A Freirean analysis of Kazakhstani social work education

Abstract

The authors examine their Kazakhstani social work teaching experiences. Key elements discussed include the history of Kazakhstani culture, language, family life; the view that the classroom is a microcosm of the larger society; and the role of language dominance in the Kazakhstani classroom. Five concepts provide a framework for analyzing our classroom experiences, including indigenization, internationalization, and three concepts from Paulo Freire (i.e. culture of silence, banking concept of education, and critical consciousness). This framework provides students with ways to awaken to social consciousness, to analyze oppression, and to participate in actions to change society.

Keywords

Critical consciousness indigenization and internationalization Kazakhstan Paulo Freire social work education

The yellow steppe

The yellow steppe or ‘Сары Арқа’ stretches like a vast, yellow sea for endless miles across northern Kazakhstan. This beautiful yet harsh landscape mirrors the complex relationships between formerly nomadic Kazakh people and remnants of the Soviet Union.¹ Under Soviet rule, Kazakhs suffered mass starvation of one-third of their population due to Soviet practices that suppressed nomadic tribal life (Millar, 2004) and had little access to participation in leadership positions in the Soviet system (Laitin, 1998). The largely Turkic and secular Islamic population was viewed by Soviets as culturally and religiously inferior in contrast to other Soviet-ruled countries such as the Ukraine or Estonia whose language, religious and cultural practices were closely associated with Soviet practices (Laitin, 1998; LeVine, 2007; McLean and McMillan, 2009). Since Kazakhstan’s national independence in 1991, there has been resurgence in Kazakh language and culture in some areas of the country and within government institutions (Fierman, 2006; Pavlenko, 2008).

In this article, the authors examine their Kazakh social work teaching experiences (Author et al., in press). The use of Paulo Freire’s ideas emerged from conversations between the two American educators and then were shared with and refined in conjunction with the Kazakh educators. The first author was a Fulbright faculty scholar who taught a social policy course in the fall of 2011 at the Eurasian National University in Astana, Kazakhstan; the second author joined the first author in teaching four day-long workshops focused on professional ethical decision-making to Kazakhstani faculty and students. Our language interpreters and the Social Work Department Director, who are ethnic Kazakh, also contributed as authors to the development of this article. Although the first author had studied the Russian language for 2 years and discussed Kazakh life and their educational system with family, friends, and university faculty, she, along with the second author, was unprepared for the reality of two distinct groups of largely ethnic Kazakh students who rarely spoke to each other and were divided based on cultural customs, values, and their spoken language as Kazakh-speaking students and Russian-speaking students.²

Upon return to the United States, the authors explored ideas that could be used to give meaning to classroom observations as they related to social work education in Kazakhstan. The following key elements are addressed in this article: (1) a brief history of culture, language, family life, and social policy development in Kazakhstan as they inform our teaching experience; (2) the view that the ‘classroom is a microcosm of dynamics operating in the larger society’; (3) the role language dominance played in the Kazakhstani classroom; and (4) Paulo Freire’s (1970) critique of education as described in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We draw upon three central concepts described by Freire to analyze our teaching experiences: the culture of silence, the banking concept of education, and conscientização (critical consciousness). The focus of our analyses is intended to demonstrate how social work education may unintentionally contribute to oppression by failing to recognize and support students in their move from a culture of silence toward critical consciousness.

History, culture, and language in Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan’s historical, cultural, and language development, placed within the context of the Soviet Union as a colonizing power (Millar, 2004), provides a window into this classroom experience. Kazakhstan currently has a population of 16.6 million people, a marked increase in population from 2004, when the population was 14.9 million (Smagulova, 2008). Speakers of Turkic languages (e.g. Kazakh, 63.1%; Uzbek, 2.9%; Uyghur, 1.4%; Tatar, 1.3%; Turkish, 0.6%; Azeri, 0.5%) make up 60.5 percent of the total population; speakers of Indo-European (IE) Slavic languages (e.g. Russian, 23.7%; Ukrainian, 2.1%; Polish, 0.2%) make up 34.6 percent of the total population; and speakers of other languages (e.g. German, 1.1%; Korean, 0.6%) make up 4.9 percent of the population (Kazakhstan National Census, 2009). Kazakh is the national language of Kazakhstan; Russian is also considered an official language of Kazakhstan (Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 1995; Smagulova, 2008).

