#moocmooc & Critical Pedagogy

I'm following #moocmooc's exploration of critical pedagogy, and this week I read Chapter 4, "The Promise of Critical Pedagogy in the Age of Globalization" in Henry A. Giroux's On Critical Pedagogy (2011). As near as I can tell, Giroux's argument goes something like this:

• We are under the threat of a neoliberalism that is 
• dismantling the safety net of the state, 
• defining democracy in terms of profit-making and market freedoms, 
• diminishing civil liberties, and
• thus robbing us of "the ethical ideal of intervening in the world" and insisting that we "adapt both our hopes and our abilities to the new global market."
• To counter this worldwide threat, we educators need new educational approaches that should both resurrect the "blemished traditions of Enlightenment thought" (freedom, equality, liberty, self-determination, and civic agency) and engage various post-modern discourses (feminism, postmodernism, critical theory, post-structuralism, neo-marxism, etc) that expand Enlightenment thought.
• avoiding the split between "modernist material politics" and "postmodern cultural politics" by recognizing "how each works through and on the other within and across specific historical contexts and social formations" and
• affirming modernity's democratic legacy while rethinking it in light of the postmodern insistence "that democracy is never finished and must be viewed primarily as a process of democratization."
• Educators must define "the pedagogical as a political practice while at the same time making the political more pedagogical" as "pedagogy has less to do with the language of technique and methodology than it does with issues of politics and power." Giroux sums up education as "a moral and political practice that is always implicated in power relations and must be understood as a cultural politics that offers both a particular version and vision of civic life, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment."
• Learning must be "linked to social change" and pedagogy must regenerate both "a renewed sense of social and political agency and a critical subversion of dominant power itself", for "learning is not about processing received knowledge but about actually transforming it as part of a more expansive struggle for individual rights and social justice."

In the rest of his article, he addresses the implications of his definition of education for students, teachers, and society.

On the whole, I agree with Giroux, but this leads to one of my main problems with this article: It is needlessly abstract and neither education nor politics are abstract. They are very concrete. I suspect that if I did not already agree with Giroux, then this essay would not persuade me to accept critical pedagogy. At best, the essay tweaks some of my understanding of critical pedagogy, but it does not connect me to it very well—not nearly so well as Paulo Freire does. Freire leaves chalk dust under my fingernails, Giroux does not.

This is most unfortunate, because if critical pedagogy is to have any chance of success then it must succeed with the fourth-grade teacher who is trying to decide if she should focus less on penmanship and more on keyboarding skills or the college biology professor debating whether or not to allow cell phone use during her exams. I suspect that these issues on the ground seem more to do with the language of technique and methodology than [they do] with issues of politics and power, and Giroux would not likely convince those teachers otherwise—at least not with this essay alone. Perhaps this is not Giroux's intention, though his article seems to have an argumentative edge to it, but I wish he had connected better to the classroom.

A second issue for me involves framing education in opposition to a particular social movement: in this case, neoliberalism. I am not a neoliberal, but I have to ask if I could be a neoliberal and pursue a critical pedagogy at the same time. I think I could. I would not be a fundamentalist, but I could pursue a line of critical inquiry that agreed with neoliberal conclusions about the role of capital and the market in society and the implications for people and education. My own thinking has taken me in a very different direction, but some very smart, critical thinkers happen to be neoliberals, which is what makes them so dangerous to my mind.

This leads me to a third issue with Giroux's argument, and I'll stop here: he comes too close to privileging critical pedagogy above all other pedagogies. For me, this privilege is too close to fundamentalism which sanctions one view, one system, to the exclusion of any other and has the primary objective of protecting itself from outside influence, with the concomitant tasks either of proselytizing those outside or of destroying them. While Giroux certainly does not go this far and while he does say that critical pedagogy should always scrutinize its own methods and madness within the local context, I still sense something in his presentation of a blessing and privilege above other views, and I still suspect that he would not mind too much if neoliberalism disappeared. I would have preferred that he talk in terms of the current affordances of critical pedagogy (and perhaps this is implied) while acknowledging that whatever affordances we have now are likely to be impediments in the not too distant future. Our rock-solid physics will almost certainly be overturned by the next Einstein. Critical pedagogy will be rendered irrelevant by the next Freire. Such knowledge keeps us humble, I think, without undermining our agency. We have to make decisions with the full understanding that eventually they will be seen as wrong.

