The SAGE Handbook of

Critical Pedagogies
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 The SAGE Handbook of
Critical Pedagogies

Volume 1

Edited by
Shirley R. Steinberg
and Barry Down
Assistant Editor
Janean Robinson
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data
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ISBN 978-1-5264-1148-8
Introduction © Barry Down and Shirley R.
Steinberg, 2020
Editorial arrangement © Shirley R. Steinberg
and Barry Down, 2020
Section 1 Introduction © Shirley R. Steinberg,
2020
Chapter 1 © SAGE Publications, 1983
Chapter 2 © Lilia I. Bartolomé, 2020
Chapter 3 © John Willinsky, 2020
Chapter 4 © Deborah P. Britzman, 2020
Chapter 5 © Ramón Flecha, 2020
Chapter 6 © William H. Schubert, 2020
Chapter 7 © David Geoffrey Smith, 2020
Chapter 8 © Hermán S. García, 2020
Chapter 9 © Marcella Runell Hall, 2020
Chapter 10 © Arlo Kempf, 2020
Chapter 11 © Paul L. Thomas, 2020
Chapter 12 © Christine E. Sleeter, 2020
Chapter 13 © William Ayers, 2020
Chapter 14 © Luis Huerta-Charles, 2020
Chapter 15 © D’Arcy Martin, 2020
Section 2 Introduction © Paul R. Carr and Gina
Thésée, 2020
Chapter 16 © Joe L. Kincheloe, 2020
Chapter 17 © Benjamin Frymer, 2020
Chapter 18 © Soudeh Oladi, 2020
Chapter 19 © Philip M. Anderson, 2020
Chapter 20 © Rodney Handelsman, 2020
Chapter 21 © Antonio Garcia, 2020
Chapter 22 © Nathan Snaza, 2020
Chapter 23 © Cathryn Teasley and Alana
Butler, 2020
Chapter 24 © Marlon Simmons, 2020
Chapter 25 © Peter Pericles Trifonas, 2020
Chapter 26 © Marc Spooner, 2020
Chapter 27 © Jane McLean, 2020
Chapter 28 © Michalinos Zembylas, 2020
Section 3 Introduction © Gregory Martin, 2020
Chapter 29 © James D. Kirylo, 2020
Chapter 30 © Robert F. Carley, 2020
Chapter 31 © Stephanie Troutman, 2020
Chapter 32 © Samuel D. Rocha and Martha
Sañudo, 2020
Chapter 33 © Robert Hattam, 2020
Chapter 34 © Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs, 2020
Chapter 35 © Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa
Sordé Martí, 2020
Chapter 36 © Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid
McAuliffe, 2020
Chapter 37 © Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter
McLaren, 2020
Chapter 38 © Shirley R. Steinberg, 2020
Section 4 Introduction © Cathryn Teasley, 2020
Chapter 39 © Domenica Maviglia, 2020
Chapter 40 © Colin Chasi and Ylva Rodny-
Gumede, 2020
Chapter 41 © Juan Ríos Vega, 2020
Chapter 42 © Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina
Stefanidou and Constantine Skordoulis, 2020
Chapter 43 © Madhulika Sagaram, 2020
Chapter 44 © Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner,
Michaela P. Stone and Marco Montalbetti
Viñuela, 2020
Chapter 45 © Brian Dotts, 2020
Chapter 46 © Kathalene A. Razzano, 2020
Chapter 47 © Jaime Usma, Oscar A. Peláez,
Yuliana Palacio and Catalina Jaramillo, 2020
Chapter 48 © Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo
Bui, 2020
Chapter 49 © Henry A. Giroux, 2020
Section 5 Introduction © Four Arrows and R.
Michael Fisher, 2020
Chapter 50 © R. Michael Fisher and Four
Arrows, 2020
Chapter 51 © Ann Milne, 2020
Chapter 52 © Jeremy Garcia, 2020
Chapter 53 © Shashi Shergill and David
Scott, 2020
Chapter 54 © Jennifer M. Markides, 2020
Chapter 55 © Adrienne Sansom, 2020
Chapter 56 © Renee Desmarchelier, 2020
Chapter 57 © Perry R. James, 2020
Chapter 58 © Rose Marsters, 2020
Section 6 Introduction © Robert Hattam, 2020
Chapter 59 © John Smyth, 2020
Chapter 60 © Tricia M. Kress, 2020
Chapter 61 © Concepción Sánchez-Blanco, 2020
Chapter 62 © Sandro Carnicelli and Karla
Boluk, 2020
Chapter 63 © Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila
E. Villaverde, 2020
Chapter 64 © Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A.
Solyom and Bryan Brayboy, 2020
Chapter 65 © Haggith Gor Ziv, 2020
Chapter 66 © Teresa Anne Fowler, 2020
Chapter 67 © Sheryl J. Lieb, 2020
Chapter 68 © Barry Down, 2020
Section 7 Introduction © Barry Down, 2020
Chapter 69 © David Zyngier, 2020
Chapter 70 © Khadija Mohammed, Lisa
McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz, 2020
Chapter 71 © Revital Zilonka, 2020
Chapter 72 © Gang Zhu and Zhengmei
Peng, 2020
Chapter 73 © Phillip Boda, 2020
Chapter 74 © Guofang Li and Pramod K.
Sah, 2020
Chapter 75 © Galia Zalmanson Levi, 2020
Chapter 76 © Ramón Flecha and Silvia
Molina, 2020
Section 8 Introduction © Michael B.
MacDonald, 2020
Chapter 77 © Silvia Cristina Bettez and
Cristina Maria Dominguez, 2020
Chapter 78 © Awad Ibrahim, 2020
Chapter 79 © Maria Padrós and Sandra
Girbés-Peco, 2020
Chapter 80 © Elbert J. Hawkins III, 2020
Chapter 81 © Shuntay Z. Tarver and Melanie
M. Acosta, 2020
Chapter 82 © Toby Rollo, J. Cynthia McDermott,
Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel, 2020
Chapter 83 © Tanya Brown Merriman, 2020
Chapter 84 © April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams, 2020
Chapter 85 © Sherilyn Lennon, 2020
Chapter 86 © Annette Coburn and David
Wallace, 2020
Section 9 Introduction © Michael Hoechsmann,
2020
Chapter 87 © Jeff Share, 2020
Chapter 88 © Michael Hoechsmann and
Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín, 2020
Chapter 89 © Sabrina Boyer, 2020
Chapter 90 © Brian C. Johnson, 2020
Chapter 91 © Tony Kashani, 2020
Chapter 92 © Juha Suoranta, 2020
Chapter 93 © Cherie Ann Turpin, 2020
Chapter 94 © Ki Wight, 2020
Chapter 95 © SAGE Publications, 2011
Chapter 96 © Gerald Walton, 2020
Section 10 Introduction © Leila E. Villaverde
and Roymieco A. Carter, 2020
Chapter 97 © Gregory Martin, 2020
Chapter 98 © Leila E. Villaverde & Roymieco
A. Carter, 2020
Chapter 99 © Judith Dunkerly-Bean and
Kristine Sunday, 2020
Chapter 100 © I. Malik Saafir, 2020
Chapter 101 © Michael B. MacDonald, 2020
Chapter 102 © Claire Robson and Dennis
Sumara, 2020
Chapter 103 © Peter R. Wright, 2020
Chapter 104 © Mary Drinkwater, 2020
Chapter 105 © Lalenja Harrington, 2020
Chapter 106 © Christopher Lee Kennedy, 2020
Section 11 Introduction © Shirley R. Steinberg,
2020
Chapter 107 © Douglas Kellner and Roslyn M.
Satchel, 2020
Chapter 108 © Andrew Hickey, 2020
Chapter 109 © Priya Parmar, 2020
Chapter 110 © Dawn N. Hicks Tafari and
Veronica A. Newton, 2020
Chapter 111 © Tony Edwards and Kerry J.
Renwick, 2020
Chapter 112 © Paul L. Thomas, 2020
Chapter 113 © Nwachi Pressley-Tafari, 2020
Chapter 114 © Mark Helmsing, 2020
Chapter 115 © Teresa J. Rishel, 2020
Chapter 116 © Jo Lampert and Kerry Mallan, 2020
Section 12 Introduction © Renee
Desmarchelier, 2020
Chapter 117 © Stephanie L. Hudson, 2020
Chapter 118 © Joseph Carroll-Miranda, 2020
Chapter 119 © Sarah E. Colonna, 2020
Chapter 120 © Edmund Adjapong, 2020
Chapter 121 © Jennifer D. Adams, Atasi Das
and Eun-Ji Amy Kim, 2020
Chapter 122 © Shawn Arango Ricks, 2020
Chapter 123 © Constance Russell, 2020
Chapter 124 © Marissa Bellino, 2020
Chapter 125 © Jodi Latremouille, 2020
 We dedicate this set of books to the notion of social justice in education…to making a
difference, to causing a fracture, to reading between the lines…to criticalizing the work we
do as educators. And to the memory of Paulo Freire, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Jesús Pato
Gómez, who paved the way…leaving us far too early.
Shirley and Barry
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Dedication v
List of Figures xvii
List of Tablesxix
Notes on the Editors and Contributorsxx
Acknowledgementsxxxix
Introduction to the Handbookxl
Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg

VOLUME 1

SECTION I READING PAULO FREIRE 1

Shirley R. Steinberg

1 The Importance of the Act of Reading 3

Paulo Freire; translated by Loretta Slover

2 Linking My World to the Word 9

Lilia I. Bartolomé

3 Freire Contra Freire: An Interplay in Three Acts 13

John Willinsky

4 A Note on Free Association as Transference to Reading 17

Deborah P. Britzman

5 Dialogic and Liberating Actions 20

Ramón Flecha

6 In the Spirit of Freire 22

William H. Schubert

7 Fake News and Other Conundrums in ‘Reading the World’ at Empire’s End 29
David Geoffrey Smith

8 Freire’s ‘Act of Reading’: Inspiring and Emboldening 38

Hermán S. García

9 In Gratitude to Freire 40
Marcella Runell Hall

10 Of Word, World, and Being (Online) 42

Arlo Kempf
viii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

11 The Critical Redneck Experience 46

Paul L. Thomas

12 On Learning to Claim Text 48

Christine E. Sleeter

13 ‘I Am a Revolutionary!’ 51
William Ayers

14 The Importance of Paulo Freire in the ‘Act of Reading’ 59

Luis Huerta-Charles

15 Share and Sustain: Two Steps to Paulo 62

D’Arcy Martin

SECTION II SOCIAL THEORIES 67

Paul R. Carr and Gina Thésée

16 Critical Pedagogy and the Knowledge Wars of the 21st Century 75

Joe L. Kincheloe

17 The Frankfurt School and Education 94

Benjamin Frymer

18 The Nomad, The Hybrid: Deconstructing the Notion of Subjectivity

Through Freire and Rumi 104
Soudeh Oladi

19 The Reader, the Text, the Restraints: A Cultural History of the Art(s)
of Reading 118
Philip M. Anderson

20 Deleuzeguattarian Concepts for a Becoming Critical Pedagogy 135

Rodney Handelsman

21 Specters of Critical Pedagogy: Must We Die in Order to Survive? 157

Antonio Garcia

22 Critical Pedagogy Beyond the Human 173

Nathan Snaza

23 Intersecting Critical Pedagogies to Counter Coloniality 186

Cathryn Teasley and Alana Butler

24 Locating Black Life within Colonial Modernity: Decolonial Notes 205

Marlon Simmons
 Contents ix

25 Critical Pedagogy and Difference 218

Peter Pericles Trifonas

26 Critical Pedagogy Imperiled as Neoliberalism, Marketization, and

Audit Culture Become the Academy 225
Marc Spooner

27 Critical Pedagogy: Negotiating the Nuances of Implementation 236

Jane McLean

28 Critical Pedagogies of Compassion 254

Michalinos Zembylas

SECTION III KEY FIGURES IN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY 269

Gregory Martin

29 Meeting the Critical Pedagogues: A North America Context

(Paulo Freire and Beyond) 273
James D. Kirylo

30 Gramscian Critical Pedagogy: A Holistic and Social Genre Approach 289

Robert F. Carley

31 Still Teaching to Transgress: Reflecting on Critical Pedagogy with bell hooks 302
Stephanie Troutman

32 Ivan Illich and Liberation Theology 310

Samuel D. Rocha and Martha Sañudo

33 From South African Black Theology and Freire to ‘Teaching for

Resistance’: The Work of Basil Moore 320
Robert Hattam

34 Coming to Critical Pedagogy in Spain Through Life and Literature:

Jurjo Torres Santomé and Ramón Flecha 334
Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs

35 Interviews with Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí 346

Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí

36 Interview with Henry A. Giroux 352

Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid McAuliffe

37 Interviews with Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren 368

Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren

38 Influenced by Critical Pedagogy: Interviews with Critical Friends 380

Shirley R. Steinberg
x THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

SECTION IV GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES 401

Cathryn Teasley

39 From Theory to Practice: The Identikit and Purpose of Critical Pedagogy 405
Domenica Maviglia

40 Reimagining the University as a Transit Place and Space:

A Contribution to the Decolonisation Debate 416
Colin Chasi and Ylva Rodny-Gumede

41 When I Open My Alas: Developing a Transnational Mariposa Consciousness 428

Juan Ríos Vega

42 Critical Pedagogy and the Acceptance of Refugees in Greece 439

Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina Stefanidou and Constantine Skordoulis

43 Indigenous Critical Pedagogy in Underserved Environments in India 453

Madhulika Sagaram

44 (Dis)Ruptive Glocality Through Teacher Exchange: Realizing Pedagogical

Love in the Chilean Context 469
Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Michaela P. Stone, and Marco Montalbetti Viñuela

45 The Sun Never Sets on the Privatization Movement: A Return to

the Heart of Darkness in a Neoliberal and Neoimperialist World 480
Brian Dotts

46 Teaching Global Affairs: Problem-posing Pedagogy and the Violence

of Indifference 496
Kathalene A. Razzano

47 Promoting Critical Consciousness in the Preparation of Teachers in Colombia 505

Jaime A. Usma, Oscar A. Peláez, Yuliana Palacio, and Catalina Jaramillo

48 Vietnamese Students and the Emerging Model Minority Myth in Germany 518
Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo Bui

49 Revisiting Hurricane Katrina: Racist Violence and the Biopolitics of

Disposability537
Henry A. Giroux

VOLUME 2

SECTION V INDIGENOUS WAYS OF KNOWING 547

Four Arrows and R. Michael Fisher

50 Indigenizing Conscientization and Critical Pedagogy: Integrating Nature,

Spirit and Fearlessness as Foundational Concepts 551
R. Michael Fisher and Four Arrows
 Contents xi

51 A Critical, Culturally Sustaining, Pedagogy of Whānau 561

Ann Milne

52 Critical Indigenous Pedagogies of Resistance: The Call for

Critical Indigenous Educators 574
Jeremy Garcia

53 Ethical Relationality as a Pathway for Non-Indigenous Educators to

Decolonize Curriculum and Instruction 587
Shashi Shergill and David Scott

54 Flooded, between Two Worlds: Holding the Memory of What Used to

Be Against the Reality of What Exists Now 604
Jennifer M. Markides

55 Dance and Children’s Cultural Identity: A Critical Perspective of the

Embodiment of Place 630
Adrienne Sansom

56 Indigenous Knowledges and Science Education: Complexities,

Considerations and Praxis 642
Renee Desmarchelier

57 Navajo Sweat House Leadership: Acquiring Traditional Navajo

Leadership for Restoring Identity in Our Forgotten World 658
Perry R. James

58 The Navigator’s Path: Journey Through Story and Ngākau

Pedagogy664
Rose Marsters

SECTION VI EDUCATION AND PRAXIS 677

Robert Hattam

59 A Critical Pedagogy of Working Class Schooling: A Call to

Activist Theory and Practice 681
John Smyth

60 Critical Pedagogy as Research 694

Tricia M. Kress

61 Poverty and Equality in Early Childhood Education 704

Concepción Sánchez-Blanco

62 Critical Tourism Pedagogy: A Response to Oppressive Practices 717

Sandro Carnicelli and Karla Boluk
xii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

63 Queer(ing) Cisgender Normativity: Reconsidering Critical Pedagogy

Through a Genderqueer Lens 729
Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila E. Villaverde

64 Culturally Responsive Schooling as a Form of Critical Pedagogies for

Indigenous Youth and Tribal Nations 743
Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A. Solyom and Bryan Brayboy

65 Feminist Critical Pedagogy 758

Haggith Gor Ziv

66 Schooling, Milieu, Racism: Just Another Brick in the Wall 771

Teresa Anne Fowler

67 An Existentialist Pedagogy of Humanization: Countering Existential

Oppression of Teachers and Students in Neoliberal Educational Spaces 783
Sheryl J. Lieb

68 Vocational Education and Training in Schools and ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ 797
Barry Down

SECTION VII TEACHING AND LEARNING 811

Barry Down

69 Critical Pedagogy, Social Justice and Contesting Definitions of

Engagement in the Classroom 815
David Zyngier

70 Critical Pedagogy and Anti-Muslim Racism Education: Insights from the UK 828
Khadija Mohammed, Lisa McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz

71 Pedagogy of Connectedness: Cultivating a Community of Caring,

Compassionate Social Justice Warriors in the Classroom 841
Revital Zilonka

72 Counternarratives: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Critical Caring

in One Urban School 854
Gang Zhu and Zhengmei Peng

73 ‘More than an Educator but a Political Figure’: Leveraging the Overlapping

Intersections of Disability Studies and Critical Pedagogy in Teacher Education 869
Phillip Boda

74 Critical Pedagogy for Preservice Teacher Education in the US:

An Agenda for a Plurilingual Reality of Superdiversity 884
Guofang Li and Pramod K. Sah
 Contents xiii

75 Teaching Social Justice 899

Galia Zalmanson Levi

76 Creating Global Learning Communities 909

Ramón Flecha and Silvia Molina

SECTION VIII COMMUNITIES AND ACTIVISM 923

Michael B. MacDonald

77 Moving from Individual Consciousness Raising to Critical

Community Building Praxis 927
Silvia Cristina Bettez and Cristina Maria Dominguez

78 Arab Spring as Critical Pedagogy: Activism in the Face of Death 941

Awad Ibrahim

79 Schools as Learning Communities 950

Maria Padrós and Sandra Girbés-Peco

80 Love Unconditionally: Educating People in the Midst of a Social Crisis 961

Elbert J. Hawkins III

81 ‘We Do It All the Time’: Afrocentric Pedagogies for Raising

Consciousness and Collective Responsibility 974
Shuntay Z. Tarver and Melanie M. Acosta

82 Critical Pedagogy, Democratic Praxis, and Adultism 989

Toby Rollo, J. Cynthia McDermott, Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel

83 Presence and Resilience as Resistance 1003

Tanya Brown Merriman

84 African American Mothers Theorizing Practice 1016

April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams

85 Deploying Critical Bricolage as Activism 1025

Sherilyn Lennon

86 Critical Community Education: The Case of Love Stings 1036

Annette Coburn and David Wallace

VOLUME 3

SECTION IX COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA 1055

Michael Hoechsmann

87 Mediating the Curriculum with Critical Media Literacy 1059

Jeff Share
xiv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

88 Empowerment and Participation in Media Education: A Critical Review 1074

Michael Hoechsmann and Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín

89 Dangerous Citizenship: Comics and Critical Pedagogy 1083

Sabrina Boyer

90 It’s ‘Reel’ Critical: Media Literacy and Film-based Pedagogy 1097

Brian C. Johnson

91 Critical Media Literacy 1115

Tony Kashani

92 Critical Pedagogy and Wikilearning 1126

Juha Suoranta

93 Diversity in Digital Humanities 1139

Cherie Ann Turpin

94 Missing Beats: Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in Post-secondary

Media Production Programs 1146
Ki Wight

95 A Shock to Thought: Curatorial Judgment and the Public Exhibition of

‘Difficult Knowledge’ 1157
Roger I. Simon

96 In a Rape Culture, Can Boys Actually Be Boys? 1175

Gerald Walton

SECTION X ARTS AND AESTHETICS 1187

Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter

97 Critical Public Pedagogies of DIY 1191

Gregory Martin

98 OASIS – (Re)conceptualizing Galleries as Intentionally Pedagogical 1206

Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter

99 Critical Pedagogy and the Visual Arts: Examining Perceptions of

Poverty and Social Justice in Early Childhood Research with Children 1220
Judith Dunkerly-Bean and Kristine Sunday

100 Performance Pedagogy Using the Theater of Justice 1233

I. Malik Saafir

101 Thanks for Being Local: CineMusicking as a Critical Pedagogy of

Popular Music 1242
Michael B. MacDonald
 Contents xv

102 Critical Life Writing for Social Change 1255

Claire Robson and Dennis Sumara

103 Towards a Critical Arts Practice 1269

Peter R. Wright

104 Theorizing a New Pedagogical Model: Transformative Arts and

Cultural Praxis Circle 1279
Mary Drinkwater

105 Through a Rhizomatic Lens: Synergies between A/r/tography,

Community Engaged Research, and Critical Pedagogy with Students
with Intellectual Disabilities 1294
Lalenja Harrington

106 The Pedagogical Afterthought: Situating Socially Engaged Art as

Critical Public Pedagogy 1313
Christopher Lee Kennedy

SECTION XI CRITICAL YOUTH STUDIES 1327

Shirley R. Steinberg

107 Resisting Youth: From Occupy Through Black Lives Matter to

the Trump Resistance 1329
Douglas Kellner and Roslyn M. Satchel

108 Where Does Critical Pedagogy Happen? Young People, ‘Relational

Pedagogy’ and the Interstitial Spaces of School 1343
Andrew Hickey

109 Lyrical Minded: Unveiling the Hidden Literacies of Youth Through

Performance Pedagogy 1358
Priya Parmar

110 ‘They Laugh ’Cause They Assume I’m in Prison’: HipHop Feminism as
Critical Pedagogy 1365
Dawn N. Hicks Tafari and Veronica A. Newton

111 Young People, Agency and the Paradox of Trust 1374

Tony Edwards and Kerry J. Renwick

112 Excavating Intimacy, Privacy, and Consent as Youth in a Hostile World:

A Critical Journey 1386
Paul L. Thomas

113 Art and Erotic Exploration as Critical Pedagogy with Youth 1400
Nwachi Pressley-Tafari
xvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

114 Youth, Becoming-American, and Learning the Vietnam War 1411

Mark Helmsing

115 The Bully, the Bullied, and the Boss: The Power Triangle of Youth Suicide 1421
Teresa J. Rishel

116 Pedagogies of Trauma, Fear and Hope in Texts about 9/11 for Young
People: From a Perspective of Distance 1439
Jo Lampert and Kerry Mallan

SECTION XII SCIENCE, ECOLOGY AND WELLBEING 1451

Renee Desmarchelier

117 Critical Body Pedagogies in Technoscience 1455

Stephanie L. Hudson

118 Computer Science Education and the Role of Critical Pedagogy in a

Digital World 1464
Joseph Carroll-Miranda

119 Where the Fantastic Liberates the Mundane: Feminist Science Fiction
and the Imagination 1476
Sarah E. Colonna

120 Conceptualizing Hip-Hop as a Conduit toward Developing Science Geniuses 1486

Edmund Adjapong

121 The Crit-Trans Heuristic for Transforming STEM Education: Youth and
Educators as Participants in the World 1497
Jennifer D. Adams, Atasi Das and Eun-Ji Amy Kim

122 Who Hears My Cry? The Impact of Activism on the Mental Health of
African American Women 1508
Shawn Arango Ricks

123 Fat Pedagogy and the Disruption of Weight-based Oppression: Toward

the Flourishing of All Bodies 1516
Constance Russell

124 Forwarding a Critical Urban Environmental Pedagogy 1532

Marissa Bellino

125 An Ecological Pedagogy of Joy 1543

Jodi Latremouille

Index 1559
 List of Figures

43.1 The progression of association of ideas and continuity of experience in

Indigenous pedagogy across India 455
43.2 The approach used to accelerate children at a rapid pace in Hyderabad, India 458
53.1 A cyclic perspective on the historical relationship of Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal people in Canada 594
54.1 Highwood River 605
54.2 Water at the level of the train bridge 606
54.3 Mud tracked out 609
54.4 Waiting for a bin 609
54.5 Trapped moisture 610
54.6 Farewell to art 1 610
54.7 Farewell to art 2 611
54.8 Three bins in three days – throwing it all away 611
54.9 Jacked up 612
54.10 Rotting on the inside, right next door 614
54.11 Sporting goods store – facade 615
54.12 New pub and hardware store – fronts615
54.13 Delivery in 30 minutes or … never616
54.14 Dentist office, now launderette 616
54.15 Posters to mask the empty insides 617
54.16 Mmm ... noodles 617
54.17 Antiques or roadhouse? 617
54.18 Hardware – not fixing anything 618
54.19 Real art gallery, ‘not fake’ 618
54.20 Fake bake shop, (really) for lease 618
54.21 ‘WE ARE STiLL CLEANG UP PLEASE DON’T TOUCH OUR
SUPPLYs AND FURNiTURE’ 620
54.22 Diner – a permanent fixture 621
54.23 Little Big Bear Gifts – a facade on a facade 621
54.24 Going nowhere 624
54.25 No news 625
54.26 Filming today 625
54.27 From hardware, to workwear – false advertising, no sales to be had 626
54.28 Roadhouse/Antiques/Roadhouse – rotating facades 626
54.29 Diner, rear view – a facade on all fronts (Markides, June 2018) 627
54.30 Low and slow 627
63.1 Intersectionality versus assemblages 737
63.2 Gender as a rhizome 740
72.1 The conceptual backdrop 856
81.1 Course activities within a Diversity of Human Services course that illustrates
Village Pedagogy 982
xviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

81.2 Preservice teacher learning activities from a literacy methods course

framed around the Black Studies Critical Studyin’ pedagogical framework 985
85.1 The cycle of inquiry extending the bricolage to incorporate community
activism1029
85.2 A particularly troubling and well-known local image 1031
85.3 My public critique of the logo 1032
86.1 Pat’s collage 1039
86.2 Sam’s collage 1039
86.3 Creative conversations at the collage table 1040
86.4 Collaborative dialogue at the collage table 1040
86.5 Jane’s collage 1044
96.1 The tweet of Nathaniel Prince 1179
S10.1 The interplay between art, aesthetics and critical pedagogy 1188
99.1 Money machine 1226
99.2 Pedagogy of a new childhood redesign cycle 1229
104.1 Transformative Arts and Cultural Praxis Circle (TACPC) 1282
108.1 The Bike Build workshop space 1346
108.2 Teasing-out where next to proceed 1349
108.3 A scene from a typical discussion 1349

 List of Tables

56.1 The impact of the construction of the neoliberal subject on classroom

implementation of curricula inclusive of Indigenous knowledges 651
62.1 A summary of our critical rethinking of tourism education 724
87.1 Conceptual understandings and corresponding questions 1062
111.1 Purpose statements from state and national curriculum documents 1378
120.1 Students’ science-themed raps 1494
121.1 Crit-Trans heuristic1506
 Notes on the Editors
and Contributors

THE EDITORS

Shirley R. Steinberg considers herself somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd generation of
critical pedagogy. Originally an American, she discovered critical pedagogy in Alberta, Canada
as a student of David G. Smith and Julia Ellis. Her high school teaching career took a radical
left turn after only a year and she determined to complete a doctorate based on the criticalizing
of media using bricolage, a philosophical research methodology she refined with
Joe L. Kincheloe (2nd generation). Expanding her idea of pedagogy into cultural studies, her
work blended the critical with the pedagogical and cultural. The author and editor of many
books and articles, her research interests have generated (often with Kincheloe) Critical
Multiculturalism, Christotainment, Kinderculture, Critical Bricolage, and Postformal thinking.
As Research Professor of Critical Youth Studies at the University of Calgary, she engages local,
national, and global community work with and for youth, refugees, immigrants, and other
disenfranchised groups.

Barry Down is Professor of Education at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. In

2003 he was appointed the City of Rockingham Chair in Education (2004-2013) at Murdoch
University, the first such position funded by a local government in Australia. In this period, he
worked on a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Projects investigating
issues of student engagement, school-to-work transitions and early career teacher resilience.
He has co-authored seven books (with long time collaborators John Smyth and Peter
McInerney) including Critically Engaged Learning: Connecting to Young Lives (2008);
‘Hanging in with Kids’ in Tough Times: Engagement in Contexts of Educational Disadvantage
in the Relational School (2012); and The Socially Just School; Making Space for Youth to speak
Back (2014). His most recent book is entitled Rethinking School-to-Work Transitions: Young
People have Something to Say (with John Smyth and Janean Robinson). His research interests
focus on young people’s lives in the context of shifts in the global economy, poverty, class,
school-to-work transitions and student dis/re/engagement.

THE SECTION EDITORS

Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa) (aka Don Trent Jacobs) is Professor, School of Leadership Studies
at Fielding Graduate University and the author of numerous publications on ‘Indigenous world-
view’, including Unlearning the Language of Conquest, Teaching Truly and Point of Departure.

Paul R. Carr is a Full Professor in the Department of Education at the Université du Québec
en Outaouais, Canada, and is also the Chair-holder of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy,
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxi

Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT)(uqo.ca/DCMT/). His latest book,

with Gina Thésée, is “It’s Not Education that Scares Me, it’s the Educators…”: Is There Still
Hope for Democracy in Education, and Education for Democracy?.

Roymieco A. Carter is Director of the Visual Arts Program and University Galleries at North
Carolina A&T State University. He teaches courses on graphic design, digital media, visual
literacy and theory, and social criticism. He is a graphic designer of print, web, and motion-
based media. He has written articles on graphic design education, art education, critical peda-
gogy, Black studies, gaming, human computer interaction and graphics computer animation.

Renee Desmarchelier is the Associate Dean Learning, Teaching and Student Success for the
Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts at the University of Southern Queensland. Her
scholarly interests include Indigenous knowledges, critical pedagogy and participatory and
Indigenous research methodologies. Her research has centered on how teachers negotiate
Indigenous knowledges in their classroom praxis and the cultural interface between Indigenous
and non-Indigenous ways of knowing.

R. Michael Fisher, a member of the Adjunct Faculty, Werklund School of Education,

University of Calgary, is an educator, artist and fearologist who has been at the forefront of fear
studies curriculum development for 30 years. He has published five books, including World’s
Fearlessness Teachings, an original resource for leaders.

Robert Hattam is the Professor for Educational Justice in the School of Education, University
of South Australia and he leads the Pedagogy for Justice Research Group. His research has
focused on teachers’ work, critical and reconciliation pedagogies, refugees, and socially just
school reform. He has published numerous books on critical pedagogy and educational ine-
quality in vulnerable communities.

Michael Hoechsmann is an Associate Professor and the Program Chair in the Faculty of
Education at Lakehead University, Orillia. His research focuses on digital and media literacies,
cultural studies and education in formal and non-formal settings. He is a co-Investigator on two
SSHRC (Canada) funded research grants, a board member of Media Smarts: Canada’s Centre
for Digital and Media Literacy, and the co-chair of UNESCO GAPMIL North America.

Michael B. MacDonald is an Associate Professor of music at the MacEwan University Faculty

of Fine Arts and Communications in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His research areas include
popular music scenes, screen production research, ethnographic film theory, ciné-ethnomusi-
cology, and audiovisual ethnomusicology. Michael is the founding program chair of the
MusCan Film Series held annually at the Canadian University Music Society conference and
serves on the editorial board of the journal Intersections.

Gregory Martin is an Associate Professor in the School of International Studies and Education
at the University of Technology Sydney. His work is transdisplinary with a focus on critical
pedagogies, spatial politics and participatory methodologies, including the power of storytell-
ing to promote learning and change.

Cathryn Teasley is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of A Coruña.

Her research on anti-racism, socio-cultural justice, nonviolence and gender equity in teacher
xxii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

education is informed by critical pedagogies, decolonial studies, peace studies, queer theory
and feminisms. Her latest contribution is to the Handbook of Theory and Research in Cultural
Studies and Education.

Gina Thésée is Full Professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Faculty of Education,
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and is also Co-Chair of the UNESCO Chair in
Democracy, Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT) (uqo.ca/DCMT/).
Her latest book, with Paul R. Carr, is entitled “It’s not Education that Scares Me, it’s the
Educators…”: Is There Still Hope for Democracy in Education, and Education for Democracy?

Leila E. Villaverde is a Professor in Cultural Foundations at the Department of Educational

Leadership and Cultural Foundations, Dean Fellow in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UNCG
and Senior Editor of The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. She teaches courses on
curriculum studies, history of education and critical pedagogy, gender studies, visual literacy
and aesthetics, and critical inquiry.

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Melanie M. Acosta is an Assistant Professor in the department of Curriculum, Culture, &

Educational Inquiry at Florida Atlantic University. Her scholarship is focused on critical issues
in teacher learning and preparation to support African American educational excellence. Dr.
Acosta began teaching as an elementary school teacher and a community organizer for a grass-
roots parent empowerment group.

Jennifer D. Adams is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor at The
University of Calgary holding a dual appointment in the Department of Chemistry and
Werklund School of Education. She researches creativity and science, teacher identity, and
informal science education and environmental education. Her work centers critical, decolonial
and sociocultural approaches.

Edmund Adjapong is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Studies Department at Seton

Hall University. He is also a Faculty Fellow at The Institute for Urban and Multicultural
Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and the author of #HipHopEd: The
Compilation on Hip-Hop Education (Volume 1 & Volume 2).

Philip M. Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Education at Queens College and the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. He has published extensively on reader response,
the literature curriculum, censorship and cultural aesthetics in education and society.

William Ayers is a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the
University of Illinois at Chicago (retired) has written extensively about social justice and
democracy. His books include A Kind and Just Parent; Teaching toward Freedom; Fugitive
Days: A Memoir; Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; To Teach: The
Journey, in Comics; and Demand the Impossible!

Lilia I. Bartolomé is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts

at Boston. Her research interests include the preparation of effective teachers of linguistic
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxiii

minority students and the exploration of teacher beliefs about minoritised students.
Dr Bartolomé’s publications are extensive and include notable books such as Ideologies in
Education: Unmasking the Trap of Teacher Neutrality and Dancing with Bigotry: The
Poisoning of Cultural Identities (with Donaldo Macedo).

Marissa Bellino is an Assistant Professor of Education at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ),
where she teaches social foundations and science methods to preservice teachers. Her teaching
interests include environmental sustainability and science education through a critical lens.
Marissa’s research interests explore youth experiences in urban environments, environmental
education and participatory research.

Silvia Cristina Bettez is a Professor in the Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations
(ELC) Department at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she teaches about
issues of social justice in a graduate program. Her scholarship centralizes social justice with a
focus on fostering critical community building, teaching for social justice, and promoting
equity through intercultural communication and engagement.

Phillip Boda is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University. He holds a PhD in

Science Education and an EdM in Teacher Education from Teachers College at Columbia
University. Phillip’s work investigates the overlapping intersections of cultural studies/disability
studies, urban teacher education and STEM education. He is the editor of the book Essays on
Exclusion: Our Critical, Collective Journey Toward Equity in Education.

Karla Boluk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at
the University of Waterloo. Karla’s scholarship examines how to bring criticality and creative
pedagogy to the classroom in order to enhance sustainable tourism education.

Sabrina Boyer is an Associate Professor at Guilford Technical Community College in English

and Humanities. Her research interests include queer theory, LGBTQ2+ studies, Feminist
theory, LatinX studies, critical pedagogy and media studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational
Leadership and Cultural Foundations and a Post-Baccalaureate in Women’s, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies from The University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Bryan Brayboy is President’s Professor, Special Assistant to the President for American
Indian Affairs, and Director of the Center for Indian Education at Arizona State University. His
research focuses on the experiences of Indigenous students, staff, and faculty in institutions of
higher education.

Deborah P. Britzman teaches at York University in Toronto. She is Distinguished Research

Professor, holds the York University Chair of Pedagogy and Psycho-social Transformations
and is a psychoanalyst. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the author of
numerous books and articles, with her main contribution being to the field of psychoanalysis
with education.

Pipo Bui holds a PhD in European ethnology from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She
holds a Bachelor of Arts in communication from Stanford University. Pipo currently works as
Director for Corporate and Foundation Relations at EarthCorps, a nonprofit organisation that
cultivates emerging environmental leaders from more than 90 countries.
xxiv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Alana Butler is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University in

Canada. She has taught in a range of settings that include preschool, English as a Second
Language, adult literacy, and university undergraduate. Her research interests include the aca-
demic achievement of low-socio economic students, race and schooling, equity and inclusion,
immigration and settlement studies, and multicultural education.

Robert F. Carley is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University. He

is the author of Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and The Politics of Practice and Autonomy,
Refusal, and The Black Bloc: Positioning Class in Critical and Radical Theory.

Fred Chapel is a member of the faculty of the Education Department at Antioch University,
Los Angeles. He was a middle school science teacher for 25 years and brings a wealth of expe-
rience in inquiry-based pedagogy to his teaching.

Sandro Carnicelli is a Senior Lecturer in Events and Tourism at the University of the West of
Scotland. Sandro has been developing research in the fields of tourism in Brazil, New Zealand
and Scotland for over ten years. His main research interests are adventure tourism, tourism
education and outdoor learning.

Joseph Carroll-Miranda is an Auxiliary Professor at the Graduate Studies Department of the

College of Education of the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras Campus. He is a strong
advocate of both Computer Science and STEM education as issues of social justice. His
research interest include youth culture, teknoculture, hacker culture, critical pedagogy and
transforming traditional classrooms as spaces of creation and innovation.

Angelina E. Castagno is a Professor of Educational Leadership and Foundations, and the

Director of the Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators at Northern Arizona University. Her
teaching and research centers on equity and diversity in US schools, and particularly issues of
Whiteness and Indigenous education.

Colin Chasi is Professor in Communication Studies and the Head of the Department of
Communication Studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa. His latest research
is focused on the transformation of higher education, in view of the contemporary decoloniza-
tion debate. He is rated as a nationally recognised researcher by the National Research
Foundation of South Africa.

Annette Coburn is Senior Lecturer and Programme Lead in Community Education at the
University of the West of Scotland (UWS). Following 23 years as a community education and
youth work practitioner, Annette began teaching in Higher Education in 2003. Her on-going
youth and community research has examined aspects of border pedagogy, equality, social jus-
tice and well-being.

Sarah E. Colonna is Associate Program Chair of Grogan College at The University North
Carolina, Greensboro and Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests
include feminist thought and pedagogy, equity and diversity, leadership and young adult literature.

Atasi Das is an educator activist and doctoral candidate of Urban Education at The Graduate
Center, City University of New York. Her research focuses on critical numeracy − a framework
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxv

examining numbers as social and political activity. She collaborates with Spark Teacher
Education Institute on advancing a liberatory praxis − learning and doing to collectively create
an equitable society.

Cristina Maria Dominguez is a doctoral student in Educational Studies with a concentration

in Cultural Studies at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and serves as a graduate
assistant in the department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations. Dominguez’s
current research interests include: critical pedagogy, social justice education, and everyday
relational social justice teaching, learning and action work.

Brian Dotts is an Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of

Georgia. He is the author of Educational Foundations: Philosophical and Historical
Perspectives and The Political Education of Democratus: Negotiating Civic Virtue during the
Early Republic.

Mary Drinkwater is a Lecturer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto,
Canada. Her research focuses on issues of arts and cultural practices for democratic and trans-
formative education. She was lead editor and chapter author for Transnational Perspectives on
Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights and Peace Education.

Judith Dunkerly-Bean is an Associate Professor of Literacy, Language and Culture and

Co-Director of the Literacy Research and Development Center at Old Dominion University.
Judith’s research is situated at the intersection of critical literacy, social justice and human
rights.

Tony Edwards has been a teacher educator in Australia and more recently Canada. He has
contributed to the learning and professional development of preservice teachers in a range of
contexts. His research is primarily focused on the possible impacts upon an individual student’s
habitus as they are presented with support to explore possible futures.

Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner is Associate Professor of Literacy at the University of Nevada,

Las Vegas. The author of over 70 publications, Varner’s expertise centers on race and critical
international engagement.

Ramón Flecha is Doctor Honoris Causa of the West University of Timişoara and Professor of
Sociology at the University of Barcelona. He is a researcher of the projects WORKALÓ (FP5),
INCLUD-ED (FP6) and IMPACT-EV (FP7). He has published in Nature, PLOS ONE,
Cambridge Journal of Education, Harvard Educational Review, Qualitative Inquiry, Current
Sociology and Journal of Mixed Methods Research.

Teresa Anne Fowler is a doctoral candidate at Werklund School of Education, University

of Calgary. Teresa’s research interests lie with Whiteness, masculinities, anti-racist peda-
gogy and critical pedagogy. Her doctoral dissertation explores how Whiteness reproduces
in schools and how this leads to a radicalisation of White boys and manifestations of
violence.

Benjamin Frymer is Professor in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State
University, and previously taught at Columbia University’s Teachers College, UCLA, and
xxvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Trinity College. He writes in the areas of education, self and society, and cultural studies focus-
ing on the study of film education, contemporary alienation, violence, and ideology.

Antonio Garcia is an independent researcher, founder and organizer of the International Žižek
Studies Conference (est. 2012), executive director of the Žižekian Institute for Research,
Inquiry, and Pedagogy, and co-editor with Rex Butler for the Žižek Studies Book Series. In
addition to being a Žižek scholar, he has focused on developing his own original theoretical
work called constellar theory.

Hermán S. García was a faculty member at Eastern Washington University, Texas Tech
University, Texas A&M University and New Mexico State University. He is currently Regents
Professor/Distinguished Professor Emeritus at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces.

Jeremy Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Education and is Co-Director of the

Indigenous Teacher Education Project at the University of Arizona. He is a member of the
Hopi/Tewa Tribes of Arizona. His research focuses on decolonisation, critical Indigenous cur-
riculum and pedagogy, Indigenous teacher education, and critical and culturally sustaining
family and community engagement within Indigenous education.

Sandra Girbés-Peco is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Department of Teaching and

Learning and Educational Organisation at the University of Barcelona. She is also a researcher
at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA), where she develops work on
gender studies, community involvement and educational actions to overcome poverty.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public
Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished
Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. The author of hundreds of articles and books, including The
Terror of the Unforseen and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism. He is a
columnist for Truthout.

Aristotelis Gkiolmas has a BSc in Physics and a Masters and PhD in Science Education. He
is member of the Laboratory Teaching Staff of the Department of Primary Education,
University of Athens. He has participated in numerous international conferences on critical
pedagogy and is a member of the editorial board of the journals The International Journal of
Critical Media Literacy and Green Theory and Praxis.

Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín is a Full Professor of Education at the University of Valladolid.

(Spain). His interests are in media literacy, digital competence and teacher training. He has
been involved in different European projects related to media education and he was the lead
organizer of the first and third International Conferences of Media Education and Digital
Competence in 2011 and 2017.

Rodney Handelsman is a founding teacher of a public alternative high school in Canada. He

has taught K-12 and worked in the field as a researcher, teacher educator (McGill, OISE,
UKZN), pedagogical consultant and curriculum writer.

Lalenja Harrington received her PhD in Educational Studies and Cultural Foundations from
The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she is currently Academic Director for
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxvii

the Integrative Community Studies certificate. She is most interested in exploring the intersec-
tions between art, community-engaged research and pedagogical approaches with the potential
for engaging marginalised folk as scholars and researchers.

Nicholas D. Hartlep holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in Urban
Education (Social Foundations of Education). He is currently the Robert Charles Billings
Endowed Chair in Education and Chair of the Education Studies Department at Berea College.
You can follow his work on Twitter at @nhartlep or at his website, www.nicholashartlep.com.

Elbert J. Hawkins, III is a native of North Carolina who resides in Jamestown. Currently, he
is a doctoral candidate, a professional high-school counsellor, nationally certified through the
National Board for Certified Counselors (National Board Certified Teacher–School Counseling/
Early Childhood through Young Adulthood).

Mark Helmsing is Assistant Professor of Education and an affiliated faculty member in the
Department of History and Art History and the Folklore Studies Program at George Mason
University. Mark’s work uses critical theories of affect and emotion to explore how people feel
about the past and how the past makes people feel.

Andrew Hickey is Associate Professor in Communications at the University of Southern

Queensland. Andrew publishes in the areas of critical pedagogy, public pedagogies and eman-
cipatory social practice and has undertaken large-scale projects with departments of education,
schools and community groups internationally.

Stephanie L. Hudson is a Doctoral Student in educational studies, concentrating on cultural stud-

ies and women’s and gender studies, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Stephanie
is a Teaching Associate in the Cultural Foundations Program. She teaches, researches and writes
across disciplines in biology, cultural foundations of education and feminist studies. Stephanie’s
research interests include curriculum studies, feminist theories and pedagogies, teaching and
learning in virtual spaces, feminist cultural studies of technoscience and critical body studies.

Luis Huerta-Charles is an Associate Professor of Multicultural Education at New Mexico

State University. He is a Nepantlero border-crosser that aims to prepare teachers as social activ-
ists in order to transform our unjust and unequal society into a more just one.

Awad Ibrahim is an award-winning author and a Professor at the Faculty of Education,

University of Ottawa. He is a curriculum theorist with special interest in critical pedagogy, hip-
hop studies and Black popular culture, cultural studies, applied linguistics, social justice,
diasporic and continental African identities and ethnography.

Perry R. James is an educator who lives and works in the Navajo Nation. A fluent speaker of
his language, he was brought up with the traditional ways of the Ni’hokaa’ Diyin Dine’é.
Currently a doctoral candidate at Fielding Graduate University, his research uses Indigenous
Interpretative Autoethnography to prepare Navajo leaders.

Catalina Jaramillo is a teacher educator at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Colombia

and an EFL teacher in a public school. She has served as a research assistant at Grupo de
Investigación Acción y Evaluación en Lenguas Extranjeras (GIAE) in the line of language and
education policies at Universidad de Antioquia.
xxviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Graham Jeffery is Reader in Arts and Media at the University of the West of Scotland. His
work spans participatory and community arts practices, creative pedagogies, cultural policy,
urban studies and community development. He has led numerous action research projects with
diverse communities in different places around the world.

Brian C. Johnson earned his PhD in Communications Media and Instructional Technology
from Indiana University of PA. An avid film fanatic and scholar, his book Reel Diversity: A
Teacher’s Sourcebook was recognised by the National Association for Multicultural Education’s
2009 Chinn Book Award.

Richard Kahn is an anarcist educator at Antioch University, Los Angeles,whose primary inter-
ests are in researching social movements as pedagogically generative forces in society and in
critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness.

Tony Kashani is an American author, educator, philosopher of technology, and a cultural critic.
He holds a PhD degree in Humanities with emphasis on culture studies from California
Institute of Integral Studies. He is the author of five books including Movies Change Lives: A
Pedagogy of Humanistic Transformation. His interests are interdisciplinary scholarship and
pedagogy on humanities in the digital age and social justice.

Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA and is
author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture. He is the author of The
American Horror Show: Election 2016 and the Ascendency of Donald J. Trump, and American
Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism, and the Collected
Papers of Herman Marcuse.

Arlo Kempf is an Assistant Professor of Equity and Education in the Department of

Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the
University of Toronto. Arlo’s research interests include teachers’ work, anti-racism and
anti-colonialism in education, and critical perspectives on educational standardisation and
neoliberalism.

Christopher Lee Kennedy is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York, who creates
site-specific projects that examine conventional notions of ‘Nature’, interspecies agency and
biocultural collaboration. Kennedy is currently Assistant Director of the Urban Systems Lab at
The New School University.

Eun-Ji Amy Kim is Lecturer at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia in the School
of Education and Professional Studies, her area is social diversity and Indigenous education.
Her research interests are Indigenous science education, ReconciliACTION through
relationship-based and land-based teaching

Joe L. Kincheloe was the Canada Research Chair of Critical Pedagogy at McGill University
in Montreal, and the founder of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical
Pedagogy. Born in the mountains of Tennessee, he was raised to recognize inequities within
society and became the humble champion for the oppressed. The author of 60 books and
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxix

hundreds of articles, he is to be remembered as a rock n’ roll musician, father, partner, and

friend to many.

James D. Kirylo is Professor of Education at the University of South Carolina. Among other
books, he is the author of Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife, Paulo Freire: His Faith,
Spirituality, and Theology (with Drick Boyd) and Teaching with Purpose: An Inquiry in the
Who, Why, and How We Teach.

Tricia M. Kress is an Associate Professor in the Educational Leadership for Diverse Learning
Communities EdD programme at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, NewYork. Her research
uses critical pedagogy, cultural sociology and autoethnography to rethink teaching, learning
and research in urban schools. She details this approach in her book Critical Praxis Research:
Breathing New Life into Research Methods for Teachers.

Jo Lampert is a Professor of Education at La Trobe University in Melbourne. While she also

researches in the area of children’s literature, most of her daily work is in teacher education for
high-poverty schools.

Jodi Latremouille completed her doctorate in Educational Research at the Werklund School
of Education, University of Calgary. She is a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Education at
Thompson Rivers University. She also taught high school French Immersion and Social
Studies. Her research interests include hermeneutics, ecological and feminist pedagogy, social
and environmental justice, life writing and poetic inquiry.

Sherilyn Lennon is a Senior Lecturer in the Education and Professional Studies faculty at
Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Her research interests include literacy, gender,
rurality and emerging qualitative and post-qualitative research paradigms. She is the author of
numerous publications including the monograph, Unsettling Research, published in 2015 as
part of the Critical Qualitative Research series.

Galia Zalmanson Levi is a critical pedagogy and feminist teacher educator in seminar
Hakibbutzim College and in Ben Gurion University in Israel. She was co-founder of the teacher
education program for social justice and peace education. Galia combines activism and leading
social change in the public education system with academic research.

Guofang Li is a Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Transnational/Global Perspectives

of Language and Literacy Education of Children and Youth in the Faculty of Education, University
of British Columbia. Her research interests are longitudinal studies of immigrant children’s bi-
literacy development, diversity and equity issues and teacher education for diverse learners.

Sheryl J. Lieb is Adjunct Professor at Grogan Residential College and Humanities Lecturer in
the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies programme at The University of North Carolina,
Greensboro. Her areas of specialisation and research interests include philosophy of education,
critical pedagogy, ethics and intellectual virtue development, existentialism (as philosophy and
pedagogical practice) and cultural studies.

Kerry Mallan is Professor Emeritus at Queensland University of Technology. Her work is

cross-disciplinary, with a focus on children’s literature, youth and popular culture and digital
xxx THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

media texts and practices. Kerry was the founding director of the Children and Youth Research
Centre at QUT.

Jennifer M. Markides is a Métis doctoral candidate in the Werklund School of Education at

the University of Calgary. Her graduate research examines the stories told by youth who have
transitioned from life-in-schools to life-out-of-school within the same year as experiencing a
natural disaster. She is also an educator, researcher, and author in the area of Indigenous educa-
tion, and the editor of three books on Indigenous ways of knowing and research.

Rose Marsters is of Cook Island descent and is a Ngākauologist, a practitioner who is profi-
cient and drives a movement in Ngākau (heart) pedagogy and intelligence. She serves both the
Pasifika and Māori communities including her employed tertiary role, at the Waikato Institute
of Technology, Wintec. Her interest is on enhancing capabilities of practitioners in appropriate
culturally responsive practice.

Teresa Sordé Martí is a Serra Húnter Associate Professor of Sociology at the Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona. Her work focuses on the Roma ethnic minority in Europe looking at
social mobilization, women’s rights, education, and health. She has worked on projects with
the European Commission and is a member of CREA.

D’Arcy Martin is a veteran labour movement educator, having created, administered and
facilitated courses within unions across Canada and internationally for over four decades.
D’Arcy has extended his popular education practice to community, policy, academic and other
activist settings, and has written widely, including the book Thinking Union: Activism and
Education in Canada’s Labour Movement.

Domenica Maviglia is Doctor of Philosophy in Intercultural Pedagogy at the Department of

Cognitive Science, Psychological, Educational, and Cultural Studies of the University of
Messina. Her work focuses mainly on critical pedagogy and the theoretical and historical
research in the field of pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of education,
the history of pedagogy and the history of education.

Diarmuid McAuliffe is the academic lead for Art-in-Education at the School of Education and
Social Sciences, University of the West of Scotland. His research includes developing critical
school art pedagogies and runs a series of public seminars in this area, most recently for the
Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.

Lisa McAuliffe is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Inclusive Education in the
School of Education and Social Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland. Her main
research focus is the interface between inclusive education policy and practice. Lisa is particu-
larly interested in the role of teacher education in promoting inclusion and social justice.

J. Cynthia McDermott is a Professor of education and the Regional Director of two Antioch
university campuses in California and is a two-time Fulbright recipient. She has been a class-
room teacher K-12.

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies,

Chapman University, where he co-directs the Paulo Freire Democratic Project, he is Fellow of
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxi

the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce (London, UK). He is the author and editor of over 50
books including Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of
Education, now in the 6th edition.

Jane McLean. Currently an Academic Instructor at the University of New Brunswick,

Dr McLean is a retired educator with 35 years’ experience teaching English Language Arts. In
2001, she developed and implemented a critical feminist course for Grade 12 students called
Women, Media, and Culture, now taught in high schools throughout New Brunswick, Canada.

Tanya Brown Merriman has taught in public, parochial and charter schools; she has taught
nearly every grade level from Pre-K to doctoral students; and she has served as an administra-
tor and designer of new schools and curricular programmes. She teaches at the University of
Southern California, she is the author of Those Who Can: A Handbook for Social Reconstruction
and Teaching.

Ann Milne is a White educator who led the Kia Aroha College community’s almost 30-year
journey to resist and reject school environments which alienate Indigenous Māori and Pasifika
learners, to develop a critical, culturally sustaining learning approach centered on students’
cultural identities and to develop their critical consciousness, which she discusses in her book,
Coloring in the White Spaces.

Khadija Mohammed is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Social Sciences, at the
University of the West of Scotland. She is Programme Leader for Early Years and is also a
Teacher Educator. Her doctoral work centers around race equality, exploring the experiences of
Black and Minority Ethnic Teachers in Scotland. Khadija supports educators to become confi-
dent and empowered to promote equality, preventing and dealing with racism. She is also the
co-founder and Chair of the Scottish Association of Minority Ethnic Educators.

Silvia Molina is Associate Professor at the Department of Pedagogy at the Rovira i Virgili
University and a Researcher at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA).
She has published in journals such as Qualitative Inquiry, Frontiers in Psychology and Higher
Education Research & Development.

Veronica A. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Race in the Department of Sociology at

Georgia State University. Her research focuses on how Black undergraduate women experience
gendered racism at White universities. Her research interests include Black feminist thought,
critical race feminism, trap feminism, hip-hop feminism and hip-hop.

Soudeh Oladi is a Postdoctoral Fellow and SSHRC Project Manager at the Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Dr Oladi’s foundational research focuses on
interdisciplinary scholarship and is deeply rooted in critical pedagogy, philosophy of educa-
tion, social justice education and Eastern and Western educational philosophies and spiritual
traditions.

Maria Padrós is an Associate Professor at the Department of Teaching and Learning and
Educational Organization at the University of Barcelona and a Researcher at the Community
of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA). She has published in journals such as Teachers
College Record, European Journal of Education and Qualitative Inquiry.
xxxii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Yuliana Palacio is a Foreign Language Teacher from the School of Languages, Universidad de
Antioquia in Colombia. She completed her graduate studies in Educational Leadership and
Policy Studies at Boston University. She is a member of the Grupo de Investigación Acción y
Evaluación en Lenguas Extranjeras (GIAE) research group in the line of language and educa-
tion policies.

Priya Parmar is an Associate Professor of Secondary Education at Brooklyn College-CUNY.

Her scholarly publications and books center on critical literacies, youth and hip hop culture and
other contemporary issues in the field of cultural studies in which economic, political and
social justice issues are addressed. She is the author of Knowledge Reigns Supreme: The
Critical Pedagogy of Hip Hop Artist KRS-One.

Oscar A. Peláez is a teacher educator and researcher. He coordinates the research field in the
ELT programme at the School of Education, Universidad Católica Luis Amigó in Colombia.
He is also an academic adviser to the university’s undergraduate and graduate students in the
area of education language policy.

Zhengmei Peng is a Professor of Comparative Education and the Director of the Institute of
International and Comparative Education at East China Normal University. His expertise
includes comparative education, German pedagogy, Western educational philosophy, theory of
knowledge and curriculum studies.

Kathalene A. Razzano holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. She
currently teaches in the Global Affairs Program at George Mason University, and the Media &
Communication Studies Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She spe-
cializes in cultural studies, feminist social theory, political economy, critical pedagogy, critical
legal studies, and media studies.

Kerry J. Renwick is a teacher educator with experience working with preservice teachers in
both Australia and Canada. Her research interests focus on social justice experienced and
developed at the personal level and in the context of the family.

Nighet Riaz is an early career researcher and associate lecturer at the School of Education and
Social Sciences in the University of the West of Scotland. Nighet’s research explores moral
panics and the perceived disaffection of young people, with a particular focus on Black and
Minority Ethnic and Muslim communities and youth.

Shawn Arango Ricks is the Assistant Vice President for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and
an Associate Professor of Race and Ethnicity Studies at Salem Academy and College in
Winston-Salem, NC. She is an intuitive healer, licensed mental health and addictions counsel-
lor, and life coach in private practice focused on helping Women of Color on their healing
journeys.

Teresa J. Rishel researches child and adolescent suicide in exploring sociocultural relation-
ships, student alienation, bullying, diverse students, hidden curriculum and leadership roles in
schools. She focuses on critical theory and pedagogy, curriculum theory, and social justice. She
works with organizations interested in sharing experiences or difficulties of suicide-related
school issues.
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxiii

Claire Robson’s federally funded postdoctoral research at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver)
investigated the potential of arts-engaged community practices. A widely published writer of
fiction, memoir, and poetry, Claire’s book, Writing for Change, shows how collective memoir
writing can effect social change.

Samuel D. Rocha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the

University of British Columbia.

Ylva Rodny-Gumede is the Head of the International Office and Professor in the School of
Communication at the University of Johannesburg. Ylva is a former journalist with experience
from both print and broadcast media. Her current research focus is on transformation and inno-
vation in higher education. Ylva is rated as a nationally recognised researcher by the National
Research Foundation of South Africa.

Toby Rollo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lakehead University.

April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams is an instructor in the African American and African Diaspora
Studies program at The University of North Carolina,Greensboro. Her research interests focus
on African American mothers, educational equity, and social justice.

Marcella Runell Hall is the Vice President for Student Life/Dean of Students and Lecturer in
Religion at Mount Holyoke College. She was the founding Co-Director for the Of Many
Institute for Multifaith Leadership and program advisor/founder for the minor in multifaith and
spiritual leadership at New York University. Marcella has written for Scholastic Books, the
New York Times Learning Network, VIBE, and various academic journals, including Equity
and Excellence in Education.

Constance Russell is a Professor in the Faculty of Education, Lakehead University in Thunder

Bay, Canada. She co-edited the award-winning book The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging
Weight-Based Oppression through Critical Education, edited the Canadian Journal of
Environmental Education from 2004–16 and currently co-edits a book series, (Re)thinking
Environmental Education.

I. Malik Saafir is President and CEO of The Southern Renaissance in Little Rock, Arkansas.
He trains education, business, government and nonprofit leaders how to end poverty in the
African diaspora. Previously, he was Visiting Lecturer of African/African American Studies at
the University of Central Arkansas.

Madhulika Sagaram is the founder and President of Adhya Educational Society, a nonprofit
engaged in improving the quality of education in underserved government and private schools.
She is also the founder of Ajahn Books and the Ajahn Center for Pedagogy. She has a vision
to develop research, engaging with the theory, practice and outreach of pedagogical perspec-
tives in education across socio-cultural diversity in India and the world.

Pramod K. Sah is a PhD candidate and Killam doctoral scholar in the Department of Language
and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia. His research work is driven by the
core values of social justice with a focus on class and ethnicity and English-medium instruction
(EMI) policy in multilingual Nepal.
xxxiv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Concepción Sánchez-Blanco has been Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer of Curriculum,

Instruction and School Organization at the University of A Coruña since 1995 (Faculty of
Educational Sciences). Her research focus is on the pursuit of justice and equity in early child-
hood education through ethnography, action research, case study, critical pedagogy, anti-bias
teacher education, social inclusion and anti-violence.

Adrienne Sansom is a Senior Lecturer in Dance and Drama at the University of Auckland. Her
academic interests include social democracy, social justice and social change through the arts,
and her research and writing focus on the body and embodied knowing in education, critical
pedagogy and cultural studies.

Martha Sañudo is Full Professor of Philosophy at Tecnológico de Monterrey at Centro de

Investigación en Humanidades.

Roslyn M. Satchel is the Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Communication at Pepperdine

University and is an affiliate faculty in Seaver College’s Social Action and Justice Colloquium
and at Pepperdine’s School of Law. Her research focuses on social justice, intersectional com-
munity organizing among marginalized groups, and critical cultural/race/media literacies —
especially, as relates to law, religion, and media.

William H. Schubert is Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of

Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he held professorial and administrative positions from 1975
to his retirement in 2011. At UIC, he received numerous awards for scholarship, teaching, and
mentoring. Schubert has published 18 books, over 250 articles and book chapters, and has
made approximately 300 scholarly presentations.

David Scott is an Assistant Professor in the Werklund School of Education, University of

Calgary. His scholarly work involves investigations into how educators interpret and peda-
gogically respond to new educational curricular mandates including calls to engage with
Indigenous histories, experiences, and philosophies.

Jeff Share is a Faculty Advisor in the Teacher Education Program at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research and practice focus on transformative education;
preparing K-12 educators to teach critical media literacy for social and environmental justice.
His published work includes Media Literacy is Elementary: Teaching Youth to Critically Read
and Create Media.

Shashi Shergill is an Assistant Principal at Connect Charter School in Calgary, Alberta,

Canada. Shashi was a 2015 recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Excellence in
Teaching History. Shashi is currently undertaking her doctorate in education at the University
of Calgary exploring ethical and cultural relationality in forming partnerships between
Indigenous and non – Indigenous schools.

Roger I. Simon was Professor of Sociology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in
Toronto, Ontario and founder of the Association of Critical Pedagogy in Canada. Over his forty
years of teaching and writing, he influenced generations of professors and public educators in
Canada. Simon authored numerous articles and seven books, the last, A Pedagogy of Witnessing:
Curatorial practice and the pursuit of social justice.
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxv

Marlon Simmons is an Associate Professor at the Werklund School of Education, University

of Calgary. His scholarly work is grounded within the diaspora, decolonial thought and com-
municative network practices of youth. Marlon’s research interests include schooling and
society, governance of the self in educational settings and the sociology of education.

Constantine Skordoulis is Professor of Epistemology and Didactical Methodology of Physics

at the University of Athens and Academic Director of the postgraduate programme ‘Secondary
Science Teachers Education’ of the Hellenic Open University. He has published extensively on
issues of history of science, science education and socio-scientific issues with a critical per-
spective.

Christine E. Sleeter is Professor Emerita in the College of Education at California State

University Monterey Bay, where she was a founding faculty member. Her research, published
in over 150 articles and 23 books, focuses on anti-racist multicultural education, ethnic studies
and teacher education.

David Geoffrey Smith is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.
His teaching and research have focussed on interculturality in curriculum through critical glo-
balization studies. His books include: Pedagon: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Human
Sciences, Pedagogy and Culture; Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization,
Empire and the Crises of Pedgogy; Teaching as the Practice of Wisdom; and CONFLUENCES:
Intercultural Journeying in Research and Teaching: From Hermeneutics to a Changing World
Order.

John Smyth is Visiting Professor of Education and Social Justice, University of Huddersfield,
Emeritus Research Professor Federation University Australia, Emeritus Professor of Education
Flinders University of South Australia, Elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences
in Australia, a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar and the author of 35 books.

Nathan Snaza teaches English literature, gender studies and educational foundations at the
University of Richmond. He is the author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the
Politics of Humanism and the co-editor of Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and
Curriculum Studies and Posthumanism and Educational Research.

Marta Soler-Gallart is Full Professor of Sociology at University of Barcelona and director of

CREA. She is President of the European Sociological Association and has served on the
Governing Boards of the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities, the
ORCID Board of Directors, and as the Expert Evaluator for the EU Framework Programme of
Research.

Jessica A. Solyom is an Assistant Research Professor at Arizona State University in the Center
for Indian Education. Her recent publications have explored postsecondary education for
American Indian and Alaska Native students, critical research methodologies, and American
Indian college student activism for education rights.

Marc Spooner is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. His
research interests include homelessness and poverty, audit culture and the effects of neoliber-
alisation and corporatisation on higher education, social justice, activism and participatory
xxxvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

democracy. He is co-editor, with James McNinch, of the award-winning book Dissident

Knowledge in Higher Education.

Dana M. Stachowiak is the Director of the Gender Studies and Research Center and an
Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
Her research interests are in transgender studies, equity education, and literacy curriculum.

Constantina Stefanidou was born in 1976 in Athens. She is a physicist who obtained her PhD
in 2013 in History and Philosophy of Natural Sciences in Science Teaching. After 12 years in
secondary education, she is currently Faculty Member at the Department of Education of the
University of Athens as Teaching and Laboratory Staff. Her research interests are in science
education, historical and philosophical perspectives of science and didactics of science.

Michaela P. Stone is Assistant Professor of Early Childhood at the University of Northern

Vermont. Her scholarly interests includes mathematics, critical disability studies and the role
of differentiation and engagement in cross-cultural contexts.

Dennis Sumara is Professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary, Alberta,
Canada. His areas of research include curriculum theory, teacher education and literacy educa-
tion, as oriented by conceptual interests in hermeneutic phenomenology, literary response
theory and complexity science.

Kristine Sunday is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and Learning at Old Dominion

University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early childhood education.
She holds a PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in Art Education. Kristine draws from
post-structural theories and qualitative research methods to pose questions about children,
learning, and the visual arts in early childhood classrooms.

Juha Suoranta is Professor of Adult Education at Tampere University. He has published exten-
sively on critical pedagogy and public sociology. His latest books are C. Wright Mills’
Sociological Life and Paulo Freire: A Pedagogue of the Oppressed.

Dawn N. Hicks Tafari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at Winston-

Salem State University. Her research interests include Black boys in public schools, Black
feminist thought, Black male elementary school teachers, hiphop culture’s influence on social
and individual identity development, hiphop feminism, critical race theory, composite counter
storytelling and narrative research.

Nwachi Pressley-Tafari, a native New Yorker, has been a developmental educator for over
20 years and is now Adjunct Professor of Diversity, the Humanities, and College Success for
ECPI University. He holds a certification in life coaching and is a licensed New Life Story
coach.

Shuntay Z. Tarver is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University in the Department of

Counselling and Human Services. He is committed to social justice with a particular focus on
the experiences of African Americans within various ecological systems (i.e. schools, justice
systems, and families).
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxvii

Paul. L. Thomas, is Professor of Education at Furman University. He taught high-school

English for 18 years in South Carolina before moving to teacher education and teaching first-
year writing. He is the author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays
Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means. Follow him at http://radicalscholarship.wordpress.
com/ and @plthomasEdD.

Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs is Associate Professor, Social Foundations, Virginia Polytechnic

Institute and the author of Re-Assembly Required: Critical Autoethnography and Spiritual
Discovery. Her research in Spain for a critical autoethnography examines life under Franco’s
dictatorship following the Spanish Civil War. She is also investigating critical pedagogy in
teacher education with colleagues in Spain and Mexico.

Peter Pericles Trifonas is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University
of Toronto. His areas of interest include ethics, philosophy of education, cultural studies, and
technology. His books include: Deconstructing the Machine (with Jacques Derrida);
International Handbook of Semiotics; Roland Barthes and the Empire of Signs; and Umberto
Eco & Football.

Stephanie Troutman is a Black feminist scholar, mother and first-generation college student.
She is the Associate Professor of Emerging Literacies in the English Department at the
University of Arizona. She serves as affiliate faculty in Gender & Women’s Studies, Teaching,
Learning & Sociocultural Studies, Africana Studies and the LGBT Institute.

