By: May Anne Joy D. Romanes
Maria Perpetua S. Talens
University of the Philippines Diliman
March 5, 2016
Critical Pedagogy is an
approach in teaching and learning which aims to eliminate all kinds of
oppressive power. It intends to liberate and empower students in a humanizing
way through critical consciousness or “conscientizacao”, and action. It
recognizes that schools can be a medium for oppressing people because of the
latter’s gender, color, race, class, and their other attributes. The major
proponents of critical pedagogy are Paulo Freire, Joe Kincheloe, Peter McLaren,
and Henry Giroux (Aliakbari and Faraji, 2011). Critical pedagogy recognizes
that dehumanization has always been a problem throughout
human’s history. It is brought about by injustice, manipulation, discrimination,
oppression, domination, and the violence of the oppressors, which have manifested
and continue to manifest in different forms in the course of our civilization
(Freire, 2005).
Critical pedagogy is asserted
by the hunger of the oppressed for freedom and justice (Freire, 2005). Interestingly,
oppressors do not have the ability to liberate either the oppressed or
themselves. The only way to liberate both of them is through the power that
comes from the oppressed. To liberate the oppressed by the oppressors is
superficial, and therefore is seen as “false
generosity” [italics added] (Freire, 2005, p. 48). An
example of false generosity is when a teacher gives a failing student a passing
grade even though he/she (the student) did not pass any of the exams. In this
situation, the teacher did not help in liberating the student from the things
that hinders the latter to achieve his/her full potential, but he/she (teacher)
is just relieving himself/herself of his/her guilty conscience. In this way,
the teacher just prolonged injustice and dehumanization by giving him/her the
grade that he/she did not even deserve.
The participation of
the oppressed in fighting against oppression is very crucial in critical
pedagogy. However, the oppressed may not even realize that they are being
dehumanized and dominated. Thus, it is difficult to get their involvement in
liberating themselves. For as long as the oppressed think that “to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor” [italics added] (Freire, 2005, p. 48), their
liberation is unattainable. In other words, some people think that for someone
to be an ideal person is to become like a specific group of persons (e.g. rich
and powerful persons, fair-skinned Americans, etc.). This is already a sign of succumbing
to the oppression leading to injustice, because these people indirectly accept
that they are lower than their ideal beings. Hence, to identify if there is a
form of oppression happening, people need to free themselves of any bias as
much as possible, and probe deeper as to why they think the way they think.
The
Banking Concept of Education
Dehumanization
is prevalent in schools practicing the banking concept of education. This involves the process of treating the
students as “containers” to be “filled” by the teacher. The more the containers
are filled, the better the teacher is. The more meekly the containers permit
themselves to be filled, the better the students are. In this set-up, education
becomes an act of depositing, with the students as the depositories and the
teacher as the depositor. The students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat
the knowledge, and they become collectors or cataloguers of the things they
store (Freire, 2005).
Not much effort is expected from
the students other than just listening to and memorizing the knowledge the
teacher will provide. However, the downside of this concept of education is
that it encourages a so called “culture of silence.” A culture of silence pervades
a classroom where the passive students believe that the teachers are the source
of all knowledge. This leads to a deceitful thinking that this is the only or
best way for them to learn (Monchinski, 2008). The teacher considers the
students to possess absolute ignorance, thus he gives knowledge to them and his
existence is justified. Neither true knowledge nor true culture was achieved
since there was no act of cognition on the part of the students. Thus, the
whole educational system becomes one of the major instruments for the
maintenance of this culture of silence (Freire, 2005).
The banking concept of education also sees
man as adaptable beings who accept their passive roles. This hinders their
critical and creative thinking which are vital to transforming their current situation. This kind of
education becomes a tool of domination because it serves the interests of the
oppressors and the students are trapped in a situation in which critical
awareness and response are impossible—a situation that is highly rejected by advocates
of critical pedagogy. For them, the students should be encouraged to know and
respond to the concrete realities of their world since knowledge is a result of
the continuing inquiry people pursue in the world, with the world, and with
each other (Freire, 2005).
