Reading Reflection
Liberation through Consciousness-Raising
This chapter focuses on the use of consciousness-raising as a form of liberation techniques. Consciousness-raising is a form of group-therapy technique that aims to enhance the participants’ awareness of their specific needs and as a group or as individuals. Thus, according to Hart, conscious raising includes the experience of personal and social transformation, which pulsate with the pain and joy of subversive power. Conscious raising began as a form of activism around the late 1960s and became popularized by the US feminists. Hart terms it as a tool for transformative learning since it is derived from the experience of oppression. According to Hart, the methods and procedures of conscious raising are governed by two principles, which also determine its content. First, concrete, lived experiences, and second, the shared and discussed experiences.
Hart put for the several principles that need to guide consciousness-raising, especially when used in educational practice. The first point is acknowledging the oppression since it requires working with a representative of a marginalized or oppressed group. Conscious raising functions as a way of denouncing injustices and violence dine to members of a group. Second, one needs to recognized personal experience since these form the main source to be critically reflected upon. The third point that requires consideration is the homogeneity of the learning group. Harts notes that only a relatively homogenous learning group would share a vital interest in liberation and fund vital experience. Another principle for consideration is equality, particularly in power mechanisms, which need to be reflected in an equal structure. For instance, in an education setting, a teacher or facilitator needs to find a way to tie her authority or expertise to a shared or common context of interests or intentions.
Using Critical Incidents to Explore Learners’ Assumptions
According to Brookfield, the critical reflection process comprises three interlinked phases; recognizing assumptions, scrutinizing these assumptions’ validity and accuracy, and reconstituting these assumptions to make them more integrative and inclusive. Central to this process is the recognition and analysis of assumptions. Brookfield examining the process of examining a learner’s assumption using critical incidents, which are brief descriptions that a learners write about significant events in their life. Educators using this gives learners’ instruction that helps identify the incident to be described and ask for vital details such as place, time, and actors in the incident and why the event is important.
When the instruction is written well, it can produce a written description of certain occurrences, so graphically that readers can visualize the event. The first step that Brookfield identifies in encouraging critical reflection is for the educator to see the world as their learners perceive it.
Since critical incidents are idiographic, their values are in fostering transformative learning is two-fold. First, they are incontrovertible data sources since they are accounts written by people about action in their life. Second, they are not threatening to complete than asking the learner to react to general issues or questions.
The last step for educators to assist learners in exploring their assumptive world is to ask them directly what assumption under in their respective lives. Since such a question can be intimidating or confusing, educators can work from specific to general. Brookfield advises educators that the best way to become critically reflective is to model the activity. Thus, before asking others to be critically reflective of their assumption, they need to be able to do it themselves.