Cherie Ann Turpin is an Associate Professor in the English Program at University of DC. Her
publications include the book How Three Black Women Writers Combined Spiritual and
Sensual Love, as well as articles in various journals and anthologies. She is completing
Afrofuturism and African spiritual traditions, as well as Digital Humanities and Diversity.

Jaime Usma is a Teacher Educator and Researcher at the School of Languages, Universidad
de Antioquia in Colombia. In his recent publications and studies, he examines language and
education policies being adopted in Colombia and their social, economic and political implica-
tions for different educational actors, ethnic groups and communities.

Juan Ríos Vega is an Assistant Professor at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, Department
of Teacher Education, where he teaches courses on English as a second language (ESL) and
diversity in education. His research interests include K-12 Latinx students in education, queers
of color critique, and LGBTIQ+ populations in Panama.

Marco Montalbetti Viñuela is an independent scholar and photojournalist with over 20 years
of experience, five of which were spent documenting the teaching-exchange programmes
described in his article in this Handbook.

David Wallace is lecturer in community education at the University of the West of Scotland.
For the better part of 40 years he has been a passionate advocate for social justice through
informal, collaborative and community-based education. His research and teaching interests
have mirrored an engagement with distinctively Scottish practices in community education and
with an overarching concern for social justice.
xxxviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Gerald Walton is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University in Canada.

His research focuses on school-based bullying as othering and he speaks and writes on
Whiteness, free speech, masculinity, gender expression and identity, sexuality, and rape culture,
among other topics. He edited the 2014 collection, The Gay Agenda: Claiming Space, Identity,
and Justice, published by Peter Lang Press.

Ki Wight is an instructor at Capilano University in Vancouver in the Communication Studies,

Women’s and Gender Studies and Motion Picture Arts programmes. Her doctoral work, at
Simon Fraser University’s Equity Studies in Education Program, looks at the relationship
between media education and systems of oppression.

John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, as well as

Professor of Publishing Studies at Simon Fraser University. He directs the Public Knowledge
Project, which conducts research and develops open source scholarly publishing software in
support of greater access to knowledge. His most recent book is The Intellectual Properties of
Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke.

Peter R. Wright is an Associate Professor of Arts Education at Murdoch University, Perth,

Western Australia. He works across the arts with a commitment to personal, social and cultural
inquiry, agency, education and expression, health and wellbeing, and Creative Youth
Development. His interest is in teacher development in the Arts, Teaching Artist pedagogy,
ArtsHealth, socio-aesthetic pedagogy, and social justice.

Michalinos Zembylas is a Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the

Open University of Cyprus, and Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University in the Chair
for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation. He has written extensively on emotion
and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human
rights education and citizenship education.

Gang Zhu is currently an Associate Professor at the Institute of International and Comparative
Education, East China Normal University. His expertise encompasses teacher education, com-
parative education and urban education. His publications, in both English and Chinese, have
appeared in Compare, Journal of Education for Teaching, The Asia-Pacific Educational
Researcher and Computer-Assisted Language Learning.

Revital Zilonka is currently a 4th-grade teacher at the Neve Hof elementary school in Rishon
Le’Zion, Israel. She received her PhD in Cultural Foundations from The University of North
Carolina, Greensboro.

Haggith Gor Ziv is a Senior Lecturer Seminar Hakibutzim Teachers College of Education in
the Early Childhood department Special Education Program, Tel Aviv. She teaches courses in
critical feminist pedagogy, disability studies and inclusion. She has facilitated Jewish and Arab
dialogue groups, and published Critical Feminist Pedagogy and Education for Culture of Peace.

David Zyngier is Associate Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia. A former teacher
and school principal, he has written extensively on student engagement, social justice, democracy
and education and pedagogies that enhance achievement for all students but in particular those
from communities of disadvantage. He established the Public Education Network in Australia.
 Acknowledgements

When we first proposed the idea of a Handbook on critical pedagogies, our global friends and
colleagues displayed remarkable passion, inspiration and commitment that allowed the book to
evolve. They generously created space in their busy lives to share something about the emotional
and intellectual labor involved in doing critical pedagogy in diverse and challenging contexts. We
invited over 160 colleagues from 6 continents to contribute to our project, these scholars, educa-
tors and community activists all shared a deep understanding of the radical possibilities inspired
by Paulo Freire. Their stories open us up to multiple ways of knowing, interpreting and acting in
the world based on context with diverse theoretical, methodological and practical approaches.
We thank them for their exceptional contribution, patience and solidarity. Individually and col-
lectively these are some of the most outstanding scholars in the field. We appreciate their willing-
ness to support this project from conception to completion. Their contribution is a powerful
illustration of the kind of solidarity that lies at the heart of critical pedagogy.
Our Section Editors provided guidance and expertise in their chosen fields often at short
notice. Paul R. Carr, Gina Thésée, Greg Martin, Cathryn Teasley, Four Arrows, R. Michael
Fisher, Rob Hattam, Michael MacDonald, Michael Hoechsmann, Leila E. Villaverde, Roymieco
A. Carter, and Renee Desmarchelier responded to our requests, assisted with reviews, collabo-
rated and assisted our authors, often at short notice or tight deadlines…we cannot quantify how
invaluable their participation was, and continues to be. Members of the editorial board have our
gratitude; not an easy task, editing such diverse articles…some academic, some storied, some
autobiographic, some historic: all critical pedagogies. Acknowledgment to Dara Nix-Stevenson
for her early contribution to our venture.
We acknowledge with reverence and respect, our dear friends and colleagues both past and
present who have played a crucial role in advancing the development of critical pedagogy. Their
influence has been profoundly important in shaping the lives of so many contributors to this col-
lection. We will hear a great deal from and about them in the chapters to follow. Paulo Freire’s
ground-breaking work provides our foundation, his work permeates the thoughts and actions
shaping this collection. The seeds for this collection of work was sown by Joe L. Kincheloe,
whose vision of tentative critical pedagogies and unique radical love paved the way for that
fateful day when James Clark from Sage Publishers showed interest and faith in our massive
volume proposal. There aren’t enough synonyms to thank James: his authenticity and conscien-
tiousness in dealing with a Yank, an Aussie, and scores of global critical pedagogues for three
years deserves a shout-out.
We wish to offer our deep appreciation to Janean Robinson, our Assistant Editor. Janean
somehow managed to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the editors, the various technologies and
tracking systems, thousands of emails, hundreds of reviews and all sorts of crises but always
with good humour and grace. Thank you Janean, you are loved, you are respected, you are
appreciated and acknowledged.
Without our families, life partners – David and Jenny, children and friends closest to us…
over the past three years, without you, none of this would be possible. This has been a complex
and challenging project that could not have happened without your love, care and support.
Barry wishes to thank his institution, Murdoch University for providing him with the space and
resources to undertake this important work.

Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg
THE LEGACY OF PAULO FREIRE
In 1970, the first English-language edition of
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo
Freire, was published. For a half a century,
the book has been translated into scores of
languages, championing a call for radical
change in schooling and a humane, social
shift to contextual education. Henry Giroux
claims that the book changed his life, and,
indeed, it certainly changed his career.
Giroux’s paradigm-shattering book Theory
and Resistance in Education, published in
1983, named Freire’s revolutionary philoso-
phy as critical pedagogy. Throughout the
1980s and early 1990s, critical pedagogy
became the counter-narrative to traditional
‘banking’ approaches to education. The book
challenged the epistemological foundations
of transmission models of teaching and learn-
ing and the institutional structures and social
practices which hold it in place.
In the past 50 years, critical scholars
have re-formed education through sustained
Introduction
critical pedagogical analyses and discourse.
Indeed, some publishing houses have cen-
tered their entire education lists around this
intervention. Many outstanding books have
been published on critical pedagogy, build-
ing upon Freire’s work and expanding it to
include analyses of contemporary socio-
cultural shifts and global transformations
(e.g., Britzman, 2003 Leistyna et al., 1999;
Darder et al., 2003; McLaren and Kincheloe,
2007; Duncan and Morrell, 2008; Kincheloe,
2008; Apple et al., 2009; Giroux, 2011;
Malott and Porfilio, 2011; Smyth, 2011; and
Emdin, 2017).
This book assembles over 160 scholar
activists from 39 countries who are deeply
engaged with advancing Freire’s transfor-
mational project for the purpose of creat-
ing a more humane and socially just world.
In communion with Freire’s writing (e.g.,
1970/2000, 1998, 2000, 2007, 2014), they
share a commitment to the values of criti-
cal curiosity, democracy, dialogue, respect,
dignity, humility, hope, justice, solidarity,
 INTRODUCTION
commitment and compassion as the corner-
stones of a new social imaginary beyond the
‘mutating’ value system of global capitalism
(McMurtry, 1999).
The task of critical pedagogy becomes
even more urgent in these dark times
(Arendt, 1973). The rise of populist authori-
tarianism, fascism, war, violence, poverty,
hunger, slavery, genocide, Islamophobia,
environmental degradation, child labour,
post-truth, forced migration and cruelty have
provided a point of existential crisis in the
world. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by
the historical, economic and social defects
of the world driven by the destructive forces
of global capitalism and neoliberal ideolo-
gies, including privatization, commodifica-
tion, commercialization, consumerism and
individualism (Harvey, 2007). It can lead to
a sense of fatalism and determinism as there
appears to be no alternative to the way things
are (Bourdieu, 1998: 29). The absurd, irra-
tional and cruel are normalized in an era of
relentless social-media propaganda promot-
ing a range of neoconservative and neoliberal
ideologies perpetuated by what Henry Giroux
(2014: 9) describes as the ‘disimagination
machine’, which perpetuates antidemocratic
and authoritarian forces by ‘distracting,
miseducating, and deterring the public from
acting in its own interests’.
In this context, Freire (2004: 105) pro-
vides us with a language of both critique
and possibility which involves a dialectic
between ‘denouncing’ the dehumanizing
conditions under which we are living as well
as ‘announcing’ that another world is pos-
sible. Critical pedagogy is central to this
broader political project because it helps
us to question common-sense assumptions,
beliefs, values, rituals and practices that
serve to mask hierarchical power relations.
It provides a way of interrupting the seduc-
tive power of corporate/popular culture and
the effects of what Donaldo Macedo (1993)
describes as ‘literacy for stupidification’.
Over 70 years ago, Adorno and Horkheimer
(1944/2000: 15) warned about the illusionary
xli
and deceptive impact of the culture industry,
which encouraged people to ‘forget suffer-
ing’ and ‘the last remaining thought of resist-
ance’. Indeed, these ‘interferences to critical
thought’ (Shor, 1980: 49) only serve to depo-
liticize and distract people from the real task
of becoming more fully human through crea-
tive practice. It is the process of reclamation
of the critical, self-reflective, moral and dem-
ocratic purposes of education that lies at the
heart of Freire’s legacy.
In response, this collection brings together
an impressive global network of scholars,
educators and community activists commit-
ted to the moral vision and practice of criti-
cal pedagogy to alleviate human suffering.
To this end, the book attempts to provide a
coherent and purposeful international conver-
sation by moving from a singular or universal
critical pedagogy to multiple pedagogies and
perspectives. Freire was concerned that his
work not be turned into a dogma, a paradigm
or a singular methodology, hence our desire
to promote a plurality of approaches and per-
spectives held together by the radical love of
Paulo Freire.
In the Foreword to Freire’s Pedagogy
of the Heart, Martin Carnoy explains how
Freire addresses progressives everywhere,
urging them to remain ‘active, authentic,
democratic, non-sectarian, and unifying’
(Freire, 2000: 8). In the Freirean tradition, he
argues that
progressives must continuously examine their
underlying strategies. New conditions demand
new answers to some of the same old difficult
questions: What is the role of progressive politics
in the world system, now a new global-informa-
tion economy? What is the role of progressive
intellectuals? And what is the role of democratic
education, again now in the information age?
(Freire, 2000: 8)
Addressing these kinds of questions is what
animates the individual and collective work
of the authors in these volumes.
For this reason, we begin with a set of per-
sonal reflections from friends and colleagues
xlii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
who have worked with or been profoundly
influenced by Freire’s ideas (Volume 1, Part I).
We invited them to respond to a formative
piece of Freire’s (1983) writing entitled The
Importance of the Act of Reading. Here, Freire
reflects on his own childhood in the neigh-
bourhood of Recife, Brazil to explain how
the ‘act of reading the word and the world’
are inseparable: one infers the other. For him,
the act of reading cannot be separated from
context or lived experience and is, therefore,
‘laden with the meaning of the people’s exis-
tential experience’ (Freire, 1983: 10). Pivotal
to Freire’s work is the understanding that
reading is foremost a political act, never neu-
tral nor objective, but capable of generating
‘difficult knowledge’ (Britzman, 1998) for
the purpose of resisting all forms of oppres-
sion and creating a better world.
In pursing these aspirations, Freire
(1974/2007: 12) believes that critical or
problem-posing education places people ‘in
consciously critical confrontation with their
problems, to make them the agents of their
own recuperation’. What Freire is advocating
is the responsibility or duty to fight against
fatalistic discourses that may not always be in
our own best interests. In Daring to Dream:
Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished, Freire
(2007: 4–5) explains how we are called ‘to
transform and re-form the world, not to adapt
to it. As human beings, there is no doubt that
our main responsibility consist of intervening
in reality and keeping up our hope’.
To this end, Freire (2007: 25) speaks about
dreams and utopia as a fundamental neces-
sity for human beings. For him, ‘There is
no tomorrow without a project, without a
dream, without utopia, without hope, without
creative work, and work toward the devel-
opment of possibilities, which can make
the concretization of that tomorrow viable’
(Freire, 2007: 26). In short, Freire (2000:
100) believes that ‘Our historical inclination
is not fate, but rather possibility’. Herein lies
the rationale for our work and those who have
contributed to it through their own unique
stories, circumstances and experiences.
Our authors bring their own particular his-
tories, experiences, languages, cultures and
perspectives to the struggle for social justice.
Their work (as well as that of many others
not included here) is intimately grounded in
the critical pedagogies which have emerged
in particular social, political and cultural
contexts. In reading these accounts we gain
a sense of how each of the authors take up
Freire’s challenge to not only ‘speak about
the limits of education’ but to engage with
what can be accomplished ‘where’, ‘how’,
‘with whom’ and ‘when’ (Freire, 2007: 64),
and in the process we see how our work as
educators ‘is not individual, but social, and
that it takes place within the social practice
he or she is a part of’ (Freire, 2007: 64–5).
Finally, we are interdisciplinary scholars,
educators and community activists who do
not seek to create a unilateral doctrine; that
would be antithetical to Freire’s intention.
Instead, we seek to learn from traditional crit-
ical pedagogical paradigms and from those
working between these paradigms, working
in the tentative, the elastic, the ever-changing
margins of revolutionary and scholarly peda-
gogy articulated so clearly and passionately
by Freire.
WHAT IS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY?
Drawing on the legacy of Freire and the tra-
dition of democratic education (Dewey,
1916/1944) we bring together scholars and
practitioners committed to the realization of
Freire’s vision and practice of critical peda-
gogy. What emerges in the three volumes is
the understanding that critical pedagogy is
not something easily defined in terms of a
particular theory, curriculum or method,
which would be anathema to Freire’s prob-
lem-posing approach to education
(1970/2000: 79–86). As Gregory Martin
points out in his Introduction to Part III of
Volume 1, critical pedagogy is ‘an umbrella
term which captures a broad range of
 INTRODUCTION
approaches and standpoints that have
emerged in response to unjust laws, policies,
issues and practice’.
Like our dear friend and mentor Joe
Kincheloe (2008: 8), we find it difficult to
define critical pedagogy in a brief and com-
pelling manner because it asks so much of
the educators and students who embrace
it. Given the complexity and breadth of the
body of work in this handbook it is apparent
that there is a lot to comprehend in terms of
knowledge, pedagogy, politics and culture.
Therefore, a reasonable starting point might
be to share a set of basic concepts identi-
fied by Kincheloe in his book Knowledge
and Critical Pedagogy. By way of summary,
Kincheloe says critical pedagogy is:
• Grounded on a social and educational vision of
justice and equality
• Constructed on the belief that education is inher-
ently political
• Dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering
• Concerned that schools don’t hurt students –
good schools don’t blame students for their
failures or strip students of the knowledges they
bring to the classroom
• Enacted through the use of generative themes
to read the word and the world and the pro-
cess of problem posing – generative themes
involve the educational use of issues that are
central to students’ lives as a grounding for the
curriculum
• Centered on the notion that teachers should be
researchers – here teachers learn to produce
knowledge and teach students to produce their
own knowledges
• Grounded on the notion that teachers become
researchers of their own students – as research-
ers, teachers study their students, their back-
grounds, and the forces that shape them
• Interested in maintaining a delicate balance
between social change and cultivating the intel-
lect – this requires a rigorous pedagogy that
accomplishes both goals
• Concerned with the ‘margins’ of society, the
experiences and needs of individuals faced with
oppression and subjugation
• Constructed on the awareness that science can
be used as a force to regulate and control
xliii
• Dedicated to understanding the context in which
educational activity takes place
• Committed to resisting the harmful effects of
dominant power
• Attuned to the importance of complexity –
understands complexity theory–in constructing a
rigorous and transformative education
• Focused on understanding the profound impact
of neo-colonial structures in shaping education
and knowledge.
(Kincheloe, 2008: 10)
Thus, a fundamental feature of critical peda-
gogy is the preparedness to interrupt com-
mon-sense ways of seeing the world with
which people have grown so comfortable
(Kumashiro, 2004). At the root of critical
pedagogy, then, is the willingness to confront
injustices and relations of power which hold
them in place. This requires a fundamental
transformation in the ways in which knowl-
edge is produced and legitimated and by
whom. This critical intellectual work requires
a shift, or ‘repositioning’, whereby we ‘see
the world through the eyes of the disposed
and act against ideological and institutional
processes and forms that reproduce oppres-
sive conditions’ (Apple et al., 2009: 3). The
task of rethinking requires a new language
and set of theoretical tools capable of helping
us to ‘think anew, to think otherwise … away
from convention and cant’ (Burbules and
Berk, 1999: 60). As Arendt (1958/1998: 5)
argued in her effort to comprehend the evils
of totalitarianism, what the modern world
requires is a ‘matter of thought’ that opposes
the kind of ‘thoughtlessness’ which leads to
‘the heedless recklessness or hopeless con-
fusion or complacent repetition of “truths”
which have become trivial and empty’ and
remain one of ‘the outstanding characteristics
of our time’.
In this context, we find Kincheloe and
McLaren’s (2005) notion of ‘evolving criti-
cality’ especially useful. For them, critical
pedagogy ‘is always evolving, changing in
light of both new theoretical insights and new
problems and circumstances’ (Kincheloe
and McLaren, 2005: 306). This spirit of
xliv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
criticality seeks to comprehend diverse forms
of oppression including class, race, gender,
sexual, cultural, religious, colonial and abil-
ity-related concerns. Roger Simon sums it
up pretty well when he states that criticality
involves figuring out:
why things are the way they are, how they got that
way, and what set of conditions are supporting the
processes that maintain them. Further … we must
be able to evaluate the potential for action that [is]
embedded in actual relationships. To think these
tasks through requires concepts that can carry a
critique of existing practice.
(Simon, 1998: 380)
Of course, criticality can be sometimes ‘vio-
lent and destructive’ because it endeavors to
disrupt some deeply entrenched ‘truths’ and
taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs,
values and practices (Ball, 2006: 1). The
contributors to this handbook do exactly this.
They draw on a range of critical theories to
help them challenge existing injustices and
oppressive institutional arrangements as they
attempt to transform inequitable, undemo-
cratic or oppressive policies and practices.
Thus, critical pedagogy involves a twofold
move: first, to develop a critical sensibility
about the way things are and, second, a will-
ingness to take action to change the status
quo. It is this desire to engage in forms of
social criticism as well as activism that are
the hallmarks of critical pedagogy.
Delving into each of the chapters we gain a
greater appreciation of the complexity of this
work. Each of the authors, in their own unique
way, draw on a range of critical theories to
guide their thinking and action. While these
critical theories have their own intellectual
histories, points of emphasis and explanatory
power, together they highlight both the com-
monalities identified by Kincheloe (2008)
and the differences within the tradition of
critical pedagogy. It is beyond the scope of
this introduction to rehearse these theories in
any detail, although a cursory overview does
provide a sense of the rich multiplicity of the-
oretical influences deployed by our authors.
Most notably, the Frankfurt School of Critical
Theory (Giroux, 2003); progressive educa-
tion (Dewey, 1916/1944; Kozol, 1967, 2005;
Postman and Weingartner, 1969); schooling
and the political economy (Bowles and Gintis,
1976; Harris, 1979; Apple, 1982; Carnoy and
Levin, 1985); feminism (hooks, 1981/2014;
Gore, 1993); anti-racism (Gillborn, 1995),
critical race theory (Ladson-Billings and
Tate, 1995; Leonardo, 2005); Indigenous
knowledges (Smith, 1999); critical media
and literacy (Macedo and Steinberg, 2007);
critical youth studies (Ibrahim and Steinberg,
2014); critical multiculturalism (Sleeter and
McLaren, 1995; McLaren, 1997); libera-
tion theology (Gutiérrez, 1971/1988; Freire,
1985: 121–42); and critical ecopedagogy
(Kahn, 2010), to name a few.
While Freire provides a set of founda-
tional, and even necessary values (moral,
ethical, political and pedagogical), critical
pedagogy itself is far more expansive than
his work alone. As Freire (1970/2000: 90)
himself insists, critical education is a process
which endeavors to continually ‘make and
remake, to create and re-create’ the world
in a spirit of epistemological curiosity, dia-
logue, humility, solidarity and love. Herein
lies the major strength of critical pedagogy: it
is never static, formulaic or complete but per-
petually in motion, or, in the words of Horton
and Freire (1990: 11), ‘a permanent process
of searching’. This collection seeks to add,
no matter how modestly, to a rich archive of
critical pedagogy inspired by Paulo Freire
around the world. We are mindful that our
work builds on the spirit of generosity and
hard labour of thousands of scholars, teach-
ers and activists who engage in the struggle
for social justice daily.
HOW IS THIS BOOK ORGANIZED?
This Handbook consists of three volumes
divided into 12 sections, four per volume. In
total there are 125 chapters. The book is
 INTRODUCTION
intended to be a central resource for multiple
audiences, including academics, pre-service
and in-service teachers, postgraduate stu-
dents, educators, social workers, artists,
activists and community workers. For this
reason, the book offers multiple points of
entry depending on one’s interests. From the
seminal writing and influence of Paulo Freire
and social theories to the enactment of peda-
gogical insights and practices in universities,
colleges, schools, classrooms, communities
and non-formal spaces, readers are encour-
aged to engage with the ideas, debates and
practices in critical pedagogy. We now pro-
vide an overview of each volume and some
context for each of themes that will be
extended through a series of provocations by
the section editors.
Volume 1
In Section I: Reading Paulo Freire, we begin
with a set of 14 short personal responses to
Paulo Freire’s (1983) piece The Importance
of the Act of Reading. We deliberately chose
this article because it provides a starting
point for the conversations to follow. The
notion of ‘reading the word and the world’
seems to be a pivotal moment in compre-
hending the power and significance of
Freire’s work. Indeed, as we read these per-
sonal responses from a range of eminent
scholars and activists we gain a much deeper
insight into the ways in which Freire’s ideas
have profoundly influenced their lives. From
the moment we invited our colleagues to
share something about their encounters with
the writing of Freire, there was an immense
sense of excitement, passion, joy, generosity
and love as each of the contributors reflected
on their own personal intellectual and peda-
gogical journey. What they describe in their
own particular ways is the power of ideas,
commitment, dialogue, justice and action to
create a more humane and socially just
world. We believe these kinds of stories
reveal a great deal about two fundamental
xlv
questions which preoccupied Freire’s work –
namely, what does it mean to be more fully
human and what does it mean to be edu-
cated? We are sure readers will find these
encounters interesting and informative on
many levels.
In Section II: Social Theories, we provide
an opportunity for the authors to open up a
range of social theories that have shaped
their thinking and practice. The intention is
not to provide some kind of definitive shop-
ping list of social theories but to indicate the
ways in which the authors use different criti-
cal theories to illuminate their understanding
of injustice and what might be done about
it. In this sense, we begin to see how theory
and practice (praxis) interface to generate
new insights with which to address persistent
problems, questions and concerns in multiple
contexts. Importantly, it opens up opportu-
nities to engage with a range of theoretical
orientations and to appreciate how different
authors respond to the challenges posed by
Freire’s desire for dialogue and his acknowl-
edgment of the ‘incompleteness’ of the
human condition.
In Section III: Seminal Figures in Critical
Pedagogy, we examine the contribution of a
number of influential thinkers in the field.
For obvious reasons, this section of the
Handbook presented a number of dilemmas.
We are mindful of not eulogizing particu-
lar individuals over others; this would be a
fraught task, as Gregory Martin points out in
his introduction. Rather, we wanted the con-
tributing authors to provide a sense of how
a range of critical thinkers have influenced
their own work. As such, this is by no means
an encyclopedia of ‘key figures’ in critical
pedagogy: it offers a number of provoca-
tions to engage with some important writers
and ideas. We endeavor to extend this con-
versation through four additional chapters of
interviews (Chapters 34–7) to provide some
personal insights into the ways in which peo-
ple who have worked in critical pedagogy
understand the intellectual, emotional and
political nature of their work, which may not
xlvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
always be accessible through normal publish-
ing outlets.
In Section IV: Global Perspectives, the
focus shifts to the global context of critical
pedagogy. With the emergence of ‘global
capital and the new imperialism’ (McLaren
and Farahmandpur, 2005), critical peda-
gogy takes on new and important work as
it seeks to comprehend the seismic shifts in
the global economy and the implications for
nation states, the economy, education, teach-
ers’ work and students. The contributors in
this section draw attention to the fallout from
what Sasson describes as the ‘new logics of
expulsion’, which is a way of not only cap-
turing the growing levels of inequality but
‘the pathologies of today’s global capitalism’
especially its ‘brutality’ and ‘savage sorting’.
Each of the contributors in this section under-
takes a critical analysis of how these forces
play out for marginalized communities,
groups and individuals, and in the light of
these experiences they identify the kinds of
pedagogical responses required to alleviate
suffering.
Volume 2
In Section V: Indigenous Ways of Knowing,
the editors, Four Arrows (aka Don Jacobs)
and Michael Fisher, explain the synergies
between the aspirations of critical pedagogy
and Indigenous peoples around decolonizing
and Indigenizing movements in education. In
this section, Indigenous knowledge and
knowing are used as a form of resistance
against oppressive colonial policies and prac-
tices which have for far too long subjugated
Indigenous voices and ways of knowing. As
Linda Smith explains so lucidly, Indigenous
peoples around the world have had ‘to chal-
lenge, understand, and have a shared lan-
guage for talking about the history, the
sociology, the psychology and the politics of
imperialism and colonialism as an epic story
telling of huge devastation, painful struggle
and persistent survival’ (1999: 19). As part of
this ongoing struggle, the authors describe a
range of critical pedagogies grounded in
deep listening, storytelling, integration with
nature, spirituality, justice, human rights and
a spirit of ‘fearlessness’.
In Section VI: Education and Praxis, sec-
tion editor Rob Hattam frames the discus-
sion by reminding us of the temporal nature
of critical pedagogy, which is ‘an unfinished
project’ on three levels: first, ‘taking up pow-
erful diagnoses of the times’; second, ‘taking
up readings of the places we live in’; and,
finally, ‘responding to philosophical investi-
gations’. Drilling down into this framework,
the contributors examine the implications for
understanding praxis, including the classed,
racial and gendered dimensions of education.
Each of them brings their own unique take
on the diagnosis of the problem under inves-
tigation, its particular context and alternative
strategies and tactics. What ties these takes
together is an unwavering belief in the eman-
cipatory potential of education to address
unjust policies and practices, which serve to
demean and denigrate the most marginalized
in society.
In Section VII: Teaching and Learning,
the emphasis shifts to the terrain of teaching
and learning in schools and communities. In
the context of unprecedented levels of inter-
ference from ‘right wing’ ideologues and
their prescriptions (standardization, back-to-
basics, scripted lessons, high-stakes testing,
accountability, competition, commodifica-
tion and privatization) to fix the so-called
educational crisis, teachers, schools, commu-
nities and students are under assault. These
‘backlash pedagogies’ (Gutiérrez et al.,
2002: 335) blame teachers, progressive ideas
and linguistically and culturally diverse and
poor children for the perceived problems of
education and society. According to Giroux,
this ‘pedagogy of stupidity’ is focused on
‘memorization, conformity, passivity and
high stakes testing’ (2013a: 2) rather than
the ‘practice of freedom’ (Freire, 1970/2000:
80). In response, the authors provide exam-
ples of alternative pedagogies based on a
 INTRODUCTION
more hopeful and optimistic vision of edu-
cation that draws on notions of inclusivity,
engagement, social justice, connectedness,
learning communities and culturally respon-
sive pedagogies.
In Section VIII: Communities and
Activism, there is a fundamental recognition
that the work of critical pedagogy occurs in
multiple sites beyond formal institutions like
schools, colleges and universities. Indeed,
Freire’s (1970/2000) book Pedagogy of the
Oppressed advanced the view that educa-
tion can be a radical tool for social change
if linked to the needs, desires and aspira-
tions of local communities and their ‘funds
of knowledge’ (Gonzalez et al., 2004). In
this context, the work of community activ-
ists like Saul Alinsky (1989) reinforces the
pivotal role of community organization,
Indigenous leadership and collective action
in the fight for social justice. Each of the
contributors to this section recognizes the
necessity of building local knowledges, net-
works, capabilities and power through the
development of critical awareness and activ-
ism, both locally and in association with
wider social movements.
Volume 3
In Section IX: Communication and Media,
the focus is on the proliferation of mass com-
munication and media in shaping the iden-
tity, needs and desires of young lives, for
better or worse (Rosa and Rosa, 2011). Doug
Kellner and Jeff Share (2007) explain how
experience and everyday life for young
people in the 21st century is vastly different
from that of our own childhood. They argue
that today’s world is ‘media saturated, tech-
nologically dependent and globally con-
nected’ in ways previously unimagined
(Kellner and Share, 2007: 3). Therefore, it
would be irresponsible not to equip students
with media literacy skills and critical aware-
ness of how ‘media construct meanings,
influence and educate audiences, and impose
xlvii
their messages and values’ (2007: 4). Critical
media literacy is a significant pedagogy not
only in countering the pervasive influence of
corporate/popular culture in producing con-
sumer-citizens but in ‘deepening and extend-
ing the possibilities for critical agency, racial
justice, and economic and political democ-
racy’ (Giroux, 2000: 171). These critical lit-
eracy strategies are brought to life by the
contributors, who draw on critical literacy
theories to investigate a variety of media
including film, comics, public exhibitions
and Wikilearning and analyse the implica-
tions for critical citizenship and democracy.
In Section X: Arts and Aesthetics, there
is a turn to affect (emotions, feelings, rela-
tionships and love) to understand the revo-
lutionary potential of artistic endeavor and
aesthetics in creating a more participatory,
connected, sensual, creative and humane
world. There is an appreciation of what it
means to be alive through creative practice.
In an interview with Donaldo Macedo in
1985, Freire spoke about the things he likes
to do. His response reveals a great deal about
the profound importance of affect in people’s
lives: “I love to eat; I love music; I love to
read; I love sports; I love the sea, the beaches;
I love to receive letters; I love children; I love
simple things, common, everyday places;
I love Elza; I love to write” (Freire, 1985:
197–8). In this short exchange, Freire man-
ages to not only capture the essence of being
human but also identify the dynamic rela-
tionship between the emotional and intel-
lectual dimensions of knowledge production.
In this section, our authors, activists, artists,
educators, describe how they use arts-based
processes to raise critical awareness and
commitment to social justice (Beyerbach and
Davis, 2011). They identify spaces and places
where they can connect to young people’s
lives, harness their creativity and imagination
and change context. These artists/educators
appreciate that there are multiple ways of
knowing and interpreting reality (e.g., imagi-
native, creative, intuitive, empathetic, kinaes-
thetic and aesthetic) beyond the limitations of
xlviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Western scientific rationality and objectivity
(Kincheloe, 2008: 224–6).
In Section XI: Critical Youth Studies, the
contributing authors address two interrelated
questions: first, how are young lives being con-
structed and consumed under global capital-
ism. Second, what kinds of counter-narratives
are possible? There can be no doubt that young
people today are the casualties of a period of
unbridled free-market individualism and com-
petitiveness, with devasting effects captured
in the stark language of ‘collateral damage’
(Bauman, 2011), ‘cruelty’ (Giroux, 2013b) and
‘disposability’ (Giroux, 2009). In this ‘rapidly
mutating and crisis-ridden world’ (Best and
Kellner, 2003: 75), the authors provide a set of
counter-narratives to illustrate the emancipa-
tory potential of critical pedagogy. At the heart
of this pedagogical work is a commitment to
working with young people as co-researchers/
participants capable of producing knowledge
relevant to their own lives and circumstances
(Cammarota and Fine, 2008). These ‘warrior
intellectuals’, as Kincheloe describes them,
develop the ability to think critically and ana-
lytically and in the process ‘use their imagina-
tion to transcend the trap of traditional gender,
racial, sexual, and class-based stereotypes and
the harm they cause’ (2009: 388).
In Section XII: Science, Ecology
and Wellbeing, section editor Renee
Desmarchelier sets the scene by calling out
the challenges facing the planet, human soci-
eties, the natural environment and individu-
als. She goes on to argue that what is required
is a fundamental shift away from dominant
ways of knowing in the Western scientific
tradition of positivist epistemologies and
cultural imperialism and towards cultivating
the different ways of knowing found in mar-
ginalized and subjugated knowledges of the
oppressed. The authors in this section take
up the challenge by providing a critique of
the dominant approaches to science educa-
tion. They use the lens of feminist readings
as well as developing alternative approaches
to an ecological pedagogy of joy, health and
well-being.
IN READING THESE VOLUMES
As editors and authors, we do not endeavor
to name, define nor place critical pedagogy.
Rather, we have attempted to collect the
works, stories and research of those who
engage within the tentative notion of critical-
izing education both in and out of schools.
We hope for a fluidity of thought within our
work and honour Freire’s intent to create an
ongoing dialogue which we continue to
revise, augment, argue with, contemplate and
celebrate. Critical pedagogy did not evolve
to become orthodox; indeed, we embrace the
unorthodox and hope to add to these pedago-
gies as they continue to evolve and develop.
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Reading Paulo Freire
As we compiled the chapters in these three
volumes, it became apparent that while we
were hoping to contextualize critical peda-
gogies in the present, we needed to histori-
cally anchor them. Seeking to find a definitive
piece from Freire, other than the obvious
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we wanted to find
something that would speak to not only his
development of the field, but to his own pro-
fessional etymology. We sought an example
of his work that could elicit memories within
those who began in the 1980s and early 1990s,
during the development of critical pedagogy
as ways of knowing. I was in a search for an
accessible piece, with few (if any) citations,
maybe pinches of social theory, a work which
spoke to teachers and to scholars. Significant
to the endeavor was to locate writing that
would elicit a critical pedagogical nostalgia,
remind us of Paulo’s oeuvre, and to allow
thoughts to associate freely with his words.
I am not sure quite how I located our silver
chalice (by the way, Freire would hate this
SECTION I
Shirley R. Steinberg
metaphor), but I came across an old text from
a speech Paulo delivered in Campinas, Brazil
in November of 1981. The speech was
translated and published in the Journal of
Education (Vol. 165, no.1: 5–11) in 1983 as
‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, and
brought us to where he began. Beginnings are
essential and understanding our critical peda-
gogies, they take us to context, to the essence
of how we came to be. The article witnesses
the union of the personal and the political self
within Freire, a way of being which is found
within all of his work. This short article was
perfect for our intent to include an example of
his early work.
Taking on the proverbial life of its own,
the provocation was clear … we would en-
ter into a dialogue with the article. Writing a
brief email to the first 20 authors who came
into my mind, I invited each to write a short
response to Paulo’s early work. I asked them
to keep within 500–3,000 words and to craft
a narrative response. Barry (Down) and I
2 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
were astonished at the eager and immediate
responses from our colleagues. Within weeks
we had 14 intuitively autobiographical contri-
butions for the first section of the Handbook.
As the article by Paulo lays the warp, each
response is woven within as the weft is trans-
versed into a precious cloth. Organized in no
particular manner, the following responses
with Paulo begin our volumes.
Our stories begin with Lilia Bartolomé’s rec-
ollections of her own literacy journey into read-
ing in Spanish, led by her mother who guided
Lilia into her love and appreciation for litera-
ture which reflected her own origins and au-
thentic cultural/linguistic ways of being. John
Willinsky’s interplay follows Paulo’s muse of
reading in three acts, situating Freire’s politi-
cal influences, through schools, to the notion of
‘real reading’. Recalling the ignominy of find-
ing her young self consigned to the ‘bad’ read-
ers group at the age of six, Deborah Britzman
examines the act of reading with free associa-
tion leading to the notion of an interpretive act.
Ramón Flecha recalls reading Freire as a
15-year-old student in Bilbao, just awakening
to the political within the act of reading. Twenty
years after the experience, he met Paulo as he
worked to have him awarded an honorary doc-
torate from the University of Barcelona. Bill
Schubert recalls his early years as a teacher and
student without knowing Freire’s work, finally
discovering him on a mimeographed paper by
James Macdonald; one smiles at the intersec-
tion of these three men on pages in the early
70s. I am reminded of my own intersections
through my mentor, David Smith, who intro-
duced me to Paulo Freire in the mid 80s. David
takes up the notion of dialogical pedagogy and
the political and he juggles notions of reading
the word and the not-so-truthful world.
Hermán García carries on with Freire’s
thoughts on reading the world, and the cel-
ebration resulting from our own empower-
ment, engagement and critical understandings
of that world. Marcella Runell Hall under-
stands through Paulo’s work that her mul-
tiple positionalities create her political and
spiritual selves. Arlo Kempf reminds us that
words have moved from his own early read-
ing, Mr. Mugs, to what he terms, corporate
think-spaces – social media and networks; he
sees Paulo’s words as foundational for future
world and word navigations.
Understanding his designation of ‘red-
neck’, Paul Thomas relates the irony of his
literacy/reading childhood, as criticality
was facilitated unwittingly by his parents.
Christine Sleeter celebrates her students’
discoveries as they find ways in which to
insert themselves into their own texts. Bill
Ayers remembers his own development as
a pedagogical/political person, asking the
question: what does it mean today to be a
free person living in a humane society? Luis
Huerta-Charles discusses children of poverty
and marginalization and the development of
alternative pedagogies. He relates the ways
in which Freire’s teaching opened Brazilian
peasants to read, consequently allowing them
to vote, creating a new political stance. He
notes that neoliberalism has made attempts
to seize Freire, reminding us of the essential
nature of criticalizing pedagogy.
I mentioned earlier that David Smith had
introduced Paulo Freire to me. Indeed, it was
through D’Arcy Martin’s work that this intro-
duction was made. In Section I’s concluding
chapter, D’Arcy tells of his work with Paulo
and making the film, Starting from Nina: The
Politics of Learning. Watching this film in
David’s class was my first moment of con-
scientization, as teachers and Freire discuss
pedagogy for working-class children being
created through their own life experiences.
What precious gifts we have in this group
of essays, inspired by Freire and carried on
by our continued work to create a literate and
equitable world.

The Importance of the
Act of Reading1
The question of the importance of reading is
addressed by considering the ways in which
experience itself is read through the interac-
tion of the self and the world. Through exam-
ining memories of childhood, it is possible to
view objects and experiences as texts, words,
and letters and to see the growing awareness
of the world as a kind of reading through
which the self learns and changes. The actual
act of reading literary texts is seen as part of
a wider process of human development and
growth based on understanding both one’s
own experience and the social world.
Learning to read must be seen as one aspect
of the act of knowing and as a creative act.
Reading the world thus precedes reading the
word and writing a new text must be seen as
one means of transforming the world.
In all my years in the practice of teach-
ing – which is political practice as well – I
have rarely allowed myself the task of inau-
gurating or closing meetings and congresses.
I have, nevertheless, agreed to speak here,
though as informally as possible, about the
importance of the act of reading.
1
Paulo Freire
Translated by Loretta Slover
In attempting to speak about the importance
of reading, it is indispensable for me to say
something about my preparation for being
here today, something about the process I
inserted myself into while writing the text I
now read, a process which involved a critical
understanding of the act of reading. Reading is
not exhausted merely by decoding the ­written
word or written language, but rather antici-
pated by and extending into knowledge of the
world. Reading the world precedes reading the
word, and the subsequent reading of the word
cannot dispense with continually reading the
world. Language and reality are dynamically
intertwined. The understanding attained by
the critical reading of a text implies perceiving
the relationship between text and context.
As I began writing about the importance of
the act of reading, I felt myself drawn enthu-
siastically to re-reading essential moments
in my own practice of reading, whose mem-
ory I retained from the most remote experi-
ences of childhood, from adolescence, from
young manhood, when a critical understand-
ing of the act of reading took shape in me.
4 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
In writing this text, I put objective distance
between myself and the different moments in
which the act of reading occurred in my exis-
tential experience: first, reading the world,
the tiny world in which I moved; afterward,
reading the word, not always the word-world
in the course of my schooling.
Recapturing distant childhood as far back
as I can trust my memory, trying to under-
stand my act of reading the particular world
in which I moved was absolutely significant
for me. Surrendering myself to this effort, I
re-created and re-lived in the text I was writ-
ing, the experience I lived at a time when I
did not yet read words.
I see myself then in the average Recife
house where I was born, encircled by trees.
Some of the trees were like persons to me,
such was the intimacy between us. In their
shadow I played, and in the branches sus-
ceptible to my height I experienced the small
risks which prepared me for greater risks and
adventures. The old house, its bedrooms, hall,
attic, terrace – the setting for my mother’s
ferns – the back yard where the terrace was
located, all this was my first world. In this
world I crawled, gurgled, first stood up, took
my first steps, said my first words. Truly, that
special world presented itself to me as the
arena of my perceptual activity, and therefore
as the world of my first reading. The texts, the
words, the letters of that context were incar-
nated in a series of things, objects, signs. In
perceiving these, I experienced myself, and
the more I experienced myself, the more
my perceptual capacity increased. I learned
to understand things, objects, signs through
using them in relationship to my older broth-
ers and sisters and my parents.
The texts, words, letters of that context
were incarnated in the song of the birds –
tanager, flycatcher, thrush; in the dance of
the boughs blown by the strong winds
announcing storms; thunder and lightning;
rain waters playing with geography: creat-
ing lakes, islands, rivers, streams. The texts,
words, letters of that context were incarnated
as well in the whistle of the wind, the clouds
of the sky, the sky’s color, its movement; in
the color of foliage, the shape of leaves, the
fragrance of flowers – roses, jasmine; in tree
trunks; in fruit rinds: the varying color tones
of the same fruit at different times – the green
of a mango when the fruit is first forming, the
green of a mango fully formed, the greenish
yellow of the same mango ripening, the black
spots of an overripe mango – the relationship
among these colors, the developing fruit,
its resistance to our manipulation, and its
taste. It was possibly at this time, by doing it
myself and seeing others do it, that I learned
the meaning of the word squashing.
Animals were equally part of that con-
text – the way the family cats rubbed them-
selves coyly against our legs, their mewing of
entreaty or anger; the ill-humor of Joli, my
father’s old black dog, when one of the cats
carelessly approached too near to where he
was eating what was his. In such instances,
Joli’s mood was completely different from
when he rather sportively chased, caught, and
killed one of the many opossums responsible
for the disappearance of my grandmother’s
fat chickens.
Part of the context of my immediate
world was also the language universe of my
elders, expressing their beliefs, tastes, fears,
values, and which linked my world to wider
contexts whose existence I could not even
suspect.
In the effort at recapturing distant child-
hood, trying to understand my act of reading
the particular world in which I moved, permit
me to say again, I re-created, re-lived in the
text I was writing the experience I lived at
a time when I did not yet read words. And
something emerged which seems relevant
to the general context of these reflections. I
refer to my fear of ghosts. The presence of
ghosts among us was a permanent topic of
grown-up conversation in the time of my
childhood. Ghosts needed darkness or semi-
darkness in order to appear under their vari-
ous forms – wailing the pain of their guilt;
laughing in mockery; asking for prayers;
indicating where their cask was hidden.
 THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ACT OF READING
Now, probably until I was seven years old,
the Recife neighborhood where I was born
was illuminated by gaslights lined up with a
certain dignity in the streets. At nightfall, the
elegant lamps gave themselves to the magic
wand of the lamplighters. At the door of my
house I used to accompany the thin figure of
my street’s lamplighter from afar as he went
from lamp to lamp in a rhythmic gait, the
lighting taper over his shoulder. It was a frag-
ile light, more fragile even than the light of
the lamp we had inside the house; the shad-
ows overcame the light more than the light
dispelled the shadows.
There was no better environment for
ghostly pranks than that one. I remember the
nights in which, enveloped by my own fears,
I waited for time to pass, for the night to end,
for dawn’s demi-light to arrive bringing with
it the song of the morning birds. In morn-
ing’s light my night fears ended up by sharp-
ening my perception of numerous noises
which were lost in the brightness and bustle
of daytime but mysteriously underscored in
night’s deep silence. As I became familiar
with my world, however, as I perceived and
understood it better by reading it, my terrors
diminished.
It is important to add that reading my
world, always basic to me, did not make me
grow up prematurely, a rationalist in boy’s
clothing. Exercising my boy’s curiosity did
not distort it, nor did understanding my world
cause me to scorn the enchanting mystery of
that world. In this I was aided rather than dis-
couraged by my parents.
It was precisely my parents who introduced
me to reading the word at a certain moment
in this rich experience of understanding my
immediate world. Deciphering the word
flowed naturally from reading my particular
world; it was not something superimposed on
it. I learned to read and write on the ground
of the back yard of my house, in the shade of
the mango trees, with words from my world
rather than from the wider world of my par-
ents. The earth was my blackboard; sticks,
my chalk.
5
When I arrived at Eunice Vasconcellos’
private school, I was already literate. Here I
would like to pay heartfelt tribute to Eunice,
whose recent passing away profoundly
grieved me. Eunice continued and deep-
ened my parents’ work. With her, reading
the word, the phrase, the sentence never
entailed a break with reading the world.
With her, reading the word meant reading
the word-world.
A little while ago, with deep emotion, I
visited the home where I was born. I stepped
on the same ground on which I had first
stood up, on which I first had walked, run,
begun to talk, and learned to read. It was that
same world which first presented itself to my
understanding through my reading it. There I
met again some of the trees of my childhood.
I recognized them without difficulty. I almost
embraced their thick trunks – young trunks
in my childhood. Then, what I like to call a
gentIe or well-behaved nostalgia, emanating
from the earth, the trees, the house, carefully
enveloped me. I left the house c­ontent, feeling
the joy of someone who has re-­encountered
loved ones.
Continuing the effort of re-reading fun-
damental moments of my childhood experi-
ence, of adolescence and young manhood
– moments in which a critical understanding
of the importance of the act of reading took
shape in me in practice – I would like to go
back to a time when I was a secondary-school
student. There I gained experience in the crit-
ical interpretation of the texts I read in class
with the Portuguese teacher’s help, which I
remember to this day. Those moments did not
consist of mere exercises, aimed at our sim-
ply becoming aware of the existence of the
page in front of us, to be scanned, mechani-
cally and monotonously spelled out, instead
of truly read. Those moments were not read-
ing lessons in the traditional sense, but rather
moments in which texts were offered to our
restless searching, including that of the young
teacher, Jose Pessoa.
Some time afterward, as a Portuguese
teacher myself in my twenties, I lived
6 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
intensely the importance of the act of
reading and writing – basically insepara-
ble – with first-year high-school students.
I never reduced syntactical rules to charts
the students had to swallow, even rules
governing prepositions after certain verbs,
agreement of gender and number, contrac-
tions. On the contrary, all this was proposed
to the students’ curiosity in a dynamic and
living way, as objects to be discovered
within the body of texts, whether the stu-
dents’ own or those of established writers,
and not as something stagnant whose out-
line I described. The students did not have
to memorize the description mechanically,
but rather learn its underlying significance.
Only by learning the significance could
they know how to memorize it, to fix it.
Mechanically memorizing the description
of an object does not constitute knowing the
object. That is why reading a text taken as
pure description of an object (like a syntac-
tical rule), and undertaken to memorize the
description, is neither real reading, nor does
it result in knowledge of the object to which
the text refers.
I believe much of our insistence as teachers
that students read innumerable book chapters
in one semester comes from a misunder-
standing we sometimes have about reading.
In my wanderings throughout the world there
were not a few times when young students
spoke to me about their struggles with exten-
sive bibliographies, more to be devoured than
truly read or studied – reading lessons in the
old-fashioned sense, submitted to the stu-
dents in the name of scientific training, and of
which they had to give an account by means
of reading summaries. In some bibliogra-
phies I even read references to specific pages
in this or that chapter from such and such a
book which had to be read: ‘pages 15–37’.
Insistence on a quantity of readings with-
out due internalization of texts proposed for
understanding rather than mechanical memo-
rizing reveals a magical view of the written
word, a view which must be superseded.
From another angle, the same view is found
in the writer who identifies the potential qual-
ity of his work, or lack of it, with the quan-
tity of pages he has written. Yet, one of the
most important documents we have – Marx’s
‘Theses on Feuerbach’ – is only two-and-a-
half pages long.
To avoid misinterpretation of what I’m
saying, it is important to underscore that my
criticism of the magical view of the word
does not at all imply an irresponsible position
on my part in relation to the obligation we all
have, teachers and students, to read the clas-
sic literature in a given field of knowledge
seriously and continually, to make the texts
our own, to create the intellectual discipline
without which our practice as teachers and
students is not viable.
To return to that very rich moment of my
experience as a Portuguese teacher, I remem-
ber as vividly as if it were today rather than a
remote yesterday the times I dwelled on the
analysis of the texts of Gilberto Freyre, Lins
do Rego, Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado. I
used to bring the texts from home to read with
the students, pointing out syntactical aspects
strictly linked to the good taste of their lan-
guage. To that analysis I added commentar-
ies on the essential differences between the
Portuguese of Portugal and the Portuguese of
Brazil.
In this reflection on the importance of the
act of reading, I want to make clear once
again that my primary effort has been to
explain how I became increasingly aware of
its importance in my own life. It’s as if I were
doing the archaeology of my understanding
of the complex act of reading in my own exis-
tential experience. For this reason I have been
speaking of certain moments in my child-
hood, adolescence, and young manhood. I
would like now to conclude by reviewing, in
general terms, some aspects central to what
I proposed a few years ago in the field of
teaching adults to read and write.
First, I would like to reaffirm that I always
saw teaching adults to read and write as
a political act, an act of knowledge, and
therefore as a creative act. I would find
 THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ACT OF READING
it impossible to be engaged in a work of
mechanically memorizing vowel sounds,
like in the exercises ba-be-bi-bo-bu, la-le-li-
lo-lu. Nor could I reduce learning to read and
write merely to learning words, syllables, or
letters, a process of teaching in which the
teacher fills the supposedly empty heads of
the learners with his or her words. On the
contrary, the student is the subject of the pro-
cess of learning to read and write as an act
of knowing and a creative act. The fact that
he or she needs the teacher’s help, as in any
pedagogical situation, does not mean that the
teacher’s help annuls the student’s creativ-
ity and responsibility for constructing his or
her own written language and reading this
language.
When, for instance, a teacher and a learner
pick up an object in their hands, as I do now,
they both feel the object, perceive the felt
object, and are capable of expressing ver-
bally what the felt and perceived object is.
Like me, the illiterate person can feel the pen,
perceive the pen, and say pen. I can, however,
not only feel the pen, perceive the pen, and
say pen, but also write pen and, consequently,
read pen. Learning to read and write means
creating and assembling a written expression
for what can be said orally. The teacher can-
not put it together for the student; that is the
student’s creative task.
I need go no further into what I’ve devel-
oped at different times in the complex pro-
cess of teaching adults to read and write. I
would like to return, however, to one point
referred to elsewhere in this text because of
its significance for the critical understanding
of the act of reading and writing, and con-
sequently for the project I am dedicated to,
teaching adults to read and write.
Reading the world always precedes read-
ing the word, and reading the word implies
continually reading the world. As I suggested
earlier, this movement from the world to
the word and from the word to the world is
always present; even the spoken word flows
from our reading of the world. In a way, how-
ever, we can go further, and say that reading
7
the word is not preceded merely by reading
the world, but by a certain form of writing it
or re-writing it, that is, of transforming it by
means of conscious practical work. For me,
this dynamic movement is central to the lit-
eracy process.
For this reason I have always insisted
that words used in organizing a literacy
program come from the word universe of
the people who are learning, expressing
their actual language, their anxieties, fears,
demands, dreams. Words should be laden
with the meaning of the people’s existen-
tial experience, and not of the teacher’s
experience. Surveying what I call the word
universe thus gives us the people’s words,
pregnant with the world, words from the
people’s reading of the world. We then
give the words back to the people inserted
in what I call codifications, pictures imag-
ing real situations. The word brick, for
example, might be inserted in a pictorial
representation of a group of bricklayers
constructing a house.
Before giving a written form to the popu-
lar spoken word, however, we customarily
challenge the learners with a group of codi-
fied situations, so they will apprehend the
word rather than mechanically memorize
it. Decodifying or reading the situations
pictured leads them to a critical perception
of the meaning of culture by leading them
to understand how human practice or work
transforms the world. Basically, the pictures
of concrete situations enable the people to
reflect on their former interpretation of the
world before going on to read the word.
This more critical reading of the prior less
critical reading of the world enables them
to understand their indigence differently
from the fatalistic way they sometimes view
injustice.
In this way, a critical reading of reality,
whether it takes place in the literacy pro-
cess or not, and associated above all with the
clearly political practices of mobilizing and
organizing, constitutes an instrument of what
Gramsci calls counter-hegemony.
8 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
To sum up, reading always involves criti-
cal perception, interpretation, and re-writing
what is read.
I would like to close by saying that for
these reflections on the importance of the act
of reading I resolved to adopt the procedure
I used, because it was consonant with my
way of being and with what I am capable of
doing.
Note
1  This article was first published in English as ‘The
Importance of the Act of Reading’, Paulo Freire,
Journal of Education 165(1), 1983. © Sage,
1983. It was originally presented as a paper at
the opening of the Brazilian Congress of Reading,
Campinas, Brazil, November 1981, and published
in Portugese in A Importancia do Ato de Ler em
TIes Artigos que se Completam, Paulo Freire, Cor-
tez, Sao Paulo, 1983.

Linking My World to the Word
Paulo Freire’s ability to compellingly link the
personal to the political and the pedagogical
is evident in his discussion of his life as a
young reader of both the world and the word.
In his essay, ‘The Importance of the Act of
Reading’, Freire provides captivating exam-
ples of his ability at a young age to discern
the relationship between text and context
while engaging with print.1 He poetically
describes how ‘[t]he texts, the words, the let-
ters of the context were incarnated in a series
of things, objects, [and] signs … [I]n per-
ceiving these, I experienced myself, and the
more I experienced myself, the more my
perceptual capacity increased’.2 Similar to
Freire, I too have been ‘drawn enthusiasti-
cally to re-reading essential moments in my
own practice of reading whose memory I
retained from the remote experiences of
childhood’ in order to better understand how
it is that I learned to concurrently read the
world and the word.3
Freire’s stimulating discussion of this
essential component of reading and writing
2
Lilia I. Bartolomé
the world and the word – linking to one’s
cultural knowledge and experiences, espe-
cially at the initial stages of learning to
decode and encode words – reminds me of
my own experiences as a young reader of
first English and then Spanish. I grew up in a
working-class home located in the Mexican/
Chicanx Shelltown barrio of Southeast San
Diego, California in the 1960s, when bilin-
gual education or native language instruction
was simply not available. Nevertheless, with
my mother’s assistance, I learned to read in
Spanish and to interact with content that was
far more culturally relevant than what I found
in my school’s English language basal series.
As I describe in deeper fashion in a previ-
ously published piece, ‘Literacy as Comida:
Learning to Read with Mexican Novelas’,4 it
wasn’t until my mother taught me to read in
Spanish using Mexican comic book novels
as texts that I felt the intellectual and emo-
tive pleasure of reading about my world in
my beloved Spanish language. In the first
grade, prior to learning to read in Spanish,
10 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
I was taught to read in English using the
‘Dick and Jane’ whole word or sight word
approach, which essentially required that
students memorize repetitive sight words
and sentences such as: ‘see Dick and Jane.
See Dick run. See Jane run’. Although I was
considered a successful reader of English, I
often wonder if I would have started to fall
behind once I could not memorize longer and
more difficult vocabulary that could not be
anchored in my own cultural reality or world.
Fortunately for me, I believe that it was my
Spanish language literacy skills that spared
me from this fate that is all too often the case
for many w­orking-class Latinx students.
My mother’s instructional response utilized
a simple phonics approach that mirrored the
one she had been exposed to in the elemen-
tary school of her little village of Jesús María
in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. I vividly
recall how effortless and fun it was to learn
vowels and consonants, then syllables, and
then progress to whole words, phrases, and
then complete sentences. Sentences such as
‘Mi mama me ama’ (‘My mother loves me’)
and ‘Amo a mi mama’ (‘I love my mother’),
with their focus on familial love, struck a
powerful emotional chord in me. Similarly,
many sentences created by my mother for me
reflected our life, such as ‘Lilia es una niña
estudiosa’ (‘Lilia is a studious girl’). Others
were playfully taunting, ‘A veces, Lilia es
una niña traviesa y burra. Lilia es una niña
apestosa’ (‘Sometimes Lilia is a mischievous
and stubborn girl. Lilia is a stinky girl’.) Oh,
how I loved engaging with text that was so
playful and personal!
Once I had sufficiently mastered phonics, I
directed my attention to the numerous novelas
that my mother stored and traded with female
friends and relatives. Novelas, or historietas as
they are also known, refer to two once-popular
weekly comic book-like series such as Memín
Pinguín (Billy the Rascal) and Lágrimas y
Risas (Tears and Laughter). Memín Pinguín
was a favorite of mine because the series
focused on the adventures and hijinks of a
­little Black boy, Memín Pinguín, and his best
friends growing up in 1950s/1960s working-
class, urban Mexico City. Memín’s close
and loving relationship with his mother, Ma’
Linda, especially resonated with me since
it mirrored my own relationship with my
mother. Ma’Linda’s economic struggles as a
single parent coupled with Memín’s concern
for his beloved mamá pulled at my heart-
strings and elicited my own empathy and con-
cern. The comic book series Lágrimas y Risas
was another serial publication – also written
by renowned Mexican popular-culture author,
Yolanda Vargas Dulché – that contained
romantic tales with similar story structure and
content. For example, the story, María Isabel,
chronicles a humble, Indigenous woman’s
rise to affluence, while Yesenia tells a similar
story about a humble but strong-willed gypsy
(or Roma woman) whose intelligence and
honesty propel her rise in social status. A third
type of novela that my mother read and shared
with me were thicker, conventional novel-
length comic books that included a variety of
genres, like La Novela Policíaca (crime and
detective), El Libro Semanal (romance), and
El Libro Vaquero (western).
In contrast to the stilted language and inau-
thentic content of my ‘Dick and Jane’ basals,
I perceived the Mexican novelas to be highly
interesting and informative. (Although I
must admit that I also enjoyed the somewhat
‘exotic’ language and content of the ‘Dick and
Jane’ readers.) While many educators might
question the appropriateness of presenting a
second grader with texts that dealt with adult
topics such as falling in love, infidelity, loss
of virginity, and other romance topics, I recall
feeling the thrill of reading about characters
that looked like me, my family members, and
other members of my community. Despite
the fact that the novelas presented Mexican
culture in a static, stereotypical, and acritical
manner, I learned a great deal about Mexican
culture and the Spanish language (especially
in terms of Spanish language vocabulary
development). Prior to reading the Mexican
novelas, I had not consciously realized that
there was such a thing as Mexican culture.
 LINKING MY WORLD TO THE WORD
Reading these texts, I increased my
Spanish language vocabulary and learned
about cultural worldviews such as what con-
stituted culturally ‘appropriate’ gender roles
in general and female roles in particular. My
learning about the cultural preference for
females to be docile and long-suffering wives
and mothers was met with incredulity and
exasperation since I grew up in a household
where my mother did not assume a subordi-
nate role to my father. I can remember anger
burning my cheeks because I felt it just was
not fair for a woman to be expected to forgive
men after being mistreated by them. I recall
approaching my mother and female relatives
to angrily express my indignation that female
characters, in order to be ‘good’, had to allow
others to take advantage of them. I recall my
relatives’ acknowledgment that yes, most
novelas portrayed good women as somewhat
stupid but I should not confuse ser noble, con
ser tonta (being kind with being foolish).
Despite the sexist nature of the novelas, I
savored reading, discussing, and challenging
the dubious morals of the some of the sto-
ries because I found it gratifying (although
I could not articulate it at the time) that
Spanish speakers – people just like my fam-
ily, community, and me – occupied these
pages. In fact, I was especially impressed that
the heroines were often typically brunettes
(from humble origins), while the villainesses
were blond (and upper class), which was the
opposite of what I saw in US television shows
such as Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. I
savored that in the world of novelas, brunettes
were considered to be morally superior and
more beautiful. Even at a young age, I appar-
ently grasped and rejected dominant culture’s
notions of beauty because they were counter
to what I and other Mexicans looked like.
Learning to read in Spanish at my mother’s
side constituted the pivotal reading experi-
ence of my childhood. It is amazing to recall
that my mother, with her limited schooling,
was so successful in teaching me to read and
write in Spanish. I cannot help but wonder
how it was possible for her to be such an
11
effective reading teacher when teachers with
advanced degrees in US schools seem inca-
pable of teaching working-class Latinx stu-
dents to read. During my mother’s literacy
instruction, I was presented with numerous
opportunities to analyze, critique, and dis-
sect a variety of narratives. Together with my
mother and other female relatives, I learned
to ‘construct’ the text read in order to under-
stand the author’s intent, then to critique or
‘deconstruct’ the content and, finally, to
‘reconstruct’ the novelas so as to envision
more socially just and joyful endings for the
underdog characters portrayed.
As a result of learning to read in Spanish
about Mexican/Latinx characters, I devel-
oped a greater sense of agency and pride as
I attended mostly low-income, urban, seg-
regated schools. I also developed a healthy
and confident academic identity that embold-
ened me to transfer my enthusiasm for and
confidence in reading in Spanish to English.
Exposure to literature that portrayed un-sub-
ordinated Mexican characters from all walks
of life – from professional to blue collar
helped me understand that, unlike life in my
barrio where Mexicans worked hard and dirty
jobs and were often portrayed as second-class
citizens on US television, worlds existed
where Mexicans were first-class profession-
als. In fact, it is my sense that my mother’s
intervention served to short-circuit any
potentially negative effects of my schooling.
In the process, I developed pride in myself as
a reader and as a Mexicana/Chicana. One key
end result was that I felt affirmed and proud
of my language and culture at a very young
age although at the time I did not have the
maturity or language to express these senti-
ments. This pride and confidence propelled
me to work aggressively to excel, even when
my teachers and other school personnel did
not necessarily cooperate.
In conclusion, I believe it was not so much
the technical aspects (phonics) of my moth-
er’s instruction that made the difference in
my life. The actual strength and success of
methods depend, first and foremost, on the
12 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
degree to which they embrace a pedagogy
that values students’ background knowledge,
language(s), culture(s), and life experiences,
and creates learning contexts where power
is shared by students and teachers. As Paulo
Freire eloquently states:
Reading the world always precedes reading the
word, and reading the word implies continually
reading the world.… I have always insisted that
words used in organizing a literacy program come
from the word universe of the people who are
learning, expressing their actual language, their
anxieties, fears, demands, dreams. Words should
be laden with the meaning of people’s existential
experience and not of the teacher’s experience.
(Freire, 1983: 10)
Sadly, to this day, I continue to witness the
transformation that Latinx and other linguis-
tically minoritized students undergo during
their elementary school years. Most of these
students begin kindergarten wide-eyed and
excited about school. However, by the end of
elementary school, too many have become
bored, anesthetized, and, ultimately alienated
and resistant after years of subtractive, cul-
turally irrelevant, and mind-numbing educa-
tion. My own early reading experiences
highlight the power and potential of cultur-
ally relevant and counter-hegemonic litera-
ture to assist linguistically minoritized
students to concurrently develop literacy
skills and critical consciousness. Schools
have the responsibility to utilize pedagogy
that is culturally relevant and honors stu-
dents’ already present funds of knowledge.
Notes
1  Paulo Freire, ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’,
Journal of Education Vol. 165, no. 1 (1983): 5–11.
2  Freire, ‘Reading’: p. 6, emphasis in original.
3  Freire, ‘Reading’: p. 5, emphasis in original.
4  Lilia I. Bartolomé, ‘Literacy as Comida: Learning to
Read with Mexican Novelas’, in Words Were All
We Had: Becoming Biliterate against the Odds,
ed. María de la Luz Reyes (2011), 49–59. New
York and London: Teachers College Press.

