Lens Of Critical Pedagogy Research Articles

Exploring Discursive Positionings and Negotiations of Gender Diversity in English Language Teaching Through the Lens of Critical Pedagogy

This study explores EFL students’ perceptions of gender diversity by analyzing their interactions about Chile’s same-sex marriage law in 2022. The study focused on fostering linguistic and critical skills through classroom discussions. A safe space for open conversations allowed students to express diverse views on gender diversity. While opinions varied, students’ discussions were navigated respectfully and indicated that the pedagogical approach used by the teacher encourages critical awareness of societal inequalities in Chile.

The Politics of Preferential Policy in an Ethnically Diverse School

China, a country with a significant number of ethnic groups, has established a form of multiculturalism known as "preferential policy" to foster social cohesion between a dominant ethnic group and minority ethnic groups and to reduce social and economic disparities. In addition, preferential policies have been integrated into educational policy and practice. This led to the development of a school curriculum based on ethnicity. Through the lens of critical pedagogy, this paper examines the Dai language curriculum implemented in an ethnically and linguistically diverse school located in Yunnan. The data was collected through conducting in-depth interviews with the school's principal, teachers, and students and observing teaching sessions without participation. An examination found that ethnic Dai pupils were taught language, history, cultures, and Dai values by a Dai school teacher who is the school principal. This has enormous ramifications for Dai students' identity preservation. Yet, when the multicultural curriculum focuses exclusively on the Dai ethnic group despite the presence of other ethnic groups in the school, it contradicts the tenets of multiculturalism and perpetuates educational disparity based on ethnic identity. Keywords: Multicultural Education; Critical Pedagogy; Education Equity; China

Collaborative Video Game Design as an Act of Social Justice

This research is about bringing social justice art education into classrooms through the medium of video games and exploring the ways in which video game design can be a learning tool that can make contributions to and engage in social justice work. Drawing from a case-study research project with a small group of middle school students, through the lens of critical pedagogy informed by recent work by Dipti Desai, this project examines how learning happens through dialogue and knowledge weaving. Findings have led me to consider the potential of this type of video game design as a site of resistance and transformation in art education.

Moving towards critical democracy: democratic spaces in the Portuguese early years classroom

ABSTRACT In societies where authoritarian and populist perspectives are on the rise, a focus on the concept of democracy within education can provide a meaningful space to reflect critically on, and disrupt, the status quo. In post-dictatorship Portugal, democracy has become a central symbolic concept within education policy and, in particular, Early Childhood Education (ECE) policy emphasises the importance of democratic citizenship within children’s personal and social development. Through a lens of critical pedagogy, we examine the diverse enactments of democracy at the classroom level within ECE settings in Portugal. By analysing interviews with twenty early years educators in three kindergartens, we identified ten concepts of democratic educational practice. Through observation of their classrooms, we explored divergent applications of these concepts in practice which embodied three distinct pedagogical approaches, which we termed instructive, responsive, and synergetic. These respectively enacted three styles of classroom democracy, which we described as procedural, interactive and critical democracy. We found that “critical democracy” was most evident where collaborative democratic spaces were created by educators who emphasised and enacted the values of listening, critical thinking, freedom, and respect.

Racial justice pedagogy: foregrounding what it means to be an immigrant teacher of color in the United States

This paper contributes to the discourse on the role of critical pedagogy in the U.S. education system. The paper is inspired by the story of a participant from a larger ongoing phenomenological study designed to explore the experience of immigrant teachers in the United States. The participant was selected because she gained prominence in the larger study as the only teacher who reported that because of the injustices she experienced (personally and vicariously) during her K-12 education, she was inspired to pursue teaching as a career. The participant is a Black female teacher who immigrated from England to the United States, and who has taught for approximately 30 years between both countries. Her experience as a student and her work as a teacher, are reflective of, and analyzed through the lens of critical pedagogy. The participant’s experience was carefully and respectfully crafted into a profile that produced three major themes: (1) Racial injustice as an altruistic inspiration to becoming a teacher; (2) the work of the immigrant Teacher of Color in the United States necessarily involves actuating an inclusive and racial justice curricular agenda; and (3) what it means to be an immigrant Educator of Color in the United States is to conceptualize your practice as a deliberate political act that counteracts racial injustice and inequity.

