whither critical pedagogy in the neo-liberal university today?

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ELiSS, Vol 1 Issue 2, November 2008 ISSN: 1756-848X

Whither critical pedagogy in the neo-liberal university today?

Two UK practitioners’ reflections on constraints and

possibilities

Sarah S Amsler, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Kingston University

Joyce E Canaan, Reader in Sociology, Birmingham City University, Sociology

Coordinator, C-SAP, University of Birmingham

Abstract

This paper, based on the reflections of two academic social scientists, offers a

starting point for dialogue about the importance of critical pedagogy within the

university today, and about the potentially transformative possibilities of higher

education more generally. We first explain how the current context of HE, framed

through neoliberal restructuring, is reshaping opportunities for alternative forms of

education and knowledge production to emerge. We then consider how insights from

both critical pedagogy and popular education inform our work in this climate.

Against this backdrop, we consider the effects of our efforts to realise the ideals of

critical pedagogy in our teaching to date and ask how we might build more productive

links between classroom and activist practices. Finally, we suggest that doing so can

help facilitate a more fully articulated reconsideration of the meanings, purposes and

practices of HE in contemporary society.

This paper also includes responses from two educational developers, Janet Strivens

and Ranald Macdonald, with the aim of creating a dialogue on the role of critical

pedagogy in higher education.

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Keywords

critical pedagogy, higher education, neoliberalism, popular education

Introduction

We are two academic social scientists committed to the idea that higher education

(HE) can potentially play an important role in public life by informing, motivating and

empowering progressive social action. However, we find that the universities in which

we work are increasingly organised around rationalised economic logics that often

mitigate against critical pedagogy. This situation is largely due to the radical

restructuring and reconceptualisation of HE, in the UK and elsewhere, around logics

of marketisation and commodification (Canaan and Shumar 2008, Hall 2007, WASS

Collective 2007). As we discuss below, these now-familiar concepts have become

blunt shorthand for explaining the contradictory processes creating both many new

obstacles for critical education and also – by necessity – many new possibilities for

initiating more progressive and collaborative practices. In light of this, we find

ourselves increasingly asking how our work within, against and beyond the academy

might contribute to broader projects of critical education for social change.

This brief paper outlines some tentative answers. We first explain how the current

context of HE is reshaping our understandings of how to realise critical pedagogy in

practice. We then consider how insights from both critical pedagogy and popular

education inform our work in this climate. Against this brief backdrop, we consider the

effects of our efforts to realise the ideals of critical pedagogy in our teaching to date

and ask how this might go further if we more fully link classroom and activist

practices as we have tentatively begun to do. We conclude by suggesting that doing

so offers greater potential for facilitating a thorough reconsideration of the meanings

and purposes of HE.

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The state we’re in: neo-liberalising UK HE

Whilst British universities have never been fully autonomous from state control, until

recently the State adopted the Humboldtian assumption that knowledge creation

required relative autonomy and that independently organised academic research

could help develop insights, which might elsewhere be applied to resolving practical

problems (Lyotard 1984, Readings 1996). In the new context of the so-called

‘knowledge economy’, however, knowledge production is organised primarily around

its economic relevance for facilitating processes of neo-liberal marketisation and

commodification (Amsler 2007; Bourdieu 1998, Canaan and Shumar 2008).

Accordingly, as universities are more accountable for their contributions to the growth

of the ‘knowledge economy’ in national contexts, they are subject to greater state

regulation and increasingly open to the influence of wider social forces, particularly

market demands. We hence witness the ascendance of what Boron (2006: 149)

refers to as the ‘bizarre idea that universities should be regarded as money-making

institutions able to live on their own income’. As a result, ‘marketlike and market

behaviors’ are now considered essential foundations for educational activities, which

form part of an ‘academic capitalist knowledge/learning/consumption regime’

(Rhoads and Slaughter 2006: 103, 105; Clarke 2003; Shumar 1997, Slaughter and

Leslie 1997).

These processes have had uneven effects on universities but largely have

transformed educational contexts for students and academics alike. The rapid shift

from elite to mass HE and the influx of more diverse students to an increased

number of universities was not paralleled by faculty growth: average staff–student

ratios have risen from 1:15 to 1:28 in twenty years. This contributes to work

intensification, itself exacerbated by managerialist practices that deprofessionalise

academics by greater surveillance of and accountability for pedagogical and

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administrative work and students’ results (Canaan 2008, Davies and Bendix

Petersen 2005). In these conditions, many students also find they are work-

intensified – particularly those who work at least part-time to pay tuition fees, the

numbers of whom have trebled since New Labour introduced them in 1997 (Ainley

and Weyers 2008, Callender 2003).

