Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that has developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture. Advocates of critical pedagogy view teaching as an inherently political act, reject the neutrality of knowledge, and insist that issues of social justice and democracy itself are not distinct from acts of teaching and learning. The goal of critical pedagogy is emancipation from oppression through an awakening of the critical consciousness, based on the Portuguese term conscientização. When achieved, critical consciousness encourages individuals to effect change in their world through social critique and political action.
Background
The concept of critical pedagogy can be traced back to Paulo Freire's best-known 1968 work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire, a professor of history and the philosophy of education at the Federal University of Pernambuco
in Brazil, sought in this and other works to develop a philosophy of
adult education that demonstrated a solidarity with the poor in their
common struggle to survive by engaging them in a dialogue of greater
awareness and analysis. Although his family had suffered loss and hunger
during the Great Depression,
the poor viewed him and his formerly middle-class family "as people
from another world who happened to fall accidentally into their world". His intimate discovery of class and their borders "led, invariably, to Freire's radical rejection of a class-based society".
The influential works of Freire
made him arguably the most celebrated critical educator. He seldom used
the term "critical pedagogy" himself when describing this philosophy.
His initial focus targeted adult literacy
projects in Brazil and later was adapted to deal with a wide range of
social and educational issues. Freire's pedagogy revolved around an
anti-authoritarian and interactive approach aimed to examine issues of
relational power for students and workers.
The center of the curriculum used the fundamental goal based on social
and political critiques of everyday life. Freire's praxis required
implementation of a range of educational practices and processes with
the goal of creating not only a better learning environment but also a
better world. Freire himself maintained that this was not merely an
educational technique but a way of living in our educative practice.
Freire endorses students' ability to think critically about their
education situation; this way of thinking is thought by practitioners
of critical pedagogy to allow them to "recognize connections between
their individual problems and experiences and the social contexts in
which they are embedded".[4] Realizing one's consciousness ("conscientization", "conscientização") is then a needed first step of "praxis",
which is defined as the power and know-how to take action against
oppression while stressing the importance of liberating education.
"Praxis involves engaging in a cycle of theory, application, evaluation,
reflection, and then back to theory. Social transformation is the
product of praxis at the collective level."
Critical pedagogue Ira Shor, who was mentored by and worked closely with Freire from 1980 until Freire's death in 1997, defines critical pedagogy as:
Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse. (Empowering Education, 129)
Critical pedagogy explores the dialogic relationships between
teaching and learning. Its proponents claim that it is a continuous
process of what they call "unlearning", "learning", and "relearning",
"reflection", "evaluation", and the effect that these actions have on
the students, in particular students whom they believe have been
historically and continue to be disenfranchised by what they call
"traditional schooling".
The educational philosophy has since been developed by Henry Giroux and others since the 1980s as a praxis-oriented "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop a consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action". Freire wrote the introduction to his 1988 work, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning. Another leading critical pedagogy theorist who Freire called his "intellectual cousin", Peter McLaren,
wrote the foreword. McLaren and Giroux co-edited one book on critical
pedagogy and co-authored another in the 1990s. Among its other leading
figures in no particular order are bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), Joe L. Kincheloe, Patti Lather, Antonia Darder, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Peter McLaren, Joe L. Kincheloe, Khen Lampert, Howard Zinn, Donaldo Macedo, Sandy Grande, Michael Apple, and Stephanie Ledesma. Educationalists including Jonathan Kozol and Parker Palmer are sometimes included in this category. Other critical pedagogues known more for their Anti-schooling, unschooling, or deschooling perspectives include Ivan Illich, John Holt, Ira Shor, John Taylor Gatto, and Matt Hern.
Critical pedagogy has several other strands and foundations. Postmodern, anti-racist, feminist, postcolonial, and queer
theories all play a role in further expanding and enriching Freire's
original ideas about a critical pedagogy, shifting its main focus on
social class to include issues pertaining to religion, military identification, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and age. Much of the work also draws on anarchism, György Lukács, Wilhelm Reich, postcolonialism, and the discourse theories of Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Gilles Deleuze (rhizomatic learning) and Michel Foucault. Radical Teacher
is a magazine dedicated to critical pedagogy and issues of interest to
critical educators. Many contemporary critical pedagogues have embraced Postmodern, anti-essentialist perspectives of the individual, of language, and of power, "while at the same time retaining the Freirean emphasis on critique, disrupting oppressive regimes of power/knowledge, and social change".
