International Journal of Education through Art Volume 4 Number 3

Article. English language. doi: 1o.1386/eta.4.3.247/1 Intellect Ltd 2oo8

Thinking critically about critical thinking: towards a post-critical, dialogic pedagogy for popular visual culture
Paul Duncum University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA Abstract
The influence of criticaltheory in art education has become commonplace, but its use in addressingstudents' popular culture in kindergarten to Year 12 classrooms is problematic. The now numerous reports by art teachers of theirsuccessfully inculcating critical consciousness towards popular visual culture appears to have more to do with a reforming zeal or advocacy than evidence. Moreover, in echoing the modernist origins of critical theory, their attempts to facilitate critical thinking often take theform of unproblematic and authoritarianpedagogy. Lessons learned from media education in the United Kingdom are employed to recommend that art teachers reject primafacie evidence of critical thinking among their students and learn to appreciate the complexity of student negotiations with popular culture. Taking their cue from media educators, it is proposed that art educators adopt a post-criticalpedagogy based on Bhaktin's notions of dialogue.

Keywords
popular culture post-critical dialogic pedagogy media education

(Imagine a teacher holding up two images before a class, one by Picasso, the other an advertisementforjeans. Both images involve a man and a woman.) Teacher: See how in both images the man is looking at the woman
and the woman is looking out at us. The woman appears

1.

I did not always think so and I am as guilty as anyone in art education of previously advocating critical pedagogy. See
Duncum 1989 and

to rely for approval on the viewer, who is presumably a male. Girl Student: What's the point? Teacher: Well, it's sexist isn't it? Girl Student: Oh yeah, girls know all about that! Yes, I'm sure. Now we're going to talk back to sexism by Teacher: creating pictures that show men and women as equal. (Some of the boys giggle, some nod in agreement, while some of the girls roll their eyes, some smile, and some give nothing away.) This well-meaning teacher is evidently intent on transforming the consciousness of students, empowering both the boys and the girls to think critically about gender roles as part of an agenda to develop a more just, equitable and democratic society. The goals are laudable, but through my own teaching and a review of media education research I have come to believe that the means are deeply flawed.' I contend in this paper that critical thinking is necessary to deal with the struggles over values and beliefs

2005.

ETA 4 (3) pp. 247-257 Intellect Ltd 2008

247

played out everyday in and through visual imagery, but alone it is seriously deficient. The development of critical thinking must be approached through a dialogical pedagogy, what British media educators variously call a 'playful form of pedagogy' (Buckingham 2003: 58) 'or post-critical pedagogy'
(Green 1998: 18o). Kindergarten to Year
12

(K-12) media teachers in Britain,

who have long and deep experience of teaching popular culture, have found that critical theory translated directly into a critical pedagogy without the leavening of dialogue simply does not work. While it is often the case in education that there is little reliable evidence of success, in this case a substantial body of evidence exists showing that while critical pedagogy in schools secures an A grade for effort it only secures an F grade for achievement (e.g., Buckingham et al. 2005). Media educators warn that developing a critical consciousness in school students should be viewed more as a long-term goal than an expectation. It is naive for teachers to expect students to adopt a critical consciousness simply because they promote it. This is notably the case when dealing with students' preferred popular imagery, which many art educators now advocate, because students, deeply invested in their own preferences, resist teacher intervention, and because teachers often miss the subtleties of student understandings.

