Category Archives: Critical Pedagogy

Critical Pedagogy, Education

Knowledge: Not If, but How (and Who Decides)

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As I have posted before, progressivism and whole language have a long history of being blamed for failure when in reality neither has been practiced in any substantial way by teachers. While school policies and classroom practices have remained committed to traditional approaches and behavioral groundings, it is likely more accurate to describe schooling in the U.S. as dominantly bureaucratic—often failing any ideology whether or not, as Harry Webb notes, schools and colleges of education are almost exclusively progressive.

And thus, education remains mired among some in a constant tension between so-called traditional and progressive commitments; as Webb explains, that tension is itself reductive and misleading:

The differences between educational progressives and traditionalists, although often defined in terms of how they go about teaching, are really more fundamental even than that. Progressives and traditionalists actually have different goals. They are trying to achieve different ends. To progressives, traditionalists are trying to fill children’s heads up with rote, disconnected facts. To traditionalists, progressives are trying to ‘facilitate’ the development of nebulous skills; skills that often cannot be defined and certainly not assessed. Of course, there are always those who are quick to cry, ‘False choice! You can have both nebulous skills and rote, disconnected facts.’ Of course there are.

There is a continuum here: on the far right, rote memorization, and on the left, touchy-feely “do your own thing” playtime. While as a critical educator I have serious problems with positivism, behaviorism, and the cultural knowledge concepts promoted by E.D. Hirsch, I agree with Webb, a traditionalist, that both extremes fall well short of what most thoughtful educators are pursuing regardless of their pedagogical commitments or educational philosophies.

So let me enter this debate with a few examples of what critical educators see as the foundational problems with how schools treat the pursuit of knowledge—with the full disclosure here that how the real world of teaching happens is often out of focus when compared to the more complex theories and philosophies identified. In other words, when a school or teacher claims to be implementing essential questions, it is unlikely that is the case. The same can be said of direct instruction, cooperative learning, authentic assessment, and so forth.

If there are educators who say content doesn’t matter, I don’t know any. It is a provocative claim, none the less. Of course content matters, but for critical educators, authoritarian static knowledge is the problem because of the “authoritarian” and “static”—not the knowledge.

Whether directly or indirectly, when a teacher prescribes that all children learn X without consideration for the needs or interests of the students and without any opportunity to examine whether or not that content should be accepted  uncritically, education has failed.

Another issue for critical and even progressive educators is the concept of when knowledge is acquired, when (and how) content becomes automatic.

Treating content as value-free, discrete, linear, and sequential is the problem; not the knowledge itself.

Assuming that the human mind is essentially analytic—learning from part to whole—and that most knowledge must be acquired before real thinking, maybe critical thinking, can occur are the problems.

So I want two offer to examples of what I mean.

First, I happen to know a huge amount of content in a fairly wide range of disciplines. Some is very useful on Jeopardy! and a great deal is incredibly useful for my roles as scholar, teacher, and writer.

For example, if I see a panel from a Silver Age Marvel comic book, I am able most of the time to tell you who pencilled and inked the artwork. I also regularly cite research aloud when I am teaching, often identifying the author, year, and even page of the research.

None of this happened by rote memorization that is all too common in traditional schooling. I did not have any of this assigned, I did not study any of this for a multiple choice or true/false exam.

Throughout the 1970s, while wearing a back brace for scoliosis, I retreated into the world of collecting comic books—amassing about 7000 comics that I read, re-read, and carefully catalogued before storing them all in plastic bags.

In the mid- to late 1990s, I wrote a dissertation on Lou LaBrant, meticulously gathering everything she wrote and everything others wrote or said about here before writing a book-length biography of her life and career.

What are notable about these experiences and how I have come to gain and retain so much knowledge?

  • Both grew from my choice—one as a teenager and the other as a grown man in my mid-30s. (My point: Let’s not assume that children have no ability to make real and substantial choices, just as, see below, let’s not romanticize childhood as a time when all children’s choices are good for them and that all adult imposition is oppressive.)
  • Both were experiences with rich and complex content. Nothing was easy about either experience (despite what people misunderstand about comic books). This is about challenging content (and not the misused and misleading concept of rigor)—in the two sense of the content is complex and thus challenging and that learners should challenge the content in order to learn it.
  • Both required that I engaged in a great deal of synthesis, and thus re-creation—resulting in experiencing, re-experiencing, and thus coming to acquire an evolving memorization that has context.
  • Both were aided substantially by my having access to authorities on the content I was pursuing.