Furthermore, many academics and students working in universities face new

constraints on academic freedom, both in response to ‘market pressures’ and to the

post-9/11 ‘War Against Terror’. The latter, for example, has restricted the academic

mobility of some lecturers and (particularly foreign) students (see, for example, Apple

2002; for a discussion of wider constraints, see Lewis 1999; Rhoads and Slaughter

2006; Shore and Wright 2000; Wright 2004; Rhoads and Torres 2006). Painted thus,

the current conditions of HE in the UK appear grim. As Gibson-Graham (1996) notes,

however, linguistic representations of a process or condition as a totalising, inevitable

and completed script have a performative function: they potentially depict as

‘complete’ processes that are often incomplete, contradictory and more permeable to

other forces and practices than their representation suggests (see also Trowler

2001). We thus suggest that in critically analysing the conditions of HE, educators

should resist simply reproducing this depiction of reality. Whilst we recognise that we

cannot help but at least partly internalise and be complicit with processes of neo-

liberal restructuring that we ourselves experience (Canaan 2008, Davies and Bendix

Petersen 2005; Holloway 2005; Rhoads and Slaughter 2006), it is nevertheless

possible to contest the fatalist assumption, prevalent at least since the Thatcher era,

that ‘There Is No Alternative’ to these trends (Freire 1996).

We aim to negate this damaging philosophy in both thought and practice, saying, as

the Zapatistas did when initiating resistance to the neo-liberal restructuring of their

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land and lives in 1994, ya basta! – we’ve had enough! Like the Zapatistas and critical

theorists before them, we recognise that this space of negation enables movement

towards an alternative – in particular, towards creating more horizontally organised,

collaborative and dialogue-based learning and teaching practices within HE. We also

believe that the new permeability of the institution to the market offers academics

new opportunities to forge alliances with progressive activists beyond the university

(Santos 2006: 76).1 Rather than seeking a return to greater institutional autonomy or

segregation for academics, we therefore argue that the notion of critical pedagogy

should be expanded to include practices outside as well as within the university.

Critical pedagogy and popular education in and outside the university

Whilst the term ‘critical pedagogy’ is most often associated with the work of Paulo

Freire (1996, 2000), it also encompasses a wider range of educational projects

including ‘critical literacy’, feminist and other anti-oppressive philosophies of learning,

and ‘critical-revolutionary’ and utopian pedagogies which are embedded in broader

critiques of capitalism and authoritarian culture (see, for example, Chatterton 2007;

hooks 1994; Shor 1999). There is considerable debate within and between these

traditions of critical pedagogy, which is unfortunately beyond the scope of this essay

(Coté et al. 2007). However, we note that our own inspiration comes from beyond the

academy: we are rooted in and inspired by a Freirean ideal of conscientisation and

by pedagogical principles of mutuality, dialogue and problem-based inquiry. We are

also schooled in traditions of critical humanism that assume that the transformation of

social consciousness is a necessary condition for political action that can be

1 See also recent work on the ‘asymmetrical convergence’ of science and business and the

consequent transformation of environmental activism in Frickel (2004).

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achieved pedagogically even in formal university settings. This approach to critical

pedagogy has never been straightforward, for, while Freire encouraged

reconsideration of his work for diverse purposes including HE and was located in a

formal educational system, his ‘education for critical consciousness’ was articulated

as a form of popular (literally meaning ‘of the people’ and metaphorically referring to

transformatory political action) rather than academic education

However, we argue that these projects are closely connected – and that attempts to

make HE more politically transformative are intertwined with work to create

institutions that are inspired by, and offer spaces for, more ‘popular’ forms of

education. Popular education, according to an often cited definition, refers to

education oriented towards advancing concrete struggles for emancipation and as

such, is:

rooted in the real interests and struggles of ordinary people;

overtly political and critical of the status quo;

committed to progressive social and political change.

In addition:

Its pedagogy is collective, focused primarily on group as distinct from

individual learning and development.

It attempts, wherever possible, to forge a direct link between education and

social action.

(Crowther et al. 2005: 2)

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Under certain circumstances, it is possible that HE can be organised around some of

these principles and practices (for example, in Paul Chatterton’s work discussed

below). Even within the aforementioned constraints, it is possible to design socially

engaged curricula, organise learning collectively and help students ‘read the world’

critically by ‘reading the [academic] word’ (Freire 1997). However, spaces for this

type of education were always few and are now diminished. Most formal classes of

students cannot be regarded as ‘communities of struggle’, and gross inequalities

(particularly in terms of previous educational opportunities) continue to persist if not

grow within and across UK universities (Allen and Ainley 2007; Quinn 2006). Whilst

we might aspire to encourage students to become socially and politically engaged,

we sometimes find that at best we can encourage them to strengthen their capacity

for critical thinking and recognise that this might help them to take additional steps

towards practical engagement in future (Kane 2007).

