Comments on "Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts"

Peter McLaren's "Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts" suggests that cultural and social constructs must be taken into account when dealing with students. This is an important concept to understand, but is most likely a difficult one for individuals to comprehend. In order to combat your personal prejudices against certain social cues and constructs you must be aware that these prejudices may exist in the first place--which is an amount of self-awareness and humbleness that is difficult to attain. The power structures that make up society are difficult to ascertain because they appear to be the natural state of the world. What critical pedagogy asks of teachers is to rewire the hierarchies of their mind—hierarchies that seem utterly natural and are therefore difficult to realize. But the difficulty of the task is equal to its importance. The classroom could provide a place to escape the politics of society; a politics that too often disenfranchises those who are without the social power and rewards those who know the “correct” cultural codes. The key to realizing the biases of your social conditioning is to be constantly aware of yourself and the history of your social class and how they can undermined an intention to be fair and understanding.

But what does all this mean practically? How do we combat the hierarchies of society in the classroom? How do we free the classroom from hegemony into Democracy (and be in accord with the Common Core Standards)? I am not quite sure the article adequately addresses this issue. There is also the problem that even if the teacher is able to make the classroom a more democratic state, the students themselves may still cling to the older hierarchies, inhibiting those with less power. I do not know how to address this issue—if it’s even an issue at all.