Browsing by Subject "critical pedagogy"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Accompaniment for the climb: Becoming reparational language educators of Spanish as a ‘heritage’ language
    (2017-12) Cushing-Leubner, Jenna
    ‘Heritage’ language classes (e.g., native speaker or native language literacy classes) are often taught by already licensed world language teachers. Only a handful of U.S. teacher preparation programs offer explicit and extensive preparation for teaching ‘heritage’ languages (National Heritage Language Research Center, 2017). ‘Heritage’ language pedagogies (Fairclough & Beaudrie, 2014) and teacher preparation (Caballero, 2014; Potowski & Carreira, 2004) are underdeveloped and undertheorized. This dissertation considers what is possible when a teacher learns to teach Spanish as a ‘heritage’ language by attending to raciolinguistic ideologies and raced-language schooling policies/practices, generational knowledge of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, and lineages of collective struggle. This is informative for both the preparation/support of ‘heritage’-language specific teachers and for conceptualizing of critical and humanizing pedagogies that center the desires and possibilities of ‘heritage’ language learners. This dissertation emerges from the participatory design of one multiyear ‘heritage’ language program at a Midwestern city public high school that took shape around reparational aims for educational justice. It draws on five years of participatory research designs and the use of paired collective memory work. Participatory research connected multilingual and multiply racialized youth of Américas descent (self-named as Jóvenes con Derechos), their black multilingual non-Latina Spanish as a heritage language teacher (Toni), and a white multilingual non-Latina teacher educator (Jenna) as co-researchers and co-designers. Over five years, Jóvenes con Derechos youth, Toni, and Jenna engaged in multiple overlapping and interacting participatory action research and design projects that shaped the development of a reparational stance towards ‘heritage’ language education, curriculum, and pedagogical approaches. Youth-led participatory action research projects connected youth with existing movements for social change led by members of their own communities and in solidarity with other communities of color and Indigenous communities in their state and beyond. Using participatory design research components of historicity, instructional thinging, curricular infrastructuring, and role re-mediations, this study offers methodological and conceptual theorizing of participatory and humanizing research and pedagogies. I argue for the need of “methodological arts of the contact zone” and suggest as examples the framework of “interlapping participatory research projects” and collective memory work. This work also outlines an argument for conceptualizing ‘heritage’ language education as reparational in its desires and designs. The methodological framework of interlapping participatory research, accompanied with paired collective memory work, is then used to make visible the processes of becoming reparational language educators through a memory work montage of instructional thinging and necessary role re-mediations over time. Final implications consider what is required of teacher preparation institutions to engage in the formation of critical pedagogues who take a reparational stance to language education that understands multilingual youth of color as co-designers of their educational experience in schools.
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    A Balanced Curriculum For Student-Oriented Learning In Art + Design Education: Toward Community-Based Participatory Design Research
    (2020-06) JEKAL, MEE
    This study started from my own experiences as a Korean international student living in a different culture and studying in a different higher education system within the U.S. Asking why my previous knowledge and learning of arts-based top-down design processes (ABTD) in South Korea are different from learning engineering-based bottom-up design processes (EBUD) in the U.S., guides this study of different cultural norms and educational systems in South Korea and the U.S. Through my own stories of art + design education in these different settings, I draw upon critical pedagogy (CP) (Freire, 2000; Kumashiro, 2004), culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) (González, 2005), and Dewey’s (1934, 1938) philosophy stressing the value of lived experiences, to research student-oriented creative learning in art + design. My research addresses the clash of cultural and pedagogical issues in higher education design programs. Through a comparative accounting of different art + design education approaches in South Korea and the U.S., I explore what a balanced culturally relevant curriculum development process looks like if students’ lived experiences are valued and critical pedagogy leads to reflexive and creative student-oriented learning in art + design education. My research questions ask: 1) How do international students from South Korea adapt to different teaching and learning approaches in a U.S. art + design education program? 2) How do lived experiences affect Korean students’ response to U.S. art + design education practices? and 3) How would Korean students improve the educational environment for student-oriented learning in art + design education? The study used arts-based research methodologies (ABR) including poetry to address and explore cultural issues in the emotional aspects of social life, lived experiences, and identity work, within an autoethnography. My qualitative in-depth interview process also added autoethnography to support personal perspectives in art + design education. Through the multi-layered data collected from the study, I could generate three themes: 1) Students with diverse funds of knowledge and lived experiences are struggling with flatten curriculum and would like to learn diverse design approaches in studying art + design education. 2) Lived experiences inside and outside the classroom influence creative design thinking, learning and the teaching process in art + design education. And 3) Art + design educators play a role in encouraging students to learn about cultural differences inside and outside the classroom, and how creative design abilities contribute to our society and students from diverse communities. Based on these three themes, I confirmed the value of balancing curriculum for student-oriented learning toward community-based participatory design research (CBPR). Through the iterative process of the research, I confirmed autoethnography, as ABR, can expand one’s view of inquiry in art + design education and allow researchers to address diverse cultural issues, expressing emotional feeling and interweaving multi-layered data kinds. On the research, I could acknowledge how my teaching philosophy was improved through self-study, and how I could grow as an educator beyond being a good designer. I express my long journey becoming an art + design educator via several poems and conversational stories with my colleagues.
