Throughout this document, I have attached “comments” to various words and phrases. These comments are excerpted from written reflections I recorded over the past six months of working on this project, and are intended to showcase how my shifting thinking influenced the development of this project over the course of its lifespan. You can click on a piece of highlighted text to see which comments are connected to which phrases.
Originally, this AHS Capstone project was a means for increasing awareness of educational discourse at Olin. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), an analytical method that examines language as a mediator of power dynamics, I’d hoped to explore how the use of language at Olin can shape our understanding of what education should look like and what purposes it should serve. In the project proposal, which I wrote at the end of the previous semester, I outlined a central goal of the project:
to explore the state of educational discourse at Olin - the ways in which we talk about Olin’s curriculum, its purpose in the broader landscape of engineering education, and its possible directions in the future - and to examine how this discourse is reflective of underlying beliefs about pedagogy and purposes of education.
3/23/20
In the week after leaving Olin and moving back home, I wrote:
“With everything that has changed over the past two weeks, it feels weird and somewhat inappropriate to continue with the project as if nothing has changed. I can’t imagine finishing my project according to its current plan and presenting it at the final event (whatever that may be), because it feels quite detached from the reality the Olin community is currently occupying.
In particular, I find myself struggling with the notion of criticality, particularly about Olin given its current situation. In my mind I equate criticality with negativity, which I know is not necessarily true, but criticality does imply a certain amount of tearing down, of deconstructing and revealing the schemas of power behind certain things. In the context of Olin, it certainly feels like what it needs right now is not more tearing down.”
…
“To be more precise, perhaps the true underlying issue is the fact that the analysis I’ve done so far feels wholly detached, a sort of intellectual exercise that serves my own learning goals and ego but doesn’t truly exist in play with, and in communion with, the lived realities of the Olin community. What I’m searching for, then, is a mode of thinking that serves to connect, not to detach. We don’t need academic output that serves to widen the gap between individuals; the physical distance has already done that for us. What I’m looking for is a way to analyze discourse that focuses on the work it does to connect, the ways discourse can glue together a community and provide a basis for meaningful emergent community.”
However, midway through the semester, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Olin, along with nearly all colleges and universities, to close its campus and move classes online for the rest of the semester. With this sudden, unprecedented shift, we as a community have been forced to reckon with the question of which components of the Olin experience can – and should – be maintained in online form. Along with this, I have done my own reflection and reconsideration of the purpose of my work for this project. Rather than continue with my original project direction, I have paused my work in its original direction to focus my efforts on reflective meta-analysis, examining my own past work as an artifact that is interwoven with my educational experiences and reflecting my Olin identity—as a student, community member, and researcher—which I have developed over the past four years.
This project is composed of two sections. In the first section of this piece—the reflective portion—I discuss several of the writings that have been influential toward my self-reflection throughout this project, particularly in developing my thinking about criticality and how I engage with it. The second section of this piece is my original analysis, which I wrote prior to the announcement of Olin classes shifting online.
I intend for this project (in its new reflective form) to serve as an example, for others in the Olin community hoping to study Olin formally or simply to unpack their experiences, of how our thinking is inherently connected to and shaped by our positions within Olin—and to emphasize the importance of doing so. This same principle is true of any group, community, or institution one is a member of, but Olin’s small size and relatively high level of intra-community connectivity affords us a distinct opportunity to understand ourselves, and consequently to use that understanding for change. We can attempt to remove ourselves from our Olin context and be objective in our analysis, as I originally intended in this project. However, as I have come to learn, we have an alternative choice. We can choose to acknowledge our connectedness to our (Olin) context, and in doing so we discover the opportunities to use analysis constructively, as a basis for potentially transformative conversations with others in the Olin community.
To highlight what I was attempting to accomplish in this project in its original form, I first want to consider criticality. Criticality, and critical thinking, is something we engage with frequently at Olin. Its status as one of the twelve Olin Learning Outcomes (OLOs) solidifies its position within the foundation of Olin’s approach to education. As a term, it encompasses a broad range of thoughts and actions, making it worthwhile to define what we do when we think critically. The OLO offers one interpretation:
Think Critically
Engage in analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and applying diverse information and experiences to support decision-making, attitude formation, action and expression.
