Estimated reading time: 7 minutes, 43 seconds

Hi Maha, this is a great outline and much to think about. I’d be happy to cross-blog with you about postmodernism some time – I did read a lot of it at college, and I notice ideas from PM thinkers used a lot in ed tech theory just at the moment. But until such time as i can write/think a lot more about why I find that problematic, thinking about your third category which I understand as critical research/pedagogy: do we need to say something about this as a reflexive space? i.e. there is an understanding we can’t escape the conditions of teaching and research as power relations – there is an attempt to situate those conditions within wider forces conceptually – but the praxis is to work with the grain of those relationships, to empower the ‘other’ to realise (learn or theorise about) them, to be critical in turn about the very situation we have established. I think it’s somewhere in Freire that ours must be ‘authority on the side of freedom’, with all the contradictions that supposes. Anyway, given the current attacks on ‘liberal values’ in the curriculum I just wanted to say that criticality is not so much teaching about social justice as creating curriculum contexts in which emancipatory (and if necessary oppressive) forces can be played out, inhabited and better understood, e.g. in the language used, activities promoted, and especially the relationships developed.