During class our table (Table 4: Aislinn, Ben, Sengul, Susan, Andrew, Rathsara – full names and blogs posted at the bottom of this post) discussed perspectives of critical pedagogy. Below is our definition of the term followed by objects that illustrate a few key concepts. Enjoy!
Critical Pedagogy is a process where learning is teaching and teaching is learning.
Reality is a process
Critical Pedagogy challenges what we know and the structures that control society
Critical consciousness can be used as a political tool
Banking Concept of Teaching
Think, Engage, Work together, Learn
Susan – School is failing to teach us the necessary skills to function once we become an adult. Instead, most of the topics that are taught are important, but may not be important later in life.
Susan – As a TA or an instructor, I am always learning, either from research literature or from my students. I don’t know everything about a topic and I don’t think I ever will.
Contributors:
Aislinn’s Blog: http://aislinn-mccann.com/
Ben Kirkland: https://benkirkland.home.blog/
Sengul Yildiz Alanbay: https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/sengulalanbay/
Susan’s blog https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/chensusan518/
Andrew Barnes Blog: https://drewbarnes892674021.wordpress.com/category/grad-5114-contemporary-pedagogy-19/
Rathsara Herath: https://rathsaraherath.home.blog/
Drew Barnes 
Very interesting approach to your post. The sequence of memes worked to communicate some important ideas. I particularly liked the one where the student wanted to learn practical information and the teacher wanted to teach recorder. It’s a good reminder that engaging students in the process often requires giving students a level of control over what they’re learning. As your previous meme showed, it can’t just be teachers pouring knowledge into students.
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I love your group’s post! In this group’s post (https://timothystelter.wordpress.com/2019/04/12/a-collaborative-definition-of-critical-pedagogy-through-jig-saw-pedagogy/) they mention how part of critical pedagogy is teachers and students embracing “the joy and power of thinking together.” Basically, learning should be fun, even as it empowers systemic change. Your post really embraces the fun aspect of learning, as you chose not just to write, which comes easy as academics, but to challenge yourself to find effective memes and gifs to display your points. I think your memes and gifs match the definition you provided for critical pedagogy, but I was curious if your group considered any other potential definitions/aspects of critical pedagogy?
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Memes galore! They do showcase a lot of the motifs of the readings on critical pedagogy. My favorite of the bunch is the drawing where knowledge is being pushed into the child’s head which exemplifies the banking of knowledge theme. But most importantly, the picture showing the school teaching hot cross buns over more complex life skills is interesting. I was fortunate to go to a school system that did teach me about taxes, credit card scores, general life skills, and even hot cross buns. Is this something that is not the norm? I suppose education can widely vary.
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Bravo on your use of memes, I tried and failed to do this on our post and ended up with political cartoons instead. You did a good job capturing the array of emotions that I think both teachers and students feel during a class.
I do have mixed feelings about this comment though:
“Susan – School is failing to teach us the necessary skills to function once we become an adult. Instead, most of the topics that are taught are important, but may not be important later in life. ”
I think the word “may” is critical here. There is only so much that we can teach in grade school, and almost every subject is important later in life to a handful of students in every class. I didn’t care to learn art, and it’s not really important to me now. However, I also had artists in my statistics class that probably felt the same. We need both classes to be offered, and not every class can be perfectly tailored to every student, but every student needs some exposure so they can find their passions. And giving choice isn’t perfect either, because I’ve seen people that figured they’d never learn how to properly use a computer become amazing coders once they were forced to learn. Now they love coding, but without that forced learning, they probably wouldn’t have touched MATLAB or R with a ten-foot (virtual) pole.
Higher ed can be a little more student-centric because you probably won’t have an unwilling history major in a fluid mechanics class. However, at the same time, balancing a budget is hardly relatable to something like fluid mechanics. There is only so much tailorability for a given class.
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The fact that we learn while teaching is so true! I had the same experience while TA-ing. In fact, I learned the material better when I taught it than when I learned it. It is interesting to me that most teachers go through the process of relearning and learning more thoroughly while teaching and don’t bring that process into their teaching method.
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I love the meme’s – very creative. I wonder about the definition of critical pedagogy, though. Granted, I’m still not clear on the definition either, but I thought it was supposed to also include some social justice tilt also? Maybe Sarah will help us clarify. Thank you for the fun post!
