University of St Andrews Innovation in EAP: The Key to the Future An Innovative Understanding of Criticality: Consequences for the Art Student Experience Gary Riley-Jones Goldsmiths, University of London St Andrews, 1st March 2014

Definitions of Criticality: 1) Critical Thinking 2) Critical Pedagogy 3) Poststructuralist Critique

Critical Thinking 1) Involves generalised skills and abilities for the ‘correct assessing of statements’ (Ennis, 1962: 83) 2) Is ‘purposeful, reasoned and goal directed’ (Halpern, 1997: 4) 3) Involves ‘requisite tendencies’ (Ennis in Siegel, 1988: 6)

Critical Pedagogy 1) Represents an engagement with the ideological 2) Is concerned with social change and collective action to achieve that change 3) Offers a language of possibility which ‘raise[s] ambitions, desires, and real hope for those who wish to take seriously the issue of educational struggle and social justice’ (Giroux, 1988: 177)

Poststructuralist Critique 1) Is concerned with an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1984: xxiv) 2) Involves a suspension of judgment not because of a lack of knowledge but because it risks closure (Butler, 2002) 3) Represents a shift from causal responsibility to conditions (Butler, 2004)

Poststructuralist Critique and the Potential for Self-Transformation ‘The main interest in life and work is to become something else that you were not in the beginning.’ Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October, 1982)

More on the Potential for Self-Transformation… Criticality should ‘create epistemological and ontological disturbance in the minds and in the being of students’ (Barnett, 2000: 154) Or, in Rogoff’s (2006) terms, a ‘critical embodiment’

The Nature of Fine Art Education Fine Art education is associated with a high degree of ambiguity which encourages an associated ‘intensified emotional component’ (Austerlitz, 2008: 21) which may lead to ‘a sense of anomie and other negative emotional responses’ (Sovic and Blythman, n.d.).

The Death of Marat (2011), video

Mozhdeh M: Last year was foundation degree and we were separated with other students. I mean from British students so that… so I was feeling like being other and at the same time was a bit complicated because if we are in a room, I’m for you the other but if a Japanese girl were here, she is other as well so at the same time you are in the system at the same time you are out the system which is quite complicated in a way. My work was based on it.

Chaosmos (2011) acrylic on canvas, mixed media

Young-Jae Y: At the moment. It’s just the process. It’s finding my identity so I err look clear I’m woman, I am from Asian… I try to see [pause] my position in the social class… I’m learning from you, from Foucault, and that’s the moment what I can find myself clearly, my identity. Y: Umm. Don’t know. At the moment I’m not doing and kind of work now. I’m just not enough to make something now.

Implications Criticality involves an ability to cope with ambiguity Criticality involves an awareness of the ‘limitations’ of binary opposition and ‘thinking of the impossible’ Criticality involves a process of self-transformation Criticality involves an epistemological and ontological disturbance

Implications for EAP 1) An awareness of the ‘intensified emotional component’ of art education and the potential for ‘negative emotional responses’ 2) An awareness that other forms of criticality exist which may involve a critique of the underlying precepts of Critical Thinking 3) An awareness that criticality is more than just a different way of seeing, but potentially a different way of being

Select Bibliography Applebaum, B. 2011. ‘Critique of Critique: On Suspending Judgment and Making Judgment’. Journal of Philosophy of Education 44, 1: 55–64. Burbules, N. and R. Berk. 1999. Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy: Relations, Differences, and Limits in Critical Theories in Education, eds. Thomas S. Popkewitz and Lynn Fendler. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. 2002. ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’ in The Political, ed. David Ingram. Oxford: Blackwell. Ennis, R.H. 1962. ‘A Concept of Critical Thinking’. Harvard Educational Review, 32, 81–111. Giroux, H.A. 1988. Teachers as Intellectuals: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Learning. South Hadley, MA: Bergin Garvey. Vlieghe, L. 2011. Suspending Judgment Altogether: Butler, Limit–Experience, and Critical Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education 44, 1: 153–70.