Alecia Youngblood Jackson
Language Education Department

Since I work in teacher education, I am faced with the difficult task of preparing teachers for the teaching profession while also demonstrating those methods that I espouse.  I do this by taking the stance that pedagogy is a process of learning, unlearning, and relearning, a dynamic interaction between teaching and learning. It involves constant reexamination of old practices and established beliefs.  We do this through reading, studying, and enacting critical pedagogy, which makes me and my students attend to issues of social justice in education.  As a teacher, I model ways to be reflective about theory and practice in order to formulate a praxis – which combines thinking and action in becoming a better teacher.  I try to show my students, who are future teachers, that we must always reinvent ourselves in the classroom based on the needs, desires, and the social, cultural, and historical backgrounds of our students.  Another way that I enact a critical pedagogy in my classroom is that I do not provide pre-service teachers with a “bag of tricks” for them to take into the world of teaching; instead, they learn to read, think, and act in critical ways that help them make personal and relevant decisions about their teaching strategies in the future.

I teach my students that no education is politically neutral.  I attend to issues of power in the classroom – whose voices are heard and whose are silenced.  I foster a critical stance of our reading and writing and speaking practices.  We examine the ways in which we were schooled and critically analyze the ways in which education can be a site of oppression and hegemony (“banking” education) as well as a site of liberation.  We think about our roles as teachers in this context through a method of “problem posing” – a process of asking hard questions that make us uncomfortable.  We “read the world” – the social practices of the world – to understand and critique how and why knowledge and power are constructed, by whom, and for whom.  To take this stance of persistent critique means to see the complexities of teaching and learning, to see widely and deeply, to focus on the subtleties of social, cultural, political and economic conditions of their students’ lives.  They apply this critical approach through action research projects in which they pose a “problem” they see in education and interview students so that they can work at constructing their own solutions to the problem before they enter the classroom.  We also take this critical approach and apply it to the teaching of English by examining ways in which reading literature and writing can be used in education for social justice.  They plan thematic units in which they incorporate a wide variety of texts that can be used to address issues of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, and anti-semitism in the English classroom.

I believe that working within a stance of critical theory of pedagogy empowers future teachers to construct their own praxis that is shaped from their particular experiences through a critical, dialectical approach, one in which they learn the patience and courage to persistently critique their ways of knowing throughout their careers.