Critical Citizens for an Intercultural World: Foreign Language Education as Cultural Politics
312
Critical Citizens for an Intercultural World: Foreign Language Education as Cultural Politics
312Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781853596100 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 10/14/2002 |
| Series: | Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education , #3 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.85(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.85(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Critical Pedagogy as Cultural Politics
Critical Pedagogy provides the educational backdrop for the development of critical cultural awareness in foreign language/culture education. Although, according to Pennycook, 'critical approaches to TESOL should [not] be assumed to be critical pedagogy applied to TESOL' (Pennycook, 1999: 341), Critical Pedagogy presents important guidelines for an understanding of pedagogy as cultural politics. It therefore offers stimulating paths towards showing a possible cultural and political role of foreign language/culture education in contemporary societies both nationally and internationally. For this purpose, Critical Pedagogy supplies us with some pedagogical perspectives and processes, that will be expanded upon later, namely reflection, dissent, difference, dialogue, empowerment, action and hope, that are to be considered tools for a critical approach to foreign languages/cultures. These notions, when implemented within the scope of foreign language/culture education, acquire particular meanings that invest our tasks with definite cultural and political purposes.
The multiple, flexible and eclectic nature of Critical Pedagogy (CP) makes the often simple task of labelling, defining, or describing it very complex. First, it is defined as a pedagogy rather than a teaching method. It should not be considered as such because teaching has often been understood as transmission of knowledge, and method, in this case, as mastery of teaching techniques. The reason why the term pedagogy is adopted here is not, as implied by Apple with regard to CP, for 'linguistic elegance' or due to an attempt to change the general opinion that 'teaching is seen as a low-status occupation' (Apple, 1996b: 141, 142). Instead, CP is a pedagogy that includes teaching understood as part of the teaching/learning process viewed as the dialectical and dialogical reproduction and production of knowledge. It is a pedagogy since it 'refers to the process by which teachers and students negotiate and produce meaning' (McLaren, 1995: 34). Furthermore, pedagogy is a broader term that implies a project, one that takes place at school but that does not end within its physical limits. It consists of a reinterpretation of previous and ongoing experiences and it entails a vision for the present and for the future, that is, it has a political purpose for social transformation. The point where pedagogy detaches from teaching is well illuminated by Simon:
To me 'pedagogy' is a more complex and extensive term than 'teaching,' referring to the integration in practice of particular curriculum content and design, classroom strategies and techniques, and evaluation, purpose, and methods ... Together they organize a view of how a teacher's work within an institutional context specifies a particular version of what knowledge is most worth, what it means to know something, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. In other words, talk about pedagogy is simultaneously talk about the details of what students and others might do together and the cultural politics such practices support. (Quoted in McLaren, 1995: 34–5)
Viewed in this light, pedagogy informs teaching by giving it meaning and purpose. Pedagogy is about cultural and political engagement and transforms teaching and learning into a form of cultural politics since it provides the opportunity for both teachers and students to construct their views of themselves and of the world in a proactive attitude that reaches beyond the interpretative endeavour.
Second, CP is described here as a movement because of it being an 'ever-evolving critical pedagogy' (Giroux, 1997b: xii) and of not being a monolithic body of theory or practice. Moreover, besides applying a 'language of critique' it also engages with a 'language of possibility' that aims towards democratic education and social improvement (Giroux, 1992). It may be regarded as an attempt at educational and social reform that starts from within the school.
Most proponents of CP have not given it a specific definition and they even advise their readers to be cautious about doing so 'because there is no generic definition that can be applied to the term' (Giroux, 1994a: 131). Giroux refuses to give simple prescriptions for a practice that would not be context-specific. However, he recognises common insights that permeate CP discourse and practice, that may be summed up as a special concern with culture, ethics, politics and their interconnectedness.
Culture in CP is viewed as crossing disciplinary boundaries and the hierarchical division between high and popular culture. Moreover, difference is an ever-present notion that accounts for the heterogeneity of cultural production and that problematises the relationship between cultural production and reproduction in our societies that are growing ever more ethnically diverse and, hopefully, more politically aware. CP meets the challenge of dealing with culture by 'bringing the laws of cultural representation face to face with their founding assumptions, contradictions, and paradoxes' (Giroux & McLaren, 1994: 216). The past, present and future constructions of individual and collective identities are brought into discussion in a critical and visionary way. CP questions dominant cultural patterns and seeks the reasons which lead to them being blindly accepted and unquestioned.
