An unsettled bookcase: a critical paradigmatic approach to connect theory and pedagogy

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I explore the shifts in the current landscape regarding the treatment of theory and pedagogy as a critical endeavor. Swartz argued that there is disconnect between the work of “theory” and “pedagogy,” a notion I find quite unsettling. In contrast, Critical Communication Pedagogy educators begin with a premise of equity, inclusiveness, and reflexivity—arranging paradigms for disciplinary spaces to foster advancements of theory and pedagogy in concert with each other. I examine the possibilities within the literature, offer consideration for what has been accomplished, nuance the critical paradigm to connect theory and pedagogy through praxis, share innovations and acceptance of disciplinary spaces, and invite a conversation around educational commitments, ownership, and “work.”

KEYWORDS:

• Critical communication pedagogy
• commitments
• disciplinary reflection
• reflexivity
• equity

Notes

1. Donald E. Hall, The Academic Self: An Owner's Manual (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002).

2. Victor W. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974).

3. Ronald J. Pelias, “The Critical Life,” Communication Education 49, no. 3 (2000): 220–28.

4. See, for example, the following works by Jo Sprague: “The Goals of Communication Education” in Teaching Communication: Theory, Research, and Methods, ed. John A. Daley, 15–30, 2nd ed. (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1990); “Retrieving the Research Agenda for Communication Education: Asking the Pedagogical Questions That Are ‘Embarrassments to Theory,’” Communication Education 42, no. 2 (1993): 106–22; “Ontology, Politics, and Instructional Communication Research: Why We Can't Just ‘Agree to Disagree’ About Power,” Communication Education 43, no. 3 (1994): 273–90; “Communication Education: The Spiral Continues,” Communication Education 51, no. 4 (2002): 337–54.

5. Peter McLaren, Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 1.

6. See, for example, Antonia Darder, Marta Baltodano, and Rodolfo D. Torres, The Critical Pedagogy Reader (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003); Henry Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (London: Routledge, 1993); McClaren, Schooling as a Ritual Performance; Ira Shor, Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Joan Wink, Critical Pedagogy: Notes from the Real World, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2000).

7. See note 4 above.

8. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970), 51.

9. David Kahl, Jr., “Connecting Autoethnography with Service Learning: A Critical Communication Pedagogical Approach,” Communication Teacher 24, no. 4 (2010): 221–28.

10. Shor, Empowering Education.

11. Omar Swartz, “Interdisciplinarity and Pedagogical Implications of Rhetorical Theory,” Communication Studies 46, nos. 1/2 (1995): 130–39.

12. Sprague, “Communication Education: The Spiral Continues.”

13. See, for example, Stephen P. Banks and Anna Banks, “Reading ‘The Critical Life’: Autoethnography as Pedagogy,” Communication Education 49, no. 3 (2000): 233–38; Leda Cooks, “Pedagogy, Performance, and Positionality: Teaching About Whiteness in Interracial Communication,” Communication Education 52, nos. 3/4 (2003): 245–57; Leda Cooks and Chyng Sung, “Constructing Gender Pedagogies: Desire and Resistance in the ‘Alternative’ Classroom,” Communication Education 51, no. 3 (2002): 293–310; Deanna P. Dannels, “Time to Speak Up: A Theoretical Framework of Situated Pedagogy and Practice for Communication Across the Curriculum,” Communication Education 50, no. 2 (2001): 144–58; Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren, “‘You Get Pushed Back’: The Strategic Rhetoric of Educational Success and Failure in Higher Education,” Communication Education 53, no. 1 (2004): 21–40; Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren, Critical Communication Pedagogy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage); Henry Giroux, “Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti-Black Racist Pedagogy Under the Reign of Neoliberalism,” Communication Education 52, nos. 3/4 (2003): 191–211; Henry Giroux, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 59–79; Katherine Grace Hendrix, Ronald L. Jackson II, and Jennifer R. Warren, “Shifting Academic Landscapes: Exploring Co-Identities, Identity Negotiation, and Critical Progressive Pedagogy,” Communication Education 52, nos. 3/4 (2003): 177–90; Robert L. Ivie, “What Are We About?,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (2004): 125–6; Julia R. Johnson and Archana J. Bhatt, “Gendered and Racialized Identities and Alliances in the Classroom: Formations in/of Resistive Space,” Communication Education 52, nos. 3/4 (2003): 230–44.

14. Ann L. Darling, “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Communication: New Connections, New Directions, New Possibilities,” Communication Education 52, no. 1 (2003): 48.

15. Fassett and Warren, Critical Communication Pedagogy, 3.

16. Sarah Fenstermaker and Candace West, Doing Gender, Doing Difference: Inequality, Power, and Institutional Change (New York: Routledge, 2002).

17. Pelias, “The Critical Life.”

18. Roger I. Simon, Teaching Against the Grain: Texts for a Pedagogy of Possibility (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1992), 58.

19. Pelias, “The Critical Life.”

20. Quoted in Charles H. Rowell and Audre Lorde, “Above the Wind: An Interview with Audre Lorde,” Callaloo 23, no. 1 (1990), 86

21. Fassett and Warren, Critical Communication Pedagogy.

22. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 10.

23. Ibid., 67.

24. Michael Burgoon, Judee Heston, and James McCroskey, “The Small Group as a Unique Communication Situation,” in Messages: A Reader in Human Communication, ed. Jean M. Civikly, 1–12 (New York: Random House, 1974).

25. Nancy F. Burroughs, Patricia Kearney, and Timothy G. Plax, “Compliance-resistance in the College Classroom,” Communication Education 38, no. 3 (1989): 214–9.

26. Quoted in Fassett and Warren, “‘You Get Pushed Back,’” 24.

27. bell hooks has written extensively on this point, see: Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992); Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994); Where We Stand: Class Matters (New York: Routledge, 2000).

28. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

29. Paulo Freire and Ana Maria Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1994), 66.

30. Deanna L. Fassett, “On Defining At-Risk: The Role of Educational Ritual in Constructions of Success and Failure,” Basic Communication Course Annual 15 (2003): 41–82.

31. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1977).

32. Swartz, “Interdisciplinarity.”

33. Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), 9.

34. Pelias, “The Critical Life,” 1.

35. Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2008).

36. P. J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 3.

37. John Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1984), 311.