Abstract
This article explores how critical pedagogy unfolds in the everyday interactions between teachers and students. Specifically, Freirean constructs of critique and dialogue were explored in two key literacy events drawn from an ethnographically informed case study of one fourth-grade classroom. The events were first examined from an ethnographic perspective to understand how sociopolitical issue(s) were being critiqued (or avoided). These events were then analyzed again through microanalytic discourse analysis to explore how teachers and students jointly accomplished dialogue and critique through proposing and taking up of particular stances toward text(s). By juxtaposing these two analytic lenses, the researchers argue for an understanding of critical pedagogy, particularly the tenets of critique and dialogue, as interactionally co-constructed in the continually evolving, everyday talk between teachers and students. This article closes by considering the implications of this work for classroom-based literacy research that examines critical pedagogy.
What, exactly, does critical pedagogy look like in the everyday teaching and learning practices of a literacy classroom? In our roles as teacher educators, this is a question we are often asked by teachers and is a question that we in turn ask ourselves as researchers and former teachers. Initially, the answer appears straightforward, given the substantial body of scholarship theorizing critical pedagogy. This high-level theory provides responses in the form of overarching principles and tenets, but it does not typically name specific practices. The lack of concrete methods put forth in this scholarship is intentional, rooted in a humanizing orientation toward teaching and learning as occurring between unique subjects (students and teachers) rather than being deposited into dehumanized objects (Bartolomé, 1994; Philip et al., 2019). Yet, such necessary abstraction leaves questions for teachers and researchers regarding the everyday practice of critical pedagogy.
Our interest in the everyday stems in part from Vossoughi and Gutierrez’s (2016) call for scholarship on critical pedagogy to engage with the how of critical pedagogy as well as the what. They argue that scholarship emerging from the Freirean (1970/2015) tradition of critical pedagogy has focused primarily on content, meaning curricular foci on sociopolitical issues and counterhegemonic ideas. Yet, just as fundamental to Freirean critical pedagogy is how this content is engaged, which Vossoughi and Gutierrez term “the micro-processes of critical pedagogy” (p. 143). Foregrounding pedagogical practice, a focus on microprocesses centers how relationships are constructed and how power circulates in the daily life of the classroom. In so doing, it resists a tendency toward reducing critical pedagogy to particular outcomes or procedures (Aukerman, 2012; Biesta, 1998) or toward constructing binaries between “critical” and “not critical” pedagogies (Luke, 2012; Philip & Zavala, 2016). Instead, an attention to microprocesses allows us to grapple with the tensions inherent to the practice of critical pedagogy within our oppressive reality.
Recognizing the centrality of dialogic teacher–student relationships in the Freirean tradition, a focus on microprocesses directs attention to how such relationships are unavoidably shaped by the distribution of power within both institutional (teacher/student), social, and cultural identities of teachers and students (see Ellsworth, 1989). An attention to everyday microprocesses also accounts for the dynamism of power and oppression, both spatially and temporally. Mechanisms of power mutate across time and place, and thus, critical pedagogy itself must necessarily be adapted to each local context. Within the contemporary neoliberal context, for instance, everyday pedagogical interactions are shaped by standardization and accountability (De Lissovoy, 2015) that introduce tensions to the practice of critical pedagogy.
Taking up calls to root scholarship on critical pedagogy more firmly in the everyday interactions of teachers and students (Rymes et al., 2005; Salazar, 2013), we focus our attention on how one fourth-grade teacher and her students made and remade critical pedagogy in her daily classroom practice amid neoliberal pressures toward standardization and accountability. To do so, we situate our analysis of critical pedagogy within a framework of languaging (Becker, 1991; Bloome & Beach, 2019), viewing critical pedagogy fundamentally as a social practice co-constructed by teachers and students in and through language.
We share the analysis of two events drawn from an ethnographic study of elementary literacy teaching and learning, each of which expanded our understanding of what might constitute critical pedagogy in the everyday. To do so, we adapted interactional constructs initially developed to theorize the social construction of intertextuality (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993). Here, we consider how interlocutors proposed, acknowledged, and recognized different pedagogical orientations within their interactions, as well as the social consequences of these interactional moves. By presenting our initial ethnographic analysis and a subsequent microanalytic languaging analysis side by side, we illustrate how a centering of teacher–student interactions (or—of “talk”) can provide insight into the practice and analysis of critical pedagogy in the everyday.
Critique and Dialogue: Tensions of Freirean Critical Literacy
For this analysis, we draw on Freire’s (1970/2015) critical literacy pedagogy as a theoretical lens to analyze the everyday practices of our participants, focusing specifically on two tenets of Freire’s theorizing: critique and dialogue. Critique foregrounds analysis of sociopolitical structures and discourses, with the ultimate goal of fundamentally transforming those that are oppressive (Aronowitz, 2015; Freire & Macedo, 1987). It also emphasizes students’ development in understanding how power and oppression operate in people’s lived experiences—reading the word and the world—and in students’ capacity to work toward transformation. Studies of critique-centered critical pedagogy illustrate how a curricular focus on sociopolitical topics, such as racism, climate change, and immigration policy, can support students in developing understandings of how oppression has been constructed and resisted (e.g., Curwen et al., 2019; Hanes, 2019). Further, research has illustrated how teachers can guide students both to analyze how texts are shaped by an author’s purposes and to question textual authority (e.g., Papen, 2020; Yoon & Uliassi, 2018). The tenet of critique tends to focus on what Vossoughi and Gutierrez (2016) term the what of critical pedagogy, or the curricular content and pedagogical outcomes.