With regard to our own practices, Sarah’s work in teaching undergraduate social

theory suggests the importance of looking beyond ‘pedagogical’ issues per se to

working towards political changes in the organisation of learning itself. Although she

designs her courses to be practically meaningful, politically engaged and dialogical,

she has found it extremely difficult to facilitate dialogical learning or critical

engagement with the social world in situations where class sizes have been

extremely large. In such cases, while individual students reported that they had

moments of inspiration or heightened critical awareness, in a broader sense, the

courses contributed to legitimising the status quo. Students are ranked hierarchically

in relation to each other and to standardised criteria of achievement; they learn a

standardised body of knowledge for the purpose of accreditation, in ironic

contradiction to many of the theories of knowledge they actually study; they are

alienated in anonymity due to sheer numbers; and they are disciplined in mind and

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body by the architecture of the lecture theatre and the rationalised organization of

learning time.

It is of course possible to soften, alleviate and adapt to these problems with

pedagogical techniques, and Sarah works to do so. However, she has gradually

come to realise that this belief – the belief that if we only tried hard enough we could

make this work – is integral to maintaining the legitimacy of new managerialism

(Canaan 2008; Davies and Bendix Petersen 2005; Shore and Wright 2000; Wright

2004). It also contributes to crediting a wider discourse that critical HE is either

illegitimate or impossible. It thus seems increasingly likely that projects to transform

HE exclusively from within the university may be counter-productive. Sarah has

therefore been working increasingly to create informal spaces both inside and

outside the university (such as reading circles, autonomous gatherings and a critical

pedagogies working group) where critical connections between academic knowledge

and social practice might more organically emerge.

Joyce’s contexts of learning and teaching are both similar and different to Sarah’s.

She too faces large numbers of students – but only of classes of up to approximately

eighty students, which she now holds in four sessions of twenty students each. She

has also been able, with students and colleagues, to encourage her university to

begin to soften the conditions of learning somewhat. Guided and legitimated by the

example of the HEFCE-funded Warwick–Oxford Brookes collaborative ‘Re-invention

Centre’, Joyce recently helped introduce a new learning space that students call ‘the

beanbag room’.2 This space, with no ostensible front or back, mostly white walls, a

moveable projector, no tables/desks and colourful beanbags (as well as one chair),

2 HEFCE is the acronym for the Higher Education Funding Council of England.

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enhances physical possibilities for more dialogical and facilitative work amongst

students and between students and lecturers.

Nevertheless, like Sarah, within the classroom Joyce has found that most of her

efforts are channelled into developing students’ critical academic literacies – their

appreciation of how to read and write sociologically – and helping them use these to

sharpen their understandings of the world. Students often say that modules are ‘eye-

opening’ – a metaphor which seems to capture the way students claim to literally see

more of the world and to use this vision to rethink prior understandings. But whilst the

usage of this and other metaphors in module evaluations is gratifying, students may

not easily relate what they do in class to praxis whilst at university.

In other words, as Joyce has noted elsewhere (Canaan, forthcoming), there is

considerable hubris in assuming that academic learning alone will enable radical

practice, especially given that education increasingly encourages students to give

primacy to the rather different political project of developing skills of employability

(Allen and Ainley 2007). If, as Merleau-Ponty noted, radicalisation is a gradual

process (2003: 221), we must perhaps rethink the role that classroom learning might

play in more complex human processes which are existentially indeterminate, then

critical educators must be mindful that the effects of our work on future practices are

inherently open-ended – a source of hope, we argue, rather than despair.

Within, against and beyond: new directions in critical education

We find, however, that we are tired – and not just by the sheer volume and intensity

of work, or student numbers, or the neo-liberal logic impacting on our identities more

fully than we often realise. We are also exhausted by the limits of our efforts within

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the university to encourage and enable students to move beyond ‘critical thinking’ to

social and political engagement. We have hence begun to explore how the creation

of institutions which are places for emancipatory education might be more fully

realised if we work not just within and against the university, but also beyond it.

