outliers

Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell, 2008) is subtitled The Story of Success, because Gladwell sets out to look at successful people, how they achieved that success, and what factors outside their control helped (or hindered) them on the way to success. He looks at professional hockey players and other athletes. He looks at Bill Gates. He looks at school children and lawyers. From my perspective his conclusion is that every successful person has a series of advantages and/or opportunities that don’t come to most of us; there is some unearned, usually structural advantage—often several of advantages—that successful people have that the rest of us don’t. Therefore, Outliers is a thoroughgoing critique of idea that meritocracy exits.

For example, in Canada, where many professional hockey players grow up, children’s hockey is organized by age group. If you will be 12 during the calendar year, whether in January or June or December, you will play in the 12 year-old league. If you turn 12 in December, compared to children born in the first few months of the year, you will be 10 or 12 months behind in development. So, when it comes time to select the best of the 12 year-old league, you’ll be at a significant disadvantage, because you’re likely to be less physically developed than most of your peers. The best of any particular age group tend to get more playing time, more coaching, and just play more hockey. Thus, when you get to the 13 year-old league, not only are you behind your peers physically, but also in terms of experiencing and training. This gap widens at every age group—is it any surprise that most of the Canadian national hockey team is born in the first three months of the year? According to Gladwell, the great majority are.

This is a great illustration of an arbitrary advantage, given to some and not to others, that leads to the difference between success and failure at something, in this case hockey. Gladwell describes similar structural and systemic advantages and disadvantages in all kinds of situations until, after telling a story about a “brilliant immigrant kid [who] overcomes poverty and the Depression, can’t get a job at the stuffy downtown law firms, makes it on his own through sheer hustle and ability,” he says: “I hope by now that you are skeptical of this kind of story . . . . [S]uccess doesn’t happen that way. Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.” Successful people are “a product of the world in which they grew up.

Gladwell goes further, explicitly critiquing the way our culture clings to “the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we chose to write as a society don’t matter at all,” thereby wasting huge a amount potential talent:

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes and who doesn’t.

Gladwell implicates us all. “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success . . . with a society that provides opportunities for all. ”

Societal responsibility for helping our children succeed and for helping all people realize their potential is an important message. If Gladwell had left I there—pushing us to accept our responsibility and calling out to change the arbitrary nature of success in the current structures—the book would have been a useful and even profound call to improve education and opportunity for all.

Unfortunately, rather than change society to acknowledge the talent and skill of more of us, for Gladwell the solution seems to be to deny ones culture in the name of being successful by the standards of our current structures. Looking at Korean Air pilots and their historically disproportionately high crash rate, Gladwell literally argues that “to be a success at what they did, they had to shed some part of their own identity,” a deep respect for authority that he admits “runs throughout Korean culture.” Similarly, for Marita, a twelve year-old girl in a special school called KIPP (Knowledege is Power Program) in New York City. “[T]he cultural legacy she has been given does not match her circumstances . . . . Her community does not give her what she needs. So what does she have to do? Give up her evenings and weekend and friends—all the elements of her old world—and replace them with KIPP.” That is, Marita needs to give up her culture because her culture isn’t giving her “what she needs.”

This attitude is classic cultural deficit reasoning (see the work of Tara Yosso and my entry on a lecture she gave in San Francisco). The idea, often put forward by well-meaning liberals, is that the poor (usually non-white) unfortunates, who don’t have the advantages that middle-class white kids have, can be saved by assimilating, by learning and adopting white middle-class culture. That this ignores the strengths, abilities, intelligences, and experiences the rest of the world brings to every situation doesn’t seem to register. This perspective looks at what people don’t have (i.e., they don’t have middle-class white culture), rather than what they do have (i.e., cultures and practices and abilities all their own). It also ignores the racism, sexism, classism, and other oppression that people outside dominant groups endure and the way that identity is fundamentally shaped by those forces.

A much better approach would recognize that everyone comes with strengths and weaknesses and would celebrate the incredible diversity of our cultures and abilities. It would foster talents we currently don’t even call talents. Creating true opportunity for more people to be successful in our culture means acknowledging the wealth that all people bring to school and work and politics and life.

a brief exam

Now that the school year is over, I find myself looking for some conclusions, or lessons learned, or at least some reflections. It’s an indulgence on some level, but I’m enough of a believer in the “examined life” to make an attempt:

I dove into a more overtly political world in the last year and, as a result, I’ve written much less here. I’m still writing—perhaps more than before—but instead of writing about what I read, I prepare for public statements and speeches. I summarize arguments and send out mass emails and construct positions. It is a very focused style, rhetorical and argumentative and to help myself I’m studying speeches by politicians like Presidents Obama and Lincoln.