The tenet of dialogue, in contrast, might be understood as centering the how of critical pedagogy, directing attention to interactions between teachers and students. Although transformation beyond the individual was Freire’s (2015) ultimate aim, he argued such transformation must begin with teacher and student co-constructing a “horizontal relationship…of mutual trust” (p. 91). Thus, the teacher–student relationship is not a corollary in critical pedagogy, but a necessity, and one that must be continually constructed within pedagogical interactions. Such a relationship is built upon the fundamental humanity of both teacher and student, positioned as subjects rather than objects in their quest for liberation (De Lissovoy, 2015). Scholarship centering this dimension of critical pedagogy has illustrated how teachers demonstrate care for their students as complete and complex human beings, welcoming their emotional and intellectual selves into the classroom (e.g., Huerta, 2011; Zisselsberger, 2016). Key to the tenet of dialogue is a recognition that critical pedagogy cannot be created solely by the teacher, but instead must be co-intentional (Freire, 2015), or collaboratively constructed, within the interaction between teacher and student.
While not opposed at the abstracted level of theory, these tenets of critique and dialogue can conflict with one another in the practice of critical pedagogy. Philip and Zavala (2016) illustrate one potential conflict through their analysis of the talk of Hugo, a self-identified critical educator. Hugo demonstrated a deep commitment to social transformation and the centrality of critique in that aim. Yet, he drew “crude dichotomizations” (p. 7) between those he viewed as critical educators in his teacher education program and those he did not, and he proposed a banking approach, rather than a dialogic one, should be used to educate those deemed noncritical. For Hugo, critique was supreme, necessitating an abandonment of dialogue.
In this article, we analyze two events that illustrate additional ways these tenets of critique and dialogue may both intersect and contradict one another. Rather than consider this apparent conflict as a problem to be solved, we instead draw on a languaging framework to approach these intersections as tensions negotiated within teacher–student interactions.
Methodology: A Case Study of Languaging Critical Pedagogy
In this article, we analyze data collected within a case study of one fourth-grade classroom. Informed by the tradition of ethnography (Heath & Street, 2008), the study included long-term engagement and participant observation designed to examine language and literacy practices in interaction. We focus on two key events (Thomas, 2015) that reveal something particular from the larger study: (1) to explain the phenomenon in which we’re interested, critical pedagogical practice, and (2) to build mid-level theory, or an explanatory model (Thomas, 2015) or heuristic, hovering “just above the particularities of any social event” (Bloome & Beauchemin, 2016, p. 154). The phenomenon we aim to explain is that of critical pedagogy as ongoing and co-constructed through languaging actions. Here, we do not suggest that we are building grand theory or even something altogether new. Rather, we draw on existing theories of languaging in order to view critical pedagogy from another perspective.
The languaging framework in which we situate this work (Becker, 1991; Bloome & Beach, 2019) is “interested not in language per se but in languaging as it is and as it evolves in a particular unique event and in languaging as a set of social practices’’ (Bloome & Beach, 2019, p. 3). That is, we are interested in how meaning is collaboratively (interactively) constructed (and continually reconstructed) between interlocutors within and across particular times and spaces. One of the things made meaningful within these interactions, and arguably all, is the concept of personhood (Bloome & Beauchemin, 2016), or how a culture or community defines what it means to be a person including attributes, types of people, and degrees of agency. We argue that the construction of horizontal relationships in which teachers and students are both subjects (or personhood as the I–You orientational relationship as Bloome and Beauchemin [2016] might say) is accomplished, or not, through languaging. Thus, through a languaging lens, we can examine how dialogic relationships are continually made, remade, and unmade through languaging that unfold as people “act and react to each other” (Bloome et al., 2004, p. 93) across time and space. We intentionally drew on languaging in this analysis of critical pedagogical practice, in part, because it shifts interpretation away from a centering of our own perspectives as researchers toward seeking to understand the unique orientations and commitments of our teacher and student participants (Rymes et al., 2005).
Similarly, because we were interested in examining the complexity of critical pedagogy as it was practiced in everyday classroom literacy events, a languaging perspective allows us to consider how teachers and students constructed and reconstructed a critical literacy pedagogy within and across these continually unfolding literacy interactions, engaging with tenets of both critique and dialogue. By examining the languaging of classroom literacy interactions, we could explore the mechanisms teachers and students employed to engage in critique and dialogue. Here, we borrow the interactional constructs of proposal, acknowledgment, and recognition developed in Bloome and Egan-Robertson’s (1993) theorizing of intertextuality as socially constructed. By analyzing how teachers and students proposed, acknowledged, and recognized (or did not recognize) particular orientations to text, we examined how critique and dialogue were collaboratively languaged between a teacher and her students, a practice described more thoroughly in the section on analytic approach.
