In a nutshell: After a year of blogging, it turns out my blog is really about critical thinking, critical theory, critical pedagogy, and critical culture—not pedagogy per se. Hence, a new name for a new direction.
This blog you are reading, formerly called Pedagogishness, has just this very hour been renamed Criticality. The new name better fits my vision and mission for this blog.
I began this blog in January 2012 as a place to share my own ideas about teaching and learning in the humanities classroom. But I quickly found that I was more interested in blogging about the problematic status of the humanities and humanism itself than in things like learning objectives or low-stakes writing in the classroom. I found that I was most interesting in writing about critical theory and how it relates to critical thinking and critical pedagogy. I was more or less obsessed with redefining humanism for a postmodern society.
So in 2013, it turns out that my blog is really about critical theory and critical culture more than it is about pedagogy per se. Hence, the change in name. In addition to blog posts, I’m creating pages on things like critical thinking, critical theory, critical pedagogy, and something called critical culture, which is a term that I think I may have coined for a concept that I think may be somewhat novel. There are also pages on individual humanities disciplines where the goal is to explore how the critical and cultural turns of the twentieth century have affected these fields in terms of both theory and practice.
For the moment, there’s still some good old-fashioned pedagogy on Criticality. There’s a Teaching Tip of the Day (but I’ve removed the Education Quote of the Day). There is a Pedagogish Infobase where I am posting downloadable PDF handouts on research and writing skills for students. There’s an ever growing blogroll in the sidebar listing blog and websites that I find useful for teaching and learning in the postmodern humanities. And I’m sure there will be more and different over time. Stay tuned. Come again.