Education for Social Change

EdSe 4244 Social Studies Methods

Small group discussions Individually, what do you do to change the

status quo, to challenge inequities in our society, inequality in power and socio-economic status. What do you perceive as your personal role in effecting change?

The Status Quo Hegemony - a system of laws, policies,

ideologies, institutions and behaviors that supports the status quo.

Education that purports to be “neutral” supports the status quo. Not encouraging students to question knowledge and society tacitly supports the status quo.

Education is politics Why does the government enforce mandatory

schooling on its citizens? Whose history and literature is taught and whose is ignored? Which groups are left in or out of the reading lists? From whose point of view is the past examined? Is the curriculum balanced and multicultural, giving equal attention to men, women, minorities, and non-elite groups, or is it male-oriented and Eurocentric? Do we spend more time studying photosynthesis or the biochemistry of our food supply, or the toxins in our local air, water, and land?

School funding and testing is politics More public money is invested in upper

class students and elite collegians than is spent on lower-income students and in community colleges. Testing policies support standardized exams in which women and minorities have traditionally scored lower than men and majority students.

What is empowering education? Empowering education is a critical

pedagogy that challenges the existing status quo and asks students to engage in a critical inquiry of society, power, inequality, and change.

Values of Empowering Pedagogy Participatory Affective Problem-posing Situated Multicultural Dialogic Desocializing Democratic Researching Interdisciplinary Activist

Participatory Non-participatory schools depress

achievement levels, leading to low student achievement and teacher burnout.

Dewey argued that students must participate in both the constructing the purposes and meaning of their education.

Discussion In small groups, develop a plan to engage

students in constructing course results, assessments, teaching and learning plans, and classroom rules.

What issues are inherent in empowering student participation in their education?

How can teachers model empowerment?

Affective Empowering education engages both the

cognitive and affective domains. Critical thought is simultaneously an affective and cognitive process - play, humor, hope, conflict, and sorrow are purposely interwoven and an integral part of constructing understandings, developing knowledge and skills.

An Example Author Tim O’Brien’s, “How to Tell a True

War Story”

Activity In groups, plan a lesson (big idea) based

on the Minnesota Standards that relies heavily on engaging the affective domain as a way to foster student understanding, knowledge, or skills.

Problem-posing Dewey and Piaget both advocated for

active, inquiring education, through which students constructed learning rather than memorize facts. Freire built on this and suggested that teachers be “problem-posers”.

Problem-posing II Freire decried traditional education as a

“banking” model where knowledge is kept in texts and academicians and deposited into students. He said educators need to cast the old model off and use problem-posing, whereby we regard all subject matter as historical products to be questioned rather than as universal wisdom to be accepted.

Problem-posing III Freire further said the banking model was

anti-democratic because it subordinates and denies marginalized cultures all the while promoting the status quo. Liberation, he said, is a praxis: the action and reflection of humans upon their world in order to transform it.

Freire’s problem-posing model In a Freirian classroom, teachers don’t

reinvent traditional knowledge; they study it in a critical context which is democratic (participatory) using a multicultural syllabus.

Discussion In your groups, apply Freire’s problem-

posing model to a big idea imbedded in the Minnesota Social Studies Standards.

Situated Empowering education situates

curriculum in issues and language from everyday life. Themes are: Generative - discussion among teacher and

students Topical - teacher derived Academic - derived from the literature

Activity Brainstorm among yourselves ways of

developing generative, topical and academic themes which touch on an aspect of the Minnesota Standards.

Multicultural An education that is situated in the issues

and language of everyday life is by its very nature multicultural.

Dialogic Empowering teachers talk with students,

not to them. Mutual dialogue encourages critical thinking and aids students in constructing their own meanings, and develops the intellectual and affective powers to think about transforming society.

Balancing teacher talk and free-wheeling discussion What are some ways to avoid the silence

engendered by teacher talk and free-wheeling, random discussions?

Desocializing Empowering education is desocializing,

from mass culture, from regressive values absorbed from mass media such as racism, sexism, class prejudice, homophobia, self-reliant individualism, excessive consumerism, authority-dependence, celebrations of militarism, and so on.

Critical Consciousness By being desocializing, empowering

education encourages the development of critical consciousness, to both know and transform their individual world and society.

Democratic The purpose of a democratic education is

to increase students’ abilities to make meaning from their own experience and to act on it.

Researching Empowering education does research

(primary data) set in the communities where students live. The research is intended to affect social change.

Interdisciplinary Empowering education crosses

academic disciplines, modeling real-life.

Activist Critical pedagogy is activist in its

questioning of the status quo, in its participatory methods, and in its insistence that knowledge is not fixed but constantly changing.

Critical Pedagogy UbD Assignment Design a backward design lesson which

incorporates elements of critical pedagogy, using the Minnesota or Wisconsin Standards in Social Studies.