In this review I have conducted three simultaneous experiments. First, I have examined critical pedagogies through the lens of educational technology, to reveal how critical teachers’ tools and concepts inform each other. Second, I have framed this examination within a model of my own creation, and I have used this review to test the Realms of Application and the key questions I have proposed as part of it. Third, I have written this review as both a linear and a non-linear artifact, and I have explored how linearity (or lack thereof) affect the process of writing and of reading the work. Though the experiments have been successful in the sense that this review exists, the three projects remain unfinished. Critical pedagogies are vast and varied, and any examination of their tools is bound to be ever-growing, ever-changing. The model, while successful in this case, remains untested against other pedagogical approaches. The non-linear review, meanwhile, is only a first attempt at such a structure. It must still be perfected. Regardless, I want to highlight some insights I have gathered from this project along each of these experimental avenues.
The technologies of critical pedagogy
Despite not focusing on the largest or most famous texts of critical pedagogy, I have been continuously amazed by the technological complexity of all the articles I reviewed. All those in this work, and tens of others I read and did not end up making it to the final product, reveal cohesive, complex understandings of what it means to teach critically. All of them also contain clear answers to all key questions in my model, and as such the challenge has not been to find the technologies that the authors are using, but rather to tease out the specific technical contribution of each author, to understand what they are focusing on and why. Thus, I have been forced to pair down my analysis of each article, to examine these notable contributions instead of just mapping out each Realm in each article as I originally intended. Doing so would have entailed an enormous amount of work and redundancy, since many articles share basic ideas, even when they present them in different ways.
In that sense, I have also found a great cohesion in all of the works I reviewed. Even when taking into account Down and Steinberg’s (2020) assertion of the enormous variety of critical pedagogies, I am astounded by their general agreement, even beyond Kincheloe’s summary of common elements across pedagogies. When technologies addressing any individual Realm are different between authors, they are rarely in conflict with each other, and instead they all seem aware that their answer is only one of many. What seems to unite them is, then, this radical acceptance of diversity in approach, along with the aforementioned emphasis on technical complexity. Critical pedagogies are all holistic, all intimately aware and interested in the relationship between thought and action, between theory and practice, between all the Realms of Application, and yet they are all fiercely different. I can draw no essentialist conclusion or set of technologies that define critical pedagogies, nor do I think one should. Instead, I encourage us to continue focusing on how their tools inform one another, and how we as teachers draw from many other, different, teachers’ pedagogies to construct our own.
The Realms of Application of Educational Technology
Throughout this project, I have continuously refined the names and key questions for each Realm, and interrogated whether it makes sense to think about them by themselves at all. As it stands now, I posit that the model is functional in that it has allowed me to analyze in detail how each author approaches the tools they are interested in constructing, and it has provided me with a frame that facilitates identifying and comparing different tools that do similar work across the writing of diverse authors. Yet, the model can be refined further. An outstanding question is about the broadness of some Realms, such as Context and Methodology, and the narrowness of others, such as Teaching and Lesson. As it stands, I think the former could be cut down into sub-Realms that might facilitate more in-depth analysis of the tools that engage with them, and even include some of the narrower Realms. However, doing this would make the model ever more complex to use, more rigid in the possible interpretation of the Realms, and maybe create false visions of how to evaluate all educational technology based on the specific tradition I used to refine the model itself. Instead, I envision the next step is to attempt a similar project as this one with a different tradition of education, to explore how it might respond to a different understanding of the phenomenon, to a different tradition of writing and research, to a different orientation of tools.
The Non-Linear Review
I must admit that writing a non-linear review has been hard. My academic training has prepared me to think about constructing, presenting and consuming information linearly, where the expectation at every moment is that the reader already possesses the context of what came before in the text. With a non-linear review, this is not the case, and so the challenge has been to construct each article such that it might be read on its own as much as possible, while simultaneously ensuring that each idea retains the complexity of its relations to other concepts. In this, I am unsure as of yet if I succeeded or failed, as I am still too close to the project and cannot examine it critically, without the knowledge of what it meant to make it. As the writer, however, I do believe that writing non-linearly has expanded my understanding of this complexity of ideas, and it has allowed me to draw lines that would otherwise be complicated to draw between two concepts that don’t end up close to each other on a text. Perhaps, then, this structure will continue to work best for projects that, like this one, are not intended to present a hierarchy of information, but rather a rich complexity and interrelatedness between concepts. However, I must point out that the possibilities of this format are endless, and that I have settled on this structure of non-linearity because it best reflected the web of complexity that I was envisioning in my head. In comparison with the linear version, I think that this is the greatest advantage of this non-linear format, that it can formally reflect the structure of the knowledge it contains.