Belonging Part 4.0: Belonging and Emancipatory Pedagogies (Part 1)

Here’s the part where we (I as the writer, you as the reader) try to integrate belonging and emancipatory pedagogies, like ungrading. Which I *think* is a bigger lift than I first thought it was. So, in the end, this is a two parter: this part talks about what emancipatory pedagogies are and the second part talks about how they intersect with belonging. WHOO HOO! LET’S GO!

What are emancipatory pedagogies?

Nouri and Sajjadi (2014) defined emancipatory pedagogies as “founded on the notion that education should play a fundamental role in creating a just and democratic society” (Nouri & Sajjadi, 2014, p. 76).

Key principles for emancipatory pedagogies include these critical notions:

• Education broadens the student’s view of reality.
• Education is transformative.
• Education is political.
• Education is empowering.
• Education is based on true dialogue. (Nouri & Sajjadi, 2014, p. 80)

I think emancipatory pedagogies differ from inclusive pedagogies and active learning, as shown in the slide below.

This is one of my favorite recent slides because, in the process of writing it, I finally figured out the relationship between active learning, inclusive/authentic learning, and equity-minded/emancipatory learning – they build on one another as levels of learning. Active learning involves students working on the challenges of learning in class instead of at home. This process can be implemented in many different ways, with often a constant honing of the process over time by faculty to maximize their pedagogical impact based their personal strengths as well as benefits students receive. Yet, there is a semi-constant debate between the benefits of active learning vs. the benefits of traditional lecture (including here). No matter what side you land on, the process of learning to implement active learning seems to open our pedagogical minds-eye to the idea that the classroom can be a radically different space than the ones in which we were originally taught (and perhaps traumatized).

Inclusive/Authentic pedagogies (ie pedagogies of kindness, trauma-informed pedagogies, etc.) involve working within the current educational system to try to be as equitable and humanistic (maybe human-centric is a better term here) as possible. These pedagogies may or may not understand the white supremacist undergirdings of the current education system but they absolutely understand that certain groups are oppressed within this system and that education must work for all involved. However, this is my distinction – in many discussions, the phrase “inclusive pedagogies” has become so broad as to include almost everything under the active learning or emancipatory levels.

Equity-Minded/Emancipatory pedagogies involve breaking the constraints of the educational system we already know is rigged to benefit certain groups (based on white supremacy or colonization or, or, or…) in ways that best benefit learners from those groups that are most oppressed. In this paper, I defined ungrading as a set of emancipatory pedagogical practices that embody the common themes of emancipatory pedagogies: engaging in critical reflection as a fundamental and important aspect of learning (Bali et al., 2020; Freire, 1970; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Mejia et al., 2018; Nouri & Sajjadi, 2014), redistributing the power in the classroom so that learners can better manage their own learning (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Clack, 2019; Rodriguez, 2013), increasing agency for students (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Bali et al., 2020; Giroux, 1988; Olitsky, 2007; Phuong et al., 2017), involving students in participatory design (Klenowski et al., 2006; Könings et al., 2011, 2014), and embracing dialogic engagement in the classroom, including the questioning of authority and authoritative institutions (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Bali et al., 2020; Blum, 2020b; Freire, 1970; Hannafin et al., 2014; Kent & Taylor, 2021; Paris, 2012). I also discussed how emancipatory pedagogies should also be transparent (Bali et al., 2020; Hannafin et al., 2014) and asset framed (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Paris, 2012).

While Nouri and Sajjadi (2014) mainly discuss critical pedagogy as an emancipatory pedagogy, I also include culturally responsive pedagogies, open pedagogies, and ungrading under this designation. The hope in embracing these pedagogies (especially at the inclusive or emancipatory levels) is that our classrooms become “the one space where pedagogical practices were interrogated, where it was assumed that the knowledge offered students would empower them to be better scholars, to live more fully in the world beyond academe” (hooks, 1994, p. 6).

Because it’s good for all of us to be on the same page (OTherwise known as A brief description of each emancipatory pedagogy)

Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy asks what factors influence educational knowledge (and cultural formations) in a way that perpetuates or legitimizes unjust status quos, specifically those status quos that continue to oppress underrepresented groups. Critical pedagogy develops a critical capacity in individuals that empowers them to resist societal norms that systematically oppress the least powerful. Critical pedagogy’s primary preoccupation is social justice – “how to transform inequitable, undemocratic, or oppressive institutions and social relations” (Burbules & Berk, 1999, p.3). Critical pedagogy regularly asks: “Even if claims are ‘true’, are they just?”

Critical pedagogy in its most humanizing lens forces us to ask: “1) From whose perspective are we defining and enacting ‘humanizing’ pedagogies in our contexts? 2) Toward what ends are we enacting and advocating for these approaches? And who benefits from these approaches?”(Mehta & Aguilera, 2020, p. 113). Where can we “address issues of inequity, social justice, access, culturally marginalizing practices, racist, sexist, and homophobic practices in education…” (Mehta & Aguilera, 2020, p. 113)?

