definition of problem posing education

Problem Posing Education – 6 Key Characteristics

Problem-posing education is an active learning strategy where a teacher or student poses a problem and the class collaborates to find answers.

The six key characteristics of problem-posing education (PPE) are:

• Learners are conscious and capable.
• Learning takes place through problem-solving.
• Learning must be practical.
• Students and teachers are co-investigators.
• The teacher learns from the students.
• Learning is a Process of Becoming

PPE was first presented by Christian Socialist and progressive educator Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed . It is a progressive-democratic teaching strategy , popular in 21 st Century education .

It is juxtaposed to banking education, also theorized by Freire, which involves transmission-style teaching and passive learning .

Key Characteristics of Problem-Posing Education

Six key characteristics of PPE include: (1) Learners are conscious and capable. (2) Learning takes place through problem-solving ; (3) Learning must be practical; (4) Students and teachers are co-investigators; (5) The teacher learns from the students; (6) Learning is the process of becoming.

Below is an outline of each key characteristic.

1. Learners are Conscious and Capable

Problem-posing education respects that students are active and agentic learners.

In banking education, learners are considered passive recipients of knowledge. They are not presumed to have any prior knowledge or inherent intelligence. Their job is to simply absorb information that is deposited into their minds by their teacher.

However, from a PPE perspective, Freire argues that learners are in fact conscious and capable. It, therefore, follows that:

• Cognitive Approaches are best: Learning occurs through cognitive processes. In other words, we learn when our minds are exercised and we’re asked to think hard about something.
• Prior Knowledge matters : Students’ prior knowledge and existing intelligence should be used to help them think about new topics.

2. Learning takes place through Problem-Solving

One of the best ways to support students’ learning is by presenting problems to them for them to find ways to solve.

Instead of students being given answers, they are given problems. Once a student is given a problem, they need to use their intelligence and research skills to seek out an answer.

The answer is not given or ‘gifted’ to the student like in the banking approach. Instead, the answer must be discovered by the students alone.

Some key considerations when posing problems include:

• Both the teacher and the student can pose a problem. It is not just the teacher’s role to come up with problems, although they can and do. Sometimes, a student will come to the class with a problem. It is appropriate and encouraged that the class works together to come up with an answer to the problem that was posed.
• The answer is not already known. Sometimes the teacher may have the answer in their mind, sometimes, they may not. But even if the teacher knows the answer, they should not tell the students. The students need to come up with it themselves. Furthermore, the teacher might change their mind after new knowledge is discovered by the students – so, the teacher needs to keep an open mind to the knowledge discovered through the process.

3. Learning must be Practical

Problem Posing Education believes that practical education is more important than theoretical education.

Freire did not like that 20 th Century education was so theoretical. Information was presented to students without context or consideration for how it would be used outside of school.

Purely theoretical information can be bad because:

• Students feel like it has no relevance to them and their lives.
• It is hard to remember because students don’t have any lived experiences of using it.
• It may not be of any use to students in the future.

So, Freire argued that all learning should be both theoretical and practical. Any theoretical information that is presented needs to be linked to real life. Students need to know why and how the theoretical information impacts their lives.

Benefits of practical learning include:

• Students can use what they are learning in real life.
• Learning occurs through engagement with the world, the discovery of facts, and trial and error.
• Knowledge is contextualized, making it easier to store and recall.

4. Students and Teacher are Co-investigators

Teachers should not be the authoritative holders of knowledge but rather should be open-minded investigators alongside their students.

Freire argued that the banking model of education separated students and teachers. The teacher was the knowledge giver and the student the knowledge receiver.

This created a power imbalance where the teacher held all the power, and students were unable to exercise any power of their own.

When the teacher has all the power, students:

• Learn to be passive followers.
• Do not learn democratic values.
• Fail to develop critical thinking skills.

Freire argued that the role of the teacher needs to be changed. Teachers should now be seen as co-investigators.

When teachers are co-investigators:

• The teacher does not have to be an expert on every topic.
• The students and teachers work as a team rather than having opposing roles.
• Students are given a chance to exercise agency (the ability to impact the learning process) in the classroom.

5. The Teacher learns from the Students

If teachers are no longer the authoritarian in the classroom, new possibilities emerge.

It would not be possible for the teacher to learn alongside the students.

But Freire takes this future: the teacher might also learn things from the students!

This is because:

• The teacher respects that students have prior knowledge that might be useful in the classroom.
• The teacher doesn’t presume to know all the answers. Answers unfold through the problem solving exercises.
• The teacher should be open to changing their mind when new information is introduced by the students.

As Freire argues:

“The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own.” (Freire, 1970, p. 81)

6. Learning is a Process of Becoming

Freire believed that learning is an endless process. Teachers and students combined are constantly learning throughout their lives.

He therefore argued for learning to be considered a ‘process of becoming’. Whenever we learn something new, we change our ideas and even ourselves. We become more knowledgeable, wiser, thoughtful, etc.

Problem-posing education is very beneficial for the process of becoming because the things we learn are directly relevant to the troubles in our lives. We come across a problem and we consider how to overcome it. In the process, we learn new things and ‘become’ more knowledgeable in the process.

Pros and Cons of Problem-Posing Education

Benefits (advantages).

