Enhancing Critical Awareness through Socratic Pedagogy

Abstract

Socratic pedagogy is an approach to teaching through questioning mainstream practices without beingjudgmental in an effort to understand, empathize and reach more objective conclusions about reality. Thisstudy explores the effects of its use on student teachers’ critical awareness skills during their participationin a Spoken English course given at a Foreign Language Education Department in Turkey. This qualitativestudy was conducted with freshman students and the intervention lasted one academic year. Individualand focus group interviews, and observation notes based on student performance in class were used as datacollection tools. The results clearly indicate the development of students’ critical awareness of political,economic and culture-related issues regarding language teaching settings, and they generated deeperinsight to multiple aspects of teaching English. Students displayed an understanding of the consequencesof political decisions as well as the economic dimensions of educational commitments, and expressed apositive attitude towards cultural diversity after a yearlong Socratic pedagogy intervention