Glossary from information on Issues in Freirian Education by Tom
Heaney
http://nlu.nl.edu/ace/Resources/Documents/FreireIssues.html#Glossary
Extended Glossary
Antidisciplinarity: organizing courses around questions whose
answers oblige one to rethink the framework within which the questions
were formulated, a rethinking that allows one to savour the dynamics of
deferral (the pleasure of difficulty while at the same time emphasizing
the importance of answers that change the way we think by changing the
social conditions under which thinking takes place).
Borderlands: (described by Henry Giroux) are spaces crisscrossed
with a variety of languages, experiences and voices. For the Chicana feminist
poet Gloria Anzaldúa borderlands are physically present wherever
two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy
the same territory, where under lower, middle and upper classes touch,
where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.
Critical Pedagogy: the means and methods of testing and attempting
to change the structures of schools that allow inequities. It is a cultural
- political tool that takes seriously the notion of human differences,
particularly those related to race, gender, and class. Critical pedagogy
seeks to release the oppressed and unite people in a shared language of
critique, struggle, hope, to end various forms of human suffering. Through
critical pedagogy the classroom is not the place where information is dispensed
by teachers and consumed by students, but rather as a site for the production
of new knowledge grounded in student's practices.
Culture: We need to understand culture as a process of meaning
making and we need to give attention to the power relations that set boundaries
to those processes. This may regard specific textual or lived cultures,
popular culture, consumer cultures, film, art or body cultures.
Cultural Studies (CS): Cultural Studies fosters the interdisciplinary
investigation of culture as a dynamic organization of resources, peoples,
artifacts, and power. The field draws together marxism, feminism, poststructuralism,
psychoanalysis, popular culture and media studies, the study of minority
and emergent literatures, and gender studies. Cultural Studies examines
the relationship between theory and practice. Cultural Studies is generally
regarded to have originated out of work done out of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Burmingham especially under the leadership of
Stuart Hall. The concept has evolved now into a more general term referring
to an increasingly popular inter (or even trans) national cross-disciplinary
and anti-disciplinary field as well as an intellectual movement. The work
of the CCCS was thoroughly grounded in Marxism and has adapted theGramsci's
theory of hegemony. Cultural studies has been expressed as a crossroads
between different disciplines and lines of thought, an eclectic and loose
paradigm within which "culture" is taken seriously. Typical areas of research
for CS include media and popular culture, ethnographic studies of youth
cultures. The Burmingham School of Cultural Studies emerged within English
and drawing on sociology, which combined ideas from Marxism, feminism,
structuralism(s) and forms of ethnography to develop a loose working theory
of culture and society and methods for its investigation in concrete settings.
Iaon Davies in Border/Lines shows that CS has involved
overt identity/identification politics and commitment to working for social
justice. A second fact is that CS involves performative acts that extend
beyond writing in and for the academy: it embraces the undertaking of hands-on,
cultural and political work in the larger community.
The legitimacy of CS depends on an ethis (and
a Politics) of the encounter: on the claimed productivity of dialogue across
disciplinary, geographical and cultural boundaries, on a committed desire
to reach out to the "other", and on a refusal to homogenize plurality and
heterogeneity as a way to resist, subvert or evade hegemonic forms of power.
A CS Principle is that Theory must always be practiced
and practice must always be theorized.
Alternative pedagogies are intended to be anti-hegemonic.
Key terms in CS work: collaborative, interdisciplinary,
self-reflexive, site-specific
CS was to be free to borrow its methods from all
of the social sciences and the humanities. It was supposed to cover a range
of practices and representations through which social groups construct
and maintain their realities. All of this freedom with one responsibility:
to expose all mechanisms by which culture and knowledge are manufactured,
managed and controlled.
Debriefing: a critical component of Experiential learning. There
are two major phases. The first clears the air by providing an opportunity
for learners to express their emotions in a nonjudgmental environment.
The second phase facilitates a systematic and objective analysis of the
experience. The purpose of debriefing is to help people to rationally reflect
on their experience and to derive useful generalizations from it.
EduAction: innovative teaching strategies grounded in radical
social analysis that can bridge the gap between the classroom and the community,
theory and practice. This perspective was developed by Charles Reitz and
was taken from his article "Elements of EduAction: Critical Pedagogy and
the Community College". Journal of Critical Pedagogy. Volume I, Issue 2,
April, 1998. www.lib.wmc.edu/pub/jcp/jcp.html
Experiential Education/Learning: A process through which a learner
constructs knowledge, skill, and value from direct experiences (from the
Association for Experiential Education home page) It takes place in the
real world through direct, meaningful experience and rational reflection
on the contents and the consequences of this experience. There are two
important components to EL: the experience and the debriefing. Objectives
for EL include: * Affective objectives where feelings are evoked which
may not come out of a textbook
* Empathic objectives - seeing what it feels like to be in someone
else's shoes
* Interactive objectives - human interaction skills are best
learned in an experiential setting, eg. interviewing, critical listening,
counseling, debating etc.
* Higher level cognitive skills - to practice evaluation and
synthesis skills. Real experiences provide us with realistic feedback that
strengthens our ability to transfer and apply these skills to the outside
world. Experiences also provide learner with confidence about the depth
and worth of the learning.
