Thank you for the funny pictures! The last one is my favorite, our group also talked about equity, and the difference between equality and equity. Similar to your picture, we also found a picture describing equality and equity: all riding the same bicycles is actually equality, and riding all different bicycles according to the height of each person was equity.

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If I had to choose one description as to what critical pedagogy means to me, I would go with, “get comfortable with being uncomfortable in the classroom – recognize and set aside biases.” Discomfort was a topic recently discussed in my graduate teaching scholar class. Is it ok to feel uncomfortable? We, as humans, typically run away from it; we naturally gravitate towards things, people, and situations that bring us comfort. However, if you reflect on times in life when you have learned the most, it can often be drawn back to an instance that wasn’t necessarily comfortable per se. For example, I think about the time I lived in Philly, interning with the USDA for a couple of months. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, but I learned a great deal about food microbiology, travel, what I’m looking for in a potential career, and about myself as a person. I think the same goes for the classroom. While it is important to make students feel that class is a place where they can be comfortable to share their thoughts and feelings, the idea of discomfort comes into play for things such as challenging students with difficult questions, having students interact with people different from themselves, and encouraging students to try things they have never done before.

Thanks for the comments Jaclyn! To be fair, I suppose I am still technically a student since I’m still working towards my degree but I’ll stand by my statement. I think its an important point to make. Whether we learn new perspectives or ideas from our students, or we continue formally learning ourselves, we are always still and honing our craft.

I really appreciate your description of incorporating multiple perspectives and respecting students’ prior knowledge in this context that is changing and evolving. Thanks for the post!

I really enjoyed your post! It was great!! You bring up so many great points in this post. I would be curious to hear your ideas on how these ideas could be implemented in various educational settings, especially pertaining to your last point of doing things differently.

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This is such a cool example, Bethany! Last Wednesday in class was the first time that I had seen the Jigsaw approach in action so it is really cool to hear about other ways that it has been and can be implemented.

This was a great post and there are so many great comments! I love this idea of engaging students in the process of thinking critically, connecting material from a classroom to things that are happening in students’ lives, and making learning relevant. When I taught a first-year engineering course, I found myself instinctively wanting to provide an answer when students asked a question. I had to be really intentional about asking students what they thought and why they thought that and getting students to see a variety of perspectives related to a topic. I loved Bethany’s comment about strategies that she uses to help students during office hours such as letting them make mistakes and encouraging them to explain their thought process. Because, as Qichao said, “there are many things that are too beautiful to skip.” I just love that idea and think it is so relevant to learning!

I agree that “forming relationships leads to engagement in the learning process by the students”. Critical pedagogy is an interactive process where both, the teacher and student, can learn. I also like the analogy of incremental learning with cooking. That totally makes sense to me. That’s the way how we can move away from the traditional education approach. Each time, we can add something new to the basics.

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Thank you for the cartoon, it’s so cute! I think “Why is it important” is a really important part. of learning. When I was a student , I had a big difference in my learning attitude when I knew the reasons of my learning. I hope I can show enough my future students their reasons of learning and give motivations.

I agree with you Brandon, this was a very good point to remember. Sometime I need to remind myself is that if I accept that students have their own agency in my class, they likely will not be as passionate or value my subject as much as I do. I am not trying to recreate myself in my students. This is hard to accept because I do care deeply about what I study and teach, but if I can accept that my students bring and will have different life experiences, I can do a better job teaching them what they do need to know about soil science for whatever they end up doing in the future.