Yes, knowledge matters, but who decides what knowledge matters is essential to address and how that knowledge is acquired is also central. It fails our goals of acquiring knowledge, then, if we only honor the acquisition of knowledge before any real engagement occurs on a complex level.

Each discipline needs to take a step back from linear, discrete, and analytical assumptions about acquiring knowledge in order to identify when that approach is genuinely essential. (And I suspect it is far less often than is traditionally practiced.)

Next, let me return to the continuum noted about, adding that to the far right we fall into the trap of cynicism (no child knows what is good for her/him) and that to the far left, the trap of romanticism (just leave children alone and allow their natural curiosity to work).

Just as knowledge acquisition may come after deep and rich engagement with experiences (as I detailed above), students may come to “choose” and recognize value in knowledge after being asked to learn it. And so a final example.

Too often traditional approaches to teaching and learning have been (and are) reduced (and more often with students identified as “weak”) to isolated and rote experiences with knowledge. (This can be traced to the failure of the cult of efficiency found in the bureaucracy of schooling [1].)

For example, what has counted (and counts) for “learning about the presidents” in social studies or history class is memorizing the presidents in order to be recited on a test. This is the sort of real-world traditionalism that progressive and critical educators balk at—and recognize as all too common, again, especially for certain students. And there is a cynicism and deficit view of children embedded in that sort of teaching.

However, a romantic view of children may seek to leave whether or not children learn about the presidents up to the students (again, making the mistake of ignoring context), and traditionalists are rightly concerned that many children would find little initial interest in the presidency—despite that core knowledge being quite important for each child as a member of a democracy and to the wider democracy itself.

Instead, then, asking students—either individually or in groups—to choose one president as a research project and to use that example to identify and examine the powers of presidents in the U.S. is the sort of assignment a critical educator would embrace.

Many students are likely to come to appreciate the need to understand the presidency after this experience, and we are failing students by the fault of romanticism if we allow them only to pursue what they initially believe is important.

For critical educators, our concern is with authoritarian education, but not with authoritative teachers. And our goal is a classroom with a teacher/student among students/teachers [2]. Teaching and learning are collaborative, but the ultimate authority is still the teacher.

From his traditional commitments (ones Webb strives to advocate for in real and complex ways), Webb asserts: “By contrast, progressive education is a mirage.”

I would argue that the ways in which both progressive and traditional practices are found in schools are mirages—in the sense that they fail our goals of knowledge acquisition as a vehicle for human and social agency. In fact, those failures, I think, have little to do with progressivism and traditionalism, but much to do with the romanticism and cynicism I have examined above.

[1] Callahan, R. E. (1962). Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the social forces that have shaped the administration of the public schools. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

[2] Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare to teach. Trans. D. Macedo, D., Koike, & A., Oliveira. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

——— . (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Trans. P. Clarke. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

——— . (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Critical Pedagogy, Education

“What Is Wrong with Aiming for Basic”?

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English educator and Deweyan progressive Lou LaBrant taught from 1906 until 1971; LaBrant lived to be 102.

She led a long and rich life as an educator, and when she wrote her memoir for the Education Museum at the University of South Carolina, in that reflection, she confronted the back-to-basics movement under Ronald Reagan’s administration that spurred the current accountability reform era.

LaBrant noted that she had lived and worked under a recurring cycle of back-to-basics movements—sparking in me a not-so-funny version of real-life Groundhog Day.

Calls for basics, essentials, and core knowledge are nothing new; in fact, these calls are ideological and simply will not die, regardless of the evidence of their ineffectiveness.

And thus, we have Annie Murphy Paul blogging about a Robert Pondiscio blog titled Be Excellent at Simple, both endorsing 5 basic commitments for education proposed by Pondiscio:

1. Every child must have a safe, warm, disruption-free classroom as a  non-negotiable, fundamental right.

2. All children should be taught to read using phonics-based instruction.

3. All children must master basic computational skills with automaticity before moving on to higher mathematics.

4. Every child must be given a well-rounded education that includes science, civics, history, geography, music, the arts, and physical education.

5. Accountability is an important safeguard of public funds, but must not drive or dominate a child’s education. Class time must not be used for standardized test preparation.”

A series of comments on Paul’s blog—mine and Chris Thinnes—prompted comments from Paul, and some of the key points she raised and questions she asked are my focus here:

But on the other hand, what is wrong with aiming for basic–if we’re not even achieving basic now?

