Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy in Early Childhood Teacher Education: A Conversation

Abstract

What I have been proposing is a profound respect for the cultural identity of students—a respect for the language of the other, the color of the other, the gender of the other, the class of the other, the sexual orientation of the other, the intellectual capacity of the other; that implies the ability to stimulate the creativity of the other. (Paulo Freire in McLaren, 2000) 7.1 Contexts of Our Work As advocates of critical pedagogy (CP) and anti-oppressive education, in as much as these paradigms serve as critical lenses for " learning to question " (Freire and Faundez, 1989) and for critically " reading the world " (Freire and Macedo, 1987) and our experiences in it, we understand that all forms of educational practice occur within politically contested spaces (Adams et al., 1997 ; Apple, 1995, 1996 ; Ki ncheloe, 2005) . One of the aims and challenges of our pedagogical practice/ praxis as critical teacher educators is to address explicitly the contested political and social dimensions of the classroom and other learning spaces we inhabit, in order to co-create a safe, democratic, and participatory teaching/learning environment conducive to identifying and examining our assumptions, values, and belief systems regarding the culture, language, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and religion of " the other. " In various capacities, we all teach within the context of an Early Childhood Education (ECE) teacher education program in the Southwest United States. In addition, we have worked together over the past several years in early child-hood professional development projects focused largely on preschool teachers working in high poverty settings and linguistically diverse communities, ranging from urban predominantly Hispanic settings to indigenous (tribal) communities in rural areas. This has provided contexts for us to work with more diverse groups of future teachers than reflect the national profile of predominantly white, mid-dle-class teachers (Darling-Hammond and Bransford, 2005) .