A three-day professional development workshop for tertiary teachers in all disciplines. 

LEARNING TO CHANGE THE WORLD.

Workshop-Seminars with Tony Ward PhD.

Who is this course for?

This 3 day professional development course in Critical Pedagogy is designed for teachers in the tertiary sector in all disciplines

What makes it a suitable programme?

We are collectively teaching in the 21st century with methodologies developed in a bygone era. They t are outdated and do not respond to the dramatic increases in the social and cultural complexity of the classroom or the technological developments in the learning environment that have taken place over the last twenty years.

Rationale:

• The transmission of “facts” to a new generation of students
• The development and growth of knowledge
• Developing meaningful models of the material world
• Developing a student’s individual potential
• Helping students to acquire job skills
• Increasing graduates’ employability chances
• Increasing individual’s earning capacity
• Improving life chances and social position
  

To be sure it is about these issues. But it is about more than this too. Education is also and always about an imagined future – about what kind of world we would like to see come about. Education plays a vital role in the shaping of the social world and the relationships that it manifests. In the big picture, Education is about the creation of a just and caring society - a society that ought to be. Adorno also realised this when he spoke of formalised education as “half-education”. Critical pedagogy speaks to this “other half” of the educational experience.

Why Is it important?

In the last twenty years the world has changed dramatically. Globalisation has transformed the social, political, cultural and economic landscape. We are collectively beset by seemingly insurmountable planetary crises. Disparities in wealth and power have escalated, promising certain future political unrest. The classroom environment has become increasingly socially and culturally complex, with a shift in our conceptions of what constitutes legitimate knowledge. This has led to a loss of confidence in expertise and  a questioning of teacher authority.

Despite these changes, education remains largely locked into a traditional top-down pedagogy of a bygone era. We tend to teach the way we were taught, presuming that while it “worked for us” it must be a reliable methodology. But the old teaching methodologies were shaped by more certain times and are no longer able to cope with the challenges of the modern classroom and social world.
 

• Much more learning now takes place outside the classroom environment and is often at odds with school objectives

• Popular culture now represents an increasingly important realm of the learning environment

• The intersecting complexities of race, class and gender have shifted both the cultural makeup of the classroom and the needs of the students.

• Cultural pluralism in the wider society has changed our perceptions of what constitutes appropriate curriculum content

• The ensuing multicultural composition of classes has highlighted the issues of language (student voice), cultural sensitivity and expertise.

• We now recognise that “expert knowledge” systems upon which our education was and is based are not value-free, but are implicitly culturally determined

• Traditional pedagogies, based upon a belief in such “expert knowledge” systems are threatened by rapid advances in technology and by widely available information in the open-access digital wiki-world.

• Educational programmes are increasingly detached from the social, political and economic world, rendering students unprepared to address real-world issues.

• Economic and social disparities have increased, and the education system is increasingly failing to address the needs of minority students whose high non-completion rates persist.

• Society itself has become less stable and more potentially violent, and the social values that were previously developed in school now seem inadequate to the shaping of a better world.

• The increasing corporatisation of education has led to an increasing emphasis upon competition and individual achievement at the expense of participatory citizenship in public life.

• The increasing emphasis on competition and individualism in education has helped to foster a culture of competitive individualism in everyday life which seems to be at odds with  our desire for social harmony.

• And so on…

In these circumstances, teachers can no longer presume to an authority that was implicit in the old system. Yet the need to maintain a healthy learning environment remains essential. What, then, is the role of the teacher to be in the emerging complexity and uncertainty of the second decade of the 21st Century? Critical Pedagogy provides some valuable insights and answers to this question.

Objectives

• To create an awareness of the changes that have taken place in the learning environment in the last twenty years
• To make teachers aware of the latest research in adult education
• To highlight the relationship between culture and learning
• To make available alternative models of assessment and evaluation
• To highlight the advantages of co-operative learning processes
• To train teachers in group facilitation, conflict resolution and consensus-building
• To establish a cross-disciplinary peer support mentality around critical issues in education
• Promote the development of critical and reflective thinking, and active and informed citizenship locally, nationally and globally 

The Workshops

The course is composed of three days of interactive workshops and seminars on the significance and practice of critical pedagogy in a tertiary setting.

Day 1: Morning
•    Introductions
•    Problems in the classroom (case studies)
•    Class, race, gender, and culture in the classroom
•    Related problems in public life
•    The relationship between education and public life
Day 1 Afternoon
•    The relevance of “facts”
•    Expert knowledge systems
•    Teacher authority, evaluation and assessment
•    The importance of competition?
•    Co-operative learning

Day 2: Morning
•    Education and objectivity: models of knowledge
•    Education and power: models of expertise
•    Alternative models of learning
•    Listening to students: validating voice and identity
•    Participatory education: Is it a threat?
Day 2 Afternoon
•    The civic role of education
•    Educating in and for the real world
•    Espoused Values and Values-in-Action
•    Internal consistency: the medium is the message
•    The impact of new technologies

Day 3: Morning
•    Making use of technology
•    New teacher roles
•    New pedagogies
•    New forms of evaluation and assessment
•    Case studies
Day 3: Afternoon
•    Individual prescriptions
•    Summary
•    Peer support
•    Final questions/answers
•    Poroporoaki

• bibliography

• glossary

• preferential access to online and downloadable PDFs on Critical Education Theory and Critical Pedagogy

• One month’s online follow-up in-service support.

Methodology

• Presentations
• Discussions
• Problem solving / case studies
• Research
• Background Reading
• Individual tasks
• Group work
• Handouts and course notes
• Practical work/experimentation
• Individual feedback and support

Learning Outcomes

This Professional Development course will equip tertiary teachers to:

• develop more effective ways of addressing student needs
• recognise and validate student voices
• increase student completion rates
• become skilled in group facilitation, conflict resolution and consensus-building
• develop culturally harmonious classrooms
• run successful co-operative learning programmes
• develop new and appropriate forms of evaluation and assessment
• help students to situate their studies in the context of the real world
• help students to develop entrepreneurial skills
• develop student research capabilities
• prepare students for higher levels of academic achievement

Costs:     P. O. A.

   Maximum 12 participants

             Lunches, morning coffee and afternoon tea will be provided.

Venue:    To be determined

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