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Personal Praxis: Becoming Critical Educators
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Contribution: This study offered 60 doctoral students in curriculum and leadership strands an opportunity to identify their own assumptions, to explore alternatives, and to make conscious choices about their own practice. The first step toward careful reflection and choice is recognizing that consciously or not, anyone who has ideas about what schools “should” be or do is already aligned with one paradigm of education or another. The doctoral students focused on the assumptions that undergird their behavior through interviews, focus groups, and social map construction. They developed a deeper understanding how particular life experiences shaped the thinking of teachers and students alike. They also considered how life experiences of students who come from very different backgrounds and experience the world very differently, than their teachers.
Relevance: For many educators the path to critical consciousness will result in a new awareness of unacknowledged and unearned privilege. It may also reveal equally unfair biases and roadblocks. But no matter the specific results, the process of examining formerly unconscious assumptions is never easy or pleasant because it always requires a move out of our comfort zone and into unfamiliar territory. Unpleasant as this might be, teachers with a sincere commitment to making informed professional choices have no choice but to ask themselves hard questions about their own experiences and assumptions. To do otherwise is to choose professional blindness and to drift on a current of complacency at a time when children desperately need their teachers to be charting the future of education thoughtfully and ethically.
Implication for Action: “When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them through a glass darkly in the shadows of my unexamined life- and when I cannot see them clearly I cannot teach them well”- Parker Palmer
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Contribution: This study offered 60 doctoral students in curriculum and leadership
strands an opportunity to identify their own assumptions, to explore alternatives, and to
make conscious choices about their own practice. The first step toward careful reflection
and choice is recognizing that consciously or not, anyone who has ideas about what
schools “should” be or do is already aligned with one paradigm of education or another.
The doctoral students focused on the assumptions that undergird their behavior through
interviews, focus groups, and social map construction. They developed a deeper
understanding how particular life experiences shaped the thinking of teachers and
students alike. They also considered how life experiences of students who come from
very different backgrounds and experience the world very differently, than their teachers.
Relevance: For many educators the path to critical consciousness will result in a new
awareness of unacknowledged and unearned privilege. It may also reveal equally unfair
biases and roadblocks. But no matter the specific results, the process of examining
formerly unconscious assumptions is never easy or pleasant because it always requires a
move out of our comfort zone and into unfamiliar territory. Unpleasant as this might be,
teachers with a sincere commitment to making informed professional choices have no
choice but to ask themselves hard questions about their own experiences and
assumptions. To do otherwise is to choose professional blindness and to drift on a current
of complacency at a time when children desperately need their teachers to be charting the
future of education thoughtfully and ethically.
Implication for Action: “When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students
are. I will see them through a glass darkly in the shadows of my unexamined life- and
when I cannot see them clearly I cannot teach them well”- Parker Palmer
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