Sociological Praxis in the Nexus of Critical Pedagogy and Cognitive Load Theory
Subject Areas : Sociological Studies of Youth
Naser Danesh Pouya
1
*
,
Masood Siyyari
2
1 - Department of English, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
2 - Department of English, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
Keywords: cognitive processing, education, empowerment, social relations, synergies,
Abstract :
The paper explores the intersection of critical pedagogy and cognitive load theory from a sociological perspective. Critical pedagogy emphasizes empowering students to critically examine and transform oppressive social conditions, whereas, cognitive load theory focuses on managing intrinsic cognitive load, and optimizing instructional design to reduce extraneous cognitive load and enhance learning. The study examines the potential synergies and tensions between these two frameworks. It considers how sociological factors like race, class, gender, and power relations shape students' cognitive processing and learning experiences. It also explores how critical pedagogy can be implemented in a way that manages cognitive load and facilitates effective learning. The study attempts to provide key insights into integrating critical pedagogy and cognitive load theory through a sociological lens to create transformative learning experiences that empower students to decipher and alter oppressive social structures.
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ISSN: 2645-5498, SSYJ
2025, 15 (55), 96-105
Sociological Praxis in the Nexus of Critical Pedagogy and Cognitive Load Theory
Naser Danesh Pouya.1
Masood Siyyari.2 *
Received 26 May 2024, Accepted 29 October 2024
Abstract
This library-based research probes the synergies between critical pedagogy and cognitive load theory from a sociological perspective. Critical pedagogy focuses on empowering learners to challenge and transform oppressive social conditions. In contrast, cognitive load theory deals with managing intrinsic cognitive load by optimizing instructional design to reduce extraneous cognitive load, enhancing learning. The study also considers how sociological factors like race, class, gender, and power relations shape learners' cognitive processing and learning experiences, and how critical pedagogy can be implemented to manage cognitive load and facilitate effective learning by providing key insights into integrating critical pedagogy and cognitive load theory through a sociological lens. It may contribute to creating transformative learning experiences and help learners decipher and change oppressive social structures.
Keywords: cognitive processing, education, empowerment, social relations, synergies
Introduction
Critical pedagogy (CP) is a transformative approach to education and emanates from critical theory that emphasizes the development of critical consciousness among learners (Mustakova-Possardt, 2004). Contrasting with the traditional “banking model” of education (Bybee, 2020), praxis, as a cycle of reflection and action, fosters critical consciousness by promoting dialogic education, where teachers and students co-construct knowledge. CP also aims to help students by encouraging them to critically test their experiences in the social context, enabling them to be active agents of change by challenging dominant ideologies and oppressive structures.
Critical pedagogy is an approach to language teaching and learning that, according to Kincheloe (2005), aims to humanize and empower learners by transforming oppressive power structures. As Tavin (2003) asserts, CP is not a homogeneous body of discourse; it challenges individuals to delve into the links between schooling, ideology, power, and culture to attain social justice through praxis and critical consciousness. This involves questioning the epistemological and sociopolitical nature of authority and experience, requiring students to analyze the consistency of their values, beliefs, and knowledge with issues of agency, politics, and power.
Giroux (2004) believes that such skills, knowledge, and authority assist learners in inquiring and acting upon anti-democratic forms of power and inequalities. This redefines the links between knowledge and power, pedagogical practices and social consequences, and authority and civic responsibility, which often contradict educators' roles and social functions in the classroom. Pedagogy, in this view, as a form of academic labor, bridges the gap between individuals and public concerns, sustains social bonds, and challenges the link between individual notions of freedom and social norms to support a vibrant democracy within particular contexts through the interaction among texts, teachers, and students. Contrary to the theoretical suppression of traditionalists, critical educational theorists, such as Giroux and McLaren (1992), argue that schools are principally agencies of social, economic, and cultural production. Francis (1982) hopes that the democratization of processes in the classroom can empower students in their social context outside.
Research Gap and Objectives
Despite the extensive discourse on critical pedagogy, there is limited research on its interaction with cognitive load theory, particularly through a sociological lens. The following study aims to fill the gap by exploring the potential bonds between these two frameworks; therefore, it specifically investigates how sociological factors shape learners’ cognitive processing and learning experiences and how critical pedagogy may be implemented to regulate the cognitive load and enhance effective learning.
Significance of the Study
By bridging the gap between individuals and public concerns, this research aims to sustain social bonds in a vibrant democracy through the interaction among texts, teachers, and students. As a result, the significance of the following study lies in its attempt to depict transformative learning experiences enabling learners to alter their oppressive social structures.
