Development Of Critical Consciousness Research Articles

Using Multimedia in Faculty Development on Multicultural Education: Scenes From the Movie “Crash”

OPEN ACCESSApril 27, 2010Using Multimedia in Faculty Development on Multicultural Education: Scenes From the Movie “Crash” Monica Lypson, MD, Paula Ross, MA, Terence Joiner, MD, Arno Kumagai, MD Monica Lypson, MD University of Michigan Medical School Google Scholar More articles by this author , Paula Ross, MA University of Michigan Google Scholar More articles by this author , Terence Joiner, MD University of Michigan Google Scholar More articles by this author , Arno Kumagai, MD University of Michigan Google Scholar More articles by this author https://doi.org/10.15766/mep_2374-8265.8008 SectionsAbout ToolsDownload Citations ShareFacebookTwitterEmail AbstractTraining medical students to address health care disparities based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class involves not only education on epidemiologic and clinical evidence for the existence of such disparities, but also the fostering of critical awareness of the impact of assumptions, biases, and prejudice on physician-patient interactions. Development of critical awareness may be achieved through engaged small-group discussions in a safe environment and requires instructors who are skilled at facilitating discussions on potentially contentious issues such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class.This 1.5-hour workshop will assist faculty in guiding discussions on race, gender, sexual orientation and socioeconomic diversity. Upon viewing four different scenes from the Academy Award-winning movie “Crash,” participants will engage in active discussion sessions in which they reflect on their impressions of the actors, situations, and themes of each scene. Participants will be asked to discuss the contentious and emotionally-charged issues that created the situation in each scene as the basis for exploration of their own personal and professional experiences and identities. In preparation for teaching in these areas, it is essential that the instructors themselves reflect on their own biases, values, and perspectives, and model the types of discussions they will facilitate.This workshop is a unique tool for getting faculty to reflect on their own attitudes toward race and diversity (e.g., race, socioeconomic class, and gender) and to capture the interest and involvement from the audience. This workshop also provides faculty with an opportunity to both discuss how best to manage opposing opinions and difficult topics in the classroom environment, and recognize how struggling with these issues themselves informs them of how students may deal with similar issues. Educational Objectives By the end of this session, learners will be able to: Gain increased critical consciousness and critical thinking of the faculty as it relates to pedagogical theory.Develop faculty instructor's skills in facilitating discussions on issues of diversity, the roles both positive and negative of conflict in interpersonal relationships, and small-group dynamics.Emphasize the importance of critical reflection on personal values and perspectives in fostering the awareness of societal problems and approaches to their solutions. Sign up for the latest publications from MedEdPORTAL Add your email below FILES INCLUDEDReferencesRelatedDetails FILES INCLUDED Included in this publication: Crash Faculty Development Workshop.doc Crash Workshop Evaluation.doc To view all publication components, extract (i.e., unzip) them from the downloaded .zip file. Download editor’s noteThis publication may contain technology or a display format that is no longer in use. CitationLypson M, Ross P, Joiner T, Kumagai A. Using Multimedia in Faculty Development on Multicultural Education: Scenes From the Movie “Crash”. MedEdPORTAL. 2010;6:8008. https://doi.org/10.15766/mep_2374-8265.8008 Copyright & Permissions© 2010 Lypson et al. This is an open-access publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike license.KeywordsCultural DiversityEthnologyMulticultural EducationHealth Equity ResearchCultureFaculty DevelopmentEthnicitySocioeconomic FactorsMultimediaEthical Relativism Disclosures None to report. Funding/Support None to report. Prior Presentations Lypson ML, Ross PT, Joiner TA, Kumagai AK. Using Multimedia in Faculty Development in Multicultural Education. Generalists in Medical Education Conference; November 2009; Boston, MA. Loading ...