Problem
Posing Education
Critical pedagogy therefore advocates “problem-posing
education.” This type of education consists of acts of cognition rather than
just transfer of information. In this set-up, the teacher ceases to be the only
one who teaches. The teacher learns from the students, who also teach while being
taught. It posits
that people teach each other and become jointly responsible for a process
resulting in their mutual growth (Freire, 2005).
Communication is necessary to people
as they teach each other. In the problem-posing education, students are deemed
to be critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. This kind of
education is seen as a practice of freedom since there is a continuous
discovery of reality and a critical intervention in reality. Furthermore, in problem-posing education, students
are considered as “unfinished” with an “unfinished” reality, making the
education a continuous activity (Freire, 2005). For example, in teaching
Mathematics, students can compute for
salary differences across places and create maps, tables and graphs using the
data. Test scores and incomes can be compared and students asked if there seems
to be interrelationships between the data. Teaching language arts and social
studies should go beyond names and dates. Discussions, debates and role-plays
can be implemented. Bigelow and Diamond (as cited by Monchinski, 2008) ask students to list some things in their daily
lives in which the people who do the work are not usually seen. For example, a
television program or a piece of fruit each needed a great deal of human labor,
which we don’t see. Or think of jobs with which they are familiar—bakeries,
janitorial or food preparation—that are isolated from the ultimate consumers.
Then students will be asked to make a poem out of this list. Another strategy
is to interview another person to make a historical timeline about him/her. (Monchinski,
2008). According to
Kincheloe, critical pedagogy in social studies and language arts classes should
deconstruct texts and textbooks, with a text understood as “any entity open to
analysis and interpretation” (as cited by Monchinski,
2008, p. 173). Things that are considered as text includes language,
films, TV shows, commercials, accepted canons in English and other classes, and
the layout and seating arrangement of a classroom. Students can also be
encouraged to think about the words they use and the meanings behind those
words (Monchinski, 2008).
Use of Dialogues
A dialogue is the
encounter between people, mediated by the world, done in order to ‘name the
world’(Freire, 2005, p. 88). For the advocates of critical pedagogy, to ‘name
the world’ means to exist in the world and to change it. A dialogue does not involve a person ‘depositing’
ideas in another person, nor a simple exchange of ideas to be ‘consumed’ by the
discussants. It is not an instrument for the domination of one person by
another. The love for the world and for people is the foundation of dialogue.
To a critical pedagogue, love is an act of courage and a commitment to the
cause of freedom of the oppressed. A dialogue, for them, necessitates love,
humility and faith. It also necessitates a strong faith in people—that they are
capable of transcending their situation. Mutual trust then becomes the result
of dialogue if the words correspond with the actions of the participants (Freire,
2005).
To a critical pedagogue, people need
to employ critical thinking to engage in true dialogue. This involves the idea
of being united with the world and people. It sees reality as a process, as
transformation and connects itself with action (Freire, 2005). Critical pedagogues believe that teachers should not
speak to the students about our own view of the world, nor try to impose that
view on them. Instead, they should
dialogue with them (students) about their view since their view indicates their
situation in the world.
To communicate effectively, teachers should understand the context of the
people they are addressing (Freire, 2005).
Critical pedagogy reminds
us that it is not appropriate to give the students programs, which are not
linked with their own preoccupations, doubts, hopes, and fears. One critical pedagogical
method is hence to use generative themes. Generative themes are topics which
are very relevant to the lives of the students, to elicit excitement from them.
(Freire, 2005) These themes help the students obtain and question knowledge as
well as learn about themselves, their opinions on issues and the influence of a
dominant culture on these factors (Kincheloe, 2008). In our classrooms we also show respect to
our students and we expect them to do likewise for each other and for us. We
make it clear through our actions and discipline that we model democratic
forms, that our classrooms are safe places of growth and transformation (Monchinski,
2008).
