Education, Social Interaction, and Material Co-Presence: Against - - PDF document

1

Education, Social Interaction, and Material Co-Presence: Against Virtual Pedagogical Reality Mireille Coral and Jeff Noonan On the Brink: Oakland-Windsor Teaching and Learning Conference 2013 University of Windsor, May 2nd, 2013 Myles Horton, one of the founders of the Highlander Folk School, a centre for adult popular education renowned for its work with the union and civil rights movements in the American South, argued that education was a process that was painful for the student. “There’s a lot of pain in it,” he reflected. The pain caused by education is not debilitating, but indicative of a movement from lesser to greater development. “I realized,” he continued, “that was part of growth, and growth is painful. A plant comes through the hard ground, and breaks the seed apart.”(Horton, 1990, p. 184). If the sprout fails to emerge from its shell, or if it is too weak to break through the ground, there is no mature plant. The same is true, we will argue, with regard to human beings: education is the process of cognitive growth beyond immature and one-sided forms of understanding. As a process of growth, it too cannot be achieved without pain. A crucial role of the educator, we contend, is to motivate students to want to feel the pain that all cognitive growth requires. To accomplish this task, the educator must be part provocateur, challenging students to break apart the seed of their own intellectual limitations. This challenge, we will suggest, makes a certain form of conflict essential to the pedagogical relationship, a conflict which requires co-presence in shared physical space. If we are correct, then on-line contexts are not conducive to education. Virtual environments permit the exchange of useful (and useless) information, but the absence of genuine, felt human contact limits their educational

2

value, even when they provide highly mediated social interactions (through Skype, in chat- rooms, etc). Our argument is not directed against on-line environments in general. We admit that on- line learning is possible. Our target is thus not the exchange of information through the internet, but the substitution of information exchange in virtual environments for challenge, questioning, dialogue, and argument in live, physical environments. Education is possible only in the latter environment, for the challenge and conflict upon which cognitive growth depends requires co- presence in physical space. There is no avoiding the question when the questioner is in front of you looking you in the eye. That experience is disconcerting; it produces a discomfort essential to education: the unease at feeling an earlier world-view challenged and exposed as partial, contradictory, or rooted in false normative assumptions that serve the prevailing structure of power and value. To become educated is to internalise this dissatisfaction with the given state of your understanding, to practice on yourself the critical questioning through which cognitive growth occurs, and then to engage others in the same spirit of respectful conflict, in formal or informal settings. Our argument will be developed in three steps. In the first, we will explicate our understanding of education and its intrinsic connection to social interaction in physical space cby examining relevant aspects of the pedagogy of Miles Horton, Paulo Freire, and George Herbert

• Mead. In the second section we will turn our attention to the on-line environment and contend

that the consumeristic and ego-centric mentality virtual environments encourage are not conducive to the emergence of the self-and world-critical dispositions that education-- cognitive growth-- requires. In conclusion we will further support our conclusions by sharing insights

3

derived from our own pedagogical practice in university and adult high school education contexts. I: Education, Social Conflict, and Cognitive Growth In order to become functioning members of society, children must undergo a socialization process. While the content of this process differs historically and culturally, its function is the same: to integrate children into the dominant institutions and get them to internalize the dominant value system. Socialization is indispensible to social reproduction, but since the identities it produces are “forged in history and relations of power,” unless those histories are exposed to critical consciousness they will be reproduced rather than overcome by the socialization process (hooks, 1994, p. 30). Schools, which both socialise and educate, are therefore contradictory institutions. On the one hand, as Stanley Aronowitz argues, schools are “charged with the task of preparing children for their dual responsibilities to the social order: citizenship and—perhaps its primary task—labor” (Aronowitz, 2008, p.16). In so far as schools are preparatory for citizenship and labour, they are agents of socialization whose aim is the reproduction of the established power relations and value system, with all of their contradictions, hierarchies, and injustices. On the other hand, to the extent that schools must cultivate in the student cognitive capacities that will not develop simply through the biological processes of physical maturation, they must involve a genuinely educational moment. Hence, as an institution

