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.