We are heartened by the experiences of those in other disciplines, particularly

geography, who combine academic and activist pedagogy to help students engage

with the world beyond the university. For example, Paul Chatterton (himself a

member of TRAPESE, a popular education collective) uses Giroux’s notion of ‘border

pedagogy’ to encourage students of ‘autonomous geographies’ to engage with

anarchist ideas ‘not in a doctrinaire or overtly theoretical way, but as living ideas

which would catch their imagination and can act as possible openings for how we

might live more sustainable, just and equal lives’ (2007: 6). Students in this class

were marked partly by engaging ‘with an outside group, campaign or event’ and then

reflecting upon this experience using relevant literature (Chatterton 2007: 20). Some

students were so enthused by the module that they encouraged Chatterton to set up

an MA programme in ‘Activism and Social Change’ in autumn 2007.

Joyce has also been heartened by the experience of using popular-education

insights in her own political work and by seeing the impact of bringing popular

education into the university classroom. In spring 2007, for example, she invited a

political theatre company, Banner Theatre, to perform a show about asylum-seekers

for students taking her ‘Social Identities’ module. This production was preceded and

followed by popular-education practices and was itself informed by such practices.

Many students were powerfully challenged and inspired by encountering the

experience of ‘the other’ in this way. Joyce has also been motivated by possibilities

for progressive thinking and action enabled by the resources of C-SAP where she is

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now Sociology Coordinator. She has recently established a new Critical

Pedagogy/Popular Education special-interest group within C-SAP that provides

greater opportunities to link activities within, against and beyond the university.

Through it, for example, Joyce was able to organize a weekend that brought together

two of her students, Sarah, Paul Chatterton and other academic activists, Dave

Rogers of Banner Theatre and two Venezuelans who regard the combination of

critical pedagogy and popular education as a major contribution to their country’s

explicitly socialist revolutionary process.

Such efforts, which have until recently seemed isolated, are beginning to take shape

as part of a wider movement for educational and social change. At the 2003 World

Social Forum, Santos proposed a popular university of social movements, resting

explicitly on Freirean pedagogical practices and working ‘to educate activists and

leaders of social movements, as well as social scientists, scholars and artists

concerned with progressive social transformation’. Its aim is for this diverse

community to ‘make knowledge of alternative globalization as global as [dominant]

globalization itself, and, at the same time, to render actions for social transformation

better known and more efficient, and its protagonists more competent and reflective’

(Santos: 2003). Indeed, this proposal articulates the sort of agenda that we hope it

may be possible to develop for critical education in the UK today.

Implications

In order to advance this movement within UK contexts, we suggest that the university

might be considered one of many interrelated sites of critical learning and socio-

political practice rather than as a separate or superior one. From this, we also

suggest that the possibilities for critical pedagogy within any institutionalised space

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are contingent rather than absolute and that we should be able to think creatively

about where such spaces of hope might exist or be created and with whom we might

possibly ally. As the normative visions, administrative logics and systemic forms of

organising universities become increasingly incorporated into or shaped by the

values and practices of neo-liberal capitalism, it becomes more difficult to transform

them from within. Like others, we therefore draw alternative inspiration and energy

from elsewhere – from popular educators, non-geographical communities of practice

and academic and political activists. This work has important implications, for it

challenges existing boundaries between ‘critical pedagogy’, ‘popular education’ and

social and political activism. More importantly, however, education that combines

insights from these diverse types of ‘pedagogical’ practices seems to be more

personally and politically meaningful. We therefore suggest that linking critical

pedagogy within the university to both educational and political struggles for justice

beyond it is crucial for a HE that can contribute to progressive social and political

change.

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Whither critical pedagogy in the neo-liberal university today?:

Responses

Janet Strivens, Educational Developer, University of Liverpool

As Sarah and Joyce are very clear about their value position, as a starting point to

this piece I should be equally clear. As an educational developer I work with staff. I

want to inform, motivate and empower them, and I assume they want to inform,

motivate and empower their students. But to what end? In so far as academics’

identities are bound up with their subjects, an end which many would concur is that of

making more of the students more like themselves: possessing skills more like theirs,

knowing more of what they know and, above all, valuing these skills and this

knowledge in a similar way. Sometimes this will coincide with valuing progressive

social action. Probably more often it does not. A major problem for me as an

http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/1/lambert.html

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educational developer working across the institution is that I cannot see how the logic

of this paper applies much beyond the boundaries of the subjects mentioned by the

authors.

I applaud Sarah’s and Joyce’s efforts to design socially engaged curricula (this is

likely to result in more powerful learning environments), to organize learning

collectively (ditto) and especially to help students ‘read the world’ critically by ‘reading

the [academic] word’ (though I occasionally wonder about this correspondence). I

don’t think the spaces for this are necessarily diminished – certainly, technology has

opened up new possibilities. There is some irony in Sarah’s comment that ‘the sheer

number of students [ . . . ] makes it extremely difficult to facilitate dialogical learning

or critical engagement with the social world.’ The ‘unit of resource’ is dramatically

lower, but, with widening participation, many, many more students have the

opportunity to benefit (despite the gross inequalities that still exist). The resulting

pressure has been one of the drivers in the growth of the educational development

community: we must re-examine traditional methods of learning and assessment and

find better ways.

