Discovering dialectically and diving deeper into critical education praxis This section traces my ontological shift in understanding the critical education project as

background and an entry point to a life affirming pedagogy. I structure this shift with Bhaskar’s epistemological dialectic. Dialectical critical realism has been developed by Bhaskar (Bhaskar, 2008; Norrie, 2010), making an important contribution for thinking about the work of thinking! It has a range of both theoretical and practical relevance linking

epistemological and ontological conceptions of agency, connecting structure and causation to the nature of change in a dynamic world, and to the relationship between the human being and nature on the one hand, and the human being and history on the other. It can be described by the following ‘moves’ that are distinct in quality (elaborated on below) as a way of tracing the dimensions of change – an analysis of change (Scott and Bhaskar, 2015). In this section I draw on these theoretical constructs to understand the movement in thinking relevant to the critical education project.

• 1 M: the First Moment signifies something finished, behind us, determinate – a product: transfactual (structural) causality, pertaining to NON-IDENTITY; first indicates founding.

• 2E: the Second Edge speaks of the point of transition or becoming; the exercise of causal powers in rhythmic (processual) causality; pertaining to NEGATIVITY and ABSENCE.

• 3L: the third Level announces an emergent whole with its own specific

determinations, capable of reacting back on the materials from which it is formed – process-in-product: holistic causality, pertaining to TOTALITY.

• 4D: the fourth Dimension singles out a geo-historically recent form of causality – product- in-process: human intentional causality, transformative AGENCY or praxis.

(Bhaskar, 2008, pp. xiii-xiv) This exploration/shift is based on my reading of the literature that critiques and clarifies various dimensions of critical education or what it means “to learn to read the world in order to change it” (Cooper and Luckett, 2017, p. 258). As I go, I represent this as a shift in familiar images – from the cycle of praxis action-reflection, uncovering its critiques and

incompleteness through to a recovery of learning in terms of Bhaskar’s dialectic which has been adapted to learning. Inspired by the idea that we need to ‘embody critique’, I present how we might think about what constitutes a critical learning process and then return to a repair of learning.

Figure 2: Graphical representation of critical education processes, neither linear nor circular but both

4.4.1 1M: what is the learning that enables change and transformation?

An action learning circle or the cycle of praxis is an interesting place to begin to unpack the praxis of critical pedagogy. It does not encompass it all, but it is a crucial entry point as it is commonly found in spaces of critical/ transformative education (Michelson, 2015). The action learning cycle (represented in the second shape in Figure 2 above) is often used as an interpretation of the work of Paulo Freire. It is an important and helpful conceptual tool in many practices of education as it moves away from the kind of transmission model which might be conceptualised as a straight arrow (first arrow shown in Figure 2 above). However, there is a danger that the cycle of praxis can become depoliticised and interpreted in ways that are contradictory to the transformative potential of its original intentions. This danger was confirmed by O’Donoghue’s (2018) critical review of critical pedagogy in environmental education: what should be a contextualised engagement, becomes a “plan-act-reflect” which is abstracted in the form of a process. Keeping in mind the aim of understanding learning in

the context of global capitalism, I draw on developments in dialectical thinking to expand the meaning and thinking behind the praxis that this cycle diagram represents, towards a way of thinking about critical education praxis. This is a basis for reflecting upon the empirical work in this PhD.

4.4.2 2E: How is it that critical education attempts have produced new contradictions?

What inspired me to learn more about the transformative possibilities of critical education was a critique of a branch of critical education known as transformative learning (Michelson, 2015). Origins of transformative learning theory and the critique thereof originate from scholarship in America, specifically of Kolb (1984) and Mezirow (1978) (Michelson, 2015;

John, 2016). The area of transformative learning has been expanded by suggestions that it requires re-inventing outside of westernised contexts (John, 2016) or that “transformative learning theory is stagnating and needs to continue transforming itself” (Lange, 2018, p. 282).

In an article which questions the existence of the phenomenon of transformative learning, Newman (2012, p. 18) wrotes that “the word [transformative] is being leeched of meaning through over-use, or is taking on a new existence associated with its original meaning [attached to grounded traditions of education in social movements]”. Taking note of these cautions, I stay with the term “transformative” in this thesis but couched in a critical discussion of how it is shaped by a broader politics.

