Possibilities for and Limits of Critical Pedagogy in Higher Education Today
Joyce E Canaan
Reader in Sociology
School of Social Sciences
Faculty of Law, Humanities, Development and Society,
University of Central England in Birmingham
Perry Barr Birmingham B42 2SU
Email:
(Draft paper; please do not cite without permission).
I am also struck and indeed stirred by Freire’s idea that education . . . works to conscientise those who could provide the energy for a future revolutionary movement (Canaan Reflexive Diary autumn 2003:2).
I think that is a strength really [of Joyce’s lectures] to say wake, up, wake up, you’re not just here to listen to my jargons [sic] . . . you’re here to see that the theorists and critical social theorists is not just ignoring the issues, it’s about you being able to contribute with what is going on with society (Student 4[1], Focus Group 1 December 2003:16).
Interviewer: What about developing your appreciation of yourself as a theorist, have the lectures helped you with that at all?
Student 2: Not me.
Student 3: I don’t know
Student 1: Perhaps like about 10 years down the road I might appreciate what she said but like it’s a bit too early for me at the moment (Focus Group 2:9).
For the past four years I have been trying to implement a more critical pedagogy (Canaan 2002a, 2002b, 2005, 2006) guided especially by Freire (1996, 2002) whose notion of critical hope—a hope that rests on critiquing society and exposing its inequalities in order to build a society in which all can realise their dignity and equality—seem more necessary now than before. This necessity is caused by this government and many others North and South neo-liberalising, and consequently marketising and commodifying, HE like other parts of the former welfare state. Consequently lecturers are being work-intensified, disciplined by new managerialism and rendered job-insecure, which is encouraging greater instrumentality in teaching and marking as well as research and administration. These processes are also lcontributing to HE students’ work-intensification (as fees are raised and many consequently work at least part-time to pay these fees) and instrumental learning as the students we teach have been through an education system that emphasised learning for the sake of exam performance (as schools have come to compete for students through their ranking in league tables in which exam performance plays a key role). (Ibid, Ainley and Canaan 2005, 2006, Ball 2003, Levidow 2002, Shumar and Canaan nd).
The situation that students generally are facing is compounded for the ‘Widening Participation’ students now in HE, who, as Naidoo notes, come from ‘those socio-economic and ethnic minority groups that have been historically excluded from postsecondary education’ (Naidoo 2000:25). Many of these students may have been deemed average or deficient ‘cognitively, culturally and/or linguistically’ in their prior education in which ‘schools and their personnel’ failed to recognise how their pedagogic strategies discriminated ‘against many culturally different groups’ and thereby denied ‘their humanity’ (Bartolme 2003::408, 411, see also Gillborn and Youdell 2000). These students are likely to ‘choose’ to enter former polytechnics, now ‘new universities’, where lecturers committed to teaching working class and minority ethnic students have traditionally worked.
As HE is being subject to neo-liberal marketisation and commodification, Kane (2005:9) reminds us that ‘state education does not necessarily function as a reproductive agent of a dominant ideology [and can instead be conceptualised] . . . as a ‘site of struggle’ in which . . . alternative ideas can do something’. Kane further argues that we should try to do more than we think is possible; by doing so we might find that we can push against the door of limits and find them either open or open-able (Ibid:10, see also Ainley and Canaan 2005, 2006).
Kane’s call to radicalise state education generally and HE in particular is something that a growing minority in HE are beginning to do. We are seeking to subvert efforts to marketise and commodify at least some aspects of HE learning, teaching, research and administration. Neary refers to this process in the UK as ‘academic activism’, which starts from the assumption that ‘education needs to be grounded in the real lives of the students who should become active in the production of real knowledge, rather than passive recipients of what teacher tells them’ (Neary 2005:12). Some of us working in new universities where Widening Participation students predominate are committed to developing pedagogies that seek not to stigmatise such students for what they lack, but to support them in developing their understanding of the world further and to encourage them to actively engage in learning and in doing—and more specifically, in working to make the world a place where all can fully realise their humanity and dignity. This commitment has required us to rethink how we teach, to recognise that there are ‘gaps between faculty expectations and student interpretations of what is involved in’ (Street 2004:15) and that it is up to us to devise strategies to bridge these gaps. It has also led us to re-conceptualise the students we teach (see, for example, Haggis 2003, Leathwood and O’Connell 2003). and how they learn as we aim is to enable students to learn more fully in part by working to change the world using and expanding the insights gained from this fuller engagement with learning and doing.
This paper is part of my contribution to academic activism. Here I focus on my efforts to realise critical pedagogy in my teaching and students’ learning of Contemporary Social Theory in autumn 2003, the third year I was researching my teaching and students’ learning. Time limits prevent me from locating this teaching in the context of 2001 and 2002, although the final draft will do so. Here I first discuss the critical pedagogy I am developing and I explore how the realist model of transformation can be used to understand learning and teaching. I then use this model to explain first how I was changing my approach to teaching (using the reflexive diary I kept) and second how students were changing their approaches to learning (using data from focus groups by my research assistant, Julie Cappleman-Morgan[2] conducted with students at the end of the semester). I conclude by suggesting that whilst these efforts were more limited and mixed than I would have liked, my efforts at developing them more fully this autumn suggest that we can take critical pedagogy considerably further than we might think.
