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Critical pedagogy is a teaching approach grounded in critical theory. Critical pedagogy attempts to help students question and challenge domination, and the beliefs and practices that dominate. In other words, it is a theory and practice of helping students achieve critical consciousness. Critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as

"Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse." (Empowering Education, 129)

Critical pedagogy includes relationships between teaching and learning. It is a continuous process of unlearning, learning and relearning, reflection, evaluation and the impact that these actions have on the students, in particular students who have been historically and continue to be disenfranchised by traditional schooling.

Contents 1 Central tenets 2 Background 3 Examples 3.1 History 3.2 Literature 4 Alternatives to critical pedagogy 5 See also 6 Further reading 7 References

[edit] Central tenets

In his book, Critical Pedagogy (2008, second edition), Joe L. Kincheloe describes the basic tenets:

"Advocates of critical pedagogy are aware that every minute of every hour that teachers teach, they are faced with complex decisions concerning justice, democracy, and competing ethical claims. While they have to make individual determinations of what to do in these particular circumstances, they must concurrently deal with what John Goodlad (1994) calls the surrounding institutional morality. A central tenet of critical pedagogy maintains that the classroom, curricular, school structures teachers enter are not neutral sites waiting to be shaped by educational professionals. While such professionals do possess agency, this prerogative is not completely free and independent of decisions made previously by people operating with different values and shaped by the ideologies and cultural assumptions of their historical contexts. These contexts are shaped in the same ways language and knowledge are constructed, as historical power makes particular practices seem natural—as if they could have been constructed in no other way." (Chapter 1).

Later in this same work Kincheloe lists the basic concerns of critical pedagogy:

• all education is inherently political and all pedagogy must be aware of this condition
• a social and educational vision of justice and equality should ground all education
• issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and physical ability are all important domains of oppression and critical anti-hegemonic action.
• the alleviation of oppression and human suffering is a key dimension of educational purpose
• schools must not hurt students--good schools don't blame students for their failures or strip students of the knowledges they bring to the classroom
• all positions including critical pedagogy itself must be problematized and questioned
• the professionalism of teachers must be respected and part of the role of any educator involves becoming a scholar and a researcher
• education must both promote emancipatory change and the cultivation of the intellect--these goals should never be in conflict, they should be synergistic
• the politics of knowledge and issues of epistemology are central to understanding the way power operates in educational institutions to perpetuate privilege and to subjugate the marginalized--"validated" scientific knowledge can often be used as a basis of oppression as it is produced without an appreciation of how dominant power and culture shape it.
• education often reflects the interests and needs of new modes of colonialism and empire. Such dynamics must be exposed, understood, and acted upon as part of critical transformative praxis.

[edit] Background

Critical pedagogy was heavily influenced by the works of Paulo Freire, arguably the most celebrated critical educator. According to his writings, Freire heavily endorses students’ ability to think critically about their education situation; this way of thinking allows them to "recognize connections between their individual problems and experiences and the social contexts in which they are embedded."^[1] Realizing one’s consciousness ("conscientization") is a needed first step of "praxis," which is defined as the power and know-how to take action against oppression while stressing the importance of liberating education. "Praxis involves engaging in a cycle of theory, application, evaluation, reflection, and then back to theory. Social transformation is the product of praxis at the collective level."^[1]

Postmodern, anti-racist, feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories all play a role in further explaining Freire’s ideas of critical pedagogy, shifting its main focus on social class to include issues pertaining to religion, military identification, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and age. Many contemporary critical pedagogues have embraced postmodern, anti-essentialist perspectives of the individual, of language, and of power, "while at the same time retaining the Freirean emphasis on critique, disrupting oppressive regimes of power/knowledge, and social change."^[1] Contemporary critical educators, such as bell hooks appropriated by Peter McLaren, discuss in their criticisms the influence of many varied concerns, institutions, and social structures, "including globalization, the mass media, and race/spiritual relations," while citing reasons for resisting the possibilities to change.^[1]

Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg have created the Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy at McGill University ^[2]. In line with Kincheloe and Steinberg's contributions to critical pedagogy, the project attempts to move the field to the next phase of its evolution. In this second phase critical pedagogy seeks to truly become a worldwide, decolonizing movement dedicated to listening to and learning from diverse discourses from peoples around the planet. Kincheloe and Steinberg are intent on not allowing critical pedagogy to become merely a North American phenomenon or a patriarchal one. In this listening and introspective phase critical pedagogy becomes better equipped to engage diverse peoples facing different forms of oppression in emancipatory experiences. Taking a cue from Sandy Grande and her discussion in Red Pedagogy of the fruitful negotiation between indigenous peoples and critical pedagogy, Kincheloe and Steinberg envision such dialogue with peoples around the world.

