Critical Pedagogy in an EFL Teaching context : An Ignis fatuus or an Alternative Approach - Sima Sadeghi
My thought ..
While reading material for my Culture and Language course, the part of about silence and nonverbal behavior made me think critically about discourse in a multicultural environment.
Critical Pedagogy seems to be ideal for a homogenous group of similar cultural background. But, I wonder if it can work and how it would work for a heterogenous group with differing cultural backgrounds especially when it comes to dialogue.
It seems like Western cultures that value direct speech with an immediate response goes against the concept of critical pedagogy when mixed with a culture that values silence and forethought before speaking. Westerners look at silence negatively and feel awkward if there is a brief period of silent during a dialogue. But Asians think it is respectful to the speaker and is an acknowledgement to the speaker that their words were heard and that the listener is giving them due thought. This quote from the reading “…anti-dialogical method which…..leads to domination and oppression through the silencing of students’ knowledge and experiences” seems to be what happens when these two cultures interact in a critical pedagogical classroom.
In addition, psycholinguistics states that if a person isn’t truly bilingual then there is about 15 seconds from the time a sentence is received in one part of the brain then transferred to another part of the brain and a reply is made. I know 15 seconds is an eternity in a discussion but then how do we minimize the impact of the silence so we can liberate the oppressed?
Then how to go about liberating the oppressed? I don’t know but I think we can first start by considering the fact that there are different levels of English proficiency among us Koreans and how can these differences be integrated with the fully fluent native speakers so everyone has a voice.
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