Revolutionizing Our Praxis As Educators and Civic Agents: How the Agency of Urban Youth Changed the Lives of Three Teachers

• In Event: The Critical Pedagogy in Mentoring: Planting the Seeds for Critical Consciousness and Transformation

Abstract

Much of the literature in the field of critical pedagogy focuses on the liberation, empowerment, and humanization of the students in a learning space (Freire 1970; Duncan-Andrade and Morrell 2008; hooks 1994; Shor 1992). Yet, when we look at the impacts that these critical learning spaces have on teachers/mentors, this aspect has been under theorized and researched. This leaves room to question, as teachers develop learning experiences that utilize a critical pedagogical framework, in turn, how does it impact their own lives and identities? This paper focuses on the processes that three mentors/teachers go through in facilitating a youth after-school research program in a large urban high school. Specifically, I analyze the ways in which mentoring students as they engage in conducting youth participatory action research (YPAR) projects about their school, impacts the teachers’ pedagogy and trajectory as civic agents.

As an ontological process for both students and teachers, Freire (1970) teases out the concept of critical praxis—the process in which theory informs practice and practice, in turn, informs theory through a constant reflection. In result, Freire argues that this process leads to self-actualization and critical consciousness, but only through a problem-posing pedagogy. Conversely, in talking about the ways that schooling is oppressive and set up to privilege social and economical hierarchies of power, Giroux (2009) argues that the current systems of education prevent teachers from “assuming their full potential as active, reflective scholars and practitioners” or in other words becoming transformative intellectuals. In contrast to Giroux’s argument, this study looks into the unique, hybrid educational space of the Freedom Scholars Program, a youth research program that engages high school students from Los Angeles in doing critical research around their schools and communities, as an actual school site of learning that facilitates these three teachers’ processes of self-actualization, clarity of politics, and development of more engaging and effective pedagogies.

Through a participatory action research methodology, I traced my trajectory as a mentor and researcher and that of the other two co-teachers from the Freedom Scholars Program at South Central High School. It was found that, as the teachers reflected about what they had learned from their students and their experience in the program, they gained a deeper understanding of their role as educators in an urban setting; 1) the pedagogy that they utilized in the freedom scholars program carried on into their "regular" classes at the high school and university level and 2) the YPAR process helped them demystify and transform deficit notions of “urban youth” by developing a language and mentality that other educators can learn from. This paper extends the literature on critical pedagogy and YPAR in that it provides a clear example of teachers learning from their students by engaging in YPAR, a transformative research methodology that pushes for social critique and action (Camarrota and Fine, 2008; McIntyre, 2001; Morrell, 2004).

Author

• Mark Bautista, The University of Texas - Arlington