When I say “research-based” I am referring to his five prescriptions, which are the focus of what I presented here. And his five prescriptions have solid research behind them. Cognitive science research demonstrates that children should be taught to read with phonics-based instruction. Cognitive science research demonstrates that children should master math facts to automaticity. Cognitive science research demonstrates that children need a broad base of content knowledge (Robert’s “science, civics, history, geography, music, the arts”) in order to comprehend what they read and in order to think in a sophisticated way about the world. THAT’S what I meant by “research-based.”

What can we learn from this long-running see-saw between Romanticism and back-to-basics? Does the answer lie in finding a happy medium between the two, or breaking out of this dichotomy entirely?

First, what’s wrong with a basics approach to education is highlighted by #2 above, a Hooked on Phonics reduction of how to teach reading.

Next, in Paul’s comments—notably “cognitive science research demonstrates”—we have the seeds of why the call for basics remains flawed.

Finally, her two concluding questions offer a way out.

Identifying direct and isolated phonics as a model for basic education exposes how this argument is self-fulling and ultimately outside the current research base on literacy.

As with direct, isolated, and intense grammar instruction, phonics instruction appears effective only within a narrow research paradigm built on a narrow testing context. The National Reading Panel (NRP) and its role in No Child Left Behind calling for “scientifically based research” is a powerful example of how this dynamic is bureaucratically effective but pedagogically blind.

Traditional parameters for quantitative research are grounded in aspects of control—controlling for noise that can distort findings. Experimental and quasi-experimental research models remain the gold standard for such research, and those narrow definitions of research were the driving ideologies behind the NRP.

I invite anyone interested in how narrow and traditional paradigms for research distort what we know about language development to read Joanne Yatvin’s expose of the NRP. But let me offer a brief explanation.

In order to test and conduct research on reading (a messy and holistic, although artificial, human behavior), we must first examine how reading is defined. To make reading efficiently measurable in selected response testing formats, researchers often break reading into discrete and isolated skills—decoding, phonemic awareness, comprehension, etc.

Then researchers tend to create testing  formats divided into enough test items on each isolated skill to constitute the sort of data that researchers deem adequate for issues related to validity and reliability; for standardized testing, how well those test items create score spread is also a factor in designing the tests.

This process (although simplified for this discussion) exposes how meeting the needs of narrow research paradigms and standardized testing can produce credible data within those paradigms while also severely distorting what we need to know about teaching real children to read.

The phonics problem is this: Once researchers allow “decoding” and/or “phonemic awareness” to count as “reading,” and then they test those skills in isolation on tests labeled as a “reading” test, intense, isolated, and direct phonics instruction is revealed as an effective way to raise scores on those tests.

The literacy problem is this: The field of literacy has known for decades and proven often that even when short-term evidence such as that described above may look effective, it doesn’t last and doesn’t correlate well with a richer holistic definition of reading.

Again similar to acquiring grammar and usage conventions, acquiring phonemic awareness requires that students receive the minimum amount of direct instruction that facilitates students becoming eager and frequent readers; once students are engaged as readers, they acquire greater and greater decoding and phonics “skills.” Ample evidence shows that intense phonics instruction fails in many ways—wasting time better spent by students actually reading as well as creating reading problems in students who are past the stage of needing direct instruction (see this brief outline of Ken Goodman on phonics and how NCLB, NRP, and Reading First created DIBELS and thus failed the teaching of reading again).

As pedagogy, skill-and-drill is effective for raising test scores on tests that look like that skill-and-drill.

If acquiring phonics rules is our instructional goal, intensive phonics lessons are appropriate.

But, to answer Paul’s initial question above, the problem with seeking such basics is that these should not be our goals.

Narrow paradigms of research and testing are the problem; they distort our view of the real world and in effect distort how we should be teaching students who inhabit that real world.

Reading and learning to read are messy, complex, and much more than a discrete set of skills that can be taught and measured in isolation in any ways that reflect accurately the whole act of reading.

Literacy experts have known this for decades: All students need the least amount of direct phonics instruction necessary for them to engage with whole texts; no literacy experts have ever said “don’t teach phonics.” But the field of literacy also knows that intensive phonics programs that treat phonics as a goal in itself is not teaching reading; it is teaching phonics.

Now to Paul’s final questions.

Public school instruction has been primarily traditional (grounded in the exact essentialism Paul and Pondiscio endorse, an essentialism that falls into the trap of misguided certainty) and the Romanticism Paul notes as also failing has never had any serious place in the public school classroom (I suspect she is targeting progressivism, which has the odd history of almost never being implemented but being blamed for the failures of public schools; this is the same dynamic experienced by whole language, which was also demonized as a failure although it has been documented as never having been implemented by teachers who closed their doors and practiced traditional strategies despite mandates to do whole language).