Developments
Like critical theory itself, the field of critical pedagogy continues to evolve. Contemporary critical educators, such as bell hooks and Peter McLaren,
discuss in their criticisms the influence of many varied concerns,
institutions, and social structures, "including globalization, the mass
media, and race/spiritual relations", while citing reasons for resisting
the possibilities to change.
McLaren has developed a social movement based version of critical
pedagogy that he calls revolutionary critical pedagogy, emphasizing
critical pedagogy as a social movement for the creation of a democratic
socialist alternative to capitalism.
Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg have created the Paulo and Nita Freire Project for International Critical Pedagogy at McGill University.
In line with Kincheloe and Steinberg's contributions to critical
pedagogy, the project attempts to move the field to the next phase of
its evolution. In this second phase, critical pedagogy seeks to become a
worldwide, decolonizing movement dedicated to listening to and learning
from diverse discourses
of people from around the planet. Kincheloe and Steinberg also embrace
Indigenous knowledges in education as a way to expand critical pedagogy
and to question educational hegemony. Joe L. Kincheloe, in expanding on
the Freire's notion that a pursuit of social change alone could promote
anti-intellectualism, promotes a more balanced approach to education
than postmodernists.
We cannot simply attempt to cultivate the intellect without changing the unjust social context in which such minds operate. Critical educators cannot just work to change the social order without helping to educate a knowledgeable and skillful group of students. Creating a just, progressive, creative, and democratic society demands both dimensions of this pedagogical progress.
One of the major texts taking up the intersection between critical pedagogy and Indigenous knowledge(s) is Sandy Grande's, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). In agreement with this perspective,
Four Arrows, aka Don Trent Jacobs, challenges the anthropocentrism of
critical pedagogy and writes that to achieve its transformative goals
there are other differences between Western and Indigenous worldview
that must be considered. Approaching the intersection of Indigenous perspectives and pedagogy from another perspective, critical pedagogy of place examines the impacts of place.
In the classroom
Ira Shor, a professor at the City University of New York,
provides for an example of how critical pedagogy is used in the
classroom. He develops these themes in looking at the use of Freirean
teaching methods in the context of the everyday life of classrooms, in
particular, institutional settings. He suggests that the whole
curriculum of the classroom must be re-examined and reconstructed. He
favors a change of role of the student from object to active, critical
subject. In doing so, he suggests that students undergo a struggle for
ownership of themselves. He states that students have previously been
lulled into a sense of complacency by the circumstances of everyday life
and that through the processes of the classroom, they can begin to
envision and strive for something different for themselves.
Of course, achieving such a goal is not automatic nor easy, as he
suggests that the role of the teacher is critical to this process.
Students need to be helped by teachers to separate themselves from
unconditional acceptance of the conditions of their own existence. Once
this separation is achieved, then students may be prepared for critical
re-entry into an examination of everyday life. In a classroom
environment that achieves such liberating intent, one of the potential
outcomes is that the students themselves assume more responsibility for
the class. Power is thus distributed amongst the group and the role of
the teacher becomes much more mobile, not to mention more challenging.
This encourages the growth of each student's intellectual character
rather than a mere "mimicry of the professorial style."
Teachers, however, do not simply abdicate their authority in a student-centred
classroom. In the later years of his life, Freire grew increasingly
concerned with what he felt was a major misinterpretation of his work
and insisted that teachers cannot deny their position of authority.
Critical teachers, therefore, must admit that they are in a position of authority and then demonstrate that authority in their actions in supports of students... [A]s teachers relinquish the authority of truth providers, they assume the mature authority of facilitators of student inquiry and problem-solving. In relation to such teacher authority, students gain their freedom--they gain the ability to become self-directed human beings capable of producing their own knowledge.
— Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy Primer p. 17
And due to the student-centeredness that critical pedagogy insists
upon, there are inherent conflicts associated with the "large
collections of top-down content standards in their disciplines".[8] Critical pedagogy advocates insist that teachers themselves are vital to the discussion about Standards-based education reform in the United States because a pedagogy that requires a student to learn or a teacher to teach externally imposed information exemplifies the banking model of education
outlined by Freire where the structures of knowledge are left
unexamined. To the critical pedagogue, the teaching act must incorporate
social critique alongside the cultivation of intellect.
Joe L. Kincheloe argues that this is in direct opposition to the epistemological concept of positivism, where "social actions should proceed with law-like predictability". In this philosophy, a teacher and their students would be served by Standards-based education
where there is "only be one correct way to teach" as "[e]veryone is
assumed to be the same regardless of race, class, or gender". Donald Schön's
concept of "indeterminate zones of practice" illustrates how any
practice, especially ones with human subjects at their center, are
infinitely complex and highly contested, which amplify the critical
pedagogue's unwillingness to apply universal practices.