The formation of the people we know today as Kazakh first began in the 15th century as a political union of various nomadic Mongol and indigenous Turkic groups (Smagulova, 2008; Surucu, 2002; Zardykhan, 2002) who roamed the steppes of Central Asia all the way from East Asia to Eastern Europe. During the 19th century, Russia annexed all the Kazakh groups, abolishing the power of the khans, or leaders, and placed the tribes under different provincial and territorial administrations. Slavic groups moved onto the Kazakh steppe in two major migrations; and in 1918, Russian Bolshevik rule came to Central Asia. Kazakhstan remained under Soviet rule until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Kazakhstan became an independent republic (Golden, 2011; Smagulova, 2008).

Prior to the Soviet regime, few Central Asians had a sense of ‘nationality’ (Dwyer, 2005). For millennia, the nomadic nature of many groups, including early IEs (Tocharians, Persians, Greeks), Turks, and Mongols, helped to create a complex ethnic mixture that often makes the problem of identifying original ethnic groups daunting if not impossible. Yet, Soviet colonial policy instituted a massive and largely successful project of social and ethnic engineering (Golden, 2011) based largely on so-called scholarly ethnographic and linguistic studies, creating nation-states and shaping borders to suit its own governing purposes while tailoring ‘nationalities’ for the national republics, integrating them into the imperial state and economy (Millar, 2004).

Turkic languages, such as Kazakh, have a rich history in Central Asia that dates to the 7th and 8th centuries ce (Scharlipp, 2004; Smagulova, 2008). However, because modern Kazakh has had a long period of contact with the Russian language (which was dominant throughout the Soviet era), Kazakh has changed under Russian language influence. For example, bilingual Kazakh speakers have inserted Russian syntactic features into Kazakh speech, in effect altering its typical Turkic syntax into that of an IE language (Muhamedowa, 2009).

It is against this historical and linguistic background that, as in so many other colonial situations around the world involving Western against non-Western or ‘other’ societies, Soviet policy came to define indigenous Kazakh society as archaic, inferior, and incapable of modern nationhood and self-governance (Yessenova, 2005). Furthermore, through Russian state-sponsored migrations, Russians over time became not just a demographic majority, but also a dominant group politically, economically, and culturally in Kazakhstan (Smagulova, 2008). Russian-speaking newcomers have been employed in better paid and more prestigious economic sectors as skilled workers, technicians and engineers (Landau and Kellner-Heinkele, 2004), while Kazakhs worked the land as farmers. Russian-speaking Kazakhs were more likely to have university degrees or professional training and to be urban, cosmopolitan, and more economically prosperous. Kazakh-speaking Kazakhs were more likely to have lower levels of education, be rural and poor (Smagulova, 2008).

In 1938, the teaching of Russian in all non-Russian schools became obligatory. The use of Kazakh language during the Soviet era was limited to only a few domains, and consequently, the prestige of Kazakhs and their language declined. Even today, public elementary and secondary schools that are Russian language dominant have far greater financial resources than Kazakh language public school counterparts; federal government policies are careful not to be ‘anti-Russian’ and have not funded Kazakh language public schools to a similar level as Russian language public schools (Verschik, 2010). There is also evidence of an emerging dominant public ideology of multilingualism (Smagulova, 2008), involving the use of Kazakh, Russian, and English languages. Recent developments include the opening of several experimental multilingual schools that are teaching subjects in Kazakh, Russian, and English; for example, in public universities, students can typically choose the Kazakh or Russian language for instruction, but in the most prestigious Kazakh universities (i.e. the President Nazarbayev University), all classes are taught in the English language by faculty members who have been educated outside of Kazakhstan (Low and Yermekbayeva, 2012; Smagulova, 2008). Russian influences also impact Kazakhstan in other ways; for example, modern Kazakh medicine has developed out of a combination of Soviet and Western medicine with the influence of native paganism or shamanism (Grzywacz, 2010), and Kazakhstan continues to recognize Russian Orthodox Christmas as a national holiday (Congress of World Religions, 2013).