Critical Pedagogy in
the Philippine Context
Oppression
is not a new concept to the Filipinos. We have a rich history of being
oppressed, from the Battle of Mactan to the present territorial disputes with China,
not to mention the kind of oppression that exists in schools themselves. There
were many who kept silent about it, but there were also brave ones who spoke
against the oppression and fought for the freedom of our country. It was
mentioned in the earlier part of this paper that the oppressors cannot free us
from oppression; the oppressed people are the only ones who can. Oppression is
still prevalent in our country. It comes in many forms and so it is of utmost
importance to recognize them because there is no one who could go against
oppression but us, the oppressed. But who would guide us to recognize the
instances of oppression? Will our educational system be a medium for
oppression, or would it be a medium to fight against it? Does our educational
system reflect the critical pedagogy’s vision of a just and humanizing society?
In
order to answer this question, a critical pedagogue would examine the vision
and mission of the Department of Education, or simply, DepEd (Department of
Education, n.d.) which states that:
“We dream of
Filipinos [italics added], who passionately love their country and whose values and competencies enable them to
realize their full potential [italics added] and contribute meaningfully to
building the nation. As a learner-centered public institution, the Department
of Education continuously improves itself to better serve its stakeholders.”
The phrase “We dream of
Filipinos… whose values and competencies enable them to realize their full
potential” implies that our educational system wants Filipinos to possess
values to help them be at their best. At first glance, it seems that the DepEd
vision is reflective of critical pedagogy. However, a critical pedagogue would
carefully examine the DepEd vision further, looking and thinking beyond what is
written. For instance, a critical pedagogue would ask: Who decides what values
and competencies would enable a Filipino to realize his/her full potential? How
can we say that a Filipino reaches his/her full potential? Who decides what a
Filipino’s full potential is? Hence, a critical pedagogue is most likely to be
suspicious of the motives of DepEd. In a traditional classroom, the DepEd
vision will not be scrutinized, and sometimes, will even be asked to be
memorized by the students. This practice is way different in a classroom
employing critical pedagogy. To illustrate, in familiarizing the students with
the political conditions surrounding them, the teacher will start a problem
posing dialogue by choosing the theme of the discussion, for instance the word
"values". This will be the first word to be learned in the lesson.
The students will then try to name the problems about the values and its
implications in the community using a series of questions. After naming the
problems, they will generate different possible solutions. They will then weigh
each solution based on its consequences. They may be required to implement the
agreed solution, depending on the level of the students.
Second, a critical pedagogue
would look into the DepEd mission (Department of Education, n.d.), which states
that:
“To protect and to promote the right of every
Filipino to quality, equitable, culture-based, and complete basic education
where: students learn in a child-friendly, gender-sensitive, safe, and
motivating environment; teachers facilitate learning and constantly nurture every
learner; administrators and staff, as stewards of the institution, ensure an
enabling and supporting environment for effective learning to happen; and the
family, community, and other stakeholders are actively engaged and share
responsibility for developing life-long learners.”
For
sure, a critical pedagogue would agree with the phrase “to protect and to
promote the right of every Filipino to quality, equitable, culture-based… basic
education.” This is basically a way to overcome oppression if properly implemented.
A critical pedagogue would further agree on the second and third part of the
mission. The culture of silence, which critical pedagogy is against, could be
overcome by a child-friendly, safe, and motivating environment. Moreover, the “teacher
acting as facilitator,” is something that would coincide with critical pedagogy’s
notion of giving importance to the knowledge the students contribute to the
classroom to lessen, if not completely eliminate, the teacher’s monopoly of
knowledge. Despite the fact that a critical pedagogue would agree on a few
points in the DepEd mission, there are still some points that he/she would dispute.