Acculturative integration, self and citizenship construction: The experience of Amal-Andaluza, a grassroots organization of Moroccan women in Andalusia

Abstract This paper describes the role of grassroots associations in the acculturative integration process from an approach that stresses the contributions of community and cultural psychologies. Community psychology allows us to understand the acculturative transition as an empowerment process by which immigrants transform both structural conditions and themselves. Cultural psychology explains this empowerment process as a self-construction through which immigrants acquire a new vision of the world and of themselves. From these insights, acculturative integration is understood as an active, multidimensional and ecological process in which immigrants become an accepted part of the new society through the development of critical awareness, gaining capacities and opportunities to influence their environment and involving themselves in activities which transform both their “self” and their environment. The promotion of grassroots organizations, as empowering community settings, is presented as a tool to bridge newcomers and the receiving society. This model is illustrated by the experience of Amal, a grassroots organization of Andalusian Moroccan women. Using the personal, organizational and community narratives of Amal (activists, recipients, community workers, policymakers and written documents), we describe the influence of citizen participation in the construction of self and citizenship among activists, the bettering of an integrative community, and the promotion of a fair multicultural society. Lessons learned will be summarized in order to pave the way for the implications of the Amal experience for acculturative research agendas and social policy and action.

Youth empowerment for the most vulnerable

PurposeThis paper aims to review global adolescent empowerment programmes and develops and proposes a model that can be used with vulnerable adolescents. The model reflects theory and experience drawn from the literature.Design/methodology/approachThe review is a synthesis of articles on empowerment theory, models and programme evaluations. Literature is selected and critiqued that reflects aspects of empowerment as described by Freire or relating to empowering models that could be generalised and related specifically to vulnerable adolescent programmes. Vulnerable adolescents within the context of this paper have been identified as those experiencing social, economic, cultural or physical disadvantage.FindingsThe findings document that empowerment programmes do not fully integrate the theory or pedagogy of empowerment as described by Freire. In most cases the goals of empowerment programmes, when stated, do not reflect the transformative or social action aspects of empowerment theory. Nevertheless there are sufficient examples of successful empowerment programmes with marginalised populations to warrant more rigorous application and evaluation of empowerment theory with this population in a variety of social settings. The relationship between the facilitator and participants and the development of critical consciousness are two vital aspects of empowerment theory that are unexplored and need further study.Research limitations/implicationsMany empowerment programmes for vulnerable adolescents in resource‐poor countries have not been evaluated or have not been published. Lack of consistency in the use of terminology and evaluation also makes it difficult to compare studies.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a model of empowerment that could be effective in addressing the health needs of marginalised adolescents and is based on theory and field experiences.

Developing Critical Consciousness Through Film

Recent instructional trends in the field of TESOL emphasize teaching language through course content. The dual focus of content-based English instruction (CBI) provides a way for language teachers to engage learners with challenging material while increasing their linguistic proficiency. This article describes a unit in a CBI course at a Japanese university that was designed to promote the development of critical consciousness (Freire, 2005) through the analysis of a film. Students identified race- and gender-related issues, engaged in discussions about these issues, and finally wrote a critical response paper to the film.

Teaching Globalization Issues to Education Students: What's the Point?

We argue that teaching the dynamics of globalization to education students is an important aspect of teaching for social justice and for the development of critical awareness, thinking, and sensitivity. We begin this position paper by briefly characterizing globalization and exploring a range of approaches to teaching this topic. We then describe some of the challenges and risks of teaching globalization issues. We reflect on the responses of our students, looking at such issues as guilt, paralysis, disconnection, fear, pity, and anger. We end by describing how teaching about globalization can support our broader goals as critical educators, which include helping students to disrupt commonsense understandings, to unlearn dominant ideologies, to think systemically, and to create new habits of learning.

