What is Critical Pedagogy?

Critical Pedagogy For Beginning Teachers: the Movement From Despair To Hope Barry Kanpol Associate Professor St. Joseph'S University (Students in EDF5112 should read this important document)

Ring the changes A new vision is needed if schools are to survive in the 21st century, by Geoff Maslen Campus Review December Number 7 2003 (Students in EDF5112 should read this important document)

"The critical question here is whose future, story, and interests does the school represent. . . Critical pedagogy argues that school practices need to be informed by a public philosophy that addresses how to construct ideological and institutional conditions in which the lived experience of empowerment for the vast majority of student becomes the defining feature of schooling."

What is critical pedadgogy?
According to Henry Giroux critical pedagogy attempts to:

  1. Create new forms of knowledge through its emphasis on breaking down disciplines and creating interdisciplinary knowledge.
  2. Raise questions about the relationships between the margins and centers of power in schools and is concerned about how to provide a way of reading history as part of a larger project of reclaiming power and identity, particularly as these are shaped around the categories of race, gender, class, and ethnicity.
  3. Reject the distinction between high and popular culture so as to make curriculum knowledge responsive to the everyday knowledge that constitutes peoples' lived histories differently.
  4. Illuminate the primacy of the ethical in defining the language that teachers and others use to produce particular cultural practices."
    http://www.perfectfit.org/CT/giroux2.html, text reproduced with the kind permission of the pagemaster Laurie Williams

Rage and Hope website summarises the ideas of the seminal theoreticians Giroux, Apple, McLaren and Freire This website is a beginners guide to some of the most important thinkers and contributors available on-line.

Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and Radical Democracy at the Turn of the Millennium: Reflections on the Work of Henry Giroux by Doug Kellener

On Line Reading List
Glossary

Carr and Lund (2008) Doing Democracy: Striving for Political Literacy and Social Justice Chapter 1 Introduction: Scanning Democracy

Your feedback would be appreciated. Please enjoy!

David Zyngier