Using Critical Research for Educational and Social Change

Tricia Kress

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138377851
• eBook ISBN: 9781134928507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume features the works of scholar-practitioners who embrace critical pedagogy and critical research as praxis in qualitative research about education. The authors take an explicit stance toward social justice through education, and they use critical research as a vehicle toward that end. The chapters critically engage with topics such as researcher role and position in critical research; collaborative research models with teachers and students; exploring visual epistemology in schools and with students; critical science education and cosmopolitanism; and developing praxis within teacher preparation courses and teacher research. Contributors push the boundaries of scholarship by presenting nuanced theoretical discussions or critical and timely educational issues via innovative forms of representation (i.e., fiction, narratives, dialogues, rich descriptions, and visuals).

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Stepping out of the academic brew: using critical research to break down hierarchies of knowledge production

Tricia M. Kress

Department of Leadership in Education, Graduate College of Education, The University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA 02125, USA

Critical theory and critical research are undeniably useful for revealing oppressive social structures and challenging the status quo in the realm of grand theory; yet, they are also useful for creating knowledge structures when academics deploy them on the ground. This article explores how critical theory and critical research can be used to critique hierarchies of knowledge in academia and society in order to create new opportunities for learning and researching dialogically, a process that the author calls, ‘stepping out of the academic brew’. Using the concept of REDO (reveal, examine, dismantle, open) and an example of critical research done with and by urban high school students, the author offers a framework for how critical researchers (with the help of those with whom they work) might begin flattening hierarchical knowledge structures in education, in themselves, and in life.

The burden of knowledge

The idea that it is not really about what you know is solidifying itself each passing day. So I am left with this choice dumb it down or forever be wasted potential. That might sound illogical since you’re always told that knowledge is power but coming from where I’m from, knowledge is a burden. (Spock’s research journal 2009, emphasis in original)

In the Spring of 2009, one of my doctoral advisees invited me to co-teach a group of 10th- and 11th-grade students enrolled in ‘Social Activism’, an elective course at Urban High School (UHS), a ‘failing’ school in Boston, Massachusetts. Many of the students in the class had been labeled ‘underperforming’ or disruptive, and many were truant from their other classes. Yet, most of those enrolled in this course faithfully showed up to first period to learn how to conduct critical research complete with theoretical frameworks derived from critical social theory. They learned about Bourdieu’s (1991) theory of social capital, Sewell’s (1992) structure/agency dialectic, and the individual/collective nature of identity as described by Roth and Tobin (2007). They applied these theories to their lived experiences at UHS while keeping reflective journals and engaging in class discussions.

At the time, Spock,¹ the author of the quote at the beginning of this article, was attending the 11th grade. By luck of the draw, she had been scheduled to take the Social Activism course. She was not there by choice. That day, she boldly told her teacher that everything they were learning about was ‘bullshit because it won’t change anything’. She was right, of course; simply naming sources of inequality would not change anything. Being able to theorize about social inequality is not the same as doing something about it. And besides, when she sat down in her second period class, this language she was learning was useless, detrimental even, because in another classroom using critical theory could be construed as being oppositional and disrespectful to the teacher.

When Spock shared with me the above quote from her journal, her words struck a nerve: ‘dumb it down or forever be wasted potential’. This kind of thinking ran counter to my lived experiences as a PhD and a White middle class woman for whom knowledge was a valuable commodity, a means of getting ahead. ‘Dumb-ing it down’ in my world would surely lead to wasted potential; whereas, for Spock, ‘dumb-ing it down’ guarded her against becoming wasted potential. This contradiction cut through my common sense reality as I was forced to consider the plausibility of her words: where Spock is from, ‘knowledge is a burden’.

Bringing critical theory to the ground

The application of critical theory is undeniably a useful starting point for troubling existing hegemonic notions of education. It exposes the baldness of meritocracy and the achievement ideology (MacLeod 2009). It illuminates that education is not the ‘great equalizer’, it is the ‘great regulator’ that ensures that power and wealth will remain concentrated (mostly) in the hands of those who already have it (Duncan-Andrade and Morrell 2008). And it reveals underlying struggles over epistemology by illustrating how throughout history, some people’s knowledge ‘counts’ while others’ is tossed into the epistemological trash heap of society (Kincheloe 2007). Policies that we see today regarding education and research, indeed policies we have seen throughout the history of the USA (Lagemann 2000), are derivative of certain people’s beliefs about which and whose ways of knowing are considered legitimate and valid in our public institutions of education (Apple 2000).

These ‘certified’ ways of knowing, what Apple (2000) calls ‘official knowledge’, that regulate education and society neither include nor recognize the knowledges of students like Spock; rather, they most closely align with a White, Western, middle class, heterosexual, male view of the world which is presented as ‘objective truth’. For an academic like me, ‘official knowledge’ can appear commonsensical because it aligns with my lived experiences; whereas, for an urban high school student like Spock, this knowledge becomes burdensome because she understands the painful reality that in order to graduate high school, she must play ‘the game of school’ in which she is passive and unknowing, an empty receptacle waiting to be filled with ‘facts’ gleaned from a (mythical) White, Western, middle class, heterosexual, male view of the world that runs counter to her lived reality.

In UHS, knowledge can indeed be a burden because, for the most part, Spock’s lived experience does not count; only knowledge of the state curriculum counts. She must ‘dumb it down’ and parrot back what is expected of her in order to pass her classes and pass her tests or else she will be wasted potential. There is no mention in her classes about the social inequality that she knows exists because she has lived it, and the more Spock knows about how inequality is perpetuated in her life and the longer it is ignored as she goes through school, the harder it is for her to deal with the oppression that she experiences every day. She further explained the burden of knowledge in this way:

What I was basically trying to say was that I feel like the more you know about how the system is set up against you, the harder it is for you to go through the motions and come here every day knowing that, like, you’re not getting, you’re not getting the bene-fits you should be getting … I think that, sometimes I think that if I wasn’t as intelligent as I am, which isn’t a lot, then I would be happier in this environment, but uh, I’m really frustrated.

Spock is simultaneously compelled to comply with and struggle against being positioned at the bottom of the knowledge hierarchy of school and society in order to get her diploma and hopefully have the freedom to determine her own place in the world.

Her words also touch upon the double-edged nature of being and becoming a critical researcher: on the one hand, it is empowering to have command of a language that challenges oppressive norms; on the other, seeing the depth of social inequality, including one’s own oppression and/or complicity in oppression, and recognizing the impossibility of changing society in one’s lifetime is disheartening. Being critical of social inequality, whether one comes from my background or Spock’s, does not amount to much if that criticality is not used to change our own or others’ lived realities. For the critical theorist, there is a very real danger of slipping into nihilistic despair, thereby allowing the status quo to remain pristine while he/she becomes bitter and impotent, all the while maintaining his/her status as a knowledge authority and, in effect, becoming part of the oppressor group.

In this regard, Spock’s assessment of the limitations of criticality for affecting change are accurately bleak; yet, I still have faith that when critical researchers actively work to use criticality in an applied manner not just for revealing and decon-structing inequality but also for constructing new possibilities in education, there is the potential to dismantle and transform these same knowledge hierarchies that limit Spock’s agency. To do so, criticality must be deployed to external sources of oppression, but it also must be used to dislodge the oppressor within, that is, those parts of us that are comfortably steeping in a warm bath of ideology that normalizes social and epistemological inequality. This act, applying critical theories purposefully to break down (not just critique) knowledge hierarchies and create new ways of knowing and being, is what I call ‘stepping out of the academic brew’. In the sections that follow, I myself will ‘step out’ by providing a discussion about the knowledge hierarchies Spock and I are referring to and what it means to me to ‘step out’ of them.

With help from Spock and The Young Researchers Club (YRC, a group of high school students I work with in my research), I will illustrate how I ‘step out’ in my own research by undergoing a process that I refer to as ‘REDOing’ (Reveal, Examine, Dismantle, Open): consciously working to unravel the knowledge hierarchies that are within me while simultaneously working to REDO the hierarchies that emanate from the social structures around me. By illustrating the sophistication of the work that Spock and the Young Researchers do and how working with them has challenged me to see education and research differently, I aim to open discussion about how we might lift the burden of knowledge by exposing the artificiality of the knowledge hierarchies we create and enforce in education, research, academia, and society. From there, we may begin to envision education and research as collaborative processes that are ongoing, dialogical, reciprocal, and conscientizing for the teacher and student, and the researcher and the researched.

‘Stepping out’ of knowledge hierarchies, politically and personally

The knowledge hierarchies that Spock and I are referring to are intimately tied to Western ways of knowing and being and have their roots in colonialism and positivism. They permeate US society as a whole, but they are most obvious in institutions of education. In my own life as an academic, I feel these hierarchies acutely as I teach my classes and conduct my research. As Smith (1999, 56) explains, much of the knowledge that emerges from the academy has been developed by conducting ‘research “through imperial eyes”’. This type of research takes: ‘an approach which assumes that Western ideas about the most fundamental things are the only ideas possible to hold, certainly the only rational ideas, and the only ideas which can make sense of the world, of reality, of social life and of human beings’ (Smith 1999, 56). Denzin, Lincoln, and Giardina (2006, 774) further explain that this type of Western academic research:

[…] fails to recognize legitimate differences in ‘ways of knowing’ possessed by diverse groups and peoples, and imposes a Western sensibility and rationality on experience even when Western sensibilities and rationality are highly inappropriate and indeed meaningless.

This results in the colonization, domination, marginalization, and hierarchical structuring of knowers and knowledges.

In this mentality, any knowledge, approach to knowledge, or knowledge worker that does not align with the epistemological ideal of the rational Western man (often regarded as synonymous with ‘science’ or ‘scientist’) is relegated to a lesser positioning in academia and society because, supposedly, subscribing to this Western way of knowing places the inquirer on the path toward discovering objective ‘truth’ about the world. Accordingly, the White Western male way of knowing is ostensibly superior because it is divorced from sensations of the body that taint the mind’s ability to reason; in contrast, women’s and minorities’ inability to bifurcate mind and body mark their ways of knowing as inferior and thereby incapable of discovering ‘pure’ knowledge (Kincheloe 2008b). When positioned in opposition to this ‘ideal’ epistemology, other ways of knowing are then defined as subjective, biased, emotional, political, irrational, non-empirical, impure, and flawed; in other words, they are defined as ‘other’ than and therefore not ideal.

For scholars such as myself who have been immersed in Western culture and Western notions of research and science, colonialism and positivism have been normalized to the point where they feel commonsensical and are often hidden from me even as I might embody and enact these norms. As Kincheloe and Tobin (2009, 513) point out, like Whiteness, ‘many of the tenets of positivism are so embedded within Western culture, academia, and the world of education in particular that they are often invisible to researchers and those who consume their research.’ Even if we identify as critical or postmodern, we will experience limitations in our abilities to critique this Western vision because of the ways it shapes our own ways of understanding the world. To an extent, we may be able to define what it is and how it operates in our lives, but without being introduced to other ways of knowing and without being able to see ourselves through the eyes of another, we might be hard-pressed to envision alternatives if this is the only world we know.

Kincheloe (2008b, 29) explains, ‘As living parts of the world, we are trying to figure out the world from within the world. In such a situation we can only approach this task from existing cognitive structures that sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Inside the ‘thick wrapper’ of critical pedagogy and research
• 1 Stepping out of the academic brew: using critical research to break down hierarchies of knowledge production
• 2 Citizenship and social justice in urban science education
• 3 Seeing what we mean: visual knowledge and critical epistemology
• 4 Picturing oppression: seventh graders’ photo essays on racism, classism, and sexism
• 5 ‘Working with’ as a methodological stance: collaborating with students in teaching, writing, and research
• 6 Keeping a ‘vigilant critique’: unpacking critical praxis as teacher educators
• 7 Recovering from ‘yo mama is so stupid’: (en)gendering a critical paradigm on Black feminist theory and pedagogy
• Index