Ira Shor is a professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches composition and rhetoric. In collaboration with Paulo Freire, he has been one of the leading exponents of critical pedagogy.
Shor grew up in the working class area in the South Bronx of New York City. According to Shor coming from a working class area had a powerful influence on his thinking, politics and feelings.
Critical Pedagogy is a teaching approach that attempts to help students question and challenge domination and the beliefs and practices that dominate. It encourages students to think critically about their education situation to get them to see the connections between their individual problems, experiences and their social context. According to Shor, critical pedagogy is a student-centred pedagogy that is democratic, dialogic, and interdisciplinary. It is active and also dissocializing. It moves away from the dominant teacher-centred learning. Instead, students are encouraged to be critical agents of their own education.
Critical teaching begins with student-generated themes and then invites unfamiliar reflection. In his book ‘When Students have Power’, Shor takes the concepts of student-centred learning and sharing power in the classroom to new heights.
In this book Shor describes his students, who are mostly from working class areas and usually the first generation in their families to go to college. In his class Shor permits students to determine their classroom rules, the syllabus, course planning and how they will be evaluated. Students also sign a contract for the grade they want to receive. Shor established an After Class group that was responsible for critiquing the previous class and provided input for planning the next class. In addition they discussed with Shor curriculum changes and so practiced democratic power relationships. Shor says ‘this democratic disturbance of the teacher—centred classroom confirms a primary goal of shared authority: to restructure education into something done by and with students rather than by the teacher for and over them” (P 147 — 148)
Shor frequently uses the questioning technique to ‘backload’ student’s responses and to push them into futuristic thinking. He constantly tries to reach his students who sit in what in calls ‘Siberia’ in the furthest away point in the room as they need to be a away from the authority figure of the teacher.
Shor states that schools and colleges are teacher centred systems and are not student centred, he says that a lot of traditional teachers and lecturers don’t have the confidence to use other models of teaching. Shor suggests that prior to introducing the formal subject matter the teacher should ask students the following questions at the start of each semester:-
? Would you rather sit in a circle or a row and why?? Would you rather raise your hand or speak by mutual consents and why ?? What do you think an A grade should be and why?? How many absences and lateness are permitted?? Do you prefer a lecture course or a discussion seminar?
