Table Of ContentCritical Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire
Also by Luis S. Villacañas de Castro
GIRO COPERNICANO Y CIENCIAS SOCIALES
Critical Pedagogy and
Marx, Vygotsky and Freire
Phenomenal Forms and Educational
Action Research
Luis S. Villacañas de Castro
Assistant Professor, University of Valencia, Spain
© Luis S. Villacañas de Castro 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-56243-2
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Villacañas de Castro, Luis Sebastián, 1982–
Title: Critical pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky, and Freire: phenomenal
f orms and educational action research / Luis S. Villacañas de Castro,
Assistant Professor, University of Valencia, Spain.
Description: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015025950 | ISBN 9781137562432 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Critical pedagogy. | Marx, Karl, 1818–1883—Influence. |
Vygotski˜ı , L. S. (Lev Semenovich), 1896–1934—Influence. | Freire,
Paulo, 1921–1997—Influence. | BISAC: EDUCATION / Educational
Psychology. | EDUCATION / Secondary. | EDUCATION / Philosophy &
Social Aspects. | PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Phenomenology.
Classification: LCC LC196 .V55 2015 | DDC 370.11/5—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015025950
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
Contents
Introduction: The Pedagogical Obstacle of
the Phenomenal Forms 1
Part I Marx, Freud, and Pedagogy
1 Beyond The Ignorant Schoolmaster: On Education,
Marxism, and Psychoanalysis 23
Part II Epistemology, Critical Pedagogy, and
Liberal Principles
2 The Pedagogical Problem: Vygotsky’s Encounter
with Marx’s Phenomenal Forms 45
3 The Pedagogical Solution: Freire’s Critical Pedagogy
and Social Democracy 67
Part III Theory and Practice of Educational
Action Research
4 The Critical Potential of John Elliott’s LiberalPedagogy 93
5 A Practical Case of Participatory Meta-Action Research 115
References 146
Index 159
v
Introduction: The Pedagogical
Obstacle of the Phenomenal
Forms
An ongoing project
This book is a further development from a previous one, published
only in Spanish, whose title can be translated asThe Copernican turn
and the social sciences (Villacañas de Castro, 2013). It was a philo-
sophical work relating to a general epistemological problem lying at
the heart of the social and natural sciences. On the other hand, the
present volume is firmly rooted in pedagogy. This difference reflects
the professional journey that I have made in the meantime, from
being a Graduate Student at a Faculty of Philosophy to becoming a
member of staff at a Faculty of Education, where I currently lecture
and carry out research. Despite the various shifts brought about by
this transition, an underlying interest has remained throughout and
inspired me to write this volume. This is why I consider both books
to be part of a single, ongoing project.
Accordingly, the first aim of this introduction is to make the
nature—the essence—of the continuity I am alluding to clear, an
objective which cannot be satisfied without summarizing (no matter
how briefly) The Copernican turn and the social sciences. This summary
should prepare the reader for the original contribution that I make in
the following five chapters. Accordingly, the first three sections of this
introduction present some of the ideas developed in that earlier work,
while the last three begin to deal with those developed in this one.
Let us start with my previous book. My aim then was to analyze
a problem which I considered to be no less than an epistemological
mystery, or enigma, presented by those revolutionary theories which,
1
2 Critical Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire
in my view, had enacted a Copernican turn in the realm of the sciences.
Four scientific theories fell within the scope of that concept: Sigmund
Freud’s psychoanalysis, Karl Marx’s contribution to sociology, Neo-
Darwinism (the paradigm which ensued when Darwin’s and Mendel’s
discoveries in biology were articulated), and relativity theory in the
field of physics. I assume readers possess some basic notions of them,
although this is not necessary to understand this project. I defined
these Copernican turns as scientific discoveries whose revolutionary
nature consisted precisely of the fact that they had contributed new
knowledge about particular objects (the psychic apparatus, the mode
of production, the natural habitat, and the universe) but also about
the position that human beings held in relation to those realities,
insofar as they formed part of them. Actually, an individual crystal-
lized where these four objects intersected. A Copernican turn thus
involved two kinds of knowledge: about the objectt and the subjectt;
knowledge about specific realities; and also new knowledge about
how human beings should understand themselves in relation to
those four objects. All four Copernican turns revealed that human
beings were neither independent nor separate from the realities
which they studied, but were inscribed in them, embedded in their
materiality. Instead of downplaying the objective quality of outside
reality in order to stress its subjective side, this argument focused on
the objective quality of dimensions to which the human being had
normally attributed a subjective character.
