Critical Pedagogy is as much a political approach as it is an educative one, a social justice movement first, and an educational movement second. Digital technologies have values coded into them in advance. Many tools are good only insofar as they are used. Tools and platforms that do dictate too strongly how we might use them, or ones that remove our agency by covertly reducing us and our work to commodified data, should be rooted out by a Critical Digital Pedagogy.

1. An Urgency of Teachers:
the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy

2. Jesse Stommel
@Jessifer
Sean Michael Morris
@Slamteacher

3. “In the face of stories insisting the future will be automated —
that is, in the face of the urgency of machines — Morris and
Stommel want us to agitate instead for an urgency of teachers.”
~ Audrey Watters, An Urgency of Teachers: “Foreword”

4. It is urgent we have teachers, it is urgent we employ them, pay them,
support them with adequate resources; but it is also urgency which
defines the project of teaching. In a political climate increasingly
defined by its obstinacy, lack of criticality, and deflection of fact and
care; in a society still divided across lines of race, nationality,
religion, gender, sexuality, income, ability, and privilege; in a digital
culture shaped by algorithms that neither know nor accurately
portray truth, teaching has an important (urgent) role to play.

5. There never were going to be any dinosaur bones.
Critical Pedagogy and the Imagination

6. Dinosaurs were not a popular subject at my elementary school,
and independent study for a fifth grader wasn’t rewarded. My
motivations were entirely those of my hungry imagination. For
many of today’s students, those dinosaurs of mine are
everywhere. In every nook and cranny of their days. And in
their back pockets.

7. We have created best practices “to guard us against the
incalculable difference of students.” We have created the
learning management system to parse learning into discrete
moments and sections, all interrelated through the will and
capacity to grade and assess.

8. Why is imagination important to the project of critical
pedagogy? By which, I’m also asking why is imagination
important to the project of social justice?

9. It is imagination that enables us to believe that things can be
changed.

10. “It is a primary purpose of education to deny people the
opportunity for feeling bored … The role of the imagination is not
to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to
disclose the ordinary unseen, unheard, and unexpected.”
~ Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination

11. “Without a minimum of hope,” Freire writes, “we cannot so
much as start the struggle.” Is there education without hope?
What would be its purpose?

12. Without imagination, education shrivels to training, which is an
occupation without hope, and one which doesn’t even long for
hope. Training seeks to maintain the status quo, and assumes
that the systems already in place are not only satisfactory, but
beyond question.

13. “Never does an event, a fact, a deed, a gesture of rage or love,
a poem, a painting, a song, a book, have only one reason
behind it. In fact, a deed, a gesture of rage or love, a poem, a
painting, a song, a book are always wrapped in thick wrappers.
They have been touched by manifold whys.”
~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope

14. “The difficult task for the teacher is to devise situations in which
the young will move from the habitual and ordinary and
consciously undertake a search.”
~ Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination

15. When the imagination leads us astray, when it takes us down
paths our teachers would not advise we walk, it “poses the
issues of decision, of option, of ethics.” Even, says Freire, “of
education and its limits.”

16. “If teaching can be thought of as an address to others’
consciousness, it may be a summons on the part of one
incomplete person to other incomplete persons to reach for
wholeness.”
~ Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination

17. There might have been dinosaur bones. There didn’t need to be
dinosaur bones.

18. Learning is Not a Mechanism
Digital pedagogy is not equivalent to teachers using digital
tools. Digital pedagogy demands we think critically about our
tools, demands we reflect actively upon our own practice.

19. The large-format blackboard was first used in the U.S. in 1801. The
vacuum tube-based computer was introduced in 1946. In the 1960s,
Seymour Papert began teaching the Logo programming language to
children. The first Learning Management System, PLATO (Program
Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), was developed in 1960.

20. After the introduction of the Radio Lecture in the 1930s, Lloyd Allen
Cook warned, “This mechanizes education and leaves the local
teacher only the tasks of preparing for the broadcast and keeping
order in the classroom.”

