Meaning Making and Making Meaning Meaningful: The Relationship Between Language and Thought in Critical Pedagogy

This article examines the relationship between reasoning and language in critical pedagogy, which is quite curiously left unspecified by many critical theorists, who relegate to a singularity: “language-thought.” Exploring that language-thought relationship reveals that the exercise of language is not enough to constitute thinking. Rather, thinking emerges only through self-aware meaning-making. The crux is that neither self-awareness nor meaning-making emerges unless words construct change