Category Archives: Education

Childhood, Critical Pedagogy, Education, Paulo Freire, Teaching

Our Practice, Our Selves

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In my undergraduate introductory education course, I read aloud the first or second class Sandra Cisneros’s “Eleven.”

The central character is Rachel, and the setting is her school day on her eleventh birthday. School that day strips all the shine from what should be a day of celebration and joy for this child because her math teacher, Mrs. Price, demands that Rachel not only claim but also wear a red sweater the teacher is certain belongs to Rachel (although, as the readers, the teacher, and students discover, it doesn’t). A key moment in the story highlights the power dynamic between Mrs. Price and Rachel: “Because she’s older and the teacher, she’s right and I’m not.”

Even for college students (and especially for my sophomores when I taught high school in rural South Carolina), I am hard to take those first days, and even weeks. My teacher persona and my class ask a great deal of students, who often feel overwhelmed, disoriented, and even angry.

So this semester I have just had “the talk” with that introductory class (and I also teach two first years seminars that are writing intensive); it includes acknowledging that I recognize how disorienting my class and I are for them as well as reminding them of “Eleven” and Rachel.

I very consciously want my students to be intellectually and ideologically rattled, but I also am committed to a much more important and foundational imperative: Students must always feel and be physically, emotionally, and psychologically safe in their learning spaces that I orchestrate.

Rachel in Cisneros’s story cannot learn on that day when she feels tiny, powerless, dehumanized. And the agent of those feelings are Mrs. Price, her callous attitude toward her students (children), and ultimately her practice.

Our Practice, Our Selves

Those of us who teach are now likely beginning new academic years, whether at the K-12 or higher education levels. As a result, I have read many posts and conversations on social media about our practices.

For my first year students, for example, I shared John Warner’s really fine piece, New Cell Phone/Computer Policy Draft Version. The transition from high school (significantly rule-based) to college is often difficult for students for reasons beyond the greater academic expectations. I have found that the transition to making decisions and being self-sufficient is far more disorienting for our students than even the challenges of college academics.

I have also come across online debates about handling late work from students and even a Tweet about a professor banning students from emailing except for emergencies.

After 31 years of teaching, then, I have been thinking again about how our practice teaches our students who we are and sends lessons that may not be in either our or our students’ best interests. I want here to outline a few of these in order to highlight what has always driven me as a teacher, coach, and parent: Seeking ways in which to avoid practicing what I believe is the greatest failure among adults, hypocrisy—holding children to standards that we ourselves never meet:

  • Let me start with Warner’s topic: cell phones and computers in class. Over my three decades as an educator, I have never attended a meeting with teachers or professors in which all of those attending paid full attention. In recent years, computers and cell phones are always out, and a significant number of teachers and professors are either multi-tasking or simply not paying attention. Thus, instead of imposing rules because I can, I discuss with students how and why their cell phones and laptops can be either productive or distracting in class—and how that is their decision, one that impacts everyone else in the room. I had similar talks with my high school students about needing to leave class to use the bathroom (automatic demerits where I taught, by the way). While teachers and schools are prone to embrace hard-line black-and-white rules, justifying them by invoking the real world, that approach to “rules” is in fact nothing like the real world.
  • The professor banning email from students struck me hard because I not only encourage students to email me, but also give them my cell number and mention texting. In fact, I want communication from my students—and I expect that a significant amount of it will be frustrating (asking me information they should know) and even so-called “disrespectful” (emails with “BTW” and other such text-ese). But I encourage these communications because I seek as many opportunities to teach students as I can, and I also am committed to doing so with patience and affording them the dignity they deserve. I often say in class that they should feel free to say what they want in class, in part so I can warn them never to utter such again, especially in a college classroom.
  • Both of the above, I think, are informed by my greatest pet peeve about (possibly) the most repeated commandment we make to teachers: Don’t be friends with your students. This always baffles and infuriates me because I cannot fathom what there is about friendship that isn’t appropriate for the teacher/student relationship. Kindness? Compassion? Attentiveness? I suspect that this dictum confuses a rightful restriction to the level of intimacy between teacher and student, but I also notice many teachers work so hard to maintain some artificial pose of professional distance between them and their students that all the humanity is drained out of teaching and learning. My students are my friends by default, and I love them. Again, I cannot comprehend how any of that should be avoided.
  • And just to address one practice linked more directly to instruction: How do we treat late work? [1] First, I have already examined high and reasonable expectations for student work—in which I made an important point related to the first bullet above: While editing several scholarly volumes, I have yet to have all work submitted complete and on time by college professors and scholars. In fact, in each situation, a number of the pieces were late (not just one or two) and many had significant citation problems (including not using the requested style sheet) as well as most needing heavy copyediting and feedback. So once again, while meeting deadlines and high-quality work are obviously important to instill in students, both are not as pervasive in the adult world as many teachers model in their classes: “I don’t accept late work,” “Late work starts at a B (or C),” and such. I no longer grade work, but if I did, I would never put a grade on an artifact of learning that didn’t represent the quality of the artifact (and not outside aspects unrelated to that quality). I did include considerations of habitually late work in quarter grades when teaching high school, but the key there was “habitually late,” and the need to address that habit.

