Abstract
The 21st-century digital society has brought with it an overflow of information which makes it more urgent than ever to develop critical skills and the ability to think for oneself. The theories of education have stressed this need for long, but the recent, emerging inclusion of LGBTIQ+ people in formal lessons, even if frequently contested by some, may be a timely opportunity for teachers to help their students develop criticality. This chapter delves into all these issues to carry out an argumentative literature review whose aim is to show the potential that the critical inclusion of LGBTIQ+ experiences in education has for the sake of promoting both teachers' and learners' critical thinking skills. This initial understanding of the diversity inherent to sexes, genders, and identities, it is argued, can easily prepare them to transfer such competence to the comprehension of other complex human realities.
TopUnderstanding Education
Undeniably, a lot has been written about education and its aims. It has been a long debate among philosophers, pedagogues, and psychologists, among others. Although the aim of this section is not to provide a comprehensive definition of this phenomenon, it is necessary to understand the paradigms that help interpret both education and the theories posed in this chapter.
When analysing the definitions, by classical authors like Plato, Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Rousseau, Kant, Dilthey, Durkheim or Dewey, some conclusions can be drawn. These authors tend to understand education as a personal process that entails the perfectioning of the learner’s natural capacities, an endeavour planned and enhanced by the educator (Sarramona, 1989; Escribano, 2004).
This understanding of education, which could be labelled as humanistic, seems to have changed in the last two centuries, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution first, and universal education later (Torres, 1998). On the one hand, oriented to the masses and deprived of more personal approaches, it became structurally repetitive, expecting students to passively gather the contents transmitted by teachers, so they could later answer questions in tests. This form of education has been named as “banking education” by authors like Paulo Freire (2005), who argues it constitutes an alienating practice rather than a liberating one. Far from a liberating embodied approach, this alienating transmission model considers knowledge as a dogmatic, fixed body of truths, external to the learner, which the teacher must perpetuate. This configuration of the education system empowers the teacher as an expert knower, at the same time it disempowers the student, since this “one-size-fits all model […] ignores the uniqueness of each learner” (Roche, 2014, p. 11).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Critical Thinking: High-order cognitive ability to detach from mainstream consensus to argue individually and ask questions beyond mere appearances.
Queer Pedagogy: Type of critical pedagogy that aims at questioning stable identities, both normative and non-conforming, with a special focus on shedding light on the injustices exercised on the latter.
Binary Thinking: Stance that understands the world as formed by contraries made up of two different ends, one of them valid and the other devalued.
Dogmatic Thinking: Stance that makes meaning of the world by posing a series of sets of unquestionable, permanent truths.
Banking Education: Education centered on the accumulation of knowledge, provided by the teacher, considered an expert knower.
Actualizing: Teaching method that intends to actively and critically study disempowered social groups. It builds upon previous usualising.
Usualising: Teaching method that intends to make learners familiar with non-conforming identities through just representation, with no need for deep explanation. It is the step that prepares for actualizing.
Special Guest Approach: Attempt to include non-valued identities in the curriculum with occasional lessons that entail the participation of individuals who identify with such identities. In a broader sense, this label can also apply to occasional references to such people, with no need for their factual participation.
Critical Pedagogy: Pedagogy that aims at making meaning of the world by questioning the status quo and understanding its origin, thus contributing to changing unfair situations.