3/23/20
I ended up reading this book for reasons unrelated to the project, so it’s mostly coincidental that I ended up reading it at a time when it was needed. When I was reflecting on my project post-transition, I wrote:
“Recently, I read bell hooks’s Teaching Critical Thinking, which offered a number of insights that felt constructive. In general, I appreciate how hooks seamlessly blends together intellectual thought and lived experience. Her anecdotes about her life and her upbringing bring a nourishing pathos to the more “scholarly” work she lays out, making it feel much more humanizing and grounded. I also find that she has a lot of useful things to say about criticality, acknowledging its potential to appear negative.
In general, hooks crafts a picture of criticality as not a detached intellectual thought exercise that serves one’s ego, but rather a very real process of deconstruction and speculation that does tangible work of liberation and humanization. I want my project to serve the latter purpose. And perhaps a starting point for accomplishing that is to shift the project’s focus to connectedness, particularly my own connection to the community I am studying.”
This definition outlines what acts comprise critical thinking, and what purposes critical thinking can serve, but it does not illuminate the potential of critical thinking to be transformative in itself. In Teaching Critical Thinking (2013), bell hooks provides several ideas about criticality that help complete the picture. Intellectually, she frames criticality as an act of deconstructing a text or an artifact for the purpose of expanding understanding: “intellectual work embraces the art of the possible; it is like an archeological process where one goes deep in search of truths that may constantly change as new information comes to light. (p. 139)” In classroom contexts, she frames critical thinking as “one way to cultivate greater awareness. It enables students to better recognize the interconnected nature of life and by so doing brings them face to face with the sacred. (p. 149)” Key to these definitions of critical thinking is a moving toward a more complete, nuanced, connected understanding of the world. In comparison to the Olin definition, hooks describes critical thinking as not merely an intellectual exercise; rather, the increased understanding brought about by critical thinking is a key component of an education that liberates and breaks down power structures.
This framing of criticality—as a process of tearing down, of deconstructing and revealing the schemas of power behind various aspects of life—makes it somewhat easy to equate criticality with negativity. But as hooks illustrates, criticality can serve a multitude of purposes. These different framings of criticality provide a useful lens for understanding my own experiences with criticality and how I engaged with it throughout this project.
With this idea of criticality in mind, it is worthwhile to examine how I engaged with critical thinking in working on this project. My own understanding of criticality has been continually developing over the past several years. In junior year, I discovered a language to describe this notion through the work of Paulo Freire. Freire developed numerous ideas about education as a practice of liberation, but his idea of education as a dialogue, as outlined in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1968)—where the roles of “teacher” and “student” are broken down, and instead the classroom is a place for learners to engage openly in mutual construction of understanding—stuck with me. It provided the most nuanced framework I’d encountered for understanding how language and education can serve to reproduce structures of power, or to liberate.
When researching analytical methods for this project, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) seemed to be a natural extension of these ideas surrounding criticality. CDA is not a single prescriptive analytical method, but rather a wide-ranging framework for understanding how language mediates power and privilege in interactions and social institutions (Rogers, 2005). Several different conceptualizations of it exist. The particular framework I chose is outlined by Gee (2004), but even a singular framework contains possibilities for doing useful, tangible work.
3/30/20
I first read this paper by Stevens at the beginning of the semester, and it seemed important then, but I ended up not fully incorporating it into my work because it seemed out of scope. However, upon re-reading it after the transition, I reflected:
“Reading Stevens highlights a tension that I have neglected to examine, yet is likely a major source of my concern over doing something “critical.” As I have reflected on my work in this project, I’ve struggled to disentangle “criticality” and “negativity” - that is, I don’t think something negative about Olin is appropriate for the situation, yet maybe something critical still is. However, perhaps the reason why this criticality feels negative is because the way I’m going about it doesn’t fit my ultimate purpose for this project.
The CDA I’m doing is, in a sense, “from afar;” I am analyzing recorded language without any sort of direct exchange between myself and its authors. As Stevens points out, this sort of analysis is much of where CDA originated from, but largely because folks (e.g. Fairclough) were analyzing in venues where they didn’t have access to dialogic exchange (e.g. analyzing policy speeches). However, critically, that is not the situation I find myself in. If I want my CDA to explore transformation of social practices, as Stevens posits it can, it should be as dialogic as possible.