The Soviet collapse of 1991 led to the termination of Soviet state subsidies, to inconsistency in agricultural economic reforms, and subsequently to the impoverishment of villagers, causing thousands of them to migrate to the cities (Yessenova, 2005). This has caused a bifurcation of Kazakh identity depending on whether one is a rural Kazakh (auldiktar) or an urban Kazakh. These two perspectives, urban and rural, shape two sets of identities currently caught in opposition, manifesting unequal power relations within the nation. The legacy of this inequality allows the urban populace to exercise power over former villagers; for example, the urban populace of post-Soviet Almaty (i.e. former Kazakhstan capital) considers rural immigrants to be marginal and not sufficiently skilled or mature for urban society (Yessenova, 2005).

After the Soviet collapse, the number of Russians, other Slavs, and Germans decreased as a result of mass emigration. The Kazakh share of the country’s population, on the other hand, has increased due to higher birth rates among Kazakhs, and as a result of the state policy of repatriation of ethnic Kazakhs from other countries (Bonnenfant, 2012; Smagulova, 2008). More than 464,000 returning ethnic Kazakhs, called oralmandar (Bonnenfant, 2012; Dubuisson and Genina, 2011), have migrated to Kazakhstan from Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, China, Iran, and Mongolia. These latest developments have caused uneasiness among the Russian-speaking population (Diener, 2005; Peyrouse, 2008). For example, even though there continue to be significant government documents and policies translated only into the Russian language, these latest developments reflect that the hegemony of the Russian language has been challenged and that the Kazakh language is gaining in social prestige (Dubuisson and Genina, 2011; Smagulova, 2008).

Kazakh family life

The following discussion explores the bifurcation between rural and urban ethnic Kazakh identity as it impacts family life and also addresses recent changes in national social policy that impact the role of social workers and the provision of social services to Kazakhstani families. The traditional, typically rural Kazakh family stems from patrilineal and extended family units that are characteristic of the nomadic Kazakh clans (Geiger and Inkeles, 1954). Kazakh clans range between interdependent and dependent blood families, and this is a key attribute of current rural Kazakh family life (K Kuramyssova, 2013, personal communication). Traditionally, the wife marries the husband’s family, whereas urban Kazakhstanis of Russian descent are more like those in Russia where the husband marries the wife’s family, but is not as interdependent or dependent as are the ethnic Kazakh families. Due to Kazakh family traditions, it is very difficult to leave the family unit and gain independence, which is also different from Kazakhstanis of Russian descent (K Kuramyssova, 2013, personal communication). This is further enforced by the reality of economics for young people in Kazakhstan where, because of unemployment and low wage jobs, many single and married youth, as old as their late 20s, live with their parents or are living in housing owned by relatives in urban areas, and even more so in rural Kazakhstan (Eshpanova and Nysanbaev, 2006).

Family problems are handled by the elder of the family, typically the oldest male. Age is viewed as sign of wisdom stemming from experience. The goal of addressing the elder to solve family problems, such as spousal abuse, is to obtain his viewpoint, show respect, and gain his approval for wanted decisions. For example, if there was a concerned family member willing to assist the wife in addressing spousal abuse with an elder who has power over the husband, it is the elder who decides whether or not to take action regarding the abuse. However, the wife always has the right to leave her husband and typically will return to her parents’ home. Law enforcement would rarely be called to intervene because the ethnic Kazakh family has a structure already in place to deal with these situations. Ethnic Kazakhs also do not trust law enforcement as historically the people who work for the government are often engaged in corrupt behaviors (K Kuramyssova, 2013, personal communication). In contrast, Kazakhstanis of Russian descent are far more likely to be open to government intervention due to fewer family connections and support (K Kuramyssova, 2013, personal communication). They generally do not view such things as spousal abuse as purely a private matter. Ethnic Kazakhs, especially in the rural parts of the country, hold government intervention in spousal abuse scenarios as a last resort in favor of familial processes and are not as politically aware of women’s rights as in Western societies (Snajdr, 2005; Werner, 2009). Finally, it should be noted that although recent national legislation has been developed to address domestic violence and shelters have been created through the joint work of nongovernmental agencies (nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)) and the national government, these services have faced budgetary challenges, unclear procedures, and conflicting lines of bureaucratic control which hamper their effectiveness and impartiality (Advocates for Human Rights (AHR), 2011; K Kuramyssova, 2013, personal communication; Snajdr, 2005, 2010; Werner, 2009).