Those choices are, of course, quite conscious; they are leaders I’d like to emulate in some ways. While I do not pretend to have the intellect or ability of either men, I do try to learn from them. I’m impressed, in particular, by the way Lincoln prepared and the careful way he argued. Sometimes he made fine distinctions that may not play as well in today’s faster, sound bite politics, where a subtle point is hard to make, but the power of his logic and his tendency to evoke first principles are important.

I’ve also been reading about organizing and framing and the political process more generally. There’s a whole set of skills and abilities that are unique to the political world and that I have never before worked to develop. I’m beginning to see it as a perspective, a way of seeing the moves that people make, the postures they take. I’m learning how to respond. And, fortunately, I’m comfortable disagreeing with people while still respecting them.

This process of acquiring new skills and a new lens through which to view the world is akin to going to graduate school. Also like graduate school, I’ve been conscious of a desire not to lose the person I was when I entered the process. So far, I don’t believe I have. In fact, in many ways the heat of political pressure only drives me closer to my core values: it’s always about the students for me. They are the reason I put myself through the pain of interminable meetings and other minutia of the political process. And I’m reminded of those values every time I go to the classroom. There I am part of the miracle that we call teaching and learning, through which people create new lives and begin to see themselves in new, more powerful light.

The challenges and growth I’ve experienced in the last year are part of my own process of seeing my self and my life in a new way. Where it will lead I cannot say—which of course is part of why we get up every day: to find out what will happen. My life is full and rich with learning. I can ask for little better.

the art of critical pedagogy

Let us begin by rethinking the position that urban schools are failing. . . . When one set of schools [in high-income communities] is given the resources necessary to succeed and another group of schools [in low-income communities] is not, we have predetermined the winners and losers. . . . Urban [low-income community] schools are not broken; they are doing exactly what they are designed to do.

This in the second paragraph of Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell’s brilliant book, The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. It’s brilliant because it is based in the experience of actually teaching our country’s youth, on working day in and day out with high school students in Los Angeles and Oakland. Most of the book is Duncan-Andrade and Morrell detailing several educational projects on which they’ve worked, describing their experiences as they try to put their belief in critical pedagogy into practice, and explaining what they learned.

As grounded in experience and practice as they are, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell know the theory, too. In chapter two, they give the best overall summary of the work and writing of the major names in critical pedagogy—Freire, Shor, Darder, McLaren, Giroux, hooks—I’ve seen. In addition, they discuss the efforts of a few “lived examples of critical pedagogy to emphasize that critical pedagogy is more than just a teaching strategy—it is a personal, financial, political, emotional, and spiritual commitment to prioritizing the needs and liberation of people who are suffering under various forms of oppression”: Carter G. Woodson, Lolita Lebrón, Franz Fanon,Reies López Tijerina, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Subcommandante Marcos. (If this list and the words used to describe these people intimidate you, you’re a normal human being. The authors make it less intimidating as they describe how they put those words into practice in the work they have done and continue to do.)

Before they do that, they lay out their understanding of the urban public school context in which students try to learn and in which teachers try to teach. They argue that “urban school failure is tolerated because deep down our nation subscribes to the belief that someone has to fail in school,” belief supported by racist and classist ideology. Currently, the line is that “educational failure is the result of cultural deficiencies on the part of the student, the family, and the community—de facto, educational attainment is attributed to cultural superiority or assimilation into culturally superior ways.” Regardless of the reasons, the result serves the dominant culture in our country, because “some people must fill the least desirable places in society, and it is important that they feel they deserve to be in those positions or, at the very least, that there is a formal mechanism to justify their place there.” The attack on students’ esteem and confidence is self-perpetuating and circular: if you’re made to feel stupid, you do worse on tests because of your lack of belief in yourself.

But, according to Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, the equation of performance in school and intelligence is false. For, if

school achievement were an accurate measure of intellect, achievement patterns would more closely mirror the random distribution of intellect that genetic scientists report in human populations. Instead, the results of schools are quite predictable. . . . With remarkable consistency, schools serving low-income, non-white children disproportionately produce the citizens who will spend most of their adult lives in the least desirable and least mobile socioeconomic positions (prison, low-ranking military positions, and service labor).

