When I read this I remembered my time in the career office and how you polish you resume and cover letter to be targeted to places of employment you wanted. “X company really likes this skill” or “It’s better to give yourself wiggle room by conveying…” and so on. I think this is because in university we learn a wide variety of skills and topics — but only a very small fraction of them are required for the next stage of your working life. So the “School Factory” is very much meant to get the company employees as it is to getting new graduates jobs. Some jobs are not glamorous and are repetitive in nature — others have skills that are applicable and dynamic (i.e. engineering firms).

How can the system change? I don’t believe it can change in the way we want it to due to the pressure of having students go towards the working class — and the evaluation method people look at are grades. For instance, software developers are getting hired without formal education by having a portfolio showcasing their skill set. However, this is just one kind of job — but I can see an undergrad historian having trouble making that same case as they do different work entirely.

So what can teachers do? I’m not sure honestly.. my thoughts go to how can the teacher better prepare a student for them to think deeply about their discipline. Fan the fire of a passion that the student has so they may broaden not only their knowledge but their skill set as well. Who knows, this student could start their own business, be a sole proprietor, freelance — and avoid being a part of the machine if you will.

I have a friend who is going through Microbiology right now and she would echo this sentiment heavily. The courses she takes really hits on the homework assignments and exams. Recently, she has shown me the poor quality that goes into constructing the exams. I think the good, yet sad part of the story is that it had classmates bond over the fact of how terrible it is. Altogether this approach is becoming stale and outdated in an era of technology and pedagogical change. For instance, courses are leaning towards a project center approach rather than complete lecture and exams only. As we saw earlier in the semester there are creative ways to have rote memorization courses be taught with an engaging manner. I empathize with your prior experience and hope that changes are coming sooner rather than later as the next generation of professors come about.

After reading Dr. Henry’s article on empathy for medical students in residency I believe I felt a similar chord stuck. To often various disciplined engineers have forgotten that schematics, structures, software, etc. are going to be used by someone else. During the training to become an engineer it is often filled with work demonstrating your proficiency in the area — yet it lacks the human component and usually focused more on saving your own ass. Often words like “client” or “product owner” are used for someone to remain accountable to when developing the product. But it goes beyond these characters and we need to remember that. To some degree, the recent Boeing airplane incident is a case example of this. The failure was software and hardware — and as a computer scientist I can’t rightfully know what truly happened without knowing the details but a breakdown process is a likely culprit. And I just hope it wasn’t someone who turned a blinds eye because of a mundane reason (or a serious one). Of course this viewpoint should be taken with a grain of salt.

An apt question Cindy. I would imagine without practice of the knowledge gained you it’s rather hard to internalize new knowledge with would make learning harder. Or the more cynical reason would be learning and kowledge would be useless for real world context other than conversation. Not a shot at anyone — but I noticed that career students have a harder time in industry when the time comes to apply their knowledge because they are not comfortable with the results that could happen (positive or negative).

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Cool collective post! What caught my attention was at the beginning of the post where Heather approaches critical pedagogy through change in Psychology through research and understanding more about context given a particular the situation. It was unique to me because it extends beyond the classroom where the community at large helps develop questions that need answers where the diverse backgrounds of the questioners come into play.

My comment is kinda cryptic — TL;DR understanding diverse backgrounds in students gives motive to focus more on diversity of the community to get the best answers in both the classroom and in research in Psychology. Cool thoughts.

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I recently took part in a workshop Algorithms That Make You Think where a lot of ‘social fairness’ and ‘critical thinking on behalf of student’ questions came up. Them more I read, the more I thought about how ethics in critical pedagogy with regards to technology would be a good thing to have in multiple disciplines. This group’s post has hit a couple of points where students should have the freedom to learn and a provocative learning environment. When you have this safe space to work in I think the hard questions of technology could be asked from both a humanities perspective and a engineering perspective. Nice read!

Awesome post. When reading the “How does this apply to our specific fields and educational settings?” section I could get a feel for how critical pedagogy could be utilized for both theory and lecture courses, but also project oriented courses. This seemed to pop for me when the metaphorical learning environment is molded into a safe place for a student to express their critical thinking and problem solving abilities and receive feedback. As for the Leonardo DiCaprio meme, “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”.

Thanks for your post. I enjoyed how multiple discipline view points influenced the collective definition of critical pedagogy. One point I liked was the Problem-posing idea. As an engineer, the importance of problem posing couldn’t be stressed enough. The details of a problem help us develop a solution and any missing information can cause a lot of problems down the line. And for academic purposes, we want to be cognizant of making light of problems just to game the system for student. We want to be sure we pose the correct problems to engage the curiosity and intelligence of a student where a solution can be developed and justified. Now how does this go back to humanities based disciplines — honestly, I am not the one to say as it is isn’t my background, but my best English, history, culture teachers engaged us in some aspect of the discipline we found enjoyable where we practiced our skill sets.

Hi Sara, sorry for the late reply to such a thoughtful comment. You’re right, these issues are gaining more traction within the academic world. Do we risk fundamental needs to complete hefty requirements of a degree? For research? In prior generations it was expected — but now we are in a different world with similar stresses that have grown to a higher standard with little to no change (physical, mental, financial, familial, professional, etc.).

What is even better is mindfulness encourages us to reflect and asks questions and have the ability to be open to the answers we received (to then reflect once more). It is my hope that it’ll be a way to allow for change to happen without much consequence within the academic world.

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Thanks for reply Drew! I will keep your advice in mind. My time in industry (not really mentioned in the post) and academia have given me a lot of insight on how to best live my life. As you put it, life and our internal reward system change given the stage of our lives. Among my peers, I am a young 25 year old who is just scraping the potential on how to purse my goals as a future educator — and be there a long time. Again, thanks for your comment and I hope you are thriving with the freedom and autonomy you’ve earned :).

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