Helmer 2014

Source:   RESEARCH ARTICLE

APA Citation:

Helmer, K. (2014). Disruptive Practices: Enacting critical pedagogy through meditation, community building, and explorative spaces in a graduate course for pre-service teachers. The Journal of Classroom Interaction, 49(2), 33-40.

Author bio:

Kirsten Helmer – University of Massachusetts

Thesis/Argument:

Disruptive practices unsettle traditional teacher/student hierarchies in the classroom, traditional notions of what constitutes knowledge, as well as traditional ways of engaging with the curriculum of a class. 33

On the micro level of individual interactions, disruptive practices manifest in the form of classroom interactions that allow for collaboration, creativity, and multiple ways of knowing within a safe and supportive classroom community 33

While some critical teacher educators engage in practitioner research, narrative inquiry, and self-study around the courses that they teach, systematic empirical research is largely missing. …this article focuses on three disruptive practices that challenged and transformed preservice teachers’ commonsense notions about teaching and learning: constructing creative explorative spaces, community building, and using mindfulness practices in the form of secular meditation. 34

This paper showcased classroom interactions that reveal the transformational potential of educational practices which disrupt traditional notions about teaching and learning … offers students new ways to think critically and act with authority as agents in the classroom, exerting their own power as critically engaged human beings and taking responsibility for their own learning. 39

Discussion/Conclusion:

Teacher educators who wish to model critical pedagogy in their teaching practices have to rethink their own position in the classroom, moving from a position of authority to that of facilitator and guide of learning experiences. 35

Critical pedagogy:

Critical pedagogy is a teaching approach inspired by critical theory and other radical philosophies, which attempts to help students question and challenge posited "domination," and to undermine the beliefs and practices that are alleged to dominate.

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Critical_Pedagogy

One of the central tenets of critical pedagogy, especially as it is outlined by education scholar Paulo Freire, is the establishment of classrooms in which teachers and students learn together. Critical pedagogy allows students to speak with greater authority because they are drawing on knowledge they already possess.

https://www.learner.org/workshops/hslit/session7/

Few preservice teachers have sustained personal experience with critical pedagogy practices. When they encounter such practices in their teacher education classes, at first they often resist taking ownership of their own learning. 36

The sitting meditation focusing on the breath used in the classroom as a mindfulness practice served mainly to ground the students and bring them into the space of the classroom … aware of its disruptive effects as it challenged the students to rethink the place of spiritual practices in the classroom and what is valued and recognized as teaching and learning. 38-9

Meditation also allowed students to initiate disruptive practices on their own … students appropriated classroom space in their own ways, demonstrating the kind of agency (i.e. flopping down onto the floor rather than sitting in a chair) that we want to see in critical classrooms 39