Investigating the Applicability of Critical Pedagogy among Saudi EFL Teachers: An Exploratory Study

Majed Abdullah Alharbi

Abstract


Crooks (2010) has elucidated that Critical Pedagogy (CP) is more likely to be dismissed when it may be perceived as culturally inappropriate. Hence, this paper aims to unpack the possible applicability of implementing tenets of critical pedagogy in the context of Saudi Arabia. The article explores the potentiality of CP among higher education English language teachers in Saudi Arabia; the populations of this mixed method (i.e., survey and interviews) study are teachers who teach at colleges of language and translation and departments of English and literary studies at two Saudi universities. Findings indicate that the participants’ perspectives on CP showcase their ideational stance towards their own pedagogical orientations, which included: high awareness of CP principles, tactically using CP in some classroom scenarios, at the micro-level, and sometimes rejecting the application of such a tool due to its serious consequences. The paper thus implicates that applying CP in Saudi Arabia can foster the concept of teaching as a ‘value,’ (Crookes, 2021) which sustains the globalized collective waves of emancipatory education.

Keywords


critical Pedagogy; EFL in Saudi Arabia; emancipatory education; critical language awareness; transformative teaching; power relations in education

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