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    Critical Pedagogy In the Undergraduate Music therapy Curriculum: A Grounded theory Study of Music therapy Educators
    (2020-05) West, Rebecca
    Based on Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and related writings, critical pedagogy applies theoretical constructs from critical theory through emancipation of the oppressed and oppressor. Liberation is achieved through the process of: (a) acknowledging and naming oppression, social injustice, and biases, (b) critical reflection and dialogue, and (c) action to overcome those systems. These tenets are explored through learning and teaching contexts, where both the teacher and student are equal participants as intellectuals. Music therapists primarily work with individuals with an identified area of need, change, or growth and may belong to groups or communities that are historically and socially oppressed or marginalized. Therefore, application of critical pedagogy is particularly relevant to the field of music therapy. Music therapists are aware of the need to increase diversity within the field, as the field is predominantly white, female, and under 30 years of age. Moreover, the need to demonstrate cultural humility when working with service users is a growing area of research in music therapy. However, scant research exists exploring the role of critical pedagogy within music therapy curriculum. Specifically, how music therapy educators provide spaces for their students to identify and name systemic oppression, inequality, and barriers; how those impact service users; acknowledging our own lenses, biases, values, and lived experiences; and facilitating opportunities for students to enact change. The purpose of this interpretivist study was to explore why music therapy educators in the United States believe critical pedagogy is important and how they apply critical pedagogy in their undergraduate curricula and classroom environments. Constructivist grounded theory, theoretical sampling, constant comparative method, and both inductive and deductive methods were used to elucidate the data and analysis process. Eight music therapy educators completed semi-structured interviews and shared their experiences implementing critical pedagogy in their curricula. Analysis of the data resulted in two core categories: critical music therapy curriculum and outcome of critical pedagogy in undergraduate music therapy. The analysis also resulted in a model for critical music therapy curriculum. Music therapy educators discussed critical pedagogy benefits everyone and the need for critical pedagogy embedded throughout the curriculum.
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    Disrupting Authority: The Phenomenality of Antioppressive Education in the Arts
    (2017-05) Babulski, Timothy
    The effort to engage in critical pedagogy is often stymied by several factors: institutional or systemic authority acting in opposition to anti-oppressive teaching, a lack of opportunities for students to develop and use personal agency, and the structures within disciplinary discourses and curricula that limit the possibility of social change. Drawing from post-intentional phenomenology (Vagle, 2014) and narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), this study attempts to reconcile structural and agentic approaches. By placing the poststructural philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari (1987) in dialog with critical (Freire, 1970/2000; Kumashiro, 2015) and post-critical pedagogies (Lather, 1995), I have been able to explore my lived-experience of authority as that which defers or denies student authorship. I have further explored a Deweyan approach to expression as I endeavored to live out the promise of using disruptiveness as a pedagogical tool for instigating student authorship. The resultant text is an assemblage that explores the complex, partial, shifting, multiple, tentative, and sometimes contradictory manifestations of authority and authorship. Through the selective use of voice, typeface, color, and illustration, this layered multivocality creates a palimpsest (Dillon, 2007) that progressively narrows, not to certainty, but to the present moment. Results of this study do not support causality or claim to raise test scores and close achievement gaps. Instead, this work underscores the importance of teachers’ critical reflections on their practice and the long-term benefits for students and society that such reflexivity allows. Teachers and teacher candidates who are able to examine their own education and to understand the relationship between student authorship and the manner in which authority is taken up will be primed to create pedagogical spaces in which students are not merely the recipients of knowledge but the authors of their own phenomenality. In this way, teachers who allow their authority to be disruptive and disrupted acknowledge students as the complex fully-realized beings they are and erase the false distinction between being-schooled and being-in-the-world.
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    "Is Corporate a Bad Word?": The Case for Business Information in Liberal Arts Libraries
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018-04) Leebaw, Danya
    Literature on business information literacy primarily focuses on business students. This paper instead explores business information literacy for students in liberal arts colleges: aside from career preparation, are there reasons to teach them to critically grapple with business information? This paper brings together survey findings, concepts from critical information theory, and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education developed by the Association of Colleges and Research Libraries to bear on this question. It argues that business information is a powerful genre for teaching core concepts central to both information literacy and liberal arts: critical inquiry, authority, access, incentives, rhetorical practices, and more.
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    Mobilizing Love in Literacy Classrooms: Connection, Resistance, and Pedagogy
    (2017-06) Crampton, Anne
    That love has something to do with teaching and learning is a claim that finds its way into numerous, overlapping, and contending theoretical frameworks, including arguments from critical, progressive, psychoanalytic, feminist, and post-structural traditions. However, to date there is very little critical empirical research that seeks to better understand and make solid this claim, to link it to everyday classroom actions and interactions. This multi-site critical ethnographic study asks how love is mobilized in an exploration of powerful, sometimes difficult, moments of connection and learning in two English-Social Studies classrooms--one in a large city high school, and the other in a small charter middle school--with teachers who sought to challenge educational inequities through a critical literacy curriculum and critical instructional practices. Using mediated and critical discourse analysis to examine classroom actions and interactions, the study looks at how students affect and are affected by their social “others” in meaningful and complicated ways. A theory of “cosmopolitan desire” is offered to describe the affective experience of connecting across difference. The study also frames students’ aesthetic and resistant projects as expressions of armed love (Freire, 2006); these demands for self and community are necessary rejections of oppressive and damaging discourses, fueled by the desire to envision a more just social reality. Finally, the study explores practices of pedagogical love, finding instantiations of dialogic (Freire, 1996) and nurturing relationships (Noddings, 2013), as well as demonstrations of radical inclusion and love (Greenstein, 2016; hooks, 2003). This work has implications for how we might realize and better understand the stakes in the vague schooling goal of “getting along,” bearing in mind the ongoing conundrum in hoping that through public education, “youth [will] accomplish what we haven't been able to accomplish--to establish rich, vibrant, and cooperative interracial relationships, contexts, communities, and projects” (Fine, Weis, & Powell, 1997, p. 248). It also makes plain the scale of a teacher’s labor, and considers how to make academic literacy productions meaningful, and potentially transformative.