A child-friendly environment is something that a critical pedagogue agrees
with, but will also argue about at the same time. He/she will ask: “What is a
child-friendly environment?”; “Who decides what a child-friendly environment
is?” Another point is gender-sensitivity mentioned in the DepEd mission, which
implies that the educational system discourages gender discrimination in the
classroom. However, there are also other forms of discrimination which are not
addressed, such as discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, and skin color.
A critical pedagogue would think that the educational system is not very sincere
in promoting equality among its students. Critical pedagogues would not agree
with and be very wary about the part that states that the “administrators and
staff, as stewards of the institution, ensure an enabling and supporting
environment for effective learning to happen.” A critical pedagogue would ask
questions such as:“Who decides what effective learning is?”; “Does effective
learning mean that students memorize everything that the teachers tell them?”; and
more importantly, “To what extent does the administrators and staff act as
stewards of the institution and how do they influence what to learn in the
classroom?”
The
critical pedagogues’ congruities and incongruities on certain points stated in
the DepEd mission and vision alone indicate that while our present basic education
system has efforts to ensure that the schools provide a “non-oppressive”,
unbiased, and non-discriminating learning environment, it still does not have
the ability to fully provide it. In the same way, critical pedagogy can be
practiced in certain instances in teaching the students, but not all the time. Furthermore,
education is inherently political, and therefore deals with a lot of dominant
powers, which dictates what to teach, what to believe in, and what kind of
graduates to produce. Note that critical pedagogy is against these types of
power. For them, it is not enough to be just mere observers on how domination
and oppression affects people. They believe that the oppressed should take
action; however, taking action by challenging and questioning these powers can
be dangerous and can be seen as a form of rebellion—making it difficult to
discern whether to utilize critical pedagogy or not to the students. Also, if a
teacher becomes a critical pedagogue, how sure is he/she that the content of
the lesson is not generated from the knowledge controlled by a dominant power,
when in fact, the competencies and the standards to be met are also imposed by
a dominant power (e.g. officials from the government)? Doesn’t the critical pedagogue
also need to dominate in order for the oppression to stop? Moreover, the extent on which you want
justice for the oppressed might not be the same as the extent they want justice
for themselves. Thus, although the present educational system is not entirely in
disagreement with the principles of critical pedagogy, the latter cannot be
applied to the fullest extent because it can be a threat to the government, and
also to democracy, a principle that critical pedagogy also fights for.
Final
Thoughts on Critical Pedagogy
Though we are in the modern times,
oppression is still a reality and is still prevalent in different parts of the
world. There is much to say about oppression and how it affects us. Many people
are hungry for freedom and justice. Thus, it becomes a universal goal to live
in a world that is just and humanizing, where everyone is given equal
opportunities and no single dominant power control people’s freedom. Herein lies
the beauty of critical pedagogy. It teaches people to be actively involved in their
learning, and not to depend solely on what is taught in school. It helps them to
be conscious about their world and encourages them to speak up and fight
against injustice. It helps them to
understand that if they want to change the world, they need to do it themselves.
Critical pedagogy honors the need and
the right of every individual to ask ‘why’.
Needless to say, critical pedagogy is a very crucial
approach in educating students. However, as this philosophy encourages a
critical analysis of what is happening in the world, it also opens itself to
it.
Oppression is still very rampant. Though the
Philippines is already a free country in the sense that we are no longer under
the Spanish, the American, or the Japanese governments, oppression still
exists. In the classroom, oppression is commonly manifested by bullying because
of one's gender preference, physical appearance, language, or status. One
example is when a student calls his classmate a beggar because the latter's dark
skin. This illustration shows that poverty is linked to the dark skin.
