Utopian Social Praxis in First-Year Writing Courses

Abstract

Critical pedagogy is a utopian social praxis that seeks to establish conscientization between educator(s) and learner(s) in engaging the literacy goals of the community. In the first-year writing course, conscientization develops through the praxis of the critical-dialectic and the reflexive literacy practices of emerging teacher-scholars. In this chapter, the author seeks to explore this definition of critical pedagogy in first-year writing in the form of a literacy narrative that explores the three readings of Pedagogy of the Oppressed over the course of the ten-year period of the author’s teacher-scholar training with an emphasis on several critical incidents that assisted with contextualizing the reading. Pedagogy of Freedom and The Politics of Education are utilized to provide additional context for defining critical pedagogy and conscientization—and for unpacking the critical-dialectic and the reflexive literacy practices. Each reflection of a period of reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed rediscovers three of Freire’s ideas that contributed to the author’s understanding of some of the foundational ideas of critical pedagogy. The chapter concludes with a reflection on Freire’s work in relation to the idea of conscientization as a foundation of critical-pedagogy in first-year writing courses, and the issue of epistemological racism in post-secondary education.