Critical theory and critical pedagogy

For a largely older generation of art educators - those few who addressed popular culture at all - popular culture was considered debased and responsible for undermining civilized society (e.g., Feldman 1982; Smith 1981; McFee 1961). While this view may still be active among some art educators today, among a younger generation of art educators - children of a postmodern, image-saturated society - the tendency is rather to concentrate on the way popular culture is riddled with ideologies that help to maintain social inequality. In either case, lessons about popular visual culture often seem to be less about popular culture and more a means for teaching moral and political lessons: popular culture is understood to be dangerous, and something from which gullible students need to be rescued. Critical pedagogy draws upon a well-developed body of critical theory with origins in Biblical exegesis, Hegel, Weber and Marx (Honderich 1995). Critical theory assumes that all ideas, concepts and theories, including its own, are determined by historical as well as contemporary pressures and processes and are not simply in the nature of things. Nothing is taken as value free, and widely accepted common-sense 'givens' least of all. Moreover, in a hierarchically structured society that is inherently oppressive of some segments, the dominant intellectual production - including art and popular culture - embodies the ideological frameworks of the dominant social forces. Dominant production is employed to further dominant interests, not only through propagation but also through marginalizing and appropriating opposition. This said, societies are understood to be sufficiently dynamic always to engender counter positions - critical theory itself being a prime example. In resisting dominant positions and offering alternative readings of reality, critical theory claims to liberate people from the oppression of dominant mindsets. Critical theory aims - to use two of its key terms - at empowerment and transformation.

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However, the examination of popular culture in such critical terms is highly problematic in school classrooms. While it is relatively easy to be critical of cultural forms with which one has little personal experience or engagement (as is the case with fine and contemporary art for most students), it is another matter with the popular culture in which students are daily immersed and with which they share powerful, affective associations. Critiquing popular culture means asking students to critique themselves, which is difficult even for mature adults. Nevertheless, whether relying upon student discussion or student artwork as evidence, many art teachers have claimed their recent efforts in introducing critical thinking about popular culture are successful. Many cultural sites have been critiqued in art lessons, for example, advertising (Ahn 2007), tourist attractions (Ballangee-Morris 2002), reality TV shows (Polaniecki 2006), Disney animated movies (Tavin and Anderson 2003), music videos (Taylor 2000), computer games (Lee 2007) and even images of children among pre-schoolers (Trafi 2o06). The issues examined are equally diverse, including - and again these are only examples - celebrity (Briggs 2007), product placement, family life (Polaniecki 2006), violence
(Chung 2006; Lee 2007), racism (Tavin and Anderson 2003), gender (Kharod 2oo6), alcoholism, pollution (Ahn 2007), beauty, anorexia, bullying, divorce (Plummer-Rohloff 2oo6), drugs, drunkenness and credit card abuse (Higgins 2007) .2 Typically, teachers attempt to demonstrate the dis-

2.

See Duncum 2007 for an extensive review of

K-12 art teachers

dealing with popular culture in their classrooms over the past few years. 3. Rare exceptions include comments by
Lee (2007), Chung (2006), Polaniecki (2006), Briggs (2007)

and Cummings (2007) that some of their students showed marked disinterest in thinking critically.

tance between visual representations, which often take the form of stereotypes, and students' lived experience. Alternatively, they propose that visual representations of others are often as inadequate as visual representations are frequently of them. While the goals are praiseworthy, significant problems exist.

