Building students’ voices through critical pedagogy: braiding paths towards the other

Colomb. Appl. Linguist. J., 2010 vol:12 nro:2 pág:55-71

Research Articles

Building Students’ Voices through Critical Pedagogy: Braiding Paths towards the Other

Construcción de las voces de los estudiantes a través de la pedagogía crítica: trenzando caminos hacia el otro.

Silvia Patricia Umbarila Gómez

Academic Coordinator Colegio Colombia Viva IED, Bogotá, Colombia E-mail: silvipato@yahoo.es

Abstract

This study attempts to promote social reflection and cultural recognition in the multicultural scenario of the classroom. This is a qualitative study carried out with ninth grade students at a public school in Bogotá. The main objective is enrolling the students in critical pedagogy practices that allow them the construction of the sense of Other. The experience was implemented through the students’ exposure to authentic historical facts in which they acquired knowledge about social, political, and cultural issues. This exposure then encouraged reflection during the classes, empowering the students with a voice to refuse and denounce. Students’ voices were identified and interpreted through the instruments used, video recordings and artifacts. The results highlighted the importance of giving students a voice that enriches their role as citizens in terms of their responsibility and commitment towards Others.

Resumen

Este estudio pretende promover la reflexión social y el reconocimiento cultural en el escenario multicultural del salón de clases. Este es un estudio cualitativo se llevó a cabo con estudiantes de noveno grado de un colegio público de Bogotá. El objetivo principal es involucrar a los estudiantes en prácticas de pedagogía crítica que les permita la construcción del sentido del Otro. La experiencia se implementó con la exposición de los estudiantes a hechos históricos, en los que adquirieron conocimiento de los aspectos sociales, políticos y culturales. Dicha exposición animó la reflexión durante las clases, dándoles el empoderamiento de tener voz para rechazar y denunciar. Entonces, las voces de los estudiantes se identificaron e interpretaron a través de los instrumentos usados: grabaciones de video y producciones escritas de los estudiantes Los resultados resaltaron la importancia de dar a los estudiantes una voz que enriquezca su rol como ciudadanos en términos de su responsabilidad y compromiso hacia los Otros.

Palabras clave: Pedagogía crítica, Otredad, voz, culturas oprimidas, culturas dominantes, multiculturalidad, discriminación, empoderamiento.

Introduction

As a teacher in a public school in Bogota, Colombia, I have become familiar with the difficult living conditions faced by the less privileged class. A considerable number of students from public schools have dysfunctional families in which they have neither a father nor a mother figure. Some of them are from different regions of Colombia, and most of this percentage are from rural regions. They arrived in the city because their parents were unemployed or displaced. Thus, these students have suffered the consequences of the violence in our country. Another relevant issue is that the local context in which the students are immersed obligates them to follow the rules “imposed” by the prevailing subcultures, especially some subculture gangs. Most of them live subordinated to these rules and to the social relations imposed by these subculture gangs. In fact, a certain number of the problems that students stir up in the school are caused from situations derived from the neighborhood. Therefore, some of them were very aggressive as a way to exert their power over their peers, and others become victims of the bullying.

Students from public schools are immersed in permanent struggles of power in their relationships. They represent the existence of social inequity, injustice, discrimination, and disempowerment. These are consequences of the lack of opportunities and the existing social differences in the context in which they live. The students, along with their families, struggle day after day with a lack of work, food, medical care, and free time to develop as an individual. This current situation provokes in the learners unpredictable responses that affect their relationships. In this sense, I have identified through class observations that students experience isolation and voicelessness in their relations with others including: with their teachers and parents as dominant figures and with their peers in their competition with each other.

By implementing critical pedagogical practices learners are enabled to ask questions about aspects of the dominant culture. They examine the surrounding power structures of the dominant societies through history, and learn how sometimes these kinds of power structures are reproduced when a person assumes the role of the prevailing culture. Moreover, students analyze critically why they have no voice in their relationships in the society and why they may have feelings of isolation and powerlessness.

Also, students are between the adults’ alienation and their own competition as peers. They feel isolated as a class and as monadic individuals. They need to question the social, economic, and cultural issues surrounding their relationships and understand why they feel as they do. Then, students are provided with ways of analyzing their own histories and the cultural politics in which they are embedded.

Under this perspective, the focus of this qualitative study relies on analyzing the voices that ninth graders build at a public school in Bogota when they are engaged in living and in studying historical, social, political, and cultural issues. In this sense, Critical Pedagogy (McLaren, 2003) would be the tool to prepare students to be critical agents of transformation in their own lives, as well as allow them to act on the larger social and political struggle rather than be voiceless and passive citizens.

