The Technologies of Critical Pedagogy

Blikstein (2008)

8 min read

Blikstein’s article describes a series of technology workshops he conducted with the children in an underserved community in urban Brazil. He commences by framing his interventions from two perspectives: in the realm of Theory, he adopts Paulo Freire’s ideas that education is for personal and social liberation, and by reflecting on his life arrives at an understanding of the Freirean mission. His workshops, then, are explicitly and specifically devised to enact this emancipatory dream. Blikstein complements this Theory-oriented framing with the work of Seymour Papert. Adopting from him a series of ideas on Learning, he suscribes to the importance of technology as “an emancipatory tool for mobilizing change in schools and empowering students.” (p. 206). This concept is drawn from Papert’s constructivist vision of learning, and his focus on teaching technological skills through the students’ own participation on the creation of new artifacts.

From these two basic ideas, Blikstein is interested in how to build a Praxis. He is explicitly focused on questions of Methodology, proposing his reflections as “a design framework for implementing Freirean learning environments” (p. 206):

Quote

First, we identify a community-relevant generative theme. Second, we depart from the community’s technological culture and expertise as a basis for introducing new technologies. Third, we deliberately use a mixed-media approach, in which high- and low-tech, on- and off-screen, and high- and low-cost expressive tools coexist for students’ production of artifacts. Lastly, we question (or “displace”) taken-for-granted school practices and mindsets, even those that are apparently irrelevant to teaching and learning.
- p. 206

This framework, identified a posteriori, is explored through examples in great detail throughout the rest of the article. Because Blikstein himself uses it to frame the experiences he narrates, I will follow it as well to further examine his ideas.

First, we identify a community-relevant generative theme. The first step in Blikstein’s framework remains in the realm of Methodology. He leverages the established critical pedagogy idea of the generative theme to devise an entry point into the workshop for both himself and the students. But his chosen generative theme in the first stage remains shallow and relatively uninformed about the particularities of the community that will engage with it. So Blikstein deploys for the first time his overall outlook for Research: throughout the workshops, he remains ever curious to how the students’ relationships with his intervention evolve, and he modifies his program as he discovers new information. His original generative theme, Brazil’s mandated 20% reduction in home consumption of electricity, quickly changes based on the students’ circumstances and their community’s particular relationship with electricity on the border of legality.

Second, we depart from the community’s technological culture and expertise as a basis for introducing new technologies. Blikstein leverages his Research tools to specify his Lessons. He starts from a broad understanding of his lesson goal to demystify the creation of technology, and introduces new Lesson artifacts, the technologies themselves, as their use becomes convenient. He thus describes how a student group’s interest in art evolves from drawing to sculpting to the construction of a model house to its transformation into a smart home. At every stage, Blikstein suggests the technological artifacts that might be explored, while leaving the program of exploration up to the student. This Lesson plan reflects both his Freirean and his Papertian inspiration, prioritizing self-realization and independent exploration in the students’ journey to discover the technology. The student who struggles to commit to a project is thus asked to document the projects with a camera, which leads to her developing the expertise in its use, then to the production of small progress reports, a documentary, and a number of fiction films. Blikstein’s artifact-first Lessons thus ripple as students build expertise and interact with others’ projects. The documentation inspires the same student to do the reports and the documentary, but a different group is also inspired to embark on a robotics project by the film, and it is another group of students, not the original filmmaker, that decide to produce fiction films. By having an original open ended orientation, Blikstein’s Lessons evolve and integrate comfortably with each new ripple project, his role thus reduced to introducing the technology necessary for exploration rather than guiding it.

Third, we deliberately use a mixed-media approach, in which high- and low-tech, on- and off-screen, and high- and low-cost expressive tools coexist for students’ production of artifacts. In rejecting the prioritization of one kind of technology over another, Blikstein again shows how his flexible approach to Lesson based on Research is leveraged to bring the learning experiences closer to the students’ context. When he observes the participants’ reticence to interact with costly LEGO kits he also identifies an existing culture of technological scavenge and reuse within the community, so he actively leaves the higher end tools behind and embraces the existing understanding of how technology is produced. For the next round of his workshop, his Lesson objects are now composed of kits made up of low cost and scavenged electrical parts. His students not only feel more comfortable with these artifacts, but their use allows them to bring in their culturally-valued ingenuity into the work, further vindicating their community-based expertise. On another note, his broad understanding of what technology is facilitates students’ exploration of topics closer to their own intellectual and skill-based interest. Both the documentarian and the home-construction projects I described before arise from an original relative disinterest in robotics and programming, which is overcome by understanding each individual student’s interest and facilitating their approach to digital technology through the production of work that is interesting to them. Technology is thus reframed as a means to an end, rather than a reified subject of its own, and crayons and modeling clay, digital cameras, and robotics equipment are all placed on a level playing field where what is important is what one wants to do with them.

Lastly, we question (or “displace”) taken-for-granted school practices and mindsets, even those that are apparently irrelevant to teaching and learning. Blikstein once more relies on an active Research stance to develop Teaching practices appropriate to his students. When, at the beginning of his workshop, he happens to place all his expensive materials on the floor rather than on the tables, he notices that students are less afraid of the technology. So, he integrates this de-reification of technology into his subsequent workshops, leaving the items on the floor and encouraging students to interact with an expensive laptop the way they would with any other object. He also encourages other teachers to adopt this approach, and to involve themselves actively in the students’ exploration of technology despite their established hierarchical boundaries. When he switches to salvaged and low-cost components, he leads the teachers in salvaging equipment, and when a teacher expresses discomfort with the students’ “lazyness” in only taking pictures, he encourages her to sit on the floor with the students and to take on the role of co-explorer rather than authority figure. Ultimately, his program redefines technology as tool rather than treasure not just for the students, but also for their teachers, who have so far valued the monetary risk of freely distributing the technology above the potential benefits of doing so.

Though Blikstein is interested in devising tools of Methodology, it is his Research approach, his flexibility in implementation and his attention to the evolving circumstances of students and teacher that stands out from his article. Though all of his tools flow from a grounding in Theory and Learning, they evolve and change as he immerses himself deeper and deeper into the Context in which his students live. Interestingly, though, he prioritizes individual insights and their impact on specific practices rather than a comprehensive reading of the students’ environment, thus highlighting the interplay between contextual insights and the evolving practices of Teaching and Lesson.

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