Yet despite the fact that I do, in fact, have direct exchanges with the folks who authored (at least some of) the texts I’m examining, I don’t take advantage of that opportunity for dialogue, and therefore the answerability of my work fails to reach its full potential. My analysis can thus be “critical enough,” but in its current form, it doesn’t reach its full potential to be constructive and transformative.”
In contemplating the role of a critical discourse analyst, Stevens (2011) frames CDA in terms similar to hooks’, as a potential catalyst for transforming social practices. She presents the notion that CDA, beyond being a method of analysis, can also be an invitation to engage with others. That is, there are two distinct modes it can take. When CDA is done “from afar,” by analyzing texts whose authors one cannot directly access (Stevens gives the example of public policy speeches), the only engagement that can happen is between the analyst and other people from the academic world who are detached from the original context. In CDA done “up close,” the person(s) whose language one is analyzing might be reading your analysis and engaging with the analyst in conversation about it. This involves entirely different dynamics of trust, forcing one to consider how the author being analyzed would respond. Using her own work as a language coach and researcher analyzing the discourse of an elementary school teacher with whom she works, Stevens highlights how by being “willing to claim their positions, speak from those positions, answer to others’ positions, and reflexively re-engage in those roles,” she and the teacher she worked with were able to more effectively engage in dialogue. Her own usage of CDA, combined with her willingness to share her findings with the teacher, facilitated generative conversations that made the teacher more understanding of her own language and practice, and enabled Stevens to conduct analysis that was truer to the teacher’s perspective.
It should be pointed out, then, that almost any language at Olin can be analyzed “up close.” The distance (physical and hierarchical) is small enough at Olin that nearly any student, faculty, or staff member reasonably has the ability to engage in conversation with nearly anyone else in the community (with a few exceptions, such as when analyzing language whose author has left the Olin community). Therefore, the mode of one’s critical analysis is an important consideration.
4/2/20 I think this perception was built up over a number of (mostly informal) experiences. At some point, I began noticing in many conversations that people, particularly students, would talk about Olin education using terms like “experimental” and “project-based” to refer to a lot of different things. At the same time, I got the sense that people had only a few dichotomous ways of talking about classes and pedagogy. Things were either “traditional” or “project-based/experimental,” and the definitions people gave for those terms seemed to be defined entirely by context. I found myself gaining at least a slightly more solid understanding of the history behind these terms, and I wanted to start unpacking the way they were talked about at Olin in order to bring folks into better alignment.
4/4/20
There is also a motivational element here that involves my own deeply-held beliefs about education. As mentioned earlier, at some point I sensed a growing cohort of students who defined Olin education as a dichotomy of “traditional/project-based”–and who felt that Olin’s education should shift toward being more “traditional” and like an engineering education at another university. This sense came from a number of conversations with other students, as well as from faculty discussing feedback they’d received in their classes.
I don’t unilaterally support things that are “experimental” or “project-based” by virtue of that nature alone, but I care about Olin trying new things and building its own unique model of education, so I found myself taking the side of “experimental” classes, even if I necessarily didn’t support them. Herein lies the problem with using these terms to talk about Olin’s education; they are inadequate at describing the variety of pedagogies and educational settings that exist.
QEA is a classic example of this. It’s a lightning rod for people’s strong (and generally critical) opinions about project-based learning. Yet, I found that people would consider their issues with the course as an indictment of project-based learning, which they aren’t–QEA is one particular instance of a type of course that, by some definitions, isn’t even project-based.
Stevens suggests that a complete critical analysis of something must also be a self-examination on the part of the analyst. As such it is important for me, as someone attempting to study Olin, to consider my own positionality—the various identities I inhabit in Olin contexts, and consequently in my analysis.