I also believe that, whatever you do in the classroom (or in the virtual learning

environment), the ultimate instrument of liberation or oppression, the ultimate ground

for struggle, is assessment. John Heron recognized this in 1981, albeit from a more

liberal-humanist perspective:

the issue here is a political one; that is, it is to do with the exercise of

power. And power is simply to do with who makes decisions about

whom [ . . . ] the objective of the [educational] process is the

emergence of [ . . . ] a person who is self-determining – who can set

his [sic] own learning objectives, devise a rational programme to attain

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them, set criteria of excellence by which to assess the work he

produces, and assess his own work in the light of those criteria [ . . . ]

assessment is the most political of all the educational processes.

(Heron 1981: 55–63)

As trade unionists, we recognise it: the only real power we possess is to withdraw our

labour from the process of assessing. Increasingly, we do not own the knowledge or

the means of accessing it, but we exercise real power through the making of

evaluative judgements. Sarah and Joyce might argue that we have been increasingly

constrained by the ‘managerialist practices that deprofessionalise academics’ in how

we make those judgements: QAA Codes of Practice, institutional assessment

strategies, attempts (though these have largely failed) to professionalise the external

examiner system. Nevertheless, they themselves are not (I imagine) in a position to

award grades to students on the basis of their commitment to social justice.

Inevitably, as an educational developer, I am complicit in this. I exhort staff to set

assessment tasks aligned with learning outcomes, to be clear about their

assessment criteria and transparent in their moderation and standardization

processes. At least part of my purpose is to foster practices that help all students but

most especially ‘non-traditional’ students, to engage with, benefit from and perform

successfully within the academy. I’m keenly aware of the pressure this puts on

overworked academics who are, like Gandalf, already tired. I seek ‘efficiency’ in the

learning, teaching and assessment methods I propose (including my championing of

e-learning) because this is how I attempt to reconcile my commitments to the

interests of both my fellow academics and to the students whom I rarely meet face to

face but who are the ultimate motivating force behind what I do. I would like to think

20


that I and my educational developer colleagues are part of the solution rather than

part of the problem.

References

Heron, J. (1981) ‘Assessment Revisited’, in D. Boud (ed.), Developing Student

Autonomy in Learning, London: Kogan Page.

Ranald Macdonald, Professor of Academic Development, Learning and

Teaching Institute, Sheffield Hallam University

On first reading this article, I was inclined to accept the case being made for the

adoption of a more critical pedagogy in various forms, even if against the prevailing

neo-liberal agenda. However, after reflection and a rereading I became more

uncomfortable, and, in response to many of the statements made, I continually asked

‘Why?’ or ‘How?’

As an academic developer working in what Rowland (2002) calls the ‘fault lines’ in

higher education, my role is partly to encourage and support changes to curricula at

institutional level and, more widely, to try to resolve the often conflicting demands of

managerial imperatives and my academic colleagues. I am particularly concerned

that what is proposed in this article is a largely teacher-focused approach to student

learning. There is little sense of the students choosing the what, why and how of the

learning, much less how they will demonstrate what and how well they are learning

(often referred to as assessment). Nor is there any attempt to focus on the needs of

individual learners. It is somewhat disingenuous to claim that large student numbers

prevents innovation, as some teaching business studies, courses at the Open

21


University or, where I am currently writing, in Sri Lanka would look in open-eyed

amazement at a group of 150 students, even more so one of 80. Why this is a

problem is the focus on what the teacher does rather than the learner. Yes, ‘large’

numbers do increase the burden of assessment and administration, but they also

present opportunities to be more imaginative.

Whilst widening participation may have caused problems – and the nature of these

are in themselves contestable – increasing access for many groups has, in itself,

been emancipatory. This has been the case, not least, for first-generation and ethnic-

minority students who may have little concern for more radical curricula when the

opportunity to gain a higher education to locate them firmly in the mainstream is what

matters more to them. That is not to say that we should not challenge these ‘new’

students but, rather, that this challenge should be a feature of all higher education

and not just those fortunate enough to be tutored by the authors.

