pedagogy of teaching The rapidly changing demographics of the classroom in the United States has resulted in an unprecedented amount of linguistic and cultural diversity. In order to respond to these changes, advocates of critical pedagogy call into question the focus on practical skills of teacher credential programs. "[T]his practical focus far too often occurs without examining teachers' own assumptions, values, and beliefs and how this ideological posture informs, often unconsciously, their perceptions and actions when working with linguistic-minority and other politically, socially, and economically subordinated students." As teaching is considered an inherently political act to the critical pedagogue, a more critical element of teacher education becomes addressing implicit biases (also known as implicit cognition or implicit stereotypes) that can subconsciously affect a teacher's perception of a student's ability to learn. Advocates of critical pedagogy insist that teachers, then, must become learners alongside their students, as well as students of their students. They must become experts beyond their field of knowledge, and immerse themselves in the culture, customs, and lived experiences of the students they aim to teach. Criticism Critical pedagogy has been the subject of varied debates inside and outside the field of education. Philosopher John Searle characterized the goal of Giroux's form of critical pedagogy "to create political radicals", thus highlighting the antagonistic moral and political grounds of the ideals of citizenship and "public wisdom." These varying moral perspectives of what is right are to be found in what John Dewey has referred to as the tensions between traditional and progressive education. Searle argued that critical pedagogy's objections to the Western canon are misplaced and/or disingenuous: In 1992, Maxine Hairston took a hard line against critical pedagogy in the first year college composition classroom and argued, "everywhere I turn I find composition faculty, both leaders in the profession and new voices, asserting that they have not only the right, but the duty, to put ideology and radical politics at the center of their teaching." Hairston further confers, Sharon O'Dair (2003) said that compositionists "focus [...] almost exclusively on ideological matters", and further argues that this focus is at the expense of proficiency of student writing skills in the composition classroom. To this end, O'Dair explained that "recently advocated working-class pedagogies privilege activism over "language instruction." Jeff Smith argued that students want to gain, rather than to critique, positions of privilege, as encouraged by critical pedagogues. Scholars who have