CP is a way of life. It probes deeply into our roles as teachers, students, citizens, human beings. This is the reason why it is impossible to give simple prescriptions about how to do CP: 'I doubt I can teach someone how to do critical pedagogy. We do not do critical pedagogy; we live it' (Wink, 1997: 103). This characteristic provides for a strong link between CP and ethics. The notion of ethics here is both observant of universal human rights and attentive to particular stories located in specific contexts:
Ethics must be seen as a central concern of critical pedagogy. This suggests that educators should attempt to understand more fully how different discourses offer students diverse ethical referents for structuring their relationship to the wider society. But it also suggests that educators should go beyond the postmodern notion of understanding how student experiences are shaped within different ethical discourses ... Thus ethics is taken up as a struggle against inequality and as a discourse for expanding basic human rights. (Giroux, 1992: 74)
In relation to ethics, questions of human suffering, dignity and emancipation are worries central to CP. Within this framework, CP is closely connected with multicultural democratic citizenship education. It has to do with individual improvement, social solidarity and public responsibility. This concern for the public and the democratic process leads us to another important feature which is also often associated with critical pedagogies, the political dimension.
In his introduction to Giroux's well-known work, Teachers as Intellectuals, Freire explained in his straightforward manner that education and, by extension, CP is a political act. He states:
I believe that central to a realizable critical pedagogy is the need to view schools as democratic public spheres. This means regarding schools as democratic sites dedicated to forms of self and social empowerment. In these terms, schools are public places where students learn the knowledge and skills necessary to live in an authentic democracy. (Giroux, 1988: xxxii)
Through the production of knowledge, the training of skills, self and social development, the ultimate goal of schools should be to prepare empowered citizens to live in authentic democracies. This is not a humanitarian effort to accommodate subordinate cultures nor a political strategy to replace political forces, but an authentic movement to make, in Giroux's terms, the pedagogical more political and the political more pedagogical.
Despite the diversity of practices, which is itself encouraged by the literature on CP, and the various theories with which CP connects without entirely coinciding, there is, nevertheless, a consistent corpus of research on CP that is acknowledged by 'outsider' educational specialists as having provided 'the most systematic commentary on and reformulation of the contemporary educational situation' (Usher & Edwards, 1994: 219).
Critical Pedagogy as Cultural Politics
Schools are not only sites where knowledge is transmitted but also knowledge producing agencies. In this instance, it is indispensable to use pupils' experiences of their more restricted cultural circles, of the larger society into which they integrate, and of other cultures they come into contact with. In order to be productively critical about what they are learning, students need to make it meaningful first and this happens through the relationship they establish between what they know and what they have just come to know about. This process involves 'relearning' and 'unlearning' before it reaches 'learning' which means reinterpreting or even discrediting previous knowledge before coming to another temporary and incomplete stage of knowing (Wink, 1997). From this perspective, knowledge is not only 'accumulated capital' (Giroux, 1992: 98) and schools are not 'banking systems' as Freire described the process of accumulating received knowledge. Therefore, learning is not only about 'reading the word' but also about 'reading the world', to use Freire's words again:
The reading of the word, also a function of a search for text comprehension and thus of the objects contained therein, directs us now to a previous reading of the world. I must make it clear that this reading of the world, which is based on sensory experience, is not enough. But on the other hand, it must not be dismissed as inferior to the reading of the abstract world of concepts that proceeds from generalization to the tangible. (Freire, 1998: 19)
Accordingly, the cultural content of knowledge acquired at school identifies with the closer and broader premises of the students' lived experiences, although it should not be limited by them. Therefore, schooling is not only about what goes on in school, and schools are both instructional and cultural agencies. Through reflecting upon and speculating about their everyday observations and their significant incidents or discoveries, students learn about the complexity of social relationships, find out about the difference between appearance and reality, look for underlying normative frameworks that impose meanings, values and beliefs and recognise asymmetrical relations of power that determine the structure they are becoming more aware of (Giroux, 1981: 81). Thus, they will be more prepared to face the unexperienced and to develop intellectual capacities and social skills that will enable them to shape or reshape future experiences, to integrate and envisage social change, in sum, to empower themselves both in an affirmative and transformative way.