The broader politics and the critique that drew me further into the debates about this area of educational scholarship had to do with how experience was conceptualised in relation to the other elements of learning, the relational encounter. The critique pointed out that in particular interpretations of scholarship on transformative learning, experience is treated as ‘raw

material’ that would be reflected upon (Michelson, 2015). To add to this, the way in which experience is brought into learning was determined by particular rationalities – methods of reasoning – located in the particular cultures of the academy which Michelson decried as

‘abstract masculine’ versions of universality. By this was meant that experience was taken out of the context in which it was produced, and understood as being something from which the individual might learn to function better in the world, rather than a site of transgression and resistance in the way knowledge and power interact to shift the world. The treatment of experience became infused into a model of learning in order to exist in the world instead of a source for learning about the world in order to change it. I now know that Freire is positioned slightly differently (Section 3.3) to the scholarship on transformative learning as it as arising

in the US but they have in common an absence of feminist politics of experience which transgresses the hegemony of educational processes. So, here was an important contradiction in the praxis of critical education – that there are ways in which it can be used which

reinforce the hegemony it is trying to tackle (Ellsworth, 1989).

In part, this is a critique of the chronological relation between experience and reflection. Of course, we learn and reflect with time but as we do that, we are also experiencing beings and whenever we are experiencing, we are also reflecting and interpreting. A counter hegemonic potential, according to Fenwick (2006), is to work with the ‘daily disturbing encounters’, the experiences that bug us and shed light on the parts of the world that are not quite right. These are encounters that shake up the hegemony in our heads – the smog or abstraction – and ask us to think about how we think in the context of our being in the world (a key element of critical education). Thus, in part, exploring our experiences is also about exploring our interpretive habits. From this I updated the cycle to remember that experience and interpretation are intertwined and to resist quick abstractions that would ‘purge the

transgressive’ (Michelson, 2015) or transformative potential of engaging experience within an educational encounter.

A number of people have critiqued the notion of conscientisation in the critical education tradition as being akin to pulling someone out of a cave (Tuck and Yang, 2012)⁠, or to unveiling the mask over their mind (Ellsworth, 1989). Indeed, this can play out in practice and can lead to yet again oppressive forms of ideological educational situations where a ‘so- called’ emancipatory process is dependent upon an already conscientised educator (Esteva, Prakash and Stuchul, 2004). Carpenter and Mojab (2017) note how conscientisation becomes framed as a kind of output from critical education interventions in which it falls prey to becoming again an individual cognitive ability. This provides some kind of enforced

education where an idea of reality is imposed upon learners, therefore “leaving learners with a language of critique but no ability to embody the critical ontologically or (to) extend it beyond it’s particular” (Carpenter and Mojab, 2017, p. 19). This is a paradox in the ways the ideas of critical pedagogy have expanded into the world.

Carpenter and Mojab asked: what is critical about critical education? This question is a very important invitation to introspect about an educational approach that claims to work on changing conditions of oppression in the world. The question foregrounds an important meta- critique of the critical education tradition. In Table 4 below I have listed four of the

problematic obstructions that affect the realisation of critical education’s transformative potential as offered by Carpenter and Mojab (2017, p. 28)

Table 4: Pitfalls of critical education Drawn from Carpenter and Mojab, 2017, pp. 28-29) 1. “Resistance to critical theorisations based on assumptions about Marxism as being mechanical or deterministic” [we do not know our theory well enough!]

2. “Horizons of innovative forms of resistance appear wrapped up in either social-

democratic romanticisations of participation, or leaderless mobilisations that celebrate lack of organisation” [we have adopted other people’s dreams and failed to practise what it means to move]

3. “Nihilistic humanism that draws learners into survivalist mentality that prioritizes the self over the social and ecological and emphasizes critical introspection” [we focus on the self and avoid collective struggle]

4. “A body of feminist, anti-racist and post-colonial literature that is profoundly important to critical scholarship, but which is predominantly locked in abstracted frames of culture and which lacks a strong grounding in the materiality of social relations” [we forget that it is all related and get stuck in ossified identities]

Their introspection concludes that we have ossified ‘critique’ and forgotten that it is also a process with an agenda or is directive for something specific. There is a danger that critical education becomes about replacing one ideology with another and in this way, masks the reality that critique is a process: an action with a context, purpose, and an analytical frame.

