EDLPS 5XX: Critical Pedagogy: A History of an Idea, 1970- Present
Instructor: XXXXXXXXXXXX
Monday: 4:30-6:50
The Library of Congress lists 342 books under the subject heading “critical pedagogy.”
A JSTOR search reveals 1,278 articles using the term “critical pedagogy.’
Critical pedagogy is ubiquitous.
But what is it?
Critical pedagogy has emerged as one of the field’s most frequently used and most contested terms. Is it a social theory or is it a teaching method? Is it a project specific to a particular intellectual and political tradition or is the term more elastic, useful in describing a range of progressive approaches to thinking about and ‘doing’ education?
This course is intended to offer some historical perspective on critical pedagogy. We will read, write about, and discuss some of the formative texts and arguments about critical pedagogy over the past 40 years, from the publication of Paulo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970 up through feminist and critical race critiques that are resounding today.
Course conversations should deepen our understanding of the relationship between school and society and our thinking about teaching and learning. The course should also help orient us to major social theory debates in the field and improve our ability to read and unpack theoretical texts that continue to shape educational research and practice.
Readings will include three books and several essays: Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Henry Giroux’s Theory and Resistance in Education: An Education for the Opposition (1983), Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell’s The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools (2008), and essays from scholars such as Kathleen Weiler, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Jennifer Gore, Carmen Luke, Patti Lather, C. Alejandra Elenes, Gloria Ladson-Billings, William Tate, Zeus Leonardo, Ricky Lee Allen, Peter McLaren and others.
To me, beginning a course with questions seems like a very worthwhile ideal - we should have a purpose and intention about what it is we would like to be doing in pedagogical spaces. Here, however, we don't see the same kinds of questions being posed that have arisen in every course on critical pedagogy (this is now my fourth) that I've been in. That is, very few of us come to critical pedagogy with questions about the links between school and society or even the relationship between teaching and learning. Perhaps better put, these are such broad categories, someone who says they are interested in school and society is either referencing Dewey or is saying something akin to "I'm pro-education." Critical pedagogy attracts those who already see themselves as engaged in political work, who see schools as sites of reproduction for an oppressive society, and who retain their hope that education as the practice of freedom is possible if not in schools, but in classrooms (hooks, 1994).
So then, I'm wondering about this blurb on the course and who it was intended to attract. The course ran in the college of education, and was taught in the educational leadership and policy department of that college. Those who do not come to this course with a background in schools of education would be aided here by knowing that Curriculum and Instruction is often seen as more teaching-focused, than the more policy oriented Educational leadership departments. While there is great overlap, there is also often a very different kind of focus in terms of the purposes for a course and the kinds of scholarship the two departments seek to produce. My hunch here is that this course was not actually about "how to do" critical pedagogy, but more about what critical pedagogy means and has meant in the research and writing on critical teaching over the past 40 years.
But here I have to pause, and think of one of my favorite educational writers Gloria Ladson-Billings. She has a wonderful chapter titled "Yes, But How Do We Do It?" where she writes about her experience with pre-service teachers learning about culturally relevant pedagogy. She tells her students plainly that she cannot tell them "how" to do it, because then they'd just go do it, without thinking about who was in the space, what needs were present in that unique pedagogical space, and what they as the instructor brought with them (as we all do, teachers and students alike) into the classroom. Conversations about whether or not one is doing critical pedagogy seem far less important to me now than they did just three years ago when I was constantly asking myself if what I was doing in my classroom was properly Frierean.
Ladson-Billings ends her chapter by distinguishing between doing and being in classrooms. I believe her advise to her undergraduate pre-service teachers is well worth taking here as we continue our work to make sense of critical pedagogy and define for ourselves what our commitments to such a pedagogy and politics mean for our work in classrooms. She tells them that she is far less concerned with what they do in their classrooms, but rather she's worried about who it is they will be. So, when I use this article in my classroom, I always ask my students to try something - instead of asking "what will I do in class" ask "who will I be?" It is this move that brings the concept of praxis to its most profound application in thinking about pedagogy. We must stop asking if we are doing critical pedagogy, and ask instead if we are being critical pedagogues.
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