REFLEXIVE PEDAGOGY AND THE ACADEMIC HERETIC

 Abstract

The challenges to education-lacking homegrown traditions of scholarly criticism from its early institutional forms and now enmeshed in a global free market determinism, trumpeting ambiguous visions for a new India-are compounded by vacuous utilitarian policy imperatives. A critique of CBET and groupthink is offered as example of the dominant narrative of neoliberal market ideology impacting knowledge and education. The paper posits the reflexive teacher educator as academic heretic-the idol of enlightenment, discovery and resistance-as a useful frame to analyse the epistemologically specious and ideologically unsound challenges facing education. Reflexive pedagogy and the academic heretic are proposed not as fixed definitions, but as a pluralistic, reflexive, interpretive approach to stimulate dialogue, to engage with the tensions of traversing the ethically-bankrupt technocratic management of educational endeavours. The paper offers reflexivity and reflexive pedagogy—a philosophy for and of education—to counter the rapacious onslaughts of neoliberal economics, and the need for reflexive teacher educators through a deeper critique to locate learning in the larger arena of mind and spirit. This paper positions the possibilities of reflexive teacher educators to identify and challenge prevailing orthodoxies and to voice their potentially ‘heretical’ views about education in the 21st century.

Key Words: Academic heretic, CBET, Groupthink, Reflexive Pedagogy, Teacher Educator