• f social reproduction and integration which cannot as such avoid education, the school is

dangerous—in order to perform its socializing function it must educate, and to the extent that it educates it must enable the student to question the scientific, moral, and political certainties social reproduction requires. If school did not enable students to question these established

4

certainties, then adolescents graduating from secondary school would have the same beliefs and cognitive capacities they had as four year olds entering kindergarten. The socialization function of schooling involves the transmission of information-- facts about history and society, the rules to follow in order to carry out mathematical operations and construct grammatical sentences, practical and interpersonal skills required to compete in the job market, etc. Yet, for this transmission of information to occur, there must always be a prior challenging of the student to open him or herself cognitively to that which he or she has not already thought or experienced. Let us take a simple example. A young student has been taught by his parents that his new baby brother has been brought by the stork. He tells this story in health class. The educator must now confront the student with the biological story. If the educator does not, she fails in her duty to open the student’s mind towards the more comprehensive and coherent understanding of human reproduction that biological science

• provides. But the educational achievement is not identical to the successful transfer of

information, but is the moment where the student feels in himself the need to abandon the old

• story. The educational practice is not the explanation of how eggs are fertilized, it is the

respectful but insistent challenge to the stork story. Education is successful when the student sees, for him or herself, not the truth of the biological story, but the inadequacy of the fairy tale. He has now opened his cognitive horizons and can discover the truth for him or herself. From the side of the educator, challenging and opening cognitive horizons is education, explaining the biological mechanics is teaching. From the side of the student, feeling the need to abandon the comforting fairy tale is becoming educated, assimilating the new information about the mechanics of reproduction is learning.

5

We thus define education as an interactive social process involving respectful challenges to authoritative opinion, whether the authorities be parents, politicians, or priests. The goal of education is cognitive growth, by which we mean the development, through an on-going dialectic of challenge, response, and higher level integration, of “humanity’s more inclusive comprehension of natural and human phenomena.” (McMurtry, 2012). Education in this sense requires that students examine previously held beliefs, question themselves, each other, the educator, and the value system of the world they inhabit. It requires human interaction in which communication can take place freely, “intellectual fellowship and radical openness” as bell hooks argues, which students themselves feel the need to transform in order to expand their intellectual horizons (hooks, 1994, p. 205). Education is thus a process that engenders in human beings a disposition to recognise the complexity of the social and natural worlds, the partiality of received perspectives on them, and the power dynamics and social interests that often seek to cultivate belief for the sake of securing their private interests against the common life-interest. The educated person not only grasps facts, she is able to structure that knowledge of facts into internally integrated wholes that express an understanding not only of how the world works, but how it fails, and how it can be developed in the direction of inclusive satisfaction of the complex spectrum of human life-requirements (Noonan, 2012, p. 162-3). The educated person adopts a reflective and self-critical attitude towards prevailing opinion, political or scientific, and refuses to rest content with that which authorities assert to be the case. While there is clearly a critical-political motivation to our understanding of education, we believe that the conception of pedagogical practice that follows from it is of general

• significance. Our belief is based upon the similarities we have discovered between the practices
• f self-consciously radical educators like Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, with that of George

6

Herbert Mead, who was interested in the reproductive function of education, not its revolutionary implications. Horton was an educator of adults working outside the formal classroom who consciously employed his pedagogical practice for progressive political ends, but we believe that his practice

• f educating through respectful conflict and unceasing challenge describes all genuine

educational processes, in formal or informal settings, with children, adolescents, or adults. Reflecting on this practice Horton noted that “I made people uncomfortable quite often, because I kept pushing them, trying to help them grow. I make them unhappy and they say, ‘Miles, we just did this and we thought you’d let up, but the pressure is just the same as it was before.’ I tell them, ‘that’s because you’ve got to keep growing’” (Horton, 1990, p. 132). The point of general significance is that people will rest content with established plateaus of understanding unless the educator keeps pushing them to see that there is still more outside that needs to be understood, or there are still unresolved tensions that compromise the coherence of the given belief set. The educator does not transmit information to make good the deficit or correct the incoherence; she pushes the student to recognise the limitations and the contradictions, and make them want to

• vercome them.

