Attended a panel today where one of the presenters from Korea discussed creating a teacher education program with Critical Pedagogy. This guy laid it out like it really is on a global level. It was nice to see a nuanced approach to Freire\u2019s ideas being practiced and discussed in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. The presenter showed TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) as a damaging and hegemonic view of EFL with the marginalized use of the word \u201cother.\u201d And while it was clear what Kiwan Sung meant when discussing Critical Pedagogy, I appreciated his naming of the approach as a way of \u201cmobilizing one\u2019s desires,\u201d especially when pointing out that English is viewed as a global commodity. Sung also busted out the idea of researchers and teachers practicing the \u201cPedagogy of Indeterminacy,\u201d a term I appreciate and I am still unpacking. <\/p>\n
On a related note, at the end of the panel, I asked Sung about hegemonic and governmental resistance to his pedagogy in practice (he\u2019d already addressed other professors and some students\u2019 reticence at embracing a program they felt too idealistic). And while Sung\u2019s response was to the point and what I wanted, I found it interesting that a former presenter who had done something or other on literacy at some small school for her dissertation decided to bring up that it\u2019s hard for first year teachers to openly discuss race and to have these kinds of \u201creal\u201d conversations in a classroom. First of all, \u201cdiscussions about race\u201d should be happening no matter if you are a Caucasian graduate student or a teacher or a bystander; her answer was uninformed and drew on the kinds of ridiculous assumptions that Critical Pedagogy tries to resist. Further, \u201cdiscussions about race,\u201d though they may be important and valuable, have nothing to do with Critical Pedagogy. I\u2019ve become more and more wary of these grad students (as well as the professors they inevitably become) who have never spent legitimate time teaching in a classroom or really reflecting on the teaching profession. Not that research for research\u2019s sake is not valued, but where is the real world connection to the work of a preternaturally, misinformed, middle-class, WASP-y, idealist? <\/p>\n