Freire Contra Freire:
An Interplay in Three Acts
In ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’,
Freire offers heartfelt ruminations on parents,
teachers, pets, ghosts, and books, as ‘infor-
mally as possible’, in an opening address to
the 1981 Brazilian Congress of Reading in
Campinas. Only the year before had he been
able to move back to Brazil after 15 years in
political exile. The country’s military dicta-
torship had passed an amnesty law in 1979
permitting the repatriation of exiles, even as
the law sought to protect the faltering regime
from human-rights prosecution. He does not
mention his exile in this address, but describes
returning, at almost 60 years of age and ‘with
deep emotion’, to his childhood home in
Recife, leading him to reflect back on the
‘gentle or well-behaved nostalgia emanating
from the earth, the trees, the house’, in
Loretta Slover’s translation (1983: 5, 8).
Freire is, however, somewhat apologetic
at having ‘inserted’ himself into the proceed-
ings of the congress. There is, of course, lit-
tle reason to apologize. How could we not be
absorbed by the one who taught us to read
3
John Willinsky
our own education in such important ways,
taking us for a drive by his childhood home,
neighborhood, and school? Still, he seeks to
redeem this autobiographical turn by draw-
ing a number of literacy lessons from the ripe
mangoes of his past.
I ended up stumbling over the lessons,
shaken by how quickly he moves from the
fluidity of his reading life to the rigidity of the
lessons on ‘real reading’ and what is ‘truly
read’. In trying to resolve the seeming dis-
crepancies between life and lessons, I came
across Freire’s own attentiveness to contra-
dictions in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
‘Every entity develops (or is transformed)
within itself, through the interplay of its con-
tradictions’ (2018: 136). It is this contradic-
tory interplay that I want to develop out of
Freire’s meditations on reading. While Freire
identifies the importance of the act of reading
in his title, I find him demonstrating a much
broader sense of this concept in this brief
work. I think his address to the reading con-
gress would be better framed as an interplay
14 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
in three acts. By better, I mean more instruc-
tive for advancing the critical pedagogies that
those of us gathered in this three-volume col-
lection are seeking to advance.
Reading’s first act comes early in life for
Freire, as for us all. He introduces how, as a
child, he first read with wonder the world of
trees and birds, sky and clouds, dogs and cats.
As this constant pulse of consciousness frames
Freire’s earliest perceptions, he ‘learned to
understand [i.e., read] things, objects, signs
through using them’ (1983: 6). The process
forms, for Freire, the famous association of
world and word: ‘Reading the world pre-
cedes reading the word’ (ibid.: 5). These may
have been the ‘moments in which the critical
importance of the act of reading took shape
in me in practice’ (ibid.: 8). He vividly con-
veys, for example, how he read ‘the dance of
boughs blown by the strong winds announc-
ing storms’ and the ‘black spots of an overripe
mango’ (ibid.: 6). This hunger for making a
greater sense of the world’s ways is a man-
ner of reading that remains with us, although
Freire sets it aside in reading’s second and
third acts.
School is largely responsible for the sec-
ond act. Freire identifies this form of reading
with three activities: learning grammar rules;
‘mechanically memorizing the description
of an object’; and struggling through ‘exten-
sive bibliographies, more to be devoured
than truly read and studied’ (ibid.: 8–9, his
emphasis). Freire takes issue with memoriza-
tion, in particular, denouncing it as ‘neither
real reading nor does it result in knowledge
of the object to which the text refers’ (ibid.:
9). Yet his charge applies, by implication, to
the whole of this educational act. His sug-
gestion that this reading was not real gives
me pause. It seems too categorical a call for
a term that he otherwise uses with such meta-
phorical finesse. It begs the question of how
many of our own students have found our
most carefully curated reading lists ‘exten-
sive’ if not excessive; how many read through
them mechanically, if at all? Who among us
did not, in our student days, plow through
such lists, only to later appreciate a passing
familiarity with one or two of the many read-
ings? Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, which
Freire cites in his address, may be one exam-
ple, Freire’s work may be another.
It is hard to see what is gained by denying
that common school activities count as read-
ing or lead to learning. It unduly deflates what
students work through in the course of a long
school day. It sets apart those teachers who
are not (yet) engaging in critical pedagogy –
those whom we should be seeking to interest
in this approach – saying to them, in effect,
what you are doing in the name of literacy is
not even reading. It seems more Freiean, if I
may, to take a dialogic approach by exploring
with such educators what they see or name
as ‘reading’ in their own lives, as well as in
their students’; it means asking what more
they might want from reading, in treating it as
a form of cultural action that addresses issues
in the students’ lives, to again return to themes
of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2018:
125–8). Still, I can appreciate the returning
exile’s impatience with traditional reading
lessons, especially with the dictatorship still
clinging to power. After finding a place in the
audience’s heart with his childhood memo-
ries, Freire might well have wanted to rat-
tle their educational complacency by calling
their sense of reading into question.
In his third and final act, as I see it, Freire
introduces ‘real reading’ (1983: 9). What
makes it real is the reader’s critical engage-
ment with word and world: ‘To sum up,
reading always involves critical perception,
interpretation, and rewriting what is read’
(ibid.: 11, his emphasis). Freire’s writing often
(if not always) reflects these admirable quali-
ties in ways that have engaged many readers
over the years (‘Over 1 million copies sold’
declares the cover of the 50th Anniversary
Edition of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed).
Again, however, I can’t help feeling that
something is amiss in suggesting that reading
‘always involves critical perception, interpre-
tation, and re-writing’ (my emphasis). Freire
is, in effect, pulling the carpet out from under
 FREIRE CONTRA FREIRE: AN INTERPLAY IN THREE ACTS
his earlier claims in this address, in which his
‘reading’ is all about a ‘distant childhood’
amid ‘the enchanting mystery of that world’,
while insisting that he is no ‘rationalist in
boy’s clothing’ (ibid.: 7). The young Freire is
continually reading the world the whole day
long, with that reading occasionally punctu-
ated by, for example, the nighttime emergence
of ghosts that brought about a deeper reading
of their puzzling mockery and wailing.
In this address, Freire sets out his path in
acquiring the critical interpretive reading of his
maturity. He credits the efforts of his school
teacher, Jose Pessoa. Elsewhere, Freire explains
in more detail how Pessoa introduced him into
an extensive world of distinguished teachers,
writers, and scholars, some of whom he even-
tually met and held ‘unguarded, brotherly con-
versations’, including the writer and politician
Odilon Ribeiro Coutinho and the Brazilian
sociologist Gilberto Freyre (Freire, 1996: 51).
They taught Freire how to attend to reading as
an act of critical interpretation, although not
initially in a political or revolutionary sense,
but in what he identifies as ‘the aesthetic
moment’ in writing and ‘the beauty of the
language’ (ibid.), traces of which are found in
this piece amid the scenes of elegant gaslights
and fragrant flowers. The literary criticism and
attention to language represents a rarified layer
of meta-reading, built atop basic reading prac-
tices. It is to make an art, profession, or trade
of reading, which is why I am hesitant about
treating this form of reading as a norm. Even in
the conversations that Freire clearly treasured,
it was surely not wit and aperçu at every turn. It
can only blunt the force of this pedagogy to be
always on, in an always critical reading of the
world’s every aspect. Who has the stamina to
read everything deeply? Or perhaps more per-
tinently, who wishes to suffer such stamina in
another? Even Marx, so persistently the revo-
lutionary in his writing, was known for putting
on the charm in person.
But more than that, critical pedagogy,
whether in Freire’s or other’s hands, is more
effective when it is selectively applied to
what calls out for a thorough rethinking and
15
rereading. I must admit that it gives me pause
to think that I may well have been all too
selective and all too narrowly focused on a
small array of related topics for far too long,
as a Google search of my name might well
suggest (to avoid needless self-citation). Still,
I advocate this selective application of criti-
cal pedagogy as an effective way of helping
teachers and students to work on what mat-
ters to them, why such a careful reading of
such matters is needed, and how to frame a
critical perception, defend an interpretation,
advance a rewriting of those matters. The goal
is not the critical reading, except as it brings
to the fore a compelling basis and reason-
able means for changing what is awry with
the world. This is accompanied by a need to
share and communicate, to make public and
known, what has come of that reading. Much
reading comes before that moment of sharing
what’s been learned about the world; much
reading and rewriting goes into what is going
to be shared of it, and, one only hopes, some
reading by others will follow such acts, even
if their reading is in this same critical spirit.
But these intense, concentrated efforts are not
the always of the life of reading.
Sometimes, reading is simply learning
about an old black dog, as when Freire tells us
about Joli, fondly recalling how his father’s
dog protected ‘my grandmother’s fat chick-
ens’ from the opossums (1983: 7). It seems
unlikely that Freire expects us to subject the
dog to critical perceptions, interpretations,
and rewriting (even as I may seem to have
done as much through this belabored analy-
sis). Sometimes, writer and reader can agree,
with bemused smiles, to let sleeping dogs lie.
This point becomes all the more clear in
comparing the chicken that figures in Freire’s
Letters to Cristina: Reflections on my Life
and Work (1996), published a year before
his death in 1997. In Letters, which he wrote
at the request of his niece, Freire poignantly
describes how, after the economic collapse of
1929, ‘we had very little to eat’ despite the
family’s middle-class markings of his father’s
neckties and his aunt’s piano (1996: 22). One
16 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
day, he reports, he and his brothers, feeling
the hunger of those days, end up stealing one
of the neighbor’s chickens: ‘In a split sec-
ond, as if we had rehearsed it, premeditated
it, we had the kicking chicken in our hands’
(ibid.: 24). It becomes the family’s meal with
little said of it, although his mother’s silence
was to long haunt him. Similarly, when he
speaks to the congress’ participants about
‘the varying color tones’ of fruit (1983: 6),
he makes it clear in Letters that those colors
took on their significance through his daring
‘childhood fruit thefts’ that grew out of ‘our
need to kill our hunger’ (1996: 21, 19).
It is perfectly understandable that on return-
ing to Brazil and in speaking to the teachers
attending the congress, Freire focused on
how he read the world and the word during
his happier childhood years in Recife. He is
no less free than any of us to rewrite his life
in a multitude of ways. I only raise this aspect
as it, too, points to how there is no always
to reading, no ready sense of when a read-
ing is sufficiently critical or adequately inter-
preted to then somehow count as real reading
in Freire’s sense. It may be worth noting that
no less a major interpreter of Freire’s work
than Donaldo Macedo has commented on
the interpretive significance of what Freire
chose to omit, as Macedo notes that he ‘did
not fully capture the layered complexity
of Freire’s philosophy’ until he visited ‘the
impoverished community’ to which Freire’s
family moved during those indelibly hungry
years of his late childhood (Freire, 2018: 12).
The differences between the chicken-and-
fruit stories serve as a reminder of how con-
text shapes reading, whether in Freire being
invited to open the Brazilian Congress of
Reading in 1981 or in the invitation extended
to a number of scholars, including myself,
to comment on this opening address some
38 years after it was delivered. But then how
unkind of me to read Freire against Freire in
this way, using but a slight sliver of his work.
Yet such critical questioning and rewriting
are his prescription for keeping reading real.
And because I believe it more effective and
realistic to selectively exercise such skills, it
seems worthwhile giving Freire his due on
reading in a handbook of critical pedagogies.
REFERENCES
Freire, Paulo. The Importance of the Act of
Reading. Trans. Loretta Slover. Journal of
Education 165, 1 (1983): 5–11.
Freire, Paulo. Letters to Cristina: Reflections on
My Life and Work. Trans. Donaldo Macedo.
New York: Routledge, 1996.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. 50th Anniver-
sary Ed. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018 (orig.
1970).

A Note on Free Association as
Transference to Reading
Would it be so far afield to relate Paulo
Freire’s (1983) ‘The Importance of the Act of
Reading’ and his return to ‘the most remote
experiences of childhood’ (ibid.: 5) with that
of a psychoanalyst who listens in on a case
history? And, given that Freire mainly wished
to comment on the significance of reading to
his own life and to the creation of his peda-
gogical acts, might I, too, take a chance and
freely associate to signs along the way and
ask the affecting question, why is there a
desire to read? Might I too search for lost
traces of my long-ago childhood and link this
prehistoric past to the currency of my com-
mitments to protecting the life of the mind?
Might I, too, narrate the transference, both
positive and negative, both with love and
hate, to reflect on what has become my edu-
cation? And, if I can do that, would I then
open a new reading, a new world, and a new
approach to old and seemingly intractable
conflicts? Might I too find that what reading
teaches is that nothing is what it seems to be,
that reality too must pass through my
4
D e b o r a h P. B r i t z m a n
subjective world, and that within the act of
interpreting there is allowance for our earli-
est mental paradox, namely that we are
always reading for what cannot be seen but
can be still be imagined?
One day, 60 years ago, when I was once six
years old and therefore in my first-grade class,
the teacher ordered me into the ‘bad’ readers’
group. I then stumbled upon the strange fact
that I was going to be called a slow reader.
My first grade had four reading groups: the
good, the almost good, the not-so-good, and
the truly terribly bad. All children knew that
the pretence of the names of the groups (the
butterflies, the bees, the frogs, and fishes)
were mere cover stories for whether or not
one was either good or bad. The bad (dumb)
group was given a very stupid, thin, book of
gigantic type. Each page held a large picture
and a few rhyming words: ‘See, Skip, Jump’.
‘Jump, Skip, Jump’. ‘Jump, Jump, Jump’.
Ad nauseum. The good (smart) group had a
beautiful, thick book, filled with stories and
adventures. I felt humiliated, jealous, and
18 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
desperate. I had no idea how I could leave
the dumb group. Indeed, I didn’t know why I
was there. One day when the teacher was not
looking, I went to the bookshelf and stole the
smart book. I put the book under my coat and
left school with the stolen book. I was very
worried my mother would ask how I came to
possess this book. So, I hid the book under
my bed and only took it out to read when I
was sure I would not be disturbed or caught.
But I worried I would be accused of steal-
ing the book. And I fantasied that my teacher
would march to my house, demand I confess,
and take the book away. Near the end of that
first year, I threw the book out of my bed-
room window. It landed on the roof. For the
next few years I watched the weather destroy
the book, until there was hardly a sign of
my crime. I hoped no one would learn that I
had stolen and then destroyed a school book.
Reading was not only dangerous. Reading
was my most complex emotional situation
and my most obsessive fantasy.
In the naïveté of a young child – where
reason and unreasonableness and desire and
anxiety were one and the same – I could not
imagine telling the teacher I wanted to read. I
symbolically equated my desire to read with
a crime and with feelings of guilt. Somehow,
I was really able to steal words and the
words knew that. Of course, childhood is that
privileged time when there is no difference
between the animate and the inanimate and
feelings were everywhere and attributed to
anything. And, in childhood our transference
to objects felt as powerful as did the transfer-
ence of love, hate, and authority onto people.
Yet I have to wonder today, what could it
mean that I would learn the desire to read?
Like Freire, who needed to assure his audi-
ence that his idea of the act of reading was
and remains an emotional experience even as
these affecting ties design intellect, I too must
proclaim that in reading I was not ‘a rational-
ist in boy’s clothing’ (ibid.: 6). I was however
a fabulist with the capacity for imagining the
worst, and by hiding in sheep’s clothing, or
so I thought, I held the illusion that I could
escape my fate and freely associate with my
desire as a reader. I came to learn that just as
with people, there would be transference to
books loved and hated, understood and mis-
understood. Only later did I learn why.
Sigmund Freud (1899) has made the argu-
ment that our earliest memories involve two
nearly opposing experiences – the actual and
the imagined. Both are affected by leftover
time and by the ripples of impressions. He
described this complex as ‘screen memories’
(ibid.: 320), fragments of one event displaced
from the original scene and projected onto
another later event. It was Freud’s answer to
the common questions of why people tend to
remember irrelevant things, why people ideal-
ize a past never experienced, why we need a
cover story, and why memory and forgetting
are two sides of the same coin. The feeling
of an event persists but the historical event is
subject to the ravages of time, fractured and
displaced. Memory is just that construction.
Freud also compared approaching psychical
life, or taking a case history, to an archeologi-
cal dig. The bits of pottery and material signs
of everyday ancient life are in fragments and
scattered across a wide swathe of land due
to the weight of the earth and its capacity for
burial. The archeologist cannot be sure if the
fragment found remained in its original place
or, whether the bit of pottery had shifted to
another location. But the metaphor of archeol-
ogy could not quite address the liveliness of
these fragments in mind. While today’s sci-
entific instruments might aid in clarifying the
time, date, and place of an object, the same
cannot be said of the objects of human feelings
and the traces that return at a moment, say,
when staring out of one’s window and halluci-
nating a decaying book still there on the roof.
I would have to say that reading is not only
an interpretive act. It is also a mirror and at
times a screening of the mind’s functions that
involve how attention, reception, hallucina-
tion, bodily action, refinding, and notation
form associative pathways and broken links
between the inner and outer worlds. There is
something that happens before interpretation
 A NOTE ON FREE ASSOCIATION AS TRANSFERENCE TO READING
and it has to do with our susceptibility to the
things we don’t know, to the destiny of life’s
impressions, and then to the act of becoming
absorbed and lost in the other’s words. Then,
reading is like taking in one’s own case his-
tory. The details slowly become a story of
revision. Reading is an act of projective
identification and imagination for, after all,
words must signify what is no longer there,
and in reading we are able to associate with
absence, a general principle for the capacity
for symbolization as well as the forming of
memory. Something stands in for something
else but is not the original thing. This little
lesson, that the book can stand for a crime,
for a secret, and for an emotional situation
also brings thoughts for a second chance to
make a better world and a self that is less
19
naïve, more assertive, and freer to associate
disparate and fractured memories into a new
narrative. And all these dynamic associa-
tions lend the mind its freedom and openness
to things unseen so as to risk the self when
one reads the dream of transference with the
world.
REFERENCES
Freud, Sigmund. Screen Memories (1899). The
Standard Edition, Volume 3, pp. 303–322.
London: Hogarth Press, 1968.
Freire, Paulo. 1983. The Importance of the Act
of Reading. Journal of Education, Vol. 165,
no.1, pp. 5–11.

Dialogic and Liberating Actions
Freire’s first writing1 came to my hands in
1967, in the clandestine movement for
democracy against the Francoist dictatorship.
I was then 15 and was a high school student
at Bilbao’s Jesuits’ School, where students
with good grades were oriented towards pro-
fessions such as engineering or business
management. Education was not part of my
professional academic objective, but Freire’s
proposal provided us a theoretical and practi-
cal orientation for our literacy work in
Bilbao’s shanty town.
The act of reading conceived as a dia-
logic action, including its liberating sense,
provided me with an educational vision that
creatively connected with the activities of
García Lorca’s La Barraca theatre and with
the author’s work. García Lorca showed that
common people made metaphors that were
as creative as those of the best writers; he
said that calling a roof’s ledge ‘eaves’ or a
sweet ‘tocino de cielo’ [‘heaven’s bacon’]
were wonderful metaphors. Freire’s theory
oriented that thought pedagogically. It was
5
Ramón Flecha
not about going to the shanty town to bring
them our culture: together with the people
who lived there, we had to construct a culture
that could be, as shown by the popular meta-
phors, of the highest worldwide level and that
allowed everybody with no discrimination of
class or condition to enjoy humanity’s best
creations. Freire’s dialogic proposal took that
egalitarian, democratic and liberating orien-
tation into the educational practice.
With the dialogic act of reading, those poor
people, who in many cases had never gone
to school, could read the words and also the
world; they could not be excluded from any
human creation. I met Paulo in January 1988,
when I proposed him as Doctor honoris causa
of the University of Barcelona. The first thing
he asked me about when he saw me was Ferrer
i Guardia’s bibliography (Ferrer i Guardia,
1979), enthusiastically saying that his
Modern School movement had had schools in
Brazil too. Ferrer i Guardia was the most rep-
resentative pedagogue of an anarchist, (very)
pacifist educational tradition, really based
 DIALOGIC AND LIBERATING ACTIONS
on what we today call human rights. In that
tradition, many libertarian athenaeums had
encouraged common workers, who did not
know how to read, to enjoy the best literary
works such as Shakespeare or Homer as well
as essays such as Kropotkin’s ‘The Conquest
of Bread’ (1995). Paulo loved encounter-
ing the Dialogic Literary Gatherings at the
Escola d’Adults de la Verneda-Sant Martí in
which people who were becoming literate
read James Joyce’s Ulysses (2000), Homer’s
Odyssey (2006), The Arabian Nights (2010)
and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (2000) or
Cortázar’s Rayuela (2016). He also liked
knowing that the key pedagogical contribu-
tion to creating those gatherings had been his
dialogic action.
In those days, and other occasions, we
talked a lot about the process that led from
my first encounters with Lorca’s work and the
athenaeums’ cultural practices, to the crea-
tion of the first Dialogic Literary Gathering in
1978 and what role Paulo’s work had played
in that trajectory. In conversation, we came to
the conclusion that it had been very important
due to three coincidences and a great contri-
bution. The first coincidence was the rejec-
tion of fatalism and determinism with which
many critics then analysed education, saying
that it could only reproduce inequalities and
not transform them. The second was the con-
viction that, as Alain Touraine wrote about
the Dialogic Literary Gatherings, sometimes
‘knowledge flows from the bottom up’2. The
third one is the profoundly dialogic con-
ception of democracy rejecting all kinds of
dictatorship and authoritarian leaders, both
21
from the right and the left. For all that, I still
needed the ingredient that I learned from
Paulo – the great contribution – which is the
dialogic education he gave to the world.
There are many activities which keep
Paulo’s spirit very much alive, creating a
better world for everybody, and the Dialogic
Literary Gatherings is one of them.
Notes
1  It was a cyclostyled material that was distributed
clandestinely which consisted of a part of “Educa-
tion as the Practice of Freedom”, but it was not the
book or a full copy of it.
2  Words of commentary from Alain Touraine about
the book: Flecha, R. (2000): Sharing Words.
Lanham, M.D: Rowman & Littlefield.
REFERENCES
Anonymous. (2010). The Arabian Nights. Tales
of 1001 nights. London: Penguin Classics.
Cortázar, J. (2016). Rayuela. Barcelona: Debol-
sillo editorial.
Ferrer i Guardia, F. (1979). La Escuela moderna.
Guecho: Zero.
Homer. (2006). The Odyssey. London: Penguin
Classics.
Joyce, J. (2000). Ulysses. London: Penguin
Modern Classics.
Kropotkin, P. (1995). The Conquest of Bread
and Other Writings (edited by Shatz, M.).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, V. (2000). The Waves. Knoxville: Words-
worth Classics.

In the Spirit of Freire
I am grateful to be invited to respond to Paulo
Freire’s (1981/1983) ‘The Importance of the
Act of Reading’. I have benefited from and
cited many of Freire’s writings in my work
since the late 1970s but had not seen this
piece. As I perused it, I was amazed by the
ways in which Freire read and re-read him-
self, and as I read and re-read his writing I
grasped more of the text of Freire’s life, and I
often lapsed into reflection on dimensions of
the texts that shaped who I am. I should prob-
ably say ‘that I have been, am, and am still
becoming’– all simultaneously. As Freire re-
read texts of his childhood and youth, I
accompanied him, renewing awareness of the
corridors of my own childhood homes. I agree
with his several admonitions to recognize that
reading the world precedes reading the word,
and I can see an interactive and transactive
relation between the world and the word that
evolves in complex convolutions as life con-
tinues, as every revised text transforms the
reader and the world in meaningful ways.
6
William H. Schubert
Clearly, Freire exemplifies what he
encourages readers to be and to do. As I
read his short paper, I reflected on the pos-
sibility that Freire’s orientation is part of a
larger spirit that he embodied, and that both
his work and the many whom he influenced
continue to embody. I see it as a spirit that I
have known longer than I have been aware
of Freire. I met Paulo Freire at conferences,
and before that I corresponded with him
when I chaired the nomination committee
for the Lifetime Achievement Award of the
Curriculum Studies Division of the American
Educational Research Association (AERA) –
a recognition we were honored to have him
accept in 1990. When I saw Freire make pres-
entations at AERA, and when I participated
on the committee to draft the statement for
his Honorary Doctorate at the University of
Illinois at Chicago in 1993, my brief encoun-
ters with him were surrounded with his spirit
of tranquility, approachability, and wisdom,
infused with his ethos of radical love.
 IN THE SPIRIT OF FREIRE
As I read and reflected on this brilliant
piece (Freire, 1981/1983), I realized that I
had experienced six years of teaching in ele-
mentary school before having heard of Paulo
Freire. Nonetheless, in my deepest moments
of preparation for teaching I believe I some-
how glimpsed deeply a Freirian spirit. This
spirit that prepared me to be a teacher traces
back to the dinner table with my parents, both
highly regarded public educators, in the rural
midwestern United States. Their discussions
of interactions with teachers, administrators,
students, and parents moved deeply inside me
in ways that I still do not fully comprehend.
My larger extended family included two
great aunts and my maternal grandmother
who were teachers in country schools – often
in one-room school houses, one of which I
attended for two years – and my grandfa-
thers, one educated as a minister and the
other as a politician and farmer. While they
were all good teachers in their professional
lives, I was most inspired and perplexed by
the ways in which they taught me informally
through stories, and play that extended those
stories. And they taught through conversa-
tion, perhaps dialogue. When I came to my
father with a problem he would usually tell
me a helpful story from a similar dilemma in
his life. My mother, grandmother, and great
aunts would read stories from literary clas-
sics and then extend them as we acted out
dramas together overcoming social justice;
my grandfather would imagine episodes in
which I was a character who helped others
overcome oppression. Formalized schooling
paled, even when these relatives were the
educators, in comparison to the theatrical
play and conversations that they drew from
my interests and concerns. I am not sure my
relatives knew how deeply they were teaching
in those informal contexts, but they reached
deeply within me because they loved me, and
they helped me to imagine and create myself.
Every summer, several of these relatives
and I would take a road trip for three to four
weeks through North America – each sum-
mer a different destination. We did this from
23
1952 to 1964 and they often let me design the
curriculum of those journeys.
When I began college in the Fall of 1962, I
was possessed with a fear of failure to be able
to do college work since only a small per-
centage of my high school classmates went
to college; however, with hard work I made
the grades. As in high school, in college I
talked with best friends about our future lives
as we tried to figure out what we should be
and do. In my sophomore year I had a kind
of quiet epiphany. I was asked by a literature
professor to read some literary criticism on
the plays and short stories we read for his
class. I did not know what literary criticism
was! Nonetheless, as I read, I began to see
that this opened up an internal conversation
between me and the texts I read that was
like my sessions with friends on the mean-
ing of life – though the texts raised the bar of
sophistication. Similarly, I began to see study
as an extension of the childhood play and
conversations with my family. At that point
I concluded that immersion in these texts
(literary, philosophical, historical, cultural,
scientific, and more) was where I needed to
be, but I could not express this discovery at
the time. However, I was beginning to use
intellectual texts to fashion a text within me,
in what I would now call the spirit of Freire.
I was beginning to ask what I later wrote
about in almost every article and book: the
worthwhile question – although it would be
some years before I could articulate it. In my
careers as teacher and professor I have called
it the ‘basic curriculum question’. Time and
again I have admonished educators, students,
and human beings generally, to ask: what
is worth knowing, needing, experiencing,
doing, being, becoming, overcoming, shar-
ing, contributing, wondering, and imagining?
(Schubert, 2009a).
That day in the Manchester College
library – the moment of my epiphany – I realized
that education, even schooling, could be writ-
ing the texts of my life. Moreover, I thought
it would be good to help others to see that
as a central tenet of education for everyone.
24 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
That observation made me think anew about
what I wanted to be and do occupationally.
Teenage rebellion decided me against follow-
ing the paths of my relatives as school teach-
ers, despite their success, yet they had never
said I should be a teacher. Before that day in
the library, every time I took a good course
I was inspired to change my mind about my
desired occupation – from philosopher or the-
ologian, to anthropologist or novelist, from art
critic to sports writer, from biologist to psy-
chologist, from novelist to poet, playwright,
or actor, and more. However, at that moment
I thought I could be all of these if I were a
teacher or theorist of education. Curriculum
was not in my vernacular, yet, but I enrolled
in a teacher education program, and contin-
ued my pursuit of the liberal arts. It was soon
clear to me that the liberal arts classes usu-
ally taught me more about the new meaning
I embraced for education than the teacher
preparation courses. The kind of teacher I
wanted to be – that exemplified informally by
my parents and other relatives – was not what
the teacher education faculty offered. I craved
the spirit of Paulo Freire, though I was unable
to articulate this at the time. Here and there
in my liberal arts courses, and through con-
versation with my enlightened and inspiring
professor, I was able to pose and pursue prob-
lems and move beyond the banking model
of education. Threads of praxis entered the
fabric of the text I was becoming in the sum-
mer of 1964 when my best friend and I were
political interns for senators in Washington,
DC. It was the summer of civil rights legisla-
tion and being in DC opened me to what city
life offered; both enabled my perspective to
be less provincial, more cospomolitan, more
activist. We were 20 years old and found
many experiences that both enriched our
sense of possibility and dampened our enthu-
siasm for careers in formal political spheres.
The informal movements were just around
the corner for us – facing injustices in spheres
of race, gender, and the war in Vietnam.
These are merely selective examples of my
reading the world, reading the word, writing
the word, writing the world, and even trying
to right some of the world. A kind of Freirian
spirit resonated within me to re-read and re-
write the text that I was and to revise that text
continuously. When I went immediately from
college graduation to Indiana University to
pursue a Master’s Degree, to avoid killing or
maiming on highways or in Vietnam, I found
a home in the Department of History and
Philosophy of Education. There were several
Deweyan scholars there and the Deweyan
influence revised the text I was writing, the
ways I was reading the world, reading the
word, writing my text, and my commitment
to read and write texts of and with others.
Dewey’s advocacy of starting with the inter-
ests and concerns of learners, or mutual con-
cerns of students and teachers, shifted my
focus from how texts of liberal education
help me read my world more fully, to how
the texts of all those I meet serve that func-
tion for me, and I hope that my texts do the
same for their texts.
When I began teaching in elementary
schools in the Chicago area in 1967, I soon
realized that to teach well I had to read this
new world of my life in teaching. However,
that notion of reading was not in my vocabu-
lary, but the idea of curriculum was part of
my repertoire by then, so I started to play
(harkening back to my relatives’ play with
me as a child) with curriculum, expanding
it beyond the usual meanings: cover the cur-
riculum, uncover the curriculum, discover
the curriculum, recover the curriculum, and
so on. I thought I needed a curriculum to help
me grow as a teacher, a barrage of ideas to
enrich my teaching life with students, some-
thing that I read every day. So, I began to cre-
ate a curriculum of self-designed in-service
education. Much of it involved books, films,
and myriad resources from the Chicago
area – including friends. An even bigger part
was played by the children who entered my
classroom and the wealth of experiences
they brought with them. The best of our
times occurred when we read and re-read
our worlds together and used that reading as
 IN THE SPIRIT OF FREIRE
an opportunity to read the words of class-
room texts, challenging those texts with the
ones we were writing of ourselves, and using
those texts to challenge and revise our own
texts-in-the-making.
Still, I had not heard of Freire. I found
much sustenance in Dewey, and in John Holt,
Herb Kohl, Jonathan Kozol, and Caroline
Pratt, as well as a curriculum book that I
felt a kinship with when I read it at Indiana
University: Fundamentals of Curriculum
Development by Smith, Stanley, and Shores
(1957). I saw a lot of Deweyan influence in
that text, and much of it resonated to help
my text as a teacher grow. Little did I know
then that J. Harlan Shores would eventually
become my PhD adviser. The school district
where I worked had a good library, and a pro-
gressive orientation, so I sought curriculum
literature that expanded my sphere of study.
After six years of teaching and studying, I
applied for sabbatical leave to do doctoral
studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign (UIUC), and I was fortunate to
have the application accepted.
At UIUC, a college of education with a
laudable historic reputation in the curriculum
field, I was pleasantly surprised when Harlan
Shores told me that there was no program
in curriculum studies, so we needed to cre-
ate a program to fit my needs and interests.
I was thrilled. That, I thought, would be a
natural continuation of my self-designed in-
service education or professional develop-
ment project, though more scholarly I hoped,
since it led to the PhD. I loved working with
Professor Shores and other professors to
design a set of courses, independent studies,
and audited courses, from many fields, con-
ferences, tutorials, and ponderings from my
library carrel, to provide a strong basis for
writing a dissertation that built on my previ-
ous experience and grew from my interests,
concerns, and the problems I posed.
One of my early courses was about the
intellectual roots of open education, then a
major phenomenon, and it fit the fact that I
had helped design an open school – under
25
the guidance of faculty members at the
University of Wisconsin and colleagues in
the Downers Grove, Illinois, public schools –
and had taught there for four years. I was
most interested in the roots identified by
Professor Bernard Spodek that traced back
to Quintilian in ancient Rome, and went
through Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Robert Owen,
Froebel, Dewey and many other progressives,
Margaret and Rachel McMillan, and Michael
Polanyi, among others. In that 1973 course
we read a mimeographed paper by James B.
Macdonald which would be published a year
later (Macdonald, 1974). In it Macdonald
cited and discussed Paulo Freire’s (1970)
Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It was my first
acquaintance with Freire. Studying Freire’s
text gave me the capacity to understand more
fully his spirit, much of which I concluded I
already knew from multifarious experiences.
Nonetheless, finding Freire’s work enabled
me to read with greater nuance the world
and the word that I experienced through the
above stories.
After studying much of Freire’s work, the
gift of his article (Freire, 1981/1983) from
Shirley Steinberg a few weeks ago and her
invitation to read and respond fit beautifully
with my attempts to write some memoirist
stories in my retirement. I was so glad that
in this piece Freire focused on his childhood,
youth, and young adulthood. In so doing, he
inspired me to read more deeply into my own
world and the texts written within me. I offer
deep appreciation to Freire for emphasizing
the non-human dimensions of his reading of
the world in which he grew up. The nuance
and vibrancy with which Freire sketched for
his readers, invoked in me a greater capacity
to read similar dimensions of my places of
growing: images of homes, their nooks and
crannies (in which I played in solitary as
a child and as I read Freire’s words I think
of myself as he thought adroitly of himself,
i.e., reading my world as ‘rationalist in boy’s
clothing’, on page 7); similarly, I resonate
with Freire’s commentary on the places
where he learned to walk, talk, and socialize
26 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
(some of the most profound and taken-­for-
granted learnings for all of us); early encoun-
ters with written words, lights, colors, and
gates (metaphorically as passages, too);
encounters with trees, other plants, birds and
their songs, and animals (all akin to read-
ing my life as an only child growing up on a
farm); and ghosts (I think of loving ancestors,
unborn babies, and Chief Seattle’s (1855)
warning of hauntings of children massacred
by White oppressors). Therein Freire came to
know the oppressed, marginalized, hungry,
and illiterate, and I thought of how I came
to know those realities. When Freire told of
earth and sticks as chalkboard and chalk, I
thought of the way my wife, Ming Fang He,
telling me of how her father taught her to read
the world and word with sticks on a dusty
path, used to draw and write about a bird seen
in the natural settings of China. Freire helped
me see the elements of weather and geogra-
phy (storms, lightning, thunder, lakes, riv-
ers, clouds, islands, wind) as too often taken
for granted in reading and writing texts of
who we are. Taken together such influences
illustrate the need to read and re-read social
and political life within contexts of the non-
human (often neglected, though maybe con-
stituting a different form of living or being).
And even with the barrage of dimensions of
the world Freire portrayed in this small arti-
cle, he makes it obvious that any reading of
the world can be realized only partially, then
more fully realized through successive read-
ings. Despite this, it is impossible to grasp the
whole. That all possibilities for any event or
situation exist simultaneously is too much to
grasp as Borges (1964) brilliantly conveys in
his ‘Garden of Forking Paths’, the piece that
awakened me to postmodernism in literature.
It awakened me, too, to the apprehension of
­living multiple possibilities at once.
I think, too, of the relevance of Freirian
spirit in the reading and writing of my world
in curricula over the years. Some brief exam-
ples: (1) I have written of the theory within
persons (Schubert, 1982, 1989), meaning that
in the process of teaching and learning we
grow our theory of our world, and now with
Freire’s (1981/1983) article as a guide my
conception of writing the world broadens and
deepens. (2) I have argued that one of the best
ways to engage in curriculum research is to
write speculative essays (Schubert, 1991) and
that notion is enhanced by Freire’s writing
of the world. I have also elaborated on how
much of anyone’s philosophical speculation
cannot be written, because it is so vast and
diversified, so fully in motion, that it cannot
be rendered into words, and that is enhanced
in what I see as Freire’s (1981/1983) empha-
sis to let there be writing that far exceeds what
we can grasp in writing processes. Rather, it
is embodied, or can only be lived, and that we
need to let it thrive in embodiment and shared
in dialogue. (3) I have often emphasized that
we should be aware of the outside curricu-
lum (e.g., Schubert, 1981, 2010), not only
the school curriculum or other institutional-
ized curricula; outside curricula are formed
and reformed from myriad combinations
of our lived milieus in multitudes of non-
school settings. Freire’s (1981/1983) article
accentuates for me that our reading of the
world must embrace even more dimensions,
combinations of things, as we write texts of
words and texts of being. (4) I have argued
that curriculum can never be fully for learn-
ers if it is not also of and by them (Schubert
and Lopez Schubert, 1981). In the title and
throughout the article we said that curricu-
lum must be of, by, and therefore for students,
and we illustrated examples from our expe-
riences. As Freire (1981/1983) exemplifies
and as he explicated earlier in differentiating
problem-posing pedagogy from the banking
method of education (Freire, 1970), curricu-
lum as pedagogy must begin with the con-
cerns of learners, their reading of the world.
(5) This beginning with the experiences of
the learning group struck me early on as so
opposed to conventional practice in most
schools that political action must be taken
to enable it to occur. Realizing this, Freire
brilliantly declares, ‘I always saw teaching
… to read and write as a political act, an act
 IN THE SPIRIT OF FREIRE
of knowledge, and therefore as a creative
act’ (1981/1983: 10). It is the basis for ask-
ing and pursuing what is worthwhile, who
benefits, and for moving to overcome what-
ever oppresses and skews the benefits. Also,
Freire (1981/1983) helps me add nuanced
understanding about the position I set forth
in Love, Justice, and Education: John Dewey
and the Utopians (Schubert, 2009b). My posi-
tion in that book, based largely on Dewey, was
that love must propel justice in education. As
I re-read that text I will doubtless ponder for
some time Freire’s admonition that the worth-
while teaching–learning situation ‘enables them
to understand their indigence differently from
the fatalistic way they sometimes view injus-
tice’ leading to ‘organizing and mobilizing’ that
in turn enables counter-­hegemony as Antonio
Gramsci advocated (Freire, 1981/1983:11).
So, what I have been calling the spirit of
Freire and his work is a spirit of the best of
humanity, never finalized, always in the mak-
ing, and accessible in his roots (for instance
in G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, John Dewey,
Erich Fromm, Antonio Gramsci, Martin
Buber, liberation theologists such as Gustavo
Gutiérrez of Peru or Leonardo Boff of Brazil
(see Lake and Kress, 2013)). Perhaps, this
hopeful human spirit streams back to revo-
lutionary religious leaders, such as Jesus,
Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tse, Muhammad,
and many more, including persons who are no
longer known but whose influence prevails.
They share certain common lines of thought
and practice, praxis, that should always be
emerging, being re-­written, as has been done
by authors in this volume. They read and re-
read words, and living texts that grow from
multiple perspectives and pedagogies such as
those developed by Joe Kincheloe (2008) and
others. I feel fortunate to have shared a spirit
of humanity from Freire (e.g., 1970, 1998),
which I believe is a special spirit of humanity –
a voice of growth, dialogue, justice, peace, and
radical love to which all should aspire. Our
world of conquest and oppression desperately
needs the spirit many have shared with Paulo
Freire. That spirit should be nourished so that
27
it flourishes for current and future generations,
especially empowered by Freire’s (1997:
101–7) heartfelt and steadfast sense of faith
and hope in humanity.
REFERENCES
Borges, J. L. (1964). The garden of forking
paths. In J. L. Borges, (Ed.), Labyrinths:
Selected stories and other writings (pp. 31–9).
New York: New Directions.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed.
New York: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1981/1983). The Importance of the
Act of Reading. Journal of Education, 165(1),
5–11.
Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of the heart. New
York: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1998). Teachers as cultural workers:
Letters to those who dare teach. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
Kincheloe, J. (2008). Critical pedagogy primer.
New York: Peter Lang.
Lake, R. & Kress, T. (Eds.). (2013). Paulo Freire’s
intellectual roots: Toward historicity in praxis.
London: Bloomsbury.
Macdonald, J. B. (1974). A transcendental
developmental ideology of education. In
W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Heightened consciousness,
cultural revolution, and curriculum theory
(pp. 85–116). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.
Schubert, W. H. (1981). Knowledge about out-
of-school curriculum. Educational Forum,
45(2), 185–99.
Schubert, W. H. (1982). Teacher education as
theory development. Educational Considera-
tions, 9(2), 8–13.
Schubert, W. H. (1989). Reconceptualizing and
the matter of paradigms. Journal of Teacher
Education, 40(1), 27–32.
Schubert, W. H. (1991). Philosophical inquiry:
The speculative essay. In E. C. Short (Ed.),
Forms of curriculum inquiry (pp. 61–76).
Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press.
Schubert, W. H. (2009a). What is worthwhile:
From knowing and needing to being and
sharing? Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy,
6(1), 21–39.
28 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Schubert, W. H. (2009b). Love, justice, and
education: John Dewey and the Utopians.
Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
Schubert, W. H. (2010). Outside curricula and
public pedagogy. In J. A. Sandlin, B. D.
Schultz, & J. Burdick (Eds.), Handbook of
public pedagogy: Education and learning
beyond schooling (pp.10–19). New York:
Routledge.
Schubert, W. H. & Lopez Schubert, A. L. (1981).
Toward curricula that are of, by, and there-
fore for students. The Journal of Curriculum
Theorizing, 3(1), 239–51.
Seattle, Chief. (1855). Speech to the Governor
of Washington Territory.
Smith, B. O., Stanley, W. O., & Shores, J. H. (1957).
Fundamentals of curriculum development.
[Revised ed.]. NY: Harcourt, Brace, and World.

Fake News and Other
Conundrums in ‘Reading the
World’ at Empire’s End
Paulo Freire’s articulation of a dialectic
between reading the word and reading the
world may be one of his most well-known
and, indeed, celebrated ideas. It provides the
foundation for dialogical pedagogy. It ani-
mates adult learners who come to realize that
the language of their worldly surroundings
can provide a text whose words are readable
(decodable) in personally meaningful ways.
It anchors learning to read in actual experi-
ence rather than in the mystical worlds of
abstraction and objectified idealism. It pro-
vides an escape from enslavement in what
Freire called the ‘natural attitude’ wherein
one’s learning receipts are simply accepted
as the way things are and unchangeable.
In the simplest forms of praxis, all this
seems relatively easy and straightforward.
This may be termed naïve praxis. If a child
loves baseball, you can take the key words
of the game – ball, bat, strike, hit, run, walk,
inning, etc. – as the basis for learning the
very words needed to read stories of your
favourite pastime and gradually the broader
7
David Geoffrey Smith
world. Such activities could even inspire one
to become a baseball writer; Freire always
insisted on the importance of understanding
the hopes and dreams of learners. (For a good
summary study of Freire’s life and work see
Gerhardt, 1993.)
Things become much more complicated
though when the other shoe in Freirean
theory drops, namely, that all learning is
political. This is when naïve literacy shifts
to becoming critical literacy, and here the
word critical doesn’t mean adolescent harp-
ing on the negative aspects of things, but lit-
erally ‘the turning point in a disease’, from
the Greek word krisis, so used by early medi-
cal researchers like Hippocrates (400 bce)
and Galen (200 ce). Start scratching sim-
ple words like ball and bat by tracing their
material origins and the real stuff, the really
difficult stuff, the stuff dealing with nothing
less than the deeper truth of things, starts to
reveal itself. And this can lead to trouble,
which is why Freire flunked his final doc-
toral oral examination, why he spent several
30 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of his early adult years in jail, and why most
of his adult career was spent in exile from his
beloved homeland, Brazil.
How things play out depends on where
one is located geographically, and while the
ends in view of critical work hold much in
common regardless of one’s location – a
healing of the body politic from its diseases
of inequality, injustice, suppression of truth,
etc. – the specific nature of that work will
vary according to one’s place on the spec-
trum of power within the prevailing global
order. Take the word baseball, for example.
If you live in Canada you may be a fan of the
Toronto Blue Jays, Canada’s team in Major
League Baseball (MLB). As a child you may
aspire to being a professional baseball player
yourself, so persuade your dad to enrol you
in a city kids’ league, or go to the nearest
Canadian Tire store to buy some baseballs
(and gloves and bats) to practise different
skills in the neighbourhood park with other
kids. Under the conditions of naïve praxis,
yes, referring to the words in the game of
baseball is a good way of gaining basic lit-
eracy. In this scenario, however, the material
origins of a simple baseball never register as
a topic of thought or conversation. Baseballs
simply are available for purchase at a local
store, then … game on!! Forget about the rest.
The shift from naïve to critical literacy in
this instance depends on not forgetting the
rest of the story about baseballs. If Canadian
teachers and students pose a simple question,
‘Where and how are baseballs made?’ they
could be in for a shock, especially if Costa
Rica is a favourite family holiday destination
for its sandy beaches and interesting eco-
tourism. Since 1976 the Rawlings Co. has
been the official manufacturer of baseballs
used in MLB, and their production facil-
ity is in the town of Turrialba, Costa Rica.
Originally the company was set up in Haiti,
when the right-wing dictator (read friend of
the US) ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier was president.
In 1990, a socialist (read enemy of the US)
Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically
elected president but this was followed by
political violence and a coup, with Aristide
fleeing to Venezuela and Rawlings to Costa
Rica.
Sarah Blaskey (2014) has written of the
troubling conditions for workers who labour
ten or more hours a day hand-sewing base-
balls for the global market. According to
a Costa Rican National Labor Committee
report, life in the factory is like ‘living in jail’.
Workers are required to keep to a minimum
production quota of 156 balls a week. Failure
to meet quota results in termination. Eighty
per cent of employees suffer from shoulder
injury and repetitive motion ailments but can
be fired for complaining. A worker can be
fired without pay for assisting a co-worker
meet quota. Any attempt to form a union will
result in termination without pay. The aver-
age salary for a Rawlings worker is $1.88 per
hour, while in 2013 MLB’s gross revenue
exceeded $8.5 billion, average player sal-
ary was $3.39 million per annum, and now
former Commissioner Bud Selig’s annual
salary was reported to exceed $20 million.
Rawlings sells its baseballs to the MLB
for $45 each, with only 50 cents reaching a
worker in the Turrialba plant. Blaskey reports
that most Costa Ricans are not interested in
playing baseball. When Rawlings established
its plant in Costa Rica it was set up in a ‘free-
trade zone’ which allows it to pay no tax and
no import duties on the necessary raw mate-
rials of sheep wool from New Zealand and
cowhide from Tennessee. Rawlings is part
of a global maquiladora phenomenon which
allows US manufacturing companies to set
up in impoverished countries, with minimum
financial impediment, to benefit from high
unemployment rates and consequent cheap
labour conditions. Maquiladoras are a com-
mon practice of US business foreign policy in
many parts of the world.
The point is, how many kids in Canada
who love baseball are aware of this other nar-
rative of their favourite game? How could
they ever find out if such stories never make
it to mainstream media? What would happen
if a school district tried to make it part of the
 FAKE NEWS AND OTHER CONUNDRUMS IN ‘READING THE WORLD’ AT EMPIRE’S END
formal curriculum? No doubt there would be
strong resistance from the established busi-
ness community, with accusations of pan-
dering to ‘special interests’. In a course on
Globalization that I taught at the University
of Alberta, one of the activities was to go to a
local shopping mall and ask the retail clerks
if they knew the origin of the clothing they
were selling and how much financial mark-
up was on it. Most clerks pleaded ignorance,
but on several occasions the store manager
came out and threw the students out of the
store with a directive never to return on threat
of mall security being called in.
When it comes to critical literacy then,
there is a price to be paid. There are systemic
elements in place to ensure that the fuller story
of material objects and the political arrange-
ments of their production and distribution
never gets told. The status quo is under tight
control of the rich and powerful, coalescing as
the ‘Deep State’, a term coined by Canadian
academic-turned-social activist Peter Dale
Scott (1996), and which largely operates in
secret, with unrelenting brutality if necessary.
Yanis Varoufakis (2017) is the former
finance minister of Greece who fought
against the debt-accumulating bailout pack-
ages being forced on Greece by Wall Street
banks and the International Monetary Fund.
In 2015, a meeting was arranged with Larry
Summers, Treasury Secretary of the United
States (and former president of Harvard
University) for Varoufakis to present the
Greek case. In a moment of great poignancy,
Summers looked Varoufakis straight in the
eyes and declared that in politics there are
two kinds of people, insiders and outsiders:
The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak
their version of the truth. The price of their free-
dom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who
make the important decisions. The insiders, for
their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn
against other insiders and never talk to outsiders
about what insiders say or do. (8)
In other words, the world is currently run by
a cadre of people deeply embedded within
31
the geopolitical power structure. Everyone
else can enjoy their opinions, theories, and
recommendations, but in the end they are
irrelevant. Democracy is simply a rhetorical
mask behind which the true powers conduct
themselves. Varoufakis, an academic econo-
mist as well as politician, eventually came to
realize that ‘those embedded in the very heart
of the network are usually too far inside to
notice that there is an outside at all’ (ibid.: 12).
All of this confronts critical literacy advo-
cates, critical pedagogues, and other ‘readers
of the world’ with a particular set of chal-
lenges, both for themselves as well as for
the people with whom they work, for a bet-
ter world as they would envision it. For one
thing, secrecy is a guiding rule for those who
control the operations of the global economy,
at least from the perspective of the contem-
porary US imperium and the British empire
before it. This rule of secret operation is long-
standing. In the late 19th-/early 20th c­ entury
British industrialist Cecil Rhodes was part
of a larger Victorian vision foreseeing a
world dominated by Protestant Christian
values understood as necessary for a new
kind of global federalism with Britain, and
later the United States, as both its beacons and
exemplars. As Caroll Quigley in his masterful
study The Anglo-American Establishment
described the goal:
[For Rhodes and his circle it] could best be achieved
by a secret band of men united to one another by
devotion to the common cause and by personal
loyalty to one another. [This] band should pursue
its goal by secret political and economic influence
behind the scenes and by the control of journalistic,
educational, and propaganda agencies. (Quigley:
1949/1981: 49, emphasis mine)
One of the educational instruments established
to secure this goal was/is the Rhodes Scholarship
programme, with the brightest and best from
around the empire invited to study at the
University of Oxford with a view of grooming
them for responsible positions within the
emerging global federation (pace Bill Clinton).
In the United States, the Rhodes Principle,
as it may be called, had later iterations in
32 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
the emergence of the radical right, starting
in the 1950s with the work of James McGill
Buchanan who saw in the 1955 Supreme
Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education
(mandated desegregation of schooling) a
broader principle of the right of government
to usurp individual rights and freedoms. For
Buchanan and his intellectual heirs, this deci-
sion foreshadowed nothing less than an end
to economic and political freedom, posing a
threat to the very idea of ‘America’, a threat
requiring the most sophisticated and organ-
ized counterattack possible. Buchanan’s
ideas were extended further and into the pre-
sent by such figures as the Koch family (most
notably Charles and David) who have spon-
sored university-endowed chairs, university
presidential appointments, scholarship fund-
ing, and think tanks such as the American
Enterprise Institute and in Canada the Fraser
Institute, to say nothing of financially sup-
porting mainstream media such as Fox News
and CNN. That their own practices may vio-
late the rights and liberties of others does not
seem to register in their operating paradigm.
And again, secrecy of operations is a given
condition of participation in the paradigm.
(For an extended discussion of Buchanan, see
MacLean, 2017; for Koch, see Mayer, 2016.)
Anyone who seriously challenges this
Deep State may expect serious personal reper-
cussions. The charge of being a ‘Conspiracy
Theorist’ and hence a kook of some sort, is
only one of the milder forms of repercus-
sion. As Lance deHaven Smith (2014) has
revealed, the very concept of ‘Conspiracy
Theorist’ was itself constructed by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the
Deep State to slander anyone who questioned
the orthodox view that the assassination of
President J. F. Kennedy was anything other
than a random attack by a solitary deranged,
possibly communist individual. In Canada,
the latest victim may be Professor Anthony
Hall of the University of Lethbridge, who
was forced to relinquish his position as a con-
sequence of teaching a course trying to objec-
tively assess the evidence that 9/11 was an
event constructed by neoconservatives in the
Bush II administration in partnership with the
state of Israel (CBC, 2016). Hall has never
been allowed to publicly defend himself.
In recent years, a view has been consolidat-
ing in the United States that the liberal demo-
cratic ideal is in crisis, not just because of the
difficulties of implementing it, but because
such an ideal was actually never part of the
vision from the very beginning of the repub-
lic. Lewis Lapham, former editor of Harper’s
Magazine and founder and editor of Lapham’s
Quarterly, has recently written on the ascent
of Trump to the presidency of the United
States (Lapham, 2018). Personifying the
link between money and power, Trump fur-
ther embodies the second truth, which is that
such power operates beyond the constraints
of normal law and order. The framers of the
US Constitution in 1787 shared the view of
John Adams that ‘democracy will infallibly
destroy all civilization’ (ibid.: 2). Similarly,
James Madison, another Constitution signa-
tory argued that democratic ideals lead the
common people into conditions of ‘dangerous
agitation for elimination of debts’ and ‘other
wicked projects’ (ibid.: 2). The signatories’
political theory was essentially Platonic: the
best government is ruled by a privileged wise
and virtuous few who define the necessary
arrangements for everyone else. John Jay,
Chief Justice for the Supreme Court put the
matter plainly: ‘Those who own the country
ought to govern it’ (ibid.: 2).
In more recent history the same scenario
has played out again. As Wolfgang Streeck
(2016), director of the Max Planck Institute
for Social Research has argued it, the social
contract between capital and ordinary peo-
ple that underwrote political and economic
policy after World War II began to unravel in
the 1970s as the shared prosperity of the wel-
fare state became unsustainable. Economic
competitiveness precluded the possibility of
fulfilling the rising expectations of the work-
ing and middle classes, to say nothing of the
role of technology in increasingly undermin-
ing the levels of human labour required to
 FAKE NEWS AND OTHER CONUNDRUMS IN ‘READING THE WORLD’ AT EMPIRE’S END
that point. The provision of easy credit by
central banks, alongside a widespread insist-
ence on the importance of staying in school
(and hence out of the labour market) became
two strategies through which the capitalist
world system allayed a collapse. The strong-
est measures for survival came in the form of
a resuscitation of the Platonic ideal, through
the theoretical work of Leo Strauss, Friedrich
von Hayek, and his American acolyte Milton
Friedman. Neoliberalism economic policy
was born along with its political sibling neo-
conservativism. Back to rule by elites. Turn
market logic into a transcendent theology,
with the market defined in studiously nar-
row terms of accumulation; social welfare be
damned. Let market discipline be the defining
moral trope with tentacles reaching into every
aspect of public life, notably education, with
the academy today, at least at its highest levels
of administration, answering only to the siren
of market demands. In the words of theolo-
gian Harvey Cox (2016), now ‘the market
… is God’. In an ironic, perhaps tragic twist
however, the Platonic requirement of virtue in
the exercise of power has dropped off, giving
way to the venality of pure self-interest. The
increasing immiseration of everyday life in so-
called democratic societies is simply reflective
of the cost of doing business. While Streeck
argues that the triumph of neoliberalism in
Western societies is now virtually complete
with forms of resistence undermined through
such strategies as cooptation, this only means,
surely, that the need for critical work – ­critical
literacy, critical pedagogy – has never been
greater, with the need for clear articulation of
strategies that can draw people into that truth
of things enabling life to be Life, and living
more than an endurance contest.
The rather bleak scenario drawn above
should not be a signal for despair for those
who desire a fairer world. As Buddhist the-
ory reminds us, things are always in motion,
with breakdowns and breakthroughs inevi-
tably part of the process of Life itself. In
concrete terms, there is no justification for
believing that the current global arrangement
33
of things, for example, is permanent. No
amount of military might renders that order
impervious to destruction, disintegration, or
devolution. Indeed, the inauguration of the
Trump presidency in the United States has
been a harbinger of unprecedented destabi-
lization on many levels, domestic and inter-
national, and in many deep respects this can
be read positively if understood as a radical
destabilizing of an international system that
remained intentionally deaf and blind to its
underside. And while nobody knows how
things will actually unfold, in the meantime
those involved in education, i.e. in the work
of protecting the conditions under which life
can go on creatively and healthily through the
lives of the young, there is much to be done.
What remains here, then, is to investigate
how critical literacy may be understood and
undertaken in the conditions of our current
‘situation’, as Freire would term it. Indeed a
critical question may be ‘Is the world in fact
readable in the age of “fake news”?’.
To begin, I would suggest that the issue of
fake news is not really the issue at all, in so
far as propaganda and the manipulation of
information to suit predetermined purposes
is a practice as old as politics itself, as Philip
Taylor (2003) has amply documented in
Munitions of the Mind: A history of propa-
ganda from the ancient world to the present
day. The unique difference today lies in the
proliferation of technologies of information
and social media, and the saturation of the
public sphere with ‘information’ that has
suffered a severance from the deep narrative
structures of its origins. Information in this
context means instantaneous access to facts
and figures, stories and images which produce
the personal psychological effect of ‘seeming
to know’ what is going on, but all this infor-
mation is presented at such a speed and with
such a seductiveness – designed to profit the
owners of the technology – that an individ-
ual is largely at a loss as regards the ability
to verify the truthfulness of any offerings is
concerned, websites like FactCheck.org not-
withstanding. Informationalism, as it may be
34 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
called, is precisely a symptom of the totalitar-
ian proclivities of the neoliberal state, since all
discursive powers have now been subsumed
and silenced under a single metaphysic, the
fake metaphysic of the free market. The war
over fake news currently raging is actually
nothing less than a war over who shall con-
trol this metaphysic, with older long-standing
liberal ‘democratic’ forces trying to preserve
a global rules-based (Freeland, 2018) inter-
national market system, battling forces that
inchoately recognize fundamental hypocrisy
at the heart of that system. As Harold Laski
(1919) argued in his brilliant deconstruction
of the foundations of economic liberalism
in Adam Smith’s theory of the free market,
while free market logic liberated individuals
from the control of the state and the establish-
ment religion behind it, such control being a
condition of the mercantilist economic theory
that had pertained since the 15th century, the
new 18th-century theory of the free market,
celebrating ‘private’ enterprise and property,
actually produces rather than relieves condi-
tions of immense inequality, immiseration,
and slavery. In Laski’s terms, the neoliberal
undermining of state power except for the
protection of market freedom means for most
‘not merely hardship but degradation of all
that makes life worthy. Upon those stunted
existences, indeed, a wealthy civilization
may easily be builded. Yet it will be a civi-
lization of slaves rather than of men (sic)’
(1919: 179). Such a claim may be quickly
denied by most in the North American con-
text but critical literacy must surely point out
the nature of slavery in its present form. It is a
slavery of the mind, of imagination, of a pub-
lic sphere that denies entrance to any visions
contrary to its own vaunted yet selective
claims, a profoundly surveilled society kept
intact through engineered strategies of infi-
nite distraction. Today even education is not
a space where human beings may gather to
openly consider the auspices of their common
life; instead it has been rendered as a ‘cattle
chute into capitalism’, as Indigenous writer
Thomas King (2013) has bluntly described it.
The rendering is subtle but deep, related to
the training of desire, with authentic freedom
masked by a freedom to choose only what
has already been chosen for one through the
genius of marketing and propaganda.
The crisis, or ‘turning point’ (to invoke
the medical history of the term) that must
be faced today is the simple fact that the
political economic tradition that has brought
things to their current form is now inad-
equate for dealing with the very conditions
that tradition has itself created, conditions of
immense inequality and immiseration of both
spiritual and material kinds. The remedy for
this lies in several directions at once. One is
the recovery of deep learning and a refusal
of any kind of informationalism that neglects
the deeply rooted discursive environment out
of which genuinely new ideas can arise. In
hermeneutic terms, this calls for the recov-
ery of historical consciousness, but in present
circumstances this historical consciousness
must now recognize what has come upon it
to challenge the orthodoxy of its narrative.
The very narratives of history undergirding
both public and private life within a capitalist
order are now under siege from traditions of
consciousness other than its own. In Canada,
the Indigenous assault on the academy can be
read as good news, if taken as a prying open
of the underbelly of a belief system wherein
undisciplined private-­property ownership
and wealth accumulation lie beyond ethical
debate, even in the midst of monstrous envi-
ronmental degradation and widespread pau-
perization hidden behind convoluted statistics
masking real conditions. In Canada, the aver-
age debt-to-household income ratio now
stands at 171% (Wong, 2017). In real terms,
the average Canadian is insolvent, clinging
to life on borrowed time and money, highly
vulnerable to downturns in global finance.
In the United States, 43.1 million citizens
live in poverty according to a recent study by
University of California, Davis (Center for
Poverty Research, 2016).
Again as Laski has expressed it: ‘The dan-
ger in every period of history is lest we take
 FAKE NEWS AND OTHER CONUNDRUMS IN ‘READING THE WORLD’ AT EMPIRE’S END
our own age as the term in institutional evolu-
tion…. History is an unenviable record of bad
metaphysics used to defend obsolete systems’
(1919: 178). The vision of Chrystia Freeland
(2018), Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs
is a perfect example of the problem. In an
acceptance speech for the ‘Diplomat of the
Year’ award granted by the journal Foreign
Policy, Freeland invoked Francis Fukuyama’s
interpretation of the ‘End of History’ to mean
that the half-century of competition between
liberalism and authoritarianism had come to
an end, with liberalism the victor along with
an international ‘rules-based’ order guided by
the United States, NATO, and its allies. It is
this order that is increasingly under threat by
a populist authoritarianism in many parts of
the Western world, and which must be com-
batted, according to Freeland, for the neces-
sary maintenance of that original post World
War II order. Freeland’s analysis and vision
is breathtaking for its blindness and the lim-
its of its historical understanding, and it may
be symptomatic of the condition of ‘insiders’
that Yanis Varoufakis, as mentioned earlier,
noted: ‘those embedded in the very heart
of the network are usually too far inside to
notice that there is an outside at all’ (2017:
12). What is most noteworthy in Freeland’s
analysis is its incomprehension of the author-
itarianism of the liberal tradition itself in
its own international practice. According to
Nicolas Davies (2018) of Consortiumnews.
com, since 9/11, wars have been conducted by
the international ‘rules-based’ liberal order in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya,
Syria, and Yemen at a cost of over six million
lives. The Watson Institute for International
and Public Affairs at Brown University esti-
mates the financial cost of the post-9/11 wars
at $5.6 trillion, taken from the public purse.
Over 10 million refugees and displaced per-
sons are a further consequence of the wars
(Watson Institute, 2018).
The point is, the dreamworld represented
by figures such as Chrystia Freeland is not
only sublimely foolish and not grounded in
reality, it is also coming to an end and it cannot
35
be resuscitated. The pushback of ‘populism’
is simply a domestic rendering of the push-
back of colonized nations against European
colonization on foreign soils. The underside
has begun to rise up and speak, with a rage
and inarticulate frenzy that only the most
profoundly oppressed of souls can summon.
In Freirean critical literacy terms of reading
the world, the most important requirement for
those within the Euro-American nexus may
be one of re-reading, of re-reading the ortho-
dox narrative from the underside of its his-
tory, alongside an owning of the bankruptcy
of its own guiding metaphysic. The outsiders
in Larry Summers’ paradigm must be read as
actually part of the inside; the current insid-
ers must recognize their dependency on the
very ones banished by their paradigm to an
outside that in actuality has been inside all
along.
One positive consequence of the unprec-
edented rise of social media is the erosion of
secrecy, the primary weapon of power mainte-
nance, and a blurring of the boundary between
public and private action. The real politics,
any enduring politics of the future will be
guided less by party and ideological loyalties
than by easier access to alternative interpre-
tations of both global and domestic develop-
ments. A new democracy is being born, still
in very nascent stages, of those whose under-
standing of present circumstances is enlight-
ened by sources often dismissed pejoratively
as conspiracist, yet which contains the nec-
essary truths for a more inclusive future, a
future where the wounded of the world, those
wounded by the hypocrisy of a freedom that
is only a freedom for the monied and the self-
chosen few, have their legitimate place. This
will be a polycentric polymorphous world,
supplanting the crazed delusion of ‘full spec-
trum dominance’ (see Engdahl, 2009) of the
neoliberal/neoconservative agenda that has
ruled the world since 9/11.
In closing I would like to consider a distinc-
tion made many years ago by Kosho Uchiyama
Roshi, a commentator on a Zen classic,
Refining Your Life: From the Zen kitchen to
36 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
enlightenment by Dogen (1237/1983), a
13th-century Japanese Zen master. Following
Dogen, Uchiyama makes a distinction between
the ‘fact’ of life and the ‘truth’ of life. Roshi
tells the story of a married man who falls in
love with a young woman working in his
office. He consults an advice column about
what to do. One might expect the advice
columnist to tell the man to ‘wake up’ and
take responsibility for his wife and family.
Or perhaps not. The point is, whatever advice
is taken, there will still be ongoing problems
and difficulties. These are the facts of life and
playing around with them in dizzying per-
petuity is the fate of all who have not faced
the ‘truth’ of life which is the deeper reality
marked by wisdom, the characteristic of ‘true
adults’, as Roshi describes them. This is the
sense of reality that pierces through the fact
of both fake news and presumed-to-be-non-
fake news to reveal the limitations of both
for leading to the truth of things, since they
are both transitory in nature and inexorably
linked to time-bound assumptions about this
and that. Efforts to learn the truth of things on
the other hand leads to a kind of composure
or settlement that is not blind to the travails
of the world but is the mark of our true reali-
zation as human beings. It is the mark of all
the world’s sages whose example invites us to
an ever deeper consideration of the auspices
of our lives; to lead us from lives of infinite
distraction into that truth of life incapable of
denial because it is Life itself.
How does one, or one’s community, tribe
or nation come into this truth? There is a
hint in an ancient story of the Buddha when
tempted by Mara, the Evil One, to renounce
his enlightenment as itself illusory. ‘How do
you know you are not deceived even now?’,
asked Mara, to which Buddha, while plac-
ing his hand firmly on the ground, replied:
‘The earth is my witness’. To experience the
truth of life requires a coming down to earth
from the fantasies of utopian ideals severed
from any fundamental living connection
to the earth that sustains all living things.
The rage of Indigenous peoples around the
world is precisely over a sense of violation
of land and place, largely because the earth
is our primary teacher, without which there
is no pedagogical authority. Without a deep
acquaintance with one’s earthliness, a teacher
has not learned enough to have anything of
lasting value to say. Today all theories of
conquest, including pedagogical theories,
are inevitably hatched in heavily rationalized
urban environments that have forgotten the
consequences of their own unearthliness, the
primary consequence being an entrapment in
the cage of one’s own subjectivity for which
there is no outside, the very definition of the
psychotic state. Medication in various pre-
scribed and social forms may seem the only
prescription available for this, when the real
problem is ‘bad metaphysics’. In Freirean
terms, the solution for those of us in the Euro-
American tradition lies in re-reading the sto-
ries of our inheritances from the perspective
of those who have been damaged by them, so
that new forms of human solidarity may be
born, carried by the truth of life, rather than
simply by facts, whether fake or presuming-
not-to-be-fake. Hard work indeed. Take cour-
age! Study deeply!
REFERENCES
Blaskey, S. (2014). Costa Rica’s major league
concern. November 12. www.ticotimes.net/
2014/11/12/costa-ricas-major-league­concern.
Retrieved May 10, 2018.
CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
News (2016). Lethbridge professor accused
of anti-Semitism suspended. October 5.
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/tony-hall-
suspended-lethbridge-1.3793294. Retrieved
March 9, 2018.
Center for Poverty Research, UC Davis (2016).
What is the current poverty rate in the
United States? https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/
faq/what-is-the-current-poverty-rate-in-the-
United-States. Retrieved June 23, 2018.
Cox, H. (2016). The market as God. Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press.
 FAKE NEWS AND OTHER CONUNDRUMS IN ‘READING THE WORLD’ AT EMPIRE’S END
Davies, N. (2018). How many millions have
been killed in America’s post 9/11 wars?
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/25/
how-many-millions-have-been-killed-in-
americas-post-9-11-wars-part-3-libya-syria-
somalia-and-yemen. Retrieved December 10,
2018.
deHaven-Smith, L. (2014). Conspiracy Theory
in America. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Dogen and Kosho Uchiyama (1983). Refining
your Life: From the Zen kitchen to Enlighten-
ment. NY: Weatherhill.
Engdahl, F. W. (2009). Full Spectrum Dominance:
Totalitarian democracy in the new world
order. Wiesbaden: Edition.Engdahl.
Freeland, C. (2018). 2018 Diplomat of the Year
Chrystia Freeland: Read the Transcript. Foreign
Policy. June 14. https://foreignpolicy.com/
2018/06/14/2018-diplomat-of-the-year-­
chrystia-freeland-read-the-transcript/.
Retrieved June 23, 2018.
Gerhardt, H-P. (1993). Paulo Freire. Prospects:
The Quarterly Review of Education, 23,
No 3/4, 349–358.
King, T. (2013). The Inconvenient Indian: A
curious account of native people in North
America. Anchor Canada.
Lapham, L. L. (2018). Due Process. Lapham’s
Quarterly, XI, No. 2. www.laphamsquarterly.
org/rule-law/due-process. Retrieved January
15, 2020.
Laski, H. J. (Ed.). (1919/2018). The foundations
of economic liberalism. In Political Thought
in England from Locke to Bentham.
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CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,
pp. 162–182.
MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in Chains: The
deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan
for America. NY: Viking.
Mayer, J. (2016). Dark Money: The hidden history
of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical
right. NY: Doubleday.
Quigley, C. (1949)/1981). The Anglo-American
Establishment. San Pedro CA: GSG and
Associates.
Scott, P. D. (1996). Deep Politics and the Death
of JFK. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Streeck, W. (2016). How Will Capitalism End?
London: Verso.
Taylor, P. M. (2003). Munitions of the Mind: A
history of propaganda from the ancient world
to the present day. Manchester UK: Manchester
University Press.
Varoufakis, Y. (2017). Adults in the Room: My
battle with Europe’s deep establishment.
London: The Bodley Head.
Watson Institute for International and Public
Affairs (2018). 10.1 million refugees and
displaced persons. Watson.brown.edu/cost-
sofwar. Retrieved June 23, 2018.
Wong, C. (2017). Canada’s debt-to-household-
income ratio rises to 171 percent, StatCan says.
The Star, December 14. www.thestar.com/
business/economy/2017/12/14/canadas-debt-
to-household-income-ratio-rises-to-171-per-
cent-statcan-says.html. Retrieved June 23,
2018.

