Critical Pedagogy

Anthropology 397w

Professor Arthur Keene Administrator/Trainer: Nick Demas

Office: 209 Machmer Office: 26 Thompson Hall

Phone: 545-0214 Phone: 545-0696

Cell- 413-627-4604 Cell: 978-866-5339

Office Hours: TBA Office Hours: TBA

When we try to change the classroom so that there is a sense of mutual responsibility for learning, students get scared that you are now not the captain working with them, that you are after all just another crew member – and not a reliable one at that. To educate for freedom, then, we have to challenge and change the way that everyone thinks about pedagogical process.

bell hooks

I like to think that I have two eyes that I don’t have to use the same way. When I do educational work with a group of people, I try to see with one eye where those people are as they perceive themselves to be. I do this by looking at body language. By imagination, by talking to them, by visiting them, by learning what they enjoy and what troubles them. I try to find out where they are because their growth is going to be from there, Not from some abstraction or where your are or someone else is. Now my other eye is not such a problem , because I already have in mind a philosophy of where I’d like to see people moving. It’s not a clear blueprint for the future, but movements towards goals they don’t conceive of at the time.

Myles Horton

To teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge.

Paulo Freire

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.”

Parker Palmer “

A holistic approach to education would recognize that a person must learn how to be with other people, how to love, how to take criticism, how to grieve, how to have fun as well as how to add and subtract, multiply and divide…It would address the need for purpose and for connectedness to ourselves and one another; it would not leave us alone to wander the world armed with plenty of knowledge but lacking the skills to handle the things that are coming up in our lives.

Jane Tompkins

PREFACE: Critical Pedagogy is the first course in a two course sequence (the second course is Leadership and Activism) for students who are preparing for leader/facilitator positions in the UMass Alliance for Community Transformation’s Curricular Alternative Spring Break Program.

This course is about changing our classrooms – the one’s in which we will be the facilitators and the ones in which we are the students. It is about adopting a mode of learning that allows us to be fully human – complex beings with rich and complicated lives - and does not require us to separate our lives and our experiences inside and outside the classroom. It is about embracing an approach to education that better prepares us to assume responsibilities as citizens in a vibrant and diverse democracy. It is about learning to be reflective about education and how it works,. It aims to empower us to take responsibility for our own education and to help others to do the same. It aims to train us to become partners in learning communities where education is a mutual endeavor.

This course introduces us to the theory and the practice of engaged pedagogy – a pedagogy that is holistic, experiential, relational and liberatory. In the words of radical educator bell hooks, enaged pedagogy moves us to “share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students” and to “teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students”. The course thus aims to introduce participants to an approach to teaching and learning that is far more than the transmission and mastery of content. (what Frerie calls the banking model of education). The aim of this engaged teaching/learning is to promote the practice of freedom, liberation, justice and community.

We will do this by exploring theoretical work on alternative, critical and radical education – most notably the writings of Paulo Frerie, Bell Hooks, Myles Horton and Parker Palmer. We will combine our theoretical explorations with practical exercises in teaching – striving to connect our theory to our practice. And we will try to model what we are studying in our own practice inside this seminar. The course will operate as a learning community with all members embracing the role of teaching and learner and with everyone assuming responsibility for their own learning and the learning of the other members.

COURSE GOALS: The primary goal of this course is to prepare seminar members to assume leadership of a section of Anthropology 397H –Grassroots Community Development. While the aim of this program is to promote effective praxis the primary goal in this term is to establish the theoretical foundations of our own process of critical/engaged pedagogy. In the spring semester, the seminar will focus more on the practical aspects of the classroom including lesson planning, teaching techniques and reflection on ongoing learning and process in the Grassroots Community Development Sections.

Some Important Objectives for Term I

Build a Cohesive Leadership Team for UACT

Develop and Nurture Specific Leadership Skills

Learn/Explore The Theoretical Foundations of Radical Pedagogy

Build the confidence necessary to lead own classroom.

Begin the exploration of concrete teaching skills.

Promote Praxis – including modeling the kind of teaching learning that we aspire to within the seminar.