Methodology
This library-based study systematically reviews and analyzes scholarly literature to critically examine the interplay between critical pedagogy and cognitive load theory from a sociological perspective. Relevant data from which the selected sources are systematically extracted and organized includes key concepts, theoretical frameworks, methodologies, findings, and implications. The data are synthesized to identify common themes, synergies, and tensions between critical pedagogy and cognitive load theory. Special attention is given to how sociological factors influence cognitive processing and learning experiences by probing the methodological rigor, theoretical coherence, and practical implications of the studies reviewed.
Review of the Related Literature
Critical Pedagogy Domain
Criticizing schooling in capitalist societies is the CP priority. As Gor (2005) and Aliakbari and Faraji (2011) put it, raising awareness, and rejecting disparity against people are its primary goals. Keesing-Styles (2003) holds that CP is an educational response to inequalities and oppressions in academic institutions. To Freire (1970), the teacher unfolds reality and constructs knowledge of the world, and students critically reflect on how they exist. As he (1970) puts it, "... come to see the world not as a static reality, but as reality in process, in transformation"(p. 71).
Foley (2007) argues that education in CP is a liberatory process. It raises students' awareness, helps them decipher their experiences, and reclaims a fair society by challenging oppressive social conditions. Ares (2006) posits that the aim of Education emerges from a critical analysis of the social order, which fosters social justice through school learning. Foley (2007) states that it should occur in students' everyday lives, in intriguing discussions within their language and knowledge. Degener (2001) states that critical learners contribute to curricular developments and the associated study materials by approving or rejecting a claim. They can also provide (Lipman, 1988) reasons for their ideas and amend their own and others' procedures. As Giroux and McLaren (1992) point out, they should be involved in social criticism to establish a sphere enabling citizens to exert power over their own lives and learning. Therefore, Degener (2001) believes students can reflect on their rational knowledge and how to transform their lives. In L2 settings, Akbari (2008) contends that the first step is to create a context by the teacher in which the learners' first language is included as a teaching aid. Nevertheless, if the aim is a liberatory one, a dialogue is needed through which negotiation of meaning, reality, and experience can occur. As Freire (1970) puts it, dialogue "is the encounter between men, mediated by the world to name the world" (P. 69).
Gruenewald (2003) is in line with Burbules and Berk (1999), who posit that CP represents a concerted attempt to challenge inequalities in power and opportunities. It also aims to question belief systems suppressing any aspirations among individuals and groups to change their shares in life. Akbari (2007) refers to a paradox here. Empowered and liberated from restrictions imposed by abstract theories, teachers must reflect and find solutions to their classroom problems. They are supposed to adapt to how researchers and academics have specified, and any other mental activities are disregarded. Fendler (2003) summarizes the dilemma that education research requires teachers to be reflective practitioners. However, the interplay between autonomy and expertise cannot be settled without direction from expert authorities. Baynham (2006) and Akbari (2008) assert that CP puts the classroom context into the broader social context. Accordingly, Kumaravadivelu (2006) recognizes language as an ideology, extending to social, cultural, and political domains.
Bizzell (1991) defines "critical pedagogy" by referring to Marxist-influenced theories of Education that, while delegitimating unjust social power relations, simultaneously attempt to demarcate pedagogies that formulate egalitarian social power relations. She says CP assumes miscellaneous practices and has yet to have one orthodox methodology. She depicts a three-part anatomy of power in which one sort of power, coercion, is exercised by A over B, disregarding B's consent or best interests, and B can do nothing about it. However, in another one called persuasion, A dominates B with B's consent only if B is convinced that doing so will meet its best interests, as A suggests. Authority is the third sort of power instrumentally exercised by A over B. B must sometimes do what A demands, irrespective of how B's best interests will be met. Such authority over B, initially granted to A, can be exerted. Therefore, the authority of power is a two-stage process. The initial exercise of power lies in persuasion. However, as B is persuaded to grant authority to A and empower A, their relationship at every step taken is transformed into a less dialogic one without A's having to exercise persuasion.