Critical thinking about critical theory and pedagogy

However well meaning the numerous accounts of applying critical theory in art lessons are, it is frequently impossible to determine how they define critical thinking. With only a few exceptions, the art education literature regards critical pedagogy as unproblematic. 3 It often seems to mean no more than students were taught something, where teaching is conflated with learning and even with inculcation of habitual thought. It is as though art teachers expect students simply to learn what they teach. However, evidence that this actually happens is scant, and the distance between teaching and transformation is great. Instead of transformation and empowerment, there appears to be a tendency to romanticize students' critical thinking and view it as sophisticated. Teachers have been too willing to accept prima facie evidence that learning has taken place and curriculum goals have been met. Defining critical awareness as understanding 'contemporary social problems at a personal level', art educator Jae Young Lee (2007) draws upon his own classroom experience of teaching popular visual culture to suggest that teachers are often happy to accept as evidence of success signs that students offer up merely to placate them. Lee's point is made ad infinitum by media educators (e.g., Burn and Durran 20o6; Turnbull 1998). David Buckingham et al. found that students were quite prepared to 'play along' with their teacher's critical approach, but mostly this consisted of 'guessing what was in the
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teacher's mind' (Buckingham et al. 2005: 43). Chris Richards (1998) adds that students sometimes acquiesce or concede to being taught 'on condition' that it does not undermine their understanding of themselves (Richards 1998: 136). It seems likely that claims that students engage in critical thinking often have more to do with advocacy and/or teacher gullibility than real evidence. Moreover, while critical pedagogy aspires to be liberating, it is mostly advanced at a theoretical level. Media teacher Judith Williamson (1985) complains that academics fired up with reformer's zeal have little knowledge of the difficulties of working with real kids in actual classrooms. Where critical theory has been practised it has often been 'delivered, ironically, via authoritarian means' (Gaudelius 2000: 25). Neil Brown (2003) muses on critical pedagogy as perhaps 'little more than a form of top-down moralizing, propagating elite middle class values' (Brown 2003: 289). Proponents of critical pedagogy often seem to be guilty of failing to practise the democratic, liberating gospel they preach, rightly seeing their objects of criticism as oppressive, but ignoring their own position of authority in the classroom and its potential for abuse (Turnbull 1998; Green 1998). According to art educator Rebecca Herrmann (2005), some teachers' personal accounts of how they deal with popular visual culture from a critical perspective show they use their authority in the classroom to direct student projects to achieve predetermined solutions. In one example, an assignment began by discussing photographs of clothing and what meanings could be decoded. What followed, however, was entirely teacher directed. Students were given photocopied bodies, markers and faces from magazines, and told to make collages of clothed people. Thus the potential moment in which students could have exercised their critical capacities was circumvented by a studio activity that was fully teacher directed. Such denial of student agency is even more pointed in another example in which the teachers determined what politically correct views students should express. They discussed a photograph of a child holding a gun and were then instructed to develop images that could be used in an advertisement against violent behaviour among children. Herrmann rightly argues that telling students what form their visual responses should take is incongruent with the goal of inculcating critical habits of mind. No matter how compelling a teacher's views may appear to him or herself, they can be easily rejected by students, and the more firmly and stridently they are advanced, the more this is the case. One truth colliding with another does not necessarily lead to enlightenment but to retreat, not to synthesis or compromise but to an endgame. As travel can narrow as well as expand the mind, so the presentation of alternative ideas can lead to shutting down minds as much as opening them up. Critiques of popular culture approached as expos6s tend to silence students, and fail to carry over to life beyond the classroom. Unless students view the issues being raised through a sense of their own agency, critique remains 'academic'. While motivated by a desire to empower students, critical pedagogy ends up disempowering them and is anything but transformative (Janks 2002). In helping to open up imagery to an examination of social issues, the significance of critical theory to art education has been inestimable, but translated directly into classrooms it has proven to be severely limited.
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Towards a post-critical, dialogic pedagogy

In seeking to develop a critical consciousness in students about their popular culture several things are needed. First, it is necessary to reject prima facie evidence of success and dig a lot deeper than most art educators have hitherto been prepared to do. It is necessary to appreciate the complex, ambiguous negotiations students engage in with popular culture within the equally complex cultures of a classroom. Fortunately, researchers on media education in Britain have already undertaken much of this work (e.g.,
Buckingham 2003; Buckingham et al. 2oo5; Buckingham and Sefton-Green 1994; Richards 1998; Sefton-Green and Soep 2007). In Britain, media edu-