There can be no education, therefore, without conflict between the educator and the

• student. By “conflict” we do not mean aggressive and embarrassing demonstrations that the

educator knows more than the students. That type of arrogant showing off divides students from

• educators. Educationally productive conflict, by contrast, is a social bond linking educator and

student in a process of mutual exploration of the limitation of initial structures of understanding. Pedagogical conflict that is productive of genuine cognitive growth takes place through practices

• f problematization, questioning and answering, integration of insights into a more

7

comprehensive structure, and then more and deeper questioning. This practice of problematization through questioning was essential to the revolutionary pedagogy of Freire. Freire was most famous for his popular education work with illiterate peasants, but the principles underlying that particular practice are of general application. “If you go beyond the previously established patterns, considered as inevitable ones, you lose credibility [with the authorities]. In fact, however, there is no creativity without rupture, without a break from the old, without conflict in which you have to make a decision” (Freire and Horton, 1990, pp. 37-8). Forcing a decision through patient questioning that opens up the limits of established belief - this practice is essential to education at all levels. The student who has recognised the inadequacy of the position under questioning must herself decide—does she accept the risk on offer to create a more comprehensive and coherent position—or fall back in fear on her established beliefs, even though their limitations have been exposed? The educated person is not the one with all the answers; she is the one who is willing to risk creative thinking in search of better ones. As Freire argues, “education is an act of creation, capable of releasing other creative acts” (Freire, 1973, p.43). Creation also involves the assimilation of new content, but the act itself is not a function

• f information transfer from teacher to student, but of dialogue.

Central to the pedagogical approaches of Horton and Freire is dialogue, without which education is nothing more than the silent internalization of information. Dialogical education is a complex and dynamic process described by Horton (2003) as “everybody on the same level trying to come up together” (p. 275), and by Freire (2005) as a “human phenomenon” (p.87). For Freire and Horton, authentic learning cannot take place without dialogue. Online courses fall short in their ability to capture the dynamics of human interaction, the sense, as Horton suggests, that everyone is trying to understand something together. The act of thinking is fraught with

8

moments of clarity and moments of confusion, a process that can be difficult and painful, and not easily reflected in online postings. It is precisely through this process, however, that students may experience the act of learning, as described by Freire (1995): “it is difficult, and especially, it is demanding, but it is pleasant .... It is crucial, then, that educands discover and sense the joy that steeps it” (p. 82). Frustration, struggle, joy: for Freire and Horton, these are central to

• education. The sign of success is the emergence in the student of a felt need in to keep going

further in understanding. What is the source of this need? To some extent it is a product of maturation- the curiosity that emerges in the developing brain of a child. Yet curiosity on its own is an insufficient explanation, because it can be easily satisfied. Beyond curiosity there must be an

• utside agent—the educator- who, like Horton, keeps pushing, but also, as importantly, models

the behaviour she seeks to cultivate in students. In order to explicate this crucial point in more detail, let us turn to the educational philosophy of George Herbert Mead. Although Mead was clearly interested in the reproductive function rather than the liberatory possibilities of education, his ideas both anticipate core claims of Horton and Freire while also avoiding the tendentious political criticism to which the latter could be subjected. His conclusions about the social nature

• f education and the essential role of conflict and problematisation in that relationship thus

support our contention that our argument is of significance across the broad range of different educational encounters. Three decades before Freire criticised the ‘banking’ concept of education, Mead, writing about the education of children, argued that “what the child requires is not poured into a

• receptacle. Meaning must arise in the child’s consciousness through some sort of intercourse

9

with others” (Mead, 2008, p.177; Freire 2005). But why must this intercourse be face to face, in a defined physical space? Because education is a social process and human sociality emerges from and depends upon physical proximity and contact. New parents do not want to communicate with their children at a distance; they want to hold them. One could have robots feed and change an infant and parents could talk baby talk to it through a web link, but no one would find that acceptable because genuine human contact between infants and parents is essential for their development. After the physical and emotional nurturing of infants there is no process more important for the formation of human beings than education. As an essentially social relationship, it requires, just as child rearing requires, not just the communication of information by any means available, but communication in defined physical settings because people respond differently, take things more seriously, when they feel the presence of others. For Mead, co-presence with others in physical space is crucial to the development of language, self-consciousness, and selfhood. Human beings become selves, he argues, by becoming conscious of the demands other people place upon them. Internalizing the limitations

