Synergeo: Taking The Common Practice Model to Church: A Theological Discussion on Critical Pedagogy in Aotearoa
Essentially, while the NZC frames the content to be taught in schools across the country, the Common Practice Model is intended to govern the pedagogy of the teachers. The model itself is a set of principles that will inform classroom teaching, promoting pedagogies that are culturally responsive and sustain a multiplicity of cultures, critical pedagogies, communicating pedagogies, planned interactive learning, multiliteracies (interpreting a range of communication modes) and linguistically diverse learning.[1] It is an explicit attempt to shift understandings around teaching to acknowledge the diverse backgrounds students come from and to accommodate a wider variety of learning needs.
The Common Practice Model is meant to have widespread use, intended to “be embedded into supports and resources, professional learning, and … influence Initial Teacher Education Programs.”[2] With the intention being that it will have such an influential role in the practice of teachers across New Zealand, it is essential to pay attention not only to the ways in which knowledge is understood but also to what sort of people our government hopes our young people will become in the process of being educated in our schools. What does it mean to learn? What does the posture of a successful learner look like? What sort of formation does the Common Practice Model aim to engage in? And what does all this mean for the Christian educator?
There is much to commend here. Evident throughout the document is a commitment to address injustices by removing cultural hierarchies. There are frequent references to the redistribution of power and allowing all cultures to be represented in the classroom. It is hoped that ākonga will strengthen their cultural identities in the learning environment. The document is a formidable expression of care and value towards all learners from all backgrounds. It is designed to promote success in our increasingly multicultural country that has a sorry history regarding equity in education. Seeing such a sustained commitment to developing culturally responsive teaching practices at a high level is encouraging. Where we first notice language around formation in the document, is in the section, “Critical Pedagogies.” Here the formational aspirations of he model are made clear: this pedagogical approach will support our students' development “to participate and contribute in society.”[3] No other principle in the document has such an explicit aim of shaping human beings for the benefit of everyday life.
What is critical pedagogy?
Critical pedagogy, as defined by Joan Wink, is:
transformative teaching and learning; a focus on social justice in the school and outside the school; liberation pedagogy; a focus on power and status quo and our role in all of it; teaching and learning based on an egalitarian perspective on life; teaching and learning that includes a critical consciousness of the hidden (and often oppressive) parts of the social, cultural, political, and historical world.[4]
Critical pedagogy is an approach to teaching that reminds us that we live in a complex world and that we are embedded in systems that affect people’s lives in different ways. Texts and social discourses can and do serve to perpetuate unjust attitudes and inhibit learners' agency. This impulse to address inequalities is fundamentally a Christian one. As Holland has demonstrated, dignity afforded to the weak, poor, and sick did not arise by a supposed natural evolution of human consciousness through history but only arose as communities of believers built an understanding of what it meant to be human from the identification of God with woundedness and weakness.[5] Indeed, one of the fathers of critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire, developed his educational theory explicitly from his faith, a fact that is often omitted by many who draw on his ideas. Catholic thinker Hans Urs von Balthasar warns that divorcing the work of justice from the work of Christ inevitably means we lose sight of the “final form” of what love really looks like, and instead we create our own visions that we absolutise in the place of Christ. He warns “The preaching of social justice and work on its behalf must be informed by New Testament love from the ground up.”[6]
So, the aims and approaches critical pedagogy espouses should be affirmed and taken seriously by those who share Freire’s faith: responding to inequality is a profoundly Christian priority. Many of the reservations that centre around critical pedagogy, however, arise from its transformation from a dynamic within a system grounded in a tradition beyond itself to a system in itself that legitimises itself based on its desire for transformation through education. Liberation from social oppression is good, but a Christian response is not simply liberation from but salvation in. This inclusion of a positive replacement is missing in most of the conversations involving critical pedagogy currently espoused in the New Zealand education system.
Critical pedagogies have long been influential in educational thinking in Aotearoa, and they are often politicised because of their willingness to remain antagonistic to current modes of operating. Regardless of our political leanings, we need to have the conversations that critical pedagogy forces us into because no system works for everyone, and many dominant discourses are oppressive to those outside them. Instead of reservations arising from its inclusion, we may be more justified in our reservations about the fact that no other visions of human life are directing the teaching and learning process as articulated in this document.[7] Instead of being one interpretive stance or lens to employ when reading texts or engaging in mathematical thinking, it is the primary way of being our students are encouraged to be formed for civic participation. So, it would seem that we in New Zealand are most interested in our young people positioning themselves above knowledge. We ask them to constantly question, cross-examine, and place themselves above the texts they engage with. We seem most interested in equipping students to approach knowledge with suspicion, alert to power that dictates their experiences, and an awareness that empowers them with an activist mentality. So, what sort of posture towards knowledge does the Common Practice Model see as one that is fit for participating and contributing to our world through critical pedagogy?