Within this framework, students are invited to analyze critically the reasons behind the maintenance of some of these practices through the years. In this way, teachers can help students understand how coercive relations of power limit the opportunities for educational, social, and cultural advancement in subjugated groups and, to discover their voices that have been silenced in order to empower their role of becoming patriotic and responsible citizens to transform the statusquo.

Braiding the Path to Critical Pedagogy

Critical Pedagogy is a natural response to current human conditions (Wink, 2005). Throughout human history the search for new unexplored boundaries, new territories, and new possibilities has been a constant goal and freedom has been the principle that guides this goal.

I believe that school is one of the most important institutions through which students can enrich themselves. Critical Pedagogy is a natural response to the human condition that considers the school as the site to save society from catastrophe. As McLaren (2003) states “schools should be sites for social transformation and emancipation, places where students are educated not only to be critical thinkers, but also to view the world as a place where their actions might make the difference” (p. 187).

Therefore, critical pedagogy identifies empowerment as one of its most important tenets and the way to make the values of justice, social responsibility, acceptance, recognition, and respect concrete. (McLaren, 2003, p. 211) Thus, a critical educator is committed to empower the powerless. In this regard, empowerment is the choice for vulnerable and voiceless communities in order to enable them with knowledge and arguments so they can be more critical and aware of their own and Others’ reality.

Any teaching process is affected by political, cultural, economical, historical, and ethical concerns, among other aspects. With these ideas in mind, we as teachers have the obligation to promote reflection and dialogue about issues concerning inequities in order to raise our students’ awareness towards social injustice, especially in Colombia. Students had the opportunity to acquire critical knowledge about class division and power relations to bring the theory into practice as the means to interrogate, identify, and occupy a place in the world, which addresses the next construct, voice.

Finding the Students’ Voice

From a socio-cultural perspective, Lee (2000) has asserted that “language serves as a conceptual organizer, primary medium through which thinking occurs” (p. 192). Language creates the means by which we interpret, think, and read the world. This is the relation between language and thought, which is not static, as Wink (2005) has stated: “as words develop, thought develops; and as thought gradually develops, the words change with the emerging ideas” (p. 31).

With this idea in mind, language is the only means by which students develop their own voice; at the same time, it is through voice that language becomes concrete. Giroux has stated that voice “refers to the multifaceted and interlocking set of meanings through which students actively engage in a dialogue with one another” (cited in McLaren, 2003, p. 245).

Once students know, analyze, and are sensible towards Others’ suffering they can reflect upon the power relations that dominate this suffering. It is a commitment in terms of provoking responses to ideas, behaviors, actions, and perspectives and favoring cultural and social reconciliation in honor of justice and truth, which are concerned with the next construct: Otherness. It represents the hope of change.

Voicing the Otherness

The term Otherness has been used to understand the processes by which some cultures have excluded Others or subordinated them. In this sense, Otherness gives accounts of aspects such as identity and the role that some people assume in relation to others’ acceptance. Otherness comes from the German word alter. It was established by Emmanuel Levinas (1974) in a series of essays collected under the title Alterity and Transcendence (cited in Bergo, 2007).

The Other is a philosophical concept to define a person who is other than oneself, as opposed to the same. The term has been associated predominantly with disempowered people; for this reason, it is a necessary concept when we study cultural difference. The term Other is usually capitalized. The use of the capital O originated in the writings of Lacan (n.d.). His use of the term establishes distinction from other (with small o) from Other (with capital O). The former Lacan’s use came from post-colonial theory in which other refers to the marginalized people identified by their difference from the central power. The latter has been called the great Other by Lacan (n.d.), in whose gaze the Other gains identity and could be next to the central power.

The face-to-face encounter with the Other is called the Visage (Eskin, 2000) and implies being conscious that the Other is different from me. We are equals in our nature but different in our vision of the world. But understanding the Visage concept requires the ability to be able to hear the Other, as it is possible that the Others have already spoken to us but we have not heard them; and most important, the Other demands from me a responsibility. Responsibility is the answer to the call of the Other.

To be able to accept, respect, and admire differences in Others, students need to recognize what they like and value in themselves and to feel secure in their own identity while becoming sensitive to Others’. The first way in Others recognition is by being compassionate with the Other. This compassion is not understood as feeling pity, but as stepping into somebody else’s shoes, as Marcuse mentioned: “Look, I know wherein our most basic value judgments are rooted-in compassion, in our sense for the suffering of Others” (as cited in Pennycook, 2001, p. 7).

Habermas (1989) made use of the concept of Other in the communicative action which references that all human actions are validated through the moral norms which derive from the recognition of the acting subjects. From this perspective, he considers the importance of the formation of the Other. In this respect he identifies two processes: individuality and individuation. The former process identifies self-comprehension from the relation of a second person. It is an inter-subjective relation: I-you. The latter concept refers to the unique character of the person within the communicative community (as cited in Magendzo, 2007, p. 2).

