Igniting Curiosity: How To Develop Lifelong Critical Consciousness

The Chapter One presents the application of Toward a Liberated Learning Spirit (TALLS). Drawing from scholarship and activism around reflection, supportive resistance, asset-based learning, and direct action, the TALLS model for developing critical consciousness moves learners from passive and detached receivers of information to active and reflective co-creators of knowledge and change. Curiosity is a basic desire to know or learn something, and, as such, seems fundamental to any learning process. Yet, many Western approaches to teaching and learning reinforce conditions that stymy curiosity and lifelong learning. Through structural inequalities that shape learning spaces and the pedagogical and curricular design decisions that privilege certain ways of knowing at the exclusion of others, the formal learning process is often reduced to a transactional condition in which a credentialed authority imparts specific knowledge on passive learners, who regurgitate what they have been taught in exchange for advancement toward their own societally-valued credentials. Therefore, many students get back to the business of lifelong learning only after they have finished their schooling.