The few urban students who do well are “asked (sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly) to exchange the culture of their home and community for the higher culture of the school in exchange for access to college.” Therefore,

urban education reform movements must begin to develop partnerships with communities that provide young people the opportunity to be successful while maintaining their identities as urban youth. This additive model of education focuses on the design of urban school culture, curriculum, and pedagogy that identifies the cultures and communities of urban students as assets rather than as things to be replaced.

This “approach provides pedagogy and curricula that lend immediate relevance to school in the lives of urban youth. It also works to break the cycle of disinvestment of human capital in urban communities by crating graduates who recognize their potential agency to improve urban centers, rather than seeing them as places to escape.” Duncan-Andrade and Morrell see critical pedagogy as a win-win for students, teachers, and society as a whole, because “rather than presenting the community as a place to rise above, schools must equip themselves to draw from the knowledge that students bring with them to school—knowledge that is often not in their textbooks but is acquired from the streets, family cultural traditions, youth culture, and the media.”

They are critical of the results we’ve seen so far from multicultural education because it has “failed to deal with the conditions of modern urban life.” They argue persuasively “for pedagogical practices situated in critical analyses of the role of urban schools in social inequality.” We should “shift the rhetoric of failure from young people and caring teachers onto an inequitable system designed to concretize failure in poor communities.”

Finally, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell “believe that urban students should go to college at rates equal to their more affluent counterparts” and that a

schooling environment that foregrounds the relationship between education and the most pressing conditions in the community, an education with relevance, is most likely to produce notable increases in college eligibility. . . . [T]he desired outcome in critical pedagogies in urban education is multiple and . . . it must impact academic achievement, identity development, and civic engagement. . . . To often, we believe, critical pedagogies focus on the rhetoric of social critique to the exclusion of the development of sophisticated literacy and numeracy skills.

These academic skills frequently come “at great personal and social costs that include alienation from family, language, community, and progressive social values.” Therefore, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s work focuses maintaining a sense of community and culture for students, while still promoting rigorous academic skills, by setting those skills in the community and cultural context. Literally, they ask the students what problems or questions are important to them and then develop the curriculum around those issues.

All this made connections for me with the writing of bell hooks, especially in Where We Stand: Class Matters in which she talks about her experience of going to college and being alienated from her home culture by the college culture and the resulting disorientation of being caught between two the two. (For more, see my entry on hooks’ book.) The connection is expected, since Duncan-Andrade and Morrell begin their work with hooks and other related writers as the foundation upon which they build. Indeed, they are trying to do the work that such writers recommend.

As I mentioned above, after contextualizing their work, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell spend the bulk of the book describing their work with students in urban schools. In the final chapter, “Toward a Grounded Theory of Praxis,” they try to draw conclusions from their experiences, point to areas that need more research and exploration, and make suggestions about teacher education. Importantly, they also talk about love. In a section called “Pedagogy, Love, and Revolution” they write about “revolutionary love” and its potential to change both students’ lives and the larger world. From my perspective, real love—that includes celebrating successes and correcting errors and facilitating the development of the person each student wants to be—for your students is the foundation of good teaching. It doesn’t mean that you like every student the same or that every student likes you. It means that you love them and treat them with the respect and compassion you treat all your loved ones. It means that you treat your students the same way you treat your own children. This is a beautiful, dangerous, and somewhat radical stance—and that is right where I want to be.

gansta, wanksta, rida

“All the research shows the same thing: the bottom line is that good teaching is about relationships. The best teachers come in to their classrooms every day ready to be vulnerable to their students. Therefore, to be a great teacher is to deny your human instinct to protect yourself.”

These words from Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade, Professor of Raza Studies and Educational Administration at San Francicso State University, during his standing-room only talk at the City College of San Francisco on February 25. The title of the talk—“The Gangsta, Wanksta, Rida Paradigm: Urban Youth Culture and Learning”—is a reference to common elements he found in the best teachers in his study of urban schools. The few great teachers are “ridas” in that they “ride” with the community. On the other side are the handful of “gangsta” teachers that don’t like the students they work with and act as barriers to, rather than enablers of, those students. In the middle and on the fence are the “wankstas” who mean well and do a lot of talking about what they are going to do for students, but rarely, if ever, follow through.

