1. Education for Social Change
EdSe 4244 Social Studies Methods

2. Small group discussions
Individually, what do you do to change the status quo, to challenge inequities in our society, inequality in power and socio-economic status. What do you perceive as your personal role in effecting change?

3. The Status Quo
Hegemony - a system of laws, policies, ideologies, institutions and behaviors that supports the status quo.
Education that purports to be “neutral” supports the status quo. Not encouraging students to question knowledge and society tacitly supports the status quo.

4. Education is politics
Why does the government enforce mandatory schooling on its citizens? Whose history and literature is taught and whose is ignored? Which groups are left in or out of the reading lists? From whose point of view is the past examined? Is the curriculum balanced and multicultural, giving equal attention to men, women, minorities, and non-elite groups, or is it male-oriented and Eurocentric? Do we spend more time studying photosynthesis or the biochemistry of our food supply, or the toxins in our local air, water, and land?

5. School funding and testing is politics
More public money is invested in upper class students and elite collegians than is spent on lower-income students and in community colleges. Testing policies support standardized exams in which women and minorities have traditionally scored lower than men and majority students.

6. What is empowering education?
Empowering education is a critical pedagogy that challenges the existing status quo and asks students to engage in a critical inquiry of society, power, inequality, and change.

7. Values of Empowering Pedagogy
Participatory
Affective
Problem-posing
Situated
Multicultural
Dialogic
Desocializing
Democratic
Researching
Interdisciplinary
Activist

8. Participatory
Non-participatory schools depress achievement levels, leading to low student achievement and teacher burnout.
Dewey argued that students must participate in both the constructing the purposes and meaning of their education.

9. Discussion
In small groups, develop a plan to engage students in constructing course results, assessments, teaching and learning plans, and classroom rules.
What issues are inherent in empowering student participation in their education?
How can teachers model empowerment?

10. Affective
Empowering education engages both the cognitive and affective domains. Critical thought is simultaneously an affective and cognitive process - play, humor, hope, conflict, and sorrow are purposely interwoven and an integral part of constructing understandings, developing knowledge and skills.

11. An Example
Author Tim O’Brien’s, “How to Tell a True War Story”

12. Activity
In groups, plan a lesson (big idea) based on the Minnesota Standards that relies heavily on engaging the affective domain as a way to foster student understanding, knowledge, or skills.

13. Problem-posing
Dewey and Piaget both advocated for active, inquiring education, through which students constructed learning rather than memorize facts. Freire built on this and suggested that teachers be “problem-posers”.

14. Problem-posing II
Freire decried traditional education as a “banking” model where knowledge is kept in texts and academicians and deposited into students. He said educators need to cast the old model off and use problem-posing, whereby we regard all subject matter as historical products to be questioned rather than as universal wisdom to be accepted.

15. Problem-posing III
Freire further said the banking model was anti-democratic because it subordinates and denies marginalized cultures all the while promoting the status quo. Liberation, he said, is a praxis: the action and reflection of humans upon their world in order to transform it.

16. Freire’s problem-posing model
In a Freirian classroom, teachers don’t reinvent traditional knowledge; they study it in a critical context which is democratic (participatory) using a multicultural syllabus.

17. Discussion
In your groups, apply Freire’s problem-posing model to a big idea imbedded in the Minnesota Social Studies Standards.

18. Situated
Empowering education situates curriculum in issues and language from everyday life. Themes are:
Generative - discussion among teacher and students
Topical - teacher derived
Academic - derived from the literature

19. Activity
Brainstorm among yourselves ways of developing generative, topical and academic themes which touch on an aspect of the Minnesota Standards.

20. Dialogic