Transformative Pedagogy: an Immigrant Women's ESL Class

On Thursday in class, we took a detailed look at scenarios in ESL and how they successfully incorporated transformative pedagogy, pedagogy of engagement and learner autonomy. My group focused on the article "Participatory Education as a Critical Framework for an Immigrant Women's ESL Class" by Dana Frye. Frye's article takes place during her time as a volunteer ESL teacher at a community center in the Washington, D.C metropolitan area who developed an ESL classroom for the women.

Frye sought to find answers to the following questions: Would an awareness of social inequities or a recognition of personal strength lead to empowerment? Would the students acquire the power to step outside the classroom and make their lives better? (Frye 505). By keeping a journal of observations of oral and written interactions in the classroom (the students took part in the journaling as well). Frye used a dialogic approach, or one based in dialogue, by utilizing personal stories and journals.

Frye's findings led her to the conclusion that it is necessary to teach language that relates to the lives of the participants and helps strengthen their concepts of self and community. By utilizing the dialogic method of journaling, Frye was able to get a personal, narrated story from each of the participants and access their everyday lives.

The ESL class showed any instances of transformative pedagogy, pedagogy of engagement, and learner autonomy. Frye states that one of the main goals of her ESL class was to provide a characteristic of transformative pedagogy: "A major goal of my class was to use a problem posing approach to literacy to offer and alternative to the narrow scope of women's programs" (Frye 501). This aim of Frye's teaching follows Friere's notions of transformative pedagogy as one that is rooted in outside factors and critical thinking methods such as the problem-posing that Frye employs. She also relies of Freire's idea of literacy as ""an act of knowing, through which a person is able to look critically at the culture which has shaped him [or her] and move toward reflection and positive action upon his [or her] world" (p. 205)" (Frye 504). By drawing strength from their personal victories and focusing on their journeys and personal histories, the women defined the changes that they wanted to see women make outside of the classroom. They used this connection between their own lives and what they saw going on in the outside world to become pedagogically engaged. Finally, the women demonstrated learner autonomy by creating and working successfully in the small, safe space of their ESL classroom "that helps them strengthen their concepts of self and community and confront the oppressive forces in their lives" (Frye 511).