Benefits of problem-posing education include:

• Students learn by actively discovering and examining new knowledge rather than passively absorbing information.
• Students and teachers are partners in learning, which gives students a sense of empowerment and ownership over their learning environment.
• Teachers do not feel like they have to know all the answers to the questions students have.
• Students learn about phenomena that have relevance to their everyday lives, and don’t just learn theoretical ideas.
• Students are encouraged to develop problem-solving, creative and critical thinking skills.
• Open communication and social learning are encouraged, helping students build communication skills and learn from one another.

Limitations (Disadvantages)

Limitations of problem-posing education include:

• The teacher must relinquish control over the classroom and needs to accept uncertainty about how a lesson will turn out.
• Sometimes theoretical ideas need to be taught, and these ideas may best be presented using direct instruction .
• Learning is more difficult: students need to exercise cognitive strategies, higher-order thinking sills and active learning strategies that require cognitive load.

If you have any more limitations to add, email me! chris [at] helpfulprofessor.com

Problem Posing vs Banking Education

Problem posing helps educators overcome the damaging practice of banking education and the two are seen as opposites.

Banking Education

The banking approach was widespread in the 20 th Century. It involved teacher transmission of information to ‘fill’ students’ minds like they are empty vessels waiting to be loaded up with facts.

In banking education:

• Teachers teach through transmission or dictation.
• Students are passive learners.
• Students must memorize the information given to the students.
• The teacher has all the power, the student has none.
• The teacher is supposed to hold all knowledge and their knowledge is unquestionable.
• The student is seen as unintelligent and having no prior knowledge

Banking education had several harmful effects:

• It denied students the right to freedom of thought, critical thinking or creativity.
• It created a dualism between the teacher as knowledge holder and student as knowledge receiver.
• It denied that students have prior knowledge or innate intellect.
• It prepared students to be compliant workers in capitalist economies.

Problem Posing

According to Freire, the way to ‘liberate’ students from this damaging form of education was to change the roles of the teacher and student . Students needed to be empowered to take control of their own learning.

‘Problem posing’ would help achieve student empowerment.

In a Problem-Posing Approach:

• Instead of the teacher being the knowledge holder, no one would be.
• A problem would be presented by someone in the class and the class would have to discover an answer together.
• The student is seen as an active learner capable of reaching conclusions through the use of cognitive skills .
• The teacher is seen as a co-learner.
• The student’s prior knowledge is used to help them understand a topic.

A problem-posing approach would aim to:

• Develop free-thinking students who came to conclusions using logic rather than repeating what their teacher said.
• Create democratic classrooms where the teacher did not domineer and impose their beliefs upon the students.
• Embrace and encourage students’ use of prior knowledge to learn new information.
• Encourage higher-order cognition.

Final Thoughts

Problem-posing education is an active learning strategy that empowers students in the classroom. It encourages learning that is connected to problems that are relevant and interesting to students’ lives. It requires changing the roles of the teacher and students so the teacher relinquishes authority, embraces uncertainty, and encourages class co-investigation.

Further Reading

PPE was outlined in Chapter 2 of Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Read Chapter 2 online for free here .

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Shor, I. (1987).  Freire for the classroom: A sourcebook for liberatory teaching . New Hampshire: Heinemann Educational Books

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 5 Top Tips for Succeeding at University
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 50 Durable Goods Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 100 Consumer Goods Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 30 Globalization Pros and Cons

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

A Review on Problem Posing in Teacher Education

Cite this chapter.

• Helena P. Osana 6 &
• Ildiko Pelczer 7  

Part of the book series: Research in Mathematics Education ((RME))

3904 Accesses

3 Citations

Over the last two decades, researchers have shown increased interest in problem posing in mathematics professional development. In the context of teaching mathematics, problem posing can entail asking questions during classroom interactions to assess student understanding, modifying existing problems to adjust the difficulty level of a task, and creating problems to meet instructional objectives. In this chapter, we review the research conducted between 1990 and 2012 on problem posing in mathematics methods courses in elementary teacher education. Despite the range of foci, goals, and theoretical perspectives in the literature, we describe ways in which problem posing has been investigated in the preservice teacher population. Despite the paucity of empirical studies, we were able to group these studies into three distinct categories: (a) problem posing as a skill integral to the practice of teaching mathematics; (b) problem posing as an activity separate from teaching; and (c) problem posing as a tool to assess an outcome variable (for researchers) or as a tool for teaching or assessing the development of preservice teachers’ knowledge or beliefs. Implications for mathematics teacher educators that stem from the review of the literature are discussed.

• Problem posing
• Elementary teacher training
• Mathematical knowledge for teaching
• Specialized content knowledge
• Knowledge of content and students
• Teacher educators’ view
• Mathematics methods course

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Ball, D. L. (1988). Unlearning to teach mathematics. For the Learning of Mathematics, 8 (1), 40–48.

Google Scholar  

Ball, D. L., & Bass, H. (2001). Making mathematics reasonable in school. In G. Martin (Ed.), Research compendium for the principles and standards for school mathematics . Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Ball, D. L., & Forzani, F. (2009). The work of teaching and the challenge for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 60 (5), 497–511.

Article   Google Scholar  

Ball, D., Thames, M., & Phelps, G. (2008). Content knowledge for teaching: What makes it special. Journal of Teacher Education, 59 (5), 389–407.

