Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons^™

Pushing Boundaries: Peter Mclaren On The Importance Of Critical Pedagogy Inside And Outside The Classroom, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies and Co-Director and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project at Chapman University in the USA. Regarded as one of the leading architects of critical pedagogy, McLaren re-envisions the philosophy of Freire in the context of contemporary issues, including the struggle of the LGBTQ community, racism, and economic inequalities. Research Outreach spoke with McLaren about how critical pedagogy evolved and what he imagines its future to be.

Social Justice And The Us Food System: A Critical Course On The Human Dimensions Of Food, Ali Brooks

Food Systems Master's Project Reports

Our world is made up of overlapping political, environmental, and economic spheres that engender social injustice and inequality. Though separate societal issues can seem divergent and unconnected, they are all linked together by one universal necessity: food. Because everyone eats, everyone is connected to—and dependent on—food and the systems that govern it. However, the impacts of our industrial food system are not felt equally among people who hold different positions of power within it.

Today’s industrial food complex operates on the capitalist principle of profit accumulation through exploitation, commodification, and extraction. This set of relations is not defined by scale …

Intervening In The School To Prison Pipeline For Students With Dis/Ability, Miruna Ouatu-Lascar

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

This workshop will explore the intersection of disability and ethnicity in order to assist workshop participants in analyzing the inequity present both within the construct of disability and race and how this intersectional inequity manifests within the special education system for students of color with disabilities and how such inequities contribute to the over representation of students of color with disabilities in the school to prison phenomenon. Furthermore, the workshop aims to give participants an understanding of Dis/Crit theory and how incorporating Dis/Crit pedagogy within the larger framework of Critical Pedagogy practice serves the needs of our most underserved students …

Capitalism, Migration, And Adult Education: Toward A Critical Project In The Second Language Learning Class, Alisha M.B. Heinemann, Lilia Monzó

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Migration has become both a consequence of and support structure for global racialised capitalism. A presumed source of support for the people who migrate is adult education, especially the second language learning class. However, as a state organized institution, the policies and practices that govern second-language courses serve to inculcate the ideologies and values that support a racialised capitalist system. We draw on two case examples – the U.S. and Germany – to demonstrate these entanglements. We engage Freire’s critical pedagogy wherein learning contexts encourage students to question the realities of their lives, and Foucault’s ideas regarding heterotopian places where …

Critical Intellectuals In Postdigital Times, Petar Jandrić, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

This article starts with a brief analysis of what it means to be an intellectual within the US tradition of critical pedagogy. Pointing toward important socio-technological transformations which have taken place in the past few decades, the article situates the concept of the intellectual into the contemporary postdigital context. The article looks into two main areas of intellectual work which seem to have undergone significant transformations—automation and post-truth. It develops possible responses to recent challenges in these areas and shows that contemporary intellectuals working in the tradition of critical pedagogy need to take technology seriously. Heading toward the conclusion, the …

Foreword: The Dispossessed Majority: Resisting The Second Redemption In América Posfascista (Postfascist America) With Latcrit Scholarship, Community, And Praxis Amidst The Global Pandemic, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

Articles

As LatCrit reaches its twenty-fifth anniversary, we aspire for this symposium Foreword to remind its readers of LatCrit’s foundational propositions and ongoing efforts to cultivate new generations of ethical advocates who can systemically analyze the sociolegal conditions that engender injustice and intervene strategically to help create enduring sociolegal, and cultural, change. Working for lasting social change from an antisubordination perspective enables us to see the myriad laws, regulations, policies, and practices that, by intent or effect, enforce the inferior social status of historically- and contemporarily-oppressed groups. In turn, working with a perspective and principle of antisubordination can inspire us to …

Reflections On Critical Pedagogy In America Latina: La Lucha Continua, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"When I speak in Mexico, I support efforts there to create a revolutionary critical pedagogy—one that has not been domesticated and depotentiated by neoliberal dogma. This means the inclusion of a decolonial pedagogy which challenges the “coloniality of power” (patron de poder colonial) that still resides at the heart of post-colonial societies. I would advise as a central, overarching goal of critical pedagogy the struggle for a socialist alternative to the “value form of labor” that exists in capitalist societies throughout North and South America, and that such efforts must be transnational in scope since capitalism is now transnational in …

Systems Thinking In A Second Grade Curriculum: Students Engaged To Address A Statewide Drought, Margaret Sauceda Curwen, Amy Ardell, Laurie Macgillivray, Rachel Lambert

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Faced with issues, such as drought and climate change, educators around the world acknowledge the need for developing students’ ability to solve problems within and across contexts. A systems thinking pedagogy, which recognizes interdependence and interconnected relationships among concrete elements and abstract concepts (Meadows, 2008; Senge et al., 2012), has potential to transform the classroom into a space of observing, theorizing, discovering, and analyzing, thus linking academic learning to the real world. In a qualitative case study in one school located in a major metropolitan area in California, USA teachers and their 7- and 8-year-old students used systems thinking in …

