Critical pedagogy with pre- and in-service English language teachers

Speaker: Dr. Prem Phyak (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

In this presentation, I discuss the processes of engaging pre- and in-service English language teachers in critical pedagogy. Building on ‘critically engaged dialogue’ (Freire, 1998; hooks, 1994; Milner, 2003), I first focus on how the pre-service teachers in Nepal have developed their critical consciousness about local socio-political issues through a collaborative semiotic landscape project. In this project, the pre-service teachers were engaged in the ‘ways of seeing’ (Beger, 1972) cities critically by taking pictures and analyzing the socio-political meanings of street arts and language-in-public-display. The student-teachers then transformed their collective critical consciousness to develop teacher training handbooks, covering critical issues such as gender-based violence, environment and multiculturalism. In this process, the student-teachers built the ‘authority of experience’ (hooks, 1994) to integrate critical social issues in their pedagogies. In the second part of the talk, I focus on critical pedagogy with the in-service teachers. Drawing on our previous work (Sharma & Phyak, 2017), I discuss the engagement with the in-service teachers in critical materials development, professional development workshop and engaged dialogues. Overall, I argue that the engagement in critical pedagogy provides both in- and pre-service EFL teachers with opportunities for ‘authentic reflection’ and ‘ideological becoming’ (Bakhtin, 1981).