Fostering Preservice Teachers’ Transformative Learning in a Social Studies Methods Course: A Reflection on Transformative Pedagogy

Using a qualitative research design, this study examined the impact of a course that utilized transformative pedagogy to foster preservice teachers’ transformative learning in a social studies methods course. The study was framed around the construct and practice of transformative education and pedagogy. Transformative pedagogy was defined as an activist pedagogy that combines the elements of constructivist, critical pedagogy, multiculturalism and practices that promote dialogical relations, engage and empower students as critical inquirers, participatory, active, and self-reflective learners who confront their prior beliefs, perspectives, frames of reference and attitudes in order to foster the development of critical consciousness, visions of possibilities, and action. Drawing on multiple sources, the data revealed that participants evidenced transformative learning such as follows: (a) deepened perspectives and new understanding of social studies; (b) shifting dispositions and awareness of a new sense of responsibility; (c) evolving self-examination and redefinition of teaching role, and (d) emerging sense of social critique and conscientization. Finally, the article discusses practices of key elements of transformative pedagogy that foster transformative learning such as a community-based learning context, experiential learning activities and project, reflective journaling, modeling, and scaffolding.

‘Gender and race—what’s that to do with football studies?’ Contested ‘knowledges’ in sport and leisure curricula in HE

This paper explores the implications and affects of a level two compulsory module concerned with ‘gender, difference and leisure’ on a predominantly male student group studying for sports‐related degrees. Participant observation was undertaken by a male and female lecturer who were delivering the module. A cohort of male football students were interviewed as a group, and individual interviews were undertaken with female students. The opinions and expressions of the students are also located in the significant subculture of the collegiate footballer researched by one of the authors. The paper draws attention to the ways in which young male students negotiate their male identities collectively and the implications this has for theirs and other’s learning in HE. The findings show that many of the male football students, in particular, attempted to resist knowledge that challenged dominant male behaviours and threatened the project of patriarchy as a whole, such as the hegemonic patterning of the collegiate football subculture. While this resistance was beset with tensions, evidencing some opposition to gender ideologies at an individual level, at least, social identities constructed around gender and ‘race’, especially, were clearly disruptive in the development of critical awareness to such issues. The data presented here highlights a number of pedagogical problems that arise from these complex sets of interrelated identity issues, not least the need for lecturers to develop greater critical awareness of masculine and racial identities and to reflect upon their methods of delivery of contested knowledge.

A Phenomenological Study of the Development of University Educators' Critical Consciousness

Despite the priority higher education institutions have given to multicultural initiatives, little attention has been given to examining the multicultural experiences and other life events that influence those charged with developing and facilitating these initiatives. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore how multicultural educators known for their expertise in this area acquired the capacity to effectively serve in this role and to explore the kinds of experiences that facilitated these educators' visions of social justice. Participants were 20 university educators representing 14 different race/ethnicity groups, balanced by gender, and varied in sexual orientation. Using in-depth interviews with these individuals we developed a model that describes the major themes that emerged from their interviews and illustrated these themes with excerpts from their stories.

Staying Focused on What Really Matters: Further Thoughts on Empowerment Theory for Professional School Counselors

