Critical Consciousness - History of Application

History of Application

The ancient Greeks first identified the essence of critical consciousness when philosophers encouraged their students to develop an "impulse and willingness to stand back from humanity and nature... to make them objects of thought and criticism, and to search for their meaning and significance. In his books Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Education for Critical Consciousness, Freire explains critical consciousness as a sociopolitical educative tool that engages learners in questioning the nature of their historical and social situation, which Freire addressed as "reading the world". The goal of critical consciousness, according to Freire, should be acting as subjects in the creation of democratic society. In education, Freire implies intergenerational equity between students and teachers in which both learn, both question, both reflect and both participate in meaning-making. Using this idea, and describing current instructional methods as homogenization and lockstep standardization, alternative approaches are proposed, such as the Sudbury model of democratic education schools, an alternative approach in which children, by enjoying personal freedom thus encouraged to exercise personal responsibility for their actions, learn at their own pace rather than following a previously imposed chronologically-based curriculum. In a similar form students learn all the subjects, techniques and skills in these schools. The staff are minor actors, the "teacher" is an adviser and helps just when asked. Sudbury model of democratic education schools maintain that values, social justice, critical consciousness, intergenerational equity, and political consciousness included, must be learned through experience, as Aristotle said: "For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them."

Picking up on Freire's definition of critical consciousness, Joe L. Kincheloe has expanded the definition of the concept in his work on postformalism. In Kincheloe's formulation postformalism connects cognition to critical theoretical questions of power and social justice. In this context Kincheloe constructs a critical theory of cognition that explores questions of meaning, emancipation vis-a-vis ideological inscription, and a particular focus on the socio-political construction of the self. With these concerns in mind Kincheloe's postformal critical consciousness engages questions of purpose, issues of human dignity, freedom, authority, reconceptualized notions of reason, intellectual quality, and social responsibility. Postformal critical consciousness stimulates a conversation between critical pedagogy and a wide range of social, cultural, political economic, psychological, and philosophical concerns. Kincheloe employs this "multilogical conversation" to shape new modes of self-awareness, more effective forms of social, political, and pedagogical action, and an elastic model of an evolving critical consciousness (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1993; Kincheloe, 1999; Thomas and Kincheloe, 2006).

Freire's development of critical consciousness has been expanded upon in several academic disciplines and common applications Public health community collaborations focused on HIV prevention for women, the role of critical consciousness in adult education, and the effect of peer pressure on cigarette smokers Freire's notion of critical consciousness is, in part, a type of political consciousness.