Basic human kindness and dignity—these are the lessons I want my students to learn. And I don’t see those lessons in rules, and certainly not embedded in adult hypocrisy. I feel compelled as a teacher to work against both extremes confronted by Paulo Freire:

It is in this sense that both the authoritarian teacher who suffocates the natural curiosity and freedom on the student as well as the teacher who imposes no standards at all are equally disrespectful of an essential characteristic of our humanness, namely, our radical (and assumed) unfinishedness, out of which emerges the possibility of being ethical. (p. 59)

How often under the considerable weight of being a teacher do we bend to the callousness of Mrs. Price (“the authoritarian teacher”) and her ultimate failure—”Because she’s older and the teacher, she’s right and I’m not”—at the expense of a child’s or young adult’s respect or dignity?

How often do we fall victim to what LaBrant confronted: “On the other hand, we should not, under the guise of developing literary standards, merely pass along adult weariness” (p. 276)?

Let us be vigilant in recognizing that our practice is our Selves. Let us seek always to avoid any of our students feeling as Rachel does on her eleventh birthday, a victim of “adult weariness”:

Today I’m eleven. There’s a cake Mama’s making for tonight and when Papa comes home from work we’ll eat it. There’ll be candles and presents and everybody will sing Happy birthday, happy birthday to you, Rachel, only it’s too late.

—

[1] See Late Work: A Constructive Response, Rick Wormeli

Bessie, Democracy, Education, education reform, Gates, Liberal Media, Media, Meritocracy, NPR, Paulo Freire

Cashing in on Journalism’s Neutral Pose

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As I have highlighted several times about how often education journalism fails the democratic goals of both the free press and universal public education, this Tweet from Juana Summers at NPR represents the power of the neutral pose among journalists:

Let me stress here, that this claim is not unique to Summers of NPR, but pervasive throughout media and journalism as the hallmark of “professionalism.” I have been mulling the breezy NPR approach to all topics for some time now, and thus was not surprised to find this piece from 1982, The Tedium Twins, which skewers the exact issue I have confronted over and over:

Trudging back through the “MacNeil/Lehrer” scripts, the hardy reader will soon observe how extraordinarily narrow is the range of opinion canvassed by a show dedicated to dispassionate examination of the issues of the day. The favored blend is usually a couple of congressmen or senators, barking at each other from either side of the fence, corporate chieftains, government executives, ranking lobbyists, and the odd foreign statesman. The mix is ludicrously respectable, almost always heavily establishment in tone. Official spokesmen of trade and interest groups are preferred over people who only have something interesting to say.

As we confront the inherent danger in honoring civility and balance over accuracy and taking evidence-based stances on credibility, we must also admit that the neutral pose is little more than a mask for something pretty insidious: the influence of the powerful and wealthy over what the media covers (and does not cover) and how those topics are framed. To that I invite you to read Mercedes Schneider’s Gates, Other “Philanthropy,” and the Purchase of a Success Narrative, including:

Billionaire Bill Gates funds the media.