Develop strong communication skills including effective listening.

Promote transparency in our teaching and our leadership.

Promote holism – seek seamlessness in our work as students, teachers and citizens.

Transformation of Perspective - Learn to think like a leader vs. thinking like a student

Create a solidary learning community

Create an Academic Frame for the Spring Course

Learn to model how to develop an analysis and how to use the text in doing so

Learn to model connecting our practice to theoretical foundations

Develop a consciousness about establishing clear learning objectives

Get/give pragmatic experience

Build a network of support

Build ongoing assessment and reflection into our practice

Develop a practice of mutual responsibility and accountability

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

We will negotiate the formal requirements of the course at the first retreat and formulate them in a contract for our first post-retreat meeting. The requirements of the course are likely to encompass the following elements:

Seminar Meetings: The course is scheduled to meet eight times during the scheduled Sunday evening time slot for regularly scheduled seminar meetings (see schedule below). In off weeks – UACT steering will meet. Seminar members are encouraged but not required to attend steering committee meetings.

Retreats: there are two mandatory weekend retreats- one at the beginning of the term and one at the end. The timing for the final retreat will be scheduled at the first retreat.

Workshops: There will be two required workshops: one on race and privilege and one on teaching in a mulit-cutlural classroom. One of these is scheduled for our regular class meeting on October 30 and the other will be scheduled at a mutually agreeable time and date.

ATTENDANCE: is required at ALL scheduled meetings and retreats and workshops. Because everyone in this class has many important commitments and very full schedules (dare we say that we are all over-committed?) it is nearly impossible to reschedule class meetings. Trying to reschedule Sunday class has, in the past, led to a great deal of frustration and friction with the leadership team. We therefore ask everyone to clear their calendar now (including for Sunday evenings during the spring term) and to not request any rearrangements of the schedule. The one exception that we make to this is for Sunday classes that fall on a long weekend. For those meetings – we can move the class to Monday evening if we have consensus.

WRITING: Reflection is an essential part of the learning process that we are trying to promote. In this class we want to model the same kind of reflective practice and intellectual engagement that we hope to see in the classrooms that you will be directing in the spring. Therefore we will all do some directed reflection for each of our class meetings. These will be commented on by others – sometimes by Art and Nick and sometimes by peers on the team.

In addition we ask that each of you maintain a teaching journal (you may do this in your leader’s binder or in a separate bound journal) over the course of the year in which you record your thoughts and observations about teaching and leadership,. We would hope that people will use this journal to record ongoing reflections about readings, about the goings on in our class, about thoughts for planning your own classrooms and about the nature of the university and your own education (based on experiences in your other classes). We hope that the journal will be a resource for becoming more reflective about your education and also a useful tool for tracking your own evolution as a teacher leader. We will not collect, grade or evaluate these journals but from time to time we will give you the opportunity to share some of your thoughts/writings with the rest of the team.

GRADES: Grading in this seminar has, in the past, followed a similar philosophy of that used in Grassroots Community Development. That is, those who fulfill ALL of the expectations of the course will receive a grade of A. We will negotiate a grading contract/rubric at our second class meeting.

REQUIRED READINGS (books may be ordered from Amazon.com. or BN.com. Loan copies of Long Haul are available in the UACT office (26 Thomspon). The other books are available in each of the Five College Libraries. However, it is our experience that you will want to keep these books and you’ll want to really mark them up – so we strongly recommend that you get your own copies. Loan copies of selected articles are available in the UACT office and will hopefully also be provided as PDF’s. Check weekly in class for details.

Required Books:

Frerie, Paulo

1998 Pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy and civic courage. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Hooks, bell

1994 Teaching to Transgress: education as the practice of freedom. NY:Routledge.

Horton, Myles

1998 The long haul. NY: Teachers College Press

Selected Articles and Chapters to be read during the term:

Addes, Danyel and Arthur S. Keene

2005 When students really have power: alternative spring break, praxis and the professorless classroom at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst . in Student Leadership in Service Learning, Edited by Ed Zlotkowski, Nick Longo and James R. Williams. Providence, RI: Campus Compact

Arnold, Rick et. al.

