Critical Praxis

Praxis is the union of action and reflection and of theory and practice. Paulo Freire refers to praxis as the reassertion of human action for a more human world on two levels, the individual and social, where the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change occur. Critical praxis is threefold and includes self-reflection, reflective action, and collective reflective action. According to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, revolutionary practice is the changing of circumstance and human activity. Critical educational praxis occurs in two contexts: (1) authentic dialogue between learners and (2) the social reality in which people exist.

There is a long tradition of scholarship on thoughtful action and the deep connection between theory and practice in Western philosophy. The origin of praxis is Greek and refers to any activity a free person performs, especially in politics and business. According to John Locke, all human knowledge is divided into physike praktike, and semiotike; praktike is viewed as the skill of rightly applying one's powers and actions for the attainment of things good and useful. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel resists such a distinction between practical and theoretical and pushes for a higher synthesis of the two, a synthesis that is individual praxis.

In recent applications to public education, Ernest Morrell and Jeff Duncan-Andrade have used critical praxis as a tool for urban youth to break down the power relations inherent in traditional schooling so that students identify as collaborators with teachers in the struggle for social change. They acknowledge that critical praxis in the classroom involves a continuous, self-reflective cycle between theory and action as follows: (a) identifying a problem, (b) researching the problem, (c) developing a collective plan of action to address that problem, (d) implementing the collective plan of action, and (e) evaluating the action and assessing its efficacy in reexamining the state of the problem. Thus, critical praxis involves a constant path of evaluating thought with action, theory with practice, in the effort to gain a higher consciousness for positive change upon the world.