activism in higher education classrooms: examining practices and exploring possibilities for...
TRANSCRIPT
Activism in higher education classrooms: examining practices & exploring possibilities
for Communication Activism Pedagogy Monica Batac | School of Professional Communication | Ryerson University
Activism and Communication Scholarship in Canada Workshop | April 30, 2015
image: sciencesque on Flickr
a little bit about me student-teacher-activist-scholar education & communication second-generation Filipina-Canadian
image: Patricia Glogowski on Flickr
multiple identities various communities
dissec&ng communica&on educa&on
“Students flock to communica1on courses with the promise of parlaying their degree into a professional career, and, in general, they find an instruc1onal field ready, if not primarily designed to accommodate their professional needs.”
(Palmer, 2014, p. 46)
image: ebarney on Flickr
image: wyliepoon on Flickr
Professional Communication “practices — text, sound and image — that we use to communicate within, across and between communities as small as start-ups and as large as governments & multi-nationals”
“Traditional communication education has become not only a business school affiliate but a business that produces a product: c o r p o r a t e - r e a d y g r a d u a t e s , who eagerly p u r c h a s e k n o w l e d g e as a c o r p o r a t e - v a l u e d c o m m o d i t y and their degree as a m a r k e t - e n t r y certificate.”
(Palmer, 2014, p. 65)
image: Eduardo Tavares on Flickr
cri&cal pedagogy as hope [?]
“This capacity to always begin anew, to make, to reconstruct, and to not spoil, to understand and to live as a process -‐ live to become... This is an indispensable quality of a good teacher.”
(Freire, 1993, p. 98)
image: ebarney on Flickr
to refuse to bureaucra&ze the mind,
“Cri1cal pedagogy asserts that students can engage their own learning from a posi1on of agency and in doing so can ac1vely par1cipate in narra1ng their iden11es through a culture of ques1oning… it is also about encouraging students to take risks, act on their sense of social responsibility, and engage the world as an object of both cri1cal analysis and hopeful transforma1on.”
(Giroux, 2011, p. 15)
image: ebarney on Flickr
the banking concept of educa1on the neoliberal university
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(in)justice through communication
Communicat ion ac t iv i sm pedagogy (CAP) teaches students how to use their communication knowledge and resources (e.g. theories, research methods, pedagogies, and other practices) to work together with community members to intervene into and reconstruct unjust discourses in more just ways.
(Frey and Palmer, 2014, p. 8)
image: rosipaw on Flickr
Palmer (2014), p. 53
Pedagogical approaches in communication education
Traditional CAP
Goal Produce market-ready personnel Build social justice communities
Theory Strategic individual psychosociological communication theory
Critical and social justice theory
Student Consumer: future employee Public intellectual: social activist
Communication Strategic resource exchange Medium of injustice, resistance, and reconstruction
Pedagogy Technical knowledge dissemination Applied sociopolitical problem solving
Knowledge Commodity: market productive information System vision: resource of liberation
Learning Memorizing, restating, rehearsing, preparing Networking, intervening, resisting, transforming
Community Future – business communities Present – oppressed communities
Power Bureaucratic institutional hierarchy Systemic socioeconomic power imbalances
Outcome Reproduces corporate-class systems Transforms unjust social conditions
a) CAP founda1ons b) CAP courses (syllabi/
project examples) c) Social jus1ce ac1vism
through service learning d) CAP beyond the
university Upcoming book review on Teaching Communica1on Ac1vism (Canadian Journal of Communica1on)
image: Andrew Carr on Flickr
communication activism pedagogy building community, in solidarity
Today’s workshop + new Activism and Social Justice Division at the National Communication Association (NCA) Bringing communication scholars-activists (at all levels) together to connect; discuss teaching/research/service [etc.]; agitate, provoke, and support one another; cultivate future collaborations
• to illustrate and imagine what activism and social justice work look like in our university classrooms
shared language, shared struggle
references Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the city. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed). New York, NY: Continuum
International Publishing Group. Frey, L. R. & Palmer, D. L. (2014). Introduction: teaching communication activism. In L. R. Frey &
K. M. Carragee (Eds.), Teaching communication activism (pp. 1- 44). New York, NY: Hampton Press.
Frey, L. R., Pearce, W. B., Pollock, M. A., Artz, L., & Murphy, B. A. (1996). Looking for justice in all the wrong places: On a communication approach to social justice. Communication Studies, 47 (1-2), 110-127.
Frey, L. R., & Carragee, K. M. (Eds.) (2014). Communication activism: Volume 3 Struggling for social justice amidst difference. New York, NY: Hampton Press.
Giroux, H. (2011). On critical pedagogy. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group. McLaren, P. & Kincheloe, J. L. (Eds.) (2007). Critical pedagogy: where are we now? New York, NY:
Peter Lang. Palmer, D. (2014). Communication education as vocational training and the marginalization of
activist pedagogies. In L. R. Frey & K. M. Carragee (Eds.), Teaching communication activism (pp. 45- 76). New York, NY: Hampton Press.