Professor Baker-Doyle's talk presented a project she conducted with student teachers that participated in the PDS program at Penn State. Her main objective was for students to be able to evaluate and critique texts and use media to produce counter texts that could present alternative perspectives and voices that may have been incomplete, neglegted or misrepresented in the original texts.
She utilizes critical pedagogy in her strategies to teach her student teaches and at the same time engages student to understand critical pedagogy through the process of developing these counter texts.
One of her findings while carrying out this assignment was that while her students grasp of media use and technology was adequately achieved, the students had a very challenging time with the critiquing part of the assignment. They tended to focus on language use and writing style while evaluating the texts, rather than engaging in a social critique of the content. After some feedback from the instructor, students were able to better understand the concept of social critique and critical pedagogy.
Baker-Doyle 's objective for her students to be able to understand their own teaching philosophies and practices, understand and acknowldege their voice and be able to create material and incorparate it into classroom conversation (both current classroom as students and future classrooms as teachers). She effectively used critical pedagogy and presented its significance for students to be able to connect what is happening in the world and be able to connect to their classroom.
This session was particularly interesting for me as my theoretical views are very much aligned with critical pedagogy and my interest in developing materials lies closely related with the social critique evaluation of current texts.
I wonder if this conversation could also looking at texts for culturally responsive pedagogies (Ladson-Billings) , focusing not just on ethnic culture diversity but the technology and media use as part of the cultural relatedness for students. I think this was carried out implicitly in Baker- Doyle's assignment as the students incorporated media in the development of the counter texts, and thus in the process this cultural revolution becomes part of the experience and in itself can be construed as a critique of not just traditional text content, but design; and instead of being looked at separately they merge together as part of the critcal evaluation process and then creation)
Leave a comment