Boaler, J., & Brodie, K. (2004). The importance, nature and impact of teacher questions. In D. E. McDougall, & J. A. Ross (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 2, pp. 773–782). Toronto, ON: PMENA.

Bragg, L., & Nicol, C. (2008). Designing open-ended problems to challenge preservice teachers’ views on mathematics and pedagogy. In O. Figueras, J. L. Cortina, S. Alatorre, T. Rojano, & A. Sepulveda (Eds.), Proceedings of the Joint Meeting of the 32nd Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education and 20th Conference of the North-American Chapter (Vol. 2, pp. 256–270). Morelia, Mexico: PME.

Brousseau, G. (1997). Theory of didactical situations in mathematics . Dortrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.

Brown, S. I., & Walter, M. I. (1983). The art of problem posing . Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Cai, J., & Hwang, S. (2002). Generalized and generative thinking in US and Chinese students’ mathematical problem solving and problem posing. The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 21 , 401–421.

Chapman, O. (2012). Prospective elementary school teachers’ ways of making sense of mathematical problem posing. PNA, 6 (4), 135–146.

Crespo, S. (2003). Learning to pose mathematical problems: Exploring changes in preservice teachers’ practices. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 52 (3), 243–270.

Crespo, S., & Sinclair, N. (2008). What makes a problem mathematically interesting? Inviting prospective teachers to pose better problems. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 11 (5), 395–415.

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think . Boston, MA: D.C. Heath and Company.

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience . New York, NY: Perigree.

English, L. (1997). Development of seventh-grade students’ problem posing. In E. Pehkonen (Ed.), 21st Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 2, pp. 241–248). Lahti, Finland: PME.

English, L. D. (1998). Children’s problem posing within formal and informal contexts. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 29 (1), 83–106.

Franke, M. L., Webb, N. M., Chan, A. G., Ing, M., Freund, D., & Battey, D. (2009). Teacher questioning to elicit students’ mathematical thinking in elementary school classrooms. Journal of Teacher Education, 60 (4), 380–392.

Gonzales, N. A. (1996). Problem formulation: Insights from student generated questions. School Science and Mathematics, 96 (3), 152–157.

Hawkins, D. (2000). The roots of literacy . Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.

Hiebert, J., Carpenter, T. R., Fennema, E., Fuson, K. C., Wearne, D., Murray, H., … Human, P. (1997). Making sense: Teaching and learning mathematics with understanding . Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Kilpatrick, J. (1987). Problem formulating: Where do good problems come from? In A. H. Schoenfeld (Ed.), Cognitive science and mathematics education (pp. 123–147). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Leung, S. S. (1994). On analyzing problem posing processes: A study of prospective elementary teachers differing in mathematics knowledge. In J. P. da Ponte, & J. F. Matos (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (pp. 168–175). Lisbon, Portugal: PME.

Leung, S. S., & Silver, E. A. (1997). The role of task format, mathematics knowledge, and creative thinking on the arithmetic problem posing of prospective elementary school teachers. Mathematics Education Research Journal, 9 (1), 5–24.

Livy, S., & Vale, C. (2011). First-year pre-service teachers’ mathematical content knowledge: Methods of solution for a ratio question. Mathematics Teacher Education and Development, 13 (2), 22–43.

Martin, F., & Booth, S. (1997). Learning and awareness . Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (1989). Principles and standards for school mathematics . Reston, VA: Author.

Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human problem solving . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Newton, K. J. (2008). An extensive analysis of preservice elementary teachers’ knowledge of fractions. American Educational Research Journal, 45 , 1080–1110.

Nicol, C., & Bragg, L. A. (2009) Designing problems: What kinds of open-ended problems do preservice teachers pose? In M. Tzekaki, M. Kaldrimidou, & H. Sakonidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 4, pp. 225–232). Thessaloniki, Greece: PME.

Osana, H. P., Cooperman, A., Adrien, E., Rayner, V., Bisanz, J., Watchorn, R., & Sherman LeVos, J. (2012, April). Examining teacher knowledge and classroom practices during inquiry teaching on the equal sign . Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, Vancouver, Canada.

Osana, H., & Royea, D. (2011). Obstacles and challenges in preservice teachers’ explorations with fractions: A view from a small-scale intervention study. The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 30 (4), 333–352.

Pirie, S. (2002). Problem posing: What can it tell us about students’ mathematical understanding? (ERIC Accession No. ED 471 760).

Schoenfeld, A. H. (1992). Learning to think mathematically: Problem solving, metacognition, and sense-making in mathematics. In D. A. Grouws (Ed.), Handbook for research on mathematics teaching and learning (pp. 334–370). New York, NY: Macmillan.

Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15 (2), 4–31.

Sierpinska, A., & Osana, H. (2012). Analysis of tasks in pre-service elementary teacher education courses. Research in Mathematics Education, 14 (2), 109–135.

Silver, E. (1997). Fostering creativity through instruction rich in mathematical problem posing and problem solving. Zentralblatt für Didaktik der Mathematik, 29 (3), 75–80.

Simon, M. A. (1993). Prospective elementary teachers’ knowledge of division. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 24 (3), 233–254.

Sinclair, N. (2004). The roles of the aesthetic in mathematical inquiry. Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 6 (3), 261–284.

