Critical Theory/Pedagogy

For many sociologists (especially followers of functionalism) and educational theorists, education is concerned with the transmission of culture. As noted many years ago by Lawrence Stenhouse: "Sociologists commonly conceive the function of education as the transmission of culture from generation to generation … Can such a theory, founded upon the idea of cultural transmission, illuminate the practice of the primary school and catch the essence of the traditional theory of secondary education? … [And] we shall have to arrive at a clear idea of what is meant by culture and we shall have to understand how culture is transmitted" (1967, p.1).

We illustrate how culture jam practitioners and pedagogues are responding to increasing commercial incorporation by using participatory communication strategies to bring the act of jamming back into the realm of relocating culture. We analyze the past decade’s evolution of one of YouTube’s first viral videos, “Where the hell is Matt?,” and connect this case to ways university pedagogy might integrate culture jams as artifacts and assignments to empower students to use communication frameworks not only to critique the status quo but also to collaboratively generate transformation. Throughout, we elucidate culture jam processes as creative and cooperative performances of staying on one’s toes in the perpetual renegotiation of hegemony.

Despite the extraordinary amount of attention critical thinking has received in the last few decades, the teaching and fostering of critical thinking in higher education is largely failing, and critical thinking has become an empty buzzword. However, given its importance as an aim of education, it needs to be “refilled”, but that is possible only after identifying the causes of the current failure, i.e. the obstacles to fostering critical thinking. Three such obstacles are identified in this paper, two actual and one hypothetical: (1) the lack of clarity and agreement about what critical thinking is, (2) current teaching practice, and (3) social resistance to (fostering) critical thinking. Based on a critical analysis of these obstacles, this paper suggests to remove or avoid them by refocusing critical thinking “instruction” in higher education on the idea that critical thinking is aiming for truth.

Critical epistemology deems that the relationship between concept, object, signifier, and signified is never fixed and is often mediated by the social relations of capitalist production and consumption. (Carspecken, 2013 p.9)  The symbolic representations of events are always absolutely core to any social research project, are never just a matter of symbols corresponding to objective rarity because social relations involving forms of power are always entailed in any representation; therefore, critical epistemology must include a theory of symbolic representation, its relationship to what we call “reality,” and its relationship to power (Carspecken, 2013).  Traditional critical ethnographic methods of meaning reconstruction which go beyond hermeneutics consider the ritual and symbolic.  Symbolic action and interaction is considered in terms of ritual performance, ritual critique, resistance, participatory action research, and other forms that push the liminal spaces from critique towards emancipatory action.
If we are to consider the symbolic to be a germane component of critical ethnographic research, then considerations should be given to participant observation.  What factors should a ‘researcher as participant’ consider when engaging physically in observation as a component of inquiry?