Critical knowing: Learning, knowledge and experience in a high school English critical pedagogy

Most of the literature on critical pedagogy lacks the voices of the students in the class, is primarily conceptual with limited anecdotal or empirical data, and suggests that critical pedagogy is experienced unilaterally by participants, all of whom are empowered by the experience. Additionally, the literature argues that knowledge and learning are positioned differently in a critical pedagogy from how they are discussed in current educational policy. This yearlong study was conducted in an urban tenth grade English classroom, exploring how a classroom teacher enacts critical pedagogy, how the adolescent students experience that critical pedagogy, and what counted as knowledge and learning within this classroom. Using ethnographic methods of data collection, including observations, participant interviews, transcribed class discussions, and artifact collection, I then employed a critical classroom discourse analytic framework. Specifically in my data collection and analysis, I have looked for moments of dissonance (LeCompte, 1995, p. 101), and I have gone to the teacher and the students with my interpretations of classroom events to listen to their own interpretations and responses to my interpretations. I have also taken seriously the input of the adolescent students, an age group that is oft studied but not as frequently considered able to hold valuable and insightful opinions. Grounded in conceptual frameworks of literacy and learning as sociocultural practices (Moje and Lewis, 2007) and Foucauldian understandings of power, this study explores the ways the classroom teacher disrupts students\u27 established ideologies during classroom lessons but then struggles to help students construct a new framework for understanding their worlds. The students experience this critical pedagogy in complicated ways, sometimes troubling their prior conceptualizations but other times resisting or missing the teacher\u27s pedagogical intent. Additionally, when students are given the agency to speak freely in class discussions, they produce problematic narratives about race, gender, and difference. In critical moments in which differences are highlighted, the students seem uncertain about how to negotiate these differences, especially when they conflict with narratives they\u27ve already constructed about others