CCP and Me

When implementing Critical Communication Pedagogy (CCP),  teachers approach pedagogy from the understanding that society at large effects classrooms. Students and teachers become complicit to these effects through certain communication practices supportive of these structures (De La Mare, 2014).  As a pedagogy that necessitates the need for self-reflexivity, understanding how we as individuals (both students and teachers) operate within these classrooms, becomes highly intertwined with our experiences.

In our most recent class on pedagogy, we discussed the topic of whiteness.  While we understood that whiteness has become inundated throughout the course of our lives, it was an interesting to have us discuss how we personally have experienced it.  I'll avoid any individual disclosures, but we discovered that much of this inundation happens within the home, relatively more private social circles, and through a variety of repetitious performances.  For example, discourses surrounding performances of femininity and masculinity, are constantly enacted as in what I articulate as a traditional familial framework. Based on historical enactments, families perpetuate such ideologies, and consequently, pass them on to their children.  The can include the use of phrases such as "suck it up," "men don't cry," and "men are speaking" when in relation to a female's attempt at contribution to primarily male dominated conversation.

Of course this is only a small example of such performances. However, what we can gather from this information, is that our understandings of self, others, and the world around us, can greatly effect how we approach education in materials that challenge and even subvert such notions. I speak from experience when I say learning about things that challenge my cognitive schema, what is the way it is, just because its always been that way, is a very unstable concept to grasp. So as an instructor who has gone through this experience, and teaches the foundational concept of such materials, I believe it is my responsibility to ease students into these conversations.

But how can we do that? What examples could we use to help students understand that the world is not fixed to a particular conception of human expectations? I can not say with certainty to one particular method. The obligations expected in the role of student such as learning, understanding, and applying concepts in ways that rationally align with the material, while simultaneously challenging normative constructions that have organized their lives thus far, places the student in the precarious position of questioning the foundations of their world views. We should not seek to tell students it is wrong to maintain any specific ideological position, but to help them understand why these positions are taken, and what it could mean to explore beyond them.

Sources:

De La Mare, D. M. (2014). Using critical communication pedagogy to teach public speaking. Communication Teacher, 28, 196-202. doi: 10.1080/17404622.2014.911342