The Take-Away?

First and foremost, we are teaching language, and language acquisition must remain a top priority. That said, it is part of the humanistic mission to teach critical thinking, including the ability to interrogate one’s own beliefs, and that is what critical pedagogies do. As we hope the highlighted pedagogies above have demonstrated, the mindset behind all of them is criticality itself, which means that, when you ask a question, you are prepared to be surprised by the answer(s). The answers are not predetermined, but the commitment to questioning is, and this persistent questioning should prompt students to reflect more deeply on cultural issues and call assumptions into question, in the target culture and their own.

In terms of the day to day you may need to modify your teaching to model two types of practices, critical and interrogative and reflexive and introspective ones, for your students, in order to encourage the students to develop these themselves. Critical and interrogative practices involve the identification of cultural norms and power structures and then of groups and individuals who align or do not align with these norms. Reflexive and introspective practices involve the recognition of how one’s own identities, experiences and values impact one’s teaching and learning. The next step is for instructors and students to explore the constructed nature of knowledge and the influence of community on this construction. For this to succeed, instructors must model, and students must practice, curiosity, open-mindedness, and empathy. (We are indebted to Wells Castonguay for these specific formulations).

Across the different frameworks, the overarching goal is the deliberate integration of more perspectives into the curriculum and the interrogation of the dominant culture that one would expect in any classroom focused on the development of critical thinking skills. Each has a different focus or point of emphasis, but all strive towards these ends. After even such a brief introduction as this, we hope that you have a better understanding of where your own materials, lessons, and/or curriculum may fall a bit short in this regard, and, just as importantly, some ideas on how to address any such shortcomings. In the next sections, we will address these two topics in greater detail; for now, suffice it to say that you can pick and choose from the frameworks, test driving them on individual lessons or assessments, to determine what you feel most comfortable with, what works best for you, your students, and your institution.