Stein, M. K., Smith, M. S., Henningsen, M. A., & Silver, E. A. (2000). Implementing standards-based mathematics instruction: A casebook for professional development . New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Ticha, M., & Hošpesová, A. (2009). Problem posing and development of pedagogical content knowledge in pre-service teacher training. In V. Durand-Guerrier, S. Soury-Lavergne, F. Arzarello, & F. Arzarello (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (pp. 1941–1950). Lyon, France: Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique.

Tirosh, D., & Graeber, A. O. (1990). Evoking cognitive conflict to explore preservice teachers’ thinking about division. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 21 , 98–108.

Toluk-Ucar, Z. (2009). Developing pre-service teachers understanding of fractions through problem posing. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25 (1), 166–175.

Vacc, N. (1993). Questioning in the mathematics classroom. Arithmetic Teacher, 41 (2), 88–91.

Van Zoest, L., & Stockero, S. (2008). Synergistic scaffolds as a means to support preservice teacher learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24 (8), 2038–2048.

Verschaffel, L., Greer, B., & De Corte, E. (2000). Making sense of word problems . Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger.

Wilson, S., & Berne, J. (1999). Teacher learning and acquisition of professional knowledge: An examination of contemporary professional development. In A. Iran-Nejad & D. Pearson (Eds.), Review of research in education (pp. 173–209). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Zazkis, R., & Campball, S. (1996). Divisibility and multiplicative structure of natural numbers: Preservice teachers’ understanding. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 27 , 540–563.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Education, Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada

Helena P. Osana

Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada

Ildiko Pelczer

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Helena P. Osana .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Department of Educational Sciences, University of Ploiesti, Bucharest, Romania

Florence Mihaela Singer

Department of Mathematics, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, USA

Nerida F. Ellerton

Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, USA

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York

About this chapter

Osana, H.P., Pelczer, I. (2015). A Review on Problem Posing in Teacher Education. In: Singer, F., F. Ellerton, N., Cai, J. (eds) Mathematical Problem Posing. Research in Mathematics Education. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6258-3_23

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6258-3_23

Publisher Name : Springer, New York, NY

Print ISBN : 978-1-4614-6257-6

Online ISBN : 978-1-4614-6258-3

eBook Packages : Humanities, Social Sciences and Law Education (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Search Menu
• Advance articles
• Editor's Choice
• Key Concepts
• The View From Here
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• Why Publish?
• About ELT Journal
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Terms and Conditions
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Introduction, my teaching trajectory vis-à-vis critical pedagogy, freire’s problem-posing model.

• < Previous

Freire’s problem-posing model: critical pedagogy and young learners

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Nadine Nelson, Julian Chen, Freire’s problem-posing model: critical pedagogy and young learners, ELT Journal , Volume 77, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 132–144, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccac017

• Permissions Icon Permissions

The instructional rationale behind critical pedagogy is to provide students the opportunity to voice their personal stories and opinions, and to reflect and act upon social concerns relevant to their daily lives. Students can then practice being agents of transformation in their own lives, starting in the classroom. This paper is based on the first author’s experience of experimenting with critical pedagogy when she was teaching in the UAE. It justifies the suitability of implementing Paulo Freire’s problem-posing model with younger EFL learners. Outlining the tenets of critical pedagogy developed by Freire, the authors support the practical nature of the model and its transference to a primary setting. The authors explicate Freire’s problem-posing model as five phases, providing a background and case study application for each phase. The intention is to present a practical guide for teachers wishing to implement critical approaches in the EFL classroom.

Critical pedagogy has been presented as a curriculum philosophy for language education due to its transformative nature, which can empower students’ critical thinking and lead to student agency and change ( Cranton 2011 ; Jeyaraj and Harland 2014 ). Within a wider EFL context, critical pedagogy affirms the current TEFL discourse which holds that the end goal is not only a development in critical consciousness for the students, but language acquisition and meaningful use of a foreign language ( Lopez-Gopar 2019 ). Graman’s (1988 : 485) account of teaching ESL to rural labourers in Colorado in the late 1970s advocated critical pedagogy as a means to encourage authentic dialogue with his students.

The farm worker ESL class illustrated to me the motivational importance of tying student experience to the process of language. Students are more able to develop linguistically and intellectually when they analyse their own experiences and build their own words to describe and better understand these experiences.

As an EFL teacher teaching in a government school in the UAE, I was motivated by Graman’s (1988) words and was eager to investigate whether this approach could also be applied to my own classroom of young Emirati and Gulf students. I was aware of how little I really knew about my students, and the imbalance the classroom carried where the students were ingesting literacy material that had little connection to their reality. They were all young Muslim girls who were growing up in downtown Abu Dhabi. For my students, the prescribed English textbooks and guided reading materials often become the sole connection with the language and therefore they needed to be placed under scrutiny as to what was being presented ( López-Gopar 2019 ).

I was drawn to critical pedagogy and its problem-posing orientation to pedagogy. The teacher’s role is to establish a safe learning environment that promotes student-generated talk, where topics for discussion are always derived from the students’ own lives and experiences. Hence, students are encouraged to think critically about their own perceptions and judgements, to reflect and gain new understandings about previously held worldviews ( Akbari 2008 ).