Since the middle of the 1980’s, the work on human rights education in Latin American has dealt with a focus on the concept of Otherness. Precisely, Magendzo (2007) has guided this work towards Otherness in the formation of the participative citizenship in which a sense of responsibility and interest in public matters are requirements.

Just as important, this research study provides a strong foundation upon which students can build a sense of the Other. The reflection toward the issues of inequity and social injustice help raise students awareness in regards to the Others’ existence that allow them firstly, to understand their own personal experiences in a way that develops resiliency to assume human beings’ difficult situations and secondly, students recognized their role as citizens who observe differences and social problems as more than simple circumstances or isolated facts.

Methodology

This qualitative study focuses on students’ points of view and their analyses of the situations as connected to their reality. It aims at responding to the research questions: What voices do ninth graders build in their English class when addressing historical, social, political, and cultural issues? What is the role of the learners’ voices in their construction of Otherness?

In the study students account for their analysis of the world by means of a particular use of language. For this reason the study also includes a critical perspective which implies a constant reflection to describe the reality of classes through the use of video recordings that focus on the interaction between students and teacher. The students were video recorded during the class dialogue generated from the discussions of each one of the episodes composing the intervention plan. In this way, video recordings became an important source for analyzing and describing the process through which students could express their voices and achieve their sense of Otherness. In order to go more indepth in the exploration of the data collected I used students’ artifacts.

Students’ artifacts were used to track the progess of the students’ voice constructed towards the issues addressed. These were mainly workshops in which the instructional method was implemented: These artifacts were developed at the end of each of the episodes.

Context

This research study was carried out at a public school located in the northwest of Bogota, Colombia. Participants selected for this purpose were students in ninth grade. The class consisted of 45 students whose ages ranged from fourteen to seventeen years old.

The pedagogical activities of the intervention plan were organized according to the texts that were to be analyzed during English classes. These activities were named “episodes”. Table 1 illustrates the episodes implemented in this research experience.

Each episode interrogated students’ prior conceptions and generated knowledge through specific activities that developed a view of world which is not ethnocentric. These activities were designed following the instructional method selected.

Dialogue played an important role in engaging learners as active participants in their learning process. Wink (2005) defines dialogue as: “communication that creates and recreates multiple understandings. It moves its participants along the learning curve to that uncomfortable place of relearning and unlearning. It can move people to wonderful new levels of knowledge; it can transform relations; it can change things” (p. 42).

The Instructional Method

Language teaching from Critical Pedagogy requires a methodology that involves questioning assumptions, beliefs, and values and considering multiple points of view in order to make possible a more inclusive world where individuals act upon their convictions. With the purpose of prompting the dialogue in each one of the episodes of the instructional design, the Creative Reading Method by Alma Flor Ada’s (1988) was applied; it combines real life situations and students’ experiences. This instructional method consolidates an integrated model in which learners’ knowledge is taken into account in foreign language learning by discussion and debate concerning the social, historical, and cultural issues immersed in each one of the episodes of the instructional design. Ada (1988) organizes her method into phases in order to give an idea of the different purpose of each phase.

First, the Descriptive Phase is used to ascertain the comprehension of the text and its concepts. Ada (1988) pointed out that “these are the types of questions for which answers can be found.” (p.100) Initially, the texts were analyzed and discussed focusing on a literal reading with questions like where, when, and how some facts happened. These questions allowed the learners a global comprehension of the events that occurred in the texts.

Second, the Personal Interpretive Phase invited the students to deepen their analysis of the texts by grounding the knowledge in the personal and collective students’ voices constructed through the discussions. Initially, the students have a moment to interact individually with the texts, and then they engage in a dialogue among the class group, bringing in their own personal experiences. Ada (1988) stated “students are encouraged to relate it [the text] to their own experiences and feelings” (cited in Cummins, p.1)

Third, the Critical Multicultural Anti-Bias Phase is used to promote critical reflection and anti-bias awareness. Ada (1988) has expressed: “as they gain the power to think through issues that affect their lives, they simultaneously gain the power to resist external definitions of who they are and to deconstruct the sociopolitical purposes of such external definitions” (cited in Cummins, p.2) Here, the students were encouraged to assume positions towards the texts. This phase prepared students to assume a self-definition in regards to the construction of the concept of Otherness.