Freire’s ‘Act of Reading’:
Inspiring and Emboldening
Studying Paulo Freire’s, ‘The Importance of
the Act of Reading’1 is challenging and quite
thought-provoking. His historical avowal of
‘reading the world always precedes reading
the word’2, p. 23 and vice versa is a Freirean
proclamation that embodies his notion of
criticity regarding the importance of reading
as a human act. It obliges the pursuit of an
archeological inquiry of literacy itself. The
question of whether reading is an art or a sci-
ence has for time immemorial been a leading
interrogative. This million dollar question
may never assemble a definitive response,
however, it may be worthy of an instructive
examination since an overmuch of studies
attempted to sanction reading as an exclusive
terrain of the now infamous No Child Left
Behind leitmotif. Paulo Freire deeply
impressed upon us a basic precept in which
he undoubtedly depicted the inaccuracy of
what we read unless we can firmly grasp the
rhythm of our social and cultural terrain
(epistemological foundation) within which
our lives are situated. Actually, Freire might
8
Hermán S. García
have us shadow an archeological literacy
centered on experience, beliefs, and habits of
the mind that teachers want students and citi-
zens to acquire; that is, an auto report of daily
social, cultural, and linguistic engagements
that lead to an appreciation of our own
diverse, rich lives while wholeheartedly
appreciating and celebrating other people’s
diversity.
Also, Freire would assuredly inspire and
embolden us to understand and welcome our
lived experiences against the printed word in
the context of a continuum from childhood
through adulthood vis-à-vis a reminiscent
rendezvous of one’s life. Reading the world,
according to Freire, requires engaging the
world which successively impacts how we
live in and with the world. Reading the word
propels us to initiate and promote dreams,
perceive creations, generate possibilities, and
much more, so as to enhance the possibili-
ties of our personal and social evolution with
the world of experience against the grain of
book knowledge, writ large. For instance,
 FREIRE’S ‘ACT OF READING’
what have we read that had a transforma-
tive effect or outcome on our lives, but also
swayed us or impacted us in the ways it did?
Freire, through his teachings, never wanted
us to separate our lived experiences (reading
the world) from the texts we read or studied
(reading the word), that is, books, articles,
journals, or newspapers, etc. He offered to
help us comprehend that both reading the
world and reading the word should not be
divorced from each other’s synchronous
tenacities. Freire celebrated that the life we
live and the work we do builds on the knowl-
edge we use to engage the world and give
meaning to life and, as much, the word we
read moves us to create our critical under-
standing of the world.
Reading, whether imagined notions of the
world or perceptions of the word, provide
us a more comprehensive view of life. As
we learn about life from reading the world
or reading the word, both necessitate literacy
engagements in their most dynamic under-
taking. Connecting how we experience life
coalesced with what we read, perceptively
leads the reader to consider various options
for interpreting the world. Reasonably, it is
a hermeneutic process in which meaning is
concentrically inside and outside of the text
and the reader. Because reading materials
come in fixed arrangements with which a
reader engages, the meaning must be negoti-
ated between the written text and the reader’s
experience in the world. When two people see
the same object, each will perceive diverse
images even though they are both view-
ing the same thing. Their life contexts take
them to dissimilar interpretations of mean-
ing and understanding; however, the written
word potentially brings their perceptions to
39
an analogous insight. Freire’s notion conveys
that ‘reading always involves critical percep-
tion, interpretation, and re-writing of what is
read’ (1983: 11, emphasis in original).
The act of reading requires more than con-
suming information. It necessitates the reader
to critically analyze the information she is
reading and what the intention of the material
might be. Freire repeatedly stated that reading
is never neutral; what we read has a particular
passion and direction it wants the reader to
ingest and acquiesce without question. Thus,
the reader must constantly be fully aware of
what she is reading because the action always
interacts with society, directly and indirectly.
Freire insists that we move away from bank-
ing education practices to critical practices
in which educators move from routine exer-
cises of learning to answer questions to more
demanding practices of learning to question
answers.
Paulo Freire’s essay occupies a language
which is capable of disentangling both the
world and the word since language itself is
constituted by meaning-making symbols
that we employ through the act of reading,
which affect the ways in which we struggle
to acquire views and indulgent, transforma-
tive ways of life itself. May Paulo Freire’s
writings inspire us to share his vision of The
Importance of the Act of Reading!
Notes
1  Paulo Freire, ‘The Importance of the Act of
Reading’, Journal of Education Vol. 165, no. 1
(1983): 5–11.
2 Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Read-
ing the Word and the World. Critical Studies in Edu-
cation Series. Westport, Connecticut and London,
UK: Bergin & Garvey, 1987.

In Gratitude to Freire
I was six years old when this paper was origi-
nally delivered. I had already lived in four
different homes in three different states, I had
gone to five different schools and I had
endured my parents divorcing, remarrying
and a new sibling. My salient identities at the
time were White, working class and Irish
Catholic. I had also learned to read early on
and I was in the beginning stages of exploring
text while also learning to ‘read my world’.
At that time, I was inspired by Judy Blume
and the Nancy Drew franchise; gravitating to
women and girls as protagonists, I was search-
ing for the accurate, messy and often unre-
solved reflections of myself and others.
It would be over 20 years later, as a doc-
toral student, that I would learn about Paulo
Freire and his work, philosophies and con-
tributions to education. But his words in this
essay continue to resonate so deeply with me
today, because as a parent and educator, I am
continually mesmerized by witnessing myself
and others decoding texts, words, letters and
the semiotics of the world. I try to imagine
9
Marcella Runell Hall
my daughters, who are biracial, of Irish and
Caribbean ancestry, currently eight and four
years old, navigating their own experiences of
early literacy of both text and the world. I see
the way they search for reflections of them-
selves, feeling sweet relief when they find
images and stories that resonate with them
and dismay and confusion when they do not.
A gift that I received from Freire, and that
is evidenced so beautifully in this essay, is that
I now see all of my roles: parent, educator,
administrator, friend, sister, daughter, partner,
community member to be part of my ‘politi-
cal practice’ as well as my spiritual practice.
As Freire writes, ‘language and reality are
dynamically intertwined’ (Freire, 1983), and
this resonates with me because I think about
my entry points into critical consciousness,
much of it beginning in my early adoles-
cence. I noted hypocrisies and omissions from
trusted adults and teachers as we learned about
social injustices such as apartheid in South
Africa or the ‘War on Drugs’. I asked many
questions, exercising my own ‘curiosity’,
 IN GRATITUDE TO FREIRE
desperately trying to ‘decipher’ what I was
observing regarding race and racism and to
reconcile all of it with what I was observing
in my community and through the media. But
it was not formal education that allowed me to
ask these questions and engage in this reading
of my world, it was music. And in particular, in
the late 1980s and early 1990s it was Hip-Hop
music and culture. I was able to bear witness
to other young people and adults who were
creating art that addressed the questions that
I was seeking answers to. It was through art-
ists like Sister Souljah, KRS-One, and Public
Enemy that I began to read my world through
a more critical lens.
I did not know at that time, as a young girl
living in South Jersey, that I would one day
end up at New York University, and later at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
as a graduate student learning, working and
studying with scholars who were accessing
the knowledge, symbols and ‘codifications’
present in Hip-Hop to conduct research, and
eventually to write my own dissertation. Nor
did I know that Paulo Freire’s work would be
the cornerstone for my understanding of how
41
Hip-Hop had become a critical pedagogy for
me and so many in my generation. As Freire
so often called for, and does so in this piece,
‘reading always involves critical perception,
interpretation and re-writing what is read’
(Freire, 1983) and I attempted to answer that
call by contributing my own lens and ‘way
of being’ to a culture and body of work that
had so generously given so much to me. I am
in constant gratitude for Freire’s invitation
to participate in our own liberation, and to
engage in a process of consciousness raising
that transforms the world. I only hope that I
am able to introduce these concepts to my
children and my students in ways that feel
supportive and loving, as Freire’s parents and
teachers did for him. And as he has done for
the world.
REFERENCE
Freire, P. (1983). The Importance of the Act
of Reading. Journal of Education, 165(1),
5–11.

Of Word, World, and Being
(Online)
I am a little bit older than Paulo Freire’s ‘The
importance of the Act of Reading’ (1983).
I was six when he addressed the Brazilian
Congress of Reading in 1981, and I could not
yet read. Thinking through the writing of this
short reply to Freire’s seminal talk, has me, as
Freire notes, ‘re-reading an essential moment
in my own practice of reading’ (1983: 5,
emphasis in original), in order to think about
my early reading of the word. It has also
provoked a reflective comparison with the
experiences of my children.
The first book I read on my own was a
volume of the Mr. Mugs levelled book series
for young readers, by Martha Kambeitz and
Carol Roth. Mr Mugs books focus on a fluffy
sheep dog and his adventures in a multicultural
urban community. The books were aimed at
children from mixed-race working class com-
munities like mine, and were a 1970s/1980s
liberal anecdote to the whiter-than-white
Dick-and-Jane-type readers which had pre-
dominated in US and Canadian schools from
the 1930s onward.
10
Arlo Kempf
I don’t remember early acts or practices
of reading – but instead the act of having
accomplished reading. My success was quan-
titative; I remember picking up speed and
racing through volume after volume of the
short readers as if going downhill on a bicy-
cle. Illiterate at noon and literate by 4.30pm,
this was a technical accomplishment, and it
didn’t look very much like Paulo’s entreaties
with trees, who were ‘like persons’ to him or
like his commune with context, which made
up the world he first read in Recife, Brazil
(1983: 6). The world I first read was formed
by cement and people. I never have figured
out how to read anything other than people
and the things they make.
My children are a little different. The
world they have grown up reading is a lit-
tle greener than mine was – more sky and
water and rock, I think. As a flipside of these
greener pastures for my kids and many like
them, their early-world texts are often digital,
and are seductively interactive. These worlds
and words are curated by programmers using
 OF WORD, WORLD, AND BEING (ONLINE)
profit-driven algorithms, often based on the
psychology of addiction. For many, the most
important interface of world and word is
now online, in countless engineered contexts
through which much of our primary learning
takes place.
Words have moved. I recently dropped in
to see if they were home, but I couldn’t figure
out where they really lived. How do we con-
sider Freire’s assertion of the mutuality of the
word and world, and indeed the potential of
one preceding the other in light of increasingly
digital epistemologies at play in corporate
think-spaces such as Facebook™, Google™,
Instagram™, Twitter™, Snapchat™, and
others which are among our most important
learning environments? With unprecedented
intensity and concentration, the word and the
world are fusing by and within what we might
call socio-commercial online spaces (often
called search engines and social media/net-
works), which have become a central loca-
tion of learning for many children and adults.
Many children now learn far more in socio-
commercial online spaces than in schools.
Bearing in mind Freire’s linking of word and
world with the very nature of being (and of
being human), we may ask what it means to be
online.
In his later years, Freire (proudly) talked
of having been a curious boy who became
a curious old man. Absent in his experience
(absent his being) were clickbait stories and
graphics, YouTube™ spirals, and the short-
term dopamine rewards that come with
digital likes and notifications. Such behav-
iours are indeed acts of engaged curiosity and
reading. They are acts of learning and being,
online. They take place in spaces designed
and operated by our most important contem-
porary architects – the social programmers-
cum-engineers of our online being.
These discursive producers create the
structures through which learning and know-
ing (and thus being) online are possible. They
have built the monetized online playgrounds/
padded cells whose constituent features and
limitations (shapes, edges, borders) offer a
43
delimited range of axiologies, epistemolo-
gies, and ontologies (i.e. specific ranges of
knowing and being). On offer in these spaces
are curricula (e.g. social media users provided
with/navigated to, certain materials/sites),
classrooms (e.g. the rooms, designs, limits,
restrictions, and possibilities of certain sites),
and structures/rules (e.g. the types of content,
communication, and interactions possible in
online socio-commercial environments).
Although the routes of knowing and being
may feel exploratory, they are often highly
determined – following a pre-drawn algorith-
mic road map. Being and navigating online
combine wandering and being invisibly but
firmly guided. As Umaja Noble’s (2018) work
illustrates, search engines use proprietary
algorithms which combine the popularity of
certain searches, the promotion of particular
products and services, and data capture con-
siderations in order to curate what we find.
While all sources/sites should be care-
fully evaluated for reliability and accuracy
(although this is too often not the case) a
more complex problem emerges in the (pre)
selected nature of the results that algorithms
make easily available, as well as the order in
which sources are made available by com-
mercial search engines and within socio-
commercial online spaces.
While traditional libraries have intentional
collections which limit selection, as well
as librarians who curate library access and
organization, such decisions are not typically
driven by profit. Where traditional dictionar-
ies and encyclopedias reflect the significant
biases of their authors and the socio-cultural
contexts from which they emerged, they are
at least organized alphabetically. In the 21st-
century formation of these resources (the
commercial search engine) we see the same
biases present; however, the principles of
organization are now kept secret and reflect
the additional forces of monetization and
popularity. The resulting phenomenon of fil-
ter bubbles is not an accidental bi-product,
but rather a logic of information distribution
that encourages profitable online behaviour
44 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and being by readers (cum consumers, cum
widgets, cum raw material as data points)
wherein readers are exposed to fewer and
fewer divergent ideas and opinions. Our
online worlds often shrink as they grow.
While masquerading as a chance to step into
a commons, performing a Google™ search
is a form of entering private property – a
Habermasian life-world, public sphere decline
(Habermas, 1984). Similarly, our online socio-
commercial spaces are essentially gated com-
munities with their own rules, opportunities,
and monetizations. The programmer/architect
is an archeologist of the present, running real-
time analyses of big data to understand peo-
ple and groups deeply and differently in order
to make money. The world’s new gathering
place (this new home for learning and being
where the word meets the world) is extraor-
dinary. My son and daughter are reading
many first digital worlds, all ecosystems (or
Deleuzean rhizomes) in and of themselves –
yet infinitely and fixedly connected (Deleuze
and Guattari, 2004).
At the same time, the human agentive ele-
ments of socio-identity (the biases, prefer-
ences, and invisible hatreds and blind spots of
programmers and users) bleed through from
the source code to the end user sitting at a
computer or holding a phone. These stains are
visible when Google™ searches for ‘women’
yield a pornographic inventory of objectifica-
tion, and searches for ‘Black women’ in par-
ticular, offer a colonial and violent prospectus
of sexualization and subjugation. All architec-
ture is political, and socio-commercial online
spaces are no exception.
The objects of technological use through
which we access online worlds are also an
interesting site of both visible/invisible objec-
tification and oppression – take, for example,
the cell phone’s ‘hidden’ components, such
as environmental degradation due to the min-
ing of rare earth metals or the oppression that
ensues when tech waste is shipped from the
Global North to the Global South.
The long discursive arc of these commercial
online learning spaces is, so far, a dominant
one. Dominance is ­ profitable. Processes
of online being can work to straighten, to
whiten, to gender-define, etc. as part of cul-
tivating capitalist subjects and subjectivi-
ties. As sites of production and reproduction,
socio-­ commercial online spaces often rely
upon both macro- and micro iterations of
race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, coloni-
ality, and other socio-political phenomena.
Being online imprints onto being offline.
An offline search for a person likely includes
the pedagogy of the online algorithm – the
learnings of how to be, gleaned intentionally
and unintentionally from socio-commercial
online spaces. These processes are of course
reflexive as well; we learn how to perform
(how to be) our own gender(s), race(s), sexu-
alities, abilities, etc.
As a typology, Freire’s principles of word
and world apply to contemporary learn-
ing and being in socio-commercial online
spaces, just as they do to Freire’s own first
words and worlds. There is, however, a sever-
ity, perhaps even a discursive violence to the
way word and world fuse with performativity
in public constructions of self in these socio-­
commercial online spaces of learning and
identity formation/expression.
While my early experiences with reading
may have been unfortunate in terms of me
being disengaged from all but the technical
aspects of reading, this disconnect may have
been a quiet and accidental mitzvah from the
dying days of pre-digital literacy. I learned
how to read without being really read. As far
as I could tell, Mr. Mugs had nothing to do
with me, so the connection between word and
world was tenuous (for many reasons). While
there was some performance involved (I was
learning to read because school insisted), I
was not constituting self in a perpetual cycle
of (re)writing and publishing online writ-
ten and graphic bios which were personally
definitive (i.e. profile/status descriptions, pic-
tures, and updates). This near-constant and
simultaneous production and performance of
self is an a priori part of online being (and
learning), common to many young people and
 OF WORD, WORLD, AND BEING (ONLINE)
adults who exist as carefully self-­assembled
profiles on various social media/networking
sites (i.e. socio-commercial online knowing
and learning spaces).
Of course, much online learning is critical,
dialogical (if not dialectical), and even
liberatory. Among the central challenges
of a contemporary reading of Freire is thus
recognizing the nexus of word, world and
monetization, identity formation/location,
and the concurrent impacts on being in the
world – whether online or not. Key here is
noticing and valuing what learning looks,
feels, and sounds like when undertaken and
facilitated apart from commercial goals:
asking specifically, how we can better support
and understand the separation of education
from neoliberal capitalism when it comes to
online learning. Attention to being in these
contexts, to structure as well as to agency and
identity, will necessarily guide our liberatory
engagements and disengagements with
online learning and being.
While only half of the world’s population
was predicted to have internet access in 2018
(UNESCO, 2017), our socio-commercial
spaces are marching quickly toward a truly
global (private) commons. As we consider
how the remaining half of the human popula-
tion will engage and be engaged pedagogically
45
online in the coming years, the necessity of
epistemic disobedience and resistance on one
hand, and of the co-construction of liberatory
epistemological spaces and practices of being
on the other, become ever more clear. Freire’s
work continues to offer primary tools with
which to make our way forward – navigating
world, word, identity, and community together
in disruption, together in critical popular voice
and agency, and together in cahoots.
REFERENCES
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand
plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia.
London: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1983). ‘The importance of the act of
reading’, Journal of Education 165 (1): 5–11.
Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communica-
tive action. Boston: Beacon Press.
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression:
How search engines reinforce racism. New
York: NYU Press.
UNESCO Broadband Commission for Sustainable
Development. (2017). The state of broadband
2017: Broadband catalyzing sustainable
development. UNESCO. Retrieved from:
https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-s/opb/pol/
S-POL-BROADBAND.18-2017-PDF-E.pdf.

The Critical Redneck Experience
How can anybody know/How they got to be this
way?1
The first time I spoke with critical scholar Joe
Kincheloe, it was by phone. A few words in,
Joe exclaimed, ‘You are from the South, aren’t
you!’.
Joe and I had traveled similar paths, his
earlier and much more successful than mine,
but similar none the less. The journey to critical
consciousness, sprung from the contaminated
soil of the South.
I was in my 30s before I discovered
Critical Pedagogy, and Joe served as a vital
critical mentor for me in my 40s. Where did
all that begin? As Paulo Freire examines in
‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’,2 my
critical life was paradoxically nurtured in my
home, specifically by my mother – that home
and community a deeply racist one, a place
of tradition and blind deference to authority
(embodied by my father).
In June 2017, my mother suffered a stroke.
Within two weeks, my father died sitting in a
11
Paul L. Thomas
wheelchair beside my mother bereft of com-
munication. Five months later, my mother
died as well after Stage IV lung cancer was
discovered and pronounced untreatable.
My nephews and I were tasked with
cleaning out my parents’ home, where my
childhood books still sit on the crowded
bookshelf: Hop on Pop; Green Eggs and
Ham; One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue
Fish; Go, Dog, Go!
‘It is important to add that reading my
world, always basic to me’, Freire explains,
‘did not make me grow up prematurely, a
rationalist in boy’s clothing’ (1983: 7, empha-
sis in original). And for me, that growing up,
that critical awakening, was painfully slow.
But I, too, recognize: ‘It was precisely my par-
ents who introduced me to reading the word
at a certain moment in this rich experience of
understanding my immediate world’ (ibid.: 7).
The great paradox of my parents as the
source of my critical awakening is that they had
unwittingly opened the door to my recogniz-
ing and then rejecting the blind bigotry of my
 THE CRITICAL REDNECK EXPERIENCE
home, my community. From reading Dr. Seuss
as a child, I moved to comic books and science
fiction films and novels as a teen, then to liter-
ary fiction as a young adult – William Faulkner
uncritically beside Langston Hughes, Ralph
Ellison, and Alice Walker.
White parents birthed me, but Black
authors saved my life.
Freire’s reading the world and re-reading
the world rests always in my thoughts as I
navigate the world with a critical conscious-
ness that surpasses the accidents of birth but
incessantly redefines who I am.
I now live with the ghosts of my parents,
the baggage they represent, and the bitter-
sweet memories of people I loved and cher-
ished as much as I struggled to understand
without being distraught.
Reading my life, and then re-reading that life.
47
The critical life is never completed: not a
destination, but a journey, a recursive journey
that carries the entire journey along as the
new journey is created.
‘Reading the world always precedes
reading the word,’ Freire acknowledges, ‘and
reading the word implies continually reading
the world’ (ibid.: 10).
This is my being; this is my becoming.
Notes
1  Peter Katis and Paul Mahajan, ‘Daughters of the
Soho Riots’, The National A­ lligator, April 12, 2005.
https://genius.com/The-national-­d aughters-
of-the-soho-riots-lyrics. Retrieved January 15,
2020.
2  Paulo Freire, ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’,
Journal of Education Vol. 165, no. 1 (1983): 5–11.

On Learning to Claim Text
In 1995, I left Wisconsin to help found
California State University, Monterey Bay. I
had not previously pondered differences
between the California State University
(CSU) and the University of California
(UC) systems; differences that, I came to
realize, demand a critical reading. First,
since tuition in the CSU system is cheaper
than in the UC system, its students are far
more likely to be from working class com-
munities, and are considerably more racially
ethnically diverse than in the UC system.
About one-third of CSU students are the
first in their families to attend university
(California State University, 2017). Much
has been written about challenges of first-
generation students, including relatively
weak skills in reading, mathematics, and
critical thinking (Terenzini et al., 1996).
Second, while the UC system is designed
to produce researchers and theorists, the CSU
system is designed to produce workers. As a
friend put it to me once, the UC system pre-
pares knowledge creators and the CSU system
12
Christine E. Sleeter
prepares knowledge consumers. Her obser-
vation pinpointed a troubling issue: policy-
makers managing ‘the competing demands
of egalitarianism and competitive excellence’
(Bastedo and Gumport, 2003: 358) in a way
that reproduces stratification based on race,
ethnicity, and social class. After analyzing
differentiated university missions in two
Eastern seaboard states (Massachusetts and
New York), Bastedo and Gumport (2003)
concluded that who actually gets access to
what, is an important question that gets asked
too rarely. As they put it: ‘Well prepared stu-
dents at research universities have access to
a wide variety of academic programs and
disciplines, while students at state college
may face a situation where comprehensive
coverage of the disciplines is no longer a pri-
ority’ (ibid.: 358). I came to realize that the
funding structure and degree authorization
for the CSU assumes knowledge consump-
tion more than knowledge creation. PhD
programs are not offered, teaching loads are
high, and faculty are not expected to procure
 ON LEARNING TO CLAIM TEXT
large research grants nor prioritize research.
In other words, students like ours were gen-
erally expected to consume knowledge pro-
duced by their Whiter and more affluent
counterparts, predicated on the assumption
that most brought neither the inclination nor
the advanced academic skills to critique and
produce knowledge themselves.
Indeed, many of our master’s degree stu-
dents had been the first in their families to
attend university, and most were the first in
their families to attend graduate school. But
my colleagues and I wanted to disrupt institu-
tionalized patterns that afforded our students
a work-oriented domesticating education
(Sleeter et al., 2005). As Nguyen and Nguyen
point out, the research on first-generation stu-
dents has given too little attention to ‘how
graduate education is structured – by dominant
forms of capital – to differentially regulate the
achievement of students’ (2018: 168). Freire
taught us that ‘[r]eading the world always pre-
cedes reading the word, and reading the word
implies continually reading the world’ (1983:
10). My colleagues and I asked: shouldn’t our
working class, racially and ethnically diverse
students learn to critically read their own
world, and to create knowledge for themselves
in an effort to act on it (Sleeter et al., 2005)?
SITUATING MYSELF
Freire invites us to consider our work in rela-
tionship to our own childhoods, reflecting on
that time when we first began to read our
own world, and to connect that reading with
text. I recall learning to see the pen as a tool
of thought and expression – even before I
actually knew how to read. When I was four
or five, my mother helped me create books. I
would tell her a story, she would write down
my words, we would discuss the story as she
read it back to me, and I would illustrate it.
While the substance of my stories reflected
what was relevant to a young child – the
family pet, flowers in my mother’s garden,
my stuffed elephant – I learned early on that
49
text could represent analysis of life, and that
I had the power to produce text, even before
I learned to consume it. I could create a
world through text, a world based on my
reading of the world around me.
As a daughter of a physician, I grew up
having access to teachers who assumed I
would become a leader, and who pushed
me accordingly. One of my high school
English teachers, for example, organized us
into student-led groups to read and analyze
novels. A high school history teacher ran his
Ancient History course like a university-level
Socratic seminar. In contexts such as these,
I learned to analyze text, consider origins
of ideas, debate ideas, and propose my own
insights. While my schooling rarely afforded
a political reading of the world and the word,
it regularly honed my skill and comfort with
textual analysis and critical thinking.
Wouldn’t all students benefit from a
similar kind of teaching?
TEACHING WORKING CLASS
STUDENTS TO CLAIM TEXT
My colleagues and I intentionally oriented
the Master of Arts in Education program at
California State University, Monterey Bay
‘around knowledge production in which edu-
cators from local communities, working with
knowledge frameworks and theoretical tradi-
tions that have arisen within historically
oppressed communities, create knowledge
that is of, by, for, and about the community
and its own empowerment’ (Sleeter et al.,
2005: 290). In addition to completing
graduate-level courses, our students pro-
­
duced theses that we structured much like
doctoral dissertations, although, as we
explained, ‘rather than writing a traditional
knowledge production thesis, our students
learned to use research and personal experi-
ence to renegotiate their environment and, in
that process, themselves’ (ibid.: 294). But
few of our students came to us seeing
50 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
k­ nowledge as something they could produce,
and text as something they could own.
For example, one day my students were dis-
cussing articles I had assigned, one of which
was James Banks’ (1993) ‘The Canon Debate,
Knowledge Construction, and Multicultural
Education’. My intent was that they would
use this article (along with others) to dig into
epistemological questions about the nature of
knowledge and who produces it, in prepara-
tion for mining their own experiential knowl-
edge and writing based on their analysis.
I was surprised when several students ques-
tioned why I had asked them to read what this
White man had written. When I explained that
Banks is Black, they wondered why he wrote
like a White person. Students then talked more
broadly about how they saw research: research
is written in a way that sounds White and not
at all like people actually speak; it has status;
and it isn’t particularly useful. On the con-
trary, anything they would write from their
own experience is certainly relevant, but does
not sound educated, lacks status, and therefore
could not be viewed as significant.
I wish I had Freire’s ‘The Importance of
the Act of Reading’ (1983) at the time to
share with my students. I did not.
But my colleagues and I insisted that our
students begin with concerns in their own
classrooms, schools, or lives, analyze those
concerns, learn to gather and work with data
that would help them dig deeper, read research
and theory that expanded their analysis, then
produce knowledge enabling the concerns to
be addressed. We ‘conceptualize the action
thesis as a process through which students
learn to use research to transform their envi-
ronments, collaborating with their communi-
ties’ (Sleeter et al., 2005: 294). And gradually
they did. Examples of their work included
‘building a parent-school partnership to
support literacy development in a bilingual
school, working with young adult students
to transform curriculum so that it responds to
them, and collaborating with colleagues in a
low-income school to bring computers into
classroom instruction’ (ibid.: 294).
As they learned to uncover the political
and epistemological positions from which
theorists wrote, our students began to claim
their intellectual homes. Gradually, they
learned, as Freire describes it, to insert them-
selves into the text they read and the text they
wrote. By engaging in critical conversations
and approaches to claiming research, they
completed significant work that was far more
complex and useful than they had originally
believed they were capable of. Knowing
became a personal and a political act.
While we did not transform a system that
limits working class students’ access to criti-
cal reading and production of knowledge,
by pushing against that system, we exposed
flawed assumptions on which it is based.
REFERENCES
Banks, J. A. (1993). The canon debate, knowl-
edge construction, and multicultural educa-
tion. Educational Researcher 22 (5), 4–14.
Bastedo, M. N. & Gumport, P. J. (2003). Access
to what? Mission differentiation and aca-
demic stratification in U.S. public higher edu-
cation. Higher Education 46 (3), 341–359.
California State University (2017). Fact Book.
Long Beach, CA: Office of Public Affairs,
California State University.
Freire, P. (1983). The importance of the act of
reading. Journal of Education 165 (1), 5–11.
Nguyen, T. H. & Nguyen, B. M. D. (2018). Is the
‘first-generation student’ term useful for
understanding inequality? The role of intersec-
tionality in illuminating the implications of an
accepted – yet unchallenged – term. Review
of Research in Education 42, 146–176.
Sleeter, C., Hughes, B., Meador, E., Whang, P.,
Rogers, L., Blackwell, K., Laughlin, P., & Per-
alta-Nash, C. (2005). Working an academi-
cally rigorous, multicultural program. Equity
& Excellence in Education 38 (4), 290–299.
Terenzini, P. T., Springer, L., Yaeger, P. M., Pas-
carella, E. T., & Nora, A. (1996). First-generation
college students: Characteristics, experi-
ences, and cognitive development. Research
in Higher Education 37 (1), 1–20.

‘I Am a Revolutionary!’
Books are call’d for, and supplied, on the assump-
tion that the process of reading is not a half sleep,
but, in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnast’s
struggle; that the reader is to do something for
himself, must be on the alert, must himself or
herself construct indeed the poem, argument, his-
tory, metaphysical essay – the text furnishing the
hints, the clue, the start or framework. Not the
book needs so much to be the complete thing, but
the reader of the book does. That were to make a
nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train’d,
intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not
on a few coteries of writers.
Walt Whitman (Whitman, 1888)
I began teaching in the mid 1960s in a small
Freedom School affiliated with the Civil
Rights Movement. I’d been arrested in an
anti-war action and served 10 days in county
jail with several activists who were finding
ways to link teaching and education with
deep and fundamental social change. They
were following John Dewey and W. E. B. Du
Bois at that point, and learning about public
pedagogy from Martin Luther King, Jr. and
the Civil Rights Movement. Helen Keller had
13
William Ayers
written something we passed around: ‘We
can’t have education without revolution. We
have tried peace education for 1,900 years
and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see
what it will do now’ (George, 2013).
I walked out of jail and into my first
teaching position, and from that day until
this I’ve thought of myself as a teacher,
moreover, I’ve taken teaching to be a pro-
ject naturally and intimately connected with
social change, love, and justice. After all,
the fundamental message of the teacher is
this: you can change your life – whoever you
are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve
done, another world is possible. As stu-
dents and teachers begin to see themselves
as linked to one another, as tied to history
and capable of collective action, that fun-
damental message shifts slightly, becoming
broader and more generous: we must change
ourselves as we come together to change the
world. Teaching invites revolutions large
and small – and large.
52 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
The following year I became an organ-
izer for the East Side Community Union in
Cleveland, Ohio. The Community Union was
an extension of the Southern Civil Rights
Movement into the North – a grass-roots
effort to organize and mobilize disenfran-
chised and marginalized people suffering
under the yoke of White supremacy into a
powerful social movement to effectively
fight for their own needs and aspirations,
and in so doing, transform themselves and
society, and upend the known world. Our
rallying cries were ‘Let the People Decide!’,
‘Build an Interracial Movement of the
Poor!’, and ‘The People with the Problems
are the People with the Solutions!’. My
immediate task was to start a full-day pre-
school program for kids in our neighbor-
hood. I was 20 years old – and remarkably
unqualified.
We believed then that legitimate and just
social change could only succeed if it were
led by those who had been pushed down and
locked out, and that struggle in the interest of
the most oppressed people in society held the
key to fundamental transformations – internal
and personal as well as social and collective –
that would free everyone from the nightmare
of racial capitalism and colonial occupation.
We saw our political and educational work as
deeply ethical work – organizing and teach-
ing as righteousness.
The Community Union lived for only a
few years. It was founded in 1964, shortly
after Reverend Bruce Klunder was run
over by an earth-mover and killed during
a Movement sit-in at the Lakeview Avenue
construction site of what was planned by
power to become another segregated and
dysfunctional ghetto school, and gone by
the time Ahmed Evans and a group of young
Black nationalists engaged in a deadly
shoot-out with the Cleveland police from
a Lakeview Avenue apartment in 1968. In
between there was struggle, hope, possibil-
ity, occasional heroism, and one of the most
loving attempts to change all that’s glaringly
wrong in our society.
I came of age in those few years in
Cleveland, and so much of what I experienced
still resonates, still grips me, and still holds les-
sons for freedom-fighters all these years later.
I began teaching in Cleveland before
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970)
was published, and so my greatest influ-
ence at the start was Charlie Cobb, a Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
volunteer and a student at Howard University,
Washington, DC, who’d written a brief pro-
posal in 1963 to build Freedom Schools in
order to to re-energize and re-focus the Civil
Rights Movement in Mississippi (Cobb,
1963). Cobb claimed that while the Black
children in the South were denied many
things – decent school facilities, an honest
and forward-looking curriculum, fully quali-
fied teachers – the fundamental injury was ‘a
complete absence of academic freedom, and
[that] students are forced to live in an environ-
ment that is geared to squashing intellectual
curiosity, and different thinking’ (ibid: 250).
For Cobb and others, the busted furnace and
the collapsed roof provided a precise meta-
phor for the broken world that White suprem-
acy had engineered and installed. He named
the classrooms of Mississippi ‘intellectual
wastelands’ (ibid: 250), and he challenged
himself and others ‘to fill an intellectual and
creative vacuum in the lives of young Negro
Mississippi, and to get them to articulate their
own desires, demands and questions’ (ibid:
250). Their own desires, their own demands,
their own questions – for African Americans
living in semi-feudal bondage, managed and
contained through a system of law and cus-
tom as well as outright terror, this was an
expansive opening of the radical imagination –
and a life-or-death challenge.
Cobb was urging students to question the
circumstances of their lives, to wonder about
how they got to where they were, and to
think about how they might change things if
they wanted – his proposal was insurrection
itself, and he knew it. He was crossing hard
lines of propriety and tradition, convention
and common sense, poised to break the law
 ‘I AM A REVOLUTIONARY!’
and overthrow a system. His proposal was
designed to challenge the taken-for-granted,
shake the settled, plow a deep and promis-
ing furrow toward awareness and liberation.
He was proposing a curriculum of question-
asking and problem-posing, and inviting
Freedom School teachers to risk teaching
the taboo.
The schools became spaces where free-
dom could be enacted and where people
could affirm their own humanity and experi-
ences, building their projects on the rock of
their own strengths, their own insights and
wisdom: ‘If we are concerned with breaking
the power structure’ (ibid: 250). Cobb wrote,
‘then we have to be concerned with building
up our own institutions to replace the old,
unjust, decadent ones’ (ibid: 250). His pro-
posal was typical of the strategy and tactics of
the Civil Rights Movement at its best: it artic-
ulated a radical critique of the status quo and
demanded fundamental social change while
simultaneously enacting on the ground a
practice of participatory democracy and sim-
ple justice. People named the world as it was,
even as they came together to imagine a world
that could be, but was not yet; they organized
themselves to live against the oppressive and
unjust grain – in this spot, for this moment – in
that freer, more vibrant, and robust imagined
world. The 1964 Mississippi Freedom School
Curriculum was the handbook I carried into
my work as a preschool teacher/organizer.
In the midst of our efforts in Cleveland,
and in manipulative response to the massive
rebellion of African Americans sweeping the
country, agents of government-sponsored
poverty programs appeared. Their first step
was a ‘community needs assessment’ in
which they surveyed neighborhood people in
an attempt to ‘define problems and craft solu-
tions’. Instead of asking about the strengths
and capacities and wisdom already in the
community, their ‘scientifically’ developed
questionnaire looked only at deficiencies;
instead of attending to problems as shared
and social, they focused on individual ‘defi-
cits’; instead of uncovering root causes and
53
targeting specific structural obstacles and
actual adversaries, they stopped short of
collective action. Our call for community
power was recast as ‘empowerment’; our
demand for self-determination became ‘self-
help’; our insistence on ‘Freedom Now!’ was
re-branded as individual choice. In short,
while the ‘poverty pimps’ (as Movement
people called them) deployed the rhetoric of
the Civil Rights Movement, they shared none
of its spirit – they displayed no interest what-
soever in unleashing human agency, secur-
ing justice, nor challenging the larger system
which stamped bigotry and prejudice into the
very fiber of law and custom.
Even the best of the so-called poverty pro-
grams were broken or defective in this way.
Head Start, which conservatives attacked
at its inception as a communist plot, the
socializing of child-rearing, and a frontal
assault on family values, liberals defended
as a symbol of doing something good for the
poor, creating a more ‘level playing field’.
The meritocratic and hierarchic realities of
schools and society were never questioned,
and once again, some imagined character
flaw in Black or poor people was blamed
for the conditions of their oppression. The
first brochures explaining Head Start to par-
ents and staff described the poor as living
in ‘islands of nothingness’, and it was out
of nothingness that the do-gooders would
lift up the children of the poor. This is not
policy that loves or supports families or
children, nor is it policy that understands or
builds upon assets found within actual com-
munities. Rather, this kind of policy makes
acceptance of degradation and self-denial
the initial cost of participation – paint your-
self pathetic and earn a pat on the head and a
small charitable handout.
Simultaneously, the Civil Rights
Movement was evolving and transforming
into the Black Freedom Movement. There
was a generational shift to be sure, but
there was also a growing sense that Black
Liberation had an organic connection to
anti-imperialist national liberation struggles
54 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
exploding around the world from South
Africa to Algeria and from Cuba to Vietnam –
Malcolm X made the link concretely, beyond
metaphor. The Black Arts Movement burst
onto the scene at the same time, offering a
fresh, revolutionary aesthetic as well as an
opening to reimagine the Black struggle and
to resist both complacency and cooptation.
There was, as well, a sad but steadily
growing recognition that the important vic-
tories of the Movement (integrating public
accommodations, passing national voting
rights, and civil rights legislation) had added
up to neither freedom nor justice. The fail-
ure to seat the insurgent Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party delegates at the Democratic
Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, and the
willingness of the Democratic Party leader-
ship to sell out the Movement and seat instead
the White supremacist ‘regular’ Democrats
was pivotal – it showed many activists that
any theory-of-change that relied on appealing
to the consciences of good White people was
corrupt and hopeless. People became clearer
and stronger in their calls for justice, not
optics, and for liberation, not integration. I
don’t want to find my place inside your rotten
society, one activist said at the time, I want
to create a world where my humanity is no
longer a question.
When Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic
and brilliant leader of SNCC, called for Black
Power during the Mississippi March Against
Fear in 1966, he both echoed and accelerated
a sentiment that had been growing stead-
ily within the Movement, especially among
young activists, for several years. There was
no sharp break or clear distinction between
Civil Rights and Black Liberation, the ‘good
1960s’ vs. the ‘bad 1960s’, or the Beloved
Community opposed to Black Power –
Carmichael and many others embodied both.
Stokely Carmichael traveled the coun-
try after the Mississippi March, meeting
with Movement organizers coast-to-coast,
and when he came to Cleveland, his mes-
sage to us was clear: the old strategies and
tactics are exhausted and something new is
in the air; freedom is not a gift from above,
but an achievement of a self-activated com-
munity exercising its own agency; equality
will never be won without first gaining self-
determination for the oppressed; Black folks
need to develop their own leadership; and,
yes, Black is Beautiful! He argued that Black
Liberation could never be based on chang-
ing White people’s minds: We need power
over our own communities so that, no matter
what the White man thinks, we can be safe
and free. His argument to the White organ-
izers and activists was equally clear: the best
thing you can do today is to go directly to
the place that generates the problem – go and
organize White people against racism. Some
Whites felt miserable and betrayed, and left
the struggle altogether; others took the chal-
lenge to think more deeply about the dagger
at the heart of the American experience, and
to find a way to deepen and sustain a commit-
ment to fundamental change. I left Cleveland
and threw myself into teaching and organiz-
ing within the student movement.
When Pedagogy was published in the
United States and I first encountered Paulo
Freire, I felt I was meeting an old friend, or a
father I didn’t know I had – the pedagogy of
the Black Freedom Movement was, indeed, a
pedagogy of the oppressed, and the parallels
between Freire’s experiences in Brazil and
Cobb’s insights in Mississippi were striking.
Both understood that education is never neu-
tral and that it always has a value, a position,
a politics; both approached teaching as a
political, ethical, and creative act; both knew
that the students were the teachers of the
teacher and that unlocking the wisdom in the
room was the key to a curriculum of illumina-
tion and transformation; both acknowledged
as foundational the act of experiencing and
knowing the world – ‘reading the world’ –
as dynamic, generative, and linked to reading
the word; both deployed a pedagogy of dia-
logue, problem-posing and question-asking
(what does it mean today to be a free per-
son living in a humane society?) that fore-
grounded student creativity and agency; both
 ‘I AM A REVOLUTIONARY!’
assumed that self-transformation is in a per-
petual dance of the dialectic with changing
the world.
Years later on a delegation to the
Bolivarian Revolution, I witnessed another
iteration of what I now saw as a dialectic
of liberation – a pedagogy of the oppressed
and a freedom school – in the hills above
Caracas. As we made our way to a literacy
class late in the day along a long and wind-
ing road, someone noted that the wealthy –
here and everywhere – have certain received
opinions, a kind of absolute judgment about
poor and working people, and yet they have
never traveled this road, nor any road like
it. They have never boarded this bus up into
these hills, and not just the oligarchy or the
wealthy – this lack of first-hand knowledge,
of open investigation, of generous regard is
also a condition of the everyday liberals, and
even many of the radicals and armchair intel-
lectuals whose formulations sit lifeless and
stifling in a crypt of mythology about poor
people. Everyone, I thought, should come
and travel these roads into the hills – and not
just once, but again and again – if they will
ever learn anything of the real conditions of
life here, surely, but more important than
that, if they will ever encounter the wisdom
and experience and insights embodied in
every human being, even the most humble.
We arrived at eight o’clock to a literacy
circle already underway in a small, poorly
lit classroom. And yet here in this dusky
space, a light was shining: 10 people had
pulled their chairs close together – a young
woman maybe 19, a grandmother perhaps
65, two men in their 40s – each struggling
to read. And I thought of a poem called ‘A
Poor Woman Learns to Write’ by Margaret
Atwood about a woman working labori-
ously to print her name with a stick in the
dirt – a parallel to Freire’s memories of his
childhood writings where ‘[t]he earth was
my blackboard; sticks my chalk’. She never
thought she could do it, the poet notes, not
her – this writing business was for others. But
she, indeed, accomplishes the task and prints
55
her name, her first word so far, and she looks
up and smiles.
The woman in the poem – just like the
students in the class – was living out a uni-
versal dialectic that embodies education
at its very best: she wrote her name, she
changed herself, and she altered the con-
ditions of her life. As she wrote the word,
another world became – suddenly and
surprisingly – possible.
Education contributes to human liberation
to the extent that people reflect on their lives,
and, becoming more conscious, insert them-
selves as subjects in history. To be a good
teacher means above all to have faith in the
people, to believe in the possibility that peo-
ple can create and change things. The Black
Freedom Movement and the Bolivarian
Revolution are instantiations of that fact.
SNCC organizers in Lowndes County,
Alabama began to build an independent
Black-led party after 1964, away from the
scheming Democrats, and when, in order
to appear on the ballot, they had to choose
a symbol for the party, they picked a pow-
erful image of a black panther in the wild.
From then on the Lowndes County Freedom
Organization was popularly called the Black
Panther Party – and an enduring emblem
was born. When Stokely Carmichael spoke
in Oakland, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton,
two young nationalist organizers, adopted
the panther symbol and formed a new
organization: the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense.
White Americans finding easy comfort in nonvio-
lence and the radical love of the civil rights move-
ment must reckon with the unsettling fact that
black people in this country achieved the rudi-
ments of their freedom through the killing of
whites.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘Why Do So Few Blacks Study
the Civil War?’ (Coates, 2012)
The bloody Civil War was begun by
Confederate traitors willing to blow up the
whole house in defense of a single freedom:
their professed right to own other human
beings.
56 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
That war never ended – the afterlife of
slavery included the infamous Black Codes,
chain gangs, segregation and redlining, Jim
Crow laws, and the organized terrorism of
lynching and night-rides. Now the afterlife
of the afterlife abides in the serial mur-
der of Black people by militarized police
forces, the Thirteenth Amendment and
mass incarceration, separate and unequal
schools, disparate health outcomes, and
the creation and perpetuation of ghettos
through law and public policy, just to name
a few atrocities.
The Civil Rights Movement was one cou-
rageous response to the ongoing terror and
oppression of White supremacy, Black Power
and the Black Panther Party another. And as
long as the nightmare continues, the resist-
ance will express itself in new and surprising
forms.
An honest reckoning with history is
essential – who are we? Where do we come
from? Where are we headed? – but there’s no
time for romantic nostalgia. Without a note
of sentimentality, the Black Panther legacy
is important to study and reckon with pre-
cisely because of the resonance today – here
and now – of its activities and programs. And
the Panthers were and are a symbol of pride,
courage, and agency, as well as resistance to
powerlessness, cynicism, and resignation.
The Panthers’ first project was to build
armed community patrols to follow the police
in Oakland and document their habitual
abuses – exposing and resisting an occupy-
ing and militarized police force was founda-
tional to everything the Panthers undertook.
They analyzed the role of the cops and the
courts in the Black community, and called
for a United Front Against Fascism. Further,
their Ten Point Program, too often reduced to
a narrative about feeding breakfast to kids, is
built on a political base of organizing for self-
determination, reparations, and socialism.
The brilliance of the community service pro-
grams was precisely the bond between basic
human rights and a revolutionary nationalist
contestation with power. The revolutionary
underpinnings of their organizing offer a pro-
foundly different reading of basic needs:
1 We want freedom. We want power to determine
the destiny of our Black Community.
2 We want full employment for our people.
3 We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists
of our Black Community.
4 We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human
beings.
5 We want education for our people that exposes
the true nature of this decadent American soci-
ety. We want education that teaches us our true
history and our role in the present day society.
6 We want all Black men to be exempt from mili-
tary service.
7 We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY
and MURDER of Black people.
8 We want freedom for all Black men held in fed-
eral, state, county and city prisons and jails.
9 We want all Black people when brought to trial
to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or
people from their Black Communities, as defined
by the Constitution of the United States.
10 We want land, bread, housing, education, cloth-
ing, justice and peace. (Newton, 1980)
Anyone who can reduce this to ‘breakfast for
children’ is either delusional or dishonest.
These demands and the campaigns that
followed – community control of the police,
for example – were simply democratic peti-
tions on the face of it, but in the context of
colonial occupation and organized resistance
each one took on a deeply revolutionary tone
and tenor.
‘All Power to the People’, chanted the
Panthers, and they meant it. They organized
the community with the idea that the people
have the knowledge of both what is wrong,
unjust, and out of balance, as well as what is
to be done to move things forward. Workers
know what the factory assembly line is doing
to their bodies, just as people living near a
toxic waste dump in Chicago know what’s
happening to them, to their neighbors, and
to their children – that knowledge is not
validated by power because it’s subjective,
invested, and involved. Community organiz-
ing was in part a way to document people’s
 ‘I AM A REVOLUTIONARY!’
knowledge of their own situations, a way to
socially reclaim and validate that knowledge
while linking knowledge with conduct. It had
to do with naming obstacles, and with under-
standing possibilities. It had to do with com-
munity building. It was action oriented. It was
different from telling people what was good for
them. And it encouraged exploring the signifi-
cance of it all, and ended with a question: what
are we going to do about it? It was explicitly a
way to prove that we were alive and breathing
at this critical moment in history.
When Fred Hampton, Chairman of the
Illinois Black Panther Party, ended rallies
with a familiar chant, repeated over and
over, it embraced and encouraged all of us to
reach deeper and fight harder: ‘I am a revo-
lutionary!’, ‘I am a revolutionary!’, ‘I am a
revolutionary!’.
The White radicals who worked with the
Panthers tried to listen harder and listen first,
acknowledging the wisdom in others, and
mobilizing an army of allies. In a deeper
sense, ally was not the right word: disman-
tling all the structures – law and custom,
policy and politics – that produce a society
of oppression and exploitation became the
task at hand. Those White people who took
the Panthers’ words to heart needed to find
a way to make an honest contribution – not a
charitable gift – to a real revolution.
J. Edgar Hoover, founding director of the
FBI, a vast criminal enterprise, declared that
the Black Panther Party was the greatest
internal threat to the system, and unleashed
a massive assault on the Panthers as well as
the entire Black Liberation Movement. This
included the infamous Counter Intelligence
Program (COINTELPRO) program, the ‘war
on drugs’, the ramping up of prisons as a
preferred mechanism of discipline and con-
trol, and the serial armed assaults on Panther
offices nationwide as well as selective assas-
sinations of Panther leaders, including Fred
Hampton, to prevent, in Hoover’s words,
the rise of a ‘Black Messiah’ (Civil Rights
History Project, Dixon & Cline, 2013). The
FBI and the state were not playing, and
57
White activists were pushed even further –
to choose between ‘wringing our hands’ and
‘begging for civility’ or fighting back, heart-
to-heart, shoulder-to-shoulder. The shape of
US society today is based on the many ele-
ments of the assault on the Panthers, and yet,
after all that, the human spirit abides – the
will to struggle rises again.
Body cameras and prison reform and sen-
sitivity training and education will not end
the racial nightmare – even if some reforms
would be welcomed. Instead, we must face
reality and courageously confront history, tell
the truth, and then destroy the entire edifice
of White supremacy: metaphorically speak-
ing, it means burning down the plantation.
And when the plantation is at last burned
to the ground, people of European descent, or
‘those who believe they are White’, will find
the easy privileges we have taken for granted
disappearing, and along with them, our will-
ful blindness and faux innocence. Also gone
must be the fragile, precarious perch of supe-
riority. White people will have to give up
our accumulated, unearned advantages, and
yet, stand to gain something wonderful: a
fuller personhood and a moral bearing. We
face an urgent challenge, then, if we are to
join humanity in the enormous task of cre-
ating a just and caring world, and it begins
with rejecting White supremacy – not sim-
ply despising bigotry and backwardness, but
spurning as well all those despicable struc-
tures and traditions. It extends to refusing to
embrace optics over justice, ‘multicultural-
ism’ or ‘diversity’ over an honest reckoning
with reality – to becoming race traitors as we
learn the loving art of solidarity in practice.
The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda
implored his fellow writers to stay awake and
to pay attention. In ‘The Poet’s Obligation’ he
urged them to become acutely aware of their
sisters and brothers who are trapped in sub-
jugation and meaninglessness, imprisoned in
ignorance and despair. You must move in and
out of windows, he wrote, carrying a vision
of the vast oceans just beyond the bars of the
prison. The poem ends with this:
58 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
So, through me, freedom and the sea
Will call in answer to the shrouded heart.
(Neruda, 2001 [1962])
Let’s read this poem together as ‘The Teacher’s
Obligation’. We, too, must move in and out of
windows, and we, too, must build a project of
radical imagination and fundamental change.
As we open the doors to the prison and invite
the real dragon to fly out, we offer the world
a new model of education – a humanizing and
revolutionary model whose twin missions are
enlightenment and liberation.
REFERENCES
Civil Rights History Project, U. S., Dixon, E. &
Cline, D. P. (2013) Elmer Dixon oral history
interview conducted by David P. Cline in
Seattle, Washington, -02-28. Seattle, Wash-
ington. [Video] Retrieved January 27, 2020
from the Library of Congress, https://www.
loc.gov/item/afc2010039_crhp0057/.
Coates, T. (2012) Why Do So Few Blacks Study
the Civil War? The Atlantic. Retrieved from
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
archive/2012/02/why-do-so-few-blacks-
study-the-civil-war/308831/
Cobb, C. (December 1963) Prospectus for a
Summer Freedom School Program. The Stu-
dent Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Papers, 1959-1972. Sanford, NC: Microfilm-
ing Corporation of America, 1982. Reel 39,
File 165, Page 75, at Education & Democracy.
Retrieved January 27, 2020 from https://
w o m h i s t . a l e x a n d e r s t re e t . c o m / S N C C /
doc18A.htm
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Continuum: NY
George, A. (2013) Reading Helen Keller. In Ann
George, M. Elizabeth Weiser and Janet
Zepernick (Eds.), Women and Rhetoric
Between the Wars (p. 97). Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press.
Neruda, P. (2001 [1962]) Poet’s Obligation. In
Fully empowered (Plenos poderes), trans-
lated by Alastair Reid. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, pp. viii. Retrieved January
27, 2020 from https://www.ndbooks.com/
book/fully-empowered/
Newton, H. P. (1980) The Ten-Point Program
(October 1966). In Huey P. Newton (Ed.),
War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repres-
sion in America (pp. 83–85, Appendix A).
New York: Harlem River Press. Rretrieved
January 27, 2020 from http://ouleft.org/
wp-content/uploads/Huey-WATP.pdf
Whitman, W. (1888) Democratic Vistas. Demo-
cratic Vistas and Other Papers (p. 6). London:
Walter Scott.

The Importance of Paulo Freire in
the ‘Act of Reading’
In 1981, when Paulo Freire presented his
paper ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’
as the opening keynote speech at the Brazilian
Congress on Reading, the act of reading was
primarily considered a mechanical and utili-
tarian skill. At that historical moment,
Freire’s work was a pathbreaking approach
within the field of literacy and reading. It was
a historical context in which the dominant
methods of reading considered the subject
strictly as sets of skills and abilities that
needed to be taught by the teacher and
learned by the students. At this time in his-
tory, literacy and reading were based solely
on decoding processes where children just
had to learn first isolated letters, then the
names and sounds of the letters, followed by
how to use the letters (i.e. ‘putting them
together’) in order to decodify words. It was
an excessively fragmented process in which
the teacher provided the information and
dictated the children to repeat it back. It was
the classic process of the banking education
which provoked many children to fail, as the
14
Luis Huerta-Charles1
reading process, as well as the official cur-
riculum, was completely disconnected from
the experiences and culture of working-class
and marginalized children who crowded ele-
mentary public schools in Latin America.
Children who were not able to learn to read
and become literate in the first grade were
retained. Reading was an academic area that
meant success or failure within the first two
grades of elementary school. Regrettably,
children that were held back typically had to
remain with the same teacher who used the
same teaching methods that had failed the
child the first time. Ferreiro and Teberosky
(1979) indicated that at that time, 20% of
the population between 7 and 12 years of
age were not attending school. Furthermore,
approximately 53% of the population only
reached fourth grade. Among these children,
66% were retained in the first and second
grades because they had failed to learn to
read and write.
Additionally, it is important to note that
the majority of those retained children were
60 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
from a low socio-economic status, working-
class families, and historically marginalized
groups. As a result, retention levels soared,
and children ended up abandoning school.
By the time Paulo presented his work on
reading in Brazil, I was starting my first
year of teaching in elementary school, and
the preparation I had received in my teacher
education program had nothing to do with
the concept of connecting children’s reading
comprehension with the experiences they had
had in the world. As a teacher, I was never
taught that reading was a political act, or that
teachers must help children to make meaning
of their world and reality. I had only learned
to teach them to decodify words and put let-
ters together. The focus of my teacher prepa-
ration was on teaching methods, not on how
children made meaning of the reading pro-
cess within their own lives and world. Once,
I asked one of my professors why my sec-
ond-grade students did not comprehend what
they were reading, which I had noticed in my
interaction with them. In response, I was told:
‘Don’t worry, comprehension comes later
when they get into fourth-grade. For now,
just concentrate on teaching them to read’.
As if reading had no relationship at all with
comprehension!
Paulo’s experiences with the oppressed
peasants in Brazil, and later in Chile, dem-
onstrated that the political dimension in
education – and obviously in the teaching
of reading, as well – is ever present whether
we are aware of it or not. Freire’s pedagogi-
cal approach for reading stimulated other
educators to search for alternative forms of
teaching reading, with the purpose of help-
ing children to acquire literacy in meaning-
ful ways and, consequently, to eliminate the
retention of marginalized children. The hope
in these attempts to create alternative reading
pedagogies was to reduce the high number of
retained children and the number of children
abandoning schools.
These attempts at creating alternative
pedagogies were the same sort of commit-
ment that Freire had when he crafted his
pedagogical approach for helping adults
learn how read. Adults who were not able
to read in Brazil when Freire constructed
his reading approach, also were not allowed
to exercise their right to vote. For this rea-
son, when Freire taught the peasants to read,
they also became able to vote. Their votes
were critical in democratically changing the
government that exclusively served the rich.
This change happened not only because the
campesinos learned to read, but also because
Freire set up the dialogical context that
awakened them to the necessity of empow-
ering themselves to reach new levels of con-
scientization in order to remake themselves
(Fiori, 1971). They were able to break the
culture of silence that had been imposed
on them. Freire connected reading to the
conscientization process, in which campes-
inos became more, as Freire (1996) used to
mention the process of becoming complete,
more human. When the peasants began to
read their world through the word, they were
able to understand the subtle forms that the
group in power used to oppress them, deny-
ing them the possibility to become more, and
the role that the government played in this
oppressive dynamic.
However, and this is really heartbreaking,
the capitalist neoliberal system has put every-
thing possible in place to shelve away Freire’s
work. The neoliberal system has successfully
suppressed Freire’s work in most teacher
colleges in Latin America and the United
States. Freire’s oeuvre is not included as part
of the curriculum in many teacher education
programs. In some countries, Freire’s books
are not required readings at all; in others,
decontextualized abstracts of his books are
solely complementary readings. Generally
speaking, prospective teachers almost never
have the opportunity to read Freire’s work.
Although illiteracy and retention rates have
decreased through the years, we are facing a
new form of illiteracy as more students learn
to read as a deciphering skill but are not learn-
ing to read to understand their world and their
contexts. UNESCO’s (2017) report indicated
 THE IMPORTANCE OF PAULO FREIRE IN THE ‘ACT OF READING’
that 6 out of 10 students are not learning the
basic knowledge they should to succeed in
their education, which represents 617 million
students around the world who are not learn-
ing the minimum level of competency in read-
ing and math. With these data from UNESCO
(2017), the act of reading is still viewed as
separated from comprehension because stu-
dents are unable to obtain information from
what they have read. Teachers are, again,
teaching reading without conscientization,
without the commitment to help children to
become more. Freire’s work must be consid-
ered anew as a fundamental part of teacher
education programs, and particularly in read-
ing methods classes, to push back against the
mechanical and instrumentalist approaches,
the ‘lifeless language teaching mandates’
as Torres (2018) calls them. Ultimately, I
agree and align with Casey’s (2016) conten-
tion that teacher education programs must
be taken away from the hands of neoliberal-
ism and racism, in order to prepare critically
conscious teachers that will teach children to
read their world through the word in order to
transform it into a better place for all.
Note
1  I want to thank my colleagues Dr. David Rutledge
and Carolyn Raynor, both at New Mexico State
University, for the invaluable comments and edit-
ing suggestions. This paper response is, in part,
because of them.
61
REFERENCES
Casey, Z. A. (2016). A pedagogy of anticapital-
ist antiracism: Whiteness, neoliberalism, and
resistance in education. Albany, NY: SUNY
Press.
Ferreiro, E. and Teberosky, A. (1979). Los siste-
mas de escritura en el desarrollo del niño.
Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores.
Fiori, E. (1971). Education and conscientiza-
tion. In L. Colonnese (Ed.), Conscientization
for liberation (pp. 123–144). Washington,
DC: Division for Latin America-United States
Catholic Conference.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed.
New York, NY: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving
Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY:
Continuum.
Torres, M. N. (2018). Subverting Lifeless Lan-
guage Teaching Mandates with Bakhtinian
Carnival Pedagogy. Paper presented at the
International Bakhtin’s Roundtable on
“Anthropology of theatricality: the study of
the fundamental principles and basic struc-
tures of Amateur creativity in man [&
women]”. April 4 & May 23, 2018, Orel,
Russia.
UNESCO Institute for Statistics. (2017/Septem-
ber). More Than One-Half of Children and
Adolescents Are Not Learning Worldwide.
Fact Sheet No. 46. Paris: UNESCO Institute
for Statistics (UIS).

Share and Sustain:
Two Steps to Paulo
SHARE – HOME AND ABROAD
In 1976, Paulo Freire spent a couple of
months in Toronto. He led a summer course in
the graduate programme at OISE, the Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education, engaging in
private and public dialogues with educators.
There were many Latin American political
exiles living in Toronto, mostly from Chile
following the military coup against Salvador
Allende, and I had developed close bonds
with some Brazilian exiles gathered around
Herbert de Souza, known as Betinho. To my
surprise, Betinho was a close friend of Paulo
Freire, and the two of them together formed a
playful, generous and wise centre to any
social gathering. It was Betinho who passed
Paulo my writing about adult learning.
It was exciting for me, just to sit and talk
with these seasoned activists. In the early 70s,
I had been active in solidarity work with the
Latin American left, working with Chilean
and Argentinean refugees, had travelled
widely in Latin America and was committed
15
D’Arcy Martin
to student activism and organizing against
the Vietnam War. But I felt an edge of dis-
comfort in my left-wing activity. According
to Lenin, revolutionary strategy should be
developed by a tight-knit group of leaders,
who would compose such a powerful mes-
sage that masses of people would mobilize
around it. But Betinho joked one day: ‘We
may not be an effective vanguard, but we can
be an excellent rearguard’, and he was steady
in support of grassroots dialogue as the heart
of revolutionary work. Paulo had staked his
life on dialogue with people at the bottom of
the economic and educational heap. His writ-
ing had helped me resist top-down leftism,
strengthening the radical, not the sectarian,
side of social justice movements.
Other opinions, idolizing or demolishing
Paulo’s work, were whirling around North
America at that time. One radical teacher
commented:
We struggled continually to engage in dialogue
with our students, never to lecture them. For
example. Freire’s theory provided validation for our
 SHARE AND SUSTAIN: TWO STEPS TO PAULO 63

practice. He told us exactly what we wanted to Here there is no jargon to impede understand-
hear. Educational dialogue, in Freire’s theoretical ing, no references alien to everyday speech. In
universe, leads directly to revolutionary praxis …
only four sentences, Paulo traces a whole set
Too bad it’s not that simple. (Nasaw, 1974: 33)
of relations: false ­generosity – charity – true
generosity – injustice – poverty – oppression.
Or perhaps lucky for us all, it’s not that
It could be said that these are the six reference
simple. Connecting those two dots of dialogue
points in the argument. Yet in a curious way, it
and praxis had already been an exciting jour-
is difficult to define a focus, for his argument
ney for me, developing a language of learning
can be restated in an equally meaningful way
with students to counter the professors and
by starting with any one of the reference
administrators who were increasingly tying
points. The argument is hard to ‘pin down’
the university to the emerging corporate order.
because it simultaneously considers relations
It took me six years of action and reflec-
among several elements, rather than focusing
tion to distil a few pages on Paulo’s signifi-
attention on a single element. Each of these
cance (Martin, 1975). It seemed important to
terms implies the others at the same time that
share some of the practical tools developed
it is distinguished from the others. A linear
by educators in Latin America, especially a
reading will be puzzling, but a dialectical
group that I had met in Oruro, Bolivia, who
reading will be illuminating.
developed a process of literacy and numeracy
I found that I was comfortable in Paulo’s
education that built on the knowledge of local
writing, where ‘word’ implies ‘world’ and
peasants rather than talking at them. These
vice versa, where reading cannot be of texts
were educators who started their contact with
without contexts.
humble people by asking questions rather
When Paulo read my thesis, he said to
than making speeches. They drew on the intri-
Betinho and myself: ‘D’Arcy is the first North
cacy of Paulo’s arguments, and were at ease
American to have understood how I think’.
with his writing style. Yet in North America,
He was delighted that I got him, and I was
some friends and colleagues were calling
excited to find that he was open to a relation
Paulo’s writing ‘peculiar’ and ‘opaque’, sug-
of affection and respect.
gesting that it contradicted his own principles
At a later social gathering, he asked me
about access for the culturally marginalized.
directly: ‘What do you want to do next with
I came to realize that people in my culture of
my ideas?’. I told him that I wanted to make a
origin were actually baffled, not by rhetoric
documentary film about my efforts in Ontario
or jargon, but by a prose anchored in relations
to apply his ideas, but that I lacked the funds
rather than things.
to do it. Then I saw his tactical side. He said:
In writing that thesis, I delved into the first
chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where People like us have little power. We have to be crea-
Paulo does use some technical philosophical tive with what power we have. Recently three dif-
terms, but the flow of his argument is easy to ferent film makers have asked me to record an
interview with them in English, so that it could get
follow:
wide circulation in Europe and North America, and
I have always declined because I wasn’t confident in
In order to have the continued opportunity to their values. Why don’t you interview me in English,
express their ‘generosity’, the oppressors must take the pieces you need for your film, and sell the
perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social exclusive TV or film rights to some progressive
order is the permanent fount of this ‘generosity’, broadcaster, to finance completion of your film?
which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty.
That is why the dispensers of false generosity
It seemed a long shot, but at least I would
become desperate at the slightest threat to its
source. True generosity consists precisely in fighting have the anchor interview for my own film.
to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. Indeed, four months later I received a call
(Freire, 2011: 44) from Hans Strobel, who was making a film
64 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
for (West) German TV on popular education
and had been told by Paulo that the only foot-
age in the world with him speaking in
English was in my hands. Hans flew to
Toronto, made some useful suggestions
about our own film, and handed me a cheque
for several thousand Canadian dollars,
enough to complete the shooting and editing
of our film, Starting from Nina: The politics
of learning (Martin et al., 1977).
What struck me first in this experience
was Paulo’s generosity, his willingness to use
his own reputation to help a little group of
activists in our twenties, and his nimble use
of limited resources in support of his values
rather than his ego.
That impression was deepened when he
assembled a team of six people in his Toronto
apartment, four Brazilians with myself and
my partner Anita Shilton to ‘discuss an invi-
tation’ sent to him in Geneva, Switzerland,
where he was on staff at the World Council of
Churches and where I had first met him three
years earlier. Since the revolution in Portugal
in 1975 had brought down the Salazar dicta-
torship, it also created space for radicals in
Africa, where Portugal was the last remain-
ing colonial power. Independence in Guinea-
Bissau was followed by a dialogue with Paulo
in Portuguese to help design a de-colonizing
education there (later documented in Freire,
Pedagogy in Process: The letters to Guinea-
Bissau, 1978). When a similar invitation
came from the new government of São Tomé
and Príncipe, two islands off the west coast
of Gabon, Paulo didn’t have the strength to
go himself, but undertook to choose and send
a support team steeped in his ideas and prac-
tices. We secured some funds so that five of
us could take a two-month leave from our
jobs and take on the job, without any details
on what would be involved.
In the end, the team consisted of Carlos
Alberto Afonso, Cleyde Afonso, Maria
Nakano, Anita Shilton and myself. Our two-
year-old daughter Danielle completed the
group and had her first experience of living
outside the global North.
At our first meeting, Carlos informed the
Minister of Information, Alda Graça, that
Paulo sent her warm greetings and gave the
assurance that we would work hard for two
months, after which we were required for
urgent work at home. Camarada Alda didn’t
bat an eye, wished us a good lunch and con-
vened the 30 staff of the ministry to decide
how we would be used. When we returned in
the afternoon, we were all given assignments:
Carlos, an electrical engineer, was to boost
the range of the radio station so that it could
be properly heard in the smaller island of
Príncipe; Maria and Cleyde were to develop
a wall newspaper to be posted daily in the
main market. Anita and I were to balance
the radio news department from its colonial
focus on international affairs to include the
voices of non-elite local people. Our col-
leagues started taping and broadcasting street
interviews in the style of our work at the
Canadian radio programme As It Happens
rather than imitating authoritative-sounding
European news anchors. Each of us found a
way to interpret Paulo’s perspective into our
work, coaching local colleagues and shining a
light on the beauty and courage of local people
as they rebuilt their society just a year after
the departure of the Portuguese military and
administrative authorities. It was an intense
and joyful chance to contribute, a gift from
Paulo in the word and the work. I have tried
to sustain the vision of hope and the practi-
cality of learning, in the decades since.
SUSTAIN – THINKING UNION
Returning to Canada, our little team carried
the immediacy of the African project in our
bones. Our Brazilian colleagues brought a
new urgency to their desire for a return home,
to launch what became the ‘Betinho move-
ment against hunger and suffering’, an
extraordinary mass movement which laid
some of the groundwork for the rise of the
Workers Party across Brazil. I moved into the
 SHARE AND SUSTAIN: TWO STEPS TO PAULO
labour movement, hired to direct the
Canadian education programme for the
United Steelworkers. The union’s leadership,
and my mentor Michel Blondin, knew that
learning should have practical outcomes that
challenged social hierarchies instead of rein-
forcing them. Together, we built a ‘back to
the locals programme’, to democratize learn-
ing at the workplace level rather than concen-
trate on polishing the behaviour of leaders.
For example, a course already existed to
equip stewards in handling grievances and
disputes with management. We turned that
from memorizing legal procedures into prob-
lematizing the power relations on the job, and
building collective capacity to resist the arbi-
trary use of management power. The course
aimed to develop critical consciousness, to
encourage dialogue and to experiment with
strategic options. Experienced activists were
invited to share their knowledge in a network
of ‘train the trainers’, taking a break from their
industrial jobs to see themselves as facilita-
tors rather than teachers. It was an exciting,
transformational initiative, which expanded
in Canada throughout the Steelworkers and
gradually influenced other unions.
Through the early 1980s, my union work
was influenced by a group of community-
based friends and colleagues with interna-
tional experience in critical pedagogy. In 1983,
Rick Arnold and Bev Burke wrote A Popular
Education Handbook: An educational experi-
ence taken from Central America and adapted
to the Canadian context, drawing on their
experiences with the Sandinista revolution
in Nicaragua. Others like Deborah Barndt in
Nicaragua, Barb Thomas in Grenada, Judith
Marshall in Mozambique and several of us
in southern Africa had participated in activ-
ist grassroots education in a revolutionary
context, and popular education discussions in
Toronto were intense and practical.
Inside the Steelworkers and other unions,
the idea of starting from the experience of the
learner has been central, and much of the lan-
guage of popular education has become com-
mon. The scope for progressive thinking has
65
expanded to the point where over 200,000
Canadians each year participate in courses
sponsored, designed and facilitated in their
unions. The stated purposes of such pro-
grammes were summarized by a group of
union educators as:
• Engage people in a wider collective project than just
surviving and rising individually on the job;
• Equip those who step forward as worker representa-
tives to handle the varied and complex challenges
in speaking truth to power, inside and beyond the
workplace;
• Expand the social and political perspective of work-
ers towards critical thinking and active citizenship;
and
• Energize people by feeding their sprit and
connecting them to ideas and people involved
in the struggle for justice. (Bev Burke et al., cited in
Carter and Martin, 2013: 273)
During my 40 years as a labour educator,
relentless attacks from the greed of the 1%
have created a defensive climate inside unions,
where critical discussion can be hard to
sustain. Nonetheless, Freirean education is
alive and well in unions, both in Canada and
the United States. Its spirit pushes back against
the drift towards corporate and dogmatic
thinking in social movements. Soon after
2000, five of us with experience in five
different unions responded to the expressed
hunger for a handbook on progressive practice,
and co-authored a book in which each chapter
was written and rewritten by two or more of
us. The result, Education for Changing Unions
(Burke et al., 2002), was voted by members of
the UALE, the United Association for Labor
Education, as the single most useful labour
education book from 2000 to 2008. It is still in
use across Canada and the United States, and
has circulated internationally. The five authors
continue to meet each year to debate further
the issues in that book, and to reaffirm the
bond of solidarity built by the effort of merging
our personal worlds into a collective word.
In the past decade, members of the UALE
in both countries have sustained a Popular
Education Working Group, with a strong
66 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
presence in conference agendas, both plena-
ries and workshops. That group, of which I
am a member, published in 2018 a definition
of popular education that would make Paulo
Freire proud. It serves as a guidepost for
those of us, many of us, for whom education
is an opportunity to contribute to the dignity,
creativity and power of working people:
Popular Education is an approach to teaching and
learning that is aimed at radical transformation for
social and economic justice. It begins with the
experiences and issues of the learners involved
rather than the knowledge of an expert teacher.
Participants observe patterns in their experiences
and link them to theory about global and historical
trends. This process promotes critical thinking and
reflective practice as learners design ways to
improve their situation, try them out, evaluate,
modify and try again.
Popular education does not pretend to be neu-
tral, it is openly on the side of the oppressed. It is
focused on empowering a group that is engaged
in progressive struggle rather than only promoting
individual growth. It challenges oppression not
only outside, but as it plays out inside the class-
room. A popular educator strives to design and
facilitate learning events that hold to these values.
This process should be accessible to people of all
education levels and should engage people’s
minds, bodies and emotions. (www.uale.org/
groups/popular-education, 2018)
For me personally, the encounters with Paulo
Freire himself, with his words and with his
world, have been an anchor in my personal
and professional development during a life-
time in activist adult education. I am grateful
for his insistence that both text and context
need to point educators towards connection
with the oppressed. Paulo’s words challenge
us to a lifetime commitment, undoing hierar-
chies of oppression through the practice of
living authentically in relationship with
oppressed people, building on their good
sense in achieving justice and freedom for
all. This is a rich and challenging pedagogy
based on careful analysis, thoughtful dia-
logue, hopeful spirit and raw courage. May
we all measure up to the challenge Paulo
offers, in words and actions.
REFERENCES
Arnold, Rick and Bev Burke, A Popular Educa-
tion Handbook: An educational experience
taken from Central America and adapted to
the Canadian context. Ottawa: Development
Education Program, Canadian University Ser-
vices Overseas, 1983.
Burke, Bev, Jojo Geronimo, D’Arcy Martin, Barb
Thomas and Carol Wall, Education for
Changing Unions. Toronto: Between the
Lines, 2002.
Carter, Sue and D’Arcy Martin, ‘Equip, Engage,
Expand and Energize: Labour Movement
Education’, in Building on Critical Traditions:
Adult Education and Learning in Canada
(pp. 270–280), eds. Tom Nesbit, Susan M.
Brigham, Nancy Taber and Tara Gibb.
Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing,
2013.
Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy in Process: The letters to
Guinea-Bissau. New York: Seabury Press, 1978.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New
York: Continuum, 2011.
Martin, D’Arcy, Re-Appraising Freire: The
potential and limits of conscientization, MA
thesis in educational theory, University of
Toronto, 1975.
Martin, D’Arcy, Anita Shilton and Rosemary
Donegan, Starting from Nina: The politics of
learning [videorecording]. Toronto:
Development Education Centre, 1977.
Nasaw, David. ‘Reconsidering Freire’, Liberation,
September/October, pp. 29–33, 1974.

