Life in Schools: Spanning Three Decades

• In Event: 31.076 - Creating a Culture of Revolutionary Praxis: The 25th Anniversary of Life in Schools

Abstract

This author has taught critical pedagogy in higher education for the past 7 years and used McLaren’s Life in Schools as a companion book to Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom to foreground real classroom experiences under the imperialism of western ideology. McLaren’s critical ethnography of his teaching in Canadian public schools catalogues the dehumanization of youth as they struggle to find themselves in the place called school. Curiously, educators throughout English colonized terroritories see their teaching stories reflected within the pages of his journal demonstrating the timeliness of this piece of scholarship. This book has traveled over a dozen countries and has been translated into six languages. Educators have reported on the impact of this work at various conferences throughout the world, e.g. International Freire Critical Pedagogy Conference, New Zealand, December 2012. Less is known about how youth themselves find meaning in this book. What is the discourse from their perspective?

Students from marginalized communities are often perceived by educators as deficit of the cultural capital to succeed in schools. They are subsequently disciplined, remediated, and penalized. This response is no difference from medieval times in 16th century Spain when doctoral students who did not perform well in their students were made to wear white hats with a spoon attached to show they had fallen from grace and made to eat in the soup kitchen. Public humiliation for not meeting the “standards” survives within contemporary practice as well e.g. scores from value added models of teacher evaluations published in newspapers (which resulted in one suicide).

Juxtaposed to condemnation is Freire’s notion of “unfinishedness” discussed in Pedagogy of Freedom (1989). Freire postulates it is our unfinshedness that defines our humanity. It is our unfinshedness that drives us to learn and to seek others to improve the human condition. When we are conscious of this unfinishedness, we know that things can change. Instead of viewing a student as “failed,” one can think of the student as unfinished, someone who has yet to become, or better yet, one with “undiscovered potential” where it takes both student and teacher to mutually discover the potential. As teacher becomes learner (Pedagogy of Oppressed), the mutuality and reciprocal unfinishedness is the place of new consciousness, faith, and hope.

This commentary discusses interview findings of 3 high school teachers/doctoral candidates who teach in urban high schools in southern California. These doctoral students used Life in School as the pedagogical text to accompany their social studies/science curriculum and also reported how teachers’ reframing of students from deficit to unfinished has influenced their practice and epistemologies. Specific points of discussion include: a). Freire’s theorizing on unfinishedness, b). Critical ethnographer – stories still resonate, humanizing and dehumanizing episode capture, c). The criticality and the significant holding power of this book especially when accompanied with Pedagogy of Freedom, d). Unfinishedness addresses the domination of the concept of deficit theorizing and e). Conscientization

Author

• Suzanne SooHoo, Chapman University