio-political views of language teaching and linguistics. In this research, two main aims are set forward. The first aim is to explain the new concept of critical pedagogy and make suggestions for how it can be incorporated into the TESOL profession. The second is to investigate students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the concept and fundamental tenets of critical pedagogy, as well as the extent to which these tenets are utilised in formulating curricula in the context of Kurdistan. This study adopted a mixed-methods research design to employ instruments for gathering and analysing data from numerous sources. The sample for the study was 120 students who completed a questionnaire. Fourteen students from the same sample participated in focus groups and, seven teachers took part in semi-structured interviews. All participants voluntarily agreed to participate in the research and were affiliated with Soran University in Iraq's Kurdistan region. The findings of this empirical study demonstrate that the stakeholders make the curricular decisions using a monologic approach rather than a dialogic one and that students and lecturers are not engaged in the decision-making process. The results also show that both teachers and learners are not very satisfied with the banking model of education and would like to be allowed to actively participate in the design and development of teaching curricula from a critical perspective.