The Tasks of the Critical Scholar/Activist

• In Event: Education for Societal Transformation: Alternatives for a Just Future (Panel 2)

Proposal

Especially during a time of severe crises, thinking rigorously about the role of the critical scholar/activist is even more important in education. It is based on a lived recognition that serious critical work needs to be done in relation to its object. Indeed, this is not only a political imperative but an epistemological one as well. The development of substantive critical understandings of the multiple relations of differential power and of the actual possibilities of interrupting them is best done when it is dialectically and intimately connected to actual movements and struggles.

Thus, there are two fundamental motivations behind such critical work. The first is understanding the complex dynamics of exploitation, domination, and subordination in both policy and practice that all too often structure our societies and their constitutive relations inside and outside of education. Yet, while understanding is absolutely crucial, it is not sufficient. Emerging out of such understandings is a commitment to interruption. Both understanding and interruption have their basis in a set of ethical and political commitments that are simultaneously collective and personal.

My argument about what these commitments entail draws upon the noted critical sociologist Michael Burawoy’s discussion of that role. It provides us with one cogent model of what this means in academic and political practice. What he has called “organic public sociology” contains key elements of how we might think about ways of dealing with this in educational policy and practice (Burawoy, 2005).

In going further, I draw upon my much longer discussion of this in other literature to identify and describe nine tasks that constitute the building blocks of the role of the critical scholar/activist. My discussion recognizes that these tasks are demanding and that no one person can engage equally well in all of them simultaneously. Given this, the act of becoming (and this is a project, for one is never finished, always becoming) a critical scholar/activist is a complex one. What we can do is honestly continue our attempt to come to grips with the complex intellectual, personal, and political tensions and activities that respond to the demands of this role.

This will not be easy, for it involves a searching critical examination of one’s own structural location, one’s own overt and tacit educational and political commitments, and one’s own embodied actions once this recognition in all its complexities and contradictions is taken as seriously as it deserves. My points in this paper are not exhaustive. But they are meant to continue a dialogue over just what it is that “we” should do.

Author

• Michael Apple, The University of Wisconsin-Madison