Critical Pedagogy in Classroom
Dehler et al. (2001) argue that curricula should equip students with opportunities to question assumptions being exposed to varying topics, recognize power relationships, think, and treat critically with a collective focus. However, one of the complications of extant treatments for CP is how management educators implement them in the classroom. Along with Deweyan's (1916) approaches to teaching and learning, which accentuate communicative competency and authentic communication, McLaren (1999) states that CP represents a series of practices revealing the process of schooling that limits its selection of values and how educational goals delimited by macrostructures of power and privilege. For Freire, pedagogy is primarily related to efforts to transform the world to create hope through rethinking the categories used to analyze our current condition. He (1998) writes: "Hope is a natural, possible, and necessary impetus in the context of our unfinishedness .... without it, instead of history, we would have pure determinism"(p. 69). This curriculum, as Breunig (2005) and Eisner (2002) hold, cannot support a fair school system or society and presumably serves the interest of the power elite of the school and society. By nature, Education is socially, historically, politically, and culturally oriented; as Shor (1987) puts it, "There is no way we can talk about some universal, unchanging role for the teacher" (p. 211). Therefore, pedagogical approaches can link self-reflection and understanding with the supporting role of teachers committed to changing the nature of the larger society on the critical classroom's theoretical, intellectual, and political issues.
The students' 'reality' is the core principle of pedagogies, curricula, and learning. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire asserted, "The starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people" (p. 85). In this regard, Education needs to be relevant and aligned with the experiences and interests of learners. McLaren (2003) believes that classroom practices are aligned with the ideals that serve the interests of the power elites and, therefore, fail to support an equitable system (Apple, 1975; Eisner, 2002). That is, a hidden curriculum conveys messages to children through school structures, textbooks, and teachers (Apple, 1985; Braa & Callero, 2006; Eisner, 2002) that students are prepared to accommodate hierarchical structures of power; furthermore, Shor (1987) and Breunig (2005) portray the authoritarian classroom in which students are nurtured to be the passive individuals of society, hence apathetic citizens. Breunig (2005) supposes that probing the assumptions behind such a curriculum and its impact on prevailing forms of public-school classroom knowledge, pedagogy, and evaluation may reveal some parts of the hidden curriculum.
Critical Pedagogy, Power, and Social Relations
When CP structures social relations, as Burbules and Berk (1999) argue, it inevitably emanates from framed issues in a context; CP looks to how an issue relates to the core implementation of power on institutional and societal levels and typically considers it as the artificiality and abstractness of critical thinking treating it as marginal one. CP puts aside nonrelational or item-by-item issues since critical thinking focuses on an argument's direct reasons and assumptions and requires factors that may initially bear less immediate relevance.
Freire (1970) claims that a lack of the required curiosity and a certain conviviality among students when learning would impede the development of the necessary intellectual means and make them unable to learn the object of knowledge. Being unable to transform their lived experiences into knowledge and accommodate the incoming knowledge to discover new knowledge, they will undoubtedly lose a dialogue as a process of learning and knowing.
Critical Pedagogy and the Educational System in Iran
Aliakbari and Faraji (2011) contend there is no place for such an approach in the Iranian educational system. Unlike traditional methods, Education in CP tries to transform learners' behaviors regarding different social problems, which may improve their life conditions. Exposed to real-life issues, EFL learners can develop their skills by diagnosing their pitfalls of understanding. Such an approach makes teaching more enjoyable by focusing on students' real-life needs, discussing their areas of interest, and helping them to think critically and, accordingly, transform the structure of their society.
ELT context prerequisite to implementing a critical model, according to Akbari (2008), is decision-making decentralization in content, methodology, and evaluation, eliminating unclear generalities and socio-political distances. CP affects curriculum development by acknowledging learners' experiences, developing the required attitude, and empowering teachers and students in their meaningful learning enterprise. As Banegas (2011) contends, teachers can reject, criticize, revise, and even create their material as a primary source or a supplementary one in their teaching practices to help learners develop their critical thinking skills.
Cognitive Load
Cognitive load (CL), as a multidimensional construct, is an imposition of loads on learners' cognitive systems incurred by instructional design and materials (Paas & Sweller, 2014) while they are performing a task (Meshkati, 1988) and may transform the learning environment and learners' experience (Paas & Sweller, 2021); therefore, Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) strives to actualize the desired learning outcomes (Paas et al., 2010) and leverage the cognitive architecture more optimally by devising instructional procedures of superior efficiency (Paas, Renkl, et al., 2003), which aim to attenuate the extraneous cognitive load (ECL) manifested in complex tasks, thereby judiciously allocating cognitive resources (Clark et al., 2006).
