Page 402 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

Chapter 32
Rethinking Models of Collaboration in Critical
Pedagogy: A Response to Stonebanks

Cory Buxton and Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr.

Introduction

Christopher Stonebanks raises a number of important questions about the meaning
of critical thinking when it comes to teaching and teacher education and especially
about the relationship between critical thinking and indigenous knowledge. Critical
thinking and indigenous knowledge are both areas of concern for critical theorists,
but Stonebanks raises the question of how these two areas of interest play out in
teacher education – the “other hat” that many of us who are engaged in critical
pedagogy as part of our scholarship wear. Stonebanks’ answer to the question for
his own practice is that it needs improvement. He believes that his answer may have
implications for other teacher educators as well. Stonebanks makes the point that
in the North American context, those of us who work in teacher education have
largely settled with complacency when it comes to preparing our teachers for the
culturally and linguistically diverse school settings where many of our predomi-
nantly White, middle-class, female teachers will find themselves working. We give
our preservice teachers a course on multicultural education, we integrate diversity
topics such as valuing students’ “funds of knowledge” into our methods courses,
and we look for some evidence through a project or lesson plan that our teachers
have demonstrated the value of diversity in their classrooms. With those pieces in
place, we hope that our graduates will go on to be culturally responsive teachers.
After all, we ask ourselves, is there really more that we can do at this stage of these
young people’s development as teachers? As for the teachers themselves, once they
have heard our “pitch” for the importance of multicultural education in several of
their classes, they often begin to respond with some stock answers about teaching
diverse learners that they think we want to hear, or “mechanically” as Stonebanks
puts it. Stonebanks’ examples of the “water lice” experiment and his exploration of

C. Buxton
University of Georgia
E.F. Provenzo, Jr.
University of Miami

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 377
Cultural Studies of Science Education Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_32,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010