School Context
Huerta Elementary School was located in a large central Texas city. The surrounding community was predominantly Latina/o/x/e, and more than half of the students were bilingual in Spanish and English. Reflecting broader histories and practices of racism and segregation (Behnken, 2011), the student body consisted almost entirely of students of color, and the teachers were predominantly White, especially in English-medium classes like the one featured here.
Huerta had a long history of engagement with the local university, whose teacher education program centered asset-based and justice-oriented pedagogies. There was a dedicated classroom at Huerta where university teacher education courses were taught, and across the years, multiple research projects were undertaken at the school. We note this because it helps to contextualize Huerta as an educational community dedicated to supporting (mostly white) preservice teachers’ learning about, with, and in a largely bilingual, working-class community of color.
Simultaneous with these strivings toward asset-based and justice-oriented pedagogies, however, were the pressures of high-stakes testing and attendant standardization and surveillance, which particularly target schools like Huerta serving working-class students of color (Au, 2016). We have written elsewhere (Hikida & Taylor, 2020; Taylor, 2019) about how high-stakes testing pressures shaped curriculum, pedagogy, and relationships between administration, teachers, and students, as well as how these teachers carved out space to critique these structural impositions alongside their students. Taken together, we situate Huerta as a school striving toward progressive and critical pedagogies within a broader context of neoliberal White supremacy.
Focal Classroom and Data Collection
Having spent several years prior to data collection at Huerta Elementary as teacher educators and researchers, we leveraged our experiences and relationships to select the focal teacher from whose classroom we collected data. This teacher—Sandra—was selected based on classroom observations and recommendations from administrators and colleagues identifying her as a skilled literacy teacher. Sandra taught a self-contained, English as a second language, fourth-grade class. The majority of students in this class were institutionally identified as Latina/o/x/e, with a smaller portion of students identified as Black. Nearly all students lived in the predominately Latina/o/x/e working-class neighborhood surrounding the school.
Sandra was a White, middle-class, English-speaking educator with 2 years of teaching experience at the time of data collection. Recognizing her racial positionality, Sandra reported making curricular and pedagogical choices with the goal of decentering Whiteness. For example, she selected texts written by and featuring people of color and openly discussed her own privileged positions. Her approach to literacy instruction was situated in process- and practice-based approaches (Bomer, 2011; Graves, 1983), emphasizing student engagement with connected texts. She structured the enactment of these approaches through a literacy workshop model (Laman, 2013), providing students extended opportunities for self-selected and self-directed reading and writing. In informal interviews, students generally spoke positively both about their literacy instruction and about Sandra as their teacher, often expressing particular appreciation for their opportunities to read and write texts of their choosing.
Both authors, Laura and Michiko, knew Sandra and some of her students prior to the study through our work as teacher educators and researchers at the school. As part of a larger study of asset-based literacy practices at Huerta, Laura collected data in Sandra’s classroom primarily during the spring semester of the 2015–2016 school year. Drawing on ethnographic tools of data collection (Heath & Street, 2008), Laura observed literacy instruction for several days each week and for several hours each visit. She documented everyday literacy instruction through (1) audio- and video-recordings (64 hr), (2) participant observation and field notes (32 days), and (3) four formal interviews as well as many informal conversations with Sandra focused on literacy instructional philosophies, practices, and decisions.
Analytic Approach
As authors, we are engaged in an ongoing conversation about the data (Smagorinsky, 2008), the context, and the relationship between the teacher and students, among other things. In particular, we seek to better understand how asset-based and justice-oriented pedagogies might be languaged between students and teachers amid neoliberal accountability. We come to this work as former teachers who each worked in public elementary schools in Texas that were demographically similar to Huerta and shared similar accountability pressures. Laura identifies as a White woman who primarily speaks English, and Michiko identifies as a half-Japanese Chicana who speaks both English and some Spanish. These and other dimensions of our identities necessarily shaped both our data collection and analysis. In coming together to analyze these data, we have sought to intentionally examine multiple interpretations of the data; similarly, we have shared our initial findings with other scholars engaged in work at the intersections of race/racism, language, and critical pedagogy, using their feedback to further shape this analysis.
As part of our ongoing engagement with data collected at Huerta, we have systematically analyzed the impact of high-stakes testing on curriculum and instruction in Sandra’s classroom (Hikida & Taylor, 2020). As part of this ongoing discussion and analysis, we have visited and revisited particular events through various theoretical and analytical frameworks as we worked to make sense of them. For this analysis, we were particularly interested in developing understandings of how teachers and students language critical pedagogy in their everyday interactions. As such, we found ourselves returning to events where critical pedagogical interactions appeared to emerge at an unexpected time (the first key event) and where interpretations of an event vis-à-vis critical pedagogy shifted through multiple phases of analysis (the second key event).