An example of working with the process of critique rather than shifting and replacing one ideology with another is to interrogate the conceptual tools we use in the work of trying to read and write what is going on in the world. An example is the notion of democracy which looks positive in the form of its ideals, however, has come with severe baggage if we examine its historical material emergence within the world. De Sousa Santos (2007) noted that we have undermined democracy in order to protect it. Carpenter and Mojab argued that democracy, combined with neoliberal capitalism, has become more about the right to

inequality through its protection of property rights and the free market. An embrace of words without an exploration of what they mean in particular contexts is an example of taking on a

ideology and abandoning the process of critique which can shed more light on the root causes of structural challenges facing the world today.

Without this work we are left with a partial analysis (for example: we need democracy) that does not move beyond identifying the contradictions (how does democracy come to be in the world?). This can lead to what they call ‘analysis paralysis’ and hopelessness. What is clear is that we need to challenge ourselves to move beyond hopelessness, and partial critique that exists in the world of ideas, rather than in practical engagement.

Understanding these various concerns within the praxis of critical education, the treatment of experience, the process of conscientisation, the process of critique and the need for historical material analysis, left open an important question about what is this process of inquiry? How can we describe it and work with it practically in educational encounters?

4.4.3 3L: How can this be transformed?

This stage can be further unpacked in terms of the question: What should be? (Schudel, 2017b drawing on Bhaskar) – we need to locate the cycle of praxis in a critical understanding of demi-real, abstracted abyssal, and global capitalist colonial heteronormative patriarchy (De Sousa Santos, 2014) and anthropocentrism (Bhaskar, 2016, p. 132) in order to understand what gives rise to the tendency to fetishise and reify individualised experience and

consciousness. In this spirit of coming to a fuller understanding of critical education, this section presents dialectical thinking rooted in Marx and extended by others as a form of understanding more completely what a process of critical learning/inquiry might be.

To expand on a historical material process of critique – de-abstract and move towards embodying critique, Carpenter and Mojab (2017) draw attention to the dialectic: “A way of thinking about social life as relationship in which social phenomena are not abstracted, separated or fragmented from one another” (2017, p. 29). This offers us a ‘framework of inquiry’, grounded in a non-deterministic reading of Marx that allows us to go beyond identification of contradictions towards understanding the inconsistencies responsible for how they are produced. It is these nuanced challenges to the process of critical learning in the world that the dialectic helps us to identify and inform our praxis as educators.

Carpenter and Mojab were concerned with the project of critical education and remind us of a key aspect of its purpose. This purpose is understanding consciousness in the context of global capitalism, which, as described in section 4.1, is understood as historically entangled

with patriarchy, colonialism and imperialism and anthropocentrism (Bhaskar, 2016). As described in the section above, the understanding of the problem of capitalism extends far beyond an economic system. One of these ways of thinking is to essentialise and fetishise individual experience as isolated from its root in relationships in the world. We are dealing with a powerful machine that has controls in the realm of pedagogy (referred to by Darder and McKenna (2011)). Bhaskar’s theory of critical realism explains this fragmentation in his ontology characterised by constellationality which includes the possibility for events and our experiences of them to be contrary to real structures and the level of the real (Norrie, 2010, p.

8)⁠. What I understand them to be saying is that we are living in a system in which our experiences cannot be aware of their full reality and are even fooled into forgetting the totality of reality. Thus, our consciousness is positioned in relation to the workings of capitalism.

If it is true that sometimes our experiences are contrary to social structures: the question of how we learn about these structures that shape our world is pertinent to the questions and debates of emancipatory education/ecopedagogy. If the world is characterised as it is under global capitalism, we must pay attention to the contradictions that emerge between our experience and our consciousness. This is consistent with the idea that we do not chronologise our experience and interpretive habits, but rather draw our attention to the existence of abstractions, abyssal line thinking and demi-reality smog, in order to understand how it shows up in our experience, interpretive habits and actions.

Carpenter and Mojab noted that “dialectical and historical materialist critique directs our attention to problems in the theory we used to explain these conditions” (p. 38). Thus, part of clarifying a fuller theory for critical education is to attend not only to the material world but to the theories we use to explain our world. As theorised by Marx, the dialectic

conceptualises the ideal and the material as mutually reinforcing of one another – he theorised consciousness and praxis in relation to capitalist social relations which Bhaskar (2016) extended to include anthropocentrism.