* Unlearning objectives - becoming aware of stereotypes and prejudices
Experiential Learning model:
INSTRUMENTAL LEARNING
EXPERIENCE
Introduce theme and arouse some
Involves participant experience
personal commitment. Explore
Own and others' behaviour in
present constructs of phenomenon
connection with theme.
To be explored.
EVALUATION
On - going
REFLECTION
ACTION
Share experience, feelings,
Integrate new cognitions and affects
perceptions of self and other
exploring new behaviour.
concerns, motivation, explore
‘expert' knowledge.
CONCEPTUALIZE
Make sense of total experience.
Form new constructs.
The "learning" outcome involves: A cognitive element (increased awareness)
An emotional
element (changed attitudes)
A behavioural
element (changed interpersonal competence)
In experiential learning models it is important to establish an appropriate
climate of trust, a degree of openness, spontaneity, mutual support, acceptance,
warmth, respect, and purpose. A climate to facilitate self-knowledge through
interaction, introspection and risk-taking.
Experiential Education Learning Cycle: consists of PREPARATION
(for next experience), ACTIVITY AND EXPERIENCE (in the field), SOLITARY
REFLECTION (on the experience through thinking and writing), ANALYSIS (of
questions posed by the experience with other people in discussion), INTEGRATION
(with other materials such as readings and lectures), and EVALUATION.
Experiential Learning (EL) Methods:
Thiagarajan's Experiential Learning Packages book offers three types
of EL packages. The first may be instructions given to the instructor/facilitator
on how to set up fake microteaching sessions. The second is assignment
cards which require learners to undergo a series of selected and sequenced
experiences and the third package is role plays.
‘Hidden Curriculum': the unstated norms, values and beliefs
that are transmitted to students through the underlying structure of meaning
and in both the formal content and the social relations of school and classroom
life. These can precipitate the backfiring of even the most carefully formulated
strategies for egalitarian dynamics of communication. The prior inculcation
of the student with assumptions of all sorts means that a crucial component
of the "learning" experience is that of "unlearning" the hidden curriculum.
Public Intellectual: Some PI's include: Barbara Ehrenreich,
Anita Hill, Noam Chomsky. Public Intellectuals try to reach as broad and
diverse an audience as possible. An important task of the academically-trained
and university-based public intellectual is to work as a kind of translator:
to make insights and perspectives of professional work accessible, meaningful
and relevant to as broad an audience as possible. Academics are serving
as PI's in classrooms at an undergraduate level, where they present their
ideas to a diverse audience, who will go on to occupy a broad range of
positions in society. PI's are committed to serving collective political
interests and promoting social justice issues through books, journal articles
and even newspaper editorials.
Predatory culture: This term comes from Peter McLaren's 1995
book entitled Cultural Pedagogy and Predatory Culture. McLaren speaks
of the era we are living in now with its so-called democracy, mass media
influence, power driven mentality, etc. "The prevailing referents around
which the notion of public citizenry is currently constructed have been
steered in the ominous direction of the social logic of production and
consumption. Buyers are beginning culturally to merge with their commodities
while human agency is becoming absorbed into the social ethics of the marketable.
Social impulses for equality, liberty, and social justice have been flattened
out by the mass media until they have become cataleptically rigid while
postmodern images threaten to steal what was once known as the "soul""(p1-2).
Predatory culture, therefore, is a field of invisibility - of stalkers
and victims - precisely because it is so obvious. Its obviousness
immunizes its victims against a full disclosure of its menacing capabilities.
In predatory culture identity is fashioned mainly and often violently around
the excesses of marketing and consumption and the natural social relations
of post-industrial capitalism. "Predatory culture is the left-over detritus
of bourgeois culture stripped of its arrogant pretense to civility and
cultural lyricism and replaced by a stark obsession with power fed by voraciousness
of capitalism's global voyage...The capitalist fear which fuels predatory
culture is made to function at the world level through the installation
of necessary crises, both monetary and social. Computers have become the
new entrepreneurs of history while their users have been reduced to scraps
of figurative machinery, partial subjects in the rag-and-bone shop of predatory
culture, manichean allegories of "us" against "them," of "self" against
"other." The social, the cultural and the human has been subsumed within
capital." McLaren offers examples of life in this predatory culture on
pages 3-9 including the Marc Lepine shooting in Montreal, Gulf War cards,
Jeffrey Dahmer T-shirts, OJ Simpson's starring role in predatory culture
etc.
Social Education: Unlike traditional education which has focussed on
measurable aspects of learning, social education is concerned with issues
such as the collaboration between groups, relationships with people, and
problems of understanding and accepting differences in other people's perspectives
and values. Social education will enhance social learning and the transcending
of age, experience and status barriers. This type of education would contribute
to the needs and development of communities, encouraging collaboration
between groups and reducing some of the compartmentalization usually found
in traditional education.
Social Justice: the expression of human rights in public policy
and programs
Transformative intellectual: The term transformative intellectual
was coined by Henry Giroux (1988). It simply means for
our purposes that teachers possess the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes
to question, understand, interrogate and eventually act as change agents
of structural inequities in their place of employment. Taken
from Kanpol, Barry and Jeanne Brady. "Teacher Education And The Multicultural
Dilemma: A "Critical" Thinking Response". Journal of Critical Pedagogy.
Volume I, Issue 2, April, 1998. www.lib.wmc.edu/pub/jcp/jcp.html