• n the ego that social relations with other people necessarily imposes generates the sense of

selfhood, of being an individual agent in social space, a space which makes certain demands, but also affords opportunities for creative individuation. “The organized community,” he writes, “which gives to the individual his organized sense of self can be called “the generalized other.” The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole community. Thus, for example, in the case of a social group such as a ball team the team is the generalized other as it enters—as an organized process on social activity—into the experience of anyone of its individual members.” (Mead, 1977, p. 218) One knows one is a member of a team when one knows that

• thers expect one to play the position to which they have been assigned and internalises those

10

expectations as a desire to play as well as one can. One cannot be a member of a baseball team

• utside of the social relationships and rules that constitute the game of baseball.

We hold that this social process of self-formation is also essential to education. For the members of the baseball team, it is the internalization of the general expectation of the team that each play as well as possible that motivates them as players. Those expectations and the physical demands of the game—learning to catch, throw, bat, read situations, etc.—form objective limits to which the player must respond. There is no escaping these objective challenges if one wants to be good enough to be a member of the team. For Mead, all human development, including the development of thinking, requires confrontation with objective limitations. “This is the nature of

• ur consciousness. It accompanies an adjustment to various situations. The inhibition of

adjustment means readjustment—calls for thought in order to bring elements which will help. ... This situation is that in which consciousness arises. Objects call for a response. This is the way

• ur thought processes go on—in terms of question and response” (Mead, 2008, p.56). In

education, the educator is the object standing in the way of the student resting content with that which he already knows, and the subject that calls for a response to the objective challenge posed. Unlike games, the goal of education is not winning, but cognitive growth. Cognitive growth depends upon students developing the felt need to open their thinking beyond established

• parameters. If Mead is correct, the emergence of this felt need derives from the social

relationships between individual students and between the student and the educator. Everyone questions everyone else, everyone helps generalize the novel insights, everyone raises new

• questions. The role of the educator, as Horton argued, is to maintain the pressure to keep

exploring, questioning, criticising, generalising, and repeating. In order to play this role

11

effectively there must be an affective as well as an intellectual connection between students and between students and educators. In other words, they must care about each other, which means that they must work in environments in which they can get to know each other to the point where the challenges the educator must pose are not perceived as threats to the student’s identity, but as

• pportunities for growth. While we agree that on-line environments can transfer information

effectively—allowing learning to occur—we believe that the social relationship upon which education depends is completely lost in the case where on-line “learning” amounts to assimilating pre-packaged modules, and only poorly simulated by virtual forms of interaction. We will defend our position in the next section. II: Consumerism, Ego-centrism, and the Limits of On-Line Education When on-line courses are advertised, either by private education companies or universities, the hook with which they typically seek to capture students is “convenience.” Here is an example: “One of the benefits of online education is that students may not have to sit for long periods of time. Lessons can be paused when needed, and notes read at will.” (Worldwidelearn, 2013). Instead of cultivating the felt need to challenge themselves, open their cognitive horizons, and problematise their existing beliefs, ads like this speak to the consumer- mindset encouraged nearly from birth in all members of liberal-capitalist society. This mindset is the very opposite of that which must be cultivated in the person capable of becoming educated. As we argued above, education demands recognition of the ego’s limits, the development of internal discipline, and the capacity to subordinate that which one feels and desires to be true to that which can be proven to be true. Consumerism, by contrast, promotes the illusion that the world and other people exist to satisfy the demands of the ego, that there is no objective or social reality but that everything is as the ego demands it to be, that there is no right and wrong, true or

