Download - when students have power
When students have power1. Modifying teaching discourseA. Language choice: Students have the
opportunity to read, write and speak their own language variety as well as the standard
B. Generative content: The curriculum is chosen by students and teachers to address issues they consider important.
• C. New Knowledge: students and teachers produce knowledge for themselves and others.
• D. Action: Students and teachers initiate and /or support actions which challenge inequitable power relations in and out of the classrooms.
• 1. First class encounters (typical and unauthorized)
• Empowered arrangement for teachers, in syllabus decision under generical headings.
• Empowered democracy for students?• Collaboration is essential in democracy.
Students making decisions over knowledge. (Dewey)
• Against a banking method. Reproducers of rules to control students. Responsability?
• In undemocratic practices students do assert themselves informally and subversively
• No developing democratic habits. No real life abilities to be citizens , fiction.
• Choices are in some way dependant on the economical situation in the world
• How do we judge our students based on economic situations they are surrounded they can’t do anything about?
• Teacher shaping their image against the economic and political situation and who makes decisions over them. Uncomfortability.
The siberian syndrome
• Questions for the first meeting. • General information about themselves and their
families. Their free time activities and expectations. • Why they took the course.• Changes they would like to make in their college if they
had the chance to do so. • Same for their city• Questions dealing with the socio-political situation of
the country. • Questions specifically about the subject matter.
• Differences in each class, time and context• Approaching the subject to their context and
relating together• Critical thinking as a literate social performance
enabled in an experientially and linguistically meaningful context, enacted in the language students possess, inside a purposeful, negotiated process which encourages them to question the cultural assumptions of society and to imagine alternatives to the status quo.
• Restrain the teacher’s didactic voice so as to generate students’ expression as the foundational discourse.
• Try to discipline ourselves more than discipline the students to follow the teacher’s pre-emptive lecture.
• Frontloading student discourse and backloading the teachers’ commentaries. Freire: praxis, Dewey: agency of democratic education. Put theory into action.
• The teachers´authority is dialogical in discourse.
LEADING A PEDAGOGY OF QUESTIONS
• Posing questions more than making comments. Legitimazing authority in a low profile. Not easy to retain discourse. Patience is needed.
• Provide students the chance to speak can be a change to start with changes and know about them. Priorities and perceptions. Row material for building a syllabus and class discourse. (written or spoken)
• Generative topics became the topics of the agenda to be developed in the course. Projects. Committee students. Collaborative work.
• Teacher leaves students work in their rhythm, excluding teacher´s talk. Construct critical discourse.
• Developing the course as starting with the students’ previous comments, teacher took notes on them, students felt they were importat. Show respect. Authority to credit their remarks.
• Collective texts, Big Bigelow (1990) Christensen (1990) collective thought.
• Stating the subject matter as follows: • A. Where does the subject come from? And what
do we do with it?• How questions could be biased. Authority
inmersed. Consequently view on evaluation and grades. ( students mimicking teacher’s point of view for grades).
• Concretize the questions in single situations.
• Extend and monitor students talk outside the classroom. Different spaces students use
• Students ask and answer questions to frontload in their idiom.
• Students challenge the topics, not a memory or mimicking exercise.
• Following to answer the questions in the order students wanted to. (empowering them)
• codeveloping.
• Advising theoretical reading on the topics already detected by the students in their questions. Influence by teacher´s point of view. (not free from ideologies, no teaching is neutral)
• Students must show their positions even when they don’t agree with the teachers’ views. That is democracy. Punishment is not there, it rewards public criticisism.
• Offering of conceptual handles for studying the subject matter.
• Stating concrete situations in order to display the concepts to analize them.
• Negotiating the curriculum (power sharing, shared authority, cogovernance)
•CONCLUSIONS