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becomes nearly untenable. It is crucial for those teachers, then, to develop specific, situated, and localized strategies in order to retain the critical character of their teaching approach while adjusting their teaching strategies to accommodate a large number of students. Dr. Michelle Wolf is one such teacher, and this study represents a starting place for theorizing those strategies employed in her classroom. Dr. Wolf was one of my professors when I was an undergraduate student at San Francisco State University (SFSU), and her teaching approach left an impression on me that has endured. Dr. Wolf is 20-year faculty member in the Department of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts (BECA); she completed her M.A. in Communication Studies at the University of Massachusetts and her Ph.D. in Communication Theory--with a Mass Communications and Educational Psychology emphasis--at the University of Texas at Austin before coming to California. Dr. Wolf has been teaching for 25 years. Being a part of her class “Social Aspects of Electronic Media” (BECA 422) was a memorable experience for me as an undergraduate; her provocative style and inherently critical mode of teaching was always engaging. The theoretical material introduced in class was interspersed with frequently affective, sometimes graphic, and always controversial media; and, these cultural fragments were offered with a healthy measure of Dr. Wolf's own sociocultural critique. Even though I regularly found myself disagreeing with particular positions she took in the course of introducing the material, her obvious enthusiasm for, commitment to, and engagement with students and teaching facilitated a welcoming classroom environment that invited critical exploration of the course material in connection with the life experiences we all brought to the table. Choosing to study Dr. Wolf's pedagogical style for this project was motivated by my own interest in critical approaches to pedagogy, approaches I assumed necessitated a central focus on student-centered dialogue as the way to foster critical engagement. Initially, I viewed the project as an opportunity to learn how to facilitate a critical discussion with a large number of students (over 100) from a teacher whose critical perspective, like mine, also informs her pedagogy. I learned during the course of this project, however, that my own presuppositions about critical pedagogy—significantly influenced by those assumptions found in much of the literature-- were in need of (critical) reconsideration. In the following section, I offer a brief sketch of the theoretical framework within which those reconsiderations are situated. Critical Rhetoric Raymie McKerrow (1989) describes critical rhetoric as a practice and theoretical enterprise encompassing divergent critical projects in its overarching “critical spirit” or stance. Critical rhetoric serves, according to McKerrow, to de-mystify and connect, through an engaged and subjective critique, seemingly unrelated forces of knowledge/power in society in order to recognize how they can create conditions of oppression and marginalization. More than that, McKerrow points out that a critical rhetoric “establishes a social judgment about ‘what to do' as a result of the analysis [and serves] to identify the possibilities of future action available to participants” (p. 92). Critique, in this sense, is explicitly political, and the critical rhetor takes an advocacy stance in offering analyses