Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy looks at schools in their historical context as dominant social, cultural, and political institutions rather than as sites of social mobility, recognizing how schooling reflects an asymmetrical distribution of power and access to resources based on race, class, and gender. Although there is a great deal of debate around the founders, terminology, and implementation of critical pedagogy, critical pedagogues are united by their commitment to social transformation for the collective good. Critical pedagogy is a fluid and transgressive discourse and practice in which people continuously redefine the world through the contexts in which they find it. Its introduction into curriculum studies has served to redefine the field.

Critical pedagogues strive to understand the world as it is and as it should be through problem-posing dialogue, a method that dissolves the teacher–student dichotomy and transforms all learners into agents of social change. The assumption is that through self-reflective thought and action—or critical praxis—a group of learners will problema-tize and openly legitimize or challenge their experiences and perceptions in an environment that is essentially unfree with contradictions of power imbalances in order to find their own truth and to create a better world in the image of that truth.

The roots of critical pedagogy are deep and far reaching. The first textbook use of the term critical pedagogy is found in Henry Giroux's Theory and Resistance in Education, published in 1983, and the most recent North American scholars of critical pedagogy include Peter McLaren, Ira Shor, Michael Apple, Antonia Darder, bell hooks, and Ernest Morrell. In North America, individuals shaping critical pedagogy included Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, John Dewey, Leonard Covello, Harold Rugg, Septima Clark, Myles Horton, and Charles Cobb. More specifically, Dewey's work linking individual and cooperative [Page 148]intelligence with the discourse of democracy and freedom helped critical pedagogy evolve. In Latin America, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is considered one of the most influential critical pedagogy educational philosophers, but the Latin American family of critical pedagogues also includes Simón Rodríguez, Simón Bolívar, Anisio Teixiera, Abidias Nascimento, Moisés Sáenz, José Vasconcelos, and Che Guevara, among others.

Freire's seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, expanded upon the work of other key influences to critical pedagogy, including the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault. The Frankfurt School was officially established in 1923 in Germany and included Marxist and Jewish philosophers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. The school was the ballast of critical theory used as a tool against domination of all forms and a key influence to critical pedagogy. Beyond Europe, African thinkers also directly impacted critical pedagogy and included Julius Nyerere, Amical Cabral, Franz Fanon, and Kwame Nkrumah.

Critical pedagogy envelopes numerous philosophical principles from a variety of intellectual traditions and due to the evolving nature of critical pedagogy, it would be impossible to create an exhaustive list of such principles in this entry. However, the following serve as a starting point for those interested in learning more about critical pedagogy. First, critical pedagogy is fundamentally committed to creating an emancipatory culture of schooling that empowers marginalized students. Second, critical pedagogy recognizes how traditional curricular programs work against the interests of those students who are most vulnerable in society by reproducing class differences and racialized inequality. Third, it is understood that educational practice is created within historical contexts. Thus, students must strive for agency by first recognizing how they are subjects of history and then understanding how they can be self-determined to create history. Fourth, critical pedagogy supports a dialectical perspective that recognizes how all analysis must begin with human existence that involves the interactive context between individual and society with theory and practice as coexistent. Critical pedagogy therefore provides students and teachers the space to achieve emancipation through educational practices that allow people to acquire, analyze, and produce both social and self-knowledge.

...