From Honeymoon to Hostility, Reaction Paper Example

Critical pedagogy is important for the study of culture. Reading “Culture as a Disability” discusses how culture can be a disadvantage in education. The prime reaction from reading this is that I believe the point that the authors try to make is that there is no group that is intrinsically inadequate or helpless. People from a different culture are simply different from each other. For someone to say that a cultural group is deficient or disabled is a function entirely of cultural or circumstantial norms. While they anthropologically arrived at this conclusion, it also can be taken from a critical pedagogical perspective, in which people are simply different. From this understanding, the issue is not the incremental point of perceiving oppressed groups and modifying the culture to accommodate them. Rather, what is required or needed is a more substantial change in the general judgments of a culture. A change is needed in measuring individuals against each other or against some single standard. We should rather acknowledge the view that all people have an equivalent worth, however one that is distinctive for every person.

How critical pedagogy fits this thinking, is how people examine how education can be a tool for recognizing the relationships that exist between language, power, and knowledge and the look of politics of identity. (Wink 30) More importantly the essay sheds the light on the cultural conflict in the way of thinking about the relation between individuals and cultures that make them up. In reading, Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands La Frontera, the cultural conflict between individuals is also prominent. More importantly is the invisible borders that exist between groups such as Latinos and whites, and other groups in which are separated. Not only the physical border but the sociological and psychological borders in which makes preconceived notions based on assumptions. The cultures that Anzaldua chooses to highlight were the mestiza culture in which has a consciousness that plays between resistance and oppression. Much like Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds”, she is Chinese-American that struggles with her identity, and her mother’s push for to basically be someone she is not. Her mother wanted her to succeed in America, and try different things, while Amy had the internal conflict with both herself and her mother for forcing her to conform to the American identity. It represents the struggle for cultural transition, and the inability for the mother through her language and cultural differences to relay to her daughter how to carve out a better life than her in America. This follows along the pedagogy of the oppressed, in which the oppressed must be their own emulators.

The problem that exists between the borders of the US and Mexico is not only in culture but the language that separates it. Critical pedagogy is tasked with learning from the past and relearning for the present. As Wink illustrates to coincide with Anzaldua’s understanding of the white male patriarchal thinking. “It entailed a sometimes painful reexamination of old practices and established believes of educational institutions and behaviors.” (Wink 71) Much of what is learned about a particular culture is taught through the education system. In a time in which groups such as homosexuals, women, and other minorities have been classified was based on a system in which the identity was proliferated in the education system. In much like McDermott’s essay, I disagree with her blanket ethnocentrism views on ethnicity, race, and gender. While she does highlight it based on her views, she does offer a much linguistic approach in the preoccupation with cultural and racial mixture that identifies the impacts of the separation between the two. This is particular true for what critical pedagogy is trying to provide in the form of education. These stories of culture, identity, and language interrelate to how you understand their role, and your role in the world.

Works Cited

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands La Frontera. The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books. 1999. Book.

McDermott, Ray, Vareene, Herve. “Culture as Disability.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26:323-348. 1995. Print.

Tan, Amy. “Two Kinds.” The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. Oxford. 1992. Book.

Wink, Joan. Critical Pedagogy: Notes From the Real World. Pearson/Allyn & Bacon. 2005. Book.