In July 2008, I received a draft copy of an article being considered for publication by the British journal Psychotherapy Research. To my utter surprise the article dealt with the work I had been doing in critical pedagogy at the University of Auckland for twenty years, and specifically the methodology (what the authors called “The Ward Method”) I had been using to have my student develop consensus in co-creation projects in the Maori community. I had never had the time to write up the methodology, so the fact that the authors had been using it successfully for fifteen years without my knowledge came as a complete surprise. It was clear that it was time to make the methodology public and at the same time to address the concerns about methodology in general expressed by many critical education theorists.

 

 

 

Much of the theoretical premise behind this so-called Ward Method has been part of the discourse of Critical Pedagogy for the last thirty years. Others have articulated the issues much better than I ever could – John Dewey, Paulo Freire, A. S. Neill, Ivan Illich, Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Peter Mclaren, Stanley Aronowitz, Ira Shor… the list goes on. For the most part, however, their theorizing, while immensely useful and insightful, has failed to articulate any systematic methodology for critical pedagogical practice. Indeed, it has become the norm for critical pedagogues to eschew methodology and to attribute it to the forces of repressive conservatism and reductive thinking. Here I challenge this view and make a reasoned and concerted argument for the adoption of methodology into the armorment of the critical education struggle.