This is no surprise to me.

What did surprise me is the discovery that he meets with the media he funds (and others) regularly behind closed doors.

[See also Adam Bessie and Dan Carino’s The Gates Foundation Education Reform Hype Machine and Bizarre Inequality Theory.]

So we are faced with our media and our educators trapped inside demands that they remain neutral, dispassionate, not political. And this is what that has gotten us (despite claims that our free press and public schools are essential to our democracy built on claims of equity and meritocracy), as detailed by Matt Bruenig:

The top 10% of families own 75.3% of the nation’s wealth. The bottom half of families own 1.1% of it. The families squished in between those two groups own 24.6% of the national wealth.

The present wealth distribution is more unequal than it was in 2010, the last year this survey was conducted. Specifically, the top 10% increased their share of the national wealth by 0.8 percentage points between 2010 and 2013. The bottom half and middle 40% saw their share of the national wealth fall by 0.1 and 0.7 percentage points respectively.

Bruenig also highlights that economic inequity in the U.S. is race-based (whites own the U.S.) and that within that white imbalance, there exists another layer of class imbalance:

This means that the top 10% of white families own 65.1% of all the wealth in the nation. The bottom half of white families own just 2% of the national wealth. And the white families in the 50th-90th percentile of white families own 22.9% of the national wealth.

Along the media spectrum from the breezy NPR dispassion (the so-called “Liberal Media”) and the faux “fair and balance” of Fox News (the so-called “Right-wing Media”), we must admit there is little difference in the consequences of any of our media since, as Paulo Freire has warned, all that neutrality is ironically not neutral at all.

As poet Adrienne Rich [1] has confronted:

Universal public education has two possible—and contradictory—missions. One is the development of a literate, articulate, and well-informed citizenry so that the democratic process can continue to evolve and the promise of radical equality can be brought closer to realization. The other is the perpetuation of a class system dividing an elite, nominally “gifted” few, tracked from an early age, from a very large underclass essentially to be written off as alienated from language and science, from poetry and politics, from history and hope—toward low-wage temporary jobs. The second is the direction our society has taken. The results are devastating in terms of the betrayal of a generation of youth. The loss to the whole of society is incalculable. (p. 162)

That second and wrong direction is the result of the neutral pose.

For Further Reading

Universal Public Education—Our (Contradictory) Missions

—

[1] Rich, A. (2001). Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company.

Education

The Conversation UK: Keeping children back a year doesn’t help them read better

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Keeping children back a year doesn’t help them read better — The Conversation UK

NOTE

Grade retention based on high-stakes testing will disproportionately and negatively impact children of color, impoverished children, ELL students, and special needs students.

Grade Retention: U.S.

Third Grade Reading Policies, Rose (2012)

