Tension and Critical Pedagogy

Tension: That tentative tie that binds conventional pedagogy and critical pedagogy--probably with a lot of other pedagogies in there somewhere as well. But we have these two to work with this week.

We see it in the way Ann George describes how Patricia Bizzell struggles over the possibility that her work as a critical instructor might actually, ironically, violate democratic rights (108).

We see it in “the inevitable presence of paradoxes” that come with the package of critical pedagogy: Teach resistance but get the students to cooperate long enough to understand the concepts; talk about freedom but do it with some sense of authority; address the problems of the very system that may be responsible for keeping you clothed and fed and housed. (108-109).

We see it in our search to find some critical aspect worth analyzing in the lives of the more privileged students.

We see it in Jeff Smith’s argument against radical methods, whereby his means are different, but the intended “end” is the same: He compels us to consider our “obligation to be useful to students, teaching the grammar and generic conventions they will need to succeed,” as a means of promoting the democracy that is to be experienced through the critical pedagogical mechanism. (101).

If we simply refer back to our friend, John Dewey, and his argument that society be a function of education (and not the other way around), we can develop a deep appreciation for critical writing’s inevitable “interdisciplinary appeal” (94). But we must consider that one of the discplines in the interdisciplinary menu is, in fact, discipline! And we can get there, celebrating our way through all that tension, through Villanueva’s suggestion about establishing a “dialectic between hegemony and counterhegemony, between tradition and change.”

We can get there without having students merely reiterate or, worse yet, regurgitate what they’ve heard. We can envision Giroux’s ideal of cultural production versus cultural reproduction.(96); while maintaining some sense of structure that creates cooperative students, we engage them enough so that they do not simply become minions of “cultural institutions (which) function to reproduce the ideology and power of dominant groups” (95).

Because we know that “thought and knowledge are socially constructed linguistic products, (94),” we appreciate the inextricable link between the classroom and society; and it’s a messy business to figure out where one begins and one ends in critical pedagogy. As it should be.

Tension is a beautiful thing. It leads to optimal productive learning -- through our observation of it and our involvement in it. It is the synthesis of the traditional and the nontraditional, the classical and the new. There is most certainly a place for critical pedagogy insofar as there is a place for tradition. One cannot exist without the other. Without the tension generated from the presence of both, there is either pure disorder, which leads to the destruction of the masses, or there is absolute authoritarianism, which leads to destruction of the soul.