Interactive Pedagogy
Feminists and others with liberatory and interactive pedagogic goals have written extensively about why and how their efforts in the classroom run counter to traditional pedagogies centered around Socratic dialogue (Mahr & Tetreault, 1994). The Socratic "expert" (i.e., the teacher) educated by the best in her or his respective discipline enters the static classroom context in order to dispense or transmit a given body of knowledge to the awaiting "nonexpert" (i.e., the learner). Socratic dialogue is used to "pull" from the apprentice the "correct" answers to problems posed in a series of questions. "To learn" means to understand the given body of knowledge in the language approved by the respective discipline.
Liberatory pedagogies break with traditional pedagogies by altering the relationship between learner and teacher and taking an ontologically different position on the nature of knowledge (Mahr & Tetreault, 1994). Learning partially emerges from learner questions, insight, and experience. Learner letters, diaries, journals, portfolios, and CIQs are used to encourage learners to participate in the ongoing discursive construction of knowledge and thus to take an active role in creating an education relevant to their lives.
Certainly liberatory and interactive pedagogies are not the exclusive domain of feminist educators. I wish instead to place the CIQ's use within the wider rubric of less traditional pedagogies grounded in the central philosophy that "we cannot judge what people are learning until we truly understand who the students are and the experiences they bring to learning and the classroom" (emphasis mine) (Rice, 1996, p. 11). "Critically reflective" teaching embodies such a philosophy in its goals to recognize the learner's active role in learning and to remind us that the strongest warrant for any pedagogical choice is grounded in understanding learner experiences.
Critically Reflective Teaching
Stephen Brookfield (1995), in his book Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, details why it is so vital to understand "who" the learner is and how to use tools like the CIQ toward that end (see especially Chapters 5 and 6). Critically reflective teaching entails actively, continuously probing "inside" the learner's experience and using ethnographic tools like the CIQ to catch intriguing, informative, and sometimes frightening glimpses into the myriad ways learners make sense of the "same" classroom experiences. "Getting inside students' heads," Brookfield claims, is one of the trickiest and most crucial tasks if we are to discover how they make sense of our behavior in order to achieve desired outcomes. For teachers facing learners who act disengaged and hostile, who are ill prepared, and who show little or no insight into their own ways of knowing, critically reflective teaching practices offer valuable ways to gain access to the diverse ways of knowing and to capture the ongoing, slippery nature of each class experience.
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