Page 26 - Beyond Methods

14 Conceptualizing teaching acts
intellectuals.” In his 1988 book Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning, Giroux points to “the role that teach- ers and administrators might play as transformative intellectuals who develop counterhegemonic pedagogies that not only empower students by giving them the knowledge and social skills they will need to be able to function in the larger society as critical agents, but also educate them for transformative action” (Giroux, 1988, p. xxxiii).
By requiring teachers to be sociopolitically conscious and to be assertive in acting upon their sociopolitical consciousness, the con- cept of teachers as transformative intellectuals stretches their role beyond the borders of the classroom. As transformative intellectu- als, teachers are engaged in a dual task: they strive not only for ed- ucational advancement but also for personal transformation.
To achieve educational advancement, they try to organize them- selves as a community of educators dedicated to the creation and implementation of forms of knowledge that are relevant to their specific contexts and to construct curricula and syllabi around their own and their students’ needs, wants, and situations. Such a task makes it imperative for them to maximize sociopolitical awareness among their learners using consciousness-raising, problem-posing activities.
To achieve personal transformation, they try to educate them- selves and their students about various forms of inequality and in- justice in the wider society and to address and redress them in pur- poseful and peaceful ways. The dual role, thus, requires teachers to view pedagogy not merely as a mechanism for maximizing learning opportunities in the classroom but also as a means for transform- ing life in and outside the classroom.
What exactly do transformative teachers do? Using a related term, postformal teachers, to refer to teachers as transformative in- tellectuals, Joe Kincheloe (1993, pp. 201–3) summarizes their teach- ing as:
• inquiryoriented:teacherscultivateandextendresearchskillsthat help them and their students to explore problems they them- selves have posed about life in and outside the classroom;
• socially contextualized: aware of the sociohistorical context and the power dimensions that have helped shape it, teachers always monitor and respond to its effect on themselves, their students, and the social fabric;