Social work education and practice in Kazakhstan

Social work practice is in its infancy with only a few undergraduate social work programs located in urban centers. At the current time, there is a national organization for professional social workers, but no social work licensing or certification process. Social workers do work for the federal government; however, there is social work role confusion, and the federal government is seeking to better define the roles of social workers (e.g. a Social Protection branch of the federal government was developed in 2006 and charged, in part, with better defining social work roles). Social workers who work for the government will also need to justify their actions against clients’ general suspicions about government corruption. Finally, in 2011, some of the first social workers were employed in health-care settings. After observing the benefits of social workers in health-care clinics, physicians advocated with the federal government to begin to place social workers in all health-care clinics (Koenig, 2011).

The social work classroom as a microcosm of the larger society

The aforementioned tensions experienced in Kazakh cultural identity (e.g. rural vs urban), family life, and language (e.g. Russian vs Kazakh languages) are mirrored in our experiences of the Kazakhstani social work classroom within the Eurasian National University. This university has a strong national academic record and employs ethnic Kazakhs as faculty members. Students can choose their language of instruction (i.e. Kazakh or Russian) and take all of their courses in their chosen language. However, in the most prestigious Kazakhstani universities, only those educated outside of Kazakhstan are employed as faculty members, and all classes are taught in the English language.

In our specific social policy course, we discussed numerous social problems (e.g. child abuse, access to health care and education, substance abuse, domestic violence) and how they might be addressed through the development of Kazakhstani social policies and programs. Our classroom discussions revolved around comparing the goals, undergirding values, and shortcomings of American, European, and Kazakh social policies and programs.

Due to the structure of the Fulbright award, Kazakh-speaking students and Russian-speaking students were put together in this course. Furthermore, our classroom language interpreters were instructed by faculty administration to speak in Russian only as it was believed that students would be most likely to know Russian. All social policy course handouts, notes, and syllabus were translated into Russian only (nothing was translated into Kazakh). However, the instructor discovered that nearly half of the students spoke primarily Kazakh and had difficulties understanding Russian. In order to mitigate this structural barrier created by Russian language–only materials, the instructors worked with interpreters who provided Kazakh interpretation of all written materials and interpreted the instructors’ lectures and discussion into both Kazakh and Russian. The interpreters’ efforts were met with mixed response by the Russian-speaking students who felt no need to have materials, lectures, and discussion provided in the Kazakh language.

The professional ethical decision-making workshops consisted of four full days on such topics as a framework for understanding ethical decision-making, tensions between personal and professional values, the role of diversity (e.g. gender and ethnicity), and tensions between agency practice and professional codes of ethics. The same language barriers were evident in the ethics handouts in that all workshop handouts and language interpretation were made available in the Russian language only. As instructors, our philosophy involved engaging both Russian- and Kazakh-speaking students in dialogue and critique of social policies and ethical decision-making. Great attention was paid to not only put forth American views of social policy or ethical decision-making, but to encourage students and faculty members to share their perspectives on these topics as shaped by their unique cultural context.

Classroom reflections and Freire

In this section, we describe the structure (e.g. university administrative decisions affecting the course or workshop) and interpersonal dynamics (e.g. classroom interactions) of the Kazakh learning environment. First, structural concerns emerged early when the University suggested that the Russian-speaking and Kazakh-speaking students be taught in two separate social policy courses. (It was only at the instructor’s request and based on the structure of the Fulbright award that these students were put together in one course.) Second, interpersonal dynamics between the Russian-speaking and Kazakh-speaking students emerged early on in the course and continued during the last week when the subject matter shifted from social policy to a series of presentations lasting approximately 1 week, focused on ethical decision-making in social work practice. The latter experience included most of the same students but also social work faculty and some external faculty from related departments.