12

false, save what is paid for by the consumer.1 “Reading notes at will” and “not having to sit for long periods of time” are not pitches to a person who feels the need for education, but to a consumer who desires to acquire knowledge and credentials with as little intellectual cost to himself as possible. The consumeristic mindset to which on-line education appeals is exacerbated by the extreme responsivity to user in-put that is typical of the virtual world. Unlike material reality, which does not change at the click of a mouse, virtual reality appears to have no solidity at all- whatever content the user wants to consume he or she can consume with little effort beyond clicking a link. One moment one can be reading an on-line lecture on Shakespeare, the next moment one can be checking Facebook, the moment after that the scores from the baseball game, and then back to lecture notes. There is tremendous amount of information circulating from the web through the student’s consciousness, but what is lacking is any material presence that can capture and hold the student’s attention. Only social interaction in a defined space which the student cannot escape can force the self-reflection necessary for education. In making this argument we are aware of the need to avoid joining in the moral panic surrounding attention span and web-use, a panic that predates the web. The first choruses of outrage about the destruction of children’s attention spans were directed against Sesame Street, which was accused of undermining children’s capacity to learn because it used short vignettes combining funky music, funny muppets, and constant changes of action (Newman, 2010, pp. 581-596). At the same time, there is research that is beginning to suggest that constant use of social media is exacerbating narcissistic personality disorders and perhaps changing neural architecture in those who begin to use communication technology very

1 (For a broader discussion of the opposition between money-value and life-value in education,

See McMurtry, 1991, pp. 36-44).

13

• early. (Bromley, 2011, pp. 12-18; Brunk, 2011; Carpenter, 2012; Derbyshire, 2009; Paul, baker,

Cochran, 2012). Even if it is not true that attention spans are adversely affected by internet use,

• ur central claim still holds-- learning can occur through information transfer in virtual

environments, but not education, since education is the outcome of challenge and conflict in defined social space. To support our contentions, we turn first to a student’s critical reflection upon his experience of on-line courses. Advertising such as the example cited above work—like many of his peers, this student was attracted to on-line education by its “convenience.” What he discovered, however, is that this convenience comes at the cost of the social interactions through which education takes place. “First and foremost ... I took these classes not for academic reasons, but because I thought it would save me time and money. While they did serve their purpose in this regard, I did not stop to think about one of the most important aspects of being enrolled in this university – the communal gratification derived from simply walking amongst my fellow friends and faculty. My whole life the concept of school ran so parallel with physical interaction that I did not stop to even think of the connotations involved in depriving my education of this factor. In fact, I would not even call physical presence a factor in education – I would call it a necessary component to the paradigm in which all university students and staff live under. Traditionally, interaction between students and professors has always been a necessary prelude to education. The alternative of online courses disembodies and obscures the role of a professor, turning he or she into an interactive textbook that may variably respond to personal inquiries with the same sense of detachment the class provokes. In both my experiences taking online classes, I can say with certainty that for various reasons (e.g. larger class enrolment, less intimacy with professor, less awkwardness for professors in ignoring student

14

inquiries, etc.) I felt a sense of detachment from my professors and, consequently, the courses

• too. Ultimately, this sense of detachment permeated itself all the way to the very concept of

university.”(Dunn, 2013, personal correspondence). Such testimony belies the claims of administrators and on-line course sales people that “the digital generation” of students all prefer virtual environments. At the same time, the testimony of a single student is not sufficient to establish our claim with certainty. Thus we turn, ironically, to strong supporters of on-line learning themselves to bolster

• ur case. Anant Agarwal, president of the MIT and Harvard-sponsored Massive On-line Course

(MOOC) platform edX. Agarwal argues that on-line content is valuable not because it can replace social interaction in material classrooms, but because it frees class time for face to face

• interaction. The virtual classroom disseminates content, but ought not, Agarwal continues,

replace the material classroom, which remains essential as a space of educating. “Conveying content is better done through video and textbooks, and that might increasingly migrate online. At institutions of every level, professors should use face-to-face class time to help students process information. Interaction is what teaching should be all about.”(MIT, 2013). That which Agarwal calls teaching we have called educating- confronting the student with the limitations of her understanding, cultivating the desire in her to overcome them, and the motivating her to keep broadening and deepening that understanding. At this point, a critic might rejoin that perhaps our argument is sound as regards the distinction between learning and education, and that education requires social interaction, but contend against us that real-time communication via the web permits exactly the same sort of interaction as face to face relationships in the material classroom. We admit that real time communication via the web simulates social interactions, and thus to some extent enables the

15

sort of conflict that education requires, but that precisely because of the mediation of the face to face by technological means, the discomfort that is crucial to developing the felt need to confront and overcome the limits of understanding is reduced. Again, we turn to the way in which on-line education is advertised to support our position. The same ad we quoted above addresses the issue

