Reclaiming Teacher Education: A Humanizing Pedagogy of Wholeness

• In Event: Reclaiming the Teaching Profession: What Are We Reclaiming?

Abstract

Objectives

Critical scholars of educational reform such as Michael Apple and David Berliner remind us that it is important to speak back and speak clearly against the dominant discourses of neoliberalism. These discourses posit that since public schools are flawed and failing, they can only be saved through standards-based accountability, corporate approaches to managing schools including punitive teacher evaluations that are directly linked to standardized tests (Hatch, 2015, Apple, 2013). However, such conceptions fail to address the professional role that teachers play regarding the purposes of education that encompass, preparing “students for full democratic participation, maximize every students’ human potential, prepare students to be active learners for life, and to prepare students to improve the world they will inherit (Hatch, 2015, p. xi). Instead of teachers engaging students in meaningful ways to accomplish such ideals, teachers are prone to succumbing to an impoverished dehumanizing pedagogy (Authors, 2015). This paper articulates a humanizing pedagogy of wholeness that values students and teachers as complex human beings with multifaceted subjectivities, identities and positionalities.

Perspective

Freire (1970) depicts a humanizing pedagogy as an approach to instruction that “ceases to be an instrument by which teachers can manipulate students, but rather expresses the consciousness of the students themselves” (p. 51). Teachers who enact a humanizing pedagogy engage in a quest for “mutual humanization” (p. 56) with their students through the dialogic process of teaching and learning. Such a process develops a critical consciousness where students learn how to “perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Freire, 1970, p. 17). Further, Palmer (1998) encourages teachers to embrace the integrity of teaching (by discerning what is integral to one’s selfhood), consequently more whole. A pedagogy of wholeness takes into account the selfhood of the teacher and the quest for humanization.

Methods and Data Sources

I utilize illustrations of teacher candidates’ biographical accounts of their subjectivity, identity and positionality and relay the manner in which teacher educators can utilize a pedagogy of wholeness to disrupt “cultural myths” (Britzman, 1986) of learning to teach in order to counter the neoliberal discourses that essentialize teacher education. A humanizing pedagogy of wholeness allows teachers to negotiate institutional mandates of conformity as they construct their teaching identities (Britzman, 1998). Wholeness accounts for the complex identities, positionalities and subjectivities of teachers and students. This paper responds to the question: How can teacher educators utilize a humanizing pedagogy of wholeness to reclaim the integrity of teaching and learning?

Results and Significance

To reclaim the teaching profession through a humanizing pedagogy of wholeness teacher educators can embrace the idea that rather than answering to institutional powers as the “keepers of the integrity of teaching and learning,” they can trust that teaching and learning can be cultivated from within. A humanizing pedagogy of wholeness focuses on the idea that understanding the complexity of one’s selfhood—who teachers are is in relation to their identities, subjectivity and positionality is key to maintaining the integrity of teaching and learning.

Author

• Christine Wanjiku Nganga, The George Washington University