Fostering Democratic Patriotism Through Critical Pedagogy, Hillary Parkhouse

Occasional Paper Series

When I was a high school US history teacher in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, I sometimes wondered about the relationship between patriotism and critique of one’s nation. Specifically, I questioned just how critical students could be without becoming disaffected toward the United States. I tried to be honest with my students about the nation’s mixed record of democracy—how the country was founded on ideals of equality and yet stole land from Native Americans, kidnapped millions of Africans as part of a massive system of chattel slavery, and denied the vote to women until 1920. But I …

Paulo Freire And Liberation Theology: The Christian Consciousness Of Critical Pedagogy, Peter Mclaren, Petar Jandrić

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"In this article we expand our work towards intersections and relationships between liberation theology and Paulo Freire. While Freire addressed liberation theology in his writings fairly sporadically (e.g. »The Politics of Education« [1985]), there is no doubt that he »lived a liberating Christian faith« and »significantly contributed to the thinking of liberation theology« (Kyrilo 2011, p. 167). Now that Paulo Freire is no longer with us, arguably the best way to reinvent his works for the present moment is through dialogue with Peter McLaren: Freire’s close friend, »intellectual relative« (Freire 1995, p. x), and one of the key contemporary thinkers …

How Do Teachers Challenge Neoliberalism Through Critical Pedagogy Within And Outside Of The Classroom?, Rezvan Shahsavari-Googhari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis uses the qualitative case study approach to investigate current strategies and skills four Ontario public secondary school teachers apply both within and outside of the classroom to enhance students’ critical consciousness. The focus is on teachers’ pedagogical work in the era of neoliberal restructuring in order to provide a rich account of how neoliberalism challenges and affects their teaching. Existing literature shows a crisis of identity and political agency among youth in many Western societies, characterized by individuals’ inability to think critically about social, political and economic issues, which is rooted in neoliberal education reforms. Adopting a critical …

Democratic Foundations For Spiritually Responsive Pedagogy, Audrey Lingley

Democracy and Education

Spirituality has been identified as an important component of democratic education by influential scholars such as Dewey, Freire, hooks, and Noddings. However, many teachers in the United States do not engage openly with a framework for understanding, organizing, and integrating pedagogical knowledge of spirituality within the context of culturally conscious social justice education. Drawing from an analysis of the works of Dewey, Noddings, Freire, and hooks and using a critical construct of spirituality that emphasizes inquiry, practical experience, meaning making, and awareness of interconnectedness, I argue that spiritually responsive pedagogy is a vital element of emancipatory, culturally responsive education in …

Critical Pedagogy And Participatory Democracy: Creating Classroom Contexts That Challenge “Common Sense”, Lilia D. Monzó, P. Zitlali Morales

Education Faculty Articles and Research

In this response to “The Political Nuances of Narratives and an Urban Educator’s Response,” the authors applaud Pearman’s critical approach to deconstructing and challenging narratives of heroic figures who single-handedly change the world and agree with him that these narratives restrict the sense of agency that may propel citizens to become actively involved in social change efforts. We argue that it is important to question why these narratives exist and to understand them in light of the hegemonic capitalist structure that exploits the masses in service to the capitalist class. Although we agree with Pearman that democracy is best served …

A Forward To The Special Issue On Neoliberalism In Education The Long Road To Redemption: Critical Pedagogy And The Struggle For The Future, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Peter McLaren introduces a special issue of Texas Education Review focused on Neoliberalism in Education by advocating for critical pedagogy in the face of the challenges and harms wrought by American capitalism, politics, and "economic exploitation, racism, homophobia, sexism, imperialism, the coloniality of power and White supremacy".

Rethinking Critical Literacy In The New Information Age, Panayota Gounari

Panayota Gounari

This article looks at new information and communication technologies (ICTs) as sites of public pedagogy in that they produce particular forms of knowledge and literacies and reproduce representations that are always mediated through specific social relations. Public pedagogy as a process that constitutes a broader category beyond classroom practices, official curricula, and educational canons, extends to all sectors of human life, including virtual spaces. No longer restricted to traditional sites of learning such as educational or religious sites, public pedagogy produces new forms of knowledge and apprenticeship and new narratives for agency and for naming the world. Virtual spaces as …

Demythifying Multicultural Education: Social Semiotics As A Tool Of Critical Pedagogy, Stephanie Urso Spina

Publications and Research

This article discusses the assumptions and curricular implications of a social semiotic approach to education. Semiotics refers to the meaning we make with language as well as other objects. events, and actions. Social semiotics emphasizes the social, cultural, historic, and political contexts that shape that meaning. A social semiotic approach to education can help teachers and teacher educators to deconstruct the reproduction of class, politicize the ideology of colonialism, and overcome the inequities they engender. By providing a way to challenge selectively reproduced cultural politics, social semiotics provides a way to reconstruct and democratize schools and society.

Critical Literacy And Postcolonial Praxis: A Freirian Perspective, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"This essay examines the relationship among language, experience, and historical agency. It does so in the context of recent work in critical literacy and critical pedagogy. My discussion takes its bearings from the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, described in a recent interview with Carlos Alberto Torres as "the prime 'animateur' for pedagogical innovation and change in the second half of this century" (12). In part this essay stands as a poststructuralist and postcolonialist rereading of Freire that, while to a certain extent "reinventing" his work in light of perspectives selectively culled from contemporary social theory, attempts to remain …