From core curricular to core identities: On critical pedagogy and foreign language/culture education

Abstract

This chapter argues that some form of critical pedagogy should be promoted and sustained in foreign language/culture education despite current ideological and social challenges to the paradigm. It is not readily apparent what form a twenty-first-century critical pedagogy, as a theoretically grounded praxis, should take. One option would be Gerald Graff’s systematic, curriculum-centered approach, which advocates the teaching of academic controversies. A second would derive from a classroom-centered, “bottom-up” approach as represented by Ira Shor, which focuses on the needs and concerns of those we teach. A third model, and the one argued for in this chapter, would develop an identity-centered, psychologically informed approach to developing students’ compassion in relation to others while examining the core causes of human behavior, based primarily on the work of Bracher (2006). At stake is whether foreign language/culture learners might respond to a “prosocial” pedagogy and revise their conventional “information-processing scripts” so as to approach or mediate other languages/ cultures with communicative and also with ethical competence.