A modest critical pedagogy for English as a foreign language education

This paper uses the introduction of critical pedagogy to an English as a Foreign Language class in the Republic of Korea as a case study for a “modest critical pedagogy” (Tinning 2002). Focusing on the stress and resistances experienced during the introduction, we suggest a modest critical pedagogy that 1) makes the paradigm itself an explicit part of the curriculum, 2) redefines the emancipatory aspect of critical pedagogy to focus on “what we expect students to do and what we as educators do” (Gore 1993, 154) and, 3) re-examines the facilitator role of teachers. We use the work of Michel Foucault (1983) to suggest a critical pedagogy that asks students and educators to examine previous experiences of education and the effects of these experiences upon a sense of self, that explores the limits of critical pedagogy in terms of a sense of self and that experiments with the possibility of going beyond these limits to develop a different sense of self. This shift to an examination of the effects of critical pedagogy re-defines its emancipatory potential.