21. When I first taught online, I encountered the horror that is the
gradebook inside most learning management systems, which
reduces students (often color coding them) into mere rows in a
spreadsheet.

22. Learning management systems now offer (or threaten) to automate a
process which is, in fact, deeply idiosyncratic. They make grading
more efficient, as though efficiency is something we ought to
celebrate in teaching and learning.

23. “Nonconformity on our part was viewed with suspicion, as empty
gestures of defiance aimed at masking inferiority or substandard
work.”
~ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

24. Both teachers and learners must approach the classroom from a
place of flexibility, willing to see the encounters, exchanges,
interactions, and relationships that develop in a classroom as
dynamic. Grades, and the (very bizarre) notion of their systematized
objectivity, stand as an immediate affront to this kind of classroom.

25. Learning is about sitting (sometimes uncomfortably) with our not
knowing.

26. If there is a better sort of mechanism that we need for the work of
digital pedagogy, it is a machine, an algorithm, a platform tuned not
for delivering and assessing content, but for helping all of us listen
better to students.

27. “The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that
the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring.”
~ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

28. When do we decide that a tool isn’t working, and how can we work
together to set it down en masse?

29. What is Pedagogy?
We feel increasingly certain that the word “pedagogy” has been
misread — that the project of education has been misdirected — that
educators and students alike have found themselves more and more
flummoxed by a system that values assessment over engagement,
learning management over discovery, content over community,
outcomes over epiphanies. Education has misrepresented itself as
objective, quantifiable, apolitical.

30. Pedagogy is praxis, insistently perched at the intersection between
the philosophy and the practice of teaching.

31. What is Critical Pedagogy?
Critical Pedagogy suggests a specific kind of anti-capitalist,
liberatory praxis. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues
against the banking model, in which education “becomes an act of
depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the
teacher is the depositor.”

32. In place of the banking model, Freire advocates for “problem-
posing education,” in which a classroom or learning environment
becomes a space for asking questions — a space of cognition
not information.

33. “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention,
through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry
human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each
other.”
~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

34. “As a classroom community, our capacity to generate
excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in
hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s
presence.”
~ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

35. Our work has wondered at the extent to which Critical Pedagogy
translates into digital space. Can the necessary reflective dialogue
flourish within Web-based tools, social media platforms, or learning
management systems? What is digital agency? How can we build
platforms that support learning across age, race, culture, ability,
geography? What are the specific affordances and limitations of
technology toward these ends?
What is Critical Digital Pedagogy?

36. The wondering at these questions is not particularly new. John and
Evelyn Dewey write in Schools of To-Morrow, “Unless the mass of
workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they
employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and
social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with
which they are dealing.”

37. Digital technologies have values coded into them in advance. Many
tools are good only insofar as they are used. Tools and platforms that
do dictate too strongly how we might use them, or ones that remove
our agency by covertly reducing us and our work to commodified
data, should be rooted out by a Critical Digital Pedagogy.

38. Critical Digital Pedagogy:
1. centers its practice on community and collaboration;
2. must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus
requires invention to reimagine the ways that communication
and collaboration happen across cultural and political
boundaries;
3. will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather
together a cacophony of voices ;
4. must have use and application outside traditional institutions of
education.

39. Increasingly, the Web is a space of politics, a social space, a
professional space, a space of community. And, for better or
worse, more and more of our learning is happening there.

40. For many of us, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish
between our real selves and our virtual selves. When we learn online,
our feet are still quite literally on ground. When we interact via
streaming video, the interaction is nevertheless face-to-face.

41. Critical Pedagogy is as much a political approach as it is an
educative one, a social justice movement first, and an
educational movement second.

42. “If I am not in the world simply to adapt to it, but rather transform
it, and if it is not possible to change the world without a certain
dream or vision for it, I must make use of every possibility there
is not only to speak about my utopia, but also to engage in
practices consistent with it.”
~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation