Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
JOURNAL FOR CRITICAL EDUCATION POLICY STUDIES, cilt.18, sa.2, ss.159-195, 2020 (ESCI)
Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology which covers almost all areas of life, has transformed education/In Turkey as well as the whole world, and all aspects of education, including teacher training, have been faced with marketisation. Teacher education has started to aim to "train" teachers, and as a result, individuals who have gained teacher identity work as passive technicians in their professional lives, rather than as as transformative intellectuals. In this process, critical pedagogy, which is committed to resisting neoliberalism and all the forms of oppression that come with it, becomes a powerful tool in teacher education, and in all levels of education. However, the prerequisite for resisting the system is the involvement of teachers in critical pedagogy studies. The purpose of this study was to understand how teachers were influenced by the critical pedagogy studies after engagement with the a critical pedagogy lesson for the first time. The study was conducted using with the interpretive qualitative research method. Seventeen (17) teachers, who took the Critical Pedagogy course offered as a Master's degree course in the Educational Management Department in a university in Turkey, participated the study. Each teacher was asked to write a reflection paper at the end of the 14 -week course period, and these papers were subjected to with thematic content analysis. As a result of the analysis, 13 categories and 3 themes were developed through the codes obtained from the teachers' statements. Based on their meanings, all categories and themes were named after Freire's concepts in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed'. After the teachers' involvement in critical pedagogy studies, they stated that they became aware that the teacher education they had received and the education they had been providing in schools were in the service of mainstream education. They expressed how they realised that they had never questioned the system until their exposure to critical pedagogy. Moreover, they claimed that they were starting to take action to resist the system even with small steps, and they emphasised that they were hopeful for the future. At the end of this study, critical pedagogy was shown to have real transformative power, and the importance of participating in critical pedagogy studies for teachers to become transformative intellectuals was clearly demonstrated.