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17) I appreciate your used of pictures/memes as an alternative to the more conventional word based blogs. I, like others, found the taxes/recorder meme to be particular interesting. I do agree that it’s a decent example of how giving learners more say in their education may lead to them learning more ‘valuable’ skills, though I would argue there is much more nuance. At what point should learners be given this latitude? Who decides and places a valuation on a particular topic? If the proverbial ball is in the student’s court for both of these, how do they even know why they should or should no learn something?
Hindsight is 20/20, and I guarantee you that most students in elementary school (when recorders were used- or high school for that matter) were not thinking that they should be learning about taxes instead. In fact, if given the choice between learning the basics of mathematics, English, history, or science I imagine a good portion of early learners would prefer to fiddle around with a recorder or go out for recess. I know that the actual argument is less about recorders, and more about our education system failing to prepare our citizens for ‘the real world’ – to which I would overall agree — though I do believe exposing our brains to different thoughts/experiences/etc. helps us in approaching problems from different perspectives and is inherently valuable to learning.
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Dear Table 4,
Thank you for such an awesome post filled with memes and gifs. I love your phrase “think, engage, work together, learn”. It really represents one of Hooks’ important critical pedagogy points on learning being eternal and life-long. The meme at the end with Adam Sandler on the floor very much describes my experiences as a teaching assistant so far.
Minh
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I think this my favorite post of this week, just because of the use of memes. Susan mentioned that school fails to teach us the basic skills for adulthood. I agree, but I would also like to challenge this. Like everything, a skill needs to be practiced to be learned. Since most students wouldn’t have an opportunity to practice these life skills in high school, teaching them (at this point) would be a waste of time (according to me).
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Love the memes! I agree with some of the other comments. Balance is the key. A million years ago when I was in high school, we had to “keep the books” for a business. Although it did not apply at the time, I do “keep the books” or I should say use the online software to keep the books for my household now and often think of balancing those books back in high school. The teacher made Accounting class fun and my classmates and I always had a little friendly competition going.
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I love the way you guys designed your post with memes! It was really nice to read it.
In your blog post you mentioned: Critical consciousness can be used as a political tool. I believe that Paulo Freire said that, right? Paulo Freire is from Brazil, and I am also from there. In the past weeks, the Brazilian president has heavily criticized Paulo Freire as a credible person. For him, the ideas of Paulo Freire have no sense and the brazilian education system should be changed (he believes that ideas from the dictatorship times in brazil should be implemented in our system). I have heard reports that the police is entering schools in which professors are “teaching liberal ideas”. Some professors were taken to jail. All along Paulo was right. Current politicians want no critical pedagogy in schools, otherwise the general population would learn how to think, and then presidents like the current one would never be elected. Sad reality!
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This was definitely the most enjoyable post! Everything you wanted to convey was in the memes and cartoons. A great example of how to effectively switch from conventional methods and adapt to new things that would hold the attention of students (in this case readers!)
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Really cool illustrative post ! The memes were so appropriate to the topic. Some of these are so relatable like the one while TAing. Great creative group work !
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This blog post is one of the most intriguing posts. I love the visuals and most importantly I appreciate one of my favorite quotes related to education. I agree with Freire that education changes people and people change the world. This is an idea that is sometimes hard to get people to understand. If we want change, we must have people continue to learn, once they realize that things can change, they may become motivated to make the change.
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I really liked your post especially the sentence “Think, Engage, Work together, Learn”. It basically summarises the whole concept of critical pedagogy.
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I like the meme for learning to work as a teaching assistant. This is how I felt going to the undergraduate classes to learn. But I must say working as a teaching assistant for various courses helped me to learn about different teaching styles. This was very helpful when I started teaching my own courses.
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Really enjoyed the tweet about how primary and secondary education often fail to prepare people for skills necessary in their lives. I know progress is being made, but that is why we need to look at what we are teaching students and how it betters them, rather than just playing to a template. Clearly university can better prepare people for “skills” they need to pursue chosen career paths, but I think a lot of the time that idea is lost in the “process” or going through the motions of “teaching classes” rather than “teaching students.”
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I like the figure in which you compare active//passive learning. In a critical pedagogy, teacher not only delivers the essential information but also triggers minds to fill the gaps. This process is apparently much harder as it requires solid understanding of the problem as well as creativity. Good job!
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I think I might be too old but I had a hard time following the memes. It was a great approach.
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Such a creative post! great drawings and memorable memes. I believe critical pedagogy is tied to creativity and your post is the true example of that.
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It is a very beautiful group’s post! I like how you used the memes those could give good explanation related to the critical pedagogy. Excellent work guys!
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