Students’ lived knowledge can exceed teachers’ content expertise in contested subjects

Evidence

The students questioned and challenged my “superior” content knowledge and offered examples from their own lives that contradicted the lessons I was teaching, and in many ways displayed a depth and breadth of knowledge of race, class, and justice that I honestly had no justifiable reason to reject as “inferior” to what I was attempting to teach. The tensions heightened when they wanted to be heard, all the while when I attempted to “get back on track” to the prescribed curriculum. Ultimately, we were lacking a dialogical classroom setting. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 722

Categorization

• QUESTION: Under what conditions does a prescribed curriculum function as the teacher’s shield against students’ lived counter-examples? Worth probing whether ‘getting back on track’ is always epistemic silencing.
• XREF: connects to: Students’ lived knowledge can exceed textbook content and unsettle teacher authority — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 720; Students today demand meaningful, healing education connecting knowledge to lived experience — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 52

Broader Connections

• Students’ lived knowledge can exceed textbook content and unsettle teacher authority #corroborates (0.90) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 720