Furthermore, bell hooks,
who is greatly influenced by Freire, points out the importance of
engaged pedagogy and the responsibility that teachers, as well as
students, must have in the classroom:
Teachers must be aware of themselves as practitioners and as human beings if they wish to teach students in a non-threatening, anti-discriminatory way. Self-actualisation should be the goal of the teacher as well as the students.
Resistance from students
Students
sometimes resist critical pedagogy. Student resistance to critical
pedagogy can be attributed to a variety of reasons. Student objections
may be due to ideological reasons, religious or moral convictions, fear
of criticism, or discomfort with controversial issues. Kristen Seas
argues: "Resistance in this context thus occurs when students are asked
to shift not only their perspectives, but also their subjectivities as
they accept or reject assumptions that contribute to the pedagogical
arguments being constructed." Karen Kopelson asserts that resistance to new information or ideologies, introduced in the classroom, is a natural response to persuasive messages that are unfamiliar.
Resistance is often, at the least, understandably protective: As anyone who can remember her or his own first uneasy encounters with particularly challenging new theories or theorists can attest, resistance serves to shield us from uncomfortable shifts or all-out upheavals in perception and understanding-shifts in perception which, if honored, force us to inhabit the world in fundamentally new and different ways.
Kristen Seas further explains: "Students [often] reject the teacher's
message because they see it as coercive, they do not agree with it, or
they feel excluded by it."
Karen Kopelson concludes "that many if not most students come to the
university in order to gain access to and eventual enfranchisement in
'the establishment,' not to critique and reject its privileges."
To overcome student resistance to critical pedagogy, teachers must
enact strategic measures to help their students negotiate controversial
topics.
Critical pedagogy of teaching
The rapidly changing demographics of the classroom in the United States has resulted in an unprecedented amount of linguistic and cultural
diversity. In order to respond to these changes, advocates of critical
pedagogy call into question the focus on practical skills of teacher
credential programs. "[T]his practical focus far too often occurs
without examining teachers' own assumptions, values, and beliefs and how
this ideological posture informs, often unconsciously, their
perceptions and actions when working with linguistic-minority and other
politically, socially, and economically subordinated students."
As teaching is considered an inherently political act to the critical
pedagogue, a more critical element of teacher education becomes
addressing implicit biases (also known as implicit cognition or implicit stereotypes) that can subconsciously affect a teacher's perception of a student's ability to learn.
Advocates of critical pedagogy insist that teachers, then, must become learners alongside their students, as well as students of their students. They must become experts beyond their field of knowledge, and immerse themselves in the culture, customs, and lived experiences of the students they aim to teach.
History
During South African apartheid, legal racialization implemented by the regime drove members of the radical leftist
Teachers' League of South Africa to employ critical pedagogy with a
focus on nonracialism in Cape Town schools and prisons. Teachers
collaborated loosely to subvert the racist curriculum and encourage
critical examination of religious, military, political, and social
circumstances in terms of spirit-friendly, humanist, and democratic
ideologies. The efforts of such teachers are credited with having
bolstered student resistance and activism.
Criticism
Philosopher John Searle
characterizes the goal of Giroux's form of critical pedagogy "to create
political radicals", thus highlighting the antagonistic moral and
political grounds of the ideals of citizenship and "public wisdom." These varying moral perspectives of what is "right" are to be found in what John Dewey has referred to as the tensions between traditional and progressive education. Searle argues that critical pedagogy's objections to the Western canon are misplaced and/or disingenuous:
Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.
Maxine Hairston takes a hard line against critical pedagogy in the
first year college composition classroom and argues, "everywhere I turn I
find composition faculty, both leaders in the profession and new
voices, asserting that they have not only the right, but the duty, to
put ideology and radical politics at the center of their teaching." Hairston further confers,
When classes focus on complex issues such as racial discrimination, economic injustices, and inequities of class and gender, they should be taught by qualified faculty who have the depth of information and historical competence that such critical social issues warrant. Our society's deep and tangled cultural conflicts can neither be explained nor resolved by simplistic ideological formulas.
Sharon O'Dair (2003) says that today compositionists "focus [...] almost exclusively on ideological matters", and further argues that this focus is at the expense of proficiency of student writing skills in the composition classroom. To this end, O'Dair explains that "recently advocated working-class pedagogies privilege activism over" language instruction."
Jeff Smith argues that students want to gain, rather than to critique,
positions of privilege, as encouraged by critical pedagogues.
There are a wide variety of views in opposition to critical pedagogy in
the first year composition classroom, these are but a few.