[edit] Examples

[edit] History

During South African apartheid, legal racialization implemented by the regime drove members of the radical leftist Teachers' League of South Africa to employ critical pedagogy with a focus on nonracialism in Cape Town schools and prisons. Teachers collaborated loosely to subvert the racist curriculum and encourage critical examination of religious, military, political, and social circumstances in terms of spirit-friendly, humanist, and democratic ideologies. The efforts of such teachers are credited with having bolstered student resistance and activism.^[3]

[edit] Literature

Authors of critical pedagogy texts not only include Paulo Freire, as mentioned above, but also Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Joe L. Kincheloe, Howard Zinn, Suresh Canagarajah, Alastair Pennycook, Graham Crookes and others. Educationalists including Jonathan Kozol and Parker Palmer are sometimes included in this category. Other critical pedagogues more known for their anti-schooling, unschooling, or deschooling perspectives include Ivan Illich, John Holt, dead prez, Ira Shor, John Taylor Gatto, Matt Hern, and Carlo Ricci.

Much of the work draws on anarchism, feminism, Marxism, György Lukács, Wilhelm Reich, Khen Lampert, postcolonialism, and the discourse theories of Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. Radical Teacher is a magazine dedicated to critical pedagogy and issues of interest to critical educators. The Rouge Forum is an online organization led by people involved with critical pedagogy.

[edit] Alternatives to critical pedagogy

The Sudbury model of democratic education schools maintain that values, social justice included, must be learned through experience ^[4][5][6][7], as Aristotle said: "For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them."^[8]

Describing current instructional methods as homogenization and lockstep standardization, alternative approaches are proposed, such as the Sudbury model of democratic education schools, an alternative approach in which children, by enjoying personal freedom thus encouraged to exercise personal responsibility for their actions, learn at their own pace rather than following a previously imposed chronologically-based curriculum.^[9][10][11]

In a similar form students learn all the subjects, techniques and skills in these schools. The staff are minor actors, the "teacher" is an advisor and helps just when asked.^[12][13]

[edit] See also

• Adult education
• Anti-Oppressive Education
• Anti-racist mathematics
• Critical consciousness
• Critical psychology
• Critical thinking
• Curriculum studies
• Ecopedagogy
• Inclusive school
• Literacy
• Popular education
• Praxis intervention
• Praxis School
• Rouge Forum
• Social criticism
• Student voice
• Teaching for social justice
• Women's rights

[edit] Further reading

• Freire, P. (2006). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum. (Original work published 1970)
• Giroux, H. (1997). Pedagogy and the politics of hope: Theory, culture, and schooling. Boulder, CO: Westview.
• Giroux, H. & S. Aronowitz (1985). Education under siege. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.
• Kincheloe, J. (2008). Critical pedagogy. 2nd edition. NY: Peter Lang.
• lampert, K. (2008). Empathic Education - A Critique of Neocapitalism. T-A
• Macedo, D. (2006). Literacies of power: What Americans are not allowed to know. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview.
• Macedo, D. & S. Steinberg (Eds.) (2007). Media literacy: A reader. NY: Peter Lang.
• Steinberg, S. (2001). Multi/intercultural conversations: A reader. NY: Peter Lang.
• Darder, A. (1991). Culture and Power in the Classroom. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.
• Soto, L. (Ed.) (2000). The Politics of Early Childhood Education. NY: Peter Lang.
• Britzman, D. (1991). Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Kincheloe, J. & S. Steinberg (2007). Cutting class: Socio-economic status and education. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Kincheloe, J. (1999). How do we tell the workers? The socio-economic foundations of work and vocational education. Boulder, CO: Westview.
• McLaren, P. (1997). Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium. Boulder, CO: Westview.
• McLaren, P. (2000). Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the pedagogy of revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. NY: Routledge.
• Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education: Critical teaching for social change. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Aronowitz, S. (2003). How class works: Power and social movement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Monchinski, T. (2007). The politics of education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
• Viola, M. (2009). The Filipinization of Critical Pedagogy. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies Volume 7, Number 1.

v • d • e Issues in Freirian Pedagogy Anti-oppressive education • Banking • Conscientization • Critical consciousness • Critical pedagogy • Pedagogy of the Oppressed • Popular education • Praxis • Teaching for social justice • Youth empowerment

[edit] References