1991 Educating for Change. Toronto: Between the Lines Press. (excerpts).

Jo Freeman

1970 The Tyrrany of Structurelessness. http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/structurelessness.html

Ganz, Marshall

nd Notes on Organizing. Excerpts from an unpublished manuscript. Used with permission.

Hanh, Thich Nhat

1993 The raft is not the shore. In Thundering Silence: Sutra on knowing the better way to catch a snake. Berkeley: Parallax.

1994

Lunday, Suzanne

nd The tip of the reflection iceberg. Final class reflection for Anthropology 397l Leadership and Activism (May 2005 - Photocopy).

Palmer, Parker

nd The heart of a teachers: Identity and Integrity in Teaching. www.teachertransformation.org.

1998 The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey Bass

Shor, Ira

1995 When students have power. Negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapters 1-3.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Week 1 SEPT 3 and 4. FALL RETREAT – Setting The Agenda for the Coming Year. Creating a team and a learning plan.

Objectives:

Build the Team

Review and Modify the Mission Statement

Consider and Revise the Syllabus

Explore the Foundations of UACT;s Critical Pedagogy

What is OUR process?

What does it mean to be educated/

What Constitutes good teaching and good learning?

What is popular education and what does it have to do with what is happening here at UMass?

Explore the meaning of Praxis and how it applies to the work we will do in the coming year.

The emotional work of teaching: fears and anxieties.

Readings: Addes and Keene

Lunday

Horton (all)

Week 2 – SEPT 11 STEERING

Week 3 - SEPT 18 - We Teach Who We Are.

Follow Up to the Retreat:

Thnking about becoming teachers and leaders. Who are we and how does this affect what we do in the classroom? What is our motivation to teach?

The importance of Structure – for OUR preparation and for our students

Activities:

Mini-political autobiography

World View Exercise or Matrix of Identity

Introduction to mindfullness

Skills Bank

Discussions of Readings

As time permits: facilitation coaching in preparation for two students assuming facilitation duties for Frerie next week.

Readings:

Parker Palmer – We Teach Who We Are

Parker Palmer – Courage to Teach – Chapter 1

Hahn – The Raft is Not the Shore

Freeman – Tyrrany of Structurelessness

Week 4 Sept 25 THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS of Critical Pedagogy I – Education as the Practice of Freedom - Paulo Frerie

Activities:

We will devote nearly the entire eventing to a discussion of Freries book and its applicability to the work we do in UACT and to the rest of our education.

Reflection on the facilitation:

Scenarios

Readings:

Frerie (all)

Week 5: OCT 2 STEERING

Week 6 OCT 9– Theoretical Foundations II

Radical Classroooms – bell hooks – teaching to transgress

Education as the practice of Freedom

We will devote nearly the entire eventing to a discussion of hook’s book and its applicability to the work we do in UACT and to the rest of our education.

Reflection on the facilitation:

Scenarios

Reading: hooks (all)

Week 16: OCT 9 Skills Session I

Discussion and facilitation skills:

Asset Mapping

Power Mapping

Read:

Handouts on discussion Facilitation.

Ganz

WEEK 8 OCT 23 STEERING

Week 9 OCTOBER 30 - Teaching About race,, difference, gender and privlege.

Workshop – with Dr. Katja Hahn D’Errico from the faculty of Social Justice Education.

Readings: handouts

Week 10 November 6 Obstacles to learning – Student Resistence and Power in the Classroom

Faciliator power

Hijacking

Gender issues

Etc

Read: selection from Chapter 4 Educating for Democracy

Palmer – Student from Hell (from Courage to Teach)

Schor – When students have power

Week 11 NOV 13 STEERING

Week 12 – NOV 20 Teacher’s Tools: More on Reflection and Facilitation:

Week 13 STEERING

Week 14 DEC 4 refelection for facilitators and for students.

Writing Commentaries- Issues of Class Management

WINTER (concluding) RETREAT – date to be determined .