when students have power

When students have power1. Modifying teaching discourseA. Language choice: Students have the

opportunity to read, write and speak their own language variety as well as the standard

B. Generative content: The curriculum is chosen by students and teachers to address issues they consider important.

• C. New Knowledge: students and teachers produce knowledge for themselves and others.

• D. Action: Students and teachers initiate and /or support actions which challenge inequitable power relations in and out of the classrooms.

• 1. First class encounters (typical and unauthorized)

• Empowered arrangement for teachers, in syllabus decision under generical headings.

• Empowered democracy for students?• Collaboration is essential in democracy.

Students making decisions over knowledge. (Dewey)

• Against a banking method. Reproducers of rules to control students. Responsability?

• In undemocratic practices students do assert themselves informally and subversively

• No developing democratic habits. No real life abilities to be citizens , fiction.

• Choices are in some way dependant on the economical situation in the world

• How do we judge our students based on economic situations they are surrounded they can’t do anything about?

• Teacher shaping their image against the economic and political situation and who makes decisions over them. Uncomfortability.

The siberian syndrome

• Questions for the first meeting. • General information about themselves and their

families. Their free time activities and expectations. • Why they took the course.• Changes they would like to make in their college if they

had the chance to do so. • Same for their city• Questions dealing with the socio-political situation of

the country. • Questions specifically about the subject matter.

• Differences in each class, time and context• Approaching the subject to their context and

relating together• Critical thinking as a literate social performance

enabled in an experientially and linguistically meaningful context, enacted in the language students possess, inside a purposeful, negotiated process which encourages them to question the cultural assumptions of society and to imagine alternatives to the status quo.

• Restrain the teacher’s didactic voice so as to generate students’ expression as the foundational discourse.

• Try to discipline ourselves more than discipline the students to follow the teacher’s pre-emptive lecture.

• Frontloading student discourse and backloading the teachers’ commentaries. Freire: praxis, Dewey: agency of democratic education. Put theory into action.

• The teachers´authority is dialogical in discourse.

LEADING A PEDAGOGY OF QUESTIONS

• Posing questions more than making comments. Legitimazing authority in a low profile. Not easy to retain discourse. Patience is needed.

• Provide students the chance to speak can be a change to start with changes and know about them. Priorities and perceptions. Row material for building a syllabus and class discourse. (written or spoken)

• Generative topics became the topics of the agenda to be developed in the course. Projects. Committee students. Collaborative work.

• Teacher leaves students work in their rhythm, excluding teacher´s talk. Construct critical discourse.

• Developing the course as starting with the students’ previous comments, teacher took notes on them, students felt they were importat. Show respect. Authority to credit their remarks.

• Collective texts, Big Bigelow (1990) Christensen (1990) collective thought.

• Stating the subject matter as follows: • A. Where does the subject come from? And what

do we do with it?• How questions could be biased. Authority

inmersed. Consequently view on evaluation and grades. ( students mimicking teacher’s point of view for grades).

• Concretize the questions in single situations.

• Extend and monitor students talk outside the classroom. Different spaces students use

• Students ask and answer questions to frontload in their idiom.

• Students challenge the topics, not a memory or mimicking exercise.

• Following to answer the questions in the order students wanted to. (empowering them)

• codeveloping.

• Advising theoretical reading on the topics already detected by the students in their questions. Influence by teacher´s point of view. (not free from ideologies, no teaching is neutral)

• Students must show their positions even when they don’t agree with the teachers’ views. That is democracy. Punishment is not there, it rewards public criticisism.

• Offering of conceptual handles for studying the subject matter.

• Stating concrete situations in order to display the concepts to analize them.

• Negotiating the curriculum (power sharing, shared authority, cogovernance)

•CONCLUSIONS