Out of our reflections on these classroom observations, we identified ways to give meaning to the ‘raw data’, or observations, which shaped the educational experience. As social workers, we fully understood the need to place human interaction in the context in which behaviors occurred. These conversations led us to examine two themes: (1) the unique history of the relationship between the Soviet Union, more specifically Russia, and Kazakhstan, which can be seen as a narrative focused on colonization of Kazakhstan by the Russians, and (2) what educational theories had to say about the role of education in the processes of liberation and/or subjugation of people. This led us to examine the work of Paulo Freire as a way to organize our critique.

Freire’s work is massive, complex, and has been applied by many disciplines and within numerous cultural contexts reflecting its potential as an international perspective with universal application (Hegar, 2012). In contrast, indigenization, characterized by a deepening sensitivity to rich potential that exists in local customs and behaviors, holds that social work knowledge should arise from within the culture, reflect local behaviors and practices, and be interpreted with a local frame of reference and thus be locally relevant, that is, it should address culturally relevant, context specific problems (Gray and Fook, 2004; Yang, 2005). We reviewed the literature on these two conceptual ideas (i.e. internationalization and indigenization). Some writers suggest that one or the other is most important (Gray and Fook, 2004), but as supported by Gray and Coates (2010), we came to the perspective that indigenization and internationalization are, in fact, complementary rather than mutually exclusive. This allowed us to examine the application of Freire’s ideas (e.g. exploring students’ processes for developing a critical consciousness in relationship to social problems and policies) to our Kazakh classroom experiences in ways that we hope can be useful to other social work educators who are working on an international level and in diverse cultural contexts.

In the following section, we examine the Kazakh classroom and the role of language and power as key factors in oppression. We have chosen three of Freire’s (1970) concepts that provided insight into our observations. These concepts are as follows: culture of silence, banking concept of education, and critical consciousness (conscientização).

Culture of silence

In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1970) describes a ‘culture of silence’ that is pervasive among oppressed groups. According to Freire, the dominant group’s narrative that characterizes those in poverty as ignorant and lethargic derives from the larger economic, political, and social structures designed to oppress certain groups in society. Educators view poverty as a problem, but the dominant narrative rests on the belief that poverty is a personal problem, not a structural problem. Thus, students focus on the consequences of poverty, rather than root causes, which create unequal distributions for resources based on social positions (race, gender, language, class, etc.). As a result, poor people are told that they are in some way flawed as individuals (dominant narrative) rather than that their poverty is a result of social structural arrangements that oppress some groups and favor others (Freire). The consequences of this process are that the oppressed groups unconsciously adopt these cultural myths, which blame them for their conditions. Their internalized oppression silences or limits their likelihood of challenging the dominant narrative, because they are themselves inferior to the dominant group. This breeds a lack of awareness, apathy, fatalism, and absence of self respect (Freire).

In the Kazakhstani classroom, this culture of silence can be seen in the following example. Although most students in the first author’s social policy course were ethnic Kazakh, there was a language split in the classroom with over half of all students fluent in Russian and the remaining students fluent in Kazakh. Kazakh-speaking students were from the rural regions of the country, and Russian speakers were from urban centers. Furthermore, Russian-speaking students dominated class discussions. When Kazakh-speaking students attempted to engage in dialogue or when the interpreters occasionally used the Kazakh language for the benefit of Kazakh language speakers, Russian-speaking students interrupted, talked over, and were verbally hostile to the Kazakh-speaking students and interpreters. At one point, a Russian-speaking student remarked to our language interpreter who was taking a moment to explain concepts in Kazakh and said, ‘You should not provide any interpretation in Kazakh. You speak only in Russian for us!’.

In contrast, the Kazakh-speaking students sat quietly, almost passively, and rarely spoke unless called upon by the instructor. Throughout the semester, students representing both language groups were assigned to participate in small group activities for the purpose of exploring social policy questions. In the instructor’s initiation of these small group activities, Russian-speaking students rebuffed any group work with their Kazakh-speaking fellow students. Even upon the instructors’ pleading for group cooperation, most (but not all) Russian speakers refused to walk across the room to join Kazakh language speakers in small group work. These language divisions also foreshadowed distinct differences that later emerged between student language groups on key social problems (e.g. domestic violence) and their attendant social policy and program solutions.

