SWN025 Chap.11 Critical Pedagogy and Organisational Culture
Critical Pedagogy and Organisational Culture
This chapter treats education as a way of changing organisational culture. It explains critical pedagogy, Freire’s critique of the banking model, Giroux’s wider view of pedagogy, and the implications the Week 9 lecture draws for organisational practice.
It also covers why reflective workshops can feel unsafe, the difference between challenge and danger, and what students reported critical reflection changed in their own practice. A worked plan shows how a new graduate might raise a team’s language without simply correcting colleagues. The chapter treats education broadly, as anything that shapes how colleagues and service users come to understand a situation.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Critical pedagogy and its aims
- 02
Freire and the banking model
- 03
Giroux and the pedagogy of welfare
- 04
Implications for organisational practice
- 05
Challenge, safety and anti-intellectualism
- 06
Ritualised reflection in managerial cultures
- 07
What students said critical reflection changed
Worked example · free
Plan how to raise a practice issue with a team
- 1Model the practice: start by reflecting aloud on a time you used a similar label yourself, rather than correcting others.
- 1Use critical questioning: ask the team what the phrase assumes about why people return to the service.
- 1Build social empathy: invite colleagues to consider how a client would hear the phrase.
- 1Frame the learning in empowering ways: propose trying an alternative description for a month and reviewing the effect together.
Key terms
- Critical pedagogy
- Critical pedagogy is education grounded in a commitment to fight oppression by questioning ideology and working democratically.
- Banking model
- The banking model is Freire’s term for education that deposits fixed knowledge into learners who simply store it.
- Consciousness raising
- Consciousness raising is learning that makes people aware of the structural conditions behind personal problems.
- Privileged irresponsibility
- Privileged irresponsibility is Tronto’s term for how privileged groups maintain their position and ignore the needs of others.
- Normative violence
- Normative violence is Butler’s term for everyday norms that render some lives less valuable without registering as violence.
Critical Pedagogy and Organisational Culture FAQ
What is wrong with the banking model of education?
In Freire’s critique, quoted in the Week 9 lecture, the teacher fills students with deposits of information and students only store them. This denies that knowledge is a process of inquiry and, the lecture adds, rests on an ideology that perpetuates the power of the powerful over the powerless.
Why might practitioners find critical reflection workshops unsafe?
The lecture links it to anti-intellectualism, technicism that positions practitioners as passive consumers, and managerial cultures where workers are time-poor and supervision may be judgemental. It distinguishes being challenged or uncomfortable from being genuinely unsafe.
What did students say critical reflection changed for them?
Students quoted from Morley and Macfarlane described seeing themselves as the main tool of practice, gaining permission to challenge, using supervision more assertively, becoming more comfortable with uncertainty, communicating better in conflict and feeling more able to advocate for the people they work with.
What is the difference between being challenged and being unsafe?
The Week 9 lecture draws the line carefully. Being challenged or pushed outside your comfort zone can be productive, while feeling unsafe may reflect a judgemental facilitator, too little preparation or low trust. It links the second to managerial cultures in which overworked practitioners are time-poor.
Why does the lecture call critical teaching political?
Quoting Brookfield, it argues that teaching informed by critical theory is political by nature: it does not claim neutrality, it welcomes self-criticism, and it is open about steering toward its aims. For practitioners, that means being open about your values when you try to change a team’s practice.
Assessment move
Use this chapter for the part of your essay about future practice. Pick one cultural pattern in your placement organisation that your incident exposed, and plan how you might address it through education rather than confrontation, using the four implications from the lecture. Read Gardner’s chapter on leadership and managing and the Morley and Leggatt-Cook reading before citing them.
Keep the lecture’s final exercise in view: list the strategies you would use to create an empowering educational environment with service users as well as colleagues. A short plan of this kind can also anchor the reconstruction of an incident that involved team culture rather than a single service user.
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