So theoretically, it made perfect sense. The reality was that I did not know where to begin. I had all the theory at hand but needed a practical guide to lead me in the right direction. There is a scarcity of hands-on examples for implementing critical approaches in the classroom with younger EFL learners, and where there were case studies, they tended to focus on older students, such as adult learners or high school students ( Norton and Toohey 2004 ; Baladi 2007 ; Crookes 2013 ). There are logical and acceptable reasons for this. Crookes (2013) rightly points out that any prescriptive lesson plan approach is contrary to looking at the unique situational context of the students and is totally against the traditions of critical pedagogy. He further argues that ‘we have almost nothing for beginner levels and EFL contexts’ ( Crookes 2013 : 13), indicating the primacy of developing critical materials for EFL teachers. I was inspired by Graman’s experiences but required a methodology that was rooted in critical pedagogy—a critical approach that could be applied not only with older learners but with younger students as well. I needed a framework that could anchor me, as I was a beginner.

This paper describes how Freire’s problem-posing model ( 1973 ) became the framework I needed, and how it could be applied to the classroom. It is a detailed account of the five phases that should be enacted sequentially. Specifically, it provides a practical guide for other teacher practitioners interested in taking a critical approach with younger language learners.

I arrived in Abu Dhabi in August 2012 and began work at Fatima School (pseudonym applied) as an English-medium instruction (EMI) teacher. All students in my class spoke Gulf Arabic as their mother tongue at home, with English being a foreign language. Depending on the student’s years of enrolment in a government school, all participants had been exposed to English through the public schooling system from Grade 1. The class comprised students from diverse family backgrounds within the Gulf region who had settled in the UAE. Not only did I teach Emiratis ( n  = 12), but students from Syria ( n  = 6), Saudi Arabia ( n  = 2), Yemen ( n  = 1), Jordan ( n  = 1), Egypt ( n  = 1), and Sudan ( n  = 1).

Believing that second-language students should have ample opportunity to use their target language, my teaching practice for the first two years was mainly finding ways to encourage ‘student talk’. But apart from this central belief, and other observations I had gathered, I had no formal training that prepared me for teaching young EFL learners. In this respect, I was typical of novice language teachers who teach ‘without considering how it is introduced or promoted in certain ways depending on historical, political, socio-cultural and economic considerations in each country’s particular context’ ( Sung and Pederson 2012 : 153). This speaks for most EFL teachers who are trying to make their own overwhelming and often isolating adjustments to a new way of life, resulting in transferring old-school methods based on their prior teaching as a survival strategy. This was my experience, which translated in my initial attempts at creating systems that had served me well in primary schools in Australia. I began experimenting with a typical guided reading programme that had levelled texts on a variety of unfamiliar topics, such as making snowmen, firefighters in Australia, and other topics that presumed prior knowledge of Western culture.

Over time, it became apparent that despite the student’s classroom routines, and my organization of materials, my EFL students struggled to engage fully with the lesson or the reading, and so discussion around themes fell flat. A lack of vocabulary to draw on was of course an issue for my students; however, the problem was much greater than this. Because the girls needed so much teacher input in introducing new concepts, the amount of my talk dominated the lesson, and the gap in the students’ understanding was still apparent. Their reading of the text might be accurate, but robotic, and I could sense the disconnect. Truthfully, what place did a snowman have in the blistering heat of the UAE? Discussion was driven by my questioning, but my students struggled to contribute ideas beyond the standard comprehension expectations. The small-group guided reading discussion felt flat and was frustrating because it was the only time where I could sit with a smaller number of students and have that focused time in conversation. In May 2014, I discarded the guided reading programme and opted for a critical approach using Freire’s problem-posing model ( 1973 ) that I believed would reinvigorate our discussion time, while improving my students’ linguistic outcomes. I was eager to investigate the transferability of Freire’s problem-posing model with my EFL learners, aware that Freire taught his students in their L1, while I would be teaching my students in their L2. This also piqued my research motivation to see if applying the same model could provide useful implications for future research and pedagogy.

The school administration was supportive of my endeavours, as were the parents of the students. My tenure at the school had lent itself to a relationship where I was trusted to explore alternative teaching pedagogies. The duration of the six-week case study was also within the boundaries of how long the school administration was willing to give for my research. Ethical considerations were taken into account at each stage, and encompassed permissions, informed consent, and confidentiality.

Freire’s problem-posing model ( 1973 ) offers a five-phase plan that offers an instructional guide for problem posing across disciplines. Table 1 provides an overview of the five distinct phases that the students move through. The column on the left describes the phases moving progressively, while the column on the right specifies the design of the task used in this case study, and how it correlates to the model.

Freire’s problem-posing model and current study

Phase 1: listen to student histories and language for generative words

According to Freire (1973) , the goal of this first phase of the problem-posing process is to encourage educators to understand the student’s perspectives while ‘forming rewarding relationships and discovering often unsuspected exuberance and beauty in the people’s [students] language’ ( Freire 1973 : 49). This first phase is very relational and is the daily interactions with the students and cannot be forced, insincere, or rushed. For the teacher who is in the position of already building rapport with the students, this phase occurs naturally and builds a foundation for phase 2.

