Key Questions
- How do we develop a practice across multiple instances of teaching/learning/designing?
- How do we give structure, purpose or meaning to our practice?
Examples in Reviewed Articles
Technologies of Methodology address questions that connect abstract thought with specific practice. They provide structure to individual actions and interventions, and they can serve as powerful connection points between ideas that address questions in other realms of application. For example, a framework inspired by a certain idea of Theory can serve to produce technologies of Lesson that are mindful of the theory-based goals and that connect to each other meaningfully. Similarly, heuristics for design based on a certain idea of Learning can help produce artifacts that directly align with that understanding. These technologies, while not applied directly, play a large role in determining the shape a practice takes by connecting it to its grounding and seeking to transform abstract concepts into practical artifacts. Besides frameworks and heuristics, which I mentioned above, technologies that address questions of Methodology can include curricula, guidelines, and habits developed from practice among many others.
The first key question, How do we develop a practice across multiple instances of teaching/learning/designing?, facilitates technologies concerned with continuity of message, goals, values, and more across different individual artifacts of practice. Frameworks for lesson design, for example, connect the Lessons created with them structurally and in values. Curricula ensure continuity of knowledge across lessons, and long-formed habits allow experienced teachers to respond quickly and successfully to a variety of emergent issues in their practice. Whether they are developed from the abstract to the concrete or vice-versa, tools that address this question are oriented towards organizing and producing other technologies closer to practice. Meanwhile, the second key question, How do we give structure, purpose or meaning to our practice?, facilitates technologies that help us interpret our actions according to our abstract conceptions. Missions and values statements can serve as examples of these, in that they help practitioners place and justify their practice within their intellectual and cultural understanding. While there might be overlap, these technologies do not necessarily also answer questions of Theory; It is very different to think “Education should do this and that” than to think “The way I teach my students aims to do this and that”. Tools of Methodology, even when interested in the abstract purpose of practice, are still always directly concerned with the concrete.
Though critical pedagogy tends to be skeptical of methodologization, tools of Methodology are still common across critical approaches, as they help structure not only any individual practice, but an understanding across the practices of different teachers. In Kincheloe’s summary I identify points 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 and 13 as addressing questions of Methodology, more than any other Realm of application. Yet, all of these ideas place themselves at different distances from practice and seek to affect different Realms, which shows how multiple tools of Methodology can coexist within a single praxis. Generative themes (pt. 5), then, exist very close to the design of Lessons, and serve as a way to start designing individual conversations and interactions with students. Being attuned to the idea of complexity (pt. 13), meanwhile, influences how an exploration of any generative theme is to be conducted, and informs not only the way the themes are chosen in each interaction but also how the conversation around the theme should be carried out. Adopting both of these ideas, however, does not mean that any given intervention is pre-determined, and so I propose the rejection of methodologization to be understood not as a rejection of tools of Methodology, for only with them can we structure our practice, but of narrow, inflexible, over-determining tools that constrict the freedom of the teacher and the student in exploring knowledge.
Analysis of reviewed articles
Reflecting the enormous potential diversity in tools of Methodology, all five authors that are interested in this kind of tool approach it in completely different ways. Blikstein (2008) is explicitly interested in constructing a tool so that his success can be replicated, and he frames his entire article around his framework. Yet, he himself does not use it, instead proposing it a posteriori. In his practice, he has managed to conduct a series of workshops that align well with his objectives derived from Theory, and so he picks apart the experience to identify the elements that have propitiated this success. In contrast, Frankenstein (1987), similarly interested in reproducing her success, derives her own Methodology from more abstract considerations. By reconstructing both Freirean epistemology and an understanding of people’s relationship to mathematics in her communities, she establishes both abstract goals and concrete approaches that intend to bridge the perceived status quo with the desired outcome. When she presents her practice as a case study, she signals that her methodology is already in operation, and the reader is meant to be swayed (or not) by the results.
Mclean’s (2020) tools resemble Blikstein’s in that her Methodology is derived from practice. While she rejects the very idea of constructing a methodology, she does reveal how through her experience she has developed her own personal heuristics for teaching and for engaging with her community. The roadmap she proposes focuses not on the reader potentially adopting her habits, but on having them develop their own. Thus, McLean signals that she is rejecting the transmission, rather than the development, of a methodology. It must be learned, but cannot be taught.
Meanwhile, Sagaram (2020) and Zimmet (1987) both import frameworks from outside critical pedagogy and adapt them to serve their students’ needs. Sagaram’s toolplays its role at an abstract level when she designs the entire program around it. Zimmet, in contrast, brings her own external methodology to bear very close to practice, using it only to inform her design of individual Lessons. Their contributions cast further doubt on the idea that Methodology is incompatible with critical pedagogy. In both cases, the authors are leveraging tools designed outside of the field in order to construct their critical programs. In both cases, their students benefit from these technologies because the Methodology tools provide structure to the design of the individual activities that the teachers embark on with their students. Yet, in both cases the authors are importing these Methodology tools critically and consciously. They use them narrowly, for what they are intended, and they contextualize them with their own understanding of the educational project. Methodology is crucial, but it must not be adopted to the exclusion of serious thinking or of technologies in other realms of application.