Attended a panel today where one of the presenters from Korea discussed creating a teacher education program with Critical Pedagogy. This guy laid it out like it really is on a global level. It was nice to see a nuanced approach to Freire’s ideas being practiced and discussed in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. The presenter showed TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) as a damaging and hegemonic view of EFL with the marginalized use of the word “other.” And while it was clear what Kiwan Sung meant when discussing Critical Pedagogy, I appreciated his naming of the approach as a way of “mobilizing one’s desires,” especially when pointing out that English is viewed as a global commodity. Sung also busted out the idea of researchers and teachers practicing the “Pedagogy of Indeterminacy,” a term I appreciate and I am still unpacking.

On a related note, at the end of the panel, I asked Sung about hegemonic and governmental resistance to his pedagogy in practice (he’d already addressed other professors and some students’ reticence at embracing a program they felt too idealistic). And while Sung’s response was to the point and what I wanted, I found it interesting that a former presenter who had done something or other on literacy at some small school for her dissertation decided to bring up that it’s hard for first year teachers to openly discuss race and to have these kinds of “real” conversations in a classroom. First of all, “discussions about race” should be happening no matter if you are a Caucasian graduate student or a teacher or a bystander; her answer was uninformed and drew on the kinds of ridiculous assumptions that Critical Pedagogy tries to resist. Further, “discussions about race,” though they may be important and valuable, have nothing to do with Critical Pedagogy. I’ve become more and more wary of these grad students (as well as the professors they inevitably become) who have never spent legitimate time teaching in a classroom or really reflecting on the teaching profession. Not that research for research’s sake is not valued, but where is the real world connection to the work of a preternaturally, misinformed, middle-class, WASP-y, idealist?