Another issue that cut across language group lines (and poignantly demonstrated a ‘culture of silence’) involved the struggle among students and interpreters alike to understand what oppression and discrimination are and how people, including them, are harmed by these processes. For example, when the first author asked students to identify groups of people who had experienced discrimination in Kazakhstani society, the language interpreter, a master’s-level university faculty member, turned and asked, ‘What do you mean by discrimination?’. In response to his question, the first author provided examples of discrimination in American society and asked the interpreter and students if they knew of similar groups in their society. They stated that the ‘only people that we can even think of who have experienced this discrimination are the oralman’. The students reported, with some resentment, that the oralman represented Kazakh people who had left their country during Stalin’s reign and were now returning, often living on the edges of their cities, and obtaining more government benefits than those people who never left their country. The students never viewed themselves, or their prior generations, as representing an oppressed group even though under Soviet rule they were denied access to resources due to their cultural and religious heritage.

Banking concept of education

Freire (1970) also examines the nature of the relationship between teacher and students. He describes this interaction as one where the ‘subject’, the teacher, talks about reality, whether values or empirical material are presented, as if this reality were ‘static, compartmentalized and predictable’ (p. 52). The students are ‘listening objects’ who meekly accept the information being deposited by the teacher. Freire characterizes this educational process as a ‘banking concept’ of education. The consequences of this approach create barriers to actual learning because (1) a power differential is developed between the teacher and the student, with the teacher being the contributor of ‘Truth’ and the student the passive depository for that information. This power imbalance relegates students into accepting the narratives developed by the dominant group; (2) it starts from the assumption that reality is static and is best understood by focusing on content developed by dominant groups without focusing on the context in which these concepts and values emerged; and (3) students’ primary responsibilities include being able to ‘patiently receive, memorize and repeat’ the information provided by the teacher (Freire).

Freire’s (1970) assertion is that the ‘banking concept’ of education focuses the learner’s attention on the consequences of social problems, such as poverty, without acknowledging the structural arrangements that actually create oppression. The following are some examples of how the banking concept of education played out in the Kazakhstani classroom. At an interpersonal level, students expressed reluctance to work in groups focused on discussion of classroom materials. As one student stated in mid-semester feedback, ‘Listening to empty talk [from other students] that will not affect my future is worthless’. In tandem with the idea that fellow students have little that others can learn from, students viewed the source of ‘Truth’ as only coming from the teacher. One student remarked, ‘I would have preferred her [the teacher] to make us take lecture notes and ask graded questions during every lecture’.

Critical consciousness

The final concept of conscientização (critical consciousness) is described by Freire (1970) as a process of awakening or increasing consciousness which involves learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality. The process by which a person’s level of consciousness is raised is critical thinking. A person who engages in critical thinking ‘discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people and admits no reality between them – thinking which perceives reality as a process, as transformation rather than a static entity – thinking that does not separate itself from action’ (Freire, 1970: 73). For our purposes, critical consciousness is the goal, and critical thinking, involving both action and reflection, is the means to achieve in-depth consciousness. People and their social contexts are fluid and therefore, accessible to change, once they develop an understanding of how their interactions with social contexts create oppression or liberation.

