Documentation

HD 363: Education for Critical Consciousness

Dewi Ochoa
March 31, 2016
Pacific Oaks College

Documentation : HD363 Education for Critical Consciousness

I took this class in the Fall of 2015. I was very impressed by the professor. We
had a class of three which had been challenging for me in the past, particularly over
the summer when I had dropped this same class for the same reason. I was
determined to stay in the class seeing as how it would be my last class before
capstone.
My primary goal was to obtain some knowledge of a curriculum created with
social justice in mind. I was impressed by how clear the professor made it to
adapting the information for the different types of students. I definitely feel like my
own goals were achieved. SLO 1 states: Students will conduct an analysis of
education as a means of critical consciousness through the writings of Paolo Freire,
Sylvia Ashton Warner, and other theorists to examine systemic and historical power
and its impact on the development of children, adolescents, adults and families.
This was a very interesting analysis of education from my own experience. I was
invited to spend time thinking about the different education I received while I lived
in Mexico and comparing it to my education in high school and community college.
I found this reflection to be very important in developing my own theories of
education and how I wish to conduct my classroom in the future.
We read essays from the compilation The Critical Pedagogy Reader and I
learned a lot from these readings. One of the concepts that really stood out to me
was the concept of the hidden curriculum I had never learned about this and how
I may inadvertently be doing this myself. I learned about how teachers may be
inserting negativity into their curriculum by simply doing things. I found that the

teachers actions speak louder than words. I then was inspired to analyze my own
teaching, the way that I form interest groups in my classroom and started thinking
about how I might integrate childrens interest across genders and attempt to look
beyond what my immediate response would be to any childs interest or type of
play they engage in.
In this class we also were to read Teacher, which I gladly reread and found a
very different interpretation when reading it from the lens of critical pedagogy. I
enjoyed reading about how the childrens writing would often discuss their family
life and how Ms. Ashton-Warner would embrace this writing and appreciated their
value. I equate this to how a child from a violent environment might want to play
violent games and how a teacher who appreciates this need would help guide this
play rather than stop it. I often think about how important it might be to a child to
be able to process those feelings through play and how a teacher who is keen to the
needs of children will support them and even create experiences to facilitate this
processing.
In this class I was also the only student actively participating in creating
curriculum in a classroom and this was my contribution. I was able to share how in a
constructivist school we are able to build curriculum directly from the interests of
children and how this allows us to engage the whole child in infinite ways. At the
same time, students who were participating in classrooms with preset curriculum
had the challenge to create and adapt their curriculum to be a more holistic look
into the childs needs and their view of the world. I live in a small bubble of working
in a school in which all the children speak English as their first language, their
parents are educated and they are talking with large vocabularies by the time they
are 2. This in contrast with a teacher who works with children from different cultural

backgrounds where they all speak different languages at home, the building of
curriculum would be completely different. I appreciate their perspective and their
challenges deeply.
In an online class there is only a very limited amount of sharing and
contributions that can be made. True to form, while there were weeks in which
people were completely engaged in the materials and the reading, there were quite
a few times in which I was entirely frustrated by the way some of the students
misquoted the readings and were obviously only reading a paragraph or two and
using that to base their entire paper, I then had to go on reading their posts and try
to make sense of them and politely and sensibly point this out to them when I really
wanted to scream from the top of my lungs are you kidding me. It is frustrating,
but I find it a part of what it is like to be in an online class. If there had been more
students in the class, I would be able to pick and choose who I would respond to,
but alas there was only 3 people, myself included. This is why I appreciated a
professor who was invested in the material and was an active participant in the
discussion, who added to the comments by the students and asked questions to
stimulate thinking.