There is also a sense of trying to impose an ideological position on students rather

than creating opportunities to explore a range of perspectives, creating more

genuinely autonomous learning experiences for learners where they take greater

responsibility for their learning in terms of content, process, outcomes and

assessment – not least in ‘learning for an unknown future’ (Barnett 2004). However, I

am mindful of Brookfield’s warning (2007) that attempts to diversify the curriculum

may result in what Marcuse, on whom he is drawing, calls ‘repressive tolerance’ and

the further strengthening of the status quo. Sarah and Joyce might legitimately argue

that their proposal addresses this concern by practising what Marcuse called

‘liberating tolerance’ whereby students are ‘freed from the prevailing indoctrination’

(1965). It would be interesting to know where they locate their proposals within this

dialogue.

22


Whatever one thinks of the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s

Teaching Quality Enhancement initiatives such as Centres for Excellence in

Teaching and Learning, the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning,

National Teaching Fellowships, the Research Informed Teaching Initiative, the

Higher Education Academy Subject Network and the Teaching Quality Enhancement

Fund itself, they have all provided the opportunity for more creative, innovative and

divergent approaches to learning, teaching and assessment. Whether these

opportunities have been grasped or have been subject to more conservative

pressures within institutions is beside the point as they are there.

Even without these initiatives, many courses – in areas such as architecture,

environmental studies, urban planning and housing, medicine and allied professions

and, yes, even sociology – have long-adopted more enquiry-focused approaches

whereby students address authentic issues in local communities, not-for-profit

organisations and small and medium sized enterprises. Here, students have to

engage with the realities of local constraints: politics, social and economic

characteristics and, the most challenging aspect of all, people. Here are the

opportunities to adopt different perspectives – whether critical pedagogy or others –

whilst letting students experience the reality of authentic environments on the

theoretical perspectives they are exploring.

So, whilst personally attracted to critical pedagogy, this article presents more

questions than answers for me given the reality of the context in which I work – hard

as I am trying to change it.

23


References

Barnett, R. (2004) ‘Learning for an Unknown Future’, Higher Education Research and

Development, 23 (3): 247–60.

Brookfield, S. (2007) ‘Diversifying Curriculum As the Practice of Repressive

Tolerance’, Teaching in Higher Education, 12 (5–6): 557–68.

Marcuse, H. (1965) 'Repressive tolerance', in Wolff, R.P., Moore, B & Marcuse, H

(eds) A critique of pure tolerance, quoted in Brookfield (2007).

Rowland, S. (2002) ‘Overcoming Fragmentation in Professional Life: the Challenge

for Academic Development’, Higher Education Quarterly, 56 (1): 52–64.

Response to Janet Strivens and Ranald McDonald

Sarah S. Amsler and Joyce E. Canaan

We are really pleased to have the opportunity to engage with readers of our work and

appreciate that ELiSS has been set up to encourage dialogue with commissioned

authors. We thank Janet Strivens and Ranald MacDonald for their thoughtful

comments on our paper, which have already pointed to the importance of opening up

more public discussion about the theory and practice of critical pedagogy.

We want to make a number of points in response to Janet’s and Ranald’s critiques,

and discuss what we see as our commonalities and differences. First, we recognise

that we share a number of similar concerns – specifically with meeting the challenge

to engage greater numbers and diversity of students in higher education (HE) in

democratic educational processes. Second, we seem to share a commitment to

ensuring that students are prepared for the challenging world that they will face when

24


they graduate. Ours is a world of tremendous inequality within and between nations,

impending crises of global warming and peak oil (for which we are not prepared with

alternative energy sources or strategies for viably lessening oil dependence), a global

heightening of terror and a profound global economic downturn. We believe that we

differ most from Janet and Ranald in our understanding of the strategies that are

effective and important for achieving this broad goal in the current economic, social

and political climate – and we also believe that we conceptualise this climate in

profoundly different ways. In our view, the context of HE is not simply one of

progressive and perpetual change, as Ranald suggests, or of new challenges due to

greater numbers of students, as Janet argues. Rather, we think that some of the

changes in how and why students are educated today reflect wider social and

political forces which are detrimental for our students, ourselves, our society and our

world more generally. We also therefore seek to achieve somewhat different ends

through the educational process – although, like Janet, we believe that our rationales

must be matters of continual reflection and debate.

We are pleased that Janet and Ranald recognise that the increased number and

greater diversity of students participating in HE today require lecturers to rethink their

teaching strategies, and we agree that this is a potential opportunity for developing

learning and teaching. They acknowledge, as do we, that a key element of this

rethinking is that lecturers should encourage students to consider the relevance and

applicability of their academic learning to their everyday lives and professional

practices. They also recognise, however, that there can be a tension in ‘seeking to

help students ‘read the world’ critically by ‘reading the [academic] word’ (Janet’s

insertion) and that, as Ranald notes, this tension might result in lecturers imposing

our own ‘ideological position on students’. As problems of authority and autonomy

25


are central within critical pedagogy, we welcome the opportunity to respond to this

important critique.