As key events (Thomas, 2015), they are not meant to represent the totality of the data corpus. Rather, they were intentionally selected to support our conceptualization of critical pedagogy as interactionally co-constructed and to illustrate what might be made visible regarding critical pedagogy through the use of various analytic approaches. As detailed below, we analyzed each event first ethnographically and then through microanalytic discourse analysis.
Ethnographic analysis
Our ethnographic analysis began during data collection (Heath & Street, 2008), as Laura wrote field notes and analytic memos that placed her experiences in Sandra’s class in relation to existing scholarship of critical pedagogy. In particular, Laura noted how Sandra’s interactions with her students often aligned with theorizing of critical dialogue. Then, as part of our previous constant comparative analyses (Thomas, 2015) of these data centering high-stakes testing, we found moments of apparent acquiescence and the examples of outright resistance and critique of testing culture across the data corpus (Hikida & Taylor, 2020). We also analyzed interviews with Sandra to consider how she articulated her teaching philosophies and her perception of her role as a White teacher in classrooms serving almost exclusively students of color. Understanding Sandra’s philosophy of teaching and the classroom culture and practices from this ethnographic perspective helped us to contextualize moments that might be interpreted differently when viewed only through the micro lens of line-by-line discourse analysis.
Microanalytic languaging analysis
Informed by Smagorinsky’s (2008) description of collaborative coding, we began this phase of analysis by independently analyzing a transcript of one event. We then brought these analyses together to discuss our analytic processes and what those processes revealed and obscured. During those discussions, we came to a consensus regarding how we would attempt the next round of microanalysis. Again, we each individually applied the agreed-upon analytic process to a transcript in order to subsequently bring those analyses together to discuss. Through this iterative process of analysis and discussion, we arrived at a refraction of a framework first put forward by Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993). As mentioned, we used their interactional constructs of proposal, recognition, and acknowledgment, along with attention to the subsequent social consequences, as tools to analyze these events. While Bloome and Egan-Robertson used these constructs to analyze the social construction of intertextuality, we use these constructs to examine data for stance proposals, or ways of orienting toward a particular text. For example, one might orient toward a text from a stance of critique by questioning the issues of power and equity. Through this heuristic, we were better able to understand critical pedagogy as interactionally constructed by interlocutors acting and reacting to each other (Bloome et al., 2004).
We note that “meanings are enacted not only through the verbal but also through the use of public embodied actions” (Bloome & Beach, 2019, p. 6) including proxemics, gestures, intonation, eye gaze, and a multitude of other semiotic practices (Bloome & Beach, 2019; Gumperz, 1992). Thus, we attended to how recognition and acknowledgment might be indexed verbally or through some other publicly displayed action, such as a head nod or smile (Bloome et al., 2004). Below, we present the ethnographic and languaging analyses of two key events. The first documents how Sandra and her students engaged in critique through dialogue amid standardizing administrative mandates. The second provides an illustration of critique and dialogue in tension.
Co-Constructing Critical Dialogue: The Holocaust and High-Stakes Testing
Our first explanatory event involves a discussion about the Holocaust that occurred between Sandra and a small group of students during mandated test preparation. Our analysis of this event as an enactment of critical pedagogy is two-fold. First, and the primary focus of this analysis, the event represents an instance in which Sandra and her students defied an administrative mandate to engage in test preparation, instead choosing to pursue a topic of more genuine interest to the group. Second, the event involves Sandra and her students engaging in critical dialogue regarding ethical and political issues related to the Holocaust. Below, the ethnographic analysis documents the group’s momentary defiance of the mandated test preparation, while the microanalytic languaging analysis directs attention to how this defiance was proposed and enacted (made socially consequential) within the interaction.
Ethnographic Analysis
During the spring semester, high-stakes tests loomed large at Huerta Elementary, with administration mandating teachers focus a significant portion of instruction exclusively on test preparation. One mandated form of test preparation was daily teacher-led small groups where participants reviewed practice questions for the standardized reading test. Critical of this emphasis on test preparation, Sandra sought to provide opportunities for more authentic reading and writing while fulfilling administrative mandates. Sandra constructed one such opportunity in collaboration with her student teacher, Ms. Schwartz. Based on Ms. Schwartz’s ongoing professional learning about teaching the Holocaust, the two teachers designed a Holocaust inquiry unit led by Ms. Schwartz, who met with students in small groups while Sandra led the mandated test preparation sessions. This juxtaposition of high-stakes test preparation and Holocaust inquiry produced an opportunity for critical dialogue between Sandra and one particular small group of students.
The focal event began when Sandra called four students to join her for their daily test preparation after they had finished their inquiry meeting with Ms. Schwartz. These students—Inez, Alicia, David, and Kadeem—had been placed in this group by campus administrators, who had divided Sandra’s students into homogenous small groups based on reading test scores. Their test scores were slightly below the class average, although Sandra noted in interviews that she felt these scores did not accurately represent the students’ varied literacy development.