Fourth, the Creative Phase is used to promote transformative attitudes. The learners critically analyze causes and possible solutions. Ada (1988) has mentioned: “This phase can be seen as extending the process of comprehension insofar as when we act to transform aspects of our social realities we gain a deeper understanding of those realities” (cited in Cummins p.2). The student’s voices bear the concrete actions that they decided to highlight from the issues discussed. During this phase they acted in the real world which empowered them to challenge relations of power existence in the society. Thus, in this research experience students generated interpretations and analyses of what is behind power relationships as a way to understand the political, social, and economic issues that exist in the world. They also analyzed the different human relations and possible solutions to political and social problems.

Findings

The analysis of the data was based on the grounded approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) because it was done through a systematic and constant comparison between the data collected and its analysis in order to support the theory that emerges from the data.

Through the development of the axial coding, the process of relating the categories and concepts to each other from and inductive and deductive way (Strauss, & Corbin, 1990), a core category called Visage emerged from the data. Visage is the face-to-face meeting, the encounter with the Other. From this category of Visage two subsidiary categories also emerged entitled “I see myself through yourself” and “Commitment with the Other”.

The first subsidiary category “I see myself through yourself” is subdivided into “Voices of knowledge” and “Voices of Stepping into somebody else’s shoes”. The second subsidiary category “Commitment with the Other” is subdivided into “Voices of Denouncement” and “Voices of Responsibility”. These voices are different for both subsidiary categories, because each voice represents a set of meaning to which students related and responded to a specific moment. For instance, “Voices of Knowledge” represents the beginning of this process that is followed by the second voice, “Voices of stepping into somebody else’s shoes”. This second voice is followed by the third, “Voices of Denouncement”, in the same way the third voice is followed by the fourth, “Voices of Responsibility”, which is a progression of the third one.

As stated by Strauss and Corbin: the core category must be the sun standing in orderly systematic relationship to its planet (1990). From this perspective, despite each subsidiary category standing by itself, they have a relationship among themselves and collectively relate to the core category of Visage because they are surrounded by the broad phenomenon that I found during the analysis of the data. Diagram 1 illustrates the connection and interdependence of the core category and the two subsidiary categories.

Visage

The core category of Visage emerges from the data reflecting the process that is carried out by students to construct the sense of Otherness. This visage is presented in students’ voices and was strengthened through the research experience and the subsidiary categories. Levinas (2006) established that the Other is recognized by me as a visage. When I see this visage, I see it in a mirror: “The self and the other are in some sense mirror images of each other, each different yet somehow the same and, therefore, connected by their reflection” (n.p.).

At the same time, the construction of the sense of the Other is a process similar to a braid. African descendants have given much importance to braids throughout history, and during the slavery era in the USA some communities braided on women’s heads paths necessary to escape slavery. This is why this braid corresponds to the story line that students raise through their voices. Each one of the different voices represents a lock of hair to be braided. The braid is the sense of Otherness built by the students.

I See Myself through Yourself

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has stated: “the self cannot exist, because it cannot have a concept of itself as self, without the Other” (as cited in Onbelet, n.d.). The self requires the other to bring meaning to its existence, and conversely, the other also requires the self to make sense. From this point of view, only with the Others I can support my existence; I need the Others to be; that is, I see myself through my relation with Others.

Voices of Knowledge

Through these voices the barrier of indifference was broken as Freire (1993) mentioned, students began to “acquire the object” and start the adventure to really know about the issues addressed. The next excerpt illustrates this aspect. It belongs to the transcription of the fourth session, based on the episode “Reading the People’s Lives: the History of Racism in the USA”. Students answered the questions corresponding to the descriptive phase of the instructional design. They were asked what actions they remembered about the Ku Klux Klan and answered as follows:Voices of Knowledge Through these voices the barrier of indifference was broken as Freire (1993) mentioned, students began to “acquire the object” and start the adventure to really know about the issues addressed. The next excerpt illustrates this aspect. It belongs to the transcription of the fourth session, based on the episode “Reading the People’s Lives: the History of Racism in the USA”. Students answered the questions corresponding to the descriptive phase of the instructional design. They were asked what actions they remembered about the Ku Klux Klan and answered as follows:

St. 17: They fought Negroes. They had a “failosofy”

T: Philosophy. Which was it? Do you remember? Speak aloud.

St. 9: The black, indigenous, and Jewish races. They were impure races.

T: Who wants to add anything in regard to it? (I point out the board)

St. 1: Everybody is equal. The black race’s rights.

St. 17: Golpeaban negros. Tenían una “failosofy”

T: Philosophy. ¿Cuál era esa? recuerdas algo. la raza negra, indígena, judíos eran razas impuras.

T: ¿Alguien más quiere agregar algo con respecto a esto? ¿O con lo que no se ha dicho acá?

St. 1: Todos son iguales. Los derechos de la raza negra