Beatles vs Stones: Google Gives the Facts

I know Google takes some hits in the press from those who fear that the company is taking over the world, but for what I pay them — which so far has been zero — I think they are a wonderful company that has offered the world some extremely valuable resources, often at no cost. I'm playing now with Ngram Viewer, one of their latest freebies, and within 10 minutes, it has helped me resolve one of the longest running intellectual questions of my generation: who was the greatest rock band: the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?

At last I have some hard evidence to counter the silly, often drunken or stoned (pun intended) opinions of those who thought the Stones were the greatest. Clearly, the Beatles are the top rock band ever. And not only do they beat-le the Stones, but they also beat-le Elvis and Michael Jackson. You want proof? I got proof.

Ngram accesses a huge database of about 500 billion words printed over the past 200 years. As the New York Times reports: "Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities." Using Ngram Viewer, anyone — a 4th grader, for instance — can research the frequency of terms and phrases within a body of literature for a given time period. I chose to look at English between 1950 and 2000 to see how often the Beatles were mentioned, especially in comparison to the Stones, Elvis, and Michael Jackson. As you can clearly see in the graph below, the Beatles are mentioned far more than the other performers.

The Beatles vs the Pretenders

Despite the dip in the mid-70s after their breakup, the Beatles never lost prominence over their rivals. I conclude, then, that the Beatles were culturally more important and more prominent than the Stones, Elvis, or Michael Jackson. To my mind, that makes them the greatest rock band.

I did a bit more research in Ngram Viewer and discovered that John Lennon was wrong when he said in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ and that Christianity would fade away. As you can see below, Jesus Christ is far more prominent in the literature than the Beatles or any of the others or all of them together. Jesus Christ is the Superstar, at least in this analysis, and the Beatles are a far distant second.

Jesus Christ vs the Pretenders

And I did all of this in about 10 minutes. Really. Using Google's Ngram Viewer to access their database of 5.6 million books and over 500 billion words, I was able to generate an enlightening view into the long, strange journey that we've all been on since my birth in 1951.

Thanks, Google.

And what does this have to do with complexity and critical thinking? Well, just a quick note: aggregation is one of the keys to critical thinking. You must be able to gather data from a wide range of sources to have a chance of capturing the complexity of any slice of reality. And then you must be able to slice and dice that data to look at it from a variety of perspectives to illuminate it, to inform it, to give it meaning. Ngram Viewer gives us access to a collection of data that none of us could have ever hoped to have access on our own, and it gives us a tool that allows us to manipulate that data in ways that highlight and clarify it without ever destroying the context from which it comes. This is very powerful.

Critical Thinking and Blind Intelligence

I have real concerns about the ability of traditional, Western critical thinking heuristics to be sufficient for negotiating the rhizome, any rhizome.

My primary issue is that all of the CT heuristics that I've found in my research are limited to one mind: mine or yours, but not to both. Critical thinking seems to be a function of the solitary mind as it contemplates and analyzes the separate universe. Most of the scholars I've read so far tacitly assume that critical thinking is a set of operations performed by a discrete subject, the Knower, upon discrete objects, the Known, buying into what Edgar Morin calls the "paradigm of simplification." Morin says that Descartes created this paradigm by "disjoining the thinking subject … and the thing being thought of" (On Complexity, 3). This paradigm of simple thought has "dominated the adventure of Western thought since the seventeenth century" and "has without doubt allowed for very great progress in scientific knowledge and in philosophical reflection" (3); yet, according to Morin, it has led us to a blind intelligence that "destroys unities and totalities" … that "isolates all objects from their environment" … and that "cannot conceive of the inseparable link between the observer and the observed" (4). Simple thought has created a pathology of knowing that is taking a "cruel toll on human phenomena" (5), and as Morin concludes about this "mutilating, one-dimensional vision:"

The inability to conceive of the complexity of anthroposocial reality, both in its micro dimension (the individual being), and in its macro dimension (the planetary collectivity of humanity), has led us to infinite tragedies. … Political strategy requires complex knowing, because strategy plays itself out by working with and against uncertainty, chance, the multiple play of interactions and retroactions (feedback loops). (5)

I like little metaphors when I'm trying to think through an idea, and to my mind, this mode of thought is akin to dissecting a frog, a live frog. If I am skillful enough with my scalpel—my analytical reason—I can neatly divide the frog into its constituent parts, reducing it to a collection of discrete, identifiable, and classifiable parts that will, in fact, help me understand the way the parts fit together and function in frogs, but along the way, of course, I've killed the frog, and I have no skill in putting it back together. This putting back together is not a trivial issue (certainly not for the frog). Moreover, the clean, hierarchical, explicit order that I imposed upon the frog's parts is not only useless for trying to reassemble the spaghetti-mess harmony that had been the living frog, but the hierarchical structure appears to work against reassembly.

