From the revised Bloom’s taxonomy and taking it as a cumulative hierarchical framework of educational objective, being critical is one of the key skills, abilities and educational goals second to creativity and problem solving.
Being critical, from Couldry’s argument in “Voice as Value” is to give weight to voices and regard it as a process and be reflexive in the way voices are treated, interpreted and used. The ability and needs of individual persons as a subject to make meaning, reflect and present themselves as a subject need to be recognized.
From Foucault’s Questions to Methods, being critical is to investigate a subject matter by asking not only questions like what and why but how. It is just like a study of “genealogy” of practices. There are practices naturally taken as norms, self-evident and indispensable. Being critical means “examining how forms of rationality inscribe themselves into practices or systems of practices.” Being critical is to make visible the complexity in their interconnection with multiplicity of historical processes and give accounts to any discontinuity or singularity.
Towards a critical educational science, Kemmis, illustrates critical educational science as research for education by bridging the gap between research and practice. The method critical social research adopts as cited by Kemmis from Comstock is “dialogue, and its effect is to heighten its subject’s self awareness of their collective potential as the active agents of history … Critical research links depersonalized social processes to its subjects’ choices and actions with the goal of eliminating unrecognized and contradictory consequences of collective action.” The purpose in short is to engage the major stakeholders to analyze and evaluate various factors and practices from their own situation for transforming education. It therefore links to the idea of action research which is “a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their understanding of these practices, and the situations in which the practices are carried out.”
References
Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., & Bloom, B. S. (2005). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing. Longman.
Comstock, D. (1982), “A method for critical research’, in Bredo, E. and Feinberg, W. (Eds) Knowledge and Values in Social and Educational Research, Philadelphia, Template University Press, pp. 378-9.
Couldry, N. (2010, July 14). Why voice matters: Culture and politics after neoliberalism. Sage Publications.
Foucault, M. (1991) Questions of method, in Burchell, G., Gordon, C., and Miller, P. (Eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp.223-238, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London
Kemmis, S. C., W. (1986). Chapter 6: Towards a Critical Educational Science Becoming Critical: Education, Knowledge and Action Research. Abingdon: Deakin University Press.
Dear Amia EdD 