The Common Practice Model seeks to develop a “critical awareness,” by learning to address “issues of power.” It is an approach encouraging learners to “interrogate dominant discourses.” It aims to form learners through literacy who can interrogate texts and develop “an understanding of the relationship between language and power” to “develop agency and a social conscience.”[8] By working within this paradigm, teachers are directed to support students to ask “sociocultural questions at every stage of their working processes.”[9] This pedagogy is meant to equip and empower students to situate themselves in wider socio-cultural discourses, understand the influences that have shaped their worlds, and critically reflect on how these realities shape their lives. This is an important family of skills and ways of seeing that equip students to continue to identify the ways in which biases and systemic weaknesses limit opportunities and allow them to grow in confidence in moving beyond them.
My contention is not that this doesn’t have a place; it does, and it is a necessary contribution. Research has shown a significant prevalence of “disadvantageous, differential treatment … within the beliefs and practice of many New Zealand teachers,” and critical pedagogy is a powerful tool to reflect on the discourses we bring into the classroom. However, when critical pedagogy becomes used and treated as a system in and of itself, it can narrow life and all its complexity into a perpetual discussion about who benefits, how power is being exercised, and how we can identify the ways in which we are victimising or being victimised. Life is simply much more than this, and the Gospel positions Christian teachers in relation to power in more nuanced ways that we will explore below.
Epistemology
Epistemology is not a fringe topic in Western culture. We are still dealing with the social fallout from tensions around government responses to COVID-19, increased suspicion of experts, and the influence of subversive groups such as QAnon that have led to unprecedented challenges to core institutions like the January 6 2021 United States Capitol attack. The internet age has enabled the legitimisation of every theory or hot-take; it has questioned the credibility of every voice and accelerated an increasing distrust towards every expert.[10] If there is a default posture towards knowledge or the idea of truth in our current culture, it is one that is increasingly cynical and self-protective, suspicious of those in power. And while we must be able to recognise, name, and act against injustices arising from the language and conceptual frameworks we use, our educational policy seems to double-down on this posture: a survivalist mentality in a world of fragmentation. Instead of offering a real vision for a flourishing society that knows how to navigate togetherness and can imagine a hopeful solidarity, these pedagogical models seem to express an exclusive and narrow desire to ensure students understand that texts are coercive.
So, again, thinking critically about texts and the ways in which we are socially situated is an important skill, but is there a better posture towards knowledge that could help move us beyond this fracturing? Responding to The Common Practice Model provides an opportunity to broadly define what we typically mean by “Christian education.” It is not simply a school experience that incorporates Christian convictions, doctrines, and affirms biblical ideas. Christ actually reorients the way we approach knowledge. His life reminds us that there is knowledge and power that we can trust. As Sawyer notes,
When we wrestle with a mathematical puzzle, we are seeking after the reality found in Christ … And in Him, we find reality, where we see all things in glorious clarity, where all human endeavour comes home. This is because, remember, Christ is the truth. Therefore, even an apparently innocuous, a-theological mathematical problem is the creation of God, an echo of God, through which we may see His glory with the eyes of the spirit, the revealer of the true depth of reality.[11]
Educators who are shaped by the Gospel must demonstrate to students that reality is grounded in a person “in whom we live, move and have our being.”[12] Learning, therefore, is a loving response to this person who has made himself known through reality.
A Broader Epistemology
We are not the sole arbiters of truth. Central to critical pedagogy is the idea that all knowledge is socially constructed, rehearsed again in the Common Practice Model.[13] If this were the case, then of course, knowledge would be an expression of the individual will that constructed it. But if, in fact, we can know something because it has been revealed to us, then it not only changes our posture to one of secure investigation but reminds us that there are limits to this. Perhaps, instead of interrogating discourses as isolated individuals, we can practice discernment in community, asking whether these discourses are good (just). Truth is, of course, mediated and communicated through a prism of personal interests. That is the reality of living in a world in which all knowledge involves personal engagement.[14] But to define the default posture towards a text as a critical one sets up an educational system that forms students into those practiced in placing themselves above texts, the arbiters of their own truth. This is a recipe for anxiety and isolation, rather than compassionate engagement in civic society.