INTRODUCTION
Paulo Freire, Critical Pedagogy
and the Quest for ‘Transformative
and Emancipatory Education’
Why is (formal, normative) education so mired
within anti-democratic structures, postures,
frameworks and traditions, which (can) effec-
tively constrain it from critically addressing the
world’s ills (Carr and Thésée, 2019)? Is it pos-
sible for education to fulfill the immense but
fundamental mission entrusted to it, to some-
how lead to individual and collective emanci-
pation? And if so, how can it, in these times of
great conflict and chaos, both social and envi-
ronmental, become a force leading to Freire’s
notion of conscientization? How can an evolv-
ing social conscience take into account myriad
SECTION II
Social Theories
Paul R. Carr and Gina Thésée
realities, words, knowledge and actions of the
‘oppressed’, those facing multi-layered dis-
crimination, dispossession, marginalization,
alienation, colonization, domination, exclusion
and abuse, in effect representing the ‘wretched
of the earth’? (Fanon, 2002).How can, signifi-
cantly, an environmental consciousness take
into account infinite realties, words, knowledge
and actions against extractionary, consumerist
and financial/economic/profit-based logics that
threaten the health and well-being of human
existence? And above all, at the beginning of
the 21st century, at a time when these immense
social challenges, both complex and global, are
becoming increasingly difficult to target and
identify, what is, and should be, the role of
education? Education is always presented as
the answer to the evils of the world and the
key to necessary social transformations, yet,
68 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
paradoxically, it is, concurrently, blamed as
an institution of oppression, the reproduction
of social inequalities and the justification of
the alienation of the oppressed. Education
seems to function, at the same time, as an
incontrovertible lever and brake toward and
against the social transformations required to
make society more just, engaged, inclusive
and ‘democratic’. So, what education(s) do
the societies of the world need today, and
how can we avoid the many traps, pitfalls and
injustices embedded within it so as to facili-
tate meaningful social change? (Morin, 1999;
Petrella, 2000).
With the notion of Transformative and
Emancipatory Education (TEE), we wish to
humbly contribute to answering these ques-
tions, in solidarity with several critical social
theoretical (plural) perspectives (feminism,
anti-racism, decolonialism, Indigenism,
environmentalism, etc.), without closing off
the necessary discussions required to under-
stand and engage with, and frame, the diverse
cultural and educational contexts. The adjec-
tives ‘transformative’ and ‘emancipatory’
confer on this education an aura of freedom
and creativity, of positionality and critical-
ity, of complexity and opacity, of community
and solidarity, all aspects that arise in and out
of rupture with a certain hegemonic vision
of education that is brilliantly illustrated in
what Paulo Freire describes as ‘banking edu-
cation’ in his seminal book Pedagogy of the
Oppressed (Freire, 1974). This book, pub-
lished in Portuguese for some 50 years, has
been translated into several languages, and
is still considered today as one of the most
important and influential works in educa-
tion around the world. However, the educa-
tional philosophy that Freire proposes and
espouses in one of his first books as well as
his many subsequent writings is still poking
around at the margins of formal educational
contexts. Our attempt to elucidate TEE is
premised on Freire’s work and philosophy,
and also fully acknowledges the vibrant and
voluminous contribution of several critical
scholars, including Antonia Darder (2018),
Maxine Green (2003), Henry Giroux (2011),
Peter McLaren (2014), Shirley Steinberg
(Steinberg and Cannella, 2012) and many
others on all continents. The reality is that the
list is long, and we find ourselves in a most
uncomfortable position in identifying a sin-
gle work for others who have developed over
the course of decades an overwhelming body
of work that has influenced people around the
world; our dear friend Joe Kincheloe (2008a,
2008b) falls squarely in this category. We
would also add that it is not only about what
these colleagues have written, which, in itself,
is extremely invaluable but, importantly, how
they have interacted with, mentored, engaged
with and shared with others, especially from
marginalized groups.
THE FILIATION OF TEE WITHIN
FREIRE’S EDUCATIONAL
PHILOSOPHY
Contrary to what some people have claimed,
often to disqualify it, the educational phi-
losophy of Paulo Freire is far from being
old-fashioned, or draped in an obsolete
ideology, valid only for certain socio-­
educational contexts, or connected only to
the Global South, or reduced to teaching
methods targeting only adult literacy
(Darder et al., 2003). In its twofold trans-
formative and emancipatory aim, Freire’s
educational philosophy is, today and more
than ever, alive, current and urgent (Carr
and Thésée, 2019; Gonzalez-Monteagudo,
2002). To combat the evils of the world,
Freire denounces the education aimed at
domestication, and proposes an education
tethered to the aim of emancipation. He
develops a subversive education through
critical awareness and the transformation
of oppressive social realities. Key peda-
gogical principles punctuate his theory:
dialogue, praxis, theory-practice alliance,
criticality, humility, radical love and con-
scientization. We see in his treatise, not a
 SOCIAL THEORIES
goal of education among others, but above
all, more generally, an educational philoso-
phy in action, pursuing a continuous pro-
cess of transformation, one that challenges
both the relation to oneself (identity), the
relation to the Other (otherness and alter-
ity), the relation to knowledge (citizenship)
and the relation to the world (globality).
This is what led Giroux (1983) to designate
Freire’s educational thought as a ‘critical
pedagogy’, and educators who feel chal-
lenged and engaged by such frameworks as
‘critical pedagogues’.
Like other critical scholars/educators who
advance and claim self-criticality (Kincheloe,
2008a, 2008b; Sauvé, 1997a, 1997b, 2017,
2018), we take into account these criti-
cisms, especially by feminist, Afro-feminist
and environmentalist perspectives, and even
within the broad circle of critical pedagogues
(Darder et al., 2003). These broad lines
sketching out critical pedagogy through its
Marxist historicity, its philosophical theo-
retical framework of the Enlightenment, its
visible lineage of almost exclusively White
men, its non-inclusive language, its politi-
cal nature, and so on, did not always or suf-
ficiently explicate the social issues resulting
from the intersectionality of identity factors,
such as class, race, gender and sexuality.
In doing so, these critical pedagogical cur-
rents would have participated in the dynam-
ics of oppression that it denounces, thus
proving ethnocentricity, Eurocentricity and
machismo. These criticisms, which are also
relevant and dialectical, have strongly chal-
lenged certain critical educators, allowing
them to adjust the theoretical and conceptual
framework of their discipline(s) in relation
to various contemporary socio-educational
issues, open to traditionally silenced voices
and concerns. Thus, although Freirian
thought offers a significant and, even, fun-
damental potential for transformative and
emancipatory education, we also acknowl-
edge that ‘critical pedagogy does not begin
or end with the work of Paulo Freire’ (Darder
et al., 2003: 20).
69
The Ontological Framework or the
Nature of TEE
The ontological framework or the nature of
TEE refers to the essence of a concept, to its
very core and matrix foundational being.
Ontologically, the concept of TEE is situated
in a thematic trilogy with democracy and
global citizenship. It is, at the same time, a
condition, and an instrument as well as a goal
or utopia in which democracy and global citi-
zenship feed. Here, democracy is understood
as a broad process of participation and
engagement imbued within dynamic, com-
plex and problematic power relations (Carr,
2011), and global citizenship is viewed as a
fluid citizenship, taking into consideration
the paradigm of ‘trans’, including trans/
national citizenship, trans/cultural, trans/dis-
ciplinary, etc. (Carr and Thésée, 2019). The
three concepts, which have been incorpo-
rated into the logo and philosophy of the
UNESCO Chair in Democracy, Global
Citizenship and Transformative Education
(DCMÉT) (see http://uqo.ca/dcmet/), are
thus interrelated by the metaphor of the four
elements: Air, Water, Earth, Fire. Inspired by
Glissant (2010) and Pineau (2015), this met-
aphor is not trivial because the essential
qualities of each element are illustrated in the
definitions and grounding of the concepts. In
this sense, democracy is symbolized by the
element, Air (teleonomic finality, active
utopia), global citizenship is symbolized by
the element, Water (fluidity) and TEE is
symbolized by the element, Earth (base). The
fourth element, Fire (the required energy),
symbolizes the values, principles, strategies
and praxis that link the three themes into one
whole, that is, ‘education to …’, TEE to
democracy and global citizenship.
The Axiological Framework or the
Values and Principles of TEE
Driven by a desired ‘utopia’, necessary
according to Freire (2007), TEE recognizes
70 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and values the utopian nature of its project, in
the sense of an act of critical knowledge.
Utopia is this place where the imaginary
invites, orients and is guided by TEE. Utopia
joins the cardinal values of UNESCO which,
in the Education Agenda 2030, aims at living
well together in societies of peace, social
justice, inclusion and equity (UNESCO,
2015). Several decades ago, UNESCO rec-
ognized the value of Freire’s educational
philosophy and the values it promotes by
awarding him the 1986 Education for Peace
Prize (UNESCO, 1986). In the footsteps of
Freire and UNESCO, TEE is moving from
the outset toward oppressed communities
and peoples, those who traditionally live at
the intersection of diverse forms of injustice,
discrimination, domination, marginalization
and social exclusion. In this sense, the values
and principles that serve as fuel for TEE are
in a constellation that is essentially in the
direction of social and environmental justice
as well as world peace.
The Theoretical and Conceptual
Framework of TEE: Critical
Pedagogy
TEE is at the crossroads of various critical
theories that fall within the framework of the
critical social theory of the Frankfurt School
developed by Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse
and Habermas (Giroux, 2003). We highlight
here as well critical race theory (Dei, 2013;
Thésée and Carr, 2016) and various socio-
critical perspectives, such as feminism
(hooks, 2016, 2017), anti-racism (Dei and
McDermott, 2013), anti-colonialism (Abdi,
2012), Indigenous knowledge (Battiste,
2011; Smith, 2012), media and cultural stud-
ies (Steinberg and Cannella, 2012; Steinberg
and Tobin, 2015), environmentalism (Kahn,
2010; Sauvé, 1997a, 1997b, 2018; Shiva,
2005 and spiritualism (Wayne et al., 2014).
TEE emerges from critical pedagogy, and is
thus conceptualized as internal acting forces,
which are certainly nourished externally, in
the different spheres of the social, but there is
also movement from within, organically
from the will of a socially critical and con-
scious subject (and subjectivity), immersing
itself in the world community. In its etymol-
ogy, the ‘trans-formation’ is more than a
change of form as it is also a cry to move
beyond the form that eludes it in the unknown
and without certainty: it requires, no more no
less, a paradigm shift. In its etymology,
‘emancipation’ refers to the significant ges-
ture by which a ‘slave’ literally removes
from his/her shoulder (the Greek prefix) the
hand (the Latin root ‘manu’) of the master,
who wants to take possession of him as
an object or to grab it (the Latin ‘cipare’)
to effectively push it to the side. TEE feeds
on diverse critical social perspectives in
research, training, teaching/learning, com-
munication and social activism. It integrates
educational strategies of/from/in alignment
with informal, non-formal or formal contexts
to better energize and make educational situ-
ations relevant.
The Praxeological Framework or
the Praxis of TEE
Echoing Freirian thought (Freire, 1965), praxis
is at the heart of TEE. It is conceived as a con-
tinuous process, which takes place throughout
life, in all spheres of life and in all socio-edu-
cational contexts, whether informal, non-for-
mal or formal. TEE aims, on the one hand, at
the collective level, and the transformation of
oppressive social realities and, on the other
hand, at the individual level, the emancipation
of socially oppressed people. Thus, TEE is not
only concerned with and about formal educa-
tional contexts (educational institutions such
as schools, training centers, universities, pro-
fessional organizations) but also non-formal
educational contexts (cultural and political
institutions such as museums, libraries, the
arts, media, sports, governments) and informal
educational contexts (institutions such as the
family, communities). All of these spheres and
 SOCIAL THEORIES
contexts interact at the individual and collec-
tive levels as well as the local and global levels.
The Epistemological Framework or
the Driving Forces of TEE
The transformational and emancipatory
dynamic in question here is essentially a
movement of openness, to oneself, to the
Other, to knowledge and to the world, under
the impulse of three types of forces: forces of
expansion (development/qualitative), dilata-
tion forces (increasing the dimensions of the
circle/quantity) and extension forces (glo-
bality of meaning/hermeneutics). The open-
ing movement has within its meaning the
following: it is not a subtractive operation but
rather an additive one; it is not a question of
renouncing one’s culture but of plunging it
into dialogue with the diversity of human
cultures; it is not a question of silencing the
peculiarities of our local context but of align-
ing it within those of the global context; it is
not a question of denying one’s identity
(root-identity) but of including the Other
(identity-rhizomes); it is, therefore, not a
question of imposing one’s culture and
knowledge but of sharing them in a spirit of
community of a belonging and being. The
three acting forces that are intertwined in this
opening are neither equal, nor proportional,
nor necessarily correlated. However, we see
these three forces of expansion, dilatation
and extension as agonistic forces that com-
pete together, at different rates, in varying
degrees, and in different ways, concurrently.
However, the openness we are discussing
here does not rest on the good conscience
or on what Freire (1974) calls ‘humanitari-
anism’ (different from humanism) tinged
with voluntarism, paternalism or charity. In
its critical epistemological framework, TEE
opens with the essential question of ‘why?’. It
is a matter of discovering what is underlying
knowledge: the implicit, the unspoken, the
hidden sides/curriculum/agenda, the incon-
sistencies, the paradoxes, the contradictions,
71
the falsities, the nonsense, the hidden inter-
ests, the justification, the denied privileges,
etc., which enamel the knowledge. It is also
a question of reinterpreting, with the aid of
a critical hermeneutic approach, the social
and environmental consequences of ‘toxic
knowledge’ on communities and people who
are/have been traditionally oppressed. In this
case, ‘knowledge’ refers to any construction
of the human mind that serves to describe,
classify, analyze, compare, understand,
explain, qualify, quantify, control, domi-
nate, act and transform its environment. This
includes knowledge, including conceptions,
preconceptions, beliefs, myths, dogmas,
stereotypes, images, discourses, social rep-
resentations, theories, laws, models, defini-
tions, statistics, etc., which are widely shared
or transmitted in informal, non-formal or
formal contexts. ‘Toxic knowledge’ refers to
all knowledge that tends to maintain, repro-
duce, reinforce or justify the dynamics of
injustice, discrimination, violence and social
exclusion. To counteract the toxic effects of
knowledge on communities and individuals,
the TEE critical epistemological framework
requires the necessary deconstruction of
knowledge. In this sense, the acting forces of
TEE result in two complementary dynamics
and tensions with and in relation to one other,
characterized by a dynamic of ‘epistemologi-
cal resistance’ based on the following pillars:
(i) Refuse (say No! to toxic knowledge) and
(ii) Request (deconstruct the toxic knowledge);
and a dynamic of ‘epistemological resilience’
based on these pillars: (iii) Re-appropriating
(rebuilding transformational and emancipa-
tory knowledge) and (iv) Reaffirming (saying
Yes to therapeutic knowledge, to individual
and collective empowerment) (Thésée, 2006).
The Structural Framework or
the Dimensions and Components
of TEE
The continuous process that TEE is organi-
cally appealing to relates to the transformation
72 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of fundamental relationships to oneself, to the
Other, to knowledge and to the world, making it
a process in four transversal dimensions because
at any moment in our education (whether in
informal, non-formal or formal contexts), our
‘relationships to…’ are summoned to be decon-
structed, re-read, reconsidered, amplified and
transformed. ‘Relationships to …’ are attitudes
or dispositions of mind, heart, soul and body
that precede, condition and announce the ‘rela-
tionship with…’. Long before the ‘meeting
with…’, the ‘relation to…’ will have deter-
mined, often in a definite and definitive way, the
possibility or not to establish the ‘relationship
with…’. In other words, to make possible the
‘relationship with…’ and to take care of it, it
must move upstream to allow the transforma-
tion of ‘relationships to…’. Thus, the four
dimensions or ‘relationships to…’ self, the
Other, knowledge and the world represent the
four sites of transformation. These dimensions
are inspired by Sauvé (2017), according to
whom environmental education is essentially
aimed at transforming the relationship between
the environment and the transformation of rela-
tionships with oneself and the other. The rela-
tion to oneself concerns the construction of
identity and the relationship to the other con-
cerns the construction of otherness whereas the
relation to the environment concerns the con-
struction of the relationship to the biosphere
(Sauvé, 2017). We have added a fourth dimen-
sion, ‘the relation to knowledge’, mediating
between the relation to the Other and the rela-
tion to the world. This fourth dimension seems
necessary to us because, with oppressive
dynamics based on relations with toxic knowl-
edge, it is logical to think that transformation
and emancipation must also pass through the
transformation of the relationships with knowl-
edge, a detoxification of the spirit in a sense.
CONCLUSION
In sum, TEE is a philosophical adventure, at
once educational and poetic as well as social
and political, which invites us to think and
rethink, imagine and reimagine, create and
recreate our relationships with oneself, with
the Other, with the knowledge and the world,
and, in doing so, to emancipate from oppres-
sive dynamics with an interest in transform-
ing the oppressive social realities they
generate. It is clear that we do not hold the
answer to these questions; however, the reali-
ties of today’s world are so disturbing, jar-
ring and worrisome that their problematization
and transformation has become central to the
reformulation of any meaningful educational
changes at this time. Thus, this essay ends
with this note of incompleteness, which suits
the dynamic, ever changing character of a
continuous process, at once dialogical, dia-
lectical and deliberative, of a transformative
and emancipatory education. However, we
are resolute in our belief that Paulo Freire’s
work continues to be a guiding light and a
fundamental inspiration to bring about mean-
ingful, critically-engaged TEE.
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 16
Critical Pedagogy and
the Knowledge Wars
of the 21st Century
Joe L. Kincheloe

We live in nasty and perilous times. Those of
us in critical pedagogy cannot help but
despair as we watch the United States and its
Western collaborators instigate imperial wars
for geopolitical positioning and natural
resources, and mega-corporations develop
and spend billions of dollars to justify eco-
nomic strategies that simply take money
from the weakest and poorest peoples of the
world, and transfer them to the richest people
in North America and Europe. In this con-
text, the politics of knowledge become a
central issue in the educational and social
domains of every nation in the world. The
politics of knowledge firmly entrenched
around the planet are characterized by a few
rich individuals and transnational corpora-
tions controlling most of the ‘validated’ data
we can access. Thankfully, there is a rich
source of counter-data on the Internet and
from several book publishers and journals –
but students and other people are warned
about the politicized nature of this informa-
tion. Thus, many individuals are exposed
over and over again to phony rationalizations
for indefensible governmental, military,
financial, and social actions of power wield-
ers in the United States and its Western allies.
The Iraqi War, as merely one example, is not
simply a story about a brutal and unnecessary
policy, but a chronicle of the way the knowl-
edge war operates in the 21st century.
Those who wage the war employ the
authority of science and media to spread a
plethora of great untruths about Iraq’s dan-
ger to the world and the necessity of con-
tinuing military action against the ‘nation’.
The same type of knowledge tactics were
applied against Iran in 2008. The power of
such knowledge work is at times overwhelm-
ing as millions of individuals in the United
States and around the world have been pro-
foundly influenced by such misleading infor-
mation. Those of us in critical pedagogy find
it hard to believe that such lies and misrep-
resentations could still have credibility years
after they had been exposed, but, just as an
example, over a decade after 9/11 many
76 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of the people in the contemporary United
States still believed that Saddam Hussein’s
regime possessed WMDs (weapons of mass
destruction), was responsible for 9/11, and
had prepared to leave American cities under
a mushroom cloud. Such a crazy politics of
knowledge tells us that something is deeply
wrong with not only the ethical behavior and
sanity of power wielders, but that one of the
most powerful weapons in their multidimen-
sional and frightening arsenal is their owner-
ship of much of the world’s knowledge. In
this context, contemporary standardized edu-
cational systems contribute to the imperial
task as they pass along the official verities
of the regime and promote its sociopolitical
and economic interests. The focus of this
essay involves analyzing the ways critical
pedagogy might conceptualize and enact a
response to the knowledge wars being waged
against peoples in North America, Australia,
New Zealand and Europe, marginalized peo-
ples living in these regions, and the most des-
titute peoples living around the world.
THE WEST WORKS TO GAIN
MULTILEVEL SUPREMACY OVER
THE REST OF THE WORLD
The politics of knowledge and the contempo-
rary knowledge wars cannot be separated
from the relationship between the epistemo-
logical, ontological, the political economic,
and the ideological. All four of these domains
constantly interact in a synergistic manner to
shape the nature of the knowledge produced
by Western power wielders in the contempo-
rary era. Dominant power brokers attempt –
with a great deal of success – to regulate
what people view as legitimate knowledge by
utilizing a crypto-positivistic, evidence-
based science that excludes complexity, con-
text, power, multiple modes of research
design, the ever changing in-process nature
of the phenomena of the social world, subju-
gated and Indigenous knowledges from
diverse social and geographical locales, and
the multiple realities perceived and con-
structed by different peoples at divergent
historical times and cultural places. There is
no way around it; the task of the critical
pedagogue as teacher, researcher, and knowl-
edge worker is profoundly complex and
demanding in our proto-fascist era. I hate to
use the word fascist because of the accusa-
tions of overstatement that it will evoke, but
at this historical point I sense that we can no
longer avoid it.
The neo-liberal, market-driven, and
crypto-fascist logic of the contemporary
Western empire with its ‘recovered’ forms of
White supremacy, patriarchy, class politics,
homophobia, and fundamentalist Christian
intolerance represents a new ‘fall of Western
civilization’. We are all affected by the fact
that as a culture ‘we have fallen and we can’t
get up’, and in this context our critiques of
hegemonic knowledges constitute just one
aspect of a larger effort to ‘get well’, to
mend our psyches that have been broken in
this social descent (Sardar, 1999; Nelson,
2000). As I visit North American schools and
study the curricula taught in most of them, I
am reminded yet again of the preparation of
young pioneers for the empire. The superi-
ority of the European heritage, Christianity,
and Western knowledges are now firmly re-
entrenched. The notion that we might study
the knowledges or entertain the perspectives
of peoples from other cultures, religions, or
ideological perspectives is quickly fading
like the Morning Star as the sun rises over
Fallujah.
Along with geopolitical, military, politi-
cal economic, and other forms of power, the
power of knowledge (episto-power) plays
its role in reinforcing these other forms of
power by placing the various peoples
of North America, Europe, and the rest
of the world into hierarchical categories.
Poor people, diasporic individuals from
the most economically depressed parts
of the world, and residents of the ‘devel-
oping countries’ are positioned on these
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE KNOWLEDGE WARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
hierarchies as less intelligent, less civi-
lized, and more barbaric than upper-middle
class, White, Christian, and often male
Westerners. The superiority of those who
fall under the parasol of dominant posi-
tionality is made so obvious by educational
and other social institutions that everyone
knows where they fit on the status ladder.
This knowing where one fits on the ladder
does great harm – obviously to those who
at the bottom rungs who feel inferior – but
also to those at the top rungs who develop a
sense of privilege and superiority (Weiler,
2004). It is the charge of critical pedagogy
to throw a monkey wrench into a system
of knowledge – an episteme as Foucault
labeled his regime of truth – that perpetu-
ates such perspectives and the human suf-
fering that accompanies them.
DIVERSALITY: THE DIRE NEED FOR
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES, FOR
MULTIPLE FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE IN
THE EFFORT TO EXPOSE AND RESIST
THE NEW EMPIRE
A key task of critical pedagogy involves
helping people understand the ideological
and epistemological inscriptions on the ways
of seeing promoted by the dominant power
blocs of the West. In such work, criticalists
uncover both old and new knowledges that
stimulate our ethical, ideological, and peda-
gogical imagination to change our relation-
ship with the world and other people.
Concurrently, such critical labor facilitates
the construction of a new mode of emancipa-
tion derived from our understandings of the
successes and failures of the past and the
present. Such an undertaking is essential to
the planet’s survival at this moment in his-
tory. In the last years of the first decade of the
21st century, the hegemonic politics of
knowledge and the crypto-positivistic episte-
mology that is its conjoined twin are destroy-
ing the world.
77
As I write these words, I feel as if I’ve
been magically positioned in a 1950s sci-
fi movie in which the people of the earth
mobilize to fight off their destruction. Of
course, it is not the lizard people from the
planet Enyon that threaten us; it is the power
wielders of the West with their free market
economic policies, geopolitical military
actions, and the epistorays of consciousness-
constructing information that we must con-
front. Dominant crypto-positivist modes of
these epistorays are the most difficult of the
tools of hegemonic power to recognize. They
travel under the cover of phrases such as ‘sci-
entific proof’ and other high status monikers.
Flying under the public radar of perception,
they justify murder in the name of national
security and ecological devastation in the
name of economic growth. Such ‘knowledge
weapons’ help deaden our ethical senses and
compassion for those harmed by transna-
tional economic scams, and Eurocentric and
Americocentric ways of seeing that subvert
the development of a critical consciousness.
Indeed, the epistorays move us to support –
under the flag of high standards – schools
that obscure more than enlighten.
Our critical pedagogical effort to thwart
these power plays, I believe, involves engag-
ing in a transformative multilogicality. By
this, I refer to gaining the capability and the
resolve to explore the world not from the
Western imperial vantage point but from
diverse perspectives – often standpoints
forged by pain, suffering, and degradation.
The imperial, neo-liberal rationalization for
the construction of a planetary empire ruled
by the United States and its collaborators is
grotesquely disturbing to hundreds of mil-
lions of people around the world. Given
the flagrance of the imperial abuses and the
perversity of the Iraqi War, more and more
Westerners are beginning to understand the
brutality of the military violence, the material
disparity, and the ecological harm that such
policies and knowledges create. The empire’s
neo-liberal adulation of market-driven modes
of sociopolitical and educational organization
78 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
shapes its efforts to adjust children and youth
to their imperial roles as human capital and
cannon fodder for the wars of geopolitical
advantage and resources demanded by the
needs of the imperial machine.
Key to the multilogical critical pedagogy
advocated here is the notion that while theo-
retical and knowledge frameworks help elu-
cidate phenomena, they also work to mystify
our understanding of them. This is one of the
reasons that I have worked so hard to develop
the concept of the bricolage delineated by
Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (2000)
in a critical context (Kincheloe, 2001a;
Kincheloe and Berry, 2004; Kincheloe,
2005a). Bricolage involves the process of
rigorously rethinking and reconceptualizing
multidisciplinary research. Ethnography,
textual analysis, semiotics, hermeneutics,
psychoanalysis, phenomenology, historiogra-
phy, discourse analysis combined with philo-
sophical analysis, literary analysis, aesthetic
criticism, and theatrical and dramatic ways
of observing and making meaning typically
constitute the methodological bricolage.
Employing these multiperspectival (Kellner,
1995) dynamics, bricoleurs transcend the
parochial blinders of mono-disciplinary
approaches and open new windows onto the
world of research and knowledge production.
In the contemporary domain, bricolage is
usually understood to involve the process of
employing these methodological strategies
when the need arises in fluid research situ-
ations. In the critical articulation of the bri-
colage, I contend that qualitative researchers
move beyond mere interdisciplinarity as it
refers to research designs and methodolo-
gies, and move to a new conceptual domain.
Bricoleurs employing a variety of research
methodologies must also employ a variety of
theoretical insights coming obviously from a
deep understanding of critical theory as well
as feminist theory, social theory from diverse
geographical places, anti-racist theories,
class theories, post-structuralism, complexity
and chaos theories, queer theory, and post/
anti-colonial theories. This, of course, is a lot
to ask of critical scholars/activists, but peril-
ous times demand great commitment. Such
multidisciplinary insight and theoretical dex-
terity helps researchers not only gain a more
rigorous (not in the positivistic sense) view of
the world but also a new mode of researcher
self-awareness.
Critical bricoleurs understand the diverse
contexts in which any knowledge producer
operates. Transformative researchers struggle
to uncover the insidious ways that dominant
power blocs work to shape the knowledge
they produce, they begin to better understand
the relationship between any researcher’s
ways of seeing and the social location of her
personal history. As the bricoleur appreciates
the ways that research is a power-inscribed
activity, she abandons the quixotic quest for
some naïve mode of realism. At this point,
the bricoleur concentrates on the exposé of
the multiple ways power harms individuals
and groups and the way a knowledge pro-
ducer’s location in the web of reality helps
shape the production, interpretation, and con-
sumption of data. At every space, the critical
bricoleur discerns new ways that a hegem-
onic epistemology in league with a dominant
power-soaked politics of knowledge operates
to privilege the privileged and further mar-
ginalize the marginalized.
In the context of the critical bricolage, the
power of difference, of diverse perspectives,
and of insights coming from different locales
in the web of reality reveal their significance.
All of these worldviews – especially when
they are juxtaposed in dialogue with one
another – contribute to our understanding of
the world in general and the oppression that
leads to human suffering in particular. Such
diversal knowledges enhance our sociopo-
litical and educational imagination and our
ability to imagine new ways of seeing and
being and interacting with other people and
the physical world. I believe that a multil-
ogical critical pedagogy can lead the way
to these new social, ideological, epistemo-
logical, ontological, and cognitive domains.
So-called ‘primitive peoples’ were much
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE KNOWLEDGE WARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
more influenced by the unconscious dimen-
sion of the human mind than modern Western
peoples. In many ways such Western dis-
tancing from the subconscious may lead to
forms of disconnection with the world and its
people that undermine the psychological and
cognitive wellbeing of contemporary, highly
educated people from dominant cultural
backgrounds.
In the engagement with diverse knowl-
edges promoted by the critical bricolage,
critical pedagogues attempt to reengage
with these ancient Indigenous knowledges
in the process, integrating them with politi-
cal economic, sociocultural, and pedagogical
insights. The outcomes can be profoundly
transformative on both an individual and
a social scale. Indeed, the thanocentric
impulses of contemporary Western ideologi-
cal orientations and actions demand a form of
social psychoanalysis (Kincheloe and Pinar,
1991) that can repair the social unconscious-
ness of the West. Diversal knowledges –
ancient Indigenous and other types – can help
in this therapeutic process. As contemporary
Westerners stare into what Mr. Lahey from
the Canadian TV series Trailer Park Boys
would call the ‘shit abyss’, there is a great
need for alternative ontologies, epistemolo-
gies, cosmologies, and ideologies to which
they can compare their present views of self
and world. In the interaction with the diverse
ways of thinking, Westerners and Western
educators can begin to develop an Eros to
counter the dead end Thanatos of the empire.
DIVERSALITY WITH A CRITICAL
FOUNDATION
In an era of imperial wars and concomitant
information control to elicit support for such
‘preemptive strikes’, critical pedagogues
need to develop knotholes in the centerfield
fence through which teachers, students, and
other individuals can view unregulated pic-
tures of sociocultural reality. The public’s
79
consciousness is shaped just as much by what
is not perceived as it is by what is. This is why
diversal knowledges are so important in this
time and place. Critical pedagogues explore
data from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the
Islamic World, the oppressed in North
America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe,
and Indigenous communities around the
world. In this context, we attempt to construct
a political economic ecology of knowledges
that lead to new ways of seeing and being.
Simply in the act of attending to and learning
from the insights of marginalized peoples, we
operate as allies in their struggle against the
oppression of Western power blocs. Such sup-
port cannot be separated from the necessity of
upper-middle class, White, male Westerners to
step back and examine the effects of their own
immersion in such a politics of knowledge.
As we understand the compelling per-
ceptions of Indigenous peoples, we can
gain new vantage points on the sentient and
mysterious life force that inhabits both our
being and the cosmos surrounding us. The
insights that peoples from diverse cultural
and historical locales in the web of reality
have accessed about this life force in uncon-
scious and other states of consciousness
should be a source of fascination and study
by scholars from a wide variety of academic
domains, critical pedagogy being merely
one of many. Yet, this often does not happen
because of the crypto-positivistic stigma
attached to the exploration of such yet to be
understood domains. The intelligence of the
earth – which may simply be a pale reflec-
tion of the intelligence of the universe –
is not something that mainstream scholars
are ready to discuss. The insights we may
gain from connecting to such a larger cog-
nitive force – insights often appreciated by
Indigenous peoples more than Western schol-
ars – can become one of the most important
dimensions of emancipatory knowledge
work of the future. This is one of the dimen-
sions of the value of the work of Humberto
Maturana and Francisco Varela (1987) in
their work on life as a cognitive process (see
80 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Kincheloe, 2004a for an expansion of the
relation of this work to criticality).
Thus, again and again we confront the
power of difference, alterity, and diversality
by pushing critical theory and critical peda-
gogy to a more intellectually rigorous and
in turn praxiologically powerful position.
A critically complex and diversal critical
pedagogy is simply better equipped to con-
front those waging a knowledge war against
the world in the 21st century. The power of
diverse perspectives is, thankfully, recog-
nized by more and more scholars who appre-
ciate the notion that forms of cultural renewal
can come from places long viewed as irrel-
evant and peripheral to Western power wield-
ers. In this diversal domain, we become more
capable of critically scrutinizing the process
of imperial political economic, geopolitical,
and epistemological globalization. In this
process, criticalists also monitor the role that
all levels of education play in this imperial
process in order to develop more pragmatic
strategies for transformative intervention.
Elementary and secondary schools, as well
as colleges and universities, must become
‘trading zones’ of intercultural exchange and
global meeting places.
This, of course, was a central goal of the
Paulo and Nita Freire International Project
for Critical Pedagogy at McGill University,
Montreal, (now freireproject.org). As cultural
and epistemological crossroads, the purpose
of schools in a global world would forever be
transformed. The politics of knowledge would
become a central dimension of any curricu-
lum, and the contrast and comparison of dif-
ferent cultural perspectives on a wide array of
issues would emerge as a familiar aspect of
the study of any topic. In such a transformed
diversal education, critical pedagogues
would establish working relationships with
scholars and schools around the world. Such
educators would seek the help of scholars
from educational institutions in developing
nations who have already begun to chal-
lenge hegemonic systems of Western knowl-
edge. The curricula that these innovative
scholars have developed by incorporating
subjugated knowledges of their own and
other cultures can profoundly help critical
educators from all parts of the world rethink,
diversalize, and revitalize existing pedago-
gies (Nandy, 2000; Weiler, 2004; Orelus,
2007).
THE CRITICAL BRICOLAGE VIS-À-VIS
DIVERSALITY: ENHANCING AGENCY
IN A SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED
WORLD
Such proposals represent a sea change in the
everyday teaching, learning, and knowledge
production of all educational institutions. The
moribund status quo is no longer acceptable –
not that it ever was. The bricolage in this
context becomes a central research/epistemo-
logical/theoretical motif for incorporating
the diversal intersections of knowledges that
would be welcomed into schools of all types.
The hidden positivism that insidiously shapes
so much of Western curriculum, instruction,
and research is remarkably uninterested in
the contexts and processes of which a phe-
nomenon is a part – dynamics that I and
many other researchers find essential to the
study and understanding of any topic imagi-
nable. It should not be surprising that insight
into the contexts and processes of which
phenomena are a part often help explain the
role that dominant power blocs play in shap-
ing them.
Thus, the dismissal of context and process
is often an insidious and effective way of
hiding the influence of dominant power and
maintaining the status quo. A critical form of
hermeneutics and textual analysis counters
such crypto-positivist tactics, using context
and process to undermine the easy production
of universal knowledge of the reductionist
tradition of research. When phenomena are
viewed within the contexts and processes that
have shaped both them and the consciousness
of the individual observing them, a far more
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE KNOWLEDGE WARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
complex picture begins to emerge. An aware-
ness of the contexts and processes in which a
phenomenon takes place and the contexts and
processes in which an observer of the phe-
nomenon is located provides us profoundly
divergent understandings and perspectives on
the entity. In the knowledge wars of the con-
temporary era, such epistemological insights
are ‘dangerous’, as they expose the way
episto-power operates to exclude diversality
from curricula and public knowledge (Clark,
2001; Marcel, 2001).
Employing the bricolage vis-à-vis
diversality will inevitably promote paradox
where there is certainty, open-endedness
where there is finality, multiple perspec-
tives where there is one correct answer,
insight into ideological and cultural inscrip-
tion where there is objectivity, and defa-
miliarization where there is comfort and
security. In a sense the type of knowledge
work produced by the bricolage vis-à-vis
diversality creates research narratives with-
out endings. Closure simply can’t take place
when we know that phenomena are always
in process, and that as times and locales
change the ways we understand them also
changes. Thus, our critical knowledge work
offers insights from this point in time and
from this particular ideological/cultural per-
spective. Such a positioning of our work
does not weaken it – to the contrary, it makes
it stronger, more in touch with the ways the
world, the mind, epistemology, and ontol-
ogy operate.
When we view a Western social organiza-
tion for the first time, for example, from the
perspective of a marginalized individual who
has experienced a form of existential death at
the hands of the institution, we have crawled
through a new conceptual wormhole in our
effort to make sense of the phenomenon in
question. Such an insight destroys any notion
of closure we might have had. In these situ-
ations, we have been touched by Walter
Benjamin’s Angel of History in a way that
forever changes us, the knowledge we gen-
erate, and the reasons we produce it in the
81
first place. This is how the bricolage vis-à-vis
diversality works – it refuses to allow us to
be content with monological and monocul-
tural perspectives. It places abrasive grains of
epistemological sand in our pants and makes
us uncomfortable with reductionism and its
consequences.
A key anti-hegemonic dimension of the
bricolage vis-à-vis diversality is that it alerts
us to the ways contexts, processes, and rela-
tionships shape both the phenomena of the
world and consciousness itself. This is a
powerful and life-changing insight that must
always be coupled with the appreciation that
humans have agency – they do not have to be
pawns that passively submit to the demands
of dominant power. As many critical social
theorists have maintained, this agency
doesn’t mean that people can just simply do
what they want. These contexts, processes,
and relationships – always inscribed by dom-
inant forms of power – construct a playing
field on which human agents operate. Thus,
human activity is influenced by such dynam-
ics but not determined. As individuals begin
to understand this power-related and socially
constructed dimension of the world, they
sometimes feel like refugees in relation to the
hegemonic cosmos to which they can never
return. Critical pedagogy, of course, main-
tains that we don’t have to live like refugees,
as we re-construct the world and create new,
shared spaces with individuals from diverse
places around the world.
In any critical orientation, researchers,
educators, and activists always have to be
careful of inadvertently endorsing struc-
tural modes of determinism. The failure to
recognize human agency in the struggle for
justice and in the knowledge wars of the con-
temporary era is to create nihilistic forms of
pedagogy and cultural work. The critical bri-
colage viewed in this context is literally the
toolbox from which critical teachers and cul-
tural workers draw to better understand the
hegemonic mystifications of dominant power
blocs in the contemporary world. While exist-
ing tools can be and are used for valuable
82 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
effect, an evolving notion of criticality (see
Kincheloe, 2008) attempts to create the most
rigorous and useful forms of knowledge
work and social activism possible. All critical
teachers and cultural workers must become
adept hermeneuts who hone their ability to
make sense of the diverse and complex forces
at work in divergent situations. Concurrently,
they gain the ability to identify and discern the
effects of where they are situated in diverse
social and political frameworks. In this same
interpretive context, critical bricoleurs act-
ing on their understanding of diversality
deploy their interpretive skills in the effort to
make sense of the way members of dominant
power blocs from race, class, gender, sexual,
colonial, and religious perspectives see the
world and rationalize their often oppressive
actions. In previous work on race, class, and
gender (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1997),
on Whiteness and racism (Kincheloe et al.,
1998), patriarchy (Kincheloe, 2001b), and
dominant economic constructs (Kincheloe
and Steinberg, 2007), my colleagues and I
have attempted to understand not only the
nature of oppression and its effects on the
oppressed, but also the knowledge frame-
works and cognitive/affective matrixes that
shape both the consciousness and actions of
members of dominant groups whose deeds
often perpetuate subjugation. In this complex
context, critical bricoleurs always examine
such sociopolitical and pedagogical dynam-
ics within the interaction of relationship and
individuality (Steinberg, 2006).
There is no universal formula for such
interaction – indeed, each encounter is idi-
osyncratic and erratic. Although we may
recognize tendencies, we cannot count on
regularity or consistency in such complex
encounters. We must study each situation
as a unique occurrence with diverse play-
ers, divergent contexts and processes, and
distinct outcomes. The critical bricolage
vis-à-vis diversality presents a transforma-
tive, anti-hegemonic view zealous in its
effort to address and end oppression but
concurrently nuanced in its understanding
of the slippery relationship between agency
and structure. Human beings do not fade
away into the ice fog of power structures.
The process of social construction is always
a co-constructive process as individual and
structure create one another. As agential
beings who make our way through the ice
fog, individuals who grasp the critical com-
plex insights to power, agency, knowledge,
and action delineated here, criticalists under-
stand that they have to rethink what they are
going to do the rest of their lives. Previously
operating in only limited dimensions of real-
ity, they had not been faced with the ethical
and ideological decisions now placed before
them in the multilogical domains they have
entered. At this moment they realize that
there is nothing easy about living in a criti-
cal manner, about living critical pedagogy
(Faulconer and Williams, 1985; Livezey,
1988; Marcel, 2001).
THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE IN
THE EMPIRE: THE CONTINUING
CRISIS OF KNOWLEDGE
Since the time of René Descartes in the 17th
century, many Western knowledge producers
have held up their notion of reason and
research as the one pathway to enlightenment
and emancipation from ignorance. In the
contemporary era, the dominant imperial
politics of knowledge want to recover this
one universal pathway to truth via the reas-
sertion of positivist logic. Evidence-based
research has become a code word for a kind
of crypto-positivism that, like a CIA opera-
tive, always maintains ‘plausible deniability’
that it is not really positivism. As referenced
earlier, the decontextualizing dimensions of
this crypto-positivism often works effec-
tively to uphold the status quo, a Bush–
Harper–Howard reality. These politics of
knowledge become even more important in
an era where privatization and corporatiza-
tion of education becomes a key dimension
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE KNOWLEDGE WARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
of the public conversation about schooling
and more and more of an actual reality.
In higher education, the self-direction and
independence of colleges and universities
have already been compromised by corporate
influences. Every day that passes witnesses
new forms of dependency on corporate sup-
port and funding as governments back away
from fiscal support of higher education. The
fact that a pharmaceutical company pays for
research on the effectiveness of particular
drugs is part of the context that often shapes
the nature of the knowledge that is produced.
If researchers know that their multi-million-
dollar corporately funded center may be
closed down if they produce data at odds with
the fiscal interests of the funding agency, they
may find it hard not to be influenced by such
pressure.
Knowledge is never free and unconnected
to diverse power blocs because it is always
produced as part of a web of power rela-
tionships. In corporate hyperreality, these
power matrixes become even more complex
and interwoven into every dimension of the
social order with the development of diverse
knowledge technologies that disperse corpo-
ratized data everyday around the clock. Thus,
the ghosts of the new and improved Western
empire constantly haunt us with both cogni-
tively directed information and affectively
aimed images and representations designed
to win our consent to the needs of capi-
tal and dominant power. The hobgoblins of
the imperial mind are omnipresent and they
have become so adept at producing hegem-
onic data that most individuals are unable
to recognize ideologically charged informa-
tion when they consume it. The 21st-century
imperial politics of knowledge flies under the
radar like a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber drop-
ping epistemological ‘payloads’ on domestic
and foreign targets.
In the everyday life of universities, these
critical insights into the politics of knowledge
are still not a typical aspect of the conversa-
tion about the institutional research mission.
The idea that the production and mediation
83
of information in higher education is a highly
politicized process demanding careful moni-
toring of the ideological interests involved is
still unwelcome in academic circles. Most
researchers, politicians, and educators still
live in a state of denial about the political
dimension to knowledge production and the
relationship between validated information
and the international purveyors of economic
power. One is inseparable from the other. The
sooner the politics of knowledge become a
central aspect of all dimensions of research,
politics, and education, the sooner we may be
able to leave the global Gitmo [Guantánamo
Bay] of ideological mystification in which we
are all held captive (Livezey, 1988; Weiler,
2004; Smith, 2006).
Academics, from Jean-Francois Lyotard’s
(1979/1984) The postmodern condition: A
report on knowledge to diverse contemporary
analyses of the nature of knowledge produc-
tion, have been talking about the crisis of
knowledge for decades. Lyotard linked the
flood of knowledge produced in academic
institutions of the 1970s to the breakdown
of the Western ‘modernist’ grand narratives.
In a diverse world such narratives, Lyotard
argued, had outlived their usefulness and
were incapable of producing data that was
not inscribed by Western epistemological
traditions. While Lyotard was quite correct
in his understanding of the limitations of
Western knowledge work, he might not have
anticipated how dramatically the crisis would
intensify in the 21st century. With the expan-
sion of the power and concentration of capital
over the last couple of decades, scholarship
and social movements have not kept up with
the ways that power frameworks insidiously
inscribe knowledge coming from diverse
social locations (Weiler, 2004; Kincheloe,
2005b). Neither have those who serve as the
guardians of the quality and rigor of research
developed satisfactory ways of monitoring
the production of knowledge under these
ideological conditions.
In my own experience, many editors of
prestigious journals in a variety of disciplines
84 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
have no idea what my critical colleagues and I
are talking about when we make reference to
the ideological conditions under which par-
ticular knowledge is produced. Such guard-
ians of the epistemological status quo often
do not understand the episto-political factors
at work in their own journals. Their ideologi-
cal naïveté grants insight into the ways that
critical analyses of the insidious impact of
dominant power on the research act are not
commonly taught in research courses in the
physical sciences, the social sciences, and
the humanities. When such issues of power
and knowledge fall outside the purview of
the professional awareness of scholars suffi-
ciently prominent to edit prestigious journals,
we know that a regressive, hegemonic poli-
tics of knowledge is accomplishing its goals.
Those corporate advocates of privatization
and empire may not be winning in Iraq, but
they are certainly finding success in their
preemptive strikes in the knowledge wars.
The politics of imperial knowledge will
continue to exacerbate the 21st-century crisis
of knowledge until Western scholars, politi-
cos, and educators begin to understand the
intimacy between dominant power blocs and
information as well as the cultural hegemony
of monological Western epistemologies and
the data they validate. Our call for diversal
knowledges re-emerges in this context. Until
we understand the ways that power not only
validates but rank orders the knowledges pro-
duced by individuals with differing amounts
of academic and cultural capital, an episte-
mological hegemony legitimizing a political
economic hegemony will only grow more
acute and inhumane. Indeed, it will perpetuate
and legitimate unacceptable forms of human
suffering. The alienation contemporary peo-
ple experience from the physical, historical,
ethical, political, ecological, cosmological,
ontological, and epistemological contexts
of which they are intimately embedded will
also continue to deepen in this episteme. The
crisis of imperial knowledge leads to harder
stuff, more intense problems for more and
more of the planet’s inhabitants.
THE FAILURE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE:
THE POSSIBILITIES OF NEW
WAYS OF SEEING
After all the paradigmatic debate and discord
surrounding the production of knowledge,
the nature of epistemology and ontology, and
the nature of research design in the social,
psychological, and educational domains,
many of the issues addressed here about
power, justice, empire, and the sociocultural
location of knowledge are simply not
addressed in the 21st century. Much of the
analysis involving paradigmatic typologies –
positivism, post-positivism, constructivism,
interpretivism, criticality, feminism, post-
structuralism, and so on – have failed to
adequately deal with these concerns. The
effort to bring a form of crypto-positivism
back to the socio-educational sciences is cur-
rently successful with the support of many
Western governments and corporate interests.
It will ultimately fail, however, for many rea-
sons. One of the most surprising of these
reasons is that such a recovery of positivism
on many levels dismisses what future histori-
ans may see as the most important advances
in 20th-century s­cience: the advent of com-
plexity from Einstein’s relativity (see
Kincheloe et al., 1999), quantum physics,
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and com-
plexity and chaos theory and the related sci-
ence of emergent properties coming from the
biological and psychological work of
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.
Instead of focusing on the power of this
complexity and multilogicality of scientific
pursuit, contemporary crypto-positivists have
re-adjusted their lens in a reductionist man-
ner. Rather than taking a cue from the insight
into complexity to be drawn from the afore-
mentioned and much other scientific work,
the crypto-positivists have concentrated on
the isolation of what they believe to be fixed
and intractable social, psychological, and
educational phenomena. The idea that things-
in-the-world are in flux, always changing, in
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE KNOWLEDGE WARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
the process of becoming that is drawn from
the move to complexity has been swept
under the epistemological and ontological
rug. Thus, a neo-mechanism has emerged
that fears the recognition of epistemological,
ontological, and even cosmological changes
demanded by complexity and diversality.
If the physical, biological, social, psycho-
logical, and educational cosmos is more like
an indivisible, at-first-glance imperceptible
matrix of experiences in process and ever
evolving relationships then a reductionist
science simply doesn’t work. Indeed, such
a neo-positivist view of knowledge provides
tobacco companies, pesticide manufacturers,
pharmaceutical producers, standardized test
makers, and all their political beneficiaries
with a way of getting the answers they want
from a ‘validated’ (but corrupted) science.
For reductionist researchers, such words
sting. The possibility of rethinking the nature
of how we approach social, psychologi-
cal, and educational science is a disturbing
consideration for neo-positivist researchers.
Obviously there are researchers who fall into
the reductionist camp who are simply naïve
and do not understand the epistemological,
ontological, ideological, and political eco-
nomic dynamics of their work. Concurrently,
there are those who make conscious deci-
sions to sell their souls to tainted money, in
the process doing the bidding of their ben-
efactors and dancing to the devil’s fiddle. As
I write these words, I know I will not win
the Miss Congeniality award in the world of
research. I want to make clear I am not lump-
ing all researchers who disagree with me
about the complex and complicated domain
of knowledge production into the categories
of naïve scholars or playmates of the cor-
porate devils. Obviously, there are brilliant,
socially conscious researchers who pro-
foundly disagree with me and go about doing
first-rate research in ways very different than
mine. Still, the epistemological and ideologi-
cal bastardization of research practices in a
variety of domains is a reality that cannot be
ignored.
85
In addition to the complexity-based scien-
tific traditions I have previously referenced,
numerous other researchers over the last cen-
tury have laid a foundation for many of the
arguments presented here about the failures
of social, psychological, and educational
inquiry. John Dewey’s (1916) challenge to
positivism in the first decades of the 20th cen-
tury with his epistemological and ontologi-
cal questions about the reality of intractable
and timeless truths has influenced so many
researchers and educators, me included.
Obviously, in a critical theoretical essay, the
work of Max Horkheimer (1974), Theodor
Adorno (1973), Herbert Marcuse (1955), and
Walter Benjamin (1968) from the Frankfurt
School from the 1920s to the 1960s is cen-
tral in understanding the oppressive uses
to which positivist modes of inquiry have
been put. Antonio Gramsci’s (1988) work in
Mussolini’s fascist prisons in the 1920s and
1930s against hegemony and his insights into
the transformative role of the organic intel-
lectual are key aspects of the critical research
tradition.
Of course, the anti-colonial revolutionary
ideas articulated so profoundly by Frantz
Fanon (1963) and Albert Memmi (1965)
that so powerfully influenced the emergence
of the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s
movement, the queer rights movement,
and the challenges to reductionist schol-
arly knowledge these collectives inspired
constitute a central thread in the develop-
ment of critical knowledge work in the 21st
century. Indeed, the work of those involved
with the post-discourses and postcolonial-
ism are central dimensions of the body of
insights on which contemporary criticalists
draw. Running this work through the filter of
feminist scholars such as bell hooks (1981),
Sandra Harding (1986), Gayatri Spivak
(1987), Patricia Hill Collins (1991), and
Vandana Shiva (1993), to name only a few, a
powerful multidimensional canon of critique
begins to emerge.
This canon – including the previously
mentioned scholars and many, many other
86 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
critical knowledge workers around the
world – have generally argued that Western
reductionist sciences have rarely produced
knowledge that was in the best interests of
the casualties of Western colonialism and
numerous other forms of racial, class-based,
gender, sexual, religious, and physical
ability-related oppression. These aforemen-
tioned scholars all understood from diverse
cultural, theoretical, and epistemological
perspectives that something was egregiously
wrong with the reductionist knowledges pro-
duced by Western and Western-influenced
scholars. Providing only narrow strips of
decontextualized information on a topic,
such knowledges often missed the larger
epistemological and ideological forest for
the cultural trees in front of them. In such
a knowledge cosmos, great damage was and
continues to be done to those in the most vul-
nerable situations. The consistency of such
scientific damage over the decades is dis-
concerting, as too many scholars/researchers
have failed to learn the lessons the previously
mentioned knowledge producers taught. The
knowledge wars never seem to end.
As the knowledge wars continue, the US/
Western empire continues to fall deeper
and deeper into the epistemological, ideo-
logical, ethical, cultural, sociopolitical,
psychological, and pedagogical abyss. The
machine metaphors of Western Cartesian–
Newtonian–Baconian epistemology and
ontology persist in the work of the crypto-
positivists and the dead universe they pro-
mote. Individuals reared in an educational
domain grounded on a thanocentric cos-
mology struggle to existentially survive,
reaching out to fundamentalist Christianity,
Judaism, Islam, New Age mysticism, or
the contents of an ever growing pharma-
copoeia to ‘enliven’, to bring something
transcendent into their daily lives. While
many of these individuals are shielded from
educational experiences that would help
them articulate their alienation, they intui-
tively sense that there is something crucial
missing from the world machine metaphor
permeating the sociocultural, psychologi-
cal, and political dimensions of their lived
worlds. Thus, understandably, they are put
off by political discourse, rigorous theo-
logical inquiry, and education as it gener-
ally exists in the contemporary era. They
are searching for meaning and engaging
affective experiences. Such dynamics are
generally not to be found in these domains.
At least fundamentalist religion provides
affective stimulation in a world where the
‘experts’ too often promote deadening, tha-
nocentric ‘expertise’. Yet at the same time
this neo-Marcusean thano-virus morphs into
its 21st- century configuration, we know that
there is an alternative to such ways of seeing
and being in the world. While by no means
does criticality offer an ‘answer’ to ultimate
human questions or ‘salvation’ in any sense
of the term, it does provide us a different
and less mad path than the one being fol-
lowed and promoted by many Westerners
and their dominant social institutions. Make
no mistake, human beings are existentially
condemned to a life without final answers
and ultimate revelations of meaning – that is
just part of life on earth. We have to simply
get used to the uncertainty and ambiguity of
the human condition.
As we accept the inevitability of uncer-
tainty and ambiguity in light of episte-
mological, ontological, and cosmological
complexity, we can also begin to explore
with the help of the critical bricolage vis-
à-vis diversality an alternative view of the
nature of the cosmos and our role in it.
Grounded on a critical theoretical com-
mitment to social justice, anti-oppressive
ways of being, and new forms of connect-
edness and radical love, we can help set
in motion an analysis of the universe not
as a lifeless machine but as a living cog-
nitive process that is changeable and ever
connected to human consciousness. Most
great theological traditions have at some
point in their history pondered this notion
of cosmological intelligence, but now it is
becoming a more important dimension of
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE KNOWLEDGE WARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
complexity-grounded physical sciences –
physics and the life sciences in particular.
Here life is connected to the cognitive
ingenuity embedded in the cosmos. Here
creativity and historically significant work
become important in an ontology of becom-
ing. In this living universe, the inner world
of consciousness is never unconnected
to the physical cosmos we see around us
(Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Prigogine,
1996). Developing a variety of sociopoliti-
cal, economic, ethical, aesthetic, cognitive,
and educational ways to put these ideas into
action is the challenge of the 21st century –
a charge central to our survival.
Thus, the more we know about positivism
and its contemporary hidden strain, the better
able we are to get beyond a static existence
and more into a dynamic and erotic becom-
ing. In addition, such knowledge empowers
us to understand that positivism is not mis-
guided simply because it presents a decep-
tive picture of the physical and social worlds.
As if that wasn’t enough, positivism and the
culture it constructs around it are grounded
on an indefensible epistemology, ontology,
and cosmology – of course, I could add axi-
ology, teleology, and ethics to this list as
well. Indeed, positivism’s view of the nature
of humanness and life itself is highly prob-
lematic. Mechanistic, positivistic ways of
viewing the world and ourselves has led and
is leading us down a primrose path to great
human suffering and planetary destruction. In
the 21st-century Imperial Court of Corporate
Greed and Knowledge Control, criticalists
must be the ones who expose the corruption
and deception.
As critical pedagogues we must gain the
ability to look at the world anew and ask
completely different questions about it –
questions that expose what’s going on at
diverse levels of reality and the way these
events influence the lived world. It is only
at this juncture that we can produce knowl-
edges that alert the world to the under-
standing that ‘reality’ is not exactly what it
appears to be. Crypto-positivists are trapped
87
in a never-ending game of three-hand monty
with its delusions of ‘normal’ ways of see-
ing that use the name of neutrality to con-
ceal the machinations of power. Using our
multiperspectival methodologies, we begin
to reframe our windows on the world in a
way that allows us not only to view diverse
dimensions of reality in different ways but
that also permits us to resituate the problems
that confront us. As I look at the way, for
example, that the United States and many of
its Western allies have dealt with Iran over
the last several decades, I appreciate multi-
ple ways of seeing the web of colonial and
political economic relationships that has
shaped mainstream knowledge production
and policies toward the nation.
It is absurd to ignore this web of interac-
tions that have led us to this particular point
in diplomatic history. The ever worsening
relations between the United States and
Iran represent a failure of imperial ambi-
tions, economic greed, and ways of produc-
ing knowledge that help us understand the
larger dynamics at work in this situation
(see Kincheloe, 2004b for an expansion of
these ideas). Thus, we fall back into our
crypto-positivist trap of limited ways of
seeing. Critical pedagogy with its critical
bricolage vis-à-vis diversality in its concern
with multiple perspectives and divergent
forms of power identifies the normalizing
voices that ‘naturalize’ dominant perspec-
tives and invalidate the views of the ‘other’,
the marginalized. The ability of positiv-
ism to exclude a wide variety of informa-
tion and experiences from consideration is
one of the keys to its success as an invalu-
able partner to the dominant power blocs
over the past couple of centuries. Crypto-
positivism continues this tradition under-
cover and more effectively in 21st- century
wars. Critical pedagogy in this unfortunate
state of affairs delivers a jolt to dominant
epistemologies and the empire’s politics of
knowledge (Faulconer and Williams, 1987;
Livezey, 1988; Pickering, 1999; Nelson,
2000).
88 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
LOST: LOSING CONNECTION EVEN
IN THE AGE OF THE WORLD WIDE
WEB – OUR MISPLACED SENSE OF
PURPOSE
No matter how much traditional modes of
science have learned about the physical
world, humans are still children in the effort
to understand the workings of the cosmos.
In the world of physics and biology – just to
mention a couple of physical scientific
disciplines – there are so many things about
the structure and workings of the universe
as well as the nature of the life process that
elude experts. The same could be said of
any scientific domain, where the notion of
interconnection and purpose gives way
to positivism’s ontological delusion of
separateness – of things-in-themselves,
not things-in-connection or things-in-
relationship. It takes ideological and intel-
lectual fortitude to challenge the knowledge
warriors of crypto-positivism. We know
they will hit back every time with chal-
lenges to the legitimacy of one’s scholarly
or cultural work.
Young criticalists must prepare themselves
for attacks from those who would deny them
tenure, question the purpose of their peda-
gogy, use their work in criticality as exhib-
its of their potential criminality in trials and
legal proceedings, and publicize their efforts
in public media as dangerous challenges to
community values and Western civiliza-
tion itself (all of these are actual examples).
Indeed, critical pedagogy is not for the faint
of heart. I can’t help but find nasty humor
in mainstream scholars telling criticalists to
quit using provocative language (such as the
kind I’m using right now), while they destroy
the lives of critical scholars or stand silently
by while some of the previously referenced
assaults take place. But to be provocative, this
is often the modus operandi of the academic
bourgeoisie who many times have no prob-
lem with people destroying other people’s
lives and careers as long as the demolition is
carried out with a low affect, a quiet voice,
and a faint smile on one’s face.
I fervently believe in the importance of
education and the research mission of the
university. Such pedagogy and knowledge
work help shape the consciousness of people
both directly and indirectly connected to edu-
cational institutions. If such work were not
important, there wouldn’t be so many efforts
to counter the work of criticalists. Thus, in
an era of knowledge wars, the contested
space of critical pedagogy and the knowl-
edge it produces takes on a consequence
greater than before. In the purposeless world
of crypto-positivism, the effort to address
human suffering and the power asymmetries
that continue to expand or the consideration
of critical notions of affective investment and
radical love are quite out of place. Such com-
mitments can be held in private, but they have
no place in the objective and covert world of
crypto-positivism. Critical research takes
place outside the matrix of global domina-
tion and, in this locale, works to expose and
respond to the dominant power wielders’
brutal operations justified under the flag of
verified truth (Pickering, 1999; Smith, 2006;
Monchinski, 2007). In the positivist universe,
the notion of critical transformation of unac-
ceptable social conditions is not relevant to
those researchers who operate around such
horror.
Critical researchers have a passion for
social justice in research that transcends
reductionistic modes of distancing and dis-
interestedness. This means that we must
challenge forms of knowledge that are pre-
sented to us as value-free. Concurrently, we
must also challenge the removal of human-
ness from objectivist knowledges that are
deployed in the world. I have long been fasci-
nated by the use of the passive voice in posi-
tivistic research, for example, the Lwiindi
ceremony of the people (Tonga tribe of
Zambia) was observed with the natives danc-
ing and giving thanks to the gods that pro-
vided a good harvest. In such a construction
the human observer, the researcher, is erased
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE KNOWLEDGE WARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
in the same way a physical scientist would
write in her protocols that 8.8 mls of sulfuric
acid was added to 1.3 g of mixed nitroesters
of nitrobenzyl alcohols. In both examples no
human dimension of the research activity was
present to contaminate the objective descrip-
tion of the Lwiindi ceremony or the chemical
process. No matter how oblivious the Western
researchers may have been to the Tonga peo-
ple’s ways of seeing and being, they were
providing an objectively true account of the
harvest ritual.
What many critical, postcolonial, and
Indigenous researchers have of course often
found in ethnographic research of this variety
from every conceivable part of the world is
that the original investigators had completely
missed the point of the cultural practice in
question. The information they provided was
sometimes humorous and always offensive
to the peoples under scrutiny. As Dakota
Sioux singer/songwriter Floyd ‘Red Crow’
Westerman wrote in his song, ‘Here Come
the Anthros’, the anthropologists flock to the
reservation to study ‘their feathered freaks
with funded money in their [the anthropolo-
gists’] hands’. None of the money, however,
Westerman writes later in the song, ever
goes to the Native peoples. The purpose of
such culturally oblivious, positivist-inscribed
research was not to help Indigenous peoples
throw off the shackles of colonial or neo-
colonial bondage but to provide an objective
report about them.
Even in epistemological domains such as
generalizability of data, the positivistic lack
of purpose and the removal of humanness
exhibit themselves in harmful ways. The gen-
eralizability of research involves taking that
which is learned from inquiry and utilizing
it in another situation. Thus, what research-
ers ascertain in one situation is applied to
the larger population. The point in the gener-
alization process is that which is ascertained
from one population and applied to another
in social, psychological, and educational sci-
ence always implicates human beings in at
least two different settings. The researcher
89
simply can’t remove human beings from this
process. In order for generalizability to be
achievable, the human agents in the new situa-
tion must be just like those in the first inquiry.
Given the specific contextual construction of
all human actors, it appears profoundly dif-
ficult to exchange a person in the original
study with a person in the larger populace.
Research that takes humanness seriously
cannot take on faith the interchangeability of
people coming from the two sets of subjects.
Thus, in this case, the removal of humanness
in the name of objectivity and rigor ends up
undermining the quality of the data produced
(Livezey, 1988; Geelan, 1996).
Such a positivist science may be incapa-
ble of adequately dealing with even the most
uncomplicated dimensions of lived experi-
ence in a way that provides not only unprec-
edented insights into social, psychological,
or educational phenomena but also useful
knowledges that can improve human life.
Positivism is far more comfortable explor-
ing fragments of lived experience rather than
wholes, interconnections, and meanings.
The all-important scholarly act of making
sense of data is more a poetic activity than
a positivistic scientific one. Deriving the liv-
ing meaning out of human science is a pro-
foundly difficult task that demands exploring
the micro-experiences of individuals in par-
ticular circumstances, but at the same time
filtering such experiences through diverse
theoretical frameworks to figure out how
they might be interpreted (van Manen, 1991;
Lloyd and Smith, 2006; Pinar, 2006). This
process is never simple and will never yield
some facile mode of certainty. Any physi-
cal or human science that is grounded on the
quest for certainty must remove phenom-
ena of the world and human beings from its
design because such things-in-the-world are
always in process and cannot by definition
be described with final certainty. In the next
moment, in the next interaction they engage,
they are by definition something different.
The metaphysics of positivism will always
lead it astray.
90 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

