Disclaimer: I’m Still Learning
As I’ve started to read The Critical Turn in Education, the progress has been slower than I had hoped. I’ve received feedback on preliminary drafts of my next two entries from several people. All of it has been very supportive, but there’s been a range of responses from “spot on” to “very confusing.” The difference led me to think a bit more about what my goals are with writing these entries.
The biggest problem so far has been that the analysis I present isn’t organized very well, which makes it hard for the reader to essentialize the points I’m trying to make. When considering some major rewrites, I realized that my purpose here is for me to understand the ideas of Critical Pedagogy as clearly as possible. Reading and comprehending this book is very hard for me. The writer’s thoughts are often scattered, there’s buzzword jargon mixed in everywhere, and when it is comprehensible, I find it extremely frustrating that these ideas have as much influence as they do. I need the writing assignment to keep me focused on the goal of parsing what the author is getting at and putting what he says into my own words. Without that goal, it’s way too easy for me to gloss over things (or get mad and throw the book at a wall).
I’m going to keep writing these pieces and posting them to the Substack, but it’s probably better to think of them more as journal entries rather than editorials. The purpose is closer to presenting information rather than convincing the reader of my position. The two things I want to accomplish with each entry are: summarize the content of the chapter in my own words and document the instances where the Critical Theorists are abusing language.
Ultimately, I hope to know Critical Pedagogy well enough to provide a succinct, essentialized summary of the philosophy, describe where and how it connects to the problems in education today, make criticisms or predictions, and offer advice about how to combat or escape the effects of Critical Pedagogy. Unfortunately, I just don’t know it well enough to do that yet. The entries in this blog are going to be what gets me there. I’m posting it publicly because I really want any feedback people can give about things that are confusing, key points I’ve missed, where I’ve failed to steelman something properly, or places they’ve seen these practices implemented in education today. So, if you ever have anything to add after reading one of my entries, please put it in the comments—it’s the discourse that’s going to make me better at this.
The first piece of analysis will be up later today.
Image Credit: User: xOneca https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hand_made_dense_labyrinth.png