1. Critical Theory and Postmodernism in Education

2. Set Up Directions  Please clear your table space and take out a pen.  Complete the quiz, or “knowledge check” on the learning theories and reading so far in the class. You will have approximately 25 minutes.  When you are finished, please turn over your paper and sit quietly until time is up.

3. Time is Up!

4. To what extent did this quiz:  Create a disorienting dilemma for you?  Model experiential learning?  Show a power relationship between instructor and student that promoted hegemony?  Practice democracy?

5. Education to Support Social Change & Social Justice

6. Social Change Activists Past  Paulo Freire  Myles Horton

7. Paulo Freire  Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education developed by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.  Questioned the idea that students are recipients of knowledge. (Banking education)  He believed that students must actively question and participate in the construction of their own reality. This requires a close examination of their political and social ideologies and assumptions.  Only through recognition of how societal forces can impact personal values and assumptions can students begin to be truly liberated and free of socially conditioned reactions, a process Freire referred to as liberation and humanization.

8. Paulo Freire  Critical pedagogy could be an effective tool for dialogue amongst or between the formerly oppressed and the oppressors.  Paulo Freire recognized a dangerous pattern in which the previously oppressed have a tendency to take on the characteristics of their oppressors.[2][2]  His examination of oppression cautions against this inclination and encourages a careful struggle toward liberation that involves societal transformation rather than simply changing roles with their prior oppressors.  Only through education can people become humanized and empowered to create social change.

9. Myles Horton  Founder of the Highlander Research and Education Center. A school founded on principle of education for social and economic empowerment.  Believed in equality at a young age.  The son of teachers, Horton grew to understand the importance and social power of education.  His family’s influence would mold him to become one of the most influential minds of his time.  However, often overlooked, Horton’s beliefs and philosophy on teaching and learning would transform the way people found liberation.  Education became a means to a social end. Horton grew to learn the value of education as a means to uplift and move beyond the current settings.

10. Myles Horton  Educating people to become socially empowered was the driving force of Myles Horton’s life.  Believed education was a means to uplift and move beyond the current settings.  “I wasn’t interested in being good, I was interested in being good for something.” (Horton, M.1990 p. 102)

11. Highlander Research and Education Center  Founded in 1932  Served as an adult education center for community workers involved in social and economic justice movements.  Goal was to provide education and support to poor and working people fighting economic injustice, poverty, prejudice, and environmental destruction.  Helps grassroots organizations create tools for building movements for change.

12. Highlander Research and Education Center  Serves Appalachia and the South  Programs designed to build strong and successful social-change activism and community organizing led by people who suffer the most from society’s injustices.  Helps activists become effective community educators and organizers.

13. Your Role as an Adult Educator  It is our duty as educators of adults to build upon Horton’s beliefs of education for social change and learning from other’s experiences. Engage in a dialogue with our students and allow them to build their own understanding and subject matter schema vast enough that they are able to change their own situations without our push.

14. Books  Paulo Friere We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, 1991 Pedagogy of the Heart, 1998 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 2000 Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, 2001 Education For Critical Consciousness, 2005 http://www.paulofreire.org/ http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org /  Myles Horton We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, 1991 Long Haul: An Autobiography, 1998 The Myles Horton Reader: Education for Social Change, 2003 http://www.highlandercenter.org/

15. Social Change Activists Present  bell hooks  Cornell West

16. bell hooks  bell hooks is one of America's most indispensable and independent thinkers and one of the foremost Black intellectuals in America today.  hooks has described herself as a "Black woman intellectual, revolutionary activist."  She has criticized the way in which the plight of Black women has been either ignored or worsened not only by what she has termed "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" but, in many instances, by the mainstream feminist movement and the Black liberation struggle.  Education as the practice of freedom was continually undermined by professors who were actively hostile to the notion of student participation.

17. Cornell West  Modern day educational philosopher  Believes in the self-empowerment of all people through education and self-love.  Brings to light injustice throughout the country and how truth can set people free. “Who wants to be well-adjusted to injustice? What kind of human being do you want to be?” “You can not serve my people, unless you love my people”

18.  What is the extent that you believe that instruction should be planned with consideration of gender, so much that you would make significant modifications to meet individual students’ needs (Assuming it is not required)?

19.  What is your comfort level in taking a radically different approach to teaching adults than what is traditionally done? (e.g., in your current teaching environment or where you hope to teach)?