Dignifying the educational process through conscientização

Teaching is a very complex endeavor. Embedded within this complex environment are issues of power, culture, ethnicity, and race. When teachers and students come together, in the classroom, some of these issues become visible and others remain invisible. Attempting to make influences on teaching and learning visible is one of the steps toward developing a practice framed by conscientização. Ms. Cook, the teacher of this story, is empowering herself and her students; through critical reflection that serves to deneutralize educational acts by recognizing they are embedded in issues of culture, ethnicity, politics, power, and, race. Classroom based research must be more inclusive and indeed cognizant of the mediating macrostructures that teachers deal with everyday. For example, Goldberg and Muir Welsh describe some of the students as being Latinos. In doing so, they adopts a third person as opposed to a first person view of these students. A first person view can acknowledge a dialectical relationship between race and ethnicity.