Conscientization

The English term conscientization is a translation of the Portuguese term conscientizacao, which is also translated as consciousness raising and sarcastic consciousness. The term was popularized by Brazilian educator, activist, and theorist Paulo Freire in his 1970 work Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire was teaching the poor and illiterate members of Brazilian society to read at a time when literacy was a requirement for suffrage and dictators ruled many South Ameri washstand countries. minute consciousness proceeds through the identification of generative themes, which Freire identifies as iconic representations that have a powerful emotional impact in the daily lives of learners. In this way, individual consciousness helps end the culture of silence in which the socially dispossessed internalize the negative images of themselves created and propagated by the oppressor in situations of extreme poverty.Liberating learners from this mimicry of the powerful, and the fratricidal viole nce that results therefrom is a major goal of critical consciousness. Critical consciousness is a fundamental aspect of Freires concept of popular cultivation. Arlene Goldbard, an author on the subject of confederacy cultural development finds the concept of conscientization to be a foundation of community cultural development. From the glossary of Goldbards 2006 book New Creative Community. Conscientization is an ongoing process by which a learner moves toward critical consciousness. This process is the spirit of liberatory education. It differs from consciousness raising in that the latter may involve transmission of preselected knowledge. Conscientization means breaking through prevailing mythologies to reach new levels of awarenessin particular, awareness of oppression, being an object of others will rather than a self-determining subject. The process of conscientization involves identifying contradictions in experience through dialogue and becoming part of the process of ch anging the world. 2 History of application The ancient Greeks first identified the essence of critical consciousness when philosophers encouraged their students to develop an impulse and willingness to stand back from humanity and temper and to make them objects of thought and criticism, and to search for their meaning and significance. 3 In his books Pedagogy of the Oppressed4 and Education for Critical Consciousness,5 Freire explains critical consciousness as a sociopolitical educative tool that engages learners in questioning the nature of their historical and social situation, which Freire addressed as reading the world. The goal of critical consciousness, according to Freire, should be acting as subjects in the creation of democratic society. In education, Freire implies intergenerational equity between students and teachers in which both learn, both question, both reflect and both participate in meaning-making.Using this idea, and describing current instructional methods as h omogenization and lockstep standardization, alternative approaches are proposed, such as the Sudbury model of democratic education schools, an alternative approach in which children, by enjoying personal immunity thus encouraged to exercise personal responsibility for their actions, learn at their own pace rather than following a previously imposed chronologically-based curriculum. 678 In a similar form students learn all the subjects, techniques and skills in these schools.The staff are minor actors, the teacher is an adviser and helps just when asked. 910 Sudbury model of democratic education schools maintain that values, social justice, critical consciousness, intergenerational equity, and political consciousness included, must be learned through experience,11121314 as Aristotle said For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. 15 Picking up on Freires definition of critical consciousness, Joe L. Kincheloe has expanded the definition of the conc ept in his work on postformalism.In Kincheloes preparation postformalism connects cognition to critical theoretical questions of power and social justice. In this context Kincheloe constructs a critical theory of cognition that explores questions of meaning, emancipation vis-a-vis ideological inscription, and a particular focus on the socio-political construction of the self. With these concerns in mind Kincheloes postformal critical consciousness engages questions of purpose, issues of human dignity, freedom, authority, reconceptualized looks of reason, intellectual quality, and social responsibility.Postformal critical consciousness stimulates a conference between critical pedagogy and a wide range of social, cultural, political economic, psychological, and philosophical concerns. Kincheloe employs this multilogical conversation to shape new modes of self-awareness, more effective forms of social, political, and pedagogical action, and an tractile model of an evolving critical consciousness (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1993 Kincheloe, 1999 Thomas and Kincheloe, 2006).Freires development of critical consciousness has been expanded upon in several academic disciplines and common applications16 Public health community collaborations focused on HIV prevention for women,17 the role of critical consciousness in adult education,18 and the effect of peer pressure on cigarette smokers19 Freires notion of critical consciousness is, in part, a type of political consciousness. * Conscientization refers to a type of learning which is focused on perceiving and exposing social and political contradictions.Conscientization also includes victorious action against oppressive elements in ones life as part of that learning. Conscientization Psychology Wiki, * A conscientization strategy concerned with increasing peoples sensitivity to the implications of gender inequality, and demanding that problems of gender favouritism be identified and overcome in policies and programs. grammatical gender awareness means a high level of gender conscientization. Article Gender 101 Gender Sensitivity, coa. gov. ph * down * up