Empowering Education*

"Participation is the most important place to begin because student involvement is low in traditional classrooms and because action is essential to gain knowledge and develop intelligence. Piaget insisted on the relation of action to knowing: "Knowledge is derived from action...to know an object is to act upon it and to transform it....to know is therefore to assimilate reality into structures of transformation and these are the structures that intelligence constructs as a direct extension of our actions" (1979,28-29)
I agree with this because, I think that when students participate in the classrooms they will really understand the material better because they will have a visual of what is going on. Some students don't like to participate, but in the long run the students learn better when they do participate with all of the other students.

"It is a student-centered program for multicultural democracy in school and society. It approaches individual growth as an active, cooperative and social process, because the self and society create each other. Human beings do not invent themselves in a vacuum, and society cannot be made unless people create it together. The goals to this pedagogy are to relate personal growth to public life by developing strong skills, academic knowledge, habits of inquiry, and critical curiosity about society, power, inequality and change."
I also agree with this quote as well. Society isn't a society if there isn't people in it, and we the people make up a society all together, and each person puts in their differences. People and society intertwine.

"Situated, multicultural pedagogy increases the chance that students will feel ownership in their education and reduces the conditions that produce their alienation"....."But participation is a means, not an end, in this program for empowering education. There is a challenging goal to the participatory process I am suggesting: to discover the limits and resources for changing self and society"
Students that have a foreign language as their first language come into schools and already feel alienated because they don't speak the language that everyone else is speaking. If teachers bring the language into the classroom then the students wouldn't feel so alienated and they would feel welcomed and want to participate instead of not wanting to talk at all.