• f on-line interaction, noting explicitly the way in which it can be more comfortable to students:

“Instructors can be more approachable in the online setting. Students may feel more comfortable talking openly with their teachers through online chats, emails, and newsgroup discussions rather than face-to-face.” (Worldwidelearn, 2013). We contend, however, that discomfort is essential to the educational process, because that process is exactly that which happens when the educator recognises and helps the student through his discomfort. If there is no discomfort, there is only friendly chit-chat and no educational interaction. To conclude, we will spell out more fully what we mean by educational interaction by drawing on examples from our own experience as educators. III: Education for and in the Real World We do not draw our conclusion regarding the necessity of face to face interaction in defined space from our reading of Horton, Freire, and Mead in the abstract. Rather, we turn to Horton, Freire, and Mead because they best make sense of those practices we have found most successful in our practical life as educators. Although we work in different institutional contexts, and arrived at our conclusions by distinct routes, we concur in the belief that those conversations and arguments through which people become educated require physical presence. Conversation is a complex process involving a number of elements, many of which require physical co-presence to grasp. A conversation involves more than the exchange of abstract symbols; it is a material exchange as well involving body language, tone of voice,

16

pauses, silence, eye contact or avoidance of the same, perspiration, nervousness, and so on. How you voice what you know, express confusion, or raise questions about concepts that are new to your understanding may be affected by any or all of these elements. The educator must be alive to all of these physical signs in order to pose the challenge effectively, i.e., know when to press and when to relent, when to break the tension and when to heighten it, when to bring another voice in and when to maintain engagement with the initial partner. In conversation, thinking is

• shared. The extent to which online courses or the internet can provide a venue for shared

thinking is limited. Emails, text messages, internet tutorials, and online postings may impart information, but, because they abstract from physical co-presence or mediate it, they lack the embodied elements of face to face argument and conversation. But these embodied elements are essential to educational exchanges. Excitement, elevated tone of voice, and gesticulation convey the passion of the educator to the students; the same from the students back to the educator allow him or her to know that the practice is having the desired effect on students. Face to face conversation in defined space allows the educator to search for the way of problematising the issue under discussion that galvanizes attention. That which will hold attention is not always that which one thought would hold attention when thinking up a lecture or lesson plan the night before. Whether in the adult classroom or university, we know we have got it right when everyone raises their heads to look at the educator posing the questions. The educator knows she has struck a chord when no one checks their cell phones for messages, gets up to leave the room, or otherwise drifts away in bored distraction. If the educator and the students are separated or only virtually connected, so that it is impossible to see all who are “attending” the class, it is impossible to know whether people are engaged,

17

excited, paying attention, and participating. How do one hundred thousand people in a MOOC participate? Real time interaction in physical space is also effective in allowing cultural barriers to be crossed, because the people who embody the cultural differences are real for each other as embodied human beings. Properly managed, ethnocentric assumptions can be voiced and corrected and the new insights galvanised by an unanticipated conversation. For example, in the adult education environment in which one of the authors teaches, working class white people from Windsor are thrown together with recent immigrants working to acquire Canadian

• credentials. The opportunity for misunderstanding is high, but it also produces moments where

the (generally younger) Windsorites learn about themselves by seeing themselves through another’s eyes. An excellent example was a conversation between a student who had lived under authoritarian rule and a Canadian student. “Under the dictatorship, we had no choices,” the first student said to a hushed class. “People left whatever way they could.” After a pause, the student sitting two rows over remarked, “Canada must seem like a paradise to you. We complain about things, but to you it must be like another world.” “You have freedom here,” the first student replied, “but no one uses it.” In the silence that followed, the others looked at this man who had lived under dictatorship and was now sitting among us. “Well, wait a minute,” the educator said, breaking the silence. “Canada may have a better standard of living than many countries, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t protest injustices when they happen here.” The man who had lived under dictatorship nodded, “Yes, exactly.” Similar experiences abound in the university environment. In a class on Human Rights and Social Justice, Western-educated feminists had to explore the implications of human rights with conservative Muslim women, anti-colonialist women from Nigeria, and socialist critics of

18

human rights; the socialist critics had to contend with libertarian opponents of Marxism and both had to deal with the more practical orientations of soon to be law students and people with experience working with NGO’s. The intensity of the argument literally raised the temperature in the room; students and professor regularly lost track of time; arguments continued after class, down the corridors and into the Quad. Again, this energy of interaction cannot be simulated in

• n-line environments, because the co-presence in space they require is absent.

