Empowering Students as Change-Makers
Welcome to Mr. Joe's (and my mentor, Mr. Wagner's) 7th and 8th Grade Classroom!
Hello, all! My name is Joe Becerra and I'm currently finishing up my bachelors in Secondary Education with a focus in English! Our humble ELA classroom is located at Jim Bridger Middle School. This school was the same one I was enrolled in during my middle school years! It was a little weird seeing my old teachers again, but I hope I've left an impression that shows how much I've grown since then! I wasn't always the best student, and I'm sure I gave a few of them some gray hairs here and there, but here I am now!
So, why change-makers?
It's simple! Education is one of the most key instruments of any given society, it's a tool!
A tool for what?
In our personal lives, education serves as a tool for increasing our social mobility since we can obtain more opportunities with social and literacy skills. This is a key method in building generational wealth in our communities. As a society, education becomes the tool of power to conform students into the status quo.
Our position as educators is unique in that we have choices on how we teach! We can either seek conformity or liberation for our students.
"Education is a practice not disconnected from social and political systems; it’s a practice that seeks to liberate students, humanize them, and empower them to recognize and fight oppressive power structures." (Freire, 1970).
Conformity or Liberation?
To conform a student into the status quo has been the tradition of education from a historical view. There's examples in the world of colonized people in India and Africa being taught a eurocentric curriculum to "civilize" the native population and Native American boarding schools in the United States attempted to "save the man and kill the Indian."
To liberate a student means making them consious of themselves and their position in society, giving them the tools to reveal the systems of oppression that exist in their own lived experiences. It gives students autonomy in their lives, the agency to act toward change, the ability to reflect and continue lifelong learning, and truly humanize themselves in the process of becoming change-makers.
What does it mean to "humanize?"
The inability to act on one's own future is dehumanizing, and when students cannot disrupt harmful systems that exist in their lives, they lack the ability to act on their own future. When students are conformed into the status quo, they are taught to think in ways beneficial to existing systems rather than critically think in ways beneficial to themselves and their communities. The goal of education should be to humanize our students by giving them the skills, knowledge, and agency to act toward building their future. This is a liberating pedagogy.
There'll be more in my About Me section, see you there! 
