Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy is a political project that attempts to change the power structures of everyday life, especially in cultural institutions such as those in education and the media. These changes are brought about through critique, resistance, and struggle. It aims to enable people to avoid manipulation and to empower them. Critical pedagogy is closely linked with the history of cultural studies and its democratic idea of a “long revolution.”

The history of cultural studies shows that this project, with its intellectual and political nature, has since its beginning been closely linked to questions of education and pedagogy. This is because it originated in the vital and intellectually varied field of adult education in the 1950s in Great Britain. In productive exchange with mature students from working classes, Edward P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart developed their creative ideas on cultural analysis. In the context of adult education, for example, in workers' education, the roles of professor and student were not so clearly defined by hierarchy as in university. These untraditional students who had been denied access to higher education did not accept as inevitable the authority of professors, but rather applied what they learned to their own life, asked questions in class that had practical relevance to their own experience, and did not accept the borders between academic disciplines. These radical challenges not only made press, radio, and films, and so on themes alongside literature but also made it possible to bring students to view their own lives in the context of unequal social relationships. As a next step, it showed them ways in which their lives could be changed in order to create more social justice and equality. These institutions, alternatives to university, created a space for cultural studies in Great Britain.

In more recent studies, culture is described as a “network of embedded practices and representations (texts, images, talk, codes of behaviour, and the narrative structures organizing these)” (Frow and Morris 2000:316). Culture is the place where power relationships are legitimized but where they can also be challenged and changed. Cultural studies not only analyses but also has an interventionist character. Since the 1960s, the place of the working classes has been taken by new social movements, marginalized minorities, and oppressed groups whose agency ought to be increased by teaching them to socially contextualise their precise situation in life and to recognise and grasp opportunities to change.