Towards an Alternative Pedagogy
For the purposes of this paper, I will first summarise how I have elsewhere articulated insights of Freirean critical pedagogy (Canaan 2006). The Freirean framework could be said to have three radical elements. First, it encourages a teacher/student dialogue that foregrounds students as active learners capable of understanding and transforming the world. Its aim is not for teachers to transform students—which puts agency primarily in teachers’ hands—but to work together with students to transform reality. For Freire the starting point is: ‘the thought-language with which men and women refer to reality, the levels at which they perceive that reality, and their view of the world’ (Ibid:78). That is, teachers engage in a dialogue with students about their perceptions of their situation, focusing not just on the content of students’ perceptions, but also the language they use to articulate these perceptions. Teachers thus should start teaching with a recognition that the students we teach, especially those of us teaching Widening Participation students from less privileged backgrounds, have in part internalised the consciousness of the most powerful groups and interests and also a more critical consciousness, a critical awareness of their situation that can be developed further. We can use what they say and how they say it to understand their world. Critical pedagogy seeks not for lecturers to deposit their insights into students, which Freire calls the banking model of learning, but to engage with students in a dialogue about their current understandings of their situations.
Second, teachers work with students in order to re-present these students’ situations to them not ‘as a closed door from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform’ (Freire 1996:31). Through this dialogue, then, students are encouraged to see their current situation as ‘as a problem which challenges them and requires a response’ (Ibid:76-77). Teachers work with students so that students can locate this situation in a wider context and use factors additional to those they previously used to experience their world. By doing so, teachers and students together re-articulate, re-narrativise students’ understandings of their situations. Being able to re-tell one’s experience as a problem that can be responded to and, indeed, overcome, increases students’ sense of agency.
Third and finally, teachers and students develop not just fuller ‘subjective perceptions of a situation, but through action’ [struggle] against the obstacles to their humanization’ so that they might live in a world where all can realise their humanity (Ibid:100). Seeing one’s current situation as a problem whose limits can be overcome and devising means of doing so encourages and indeed requires agency that aims to improve the world. For Freire, then, learning and teaching have radical transformative action as their goal; teachers and students work together at projects to improve others’ lives that Freire calls ‘conscientisation’.
Satya Mohanty’s realist perspective on personal experience helps us conceptualise how Freirean pedagogy impacts on students and teachers. Mohanty suggests that personal experience be understood as:
socially constructed, mediated by visions and values that are “political” in nature, that refer outward to the world beyond the individual’ and it is precisely in this mediated way that it [experience] yields knowledge (2002:394).
Like Freire, Mohanty starts by positing that peoples’ understandings of their personal experience are socially produced and utilise politically informed visions and values or epistemological stances. Just as Freire claims that students initially view the world within a current limit situation that can be superceded, so does Mohanty suggest that we can judge the adequacy and indeed the accuracy of peoples’ current theories by considering if these theories provide an ‘accurate and reliable’ understanding of peoples’ experiences (Ibid:395).
Mohanty’s explains this process using Scheman’s discussion of a woman who joins a consciousness-raising group and then comes to recognise, by adopting a feminist epistemological stance, that her prior feelings of depression and guilt covered over feelings of anger. As Mohanty notes, this woman thereby:
comes to know something . . . about her repressed feelings . . . [and] also about her self, her personhood, and the range of its moral and political claims and needs. She comes to this knowledge by discovering or understanding features of the social and cultural arrangements of her world that define her sense of self, the choices she is taught to have, the range of personal capacities she is expected to exploit and exercise (Ibid).
The new epistemological stance offers this woman a fuller appreciation of her world, her self, her agency. With it she can ‘organize pregiven facts about the world . . . [and] detect new ones’. This stance thus helps the woman see ‘new patterns of salience and relevance, teaching . . . [her] what to take seriously and what to reinterpret’ (Ibid:398). This epistemological stance is more adequate than its predecessor as it enables the woman to make ‘buried explanations explicit, by examining the social and political views that are involved in what seem like purely personal choices and predilections’ (Ibid:399). The woman can now locate her personal experience in a wider social and political realm and thereby see more fully how factors beyond her self profoundly shape this experience. The woman can see, that is, that she lives in a society with ‘a particular social arrangement of gender relations and hierarchies which can be analysed and evaluated’ (Ibid:396). In this society the prevalent theories for organising experience benefit ‘the powerful and established groups and institutions’ (Ibid). Through these insights the woman experiences ‘moral and political growth, an increase both in . . . [her] personal capacities and in knowledge’ (Ibid:399).
The idea that one can develop an appreciation of herself and the world in and through a framework wider than one’s prior framework and that takes into account more features of the social and political structures and processes that shape reality helps us understand Freirean conscientisation. It suggests that through engaging in a dialogue that begins from students’ understandings of their limit situations, students can come to see that limits they placed on their understanding of their situation need not be maintained. Re-presentation of this situation by the teacher introduces factors beyond students’ prior understandings of these limits and their responses to these limits. That is, students can now see additional factors, socially produced by the most powerful groups and institutions that shaped their prior understandings.
Finally, Mohanty claims that the woman is able to develop a deeper appreciation of the power dynamics that shape the world and the injustices perpetrated by powerful groups and institutions on others through political activity by engaging in activist politics. Mohanty notes that activist engagement with ‘oppositional political struggles’ creates ‘theoretical knowledge’ (Ibid:398) because through such engagement one builds alternative understandings of the world that challenge dominant groups’ ideas and institutions. Mohanty cites Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach to explain this point: