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Teacher Preparation Pedagogy, Critical Reflection and

Reflective practice is widely considered to be a central tenet of teaching. The central concept underlying this tenet is that reflection enables one to go below the surface of conscious awareness or intentions in order to examine the beliefs, attitudes, and worldviews that inform action. The term critical reflection places that reflection within the sociopolitical context of education and focuses specifically on reflection related to social group identities such as race, class, and gender. Critical reflection recognizes structural inequality and the inequitable distribution of power, privilege, and other resources among social groups, and the central role that education plays in this distribution. Critical pedagogy is the practice of teaching from the recognition of the sociopolitical context of education and seeks to interrupt, rather than reproduce, inequality.

Critical Reflection

Critical reflection asks teachers to examine their position(s) within a system of structural inequality and how that position informs what they can see and what they can know. Critical reflection calls for an analysis of positionality. Positionality is the recognition that important aspects of identity such as race, class, and gender are socially constructed and relational rather than essential (or conversely, non-operative). Positionality is a call to examine how these social positions inform our reference points, evaluations, interests, and actions. Proponents of critical reflection are particularly concerned with the increasing homogeneity of the U.S. teaching force in terms of race, class, and gender at the same time that the student population is becoming more diverse. Some theorists, such as ?zlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, believe that without the ability to think critically about how they see the world and how they came to see it that way, teachers can only reproduce dominant ideologies such as meritocracy and color blindness and the stratified social order that these ideologies support.

Critical reflection generally includes the following goals: examination of socialization into a matrix of unequal power and how one's position within this matrix shapes one's frame of reference, interests, and evaluations; development of the capacity to sustain this examination throughout one's career and guide others in it; and recognition that the knowledge that schools legitimize is not neutral and serves specific interests. Overarching questions include, Who am I? How do I view those who are different from myself? How did I come to view them this way? Whose interests are served by this view? and What are the implications of this view as manifested in action? Critical reflection is challenging because it unsettles dominant ideologies such as color blindness and meritocracy and the self-conceptions that are formed from these ideologies. Critical reflection requires deep thinking and the ability to identify implicit as well as explicit messages.

Critical Pedagogy

Critical reflection is the foundation of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy attends to both the formal curriculum and the hidden curriculum. The hidden curriculum refers to the implicit transmission of norms, values, and social expectations by the unarticulated assumptions in what and how individuals teach, and in how education as an institution is organized. The hidden curriculum is a primary mechanism of social reproduction—how schools perpetuate the social relations and attitudes necessary to sustain the existing inequitable relations of power in the larger society. Critical pedagogy recognizes that schools are sites of resistance as well as sites of reproduction and that what dominant interests have made can be unmade. Thus, critical pedagogy links knowledge and democratic practice to social transformation and bridges the gap between society as it is and society as it might be.

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