Are We Really "Stuck In Place"? Affirming Critical Pedagogical Practices By Choosing Hope

Dylan McGlothlin (he/they)

Assistant Professor, Humanities Librarian

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA

Critical Approaches to Libraries Conference May 14, 2026

Presenter needs

• I am neurodivergent
• I will keep my camera off until Q&A
• I will be reading from a script
• There will be a short break in the middle

Positionality

My lens

• Born and raised US West Coast
• Feminist theory, critical theory, and philosophy beginner
• M.A. student focusing on critical pedagogy and adult education

I need your help

• What am I missing?
• Historical context
• Authors
• Works
• Arguments
• Holes
• Sequencing
• Logic

Have you heard critical pedagogy being described as “stuck in place”?

What feelings do you associate with critical pedagogy?

The beginning of the fall down the rabbit hole

“A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant, 2011, p. 1).

• Optimism isn’t inherently a negative thing.
• It becomes cruel when the thing is impossible, unattainable, or out of your control.

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Vocational awe is “the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in beliefs that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique.” (Ettarh, 2018)

“Cruel optimism, or, this time will be different!”

Eisenhower and Smith (2010) conclude that critical library pedagogy represents a “profoundly ambivalent” (p. 315) and even “negligible” practice (p. 315), where, at best, thinking might occur. Critical library instruction is a stuck place, an impossible practice marked by unreasonable desire. (Seale & Nicholson, 2024, p. 131, bold added)

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The Library as “Stuck Place”

We take as our starting point a claim Lather (1998) makes, quoting Ellsworth (1997): not only is “critical pedagogy in the field of schooling…impossible,” but teaching itself is also impossible. According to these writers, the entire educational project is paternalistic, and as teachers we must “[come] up against ‘stuck place after stuck place’ as a way to keep moving within ‘the impossibility of teaching’ in order to produce and learn from raptures [sic], failures, breaks, and refusals.”�(Eisenhower & Smith, 2010, p. 306, bold added)

Illusion of being “stuck in place”

• Misunderstanding of what makes something critical
• Misrepresentation of Ellsworth’s works
• “Why doesn't this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy” (1989)
• Teaching positions: difference, pedagogy, and the power of address (1997)
• Misunderstanding of the promises of critical pedagogy
• Not choosing hope

Before my critique

• Feelings of burnout and demoralization within librarianship are valid
• I am critiquing ideas, not emotions and experiences

Defining “critical”

• Paulo Freire (1921-1977) Brazilian educator and philosopher
• Stephen Brookfield (1949-) Adult education and critical thinking researcher
• Michel Foucault (1926-1984) French historian and philosopher

Paulo Freire (1921-1977)�Brazilian educator and philosopher

• Reflection + action = critical praxis
• Continuous and simultaneous
• No reflection = empty verbalism, no “commitment to transform”
• No action = empty activism, “action for action’s sake” (Freire, 2018, p. 87-88)
• Can be performed by teachers (critical teaching methods) and students (engaging in critical content)

Stephen Brookfield (1949-)�Adult education and critical thinking researcher

• Self-reflection = examining your own actions, “nuts and bolts of the process”
• Critical self-reflection = recognizing power structures, how they inform our views, and questioning those structures

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“For reflection to be considered critical, it must have as its explicit focus uncovering, and challenging, the power dynamics that frame practice and uncovering and challenging hegemonic assumptions (those assumptions we embrace as being in our best interests when in fact they are working against us).” (Brookfield, 2010, p. 216)

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)�French historian and philosopher

• Critical theory
• “constant checking”
• “We have to know the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualization. We need a historical awareness of our present circumstance” (1982, p. 778)
• Power relations: Post-structuralism (Foucault, 2003)
• Power is not good or bad
• Institutions do not create power, the outside underlying context creates the conditions for institutions to exercise power
• Power relations are fundamental to human existence

What makes something critical?

1. Understand the historical and present-day context of power systems
2. Reflect on how those structures inform one’s own view of the world
3. Question those power systems and the views they promote

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Continuous, ongoing, never-ending, a “constant checking”

Cannot be completed

Ellsworth in context 1/5

We take as our starting point a claim Lather (1998) makes, quoting Ellsworth (1997): not only is “critical pedagogy in the field of schooling…impossible,” but teaching itself is also impossible. According to these writers, the entire educational project is paternalistic, and as teachers we must “[come] up against ‘stuck place after stuck place’ as a way to keep moving within ‘the impossibility of teaching’ in order to produce and learn from raptures [sic], failures, breaks, and refusals.”�(Eisenhower & Smith, 2010, p. 306, bold added)

Ellsworth in context 2/5

Implementing critical pedagogy in the field of schooling is impossible. That is precisely the task: to situate the experience of impossibility as an enabling site for working through aporias. Ellsworth calls this “coming up against stuck place after stuck place” as a way to keep moving within “the impossibility of teaching” in order to produce and learn from ruptures, failures, breaks, and refusals.

