Experience, Knowledge Construction, and Ideology: Dilemmas in the Use of Constructivism to Teach Social Justice

• In Event: 43.080 - Sheraton Roundtable Six - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 43.080-7 - Knowledge in Tension: Dissident Experiences in Relation

Abstract

Social justice educators advocate a constructivist pedagogical approach that centers the autonomous, self-directed construction of knowledge from the learners’ experiences, as a means for facilitating students’ critique of oppression. However, students’ reflection on their experiences don’t always lead to conclusions that challenge oppression. This occurs in part because students’ interpretation of their experiences are produced through dominant ideologies, and they construct knowledge from an environment already structured by relations of oppression. This ethnographic study of an undergraduate teacher education course illuminates the contradictions involved in using constructivist approaches to teach social justice by demonstrating how students’ interpretation of their experiences, given their multiple, contradicting positionalities, led them to critique dominant ideologies in ways that contradicted the instructor’s social justice goals.

Author

• Joanne Tien, University of California - Berkeley