Duncan-Andrade sought to normalize the teachers he studied who produced student success by every measure, including good grades, high test scores, increased self-confidence, and sustained engagement with school and learning. “Being successful with our students is not heroic, not exceptional. We make it heroic to excuse ourselves” when we are not successful. According to Duncan-Andrade, great teachers have or create the following five qualities:

• Critically Conscious Purpose — great teachers are teachers because they want their students to change the world
• Duty — great teachers understand that it is a privilege to teach, that they serve the students and their communities, and that the students are more important than the job
• Preparation — great teachers meticulously prepared for class and take a great deal of ownership for their work and for the success of it in the classroom
• Socratic Sensibility — great teachers know that they don’t know, are self-critical without doubting their ability to succeed
• Trust — great teachers engender the trust of their students, choose solidarity over empathy, and know that loving their students means holding them to high expectations

Duncan-Andrade is author of The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. He has lectured around the world about developing classroom practices and school cultures that foster self-confidence, esteem, and academic success among all students. His research interests and publications span the areas of urban schooling and curriculum change, urban teacher development and retention, critical pedagogy, and cultural and ethnic studies.

word problems

Another in a long line of cleverness from Savage Chickens: http://www.savagechickens.com/2009/03/teacher.html

If a word problem isn’t relevant to the teacher or the student, why are we bothering? Just because it was done to us?

up where we belong

Gail Thompson interviewed 121 out of 136 (89%) teachers at a large urban high school asking them about their school, their colleagues, their students, the parents of their students, the quality of their own work, and their ability to be effective teachers. She asked the teachers to respond to prompts like:

• “I consider my current school site to be one of the best public schools in this district”
• “I believe that most of the teachers at this school are outstanding educators”
• “The majority of my students come from decent homes”
• “I care about my students’ academic and personal welfare both inside and outside of school.”

I’m happy to say that a large majority of them responded in ways that we would like; that is, most of the teachers agreed that they worked in one of the best schools in the district, that their colleagues were outstanding teachers, that their students live in decent homes, and that they care about their students. Further, most of the teachers believe they are making a difference for their students, that they are using innovative and pedagogically sound instructional practices, and that their students would rate highly as a teacher. Based on these answers and despite all the problems that we know exist in public schools, we can at least feel that teachers in those schools have the right attitudes and that they believe in themselves, their schools, and their students.

A deeper look at all the questions (52 in all) she asked reveals a more complicated picture.

• When asked if they would want their “own children to attend this school” only 29% agreed.
  80% of the teachers agreed that some of their “colleagues do not have high expectations of their students.”
• 64% “believe that parents or guardians are largely to blame for students’ low achievement.”
  Nearly 40% of the teachers didn’t “believe that all students deserve a college preparatory curriculum.”
• And, when asked if students are largely to blame when they “fail to pass a test or fail an assignment,” 57% of the teachers agreed.

Thompson also surveyed the students in the same school. She asked them to respond to statements like:

• “Most of my teachers are good teachers.”
• “Most of my teachers are willing to give me extra help during class if I need it.”
• “I wish I had better teachers.”
• “Most of my teachers are fair about discipline.”
• “I believe most of my teachers care about me.”

As we would hope, most students answered that their teachers are good, fair, caring and willing to help, yet there were marked differences between the way Blacks, Latinos, and Whites (the groups that made up 90% of the student population) responded. Significantly less percentage of the Black and Latino students (56% and 57%, respectively), for instance, thought most of their teachers cared about them than White students (70%).

Even more important, student responses were different from teacher responses in ways that, I believe, should make teachers sit up and pay attention. For example, 97% of the teachers said they care about their students, but as we just saw, less than 70% of the students felt their teachers cared about them. 91% of teachers said they “make the curriculum relevant” to their students’ lives, but only just over half of the students agreed with similar prompts about their courses.

While differences between student and teacher perceptions is a big part of the story of Up Where We Belong, the book Thompson wrote based partially on her surveys, the real punch comes from the voices of the students from focus groups she conducted with them to follow up the surveys. The students tell us what happens when their teachers make them feel stupid or discipline them unfairly or just don’t seem to care. They also describe what a powerful force for good a caring, skilled teacher is when he or she believes in his or her students. Those stories, combined with Thompson’s own experiences as one of “America’s stepchildren”—a term, she uses “to refer to African Americans, Latinos, Southeast Asians, Native Americans, and sometimes even low-income whites, because members of these groups are often marginalized and treated as second-class citizens in schools and the wider society”—make the book immanently readable, emotionally effective, and compellingly motivational.  The result is a persuasive argument for the educational reform “lessons” Thompson learned through her work:

• Lies, subterfuge, and denial are “weapons of mass destruction” that impede school reform and harm many students, especially America’s stepchildren.
• Some people in high places don’t really want achievement gaps to be closed.
• Too many influential people still don’t believe that Americas’ stepchildren are capable of academic excellence.
• Oppressive school settings, inadequate teacher preparation programs, and a lack of support will continue to drive new teachers out of the profession.
• As long as their voices, needs, and concerns continue to be ignored, teachers and students will find creative ways to derail school reform efforts.
• At best, school reforms that are based on high-stakes testing will produce “tuna” that looks like Star-Kist but is not the real thing.
• Because of resistance and racial prejudice, it is difficult for African American and Latino school administrators to improve the status quo in K-12 schools.

