Page 25 - Beyond Methods

Conceptualizing teaching acts 13
• Third, in spite of its expressed dislike for the teachers’ excessive reliance on established professional wisdom, the movement con- tributed very little to change it.
Out of these and other concerns has emerged the concept of teachers as transformative intellectuals.
Teachers as Transformative Intellectuals
The idea of teachers as transformative intellectuals is derived mainly from the works of a particular group of educationists called critical pedagogists. They include general educationists such as Henry Giroux (1988), Peter McLaren (1995), and Roger Simon (1987), and language teaching professionals such as Elsa Auerbach (1995), Sarah Benesch (2001), and Alastair Pennycook (2001). All of them are heavily influenced by the educational philosophy of the Brazil- ian thinker Paulo Freire. Through a quarter century of writings rang- ing from Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) to Pedagogy of the Heart, published posthumously in 1998, Freire tirelessly espoused the cause of sociopolitical emancipation and individual empowerment through the democratic process of education.
Following Freire’s philosophy, critical pedagogists believe that pedagogy, any pedagogy, is embedded in relations of power and dom- inance, and is employed to create and sustain social inequalities. For them, schools and colleges are not simply instructional sites; they are, in fact, “cultural arenas where heterogeneous ideological, discursive, and social forms collide in an unremitting struggle for dominance” (McLaren, 1995, p. 30). Classroom reality is socially constructed and historically determined. What is therefore re- quired to challenge the social and historical forces is a pedagogy that empowers teachers and learners. Such a pedagogy would take seriously the lived experiences that teachers and learners bring to the educational setting.
Critical pedagogists view teachers as “professionals who are able and willing to reflect upon the ideological principles that in- form their practice, who connect pedagogical theory and practice to wider social issues, and who work together to share ideas, exer- cise power over the conditions of their labor, and embody in their teaching a vision of a better and more humane life” (Giroux and McLaren, 1989, p. xxiii). In order to reflect such a radical role as- signed to teachers, Giroux characterized them as “transformative