By Rob Hyers

In thinking through both critical thinking and critical reflection, I wanted to focus on Paulo Freire’s concept of critical consciousness. For the workshop, we focused on the following three pages (31-33) in which steps towards critical consciousness are laid out.  As Ira Shor explains:

Those people who do think holistically and critically about their conditions reflect the highest development of thought and action, ‘critical consciousness.’ Freire refers to this group’s thought as ‘critical transitivity,’ to suggest the dynamism between critical thought and critical action. Here, the individual sees herself or himself making the changes needed. A critically transitive thinker feels empowered to think and to act on the conditions around her or him, and relates those conditions to the larger contexts of power in society. (31)

In addition, we must keep in mind that critical consciousness is something that is overtly political. As Freire details in Pedagogy of Hope, which was a reflection on writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and as we discussed in our group, critical consciousness is much more than student-centered learning which utilizes group work in order to help students better understand concepts they must then show mastery in. Critical consciousness is much more about process than product; it is a process the bourgeoisie cannot practice with each other; it is a process in which we, as the working class, help each other towards true liberation in the vein of anticapitalism.

As a group, we looked at the steps outlined in moving towards critical consciousness and discussed both the challenges and triumphs in trying implement these different steps:

Challenges:

• Desocialization, in which “Freirean dialogue desocializes students from passivity in the classroom. It challenges their learned anti-intellectualism and authority-dependence (waiting to be told what to do and what things mean)” (Shor 32). We discussed this in relation to our students who lived through education in the pandemic; the old strategies just don’t seem to work now to move students from authority-dependence in the classroom.
• The college as an institution which sells itself as liberatory to our students but is, in actuality, oppressive. A Sociology colleague discussed this regarding the challenges of decolonizing a classroom whose organization is inherently colonizing. I, as a 1A professor, discussed this regarding language: how do I grade a paper with an eye towards critical consciousness when an “A” paper’s linguistic construction is coded as white and bourgeois?  

Triumphs:

We discussed different strategies which have worked in the classroom to move our students (and ourselves as instructors) towards critical consciousness:

• The use of computer labs during class time—this not only helps busy student complete the coursework but, especially for composition courses, it helps us more easily differentiate learning; different students’ writing will reflect different stages and we can help each student progress in the moment while they are drafting.
• Integrating narrative and the student’s own experiences into the coursework. Our Sociology colleague discussed an assignment in which students write (and sometimes perform) songs which think critically about themselves, their own histories, and the external forces they interact with.
• Building choice into our assignments to give the students agency.
• For our online classes: our discussion posts need to go beyond “Post two responses” to pointed directions which guide the students into thinking through their own positionality, other students’ positionalities, and the relationships between those positionalities.

Works Cited

Freire, Paulo, et al. Pedagogy of Hope : Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Robert R. (Robert Rennie) Barr, Bloomsbury, 2014.

Shor, Ira. “Education is Politics.” Paulo Freire : A Critical Encounter.. Edited by Peter Leonarda nd Peter McLaren, Routledge, 1993. (24-35). EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=190511&site=ehost-live