(Lather, 1998, p. 495 bold added)

Aporia: state of confusion

Paradox: the contradiction

Ellsworth in context 3/5

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish.

(Baldwin, 2008, p. 17-18 emphasis added)

Ellsworth in context 4/5

Society wants educated citizens 🡪 educated citizens question society 🡪 society does not want citizens to question it = society does not want educated citizens

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Critical pedagogy liberates the oppressed and oppressor (Freire, 2018)

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Society wants educated citizens 🡪 educated citizens question society = society encourages and welcomes those questions

Ellsworth in context 5/5

To deconstruct the teacher-student binary then, is to refuse its hierarchy… reinscribing teacher and student means keeping “both the old and new hierarchies off balance” (Chang, 1996, p. 143). Rewriting the teacher-student relation this way means refusing to let the question of the teacher-student relation be settled. It means working in and through the oscillating space of difference between teacher and student as positions within a structure of relations. And it’s in that space of difference-between that a new concept of the teacher-student relation erupts. But paradoxically again, it’s a new concept that refuses to settle into any single meaning.

(Ellsworth, 1997, p. 140 bold added)

Ellsworth in context summary

• Has been negatively framed as: schooling, teaching, and critical pedagogy are impossible to resolve paradoxes
• These are not paradoxes but feels of aporia. They are “‘brushing up’ against the limits of human understanding” (studiobinder, 2020)
• Perceived promise of critical pedagogy: equality between teachers and students
• Actual promise of critical pedagogy: keeping the teacher-student hierarchy off balance

Stretch Break!

Eisenhower & Smith corporate universities 1/2

• “absence of serious reflection on how teachers are necessarily implicated in the oppressive formations to which they draw attention” (2010, p. 305)
• Freire cautions against the oppressed becoming the oppressors
• Example: myth of meritocracy
• “our counterhegemonic work results in our insinuating ourselves more into committee work, classroom teaching, and, ironically, the bureaucratic structures of the university.” (p. 314)

Eisenhower & Smith corp. uni. 2/2

• “To what else does ‘life-long learning’ refer, but the need for workers to stay productive by re-tooling in response to the demands of capital and changes in the modes of production?” (p. 307)
• Reframed as: Aware and welcoming to growing and changing
• Fighting against but becoming a part of bureaucratic structures
• Organizing: slow, difficult to see, but creates lasting change
• Mobilizing: quick, very visible, but does not create lasting change

What critical pedagogy promise?

• Liberation for the oppressors and the oppressed
• As librarians we are both
• Social and political change
• Not a fast or immediate change
• De-emphasis of teacher-student power differentials
• Not an elimination of power differences

Summary of the “stuck in place” illusion 1/2

• Misunderstanding of what makes something critical

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Components of what makes something “critical”:

1. Understand the historical and present-day context of power systems
2. Reflect on how those structures inform one’s own view of the world
3. Question those power systems and the views they promote

​

Continuous, ongoing, never-ending, a “constant checking”

Cannot be completed

Summary of the “stuck in place” illusion 2/2

• Misrepresentation of Ellsworth’s works
• Paradox = true contradiction
• Aporia = negative feeling from brushing up against the limits of our current understanding
• Many paradoxes in education are actually aporia and lead to critical practices
• Misunderstanding of the promises of critical pedagogy
• Liberation
• Change
• Off-balance teacher-student hierarchy

Hope as a choice

• Hope as a feeling
• Easy
• Does not withstand reality of suffering
• Hope as a decision and a practice
• “hope is a decision that one has to make over and over again to believe that one, the world and those within it matter, and two, there is cause to believe that things can get better for the world and those within it.” (vlogbrothers, 2026)
• Nihilism is the easy choice
• Hope leads to more hopeful outcomes

What’s next

• Other ideas to apply to this
• Futures thinking
• Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
• Pedagogy of Hope by Paulo Freire
• Re-organization/sequencing of ideas
• Master’s thesis

References

Berlant, L. G. (2011). Cruel optimism. In Cruel optimism (pp. 23–50). Duke University Press.

Brookfield, S. (2010). Critical reflection as an adult learning process. In Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry (pp. 215–236). Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85744-2_11

Eisenhower, C., & Smith, D. (2010). The library as “stuck place”: Critical pedagogy in the corporate university. In M. T. Accardi, E. Drabinski, & A. Kumbier (Eds.), Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods. Library Juice Press, LLC.

Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297–325. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.59.3.058342114k266250

Ellsworth, E. A. (1997). Teaching positions: Difference, pedagogy, and the power of address. Teachers College Press.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (2003). The essential Foucault: Selections from the essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984 (P. Rabinow & N. Rose, Eds.). The New Press.

Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed (50th anniversary ed). Bloomsbury Academic.

Seale, M., & Nicholson, K. (2024). Cruel optimism, or, this time will be different! Journal of Information Literacy, 18(1), 130–135. https://doi.org/10.11645/18.1.594

vlogbrothers. (2026, January 6). Hope is not a feeling [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8lfd6ghyhs