Reading texts, solving problems, and investigating reality are fundamentally a discovery of these echoes of Christ. To teach in a faithfully Christian way is to show learners that part of living a flourishing life is sometimes placing ourselves under texts; to be open and vulnerable to their ideas and the ways they could influence and change us. Standing under a text allows us to enter into different worlds and to let the text exercise power over us as we allow it to challenge our assumptions, inspire us, and expand our horizons. Knowledge isn’t something we have to be wary of as a default posture but something we can anticipate with joyful hope. Not all power works against us; sometimes it is utilised for our good. Are we making room for the nurturing of young people in their ability to sit under texts in trust as well as being critically aware of their ability to impose power upon them? As Rowan Williams recognised in reflection on Simone Weil’s work on attention, to truthfully engage in attention towards anything, to let knowledge speak to us properly, this process requires us to engage in “exposure to structures that have to be received in their otherness” and “involves the sheer labour of internalizing rules we have not chosen.”[15] It is a laying down of agency in the work of learning in order to grow.
Perhaps one of the most important contributions a Christian educator can bring to the aims of the Common Practice Model is to use it as a springboard into a deeper understanding of what it means to be free or liberated. In light of the Gospel, freedom is not something that is an end in itself. Our agency is a means to practice something more than autonomy. It is to move beyond freedom and agency as something bound to the idea of self-authorship that so thoroughly dominates our cultural zeitgeist and education policies. True freedom is participating in Christ’s prayer of “Your will be done.”[16] Rather than aiming to throw off power structures that bind us, we learn to sit under the right sort of power to grow into mature personhood. As Gorman explains, “It is in self-surrender to God (and others) in love that a person finds self-realisation.”[17] Critical pedagogy, therefore, should be affirmed in its conviction in keeping our attention and practice fixed firmly on the marginalised. It just can’t be the only approach to knowledge and formation in the classrooms of our already fractured world.
Sam Burrows has had a range of experience in education and church leadership, including teaching in Christian and state schools in New Zealand, a role as a deputy principal and working in young adults ministry. He has been also been on staff at Saint Augustine’s Anglican Church as part of the preaching team and youth ministry. Since 2020 he has worked as a lecturer at Laidlaw College in Auckland, teaching a mixture of theology and education papers. Sam also completed a Masters of Theology in 2022, with a thesis that explored trends in current faith and spirituality. He is interested in the ways that theology can speak to pedagogy, epistemology, and culture.
[1] Ministry of Education, The Common Practice Model: Phase 1: Principles and Pedagogical Approaches, Ministry of Education, March, 2023, https://assets.education.govt.nz/public/Documents/Curriculum/cpm/Phase-1-of-the-Common-Practice-Model-May-2023.pdf, 1.
[2] Ministry of Education, The Common Practice Model, 2.
[3] Ministry of Education, The Common Practice Model, 8.
[4] Joan Wink, Critical Pedagogy: Notes from the Real World, Fourth Edition (California State University: Pearson, 2011), 49.
[5] Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (London: Little, 2019), xxii
[6] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004) 130.
[7] Critical pedagogy is one of 4 pedagogical approaches in The Common Practice Model. Also included is “Culturally responsive and sustaining approach,” “communicating pedagogies,” and “planned interactive learning.” None of these other approaches make claims about forming young people for civic participation or make claims about the nature of knowledge in the way that the “Critical pedagogies” section does.
[8] Ministry of Education, The Common Practice Model, 8.
[9] Ministry of Education, The Common Practice Model, 9.
[10] Yuval Levin, A Time To Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus: How Recommitting to our Institutions can Revive the American Dream (New York: Basic Books,2020), 39.
[11] Jacob Sawyer, “Call No Man A Rabbi”? A Theology of Education, Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Thought and Practice (Auckland: Laidlaw College), https://hail.to/laidlaw-college/publication/emCooni/article/UbQFYiz
[12] Acts 17:28.
[13] Ministry of Education, The Common Practice Model, 4.
[14] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 312.
[15] Rowan Williams, The 2023 ISSR Boyle Lecture on Science and Religion: “Attending to Attention” Digital Companion Booklet (Cambridge: International Society for Science and Religion, 2023), 19.
[16] Matthew 26:42.
[17] Michael Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2001), 99.