I am, however, not being a progressive apologist—although when essentialists use the false progressives-as-failures narrative, I feel we are slipping off the rail to reaching the conclusion we should.

And that brings me to Paul’s final and important question noted above: “Does the answer lie in finding a happy medium between the two, or breaking out of this dichotomy entirely?”

To which I answer: The dichotomy is a false narrative itself (and thus a distraction), and I don’t see either option as the way to the sort of education a free people should embrace for their children.

I opt for breaking out, embracing a critical pedagogy that doesn’t ignore knowledge, doesn’t normalize knowledge, but challenges knowledge so that it becomes a tool for each learner and a force for all of society. For knowledge to be liberatory, it must be confronted.

I opt for breaking out, embracing a critical pedagogy that doesn’t ignore the humanity of each child, doesn’t romanticize the child, but sees teaching and learning as a partnership between teachers and students who have roles as teacher-student and student-teacher. For education to be liberatory, it must be an act of a community.

Pondiscio’s simple list is nothing new and is an ideological argument (not an objective argument) grounded in essentialism (the purview of E.D. Hirsch and other proponents of Core Knowledge). Paul appears to be firmly grounded in a narrow (although highly regarded) context for research.

They certainly have every right to their ideological commitments, but I urge that they confront how those commitments are the status quo of the educational system most essentialists declare a failure. LaBrant’s work over seven decades exposed how essentialists refuse to see how their views are the dominant practices in public education; again, even as they lament how that system has failed.

We need to break out of narrow definitions and narrow tests for those things we value most in the education of children, and certainly, the numeracy and literacy of our children deserve more than we are offering. A critical approach is that option.

Back to basics tends to be reduced to seeing children as empty vessels to be filled (especially true with the populations of students who need education most—the impoverished and minorities), and almost always asks too little of students.

So what’s wrong with aiming for basic? It is trying the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.

Critical Pedagogy, Progressivism, Traditionalism

A Critical Truce in the War between Traditionalists and Progressives

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Harry Webb has launched A War of Words: “The war is between traditionalists and progressives and it is an old war.”

Yes, this is an old war, and what is most frustrating about this battle for me is that, once again, critical perspectives are left out entirely. So let me offer here a brief critical truce to this war between traditionalists and progressives.

First, Webb’s post highlights some of the essential problems with the war itself.

Since the mid-1900s, progressive educators and progressive pedagogy have been demonized (and usually misrepresented) as key sources of educational failures, but traditional practices have historically dominated and currently dominate what happens in real classrooms daily.

We have ample anecdotal (I have been in education for 31 years) and research-based evidence that even though, as Webb notes, colleges of education and education professors disproportionately claim to be progressive, that once teachers enter the classroom, they tend to shut the door and practice relatively traditional pedagogy—often teaching as they have been taught or defaulting to traditional practices since they are more efficient and more easily managed in the challenging environments of mixed-ability and overcrowded classrooms.

I invite everyone to read Alfie Kohn’s examination of this in Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find. Kohn offers not only a solid discussion of how rare progressive practices are, but also details how progressive practices are misrepresented along with what he considers to be genuine progressive pedagogy.

Another problem I have with this war, however, is that I am not a progressive and am not offering here an apology for progressivism.

I am noting that when I wear my history of education hat (I am the Council Historian for NCTE and wrote a biography for my doctoral work), I recognize a demonizing and marginalizing of progressives that is misleading. As a critical educator, I must add, I believe that progressives have failed and do fail in many ways similar to the failures I associate with traditional practices.

I will confess that it is likely we have failed progressivism, but that point is pretty academic.

Along with Kohn’s discussion of progressivism, I also invite you to examine what I believe is an accurate model of what progressivism is by exploring the work of Lou LaBrant, the focus of my educational biography. Her work disproves the stereotypes of progressives as “touchy-feely” educators who have no grounding in empirical evidence. LaBrant practiced classroom-based research and considered herself a scientific teacher throughout her career from 1906 to 1971. She also fiercely defended the progressivism of John Dewey (something, again, that almost no one represents accurately and then almost no one practices—even those education professors who claim to be progressives).

Another problem with the war is that once traditionalists have mischaracterized progressives in order to attack those mischaracterizations and progressives have mischaracterized the traditionalists in order to attack those mischaracterizations, little value comes from the war, and as is typical of wars, we have only collateral damage.

