Page 58 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS
professionals in the US began to take up Freire's work from the late 1970s and more so after the mid- 1990s in the context of English as a second language (ESL)71. The publications of Elsa Auerbach72, the best-known proponent of Freire's ideas in ESL language education, continue to be timely and important for teachers. These ideas also appear in research on teaching English as a foreign language (EFL)73, although they are less actively taken up despite their early development by Crawford74. Bernstein75 (1971) published a paper on formal educational knowledge positing that it can be regarded as being implemented through three systems of messages: curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, which is in line with Hirst's (1966) idea that the purpose of educational theory76 is to develop rationally justified principles of educational action. Bernstein proposed that curriculum defines what knowledge a learner is expected to acquire, while pedagogy (Polish: pedagogia) defines what counts as important in the transfer of knowledge, and assessment defines the correct implementation of that knowledge on the part of learners. In this view, pedagogy refers to the integration into practice of individual subject content and curriculum design, classroom teaching strategies and techniques, and assessment, goals, and methods. All these aspects of educational practice converge on the reality of what happens in the classroom. Together they develop a view of how a teacher's work in an institutional context determines a particular version of what knowledge is most valuable, what understanding is for us, and how we can construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment (Bernstein, 1975).
and transforming the relationships between classroom teaching, knowledge production, the institutional structure of schools and the social and material relationships of the wider community, society, and the state. This way of thinking is described by Shor (1992) as habits of thinking, reading, writing, and speaking that reach below surface meaning. McKernan (2013), following Freire, argues that critical pedagogy is a social movement focused on the relationship of teaching and learning so that learners gain critical self-awareness and social consciousness and take appropriate action against oppressive forces. Finally, H. Muszyński (1997, p. 16) writes that in Anglo-American and Anglo-Saxon traditions the concept of pedagogy as a science (Polish: pedagogika) has never functioned. The prevailing view in these countries was that pedagogy is not a science because (1) it does not have its own field, it borrows facts from other sciences, (2) it cannot formulate general principles that are universal, (3) it deals mainly with actions or practices, and there is no science of actions and practices (Radosavljevich, 1911; see also Biesta, 2011).
The word 'pedagogy' occurs in English in its uncountable form when referring to research and theories related to teaching methods and principles (the teaching-studying-learning process) (source: Collins dictionary), and as a countable noun in the singular 'a pedagogy' and plural as 'pedagogies' (source: Dictionary.com) when referring to the work of a teacher, the art of teaching, or what a teacher does to influence the learning of others.
The first translations of Giroux's work appeared in Poland in the notebook Nieobecne Dyskursy in 1991. It seems that the first translations into Polish were not precise and accurate enough. Nevertheless, in the text of the book, I decided to stick to the notion of critical pedagogy as pedagogika krytyczna, following the Polish authors in order not to cause confusion.
71Crookes, 2012; Reagan& Osborn, 1998, pp. 45–62; Kubota, 1999, pp. 9–35. 72Auerbach & Wallerstein, 1987; Auerbach, 1990; Auerbach1996.
73 Shin & Crookes, 2005, pp. 113–138.
74Crawford, 1978. Crawford-Lange, 1981, pp. 257–273; Crawford-Lange, 1982, pp. 81–113.
75 British sociologist and educational theorist.
76 Hirst believed that educational theory cannot be an autonomous scientific discipline (such as pedagogy is in European countries drawing on the Germanic tradition) because it does not generate "some unique form of understanding of education" as the core disciplines on which educational theory is based, namely philosophy, history, sociology, and psychology, do, which also accounts for the interdisciplinarity of the theory (Hirst, 1966, p. 51). The perspective of pedagogy as a science is seen as extraordinary and to some extent even impossible when viewed from an Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American perspective (Biesta, 2011, p. 189).
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