Prompts: Reflecting on Oakes & Lipton Course Text Chapters 1, 2, 3
“One of the great challenges facing multicultural education today is the widening gap between its conceptualization as a redistribution of power and privilege in all aspects of schools and schooling and the practice of well-meaning, left-leaning educators who implement it in ways that recycle, rather than overturn, systemic power imbalances.” Christine Sleeter
Peter Hall (1997): “Schools represent a relatively stable system of inequality. They contribute to these results by active acceptance and utilization of a dominant set of values, norms, beliefs which, while appearing to offer opportunities to all, actually support the success of a privileged minority and hinder the efforts and visions of a majority” (Changing the Discourse in School in Race, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism: Policy and Practice, p. 151.)
Ivan Illich refered to compulsory education as a compulsory lottery system with a few winning but more losing. Those who fail to have the winning lottery number (grades) are stigmatized. This compulsory lottery system continues to higher education where it intentionally reproduces privilege rather than inspiring scholarship “Killing curiosity and killing students in the process” (Utne Reader, 1995, Snell, p. 93).
Similar to Illich’s concept was South American literacy activist Paolo Freire, who compared education to a banking system with students as ‘depositories’ and teachers as ‘depositors’. The banking system perpetuates domination and learners are passive consumers. Freire advocated for the liberating of education where the learner becomes empowered agents responsible for their own learning – not just what others want them to learn. This is what he called conscientization. Freire’s ideas about literacy empowerment were so controversial and in opposition to the dominant way of thinking that he was exiled from his own country. As educators, what kind of activists will we become as we teach in the name of educating students?
No comments:
Post a Comment