My identities at Olin are an accumulation of the various experiences and roles I’ve inhabited over the course of my Olin career. This project, and the work I did for it, is a reflection of these identities. One aspect of my identity particularly relevant to this project is my view of education; indeed, much of the motivation behind pursuing the original direction of this project was in response to what I perceived as a disconnect between parties during educational conversations I’d witnessed in classes and informal settings. Yet the fact that this pattern stood out to me is based on particular experiences: doing education research, in which I deeply analyzed people’s self-narratives about education; research meetings where we often discussed how people talk about education; readings for research and various classes, like the aforementioned Freire, that gave me language for understanding educational discourse.
10/2/19
Initially (that is, in the semester before I started the project), I thought that the best way to approach this project was for it to highlight the research-based definitions of commonly-used terminology. However, that approach became complicated. In mid-October, I wrote:
“There’s an underlying dimension to this project, a tension in the questions asked during the course of the project. A question is a sign; it points to a deeper-held belief of mine about education and Olin. Some questions and investigative framings, particularly the ones I had in mind when coming up with the project, point to a belief that there ought to be a particular level of theoretical grounding in the ways people understand education at Olin - with, admittedly, an accompanying suspicion that faculty and students do not often meet that level of grounding.
As recent events in the Olin community, in Teaching and Learning, and in the meeting today have reminded me, that framing has its drawbacks, particularly that it assumes a more theoretically-grounded working understanding of education at Olin is inherently better. While there are undoubtedly issues and tensions in Olin’s education and its impacts on students, faculty, and staff, it may be more fruitful to direct questioning elsewhere. As the deep, existential reckonings the community has grappled with recently have shown, pedagogical issues lie several layers above where the true issues likely exist. Therefore, the question(s) to be asked are likely more along the lines of: what is Olin’s purpose? What is engineering’s purpose? What should the Olin student experience look like? How can we do justice to students?”
At the time, we had just had a class session in Teaching and Learning (An Olin class focused on teaching and learning in undergraduate education) where the literature behind project-based learning, in particular, had been pretty thoroughly problematized. Specifically, some people in the class criticized the work of John Dewey, who is widely considered a key creator of project-based learning, for doing research that was essentially only for students who are white, and didn’t consider any implications of project-based learning on students who fit that mold. That, along with other things happening in my Olin work at the time caused me to rethink my motivations for undertaking this project. With this in mind, I shifted the purpose of the project to be more focused on open-ended inquiry than any prescriptive view of education.
Each of these experiences has given me a particular view of education which has informed the project, but they are just one component of my positionality. As an Olin student and community member, any attempt to study Olin’s education discourse using educational artifacts from its curriculum will necessarily be shaped by nearly every aspect of my identity. Indeed, the fact that I was able to undertake the project in the form I chose is, to some extent, reflective of the privilege I have. That is, the ability to undertake this sort of critical project as an intellectual exercise, to examine structures of power without occupying identity groups that are marginalized within these structures, is reflective of privilege. As we will see in the next section, this has potentially important ramifications for how I engage with criticality and what I accomplish through my critical analysis.
In the interest of self-reflexivity, it is worthwhile to examine what work my critical analysis actually does. There are several important decisions made throughout the project that determine the purpose it serves, one of them being the particular method of analysis chosen. However, another project decision I made, which I believe is illustrative of the nature of the project, is the source of data I’m analyzing. For this project, I settled on using class syllabi from Olin as my primary data source, for several reasons. On a pragmatic level, this data source was fairly convenient and readily available, and didn’t require further work or transcription in order to be ready for analysis. Using class syllabi as a data source also serves to illustrate a point: that Discourses are embedded in and can shape our thinking through all forms of communication, no matter how seemingly mundane or inconsequential.
However, considering the answerability of my work, analyzing educational artifacts in a formally-written paper is not an invitation to any sort of conversation. Stevens frames this sort of “from afar” discourse analysis historically as a method used primarily in situations where the discourse analyst lacked direct access to the author of the language being analyzed—for instance, in analysis of policy documents and political speeches. Given that my project arose from my own experiences in Olin contexts, then, the data source and form of my project are quite distinct choices.