In our Kazakhstani classrooms, the challenge we faced as educators was to establish a process whereby students might begin to raise their own questions about social policy and ethics without imposing external perspectives about the situation and/or possible responses that were embedded in a different cultural context (e.g. American or European). Some authors refer to this process as indigenization, which holds that social work knowledge should arise from within the culture and thus be locally relevant, that is, it should address culturally relevant, context specific problems (Gray and Fook, 2004; Yang, 2005). This was especially difficult given the students’ perspectives that teachers had all the answers based on their ‘banking concept’ of education. For example, few Kazakh- and Russian-speaking students even knew that domestic violence shelters for women existed in their major cities. The first author located a web-based review of Kazakhstani domestic violence shelters that included photos of Kazakh women who had experienced domestic violence and were receiving shelter services. She shared this information with the class. Students responded to the existence of these shelters and their services by expressing markedly different views (based on their language group membership) about the role of government in helping to ameliorate domestic violence. Kazakh-speaking students, who usually have extensive and strong family connections, expressed their dismay at the government’s role in developing domestic violence shelters. They stated, ‘This is a private family matter. Our government should not be involved in addressing this problem; families should work this out among themselves’. These same students also described a deep sense of moral conviction that men should never harm women. However, Kazakh-speaking students (unlike their fellow Russian-speaking students) would not concede that, in the face of serious harm or even death for some women, these shelters might be necessary and important to the well-being of women and their children.

Discussion

Classroom dynamics related to critical consciousness

The development of a critical consciousness is understood by Freire (1970) as paving the way for the transformation of students, educational systems, and society itself. Teachers can encourage students in the use of critical thinking about their own situations, thereby providing support in helping students find their voice, act on their own beliefs, and break through their culture of silence. Freire makes some suggestions for how teachers might do this without imposing their own values and perspectives on students. He describes teachers’ use of examples, even photographs, rooted in students’ cultural contexts as a means of awakening consciousness. The following classroom dialogue, that returns to the earlier example of Kazakhstani domestic violence shelters, is described in an attempt to illustrate possible ways of awakening student consciousness as depicted by Freire (1970).

In the social policy course, the instructor engaged in a discussion with students about the goals, objectives, and services provided by domestic violence shelters in their major cities. Erke, an ethnic Kazakh and Russian speaker, indicated that she thought the shelters should only provide services to women and their children. The goal of the shelter would be to improve women’s well-being. Alibek (a Kazakh-speaking student) responded by denouncing the need for these shelters. He stated, ‘We should not interfere in family life’. And the interpreter, Kali, added, ‘This is part of our Islamic beliefs’. The instructor responded, ‘So, if you don’t believe this is a social problem, then indeed you would not want to develop a program to reduce the problem’. The instructor further stated that there are clearly differences between the United States and Kazakhstan (e.g. religious and cultural beliefs). These differences help shape whether or not we view something as a problem. ‘Obviously, some people in your country do think domestic violence is a problem or they would not have developed a policy and shelters for women who are experiencing domestic violence’.

As we began to discuss how to evaluate the goals and objectives of a program to improve women’s well-being, we discussed in depth the concept of equity or fairness. The instructor provided several examples. ‘If you set up a program for women and children, will you include women who do not have children in your shelter?’ ‘Will shelter services only be provided for women who speak Russian?’ ‘Will Kazakh speakers be able to come to the shelter?’ ‘Will you provide services to all women?’ One student, Tokhtar, spoke up:

I read in a book by John Grisham where he described women who have money and a good job, yet are beaten over and over again by their husbands. They shouldn’t be able to get help for domestic violence from a shelter.

The instructor responded, ‘Domestic violence is complicated. It can be more than just about having money to leave a husband who beats you. There can be emotional issues and other reasons for staying in the relationship’. The instructor further stated that domestic violence occurs across all classes of people, both poor and rich. She asked, ‘So, will you only set up your shelter to serve poor people and not those who are wealthy?’. She went down the ‘list’ of diversity characteristics (e.g. gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, and class) and asked: ‘What happens if two lesbians are in a domestic violence situation? Can the lesbian woman get services at your shelter or not?’ Tokhtar responded, ‘I think they should not. There should be two shelters, one for the lesbians and one for everyone else’. The instructor responded, ‘Are you going to provide the same resources and money for both shelters? Is this a cost-effective way of providing services? Is it a good use of funds?’.

In this example, the teacher asked students a variety of questions about a Kazakhstani government-directed social policy and program by using photos and other written materials that described shelters for Kazakh women who had experienced domestic violence. It is this kind of example, grounded in what may be viewed as tensions in Kazakhstani cultural norms and values, which may best provoke students to begin to examine or awaken to oppression in their own society.