Education in Two Worlds: Follow Up to “50 Myths & Lies,” Gene V. Glass

A second myth we see as dangerous has that quality because of what it reveals about too many of America’s politicians and school leaders: it reveals both their ignorance and their cruelty! This is the myth that leaving a child back in grade who is not doing well academically is good for the child. It provides the child with “the gift of time” to catch up. We believe that only ignorant and cruel people would support such a policy, although it is law in about a dozen states, including Arizona and Florida. First of all, a large and quite consistent set of research studies, many of excellent quality, point out that for the vast majority of the children retention in grade has either no benefit, or is detrimental. Only rarely does retention benefit the child who was left back. So the research overwhelming suggests that those who recommend retention are likely to be ignorant. Second, an important piece of the rationale for retention policies is that if you cannot read well by third grade you are more likely to be a school failure. But reading expert Stephen Krashen disputes this, citing research on 12 young students with serious reading problems, dyslexics all. Eleven of the twelve did not learn to read well until they were between 10 and 12 years of age, and one did not learn to read until he was in 12th grade. Among these slow learners, all of whom would have been left back in Florida and Arizona, were nine who published creative scholarly works, and one who became a Nobel laureate. So not doing well by third grade does not determine one’s destiny. Third, the research informs us that retention policies are disproportionately directed at those who are poor, male, English language learners, and children of color. Middle class white children are rarely left back. Fourth, a retention decision changes family dynamics. Parents and siblings change in their treatment of, and aspirations for, the child identified by the school as having “flunked.” Of course, the schools do not say a child is dumb. Instead they offer the children and the families “the gift of time” to catch up. But the world interprets that gift more cruelly. Fifth, being left back is associated with much higher rates of dropping out before completion of high school. Thus, the social costs of this policy go way up since these children are more likely to need assistance in living because of poor wage earning capacity, and there is also the greater likelihood of a higher incarceration rate for people that do not finish school and cannot find decent work. Sixth, when surveyed, children left back say it feels as bad as losing a parent or going blind. It is an overwhelmingly negative event in the lives of the vast majority of the retained children, so leaving them back is cruel as well as a reflection of the ignorance of those who promote these policies. Seventh, and finally, the same costs expended for an extra year of education for the child who is held back, say eight thousand dollars, could more profitably be spent on a more beneficial treatment than repetition of a grade. A certified reading specialist, working twice a week as a tutor throughout the school year and for some part of the summer, would have greater success in improving a child’s academic performance. There is no more powerful treatment than tutoring, and in this case it is cheaper and more humane than is flunking a child. For the seven reasons given, we can think of no education policy that reflects worse on America’s politicians and educators than the policy of retaining students in grade.

Hold Back to Move Forward? Early Grade Retention and Student Misbehavior, Umut Özek

Test-based accountability has become the new norm in public education over the last decade. In many states and school districts nation-wide, student performance in standardized tests plays an important role in high-stakes decisions such as grade retention. This study examines the effects of grade retention on student misbehavior in Florida, which requires students with reading skills below grade level to be retained in the 3rd grade. The regression discontinuity estimates suggest that grade retention increases the likelihood of disciplinary incidents and suspensions in the years that follow. The findings also suggest that these adverse effects are concentrated among economically disadvantaged students

Retaining Students in Grade A Literature Review of the Effects of Retention on Students’ Academic and Nonacademic Outcomes, Nailing Xia, Sheila Nataraj Kirby (2009)

Our review of these 91 studies indicates that grade retention is associated with gender, race, SES, age for grade, student mobility, family and parental characteristics, prior academic achievement, prior behavioral and socioemotional development, and student health. Converging evidence suggests that grade retention alone is not an effective intervention strategy for improving academic and longer-term life outcomes. In general, retention does not appear to benefit students academically. Although some studies have found academic improvement in the immediate years after retention, these gains are usually short-lived and tend to fade over time. Past research has consistently shown that retained students are at significantly increased risk of dropping out of school. Although only a few studies have examined the effects of retention on postsecondary outcomes, the available evidence suggests negative effects on enrollment in postsecondary education and on employment outcomes in adulthood. Overall, the literature indicates mixed findings on attitudinal, socioemotional, and behavioral outcomes among the retained students….Our review found fruitful avenues of research, most notably the impact of supportive interventions (such as early identification of at-risk students, academic instructional services provided in and out of school, and different types of intervention strategies) on proximal and future student outcomes.

The Spillover Effects of Grade-Retained Classmates: Evidence from Urban Elementary Schools, Michael A. Gottfired, American Journal of Education 119 (May 2013)

Retention, Social Promotion, and Academic Redshirting: What Do We Know and Need to Know?, Nancy Frey, Remedial and Special Education, volume 26, number 6, November/December 2005, pages 332-346

The evidence gathered in the last 30 years on the practice of retention suggests that it is academically ineffective and is potentially detrimental to children’s social and emotional health. The seeds of failure may be sown early for students who are retained, as they are significantly more likely to drop out of high school. Furthermore, the trajectory of adverse outcomes appears to continue into young adulthood, when wages and postsecondary educational opportunities are depressed.