The Perceptions of Culturally Diverse Graduate Students on Multicultural Education: Implication for Inclusion and Diversity Awareness in Higher Education

<p style="text-align:justify">Multicultural education improves educators’ understanding of the complexities of different cultures and the inherent intersectionality of race, gender, class, and exceptionality to liberate students from oppressive structures within society. The purpose of this study is to illuminate the perceptions of educational leadership graduate students regarding multicultural education and transformative leadership through the lens of critical pedagogy. During this qualitative case study, the researchers used course materials, including discussion and responses, book reviews, and presentations, to answer these research questions: What factors drove the graduate students to want to seek out further experiences for them or their students with multicultural education? What did the participants perceive as potential barriers to influencing educational reform? In what ways did the perceptions of the graduate students regarding multicultural education change over the course of a semester? Three themes emerged from the analysis, the illusion of inclusivity, cultural awareness, and the disconnection between theory and practice. This research could impact current and potential future educational leaders and provides information that would benefit school districts, teachers, and students.</p>

Viewing Sexual Health Education through the Lens of Critical Pedagogy: A Case Study in Chicago Public Schools.

Comprehensive sexual health education (SHE) programs are being implemented in many state and local jurisdictions. Much research has focused on the strength and effectiveness of such programs. However, the experiences of teachers and students in their implementation is underexplored. A case study of the implementation of the SHE policy and curriculum in Chicago Public Schools sought to explore teachers’ and students’ experiences. Sixteen teachers were interviewed and five student focus groups, including 46 students, were conducted. Both teachers and students identified opportunities to improve upon the current program, including to (1) incorporate more student-centered learning opportunities and allow for tailoring to each specific group of students; (2) use discussion and dialogue to encourage students’ exploration of their own opinions and identities and development of a sense of agency over their own learning; (3) shift focus from risk reduction to a more holistic focus on healthy sexual wellbeing; and (4) directly discuss current health inequities, contributing factors, and intersectionality. These findings align with a critical pedagogical approach and underscore the need to understand SHE implementation within its sociopolitical context. Implications of the use of critical pedagogy as a framework for SHE in Chicago and beyond are discussed.

English Language Teacher Education from the Lens of Critical Pedagogy

In English (as a foreign) language teacher education, there have been numerous theories which have been applied, adapted, and reconstructed based on the needs and conditions of the learners and teachers from very early times so far, that is, from the appearance of Behaviourism in foreign language education in the 1940s to the present time. There have always been many transitions and shifts among and within these theories explaining the practices in English (as foreign language) classes. This paper examines how these theories and transitions can be considered from the lens of Critical Pedagogy and it interrogates whether the recognition of the Critical Pedagogy may help foreign language teacher education turn to be transformative and whether it may contribute to the development of the conditions for a better world within and outside the school with the help of teachers trained to be critical. The theoretical framework of this chapter is built on the socio-cultural view, socio-cognitive view, transformative view and Critical Pedagogy in foreign language education. However, earlier theories such as the Behaviouristic Approach, the Cognitive Approach, and the Communicative Approach are visited as background knowledge. Given that the socio-cultural approach portrays human learning as a social process and the origination of human intelligence in society or culture referring to the fact that social interaction plays a basic role in the development of cognition, the socio-cognitive view deals with how language is learned and should be treated; and transformative learning gives way to actual behaviour that learners should establish to contribute to and participate in the community where they live in; these theories in the framework shed light on developing understandings of the recognition of Critical Pedagogy in the foreign language teacher education. Regarding this overview, it is seen that socio-cultural and socio-cognitive transformation could be led by critical pedagogy, in schools initially, then in the whole society, addressing radical concerns and the abuses of power in intercultural contexts in the acquisition of foreign languages and in their circulation by the help of critically trained foreign language teachers.

Teaching Gender and Sexuality in the Wake of the Must Fall Movements: Mutual Disruption through the Lens of Critical Pedagogy

The recent Must Fall movements shone a light on how South African universities are exclusionary spaces in many respects. In addition to the focus on racial, financial, and epistemological exclusions, the movements also highlighted how gender and sexual minorities are marginalised in university curricula and spaces. In the wake of these movements, I taught a range of courses dealing with gender and sexuality to pre-service teachers at a South African university. Using an autoethnographic approach, I recount some of the challenges I faced in teaching subject matter that many South Africans consider controversial. Students often relied on simplistic discourses of culture and religion to voice resistance to my courses and to “disrupt” my classes, while the subject matter simultaneously disrupted their deeply held concepts of identity. These moments of disruption from students, while largely intended as resistance, offered considerable pedagogical value, especially when viewed through the lens of critical pedagogy that informs my teaching approach. In this article, I use autoethnographic reflections to describe some of these moments of mutual disruption. I examine how the discussions with students have shifted after the Must Fall movements, linking the philosophy and some of the events of the movements to the ways that students are engaging differently. I argue that these pre-service teachers also hold the potential to disrupt discourses of queerphobia, gender-based violence and HIV in the South African school system. Additionally, I contend that gender and sexuality diversity deserve greater focus in teacher education in order to create critical thinking spaces that can foster reflective capacities in teachers around how they relate to learners who are gender and sexual minorities.