Instructor learning

For the instructors, the classroom structure and interactions provided numerous opportunities for deepening their awareness and learning. First, and prior to arriving, one instructor’s understanding was that she was only teaching one policy course for the students. However, the reality was that the Kazakhstani educational system typically involved dividing students into different classrooms based on language (i.e. Russian or Kazakh). Due to the structure of the Fulbright as including both a teaching and research component, the instructor struggled with, but realized she could not logistically teach, two separate courses.

Second, upon reflection at the end of the teaching experience, the instructors became aware of how the development of a critical consciousness is a long-term, slow process, as classroom discussions based on differences among students related to their language group (e.g. the role of the government in domestic violence) occurred at nearly the end of the semester. One of the authors continues to have contact with two language interpreters from her Kazakhstani classroom, and one interpreter is making plans to obtain a social work degree in the United States. He wants to return to Kazakhstan to continue to serve as a social work faculty member and feels that as an ethnic Kazakh (in contrast to American professors or those from other cultural contexts) he is in the best position to help bring about awareness and consciousness within his own culture. As Freire (1970) notes, it is the people who are members of their cultural context who are in the best position to help bring about awareness and consciousness within their own society. Furthermore, as American instructors who are not members of Kazakhstani society, we believe that making a longer-term commitment to Kazakhstan is necessary as this semester-long course only barely began the process of encouraging students to explore oppression and possible responses to that oppression. We do believe that students were developing critical thinking skills, but it is inappropriate to develop conclusions as to how well our pedagogical approach worked based on one course over one semester. Change did occur in classroom behavior in that most, although not all, students began to work together across language groups.

Third, the learning on the part of instructors extended far beyond the classroom experience itself, and much of the reflexive work was done after the course was over and the instructors had returned to the United States. Awareness about what had happened in the classroom emerged out of extensive dialogue between the two instructors and required a kind of ‘incubation’ period before any framework for significant theoretical analyses could be developed. As depicted by Shaull (1970/1993: 16), the educational process is not neutral for either instructors or students.

Education either functions as an instrument used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of the world.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Kuanysh Kuramyssova to the development of this article.

Funding

This work was supported by a Fulbright Scholar Grant to Kazakhstan (Grant Number 11-20416).

Notes

Author biographies

Terry L. Koenig is an Associate Professor at the University of Kansas, School of Social Welfare. Her areas of interest include; working with older adults, ethics, social work philosophy and international social work. She is a recipient of a Fulbright scholar award to Kazakhstan in 2011-2012, has studied the Russian language, and enjoys ongoing interactions with her ethnic Kazakh family members.

Richard N. Spano is an Associate Professor at the University of Kansas, School of Social Welfare. His areas of interest include; working with children, ethics, social work history, international social work, and social work theory. In addition to his work as an educator he has 50 years of social work practice experience at both the clinical and administrative levels.

David Kaufman is a linguistic anthropologist and is fluent in multiple languages. He currently serves as the Director of the Kaw Nations Language Program in Kaw City, Oklahoma.

Matthew R. Leiste, LMSW, is a mental health clinician at the Elizabeth Layton Mental Health Center in Ottawa, Kansas where he is pursuing his clinical social work license. He graduated with his MSW in 2009 and has worked with a multitude of populations. As an undergraduate he studied the Russian language and the history, literature, and culture of Russia and the old Soviet Republics.

Ane Tynyshbayeva, is a Professor at L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Programme of Psychology and Social Work, Astana, Kazakhstan. She is a scholar in the fields of sociology, social policy and social work, has published more than 200 scientific papers, and works with many graduate and undergraduate students. In cooperation with her university, Dr. Tynyshbayeva’s department sponsored the first author’s Fulbright scholar award.

Gani Madyarbekov, MS, is a faculty member at the L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Astana, Kazakhstan, in the Department of Sociology. He served as a Russian and Kazakh language interpreter for the first author’s social policy course and assisted in language interpretation of qualitative study interviews.

Assem Karataevna Makhadiyeva, MS in psychology, is an assistant in the Department of Social Pedagogy and Self-Knowledge, L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Astana, Kazakhstan. She served as a Kazakh language interpreter for the first author’s social policy course and assisted in language interpretation of qualitative study interviews.

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