The authors assert that critical pedagogy can
definitely be applied in education. However, one of the authors does not
suggest applying this to the extreme. There are several dangers of challenging
the dominant powers. Once you applied critical pedagogy in the classroom, you
cannot be just a mere observer of an oppression taking place; you should take
action in order to liberate the oppressed. At the surface level, this objective
(to liberate ourselves from oppression) is very appealing; but if we dig
deeper, it can lead to bigger problems for us. Thus, the author suggests to ask
yourself these questions before you decide to apply critical pedagogy in your
work as an educator or in the classroom: (1) How sure am I that there is oppression happening?; (2) Why do I have to
fight against the oppression I observe?; (3) Who is the dominant power that I
have to fight against?; (4) Will I be heard if I fight against a certain
oppression?; (5) Why do I have to help the oppressed? What is in it for me?;
(6) Do I have a good and possible solution to help liberate the oppressed?; (7)
How will I fight against the dominant power?; and more importantly, (8) To what
extent am I willing to fight against it? Though it seems like it is selfish to
ask such questions, the author believes that people should also think about the
implications of their actions to their own lives. What will you gain if you
lose your life? How sure are you that your efforts will not be wasted? The
worst thing that can happen to a critical pedagogue is to get killed and have
his/her efforts become wasted. Therefore, the application of critical pedagogy
to education does not depend on the purpose of freeing the dehumanized from
oppression alone; many things should also be considered. In the end, no one can
force you, as an educator, whether you want to fight every instance of oppression
you see in your surroundings.
On the other hand, if we think that in our
classrooms, we should facilitate the transformation of our students into people
who analyze the status quo and to people who believe there can be a better
world, then we should decide and make serious efforts to use critical pedagogy
to a great extent. One of the authors suggest that we all reflect on these: 1) What is the
importance of education if it will not be a liberating tool but an instrument
of the dominating power, whoever they may be? 2) Do we still need evidence that
oppression exists when it has existed in history in different forms and still
confronts us every day? 3) What is the value of being educators if we will just
only transfer knowledge which might even be very far from the reality of our
students? Do we really believe this to be the major task of teachers? 4) Are there not instances when we realized
that we learned from our students? 5) What role do we want to play in a world
where the oppressed call for justice and equality? Are we willing to be passive
observers, and as such, become partners of the oppressors? 6) As teachers, we
impact lives in our classrooms (as our students also impact ours), thus, our
work has a multiplier effect. Do we want the current and the next generation to
live in a culture of silence or be free to exercise their right to ask why? 7)
Are we part of the oppressed or the oppressors? 8) Eventually, all of us will
exit the world. What kind of world and legacy do we want to leave behind?
Points
to Ponder
1. Why
do you think the banking system of education still exists?
How can we change it to the type of education advocated by critical pedagogy?
2. Does
critical pedagogy encourage students to disdain traditions, hierarchy, and
authority? Why do you think so?
3. How
can you apply critical pedagogy in subjects like Mathematics and Science?
4. How
can you contribute to the development of a just and humanizing society in your
everyday teaching?
5. How
will you take action against the dominant powers that control information?
References
Aliakbari,
M. & Faraji, E. (2011). Basic
principles of critical pedagogy. International Proceedings of Economics
Development and Research, 11, 77-85. Retrieved from www.ipedr.com › vol17
Department
of Education. (n.d.).The DepEd mission and vision. Retrieved from
www.depedregion5.ph/vision-mission.html
Freire,
P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum International
Publishing Group Inc.
Freire,
P. (2008). Education for critical consciousness. New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group Inc.
Kincheloe,
J. L. (2008). Knowledge and critical pedagogy. New York: Springer.
Monchinski.T.
(2008). Critical pedagogy and the everyday classroom. New York: Springer.
This essay is submitted to Prof. Abigail Thea Canuto as one of the requirements for EDFD 201. The authors got a grade of 1.0 for this essay. Yay!
Suggested citation (APA 6th ed):
Romanes, M. A. J. & Talens, M. P. (2016, March 19). Critical Pedagogy in the Philippine Context [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://jesusnevereverrfails.blogspot.com/
Romanes, M. A. J. & Talens, M. P. (2016, March 19). Critical Pedagogy in the Philippine Context [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://jesusnevereverrfails.blogspot.com/