So let me pause on one comment from Webb: “Yet, their argument is weak and not supported by evidence,” he claims about progressives.

I must call a foul here. Education has a century of research, a research base that has been ignored by policymakers and often discredited by those with narrow definitions of what counts a research (action research by teachers doesn’t count, they say, effectively silencing teachers and indirectly the voices of women in their own profession). Thus when Webb proclaims, “There is an imbalance of power here,” there is an unintended irony since that imbalance is exactly what I am highlighting.

Just as one example, Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde have offered for many years an examination of just what the body of evidence shows regarding effective pedagogy. This work calls into question two claims by Webb: first, it shows there is a robust research base, and second, the practices that are likely most effective are fairly characterized as progressive (the sorts of practices that reflect an accurate use of the term).

However, what is most important to note about Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde’s work is that what we know about best practice includes that no pedagogy is rejected and no pedagogy is demanded; in other words, best practice is implementing the instructional practices that best meet the needs of the students and match the learning goals.

For example, the evidence on teaching writing since at least the 1930s and 1940s has shown that isolated grammar instruction does not transfer to original student compositions; in the mid-1990s, George Hillocks showed that isolated grammar instruction actually inhibits writing quality. So the most effective way to teach students to write, including the most effective way for students to learn standard grammar, is through actual writing—something most people would call a progressive perspective.

However, that same research base shows that evidence-based (the evidence being found in actual writing samples from students) direct instruction (what many would call a traditional practice) is vital, and that some students (although a minority) can benefit from targeted isolated grammar instruction.

In other words, the research base emphasizes both the effectiveness of pedagogy most would call progressive, but it certainly doesn’t discount that ultimately what works best is what each student needs. As Webb noted, lecturing can be highly effective, and it can be abysmal—but that has more to do with its delivery and appropriateness than to some default judgment on the practice itself.

When traditionalists say that all students must learn standard English, they likely have a point, but their goal often falls apart when they insist on instructional practices that the evidence has shown are ineffective. “I shall prove my pedagogy is king!” is a shallow thing against seeking ways to teach each student effectively and with  compassion and patience.

When progressives say that student must be engaged in authentic activities, they also have a point (although as Webb notes, and I agree, the jargon of education offers no proof that what is claimed is what is taking place), but that goal often falls apart when they fail to recognize that having students participating in a workshop demands a teacher who also provides a great deal of structure and manages purposeful direct instruction as student work reveals the need.

In my experience, traditionalists and progressives tend to become trapped in their pedagogy and fail to see their students or the evidence of their own ineffectiveness.

If you demand all children read The Scarlet Letter, lecture on it brilliantly for two weeks, prepare a detailed study guide, and then have a class score wonderfully on the test at the end of the unit, what have you gained if most of those students never actually read the book and the entire experience taught them to hate reading?

If you invite your students to participate in writing workshop, offer no structure, fail to provide expert feedback, have no process for students to revise and improve their essays, and then bundle a portfolio of all that work with a nice decorated folder cover, what have you gained if that workshop involved more time meandering and decorating, resulting in students writing no better at the end than the beginning? (See LaBrant’s brilliant critique of failed efforts at the project method in ELA classes, a sharp unmasking of failed progressive claims.)

So, where’s the truce? Because a reasonable person could read this so far and say that I have embedded in the discussion a sneaky endorsement of progressivism (do I associate more with progressives than traditionalists? Sure. But I find they fail just as often as traditionalists, and thus, my disappointment with progressives is much more intense).

Here’s my truce.

I bet that someone as thoughtful and purposeful as Harry Webb appears in his blogs is a stellar and effective teacher, despite our differences about pedagogy.

I have seen brilliant traditionalists teachers and lousy self-proclaimed progressives. More than anything, I have seen too many teachers bound to their practices, ignoring their students and the evidence of their ineffectiveness.

Thus, my truce is that the key (the olive branch?) to this war is whether or not a teacher has a critical lens.

Let me end with a couple invitations:

I have posted before a chart that I use to introduce students to the traditionalist v. progressive divide juxtaposed with the often ignored critical alternative; please see it here.

Also consider a longer post in which I explore this dynamic in detail, Education Done To, For, or With Students?

Maybe, as Webb suggests, there is no hope for ending this war, but I would prefer a different approach, one that requires that we all step away from our commitments (as Webb critiques well, our words, labels, and jargon), take an honest assessment of the impact our commitments have on students (because the only real things that matters are if students learn and that we never sacrifice their dignity and humanity in the process), and then begin again, determined to do better the next time.

Peace?