Books about education reform come in all shades of ideology; Thompson’s is useful and different because it is based, and sets the standard for successful reform, on what the students themselves say. Too often, student voices are not part of this discussion. Thompson listens to students and helps us all hear what they say. Let us hope that the Obama administration is listening, too.

high school equity link

The broad-based coalition, Campaign for High School Equity, has created what it calls the “Plan for Success,” which seeks to prepare “every student for graduation, college, work, and life.”

Every school year, about 1.2 million students drop out of our nation’s high schools, leaving almost one of every three freshmen without a high school degree four years later. While roughly 70 percent of all high school students graduate on time, African American, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaska Native students have only a 58 percent or less chance of graduating from high school with a regular diploma. In addition – and contrary to the model minority myth – many Asian Americans also face barriers in education.

The Campaign for High School Equity’s inaugural publication, A Plan for Success: Communities of Color Define Policy Priorities for High School Reform, makes a compelling case for the need to invest in high schools and provides a blueprint for meaningful reform. Its recommendations include a call to:

• Make all students proficient and prepared for college and work;
• Hold high schools accountable for student success;
• Redesign the American high school;
• Provide students with the excellent leaders and teachers they need to succeed;
• Invest communities in student success; and
• Provide equitable learning conditions for all students.

Download the plan at: http://www.highschoolequity.org/files/PlanforSuccess_0.pdf

when access is not enough

Vincent Tinto (Syracuse University) has written a brief and provocative article about the success of underprepared students. A teaser:

[T]he success of academically underprepared students does not arise by chance. It does not arise from practice as usual, but is the result of intentional, structured, and proactive efforts on their behalf that change the way we go about the task of providing students the support they need to succeed in college. Without such support, the access to college we provide them does not provide meaningful opportunity for success.

Click here to see the full article and responses to it.

pedagogy of the oppressed continues to be relevant and revolutionary

In his forward to Paulo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Richard Shaul writes, “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process” (emphasis in the original). I take this as a given, and it is important to make this assumption explicit and to call attention to it in a time that is seeing increased emphasis on the “outcomes” of education, as well as increased calls for standardization of those outcomes. Standardized goals for students and schools imply a neutral standard and process that applies to every student, every teacher, every administrator, and every school or college. I maintain that such standardization is illogical and ill-considered. Further, standardized outcomes are ethically wrong, because they perpetuate the inequities and injustices of our already unequal educational system and society. Racism, sexism, classism, and other systems of oppression continue to be strong forces in our government, in our schools, in our jobs, in our doctor’s offices, on the streets—indeed, in every aspect of our lives. This does not mean that we should have no standards at all; nor does it mean that we should hold different people to different standards—that is yet another form of injustice. It does mean that we should understand our standards as situated within an unjust system and that we should work together with our students and the people in our lives to create standards that make sense in each situation and time. One standard does not apply in all situations.

Published in 1970, Freire’s book of political, philosophical, and, pedagogical thought is (unfortunately) still seen as revolutionary—and it should be, because, if taken seriously and incorporated into our educational system, Freire’s ideas would help dismantle the inequities and systems of oppression that underpin our society. The book is a complex and at times dense read, but mostly because it is so firmly rooted in the context of his time and place. Freire was born in 1921 in Brazil to middle-class parents who were greatly affected by the 1929 world depression. Thus, the young Freire learned first-hand about poverty and injustice. Right after World War II he began to espouse a form of liberation theology and became involved in adult literacy education, partly because being able to read was a condition for permission to vote. He continued the work into the early 1960s, but in 1964 a military coup forced him to leave Brazil and he did not return until 1980. So, even though Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published (in Spanish and English) while Freire was in the U.S., its spirit, its philosophy, and all its examples are of Brazil and his work there.

I will not attempt to summarize his arguments here, but I want to bring out, and hopefully clarify, one important point of misconception about Freire’s dialogical method and about Critical Pedagogy, which is greatly influenced by Freire and his work. In addition, I briefly want to discuss Freire’s attempt to synthesize theory and practice.

