I found that the stakes of this article for Praxis were not as clearly drawn as I would have hoped. The author’s concern regarding a hegemonically male lineage for critical pedagogy is a valid one. However, in addition to this concern, I think the practical desirability for a unified theory of critical pedagogy could have been problematized a bit more. While some survey participants noted unwillingness to confine their practice to a single all-encompassing master definition of critical pedagogy, I wonder if the author could have been more clear towards the practical need for self-reflexive matters of definition. The most interesting part of the article for me was the anecdotal evidence of a critical pedagogue supposedly not practicing his theory. Along these lines, I would have liked to know how these different pedagogue’s theoretical self-fashioning played out concretely in their teaching methods. Common across these three readings is a privileging of a relentless pedagogical self-reflexivity over practical teaching methods. Hewing close to the dialectical nature of the critical pedagogical enterprise, I would have liked to see how this idealist self-reflexivity interacted with and against its practical manifestations in the classroom. 

    I learned that (despite being someone who values theory in my research life and political life more widely), I think I tend to desire concreteness in discussions of pedagogy (if only because I see the concrete lacking from the discussions of critical pedagogy I have been exposed to thus far). My frustration with this reading (and the others) comes from the fact that though the “critical” in critical pedagogy is abundantly clear at this point, the “pedagogy” is often left all-too unclear. In the future, I would like to explore more concrete discussions of pedagogical method rather than techniques of pedagogical self-reflexivity.