Critical pedagogy, as originally conceived by Freire (1970), was radical, activist, and sought to empower the masses to overthrow the elite few. bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress reiterates this idea when she states that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy…Urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions…” (hooks, 1994, p.12).

Culturally Relevant Education

Culturally relevant education is a synthesis of two important theoretical frameworks: Geneva Gay’s culturally responsive teaching and Gloria Ladson-Billing’s culturally responsive pedagogy. Both frameworks try to enact social change in the classroom and larger community through a commitment to social justice (Aronson & Laughter, 2016). The frameworks differ in terms of who and what they center: teachers and teaching for culturally responsive teaching and students and the classroom for culturally relevant pedagogy.

Culturally responsive teaching is defined “as using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of references, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them” (Gay, 2010, p. 31). Culturally responsive teaching requires eliminating deficit thinking through learning about and validating every student’s culture as well as leveraging “students’ existing strengths to drive instruction, assessment, and curriculum design” (Aronson & Laughter, 2016, p. 165).

Culturally relevant pedagogy is defined as a way to “empower students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (Ladson-Billings, 1994, p. 18). Culturally relevant pedagogy has three intersecting criteria: student academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness, which Ladson-Billings discusses in more detail here (which is worth the hour to watch and was also one of her last recent talks specifically on culturally responsive education):

She also has an amazing talk here which is more of a career retrospective but also certainly addresses some of the most common practical issues that arise when we try to implement culturally responsive pedagogy.

Academic success may mean different things to different groups, but academic success in Ladson-Billings’ framework means mastering the skills of “literacy, numeracy, technology, social, and political” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 160). Cultural competence means using “students’ culture as a vehicle for learning” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 161). Critical consciousness is a sociopolitical understanding that “allows [students] to critique the cultural norms, values, more, and institutional that produce and maintain social inequities” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 162, []s mine)

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy vs. Critical Pedagogy

While culturally relevant pedagogy and critical pedagogy overlap in terms of their foundational focus on critical consciousness, culturally relevant pedagogy differs from critical pedagogy in four important ways:

• Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) is “a pedagogy of opposition…specifically committed to collective, not merely individual, empowerment” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 160). While Freire focuses on the individual in terms of liberating oppressive structures, CRP focuses on building community and involving community in a collective liberation from oppression.
• Critical pedagogy is often used in higher education contexts and is international oriented as it originally focused on teaching the noneducated (and oppressed) Brazilian populace literacy skills. Culturally relevant pedagogy was originally used pre K – 12 contexts and was very U.S. oriented as it originally focused on learning environments for African American students. Culturally relevant pedagogy has more recently melded with Paris’s culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014), thereby reorienting the culturally relevant framework towards global identities and humanities. The integration of culturally sustaining pedagogies into CRP vastly opened the framework to a global population, thereby bringing it more in line with critical pedagogy.
• Culturally relevant pedagogy specifically reinforces asset framing through its specific discourse on cultural competence. While deficit framing has existed for more than century (Davis & Museus, 2019), critical pedagogy has spent more time critiquing this kind of framing than offering practical alternatives that might combat it. CRP has actually provided tools to counter deficit framing.
• Many methods for assessment and evaluation are critiqued in critical pedagogy as tools of oppression (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1983; hooks, 1994, 2010), so academic achievement was really an afterthought for practitioners of critical pedagogy. Culturally relevant pedagogies, however, specifically focus on academic achievement using constructivist methods as a major component of the framework (Aronson & Laughter, 2016).

Open Pedagogy

Open Pedagogy is an access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education AND as a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable students to shape the public knowledge commons of which they are a part…we both feel that Open Pedagogy offers a set of dynamic commitments that could help faculty and students articulate a sustainable, vibrant, and inclusive future for our educational institutions. By focusing on access, agency, and a commons-oriented approach to education, we can clarify our challenges and firmly assert a learner-centered  vision for higher education.

(DeRosa & Jhangiani, 2017)

Open pedagogy is different from just using open educational resources. Open pedagogy takes the idea that students can be knowledge creators and scholars in a public forum and puts it to use in the context of creating course- or program-specific content. The options can range from empowering students to write public reflective blogs detailing their learning journey in class to writing Wikipedia articles on their favorite historical figure to creating living textbooks and lab manuals (Cangialosi, 2018). A domain of one’s own, which provides students an ability to create a website on a hosted server that can be used to curate portfolios and create a public-facing representation of the student throughout their years in higher education. The Domain of One’s Own “creates a robust ecosystem in which learners and faculty can productively explore the creation of knowledge, sharing of ideas, and participation in larger, interdisciplinary conversations” (Groom et al., 2019).

Ungrading

Have I written anything about ungrading? Or given talks on ungrading? Or done podcasts about ungrading?