What these examples from the classroom show is the importance of the material elements of dialogue. Online “discussions” cannot capture how silence feels, for example, or the effect of looking at someone directly. The very presence of another person may affect how something is said. “That’s so gay,” the adult educator heard another student casually say to

• another. “How do you know there isn’t a gay person sitting in this room?” she asked in

response, immediately forcing the person to become conscious of the real-world implications of unreflective use of offensive slang. A critical pedagogy interrogates power relations that serve to maintain an unjust social

• rder; it seeks to cultivate in students a sense of agency and hope. Its purpose is to bring about a

critical awareness of the world in which the students and the teacher live. Through dialogue, learning takes place within the context of this social order, but does not mimic the oppression of injustice wherein students must simply accept what they are told and where there is no

• pportunity to find creative solutions to problems. Now, more than ever, a critical pedagogy is
• needed. While online classes and internet instruction may effectively impart information, they

cannot replicate the intensity of face to face conversation and argument which is required for genuine education, of which critical pedagogy is the most systematic expression.

19

References Aronowitz, Stanley. (2008). Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers). Bromley, Alana. (2011). “Are Social Network Websites Breeding Antisocial Young People?” Journal of Digital research and Publishing, pp. 12-18. Brunk, Doug. (2011). “Social Media Concerns, Confuses Parents.” Pediatric News,

• Vol. 45, No. 2, February, 2011, http://www.pediatricnews.com (accessed, April 2nd, 2013).

Carpenter, Christopher J. (2012). “Narcissism on Facebook: Self-promotional and Anti- Social Behaviour.” Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 52, 2012, pp. 482-486. Dunn, James. (2013). Personal Correspondence regarding on-line courses. April 9th, 2013. Freire, Paolo. (1973). Education for Critical Consciousness. (New York: Seabury Press). Derbyshire, David. (2009). “Social Websites Harm Children’s Brains: Chilling Warning to Parents from Top Neuroscientist.” Mail Online, February 24th, 2009. (accessed. April 4th, 2013). Freire, Paolo. (2005). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (New York: Continuum). hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. (New York: Routledge). Horton, Myles. (1990). The Long Haul. (new York: Doubleday). Horton, Myles, and Freire, Paolo. (1990). We Make the Road by Walking. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).

20

Horton, M. (2003). The Myles Horton reader: Education for social change. D. Jacobs. (Ed.). Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. Mead, George Herbert. (1997). On Social Psychology. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Mead, George Herbert. (2008). The Philosophy of Education. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm). McMurtry, John. (1991). “Education and the Market Model,” Paideusis, Vol. 5, No. 1,

• pp. 36-44.

McMurtry, John. (2010). “What is Good, What is Bad: The Value of All Values Across Times, Places, and Theories.” Encyclopaedia of Life-Support Systems. (Oxford: EOLSS Publishers). http://www.eolss.net. (accessed, March 7th, 2013). MIT Communications Forum. (2013). “MOOCS and the Emerging Digital Classroom.” (http://www.web.mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/moocs.html ) accessed April 8th, 2013 Newman, Michael Z. (2010). `New Media, Young Audiences, and Discourses of Attention: From Sesame Street to ‘Snack Culture.’” Media, Culture, and Society. Vol. 32, No.4,

• pp. 58-596.

Paul, Jomon Aliyas, Baker, Hope M., Cochran, Justin Daniel. (2012). “Effect of On-line Social Networking on Student Academic Performance. Computers in Human Behaviour, Vo. 28, 2012, pp. 2117-2127. Worldwide Learn. “What Are the Potential Benefits of Online Learning? (2013). (http://www.worldwidelearn.com/education-articles/benefits-of-online-learning.htm ) (accessed, April 10th, 2013).

21