Critical Engagement Project
Introduction
In traditional doctoral programs the dissertation is frequently a final academic hurdle unrelated to coursework, unrelated to practice as a lived experience, and expressed in a highly academic and frequently abstract style. However, in this doctoral program the dissertation has been recast as rigorous, sustained intellectual inquiry across the curriculum. To emphasize its radical refocusing of doctoral research on practice, this activity has been named the "Critical Engagement Project." All research is a reflection on practice, but often practice is viewed abstractly, commodified, objectified without reference to social, cultural, or political context. The Critical Engagement Project will ground research in critical reflection on biography--day-to-day experience--and foster significant engagement with the world.
The Critical Engagement Project will be undertaken throughout the curriculum and linked directly with coursework. It will result in the production of knowledge related to practice, grounded in the life experiences of each student. Its modes of expression can be varied both in terms of format (not limited to text, but using a variety of media) and in terms of organization (ranging from a number of smaller, interrelated works to a larger, integral text).
Three engagements, each expressed in a question, undergird this research. Who am I? What are the commitments embedded in my current practice? Who am I becoming? The first two engage us with our present and our past. In the first we seek to understand ourselves and the forces that have helped to shape our present identities. In the second, we try to understand our practice--what we currently do, the forces that have shaped our work, and the values that underlie our practice. These two engagements are dialectical--each informing the other. In the third engagement, we look toward the future, the goal being to forge new and/or expanded identities and practices.
The Three Engagements
Who am I?
Here, students will focus on the ways their personal histories and professional activities inevitably intertwine to shape their identities--who they are as people, as educators, etc. They will build on the life history analysis work done in ACE 602 to study their own formation as people and educators. What cultural and psychological forces shaped their identities, ideologies and their practices? How did their interactions with family, peers, culture, (religion?), class, ethnicity shape their foundational values as educators? What was the role of gender in identity formation? What moments along their life history trajectories were transformative for them - helped them see themselves, and the world, in a new way and suggested new possibilities for them? What kinds of critically reflective episodes did they experience?
As well as the theoretical frameworks provided by their critical reflection students could build on the work done by Finger (1989) and Dominice (1990) on biographical analysis, on Kennedy's (1990) work on ideology analysis, Tripp's (1993) adaptations of ideology critique, and so on. De Marias' (1991) brief article on 'John' shows how autobiography can be understood through theoretical lenses.
Perspectives drawn from the literature of developmental psychology and critical social theory would inform students' autobiographical analysis. These perspectives would help students explore a particular dialectic - how their autobiographies represent the workings out of social and cultural processes while at the same time representing their own existential uniqueness. (I am English, white, born in the inner city, a father, a husband, an adult educator (you don't believe me?) - all generic categories and yet my existence cannot be explained only in these terms). Identity formation would be studied as an interconnected social and psychological process. The role of history, culture, ethnicity, class and gender would be investigated in students' lives, and the development of moral, ethical and political consciousness and capabilities, and of individual identity formation, would be understood as a social as much as individual process.
Students would also look at how their lives and experiences as learners shaped their engagement with the field of adult education. They would focus specifically on their decision to join the NLU doctoral program and what led up to that event, and then they would study their own engagement in the program with the critically reflective process.
What are the commitments embedded in my current practice?
In this section, students will examine their current practice (especially as educators) with a view to illuminating the personal and societal values such practices preserve, nourish, impede, or openly challenge. They would analyze how their practice springs from, and connects to, their personal histories and identities. Students would clarify the key assumptions and organizing visions on which their practice is built and trace how these were autobiographically formed. What were the sources of these assumptions and visions - experience, an authority source, theory, or what? They would examine the extent to which these assumptions and visions were culturally and politically sculpted, and the extent to which they might have been framed by formal theory and philosophy in the field? How were these assumptions and visions tested, altered, disbanded or enlarged over the years?
They would analyze their practice as a political activity - how issues of power pervaded and influenced what they did, how their practice promoted democratic processes, whose interests their practice served, and so on. Students would focus particularly on uncovering assumptions of power and hegemony in their own practice and they would document the distortions these assumptions had produced.
Students would identify ethical dilemmas they had faced, or were facing, in their practice and they would illuminate how they analyzed and tried to work through these. Students will also examine and, where necessary, critique the false dichotomy that is usually made between the personal and professional - actions in every domain of their lives would be understood as manifestations of their lives as adult educators. Some students would have already bridged the gap. For others, a clear demarcation would exist between what they see as their lives as practitioners and their lives as partners, parents, and political citizens. Building on the work done in the engagement with self paper, students would probe the accuracy of this separation. How can an educator leave one identity at the college, corporation or community center at the end of the day and assume another elsewhere, and what are the costs of this attempted separation?
Special attention would be paid to an analysis by students of how their practice embodies, reflects, contradicts and challenges key adult educational principles and values (social responsibility, critical reflection, collaborative work etc.). They would analyze formal histories and theories of adult education for the extent to which these illuminated and explained their own individual practices. This necessitates a systematic and rigorous analysis of the literature in the field of adult education. (Brookfield, 1992, 1993). The ethical and political attentiveness of the field as a whole would also be addressed. Students would clarify the assumptions and ideologies underlying different models of adult education practices and they would show how these acted to promote or impede democratic values and processes.
Students would also document their learning about practice. They would document the kinds of practical, emotional, ontological, epistemological, and political learning about practice in which they had engaged over their lives as adult educators. They would analyze how this learning about practice had happened and compare and contrast this to different models of adult learning in the literature.
Who am I becoming?
In this section, students seek to forge new identities and to reformulate their practices. Fortified with a better understanding of self, knowledge of the ethical and political import of their current practice, knowledge of alternative visions and practices within the field of adult education, and constrained by the material conditions of their lives, students seek to refashion themselves, remake their practice, and provide rationale and justification for such reformulation.
What new identities are they forging? What sources (factors) have contributed to this reformulation (eg. colleagues, literature, examination of self, exploration of practice, etc.).
What aspects of their practice would they retain, fortify, or change? What new practices would they incorporate? To aid in this process, students would examine an area of practice that is outside their immediate context. Students would do an in-depth analysis of some area of adult educational practice (it could be allied to their own area or a totally different one). They would also do an in-depth exploration of literature related to this area of practice. They would document how their own thinking and practice changed, or could be changed, as a result of this analysis.
They would also examine other sources (factors) that could have contributed to this reformulation (e.g., colleagues, literature, examination of self, exploration of current practice, etc.). How does this reformulation reflect changing and/or expanding ethical and political commitments? How does this reformulation reflect new and/or expanding visions and assumptions about adult education?
A booket which fully describes the CEP process, Critical Engagement Project: A Manual, is available as a 340k PDF file (requires Acrobat Reader).
Critical Engagement Project
Contact: thea@chicago1.nl.edu 
