Exemplary Portrait: Barbara Jaffe
- Teaches English in California’s Puente Project, El Camino College
- Puente (Bridge) works with low-income, first generation community college students
- Familia writing model
- Employs writing as a contemplative practice tool
- Faculty member becomes a change agent, liberator and healer
Agreements Professor Jaffe Broke
- Writing is a stand-alone activity disconnected from student lives
- Only a few can learn and be successful college students
- All that poor, first-generation students come to college with are deficits that are most likely insurmountable
- The teacher’s role is to be the expert detached from students
- Putting down students is tough love that can result in real learning
- English professors need not emphasize the culture of the students
- The student’s voice and whatever is personal is unimportant in the classroom
New Pedagogical Dreamfield
- Writing can be employed as a contemplative practice tool, allowing students to express themselves and to reflect meaningfully on themes that are important to them
- All can learn if given the tools and the opportunity to learn
- Students from low-income backgrounds have strengths. They bring resilience, having overcome many difficult challenges in life. They bring their culture and their life experiences, which can be used as a base to foster learning.
- The teacher can and should engage in positive working relationships with students
- Encouragement and validation are key to student learning and growth
- Students can learn when exposed to an inclusive curriculum that includes their cultural perspectives
- Students can develop self-confidence if given voice in the classroom
Exemplary Portrait:Carlos Silveira
- Professor of Art–CSU-Long Beach
- Teaching philosophy based on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- Engages students in service learning
- Worked with poor children in the favelas of Brazil
Agreements Silveira Broke
- Art is a thing of beauty with little or no connection to sociopolitical, multicultural themes or to human healing
- The classroom is race/gender/sexuality-neutral
- Content can be learned only through academic forms—read a book, develop a theory
- Real learning occurs only inside the classroom
- Feelings/compassion are unimportant in pedagogical practice
- Poor students cannot learn
- Cognitive development is the only thing that matters
Silviera’s New Pedagogical Dream
New Agreements:
New Agreements:
- Art can transform; art has healing power. Art can be used to create socio-political awareness
- Real learning occurs not just in the classroom, but also in a field setting in a community. This is where theory meets humanitarianism, compassion and critical consciousness
- Professor can be a social activist—a change agent
- Poor students can learn when allowed to express their voice, to work on projects that reflect what they know and what they represent
- Emotions can be a part of the curriculum
Exemplary Portrait:
Professor J. Herman Blake
- Carnegie Foundation Teacher of the Year
- Retired Professor of African American Studies at Iowa State University
- Believes firmly that there are no known limits to learning
- Believes in engaging with students on multiple projects–multicultural learning community, conference on race and ethnicity
Strange Fruit
- Without Sanctuary
Agreements Blake Broke
- Professor is the only expert in class
- Reflection is unnecessary
- Learning ends once the class is over
- We should not talk about disturbing issues related to race in the classroom
- There are limits to learning, especially for students of color
New Agreements Blake Created
- Contemplative Practice is critical–allows for students to reflect and engage more deeply with the material
- Issues of race create tension, but we must work through them–disruption “wakes up” neutrality
- There are no limits to learning; levels of expectation should remain high, especially for students of color
- Liberating students from self-limiting views and fostering a passion to learn and to recognize and take action against societal inequities is the work of social justice in the classroom.
What Do We Call a Pedagogy
- Rooted in ancient wisdom–nonduality, wholeness, complimentarity between two opposites
- Decenters Western epistemology and ontology
- Views individuals as whole human beings
- Individuals can transform the world by acting on it
- In all that we do, there is a greater purpose than what appears before us
- Is unitive–connects inner and outer learning; unites the student with the subject matter; employs contemplative practice to deeply engage the learner in the material
- Promotes the acquisition of both knowledge and wisdom
- Emphasizes activism, liberation, healing and social change
Celebration of the Marriage of Heart and Mind
MultiHuman Curriculum
- Is multicultural and humanistic in nature
- Affirms dignity and worth of all people
- Respects diverse ways of accessing truth (i.e., scientific paradigm & full range of qualitative methods that honor the human experience).
- Engages diverse perspectives–ancestral teachings, Western views of knowledge, Third-World & Indigenous Knowledge, etc.
- Rejects a monocultural framework that exclusively privileges a White race, a male gender and Western perspectives
The Liberating, Socially Just Classroom
- Emphasizes relationships and the betterment of the collective whole
- Promotes self-reflexivity and emergence of critically aware, socially responsible individual
- Curriculum is democratic, inclusive and reflective of student backgrounds and needs
- Students develop intellectual capacities and develop themselves as human beings–identity, path in life, critical consciousness
- Professor models social activism (service learning, working with poor students, etc.)
- Professor promotes an ethic of care, compassion and validation
- Fosters transformation–students find self-worth, purpose, and voice
- Western paradigm which over-privileges mental knowing, monoculturalism, and separation is decentered. Emphasis is on wholeness