Keith Rhodes: Report on Pedagogy of the Oppressed Session

I followed two excellent presenters who warned intelligently against specific reductive views of literacy education (and if you want more, you shouldda been there). With their agreement, we then had discussion of their papers, saving roughly 1/3 of the session for my part. I gave a very brief overview of this project, a summary of the short description printed out a bit farther along here (which was given out as a handout). Participants were urged to give me written commentary in addition to what was spoken (though near as I can tell, everything anybody gave me in writing was also said). I asked three questions, each in turn after listening to some discussion of the prior one. As it turned out, the discussion collapsed them into two. First, is the prospect for "liberatory" outcomes statements inevitably oxymoronic? Second, if there are going to be outcomes statements, what would genuinely liberatory teachers want them to say? There were a couple of pointed walk-outs, but otherwise there seemed to be a general sense that, with misgivings, it was possible to see outcomes statements as improving the liberatory quality of a classroom, particularly if they were presented in a way that permitted a full interrogation of the statements - who made them, and why, and are they really good for us, etc. There was little audible (or legible) disagreement with the point that it is teacher methods and the entire construct of graded classes that presented the greater problem, and that outcomes statements were not likely to worsen matters. Turning to how they might improve matters, the discussion crystallized into three suggested "liberatory" outcomes that might make the "test" to which we teach a more effective and liberatory one:

1. Students should be able to explore the ideology of the outcomes statements themselves;

2. Students should be able to develop criteria for the assessment of their own work;

3. Students should understand well that learning to write is a life-long process involving processes, rhetorical understanding, and sophisticated knowledge about both language and ideology

Okay, here is the link to the background detail for the more obsessive.

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