In Critical Pedagogies: Dreaming of Democracy, Ann George identifies Paulo Freire’s 1970 Pedagogy of the Oppressed as a foundational work–or urtext–upon which much of the later scholarship is built, having also introduced “many of the terms, assumptions, and methods” still in use today (Freire 2005; George 78). The underlying motivation towards a move to this type of BW teaching is the idea that “error and other deviations” are social constructs (Mutnick 32). Popular in the late 80s and early 90s BW classroom, the fundamental idea that underpins the critical approach is that BW students bring an existing body of knowledge with them to the BW learning experience. George notes that “critical pedagogies are distinctive in their usually explicit commitment to education for citizenship” (George 78). Also at the heart of all critical pedagogies is a mission to challenge any unjust, antiquated, inexplicable, politically motivated societal norms (George).

Critical approaches “conceive of the BW student as having been marginalized by mainstream societal exclusions and inequalities with respect to race, class, gender, sexuality, language, and culture” (Mutnick 25). In her 1992 Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing, Min-Zhan Lu borrows from Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands, to identify these marginalized BW students as “border residents” (Anzaldua 1987; Lu 887). While other approaches see conflict and struggle as a problem to be cured, proponents of critical approaches see these “extant skills and abilities” as “critical strengths” to be tapped (Mutnick 26); strengths that can facilitate both a breaking down of an unjust old and a rebuilding of a more just new.

Shaughnessy’s error-centered approach sees BW instruction as designed to accommodate basic writers in any situation where they are asked to navigate an academic discourse community; however, error-centered approaches do not and cannot acculturate them (Lu 889). Lu argues against the ideas of BW pioneers like Bruffee, Farrell, and Shaughnessy, who view a student’s fear of “acculturation and the accompanying sense of contradiction and ambiguity as a deficit” and “something to be dissolved;” and who, consequently, devoted themselves to finding “cures” (Lu 889). In rebuttal to those who see critical approaches as “impossible” to implement in the classroom, George cites Shor and Freire to argue that, if there are any obstacles, they are a result of “having to live and teach with the knowledge that ‘human action can move in several directions as once, that something can contain itself and also its opposite’” (Shor/Freire 1987; George 90).