As a result of the administration’s mandated ability grouping, this group of four had been meeting together regularly at Sandra’s table for their test preparation sessions. On this day, rather than immediately beginning to work with the test preparation packets in front of them, the students shared with Sandra what they had learned about the Holocaust that day and the emotions this learning provoked. Instead of shifting the focus to test preparation, Sandra participated in the conversation, sharing her own feelings. She then told students about the recent trial of a former Nazi, prompting conversation regarding whether and how to punish former Nazis for crimes committed more than 70 years ago.
After about 10 minutes, Sandra did shift to test preparation, but only briefly. After directing students to read the assigned test passage, Sandra searched for more information about the recent trial on her phone. After a few minutes, she read aloud some of the information she found. Students shifted their focus away from their test reading and once again began discussing the complex ethical issues surrounding the trial. Ultimately, Sandra and the students discussed a range of issues related to the Holocaust, with the conversation moving well beyond a simple recounting of historical events. In this ensuing conversation, the group considered the difficult decisions that people targeted by the Nazis had to make, related the Holocaust to other historical genocides, and compared the Holocaust with the institution of slavery in the United States. After 30 minutes, Sandra closed the conversation, glancing down at the test passage in front of her and saying “All right guys, we’ll just, we’ll finish this up tomorrow.”
This ethnographic analysis illustrates one instance of Sandra, in collaboration with both Ms. Schwartz and her students, engaging in covert resistance to mandated test preparation, concentrating instead on critical dialogue about an issue of importance to students. What it does not reveal, however, is how such resistance emerged during this particular meeting. While the entire class participated in the Holocaust inquiry project over several weeks, this was the only documented instance in which Sandra’s small group test preparation session focused instead on the Holocaust. How did such a disruption occur? A microanalytic languaging analysis makes visible how this shift in orientation from high-stakes testing to a critical dialogue about the Holocaust was proposed and collaboratively taken up through languaging actions.
Microanalytic Languaging Analysis
The microanalysis details how Sandra and her students initiated and sustained this critical dialogue about the Holocaust despite pressure to focus on high-stakes test preparation. (see Online Supplemental Material, Appendix A). The opening exchange illustrates how the initial proposal to focus on the Holocaust was proposed not by Sandra, but instead by a student, Inez. Inez initiated this topical proposal by referencing Ms. Schwartz’s announcement that the class would be writing letters to a Holocaust survivor (Line 1: “Ms. Schwartz taught us a surprise.”). Sandra acknowledged and recognized this proposal, explaining that Ms. Schwartz had already shared the exciting news with her (Lines 2 and 4). Perhaps encouraged by Sandra’s recognition, Inez continued to talk about the Holocaust, proposing a slight shift in focus from recounting an event to discussing her feelings about the Holocaust (Line 5: “I feel bad.”). Both Sandra and another student, Alicia, acknowledged and recognized this proposal and expressed their shared upset and disbelief (Lines 6–8). Significant is how participants’ identity positions (and attendant power) intersect with the process of proposal, acknowledgment, and recognition. Sandra’s position as teacher likely shaped this process, given that this position affords more authority to her contributions than to those made by students. Here, Inez’s proposal to orient conversation to the Holocaust would likely have been unsuccessful if not for Sandra’s uptake of this orientation.
Several turns later, Sandra made a proposal to shift the conversation to a related event recently reported in the news—a former Nazi, now 94 years old, had been put on trial for his actions in the Holocaust (Lines 20–26). Although subtle, this shift was significant in developing the conversation from a focus on the Holocaust as a solely historical event that occurred long ago (as well as an event where right and wrong have been clearly defined from a contemporary perspective) to one focused on how people continue to grapple with issues that arose during the Holocaust. This shift furthered the development of a critical dialogue by guiding students to reflect upon complex issues of injustice. Students acknowledged this shift by asking questions about the man and the trial, with discussion continuing over several more turns.
Four minutes into this discussion, high-stakes testing became salient in the form of an interruption by another teacher (Line 38), who spoke with Sandra for 1 min about the logistics for an after-school test preparation session. With the group’s conversation about the Holocaust interrupted, Sandra could have used this disruption to shift the group’s orientation to the planned task of test preparation. Instead, another student in the group, David, proposed the conversation orient back to their earlier critical dialogue, expressing his confusion (or perhaps frustration) about why the former Nazi had not been charged with his crimes earlier (Lines 43 and 44). Inez quickly acknowledged and recognized this shift in orientation to the previous conversation (Lines 45 and 47), followed by acknowledgment, recognition, and uptake from Sandra, who provided additional context about the situation (Lines 49–55). Mirroring the event’s opening sequence, it was again a student who proposed the focus on the Holocaust and Sandra who supported its development.