A significant point here is that Marx introduced a theory of change and consciousness which allowed for an understanding of individual agency and its role in history as related to the social. This notion was missing from Hegel’s thinking which kept ideas and their resolution in the world separate (Norrie, 2010; Bhaskar, 2016). Bhaskar (2016, p. 60) also explained that “agents reproduce and transform, the very structures that they utilise (and are constrained

by) in their substantive activities”. Thus, we are influenced by structures that are older than us, those structures emerge through the agency of people. We are conditioned by our material realities and they produce contradictory experience to what exists, but this “does not have to”

determine us (Carpenter and Mojab, 2017, p. 16)⁠. This understanding begins to articulate the transformative potential amidst oppressive historical structures. The dialectic, as a description of relationships and change in relationship provides a useful framework for thinking about learning in a world characterised by contradictions, abstractions, abyssal lines and the unseen.

I must pause here and reflect. The ideas I am engaging with above are not a return to a deterministic frame of thinking: that we are determined by the structures we were born into.

Marxist consideration of into consciousness is a frame that regards the almost certain

universality of capitalist social relations as something that stretches far beyond our lived-local experience, because it depends upon making our connections invisible. And thus, we need to read our experience as such. It is a frame that asks us to understand the fullness of our ontology as it is made up by both the ideal and the material. So we are not just interested in material forces but also in the force of ideological thinking (an imposed pattern of thinking, way of being with thought) which engages abstraction, reification and fetishisation in order to keep in place a particular method of reasoning to keep in place the world we have today, for the benefit of a few. Bhaskar would call this the realm of duality which forms demi-reality.

This is what De Sousa Santos would call abyssal thinking where some dualities are made visible by invisibilising other dualities.

Marx may have missed important opportunities to understand how his theory would be deepened through a consideration of reproductive labour, and has been developed through feminist, anti-racists and postcolonial traditions. However, Marx’s thinking need not be interpreted as a “set of theoretical constructs” that bind us but rather a framework of inquiry for the particular historical condition that is characterised by capitalism in its various stages (Carpenter and Mojab, 2017, p. 74). And this framework of inquiry is where his thinking might be of assistance to understanding learning in complex urban contexts.

Bhaskar took this dialectic further using the philosophy of critical realism,⁸ noting how the limitations of Marx’s version of the dialectic focused on the ‘positive’. By foregrounding

8 The best succinct explanation I have found of critical realism is from Zembylas (2013, p. 667)⁠ who noted that critical realism is not looking at whether or not something is real but rather concerned with how that something

absence in his version of the dialectic, Bhaskar included an important and radical critique of positivist western philosophy: that we should not only consider what exists and can be sensed but we must also consider what is not yet there or the possibilities that might be. Norrie (2010, p. 35) outlined Bhaskar’s argument by explaining that our reality is composed more of absence than of the positive and rather sees “the positive as a tiny ripple on the surface of a sea of negativity, albeit an important one” (Norrie 2010, p. 35)⁠. Lotz-Sisitka (2016b

referencing Collier, 2001) outlined the difference between nominal and real absence, the former being the ills we witness all around us and the latter being the capitalist production system which thrives on the production of waste. The real absences are not always easy to see and witness or sense in a positivist sense. Thus Bhaskar provided a theory of how intangible flows of power become efficacious. Price (2016, p. 28) noted that the dialectic, although commonly associated with knowledge production and social change, is actually primarily about absence, the common thread for all processes of change: that something ‘becomes’ and something ‘be goes’. Absence allows for an explanation of how change happens. In response to this, Bhaskar breathed space into the dialectic including a phase (3L) that would help us to understand the gaps in the existing theory that allow these contradictions (identified in the previous section 2E) to be maintained. This this multi-dimensional consideration of change, across the ideational and material, the dialectic takes account of the phenomenon of

“paradigm maintenance” – where a particular reason and logic lock us into contradictions (Pillay, 2018, p. 148). The multi-modes of the dialectic enable a deepened work with contradictions beyond their identification to understanding their production.

The work to this point can be represented in Table 5 which clarifies some of the concepts that are crucial to the critical education project through an underlabouring of critical realism. This table is a distillation of the concern here which is the transformative potential of pedagogical concepts and why this transformative potential is not realised.. These concepts in relation to each other set up particular power relations in educational situations and clarifying these concepts attempts to reveal this. We get power over relations generally in column 1 and we get power with relations in column 2.

is real and therefore on which basis it might be understood further. It is a radical shake up of the positivist natural sciences and the dualistic social sciences towards an emancipatory theory grounded in what is real.