"Critical Pedagogy For Beginning Teachers: the Movement From Despair To Hope" Barry Kanpol Associate Professor St. Joseph'S University
Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and Radical Democracy at the Turn of the Millennium: Reflections on the Work of Henry Giroux by Doug Kellener
Rage and Hope website summarises the ideas of the seminal theoreticians Giroux, Apple, McLaren and Freire
On Line Reading List
Glossary

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What are the key terms and concepts in critical pedadgogy?

A superb glossary from "Glossary from information on Issues in Freirian Education" by Tom Heaney http://www.uoguelph.ca/culture/glossary.htm.

A selection of terms and decriptions from his website follow:
Antidisciplinarity:(organizing courses around questions whose answers oblige one to rethink the framework within which the questions were formulated.......);
Borderlands: (described by
Henry Giroux) are spaces crisscrossed with a variety of languages, experiences and voices. For the Chicana feminist poet Gloria Anzaldúa borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, ... different races ... lower, middle and upper classes touch, ...;
Critical Pedagogy: the means and methods of testing and attempting to change the structures of schools that allow inequities. It is a cultural - political tool that takes seriously the notion of human differences, particularly those related to race, gender, and class. Critical pedagogy seeks to release the oppressed and unite people in a shared language of critique, struggle, hope, to end various forms of human suffering. Through critical pedagogy the classroom is not the place where information is dispensed by teachers and consumed by students, but rather as a site for the production of new knowledge grounded in student's practices.
Culture: We need to understand culture as a process of meaning making and we need to give attention to the power relations that set boundaries to those processes. ... ;
Cultural Studies (CS): Cultural Studies fosters the interdisciplinary investigation of culture as a dynamic organization of resources, peoples, artifacts, and power. The field draws together marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, popular culture and media studies, the study of minority and emergent literatures, and gender studies ...
‘Hidden Curriculum': the unstated norms, values and beliefs that are transmitted to students through the underlying structure of meaning and in both the formal content and the social relations of school and classroom life. These can precipitate the backfiring of even the most carefully formulated strategies for egalitarian dynamics of communication. The prior inculcation of the student with assumptions of all sorts means that a crucial component of the "learning" experience is that of "unlearning" the hidden curriculum.
Praxis: Praxis is a complex activity by which individuals create culture and society, and become critically conscious human beings. Praxis comprises a cycle of action-reflection-action which is central to liberatory education. Characteristics of praxis include self-determination (as opposed to coercion), intentionality (as opposed to reaction), creativity (as opposed to homogeneity), and rationality (as opposed to chance).
Public Intellectual: ... An important task of the academically-trained and university-based public intellectual is to work as a kind of translator: to make insights and perspectives of professional work accessible, meaningful and relevant to as broad an audience as possible. ...
Predatory culture: This term comes from
Peter McLaren's 1995 book entitled "Cultural Pedagogy and Predatory Culture". ... been steered in the ominous direction of the social logic of production and consumption. Buyers are beginning culturally to merge with their commodities while human agency is becoming absorbed into the social ethics of the marketable. Social impulses for equality, liberty, and social justice have been flattened out by the mass media until they have become cataleptically rigid while postmodern images threaten to steal what was once known as the "soul""(p1-2). Predatory culture, therefore, is a field of invisibility - of stalkers and victims - precisely because it is so obvious. Its obviousness immunizes its victims against a full disclosure of its menacing capabilities. In predatory culture identity is fashioned mainly and often violently around the excesses of marketing and consumption and the natural social relations of post-industrial capitalism. "Predatory culture is the left-over detritus of bourgeois culture stripped ...
The social, the cultural and the human has been subsumed within capital." McLaren offers examples of life in this predatory culture on pages 3-9 including the Marc Lepine shooting in Montreal, Gulf War cards, Jeffrey Dahmer T-shirts, OJ Simpson's starring role in predatory culture etc.
Transformative intellectual: The term transformative intellectual was coined by
Henry Giroux (1988). It simply means for our purposes that teachers possess the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to question, understand, interrogate and eventually act as change agents of structural inequities in their place of employment. Taken from Kanpol, Barry and Jeanne Brady. "Teacher Education And The Multicultural Dilemma: A "Critical" Thinking Response". Journal of Critical Pedagogy. Volume I, Issue 2, April, 1998. www.lib.wmc.edu/pub/jcp/jcp.html
...
Get more of this superb glossary by
Tom Heaney at http://www.uoguelph.ca/culture/glossary.htm.

 
Page compiled by djkruger, 25 June 2002 (Western Calender)