In our case, phase 1 began organically and started at the beginning of the academic year in September 2014. It was the culmination of months of being with the students as their classroom teacher and building those relationships over time. This critical period propelled me to reposition my teacher identity within the school—as a foreigner in Abu Dhabi and a Western-trained teacher with my own set of ideologies that I needed to unpack and come to terms with. In the daily struggle of classroom life that had students exerting their own dominance and power within the four walls of a classroom, and merely by being present alongside the students, future generative themes were directly drawn from the classroom interactions (or discourse) and the students’ own histories. I also started to form a solid understanding of the language issues for the students and their proficiency of communicating in English. One significant aspect is that through spending a prolonged period with my student naturally as their teacher, I also had developed an ear for the speech rhythms and cadences of each individual, enabling my own understanding of their fledgling communication to a greater degree. In this sense, conducting my investigation as a teacher researcher was ecologically sound and context responsive.

Phase 2: selecting generative themes

From the informal interactions with the students during phase 1, generative words are selected from the students’ own vocabulary. These words need to follow a set of criteria set by Freire’s (1973) model. They must have phonemic richness, phonetic difficulty, a pragmatic tone, and an emotional appeal that provokes interest in the students towards the conversation generated by that word. For example, Freire might start with the Portuguese word favela (slum) broken into the syllables fa - ve - la . These syllables would then be used to introduce a family of syllables: fa , fe , fi , fo , and fu . Using these introduced syllables, the students would then construct other words by combining syllables taken from other generative words. In my case, this phase has been slightly adapted, and leans more towards the selection of the generative theme (or investigations of situations such as bullying or language isolation ) rather than a single word, or words. Shor (1992) recommended this approach as particularly suitable for younger students, and others such as Rashidi and Safari (2011) took this further in their work with EFL learners.

In relation to the development of critical pedagogy materials, the themes of the materials should be derived from the learners ‘life situations, needs and interests, and that student motivation to participate in communicative tasks can be increased by tying the content of the materials to the student [situations]’ ( Freire 1973 , cited in Rashidi and Safari 2011 : 255). Note that the word ‘interests’ in relation to critical pedagogy does not refer to the students’ current hobbies or ‘likes’, but rather to problematic realities in their lives (e.g. injustices in the classroom, friendship issues, language and communication barriers during English lessons). In trying to determine problematic realities on behalf of the students, I did not try to stray into territory of which I did not have a full and complete understanding, nor did I attempt to portray experiences outside my students’ own lives. Put differently, the generative themes did not come from my limited understanding of the student’s home situations. Nor was I interested in selecting those themes that might include cultural and religious practices (weddings, religious worship, religious celebrations) beyond my understanding as an outsider. Any societal norms that might have superficially been thought of as ‘oppressive’ or ‘unjust’ were also not for consideration, as these were not generated by my direct observation of the students.

In terms of abiding by governing principles for critical pedagogy materials ( Crookes 2021 : 249), it was considered appropriate that the themes were derived purely from classroom interactions that I had witnessed as a teacher throughout the year. The scenarios mirrored aspects of student life experienced by me as a teacher, which had a problem-posing element that was recognisable and accessible by all students. For this reason, the themes identified during phases 1 and 2 were:

Low-level bullying

Student perceptions of good and bad behaviour

Injustice, corruption of classroom systems

Language barriers to learning.

Phase 3: creating the codification

Codification is the visual representation (e.g. a photograph, slide, or poster) of a real-life situation in which students would normally engage, but which contains an underlying problem that has implications for the viewer. Freire (1973 : 51) defines codification as ‘visual representations as coded situation problems containing elements to be decoded by the groups with the collaboration of the teacher’. The teacher would then prompt and facilitate discussion around the codification. Once discussion was exhausted, the introduction of the generative word would then create a reality-based association for the students to be used later during phase 5 of the model.

With the help of some Grade 5 volunteers, we were able to stage and photograph four distinct scenarios ready for interpretation. The volunteers were my former students and already familiar with the classroom environment and behaviour systems. I directed the volunteers within each of the four scenes, including facial expressions and body language. The student’s own classroom was used in each photograph, which was an important decision in terms of recognition and familiarity. My main goal in the process of codification was to remove anything non-relatable that could cause a feeling of ‘not experiencing’ for even one child. The choice of setting was therefore important in that it needed to be accessible and recognizable to everyone.

Through observing and learning about my students, I discovered that, for some, the majority of their childhood experiences were limited to going to school and being at home. Figures 1–4 are the four codification photographs used in this investigation. Provided here are brief descriptions of the four codification photographs to aid understanding.

The codification Mean Girls ( Figure 1 ) depicts a scenario where one student is reading, oblivious to the others, while two students on the right are whispering about her with their body language staged in a way that suggests what they are saying is not kind. The girl in the middle of the photograph has observed the girls and is captured not knowing what to do. Often the discussion would look more closely at this girl and the choices she would have to make. Topics instigated by this codification included bullying , friendship , and student responsibility .

Codification 1: Mean Girls .

The codification Work and Play ( Figure 2 ) depicts a maths lesson where the student actors had been asked to make a pattern with coloured blocks and draw it in their books. In this codification, three students are completing their workbook while one student has her book closed, and a pile of blocks on her desk, which she is connecting while the other students watch her. This codification enables multiple perspectives and interpretations of how student task completion and engagement are seen by the students. For example, was she ‘playing’ with the blocks or doing her own task set by the teacher? Discussion topics of good girl and bad girl were instigated by this codification.

Codification 2: Work and Play .

