Critical Reflection 5

In my last couple reflections I have focused on the banking model and the traditional methods that dominate modern schooling, there was a lot of focus on their limitations and many criticisms of their use, therefore I feel it's important to have a focus on alternative methods because it's easy to say that one idea is problematic and demand it be removed, but harder to offer an alternative method that could supercede and yield success. With that in mind, Ozlem Sensoy's study “Picturing Oppression: Seventh Graders' photo essays on racism, classism, and sexism” provides some empirical evidence highlighting the use and effectiveness of a critical pedagogical approach which engages students critically with class curriculum and allows them to apply it to their own experiences. The study was done at Poppy Elementary, situated in the metro Vancouver area which Sensoy (2011) describes as a “economically depressed area” (p.324) where nearly half the residents speak a language other than English (as their primary language) and nearly half are “visible minorities”. Sensoy (2011) describes the purpose of his study as “to understand the relationship between students’ lived experiences and their experiences in the classroom working with a critical pedagogue, and whether the critical work in

the classroom coupled with their own experiences allowed them to go beyond mainstream discourses of diversity around them” (p.339), this method or approach was a relatively successful one. The project that yielded good results in relation to this approach was a photo essay where the students were given camera's to take pictures of people, places and so on that relate to either racism, classism,
or sexism and then apply that to their own experiences, being from an area of low economic levels and of high ethnic and racial populations within the class studied, the students were easily engaged and highly interested.

The most interesting thing in this study, in my opinion, was the teacher of the studied seventh grade class, Ms. Chandra, daughter of an immigrant family, South Asian, who was working on her Master's degree in equity issues in education. As a result of her studies and her relations with being from an immigrant family, Ms. Chandra seemed to have a critical pedagogue type method in the class already. Because of her first-hand experiences she “believes in integrating these experiences into the class curriculum, and often models for her students how her own life experiences (with racism, for example) are connected to bigger lessons that often lie in (or sometimes just beyond) the pages of the school curriculum or school structures” (Sensoy, 2011, p.326), which is usually absent from the classroom, but it creates great teacher student relationships as opposed to traditional methods and the banking model, and again engages students with phenomenon that they can engage and think critically about. An example of the kind of things Ms. Chandra did in her class was use the controversy between Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood, in regards to Clint Eastwood having no black soldiers in his World War II Hollywood movie, and have the students use it, or whatever the “hot-topic” of the day was and apply it to curriculum. “In this case, it was an opportunity to practice the genre of persuasive essay writing. And here was a topic that the students were eager to write about” (Sensoy, 2011, p.327). I think this type of method can be very successful and should be more commonly used, it is a method I have encountered in university and has proven, for me, to work quite well.

I remember seventh-grade quite well, but I do not remember any kind of method other than constantly taking in information and then regurgitating it onto paper during a test. There were some small activities that teachers would have us do, however all they seemed to accomplish was getting the attention of students and then they would continue filling our heads with information, it was like watching a super slow and boring movie which provided some comic relief (the activity) and then you were back to the same thing. There was an event that came to mind when reading Sensoy's study, in seventh-grade me and some friends put on a “controversial” talent show, according to the principal, which we were all to be suspended and perhaps expelled for. As a result of this we decided to write a long essay, providing many arguments about why we believed it was not “sexist” as it was claimed to be, upon finishing it we got signatures from many students and even teachers. Thinking back on this situation it seems that we took some initiative to argue for what we thought was right, if not became very engaged and thought critically about the situation. Of course this is not what the school had thought, we were to receive more punishment for doing it. The reason I feel this is important to the study of education and the concepts of education methodology is because it illustrates the education system's tendency to look past the important aspect of schooling and learning, critical engagement, as its priority is to dump the curriculum's information into the heads of the students and get them out, as less and less money gets put in to the school's the less critical pedagogy we'll see. Overall, based on my experiences and the evidence provided by Sensoy in this study, I believe that this could be a successful alternative to traditional methods and the widely used banking model, if only it were given the chance, that chance seems to be slim when schools, like in N.S, are cutting budgets significantly.