4/19/20
There are probably multiple reasons why I didn’t do this, but ultimately I think it was because staying distanced was easy. Course syllabi were a convenient, easily accessible data source that was readily analyzable. And before shifting my project’s focus, this aspect of inviting others in didn’t really seem like the central focus of the project. I was in “analytical mode,” and I was focused on doing a sort of rigorous intellectual analysis. Talking to people about my analysis would a) be more work, and b) seemingly be only semi-relevant to the core of my project…at least, in how I originally thought of it.
The small size of Olin, combined with the social connections I’ve built over four years, means that the institutional distance between myself and another member of the Olin community is fairly. Indeed, the class(es) whose syllabi I chose to analyze were classes that I had taken, and whose instructors were people with whom I regularly interacted. Engaging with these classes’ syllabi in a form that fails to acknowledge and make use of this prior history feels like a sort of intellectual charade: a pretend, decontextualized “neutral” analysis that belies the very real connection I have to the context I’m studying. Of course, I could have intentionally called out this fact in my original writing, but I didn’t.
The consequence of this is that this project serves as a useful intellectual exercise and learning experience for me, but not as a useful application of criticality toward its generative and socially transformative possibilities. My project may promote my own development of analytical capabilities and critical thinking, but it is not meaningfully grounded in reality, because it does not accurately represent my relationship and ongoing experiences with the context I am studying. I failed to take advantage of the opportunity to engage with the professors whose class syllabi I analyzed, to use my analysis as an opening into conversations about their language and intent behind teaching their classes.
Considering how my project lives within the Olin community in its new form, I want to highlight its takeaways for Olin (which are applicable to some extent in any educational context). Oliners engage with criticality–particularly with regard to Olin itself–frequently, whether through formal discussions on the future of Olin and its position in higher ed, or through informal lunch table talk. However, reflexivity plays perhaps a more important role in engaging critically at Olin than it does at other institutions due to the high level of connection each individual has to the community as a whole. Making oneself “unembedded,” i.e. fully neutral and decontextualized with regard to Olin, is nearly impossible. We all occupy Olin identities and interact with other members of the Olin community so frequently that any attempt to think about Olin in any sort of reasoned way is inevitably going to be colored by these experiences.
Therefore, being reflexive, and considering how we use and engage with criticality, is imperative. In Olin contexts, it is the determining factor of an analysis that fully “lives” within Olin and embodies the individual’s connectivity to all aspects of Olin. I hope for this project to serve as an example of, and reflection on, the various ways in which we engage with criticality. By providing an example of how I attempted to be critical without meaningfully engaging with that which I was critical of, I am showing what not to do. By highlighting what happens when we don’t engage with our connectedness, we can begin to understand how our own critical thinking can be socially transformative and bring the Olin community to a more nuanced, holistic, engaged understanding of itself.
4/19/20
To that end, I want to engage with people around this project! The discussion group at the final event is one opportunity for doing this, but I wonder if there are also ways to invite the community to engage in conversation in other ways as well
We can’t disentangle ourselves from the communities and identities we inhabit, and this is particularly true of a tight-knit, interwoven community such as Olin. And in the context of doing work that is critical and generative, such a close connectedness affords us opportunities. It allows us to consider how our thinking is shaped by our interactions with others, and by definition, connectedness enables us to seek out dialogue and direct engagement with others in the community. By being conscious of our positionalities, and by choosing to engage in criticality with those we are connected to, we can use our thinking and analysis to do useful work by sharing it with others, inviting them into a dialogue, fostering conversations that are positive, constructive, and transformative.
I haven’t included the work I originally wrote for this project for the sake of brevity, but if you’d like to read my original work, you can access it here.
Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury publishing USA.
Gee, J. P. (2004). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. Routledge.
Gee, J. P. (2018). Introducing Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315098692
hooks, b. (2013). Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. (n.p.): Taylor & Francis.
Parson, L. (2016). Are STEM Syllabi Gendered? A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. Qualitative Report, 21(1).
Rogers, R., Malancharuvil-Berkes, E., Mosley, M., Hui, D., & Joseph, G. O. G. (2005). Critical discourse analysis in education: A review of the literature. Review of educational research, 75(3), 365-416.
Stevens, L. P. (2011). Locating the role of the critical discourse analyst. In An introduction to critical discourse analysis in education (pp. 211-230). Routledge.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & society, 4(2), 249-283.