Dropout Rates after High-Stakes Testing in Elementary School: A Study of the Contradictory Effects of Chicago’s Efforts to End Social Promotion, Elaine M. Allensworth, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter, 2005), pp. 341-364

Alternative to Grade Retention, Jimerson, Pletcher, and Kerr (2005)

Given the accumulating evidence that grade retention is an ineffective and possibly harmful intervention, it is imperative that school administrators advocate for “promotion plus” policies that depend on effective, evidence-based interventions. The issue for secondary school educators is twofold. Not only must educators determine whether retention is appropriate for a given student, they also need to address the negative academic, social, and emotional consequences for students who were retained in earlier grades. Very often the student’s original difficulties persist, or more likely worsen, as their school career progresses.

Winning the Battle and Losing the War, Jimerson, Anderson, and Whipple (Psychology in the Schools, Vol. 39(4), 2002)

Considering the results of this review of research examining the association between grade retention and high school dropout and other reviews of research addressing the efficacy of grade retention (Holmes, 1989; Jimerson, 2001a, 2001b; Smith & Shepard, 1987, 1988), we must move beyond the use of grade retention as an intervention strategy and attempt to implement those strategies research has demonstrated to be effective (Jimerson, 2001a). Educational professionals, researchers, parents, and policymakers would be remiss to overlook the implications of research that demonstrate the association between grade retention and school dropout. Furthermore, a new imperative has emerged, where the onus is on programs training future educational professionals to disseminate the results of the recent research presented in this review. It is crucial that we transcend limited solutions and begin to consider student developmental and achievement trajectories in order to reinforce and strengthen pathways that promote social and cognitive competence and lead to academic success.

Does Retention (Repeating a Grade) Help Struggling Learners?

Some stakeholders in Florida believe that the “hard line in the sand” created by mandatory, test-based retention created a motivational difference in teachers and parents…, since it is thought that many of the same learning supports were being provided to struggling students prior to the policy. This may be the case for test score gains close to the retention year, but given the well-known longer-term negative effect of retention on drop-out rates (e.g., Allensworth, 2005) as well as the assured delayed entry into the workforce, Florida’s evidence falls far short of even suggesting that retention is the only or best way to motivate a real positive difference for struggling students, nor has it contradicted the overwhelming evidence against retention prior and since.

What Doesn’t Work, Smith and Shepard (Phi Delta Kappan, October 1987)

The Lesson of the Cupcakes: Fixing Schools by Resisting Gimmicks and Heeding Evidence, Kevin Welner

Exploring the Association Between Grade Retention and Dropout, Jimerson, et al. (The California School Psychologist, Vol. 7, pp. 51-62, 2002)

Ultimately, the research is unequivocal in identifying that grade retention does not appear to address the needs of these students at risk of academic failure. Findings from this study should not be misinterpreted as an indication that retention was an effective intervention strategy for the retained students who did not drop out of high school. There is a need for further research comparing the retained students who completed high school with matched comparison groups of similarly low achieving but socially promoted students. This study highlights the association of early socio-emotional and behavioral adjustment and high school dropout among a group of retained students. These findings have direct implications for school psychologists and other educational professionals. In particular, rather than focusing on the unsupported academic intervention of grade retention, it is time to implement prevention and intervention programs that have been empirically demonstrated to meet the needs of these students in facilitating both positive academic success and socio-emotional adjustment.

Grade Retention: A Flawed Education Strategy, Xia and Glennia (part 1)

Decades of research suggest that grade retention does not work as a panacea for poor student performance. The majority of research fails to find compelling evidence that retention improves long-term student achievement. An overwhelmingly large body of studies have consistently demonstrated negative academic effects of retention. Contrary to popular belief, researchers have almost unanimously found that early retention during kindergarten to grade three is harmful, both academically and emotionally. [2] Many studies find that retention does not necessarily lead to increased work effort among students as predicted.

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Grade Retention, Xia and Glennia (part 2)

Grade Retention: The Gap Between Research and Practice, Xia and Glennia (part 3)

The majority of published studies and decades of research indicate that there is usually little to be gained, and much harm that may be done through retaining students in grade. Yet, many educators continue to use retention as a way to improve student achievement and claim that it produces positive results. The consequence is while a growing body of studies show that retention does not improve academic performance and has a number of negative side effects, more and more states and school districts have adopted retention policy in an effort to enhance the educational accountability.