Copernican turns
Many consequences unfolded from this ontological argument. For
instance, the scrutiny which scientists professed to exercise with
neutrality and detachment suddenly seemed to be epistemologically
unsound, since it developed from within the subject matter under
analysis. The ‘positivistic myth of the researcher as detached secretary
to the universe’, as Kemmis and McTaggart (2005, p. 570) described
it, forcefully crumbled down. At the same time, dimensions which
humanity had always interpreted as evidence of its own exceptional
mode of existence in the world (of its own transcendence from the
natural plane) were suddenly revealed to be connected to objective,
material developments. As one may imagine, all sorts of sentiments
were stirred against those discoveries. Although he did not refer to
Introduction 3
them as Copernican turns (and left Marx’s theory out of his analysis),
at one point in his later work Sigmund Freud described the impact
of these theories (including his own, psychoanalysis) as inflicting
narcissistic blows to humanity, an expression which he pulled from
his own theory, and through which he attempted to stress their
traumatic character. ‘The universal narcissism of men, their self-
love’, Freud (1917) said, ‘has up to the present suffered three severe
blows from the researches of science […]: the cosmological one […],
the biological blow to human narcissism [… and], the third blow,
which is psychological in nature, [and] probably the most wounding’
(pp. 3612–13). It seemed as if science had unveiled a kind of knowl-
edge that challenged the privileged position that human individuals
had presumed to hold in history and in the universe.
Freud was not the first to identify this resistance, of course. Darwin,
Einstein, Marx—all of them had to face fanatical opposition to their
discoveries. Centuries before them, Galileo even experienced danger
when he bore out Copernicus’ heliocentric cosmological model, the
first Copernican turn proper and the discovery which set in motion
a process that Einstein would draw to an end. In the 18th century,
philosopher Immanuel Kant approached this experience again from
a philosophical perspective. His observations on Copernicus’ original
hypothesis of the Earth orbiting around the Sun formulated, for the
first time, the structure of Copernican turns. On account of the preci-
sion of his commentary, I have always kept it at the heart of my own
theoretical developments:
We have here the same case as with the first thought of
Copernicus, who, not being able to get on in the explanation of
the movements of the heavenly bodies, as long as he assumed that
all the stars turned round the spectator, tried whether he could
not succeed better, by assuming the spectator to be turning round,
and the stars to be at rest. (Kant, 2001, p. 12)
As I have mentioned, centuries later, Marx, Darwin, Freud, and
Einstein became perfectly aware of the cognitive and affective conse-
quences effected by their turns. They anticipated the resistance which
their contemporary and future generations would per force undergo,
as people tried to accommodate their commonsensical, superficial
impressions to the ideas implied by these scientific breakthroughs—or
4 Critical Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire
more concretely, as they attempted to see themselves in terms of the
concrete dynamics which ruled their own divided mental apparatus,
the mode of production, the natural habitat, and the surrounding
universe in which they worked, reproduced, and lived. Since then,
the only factor which has proven capable of attenuating the enmity
raised against these theories has been downright ignorance, lack
of acquaintance with them—something which could actually be
interpreted as a kind of resistance in itself. Yet neither Freud, Marx,
Darwin nor Einstein developed a profound epistemological reflec-
tion on this topic. None of them made the leap from a scientific to a
meta-scientific plane of thought. This being the case, when I started
to analyze the nature of Copernican turns, I had to come up with
my own terminology and ways of illustrating my argument. This is
not to say that I found no guidance in other authors; for example,
I resorted constantly to the works of Thomas Kuhn (his theorization
of paradigm shifts) and Louis Althusser (his analysis of Marx’s change
of problematic), among others. But in the end it was Kant’s previous
quote which proved to be the most determining influence on my
own understanding, and set the terms of my discussion. Following
suit from it, I ended up describing Copernican turns as if, at some
point in the course of a scientific investigation, the observer had
gradually started to question his or her own subjective position vis-
à-vis the object of inquiry; and as if, in addition, this revision had
ended up becoming instrumental for discovering something radically
new in the nature of the object. The subjective and the objective
dimensions of this epistemological process were both integrated into
my perspective, since they characterize a revolutionary scientific
development that can, in fact, only be explained as a dialogue or an
interaction between the two.
Let me bring the discussion to a more general plane, by remind-
ing the reader that it is only when we know exactly which place we
occupy in reality that we can establish with certainty how much
more our concrete perceptions owe to the essence of the real objects
we are observing than to our local position. What is more, there is
no question that some vantage points simply make it impossible for
the real facts of a situation to be accessed and truthfully conveyed by
our impressions. Indeed, this idea is closely tied to the Copernican
breakthrough, for it was only when these scientific observers were
able to know themselves—to know humanity—fully that they could
