Amy’s education blog

Before reading this article, I’d actually never heard of Critical Pedagogy and now that I’ve read a little of what it’s about, I don’t really see how it differs from Critical Thinking. From the text, I could see some of the main differences between the two in that Critical Pedagogy seeks to raise questions about inequalities of power and places a great emphasis on change, whereas Critical Thinking is more about the drive to seek reason and evidence. Although they differ slightly, I wonder if it’s possible to have one without the other?

When I think about critical thinking and pedagogy in my own life, I think about Language Arts and Social Studies classes where there can be more than one right answer and more than one way of coming up with those answers. Most other subjects seems to place a greater importance on knowing facts and being able to spit those facts back out on a test, but these subjects seems to place more importance on the bigger picture. Now, does anyone else think that that is wrong? Because I do. Granted, with math, there is only one right answer and only one way to get there, but you can still use critical thinking to apply it to life, and I feel that this is where many teachers slack. I never had a math teacher that showed us how we could use math in real life until I got to MSU. My professors made us think harder about the material being presented because we knew that it was more important than just a grade. The same goes for classes like science, where we usually skipped over the critical thinking questions that came at the end of the “easy” ones. I don’t know if teachers just don’t want to deal with grading these questions, if they doubt their student’s ability to comprehend them, or if they honestly don’t know how to answer them themselves. Whatever the reason may be, these types of questions are the ones that make students learn. Memorizing facts for a test and then forgetting them ten minutes later is not doing any student any good. If more questions were based on the critical thinking and pedagogy ideals then maybe today’s youth would not be falling behind in school. Students wouldn’t find these questions so horrible if they were all they knew. The reason I hated doing them in certain classes was because I knew how hard they were compared to others. If you didn’t know this, you wouldn’t care.

Over the weeks in this class, I’ve noticed how apathetic and lazy some teachers can be when it comes to their student’s education and this makes me so mad because I feel like I was cheated in high school as well. I know that with a foreign language it can be difficult to incorporate critical thinking and critical pedagogy into the material because it is a lot of memorization, but I feel that critical pedagogy could especially be incorporated because there is a lot that deals with the Latin American cultures and countries, so instead of simply making student locate and memorize the countries, we should try to make them see why these countries are so impoverished and how the US contributes to the cycle of poverty. An issue like this doesn’t need to be taught by a social studies teacher only. It should be every teacher’s responsibility to make sure that our students get a broad education based on more than just facts.