Chapter 11: Challenging Test-Prep Pedagogy: Urban High School Students Educate Pre-Service Teachers Using Liberatory Pedagogy

Low-income schools and communities are under tremendous pressure to meet state and federal mandates, in part because of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Noguera, 2005). This pressure has caused considerable distress for district- and school-level educators, particularly in historically low-performing areas by encouraging and, in many ways, forcing them to shape local polices and practices that revolve largely around raising standardized test scores. For instance, many chronically low-performing schools have reduced the entire school day to what I call a “Test-Prep Pedagogy” in which the relationship between teaching and learning, teachers and students, and the overall intellectual experience is reduced to raising test scores. In schools that practice Test-Prep Pedagogy, teaching and learning is reduced to test review, such as repetitively reviewing test questions. In such schools, teachers and students are given very few, if any, opportunities to build community (Meier & Wood, 2004) or establish respectful and personalized relationships (Conchas & Rodríguez, 2007; Rodríguez, 2005), and they are often blocked in imagining what is possible (Nieto, 1994), especially in light of research that shows such processes are critical to the success of low-income students of color in U.S. schools (Valenzuela, 1999). Equally troubling, Test-Prep Pedagogy has in many ways stifled the creativity of teachers and students, both limiting the ways in which knowledge is produced and restricting any chances of realizing liberatory practice, particularly in urban schools that can serve as social spaces of activism and resistance (Lauria & Mirón, 2005). Liberatory practice, as defined by Freire, involves pedagogies driven by dialogue, reciprocity, and transformation—processes that are in direct contradiction with Test-Prep Pedagogy.