Schema construction, combined with the dynamic interplay between the limited working memory (WM) capacity and virtually unlimited long-term memory (LTM) allows us to transfer acquired knowledge and skills (Chandler & Sweller, 1991; Sweller, 2010a; Sweller et al., 1998). By circumventing WM limitations during mental processing, CLT-based tasks are handled far better in the learning process. Surpassing the extant cognitive capacity, mishandling cognitive resources, or both may deteriorate learning and performing complex tasks (Paas, Tuovinen et al., 2003). The unavailability of prior knowledge structures in organizing incoming new information and solving the problem makes learners randomly select alternatives in integrating elements, which may make the task slow, effortful, and time-consuming (Sweller, 2003). The judicious formulation of pedagogical strategies optimally enables the genesis of novel cognitive constructs and their subsequent consolidation within the repository of LTM. Appropriate instructional design, along with learners' prior knowledge, assists learners to construct schemata and regulate further cognitive processing (Schnotz & Kürschner, 2007; Sweller, 2005) through deceased ECL and ICL (intrinsic cognitive load) (Shin, 2020).
Cognitive Load Theory and Educational Technology
Complex cognitive tasks impose unlimited elements, differentiated as ECL and ICL, on learners' WM-limited processing capacity (Hanham et al., 2017; Kirschner et al., 2009; Sweller, 2011, 2012). ICL, a task's inherent complexity, which is affected by the task and learner's expertise, is determined by element interactivity (Kirschner et al., 2018), estimating the number of elements a learner processes simultaneously in WM (Sweller, 2010b). ECL imposes superfluous information elements upon the task, and is engendered by ill-designed instructional procedures (Sweller, 2011); it is also contingent upon element interactivity (Ayres, 2006; Chen et al., 2017; Paas, Renkl, et al., 2003; Sweller & Chandler, 1994). Characterized by minimal element interactivity, ECL is deemed negligible during task execution under conditions of sufficient cognitive resources. Simple tasks involve the concurrent processing of a constrained set of elements in working memory, resulting in a lower ICL compared to more complex tasks (Bannert, 2002; Pollock et al., 2002). Additionally, a low ICL and a high ECL are managed as the total CL does not surpass WM limits and may promote performance as learners are involved in controlled and conscious processing (Kotovsky et al., 1985) relevant to the construction of schemas. The reorientation of learners' attention is accomplished through the reduction of ECL once the constituent elements have been assimilated into a higher-order schema (Sweller et al., 1998). Germane pre-existing cognitive construct sustains an effective learning process (Kalyuga et al., 1998) unless it discords with the information already available, hence counteracting learners' performance (Chen et al., 2016; Janssen & Kirschner, 2020) since it restricts their cognitive capacity to accommodate incoming task demands (Brunken et al., 2003; Chen & Chang, 2011; Sweller et al., 1998).
Discussion and Conclusion
Emphasizing dialogue, reflection, and action, CP encourages learners to actively participate in their learning process by integrating theory and practice for meaningful change that challenges traditional teaching methods since it empowers learners to critically analyze societal norms, power structures, and inequalities and transform oppressive systems through open communication and mutual respect. Studies confirmed that increased cognitive task demands affect learners’ attentional pool which is inflicted by the task conditions; therefore, CLT focuses on the human cognitive architecture and attempts to make predictions on successful learning to mitigate learners' mental effort and enhance their learning outcomes influenced by the complexity of tasks, instructional design, and learners' schematic knowledge. As a result, CP and CLT intersect in several ways, since these two encourage autonomy, and relevance, which support structured learning environments that help learners manage their cognitive load, as well-organized instruction can mitigate ICL and ECL, which foster practical learning experiences; consequently, the interplay f these two frameworks underline critical consciousness that would enable learners to call for authority and injustice and redefine the bonds between knowledge, power, and social consequences. The new paradigm challenges the traditional suppression of critical educational theories and requires learners to be actively involved in their social context, leading to social transformation and improving the quality of life for all people. Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between cognitive load, instructional design, and critical pedagogy, highlighting how these elements contribute to effective learning outcomes.
Figure 1.
Interplay of Cognitive Load and Critical Pedagogy in Instructional Design for Effective Learning.
Further studies are required to employ reliable measurements of cognitive constructs to help learners improve their learning performance. They should encompass a comprehensive exploration of cognitive load and critical pedagogy across diverse demographic factors to investigate how learners interact with CL, incorporating various levels of task complexity that may refine our understanding of CL dynamics and its interplay with CP.
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[1] Department of English, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran, na.daneshpouya@iau.ac.ir
[2] Department of English, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran (Corresponding Author), m.siyyari@srbiau.ac.ir