This reminds me that for Deleuze & Guattari hierarchical thinking is a type of overcoding of reality that attempts to force all the relevant points of an object into neat little rows, each point occupying one, and only one, neat little place. As D& G note: "A rhizome or multiplicity [such as a frog, or a universe] never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines" (9). I see critical thinking as an overcoding, in this sense, as blind intelligence. Intelligence, yes. Blind, yes. Therefore, of limited use for approaching rhizomatic reality.

Critical Thinking: A Definition

I've started thinking much about critical thinking in preparation for a series of workshops that we are doing at my school, so of course, I asked myself what critical thinking has to do with life in the rhizome. As is almost always the case, I'm finding connections, but then, isn't that what the rhizome is all about? The very first characteristic of the rhizome as described by DnG is: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be (7).

The first connection that I want to explore is the role of critical thinking in cartography and decalcomania, the two mapping heuristics that DnG discuss. I think that these have been the two most difficult principles of rhizomatics for me. Perhaps critical thinking will give me a way to wrap my head around these concepts.

Let me start with a definition of critical thinking, not such a trivial task, as I have found out. Critical thinking tends to be one of those catch-all terms that everyone uses, nodding to each other in presumed agreement, while meaning slightly or totally different things. To my mind, critical thinking is a cluster of mental heuristics that increase my chances of reasonably and scientifically observing some slice of the world and deciding what to do or to believe about what I observe. Critical thinking helps me more skillfully respond to my world. What are these mental heuristics? I've found several lists, but the 1990 Delphi Report from the American Philosophical Association (Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction) provides perhaps as solid a starting point as we are likely to get. The Executive Summary of APA's Delphi Report says:

• We understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. CT is essential as a tool of inquiry. As such, CT is a liberating force in education and a powerful resource in one's personal and civic life. While not synonymous with good thinking, CT is a pervasive and self-rectifying human phenomenon. The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair- minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, clear about issues, orderly in complex matters, diligent in seeking relevant information, reasonable in the selection of criteria, focused in inquiry, and persistent in seeking results which are as precise as the subject and the circumstances of inquiry permit. Thus, educating good critical thinkers means working toward this ideal. It combines developing CT skills with nurturing those dispositions which consistently yield useful insights and which are the basis of a rational and democratic society.

They later list 6 primary skills with sub-skills:

Critical Thinking Skills
Interpretation	Categorization Decoding Significance Clarifying Meaning
Analysis	Examining Ideas Identifying Arguments Analyzing Arguments
Evaluation	Assessing Claims Assessing Arguments
Inference	Querying Evidence Conjecturing Alternatives Drawing Conclusions
Explanation	Stating Results Justifying Procedures Presenting Arguments
Self-Regulation	Self-examination Self-correction

This is a fairly workable list and grouping, but a tighter grouping is provided by Sohindar Sachdev in the book Critical Thinking Through Technology in Science and Mathematics Education (2001). Sachdev groups 19 different critical thinking skills into three categories:

1. Interpretive Reasoning - "the cognitive processes by which we begin to understand the information that has been remembered or observed."
2. Strategic Reasoning - "the cognitive process by which we develop the conclusion provided by interpretive reasoning."
3. Adaptive Reasoning - "the cognitive process by which we extend the knowledge beyond the criteria established by strategic reasoning."

Of course, I immediately see ways that I differ from these definitions. I start my critical thinking with observation, which neither of these definitions seem to do. To my mind, observation is an interpretive act, and if you are not observing in some systematic, critical way, then you are likely to see or not see most anything. But I don't choose to quibble about this just now. I think the above definitions of critical thinking form a useful starting point for my thinking about critical thinking, so I'm willing to see how far this boat will row.

In short, then, critical thinking is one way that I increase my chances for coming to know my world and positioning myself within it. If I think with some skill and grace, then I will better align with the world and make my way through it. As I mentioned in my previous post about the work of becoming an individual, "you work out the meaning of your life by the constant positioning, realignment, connecting and reconnecting of yourself with all the other selves in the rhizome." Critical thinking is one of the ways that we position, realign, connect, and reconnect ourselves with the world. It can be a fine way. It is the academic way, the path of Western intellectualism and science. Is it a rhizomatic way? I have my suspicions, but more on that later.