We would like to begin by thanking authors Zalaquett and D'Andrea, Sciarra and Whitson, Schmidt, and Mitcham-Smith for their insightful critiques of our article. We also would like to thank editors Rich Lapan and Rick Auger for the opportunity to have this extended discussion. In giving further thought to empowerment theory and in reviewing the critiques of the respondents, there are several issues that strike us as deserving additional consideration with respect to empowerment theory for professional school counselors. We would like to give further attention to the importance of the empowerment process for school counselors, the question of outcomes with respect to the empowerment process for students, and the operationalization of empowerment theory in schools. Addressing these issues should further assuage any concerns about the viability of empowerment theory as an appropriate theoretical orientation to guide social advocacy in school counseling. THE NATURE OF THE EMPOWERMENT PROCESS FOR PROFESSIONAL SCHOOL COUNSELORS As Mitcham-Smith and Schmidt in their responses both suggest, it is evident that if professional school counselors are to be successful in facilitating the empowerment of students, they must engage in a self-reflective process that leads to their own development of critical consciousness and sense of empowerment. This is especially crucial for counselors whose racial/ethnic background, socioeconomic status, ability, or sexual orientation gives them a position of power and privilege both in the school setting and the general society. Counselor educators would do well to facilitate the empowerment process for school counselor trainees; this would entail incorporating issues of social inequalities, leadership development, public policy, ethnic studies, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, women's studies, and social justice into counselor education curricula. For those professional school counselors who are already in the field, the following books are recommended to help them in the process of developing critical consciousness: Readings for Diversity and Social Justice: An Anthology on Racism, Anti-Semitism, Sexism, Heterosexism, Ableism, and Classism (Adams et al., 2000) and Class and Schools: Using Social Economic and Educational Reform To Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (Rothstein, 2004). Other insightful readings can be found in the References section of our original article. Although we agree with Mitcham-Smith and Schmidt that professional school counselor empowerment is crucial to facilitating the empowerment of students, it needs to be clear that school counselors are not to assume a savior role with respect to students from marginalized communities. Student empowerment must evolve from student efforts. Therefore, counselors must be seen as important, but ancillary to the movement of students for personal and community empowerment. OUTCOME OF EMPOWERMENT FOR STUDENTS OF MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES Answering the critical question of what do we want to see empowered students accomplish, we envision the empowered student to excel academically and be an agent of change in the community. After all is said and done, student empowerment in the school setting must be, as Sciarra and Whitson suggest in their response, about student educational achievement. …

Use of interactive theater for faculty development in multicultural medical education

Background: The development of critical consciousness, anchored in principles of social justice, is an essential component of medical education.Aim: In order to assist faculty instructors in facilitating small-group discussions on potentially contentious issues involving race, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class, a faculty development workshop was created.Methods: The workshop used ‘Forum Theater’ techniques in which the audience was directly involved in determining the course of a simulated classroom discussion and conflict. We assessed the workshop's impact on the instructors’ attitudes regarding facilitation of small-group discussions through two surveys: one to gauge immediate impressions, and another, 9–15 months later, to assess impact over time.Results: Immediately after the workshop, participants reported that the topics covered in the sketch and in the discussion were highly relevant. In the follow-up survey, the instructors agreed that the workshop had raised their awareness of the classroom experiences of minorities and women and had offered strategies for addressing destructive classroom dynamics. 72% reported that the workshop led to changes in their behavior as facilitators. Differences in responses according to gender were observed.Conclusions: A workshop using interactive theater was effective in training faculty to facilitate small-group discussions about multicultural issues. This approach emphasizes and models the need to foster critical consciousness in medical education.

Challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice: Support for urban adolescents' critical consciousness development.

This mixed-model study examined the relationship between urban adolescents' perceived support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice from peers, family, and community members and their critical consciousness development. These relationships were examined by relating participants' qualitative perceptions of support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice to quantitative data obtained from Likert-type measures of the reflection and action components of critical consciousness. Perceived support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice had a significant impact upon the reflection component of critical consciousness; the significance criterion was supported by effect size estimates. Support for challenging racism, sexism, and social injustice was not significantly related to the action component of critical consciousness. Participants perceived the most support for challenging racism, moderate support for challenging social injustice, and the least support for challenging sexism. Additionally, female participants perceived more support for challenging sexism than male participants. These results suggest that the informal interactions of urban adolescents play a role in shaping their critical consciousness, and hold implications for psychosocial interventions and research with marginalized populations.

True Confessions of an Eight-Year-Old Warrior

Within the post–9/11 context of more aggressive, preemptive U.S. foreign policy, the author gives an autoethnographic account of growing up absorbed with war within the American culture of violence of the Vietnam period. Childhood fantasies and enactments of violence and destruction in the playing of war games and football are juxtaposed with print media accounts of “real war.” The article offers critical theoretical reflections on the lived experience of U.S. violence culture, its normalcy and “taken-for-grantedness,” and the ways it reinforces hegemonic ideologies of national-identity discourse and war making. The author theorizes the social-contextual requirements for the development of counterhegemonic critical consciousness, ideology critique, dissent, and protest.

