Key Questions
- How and why do we document our evolving technologies and practices?
- How do we connect insight in one realm of application to other realms?
Examples in Reviewed Articles
Technologies of Research are those that serve to document our practices and technologies and those that allow us to analyze what has been done before in order to advance our practice in the present. They allow us to connect across Realms in the sense that documentation of progress in one can facilitate insight in another. The key questions, How and why do we document our evolving technologies and practices? and How and why do we document our evolving technologies and practices?, reflect the double interest of this Realm of application: to preserve and to inform.
Technologies of Research are perhaps the most commonly encountered by people engaging with education. At the classroom level, they can include all kinds of assessments that document student progress to (ideally) inform further interventions by the teacher. But they also include reports and manuals on all other kinds of educational technology as well as all academic writing, which is explicitly interested in answering both of the key questions of this realm of application. All of the articles reviewed and cited here are tools of Research, as is this literature review itself and the model that I have proposed. Besides all of these documents, there are also approaches to research itself and cultures of practice around research and its application. These all engage with the key questions meaningfully, and so must be included in this realm.
In critical pedagogies, tools of Research are central to many approaches. As Kincheloe points out, a key element of many of these approaches is the active integration of research into the educational activity. The line between teacher and researcher is blurred so that the teacher’s practice can more closely adapt to the environment and lives of the students. But there are also other tools of research embedded within the tradition, such as the types of article that are commonly written and the humanistic style that many authors employ. On the former, I have encountered three broad types of approach: The life narrative, the case study, and the academic analysis. In the first one, the author draws from their or another educator’s biography to highlight how their experiences have led them to their practice. In the second one, the author describes and analyzes an intervention that they designed or participated in. In the third, the author focuses on the texts of critical pedagogy, as well as those of other academic disciplines, to construct their argument. Many articles construct their ideas using more than one of these approaches, mixing for example life history into constructions of Theory or academic analysis into artifacts of Context in an otherwise case-focused article. Blikstein (2008), for example, starts his otherwise specific examination of a case by stating that “Trying to understand Freire without comprehending his personal quest is, to say the least, incomplete” (p. 205).
Yet, for most articles it is clear what approach is primarily being taken, and there are examples of all three in this review: Freire (2020) and Puiggrós (2008) are primarily life narratives, in this case both focusing on Paulo Freire’s life. Gadotti (2008) is an academic analysis, reconstructing Freirean thought through the texts and bringing it into contact with social and political academic writing. All other articles are case studies, focusing on individual interventions. This distribution should not be taken to reflect the field; instead, it reveals my interest in the tools of applied critical pedagogy, which has led me to include a disproportionate amount of case studies to the detriment of the other two types of article.
For now, I will focus only on the authors that are meaningfully engaging with questions of Research, that are interested in exploring how it plays a part in their work. I draw this line to avoid repeating myself: all authors are researchers, and all are conducting meaningful research into their Contexts, their students, their Theory, etc. But that can be seen already in all the other sections of this review.
Analysis of reviewed articles
Freire (2020) is a quintessential example of how the author can use a life narrative to abstract a concept. In this case, Freire uses his own recollections of growing up to define and explain his competing understandings of reading, the traditional and the critical one. He uses his experience as learner to construct an idea of Learning, which serves to also illustrate how he blurs the boundaries between who is a teacher and who is a student. Puiggrós (2008), meanwhile, takes different episodes from the same life (Freire’s) to explore the influences of his environment on his pedagogy, as well as to construct a roadmap of challenges for the Latin American critical educator. Though she does not construct an understanding of the current Context, her analysis does concern itself with how the reader might draw from Freire’s life to inform their response to the same sociocultural factors.
Like Freire, McLean (2020) is interested in exploring how her own life experience has allowed her to construct her pedagogy. In this case, her conclusions come in the realm of Theory, which she derives from her background in feminism and Marxism. But, since her Methodology tools are so deeply personal, they also by necessity include this form of Research. In fact, she encourages the reader to follow a similar path as her, not by copying her conclusions but by embarking on their own Research journey to know themself better as a teacher. Thus, she blends Research into her tools of both Theory and Methodology.
Blikstein (2008) is also interested in blending Research and Methodology tools, but instead of looking inwards through life history he faces outwards through observation. His entire Methodology is based on careful observation and adaptation of other tools as new information arises. He describes his insights in minute detail to exemplify how, for his approach to work, Research tools must take primacy over all others. The key is to change as one observes, rather than to figure it out from the start, and it is only through this active Research that the teacher can keep up.