It was in my work in the United States that I started thinking about having younger students study education. I saw that as students moved from primary to secondary school, education started more and more to become something that happens to them. In graduate school, I read Angela Valenzuela’s “Subtractive Schooling.” In her ethnographic work at a senior secondary school, Valenzuela frequently heard from teachers that the minority students at the school did not value education. Valenzuela’s research eloquently countered this hegemonic assertion, and put forward a counter-hegemonic narrative that insists the students she research valued education, but rejected a system of schooling that did not value them.
So I started to think that students needed to understand and critique schooling, and the start of junior secondary would be a good time to do so. When I started working in Hong Kong, I began to hear what Valenzuela and I had heard so often in the United States, that marginalized students do not care about education. But it was clear to me that my students in Hong were so thirsty for learning. Eventually, I wanted to give them the language and concepts to critique the type of schooling they rejected and articulate and advocate for the type of learning they wanted.
Pedagogy is not simply a way of teaching or learning. It is not only about knowledge and how we choose to delivery, create, or use it. Pedagogy is about our relation to reality, our relationships with each other, and about the power that is embedded in human interaction. It is about our capacity to love, hope, and transform. I deeply believe that all teachers are students, and that all students are teachers. My desire to have students study pedagogy springs from this conviction. If they are to teach each other, and if they are to be agents of change in their communities now, then they have to think about how they will go about doing this, and how various pedagogies can be useful to them. When I started to doubt myself on this, along came a form 2 student, who during a class discussion said,
“If we have a cycle of oppression in our life, then transmission pedagogy will not help us break the cycle. We will just repeat the cycle.”
Thanks to everydayhybridity, who says:
I am reblogging another interesting post by Carlos Soto. He provides a great deal of insight not just about his experiences teaching ethnic minority students in Hong Kong, but also innovative strategies towards education.
I recommend following his blog simply for inspiration…