Reflection: Language of Exclusion and Critical Pedagogy

I've taken a class before with a teacher who loved the Paulo Freire view, and he used the Pedagogy of the Oppressed book. I think I still own it. It was nice to see that book placed in context with other views and, down the line, it will be nice to be able to hold that view up against radically different views. I wrote the word view five times in this paragraph.

I am still fairly set in some of the ideas I've latched onto from the beginning such as using grammar as a means to an end (editing is important but it is not the goal) and writing essays in cycles. The cycles approach entails having students redraft essays as much as they need to, focusing on revision of ideas in early cycles and focusing on editing in late cycles (when the ideas have been developed). One interesting idea I've come up with is making word counts higher in early cycles and lower in later cycles to see if that pushes students to revise ideas through cutting and narrowing.