Critical Pedagogies in Student Textbook Tasks: A Politico-Communicative Inquiry

Abstract This critical inquiry begins with the exposition of the social mission of textbooks and the prescribed student tasks contained therein in achieving the pedagogical goal of reflective, dialectical, and transformative learning praxis. Employing the critical tradition, this study sought to surface the potential of student tasks in the media and information literacy instructional materials to possess and embody the attributes of critical pedagogies. As a set of pedagogical counter-imperatives, critical pedagogies fulfill the politico-ideological objectives of exposing, examining, and interrogating the orthodoxies and hegemonies in the instructional task design as well as the broader educational ecology. Specifically, this study privileged the authors’ critical voices and pedagogies that seek to challenge and change the prevailing social structures and social relations. In the process of conducting thematic analysis, the following mutually inclusive and reinforcing critical pedagogies emerged: critical self-reflectivity, critical potentiality, critical history, critical contextualization, critical interdisciplinarity, critical creativity, critical emotion, and critical solidarity