CHAPTER 5: PRESENTATION OF FINDINGS USING THE THEORETICAL
5.5 Empowerment
Participants’ experiences of becoming empowered were underscored by most PSSTs who engaged with U-CE in this study. The PSST participants concurred that through U-CE, they had been empowered and strengthened for their future role as professional teachers. This position corroborated the principle of empowerment in critical pedagogy. The need to equip pre-service science teachers using the pedagogy that will enhance their proficiency in dealing with community-based issues relevant to equity has been highlighted (Khupe, 2014).
Notably, Giroux (2010) agreed that critical pedagogy is the teaching and learning process that uses the tenet which accentuates students’ realization of liberty, oppression, power dynamics, and capacity to act by doing something for their liberty.
Nikolakaki (2012) concluded that students’ internal intelligence requires an uprising that will change the status quo in the world of their incapacitation and bring about independence. Scholars argued that critical pedagogy must be pertinent to the culture, driven by stakeholders and be communally empowering (Farinde-Wu, Glover, &
Williams, 2017; Freire, 1993; Lankshear, McLaren, & McLaren, 1993; Quigley, 1997).
The PSSTs who participated in this study realized that their learning about food gardening could empower them to transcend the conventional role of the Life Sciences teacher, by empowering their communities to learn food gardening to address food insecurity. The participants attained conscious freedom, confidence, and inspiration,
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which transformed their identity from that of a novice who was unaware of the impact of food gardening to address food insecurity, to becoming citizens who were eager and prepared to contribute to the social transformation of the communities in which they would practice in the future. Students in the institutions of higher learning must be made to participate in community engagement projects to become citizens who will support the efforts of transformation in South African society (Maistry & Thakrar, 2012). The authors submit that there could be unintended consequences if university students do not participate in community engagements.
To bring about social change, PSSTs who participated in this study were guided by the lecturer to resist the status quo, which focused the learning on physiology and anatomy about nutrition in biology. They transcended this boundary, by learning about nutrition using a social justice (as opposed to a biomedical) approach, by focusing on nutritional challenges of food-insecure students and the health benefits of garden food.
The U-CE activity was not the conventional activity that would have been expected in a biology class. The knowledge that PSSTs constructed was not neutral but was both political and enabling.
Giroux (2011) rejected that pedagogy where students are degraded to what resembles jovial mechanical devices which cannot develop initiatives of morality, control, integrity and principles that affect the society. He further argues that the community life and the higher education institutions must not operate parallel to each other, but rather educational practitioners must link teaching and learning with the challenges affecting humanity. The role of critical education in educational institutions cannot be overemphasized (Postma, 2015; Sultana, 1992). These authors’ views are supported by Kincheloe (2008a, p. 112) who states that “social justice should be a foundational principle on which we build our teacher education program”. The author affirms that pre-service teachers and in-service teachers should not teach learners in isolation of the social circumstances prevailing in the society. Ira Shor (1992) concludes as follows:
Students learn to be passive or cynical in classes that transfer facts, skills, or values without meaningful connection to their needs, interests or community cultures. To teach skills and information without relating them to society and to the students’ contexts turns education into an authoritarian transfer of official
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words, a process that severely limits student development as democratic citizens (Shor, 1992, p. 18).
Far from adopting an authoritarian approach, participants in this study related skills and information to students’ contexts. The PSST participants in this study developed civic courage because they taught the NBPSTs how to cultivate the food garden which was in response to the needs of the community of students residing on the university campus. Therefore, the experience gained during U-CE would be transferred to their communities where there is the need for related civic duty making their education radical. The PSSTs who participated in this study viewed themselves as agents of change in their future working environments.
Giroux (2004, p. 34) argued that “critical pedagogy emphasizes critical reflexivity, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by using the resources of history”. Reflexivity facilitates individuals to recognize and defeat the power of intimate and societal issues, such as classism and inequalities, that limit their progress in life through self-consciousness and hindsight (Bisset, Tremblay, Wright, Poland, & Frohlich, 2015; Houston, 2015). Consequently, in U-CE, reflexivity revealed the political and the power imbalance which contextualized the PST participants’ situation that engaged in this research. Thus, through U-CE, the PSTs were able to bridge the gap between learning and everyday life. In other words, PSTs who participated in this project understood the connection between power and knowledge because they indicated that they could become independent and would not have to rely on the government if they found themselves to be unemployed (in the future) which signalled freedom.
Shor and Freire (1987) maintained that knowledge reconstruction is a two-way procedure and through the inquiry process, students can answer critical questions the teacher inquiries from them. The facilitation of knowledge construction was unconventional in this study because it departed from the dominant narrative lecturing approach. Instead of alienating students, they were guided to engage in a hands-on gardening activity, based on and informed by research activity, and to develop the capacity in non-biology students simultaneously. Through these forms of engagement, the PSSTs were empowered.
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