Ashley Aretakis-Fredo
CI 5333
March 17, 2003
Literacy Review
Social reconstructivism is a contemporary philosophy which view’s education as a means for change and social reform. Social reconstructivism improves and reconstructs society by emphasizing creativeness, nonconformity, and self-actualization and provides learners with “direct experience in democratic living and political/social action which prepares students for freedom” (Ornstein, 1991, p.7).
Paulo Freire was one of the first to dialogue about “the relationship among education, politics, imperialism, and liberation” (McLaren, 1999, p.26). His early life experiences in Brazil among peasants and his experience with the education systems in different countries focused his thoughts on the elimination of social inequality and injustice in society at large. He believed that education could be the vehicle for social and political change, and that for the oppressed to act upon their world, they must have a form of “critical consciousness.” This “critical consciousness” he spoke of is achieved through “critical pedagogy”; a set of teaching practices which uncovers the ways in which the process of schooling supports the dominant or mainstream culture (those in power) and represses all other differing ideas, cultures, and people.
Freire thought that our common education practices seek to “fill” students with a reality that is motionless and static and as a result, disconnects students from the ability to act with those ideas and give them significance (Freire, 1970, p.52). He coined the phrase “the banking model” to describe this, the act of teachers making deposits into students. This type of education prevents communication about ideas and projects an assumption of absolute ignorance onto the student, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, and negates education and knowledge as a process of inquiry (1970).
Freire argued for a change in the practices of education. By viewing both the teachers and students as learners, by coinciding efforts and engaging in critical thinking and using education as a practice of freedom, schools can become the vehicle for social and political change. The ultimate goals of a reconstructivist approach created by Freire emphasize: “learning to question society, seeing through the versions of truth that teach people to accept unfairness and inhumanity, and becoming empowered to envision, define and work toward a more humane society” (Bondy, 1999, p.131).
Paulo Freire was the first reconstructionist, many have continued with his philosophy, but the idea of critical consciousness and pedagogy is a universal theme among reconstructionists.
David Hanson, in his book The Call to Teach, furthers Freire’s idea of reconstructivism. He explains that critical pedagogy can only be accomplished if teaching is a vocation; something that “comprises a form of public service to others that at the same time provide the individual a sense of identity and personal fulfillment” (Grimmett, 1997, p.3).
When teaching is a vocation, there is a focus on person and pedagogy, which enables it to be an act of reconstruction instead of just knowledge dissemination (Hanson, p.156). This vocation requires teachers to promote a sense of purpose, interest, and wonder and involves a “commitment to rendering visible the usually invisible relations of schooling and daily life.” (Grimmett,1997, p.7).
Education is never a neutral enterprise. Education, at its worst, functions “to maintain the interests of those powerful groups that dominate society” (Stanley, 1997, p. 364). Instead, what is needed is an educational program designed to promote critical thinking, self-determination, and democracy. Reconstructivist philosophy in the schools is characterized by: “active engagement, inquiry, problem solving, and collaboration with others” (Abdul Haqq, 1998, p.1). The teacher leads the students to question, challenge and formulate ideas that allow them to act upon their own reality.
Reconstructivism as Curriculum
Since Freire’s conception of critical pedagogy, just how to create a reconstructivist classroom and curriculum has been a central discussion point. Freire wrote that in problem-posing education, “people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves” (1970, p.64). Finding and teaching a reconstructivist curriculum creates students, that when posed with problems relating to themselves and the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge (Freire, 1970).
Popular Culture
The critical teaching of popular culture is one method that allows students to acquire and develop literacies and subsequently deconstructs the “dominant narrative” associated with oppressive practices. Popular culture is the site of struggle between the subordinate and dominant groups of society (Morrell, 2002). The study of popular culture adds to the reconstructivist classroom because it supplies a resource that directly discusses differences in gender, class, race, and age. These differences are what maintains disadvantage and suffering (Giroux, 1998). By discussing these groups’ struggles, a dialogue is created that promotes self-determination and questions the extent of democracy in students’ everyday lives. The inability of kids in schools today to increase their literacy skills is not due to lack of intelligence. Rather, it is from the lack of students who can identify or are not in the dominant culture (Morrell, 2002). Popular culture as a curriculum incorporates music, film, mass media artifacts, language, customs, and values. These resources provide a connection between the students lived reality and the school culture.