cation has been part of the curriculum since the 193os, and with specialist Media Schools there is a wealth of experience to draw upon, much of which has been subject to a sustained research endeavour over the past two decades. Like art education to date, media education frequently focuses upon media stereotypes and audience interpretation. As far back as 1981/1982, British media educator Williamson found significant traps for unwary teachers in dealing with popular culture stereotypes, ones that the art teachers mentioned above have unwittingly fallen into. Williamson examined the representation of women in teen magazines, especially the magazines' idealized, romantic notions of love and relationships. At first, it all seemed so easy. Drawing upon critical theory, she planned simply to show her students how unrealistic these representations of romantic love were - and students would understand. But it was not to be. Initial successes merely masked the nuances of negotiation and resistance among both boys and girls. The boys seemed especially keen to take up the topic. Success seemed assured, but to Williamson's dismay she found that the topic offered the boys opportunities to ogle and, as significantly, it reinforced their prior view that girls were weak minded. About one of the boys she writes, 'But as we go through his careful presentation ... my flesh creeps at the note of scorn in his voice. After all, girls read this rubbish don't they? It just goes to show how stupid they are'
(Williamson 1981/1982: 81). Not until Williamson attacked the boys as

immature, unthinking jocks did they begin to reconsider their views. She writes, 'it is not enough just to analyze the media' (italics in the original, Williamson 1981/1982: 84). In her view, it was necessary to create a personal crisis; without trauma, students continue to view popular culture as unbiased, and studying it merely reinforces their existing bias that sees other people as gullible. Williamson thought she did eventually succeed with the boys. She also thought she succeeded with two girls who lived in the space between their actual body shape and their desire to conform to the media ideal. For these girls, recognizing how unrealistic media bodies seemed to be at least a first step in accepting their own bodies. But Williamson felt she had failed with one girl she called Astrid, a pretty blonde, about whom she writes, 'her self-image is clearly bound to the things we seem to be attacking. She sits at the front of the class and says, literally, nothing. She may file her nails or just stare' (Williamson 1981/1982: 82). In 1998, Sue Turnbull critiqued Williamson's critique of her class. Like Williamson, Turnbull had taught students about the representation of romantic love in teen magazines. Drawing upon this experience, and prefiguring comments above, Turnbull first suggested that the success Williamson
Thinking critically about critical thinking 251