The small group’s conversation about the trial continued without any proposals to (re)orient to test preparation. Then, after 5 minutes, Sandra made a proposal for the group to begin the test preparation activity. First, she expressed excitement about their opportunity to write to a Holocaust survivor (Lines 64–68), referencing the event Inez referred to in her initial proposal. Then, she made a proposal to shift orientation: “Yeah. Oof. So cool. And
The discussion of the Holocaust appeared to come to a close, as students began reading the assigned test passages. After 45 seconds, however, Sandra quietly stated “I’m gonna look up this guy who’s on trial” (Line 91). While this utterance recalled their previous conversational topic, students did not audibly respond to it, perhaps interpreting Sandra’s quiet tone as intending the comment as an aside. Another 25 seconds passed with students reading the assigned passage while Sandra apparently read a news article about the former Nazi’s trial using her phone, followed by a brief interaction between Sandra and Alicia about the practice test.
After 15 more seconds passed in silence, Sandra said, “Hmm” and audibly inhaled, then began paraphrasing information she learned about the trial from the article: “It says, one of the guards at Auschwitz, y’all have learned about that place, right?” (Lines 104–106). In contrast to her previous turn stating her intention to find more information, she explicitly directed her comments to the students in this turn, prompting several students to acknowledge and recognize her proposal with overlapping affirmations (Line 107). The conversation continued uninterrupted by test preparation for the remainder of the group’s session, approximately 20 minutes. While Sandra did not make explicit her reason for returning to their critical dialogue about the Holocaust, her actions suggest she intentionally decided to abandon test preparation and to instead affirm and follow her students’ interests, which had been made clear through their earlier proposals.
We theorize this event as an illustration of how everyday critical pedagogy can be (and is) co-constructed between students and teacher within the contemporary neoliberal educational landscape. Mandated test preparation looms in the background throughout the conversation, resurfacing multiple times during the 30-minute discussion. Yet Sandra and her students repeatedly reoriented the languaging of this event toward critical dialogue. In designing the Holocaust inquiry unit with her student teacher, Sandra partially shaped context from which this event emerged. However, it was students who initiated the conversation in this small group context—Inez with her initial proposal and later David with his. In each case, Sandra recognized and took up these proposed orientations, using the power afforded to her as teacher to hold space (Hikida, 2018) for students’ intellectual curiosity, rather than allowing administrative mandates to guide their conversation. Sandra also shaped the critique by leading her students in wrestling with the complexity of genocide and its aftermath. This discussion presents an illustration of how the tenets of critique and dialogue can be mutually constitutive in and through languaging, with students’ interest in envisioning and critiquing sociopolitical issues guiding the conversation. In the next section, we analyze another interaction between Sandra and a student, one which we theorize foregrounds dialogue over critique, in turn raising questions about how these two tenets may at times conflict.
Critique and Dialogue in Tension: Reading Goosebumps
In our initial ethnographic analysis of this event, we interpreted this reading conference between Sandra and DeMarcus as an instance where a teacher avoided an opportunity to guide a student in the critical analysis of a problematic text. As such, it could be viewed as a failure of Sandra to enact critical pedagogy in that moment. A reanalysis of this event employing microanalytic languaging analysis, however, suggests an alternative interpretation, in which the teacher did not abandon critical pedagogy but instead foregrounded the tenet of dialogue over critique in that moment.
Ethnographic Analysis
This interaction occurred toward the end of the year, while Sandra’s class was engaged in their daily period of independent reading. As students read books of their own choosing, Sandra moved quietly around the room, conferring with different students about their reading. Sandra paused as she walked by DeMarcus, who was seated in a chair reading Goosebumps: Monster Survival Guide (Lurie, 2015), an informational text about the fictional monsters featured in a recent Goosebumps movie. DeMarcus, who identified as Black, enjoyed reading and Sandra viewed him as a good student, although she noted that he was sometimes quiet during reading conferences. Sandra initiated a conference with DeMarcus by asking, “What are
The complicating dimension of this event stems from a section of text the pair read and discussed together. Following prompting from Sandra to further explain the text’s unique genre, DeMarcus flipped through the text to find an illustrative example, pausing (apparently arbitrarily) on a two-page spread featuring “The Muglani,” which the text introduced as “a tribe of medicine men…also known as witch doctors” (p. 30). In contrast to other monsters featured in this text, the anthropomorphic depiction of the Muglani evoked racist stereotypes of people of color as primitive and nonhuman.
A large photograph, ostensibly originating from the film, covered one third of the page. It featured a brown-skinned man with clothing indexing primitive stereotypes, including an animal-print loincloth, a large bone worn as a necklace, and long fringe covering his lower legs. His face was partially covered in a white, painted design. The written text mirrored this stereotypical depiction, including quotations of a mock language the Muglani are said to chant (“Oom oom oom klak-kwe-vod-rup!” [p. 31]). While the photograph appeared to depict a human, the text clearly positioned the Muglani as monsters, not humans (stating, “they don’t like humans” [p. 30]). Taken together, the text constructs a nonspecific, stereotypical portrayal of indigenous people while simultaneously explicitly naming these characters as not human. In doing so, it unequivocally (re)produces racist discourses of people of color as subhuman.
