How Engaged Pedagogy Can Use Participation in Stimulating Learning

Engaged pedagogy, the call for student voice in liberatory education, is a needed focus of progressive educational institutions for the sake of individuality and providing a path of enlightenment for students. Presumably speaking, I believe it is safe to state that most students, at one point or another, have felt trapped within the incessant boundaries of education currently in place. It is becoming unbearable for some students that wish to strive for academic excellence to even coexist in a workroom with teachers that simply feed information only to be recited. The world has grown too large to give individualized attention to each student; therefore, the only hope lies within the enhancements brought by engaged pedagogy.

The commonly held theory that students simply must consume information and be able to efficiently relay it in an appeasing manner is to educational advancement what outhouses are to modern restrooms. It is a system sterilized to the convention of learning, an insincere method of making taught information unsustainable. Hooks had recognized this frustrating thought system and sought to reconfigure the underlying infrastructure that prevented certain individuals from active class involvement. As both an individual with excessive experience in education as well as self-actualization and a teacher who maintained a persistent attitude toward benefitting the composed self of their students, Gloria Watkins has an ideal mentality focused on the collaboration of self enlightenment and academic prosperity that should be modeled throughout educational institutions.

Since a young age, I have always had a certain sense of separation between book-based intelligence and the spiritual wisdom gained through the often-unsteady course of life. Both aspects are needed elements of a healthy life, however, I have always placed slightly more importance on the commonly heard idea of self-actualization. The process of self-actualization cannot be taught due to the fact that a proper method can never be established. This is because self-actualization is, in its most modest form, the individually gathered findings and teachings that contribute to the constantly adapting betterment of one’s soul, mind, and grand essence as they reach contentment in an enlightened journey. While self-actualization can only be unraveled within one’s self, many of those who claim to have achieved their own enlightenment may ration some credit to certain individuals (teachers or not) that they feel dramatically pushed them in a proper direction. Guidance, subjectively shamanistic mentorship in some sense, is an indubitably vital inclusion in any person’s education.

This problem of stymieing self-growth present in education is not because of the students. The blame is to be placed on the uncommitted and unemotional instructors that are merely clocking in and clocking out. In order for an engaged educational experience to be plausible, the teachers, or hopefully revolutionists, must be entirely committed to both their students and themselves. Stability is a necessary pre-requisite for the very act of educating. One who is not self-enlightened should make no effort at mentoring youth in self-actualization.

As a student that been unfortunately under rule of an unenthusiastic instructor, I sympathize with those who long for much more than copying down a PowerPoint presentation in the classroom. If one is deprived of educational freedom from their institution, their instructor(s), or in any form, it is their responsibility to seek better and achieve greater. It is unjust, but it is truth that not every, even many, professors will deprive us of gaining anything beyond a grade. This requires a greater level of commitment from the student, which will ultimately render a greater lesson.