Synthesis of Research on Grade Retention, Shepard and Smith (Educational Leadership, May 1990)

Grade Retention [a synthesis]

Social Promotion – In Comparison to Grade Retention, Advantages and Disadvantages, Different Perspectives, Jere Brophy

Meta-analysis of Grade Retention Research: Implications for Practice in the 21st Century, Shane R. Jimerson (School Psychology Review, 2001, Volume 30, No. 3, pp. 420-437)

A Synthesis of Grade Retention Research: Looking Backward and Moving Forward, Shane R. Jimerson (The California School Psychologist, Vol. 6, pp. 47-59, 2001)

In looking backwards at the retention research and previous reviews and meta-analyses, a consistent theme emerges—grade retention is not an empirically supported intervention. As reflected in the results of the three meta-analyses described above, the confluence of results from research during the past century fails to demonstrate achievement, socioemotional, or behavioral advantages of retaining students. Moreover, the research consistently demonstrates that students who are retained are more likely to drop out of high school.

Evaluating Kindergarten Retention Policy, Hong and Raudenbush (September 2006)

First, Do No Harm, Jay P. Heubert (Educational Leadership, December 2002/January 2003)

The Facts on Education: Should Students Be Allowed to Fail Grades?

Holding Kids Back Doesn’t Help Them, Deborah Stipek and Michael Lombardo

Grade Retention and Social Promotion, National Association of School Psychologists

For children experiencing academic, emotional, or behavioral difficulties, neither repeating the same instruction another year nor promoting the student to the next grade is an effective remedy. (p. 5)

Grade Retention: International

Early Academic Performance, Grade Repetition, and School Attainment in Senegal: A Panel Data Analysis (Senegal)

Grade retention and educational attainment (Belgium)

Grade retention and its association with school misconduct in adolescence (Flemish)

This study represents one of the few to investigate the effect of grade retention on students’ school-disruptive behavior in adolescence. It is unique in addressing multilevel issues in this line of research. First, it has shown that it is important to distinguish grade retention at different educational levels. While we find evidence that primary school retention may be associated with less misconduct in adolescence, we establish that secondary school retention may give rise to deviance in adolescence. Moreover, we address the important role of schools’ retention composition, finding that students attending schools with more retainees are more likely to be deviant, although this composition does moderate negative retention effects. Together with previous literature on the effectiveness of grade retention, we advocate the abandonment of this intervention, especially at the secondary level.

See Demanet and Van Houtte’s cites:

In many countries, the practice of grade retention is widespread (Switzerland: Bonvin, Bless, & Schuepbach, 2008; Germany:  Ehmke, Drechsel, & Carstensen, 2010; US:  Jimerson, 2001; Lorence & Dworkin, 2006; Canada:  Pagani, Tremblay, Vitaro, Boulerice, & McDuff, 2001; Belgium:  Juchtmans et al., 2011; Van Petegem & Schuermans, 2005). Proponents believe that giving students ‘‘the gift of time’’ will put them back on track for normal educational growth. Ensuing the popularity of this strategy, a rich body of research has developed to test its effectiveness. The practice has some positive effects on students’ cognitive growth (Alexander, Entwisle, & Dauber, 1994), but these remain mainly short term (Jimerson & Ferguson, 2007; Meisels & Liaw, 1993) and occur only when special help is provided to retained children. In fact, in recent decades many studies have condemned grade retention as an ineffective practice to improve student learning (see, e.g., Bonvin et al., 2008; Jimerson, 2001; McCoy & Reynolds, 1999; Pagani et al., 2001).

Relation of Academic History and Demographic Variables to Grade Retention in Lebanon

 

Critical Pedagogy, Education, education reform, Lou LaBrant, Paulo Freire

Beyond Caricatures: On Dewey, Freire, and Direct Instruction (Again)

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A former colleague while we both taught high school in rural South Carolina, Ed Welchel, and I addressed [1] the continuing importance of both John Dewey and Paulo Freire, despite the decrease in requirements for education philosophy in certification and degree programs, in “The Practitioner Has No Clothes: Resisting Practice Divorced from Philosophy in Teacher Education and the Classroom” for Kincheloe and Hewitt’s Regenerating the Philosophy of Education.

