Core Curriculum

The core curriculum is based on the principle of Critical Pedagogy - it is the pedagogy that Paolo Freire developed while teaching illiterate adults in Brazil. Important elements were used by Septima Clark, the teacher who founded the first freedom schools in the South of the current United States during the Civil Rights era to train teachers.

When we deny the central place of students actual life experiences, we miss the opportunity for an authentic context for learning, and set ourselves up for a lot of resistance.

Critical Pedagogy affirms the mutual and coequal roles of teachers and learners. Instead of one teacher and twenty-five students in a class, there are twenty-five student-teachers and one teacher-student. Rather than alienation from and resistance to teachers, there is the opportunity for intergenerational trust. Students can take part in a constructive collective effort, where their peers rely on them, and where the actual experiences of their lives are at the center of the curriculum.

Critical pedagogy challenges the notion that the world is what it is and can't be any different. It enables learners to reflect on their own experience historically, giving their immediate reality a beginning, a present, and, most importantly, a future. It awakens in learners the expectation of change, and the energy and cooperation to make change happen. The exact form that the action towards change takes depends on what issues the students feel most powerless about, and how they can make the greatest impact, both in terms of personal growth and effecting change that reaches beyond themselves.

In all the work that is done at the school, this core of the curriculum must be reflected. The teacher mentor must work constantly with the teachers using Critical Pedagagy, so that they have experience of personal transformation. The mentoring cannot be done in order to have an effect on children/students. It must be done to affect change in partnership with teachers in their own lives. If the former stance is taken, it will result in rsentment, greater resistance to change and the quite justified feeling of being used like guniea pigs in a larger experiment.

Critical Pedagaogy was designed to create self awareness amongst the oppressed, so they could find a way forward for themselves through the exercise of defining themselves. The power of Critical Pedagogy is dangerous because it can be used to do the exact opposite. A facilitator can manipulate a learner into believing almost anything, by creating an atmosphere of trust and belongingness in the classroom.

As in any other situation where there are differences in the amount of authority and resources available to the participants, the learner is vulnerable to manipulation by the teacher. From subtle gestures that indicate approval to more obvious rules that are non-negotiable, the learner can forced to conform in terms of behaviour as well as in thought.

Creating an environment where the learner is at par with the teacher is difficult because conventional admission procedures in any centre for learning is based on the premise that learners don't know much about what they come to learn while teachers know enough that they will always keep ahead of what the learners know even by the time they graduate.

There are four issues here:
Quite obviously, this notion doesn't hold water in this age of information, where the Internet is free and available so easily to everyone atleast in the English-speaking world. Today, it is also quite common to think that this notion never made sense. Learners come with a native perspective about the world that can be build upon to create new connections and learning (constructivism). Also, the teacher does not have exclusive rights to the information and so cannot stay ahead of her students because she hopes to have more information than her students. Thus, the concept of the often abused role of the facilitator. The teacher is but one resource in a classroom and rarely the one responsible for bringing in the new information. Instead she takes on the role of the person who helps integrate the new information with the existing knowledge and talents of the learners so that they can navigate their own individual paths to knowledge that is relevant for their lives. The concept of the collaborative classroom is born. Here the teacher, like every other learner plays a specific role. There may be a repetition of skills but everyone brings atleast one unique skill to the table without which the task that the group has set for itself will remain incomplete. The interdependence that is created then forces co-operation. The resources thus distributed short-circuits a great deal of the chances for oppression.