The codification Star Student ( Figure 3 ) was derived from our class behaviour system that had been in place for the year. Each week, I would elect two ‘Star Students’ who would have special responsibilities for that week. One of those responsibilities was to award student points, and they were given autonomy to select students carefully and make the awards, without needing to check with me constantly. The system worked best when grounded in honesty and transparency. It was a system that could be, and in fact was, exploited and corrupted, but it gave an opportunity for students to attempt self-autonomy in their classroom environment. In this codification, the Star Students in yellow caps are being whispered to by another student. The fourth student far left, observes this. Topics instigated by this codification included power , friendships , exclusion , and definitions of fairness and injustice .

Codification 3: Star Student .

The codification Language Barrier ( Figure 4 ) depicts a maths lesson familiar to the students. To the left, three students are busily cutting coupons out of a supermarket flyer. These students are on task, helping each other and contributing to the shared goal of completing their task. To the right, one student sits apart from the others, head down and silent. She is not doing anything observable, which sets her apart from the others. This codification instigates discussion around friendship , communication , language barriers , and awareness of others .

Codification 4: Language Barrier .

By taking great care with the codification itself, my investigation sought to follow the principles of Wallerstein’s (1983) and her approach to ‘good’ codification. From her extensive research with EFL and ESL communities in the United States and Brazil, she was able to delineate the qualities that codification must exhibit. According to Wallerstein (1983 : 20), codification should:

• Represent an everyday problem situation that is easily recognisable to students and to which they have emotional connections. • Illustrate as many sides to the contradiction as possible yet be simple enough for students to project their own experience. • Focus on one problem at a time while suggesting links to other themes in people’s lives. • Not provide solutions to the problem but rather stimulate dialogue. • Not present a problem which is overwhelming to the student, such as one where the actions required to solve it are out of reach for the students. There should be capacity for small actions that address the problem, even if they do not solve it.’

Phase 4: the critical pedagogy lesson

In our classroom, the literacy session comprised reading, writing, and grammar activities, and students would form into their groups and move to the activity based on the class schedule. These scheduled activities were familiar to the students, so I was able to work with each small student group without interruption. This routine also allowed me to have a daily 25-minute session of uninterrupted time for implementing the critical pedagogy lesson. The schedule in Table 2 details the groups and the codification focus for that lesson during phase 4.

Critical pedagogy lesson schedule

Once the scheduled small group was seated with me, the critical pedagogy lesson would begin. Following Freire (1973) , this is described as phase 4 where an agenda for the discussion (dialoguing) is encouraged rather than a rigid format. Ideally, there should be a flow of dialogue and sharing as a community of learners, with the teacher as a facilitator for the discussion. Rashidi and Safari (2011) referred to this phase as decodification where there is an exploration and interpretation of the learner’s ideas about the problem being posed, or more specifically, an ‘analysis of the day to day experiences to unmask the previously unperceived realities’ (Heaney, cited in Rashidi and Safari 2011 : 251). Not to be confused with rigid lesson plans and predetermined questions, this agenda was intended to be a post-lesson reflection on the points emerging from the dialogue. Freire’s intentions were that it be a co-investigation, representing the voices of all participants.

Students were each given identical codification photographs to study and could retain the photograph during the session if needed. To open discussion, I would ask display questions that placed less demand on the students. The following sample questions follow Wallerstein’s (1983 : 79) ‘tools for dialogue’:

What do you see in the photograph (e.g. setting, objects, position of students in the setting)?

What is the problem?

Once this level of orientation had taken place, motives, behaviour, feelings, and the rights and wrongs of a real-life problematic situation could be examined. The student’s perception of an event was discussed, and, in some instances, students were prompted to see the situation from various viewpoints. The next level of questioning would always be around likening a situation to the student’s own experience, or whether this had occurred to them personally, and how it affected the student.

How do you feel about it?

Why is there a problem?

What can you do?

This is where decodification exited, and where recodification began. Recodification is the process where learners ‘expand their perceptions of the phenomena to examine the former perception and to recodify the themes more critically’ ( Rashidi and Safari 2011 : 251). Because we had spent so much time unpacking experiences and feelings connected to the situation, the students were ready to offer solutions that had been previously unvoiced. It was also a chance to look at a situation through a variety of perspectives and to question previously held judgements.

Phase 5: discovery

This phase consolidates the linguistic aspect of the programme. Once a visual association has been made with the generative word, the teacher uses this word as the basis for more in-depth lesson such as phonetic makeup and word families, chunking the word into syllables, and re-forming the word to make new words. Freire found that this phase was rapidly mastered by his adult literacy students due to the problem posing and dialogic teaching occurring earlier in his model. As such, phase 5 incorporated a language-learning aspect.

In this study, students used the discussion and codification as a stimulus to then write a short story or retell of events. Students were provided with the codification from their recent discussion and a list of topic words that had been generated from the discussion (e.g. bully, friend, help, fair, playing). Beyond this initial support, students treated sustained writing as an independent activity. And because we kept with Wallerstein’s recommendations of what good codification was, the students only wrote about situations that they had experienced in the class. Introducing difficult or painful topics for ‘discussion’s sake’ is problematic ethically from a student welfare perspective, and I desired to avoid this. Therefore, the topic, while having emotional connection for the students, was never traumatic or overwhelming. Provided in Figure 5 are two sets of separate writing samples. Both students were emergent writers. The first sample (‘Camels’) is taken from journalling about a text used in their guided reading lesson. The second sample (‘Critical Pedagogy Lesson’) shows their writing development during phase 5 after the codification has been discussed in phase 4. The writing productions in terms of length, and diverse use of English vocabulary mark the difference between the two samples for both student A and student B.