This complex, in process, poetic dimen- WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE

sion of all research will not be discussed in WARS: DEALING WITH VIOLENT
the Parliament of Positivism – the gag rule KNOWLEDGE WHEN ONE ESCHEWS
has been invoked. The poetic power of the VIOLENCE
critical researcher’s imagination is a crucial
dimension of difference-making research.
The imperial political economic knowledge
Such creativity always stands in awe of the
wars of the contemporary era help pave the
autopoetic dimension of the physical, bio-
way for criminal acts by corporations and
logical, and social domains – the phenom-
their government allies against the poorest
enon of emergence that could be called the
people around the world. In this context, I’m
intelligence of the universe. Indeed, com-
reminded of a public debate I had with a very
pelling critical research possesses an aes-
personable and caring economist while I was
thetic dimension where researchers make
a professor in Louisiana. Because he came
use of a hermeneutic muse to help them
from a very positivistic econometric perspec-
make sense of particular situations. Artists
tive, he took issue with a statement I had
construct their own interpretations of the
made about the ethical dimensions of eco-
world in diverse media. Such construc-
nomics and economic policy. There is no
tions can by no means be explained in any
ethical dimension to economics, he argued,
exactitude by positivist psychology or sci-
maintaining that one simply had no choice
ence of any kind, arising as they do from the
but to follow the universal laws of the
interaction of the unconscious, a socially
market. ‘But what about the purpose of our
constructed consciousness, and a variety of
studies of economics?’, I asked him. Is it
other factors.
simply to maximize profits of particular cor-
Psychoanalysis can certainly grant us
porations or specific sectors of one nation’s
some insights into the process – but by no
economy, or is it to make sure that wealth is
means can it produce what positivists would
produced and then distributed in a way where
label validated knowledge. Thus, some
everyone would benefit? My friend was per-
of our most compelling, life-altering, and
plexed at my question and answered that my
world-changing knowledges come from
query was not an economics question but a
parts unknown. It would seem in this context
moral or a theological question. The two
that researchers and people in general who
domains were separate in his consciousness
developed a critical consciousness of the
and had nothing to do with one another.
world connected to an appreciation of many
Later, my friend told me that he had been
of the unconscious dimensions of their psy-
very troubled by my questions because in
che would be best equipped to produce bril-
receiving a BA, MS, and PhD in economics
liant knowledge and accomplish great things
he had never been confronted with or thought
in the world. In the warped neighborhood of
about such issues – and that really disturbed
positivism, however, the idea of cultivating
him. He had compartmentalized his life; he
the poetic imagination and integrated, trans-
was an economist in one dimension of his
formative consciousness of the researcher as
life, and in another he was a compassionate
a key dimension of a rigorous education is
man who sincerely cared about the welfare
viewed as idiocy. In this and scores of other
of his fellow human beings. How could it be,
ways – a few of which referenced here –
he asked me, that the twain never met? How
crypto-positivism crushes the sociological,
could he be ‘indoctrinated’ (his word) in a
psychological, and pedagogical imagination.
way that convinced him that there were no
In this context, one front of the knowledge
ethical dimensions of the ‘dismal science’?
wars involves the crusade against the scien-
One doesn’t have to be a genius to anticipate
tific imagination.
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE KNOWLEDGE WARS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
what I said to him. I hope I didn’t overdo
it, but I gave him a treatise on the politics
of knowledge and epistemology. It’s in the
interests of corporate power wielders, I told
him, to keep economists from thinking of
these dynamics. And it’s more than coinci-
dental, I speculated, that positivist modes of
economics keep ‘facts’ and ‘values’ so neatly
separate. How, we both wondered, could one
obtain three academic degrees in economics
and not deal with these issues?
In this interaction with my friend rests a
micro-manifestation of some of the macro-
issues dealt with in this essay. The economist
was a good man but had been academically
‘reared’ in a culture where positivist assump-
tions were the only game in town. Economics
was defined without challenge in his experi-
ence as the study of markets and profit mak-
ing and he had never imagined another way
of viewing the field. The idea of who was
hurt by such ways of seeing was simply never
raised in such a positivistic culture. How do
we deal with similar circumstances in other
fields such as psychology and education?
Do we continue to educate scholars devoid
of soul and civic courage? Do we continue
to ignore the violent inscriptions on much of
the knowledge that’s produced in the social,
political, economic, psychological, and peda-
gogical domains? How do we ‘fight’ in these
knowledge wars when we hate the notion of
fighting? These are some of the challenges
that face proponents of critical pedagogy in
the last years of the first decade of the 21st
century.
The logic and power of capital and its
willingness to hurt whoever gets in the way
of quarterly profit margins never ceases to
amaze me. I am even more amazed that the
educational cronies of dominant power blocs
are willing to destroy lives of teachers and
students while subverting critique of practices
that lead to injustice and human suffering to
the name of objectivity and neutrality – or,
even worse, doing so with their institutional
mission statements saturated with the lan-
guage of democracy and social justice. To all
91
of those courageous critical pedagogues who
expose these travesties without allies or sup-
porters in diverse educational and social insti-
tutions, I hope you know how much many of
us appreciate your unrewarded work. Many
of us have felt that sense of being alone, of
questioning our own sanity, as superiors in
the hierarchy deem the critical work we do as
a form of social pathology and an insult to the
academy. This is the socio-psychological and
phenomenological dimension of the knowl-
edge wars. I hope in this dark hour that criti-
cal pedagogy has the intellectual and political
facility to change the course of history.
Thanks to International Journal of Critical
Pedagogy for use of this article, the first
article written for the inaugural issue of the
Journal, shortly before Kincheloe’s death.
International Journal of Critical Pedagogy,
Vol 1 (1) (Spring 2008) http://freire.education.
mcgill.ca/ojs/public/journals/Galleys/
IJCP011.pdf©2008 International Journal of
Critical Pedagogy.
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The Frankfurt School
and Education1
INTRODUCTION
Critical Theory, as the transdisciplinary writ-
ings of the Frankfurt School came to be
labeled in late-20th-century scholarship, has
made a major impact on the development of
numerous fields – ranging from the humani-
ties to the social sciences, and particularly in
continental philosophy and aesthetics. Yet,
curiously, there has been relatively little sus-
tained attention to the major Frankfurt think-
ers in the field of education, even in the
burgeoning sub field of critical pedagogy.
Although the early writings of Henry Giroux2
provided a major bridge of sorts between the
work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno,
and Herbert Marcuse and the analysis and
critique of contemporary capitalist schooling
(Giroux, 1983), he was one of a very few
social/philosophical theorists in education to
draw and build upon the insights and impor-
tance of Critical Theory for understanding
and changing contemporary education. Even
Paulo Freire’s discussion of the secondary
17
Benjamin Frymer
Frankfurt School figure Erich Fromm, in his
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970),
failed to inspire a substantial scholarship on
the relationship between Critical Theory and
education.
This chapter nevertheless asserts the
ongoing vital significance of core Frankfurt
School writings, particularly pre-Habermasian
Critical Theory, for thinking through contem-
porary capitalist education, culture, and domi-
nation. Although seminal thinkers such as
Fromm, Walter Benjamin, and Leo Lowenthal
wrote about ‘education’ broadly conceived
and have much to contribute to thinking
through modern culture and society, this chap-
ter’s primary focus is on Theodor Adorno and
Herbert Marcuse. This is not only due to their
prominence in the actual Frankfurt School, but
to the greater attention they gave to school-
ing and education more broadly; specifically
to the significance of education in creating
the critical and aesthetic sensibilities neces-
sary for democratic life, to the centrality (via
Marx and Lukács) of reification and alienation
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND EDUCATION
in capitalist and authoritarian culture, and to
envisioning schooling as a site of resistance in
countering the ideological control of advanced
capitalist society. Although little space will
be devoted in this chapter to the work of
Benjamin, not only do his early writings con-
tain valuable statements on schooling (and his
educational writing is certainly deserving of
more scholarship) but his cultural and philo-
sophical work as a whole is a very rich source
of insights into the larger spheres of ‘educa-
tion’ in late capitalist societies.
Founded in 1923 at the University of
Frankfurt, the Institute for Social Research
(Institut für Sozialforschung), was a fairly
economistic Marxist institute until its new
director, Max Horkheimer, rapidly took what
was to be known as the ‘Frankfurt School’ in
a much more unorthodox, philosophical, and
interdisciplinary direction. Assuming the direc-
torship of the Institute in 1930, Horkheimer
announced his vision in an inaugural address
entitled, ‘The Present Situation of Social
Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for
Social Research’ (Horkheimer, 1993 [1931]).
For Horkheimer, the Institute’s central intellec-
tual project was to create and support a truly
‘critical’ interdisciplinary research program
conducted in the interests of emancipation.
At the root of Horkheimer’s call for a
renewed social philosophy was a recognition
of the power of dialectical thought, both for
critical understanding of contemporary soci-
ety and the project of radical social change
under conditions of advanced capitalism.
In Horkheimer’s view (and that of the new
Critical Theory as a school) dialectical phi-
losophy and social theory, unlike positivism,
would radically historicize empirical inquiry
and would enable this inquiry to acquire
meaning within the larger socioeconomic
totality. And within normative philosophical
considerations of ethics and the good life, dia-
lectical thinking could transcend the prevail-
ing false separation between what is and what
could be. Horkheimer therefore argued that,
instead of merely categorizing and describ-
ing the world, dialectical theory would make
95
possible the evaluation of history and society
from the standpoint of human freedom.
Although the membership of the Institute
varied from the pre-war 1930s to the post-
Holocaust 1950s, the core group is gener-
ally considered to include Horkheimer,
Adorno, and Marcuse and to extend at times
to Fromm, Benjamin, Lowenthal, and later
Jürgen Habermas. In this chapter, reference
to post-Habermasian critical theory will be
limited, but the work of such critical theorists
such as Judith Butler, Axel Honneth, Stanley
Aronowitz, and Nancy Fraser, just to name a
few, is certainly worthy of sustained attention
for continuing the Frankfurt School tradition
in more recent work. Likewise, except for
some attention to Henry Giroux’s early work,
this chapter will not explore the major contri-
butions of those education scholars inspired
by the Frankfurt School, such as Paulo Freire,
Joe Kincheloe, and Douglas Kellner.
ALIENATION AND EDUCATION:
FROM MARX TO CRITICAL THEORY
Although Marx did not write about culture or
education extensively, his analysis of alien-
ated labor and commodification in capitalist
society along with his reformulation of
Hegelian dialectics has obvious implications
for understanding contemporary capitalist
education and had a major impact on the
Frankfurt School’s writings on education and
culture. Both in his early manuscripts and
later economic studies, Marx is concerned
with the subject–object dialectic in history.
He develops his historical materialism in
opposition to Hegel’s attempt to reconcile
subject and object in the sphere of conscious-
ness instead of on the ground of human mate-
rial praxis. For Marx, however, both alienation
and commodity fetishism arise in capitalist
society and describe an inverted form of
‘species-being’ in which human beings ulti-
mately become dominated by the objects they
produce in capitalist relations of production.
96 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Marx (1987) argues that the worker in capi-
talist society is estranged in several respects:
from the product and process of labor, from
other workers, and from him/herself. What
is common to and underlies all these aspects
of estrangement is the process whereby
the laborer is transformed into a commod-
ity, and becomes an object to be bought and
sold on the market like any other commodity.
The laborer not only loses him or herself in
the object (product), and loses the object to the
capitalist, (s)he becomes an object and exists
in a condition of objectification. Alienation for
Marx is not only or primarily an experience
of estrangement, but a material and radically
historical condition – of distorted historical
being formed within the capitalist relations
of production. Laborers can only enter the
realm of human being and authentic commu-
nity, of genuine existence and social develop-
ment, by transcending the alienated labor and
ownership relations of capitalism. In effect,
the alienated material conditions at the heart
of capitalist work and society prevent the true
education and self-formation of the individual
subject as well as any type of cultivation of
genuine community relationships.
In the masterwork of his later years,
Capital (1967), Marx extends his earlier
analysis of alienation to a thoroughgoing
critique of the capitalist mode of production.
His seminal critique of political economy
proceeds through unraveling the answer to
the central riddle of capitalist society – the
true nature of the commodity. For Marx,
commodification is another way to analyze
the inverted subject–object world of capital-
ist society in which abstract exchange value
takes precedence over concrete material
use value and economic (market) relations
come to dominate the whole of human and
social life. In capitalist societies these eco-
nomic relations are organized by the produc-
tion, circulation, and exchange of objects to
increase the private profit of capitalists, not
to satisfy the needs and welfare of the pro-
ducers. The production and exchange of these
commodity-objects, an abstract historical
­ the Hungarian thinker, Georg Lukács, and
artifact of capitalist ownership, thus becomes
the basis and purpose of capitalist life itself,
subordinating real material needs to its work-
ings and the benefits of the capitalist class.
As a result, ‘[t]he increase in the quantity of
objects is accompanied by an extension in
the realm of the alien powers to which man is
subjected’ (Marx, 1978: 93).
As with the alienation of concrete labor in
commodity production, Marx argues that the
larger fetishism of commodities through the
inversion of exchange value over use value
operates according to the abstract, formal
logic of the capitalist mode of production.
Just as alienated labor constitutes the subor-
dination of real human qualities and capaci-
ties to the objects they produce, exchange
value transforms the different qualitative val-
ues and uses of unique products into quantita-
tive rates of equivalent market value. Again,
the concrete, here in the sense of specific
use values that different products supply, is
transformed into the abstract, in the form of
exchange value. Thus, the commodity form
is analyzed by Marx as the major abstraction
dominating human life in capitalist society to
such an extent that only objects are endowed
with value. In this inverted world, human
qualities are transferred to commodities and
the characteristics of objects are transferred to
human beings. Marx’s analysis of commod-
ity fetishism uncovers the true source of capi-
talist value in the autonomous power that the
economy obtains over human life, including
any and all attempts at education and cultural
development. With this economic autonomy,
abstractions dominate the relationships and
exchanges that once took place in local, con-
crete human communities and human beings
are governed by the appearances of economic
categories and objects rather than govern-
ing themselves. These economic forms also
appear to have a reality independently of the
real human beings who have created them in
history.
Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism
in Capital proved to be a major influence on
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND EDUCATION
it was not until his publication of History
and Class Consciousness in 1971 that the
next major analysis of capitalist alienation
would be conducted. Lukács had no access
to Marx’s early writings on alienation, yet
nevertheless managed to extract Marx’s con-
cern with estrangement from his reading
of Capital. According to Feenberg (1981),
Lukács does this through serious reflection
on Marx’s methodology and by reconstruct-
ing Marx’s metatheoretical ‘philosophy of
praxis’. Feenberg argues, convincingly, that
both Marx and Lukács develop a philosophy
of praxis based on the goal of transcending
alienation at the level of human being, or
ontology, which for both is always already
historical being. Lukács follows Marx in
emphasizing the necessity of transcending
the gap between subject and object in mod-
ern society and ontology through historical
praxis, rather than philosophy itself. The
subject–object split that in capitalist society
had taken the form of human commodi-
fication could not, as Hegel asserted, be
transcended on the level of ideas, in con-
sciousness, or through philosophy. It required
revolutionary praxis in history to transform
historical/material conditions.
In History and Class Consciousness
(1971), Lukács transforms Marx’s concept
of commodity fetishism into his own theory
of reification by integrating Weber’s theory
of Western rationalization into Marx’s
philosophy of praxis. As with Marx, Lukács
aims to uncover the inversion of ideological
appearance over reality in capitalist societies
through rigorous examination of the very
cultural logic of capitalist life. However,
Lukács generalizes Marx’s conception of
fetishism beyond the economic system, using
Weber to analyze this cultural logic and its
ideological effects in every institution of
modern society. In his massive body of work,
Weber had argued that formal or instrumental
rationality had assumed dominance
over substantive rationality leading to
irrational modes of life in which continual
calculation regarding efficiency overrode the
97
consideration of the ends of human actions.
From science, to law, to religion, instrumental
reason had transformed quality, substance,
and purpose into quantity, and technical
calculations for controlling society and nature.
Lukács argues that contemporary capital-
ist societies are pervaded by a similar type
of formal rationality that dominates human
beings to such an extent that they lose the
ability to grasp the material and historical
basis of their society’s dominant cultural
and institutional categories. His amalgama-
tion of Weber’s rationalization thesis and
Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism
comes together in a critical analysis of the
‘reification’ of capitalist society. For Lukács,
reification refers to a political-economic, sci-
entific, and cultural phenomenon whereby
relationships between historical subjects
are mystified by formal rationality into the
abstract appearance of those between ahis-
torical objects. While the capitalist economic
system is ultimately the basis of this formal
rationality, the reified world comes to have a
relatively autonomous hold over social life,
including the economy. In fact, for Lukács
‘What is customarily called the economy is
nothing but the system of forms of objectiv-
ity of real life’ (1971: 152). With the devel-
opment of reification he argued that not only
autonomous individual reason, but also the
possibility of working-class consciousness
was structurally blocked without the media-
tion of critical theory. However, by opposing
the reified world of formal rationality with
a critical dialectical reason, Marxism could
explode the realm of objectified appearances
and transcend the gap between subject and
object in revolution.
Lukács was one of the primary influences
on the Frankfurt School’s work on aliena-
tion, culture/education, and ideology. In the
face of fascism and the post-war spread of
capitalist ideology, both Horkheimer (with
Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1972)
and Marcuse modified Lukács into ‘end-
of-reason’ arguments that, if it wasn’t pro-
claimed already, sounded the death-knell
98 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of the Enlightenment project. Marcuse’s
One-Dimensional Man (1964) is a particu-
larly powerful examination of reason’s per-
version into capitalist ideology. However,
unlike Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Adorno,
in Negative Dialectics (1966), held out hope
for the dialectical negation of the negation of
reason – for Marcuse in the aesthetic dimen-
sion and student revolt, and for Adorno in the
critique of identity theory in Western philoso-
phy and social theory.
Building on the classical writings of
Weber, the original program of Frankfurt
School critical theory developed an extensive
critique of capitalist institutions and culture
for their pervasive ‘instrumental’ or techno-
cratic rationality. According to the Frankfurt
School, instrumental rationality had become
the dominant form of reason and institutional
organization in advanced capitalist societies.
As such, the cultural life of these capitalist
societies is controlled by technocratic, means-
end considerations of efficiency and plan-
ning which undermine the very possibilities
for the realization of a critical-emancipatory
rationality of certain Enlightenment thought.
Consequently for theorists like Marcuse
(1964), the modern capitalist school/subject
was largely prevented from engaging in the
critical thought necessary for emancipatory
action or democratic participation. Without
the development of critical reason, the mod-
ern individual finds it nearly impossible to
penetrate the reified symbols and ideolo-
gies of capitalist culture. Thus, the pacified
and petrified capitalist subject faces a bleak
fate locked in an iron cage of administrative,
spiritless culture which had subordinated the
pursuit of meaningful worldly pursuits to a
purposeless mundane existence. Currently,
this interrogation of instrumental reason has
been taken up and extended by Habermas
in his The Theory of Communicative Action
(1984); a theory in which he similarly dis-
tinguishes between critical-rational forms
of communication and those forms domi-
nated by capitalist instrumental ‘system’
imperative.
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
ON MODERN CULTURE
The Culture Industry
In their profoundly influential and signature
work Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno
and Horkheimer (1972) entitled a key section
of their exposition ‘The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. In what
would become the most widely read and
cited part of their major collaboration,
Horkheimer and Adorno subject Hollywood
and the other influential ‘culture industries’
to rigorous dialectical interrogation as they
analyze and critique the development and
pervasive spread of industrial capitalist cul-
ture as analogous to the development of
industrial production. Horkheimer and
Adorno argue that at this stage of capitalism
there is no longer any such thing as ‘mass
culture’, i.e. cultural forms which emerge
from or reflect the concerns and creative
energies of everyday people themselves.
Instead culture is thoroughly commodified
by an industrial-type apparatus and assumes
the form of objects which come to dominate
its consumers – the watchers of film, televi-
sion, and theater, for example. Consumers of
cultural products are reduced to a passive and
objectified position in their relationship to
the world of meaning, belief, and value. They
become dominated by a new world of stand-
ardized objects which limit their autonomy
and subjectivity even as these objects present
the illusion of being freely ‘chosen’.
Harkening back to Lukács (1971), Adorno
and Horkheimer claim that ideological
deception is itself one of the main products
of the culture industry.
Although this thesis veered, at times,
toward a one-sided understatement of individ-
ual agency, Horkheimer and Adorno did not
claim that modern capitalism had succeeded
in shutting out subjectivity and reflective
action, or even critical consciousness itself.
In fact, this remains one of the most common
misconceptions of the Frankfurt School; that
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND EDUCATION
its key thinkers had a monolithic and deter-
ministic understanding of modern culture,
symbolized by Adorno and Horkheimer’s
culture industry argument. Many have argued
that Adorno, in particular, generally dismissed
the value and political possibility of popular
culture. Yet the culture industry analysis is
meant to apply to so-called ‘high culture’ as
well. And Adorno’s oeuvre contains numerous
works on how classical music and ‘high’ art
have been just as commodified and devalued
as the culture of the masses. In fact, roughly
half of all Adorno’s work is on music and the
fate of classical music in modernity.
Thus, while the culture industry thesis
represents a major line of Frankfurt School
thinking on modern culture, it by no means
captures the complexity and dialectical char-
acter of the School’s work on modern cultural
forms and education. One only needs to casu-
ally peruse Benjamin and Adorno’s volumi-
nous work on the dialectical fragments of
modern culture, Marcuse’s aesthetic theory,
or Lowenthal’s sociology of literature to be
persuaded that their thought is nearly impos-
sible to categorize or reject as simply ‘elitist’.
Even the culture industry thesis itself must
be contextualized within Horkheimer and
Adorno’s larger dialectical project in their
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972).
BENJAMIN’S ‘WORK-OF-ART’ THESIS
Given the perceived pessimism if not out-
right fatalism of Adorno’s work, in many
respects Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay ‘The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ has far surpassed Adorno’s
culture industry work in contemporary dis-
cussions of cultural politics. Benjamin and
Adorno carried on a long-standing friendship
and critical dialogue even though Benjamin
was always a peripheral member of the
Frankfurt School and a figure his contempo-
raries had great difficulty understanding.
Adorno and Benjamin essentially came to
99
opposite conclusions from their analyses of
capitalist culture, especially on the place and
possibility of art in a new consumer society.
While Adorno saw art losing its critical
potential amidst a world of circulating com-
modities and reified images, Benjamin
believed the ‘mechanical reproduction’ of art
could actually have democratizing effects.
This so-called mechanical reproduction,
while emptying art of its transcendent ‘aura’
and authentic meaning within traditional
community, could, as in the case of photog-
raphy and film, raise the political conscious-
ness of the masses by making images of the
world more accessible. Art and modern cul-
ture as a whole could potentially become
more politicized and even part of the formal
political process rather than held by elites
above the realm of everyday life.
ADORNO: EDUCATION
AFTER THE HOLOCAUST
Theodor Adorno (1903–69) gave several lec-
tures and wrote a number of significant essays
on post WWII education, its role in reconstruct-
ing German society, and its critical potential,
following the rise of fascism and the horrors of
the Holocaust, in preventing future fascist soci-
eties and outbreaks of catastrophic violence.
These lectures and essays, while sometimes
overlooked in Adorno scholarship, provide
essential contributions to thinking through the
anti-­democratic forms and democratic possi-
bilities of modern education and capitalist
schooling. His key essays and lectures (radio
addresses) in this regard are ‘The Meaning of
Working Through the Past’ (2005[1959]), ‘The
Democratization of German Universities’
(1970), ‘Taboos on the Teaching Vocation’
(2005[1965]), and ‘Education after Auschwitz’
(2005[1969]). Taken together, Adorno’s work
in this set of essays constitutes the most
substantial and enduring set of Frankfurt
School writings on education and a crucial
contribution to understanding the connections
100 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
between schooling, domination, and demo-
cratic possibility.
Following his initial thinking in the late
1950s on post WWII education and society,
Adorno comes back to the problem of educa-
tion in the mid-to-late 1960s, all the way up
until his death in 1969. In ‘Education after
Auschwitz’, Adorno argues pointedly that
‘the premier demand upon all education is that
Auschwitz not happen again’ (2005[1969]:
191). What, for Adorno, is the relationship
between education and the form of mod-
ern ‘barbarism’ Auschwitz exemplifies? For
Adorno, both the education in the school and
the home must address the subjectivity of the
child and the student. In order to foster crucial
democratic cultural forms in capitalist socie-
ties which are structured through exploitation
and hierarchies, education must work on the
self, opening up crucial spaces for autonomy,
critical reflection, and resistance to domination
in the form of individual non-­cooperation. It
must also actively strive to transform the psy-
chological dispositions of a population which,
in Freud’s sense, necessarily represses its desire
for hatred and aggression of the other. Taking
Freud’s argument in his Civilization and its
Discontents seriously, Adorno sees the des-
perate need for parents, teachers, and schools
to tame the psyche’s dangerous tendencies, to
raise awareness of these barbaric tendencies,
and turn them around in the form of alterna-
tive psychological investments. Like psycho-
analysis in general, education must strive to
make the unconscious conscious.
Adorno argues that following the Holocaust,
‘[t]he only education that has any sense at all
is an education toward critical self-reflection’
(1969: 193). This turning inward must start in
early childhood in fact, right around the time
children begin formal schooling. The educa-
tional system in post-war German society needs
substantial reform from the earliest grades
through the university level and if turned toward
the fostering of autonomous, critical reflection
has an essential role to play in preventing fas-
cism and genocide. Adorno does not provide
many specifics about the type of early childhood
education he envisions but later stresses the
need ‘for making conscious the general sub-
jective mechanisms without which Auschwitz
would hardly have been possible’ (2005[1969]:
202). Adorno’s Freudian psychology is not
spelled out but Civilization and its Discontents
does not appear to be far in the background
in his warning about the destruction that may
result from psychological repression.
In contrast, in one of the most insightful
essays into Adorno’s educational thinking to
date, Daniel Cho (2009) links Adorno’s con-
cept of critical self-reflection to a critique of
reification and ‘coldness’ in late capitalist
societies. Cho cogently asserts that instead
of predominantly calling for an inward turn
toward psychological mechanisms, Adorno
conceives of self-reflection as an outward
turn as well; education must also entail the
development of critical faculties oriented to
an analysis of one’s society. Cho asserts:
[W]hat is novel in Adorno’s concept of critical self-
reflection is its content: in contrast to the introspec-
tive connotations the phrase possesses, critical
self-reflection is, for Adorno, outwardly-oriented.
The practice, in Adorno, never stops at the level of
the self or the individual; rather, it becomes an
expansive form of thinking that maps the self within
the conditions of society as a whole. It is a type of
thinking that treats the self as a particular through
which the whole is mediated. (Cho, 2009: 76–7)
And this capitalist totality for Adorno (via
Cho) is characterized by both reified cultural
forms and a pervasive ‘coldness’ – in the self
and in the interpersonal relations distorted by
late capitalism. The purpose of any education
worth its name is to orient the student toward
a type of reflection which situates the self in a
society which must be understood as a whole
and transformed.
MARCUSE: AESTHETIC EDUCATION
AND LIBERATION
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), like Adorno,
was not an educational philosopher or theorist
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND EDUCATION
by intellectual training, and has, mistakenly,
not been considered a great contributor to
educational theory or practice. Nonetheless,
as with Adorno, his writings are of major
relevance to educators and contain a number
of vital contributions to the philosophy and
critical theory of education, particularly in
such texts as One-Dimensional Man (1964),
Eros and Civilization (1955), and in his many
writings on aesthetics. More than any other
member of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse
envisioned the liberation of the individual in
and through the emancipation of society from
alienation and capitalist domination. In fact in
the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse had become by
far the most influential member of the
Frankfurt School, and a major part of his
popularity beyond academic circles stemmed
from the way his philosophy of liberation
articulated with 60s social movements,
including the ‘free schools’ movement. Yet
his particular philosophical and theoretical
contributions to the study and politics of edu-
cation are only just now gaining more recog-
nition (Kellner et al., 2009).
Although Marcuse did not write many essays
or books focused squarely on the philosophy or
theory of education, his work as a whole con-
tains a critical theory of education which can
be extracted from a number of his key works.
Some of the components of this theory paral-
lel Adorno’s revisioning of Freud and psy-
choanalysis (especially Eros and Civilization
1955, and An Essay on Liberation 1969),
and Horkheimer’s analysis of instrumental
rationality and culture (particularly his One-
Dimensional Man, 1964). Other aspects paral-
lel Adorno’s writings on aesthetics and aesthetic
theory (The Aesthetic Dimension, 1978). But on
the whole, Marcuse explicates a critical theory
of domination and liberation which builds upon
Marx’s conception of alienation and formulates
a new philosophy of aesthetic education for the
late capitalist period (Reitz, 2000).
Marcuse’s major work Eros and
Civilization (1955) and his late work The
Aesthetic Dimension (1978), both take up
the subjective realm and the possibilities for
101
transcending one-dimensional society in the
body, through aesthetic sensibility, and in/
through the human imagination. Eros and
Civilization (1955) is a remarkable early
attempt to bring Freud and Marx’s ideas
together into a critical psychoanalytic social
theory of liberation from advanced capital-
ist repression. According to Kellner et al.,
Marcuse’s early work is ‘an investigation of
revolution in relation to the body, sensuality,
imagination, culture, and the unconscious’
(2009: 3). They argue for a reading of the
text as an ‘exploration and furtherance of
Marcuse’s increasingly multidimensional
theory of emancipation, through which
intellectual and sensual existence should
be conceptualized as two interdependent
forces of resistance against what he would
later describe as one-dimensional society’
(ibid.: 3). Furthermore, they stress the major
importance of the text for an understanding
of contemporary schooling and education.
Marcuse’s critical psychoanalysis provides a
corrective to the overemphasis on reason and
cognition in educational philosophy and to
the tendency to reproduce the Enlightenment
mind–body dualism which subordinated bod-
ily, emotional, and irrational experiences to
the rule of rationality. He identifies desire and
the body as major potential sites of resistance
to the repression of modern capitalist school-
ing and society; a way to think about student
resistance and emancipation as a ‘multidi-
mensional’ set of forces and possibilities.
Kellner et al. in their introduction to
Marcuse’s Challenge to Education (2009)
provide an extremely valuable explication
of the dialectical bases of Marcuse’s criti-
cal theory of education. They locate the roots
of his theory in the possibility of grounding
schooling in a critical conception of Bildung,
and of the all too common foreclosure of this
meaningful and emancipatory education under
the one-dimensionality of advanced capitalism.
According to Kellner et. al., ‘Marcuse’s critique
of schooling in one-dimensional society thus
can be seen as emerging from a critique of the
distortion of the German concept of Bildung,
102 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
in which education is meant to enrich the indi-
vidual and culture, while transcending the pre-
sent conditions of immediacy that inhibit and
stifle human development’ (2009: 8). The one-
dimensionality of late capitalism systematically
shifts the ground of education from growth and
enrichment to instrumental forms of adminis-
trative and economic expediency. Moreover,
‘[o]ne-dimensional society is a social order that
lacks negativity, critique, and transformative
practice’ (ibid.: 8). Instead of providing stu-
dents with greater spaces for resistance, critical
thought and meaningful change, it imprisons
them in the instrumental logic and competitive
spheres of the capitalist ‘performance prin-
ciple’ (ibid.: 8). This contradiction between
Bildung and contemporary one-dimensional
society is at the heart of both Marcuse’s cri-
tique and his vision of emancipation from
repression and the ‘affluent society’ (ibid.: 9).
In The Aesthetic Dimension (1978),
Marcuse engages with Marxist debates on
aesthetic form and practice and distinguishes
his position through an emphasis on the polit-
ical possibilities of aesthetic form itself as the
individual confronts a genuine work of art.
Marcuse states in the beginning of his work:
But in contrast to orthodox Marxist aesthetics I see
the political potential of art in art itself, in the
aesthetic form as such. Furthermore, I argue that
by virtue of its aesthetic form, art is largely autono-
mous vis à vis the given social relations. In its
autonomy art both protests these relations, and at
the same time transcends them. Thereby art sub-
verts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary
experience. (Marcuse, 1978: ix)
Marcuse here and in the remainder of the text
emphasizes the emancipatory educational
possibilities of the ‘aesthetic dimension’ as a
realm of experience which can confront and
move beyond the one-dimensionality of
schools and other capitalist institutions.
Drawing upon the work of Schiller and criti-
cal aesthetics, Marcuse grounds his critical
philosophy of education, not in Adorno’s
hopes for critical rationality, but in art’s
opening up of new perceptual realms of
experience.
CONCLUSION
The educational philosophies and critiques of
Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and other
members of the Frankfurt School are just
beginning to be unearthed and recognized for
what they could contribute to diagnosing our
modern landscapes and crises. As a ‘school’
they were not only at the very forefront of
fostering neo-Marxist understandings of the
everyday ravages of capitalist culture and ide-
ology, but anticipated (just to name a few) the
radical post-structuralism of Foucault and the
disciplinary society, the radical ecological
movement and our environmental crises, the
student movements of the last half century,
and the resurgent authoritarianism and fas-
cism which have brought back painful remind-
ers of the barbarism and violence which many
members of the Frankfurt School themselves
barely survived, if at all. If, as Adorno insisted,
‘the premier demand upon all education is
that Auschwitz not happen again’ (2005[1969]:
191), we would be foolish to ignore the vital
warnings the Frankfurt School sent our way.
Notes
1  Parts of this chapter are reprinted or updated from
the following publication: Frymer, B. (2010) ‘The
Frankfurt School and Education: Critical Theory
and Youth Alienation’ in Leonardo, Z. (ed.) The
Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education.
Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. pp. 161–74.
Reprinted with permission from Brill.
2  The early work of Henry Giroux, particularly The-
ory and Resistance in Education (1983), marked
a major point of convergence between Frankfurt
School critical theory and education. Following
the publication of Paul Willis’ Learning to Labor
(1981), a classic ethnographic study of student
‘resistance’ to the ‘hidden curriculum’ of a working-
class high school and the smooth reproduction
of class relations, Giroux began to argue for the
significance of theorizing resistance in educa-
tional theory. His work in the early 1980s con-
stituted a marked challenge to what he termed
‘reproduction theory’ in education. Reproduction
theory in the sociology of education, most notably
represented by Bowles and Gintis’ Schooling in
Capitalist America (1976) and the work of Pierre
 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND EDUCATION
Bordiueu (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990), tended
to posit overly functional models of the ways
schools reproduced inequality and dominant
social relations. As an opening attempt at what
developed into ‘critical pedagogy’, Giroux argued
for the significance of more dialectical analyses of
schools and students that would begin to theo-
rize the complexity of capitalist education and
the role of schooling in modes of domination. He
turned to the Frankfurt School as a model of dia-
lectical analysis for understanding such phenom-
ena as school ideology, student subjectivity, and
resistance.
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The Nomad, The Hybrid:
Deconstructing the Notion
of Subjectivity Through
Freire and Rumi
INTRODUCTION
Unfolding the notion of subjectivity can pro-
vide new prisms with which to view, and so
move beyond, the eroded traditional struc-
tures from which fixed understandings of the
subject are derived. In this space, alternative
figurations like the nomad who desires tran-
sitional subjectivities and fluid identities can
function as alternatives. This chapter is a
philosophical investigation that provides a
platform for a conceptual conversation
between the Brazilian critical pedagogue
Paulo Freire and Persian poet-scholar Rumi.
The philosophical teachings of Deleuze func-
tion as a conceptual bridge that generates a
dialogic space for the conversation between
Freire and Rumi. In A Thousand Plateaus,
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduce us to
the figure of the nomad who has given up the
desire for fixity and, despite experiencing the
dissonance of dislocation, embraces the mul-
tiplicity of a non-linear existence. The space
where Freire, Rumi, and Deleuze meet before
18
Soudeh Oladi
going off in different directions creates pos-
sibilities for rethinking subjectivity for the
critical educator. Freire’s emphasis on unfin-
ishedness and Rumi’s focus on being ibn al-
waqt or the ‘child of the present moment’
echo the Deleuzian nomad who engages with
practices that involve innovation, multiplic-
ity, difference, and connection.
Using Deleuze as a conceptual bridge
allows for a space that helps reinvigorate
critical pedagogy with cross-cultural dia-
logues. To this end, Freire’s foundational
work in critical pedagogy and Rumi’s Sufi-
based teachings are brought into conversation
with Deleuze as mediator of this dialogue.
The current philosophical analysis is not an
arrival but a movement toward exploring the
creative potential that thinking together with
these intellectuals creates. To identify the
language through which I read Freire and
Rumi, I explore some of the more prominent
works of Gilles Deleuze, a decisive figure in
postmodern philosophy, and examine how he
tried to dismantle modern beliefs regarding
 THE NOMAD, THE HYBRID
a number of concepts including subjectiv-
ity. In line with Deleuze’s attempts to move
past essentializing of the subject, this chapter
adopts a non-essentializing discourse by cre-
ating a space to revisit spiritual and critical
pedagogical discourses.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and
Guattari (1987) revive the nomadic sub-
ject who is in a constant state of decentring
without a destination in sight. The nomad is
resistant to settled patterns of thought and
exclusionary visions of subjectivity – a move
past the essentializing of the subject. The flux
of multiple becomings as exhibited by the
nomad embraces a cosmopolitan openness
and allows for subjectivities to be articulated,
shaped, fragmented, and even dismantled. I
have adopted Deleuze’s language on nomad-
ism and reread it in the space afforded by
Freire and Rumi in order to reach ‘(im)plau-
sible readings and interpretations’ (Semetsky,
2008: xv) that are dynamic, engaging, and
constructed in interaction among these intel-
lectuals. Like a nomadic thinker, I trace the
shift from individual to social and spiritual
subjectivity for the critical educator, while
advancing Deleuze’s philosophical disposi-
tion as a vantage point through which the
move toward a different conception of the
subject is traced and the transition from being
to becoming is further examined (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987).
The transformative nature of the nomadic
life is a never-ending process of becom-
ing, and Braidotti captures the idea of such
nomadic becomings in difference:
Nomadic becomings are rather the affirmation of
the unalterably positive structure of difference,
meant as a multiple and complex process of
transformation, a flux of multiple becomings, the
play of complexity, or the principle of not-One.
(Braidotti, 2006a: 145)
The struggle for subjectivity as envisioned by
Deleuze is manifested in the right to differ-
ence, variation, and metamorphosis (1988:
106) where the subject is a never completed
project who engages creatively in new ways of
105
being. The model of subjectivity developed by
Deleuze is represented in relational networks
with others and the environment. Since the
Deleuzian subject is collectively constituted,
s/he is capable of experiencing life at both the
‘metaphysical and political’ level (May, 1991:
242). Here, the nomadic subject advanced by
Freire embodies the political while the
nomadic being advocated by Rumi personifies
the metaphysical and the spiritual. Drawing
on the works of Rumi and Freire, I engage in
an intellectual scaffolding that enables me to
open multiple ‘leakages’ and points of entry
into a non-linear space of change and becom-
ing as related to the subject. In the following
sections, I examine the nomadic subject in the
works of Freire and Rumi. The dialogue that
emerges leads to several manifestations of the
subject as a being always in the process of
becoming different (Deleuze, 1991b). The
subjects that emerge from a close reading of
Freire and Rumi’s works are: subject as seeker,
subject as storyteller, subject as resister, sub-
ject as transformer, and subject as improviser.
THINKING TOGETHER WITH DELEUZE
AND RUMI
Looking at Rumi through the lens of Deleuze
requires pushing the Deleuzian language in a
productive direction. As such, the nomadic
element in Rumi’s works is revisited in his
writings particularly in the six-volume master-
piece, the Mathnawi. Rumi’s Sufi-based roots
emphasize reaching higher levels of self-
awareness by underlining the inner dimen-
sions of a person’s being. Underhill (2002)
points to the dominance of journey, alchemy,
and love in Sufi traditions. The individual who
walks this path embarks on an inner journey
that is initiated by wandering and seeking
(sulúk). It is in this journey that the soul expe-
riences a transformation; one that Schimmel
(1975/1993) refers to as Alchemy.
Looking at Rumi through the lens of
Deleuze requires pushing the Deleuzian
106 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
language in a productive direction. In the
spirit of Deleuze’s orientations toward
nomadism and becoming, I work with aspects
of his views that are productive in the context
of Rumi’s reflections related to the subject.
As an existential foundation of Sufi practices,
the subject is viewed as a multidimensional
and flowing entity. Rumi’s Sufi-based dis-
positions provide a potential point of contact
between Sufi practices and the Deleuzian
poststructuralist position on nomadism. To
address this tension, I position my under-
standing of Sufism as a philosophy that is in
a constant state of flux as it works to release
certain nomadic qualities in pursuit of Insan-
e-Kamil or the ‘perfect human being’: A ‘per-
fect human being’ who will never reach the
stage of perfection and must constantly be
in a state of movement and becoming. The
Sufi’s journey toward becoming an Insan-
e-Kamil is one that is accompanied with a
desire to experience a complete awakening
of the consciousness (Ahmed, 2008). Rumi
defines the evolution of consciousness as
the development of consciousness through
cycles of deaths and rebirths. In each death,
one is reborn into a more conscious being,
marking a higher degree of realization. The
Sufi understanding is such that at each level
there is a death or transformation that allows
for a rebirth into greater consciousness (Boni,
2010). While Rumi’s penchant for humanism
is in clear contrast with the Deleuzian anti-
humanism, it should be pointed out that the
version of humanism Rumi embraces is not
one born of Western liberalism. Meanwhile,
humanism in Islamic mysticism and Sufi
traditions is an unattainable goal and an indi-
vidual in search of it is in a perpetual state
of wandering. Individuals can never reach
this state, considering that it is relative, plu-
ral, diverse, and inaccessible. While for the
poststructuralist this might indicate the lack
of space that breeds creativity, Marks main-
tains that it in fact ‘allows a great deal of play
to the individual – distracted, contemplative,
imaginative, mystical – and thus it does create
space for pure difference’ (2010: 11).
Deleuze’s nomadic subject is tangible in
Rumi’s emphasis on the annihilation of our
current beings and transmuting into a being
that is neither fixed nor permanent – a con-
cept known as fana (‘annihilation of the ego’)
in Sufism. As already indicated, the experi-
ence of revealing the dissolved self and going
beyond oneself is manifested in the notion of
fana in Rumi’s writings, where the person dies
in her/himself and lives in/through something
else. This act of becoming is not a journey
into death, but a new beginning that nurtures
possibilities for an infinite existence. The dis-
solution of subjectivity and the ultimate death
of the self ‘in order to enter qualitatively finer
processes of becoming’ (Braidotti, 2006a: 261)
is addressed in the writings of Rumi. Rumi’s
focus on the annihilation of the ego is aimed
at reaching a state of no-mind. According to
Braidotti (2006b), the Deleuzian perception of
death opens up new possibilities and can be
experienced as ‘becoming-imperceptible’:
[T]he becoming-imperceptible is the point of
fusion between the self and his/her habitat, the
cosmos as a whole. It marks the point of evanes-
cence of the self and its replacement by a living
nexus of multiple inter-connections that empower
not the self, but the collective, not identity, but
affirmative subjectivity, not consciousness, but
affirmative inter-connections. (Braidotti, 2006b: 154)
The individual that Braidotti depicts as ‘sus-
pended between the no longer and the not yet’
(2006b: 156) is the same individual Rumi
encourages to enter into a space of non-
existence. The Sufi way acknowledges that it
is by throwing oneself into the abyss of anni-
hilation where Rumi states, ‘we and our exist-
ences are all nonexistences’ that one reaches
a state where, ‘you are absolute Existence,
appearing as annihilation’ (Chittick, 2007:
129). This provides a potential point of con-
tact with the Deleuzian perception of the
subject who does not arrive. This non-arrival
is also evident in Sufi practices where the
subject is in a perpetual state of motion,
moving toward nothingness, since, ‘annihila-
tion is the negation of something that never
 THE NOMAD, THE HYBRID
truly was’ (Chittick, 2007: 44). Rumi points
to the state of nothingness as our exit from
self-existence toward becoming self-less:
If you could get rid
Of yourself just once,
The secret of secrets
Would open to you.
The face of the unknown,
Hidden beyond the universe
Would appear on the
Mirror of your perception. (Fadiman and Frager,
1997: 244)
Chittick (1983) proclaims that Sufism encour-
ages transcending the subjective self by gain-
ing an in-depth knowledge of the self and
describes this as ‘annulment of the self’ or
fana. Rumi’s tender story about a lover’s reun-
ion with the beloved touches on the impor-
tance of nothingness in the Sufi discourse:
A certain man knocked at his beloved’s door: his
friend asked: ‘Who is there?’
He answered ‘I!’ – ‘Be gone,’ said his friend, ‘tis
too soon:
at my table there is no place for the raw.’
How shall the raw one be cooked but in the fire of
absence?
What else will deliver him from hypocrisy?
He turned sadly away, and for a whole year the
flames of separation consumed him;
Then he came back and again paced to and fro
beside the house of his friend.
He knocked at the door with a hundred fears and
reverences,
lest any disrespectful word might escape from his lips.
‘Who is there?,’ cried his friend. He answered,
‘Thou, O charmer of all hearts!’
‘Now,’ said the friend, ‘since thou art I, come in:
there is no room for two “I”s in this house.’
(Mathnawi I: 3056–63, Nicholson, 1926)
In such spaces, the ego experiences a meta-
morphosis and a ‘death of the self’: a going
beyond ‘me’ and reaching an ‘us’. This,
according to Rumi, does not equate to lack of
existence but true existence.
There are spaces where aspects of Deleuze’s
philosophy seem to engage with spiritually.
According to Bryden, ‘Deleuze’s writing
107
recurrently demonstrates a commitment to
the unhinging of philosophy from its complex
historical affiliations with theology, so as to
release it into a zone of dynamism, affirma-
tion and becoming’ (2001: 1). This same zone
exists in the works of Rumi, where similar
to Deleuze’s (1989) understanding of mysti-
cal experiences, the self encounters a sudden
actualization of potentialities. Rumi’s poetry
exists in a field of possibilities where life is in
motion as he embraces a pedagogy of poten-
tial in the limitless space that opens up before
the seeker. According to Marks, in the context
of Islamic mysticism:
awareness of the nonexistent side of every existent
thing stimulates ‘fana’, the mystical obliteration of
the difference between things and God, I and thou.
This idea finds a parallel in Deleuze’s argument, fol-
lowing Bergson (Deleuze, 1991a), that the more
that perception becomes dissociated from our
immediate needs, the further it opens onto the
universe of images and opens us to the flow of
time. The two processes, one mystical, one episte-
mological, are strikingly similar. (Marks, 2010: 17)
Marks argues that even though Deleuze’s phil-
osophical goal is creativity, there is a fana-like
element in his philosophy as well:
I must be clear that Deleuze’s philosophical goal is
not ‘fana’: it is creativity – the capacity for new
perceptions, affects, and thoughts. Nevertheless,
something rather like ‘fana’ takes place in the
hoped-for dispersion, which Deleuze and Guattari
emphasized again and again, of the usual limita-
tions of the individual. (Marks, 2010: 17)
Rumi reveals the nomadic traits of his thoughts
by stating that ‘the ends are nothing but to
return to the beginnings’ (Mathnawi I: 767,
Nicholson, 1926). It is in such a context that
nothingness as a nomadic quality allows indi-
viduals to restlessly travel through spaces with-
out a medium. Additionally, as an existential
foundation of Sufi practices, the self is viewed
as a multidimensional and flowing entity.
Rumi’s poetry avoids orthodoxy and indoc-
trination as he promotes a pluralistic culture
of endless movement and unrest. Rumi’s work
is unique in that he breaks down boundaries
and creates spaces where metamorphosis can
108 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
include completeness, unity, fracture, and
multiplicity all at the same time. Rumi aspires
to disrupt any sense of certainty through his
stories and poems toward a culture of ‘pure
difference’ and otherness.
To expose the lack of imagination that has
too often impeded social, personal, and cul-
tural relations, Rumi’s encourages his read-
ers to engage in a culture of unveiling that
seeks to unearth deeper layers of meaning in
an effort to disrupt the appropriation of crea-
tivity and imagination:
Pass beyond (external) names and look at the
(underlying) qualities, so that the qualities may
show you the way to the essence. The opposition
(among) people takes place because of names.
Peace occurs when they go to the real meaning.
(Mathnawi II: 3679–80, Nicholson, 1926)
In his stories, Rumi (1995) attends to a form
of knowledge seeking that creates a nomadic
subjectivity for the critical educator; one that
understands, analyses, and seeks different
truths through an awareness of the qualities
that prevent her or him from becoming more
fully human. Rumi takes us on a journey to
explore the various dimensions of our inner
selves and depicts the human spirit as ‘a con-
scious intentionality, dynamic, open-ended,
and selftranscending’ (Helminiak, 1998: 13).
In such a space, the Sufi is a nomad, as s/he
has no attachment to the past or any longing
for the future. To become fully present in the
moment necessitates unfolding and creating
new dynamics. In the Sufi tradition, ibn al-
waqt is about living in the now, being pre-
sent, and fully surrendering to the moment:
O comrade, the Sufi is the son of time present. It is
not the rule of his canon to say, Tomorrow. Can it
be that thou art not a true Sufi? Ready money is
lost by giving credit. (Mathnawi I: 133–4,
Nicholson, 1926)
Here, the unpredictable is desired and being
vulnerable and entering into unknown spaces
is not problematic in and of itself. To expand
her/his spiritual consciousness, the Sufi/
nomad has no attachment, which makes
movement easier. The Sufi/nomad has little
attachment to the past and memory and her/his
desire to suspend all attachment to established
discourse (Braidotti, 1994: 18) is intense.
To avoid subjugation, Rumi cautions
against a distorted understanding of reality
and distinguishes between imagination and
the imaginary as he encourages individuals
to move beyond the ‘imaginary trap’:
Within the spirit, imagined forms are as nothing –
(yet) …
witness an (entire) world going on (based) upon
something imaginary!
(Witness how) their peace and their war (is based)
upon something imaginary, and
(how) their pride and their shame (derives) from
something imaginary. (Mathnawi I: 70–1,
Nicholson, 1926)
According to Chittick (1983), the Sufi’s
non-attachment can only be realized through
direct engagement with the ‘World of
Imagination’ or A’lame khiyal. The word khi-
yal or imagination represents a wide range of
realities including the mental faculty, which
conjures up images and ideas in the mind. In
