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ers from “consciousness raising” in that the latter frequently involves “banking” education—what Freire describes as the transmission of pre-selected knowledge from the “experts” (teachers) to passive student recipients/receptacles. Conscientization means interrupting/disturbing prevailing mythologies or power/knowledge constructs in order to develop critical levels of awareness; in particular, awareness of oppression, of being an “object” in a world where only “subjects” have power. According to Freire, the processes of critical self and other-awareness involve recognizing and identifying contradictions and tensions in experience--that are oftentimes accepted as natural and inevitable--through learner-centered dialogue in order to begin a process of transforming oppressive circumstances. 4. The term “critical pedagogy,” for the purposes of this essay, is based on the idea that critical social theory, with its emphasis on potentiality, transformation of oppressive social constructs, and human emancipation can inform educational practices in a way to promote social change. There are various other names for this approach. 5. Although outside the scope and aim of this essay, Nicholas Burbules (2000) offers an excellent survey of dialogic approaches to pedagogy along with important critiques of oftentimes taken-for-granted assumptions of criticalist pedagogical perspectives. As he reasons with respect to recognizing those assumptions: [P]aradoxically [. . .] it may actually be that those very communicative relations that try to be most open about their implicit commitments and prescriptions may be for that very reason more difficult to diagnose in terms of their blind spots and, hence, more difficult to resist. Or, to put this a different way, those modes of dialogue that put the greatest emphasis on criticality and inclusivity may also be the most subtly co-opting and normalizing. Such a recognition unsettles critical pedagogies of all sorts, whether feminist or Freirean, rationalist or deconstructionist. (p. 88, Burbules' emphasis) 6. I borrow this term from Dr. Wolf. 7. The student participants self-identified as African American, Asian American, and Latino/a. It should be noted that 12 students (17%) left the space blank or intentionally obscured what they had originally written. Moreover, some responses reflected what seemed a disdain for being asked to identify themselves partly based on an ethnic category. For example, a significant number (58%) of the self-identified Caucasian students used words like “whitebread,” “caucazoid,” and “whitey,” while other students identified as “just mixed” or “american, not important.” 8. During the course of the oral history interview conducted with Dr. Wolf, I posed questions related to the inherent risks in her approach, how they played out with respect to student responses, and how those responses may be influenced by a teacher's gender. These are some of the responses garnered in that interview. 9. These strategies were employed with significant adjustments for content; Dr. Wolf teaches media studies and I teach communication studies so, even though these areas overlap considerably, the material is different enough to require the content adjustment.