Teaching deaf culture in American Sign Language courses: Toward a critical pedagogy

AbstractCritical pedagogy and social justice education have gained increasing attention in recent years in many subject matters, and world language education has been no exception to this trend. There are a number of works dedicated to critical pedagogy in world language education. At the same time that such concerns have gained attention, another parallel development has been taking place: the increasing number of courses and programs in American Sign Language (ASL) that are being offered as foreign language options at both the secondary and tertiary levels. In this article, we discuss a curriculum development project to bring these two developments together. Specifically, we are interested in the creation of a curriculum for a beginning ASL course that both introduces students to ASL as a foreign language and which provides an introduction to the Deaf culture—and which does so through the lens of critical pedagogy and social justice education.

Indigenous Knowledge in Early Childhood Education: Building a Nest for Reconciliation

This article is based on my dissertation study exploring how Indigenous knowledges were experienced by non-Indigenous students in an ECE diploma program at a Canadian college. Analysis of participants’ stories through the lens of critical pedagogy helped identify experiences with Indigenous knowledges and Reconciliation. Critical reflection on these experiences identified key findings: 1) the promise of transformative learning, 2) an acceptance of the truths and realities of Canadian history, and 3) the necessity of experiencing Indigenous knowledges. Through the metaphor of building a nest, I see transformative learning, truth telling, and inclusion of Indigenous knowledges as a path toward Reconciliation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples within early childhood education programs.

Freire in a Changing World

This article presents critical autoethnography as a socially just way of conducting research in marginalized, vulnerable communities. Combining autoethnography, ethnography, and critical pedagogy, the researcher becomes a participant/collaborator in the study, turning inward to examine the Self and the complexities of cultural perspectives through the lens of critical pedagogy. Through intense reflexivity and introspection, the researcher can examine Self as participant, not trying to present facts as objectively as possible, as occurs with autobiography, but rather acknowledging that the interpretation of facts reflects cultural perspectives shaped by years of sociocultural, sociohistorical, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic events and circumstances. Subsequently, the researcher, more than likely a member of the dominant culture in some categories, is able to understand herself as an oppressor.

Reading Qualitative Inquiry through Critical Pedagogy

In this paper, the author reads current debates in “postqualitative inquiry” through the lens of critical pedagogy, in particular the work of Paulo Freire. The author argues that the field should more fully embrace “inquiry” as a basic disposition. In addition, the author suggests that reading postqualitative inquiry through critical pedagogy can help us to challenge reductive approaches to “data” while also allowing us to get on with our work of thinking and acting differently in the world—our work of inquiry.

What would Liz and Larry say? Performing critical approaches to choreographic mentorship in American higher education

This paper argues that Liz Lerman’s and Larry Lavender’s approaches to mentoring student choreographers denote a shift in the philosophy of choreographic mentorship in higher education, because they reflect current concerns in critical pedagogy. My particular interest is in the relationship established between student artist and educator when a philosophy of critical pedagogy is infused in the choreography classroom. Lerman’s and Lavender’s philosophies create space for students to explore a wide range of material, they allow for more agency, power, and risk taking in the students’ choreographic practice, and they also allow for a reciprocal student to mentor relationship. By enacting simulated conversation with these mentors in this essay, representing their voices and choreographic principles, I locate and analyze the elements of choreography craft and process that they value and those that they omit or reject. New insights into the philosophies of these important figures are gleaned as I play their parts, interacting with them as choreographer to mentor. The staged conversations are then reanalyzed through a lens of critical pedagogy for a closer investigation of what future mentorship could look like. This paper reinvigorates choreographic mentorship, interweaving narrativity, choreographic analysis, and pedagogical analysis in experimental ways.

From Principle to Practice: Using Children's Literature to Promote Dialogue and Facilitate the "Coming to Voice" in a Rural Latino Community

When viewed through the lens of critical pedagogy, children's literature offers a viable avenue for tapping the "funds of knowledge" abounding in culturally and linguistically diverse communities. It is an effective means for promoting dialogue, arousing critical consciousness, and facilitating the "coming to voice" of oppressed people. In this article I examine the tenets of critical pedagogy as practiced in the Libros y Familias Program, a family literacy program for Spanish-speaking families in Independence, Oregon. It gives practical examples of how children's literature can be used as a vehicle for building community and personal transformation and presents a model adaptable to other communities.