First, like Ira Shor in his excellent summary of Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, we

suggest that ‘the whole activity of education is political in nature [ . . . ] All forms of

education are political, whether or not teachers and students acknowledge the

politics in their work’ (Shor 1993: 27). Indeed, it is the recognition of the inherent

politics of education that draws us to critical pedagogy. It also makes it particularly

important in the current climate, where learning is often seen as unquestionably

linked to earning and where many students have been shaped by educational

experiences that encourage the development of instrumental relationships to

knowledge and experience. We would hence like to further consider Ranald’s

comment about ‘first-generation and ethnic-minority students who may have little

concern for more radical curricula when the opportunity to gain a higher education to

locate them firmly in the mainstream is what matters more to them’. We agree with

the subtext of this comment, which is that definitions of ‘emancipation’ in education

are ambiguous, situated and may include aspirations to mainstream employment for

students who have been historically marginalised or excluded. As critical sociologists,

however, we consider it our responsibility to help students understand the political

nature of ‘aspirations’ in education, to explain why wage labour are not necessarily

value-neutral and to introduce them to and enable them to reflect on alternative

approaches to educational policy and the world of work.

Our aim in doing this is not to ‘make more of our students more like [ . . . ]

[our]selves’, as Janet worries. Whilst we believe that we need to continually create

rather than presume common ground (both amongst students and between students

and ourselves) in order to work together, we also think that education should enable

26


students to develop skills and ideas that we don’t have so that they can know more,

and different, things than we do. Indeed, we think it is imperative to disrupt the

assumption that our increasingly diverse students should become more ‘like us’ or

each other. We encourage our students to question the values we promote, as well

as the ones they hold, and the processes through which we promote these values in

our teaching. Thus, for us, critical pedagogy requires not a ‘teacher-focused

approach to student learning’, as Ranald suggests, but an approach in which

teachers acknowledge, listen to and guide students who are encouraged to discuss

and question ideas in an open dialogical way. This requires a pedagogy that is, as

the anti-racist feminist Liz Ellsworth (1992) noted when reflecting on the challenges

she faced whilst teaching a media and anti-racist pedagogies module, partial,

shifting, context-specific and reflexive.

It does not follow from this argument, however, that widening participation is

‘inherently emancipatory’ in practice, as Ranald suggests. We are mindful of Lisa

Duggan’s point that in the current neo-liberal era, ideas about equity or freedom may

indicate ‘a stripped-down equality’ (2003: xx) of rather limited dimensions. Here we

offer a different interpretation of the consequences of the growing numbers and

diversity of students. Let us be clear that we support the full and radical

democratisation of HE, rejecting the false choice of advocating either widening

participation as it is currently practised or a return to elitist and exclusive education.

We would simply like to point out that whilst recognising increasing diversity, we must

not ignore the problem of continuing inequality within universities. Large student

numbers are not necessarily problematic, as both Janet and Ranald agree. However,

they become so when accompanied by inadequate and dwindling resources that

require impersonal forms of mass education, particularly as we face the ‘gross

inequalities that still exist’ in HE, to quote Janet. We should not forget that some of

27


the most radically egalitarian philosophies of education, approaches which are allied

most closely with the ostensible goals of widening participation, emphasise the

importance of process, dialogue, creativity and spontaneity – experiences that

become increasingly infrequent as HE standardised and made more bureaucratically

accountable. One reason why we like the virtual learning environment Moodle, for

example, is that it was created by an educationalist, who, informed by social

constructivism, recognised that learning requires dialogue, engagement, reflection

and debate (Dougiamas 1998). We welcome this technology not because it allows us

to deal with a ‘dramatically lower’ ‘unit of resourse’ in teaching, which Janet suggests

is the value of new educational technology, but because it supports the development

of these particular activities.

A similar point can be made about the role of assessment, which we see as

something to be interrogated philosophically and politically, rather than simply

improved within existing conditions and constraints. Is assessment the ultimate

grounds for (social and political) struggle, as Janet suggests? We would like to

suggest that it is not particular methods of assessment, but assessment per se which

is problematic in HE. Our main concern is that assessment is primarily used to

stratify students relative to one another and particular class marks (first, upper

second, etc.). It is possible to interpret this as a form of ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu

1989: 21). Individuals can be damaged by being labelled ‘first class, second class,

third class or failed’ students and, therefore, in part, as people – not only in terms of

the obvious consequences for self-esteem and relating to others in hierarchical ways,

but also because they may learn to accept this as a ‘natural’ fact of social life.