The misconception about Freirean thought I hear most often seems to be about the difference between an approach or philosophy of teaching and a method of teaching. By my reading, Freirean pedagogy is definitely an approach, not a method. What he discusses and advocates for is a way of engaging students and teachers in a process by which they problematize and grapple with the world in which they live. How that is done is not proscribed—only that it is done. Naturally, engaging with our world and with each other often involves discussion—dialog—but Freire does not preclude lecturing or any other teaching style. He asks only that any teaching method be in the service of the goal of helping students and teachers to process and name their world, thereby creating and understanding that world more fully for themselves.

When people suggest that Critical Pedagogy is only about students teaching themselves and others, is only about group work, is only about discussion and never about lecture, they are limiting Freire’s “dialogical” process to literal dialog only. That is, they are focusing on dialog as a method, rather than as an approach or philosophy. There are no magic pills that will make every classroom great and every teacher perfect. There is no one way to help all students learn and succeed; to look for one is folly. Freire knew that and so does every teacher who is honest with himself or herself. Instead, Freire tries to provide a philosophy that will promote the success of every teacher and every student everywhere, because it provides a framework for each classroom to define itself and its relationship to the world and to the subject it approaches.

Having talked to a lot of teachers, I feel safe in saying that most teachers do not have a consciously developed philosophy of teaching or careful theory of dialogical or democratic pedagogy (if you disagree, I’d love to hear about it). This is true even for the many teachers who practice Critical Pedagogy or variations of it. For Freire, this is a form of “activism”—“action for action’s sake,” to the “detriment of reflection.” The opposite extreme is “verbalism” or talking and reflection “deprived of its dimension of action”; verbalism turns words into “idle chatter . . . into an alienated and alienating ‘blah.’” For Freire, neither end of the spectrum is adequate or even good at all without the other end; true education, real liberation, and genuine revolution is the synthesis of theory and practice. Only “reflection and action” or “praxis” can truly transform reality; praxis is the “source of knowledge and creation.”

Thus, Freire argues for the necessity of theory, that we put that theory into practice, and that we then reflect on our experience to modify the theory and/or form new theory. Those of us who practice our teaching without a coherent, explicit philosophy, take note.

As the book’s title suggests, oppression and how we might combat it is a central theme in the book:

This, then is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. . . . Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity.

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own “effort,” with their “courage to take risks.” If others do not have more, it is because they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of all is their unjustifiable ingratitude towards the “generous gestures” of the dominant class. Precisely because they are “ungrateful” and “envious,” the oppressed are regarded as potential enemies who must be watched (emphasis in the original).

[T]he pedagogy of the oppressed . . . must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (emphasis in the original).

These are important words to remember. They are also remarkably relevant today and in the United States. I see the truth of these words in the privilege and power I possess, in the values that our consumer culture espouses, in the continued oppression of women, people of color, and of all people who vary from the normative “ideal” in whatever way. I see it also in our foreign policy, as our government continues to treat most other countries—especially those populated primarily by non-whites—as potential cheap labor sources, natural resource wells, markets in which to sell our products, and/or potential threats to our possession-based culture. The rhetoric has literally been “they want what we have” and we must protect ourselves from that “threat.”

It is a sad fact that Pedagogy of the Oppressed continues to be relevant and revolutionary. At the same time, I take inspiration from its message of hope and possibility. I try to make my teaching a part of the solution for our community and our world.

A Different Way to Fight Student Disengagement

This article by Donald W. Harward comes from InsideHigherEd.com. A teaser:

“At the source of the expressions of disengagement lies the problem of the disintegration of the purpose and core outcomes of college. All too many institutions of higher education — and even proponents of liberal education — are off-course, addressing only narrowly academic means and strategies rather than the integrated goals and ends that matter to our students and to our democracy. As a result, many of our institutions risk becoming complicit in the troubling patterns of student disengagement.

“Most institutions, in official handbooks and documents, still attest with eloquence and conviction to the importance of students’ personal and civic development. Regrettably, helping students actually achieve the full range of essential outcomes is much less evident, and only rarely are the institution’s resources, including its faculty and professionals, prepared and aligned to accomplish these ends. What is even more regrettable is that the current national debate about accountability has entirely ignored both the personal and the civic aims of a strong liberal education. As educators, as parents, as a society at large, we simply do not hold ourselves, or hold our institutions, responsible for achieving them or demand and expect such achievement. In fact, few institutions would have in place, or individuals have clearly in mind, what could be examined to determine if the core outcomes of higher education had been, even partially, achieved.”

Click here to read the full article.