Excerpts of two student writing samples in guided reading versus critical pedagogy lessons.

As evidenced in this study, the use of the problem-posing model promoted critical thinking due to the problematized nature of the codification. Because the photographs depicted ‘life as it was’ within the classroom, having the visual stimuli was an important component. Students orally rehearsed their writing by talking about their characters and character intentions, informed by what they were seeing from the codification. Rather than accept the group consensus, students became adept at looking at each scenario differently, which then informed their writing and added interesting twists and turns in the outcome of the stories. The talk that was generated around the codification allowed the teacher to orally rehearse their story development, to follow a plot line, and to decide the suitable outcome. New vocabulary was also rehearsed in context. Findings from this study evidenced a majority preference for the critical pedagogy lessons, with students responding to carefully selected codification that came not only from the source culture, as is recommended ( Rashidi and Safari 2011 ), but on a micro level, from their own classroom experience. Students were able to describe the lessons in terms of ‘thinking big’ and ‘doing a big work’, which had a positive impact on their confidence with their writing. Students were able to link the discussion aspects directly to their writing and acknowledge the ways in which the codification helped to stimulate ideas, thus enabling them to write stories of which they were proud.

This paper serves to offer a clear description of the critical pedagogy project undertaken with my Grade 4 students in the UAE. It illustrates the materials used and the learner’s responses to the materials. The initial trepidation that I felt has been replaced with a confidence that such approaches are appropriate for language learning and have since been replicated in my EFL classroom teaching in other parts of the world. Freire’s problem-posing model remains sensitive to the learner’s unique reality, without being overly formulaic and prescriptive in its methods. It is hoped that this paper could inspire other EFL teachers, especially those working with young learners, to incorporate critical pedagogy to empower students’ worldviews and critical thinking while enhancing their language productions.

The authors

Nadine Nelson is a seasoned primary teacher with over a decade of international experience working in public education in Australia, the UAE, and now as a certified English language teacher in Brunei Darussalam. Her main research focuses on critical pedagogy and how teachers can create talk-rich environments to better support and empower learners of English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D).

Email : [email protected]

Julian Chen is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics/TESOL and the Course Coordinator of Asian Languages at the School of Education, Curtin University, Australia. His research intersects technology-enhanced language learning, task-based language teaching, netnography, and action research. His work has appeared in multiple flagship journals such as Modern Language Journal , TESOL Quarterly , Language Teaching Research , System , Computers & Education , ReCALL , and Computer-assisted Language Learning . He is currently the book review editor of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics Journal , and editor of the timely volume, Emergency Remote Teaching and Beyond: Voices from World Language Teachers and Researchers (Springer).

Email : [email protected]

Akbari , R . 2008 . ‘ Transforming Lives: Introducing Critical Pedagogy into ELT Classrooms.’ ELT Journal 62 ( 3 ): 276 – 83 .

Google Scholar

Baladi , N . 2007 . ‘Critical Pedagogy in the ELT Industry: Can a Socially Responsible Curriculum Find its Place in a Corporate Culture?’ Unpublished Master’s thesis, Canada : McGill University .

Google Preview

Cranton , P . 2011 . ‘A Transformative Perspective on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.’ Higher Education Research and Development 30 : 75 – 86 .

Crookes , G . 2013 . Critical ELT in Action: Foundations, Promises, Praxis . New York : Routledge .

Crookes , G . 2021 . ‘Critical Language Pedagogy: An Introduction to Principles and Values.’ ELT Journal , 75 ( 3 ): 247 – 55

Freire , P . 1973 . Education for Critical Consciousness . New York : Seabury Press .

Graman , T . 1988 . ‘Education for Humanization: Applying Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy to Learning a Second Language.’ Harvard Educational Review 58 ( 4 ): 433 – 49

Jeyaraj , J. J. and T. Harland . 2014 . ‘Transforming Teaching and Learning in ELT Through Critical Pedagogy: An International Study.’ Journal of Transformative Education 12 ( 4 ): 343 – 55 .

López-Gopar , M. E . 2019 . ‘Critical Pedagogy and Teaching English to Children.’ In The Routledge Handbook of Teaching English to Young Learners , edited by S. Garton and F. Copland . 234 – 46 . New York : Routledge .

Norton , B. and K. Toohey . 2004 . Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press .

Sung , K. and R. Pederson . (eds.). 2012 . Critical ELT Practices in Asia . Rotterdam : Sense Publishers .

Rashidi , N. and F. Safari . 2011 ‘ A Model for EFL Materials Development Within the Framework of Critical Pedagogy.’ English Language Teaching 4 ( 2 ): 250 – 59 .

Shor , I . 1992 . Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change . Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press .

Wallerstein , N . 1983 . Language and Culture Conflict: Problem Posing in the ESL classroom . Reading, MA : Addison-Wesley .

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to Your Library

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1477-4526
• Print ISSN 0951-0893
• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.