Teacher as a transformative intellectual

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Are you as a teacher ready to face the challenges of the future? If you're not ready, stop being a teacher!

Teachers are complex individuals. There are so many challenges to be faced by a teacher. As a model person, a teacher must maintain positive attitudes. Teachers should have the authority and have extensive knowledge. This is important. When in the classroom, teachers will be faced with students who have different characters. With the attitude of his authority, the teacher will be respected by the students. In addition, teachers must have extensive knowledge. That is, the teacher must understand the circumstances that occur around him, not just understand about the lessons he taught.

Among some of the most important teacher roles are teachers as transformative intellectuals. During this time the community considers teachers as administrative personnel, meaning that teachers are only seen as a figure that teaches students, assesses them, and reports on student progress.

Though a teacher's task is not just that! Teachers also act as transformative intellectuals. With teachers as intellectuals, students can be guided to learn the discourse about public organization and social responsibility. This discourse recaptures the idea of critical democracy as a social movement that supports individual freedom and social justice. Teachers must be able to construct ways that involve the time, space, activities and knowledge organized into the daily school life. The teacher must create the structural and ideological conditions needed for her to be able to write, research and work with others in producing a good curriculum and shared power.

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Teachers also need to develop a discourse and determine the assumption that they are allowed to function more specifically as transformative intellectuals. As intellectuals, they combine reflection and action for the benefit of student empowerment with the skills and knowledge needed to eliminate injustice and to become critical perpetrators developing a world free from oppression and exploitation. Such intellectuals at the same time pay attention to individual achievement of students or advance students reach career ladder, and pay attention to effort of student empowerment so that they can read the world critically and change it when needed. Through their professional performance, teachers can play a more active role in developing a more productive critical awareness within students. Therefore, teachers should abandon conservative inspiration and began to embrace democratic inspiration. If education is a means of liberation that allows everyone to participate actively in shaping social order in society, democratic inspiration is the soul that sustains the performance of teachers as actors of change.

These concepts should you consider when you want to become a teacher. So when you apply these concepts in school and social environments, people will not think of you as a monotonous individual who is only in a school setting. We as teachers must show to the public that we are agents of change for the social order of society. The future of their children is in our hands. []

References:

academia edu
Widiyanto