Michael Forsman 230 and generic academic skills that are based on a profound knowledge of facts about media technologies, media history, media systems, media cultures and theories and empirical studies of this. Critical self-reflection could be related to the fact that media students through their studies can or even should be able to (and want to) somehow reform their mind in relation to their previous media preferences, habits, values. While critical action could be connected to the capacity in terms of media production to be able to also use media for different purposes. 8. Critical consciousness and critical pedagogy Since the 1970s there has been a university-based “Critical thinking movement” (CTM) without much more of an explicit agenda that the argument for the importance of devel- oping and implementing critical thinking at (US) universities (and high schools) in order to “create better thinkers” that can think independently in relation to the present social and politi- cal contexts and pressures. Partly CTM started out as a reaction to how critical thinking had been abducted by Marxism, femi- nism (BURBULES; BERK, 1999). Another challenge is that criti- cal thinking is reduced to certain instrumental activities that mirrors the interest of employers and corporate interests. There has also but independently been a critical pedagogical move- ment (CPM) that has been more about transformative pedagogics and social change through praxis. One key thinker in these circuits is Brazilian philosopher and pedagogue Paulo Freire who worked with illiteracy and adult literacy in peasant communities in Latin American in the 1970s. One key term in Freire theory is the Portuguese term “conscientização” (critical consciousness). This stands for the “development of the awakening of critical awareness” (FREIRE, 1974, p. 15). For Freire this is the antithesis to technocratic problem-solving. The development of a critical consciousness is about refraining from being unconscious. A critical conscious- ness is thus about not being duped, naïve, or self-deceptive (c.f. false consciousness). It is concrete political action and to the insight that “to every understanding, sooner or later an action cor-
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