Teaching Hip-Hop Culture
Rap and all forms of hip-hop music can be thought of as a representative voice to
urban youth because it was created by urban youth. In his analysis of hip-hop, Ernest Morrell wrote that, music raises the critical consciousness of a community because it is a voice of resistance through artists “who endeavor to bring an accurate yet critical depiction of the urban situation to a hip hop generation” (p.75).
Hip-hop music can be used as a curriculum in many ways, but the most popular method is through adding it to highschool English poetry units. Students can compare hip-hop music to other time periods of poetry in order to better evaluate both. In one class assignment, students were asked to present a poem from one time period and a rap song and provide a relation and comparison between the two (Morrell, 2002). Students can also critically analyze hip-hop music or create their own rap song to serve as social commentary.
Studying hip-hop is a form of reconstructivism because it calls for a “critical dialogue and critical engagement of the text and relates the text to larger social and political issues” (p.75).
Teaching Popular Film
Another aspect of contemporary society is the visual language of film and television. Film and television are yet another source of this “critical consciousness” that can lead students to critical thinking, new ideas, and an understanding between literature, film, television, and their own daily lives.
In one lesson on popular film, students studied the television show “South Park”
and examined the intended audience, who stood to benefit, language use, jokes, and violence. Examining this piece of popular media gave students the ability to discuss why “South Park” was popular to their age group and what that revealed about societies’ expectations of that age group (Stevens, 2001).
In another classroom, students studied the Godfather film trilogy and incorporated Homer’s “Odyssey.” Another unit studied the book Native Son and incorporated the film A Time to Kill (Morrell, 2002). Students discussed similarities and differences between the books and film. They were able to discuss the concept of heroes and examine social injustices in their own school based on experiences from the film. According to the teacher, “by combining popular film with critical texts, the students were able to hone their critical and analytical skills and use them in interpretations” as well as draw connections between literature, popular culture and their own lives (Morrell, 2002).
Teaching Popular Media
Studying the popular media allows students to assess and understand “the relationships between power and domination that underlie and inform those texts” (Morrell, p.73). Studying popular media allows students to discover not only what we see, but why we see it and why we don’t see other things (Weiner, 2002).
One way to show students this is by comparing mainstream and alternative news sources. In one classroom, students were asked to research coverage of the September 11 attacks using different news sources and analyze the discrepencies between dominant and alternative news sources (Weiner, 2002). Another classroom researched the Iraq situation using dominant and alternative media sources and the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting website (Kellogg, 2003).
These types of activities illustrated to students how meaning gets constructed through interpretations and showed them the power of language to construct reality.
Resilience
Another reconstructionist curriculum focuses on the concept of resilience. Bondy and McKenzie refer to resilience as the “capacity for or outcome of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances” (1999, p.130). Liberating education requires students to take risks, to be curious, and to actively question; it is about transforming the existing knowledge. Essentially, these types of actions require brave students. The failure of student resilience results an ineffective social reconstructivist curriculum (Bondy and McKenzie, 1999).
Resilience building emphasizes responsibility, social competence, autonomy, usefulness, and optimism. Classroom activities such as community service projects, teaching life skills, social skills development and other activities rooted in caring for the people in a community help foster resilience in students (1999). Subsequently, students are engaging in a reconstructivist curriculum because they are acting upon their community, taking risks, and transforming their realities with their knowledge.
The raising of critical consciousness in people who have been oppressed is the first step in helping them obtain freedom. This can be done with reconstructivism as a curriculum. It allows learners to consider the possibility for “new making” of reality and allows them to actively make connections between their own lives and the making of reality to date. With reconstructivism as a curriculum, learner’s knowledge is founded in their own being, experiences, and knowledge (McLaren, 1999).
