Notes on Critical Pedagogy
A few hypothetical thought experiments...
#1. You are standing at a bus stop along a fairly busy street near campus. Beside you are a husband and wife and their two young children. As you are waiting for the bus, one of the children misbehaves, and the father swiftly and violently disciplines the child by striking them on the side of the head repeatedly while yelling at the child. What do you, as a bystander, do?
Qualification A) The family is Native American. Does this change your response? Does this change your thoughts on why you would or would not respond?
#2. You are standing at a bus stop along a fairly busy street near campus. Beside you are a husband and wife and their two young children. As you are waiting for the bus, one of the children waves at a homeless man sitting on a near-by bus bench. The father gently, but firmly admonishes the child for initiating contact with the homeless man, saying "people like that are dirty, and choose to be that way because they are lazy. We shouldn't make contact with them. Just pretend as though they are not there." What do you, as a bystander, do?
#3. You are standing at a bus stop along a fairly busy street near campus. Beside you are a husband and wife and their two young children. As you are waiting for the bus, one of the children waves at a homeless man sitting on a near-by bus bench. The father gently, but firmly admonishes the child for initiating contact with the homeless man, saying "our God has a special place for everyone in this world, and that man's place is not our own, so do not draw attention to this man and shame him for being something he is blessed to be." What do you, as a bystander, do?
#4. You have assigned a paper to students with a topic of "something that annoys you." One student writes in her essay that she is annoyed when poor people ask her for money when she is downtown. She then goes on to say that poor people are poor because they deserve to be, and if they'd just get a job, they wouldn't have to panhandle. What, as an instructor, is your response?
#5. You have assigned a paper to students with a topic of "something that annoys you." One student writes in her essay that she is annoyed when poor people ask her for money when she is downtown. She then goes on to state her belief that poor people are poor because they are destined to be poor by a higher power, one that they cannot change. So asking for money is attempting to circumvent their divine role in life. What, as an instructor, is your response?
How we respond to each of these prompts says something not only of our own values, but how we believe our values to exist in relation to values that may not be our own. There is something here that has something to do with teaching as a means to acculturate students to a specific set of morals and values, but I don't quite know what it all means yet.