Assessment is not just about ‘who’ makes decisions, as the Heron quote in Janet’s

piece suggests, but also about how and why these decisions are made in the first

place. Indeed, we feel that it is assessment which most fundamentally alienates us

28


from our students. What if we assessed students differently, not relative to others but

to their own goals, which we discuss at the outset? Rather than seeking to ensure

simply that our ‘assessment tasks are aligned with learning outcomes’ as Janet

suggests, we would like to open dialogue about the problematic nature of some

prevailing theories of learning outcomes themselves. Introducing learning outcomes

is important: it requires us to articulate expectations and makes both us and our

students accountable. Increasingly, however, these outcomes are evaluated not on

the extent to which they enable engaged learning, but in terms of things such as

‘successful pass rates’, which are themselves important criteria within competitive

league tables.

In other words, our overarching argument is not that academics should be exempt

from responding to the changing conditions of HE, or that ‘critical pedagogy’ is an

unproblematic panacea for resolving contemporary problems within it. We agree that

we must find better ways of teaching in this context and better means of

democratising education. However, we argue that we must recognise the economic

and political roots of the new ‘challenges’ of education rather than pathologise

academics who find it difficult to ‘make things work’ in this system by altering

pedagogical techniques – or who find the overall project politically problematic in its

own right. In short, we believe that the development of our everyday teaching

practices cannot proceed without being informed by critical analyses of the structural

conditions of HE, on the one hand, or contributing to the broader goal of advancing

human freedom and social equality on the other.

We look forward to developing this discussion in future, a discussion in which we

continue to welcome insights from educational developers as well as academics.

29


References

Bourdieu, P. (1989) ‘Social space and symbolic power’, Sociological Theory, 7(1):

14-25.

Dougiamas, M. (1998) ‘A Journey into Constructivism’. Available online at

http://dougiamas.com/writing/constructivism.html (accessed 29 September

2008).

Duggan, L. (2003) The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the

Attack on Democracy, Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press.

Ellsworth, E. (1992) ‘Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working through the

Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy’, in C. Luke and J. Gore (eds),

Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 90–

119.

Shor, I. (1993) ‘Education Is Politics: Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy’, in P. McLaren

and P. Leonard (eds), Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, London and New

York: Routledge, pp. 25–35.

The Authors

Joyce Canaan is a Reader in Sociology at Birmingham City University and Sociology

Coordinator for C-SAP, the subject network for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics.

She convenes the ‘Researching Students’ Study Group of the British Sociological

Association. Joyce has written extensively on secondary and higher education,

focusing, in recent years, on higher education pedagogy and students’ experiences

of learning. She co-edited Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University (2008),

Learning and Teaching Social Theory (2007) and a special issue of International

Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2004), and also published in Cultural

Studies—Critical Methodologies, Teaching in Higher Education, and Learning and

teaching in the Social Sciences.

http://dougiamas.com/writing/constructivism.html

30


Sarah Amsler is a Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University. Her interests are in the

politics of knowledge and culture, the critical sociology of education, and critical

theory. Her research focuses on the role of cultural work in transformative social

action and the ways that education, broadly defined, is conceptualised as a political

practice. She recently finished a research project intellectual reform in post-socialist

societies, and is presently engaged in research about the politics of anticipatory

consciousness in theory and practice. She has published The Politics of Knowledge

in Central Asia (2007), co-edited a volume on Theorizing Change in Post-Socialist

Societies (2007) and has published in Current Perspectives in Social Theory (2008).

A co-authored chapter on ‘Critique and judgment in cultural sociology’ and several

articles on critical theories of ‘hope’ and ‘crisis thinking’ are forthcoming.

Ranald Macdonald is Professor of Academic Development and Head of Strategic

Development in the Learning and Teaching Institute at Sheffield Hallam University. A

previous Co-Chair of the UK's Staff and Educational Development Association he

was until recently also Chair of its Research Committee and is a SEDA Fellowship

holder. Ranald was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2005.

Janet Strivens is an Educational Developer in the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the

University of Liverpool. She has a special interest in all aspects of assessment. She

is also leading the implementation of personal development planning within the

university, which reflects the range of her interests from e-portfolios to the self-

managed learner. She helped to design the Liverpool University Student Interactive

Database (LUSID), the university's personal development planning support tool, and

is still involved in its development. In the other half of her time, she is also Senior

Associate Director of the Centre for Recording Achievement

(http://www.recordingachievement.org), the national network organisation which

http://www.recordingachievement.org/

31


supports and promotes the use of recording, reviewing and action planning

processes in lifelong learning. This half-time appointment gives her access to

national and international developments in both technology and pedagogical practice

to support the lifelong learner.

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