#criticalpedagogy

[rachaelrice]

In the darkest days of 2020 I put together a series of ancestrally-nourished, budget-friendly, seasonal weekly craft lessons on my Patreon featuring special guests and #criticalpedagogy. Our kids were home learning and it was good medicine while we were locked down. It still is. All these lessons now unlock for $10, a very affordable price for what you get: 17 lessons plus bonus lessons, video demos, PDF downloads to cut out and play with, playlists, a supplies list so you don’t have to hunt for stuff, and much can be found already in and around your home. You also get access to all other posts which feature the thoughtful, nuanced and often edgy transmissions offered for the collective and not for the algo when you pledge. And I’ll add you to my “close friends” list on IG where I post exclusive Kevin content and fire memes for the times in which we find ourselves. Lastly, please know that most of my income is redistributed in my local community and that’s the engine that drives my work. This time of year used to be a lot more freaky and a lot less frolic: rhyme battling undead horses, drinking hallucinatory reindeer piss, scary-ass Lucys, werewolves, winter witches and more. When darkness is fertile and death is a dear one, let’s make the most of the season. Link in bio, or visit patreon.com/join/rachaelrice. #Yule #MariLywd #WitchCrafts https://www.instagram.com/p/CXKMOzUPIDb/?utm_medium=tumblr

[rachaelrice]

The first of my Weekly Craft Lessons is up on my Patreon: Mini Altars to Honor The Dead using image transfers & Banking Model of Education Overview⠀ ⠀ In this lesson I show you how to create a number of 3D projects to celebrate and grieve those who have died. Kids of all ages need spaces to acknowledge and make meaning of the impact, terror, and beauty of death. While we make these pieces, we can re-member the parts of the ones who have passed that influenced us. We offer up to Spirit that which is impossible to be held by mere mortals alone. Plus, sometimes we get to draw boobs and not get in trouble. Pretty great.⠀ ⠀ As a former public school teacher versed in #criticalpedagogy, I am pretty comfortable with the idea that kids aren’t in traditional school right now. It’s the way we turn children into machines that labor for Empire. Not a big fan. Time to ancestor that model and build a better one, together.⠀ ⠀ I am reminded of this quote via opendemocracy.net by Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures:⠀ ⠀ "Education, in its different modalities, has historically been tasked with steering learning towards objectives that secure human survival as well as the reproduction of cultural norms and ideals. However, this double mandate becomes paradoxical when the reproduction of dominant cultural ideals poses a threat to human survival. ⠀ ⠀ This paradox is illustrated by Luis Prádanos, who asked in a recent piece about the future of education: '[I]s it really smart to educate people to technologically and theoretically refine a system that operates by undermining the conditions of possibility for our biophysical survival?'"⠀ ⠀ Part of knowing what needs to be born, is knowing what needs to die so to make way for its birth. This lesson gives several approaches to honoring the dead, and on Fridays 2-4pmPST we craft together, ask questions and demo techniques. ⠀ ⠀ Weekly lessons are posted on Mondays and subscriptions start at just $20/month. Sign up today and get instant access: 💀 patreon.com/join/rachaelrice.⠀ ⠀ Pictured here: altars made by me and my kids. Do you recognize anyone in these pieces? https://www.instagram.com/p/CGiZZtJACWL/?igshid=1ezud9jwju3u4

[yourdisappointedarms]

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.” #paulofreire #brazilian #educator #philosopher #criticalpedagogy #deathanniversary #practicedying https://www.instagram.com/p/B_r3uzvhKOd/?igshid=191rmm046j07g

[watchwhatyounodto]

