Summary and Conclusion

The main message we hope to have imparted during this short journey through critical pedagogies is that criticality in teaching is a mindset. It requires of both teachers and students a willingness to ask questions and an openness to be surprised by where the answers take you. While each approach we describe in the critical pedagogies section advocates for learning goals with a specific focus, be it antiracism or social justice, learning goals should not be confused with an agenda where students are led to predetermined answers about social justice, equity, diversity, etc. Rather, students should be confronted with and guided through questions that prompt deeper reflection and call into question assumptions and unspoken beliefs. We as instructors are guides in this process but also must be open to students’ perspectives and interrogate and challenge our own beliefs as necessary.

Despite what their detractors say, critical pedagogies are hardly radical, subversive ways of teaching and learning foreign to the core values of the liberal arts, but rather, in fact, the logical extension of their mission to look critically at problems and find appropriate, moral solutions to them. The language classroom, with its emphasis on culture and cultural comparison, is moreover perfectly suited to the endeavor of examining how culture is constructed and cultural identities formed. Language educators have long known that but have often assumed that the simple act of offering a foreign culture as contrast to the students’ native cultures itself suffices to encourage them to see the world and themselves in a new light. As a result, we have at times been less critical of our own presentations of culture, leading to its separation from language and portrayal as largely defined by those most powerful in it. Critical pedagogies ask us instead to turn our critical eye to our own teaching practices and representations of culture, questioning how it is portrayed and trying to figure out why it is portrayed this way. When we do this, when we ask ourselves to push the principles of liberal inquiry just a little farther, the pay-off is huge: students are not just challenged to recognize cultural differences, but also to see how culture is constructed by inclusion and exclusion alike. And that is a result that can never be put back into the box.