Ok, maybe just a few. >;p

And it’s the topic of my dissertation so…BONUS!

Even though I have a new CBE:LSE article here on ungrading that elucidates my thoughts on ungrading even further, even tying ungrading explicitly to emancipatory pedagogies in more detail than anyone has probably needed, it’s probably good to start with my (admittedly older) description here: https://www.chemedx.org/blog/ungrading-what-it-and-why-should-we-use-it

Also, I have just a few blogs, podcasts, recorded talks about ungrading (this is sarcasm BTW). They are (mostly) listed here: https://clarissasorensenunruh.com/ungrading/.

But I’m not the only one who’s written about or regularly discusses ungrading. There are several excellent articles, chapters, a book or two, and regular blogs that discuss ungrading and here is a very short beginning list (this doesn’t include even a tenth of what I have in my Zotero, y’all):

• Blum, S. (Ed.). (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). West Virginia University Press. https://wvupressonline.com/ungrading
• Kohn, A. (2013). The Case Against Grades. Counterpoints, 451, 143–153. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42982088
• López-Pastor, V. M., Fernández-Balboa, J.-M., Santos Pastor, M. L., & Fraile Aranda, A. (2012). Students’ self-grading, professor’s grading and negotiated final grading at three university programmes: Analysis of reliability and grade difference ranges and tendencies. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 37(4), 453–464. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2010.545868
• Stommel, J. (2018, March 11). How to ungrade. https://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/
• Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2023) is an entire issue devoted to ungrading.
• Crowdsourcing Ungrading (organized by David Buck)
• The Grading Conference
• A brilliant padlet of resources put together by the folks who attended my first MYFest track on ungrading: Ungrading as Emancipation. https://padlet.com/laurakgibbs/ungrading-as-emancipation-kmztrax8shds28z2
• Some free blogs that discuss ungrading (along with lots of other stuff) to possibly follow: Asao Inoue’s Infrequent Words, Maha Bali’s Reflecting Allowed, Grow Beyond Grades
• Some substack blogs (not my favorite platform but alas) that pretty exclusively talk about grades and ungrading to possibly follow: Josh Eyler, Emily Pitts Donahoe, Grading for Growth (Robert Tapert)
• Some older ungrading bibliographies gathered by Jessamyn Neuhaus (here) and Martha Burtis (here)

It’s a bit of choose your own adventure in terms of how to ungrade. But there are lots of folks who have written about their implementations, so it’s worth really looking at what’s out there to decide on what matches your own pedagogical philosophies best.

Okay – onto Part 2, where I discuss how belonging intersects with emancipatory pedagogies. Feel free to share your comments/thoughts below or on social media.

References

Aronson, B., & Laughter, J. (2016). The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education: A Synthesis of Research Across Content Areas. Review of Educational Research, 86(1), 163–206. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654315582066

Burbules, N. C., & Berk, R. (1999). Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy: Relations, Differences, and Limits. In Critical Theories in Education (p. 28). Routledge. http://mediaeducation.org.mt/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Critical-Thinking-and-Critical-Pedagogy.pdf

Cangialosi, K. (2018). But you can’t do that in a STEM course! Hybrid Pedagogy. https://hybridpedagogy.org/do-in-a-stem-course/

Davis, L. P., & Museus, S. D. (2019). What Is Deficit Thinking? An Analysis of Conceptualizations of Deficit Thinking and Implications for Scholarly Research. NCID Currents, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/currents.17387731.0001.110

DeRosa, R., & Jhangiani, R. (2017). Open pedagogy. In A guide to making open textbooks with students. Rebes Community. https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/chapter/open-pedagogy/

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (50th Anniversary Edition). Continuum.

Gay, G. (2010). Culturally reponsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press.

Giroux, H. A. (1983). Critical theory and educational practice. Deakin University. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED295320

Groom, J., Taub-Pervizpour, L., Richard, S., Long-Wheeler, K., & Burtis, M. (2019). 7 Things You Should Know About a Domain of One’s Own (ELI 7 Things You Should Know, p. 2). EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. https://library.educause.edu/resources/2019/10/7-things-you-should-know-about-a-domain-of-ones-own

hooks,  bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

hooks,  bell. (2010). Teaching critical thinking: Practical wisdom. Routledge.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. Jossey-Bass.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But that’s just good teaching: The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory into Practice, 34(3), 159–165.

Mehta, R., & Aguilera, E. (2020). A critical approach to humanizing pedagogies in online teaching and learning. The International Journal of Information and Learning Technology, 37(3), 109–120. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJILT-10-2019-0099

Nouri, A., & Sajjadi, S. M. (2014). Emancipatory pedagogy in practice: Aims, principles, and curriculum orientation. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 5(2), 76–87.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12441244

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2014). What Are We Seeking to Sustain Through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy? A Loving Critique Forward. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 85–100. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.84.1.982l873k2ht16m77