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e graphically highlighted during an emotionally intense and physically violent conflict during dinner. During the previous class period, I prepared the students for this scene by making some initial connections to material we had covered, previewing the storyline (including the strong nature of it), and inviting those who felt uneasy about watching the scene to pass on it. Importantly, in my case, because this was a class with only about 30 students, we could engage in a conversation about the clip. After we watched the scene, we debriefed the experience by talking about our initial “gut” reactions, then about how those reactions might relate to race, perception, and stereotyping. Finally, we were successfully able to make connections between the broader communication concepts, identity formation processes, and the destructive force of hate speech in those processes. However, Dr. Wolf's large student population makes this conversational process untenable; at the same time, this context contains its own unique characteristics that facilitate critical consciousness without the benefit of student- centered dialogue and those implications follow. In this study, several aspects of negotiating critical engagement with a large number of students without prioritizing student-centered dialogue were explored. This exploration suggests several strategies that can help facilitate critical consciousness development on the part of a large number of students (and, perhaps, smaller student populations, as well). Dr. Wolf's intentional and risky stimulation of her students through explicit cultural critiques and controversial media choices, open and honest self-disclosure, and spontaneous, provocative participation assignments all promoted critical engagement in diverse and particularized ways in her classroom. Likewise, her students' understanding of, and responses to, her intentions and approach seems to indicate that the performance of critical rhetoric, on the part of teachers, offers an alternative to privileging student dialogue while maintaining the ability to nurture students' critical consciousness development. Contrary to critical pedagogy literature that assumes learner- centered dialogue is the key to critical consciousness development, this study seems to suggest alternative, unique aspects of critical engagement in a large class that does not lend itself to critical discussion. During my observations over the course of this study, it appeared that the size of this student population uniquely contributed to communicative dynamics in some surprisingly effective ways. The distinctive setting with its fixed seating and large number of students--a setting traditionally considered problematic in terms of critically engaging students—seemed to actually promote the possibility that Dr. Wolf's risky, sometimes confrontation style would be critically effective. First, in the area of cultural critique and controversial media, the large room and number of students may have helped to dissipate uncomfortable feelings that, in a smaller classroom, would be more problematic. The forceful approach may be more effective when the environment is not so intimate and the students are allowed to silently explore their thoughts and feelings around the concepts and issues without being compelled to share, publicly, those thoughts/feelings. Second, in the area of self-disclosure, the personal nature of the disclosure seems to take on a public performance charact