While such (re)production of racism in a commercially produced children’s text is itself problematic, our analysis here focuses on how Sandra and DeMarcus engaged with this text in conversation. The text provided what we saw as a clear opportunity for Sandra to guide DeMarcus in a critique of the text’s racism. Yet, while the pair read and discussed this portion of the text, at no point did their conversation address the racist depiction of the Muglani. Instead, they focused on how the author used features to communicate facts about the monsters. Our initial analysis, then, suggested this conference represented a race-evasive pedagogical approach commonly enacted by White teachers (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Picower, 2009). This apparent missed opportunity for critical pedagogy was surprising to us, given the many other instances in the data when Sandra engaged students in explicit discussions of race and racism.
A second analysis of the event, one centering its co-construction through a languaging framework, suggests an alternative interpretation. When focused on how DeMarcus and Sandra proposed, recognized, and took up particular readings of the text, analysis suggests this event was not (necessarily) an example of White teacher engaging in race-evasive teaching, but instead, we argue, a teacher foregrounding dialogue over critique in enacting critical pedagogy in that moment.
Microanalytic Languaging Analysis
A microanalytic languaging analysis of this event makes visible how DeMarcus and Sandra co-constructed their focus on the author’s use of text features to convey information. It was DeMarcus who initially proposed such a focus, which Sandra acknowledged and built upon in subsequent turns. Sandra opened the conference with a broad proposal to orient their conversation to the text DeMarcus was reading (see Online Supplemental Material, Appendix B). DeMarcus then proposed a more specific focus on the text’s purpose, to inform readers about the Goosebumps monsters (Line 11). Acknowledging this proposal, Sandra asked DeMarcus for more explanation (Lines 13–15 and 17), prompting DeMarcus to open the text at random, landing on the Muglani section.
18–20 DeMarcus: (pointing at text box) This part, so you read it, and then it says, “Know your monster,” and sometimes it has like weaknesses and, 21 Sandra: Oh: 22–23 DeMarcus: So (DeMarcus reads aloud portion of text box) 24 Sandra: So this is like facts about it? 25 DeMarcus: Like how to survive it, 26 Sandra: And each one is a different monster? 27–29 DeMarcus: Mm-hm. (DeMarcus reads aloud remainder of text box)
In this excerpted exchange, DeMarcus proposed a focus on a particular text feature—the “Know Your Monster” text box listing facts about the Muglani—by gesturing to and reading from it. Sandra acknowledged and tentatively recognized DeMarcus’s proposal (Lines 21, 24, and 26) with her use of a rising intonation suggesting uncertainty. This allowed DeMarcus an opportunity to affirm or correct Sandra’s recognition, which he confirmed (Line 27). Then, DeMarcus reads around the rest of the text box (Lines 28 and 29) before flipping through the pages of the text to show Sandra other examples.
After the above exchange, Sandra took up DeMarcus’s proposal to orient toward text features, prompting DeMarcus to consider the author’s purpose for including specific text features and how they support the reader’s engagement with the text. One consequence of this co-constructed decision to focus on text features, however, was that Sandra and DeMarcus do not discuss the text’s racist depiction of the Muglani. As detailed above, this event might then be analyzed as a failure to enact Freirean critical pedagogy, namely, the critique of a text (re)producing racism. Alternatively, however, this event might be viewed as an instantiation of how critique can exist tension with another key Freirean tenet—dialogue.
DeMarcus’s interest in the text was prompted not by a desire to deconstruct racist stereotypes but instead to learn about monsters featured in the movie. The topic was of particular relevance to DeMarcus because, as he shared later in the conference (Lines 63 and 64), he had recently watched the movie with his family and wondered about the monsters’ backstories. He sought out the book explicitly for this purpose, borrowing it from a classmate who brought it from home. While it is possible that DeMarcus did interpret dimensions of the text as racist, his languaging actions suggest he was interested in orienting the conversation elsewhere in this moment, focusing on how the text helped him to learn about a topic relevant to him and his family. Perhaps we might see this as evidence that DeMarcus was foregrounding certain dimensions of his identity (e.g., family member; Goosebumps reader) over others (e.g., Black person; critical text analyst) in that moment. In acknowledging and taking up this orientation to the text, rather than attempting to reorient the conversation toward racism, we argue that Sandra foregrounded dialogue over critique. Consequently, she centered DeMarcus’s humanity as a full person with multiple interests and identities, all of which were valid to bring to the reading of a text. She also languaged herself into a horizontal relationship with DeMarcus as they investigated the text, with Sandra following his lead rather than dictating the focus of their conversation.
We are not suggesting that Sandra’s decision to take up DeMarcus’s proposed focus on text features was the only way she might have enacted a critical pedagogy in that moment. By taking up DeMarcus’s proposed orientation, Sandra missed an opportunity to direct attention to how the text’s depiction of the Muglani (re)produced racist discourses, which could have supported DeMarcus’s practice of critiquing such oppressive discourses. Certainly, a persistent orientation toward less critical readings of texts would be cause for concern from the perspective of critical pedagogy, but our long-term ethnographic data indicate this was not the case. We argue that this event provides an illustration of how the tenets of dialogue and critique can exist in tension in the everyday languaging of critical pedagogy, at times resulting in teachers and students foregrounding dialogue rather than critique.