While Dewey (Progressivism) and Freire (Critical Pedagogy) share significance for how we should implement universal public education, they also share a pattern of being discounted and discredited through caricature more often than through valid criticisms of their faults.

I have noted several times the work of Lou LaBrant, who I would identify as a “true” progressive, specifically her own efforts to unmask misguided and mislabeled progressive practices (see “Masquerading”). LaBrant’s work and career help expose (i) that progressive claims have often been misrepresentative of progressivism and Dewey and (ii) that some progressives (LaBrant) offer more accurate representations of just what being a progressive educator looks like in the real-world classroom.

Complicating the matter is the century-plus struggle to reform education, which I have represented as four competing arenas (also well teased out by Jack Hassard):

Education reform camps fall into two broad categories—Mainstream and Radical—with two divisions within each broad category: Mainstream Reform includes bureaucratic reformers and technocratic reformers; Radical Reform includes libertarian reformers and critical reformers.

Whether debates are addressing Dewey/progressives or Freire/critical educators, the issues tend to focus on the role of the student, the role of the teacher, the nature of curriculum, and the nature of instruction.

As a thirty-plus year educator who has worked through my progressive stage and settled solidly into critical pedagogy, I want to highlight the central misrepresentations of Freire with the following excerpt from the co-authored chapter noted above:

“My theoretical explanation of such practice ought to be also a concrete and practical demonstration of what I am saying,” Freire (1998) explains, thus connecting the philosophical with the practical (p. 49). Without a careful consideration of what we believe about teaching and learning, we are ill equipped to measure what we do with any precision, a precision unlike the traditional view of the term (not mechanistic quantification, but holding the real against the ideal as an act of qualitative validity). Teaching and our classrooms, then, must be “something witnessed, lived” (Freire, p. 49).

The progressive challenge that pushed against the traditional and mechanistic assumptions of teaching and learning offers practitioners a consideration of alternative views of education, but without a critical perspective, practitioners are left vulnerable to a dualistic and thus incomplete understanding of a classroom that creates the conditions necessary for the pursuit of democracy and freedom. Here, we find the necessity for the critical perspective that becomes a way of being, one that is “ethical” as teaching and learning are acts of empowerment—“to ‘spiritualize’ the world, to make it either beautiful or ugly” (Freire, 1998, p. 53).

The most damning result of either/or thinking is believing, falsely, that classrooms must be either authoritarian or chaotic. Freire (1998) explains the critical alternative:

“It is in this sense that both the authoritarian teacher who suffocates the natural curiosity and freedom on the student as well as the teacher who imposes no standards at all are equally disrespectful of an essential characteristic of our humanness, namely, our radical (and assumed) unfinishedness, out of which emerges the possibility of being ethical.” (p. 59)

The empowering classroom is far more complex than any either/or dynamic as such dynamics oversimplify and necessarily distort human endeavors (Kohn, 1993). But it is Freire’s recognition “of being ethical” that poses the greatest argument for the need to explore philosophy fully and rigorously.

A wrestling with the ethical implications of teaching and learning exposes “the dilemma arising from the tension between authority and freedom. And we invariably confuse authority and authoritarianism, freedom and license” (Freire, 1998, p. 60). And this, I believe, is the crux of why practitioners balk at any pursuits they deem impractical. They are trapped by the false dichotomy of what a classroom can be, primarily because they themselves have experienced and excelled in those exact settings that critical pedagogy challenges for being mechanistic and oppressive. When practitioners call for “practical” over “philosophical,” that call is masking a fear of deconstructing the exact assumptions that housed their own success as students—and often their own physical and psychological safety as professionals.

