242
8.4 Course Preface
Rudy: Now do you think that they’re able to comprehend some of these
complicated political and economic issues at an early age, you know things like war, environmental degradation, government?
Warren: That’s a good question. I think one of the things about them being
taught in school is that they just become academic subjects that they get graded on, and that’s then becomes boring to them. Just like some
of the classic novels for instance that I never read because I was supposed to read them. There is always that fear that if you teach
something to a kid in school they’re going to associate it with something they don’t care about. So I don’t know if it’s making the
impact at the same rate that it’s being taught to them. But you know if you talk to them for 100 hours about soci
al justice, they’re at least going to hear an hour of it, rather than if you talk to them about it for
an hour and t hey’ll only hear a minute of it. So that’s really the best I
can say if it’s working. Rudy:
Right, but you think the exposure is good? Warren:
Yes, I think the exposure is really good. I don’t think that there is any
harm in it. Youth Worker Bresee Foundation
In the following section, I will describe a course and corresponding set of classroom activities that largely draws on the classroom practices of existing
critical pedagogies and progressive schools. However, this proposed course takes into consideration all of the elements discussed in this chapter thus far, viz., the
socio-cognitive limitations of existing critical pedagogies, the specific dispositions, political-economic knowledge, and influential political educational experiences of
my youth participants, and key curriculum content that is often missing from conventional politics courses including empirically informed discussions on
human nature, welfare, alternative political-economic systems, workplace organization, and cultural content analyses. This course is different from
conventional politics courses in two key aspects. First, it is primarily designed for educators who may not have the institutional andor community support typically
afforded to educators working in progressive schools Apple Beane, 1999. Hence it is meant to be used by educators working in conventional schools, and be
taught to young people who have never attended a progressive school or had much exposure to critical or political pedagogy of any kind. To be certain, the majority
of the
CriticalIndie, ArtsyIndie,
and in particular
Mainstream
young people had received a very limited political education from their schools with only Arlene and
Lisa attending a social justice oriented school. However, teachers and pupils from progressive and social-justice oriented schools may benefit from it as well, and
243 activities 5, 6, and 7 described in the following section were initially inspired by
Arlene and Lisa’s classroom activity described above in section 8.3. Second, in order to address the possibility of pre-existing socio-cognitive
filters and limited political exposure which can compromise the effectiveness of critical pedagogies, as discussed above in section 8.1, the set of activities are
informed by the major preliminary findings of the empirical psychological work on cognitive dissonance, empathy, and fairness, which suggest the following: 1
As discussed in section 2.5, research by Dias et al., 2009 and Ramaprasad 1993, has found that cognitive dissonance may be an intrinsic property of the human
mind that predisposes individuals to hold internally consistent mental schemata to the extent that the holding of two dissonant schemata will push individuals to
consciously or unconsciously ignore, repress, rationalize, or reconfigure one of them in order to achieve internal consistency. 2 Recent empirical studies from the
fields of social neuroscience and developmental psychology suggest that empathy and fairness may be innate properties of human nature that predispose individuals
to value fairness and to feel the pain of others when observing the suffering of others directly or indirectly via sounds and images Jackson et al., 2006; Sloane et
al., 2012. Although these findings are still very much preliminary, they suggest that human beings have the capacity to value fairness, empathy, and seek to hold
internally consistent views and practices. Incidentally, these were tendencies that I repeatedly observed in my youth participants. For example, in the previous three
chapters I described several instances where my youth participants from all three classifications expressed an empathic concern for others as exemplified in the
following extract:
Rudy: What are some of things in the world that you care the most about?
Diana: I like caring a lot about others, as well, as how can you say poverty.
Like I care a lot about people that aren’t, don’t have benefits like I do. [..] Cause like in other countries that are suffering, I care a lot about
them, and I kind of want equality and just want to help them out. Rudy:
These ideas about equality, like how do you think you got these ideas, like how are you prone to thinking this way?
Diana: For me it was people it was seeing other people suffer in Peru. And
seeing the corruption [and] the way the police work.
ArtsyIndie
and Zoo participant
244 Additionally, a propensity to value fairness and justice was a pronounced
characteristic of the
CriticalPolitical
and some of the
ArtsyIndie
young people. And paradoxically, as discussed briefly in section 7.3, even in the cases where
Mainstream
youth participants’ expressed emphatically negative views and attitudes towards welfare programmes and recipients, these could be related to
their potentially inherent sense of fairness and justice which is disturbed by accounts of people cheating the welfare system. This is a speculative
interpretation; however, with the exception of one participant, all the
Mainstream
young people supported welfare provisions, and their call for more stringent regulatory schemes was entirely premised on their concern for fraud and insistence
that everyone get their fair share of provisions. And lastly, I have also noted how several of my participants from all three classifications expressed what can
arguably be considered instances of cognitive dissonance when discussing issues of labour exploitation and consumption.
Therefore building on all of these preliminary findings, activities 5, 6, and 7, for example, are designed to affectively trigger participants’ potentially existing
empathic and fairness predispositions, as well as their deep seated beliefs and expectations. If there is a clash between these, than their predisposition towards
cognitive consonance, in conjunction with the highly salient and affective stimuli of the activities which would be difficult to ignore or filter out should, in theory,
force participants to be more cognizant of and deliberative in relation to their views and expectations. Furthermore, the consequent cognitive resolution could
have lasting effects e.g., see Briñol et al., 2009, as is seemingly the case in Arlene and Lisa’s accounts described above and in section 5.1. Thus, this course
may help to circumvent the fatalist, uncritical, apolitical, apathetic, and self- interested dispositions see Table 8.1, which are likely to be common amongst
large numbers of young people especially amongst those with limited exposure to critical and political perspectives, and which can lead young people to filter out
critical and political pedagogy and knowledge. Additionally, this proposed course also contains activities designed to synergistically play on young p
eople’s aesthetic and affective dispositions in a way that orients these to critical and
political deliberations e.g., see activities 1 and 14. That is, young people whose characteristics are similar to those of the
ArtsyIndie
classification, and which include a notable apolitical disposition, may be more responsive to political
245 knowledge if it is presented with activities that emphasize aesthetic resources.
However, no one of course can ever hope to address all of the unique cognitive and socio-cognitive dispositions of every single pupil, nor am I claiming that what
is outlined in the following section will even work in circumventing the socio- cognitive filters that I observed in my youth participants. What is offered, is
simply a modest, largely provisional, and scattershot approach.
8.5 Sample Course: A Socio-Cognitive Approach
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