believed she claimed she had with the majority of the boys and girls may have had more to do with their desire to please her than any actual transformation. Specifically, Turnbull (1998) argued that some students learn to deny their own pleasures in popular culture in order to satisfy their teachers: they assume a pose of criticality that imitates the values their teachers not only espouse but reward. Desiring approval, students assess their pleasures in popular culture and even their own lives from their teacher's perspective and act accordingly in class. In short, seeming to adopt critical consciousness becomes a calculated classroom survival strategy. On the other hand, art educator Kerry Thomas (2005) argues that student collusion is not always calculated. She observes teachers who enter into dialogue with students but overlook the extent to which their desire for the teacher's knowledge/power determines how they operate in class. Thomas argues that students and teachers alike sometimes unwittingly collude to produce a fiction regarding the extent of student agency. What a teacher and students jointly see as originating with students frequently turns out to conform to the teacher's implicit expectations. Thus teachers need to be alert to student collusion, whether it is knowing or unacknowledged. Teachers who accept what students say and produce at face value as evidence of critical thinking have fallen for a trap set by the naturalization of the school environment and their authority within it. For teachers, schools and their own authoritative position within them seem so normal they fail to recognize the socially constructed nature of their student interactions. The historical and contemporary social pressures that determine the nature of schooling, as well as teachers' own participation, get lost in the daily struggle to survive schooling. Turnbull also suggests that students like Williamson's Astrid did (and still do) not show interest for reasons that have nothing to do with being dumb. Some simply refuse the masquerade others adopt. Realizing that the cost to themselves is great, they remain silent. They know that their interests and tastes are politically incorrect. Revealing what they really think and feel would only draw animosity from teachers and perhaps too from peers, thus they have no incentive to risk exposure. Seeking to avoid ridicule, at an age when they are especially sensitive to the opinions of others, they stay quiet. While the Astrids in the classroom earn the consternation of their teachers and do poorly when it comes to grades, according to Turnbull, they remain true to themselves in seeking no approval other than their own. Turnbull's account of addressing teen magazines with second-generation migrant adolescents shows that they understood the contradictions between the ideologies of popular culture and their own lives. There was no need for her to point this out. The students like Astrid who remained silent in class were not stupid. Rather, they were immobilized on the one hand by desiring romantic love and the possibility of a future career, and on the other hand by loyalty to family expectations of an early, arranged marriage. In this case, critiquing unrealistic representations of romance in teen magazines failed to address the specific dilemma of these particular students. The critical pedagogy Williamson employed, including an attack on students who disagreed with her, reflects the second wave feminism of the 198os. It was informed by critical theory that assumed a singular truth about the representation of women. Williamson viewed ideals of romance and body
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shape straightforwardly as reinforcing male patriarchy and oppression of women (Funge 1998). Turnbull's dialogical approach reflects the third wave feminism of the 199os that was informed by post-structuralism; it stressed how people make meaning for themselves irrespective of dominant meanings. Thus Turnbull understands the way young females navigate media images as empowering rather than disempowering. Today, young females take third wave, post-structuralist feminism for granted, having absorbed it through cultural osmosis as part of ordinary daily living in a changed culture (Bae 2007). Considering this, teachers who continue to adopt a second wave feminist approach will simply 'talk past' students. Coming from different paradigms, what teachers say will seem irrelevant to students. This distinction operates not only among different feminisms but also at a macro level. Buckingham (2003) understands it as a discord between modernist and postmodern paradigms. Critical theory tends to operate from within the binary terms of dominance and a liberating counterpoint in which a singular truth is opposed by a singular alternative. The singular truth about gender representation critical pedagogy adopted was essentially modernist whereas the multiple, contradictory and morally ambiguous truths embraced by Turnbull's dialogical pedagogy are quintessentially postmodern. These distinctions are equally apparent in post-colonial theory with regard to issues of race, and turn up in classrooms where teaching focuses on racial and ethnic identities. Chris Cohen (1998) and Julian Sefton-Green (199o) found teachers responded to racism by deploring racial stereotypes and offering 'positive images' of racial and ethnic identity; they were seemingly unaware of the inherently unstable nature of racial and ethnic identities as well as the fact that their students read them in diverse and often contradictory ways. Sara Bragg (2002) found the same thing applied to representations of violence and that simply deploring violent imagery failed to engage with the highly complex range of responses of students.

Dialogical theory and dialogical pedagogy

To go beyond simple applications of critical theory in the classroom, it is necessary to adopt a dialogic pedagogy that acknowledges something of the teeming multiplicity of views described above, each jostling with one another - the postmodern cacophony. This is what Mikhail Bakhtin, in prefiguring postmodernism, called a 'polyphony' of voices, or 'heteroglossia' (Bakhtin 1981: 263), where there is a constant interaction between meanings. Bakhtin believed the truth is always found in dialogue contingent on actual utterances between people: it is always fragile and never absolute. In Bakhtin's terms, critical discourse is too often offered in the form of authoritarian, even absolutist, monologue. Authoritative discourse is, privileged language that approaches us from without; it is distanced ... and permits no play with its framing context .... We recite it. IT has great power over us but only while in power; if ever dethroned it immediately becomes a dead thing, a relic.
(Bakhtin 1981: 424)

By contrast, once one acknowledges the existence of competing definitions of the same thing, discourse undergoes a process of 'dialogization'
Thinking critically about critical thinking 253

(Bakhtin 1981: 427). Here meaning is created through specific utterances in specific contexts and one meaning always has the potential to condition others. Effectively, Bakhtin privileges context over text: whatever happens in a particular time and space will have a meaning there that it will not have in quite the same way anywhere else or at any other time. This appears to be a perfect theoretical fit for what happens in classrooms in which teachers explore their own views along with those of students. Some art teachers claim to practise just such a 'dialogic' pedagogy, and I contend they offer a signpost to the future. They claim their teaching follows democratic principles and arises from students as much as themselves (e.g. Plummer-Rohloff 2oo6). They say success is dependent upon the quality of discussion (Trafi 2006; Kharod 2006). Sheng Kuan Chung (2oo6), for example, claims that it is important to situate himself as fellow learner, not expert, especially in regard to controversial topics such as violence in the media. In developing a hypertext that connected music videos to fine art, Pamela Taylor writes, 'I was learning through the research, connections and interpretations the students made' (Taylor 2000: 386). In considering her students' own cultural experiences and learning more about their own life issues, Karen Cummings writes, 'I became a student of my
own classroom' (Cummings
2007:

297).

