Within the reading “The Problem of Common Sense” by Kumashiro, he has a very interesting way of defining common sense and he raises some excellent points. He starts off by saying that common sense is basically what everyone’s expected to know or should know. These are the ways that we traditionally think about certain things, such as teaching and learning. Kumashiro explains that common sense is typically just accepted and very specific to a place, as we can see when he explains the difference between his experiences in Nepal compared to the United States when it comes to schooling and life in general. During his teaching experience in Nepal, he got to see how common sense works and more specifically, how it can cause issues in the school system. There were all these new teaching styles that Kumashiro brought with him, but common sense was preventing the students from wanting to accept these new and different methods. He soon recognized that there was a problem occurring with this idea of common sense due to the fact that it makes us fear change, being that we often find comfort in the traditional ways. Another interesting comment that he makes is that common sense can limit us. He explains how common sense doesn’t tell us what we could be doing because instead, it tells us what we should be doing. There are also instances where he describes common sense within the school system as something that makes it easy to use methods that allow oppression to continue without being questioned. When considering all of these different sides of Kumashiro’s definition of common sense, we can see his big idea that focuses on how common sense should not shape these aspects of education, being that instead this is what we must look deeper into so that it can finally be challenged.

There are many reasons why it is so important to pay attention to common sense. A majority of us do not even realize that there is this common sense in our lives because we are just used to it. This makes it hard to notice, but when we do pay attention to it, we can find ways to produce benefits. The main importance is that what may seem to be common sense to someone could be totally new to others. In this way it allows us to learn about other people’s experiences similarly to how Kumashiro learns about the unique ways of life in Nepal that they take for granted. When we pay attention to this, it allows us to raise questions about how effective the common sense ways are. It also gives us the ability to challenge it and step away from the traditional ways that we have become so accustomed to. If we continue to brush off this idea of common sense, we will become stuck in a world of repetition. When we specifically consider common sense within teaching and learning, we see that people tend to stick to the same routine and methods, but when we recognize this, it allows for us to consider other options that can potentially have greater benefits for everyone involved. As Kumashiro mentions, common sense can often lead to oppression being continued within schools and society. If we recognize the importance of paying attention to the common sense, we can address the things that are causing this inequality. If we all pay attention to the common sense surrounding us, it will overall allow for new experiences to arise within ourselves as individuals and society as a whole.

I have many common sense understandings of curriculum and pedagogy that all come from my previous experiences in school. When it comes to the curriculum, I have always understood it to simply be a document that teachers read to know what content has to be taught. It is typically seen as something that has to be strictly followed, as my past teachers would say. I have come to know the curriculum as being the reason that we must rush while learning new concepts or why we don’t have time for experiments and other activities. This was simply because the common sense understanding of the curriculum was that it contained a large amount of content that teachers had to teach in a school year, meaning there was not enough time for anything truly engaging. There are also many common sense understandings of pedagogy that I have come to know based on previous teaching styles that I have come across. I have had a majority of my teachers use the lecture, notes, assignment, test approach so that is just what I have come to expect when entering a new class. With this comes the memorization aspect that became a regular part of every class in my past years of school as well. Another common sense understanding that has to do with pedagogy is homework. This is something that I was just used to getting in school so it just became routine in my life. These common sense understandings that I bring into this class are probably similar to my peers, being that they seemed to be traditional within our education system. Now as I continue forward, I am able to understand how we tend to become stuck in these traditions and why it is so important for us to challenge them in order to benefit everyone.

References:

Kumashiro. (2009). Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice, pp. XXIX – XLI.