The Importance of Labor and Relation in Critical Social Inquiry

• In Event: Critical Inquiry in Social Studies Education: Clarifying Directions for Research and Practice

Abstract

Purpose: The IDM's taking informed action section invites students to apply their disciplinary knowledge and skills to effect change in their communities. While taking action after disciplinary learning is important, we are interested in how students engage in activism during instruction. We argue that attention to labor (e.g., how work roles are defined and unfold in the classroom community) and relation (e.g., how teachers and students negotiate social exchanges in the classroom) during critical social inquiry grounds socio-material transformation within everyday learning activity.

Perspectives: We believe the field’s emphasis on students’ and teachers’ individual use of disciplinary tools and practices has somewhat overshadowed the social intricacy of the immediate classroom context, leading to a limited conceptualization of criticality as integrating non-dominant disciplinary and cultural tools. In response to this concern, we explore how analytical attention to classroom labor and relation during critical social studies inquiry nuances existing critical scholarship. We use neo-Vygotskian sociocultural theory (Engeström, 1987, 2016) and Freirean (1970; 2000) critical pedagogy to describe social transformation within the immediate learning community and before taking informed action. We are curious about how students disrupt the socio-historically formed rules that mediate their learning activity by collaboratively (i.e., co-laboring) seeking critical disciplinary understandings. Practically, we will speak to how taking informed action begins during critical disciplinary inquiry as students reevaluate and reshape the social arrangements of their learning activity (e.g., relation and labor).

Methods and Data Sources: The paper is a conceptual piece that leans into prior qualitative case studies conducted by the authors and current literature on critical social studies inquiry. We draw on existing scholarship to demonstrate how teachers might use methods for critical inquiry (e.g., IDM) to center students’ collaborative praxis (Stetsenko, 2017).

Results: Two important findings emerged:
Through analytical attention to the community dynamics of the classroom context (e.g., labor and relation), scholars can gain deeper insight into students’ emerging critical consciousness. How students re-divide their labor during critical social studies inquiry, disrupting the socio-historically developed rules mediating human relations in the process, provides information on students’ emerging critical consciousness beyond their use of critical disciplinary tools.
Teachers who authentically engage in a critical social studies praxis see and understand dialectical relations. By seeing their position within complex social relations, critical educators come alongside their push against existing classroom power structures, including how teachers and students traditionally divide their labor in the classroom context.

Significance: Critical social studies inquiry focuses on how teachers and students embody an activist stance through disciplinary learning. Therefore, it seems important to empirically document how teachers and students engage in transformative activism during everyday classroom activity. By paying close attention to how students collaboratively act (e.g., labor and relation) during critical disciplinary learning, education stakeholders can ground hope within everyday classroom activity.

Authors

• Victoria Smith, University of North Texas

• Kevin R. Magill, Baylor University

• Ryan M. Crowley, University of Kentucky