Ideas bounce around in dialogic pedagogy. Ideas are sometimes poorly articulated and search for coherence and connection, but are rich in muli-layeredness, emotional complexity and specific, even specialized, knowledge. Knowledge is partial, values are ambiguous, dilemmas are profound and resolutions rare. In such classrooms, meaning making is inherently contingent on Bakhtin's polyphony of voices uttered in moments in particular classes that are always subject to a particular classroom dynamic. While patterned, meaning is never wholly predictable and is always unique. A dialogic pedagogy requires trust between participants - teacher and students. A sense of equality or at least reciprocal respect is necessary, when the only rule is serious consideration of the multiple and subtle shadings of others' points of view. Dialogic pedagogy does not imply abandoning critical examination or that teachers remain silent about their own views, rather that critical examination is understood as a conversation between students and students, and teachers and students. This kind of pedagogy offers opportunities for students to explore contradictions between popular culture and their own social situations - home, school and hanging around with peers. Turnbull (1998) argues that students are caught between their own desires and familial duties, and this is true of teachers as well. The sooner we acknowledge that our own dilemmas are those of our students, the sooner will we be in a position to help them speak back to the contradictions they, and we, face. And the sooner we accept that we are often confused ourselves, the sooner we are both likely to gain some clarity. Thomas' (2005) observations regarding dialogue in the classroom are critical. She found that even when teachers and students alike were fully convinced that the views students expressed were their own, and even believed those views had originated with them, there was an unintended and unrecognized collusion with the teacher's perspective. When teachers fail to express their own positions, students invariably pick them up through a process of osmosis and hold them at a level it is difficult to
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analyse let alone recognize as other. Thus, for dialogue to work, teachers should not only create a safe place for students to open up, they should articulate their own ideas where they are clearly formed and confess to confusion if not. Turnbull suggests the Astrids will speak up in classrooms where honest openness occurs and we will find out what they know and what we do not.

Summary
Research on media education practices advises rejection of critical pedagogy in favour of a playful one in which teachers refrain from advancing their own moral and political positions as if these were true. Instead of just talking, teachers should listen. Rather than assuming to know what is good for students, teachers should ask them to articulate their views in openended exploration. Teachers are most effective when they offer opportunities for students to reflect upon their own, often contradictory, negotiations with popular culture, though it is unrealistic to expect the process to be neat, simple or quick. It is messy, patience is necessary and results are not guaranteed. A dialogic pedagogy recognizes that while critical consciousness is a laudable goal, advocacy by teachers does not lead to critical consciousness among students. Expecting a simple transfer of values from teacher to student, as if employing a hypodermic syringe, will inevitably lead to disappointment. Some art teachers appear to have understood this, and in pursuing critical awareness have adopted a dialogic pedagogy. They show us what the future of art education could be. References
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Suggested citation Duncum, P. (2oo8), 'Thinking critically about critical thinking: towards a post-critical, dialogic pedagogy for popular visual culture', InternationalJournal of Education
through Art 4: 3, PP. 247-257, doi: 10.1386/eta.4.3.247/1

Contributor details Paul Duncum is Professor of Art Education at the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He is widely published in art education in the areas of his research interests, which include popular visual culture, children's unsolicited drawing, images of children in popular media and critical theory. Contact: E-mail: [email protected]

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TITLE: Thinking critically about critical thinking: towards a post-critical, d SOURCE: International Journal of Education through Art 4 no3 2008 PAGE(S): 247-57 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.