You do realize that much of this applies to every gawdamn nation state in the Americas and clearly elsewhere in the world for that matter?! #Repost @subversive.thread ・・・ Fuck all U.S. presidents. They are below the bar of who we ought to be celebrating. There isn’t a single one of them who wasn’t either a slave-owner or who didn’t support genocide and war crimes in the name of empire. For the vast majority of us around the world, they are the most unwanted parts of our histories. And if they are a part of our histories at all, they are the architects of our oppression. We don’t want to remember them ― we want to remember who fought against them. ✨ This Presidents’ Day weekend let’s interrogate how holidays like these condition our youth to admire our oppressors. Let’s encourage them to look to our own histories for better models of who they could be. #NoMasters #NoLeaders ✨ Image Description: Graphic features Arundhati Roy positioned in front of a waterfall with the caption “Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.” ✨ #Education #CriticalPedagogy #Teaching #PresidentsDay #Resistance #Liberation #History #Colonization #Decolonization #StatePower #Imperialism #TeachersOfInstagram #ArundhatiRoy https://www.instagram.com/p/B9BZ55fgown/?igshid=z2fu0c5d5756

[ecl462mywritingclassroom]

I have a dream...

Dear diary,

My rationale for a writing classroom has to be epic, insightful, philosophical. But where do I start?

I sincerely wish for my students to be able to seek and delight in beauty, which is what I believe is the true purpose of all art forms. The aesthetic gives us ‘an experience that allows us to understand the world more fully and experience it more richly’ (Mission & Morgan 2009, p. 50). That’s what this is all about. To fall in love with the idea of beauty, to find it in visuals, in language, in novels and films and artworks and performances; to find a sincere form of expression.

As critical literacy informs my practice, I dream of a classroom that questions, that fights back. That is interactive and questions the status quo. That asks, “What makes the literary canon?” (MacLachlan 1994, p. 18), and “Why have set texts at all?”. I want students to engage with texts beyond the literary canon. I want to ‘make use of the printed material that daily assaults the student’ (Watson 2009, p. 80), particularly social media, blogs, vlogs, advertisements, streaming media - not only reading and interpreting, but also writing, speaking and creating! I want students to engage with the ‘universe of discourse’ (Andrews 2009, p. 39) – to understand and question the values placed on some forms of writing over other – and to argue that... 

I want to rid this weird culture where students feel that they shouldn’t speak unless they know the answer. Although the students in Australia aren’t told this message as explicitly as in Vanuatu where I taught (yes, below was ACTUALLY a sign in the classroom), it still troubles me that in many of my classes, students don’t speak up in fear of being wrong (Locke 2014, p. 8).

(In case you can’t read it, the sign says “Sh.....!! Silence!! Keep your mouth shut until you know what you’re talking about”) - UGH! 

I want students to get it wrong, because that is when learning occurs! Mission explains it perfectly, that ‘poststructuralism undercuts this vision of glorious certainty’ (Mission 2009, p. 69), and further, I want the students to understand that certainty is a mirage, and all I care about is growth. I don’t always hold the answers. I am all too aware of the power dynamic in classrooms and hope to have a more balanced, student-centred, student-led and dialogic classroom where my position is as one of many interested readers (Andrews 2009, p. 42). 

All of this is in the hope that my students will leave my classroom with their own critical understanding of the world, their place in it and the contexts which inform everything surrounding them. 

[fourcrazycatlady]

When I think about the fact that [the University of Miami's] very public problems with diversity were addressed in an article written by a student in my 'Introduction to Black World Studies' class, then echoed in other articles by other students in the campus paper, demonstrations, demands, sit-ins, and road-blocks, I begin to think that it is possible to teach for change. And while Miami may still lack diversity, this is just a taste of what some [Black Panther Party] rhetoric, a little critical pedagogy, and Black students' writing can accomplish--of the disruptions they can make

Gwendolyn D. Pough (2002), “Empowering Rhetoric: Black Students Writing Black Panthers,” College Composition and Communication 53.3

[helloearlychildhoodeducatio-blog]

On Critical Pedagogy by Henry A. Giroux

A thorough introduction to critical pedagogy.

[mrgoki]

So this morning on Twitter… …I think she got off pretty easy from #BlackTwitter, but the last comment took the cake. #Education #CriticalPedagogy #WhereIGotThatLink