The Curriculum Challenge: Classrooms as Sites of Resistance
Abstract
Yacine Kout and Revital Zilonka teach respectively French at the high school level and pre-service teachers in a college of education. The presentation will address the challenges of social justice educators working with students that often resist critical and thoughtful educational experiences.
Yacine: As a social justice minded educator I realized within my first month of teaching French that my job was to teach language through othering and a touristic approach. In response to a curriculum that promotes ignorance and banking I developed a parallel curriculum which I entitled Thinking as a First Language to stress that learning French is more than memorization through an illusory one to one word correspondence. Through this curriculum I aim for my students to be exposed to another way of thinking and doing in order to gain a sense of possibility.
Revital: As a social justice educator, I come to the classroom wanting to wake up the students I teach. Often, they don’t want to be bothered by real world problems related to the education system, although they encounter them as interns. The curriculum that I have developed promotes critical thinking, connection, the ability to pay attention and to foster compassion and sensitivity to people that don’t necessarily sound and look like them.
While their students come from two different settings both presenters have found similarities in the resistance their students have exercised. The suggested presentation will explore how both Kout and Zilonka’s curricula address the students’ resistance.
Presentation Description
Yacine Kout and Revital Zilonka teach respectively French at the high school level and pre-service teachers in a college of education. Their presentation addresses the challenges of social justice educators working with students that often resist critical and thoughtful educational experiences. Both presenters will explore the common spaces between the curricula they have developed.
Keywords
curriculum, resistance, otherness, critical pedagogy, connection, compassion, foreign language
Location
Magnolia Room C
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Recommended Citation
Zilonka, Revital and Kout, Yacine, "The Curriculum Challenge: Classrooms as Sites of Resistance" (2015). Curriculum Studies Summer Collaborative. 5.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cssc/2015/2015/5
The Curriculum Challenge: Classrooms as Sites of Resistance
Magnolia Room C
Yacine Kout and Revital Zilonka teach respectively French at the high school level and pre-service teachers in a college of education. The presentation will address the challenges of social justice educators working with students that often resist critical and thoughtful educational experiences.
Yacine: As a social justice minded educator I realized within my first month of teaching French that my job was to teach language through othering and a touristic approach. In response to a curriculum that promotes ignorance and banking I developed a parallel curriculum which I entitled Thinking as a First Language to stress that learning French is more than memorization through an illusory one to one word correspondence. Through this curriculum I aim for my students to be exposed to another way of thinking and doing in order to gain a sense of possibility.
Revital: As a social justice educator, I come to the classroom wanting to wake up the students I teach. Often, they don’t want to be bothered by real world problems related to the education system, although they encounter them as interns. The curriculum that I have developed promotes critical thinking, connection, the ability to pay attention and to foster compassion and sensitivity to people that don’t necessarily sound and look like them.
While their students come from two different settings both presenters have found similarities in the resistance their students have exercised. The suggested presentation will explore how both Kout and Zilonka’s curricula address the students’ resistance.