During the wiki weeks I thought I would first take a look at the approach I was grappling most with - social critical and reading Shor's education is politics article - I found it very interesting due to the many parallels with this modules approach....

It seems our tutors are quite the libertines and problem posers! - and it all lies in the chat.......

here are the connections I could relate to:

' a Freirean pedagogy tries to develop a student centred dialogue'

Some values describing the 'Freirean pedagogy':

Participatory - learning process interactive and co-operative so that students do a lot of discussing and writing instead of listening to teacher talk

Situated - course material situated in student thought begining from their words and understanding of material

Critical - discussion encourages self reflection, how we know what we know, and quality of learning process -(why do we do what we do - what personal filters or biais or previous experience guides the way we are (holistically or at any one point in time), choices we make or how we act, react and interact - a lot of interpersonal, communication, rapport and building relatonship skills in the work place also covers this - for a commercial gain however rather than a socially driven libertine reason!)

Democratic - classroom discourse is mutually constructed between teacher and student - students have equal speaking rights in the dialog

Dialogic - basic format of class is dialog around problems posed by student and teacher. Teacher initiates process and guides it into deeper phases. Teacher invites students to take ownership of learning

Desocialisation - dialog desocialises students from passivity in classroom and challenges their learned authority-dependence and desocialises teacher from domineering teacher-talk socialised into - instead they are problem posers and dialogue leaders

.........

Affective - problem posing and dialogic method includes a range of emotions from humour to compassion to indignation - and we have seen many of these emotions already within our own discourse

Shor, I. (1993). Education is politics: Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy. In Paulo Freire: a critical encounter. P. McLaren and P. Leonard (Eds.). (London, Routledge): pp. 25-35