This isn't your usual obstacle course: Critical pedagogy with Special Operations Forces

In an effort to practice what we teach, this paper moves beyond a simple academic-military binary and summarizes the efforts of four faculty members to teach critical thinking to US Army Special Operations Forces (SOF) officers. All four of us teach graduate level courses in a non-thesis, interdisciplinary Master's degree program intended to satisfy military interest in civilian education. We view our work as an effort to think both with security and as an intervention into security. We position this work as an endeavor of public geographies and critical pedagogy. The paper begins by considering public geographies and the supposed academic/military binary and explores subtle and not so subtle interactions between academics and the U.S. national security apparatus. Each of the four co-authors-a geographer, a sociologist, and two political scientists-describes a particular approach to teaching critical thinking and comments on how the SOF students have responded. We conclude the paper by reflecting on the value of this work within the broader context of our shared mission as scholars and teachers.