User:LisaParzefall/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
I chose to evaluate the article on "Critical Pedagogy" (Critical pedagogy)

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Although I was searching around for a while and initially wanted to look at the "Curriculum Studies" article, I decided to switch to the Critical Pedagogy one because this concept was new to me in Dr. Park's class and ever since, I've been very interested in learning more about it. Frankly, although learning much about CP during Dr. Park's class, I feel like there's so much more to discuss, learn, and add to what I've learned in that class, so I was wondering how much of that is actually presented on Wikipedia. Despite taking the class, I never actually went to the Wikipedia page of this topic, so this is a great chance for me to finally read it, examine it upon its usefulness, and remind myself of some of the things I learned during the summer. I am also hoping to perhaps already find some gaps within the article for further engagement with this Wikipedia page.

Evaluate the article

 * Lead Section: Personally, I think the lead section is organized well. The first sentence provides a great summary of what Critical Pedagogy is and can be understood by any reader. The lead section also discusses topics (topic sentence on what it is; more information about its goals and origins; Freire and related fields; criticism). However, the last paragraph of the lead section does not have a source (see: next bullet point);
 * Sources: One of the things that immediately caught my eye was the fourth paragraph which reads, "Critics have argued that it is not appropriate for institutions of higher education to explicitly promote radical political activism among their students. They have suggested that adherents of critical pedagogy have focused on promoting political perspectives in the classroom at the expense of teaching pupils other skills, such as a proficiency in writing.[citation needed] " What can be seen is that a citation is missing for this information which I find interesting because the passage includes information that I would think requires a citation to even be "allowed" in the article. The reason I think that is because the passage mentions the word "radical" which suggests that CP entails some radical political activism in the classroom which, I believe, is not necessarily true. In addition, as a reader of this page, I would specifically be interested in why the critics mentioned argue that the promotion of CP would come at the expense of writing proficiency -- I don't see why those are mutually exclusive, why CP cannot be incorporated into the writing class, or why it would hinder the development of writing proficiency. Therefore, I was surprised to see the article including this information without proper citation.
 * I am not sure if this is just an opinion of mine or a valid point to comment on, but the article reads, "He [referring to Freire] seldom used the term "critical pedagogy" himself when describing this philosophy" without mentioning why or who then coined that term. Who mentioned it first and did they connect Freire to it or did that connection develop later?
 * Content: In the "In the classroom" section, I think the article could expand on the benefits/criticism that teaching CP might have for students. Although the section addresses some difficulties with critical pedagogy in the classroom, it seems that those are mostly in regard to the classroom, institution, curriculum, and teachers rather than what effects and goals CP has for students/pupils.
 * Content: Another area in the content that I think would be interesting to discuss is how CP might vary depending on the subject, level, and audience of a classroom. I am particularly interested in how CP can be used in the second and foreign language classroom, but I can't find information about that on this page. However, thinking about how to incorporate that into the page might be tricky based on the fact that this might not be represented much in research or is connected to other fields (perhaps World Englishes?);
 * Organization: As for organization, I was slightly confused by how the article is structured in "Developments and Critiques" with a subsection of "In the classroom" but then later introduces a very short section on "Critical Pedagogy of Teaching," After re-reading those sections, I felt that the last two could somehow be in the same section and perhaps elaborate on "student-centeredness" by mentioning empowerment as a term, too.
 * Talk Page: Reading through the Talk Page, I noticed that most of the comments are pretty old (~10 years). There's only one comment from 2019 and one from 2020. I agree with the 2020 comment on how it would be beneficial for the page to present concrete examples of how critical pedagogy is taught in the classroom/what it looks like in the classroom. Being new to the talk page, I am not sure if all of those comments are being taken into consideration or if this is just suggestions? Are these ideas that we can draw on? I guess this is more so a question to my Professor, Dr. Vetter.

Comments from Dr. Vetter
Very thorough evaluation here! - "Critical pedagogy" is not explicitly tied to rhetorical theory OR history, but I think it's close enough for this project, and I would love to see someone take on this article and make improvements.

I thought the quote you found about "radical political activism" and its [Citation Needed] to be such an interesting point about how Wikipedia mediats public opinion. This is certainly a "trope" or "genre" in conservative opposition to pedagogical license/critical pedagogy, so it's not surprising that no one has removed it. However, if the citation needed tag has been there a while, we could actually remove it, with a message that designates how long the [citation needed] tag went without being responded to.

Your second point about Freire is a good one, and definitely an example of reading between the lines - that would be a nice avenue to investigate. I can't say that I do not exactly where the term emerged, but it seems like something we could find out!

Your evaluation and comments about the content (needed development) and the overall structure or organization of the article are well-developed, and definitely places to start doing some good work.

In addition to your criticisms - which I agree with, I think the article could draw a little more from feminist critical pedagogues. For example, while bell hooks is mentioned in the article multiple times, only one of her works is used as a reference, and this only once.

Again, this would be an excellent topic to work on and I could help you with some sources should you choose to focus on this.

Best, Dr. Vetter DarthVetter (talk) 20:11, 14 February 2022 (UTC)