essence, the World of Imagination relates to
these images and ideas both at the individual
and social level, while also being linked to
the ‘world’ they originate from.
Thus, ‘imagination does not create the
images and ideas it sees, nor does it derive
them from within itself, the memory, or the
mind. Rather, it receives them from a sepa-
rate World of Imagination, which exists inde-
pendently of the mind’ (Chittick, 1983: 248).
A’lame khiyal can also be described as the
twilight zone between the spiritual world and
the sensible world.
There, imagination takes place at both the
spirit and corporeal levels and it is this very
imagination that Rumi believes breeds end-
less creativity and pure difference. Deleuze’s
conception of the transcendental imagination
and Henry Corbin’s ‘imaginal’ mode of mys-
ticism have more in common than meets the
eye. According to Ramey:
Deleuze’s ‘physics’ of the symbol has a strange
consequence: the more symbols are understood as
 THE NOMAD, THE HYBRID
transcriptions of ‘cosmic’ dynamics, the more their
spiritual aspect – the aspect of symbols that relates
to spiritual transformation – becomes clear. On this
point, Deleuze’s approach to the symbol (and more
generally his conception of the transcendental
imagination) is deeply resonant with that of Henry
Corbin, who identified an ‘imaginal’ mode of
mysticism where aspects of humanity and divinity
enter into a creative zone of indiscernibility.
(Ramey, 2012: 108)
For Deleuze it is important to distinguish
between imagination and mere fantasy
(Hickman, 2013). This is while Corbin (2013),
a champion of the transformative power of
imagination, argues that imagination that is
driven from personal fantasies has an unreal
character and is called ‘imaginary’. Meanwhile,
true imagination is rooted in the imaginal
realm and it is through the development of this
form of imagination that individuals can over-
come the ‘divorce between thinking and being’
(Corbin and Horine, 1976). While for Deleuze
‘there is no other truth than the creation of the
New: creativity, emergence’ (1989: 147),
Rumi’s invitation to imagine the impossible
creates an opportune moment to envision sub-
jectivities that have yet to be created.
The intense self-examination advocated
by Rumi empowers individuals to be honest
about their intentions. Through the purifica-
tion of the heart, a moral identity that identi-
fies with justice and liberty is formed. This
process also awakens a feeling of intense love
or ishq and ‘provides the basic motivations in
humans. The generative impulse is the desire
to generate something enduring. Ishq is pro-
creation, it is creation; it is birth’ (Zaimaran,
1985: 256). For Rumi, love never loses its
nomadic quality because, ‘love gives birth to
a thousand forms; the world is full of its paint-
ings but it has no form’ (Rumi, Divan, 5057,
as cited in Chittick, 1983). For Rumi, cross-
ing the threshold of love leads to transforma-
tion and transcendence. With its potential to
energize everything, love as a life force that
animates is ‘The Sea of Non-Being: there the
foot of the intellect is shattered’ (Mathnawi III:
4723, Nicholson, 1926). Like a nomadic
existence, a being enveloped in love is indeed
109
a ‘“Non-being”, that which is not (absent),
that which is yet to be (come into being)’
(D’Souza, 2014: 13). Rumi’s portrayal of
love as a trunkless tree that is open to new
experiences and receptive to the unknown
is similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987)
depiction of the rhizome as a de-centred net-
work that grows in all directions:
Love is not condescension,
Never that, nor books,
nor any marking on paper,
nor what people say of each other.
Love is a tree with branches reaching into eternity
and roots set deep in eternity, and no trunk!
Have you seen it? The mind cannot. Your desiring
cannot.
The longing you feel for this love comes from
inside you. (Rumi in Barks, 2003: 121)
There is, however, one fundamental differ-
ence between Rumi’s trunkless tree and the
Deleuzian rhizome. For Deleuze, the rhi-
zome is not rooted and the pure creativity
and difference that emerges is in the central
parts of the rhizome. This is while, for Rumi,
the space of difference, imagination, and
creativity can be found in the roots of the tree
that are connected to infinity and its branches
that reach out to eternity.
Exploring the tapestry of subjectivities in
Rumi’s stories reveals a continuous struggle
between various forces that swing the pendu-
lum of absolutes in the direction of the ‘field
of possibilities’. Embracing Rumi’s vision
of the Insan-e-Kamil requires that we, too,
move beyond fixed notions of subjectivity for
the critical educator and allow for new spaces
to present themselves.
THINKING TOGETHER WITH
DELEUZE AND FREIRE
Critical pedagogy as a theory is grounded in
the critical theory of the Frankfurt School
and its practices can be widely observed
in the emancipatory work of Brazilian
110 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
philosopher and educator Paulo Freire. Freire
is considered the founder of popular educa-
tion and the inspiration for the field of criti-
cal pedagogy (Kirylo and Boyd, 2017) and is
credited with the advancement of critical
pedagogical thought and practice. Freire’s
writings have influenced various fields
including postcolonial theory, ethnic studies,
adult education, and the discourses on criti-
cal spirituality and educational activism.
While thinking together with Deleuze and
Rumi opens up spaces for rethinking sub-
jectivity for the critical educator, Freire’s
critical pedagogy can also be added to the
mix. Freire’s emphasis on the social aspect
of transformative educational practices and
Deleuze’s language, which helps navigate
the nomadic potential in critical pedagogy tie
into the attempt to create a space that tries
to mediate between these interpretations of
meaningful learning and transformative edu-
cation. Like a nomad, individuals flowing in
these spaces are always between points in a
transitional or indeterminate state. Similar
to Deleuze’s depiction of the nomad, Freire
views the subject as going beyond economic
and social beings and transforming into
nomad-subjects. Freire’s nomad-subjects
are travellers in new learning landscapes
and are increasingly ready to express their
commitment to different paths. The ability
of these individuals to self-reproduce ena-
bles them to transform and act upon life as
they explore new possibilities for becoming
and living otherwise (Deleuze and Guattari,
1987). The propensity of the nomad-subject
to disrupt established patterns of thought at a
structural level and problematize traditional
perceptions of identity is reflective of her/his
interest in deterritorialization. In A Thousand
Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) dis-
tinguish between smooth and striated spaces:
while walls, enclosures, and roads between
enclosures characterize striated spaces,
smooth spaces are depicted as fields with-
out conduits or channels. In such a setting,
the nomadic space ‘lies between two striated
spaces’ (ibid.: 409). It is in this context that
critical educators are encouraged to be spon-
taneous and courageous while embarking on
a Freirean adventure of hope. This is while
smooth spaces, liked fixed subjectivities,
are constantly under the threat of being pos-
sessed, appropriated, and subjected to rules
and procedures (Barnett, 2010).
Contrary to Freire’s advocacy for being,
Deleuze’s anti-being stance becomes a site of
tension. Yet, there is a middle space where both
Freire and Deleuze can meet before going off
in different directions. In that space becoming
has precedence over being and reality is no
longer seen as ‘motionless, static, compart-
mentalized, and predictable’ (Freire, 2000: 71).
Freire alludes to a natural desire for change
in oppressive situations because he believes
human beings essentially seek and desire
transcendence (1994: 39). Deleuze (1997),
meanwhile, asserts that the desire for other-
ness creates subjectivities that lack desire for
change and transcendence. Freire emphasizes
the need for poetic imagination to be pragmati-
cally applied to social issues and informs his
readers that ‘the lovelier world to which they
aspired was being announced, somehow antic-
ipated in their imagination’ (1994: 39).
Similar to Deleuze and Guattari who view
the subject with nomadic potential as one
without a fixed subjectivity, Freire refuses to
see human beings as victims of context and
constantly encourages them to break with tra-
ditional notions of subjectivity. Freire (2000)
considers liberation as a prerequisite for the
humanization of the individual. A desire for
liberation is a meeting point for Freire’s criti-
cal praxis and Deleuze’s nomadic being. The
endless migration of the individual beyond
subjugating knowledge and fixed subjectivi-
ties is a defining feature of a nomad-subject
because ‘as nomads, subjects randomly con-
nect signs, energy flows, data, knowledge,
fantasy, objects, and other bodies in new flows
of desiring production’ (Usher, 2010: 72).
For the nomad-subject, outcomes cannot be
anticipated and Freire’s vision of full becom-
ing is essential in understanding how s/he is
modifying or being modified by the world as
 THE NOMAD, THE HYBRID
s/he strives to construct ‘landscapes of becom-
ing’ (Zembylas, 2007: 345). The desire for
transcendence can be implied even in rela-
tion to hope: ‘hope, detached from the future,
becomes only an alienated and alienating
abstraction. Instead of stimulating the pilgrim,
it invites him to stand still’ (Freire, 1985: 121).
The pilgrim, like the nomad relishes in the
creation of the new and is known for her/his
bravery because to be an eternal creator and
improviser requires an element of fearlessness.
Freire’s emphasis on re-creation is analogous
with nomadic qualities as the Brazilian educa-
tor describes ‘men and women as beings in the
process of becoming – as unfinished, uncom-
pleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished
reality’ (Freire, 2000: 84). This Freirean vision
offers remedies to the restrictive discourses
behind fixed subjectivities for the critical edu-
cator and helps articulate an understanding of
subjectivity that is creative and engages with
practices that involve complexity, innovation,
multiplicity, and connection. The flexible and
active flow prevalent in such spaces invites
critical educators to rethink their subjectivities
while simultaneously embracing the ‘uncom-
mitted potentiality for change’ (Bateson,
2000: 505).
The nomad-subject’s desire to forge new
hybrid subjectivities where s/he creates and is
simultaneously willing to leave her/his crea-
tions echoes Freire’s notion of unfinished-
ness. In Pedagogy of Freedom, Freire (1998)
points out how passing through the world is
not predetermined and allows for ‘making
history out of possibility’:
I like being human because I am involved with
others in making history out of possibility, not
simply resigned to fatalistic stagnation.
…
I like to be human because in my unfinishedness I
know that I am conditioned. Yet, conscious of such
conditioning, I know that I can go beyond it …
(Freire, 1998: 54)
Similar to a nomad who creates innumerable
subjectivities, the critical educator can enter
111
‘a realm of pure possibility whence novel
configurations of ideas and relations may
arise’ (Turner, 1967: 97). Existing in this
realm generates a sense of wide-awakeness
and empowers the nomad-subject to break
with fixed notions of subjectivity and pursue
her/his ‘passion for possibilities – what might
be, what could be’ (Greene, 2007: 2). Here,
the nomad-subject becomes a searcher and a
seeker of knowledge who is not consumed by
his/her past constructions and future possibili-
ties and instead is adamant to live in the now.
Disengagement is never an option for the
nomad-subject as s/he overcomes submission
and docility with the view that ‘to be human is
to engage in relationship with others and with
the world. It is to experience the world as an
objective reality, independent of oneself, capa-
ble of being known’ (Freire, 1973: 4). For the
nomad-learners, ‘what they perceive and enact
as more active and responsible agents and as
in-between dwellers [is] not only receptive to
but also able to engage realms of the possible’
(Cook-Sather and Alter, 2011: 30). The
nomadic qualities of critical pedagogy can
keep its transformative nature from becoming
sedentary. The same nomadic potential inter-
rupts linear notions of being where the pro-
duction of difference allows for the emergence
of endless possibilities for subjectivity for the
critical educator. In keeping with the Deleuzian
nomad who is in a constant state of flux, Freire
(1994) argues for an ‘ongoing being’ whose
future cannot be ‘determined’ by others:
[W]e are this being – a being of ongoing, curious,
search, which ‘steps back’ from itself and from the
life it leads – it is because we are this being, given
to adventure and the ‘passion to know’, for which
that freedom becomes indispensable that, consti-
tuted in the very struggle for itself, is possible only
because, though we are ‘programmed’, we are
nevertheless not ‘determined’. (Freire, 1994: 84,
emphasis in original)
Freire’s stimulating entry into a space that
breeds uncertainty is yet another nomadic
characteristic of critical pedagogy. The
nomad-subject’s reluctance to settle for a
fixed subjectivity is manifested in the
112 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Freirean logic that the ‘future is a new pre-
sent, and a new dream experience is forged.
History does not become immobilized, does
not die. On the contrary, it goes on’ (Freire,
1994: 91). Freire addresses the nomadic
urgency to constantly be on the move and not
settle while flowing through various planes
of hope as ‘a being of ongoing, curious
search’ (1994: 84). An educational space that
follows this tradition is in fact a movement in
constant search for the creation of the new.
Freire’s nomad-subject ‘does not become the
prisoner of a “circle of certainty” within
which reality is also imprisoned’ (Freire,
2000: 39).
To disrupt any vestige of tranquility for
the nomad-subject, Freire (2000) advo-
cates a form of knowledge seeking that
emerges through invention and reinvention.
Throughout this process, the nomad-subject
is restless, while at the same time exuding
hope and an eternal optimism for the future.
This curious nomad-subject moves toward
transparent instead of opaque realities and
seeks to uncover aspects of her/his subjectiv-
ity that may be hidden. The nomad-subject
who embraces such an outlook is willing to
take risks, be open to the adventure of the
spirit, and have a willingness to live in tension
and contradiction (Freire, 1998). The nomad-
subject is ‘creative, nonrepetitive, proliferative,
unpredictable’ (Grosz, 1994: 168) and chooses
how to live and tell her/his never-ending story
of subjectivity.
Freire and Deleuze advance spaces where
‘heterogeneity rather than conformity, flu-
idity rather than rigidity, and constant evo/
revo/lution and flux rather than the static’
are prevalent (Strom and Martin, 2013: 4).
These spaces allow for a hybrid reinvention
of subjectivity for the critical educator where
‘the very categories of “Self” and “Other”
emerge as fluid and negotiable’ (Bhabha,
1994: 56). To dismantle barriers to inequal-
ity and engage in a culture of audacious and
nomadic hope, the nomad-subject exhibits
‘the ability to take action when there is lit-
tle evidence that doing so will produce a
positive outcome’ (Generett and Hicks, 2004:
192). The nomadic characteristics in critical
pedagogy have the potential to keep its trans-
formative nature from becoming sedentary
or static. It is in this field of possibilities that
the creative forces give birth to infinite and
boundless creations of subjectivity for the
critical educator.
In his writings, Freire references ‘nar-
ration sickness’ (2000: 71) where teachers
offer the sole narrative in learning spaces, and
describes this act as a destructive feature of
submissive learning environments. A nomadic
learning space, as advocated by Freire, would
not be bereft of narratives because nomad-
subjects are in perpetual movement and in the
process of creating new stories as creators of
new realities. Freire’s emphasis on humans as
uncompleted beings is also reflective of the
nomadic nature of critical pedagogy: ‘Within
history, in concrete, objective contexts, both
humanization and dehumanization are possi-
bilities for a person as an uncompleted being
conscious of their incompletion’ (2000: 43).
The kind of humanization Freire envisions is
something that needs to be constantly pursued
as ‘the indispensable condition for the quest
for human completion’ (2000: 47). Freire
addresses the issue of human completion in a
nuanced way; as part of an individual’s ability
to create, challenge, and constantly recreate
structures of meaning. Such an emancipa-
tory journey empowers critical educators and
leads to a dynamic understanding of con-
sciousness and subjectivity. Freire’s emphasis
that critical educators need to be empow-
ered agents of history and conscious of their
being echoes this very point. According to
Freire, the ongoing transformative process of
becoming as part of a move toward ‘libera-
tion is a thus a childbirth and a painful one’
(2000: 25) but one where the creation and
emergence of a new being helps individuals
to constantly leap forward toward the great
unknown. In this context one can argue for a
Freirean-inspired (2000) utopian vision as a
practice of freedom, driven by critical curi-
osity, and rooted in a broader project that
 THE NOMAD, THE HYBRID
seeks to illuminate and guide critical educa-
tors toward a humanized future (Portelli and
Oladi, 2017).
SUBJECTIVITY FOR THE CRITICAL
EDUCATOR: FREIRE AND RUMI
The parallels between Freire’s concept of
conscientization and Rumi’s notion of moral
and spiritual education can be found in the
desire for completeness (Elias, 1976) or to be
Insan-e-Kamil. Embarking on this journey
would allow the critical educators to develop
certain characteristics that are closely aligned
with nomadic qualities such as ‘compassion,
integrity, commitment to the process, nonat-
tachment to outcome, [and] interconnected-
ness’ (Alario, 2012). As such the critical
educator becomes a storyteller and a seeker
of new narratives who believes outer change
requires inner transformation. Compassion
and love are transformative forces for this
individual, as s/he moves beyond a fixed
notion of subjectivity into a creative and
imaginal zone that allows for new subjectivi-
ties to emerge. Inspired by Rumi’s moral and
spiritual teachings and Freire’s praxis of
critical consciousness, I have generated five
possible subjectivities for the critical
educator:
The Critical Educator as Seeker
This individual is a human-in-progress who
possesses an ‘anxious heart’ who is con-
nected to the ‘Tree of Immortality’ in the
quest for different levels of spirituality and
activism. Like a nomad, the critical educator
as seeker is a wanderer enveloped by the
spirit of love; an individual engaged in a
pedagogy of potential striving to expand her/
his understanding of the world both without
and within. Although, this search may prove
to be challenging, this individual has but one
mission:
113
If you are not one of those who have an illumined
heart,
be awake (keep vigil), be a seeker of the illumined
heart,
and always struggle with your fleshly soul.
(Mathnawi III: 1224, Nicholson, 1926)
The critical educator as seeker engages in
different forms of activism outside the learn-
ing environment. For this individual, the ‘I’
only exists in spaces where ‘we’ is possible.
S/he works to unlock the inner teacher
through spiritual and moral development in
order to live authentically in the here and
now. S/he also emerges as a critical educator
and spiritual guide, teaching with renewed
vigour in a space of no-judgement while also
being a lifelong learner.
The Critical Educator as Storyteller
Rumi inspires the critical educator as story-
teller to tell stories of pain, resistance, and
change. The storyteller reignites hope by
introducing learners to individuals or move-
ments that have transformed their lives and
their society. Through storytelling, this indi-
vidual fosters a culture that allows for the
envisioning of different subjectivities. Inspired
by Rumi’s teachings, the critical educator as
storyteller imparts spiritual wisdom that sur-
passes the intellect and engenders a counter-
hegemonic space that raises one’s awareness
of social injustices. Through the very act of
sharing stories, s/he engages in the awakening
of individuals at the spiritual, cultural, and
societal level and creates a medium for learn-
ers to experience critical awareness in order to
emerge with new insight and understanding.
The critical educator as storyteller strives for
spaces where a sense of collective conscious-
ness is nurtured through educational practices.
In this milieu, consciousness, agency, and col-
lective subjectivities are developed in an effort
to problematize the structural and cultural
constraints that reinforce hegemonic dis-
courses. This individual is a tireless advocate
for social justice as s/he tells stories of how to
114 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
construct alternative subjectivities based on
principles of love and critical consciousness.
The Freirean-inspired pedagogy invites the
critical educator as storyteller to create coun-
terdiscourses through the act of storytelling.
The critical educator as storyteller also
expresses a great desire for a community
where individuals can practise compassion.
Here, Freire’s notion of armed love provides
an authentic liberatory praxis where passion-
ate activism is ‘the fighting love of those
convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to
denounce, and to announce’ (1998: 41).
The Critical Educator as Resister
The critical educator as resister challenges ste-
reotypes and creates alternatives as s/he pro-
motes collective resistance among various
social actors. Through a pedagogy of resist-
ance, this individual problematizes the instru-
mentalism of education. S/he is like a nomad,
in search of free spaces for a mode of creative
thinking that is equally a form of resistance. By
engaging in critical resistance against fixed
subjectivities, the critical educator as resister
partakes in multidimensional forms of struggle
in an effort to envision the yet unimagined life.
Through the construction of alternative modes
of subjectivity, this individual is difficult to
locate, and much like a nomad, nearly impos-
sible to defeat. By establishing local contexts of
resistance, s/he works to activate the collective
memories of influential social and spiritual
formations toward effective forms of resist-
ance. S/he engages in activities that create a
sense of compassion and love in what Garavan
(2012) calls ‘integral social care and compas-
sionate activism’. The critical educator as
resister is ‘the true intellectual, who always
finds the courage to seek the truth beyond ego
or fixed notions of the nature of things, […]
always walking a compassionate path’ (hooks,
2009: 186). In the space of resistance, s/he is
also vulnerable and feels the suffering of those
s/he is trying to help. This individual is pro-
foundly committed to a vision of justice that
demands intense self-reflection. The spirit of
resistance is alive in the critical educator as
resister as s/he works to foster a mutually
humanizing discourse where the suffering of all
people, particularly the marginalized and disad-
vantaged, can be acknowledged and potentially
alleviated. The coupling of resistance and love
can lead to a transformative praxis for this indi-
vidual as s/he seeks alternate smooth spaces in
search of new subjectivities as opposed to stri-
ated spaces. This individual never overlooks
her/his role as resister as s/he challenges stereo-
types and embraces alternatives ways of being.
The Critical Educator as
Transformer
The critical educator as transformer seeks to
create alternative futures by transforming the
present. This individual systematically chal-
lenges the power hierarchies and promotes
transformation at the personal and societal
levels. For the transformer, embracing social
action is accompanied by a commitment to
transformation and agency at the personal
level. In this context, deliberate transforma-
tion is accompanied by a vision of change
where becoming has precedence over being.
Like a nomad, the critical educator as trans-
former evades spaces that are stripped of
their transformative power and embarks on a
process of transformation alongside the
learners. While it is essential to engage in
action that transform structural inequalities
and power relations through challenging
practices, transforming subjectivities never
loses its ­ significance for this individual.
Although transforming the inherent inequali-
ties in society is a priority for the critical
educator as transformer, so is a soul-searching
that leads to greater awareness of the self and
character development. The critical educator
as transformer is engaged in an ongoing
struggle to enact a philosophy of intense
self-reflection that gives her/him the power to
be a not-knower. S/he advances a collabora-
tive process where gaining self-knowledge
 THE NOMAD, THE HYBRID
and transforming the consciousness is in
line with transforming the world. Through this
developmental process, the critical educator as
transformer envisions alternative futures by
transforming the present. S/he aspires to chal-
lenge binaries and hierarchies in order to
experience a rhizomatic existence. Here, rhi-
zomatics is a mode of thinking that disturbs
and disrupts hegemonic, linear, and fixed
modes of subjectivity.
The Critical Educator as Improviser
The critical educator as improviser celebrates
the nomadic learner as s/he experiments with
pedagogies that could lead nowhere or perhaps
to transformation, wisdom, hope, and limitless
possibilities. This individual engages in a fluid
and flexible wandering as s/he transcends from
being to becoming. In this state, wandering in a
constant state of inbetweenness embodies a
restlessness that leads to creativity, continuous
change, and ‘pure difference’. The tension that
exists between sedentary spaces and nomadic
ones leads to a resistance to assimilation where
motion is valued over fixation for the critical
educator as improviser. The unexpectedness
intrinsic to nomadic spaces and the ability to
function without a commanding centre sets in
motion the production of innovative flows for
this individual. Such nomadic spaces are char-
acterized by a penchant for decentralism and
imagining alternative ways of being. The criti-
cal educator as improviser is a catalyst for
transformation and exterior to the traditional
structures upon which fixed subjectivities are
derived from. Like a nomad, this individual is
‘resistance on the move’ and functions in a field
of possibilities where s/he strives to be Insan-
e-Kamil. The actions of this individual are mul-
tidimensional and uncoded and her/his greatest
accomplishment is to encourage invention:
invention of new spaces, invention of imaginal
discourses, invention of possibilities for resist-
ance, and invention of new subjectivities.
Finding traces of nomadic-subject in
the works of Freire and Rumi has offered
115
possibilities as I imagined ‘points of entry’
before the arrival. Having outlined poten-
tial subjectivities for the critical educator, it
would be worthwhile to consider how this
vision could be put into educational prac-
tice. Capitalizing on Deleuze’s argument that
the self, ‘changes in nature as it expands its
connections’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 8)
allows for the construction of creative alterna-
tives for subjectivities. In this context, criti-
cal educators become engaged in a learning
journey that incites them to bring something
to life as they explore multiplicity and other-
ness in the educational sphere. This is an anti-
dote to the ‘arborescent thought’ (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987) that encourages the individual-
ization of the learning experience and nurtures
a linear and divided space devoid of multiplic-
ity and complexity. In the Freirean ‘adventure
of hope’, critical educators resist the individu-
alization metanarrative and engage in the pos-
sible disruption of stereotypical subjectivities.
The distinctive nature of nomadic con-
sciousness allows for subjectivities, values,
and aspirations to be shaped and reshaped
in vibrant spaces. Envisioning reflective and
creative learning spaces in a state of constant
flux allows critical educators to continuously
practise their existence and redefine their
subjectivities. Such emancipatory visions
of education refuse to alienate difference
and blindly advocate for a pedagogy that is
fragmented and disconnected. The inbetween
space mediates a form of praxis where criti-
cal educators are mindful of their spiritual,
moral, and social dimensions, as they culti-
vate a conscientious awareness of the com-
plexities of the social world and their place
in it. Ultimately, the creative force that is
released enables identities to be negotiated
in an inbetween space that is decentred and
thrives in the realm of unpredictability. In
this space, beneath the struggle for subjec-
tivity, there is a no-man’s land that allows
for ‘negotiated’, ‘mediated’, and ‘imagined’
ways of being in the world. My objective in
this chapter has been to present a space where
a tapestry of subjectivities has the ability to
116 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
endlessly connect to any point and always
function in a middle milieu without a begin-
ning or an end; like Rumi’s na-koja-abad (a
place that is no place) and Deleuze’s no-man’s
land, these subjectivities are in a place that is
nowhere. The nomadic narrative of subjectiv-
ity is a rejection of the dystopia that renounces
the possibility of dreams, the need for self-
reflection, and a desire for social justice.
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The Reader, the Text,
the Restraints: A Cultural History
of the Art(s) of Reading
WORLD AT WAR
After a hundred years of cultural evolution,
progressive educational policy has ground to a
halt during the first two decades of the 21st
century. One rationalization cites a war
declared since shortly after September 11,
2001, and subsequent expenditures of trillions
of dollars fighting the global war on terror
(Filkins, 2008). Historically and culturally,
wartime curricula tend to be efficiently func-
tional, punitively regimented, explicitly patri-
otic, and limited in financial resources as well
as educational scope. The educational and
social goals of personal and cognitive growth
for students are treated as secondary to serv-
ing the country and, correspondingly, the
needs of the military/industrial complex.
Additionally, under the pretext of global
economic warfare, business interests have
dominated the school curriculum as never
before. Increasingly, billionaire gover-
nors and multi-billionaire big city mayors,
and even Presidents, have instituted a new
19
Philip M. Anderson
austerity regarding both public policy and
public spending. Studies and subsequent pol-
icies conducted through the lens of business
rationales now determine social and educa-
tional services, usually by the reduction of
resources under the rubric of efficiency. These
free market ideologues see the world through
a Social Darwinian lens, with winners (them)
and losers (everyone else, but especially
those with different value systems).
The business-centric policy model in
vogue demands economic research, and the
most influential educational policy books
published since 2001 have been written by
economists (Harris, 2011). The work of
these economists provides the basic ration-
ale promoting ‘value-added education’
(VAE) which undergirds the student and
teacher standardized testing movement of
the past two decades. VAE policy seeks to
link teacher evaluation strictly to student test
scores. From 2009–16, employees of Silicon
Valley pioneer and multi-billionaire Bill
Gates and his Gates Foundation served in
 THE READER, THE TEXT, THE RESTRAINTS
President Barack Obama’s U.S. Department
of Education, promoting teacher and student
testing driven by VAE as a pillar of the Race
to the Top reform initiative (Gates, 2013). In
response, questions about the VAE approach
as policy were raised in a letter to the White
House as early as October 2009 by the
National Academies’ Division of Behavioral
and Social Sciences and Education, Board on
Testing and Assessment (Haertel, 2009).
Much of this change of educational policy
has been accomplished outside the normal
democratic process. Parents, professionals,
and teacher organizations have been left out
of the policy and pedagogy discussion, and a
veritable civil war is being conducted against
teaching professionals and their unions.
Charter schools and voucher systems are
being established and funded by hedge-fund
managers and their ilk as an alternative to
public education and its attendant democratic
goals. As have most presidential candidates
in the United States since 1980, current and
hopeful elected officials are building their
political campaigns on educational ‘reform’,
seeking to undermine school law and teacher
professionalism.
Control of schools has shifted from citizen-
driven local school boards to gubernatorial
and mayoral control of both budget and
policies. The centerpiece of 21st-century
reactionary reform, the Common Core
State Standards (CCSS) originated with
state officials asking business councils what
they believe students should know and be
able to do upon high school graduation.
The state-sponsored reform curricula were
then constructed formally and logically in
response to those goals, tossing out a century
of developmental and social psychological
research as well as professionally established
and validated curriculum and pedagogy.
The standardized test has regained promi-
nence, having been re-established as the cen-
tral component of the ‘No Child Left Behind’
educational law, the 2002 re-branding of the
federal Elementary and Secondary Education
Act (ESEA). These now increasingly high
119
stakes tests are ideologically constructed
around the limitations of the wartime cur-
riculum, in some cases restricted to essential
mathematics and literal comprehension of
text as minimum standards.
Disturbingly, these common core/core
knowledge tests promote an anti-pedagogy
stance in which ‘proficient’ test scores are
authorized to justify any sort of method.
The ends justify the means, however lim-
ited, anti-humanistic, or oppressive. Citizen
revolt against common core testing has been
significant, but the resolution in a majority
of states has been a simple re-branding of
the common core as Next Generation
Learning Standards, with the Congress
finally passing the toothless Every Student
Succeeds Act, effectively removing fed-
eral oversight of states (U.S. Department of
Education, 2015).
The political war is also a cover for the
cultural war in which the New Right intends
the total destruction of liberal, humanistic,
and progressive modes of thought, critical
participatory action, and democratic educa-
tional rationales. Revolutionary thinkers on
the Left are treated as treasonous, and liberal
tendencies are represented as dangerous to
the common good. In schools, revolutionary
pedagogy, such as Paulo Freire’s ‘education
as the practice of freedom’, articulated first
in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970: 69) is
ignored, vilified, or even outlawed by educa-
tional authorities – see Rochester (2003) for
a representative New Right critique of critical
pedagogy and schooling.
Democratic goals for the education of the
citizenry, even that centerpiece of progressive
schooling, ‘civics’, have been pushed aside
for elemental and limiting skills instruction
and punishment-focused testing. All of the
elements of the ‘culture of silence’ that Freire
argued was the goal of oppressive education
have been overtaking US educational prac-
tice and goals.
The key observation about the role of lan-
guage and thought in democratic education
lies in Freire’s argument about generative
120 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
themes and critical pedagogy in Pedagogy of
the Oppressed:
Consistent with the liberating purpose of dialogical
education, the object of the investigation is not
men (as if men were anatomical fragments), but
rather the thought-language with which men refer
to reality, the levels at which they perceive that
reality, and their view of the world, in which their
generative themes are found. (Freire, 1970: 86)
In opposition to this democratic goal, the
New Right ideology seeks to limit both con-
tent and form (and even behavior) in citizens’
reading and writing, as well as the socio-
psycholinguistic development of students,
regardless of the communicative or perform-
ative medium.
In restrictive and controlling times, history
becomes propaganda as nationalism trumps
humanism; citizenship education centers on
responsibilities rather than individual rights;
students are represented, and treated, as either
workers or soldiers; science and technology
are fused together; and the arts are either
narrowly patriotic or censored, but mostly
neglected as non-essential. Applying wartime
logic to the literacy and literature curricula,
official policy replaces the developmental
richness, and joys, of reading and responding
to literature with ‘fact-based’, text-centered,
efficient, and ‘correct’ comprehension of
non-fiction informational text.
At the root of the fight for democracy
and humanistic education are these com-
peting visions of the nature and practice of
literacy. The culture of silence promoted by
the New Right intends to eliminate paths of
thought allowing or encouraging what demo-
cratic thinkers see as a necessary language
of critique (Giroux, 1983; Shor, 1992). The
extended implications of Freire’s praxis can
be found in the interpretations of Giroux
(1988) and Darder (2017), and Donaldo
Macedo’s groundbreaking work in critical
literacy (Freire and Macedo, 1987). At the
classroom level, this philosophical grounding
has been followed by what has been deemed
the New Literacies, with a focus on social
learning and new media, popularly illustrated
in the work of Colin Lankshear and Michele
Knobel (2011; McLaren & Lankshear, 1994).
The New Literacies movement accounts
for social learning within evolving tech-
nologies, and stands as a necessary correc-
tive to the failures, or simple exclusion from
schools, of media education since the 1960s.
However, the New Literacies view of the his-
tory of literacy practices, like many recent
pedagogy and curriculum models, bypasses
the central century-long argument about the
nature of language and literacy in the soci-
olinguistic and cognitive development of
children and adolescents within advanced
industrial and post-industrial societies. Even
critical participation in social media can be
detrimental to social growth if it promotes
only social realism as a political condition.
A literacy curriculum must include literature
and allow for the explicit forms of aesthetic
thought necessary to humanism. Humanism
is a precondition of democratic living accord-
ing to both John Dewey and Paulo Freire.
Brian Street (2003) recognized the theoret-
ical problem with the New Literacies at the
beginning of this century. Little in the way
of satisfactory theorizing has been produced
since, with most of the pedagogical practice,
as Street pointed out in 2003, focusing on
naturalistic assumptions of cognitive growth
through language use in a variety of media.
In the research that has been accomplished,
the general need for a multiple strand theory
is now recognized. However, the search for
new literacy theories ignores the available
complex theories and established practices
that have been submerged by the ideological
attacks on democratic schooling, and creativ-
ity and the arts in general, beginning in the
1980s.
There is a clear reciprocal connection
between the cognitive-developmental socio-
psycholinguistic growth of children and
adolescents and the socio-political aims of
critical pedagogy, but neither approach, nor
its practices, guarantees the other will be
accomplished. The explicit ideology, and the
 THE READER, THE TEXT, THE RESTRAINTS
concomitant theories, need to be articulated for
coherent theory and practice. Any number of
developmental approaches are anti-progressive
pedagogically, especially those from behavio-
ral and cognitive science models, while a num-
ber of critical literacy approaches assume the
adult learner, rather than the child or adoles-
cent, as a precondition for the pedagogy.
Many current approaches to literacy devel-
opment and literary reading undermine, or
even eliminate, the arts and humanities ele-
ments of human learning and growth. An
alarming number of thinkers at both ends of
the political continuum do not recognize the
arts and the aesthetic, the poetic in language
or the literary work of art, as essential ele-
ments in human growth and social thought.
The current school culture war began
20 years before 9/11. One of the central tenets
of this cultural war is an attack on the literary
reading of children and adolescents and an
assault on progressive views of the literature
curriculum necessary to democratic school-
ing. The stakes of the past 40 years have been
lost in current political debate and covered
over by the cultural distractions of the New
Media. Those who cannot learn from the
past are condemned to repeat it, as a num-
ber of insightful thinkers of various stripes
have reminded us. An historical review of
the Reagan Revolution is a necessary starting
point for recapturing Ariadne’s thread to lead
us out of the labyrinth.
THE EDUCATION REPORTS
OF THE 1980S
While the wartime curriculum accounts for
many limitations of current policy and prac-
tice, its rationale and implementation actu-
ally disguise the fundamental assault on the
public schools of the past 40 years. There
was another war declared at the dawn of the
1980s that defines and promotes the crisis of
schooling to this day. This culture war, epito-
mized in the United States today by President
121
Trump’s Twitter and political rally pronounce-
ments, originates with the presidential elec-
tion of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The
reactionary element of the Reagan Revolution
in the following decades rejected the liberal
progressive regulations and civil rights legis-
lation enacted in the 1960s. Older reactionar-
ies, such as President Reagan himself, sought
to eradicate all social change since Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s progressive reforms
reaching back to 1932, including Social
Security.
Notably, Reagan ran on a campaign
promise to close, even before it officially
opened, the newly established cabinet-level
Department of Education. He chose the first
Secretary of Education, Terrel Bell of Utah,
to oversee the destruction of the department.
Ultimately, and unfortunately, the Department
of Education instead became the home base
for attacks on US public education, a pro-
cess superintended by Bell and an 18-mem-
ber National Commission on Excellence in
Education (NCEE). In time, throughout the
Reagan and Bush 41 years (1981–93), the
department became a haven for neo-cons
such as William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, and
Chester Finn, as well as Christian conserva-
tives such as Gary Bauer, all of whom served
assistant secretary appointments within the
department.
The first salvo, the 1983 NCEE report,
A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for
Educational Reform, opened with a charge of
treason against public school officials, pro-
fessors and teachers: ‘If an unfriendly foreign
power had attempted to impose on America
the mediocre educational performance that
exists today, we might well have viewed it as
an act of war’ (Gardner, 1983). And so, here
begins the war metaphor that carries through
the ensuing cultural feuds. A Nation at Risk
became the blueprint for destroying progres-
sive educational policy and its practitioners.
Numerous conservative writers hitched their
wagons to the reactionary reform move-
ment and the subsequent amalgam of books,
reports, and polemical writings evolved into
122 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
the defining assumptions still operating offi-
cially and unofficially today.
Beyond the US progressive tradition,
the New Right conservatives were resisting
what they came to call, ‘foreign ideology’.
Revolutionary pedagogues, such as Paulo
Freire, were especially suspect. At the heart
of progressive revolution being introduced to
US schools at that time, in the published writ-
ing of Freire and his followers, was the subject
of literacy and the teacher’s role in promoting
dialogical critical discourse into classrooms.
Much of the Reagan-era conservative reform
movement promoted a nationalist agenda with
American culture at the center. The phrase,
‘what every American needs to know’, first
popularized in E. D. Hirsch’s (1987) Cultural
Literacy, became a precondition of curricular
discussion. Reading and literacy arguments
from the New Right played out within those
patriotic categories, which also masqueraded a
number of limiting and controlling pedagogies.
All these years later, the literacy curricu-
lum remains the frontline battlefield in the
culture wars. Conservatives initially appeared
to focus on policies, positions, and diatribes
regarding early reading, playing out the end-
less fight over the role of phonics within the
reading curriculum for children. While that
tussle generated reams of loud argument eve-
rywhere from Congress to the local newspa-
per, regressive proposals for the adolescent
literature curriculum were quietly turning
back the clock on literary studies and literary
reading. Three prevailing policy trends in the
1980s reports disclose the nature of the shift
in the curriculum:
1 the separation of literature from writing;
2 curriculum design premised on selection of texts
rather than teaching methodology or reading
practice; and
3 restricting literature to an interdisciplinary
humanities core with an emphasis on cultural
knowledge.
The cumulative effect was that the definition
of literacy, and even the definition of litera-
ture, changed dramatically in the 1980s. Over
the next several decades these assumptions
about curriculum and assessment in literature
study took over official policy, while class-
room pedagogy was ignored or reduced to an
afterthought. Tellingly, the general anti-­
pedagogy discourse replaces the educational
category of ‘curriculum and instruction’ with
‘curriculum and assessment’, eliminating
teaching from the equation. And, most dis-
turbingly, many of the progressive reactions
of the past several decades, though in political
opposition, assume that the curricular impera-
tives the conservatives have specified.
The most widely quoted and influential
reports in the 1980s, representing a range of
ideologies, included A Place Called School
(Goodlad, 1984), High School (Boyer, 1983),
and The Paideia Program (Adler, 1983).
The efforts of Reagan’s second Secretary of
Education, William Bennett, as official rep-
resentative of the federal initiative, shaped
the curriculum debate (What Works, 1987).
Various professional organization reports such
as The Humanities in Precollegiate Education,
the Yearbook of the National Society for the
Study of Education (Ladner, 1984), and the
Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development’s Redefining General Education
in the American High School (Roberts and
Cawelti, 1984) factored into the discussion.
A frequently quoted book within the
reform movement was Horace’s Compromise
(1985), by Theodore Sizer, a member of the
Paideia Group but also part of another reform
faction, The Study of American High Schools.
While Sizer’s ideas on the secondary school
literature curriculum can be found in the vari-
ous Paideia Group reports, his ultimate con-
tribution is ‘essential’ schooling, embodied
by the slogan: ‘Less is More’. Essentialism’s
continuing influence can be seen in every-
thing from budget to curriculum to pedagogy
to standardized testing in current policy.
What is most pertinent here regarding
the literature curriculum depicted in 1980s
school reports is how each one starts by
ignoring six decades of research and prac-
tice regarding adolescent reading. The rise
 THE READER, THE TEXT, THE RESTRAINTS
of new publishing categories such as Young
Adult (YA) literature, or student-centered,
experiential reading pedagogies and curricu-
lum developed since the 1930s (and amplified
during the 1960s), were discounted in favor
of a text-centered, adult-focused cultural her-
itage model. Eventually, an anti-pedagogy,
or pseudo-pedagogy, developed, legitimated
as ‘cultural literacy’, which came to define
the rationale for the retrogressive practice.
Pedagogically, what is most striking is the sep-
aration of literature from language study and
the treatment of literature as cultural informa-
tion rather than aesthetic experience.
Regarding the study and reading of lit-
erature, all of the 1980s education reports,
despite their specific political stances, could
have been written by the same committee.
John Goodlad, in A Place Called School,
sought to include ‘humankind’s disciplined
ways of knowing’ as the core of the school’s
curriculum (1984: 336). He cites as his model
the 1945 Harvard report, General Education
in a Free Society, a report that advocates a
humanities approach, separating literature
out from the integrated English curriculum
and into the domain of cultural studies. The
Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development report also appears to plant its
roots in the Harvard report, separating litera-
ture study from language skills and putting
it into cultural studies (Roberts and Cawelti,
1984: 8).
Mortimer Adler’s Paideia Group promoted
a cultural heritage approach to reading, even
including a list of culturally approved read-
ings in the Appendix to the Paideia Program
(1983). Adler, of course, was the origina-
tor, with Robert Maynard Hutchins, of the
Great Books curriculum, whose ideology
even reaches children through their Junior
Great Books. Fellow Paideia Group member,
Theodore Sizer, in Horace’s Compromise,
would abolish English as a subject altogether,
replacing it with ‘Inquiry and Expression’
and ‘Cultural Studies’ (1985: 132).
Ernest Boyer’s High School puts
English language skills at the center of the
123
curriculum, placing emphasis on the teach-
ing of composition (1983: 90–1). He stands
as anti-textbook and, though not proposing
a national Great Books curriculum, decries
the lack of ‘great literature’ in the schools.
He then endorses a cultural heritage curricu-
lum while referencing mostly adult c­ lassics
written before 1900 (ibid.: 312, 95–7).
Boyer speaks specifically of a required core:
‘All students, through a study of literature,
should discover our common literary herit-
age’. Additionally, while he thinks students
should ‘learn about the power and beauty of
the written word’, he articulates it as ‘learn
about’, rather than ‘experience’ (ibid.:
303). The National Society for the Study of
Education (NSSE) Yearbook, Part II, The
Humanities in Precollegiate Education,
places literature study emphatically in the
cultural heritage category, with chapters on
both cultural literacy and the Paideia pro-
posal (Ladner, 1984).
Remarkably, Part I of the 1984 NSSE
Yearbook, Becoming Readers in a Complex
Society, stresses the socio-psycholinguistic
and developmental models of reading,
including response-centered literature study
(Purves and Niles, 1984). Crucially, the two
volumes of the 1984 NSSE Yearbook appear
as antidotes to one another, highlighting
the disparity between reading scholars’ and
researchers’ policy recommendations and
those of the national political reports. In the
end, contrary to professional practice and
writing, most of the conservative and neo-
con reform reports seem to endorse the pri-
mary worth of literature study as a historical
record of cultural beliefs, or as an instiller
of moral character. And, while those goals
seem ‘commonsense’, and were promoted
as democratic, the ideology of these reports
is almost fatally damaging to progressive
education.
As Berliner and Biddle demonstrate in The
Manufactured Crisis (1996), and Gresson
et al. argue in Measured Lies (1997), the
reform reports were never about improv-
ing education, but re-engineering US social
124 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
policy. While the basic school reports look
innocuous on the surface, many other writ-
ings of the time promoted a racist or nativist
agenda tied to ‘what every American needs
to know’ (Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, 1987;
Cheney, American Memory, 1987) or ersatz
tests of nationalist historical knowledge that
seemed to ‘prove’ the failure of US schools
(Ravitch and Finn, What Do Our 17-Year-Olds
Know?, 1988). Also, there seems little doubt
that the current historically high segregation
of US schooling, and the repressive current
high stakes testing policies, are emphatically
affected by neo-eugenics writing such as The
Bell Curve (1994). Penned by the Heritage
Foundation’s Charles Murray and Harvard’s
animal researcher and Skinnerian psycholo-
gist, Richard Herrnstein, this volume sought
to demonstrate that certain ‘races’ were supe-
rior, on average, to others based on IQ testing.
President Donald Trump, a professed Social
Darwinist (who frequently mentions IQ as
a standard), presently encourages a popular
acceptance of these biases.
HIGH CULTURE AND CULTURAL
LITERACY
The socio-cultural rationale for literature
study in schools found in these 1980s reports
was originally established by the arguments
of Matthew Arnold, a 19th-century English
author and teacher employed as one of Her
Majesty’s School Inspectors. Arnold argued
the purpose of literature study was initiation
into, and furtherance of, high culture, exem-
plifying the best writings and ideas of western
civilization. His rationale, articulated in the
classic Culture and Anarchy (1869), reasoned
that the new industrialized world, seemingly
less informed by the old morality of religion,
needed to find new means to promote social
and ethical standards.
As his title Culture and Anarchy sug-
gests, civilization itself was at stake. Arnold
was clear about the political consequences
of culture: ‘culture begets a dissatisfaction
which is of the highest possible value in stem-
ming the common tide of men’s thoughts in
a wealthy and industrial society’ (1869: 52).
Culture and Anarchy, as one might expect,
devolves into an attack on democracy in its
closing arguments; tellingly, the argument
also appears to culturally legitimate west-
ern neo-colonial expansion of the late 19th
century. Arthur Applebee, in Tradition and
Reform in the Teaching of English, contends
that Arnold’s position found favor in the
United States, and, ‘in a very real sense, edu-
cational opportunities were extended because
schooling with its attendant “culture” was
seen as a new agent of social control’ (1974:
23). The political position of the high-culture
argument subordinates individual needs to
the larger requirements and interests of soci-
ety, while the interests of society emanate
from the elites.
The United States’ original canon of high-
cultural texts for secondary school literature
study originated with the National Conference
on Uniform Entrance Requirements in
English, beginning in 1874, aimed at com-
mon content for college entrance examina-
tions. The College Entrance Examination
Board assumed these lists after 1900 and
maintained them until the 1930s. While col-
lege entrance examinations shifted toward
the modern ‘scientific’ Scholastic Aptitude
Test for college admissions after 1930, the
notion of high culture, reinforced by school
anthologies in American and British litera-
ture, maintained the canon for college-bound
adolescent readers.
Only one of the 1980s neo-con and con-
servative reform volumes actually pretends
to address the adolescent reading pedagogy
question. Hirsch, in an influential 1983
American Scholar article endorsed enthu-
siastically by then Secretary of Education,
William Bennett, became the standard bearer
of ‘cultural literacy’. Cultural literacy, as a
method, is predicated on memorizing a pro-
digious store of cultural information as a pre-
requisite to reading literature. Hirsch, in the
 THE READER, THE TEXT, THE RESTRAINTS
pages of The English Journal, defines cultural
literacy as:
the idea that literate people have a stock of shared
background information which enables them to
communicate effectively through reading, writing
and speaking…. It is a census of cultural and natu-
ral information that is often alluded to without
explanation in serious talks, books, and articles.
(Hirsch, 1985: 47)
Hirsch’s subsequent book, Cultural Literacy:
What Every American Needs to Know, pro-
vides exactly such specific information, in
convenient list form. Profits from this 1987
book, now past its 30th printing, are funneled
through the Core Knowledge Foundation,
which currently provides curriculum and
resources and manages its own school net-
work to promote its overall goals. Evaluation
in this model involves a standardized demon-
stration of literary knowledge, defined as
cultural information. Cultural literacy repre-
sents an atomized, de-contextualized, philo-
sophically vulgarized neo-Arnoldian view of
literature study.
Hirsch, an English professor, makes a
case for the approach as a reflection of ‘prior
knowledge’ research from cognitive science,
but he clearly has no interest in developmen-
tal psychology nor socio-psycholinguistics.
He reveals his operant behavioral science
assumptions by comparing the developing
human brain to a computer hard drive where
information is stored and retrieved. Anti-
pedagogically, the list of cultural knowledge
is presented as a prerequisite to reading, as a
necessary prior knowledge which must be
memorized before the act of reading for com-
prehension or, in behavioral terms, ‘recall’.
This parallels the discredited ‘correct gram-
mar must be learned before students will
be allowed to write’ approach to composi-
tion. Cultural literacy, as a self-contradictory
school practice, sets formal conditions of
knowledge as prerequisites to pursuing natu-
ralistic language skills and expression.
The cultural literacy approach, like the
older cultural heritage model it apes, sees
125
methodology as a moot point, since memo-
rizing the cultural content of the text is the
focus of learning. The cultural literacy ration-
ale discounts or simplifies the developmental
and socio-psychological goals of learning
and development and, further, its general
educational argument engenders a moral
imperative. It appears to represent a variation
on 19th-century memorization of extracts
from a text (meant to ‘exercise’ the brain) as
the school’s goal for students, ignoring the
students’ experience of reading the text.
While the methodological problems of
cultural literacy are of paramount con-
cern to teachers, the philosophical basis
of the cultural literacy model is also sus-
pect. Methodologically, the cultural literacy
approach is a reaction against experiential
reading and developmental notions of lan-
guage and cognitive development. Broadly,
all these 1980s reactionary efforts seek to
replace the aesthetic experience of literary
reading with the accumulation of cultural
information. The role of aesthetics in litera-
ture, and the human arts within the culture
itself, is ignored.
A memorable exchange about this larger
question occurred at the University of Chicago
in 1934. The college had famously established
a required reading list, modestly branded The
Great Books of the Western World. Invited by
Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein was sched-
uled to speak at Chicago and, as part of her
visit, was entertained by the Great Books’
founders, Mortimer Adler and the University
of Chicago’s President, Robert Maynard
Hutchins. After, the two explained the Great
Books curriculum and method to Stein, as
reported by Wilder biographer, Linda Simon:
Gertrude was upset … because all [the books and
discussion] dealt with ‘sociological or government
ideas’. … As she became more excited, she
focused on Adler, and began lecturing him on
what she thought were truly great ideas….
‘On the contrary, Miss Stein,’ Adler told her, ‘there
is more on one page of Adam Smith’s Wealth of
Nations than in all of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Statistics tell more than poetry’.
126 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

