Challenging the Dominant Views

Freire that we should always challenge the dominant views or practices because they usually, if not always, promote or support the status quo. One of the ways that we people in education have done to respond to Freire is to encourage the students to look out for counter narrative on the taken for granted issues. Several popular topics include the controversial ones such as life after death, Columbus, Thanksgiving (See Shor & Pari, 1999 for examples). The words that come out as a result of the above effort are "reform," "rethink," "unpack," "retell," "reread," "rewrite," and so on.

At the same time, similar efforts are devoted to giving voices to the silenced. These efforts are usually tied with race, gender, ethnicity, and diversity issues. You could often come across, for example in Shore and Pari's Education is Politics (1999), stories related to gifted females in mathematics, bisexual people, and people labeled in certain ways. Oftentimes, you will see these efforts under the umbrellas of "multicultural education" and "feminism." An excellent overview of concepts on these two fields, especially of multicultural education, is also offered by Sonia Nieto in the same book, in which she defines and clearly elaborates multicultural education as:

• ...antiracist education,
• ...basic education,
• ...important for all students,
• ...pervasive,
• ...education for social justice,
• ...a process, and
• ...critical pedagogy (3).

Shor, I & Pari, C. (1999). Education is Politics: Critical teaching across differences, K-12. NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc.