I have a few things to say in response to Amy Marsh’s comments on the Burbules and Berk reading about critical thinking and critical pedagogy. I, too, see critical thinking as a method that could have very positive results for students as they learn how to consider things from different perspectives and collect evidence to come to informed conclusions. However, I don’t think that critical thinking without critical pedagogy would be as beneficial to students, as the evaluation of evidence should go beyond just what is “true” or not. If we come to the conclusion in my classroom that minorities are still underrepresented in government, for example, I don’t think we should stop there. Instead, we should think about why this is and what institutional factors are at play. This is, as Amy says, thinking politically, and yes students will hear the opinions of the students around them, but isn’t that what life is like? Students already hear their parents talk about politics, and they probably hear their peers talk about it outside of the classroom, so any political conversation in the classroom won’t be the only influence on students.
Amy also comments that students should not be further encouraged to question authority or teachers. While I would definitely agree that discipline would become an issue if students were told to question/challenge all of their teachers based on whatever injustices they perceive, I don’t think that this is the objective of critical pedagogy. Rather, I think the purpose of critical pedagogy is to help students think about issues of power and inequality in our society as a whole and how they will choose to act according to whether or not they think it is necessary to do so in order to change things. As I wrote in my response to the article, this could possibly include a discussion of the legal rights of the students, but that would not be the exclusive topic of conversation. Critical thinking and critical pedagogy both seem to have their place in the classroom, neither one to the point of excluding the other.