Developmental Transformations of Self and Identity in the Context of Oppression

We explore the developmental progression to false consciousness in oppressed groups by integrating theories and research in social, political, and developmental psychology. We identify necessary conditions for development of critical consciousness that may undo false consciousness and be empowering to members of oppressed groups. These principles are applied to research on a racially oppressed group in Guatemala, which has been the site for oppressive domination of Mayan-descent groups for more than three decades. Comparisons are made for the oppressed group in Guatemala in data collected before and after the signing of peace accords.

Nigerian “Shade Tree Theatre” with Street Children

Shade Tree Theatre is a project with working children in the streets of Jos, Nigeria. It aims at enabling children to analyze problems they encounter and to come up with practical solutions to deal with them. Based on approaches to popular education, the Shade Tree Theatre starts from the situation of children themselves, searching for their perspectives by using theatrical performance. This article presents the challenging process of reaching out to children working in the streets and building rapport with them. It describes the process of adult and peer facilitation through participation, dialogue and critical reflection. Although the Shade Tree Theatre is not part of existing interventions for working children, the approach empowers children through offering routes to the development of critical consciousness that will be of long-term benefit.

Peer education, gender and the development of critical consciousness: participatory HIV prevention by South African youth

Despite the growing popularity of participatory peer education as an HIV-prevention strategy worldwide, our understandings of the processes underlying its impact on sexual norms are still in their infancy. Starting from the assumption that gender inequalities play a key role in driving the epidemic amongst young people, we outline a framework for conceptualizing the processes underlying successful peer education. We draw on the inter-locking concepts of social identity, empowerment (with particular emphasis on Freire's account of critical consciousness) and social capital. Thereafter we provide a critical case study of a school-based peer education programme in a South African township school, drawing on a longitudinal case study of the programme, and interviews and focus groups with young people in the township. Our research highlights a number of features of the programme itself, as well as the broader context within which it was implemented, which are likely to undermine the development of the critical thinking and empowerment which we argue are key preconditions for programme success. In relation to the programme itself, these include peer educators’ preference for didactic methods and biomedical frameworks, unequal gender dynamics amongst the peer educators, the highly regulated and teacher-driven nature of the school environment and negative learner attitudes to the programme. In relation to the broader context of the programme, we point to factors such as limited opportunities for communication about sex outside of the peer educational setting, poor adult role models of sexual relationships, poverty and unemployment, low levels of social capital and poor community facilities. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of peer educational activities, and point to a number of broader social and community development initiatives that would maximize the likelihood of programme success.

“Get Up Offa That Thing”: African American Middle School Students Respond to Literature to Develop a Framework for Understanding Social Action

The use of children's literature in urban social studies classrooms to facilitate students' engagement in literate behaviors and simultaneously develop a framework for understanding social action is an under -researched area. This paper discusses the use of literature for children and young adults in an urban middle school language arts and social studies block as a pedagogical strategy to facilitate understandings of social action. The African American students' responses to literature supported a development of a working definition of social action and ideas about action/inaction in their urban community contexts. These issues and others offer guidance for how literature can be used as an extension of citizenship education with the development of critical consciousness, political identity, and social action as the objectives.

From Improvisation to Choreography: The critical bridge

It is widely assumed among dance educators who train choreographers in the modern and/or post-modern dance traditions that such training best begins with improvisational activities. The literature on the teaching and learning of choreography is packed with improvisation exercises, all of which allegedly help students to explore movement and develop movement materials that they will later select, shape, and form into complete dances. Moreover, the practice of improvisation is assumed to put students in touch with their authentic selves, and help them to find their unique artistic 'voice' so that the dance works they create later on will truly be their own. Whether or not experiences in dance improvisation actually accomplish these pedagogical goals is questionable, yet the notion that it does accomplish them is rarely - if ever - questioned. Even if we go along with the assumption that improvisation leads students to become better choreographers, nothing in the literature explains sufficiently just how it does this. We believe that students learn to become choreographers through the development of critical consciousness; the ability to describe, analyse, interpret, evaluate, and imagine/implement revisions to their own and others' dances. The basis of this belief is that art-making is inherently critical. To make a work of art one must continually make aesthetic decisions. By itself, the exploration of movement concepts, and becoming comfortable with one's own movement tendencies and choices, does not foster the development in students of the ability to make good aesthetic decisions (even by the students' own standards of 'good'). What students need to complement their improvisation experiences is training in identifying and exploiting the full aesthetic and expressive potential of the movement material they invent and explore during the improvisational process. This means that criticism - both written and oral - is the bridge between the activities of improvisation and choreography. For improvisation to function well as a kind of pre-choreography training, it must be accompanied by training in criticism. The challenge is to provide the latter training without compromising the spontaneity of the improvisation activity. Criticism is not often discussed in the literature on teaching and learning choreography. Indeed, there is much ambiguity in the literature, and thus in choreography pedagogy, about the role of criticism in the choreographic process. Many authors acknowledge only obliquely the kind of influence that substantive criticism might exert on creativity, and there is wide disagreement in the discipline about how much time and effort should be spent on criticism in the dance-making environment. We will begin with a brief overview of the development of improvisation/choreography pedagogy, examining the historical and philosophic underpinnings of current practices in the field. We will then focus on the myriad opportunities for critical training to take place within the improvisation/choreography course, and provide practical suggestions for teachers who wish to develop students' critical and creative faculties in tandem. We will close with recommendations for overcoming some students' initial reluctance to engage in creative and critical activities.

Stepping out of bounds: Performing feminist pedagogy within a dance education community

Sprague (1992) asserts that communication scholars “should be leading other teacher educators”; in communication‐focused research that can better explain how teachers’ behaviors contribute to students’ development of critical consciousness. One useful way of highlighting teachers’ pedagogical behaviors is by viewing them as social performances that can either encourage or subvert students’ abilities and desires to transform society. This critical ethnography examines a dance education culture to see whether or not instructors within this culture perform behaviors that support their espoused critical feminist pedagogical philosophy. Although the authors argue that many of the instructors’ performances help construct a culture in which this philosophy is enacted, they conclude that embedded within some of the instructors’ performances are communicative actions that constrain greatly the development of a truly critical feminist pedagogy.

Teaching Against Globalization and the New Imperialism: Toward a Revolutionary Pedagogy

The globalization of capitalism has exacerbated the continuing reduction of education to a subsector of the economy. In the process, it has brought untold misery to the lives of millions of people throughout the world. Maintaining that critical pedagogy largely remains in the thrall of postmodern theory and politics, this article sketches out some fundamental perspectives for the development of what the authors refer to as “revolutionary pedagogy.” The aim of such a pedagogy is to encourage the development of critical consciousness among students and teachers in the interests of building working-class solidarity and opposition to global capitalism.

Sociopolitical Development as an Antidote for Oppression—Theory and Action

AbstractAlthough psychology has an ample vocabulary for describing individual pathologies, the development of theory and concepts for understanding societal pathology remains in its infancy. Because community psychology theory views human behavior in its context, it is essential that interventions not be limited to stress management, personal coping, and similar programming. Interventions should not leave social injustice undiscussed and unchallenged. In this spirit we present a theory of oppression and sociopolitical development that informs an intervention with young, African American men in an urban setting. The five‐stage theory highlights the role of Freire's notion of “critical consciousness,” a sociopolitical version of critical thinking, in enhancing an awareness of sociopolitical as well as personal forces that influence behavior. The theory also draws on African American social‐change traditions and their spiritual aspects. The action section of the study describes the Young Warriors program's use of mass culture (rap videos and film) as stimuli for the development of critical consciousness. Highlights from an empirical investigation of an eight‐session high school version of the program will be presented to illustrate the practical challenges and benefits of sociopolitical interventions.