A Study On The Critical Consciousness Of University English Teachers From The Perspective Of Critical Pedagogy

This study means to investigate the critical consciousness of university Englishteachers from the perspective of critical pedagogy. The study involves an analysis ofteachers’ beliefs about critical consciousness, corresponding behaviors in the class,and reflections after the class.Wen （2012) finds out that most university students who major in language studyhave “critical thinking absence symptoms”, which means lacking of critical abilities.And scholars think one of the reasons causing this problem is that few universitylanguage teachers have the awareness of being critical and most of them lackreflections after class. As critically reflective teachers are eagerly needed nowadays,the present study examines these two abilities by using a new theory named criticalpedagogy since the goal of this theory, critical consciousness, is to mean a person whohas critical abilities and after-class reflections.According to critical pedagogy, education should engage in cultivating peoplewho have the correlated knowledge, and who have critical consciousness (Freire,1993). Critical pedagogy regards the present education as the “banking concepteducation”, where teachers are depositors and students are depositories. Teachers aredepositing knowledge to students, and students passively receive without thinking“why”. And language teaching is never just a simple educational program. It is a partof the wider social system in which it is shaped and infused with ideological,historical, and political symbols and relations (Pennycook,2004). It requires teachersto be cultural workers, policy makers, researchers and practitioners in the class. Inorder to gain the critical consciousness, critical pedagogy presents the“problem-posing education” which breaks the oppressed relationship in the traditionaleducation. Teachers in the “problem-posing education” is not the representation ofauthority knowledge, they are guides who lead students to reflect their life and society;they are promoters who encourage students to participate in the teaching processesand discuss with each other, they are contributors who offer idea, experiences, opinions and perceptions to facilitate dialogues, they are also learners among students(Wink,1999). Tang (2012) argues that the transformation of education depends onwhat teachers think and what they have done. Crookes and Lehner (1998) also deemthat students act the way they have been taught. If teachers are critical pedagogysupporters, they can lead students to be critical.Based on previous researches, the present study conducted face-to-faceinterviews and classroom observations to investigate three university English teachersand the study reveals the following findings:1. Three university teachers had some knowledge about critical pedagogy andcritical consciousness.2. Among three teachers, two of them had the awareness of leading students torelate the class topics to the real social life, and talked about the sociopolitical relatedthemes in the class while one of them was not.3. Influenced by the traditional teaching, there was only one teacher paidattention to communicating with students and encouraged discussions but two of themwere still in the dominant position.4. Three teachers did reflect after the class but most of reflections didn’tinfluence their next teachings. Furthermore, their reflections were their students’learning behaviors rather than their own behaviors.Findings of the study suggest that three university English teachers teachpartially critically from the perspective of critical pedagogy, however, therequirements of critical pedagogy are corresponding to the modern demands in China,which demand teachers be the critically reflective intellectuals. Therefore, theapplication of critical pedagogy still needs to be further explored, future study can beconducted on how to develop into critical teachers from the field of teacherdevelopment.