Discussion
There is no one right way to do critical pedagogy. Rather it is a “multi-voiced field and movement” (Vossoughi & Gutierrez, 2016, p. 140), one that demands that we as teachers and researchers recursively reflect on and rework our practices of teaching and learning (Aukerman, 2012; Kumashiro, 2015; Love, 2019). Accordingly, what we have illustrated here through these key events is not to be understood as the way of enacting critical pedagogy nor was this our goal. Rather, what we hope to have contributed is a representation of critical pedagogy as dynamic, temporal, multiplicitous, partial, and continually languaged. Through the examination of these moments both ethnographically and through the adapted discourse analytic framework of Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1993), we aimed to illustrate how critical pedagogy’s tenets of critique and dialogue are sometimes mutually constitutive and sometimes conflicting. Rather than hierarchically juxtapose events as better or worse instantiations of critical pedagogy, we argue for the analytic value of orienting to the how of critical pedagogy in the everyday, as it is continually made and remade within the ongoing unfolding of everyday classroom events (Vossoughi & Gutierrez, 2016).
We argued in the first key event that Sandra and her students co-constructed critical pedagogy by engaging in a critique of the testing regime when Sandra took up students’ proposals to discuss their inquiry project (which itself can be seen as a critique of how testing exerts curricular control [Au, 2007]) during time marked for test preparation. Through ethnographic analysis, we demonstrated what happened in this event (a defiance of mandated testing curriculum in favor of a critical dialogue centering students’ interests), and in the microanalysis, we demonstrate how it was jointly accomplished through languaging actions as interlocutors proposed foci for the interaction, which were or were not taken up (by the teacher in particular, whose position empowered her to sanction topical shifts). We juxtaposed that event, a relatively unambiguous construction of critical dialogue, with the more complicated conference between Sandra and DeMarcus. This latter event could be interpreted as a failure to enact critical pedagogy. Yet, through the line-by-line microanalysis, we argued that Sandra did not abandon critical pedagogy in that moment but instead chose to foreground the Freirean tenet of dialogue, and with it both DeMarcus’s humanity and their relationship. The moment-to-moment languaging of the event positioned DeMarcus’s knowledge and interests as legitimate within the context of school as he forwarded himself, not exclusively (or essentialized) as a Black boy but also as a reader with particular purposes for engaging with text. We note that in both interactions, Sandra took up and elaborated on proposals initiated by her students. This positioning of the teacher as following the lead of her students seems an important aspect of the ways Sandra engaged with students in dialogue.
We recognize possible concerns regarding Sandra’s decision to foreground dialogue over critique in her conference with DeMarcus. Certainly, if a teacher were to perpetually prioritize dialogue over critique (which our ethnographic data suggest was not the case for Sandra), they would not be enacting a Freirean critical pedagogy. However, the converse—a persistent prioritizing of critique over dialogue—is similarly problematic from a Freirean perspective. Freire (2015) repeatedly emphasized learners’ humanity as fundamental: “They cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become human beings” (p. 68). Yet, an analytic emphasis on the ends rather than the means of critical pedagogy can produce just that, inducing the use of transmissive teaching methods that forgo dialogue in favor of achieving critical outcomes (Philip & Zavala, 2016; Vossoughi & Guitteriez, 2016). This potential reinscription of dehumanizing, banking teaching is perhaps especially a concern when the teacher is White and the students are people of color (Ellsworth, 1989). In contrast, our focus on critical pedagogy as languaged through interaction allowed an attention to the means through which Sandra constructed “horizontal relationship(s)…of mutual trust” (Freire, 2015, p. 91) with students of color by acknowledging their proposals as legitimate and worthy of dialogue.
We concede that the critical pedagogical practices analyzed here are imperfect, but we maintain that perfection is impossible. Echoing Aukerman (2012), we assert “there are no discursive utopias…educators must make choices about how to teach from among imperfect options” (p. 48). Yet in making those imperfect choices, teachers and their students can build coalitions of conscience (Collins, 2017) in which they collaboratively work toward justice. We argue this kind of collaboration is predicated on an understanding of how power, positionality, and context shape practice—what is said, to whom, where, when, and how (Bloome et al., 2004; Ellsworth, 1989). It is on these dimensions we have focused here, and it is on dimensions we believe it is important for scholarship on critical pedagogy to continue to focus.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material, final_Taylor_appendix_a - Unpacking Everyday Critical Pedagogy: Languaging Critique and Dialogue
Supplemental Material, final_Taylor_appendix_a for Unpacking Everyday Critical Pedagogy: Languaging Critique and Dialogue by Laura A. Taylor and Michiko Hikida in Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material, final_Taylor_appendix_b - Unpacking Everyday Critical Pedagogy: Languaging Critique and Dialogue
Supplemental Material, final_Taylor_appendix_b for Unpacking Everyday Critical Pedagogy: Languaging Critique and Dialogue by Laura A. Taylor and Michiko Hikida in Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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References
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