CP also redefines the link between theory and practice. Theory is not simply considered as preparation for practice, theory proceeds from practice, interrelates with it, informs and reforms practice, and vice-versa. As a result, it intervenes with ways of knowing and ways of living thus being a cultural enterprise as well as an educational one. CP deals with the relationship between the self, the others and the world and by leading the pupils to critically examine these relationships it makes them believe that they can make a difference and, in so doing, the pedagogical and the cultural become political too.
As far as CP is concerned, the political element in pedagogy does not mean indoctrination, although it is ideological in the sense that it is understood as political and it implies taking a position. Furthermore, due to the critical and dialogical qualities of CP, it does not tend to be hegemonical either. The political here acquires a broader meaning that includes the whole network of social interactions as informed by the power relations underlying the tensions people have to deal with but of which they are only partly aware. Giroux is clear on this issue:
In effect, as a form of cultural production, critical pedagogy becomes a critical referent for understanding how various practices in the circuit of power inscribe institutions, texts, and lived cultures in particular forms of social and moral regulation which presuppose particular visions of the past, present and future. (Giroux, 1992: 160)
To engage in CP as a form of cultural politics is, in short, to be committed to the task of preparing our students for critical and participatory citizenship. This entails expanding individual capacities and social opportunities to fully develop cultural, social and political identities within the narrow scope of their closer relationships or the wider contexts of national or transnational communities. Equally important is enabling our students, and by extension our citizens, to make informed choices about their lives and, above all, to make them aware that they are entitled to a choice.
In general terms, CP is a culture of politics since it involves advancing a public discourse on democracy and social justice and giving voice to those histories that have been marginalised or even silenced. Furthermore, it entails establishing a vision for a just society and striving for its realisation.
As a result of all that has been discussed above, CP implies a reformulation of the teacher's role into an intellectual and transformative one. Teachers themselves must be conceptually and critically engaged in the mission of empowering their pupils by empowering themselves. This notion provides for an informed praxis, by relating theory to practice and vice versa, and deepens their own commitment to democratic principles. By negotiating between the relativity of their own and their students' perspectives and universals which ensure human rights, they forge civic courage, social and political initiative.
The Roots of Critical Pedagogy
The foundation of CP cannot be attributed to one single theory. It results from an impressive and effective blend of elements from several theoretical standpoints reflecting CP theorists' intellectual journeys. With regard to its philosophical foundations, CP mainly adopts Critical Theory and Postmodernism, and, despite their different and, to some extent, irreconcilable theories, CP views them as complementary with respect to the understanding of culture and the functioning of radical democracy. As far as education is concerned, CP made use of the most progressive educational theories of the twentieth century in order to design its own version of pedagogy. Besides the ones already mentioned (the New Sociology of Education and, originally, radical pedagogies), CP was also inspired by Dewey's progressivism, the reconstructionists' theoretical insights into citizenship education and, most particularly, Freire's theory of education. Although CP owes most of its theoretical foundations to 'western-centred' philosophical and educational schools of thought, its main feature is its openness to different cultural frames of mind. This is due to many factors. Among them is the influence of postmodernism, with French poststructuralism at its core, which responds to an era of postmodernity when all sorts of borders, institutionalised by what in contrast is identified as modernity, are disrupted and which accounts for the 'decentring' perspective of CP. Furthermore, as we shall see, the vital role that Freire's thought plays in CP, bearing in mind the Latin-American context where he based and developed his educational theory and practice, in spite of his adoption of some European and North American philosophical and educational theories, explains CP's non-Eurocentric stance. Similarly, the fact that CP has developed in the United States mostly within the scope of multicultural education (CABE, 1992), and under the influence of the post-1960s movements in favour of Third World cultures has provided it with a special sensitivity to cultural insights into the Third World. The combination of these influences has provided CP with a global stance, in the sense that it is inclusive and it values all cultural perspectives equally as long as they are themselves respectful of human rights and, reciprocally, of other cultures.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Critical Citizens for an Intercultural World"
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Copyright © 2002 Manuela Guilherme.
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