Whither critical pedagogy in the neo-liberal university today? Two UK practitioners’ reflections on constraints and possibilities

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.

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.

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 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 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 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)

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 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), 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 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 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 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.

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

Strivens Janet

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

Macdonald Ranald

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 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.

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.

Response to Janet Strivens and Ranald McDonald

Amsler Sarah S.Canaan Joyce E.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

Notes

¹ See also recent work on the ‘asymmetrical convergence’ of science and business and the consequent transformation of environmental activism in Frickel (2004).

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