Critical Canon Pedagogy: Applying Disciplinary Inquiry to Cultivate Canonical Critical Consciousness

Abstract

In this article, Jeanne Dyches investigates the ways in which inquiry models of instruction have failed to provide students with a space in which to grapple with discipline-specific histories and hegemonies. Accordingly, this study offers critical canon pedagogy (CCP) to help students problematize and disrupt the practices specific to a discipline. Drawing from critical curriculum theory and critical Whiteness studies, Dyches details the experiences of high school students who participated in a CCP unit that investigated the disciplinary practices that have marked the teaching of canonical British literature in secondary English classrooms. Dyches shows how the unit provided students with an opportunity to restory their entirely White curriculum and, in doing so, reconsider and resist the traditional narratives and voices of the canon, develop an increased sense of canonical critical consciousness, and demonstrate a sense of discipline-specific agentive identity.