Problems with Reconstructivism
Incorporating reconstructivism as a curriculum into today’s schools presents many challenges and difficulties. Many advocates of Freire’s philosophy argue that he provides no real ways in which teachers are to move “from critical thought to critical practice” (McLaren, 1999, pg. 30). Freire does not give specific examples of curricular practices for teachers to use, rather just discusses the ideology of the philosophy.
Critics claim reconstructivism as a curriculum is ineffective because one must have a relationship between learning and teaching that is measurable, such as those curriculums measure by standardized testing (Weiner, 2002). Some subjects, such as math and other sciences are more bounded by rules and formulae and they are more likely to be regarded as correct and incorrect. Incorporating a reconstructivist philosophy makes teaching standard scientific subjects seem difficult (Abdal-Haqq, 1998).
The current climate of today’s schools presents an already outstanding amount of difficulty for teachers. Reconstructivism is an approach that may seem more difficult to teach than the standard curriculum. One teacher reported several factors that made it seem almost impossible to incorporate a reconstructivist approach. He attributed his failed attempts to the students lack of passion, the manner in which students treated one another, and the students being “me-oriented” instead of oriented towards to the community, and frustration with the students’ general disruptiveness (Bondy and McKenzie, 1999).
Indeed, these are valid problems and present major difficulties for a reconstructivist classroom. Many of the solutions and answers to these difficulties lie in the original philosophy of Paulo Freire.
Hope for Reconstructivism
Freire’s shortcomings in providing a more concrete guideline for reconstructivism is also “a strength and marks the durability of his thought” (McLaren, 1999). There cannot exist a general guideline for reconstructionists curriculum because its’ focus is on the individual learner. Instead, teachers must personalize and discover, with their students, ways to create a classroom curriculum that addresses the tenants of “critical consciousness”. Freire wrote that “the progressive educator must always be moving out in his or her own, continually reinventing me and reinventing what it means to be democratic in his or her own specific cultural and historical context” (Freire, 1997). It is possible for educators to create curricula that are inclusive and affirmative yet facilitate the development of academic and critical literacies (Morrell, 2002).
Modern school reform and the emphasis on standardized testing make the reconstructivist classroom seem almost impossible. One must assess the worth of current education to understand the failure of our modern reforms. Students are less and less interested in current curriculum practices. The success of these is little:
“Fewer than 5% of adolescents assessed by the National Assessment for Education Progress in 1996 could extend or elaborate the meanings of the materials they read....few adolescents could write with sufficient details to support a main point” (Stevens, 2001, p. 554). Lisa Stevens reports that students, when challenged to relate school-based concepts to their own experiences, have overwhelmingly positive responses (2001). The lack of ability to use standardized testing does not imply the failure of a curriculum. Events created by a reconstructivist curriculum “prepares students for a life of learning and political participation minus the oversimplified certainty that standardizing outcomes promote” (Weiner, 2002, p.12). Indeed, educating people to read and act upon the world is quite different and much more important that training them to pass a test.
The teacher described earlier that attributed his failed attempt to the students lack of passion, mistreatment of one another, and general disruptiveness redesigned his reconstructivist curriculum and incorporated the theory of resilience into his classroom practices. At the end of the school year, his students were interviewed and reported that the teacher had “helped me to believe in myself”, and that he “teaches us to set a goal, and... how to be a man” (Bondy and McKenzie, 1999, p.133). Students also reported that they appreciated being given choices, sensed that everything in the world had a purpose, and learned how to make the world better (1999). The teacher became a student and learned how to adjust his classroom to his student’s needs.
To accomplish the goals of social reconstruction, the ideas of education must be deconstructed, and the cultural assumptions, power relations, and influences that underlie it must be exposed, critiqued, discussed, and altered (Abdal-Haqq, 1998). The need for a social reconstruction curriculum is very evident. Our students live in a country whose economic and political leaders make decisions that ripple through the world, they live in a country who uses more resources than any other country, and participate in a world that with globalization, has growing interconnectedness (Teaching the Word and The World, 1999). Our students, if guided correctly and compassionately can: recognize and act on their connections to others, can foster a tremendous capacity to grow, and can confront injustice and make change (Bigelow, 2001).
Works Cited
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