The practical becomes in effect a perpetuation of the status quo, a fixed thing. A philosophical perspective, one augmented with a critical lens, however, is an embracing of a state of flux: “This permanent movement of searching creates a capacity for learning not only in order to adapt to the world but especially to intervene, to re-create, and to transform it” (Freire, 1998, p. 66). With the practical, we have a sense of security; with the theoretical, a sense of risk. The classroom that seeks and embraces risk is a classroom that confronts authority; thus, the practitioner trapped by dualistic assumptions believes confronting authority can only lead to chaos. Without a critical perspective, the practitioner is left without the possibility of authoritative (instead of authoritarian), without the possibility of freedom (without slipping into license).

Classrooms guided by practitioners who have ignored a careful consideration of philosophy—of progressivism and critical pedagogy—slip into an authoritarian, and thus oppressive, dynamic that contradicts democratic ideals by silencing students. The mechanistic assumptions of these classrooms embrace a traditional view of objectivity as both attainable and preferable to the contextual arguments made by critical pedagogy: Freire (1998) maintains “that the school. . .cannot abstract itself from the sociocultural and economic conditions of its students, their families, and their communities” (p. 62). Education without a rich philosophical understanding embraces a clinical view of humanity—oppressive in its narrow view of “scientific.” [2]

And thus we come to some clarifications:

  • Progressive educators and critical educators—while embracing many overlapping concerns, beliefs, and practices—are not the same as unschoolers, exsitential educators, and “naturalist” educators.
  • For critical educators, a teacher seeks to serve as teacher/student while a student serves as student/teacher. Key here is where authority lies (not that it is absent). Authority for a teacher should grow from that teacher’s expertise, and not primarily or solely from that teacher’s status as “teacher.” Critical educators are skeptical of authoritarianism, but embrace their authoritative status.
  • Progressive and critical educators do not reject direct instruction, but are skeptical of direct instruction that is isolated and determined for students without any evidence of student need/interest or input. Again, the problem is isolated direct instruction, and the question is not if we use direct instruction, but when, how, and why. (Read carefully again the quote from Freire [1998], p. 59.)

So rejecting Dewey/progressivism or Freire/critical pedagogy with caricatures ignores the need to criticize both on substantive grounds (bell hooks has taken Freire to task well, and Lisa Delpit has dismantled failed progressivism, for example) while also perpetuating a reality that I find most troubling: Neither progressivism nor critical pedagogy has ever had any real and substantial place in U.S. public education.

The irony of this is that those who are most apt to criticize both progressivism and critical pedagogy by relentlessly calling U.S. public education a failure are in fact criticizing the policies and ideologies they claim will “reform” schools because those classrooms have been dominated by transmissional practices, content- and teacher-centered commitments, and technocratic policies driven by prescriptive standards/curriculum and high-stakes testing.

I end, then, with the final paragraphs in the essay excerpted above:

The empowered student necessarily requires the classroom offered by the empowered teacher. Any who teaches must first work through the philosophical evolution that Dewey and Freire represent—as well as continuing beyond the possibilities offered by Dewey’s progressivism and Freire’s critical pedagogy. The pursuit of an educational philosophy, then, is a journey that inseparable from being a practitioner—not something we “finish” in undergraduate courses and then mindlessly build upon.

Choosing between the status quo (norms and traditions) and progressive as well as critical possibilities is a choice between the moribund and the fecund. Norms and traditions are moribund—but the mind requires the fecund classroom that works against norms and traditions (thus progressive and critical) instead of bowing mindlessly to them. Philosophy is not something merely academic, something that wastes a teacher’s time better spent on the practical. Again, as Freire (1998) argues, “Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply ‘blah, bah, blah,’ and practice, pure activism” (p. 30). The soul of teaching, then, is an act of the mind and the heart that rises above the limitations falsely separating theory from practice.

[1] Co-authored with Welchel, E. (2011). The practitioner has no clothes: Resisting practice divorced from philosophy in teacher education and the classroom. In Eds. J. Kincheloe & R. Hewitt, Regenerating the philosophy of education: Whatever happened to soul (pp. 43-54). New York: Peter Lang USA.

[2] See Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. (Trans.) P. Clarke. New York: Rowman & Littlefield;

Kohn, A. (1993, September). Choices for children: Why and how to let students decide. Phi Delta Kappan. Retrieved from http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/cfc.htm

Education, Workers

On Labor Day 2014

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