“I Should Now Confess That I Followed the Banking System of Education…”: Reexamining and Reimaging my Teaching Practices Through Critical Pedagogy Lens

This paper analyzes my prior teaching practices through the principles of critical pedagogy. It interprets my prospective teaching agenda on how education in critical pedagogy is shaping my teaching practices to promote students’ criticality. In this paper, I argue that in order to promote critical pedagogy in teaching, a teacher must be transformative intellectual to reinforce students’ sociopolitical awareness through a set of critical orientations. It recognizes transformative intellectual as a legitimate teacher’s identity to promote critical pedagogy in teaching. It identifies criticality, praxis, and freedom as three notions promoting critical pedagogy through students’ voice to address oppression. This paper additionally explores how the banking system of education, linguistic colonialism, and linguistic hegemony function as major oppressional practices, through pedagogical experiences, empowering native speakerism. It utilizes significant theories of critical pedagogy to analyze and interpret my previous teaching practices and established strategies on how to incorporate common orientations of critical pedagogy into my future teaching practices. In this paper, although I did not deny the possibility of promoting orientations of critical pedagogy by everyone, I justify that transformative intellectuals are those types of teachers who predominantly focus on changing students’ personality from neutral to sociopolitical and are substantially effective to promote critical pedagogy in teaching. In addition, it recognizes a transformative intellectual as a legitimate instructor in order to enhance students’ sociopolitical awareness and consciousness. It finally addresses a possibility that critical pedagogy could be sometimes oriented subconsciously in teaching.