Critical Reflection Five: Critical Pedagogy

            The article this week by Ozlem Sensoy (2011) recounts his work with twenty seventh graders from Vancouver and there results from a photo essay about living with racism, classism, or sexism. Sensoy decided the students from Poppy Elementary were viable candidates to study based on the fact they represent a diverse community. Their teacher Ms. Chandra teaches from a critical pedagogy framework. Ms. Chandra asks students “to think about the textbook as a constructed narrative and by bringing students’ own lived experiences and concerns into the classroom” (Sensoy, pg. 323). By letting her students tell a ‘counterstory’ they are “‘telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told’” (pg. 324). Many scholars used “counterstories or counterstorytelling to examine how race and racism in particular have shaped the lives and experiences of students of color” (pg. 324). By following the students work throughout the month Sensoy found three main themes: theme one was “thinking literally and thinking metaphorically”, theme two was “I want them to ‘feel’ what it’s like” and theme three was “unsettled expertise” (pg. 324).

           

Since the majority of students in the classroom were visible minorities they were able to give greater insight then students who went to predominantly white and middle class schools. Ms. Chandra’s “own history and social location allow her to relate to and understand many of her students’ experiences in first-hand ways” (pg. 326). I believe Ms. Chandra genuinely cared about her students thoughts. Ms. Chandra reminded me of my grade seven teacher and how her mission of the year was to give back to the community and by doing so we learned quite a bit about ourselves. Each student was required to do a specific amount of volunteer hours a week. By getting her students to do this she taught us that whoever we were and wherever we came from our time and dedication to volunteer made all of us useful in society.

            The idea that Ms. Chandra had about making the project a visual one was useful for two reasons. Firstly, it was “more accessible to this high ESL and high IEP population of students and allowed for a new forum within the formal school structure that complemented the traditional classroom work occurring in the school” (pg. 329). Secondly, it “may offer new ways of capturing this messy business and the complexity of social realities as they relate to race, class, and gender” (pg. 329). What I really liked about Ms. Chandra was “she believes in integrating these experiences into the class curriculum, and often models for her students how her own life experiences are connected to bigger lessons that often lie in the pages of the school curriculum or school structures (pg. 326). Both Ms. Chandra and Sensoy’s main goal was “to see how they combined their school-based work with their own real-life experiences and knowledge” (pg. 329).

            Theme one represents all the students who took race, gender, and class with a literal interpretation. For example “if their theme was race, students took photographs of skin and hair” (pg. 332). Sensoy believes “this type of interpretation is important because it gives educators insights into the discourses students are more fluent in” (pg. 334). Other students gave “a metaphorical representational discourse around race, class, and gender” (pg. 334). One student named Latif demonstrated how his “dual identity (or ‘disguise’ as he called it) gave him a complex social location” (pg. 334). Theme two represents how students wanted the individuals reviewing the photos to “feel”. Sensoy notes how “many other students who wanted the audience to think, stop, or feel did not want to make it easy for the audience” (pg. 336). By making the audience “push” to understand the project it made “the audience more unsettled, uncomfortable, and work harder at understand race, class, or gender” (pg. 336). Theme three represents how the “production work unsettled the identifications of who were the academic ‘high’ and ‘low’ achievers in the class” (pg. 336). The students who were generally considered academic achievers were found to be struggling with this type of project since it was more self direction then doing the “right” thing and being told what to do.

            Sensoy found that “students’ own racial, class, or gender positionings were not reliable indicators of more complex storytelling about race, class, or gender issues” (pg. 339). Sensoy also found that the “critical pedagogue were not reliable indicators for a more complex presentation of race, class, and gender” (pg. 340). He also found “counterstories they produced is not so much the insights they offer about students’ ideas on race, class, or gender, but the capacity (or limitations) of students to integrate their lived experience and knowledge with school-based knowledge” (pg. 340). Sensoy’s study was very interesting and it is amazing to see how seventh graders view the world and view things in a completely different light. The only changes I would have liked to have seen with this study is involving more students and doing the study at a different time during the school year, which Sensoy addresses. I think this study gets the ball rolling on important ideas.

Sensoy, O. (2011).Picturing Oppression: Seventh Graders’ Photo Essays on Racism, Classism, andSexism.  International Journal ofQualitative Studies in Education, 24(3), 323-42.