‘Nonsense, young man,’ she replied, … ‘There is
more on one page of Paradise Lost than in all of
the Wealth of Nations!’.
(Simon, 1979: 106–7)
Everything about the Great Books and the
cultural literacy prospective offers evidence
of that statement’s veracity.

The record of this exchange remains as clear

evidence of the anti-literary function of the THE ART(S) OF READING
Great Books. Adler’s insistence that ‘statis-
AND DEMOCRACY
tics tell more than poetry’, could be the
mantra of reactionary efforts to transform the
The history of literacy represents a small part
school curriculum, K–16, and beyond. The
of the evolution of humans. Though we have
current core curriculum state standards show
evidence of symbols and signs made by pre-
minimal interest in literature or literary read-
historic humans, the actual period of written
ing as an art. The adolescent reader and the
symbols roughly noted as alphabetic is only
reader’s agency are missing from the current
several thousand years (Manguel, 1996). The
testable common core curriculum goals.
age of the mass-printed book, McLuhan’s
The overwhelming western focus and
Gutenberg galaxy, dates roughly from ad
Caucasian male bias in the authors selected
1450 to the present, barely a half-millennium
for the Great Books curriculum is politically
(1962). During that time, up until the dawn
worrisome, but the cultural assassination at
of modern nation states, social and cultural
the center of the Great Books as a replace-
laws demanded the withholding of even
ment for literary study is anti-human at its
simple literacy from the lower socio-­economic
core. Adler subsequently went to the trou-
classes.
ble of writing a best-selling volume entitled,
In the modern industrial age of the past
How to Read a Book (1940), which outlined
several centuries, the literacy now required by
the ‘proper’ approach to reductively analyz-
the working classes has been a controlled and
ing and comprehending a book. The method
limited literacy. Literacy necessary to do work
lacks any sense of literary response or aes-
has been prized over, and mostly to the exclu-
thetic consideration, or human emotion, as
sion of, other purposes and forms of literate
part and parcel of reading literature. And, sig-
behavior. As the influential British sociolo-
nificantly, Adler goes to great lengths here,
gist, Raymond Williams has observed:
and in other books, to attack John Dewey’s
educational philosophy as well as psycho- [T]he ruling class decided to teach working people
logical constructions of pedagogy and curric- to read but not to write. It was argued that if they
ulum. He rails against experiential learning could read they could understand new kinds of
instructions, and moreover, they could read the Bible
in particular, especially student-centered
for moral improvement. They did not need writing,
responses to texts. however, since they would have no orders or instruc-
The philosopher Suzanne Langer, one tions or lessons to communicate. (Williams, 1975:
of the few American philosophers outside 131; see also 1965)
of John Dewey to focus on the educational
­curriculum, wisely observed in Feeling and Further, since the 17th century, the Protestant
Form: tradition required basic literacy for reading
the vernacular-language Bible. The Bible lit-
Literature is one of the great arts, and is more eracy of the US Puritan tradition, dating to
widely taught and studied than any other, yet its the so-called Old Deluder Law of 1647 was
artistic character is more often avowed than really
necessary to salvation among these Christian
discerned and respected. [Ironically, she argues,] [t]
he reason why literature is a standard academic dissenters, while not including general liter-
pursuit lies in the very fact that one can treat it as acy as a goal. This cultural choice marked the
something else than art. (Langer, 1953: 208) beginning of controlled literacy in the United
 THE READER, THE TEXT, THE RESTRAINTS
States, a tradition that still holds today. That
tradition has been carried through the cultural
heritage model of Matthew Arnold in the
1870s, the cultural literacy model of the
1980s, and the current Neo-Puritanism. (In
our Orwellian Age, the conservatives are now
trying to co-opt ‘Neo-Puritanism’ as a label
for liberal and progressive social justice phi-
losophies and policies; the connection to the
original Puritans is retained in this work.)
Most literacy schemes for schools,
only sometimes including an articulated
curriculum, remain controlled curriculum
and anti-pedagogy, primarily serving as a
means for limiting literacy. Ominously, the
21st-century conservatively constructed
literacy curriculum is not merely defining or
shaping the cultural thrust of literature but
trying to enforce one sort of literacy in place
of other possibilities. Current repressive
policy explicitly rejects student experience
in favor of the authority of the text. Literacy
education has become as ‘abstinence only’
as sex education. Thankfully, as Raymond
Williams has noted: ‘There is no way to
teach a man to read the Bible which does
not also allow him to read the radical press’
(1975: 131).
Controlled literacy seems a futile effort,
unless the planners include censorship as a
key component of the model. In fact, most of
the current state standards movement is tied
to the ideology of core knowledge, a limiting
structure of knowledge. Core knowledge is a
self-contradictory restrictive construct, again,
a ‘less is more’ proposition. Moreover, in
21st-century Neo-Puritan, wartime America,
efficiency dictates resources only for cultural
content and textual information. So, the cul-
tural literacy model holds sway over literature,
justified because the art(s) of literary reading
are constructed as non-essential.
In democracies, there exists a set of recip-
rocal cultural interests that center on the
individual and the pursuit of happiness. This
evolutionary goal constructs reading as part
of human development: linguistic, cognitive,
and emotive as well as political and social,
127
and cultural. Books are also made to be
read for pleasure, a fraught word in Puritan-
inflected America. In a humanistic and demo-
cratic world, books are frequently read out of
personal interests and perceived need. Self-
selection, and self-interest, takes its rightful
place alongside required, common readings
in a democratic system of schooling.
And, as many writers have insisted, the
personal is a necessary condition for free-
dom. Ray Bradbury presents the definitive
post-WWII argument in Fahrenheit 451
(1953), one of the eternal texts about the
role of literature in society. Accordingly, in
the introduction to the 60th anniversary edi-
tion of Bradbury’s classic, the author Neil
Gaiman addresses the central problem with
essentialist and Puritan systems of reading:
If someone tells you what a story is about, they are
probably right.
If they tell you that that is all the story is about,
they are very definitely wrong. (2013: xii)
In the end, ‘one-best-way’ is a restrictive
ideological construct. Multiple approaches
and multiple meanings define the educational
needs of the developing human, and human
experience is at the center of education and
growth. Less is not more, but simply not
enough. Out of multiple meanings comes the
need, and pleasure, of the Freirean dialogical
model of learning.
Historically, the cultural goal of produc-
ing individual, proactive humans had gained
currency along with democratic ideals. The
progressive idea of reading as experience
evolves directly from John Dewey’s writings
on experiential education, work that defines
democratic processes of schooling. The range
of literacy, and the range of response to lit-
erature, is defined by the political stance of
the school system within the culture. The
Neo-Puritan reactionary core knowledge cur-
riculum and limited assessment policy places
students outside knowledge, fashioning stu-
dents as passive consumers in a punitive,
restrictive system.
128 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
During the 1930s, the Progressive Education
Association (PEA) promoted Dewey’s notions
of experiential learning which subsequently
transformed reading instruction. The highlight
of that effort was a PEA-commissioned book,
Louise Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration
(1938). Now in its 5th edition, published by
the Modern Language Association (1995),
Literature as Exploration articulates the prin-
ciples of democratic practice when applied to
reading, in particular, literary texts. The argu-
ment for literary reading as the participatory
engagement of the reader became a prime
component of democratic schooling and citi-
zenship. Rosenblatt’s theory, supported by
extensive research in the field on developing
readers, the social and psychological inven-
tion of adolescence, and the rise of public and
school libraries, redefined the questions sur-
rounding reading literature in schools.
Rosenblatt’s later development of what
became the transactional model of reading in
The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978) sum-
marizes supporting socio-psycholinguistic
research, clearly distinguishing between an
efferent reading stance associated with get-
ting information from a text and an aesthetic
reading stance focused on entering into the
world of the text. The pedagogy of the trans-
actional model is a marker of its intent, both
for the curriculum decisions and the class-
room teacher’s actions (see ‘What Facts Does
this Poem Teach You?’, Rosenblatt, 1980).
Developmentally, both stances of reading,
seen as a complementary continuum of expe-
rience, are necessary for the development
of literacy. Literacy is an essential construct
of education when the developing child and
adolescent engages a range of reading stances
with both vicarious and life experiences.
This democratic vision of the literature
curriculum has been the object of conserva-
tive derision over the decades. The reaction
to democratic reading practice starts as early
as the 1920s with the New Humanists, cen-
tered on Irving Babbitt (1924), who blamed
the child-centered Romantic philosophy of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the decline of
western civilization. Adler and Hutchins’
Great Books curriculum was promoted as a
direct reaction to progressive schooling ideas.
Democratic goals were upended once again
by the Sputnik Crisis of 1958, reinforced by
the National Defense Education Act. The
Cold War social shift of patriotic fervor that
followed sent young people to Vietnam and
middle-class folks to building bomb shelters,
while schools sought to find and train gifted
scientists for national defense. Ultimately,
the humanistic revolution of the 1960s served
as a reaction against that repressive time.
The latest revival of the democratic, com-
prehensive approach to literacy, the root of
sophisticated research pursued in the second
half of the 20th century, was instigated in 1966
when scholars from the United States, the UK,
and commonwealth nations convened at what
became known as the Dartmouth Conference.
North Americans were introduced to the work
of the great British language researcher James
Britton and his Institute of Education col-
leagues at the University of London. Central to
their work, for pedagogical purposes, was the
notion of language play and the importance of
drama and oral language performance for lan-
guage development, particularly in elementary
classrooms. Significantly, this ‘language in the
classroom’ approach reconnected oral and writ-
ten language instruction in schools, improving
reading and writing pedagogy and student lan-
guage performance in all social classes.
As reported in books summarizing that
work, such as Language and Learning
(Britton, 1970), Language, The Learner and
the School (Barnes et al., 1971), and The
Development of Writing Abilities, (11–18)
(Britton et. al, 1975), the researchers and
their pedagogical colleagues at the National
Association for the Teaching of English
(NATE) developed new comprehensive lan-
guage curricula and multimodal literacy
pedagogies that returned reading and writing
to reciprocal practice in schools. The recon-
nection of the oral and the textual brought the
naturalistic development of language back to
the center of the curriculum. The students’
 THE READER, THE TEXT, THE RESTRAINTS
experience was a center point of the peda-
gogy. The curriculum moved beyond school-
based formalism and connected the world
of children and adolescents to the work of
school and society.
This progressive political element worked
against social class-biased formalism in the
post-war period (1946–66), when English
language schooling intended to supplant the
students’ oral language skills and habits,
rather than draw on the sophisticated gram-
mar in use the students had learned as tod-
dlers before even attending school. School
practice assumed that the oral language skills
of the students were inherently deficient and
interfered with learning to write and speak
‘correctly’. In those days, one could still hear
professionals insisting that the study of Latin,
available in most public schools, was neces-
sary to literacy development.
Furthermore, the traditional, official trends
in the post-war period privileged reading
over writing, with very little attention to
actual writing. Even the SAT’s writing meas-
ure, Test of Standard Written English, was a
multiple-choice grammar and usage test. The
social assumption was the same that had been
applied to the working classes since the begin-
ning of universal literacy in the industrial rev-
olution. Workers needed to read instructions,
but it was not necessary for them to respond
in writing or to publish their thoughts in a way
that could organize the workers.
James Britton and colleagues shifted the
pedagogical task to the reciprocal relation-
ship between reading and writing, especially
in a developmental context, shifting agency
from the text to the learner, re-thinking and
expanding the task of writing with ‘cor-
rect’ grammar to an emphasis on audience
and purpose of the writing determined by
personal and social expectations. This func-
tional approach to language produced peda-
gogies that expanded and defined the notions
of common language skills in a free society.
Writing across the curriculum, writing as
process, treating plays as drama and perfor-
mance rather than treating them as reading
129
texts, reading books for pleasure, all lim-
ited or absent in the traditional curriculum,
became commonsense and expected catego-
ries of language instruction.
At the elementary - and middle school
level, the revolution also centered on the use
of children’s and young adult literature as
an essential part of reading instruction. The
official formal model still emphasized basal
readers: controlled, scientifically constructed
texts based on assumptions of difficulty with
‘comprehension’ questions. Children’s litera-
ture was seen as a pleasant diversion, but not
the focus of instruction. The British model
brought children’s and young adult literature
into the curricular mainstream. In the years
since, it has been reported that sales of chil-
dren’s and young adult books carry the costs
of producing and selling the adult books for
many publishers today, reflecting the grand
transformation of children’s, and their par-
ents’, reading interests.
One of the unintended consequences of the
economic growth of children’s and young adult
books is that some of the best authors since
the Victorian period are writing children’s and
young adult literature. J. K. Rowling’s already
immortal Harry Potter series could not find a
US publisher for years. A progressive educa-
tional publisher, Scholastic, published Harry
Potter and has seen its fortunes rise right along
with Rowling’s. A company committed to pow-
erful reading for kids now has the economic
resources to promote the value of literary read-
ing for all. Importantly, as a sign of cultural
significance, the second-generation CEO of
Scholastic, Dick Robinson, received the 2017
National Book Award Foundation’s ‘Literarian
Award for Outstanding Service to the American
Literary Community’ (Maher, 2017).
Looking back at the socio-psycholinguistic
work of James Britton in Language and
Learning and the collaboratively published,
The Development of Writing of Writing
Abilities (11–18), the reader finds that one
of the key components to holistic language
development is what this research calls the
poetic function. This function is the aesthetic
130 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
mode of language and thinking that Suzanne
Langer is concerned with in her philosophi-
cal work on the arts. This is the aesthetic
mode that Louise Rosenblatt requires for
democratic reading. James Britton and col-
leagues distinguished between transactional
writing aimed at communicating information
and poetic writing aimed at creating a rep-
resentation of experience. Both stances, in
reciprocal relation to one another, are neces-
sary for comprehensive literacy instruction,
and linguistic and cognitive growth.
A myriad of language and literacy theo-
reticians and researchers are connected to
Britton and Rosenblatt’s work both in time and
ideas. Freire’s Brazilian exiled fellow-traveler,
Augusto Boal, developed his theories of demo-
cratic theater in the same philosophical context,
the theory reported in Theatre of the Oppressed
(1979) and the pedagogy in Games for Actors
and Non-Actors (1992). That work informed
and was informed by Dorothy Heathcote’s
work in England, which affected the expansion
of language play and drama in the classroom
promoted by James Britton and colleagues’
school praxis (Wagner, 1999). Her work with
prisoners shaped Daniel Fader’s work with
incarcerated youth which inspired Hooked on
Books (1968), which transformed literacy prac-
tice in the United States. Connections between
Britton’s notion of ‘expressive discourse’
and Lev Vygotsky’s ‘inner speech’ undergird
much of the progressive language practice as
it developed during those times (Britton, 1976;
Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). The pioneering work
by D. W. Winnicott (Playing and Reality, 1971)
influenced both role-playing and the artistic
play necessary to the larger linguistic and cul-
tural goals.
NEO-PURITAN ANTI-PEDAGOGY AND
MULTIMODAL DEMOCRATIC LITERACY
The response to this triumph of educational
theory and practice in our current reactionary
era is to remove all of those elements from
the current classroom. Reactionaries accom-
plish this abstinence through neglect, open
hostility, and restricted high stakes common
core testing. And, censorship lies both in con-
tent and in method. The common core test
favors only one variety of reading. The latest
high stakes tests tied to the Common Core
State Standards Initiatives (2009) overtly pro-
mote ‘text-based comprehension of informa-
tion’ over literary response. Here are the Key
Shifts in English Language Arts highlighted
on the CCSS Initiative official website (italics
here indicate underlining in original text):
1 Regular practice with complex texts and their
academic language.
2 Reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evi-
dence from texts, both literary and informational.
3 Building knowledge through content-rich
nonfiction. (CCSS, 2009)
Moreover, so even the casual reader cannot
miss the shift in stance regarding school
practice, the authors provide an explanation
under #2:
Frequently, forms of writing in K–12 have drawn
heavily from student experience and opinion, which
alone will not prepare students for the demands of
college, career, and life…. Rather than asking stu-
dents questions they can answer solely from their
prior knowledge and experience, the standards call
for students to answer questions that depend on
their having read the texts with care. (CCSS, 2009)
Neglecting, or even demonizing, student expe-
rience is a direct assault on progressive peda-
gogy, the distinguishing feature of which is
integrating students’ experiences into their
schooling. Abstinence-only, the CCSS says,
no life experience from the students is neces-
sary. This stance quickly morphs into no expe-
rience with reading and writing, but gathering
information about reading and writing, which
is tested with criteria other than reading and
writing.
The 1980s policy romance of US President
Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher combined and concentrated
conservative political fronts, directly attacking
 THE READER, THE TEXT, THE RESTRAINTS
the Anglo-American progressive education
and its evolution in the 1960s. By the 1980s,
the key professional group for English teach-
ing in the UK, the NATE, was not even invited
to the table when Margaret Thatcher’s gov-
ernment ‘reformed’ the state-sponsored cur-
riculum. And, not insignificantly, Thatcher’s
rise to power came through her work attack-
ing the progressive curriculum in her role
as the UK Minister of Education, where she
paved the way for the reactionary change in
school policies that marked her time in the
Prime Minister’s office.
The anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, anti-
experience conservatives are now in charge.
The recent victories of populist elected leaders
in various Christian-majority countries look
very much like the victories of the religious
right in Muslim-majority countries. In the
United States, 2017 saw the appointment of
a Secretary of Education, another billionaire,
whose own education, and that of her chil-
dren, is limited to attending private schools
affiliated with her conservative religion. It is
unlikely she will promote multiple literacies
as a goal of schooling. Unsurprisingly, she is
an advocate for, and beneficiary of, privatiz-
ing the public system, or at least vouchering
its financing. But in the end, it is the Neo-
Puritanism that is of greater concern.
The literalist, text-focused philosophy
of Neo-Puritanism has consequences well
beyond school practice. The very same argu-
ment informs the current wrangle over the
appointment of federal judges. The ultimate
example of the anti-progressive, ‘literalist/
originalist’ and ‘textualist’ movement in the
United States dwells in a recent appoint-
ment to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch.
Replacing the most infamous of the origi-
nalist and textualist justices, Antonin Scalia,
Gorsuch recently spoke to the conservative
Federalist Society, proclaiming his appoint-
ment as a victory for the influential group
working to pack the federal courts with its
acolytes (Blake, 2017).
The judicial philosophy of The Federalist
Society, and its larger and more influential
131
fellow traveler, The Heritage Society, can be
summarized thusly:
Federalist Society luminaries will tell us judicial
review does not need knowledge or guidance
assembled from legal precedent, legislative history,
social science, natural science, or data science.
Judicial review requires only the inert words cap-
tured in a small, fixed, and dated set of canonical
‘founding’ texts. (Schwartz, 2017)
And, so, limited text-focused reading is more
that limiting access to knowledge for students;
it becomes a rationale for the legal oppression
of US citizens.
In the most progressive schools, many of
them serving the leadership and managerial
socio-economic classes, the rich multimodal
literacy curriculum remains intact, but only
through the efforts of the teaching profes-
sionals and the students’ parents. Increasing
pressure on even those teachers and parents to
focus on the common core curriculum stand-
ards or New Generation Learning Standards
continues, while the less powerful citizens’
children are reduced to studying for the com-
mon core tests as the full extent of their learn-
ing experience in schools. This effect extends
to many of the new charter schools, most of
whom trumpet their allegiance to the notion
of a common core. The common core, with
its abstinence-only focus, remains the politi-
cal measure of success and takes precedence
over other humanistic and social intentions of
education.
In the end, the multimedia universe we
inhabit demands an expansion of literacy that
still accounts for the humanistic complexity of
individual and social learning. The technical
rationality currently informing most school-
based educational technology negates aes-
thetic form and experience in favor of reductive
a curriculum and pedagogy. Regardless of the
delivery system, the Neo-Puritan literalist and
textual literacy teaches the bare minimum.
Given the complexities of multimedia literacy
now shaping our planet, reducing education to
a simple, inadequate text-based literacy is a
threat to democracy as never before.
132 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
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Deleuzeguattarian Concepts for a
Becoming Critical Pedagogy
[C]ritical pedagogy issues a challenge to scholars
and social activists to push the boundaries of
knowledge, to go to new epistemological places,
and to employ the insights gained for the larger
social good. (Kincheloe, 2008b: 10)
It is always a question of freeing life wherever it is
imprisoned, or of tempting it into an uncertain
combat. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 171).
AN EVOLVING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(Freire, 1970/2005) inspired critical move-
ments and works that have proliferated under
the sign of critical pedagogy. Critical
­pedagogy1 emerged in the 1980s as Freire’s
revolutionary philosophy was reformulated
in light of the material and ideological land-
scape of schools, initially in the United
States (Giroux, 1981, 1983b) and Canada
(McLaren, 1980, 2015). It has developed as a
means to overcome oppression and combat a
neoliberal paradigm that has taken hold and
20
Rodney Handelsman
reshaped the welfare and educational policies
and arrangements in capitalist countries since
at least the 1980s2 (Giroux and Giroux, 2006;
Harvey, 2005). In this context, critical peda-
gogy rejects any reduction of teaching and
learning to a neutral process of knowledge
transmission, or one that takes place without
reference to history, social context, or the
operation of power. Instead, it invites an
understanding of schools as important sites
of struggle (political, ideological, material,
etc.) that are both: (1) implicated in producing
various social and educational inequalities;
and; (2) hold the promise of key public spaces
in which to develop the democratic sensibili-
ties and skills necessary to name, resist, and
transform practices that produce inequality
and the multiple forms of oppression that
press upon us, our schools, our words and
worlds. Work taking place within ‘the big
tent’ (Lather, 1998) of critical pedagogy
offers ‘both a language of critique and pos-
sibility’ (Giroux and Giroux, 2006: 22) that
has taken root, and been elaborated, within
136 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
multiple social, political, and educational
contexts (see this Volume).
For critical pedagogy to enhance its char-
acter as a relevant and revolutionary force, it
must perceive and contend with the complex-
ity that characterizes contemporary social
and educational arrangements – with their
attendant inequalities – amidst rapid techno-
logical, migratory, and ecological changes
that mark the beginning of the third decade
of the 21st century. These challenges demand
as ever an expansion of the theoretical and
practical tools at our disposal to think, feel,
and fight, as we forge new solidarities and
create new realities.
This chapter introduces Deleuze and
Guattari (henceforth DG3) as key thinkers in
an (as yet?) becoming critical pedagogy: a
critical pedagogy that can help us to not only
survive but flourish4 differently, as we dis-
cover ‘new ways of being human’ (Kincheloe,
2008b: 250). Over the past decade scholarship
that draws upon DG has proliferated in a vari-
ety of disciplines, including education.5 My
exploration of deleuzeguattarian concepts for
critical education continues a tradition of criti-
cal pedagogy that provides expanding con-
ceptual and methodological tools, which relay
between social theory and power-inscribed,
context-specific, practice.6 DG’s concepts of
difference can be marshalled to develop ‘new
ways of seeing and being … and learn from
divergent modes of relating to difference’
(Kincheloe, 2008a: 2). As such they may prove
indispensable to critical pedagogies of the 21st
century that seek to overcome the forces (his-
torical, political, educational, epistemological,
etc.) that produce oppressions, educational
and social inequities, and unprecedented eco-
logical upheavals.
I acknowledge that this chapter won’t
and can’t – due to limitations of space and
the author – convey the breadth or depth of
DG’s oeuvre. Instead it shoots off in multiple
­directions – rhizomatically – with no hope of
following these lines back into a single easily
grasped vector or tree (DG, 1987). I consider
bits and pieces of their work in the hope of
evoking new thoughts, feelings, and collabo-
rations relevant to an ongoing critical peda-
gogical praxis. The sections explore: (1) the
immanent ontological coordinates of DG’s phi-
losophy with which they trouble linear notions
of time and affirm the material as well as the
non-material (linguistic and asemiotic, affec-
tive) dimensions of life’s unfolding; (2) key
concepts of difference that DG forge to combat
fascism, mutating Capitalism, and dogmatic
images of thought; and (3) what these concepts
may imply for our conceptualization of critical
consciousness, schools, educational practice,
and political composition. Engaging in their
work risks perceiving what escapes thought
and feeling what escapes consciousness, as we
enact critical pedagogies anew.
DG’S ONTOLOGICAL COORDINATES:
DIFFERENCE, DURATION, AND
POSSIBILITY
The ontological coordinates of DG’s work
bewilder common notions of our spatial and
temporal universe and open up new modes of
building out critical pedagogies from a com-
plex ontology.7 DG’s work can be thought of
as an effort to develop a philosophy of life
worthy of the life’s multidimensionality,
movement, creativity, intensities, and possi-
bilities. What follows is a sketch of the onto-
logical coordinates within which DG fashion
an array of concepts of difference that help
map out this complex territory and create
new grounds, new cartographies, for becom-
ing critical pedagogies.
From Traditional Ontology to
Immanence, Difference, and
Affirmation
Traditional ontology rests upon notions of
essential identities and presupposes a con-
ceptual stability that is fit to then describe
what is ‘out there’ and waiting to be
 DELEUZEGUATTARIAN CONCEPTS FOR A BECOMING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
discovered by us. Perhaps since Plato, in the
West, we are used to thinking in terms of
essences, and bounded identities. And we
often take for granted that the human mind
enjoys a (transcendent) status within this
traditional ontology that makes possible our
questions about ‘reality out there’ and episte-
mological questions about how best to dis-
cover its nature and characteristics.
In contrast to traditional ontology, DG
embrace a Spinozist8 philosophy of imma-
nence to render an ontology of difference.
Rejecting transcendence in all its forms, imma-
nence is a philosophy of being that asserts that
there is only one substance of existence. There
is only one ‘being’ and all forms and attributes
of the substance of the universe are expres-
sions of this univocal ontological substance
(May, 2005). The ontological ‘substance’ of
their univocal reality is made up of difference:
‘Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given,
but difference is that by which the given is
given’ (Deleuze, 1994: 222).
The concept of difference – developed
by Deleuze (1994) and utilized by DG
(1972/1977, 1987) – is fundamentally dif-
ferent from traditional notions of difference.
For DG, difference is not defined as some-
thing characteristic of one identity in relation
to another, or one identity in relation to an
imagined standard image (or ‘ideal form’) of
that identity. That is, difference is not defined
through lack (DG, 1972/1977). Instead, DG
render difference in positive terms; difference
as affirmation9 with no ‘necessary connection
with the negative or with negation’ (Patton,
2000: 31). DG’s theorization of difference is
part of an overall project to reinvent critique
as a process of creation (rather than negation)
and in that sense DG’s work can be understood
to function as a positivity (Allan, 2007b).
Casting difference as a positivity stuns
‘thinking as usual’, and pushes us to attend
to objects as much as thoughts, as emer-
gent aspects of a world characterized by ‘an
active process of differentiation in which the
becoming-something is itself constitutive’
(Robinson and Tormey, 2007: 131, italics in
137
original). Because DG render difference as a
positivity within an immanent ontology, there
is no hierarchy of existence conferred upon
the stuff of the universe – mountains, humans,
dirt, words, feelings, thoughts, fractals, black
holes – all share the same ontological status
within a single ontological plane.10
If difference is not a characteristic that
depends upon lack, and if it is not a ‘thing’,
it might be better understood as a process of
expression. Perhaps akin in origami to how
a piece of paper folds and unfolds to express
different figures (May, 2005): to express in
different modes. In this analogy, the figures
(objects, subjectivity, etc.) are expressions, and
immanent to (not transcendent of) the piece of
paper, that is, a single ontological plane com-
prised of difference. Thinking with DG, being
itself is not a static state, but rather a pro-
cess of becoming (Hardt, 1995) and ongoing
(un/re)folding that comprises a single reality
that is nonetheless ‘on the move’. Because
DG’s theorizations of immanence and differ-
ence are processual, a given entity – the state,
a person, a pack of wolves, a flower, a gesture,
a broken nose – ‘exists primarily as a process
rather than a thing’ (Robinson, 2010: para. 3).
To understand how our present emerges (or
is actualized) we must consider the temporal
dimension of DG’s ontological coordinates:
duration. Duration for DG allows for the pre-
sent to be actualized (as an expression of dif-
ference) based on ‘the principle of the positive
movement of being’ (Hardt, 1995: 112–13).
If difference is a process or ‘force of differ-
entiation and elaboration’, then ‘[d]uration is
the “field” in which difference lives and plays
itself out’ (Grosz, 2005: 4). For DG, duration
is required in order for immanence to be born.
Drawing upon Bergsonian notions of dura-
tion, DG lead us to rethink our sense of time
as usual. As Deleuze writes:
The past and the present do not denote two
successive moments, but two elements which
coexist: One is the present, which does not
cease to pass, and the other is the past, which
does not cease to be but through which all pre-
sents pass. (Deleuze, 1991: 59)
138 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
The temporal field is rendered such that past
and present are not two successive (linear)
moments but rather are two (non-linear) ele-
ments that co-exist. This coextensive, non-
linear sense of time encompasses a virtual
field that is made up of difference as well as
the actualized present that we encounter in
everyday experience. The virtual ontological
past is nevertheless as real as that which it
actualizes as the present (May, 2005; May &
Semetsky, 2008; Semetsky, 2017). With dura-
tion, DG invite us to trace how the present is
always interconnected with an ontological
past that continues to exist (virtually) and to
exceed as well as adhere to that which is actu-
alized in the present. Semetsky suggests that
virtual tendencies become embodied or actu-
alized ‘in the guise of new objects, experi-
ences, and states of affairs’ (2009: 448) and
thus, the everyday identities we encounter in
the present are not limited to what they
appear: ‘coiled up’ in each is the virtual differ-
ence of which they are an expression.
May (2005) uses genes as an example to
illustrate how the virtual exceeds what is actu-
alized even as it adheres to and is embodied in
specific – but not determined or necessary –
forms. Information contained by genes can
be viewed as part of a virtual past: contain-
ing data produced in constellations of time
amidst multiple relations and interactions with
effects at various scales (geologic, species,
individual, sub-individual, etc.). As coded
information it exists and is real, but in a dif-
ferent form from biological entities that are
actualized in the present. Information encoded
in genes cannot simply be read under a micro-
scope and ‘viewed’ as a series of discrete bits
of compressible datum. Rather it is our genes’
unfolding and complex expression and sup-
pression that takes place in a process of inter-
action with myriad variables and relations of
force that is a key component of generating
a specific living being (May, 2005). In this
sense, our ­becoming – as a critical educator
no less than as an embryo – draws upon an
ontological past that exceeds and is expressed
as an actualized and not-determined present.
If coiled up in the ‘identities’ we encounter
in the present is a virtual past that is distinct
but inseparable from the ‘present’ that we
experience in everyday life, then we begin to
sense how virtual possibilities exceed what is
actualized: ‘[w]hat is striving to become the
actual is that which is in virtu, only waiting for
conditions in real experience to come forward’
(Semetsky, 2009: 449). This implies that there
is always a greater potential for transforma-
tion of the present than it may appear (May,
2005). By positing a reality that is fundamen-
tally brimming with virtual possibilities of
actualization we add an ontological dimension
to Freirian ‘hope’ (Freire and Freire, 2004)
that exceeds the individual or collective will
of people. Becoming is a process that applies
to human and non-human components of real-
ity and it is necessarily uncertain and indeter-
minate. These ontological coordinates imply
(posthuman) hope insofar as the unfolding
actualized present is comprised of unknown
virtual possibilities that await particular rela-
tions, arrangements, or forces, in order to
become actualized, or unfold differently.
In addition to understanding present real-
ity as immanently emergent and processual,
DG’s ontological coordinates foreground
the relational character of reality (objects
as much as concepts). That is, for DG rela-
tions are external and ontologically prior to
their terms, ‘thereby invalidating the whole
dualistic split expressed in the logical copula
“is.” Instead, it is the conjunction “and” itself
an in-between relation that is ontologically
basic’ (Semetsky, 2017: 426). This relational
ontology foregrounds the dynamic sets of
relations that presuppose and compose enti-
ties of various kinds: that is, a given entity
may be understood as an assemblage11
(DeLanda, 2006; DG, 1987).
This complexity is not a gateway to post-
modern relativism. For DG, the present is
actualized in the context of power and specific
competing forces. Bodies of all kinds – biolog-
ical, geologic, chemical, institutional, politi-
cal, social, etc. – do not emerge arbitrarily, but
as the product of forces entering into relations
 DELEUZEGUATTARIAN CONCEPTS FOR A BECOMING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
together. For them – with Nietzsche – a body
is defined by a ‘relation between dominant and
dominated forces [and] [e]very relationship of
force constitutes a body’ (Deleuze, 2006: 39).
It is this relational and dynamic assembly –
through unequal forces – that characterizes the
actualization of the present.12 Thus, the un/re/
folding of the world is understood to be fun-
damentally power-inscribed and contingent
(Grossberg, 2010) without recourse to total-
izing or atomizing reductionism (DeLanda,
2006). This resonates with critical pedagogy’s
insistence upon the contextual nature of edu-
cation and the importance of an analysis of
power that rejects both essentialism and deter-
ministic notions of either base or superstruc-
ture (see Giroux, 1983b; Kincheloe, 2008b;
McLaren, 1987). DG invite us to explore a
human-non-human world of process, rela-
tions, and dis/connections, that exceeds our
usual perception.
One consequence that opens up by index-
ing the relational present with duration and
understanding bodies of all kinds to be the
product of unequal forces, is that it pushes us
to trouble the ways we perceive and experi-
ence particular modes of subjective time (t).
Here we can make a distinction between
‘ontological time’ (T) – which can be thought
of as encompassing all time – and ‘subjec-
tive time’ (t) which refers to specific experi-
ence and perceptions of time that individual
humans encounter as the present is actual-
ized. Although our experiences of time are
themselves constructed in connection with
particular codes (genetic, linguistic), hab-
its, and relations of force, we often take for
granted (or ‘naturalize’) our sense of time and
assume it to be universal (ontological; large
‘T’) Time, rather than a specific expression
through experience of subjective (small ‘t’)
time (even as t is a dimension of T). As Konik
argues, our taken-for-granted sense of time
(t) amounts to ‘the failure to perceive time
as something political’ (2015: 113) as well
as historical.13 DG encourage us to trace
behaviours, habits, language, and social and
material arrangements through time and in
139
their complexity. This multidimensional ana-
lytical field can be put to work to help make
conspicuous particular kinds of (majoritar-
ian14) time – for instance neoliberal time or
developmental time – that have dominated
our perception, bent us toward rigid beliefs
regarding continual progress and advance-
ment, hold and move our bodies along partic-
ular paths, and shape the logic and practices
within our educational institutions.
DG (1994) fabricate concepts as a means
to sense and remake ourselves/our worlds.
For them philosophy is not a route to answer
a question about what exists ‘out there’ but
is a means to disturb our taken-for-granted
concepts, categories, and habits of mind and
body. Their ontological coordinates under-
score the unknowable possibilities at each
turn, to be discovered in the practice of new
images of thought, relations, and actions.
This ontological thrust pushes further critical
pedagogy’s language of critique and possibil-
ity as we explore how to articulate our bodies
(individual, politic) to test out the unknown
virtual ‘potential’ that awaits the right condi-
tions to manifest. As Read suggests, we can
become revolutionary as we:
grasp this potential underlying the present, the vir-
tual underlying the actual. The virtual is always
already present in every labour, in every action.
Politics is no longer a struggle over this world, even
of its contradictions, but a production of new worlds.
Another world is always possible. (Read, 2010: 100)
This dovetails with critical pedagogy’s insist-
ence that the unfolding of history implies
change, and that liberation from oppressive
forces can not only be a goal but must be a
part of a process of ushering in ‘a radically
different world’ (McLaren, 2002: 186).
CONCEPTS OF DIFFERENCE AND
STRATEGIC ADVERSARIES
If what humans can perceive – human con-
sciousness – is only a subtracted portion of the
140 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
ontological vibrancy in which we emerge
(Massumi, 2002), then to push the limits of
our perception, consciousness,15 and avenues
of engagement with the world, requires new
concepts. DG defined philosophy as ‘the art of
forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’
(1994: 2). Their concepts and theorizations
can be thought of as a tool box16 filled with
‘device[s] you can fight with’ where theory
does not totalize but rather, if it works, multi-
plies and is ‘by nature opposed to power’
(Deleuze, 2004: 208). Fabricating concepts
and developing theory are not trivial matters
of creating a fiction or merely developing
abstractions. Rather, they constitute theoreti-
cal and practical dimensions of political work:
of praxis.17 For new concepts to ‘work’ they
‘must relate to our problems, to our history,
and, above all, to our becomings’ (DG, 1994:
27). DG fabricate an array of concepts of dif-
ference that can be put to work within critical
pedagogies’ political and pragmatic horizons
of inquiry and action. In the process they can
help us to sense and act in our world as part of
a process of creating a new one.18
DG’s work is too often taken up in the
educational field without recognition of their
concern with the operations of power. As
a result their work can be rendered blunt –
or not ‘dangerous enough’ (Wallin, 2012: 148).
We can contribute to an evolving critical peda-
gogy by wielding the concepts that DG forged
in light of several powerful ‘strategic adversar-
ies’ that they targeted and sought to overcome
or become otherwise to. These adversaries
include: fascism, mutating Capitalism, and
dogmatic images of thought, that penetrate our
being, hinder our perceptions, and constrain
the enactment of new lines of becoming.
Assembling Desire Against Fascism
DG fashion and use concepts – of
desire, machines,19 desiring-machines, or
­assemblages – as new (analytical, pragmatic)
devices to ‘bring the fight’ to their ‘strategic’
adversaries. Foucault (1977) suggested that
‘the major enemy, the strategic adversary’ of
DG’s first volume of their Capitalism and
Schizophrenia series was fascism:
And not only historical fascism, the fascism of
Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize
and use the desire of the masses so effectively –
but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in
our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us
to love power, to desire the very thing that domi-
nates and exploits us. (Foucault, 1977: xiii)
Referring to the German masses that fol-
lowed Hitler, DG insist that ‘the masses were
not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under
a certain set of conditions, they wanted fas-
cism, and it is this perversion of the desire of
the masses that needs to be accounted for’
(1972/1977: 38, italics in original). Whereas
Freirian-inspired critical pedagogy looks to
critical consciousness to counter and trans-
form dangerous ideologies, false beliefs,
misplaced commitments, and relations of
oppressions of all kinds, DG suggest that
recourse to the conscious minds (or higher
consciousness) of people alone, is an
approach doomed to fail,20 if it is not aug-
mented by an account of the movements and
marshalling of desire (Buchanan, 2014).
Desire is a slippery concept that exceeds
the individual and leaks into and beyond
what we might normally think of as human
desires – usually conceived as a human drive
to attain pleasure or overcome a lack of
some kind. DG instead conceptualize desire
as a positivity, desires as animating forces
that create connections and bodies of vari-
ous kinds (biological, human, institutional,
political, social), as they traverse mental and
material21 dimensions of reality. ‘[D]esire is
present wherever something flows and runs,
carrying along with it interested subjects –
but also drunken or slumbering subjects’
(DG, 1972/1977:105). For DG, ideology
does not mobilize desire as much as desire
mobilizes power blocs. For them the expres-
sions of ideology, motivation, and actions are
functions of desire which is itself a ‘process
of production’ (DG, 1987: 154).
 DELEUZEGUATTARIAN CONCEPTS FOR A BECOMING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
DG posit desire as a device by which we
might fathom and disrupt the organization of
power22 and the personal psychological and
mass conditions that fascism depends upon
in order to flourish. For them, desire flows,
disrupts, delays, and infuses the psychic
and material infrastructure and ‘thereby
organizes power … organizes the system of
repression’ (Deleuze, 2004: 264). DG describe
this ‘desiring-production’ (1972/1977: 9) as
intimately related to social production: ‘There
are no desiring-machines that exist outside the
social machines that they form on a large scale;
and no social machines without the desiring-
machines that inhabit them on a small scale’
(DG, 1972/1977: 340).
Exploring connections of how power is
organized at personal and mass scales to
induce human suffering, Buchanan points to
the continual consumption of petrochemical
products as an example of directed desires
that work against our interests; as ‘we con-
tribute to the reproduction of a global situ-
ation that literally and figuratively locks us
all into a situation of actual servitude’ (2014:
11); a servitude that takes on ecological as
well as military dimensions. To understand
these dynamics, we can wield DG’s con-
cept of desire to help us recognize existing,
and articulate new kinds of, connections as
part of an evolving critical pedagogy that is
‘especially concerned with the complex rela-
tionship connecting individuals, groups, and
power’ (Kincheloe, 2012: 178), and look out
out for how it is we enter into relations for
our own servitude. An important inroad for
critical pedagogues to combat what Foucault
described as ‘the fascism in us all, in our
heads and in our everyday behavior’ (1977:
xiii) is to use DG’s concepts to explore the
‘affective dynamics at work in the production
of selfhood’ (Kincheloe, 2012: 171).
DG’s initial theorization of desire has mul-
tiplied as the links among mass and psycho-
logical dynamics have developed through
what is sometimes referred to as the ‘affective
turn’ (Clough, 2008: 1). Affect has been con-
ceptualized ‘as pre-individual bodily forces
141
augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity
to act’ (Clough, 2008: 1; Massumi, 1987a) and
the affective turn includes efforts to ‘critically
engage those technologies that are making it
possible to grasp and to manipulate the imper-
ceptible dynamism of affect’ (Clough, 2008:
1–2). The concept of affect provokes us to con-
sider, among other things, the role of ‘human
passions’ as a determining force in politics
(Crociani-Windland and Hoggett, 2012). In
this context, human feelings can be under-
stood to encompass affect and emotion. Affect
includes the more somatic component of feel-
ings at the level of experience, and works to
shut down or enhance a body’s capacity to act.
Emotion here is shorthand for the cognitive
component of feelings as they undergo quali-
fication and are expressed at a more discursive
level (Crociani-Windland and Hoggett, 2012).
As desire flows ‘within a biological, social,
and historical field where we are equally
immersed or with which we communicate’
(DG, 1972/1977: 293), we can use the con-
cept of affect to probe desire’s flow within
the field of education (Kenway and Youdell,
2011) and as a key dimension of the produc-
tion of our existential territories (Guattari,
1989/2008). Along these lines, DG pro-
voke us to conceive of, feel, and follow the
forces that produce our own ‘taste for a job
well done, each one in [our] own place’
(1972/1977: 347). As educators or students,
from where do these tastes arise? What are
they expressive of? To where do they carry
us? Questions of desire, flow, and intensity
can be used to marvel at arrangements we
encounter in our everyday lives. My desire to
pose a question in a classroom; feelings about
grading my students; the relief of prostrat-
ing on a yoga mat or submitting to instruc-
tions, the way my body might heat up when
a student ‘disrupts’ ‘my’ classroom. We must
follow these flows of affect to discover the
desiring-machines they are composed with –
the microfascisms they might imply – and how
we articulate our bodies with these machines,
or as parts of these machines, and perhaps get
carried away by them, or carry away others.
142 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
These aren’t frivolous inquiries. Everywhere
we are linked to, and coordinated with, the vio-
lent forces of repression, oppression, and eco-
logical destruction (Guattari, 1989/2008) and
we can look to our own dynamic subjectivity,
forces beyond consciousness – the affective
winds that blow through us – for clues as to
how this plays out. The rise of neofascism in
Western democracies and new forms of cap-
tivating politicotainment, no less than violent
extremism of various kinds, can scarcely be
confronted without appreciating the affective
forces that produce them. Dangerous beliefs
(e.g. white or religious supremacy) must be
challenged not only at the level of rationale
or content of propositional statements, but
also in terms of the intensity of feeling with
which beliefs are held, expressed, or resisted
(DeLanda, 2006): the affective dimension that
animates our bodies and body politic.
As DG deploy their concept of desire to
transgress analytical distinctions between
psychological repression and social oppres-
sion they provide new openings to consider
how our own capacities (individually, col-
lectively) to be affected – and importantly to
affect other (individual or social) bodies –
play out and might yet play out (Hardt,
2015). Since we are both subject to, and
participants in, the operation of power –
as expressed in the personal repressions,
social oppressions, and ecological disrup-
tions that we face – intervention anywhere
is potentially connected to movements and
blockages at more or less distant proximi-
ties. The affective dimensions of our praxis
are always already physical and mental,
individual and collective: they are always
at hand.
Updated Critique of Capitalism
and the Affective Plane
DG marshal their concepts of desire, desiring-
machines, or assemblages, to put forward an
updated critique of mutating Capitalism:
arguably another ‘strategic adversary’ of
their collective work (DG, 1972/1977, 1987,
1994):
Except in ideology, there has never been a humane
… capitalism. Capitalism is defined by a cruelty
having no parallel in the primitive system of cru-
elty, and by a terror having no parallel in the des-
potic regime of terror. (DG, 1972/1977: 373)
DG describe how Capitalism thrives by dint of
its forever expanding interior limits, as it
reduces qualitative differences between things
(people, tastes, objects) into quanta for market
exchange. Undoing the Capitalist machine(s) is
no simple matter. With Marx they acknowledge
that capitalists extract profit from labour at the
expense of workers, and they recognize that
this plays out within Integrated World
Capitalism – particularly at the expense of the
global south at the periphery – however, they
insist that this aspect of Capitalism does not
explain its endurance. To do that, we must con-
front the desire that conditions profit extraction
and pre-conscious class interest. Along these
lines DG insist that the libidinal potency of
social arrangements is apparent everywhere23
and that ultimately there is ‘no distinction in
nature between political economy and libidinal
economy’ (DG, 1972/1977: 381). Therefore,
the tiny libidinal investments in the capitalist
system that accrue must be accounted for: even
‘a small-time capitalist, with no great profits or
hopes, fully maintains the entirety of his libidi-
nal investments: the libido investing the great
flow [of capital]’ (DG, 1972/1977: 347).
As part of their critique, DG build upon
and sometimes ‘play with’ Marx24 as they use
their concept of desire to foreground affec-
tive dimensions of how Capitalism functions
and mutates. For example, DG modify Marx’s
theory of surplus value as they describe how
surplus labour can be increasingly produced in
the absence of traditional human labour through
(passive) acts of consumption: ‘[I]t is as though
human alienation through surplus labor were
replaced by a generalized “machinic enslave-
ment”, such that one may furnish surplus-value
without doing any work (children, the retired,
the unemployed, television viewers, etc.)’ (DG,
 DELEUZEGUATTARIAN CONCEPTS FOR A BECOMING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
1987: 492). This takes place as the result of ‘a
complex qualitative process’ that brings into
play new modes of communication, produc-
tion (technological, semiotic), industries of
entertainment, and the capture, or directing, of
human attention, to produce particular ‘ways of
perceiving and feeling’ (ibid.: 492). DG’s con-
cerns were prescient given the subsequent emer-
gence of new technologies, social media, and
a largely privately owned World Wide Web.25
DG’s concepts can help us contend with elec-
tronic, sensory, and algorithmic architectures
that compete to capture and direct our attention,
feelings (affects, emotions), and habits of mind
and body. At stake is the degree to which our
orientations and subjectivities are transformed
into quasi products to be exchanged or capital
to be accrued. The expanding interior limits
of mutating Capitalism emerges at a nexus of
ongoing relations that involve material and non-
material resources, create financial debt, direct
human attention, and produce a strange kind
of atomized-mass ‘enslavement’. The proxim-
ity of human faces to smartphones is but one
expression of this complex affective process
and passive production of surplus labour.
As surplus labour takes on new forms of
consumption, labour itself is undergoing con-
stant transformations that suggest a need to
develop new solidarities in addition to tradi-
tional labour organizing.26 Multiplying DG’s
theoretical interventions, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
(2009, 2011) has used DG’s ideas to better
understand contemporary forms of labour and
work in the functioning of mutating capital.
Berardi (2009) contends that the nature of
work has increasingly captured the language,
desire, and creativity of workers in the process
of adding value to capital in Western capitalist
countries. In the process, the reach of capital
has penetrated and stratified not only classes
of people, but the most intimate aspects of our
subjectivity. Berardi (2009, 2011) uses the
term ‘semiocapitalism’ to refer to new capaci-
ties of Capitalism to capture human creativ-
ity and components of identity into emerging
forms of capitalist production. Semiocapital
implies a production of ‘psychic stimulation’
143
more than material goods: ‘[t]he mental envi-
ronment is saturated by signs that create a sort
of continuous excitation, a permanent electro-
cution’ (Berardi, 2011: 73), which shapes and
deterritorializes the individual and collective
mind. As our capacities for creativity, mean-
ing, and expression become captured in the
psychic imaginary and material arrangements
of a competitive marketplace, notions of self
become inseparable from branding and ongo-
ing and never-ending modulations of (profes-
sional or ‘consumer’) development in order to
realize our potential as a (marketized) human.
If the ‘extraction of surplus value …
include[s] the capture of affects, desires,
and emotional energies’ (Carlin, 2017: 404),
and the production of capital is increasingly
related to the production of ‘psychic stimula-
tion’ and formation of (inadequate) worker
identities, then we are badly in need of new
concepts to grasp and fight the affective
dimensions of contemporary workings and
the power of Capitalism. DG’s concepts of
desire and affect provide new tools to work
against contemporary capitalist arrangements
and mutations. They can help us to explore
how our capture as consumers or workers by
capital is not a process that occurs just ‘out
there’ in the boardrooms of ‘capitalists’, but is
also an intimate process that depends upon our
own mind/body’s receptivity to be affected by
and become an extension of capital.
DG underscore the importance of renewed
critique and concept creation to capture and
break through the ways capital adjusts, trans-
forms, ‘employs’, and ensnares us as labour-
consumers. For them, politics is emergent,
contingent, relational, and turns on questions
of desire and affect that traverse inherited
dualisms of thought.27 If politics turns on
questions of desire and affect, then DG’s
updated critique of Capitalism can provoke
new kinds of ‘political thinking in order to
confront the unforeseeable of new knowl-
edge, new techniques and new political facts’
(Pellejero, 2010: 102). In the age of big data,
AI, and use of algorithmic techniques to
gauge, anticipate, create, amplify, and direct
144 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
human desires, we are confronted with rap-
idly mutating, new, frightful, and sometimes
bizarre (Bridle, 2017) manifestations of capi-
tal’s enthralling techniques and our libidinal
ensnarement. In this context, DG invite us
to tune in to how our ‘interests’ are carried
away by, or follow, desire (Buchanan, 2014)
and explore our affective articulation with
emergent technologies and (as) products of
Capitalism.28 DG’s work might yet be mar-
shalled in a becoming critical pedagogy to
provoke a new ‘revolutionary subjectivity’
that can grasp ‘that point of rupture where,
precisely, political economy and libidinal
economy are one and the same’ (Deleuze,
2004: 199, italics in original). These deleuze-
guattarian conceptual tools might prove
indispensable to critical pedagogies estab-
lishing new grounds from which to produce
subjectivities, and forge collective relations,
outside of capital’s logic and movements.
Dogmatic Image of Thought:
From Enlightenment Subject
to Posthuman
An evolving criticality is concerned with the
operation of power and the ways it works to
produce the social order and human subjectiv-
ity (Kincheloe, 2012). DG’s relational ontol-
ogy, and their concepts of difference – such as
assemblage (see endnote 11) or their machinic
concept of desire – foreground how entities of
various kinds are presupposed, and composed,
by heterogenous relations (material, linguistic,
affective, etc.) that are ‘on the move’. This nec-
essarily troubles a ‘dogmatic image of thought’
wherein what we think of serves as a represen-
tation of essentially stable and bounded identi-
ties ‘out there’. It is this ‘dogmatic image of
thought’ that makes possible the Enlightenment
conception of a bounded unitary human subject
that might count as a third strategic adversary
of DG’s work. This stable and ‘universal’
Enlightenment subject undergirds much of tra-
ditional political thought and continues to lurk
amidst Freirian-inspired critical pedagogies.
DG add a variety of components – biological,
non-human, technological, mental, ecological –
to an understanding of how human subjects
(bodies as much as subjectivities) are produced
(Guattari, 1989/2008).
The relational – or what Braidotti (2013b)
and others refer to as posthuman – subject
that DG put forward invites an exploration
of how our (individual/collective) capacities
are maintained, restricted, or catalysed by
any number of relations that we enter into,
create, or break free from. The impact of
these changing relations are often apparent in
moments of personal crisis or transformation –
falling in love, death of a loved one,
learning to ride a bike, sustaining an injury,
giving birth, ingesting psychedelics, etc.
Our emergent subjectivity (existential
territory) is in a constant state of flux –
(de)composition or (de)territorialisation – that
depends upon various material and non-
material relations that are disrupted, sustained,
or created over time.
By considering the assemblage of power-
inscribed relations that produce our bodies,
delimit the exercise of their capacities, and
produce a sense of self which interacts with
processes of our becoming, DG augment our
notions of the human subject and provide
critical tools to develop ‘a socio-individual
imagination’ that reconstitutes ‘the individual
outside the boundaries of abstract individual-
ism’ (Kincheloe, 2012: 177). Their rework-
ing of our sense of the human subject – as a
dynamic product of relations and forces – is
an important move to make in order to better
apprehend how particular subjectivities are
produced, and to set the stage to choregraph
political composition within complex and
rapid technological, media, social, ecologi-
cal, economic, and political changes that are
underway in the 21st century.
Within the humanist tradition, Freire
grasped the dynamic nature of ‘being’ as an
engaged human subject as one of ‘becoming’
‘in order for us as human beings to be, we
need to become…. We are precisely because
we are becoming’ (2016:16). Personal and
 DELEUZEGUATTARIAN CONCEPTS FOR A BECOMING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
ongoing change was a necessary character-
istic of Freirian political engagement and
pedagogy. DG extend notions of becoming
as they provide a language to describe the
movements, flows, disruptions, that propel
this process and which necessarily exceed
a traditional image of the individual human
subject. This process of becoming plays out
across their Spinozist ontological plane and
thus pushes us to return the image of human
to a non-transcendent location within real-
ity’s unfolding. Rather than acting upon the
world to transform it (Freire, 1970/2005),
we are ontologically and already a part of an
actively becoming world. This flattening of
the ontological plane is an important move
in the context of considering human and non-
human elements of a given state of affairs,
and reconsidering individual, and populations
of, humans within, and as a part of, ecological
and technological dynamics. DG bump the
record of humanism that plays in the back-
ground of much of Freirian-inspired criti-
cal pedagogy. In the disorientation that may
arise, new refrains and possibilities are born.
DG’s posthuman (as opposed to an
Enlightenment or postmodern/partial) sub-
ject emerges as a veritable ‘terminal’ of
forces – or ‘vectors of subjectification’ as
Guattari calls them (1989/2008) – which
isn’t a space of compromise as much as a ter-
ritory of paradox or if necessary, conflict. A
posthuman subject is not necessarily passive
or constituted by arbitrary forces. Nor does
it have the unlimited capacity of a bounded
rational Cartesian subject to act decisively to
effect change. It’s always in between and on
the move. We can experiment with how our
(individual/collective) capacities change, or
are expressed differently, as we alter (dimin-
ish, enhance) some relations, end others, or
forge new ones (Hardt, 2015). This is a terri-
tory of ongoing exploration and experimenta-
tion to discover the possibilities to be affected
and to affect other bodies, which is to say,
to discover our capacity (individual, collec-
tive, earthly) to become otherwise (Grosz,
2005; Semetsky, 2013). DG are always on
145
the search to learn from radical breaks from
power (e.g. the ungovernability of madness)
but only as a starting point from which to
forge new connections that make new pas-
sions and actions possible, and as part of a
militancy with a potentially collective char-
acter (Seem, 1977).
Embracing a posthuman subject is not the
same as being anti-human (Braidotti, 2013b).
Rather, it is a move to de-centre the human
subject that is sanctioned by tradition but
which has proved inadequate and danger-
ous in the context of how humans relate to
‘others’, difference, themselves, the planet
(Braidotti, 2016). This shift in perspective is
necessary to enhance our capacities to con-
ceive of and respond to unprecedented eco-
logical transformation induced by humans.29
These upheavals are undergirded by the
image of (transcendent, bounded) humans as
separate from nature which is understood to
be passive and of value as a function of its
use by humans. By recasting the human sub-
ject, we can develop further the long-overdue
(Kahn, 2010; McLaren and Houston, 2004)
ecological dimension of critical pedagogy.30
A posthuman subject pushes us to reconsider
emergent human bodies, groups, and subjec-
tivities, amidst, and as part of, rapid ecologi-
cal and technological changes that shape how
we and other species emerge, interact, flee,
and disappear in the Anthropocene.31
DG’s immanent ontological plane is a cor-
rective to western siloed thought as it under-
mines Descartes’s Cogito (‘I think therefore
I am’) and confers equal ontological status
to human and non-human components of
life’s expression. The categorical distinc-
tions between human life (anthropos) and
the life of other living beings (bios) are radi-
cally traversed as the posthuman becomes
embodied while being simultaneously struc-
tured ‘as a composite assemblage of human,
non-organic, machinic and other elements’
(Braidotti, 2013a, 2016: 19).
DG’s relational and immanent concep-
tualizing of the subject affirms the inter-
connectedness of humans and prods us to
146 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
discover new territories of analytical and
political exploration and insight that flow
beyond a stable or strictly bounded individ-
ual human subject (Banerji and Paranjape,
2016; Braidotti, 2016). Unencumbered (or
less encumbered)32 by the dogmatic image
of thought – where what we think of repre-
sents a universe of stable entities, including
the bounded human subject – we can more
freely experiment (analytically, affectively,
practically) in ways that were previously
unthinkable. We may also find ourselves,
consequently, less constrained by the modes
of political composition that image implied.
In this context, becoming critical pedagogies
may develop to correct the anthropocentrism
(and andropocentrism) that is implicated in
deleterious ecological and social disruptions
of the 20th and 21st centuries (Braidotti,
2013b; DG, 1987; Guattari, 1989/2008).
BECOMING CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Posthuman Implications for
Critical Consciousness
Bringing to bear affective, biological,
technological, ecological, social, and political
relations into our conceptualization of a
human subject requires of us to ‘think again
and to think harder about the status of human
subjectivity’ (Braidotti, 2016: 13). We need
not abandon ‘critical pedagogy’s celebration
of self-realization’ (Kincheloe, 2012: 177),
but rather hold this celebration ‘lightly’ and
with curiosity. A relational human subject
multiplies our sense of the dimensions and
forces that contribute to, or catalyse, our
development as critically conscious human
subjects and collectivities. It pushes us to
expand notions of critical consciousness
since the mind ‘is not limited to the self-
conscious Cogito, but is also excessive and
includes the unconscious, affective,
dimension’ (Semetsky, 2009: 450). As we
explore the affective dimension at work and
expressed by our capacities to think and act it
becomes clear that understanding is not
enough: experimentation is called for. Critical
consciousness becomes less a stable state at
which we arrive and see the world ‘as it really
is’, and more an affective mode of being/
becoming that tests out the openings and
escape routes as we create new grounds from
which to become outside of the imperatives
of our strategic enemies. In the process we
contribute to a critical pedagogy that seeks to
create ‘new forms of self-realization and
social collaboration’ (Kincheloe, 2012: 177).
Both personal and social transformation
involves intensive affective experiences that
imply specific forms of learning and self and
social realization. Attending to the affective
intensities of our changing capacities – and the
types of learning they comprise – is a critical
area of development within becoming criti-
cal pedagogies. Without recognition of these
dimensions of critical learning and transfor-
mation, educators will remain mystified by the
fact that student transformations tend to occur
outside of school walls. Similarly, we will be
baffled by the emergence of leaders who ride
affective forces into office as we ignore the
affective impact of their words and actions.
By taking seriously the intensity and direc-
tionality of affective components of our edu-
cational and political compositions, we can
discover new ways to conceive of critical con-
sciousness and political action. MacDonald
(2017) explores a systems approach to con-
sider Freirian learning circles where critical
consciousness is conceptualized as a thresh-
old that is crossed as an emergent property of
particular collective arrangements of humans
in affective dialogical communication. This
posthuman, systems approach recasts criti-
cal consciousness as ‘the practice of bring-
ing immanent epistemologies into awareness’
(MacDonald, 2017: 213). These are promising
and important directions for further inquiry
and theorization as we experiment toward
configurations that produce posthuman affec-
tive critical consciousness to transform the
world.
 DELEUZEGUATTARIAN CONCEPTS FOR A BECOMING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
Control Society and the
Standardization of Desire
If the three ages of the concept are the encyclope-
dia, pedagogy, and commercial professional train-
ing, only the second can safeguard us from falling
from the heights of the first into the disaster of the
third. (DG, 1994:12)
During his lifetime, Deleuze (1995) per-
ceived that the closed disciplinary physical
spaces of schools, factories, or prisons, were
in the midst of a frightful transformation:
from a disciplinary society to a control soci-
ety: ‘One can envisage education becoming
less and less a closed site differentiated from
the workspace as another closed site, but
both disappearing’ (Deleuze, 1995: 175). In
a control society, physical territories of disci-
pline give way to new forms of modular
control:33 ‘frightful continual training …
continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids
or bureaucrat-students’ (ibid.: 175). Packaged
as school reform, control-based systems
leave no one ‘alone for long’ and signify the
dismantling rather than the reform of the
school system (Deleuze, 1995).
Elements of this shift over the past several
decades include the shaping of ‘learning’ as a
means to adapt to fluctuating market demand
for financialized skills and/or knowledge.
Transformations toward a control society
take the form of ‘continuous assessment, …
“business” being brought into education
at every level’ (Deleuze, 1995: 182). In a
control society we are produced as subjects
in interminable debt (figuratively and liter-
ally), where ‘life-long learning’ becomes the
never completed but urgent means by which
students/teachers attempt to secure human
capital enhancement. These trends might be
expressed in the prioritization of our grades,
CVs, or social media posts (branding), and at
the expense of cultivating our own curiosity,
citizen-subjectivities or political capacities.
The analysis of ongoing modular control
represents an important area of study for
critical pedagogues committed to enhancing
the capacity of public educational spaces to
147
foster democratic citizen-subjects. The deter-
ritorialization of such spaces undermines
our capacity to produce citizen (compared to
consumer) subjectivities and thus, undercuts
our capacities to elude capture by capital.
We are just beginning to come to terms with
radical shifts toward a control society taking
place within and beyond traditional educa-
tional institutions. Indicators of these shifts
include massive open online courses, endless
professional development or credentialing
and constantly adjusted performance met-
rics that reflect ‘a brave new world of con-
tinuous education and motivation’ (Savat and
Thompson, 2015: 273). The rise of the audit
culture within the academy as much as pub-
lic schools is another aspect of these fright-
ful developments of control within education
(Allan, 2007a; Savat and Thompson, 2015;
Webb, 2012).
Schools, like other social institutions,
presume an image of ‘how life ought to go’
(Wallin, 2014: 136) and in the process are
part of assemblages that make certain organi-
zational, student, teacher, group, ‘formations
“thinkable” in education’ (ibid.: 136). In the
current moment of standardization and inces-
sant assessment coupled with expectations of
a never-ending process of learning and adjust-
ment in response to the demands of market
needs in a competitive economic landscape,
we can see how standardized education pre-
supposes a certain homogenization of desire
(Wallin, 2014). It is here that critical peda-
gogies seeking to grapple with the force and
complexity of these changes must remain alert
to the kinds of subjects (students, teachers,
administrators) that we are preparing within
the current plateau of capitalism.34 Are we
inadvertently preparing subjects amenable and
endlessly adaptable to the exigencies of capi-
tal? Is the very meaning and feeling of a ‘job
well done’ the result of interests that were car-
ried away by the desiring-machines of capital
against our own class or ecological interests?
DG’s concepts can help us fight multiple
adversaries as we consider desire, (neo)fas-
cism, capital, dogmatic images of thought,
148 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
subject formation, and educational institu-
tions in the 21st century. Becoming criti-
cal pedagogies must forge new connections
and experiment to discover the conditions
that allow and affirm teachers and students
becoming outside of market logics, as indi-
vidual subjects, networks, swarms, as part
of a-people-yet-to-come (Carlin and Wallin,
2014; DG, 1987).
WHAT IS IT THAT A BODY IS
CAPABLE OF?
As many of us teachers might have had occa-
sion to experience, planned (critical) learning
in a classroom of a standardized education
system is just one fart away from relative
chaos or illumination as the case may be. It
won’t do to reduce things to a complexity in
the fuel of an oversimplified binary stand-off
between neoliberalism/financialization and
its opposite (transformative resistance). The
kind of critical pedagogy that DG provoke is
necessarily one that becomes attuned with
affective realities and undermines self-
confident pronouncements and prescriptions. It
invites us to take up our usual perceptions
with a sense of suspicion and possibility as
we augment the revolutionary education
envisioned by Freire, by fashioning and
sharpening new tools with which we might
fight: read, feel, affect, and be affected
through, the word and world. Walking into a
classroom, we can immediately pick up on
the atmosphere. We can fine-tune our aware-
ness for the affective winds and expressions
that sweep and threaten to sweep through a
student/teacher(’s) learning body and partici-
pate in bodymind learning (Semetsky, 2013).
Deleuzeguattarian complexity demands that I
probe and experiment with my usual
thoughts, feelings, and actions to discover
the ways that I articulate with flows of desire
that enhance or shut down my, and my stu-
dents’, capacities to become and to flourish
within a posthuman ethics. We can conceive
of our pedagogy and schools less as solutions to
problems and more as contingent and specific
embodiments of the problematic field that is
the education assemblage (Handelsman,
forthcoming). Within it we can create and
test out what it is that a (student, teacher,
school, planet) body is capable of. Not
through control, but through an enhanced
capacity to be affected and affect: through
strategy perhaps, but within a larger process
of experimentation.
The collective enactment of a 21st-­century
politics against neofascism and mutat-
ing Capitalism, is an existential necessity
(Kincheloe et al., 2017), even as the politics
of division gains traction and one of solidar-
ity appears increasingly fraught. ‘The left’
appears profoundly divided in the face of
powerful white-supremacist, colonialist, and
capitalist forces, and seems vulnerable to
division as an identitarian politics threatens
to police ‘others’ where relations of solidar-
ity might otherwise be forged.35 How can we
enact politics without producing a demeaned
‘other’ that we must obliterate? In what
ways is our politics susceptible to, or com-
plicit with, contemporary forms of (neo)fas-
cism? How shall we pursue justice without
proceeding in a manner that recuperates dif-
ference into the same (Lather, 1998)? These
challenges can be understood as practical in
nature as much as they might be philosophi-
cal. How might we cultivate thought and
subjectivities that forge ever new connec-
tions with ‘others’ as part of a politics that
‘does not repose on identity… [but] rides dif-
ference?’ (Massumi, 1987b, p. xii). Can we
exchange the weapons of shame with new
tools of political assemblage without losing
sight of our strategic adversaries? To meet
the theoretical, material, strategic, and exis-
tential challenges that humans face in the
first quarter of the 21st century, critical peda-
gogies need to grapple with difference and
complexity (Kahn, 2010; Kincheloe, 2005,
2008b; Kincheloe and Berry, 2004), consider
our status as emergent ecological beings,
and cultivate the conditions and educational
 DELEUZEGUATTARIAN CONCEPTS FOR A BECOMING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
arrangements to produce ‘a-people-yet-
to-come’ (Carlin and Wallin, 2014). This
requires that we treat inherited concepts and
habits of thought and body with suspicion,
and affirm the possibilities of producing our
own subjectivities outside of Capitalist forces
that reduce the living – and what a life might
do – to interchangeable quanta for market
exchange.
Thinking with DG requires us to be on the
move as we recast experience as an oppor-
tunity to discover/create and test out possi-
bilities that are not yet actualized but whose
virtual potentials are real, and whose becom-
ing we might yet usher in. Numerous schol-
ars have warned against considering the work
of DG as a viable source of insight to guide
political composition or struggle36 (Buchanan
and Thoburn, 2008). And it is true that DG
disorient and resist offering a new model to
replace an old one. However, their work is
less a failure to serve as a wellspring from
which to compose political responses, and
more an invitation to escape the dogmatic
images of thought (bounded human subject,
fixed intelligence, etc.) that animate educa-
tional arrangements and shape our habits of
mind and body toward market capture and a
homogenization of desire. Instead they invite
the assembling of new grounds from which to
create new forms of subjectivity, connection,
and collaboration.
An invitation to escape through creation
provides no guarantees as to what might
emerge but suggests a number of possible
and simultaneous steps we might take: (1)
exercise our imaginations and experiment
with our bodies to conceive of and invite the
virtual tendencies that await specific condi-
tions to actualize; (2) shake up the ‘solid’ and
taken-for-granted cognitive-sociopolitical
individual that lurks behind our theories and
actions into something more fluid, dynamic,
and emergent;37 (3) reconsider material, as
well as nonmaterial (semiotic/discursive and
asemiotic, e.g. affective) forces that produce
bodies and shape thinking and (critical) con-
sciousness; (4) reconceptualize difference
149
and desire as a positivity (not defined by
lack) and explore how traditional and fixed
notions (e.g.s. intelligence, individual)
become multiplicities of possibility; (5) con-
sider the composition of various bodies as the
result of dominated and dominating forces
and trace the map of forces that direct our
desires against our interests; (6) experiment
with the possibilities and capacities that are
at hand for one (individual, collective, eco-
system) to become differently, and otherwise
to the dominant image of how it is that a life
will go.
My purpose in introducing some of DG’s
mobile concepts of difference is not to pro-
duce Deleuzian or Guattarian acolytes, but
rather to experiment as we think with them,
as a means to extend and provoke new analyt-
ical, sensory, practical, ethical, and political
avenues of critical engagement. Deleuze and
Guattari invite us to experiment with what it
feels and looks like to become otherwise to
the current plateau of capitalism, and to dis-
cover through practice what it is that one (a
person, school, community, movement, spe-
cies, planet) is capable of.
Notes
1  Giroux (1983c) initially coined the term critical
pedagogy in his reading of Freire’s work with and
against thinkers from the Frankfurt School (Gir-
oux, 1983a) and within the context of schooling
in America.
2  Neoliberalism proffers notions of meritocracy,
hyper-individualism, and competition while
prescribing the takeover of previously publicly
owned institutions by private corporations.
3  I use the sign, DG, to highlight the central place
of the collaborative works of Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, and also to connote that these
works are difficult to reduce to either author
(i.e. > Deleuze + Guattari). As they described:
‘The two of us wrote… together. Since each of
us was several, there was already quite a crowd’
(1987: 3). Biographical descriptions of Deleuze
and Guattari are available (Beckman, 2017;
Dosse, 2010; Genosko, 2009), including ones
that reference their pedagogical practices (Savat
and Thompson, 2015). I draw upon a selection
of their collaborative and individual works, as
150 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
well as a few of the many who have taken up,
improvised, translated, and plugged these works
into the field of education and elsewhere. I hope
this provides an accessible, if idiosyncratic, intro-
duction to a few of their concepts and possible
implications for critical pedagogy.
4  Grant calls upon schools ‘to bring about flour-
ishing lives for students’ (2012: 910) as part of
a robust conception of social justice that goes
well beyond equitable access or outcomes within
a standardized educational system. Flourishing
implies both risk and possibility even as what it
might mean or look like depends upon the par-
ticular context, people, or ecosystem in which it
arises. We can probe our own sense of what is
for our own flourishing or withering as a heuristic
to guide intuitive pedagogies of affirmation and
what they may look or feel like. In the process we
can discover the arrangements we wish to enact,
or conversely flee from. As a teacher working
within marginal school locations, it is clear that
pedagogies for student and teacher flourishing
are needed to escape failure-producing school
machines (Handelsman, forthcoming).
5  Concepts produced or inspired by DG are plough-
ing the educational field and proliferating in edu-
cational theory (Masny, 2013; Morss, 2000; St.
Pierre, 2004), curriculum studies (Gough, 2017),
teacher education (Allan, 2004), treatments of
specific schools’ subjects (Semetsky and Masny,
2013), classrooms (de Freitas, 2012), alternative
school locations, programmes, and policy (Tuck,
2008; Youdell, 2011, 2015). They are also mak-
ing mischief of educational research orthodox-
ies (Masny, 2015; Mazzei and McCoy, 2010;
St. Pierre, 2011). These developments have led
educators, and educational theorists to engage
in novel ways with issues that remain under-­
investigated within critical pedagogy, including,
issues of disability (Feely, 2016; Goodley, 2007)
and ecological concerns (Greenhalgh-Spencer,
2014).
6  This chapter emerged as a response to the fol-
lowing lines of inquiry: If DG were key figures in
critical pedagogy, how might this be so? What
practical tools might we fashion as critical peda-
gogues by following pathways on the map of
their invitational and often confounding bodies
of work?
7  As Kincheloe described: ‘[o]n the landscape of
complexity, I am lost … if I do not possess an
epistemological and ontological map to help
me understand the nature of the territory I am
exploring’ (2005: 333).
8  Key concepts that emerge from Deleuzian
reworkings of Spinoza, Bergson, and Nietzsche
are those of difference, duration, and affirmation.
Discussions of each can be found in the works of
Hardt (1995) and May (2005). The potential of
these concepts to contribute to the work of criti-
cal pedagogues remains a critical field for further
exploration and experimentation.
9  Affirmation shouldn’t be misunderstood here
as one part of a polar opposition (Hardt, 1995),
or somehow eliding the darker aspects of our
world. DG’s philosophy of life does not shy away
from any aspect of life’s experience, it ‘critically
includes death, decay, extermination, hopeless-
ness and madness’ (Cole, 2013 : 56) in its push to
sense and apprehend the real.
10  DG (1987) use their notion of difference to avoid
recuperating what is different into the same, or
in their words, reducing anarchy and unity to
the same. We are pushed to apprehend both
simultaneously, and as part of a strange unity
that encompasses singularity and multiplicity:
‘not the unity of the One, but a much stranger
unity that applies only to the multiple’ (DG,
1987: 158).
11  Fashioned by DG, developed by others (DeLanda,
2006, 2016), and now being put to work within
the field of critical education (Youdell, 2011),
an assemblage helps us to think of the diverse
elements (material, semiotic, asemiotic, affec-
tive, etc.) that enter into productive relations
together to produce a given entity or state
of affairs. Assemblages are not static wholes,
but ‘passional’ emergent entities undergoing
constant flux and subject to changes at vari-
ous speeds depending upon the simultaneous
‘co-functioning’ of its ‘many heterogenous
terms’ or components (DG, 1987: 399).
  The concept of assemblage underscores the
temporal instability of its own emergence: an
assemblage exists for a time and is historically
contingent (Grossberg, 2010). It is composed of
heterogenous components ‘as a productive prop-
erty of the interaction of open systems’ (Marcus
and Saka, 2006: 103), that contribute to its his-
torical (de)composition and mutation. Analyses of
assemblages lend themselves to ‘delineating the
becoming of new social and cultural formations’
(ibid.: 103) and as such can be understood as
an important theoretical response to the limita-
tions of structural analysis to account for change
(Sewell, 1992) while remaining always concerned
with questions of power (Buchanan, 2015; Fox
and Alldred, 2018).
12  The formation of bodies can be understood as a
power-inscribed event. Along these lines, Bignall
describes DG’s view of existence as ‘order emerg-
ing from an immanent field of virtual difference
that becomes organised through various events
of actualisation’ (2008: 130).
 DELEUZEGUATTARIAN CONCEPTS FOR A BECOMING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
13  Following Marx, history is viewed as contingent
and not determined. It is not merely a linear set
of events that necessarily culminate in progress or
graduation from one kind of society to another,
but instead is understood as discontinuous and
‘made up of ruptures and limits, breaks and trans-
formations’ (Buchanan, 2008: 93). Questions of
pro/regress always depend upon the specific nor-
mative criteria and vantage point from which we
consider qualitative and quantitative differences
among places and epochs that can be contradic-
tory to, or paradoxical with, other ruptures.
14  DG’s works undermined ‘majoritarian’ power
and domination of all kinds as they troubled any
‘constant, of expression or content, serving as a
standard measure’ by which (minoritarian) others
might be judged, defined, or otherwise limited
(1987: 105). They use ‘the average adult-white-
heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard
language’ as an example of a majoritarian power
that dominates as ‘he appears twice, once in the
constant and again in the variable from which the
constant is extracted’ (DG, 1987: 105).
15  DG’s pursuit of ‘nomad thought’ within a com-
plex ontology led them to look to the margins
of social formations to discover minoritarian
becomings or nomadic movements that become
otherwise to – and potentially liberated from –
majoritarian and capitalist domination. This
resonates with the development of bricolage
within critical pedagogy as a means to transgress
inherited siloed thinking, enact critical research,
and pursue marginalized practices through the
development of transgressive conceptual tools
(Kincheloe, 2005; Kincheloe and Berry, 2004;
Kincheloe et al., 2017; Semetsky, 2013).
16  ‘Yes, that’s what a theory is, exactly like a tool
box … A theory has to be used, it has to work’
(Deleuze, 2004: 208).
17  As soon as a theory (that ‘works’) is developed
it encounters ‘a wall, and a praxis is needed to
break through’ (Deleuze, 2004: 206). Theory
and praxis are dimensions of action: ‘There is only
action, the action of theory, the action of praxis, in
the relations of relays and networks’ (ibid.: 207).
18  How we describe and understand the world is
always already philosophical, theoretical, and
political. If it is the case that the world as we have
come to know it, and ourselves included, are as
much products of practice and theory, then it
is the case that by putting different theories to
work, we necessarily change the world (St. Pierre,
2011).
19  Machines are among DG’s mobile concepts that
can be ‘situated at the level of the individual,
the society, the state, the pre-individual, among
groups and between people, and across these
151
various realms’ (May, 2005: 122). This kind of
‘ontological mobility’ allows it to move outside
the ‘dogmatic image of political thought’ of the
state, institution, and ‘pre-given’ individual (ibid.:
124). Importantly, machines are not technical
mechanisms that can be dismantled and reassem-
bled and function the same way. To be machinic
is to imply mutation, linking up with different
machines, ongoing evolutions.
20  DG suggest that revolutionary formations will fail
if they don’t account for desire and acquire ‘at
least as much force as these coercive machines
have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows’
(1972/1977: 293).
21  The materialism practised by DG refuses to sub-
ordinate ‘the corporeal to the mental world’ but
importantly can be understood as ‘an exaltation
of being with respect to both realms’ (Hardt,
1995: 114).
22  See Bignall (2008) for helpful discussion of the
development of the concepts of desire and power
for the purpose of forging an explicitly poststruc-
turalist theory of agency.
23  Its expression takes form in ‘the way a bureau-
crat fondles his[sic] records, a judge administers
justice, a businessman[sic] causes money to cir-
culate, the way the bourgeoisie fucks the prole-
tariat…. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of
people aroused’ (DG, 1972/1977: 293).
24  While DG reject essentialist or deterministic strains
of Marxism they retain a commitment to – an
albeit reconceptualized – project of ­emancipation
in light of the failures of Marxist state-­building in
the 20th century (Jain, 2010).
25  A key threshold for experimentation is how to dis/
engage with or repurpose the current corporate
infrastructure of communications development
and ownership to harness the material and libidi-
nal infrastructure of social media toward demo-
cratic and revolutionary ends.
26  The power of traditional labour to confront capi-
tal by disrupting or withholding labour from an
alienating process of value production has gener-
ally diminished in the post WWII era in Western
capitalist societies, in part due to the advent of
technological interventions, that have affirmed
the place of capital, but also due to the outsourc-
ing of manual labour to the periphery as cogni-
tive labour has increased in the centre (Berardi,
2009).
27  DG construct dualisms, such as the rhizome and
the tree (1987), in order to push thinking to the
limit. They view dualisms as ‘an entirely necessary
enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging’
(1987: 21) as they ‘invoke one dualism only in
order to challenge another … to arrive at a pro-
cess that challenges all models’ (ibid.: 20).
152 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
28  We might look to what our bodies feel and do
as we articulate with: the thrill of a purchase,
following (‘investing in’) millionaires who play
professional sports or vie for political office, the
taste for a job well done within the school-to-
prison pipeline, ‘surfing the net’, etc. As students
or teachers we might also explore the affective
forces that shape the frequency with which we
exit the territory of our classroom through vir-
tual portals of desire such as socially networked
phones or computers.
29  Over the past 540 million years there have been
five mass extinction events prior to humans cur-
rently ushering in a sixth (Ripple et al., 2017).
These planetary changes include unprecedented
human-induced loss of life and life-supporting
systems (IPBES, 2019).
30  Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy did take on
an eco-humanist thrust in his final reflections,
although he retained the humanist dualisms of
human/animal and human/nature (Kahn, 2010).
31  The term Anthropocene denotes the current
geological epoch that is characterized by the cen-
tral role of the human species in changing the
planet’s geological and ecological characteristics
(Crutzen, 2002).
32  A pronoun still has its uses, perhaps as DG sug-
gested, we can use ‘I’ in the same way that we
say ‘the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only
a manner of speaking’ (Deleuze and Guattari,
1987: 3).
33  Deleuze recognized the disciplinary nature of
social formations that led schools and prisons
to be different as a matter of degree rather than
kind: ‘It’s not only prisoners who are treated like
children, but children who are treated like prison-
ers’ (Deleuze, 2004: 209). Control society can be
understood as emerging ‘alongside’ disciplinary
formations amidst a process of the former dis-
placing the latter.
34  These changes cannot be separated from broader
economic changes toward an increasingly precar-
ious labour force or the positioning of students
(from kindergarten to post graduate) less as
learners and increasingly as consumers that are
simultaneously subject to the machinations of
ongoing (human) capital development.
35  This shows up in the temperament of identarian
politics with its focus upon ‘calling each other out’
or ‘in’.
36  Critiques are wide ranging (Garo, 2008) and
include: (1) their work belongs to specific historical
moment (post May 1968 France) that has since
passed and whose relevance is questionable;
(2) it doesn’t offer a clear perspective or alterna-
tive to psychoanalytic or Marxist f­ormations of
­intellectual engagement and political militancy even
as DG reject these as outmoded and impractical;
(3) their work renders ‘inoperable any possibility of
collective action’ in part due to their assertion that
everything is political, and focusing on desire and
flows at the heart of their analyses (Garo, 2008:
62). Gur-Ze’ev (2005) also rejects the work of DG
in order to articulate a critical pedagogy that seeks
to resuscitate the Enlightenment subject as a basis
for protecting notions of justice and rationality in
the process of human betterment (175–77).
37  The intensity with which we bump the humanist
record of critical pedagogy with the posthuman-
ist elbow of DG, will no doubt effect the risks,
complications, and possibilities for thought and
action that can emerge within the education
assemblage and as we engage with and reterri-
torialize critical pedagogies anew.
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Specters of Critical Pedagogy:
Must We Die in Order to Survive?
NOTES FROM THE MARGINS
We’re living in a period when, in order to endure
its legitimacy, the Left has had to abandon the
notion of revolution. So what’s left after the
possibility of a radical transformation of society
has been written off? What’s left, for the Left,
are practices of resistance, practices of critique
and of civil disobedience. In other words, it’s a
strictly negative vocation…. [moreover] there’s
a great dignity in criticizing things and that
you’re kind of stupid if you actually propose
something … If you propose something on the
Left today … you get critiqued by everybody
because they are great at critiquing things.
(Michael Hardt, 2009: 135)
There is no great thought, opinion, or theory
that has not at its initial reveal risked the
vulnerability of dismissal, incredulity, and
deep criticism. Freire said:
Intellectuals who memorize everything, reading
for hours on end, slaves to the text, fearful of
taking a risk, speaking as if they were reciting from
memory, fail to make any concrete connections
with the world, the country, or the local
community. They repeat what has been read with
21
Antonio Garcia
precision but rarely teaching anything of personal
value. (Freire, 2001: 34)
As an academic theorist and philosopher,
I am always confronted with a ‘tradition’
where I am expected to follow certain disci-
plinary traditions, theses, and so forth
(Cusset, 2008: 194; Deleuze and Parnet,
2002: 13–14; Giroux, 1988: 146). There is a
deep value placed on using the most radical
and resistance oriented language and framing
to appear as a champion for the oppressed,
marginalized, and dispossessed of society. To
consider a philosopher that would propose a
viewpoint in opposition or in tension with
anything outside of the domain of Marxism
and critiquing neoliberalism runs the risk of
being accused of heresy. Eagleton illumi-
nates: ‘To be inside and outside a position at
the same time – to occupy a territory while
loitering skeptically on the boundary – is
often where the most intensely creative ideas
stem from’ (2003: 40). In the spirit of a true
pedagogical practice, I personally proceed
first and foremost with an evaluation of the
158 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
evidentiary and conceptual material availa-
ble, then endorse as a matter of summary
conclusive judgment. However, there is no
objectivity that is not in some degree limited
by the need for subjective consideration, as
Dostoevsky (2004) suggests in Notes from
the Underground. And, by the same token,
subjective evaluations – those that first prior-
itize the life world of the individual contra a
universal master narrative (see Lyotard,
1984) – should acknowledge the limitation of
such a foregrounding that dismisses or disa-
vows the objective empirical reality at
present.
There is little to nothing I have found in
the world that is totally banal in its effect,
regardless of its moral position of good and
evil. There is always-already a dialectical
issue that we must place in our evaluations
of trajectories, be they research, choosing
friends and relationships, choosing a job, and
so on. With all propositions of revolution and
progress, I frame the dialectical considera-
tion within the dimensions of (1) possibility
and (2) consequence. That is, without abso-
lute universal totality – as an actual empiri-
cal reality – that presupposes all individuals
to be of equal nature across mind, body, and
spirit/consciousness, the universal exception
(Žižek, 2014) will always be in effect: when
one group progresses in their own ideologi-
cal auspices, then another group(s) bears
a subsequent consequence (or reversal) to
their own ideological position and desire. For
example, the legalization of gay marriage in
the United States was a progressive advance-
ment for the LGBTQ community; however, it
can be conceptualized as having the obverse
enactment (i.e., the consequential) to those
that are more conservative. Accordingly, I
believe the judgment of progress and con-
sequence is not conducted with an objective
ambivalence but rather always-already from
the position of a moral authority – a predi-
cating ideological ontology – that is enacted
at the conscious and unconscious level that
elevates one to a feeling of superiority (or
having special knowledge over another).
This is ideology par excellence (Althusser,
2008; Žižek, 1989). We often hear, for exam-
ple, radical engagements legitimated by the
assumption that one is on the ‘right side of
history’. Castro infamously stated, ‘Condemn
me. It does not matter. History will absolve
me’ (2008: 105).
In general, critical pedagogues claim to not
be dogmatists, yet there seems to be a pro-
phetic emphasis in their words and actions.
In critiquing Peter McLaren, for example,
Ellison writes that ‘the problem with utopic
visions is the ease with which they lend
themselves to dogmatism and ideology’
(2009: 327). Perhaps this is rightly so, as
Paulo Freire said: ‘A society in a permanent
state of revolution cannot manage without
a permanent prophetic vision’ (1985: xvii).
That we attempt good works does not omit
us from the culpability of moral superiority
and authority. In Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers
provides an example of this culpability when
Diana’s father says, ‘When you say you’re
not a better person than any other, beware
lest that becomes its own superior stance,
with you a new kind of crème de la crème
[emerges]’ (2003: 95). Is the harsh realiza-
tion that critical pedagogy may itself be
ideologically blinded and proffering the very
thing it seeks to eliminate? Was this not the
thesis of Ellsworth’s article, ‘Why Doesn’t
This Feel Empowering? Working Through
the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy’,
in which she points out that critical pedagogy
‘strategies such as student empowerment and
dialogue give the illusion of equality while
in fact leaving the authoritarian nature of the
teacher/student relationship intact’ (1992:
98). Žižek explains:
Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to
escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension
it is a fantasy-construction which serves to support
our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our
effective, real social relations and thereby masks
some insupportable, real, impossible kernel … The
function of ideology is not to offer us a point of
escape from our reality but to offer us the social
reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real
kernel. (Žižek, 1989: 45)
 SPECTERS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: MUST WE DIE IN ORDER TO SURVIVE?
At the end of Blindness, Saramago writes, ‘I
don’t think we did go blind, I think we are
blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who
can see, but do not see’ (1997: 326).
When I critique critical pedagogy and
explore the practice of learning to die in
order to survive, it should be in considera-
tion, complicating, and critically reflecting
on that which has run its course of rele-
vance, utility (and power-as-influence), and
risks falling into anachronistic despair. In
contrast, I support the conceptual spirit of
critical pedagogy as a pedagogy to come;1
that is, a pedagogy always-already relegated
to the reality of the present, but not without
the fantastical idealism (e.g., imaginarium)
to move in fluid directions of tomorrow –
a concept that can never truly be realized
because when tomorrow comes it is no longer
tomorrow, but today – that provokes anxiety
in its invitation of the unknown-unknown
(i.e., the beyond). Critical pedagogy should
be a fluid embrace of the Becoming and the
coming into.2
SPECTERS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
He had a strange sense of being haunted, a feeling
that shades of his imagination were stepping out
into the real world, that destiny was acquiring the
slow, fatal logic of a dream. ‘Now I know what a
ghost is’, he thought. ‘Unfinished business, that’s
what’. (Salman Rushdie, 2008: 554)
In the opening of The Communist
Manifesto, Marx wrote, ‘A specter is haunt-
ing Europe – the specter of communism. All
the powers of old Europe have entered into
a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope
and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French
Radicals and German police-spies’ (1988:
54). Such an ominous and sinister tone
conjures images of the ghost of Banquo in
Macbeth (Shakespeare, 2009), the three spir-
its of Christmas past, present, and future in
A Christmas Carol (Dickens, 1991), and the
Dementors of Harry Potter and the Prisoner
159
of Azkaban (Rowling, 1999). The specters we
find in literature and folk tales tend to hold the
position of tragic sage totems providing fore-
shadowing because they have been cursed,
imprisoned, or held back from ascendance to
the next plane of Being because of a life that
was incomplete in some quasi-ontological
way (Zamora 2005). Žižek explains: ‘From
within the symbolic order, specters, appari-
tions, the “living dead”, and so on signal the
unsettled (symbolic) accounts’ (2005: 193).
The specters are caught in a mediating realm –
the ‘sutured’ space, an ontological moat
connecting and protecting the two realms –
where the world of mortal flesh and sym-
bolic registry, and the transcendental spiritual
worlds meet.
When Derrida (1994) spoke of specters
of Marx, he spoke of specters in the plural.
Who are the specters of critical pedagogy
and what do we owe them, if anything?
The discourses that have emerged under
the tutelage of critical pedagogy are noble,
but it is still riddled with legitimate critiques
and deadlocks. Critical pedagogy emerged
and created its own structures of discourse and
institutional power; however, the educational
system it sought to transform created its
own institutional discourse in the guise
of neoliberalism. What do we do with the
ghosts of critical pedagogy in the face of
‘failure’? Critical pedagogy runs the risk of
not moving on and letting the dead (ideas)
lie in their own time; it risks anachronistic
despair – right approach, but wrong time – as
Postman (1979) suggests. Does not the thesis
of Weekend at Bernie’s (Kotcheff, dir., 1989)
give us pause to consider the possibility that
we are making a ‘spectacle of the specter’;
that is, even though we know it’s dead, we
treat it like it’s still alive so that we benefit
from its presence.
In the midst of entertaining critical peda-
gogy, we have to wrestle with the specters
that still haunt us, one(s) that loom(s) in our
dreams of ‘utopian raptures’ rescuing us from
a ‘civilization of discontents’ (Freud, 1989).
History has shown us that the most of the
160 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
benevolent inventions of Man have caused the
most catastrophic events. Therefore, we must
critically reflect on our ideological benevo-
lence in which, as Žižek (1989) warns, ‘an
excessive commitment to Good may in itself
become the greatest Evil: real Evil is any
kind of fanatical dogmatism, especially that
exerted in the name of the supreme Good’
(1989: 27). And, as Nietzsche (1989) ques-
tioned, ‘How much blood and cruelty lie at
the bottom of all “good things”?’ (ibid.: 62).
LEARNING TO FAIL AND
THE LEAP OF FAITH
What lies beyond involves a Leap of Faith, faith in
lost Causes, Causes that, from within the space of
skeptical wisdom, cannot but appear as crazy. And
the present book speaks from within this Leap of
Faith – but why? The problem, of course, is that in
a time of crisis and ruptures, skeptical empirical
wisdom itself, constrained to the horizon of the
dominant form of common sense, cannot provide
the answers, so one must risk a Leap of Faith.
(Žižek, 2008: 2)
The constellation of today’s critical peda-
gogy represents a religio-ideological injunc-
tion; that is, it requires a leap of faith in the
midst of failure. Before we can learn to die
we must first learn to fail, as Beckett wrote,
‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again.
Fail again. Fail better’ (1996: 89). Therefore,
critical pedagogy should be framed not nec-
essarily as a failed pedagogical practice but a
practice of failing in the Beckettian sense.
Žižek explains:
At its most radical, theory is a theory of failed
practice … an examination of these failures con-
fronts us with the problem of fidelity: how to
redeem the emancipatory potential of these fail-
ures through avoiding the twin trap of nostalgic
attachment to the past and all-too-slick accom-
modation to ‘new circumstances’. (Žižek, 2008: 3)
We can think about the story of Niels Bohr,
the famous physicist, in which a visitor
comes to his house and notices a horseshoe
hanging on the door. The visitor knows that
Bohr is not superstitious and asks him why
he has it. Bohr replies, ‘I’m not superstitious
and I don’t believe in it, but I hear that even
if you don’t believe in it, it still works’
(Žižek, 2006b: 330). Does this apply to our
faith in part to Marxist theory but more spe-
cifically to critical pedagogy? Even though
we might not know if it works, we believe in
it nonetheless as a matter of faith?
Why does critical pedagogy encounter
such resistance in being implemented in the
K12 public schools of the United States?
Despite public schools being funded by the
state, they are not neutral and objective but
highly ideological (Althusser, 2008) and
balkanized (Higgins and Abowitz, 2011)
with the curriculum and overarching goals
(Apple, 2004; Giroux, 1983; Kliebard, 2004;
Pinar, 2004). The schools are ideological bat-
tlegrounds that have tended to cater more
toward a ‘conservative’ and perennialist posi-
tion. Rorty suggests that ‘our system of local
school boards means that precollege teachers
cannot, in the classroom, move very far from
the local consensus’ (1989: 199). Schools that
have an unapologetic and identified ideologi-
cal position, especially religious schools, as
Postman believes, have ‘no school crisis …
[because] there is a transcendent, spiritual
idea that gives purpose and clarity to learn-
ing’ (1995: 4). But owing to the larger pic-
ture of education (theory, philosophy, and
pedagogy) and ‘progressive reform’, Ravitch
charges, ‘radicals have long dismissed the
schools as a tool of the capitalist economy
which distracts attention from the need for
fundamental change’ (1977: 4). Radical and
resistance oriented discourses about educa-
tion have, in Hofstadter’s view, ‘been left
to us by men whose names command our
respect [and] is to a remarkable degree a lit-
erature of acid criticism and bitter complaint’
(1966: 301). Despite such particular critiques,
Freire encourages keeping the faith because
‘it is a fundamental error to state that educa-
tion is simply an instrument for the produc-
tion of the dominant ideology, as it is an error
 SPECTERS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: MUST WE DIE IN ORDER TO SURVIVE?
to consider it no more than an instrument for
unmasking that ideology’ (2001: 87).
A solution falls empty without a problem.
When observing individuals with depres-
sion and extreme anxiety, one symptomatic
feature that compounds and tortures the indi-
vidual is the catastrophizing effect (Sullivan
et al., 2001). Žižek observes, ‘A favoured
exercise of intellectuals throughout the
twentieth century … was the urge to “cata-
strophize” the situation: whatever the actual
situation, it had to be denounced as “cata-
strophic”, and the better it appeared, the more
it solicited this exercise’ (Žižek and Daly,
2004: 48). We can apply Newton’s third law –
for every action there is an equal and oppo-
site reaction – in that a ‘true’ or ‘perceived’
act of aggression, threat, or catastrophe may
derive as a resulting consequence a reaction
proportionally related to its degree. In other
words, the higher the degree of catastrophe,
the higher the degree of response that posits
that the responsive force must be in conjunc-
tion and equal to it in order to, in theory, be
able to resist it. One problem with critical
pedagogy and critical discourses is the pre-
supposition that its discourse and conceptual
solutions are the theoretical and pedagogi-
cal laxative through which the ‘constipated
crisis’ (Garcia, 2014) can be overcome with
critical consciousness as the resulting peri-
staltic rush. Adler (1939) wrote, ‘Crisis is a
turning point. In pneumonia, it is the point
at which the patient gets better or worse. But
the recent crisis in education is different.
Things can’t get worse. They can only get
better’ (unpaginated). Hope has the fantas-
tical power to keep us progressing – taking
leaps of faith – even in the ‘nightmare that
is the present’ (Pinar, 2004) that relegates us
to ‘prisoners of hope in desperate times …
[in which we] must try to speak our fallible
truths, expose the vicious lies, and bear our
imperfect witness’ (West, 1997: xii). But we
must also consider that, possibly, ‘hope is
a bad thing. It means you are not what you
want to be. It means that part of you is dead,
if not all of you. It means that you entertain
161
illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap’ (Miller,
1961: 3).
What plagues us as Leftists, as critical ped-
agogy scholars, and as cosmopolitan citizens
is that we have been sadly disappointed with
a revolutionary dream constantly deferred;
that our disappointment and clinging to the
revolutionary spirit and specter of revolution
is nothing more than a symptom of some-
thing not yet recognized, not yet wanting to
be acknowledged (i.e., a disavowing fetish).
At this point, ‘[r]evolution seems an unlikely
scenario. The end really is nigh for revolu-
tionary socialism’ (Mann, 2013: 92). Dean
points out, ‘Capitalism is more revolutionary
than the left has ever been’ (2009: 9). The
logic of capital has a recursive reproductive
quality where even ‘if someone found a way
of overcoming capitalism, then some corpo-
ration would doubtlessly buy the copyright
and the distribution rights’ (Critchley, 2008:
98). ‘Terms like “revolution”, or, more espe-
cially “crisis”’, about which Balibar draws
concern, ‘have become trivialized in the
extreme’ (1991: 156). In order to examine
critical pedagogy for the tensions within and
superseding Marxism, we need to proceed
with caution and take to heart Balibar’s obser-
vation, ‘if Marxism is going somewhere, it
can only be towards its own destruction’
(1991: 154). Since critical pedagogy is rooted
in Marxism, does it stand to reason that it may
also be marching toward its own destruction
or irrelevance in education? Revolution for
critical pedagogy is not impossible, but it must
confront its hagiographic and dogmatic affin-
ity for Marxist idealism that may be the real
obstacle in Leftist education (e.g., Ravitch,
1977), not capitalism. Badiou approaches
with a sensible consideration that ‘in itself,
the economy is neither good nor bad; it is the
place of no value. It simply runs more or less
well’ (2001: 31). Capitalism is no more evil
than it is good; it simply is. The originating
point and truth most crucial to any system,
capitalism or otherwise, created by mankind
as such is that it is always-already vulnerable
to the corruption and co-option of power that
162 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
inevitably runs the vulnerability and risk of
a kratocracy. Still, revolution should not be
reduced to this or that, but rather understood,
thus:
[F]or the state, revolution is never anything more
than an intervening period … For a politics of
emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most
is not repression at the hands of the established
order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the
unbounded cruelty that can come with its empti-
ness. (Badiou, 2010: 31)
However, we should not overlook Arendt’s
caution that ‘the most radical revolutionary
will become a conservative the day after the
revolution’ (1970: 70).
Before we can critique the world, we must
first know it and our limitations of knowing
such an organic and malleable world. Giroux
explains:
The concept of critical theory refers to the nature of
self-conscious critique and to the need to develop
a discourse of social transformation and emancipa-
tion that does not cling dogmatically to its own
doctrinal assumptions … [it] calls for the necessity
of ongoing critique, one in which the claims of any
theory must be confronted with the distinction
between the world it examines and portrays, and
the world as it actually exists. (Giroux, 1983: 8)
Despite Giroux’s assertion here, critical peda-
gogy as a matter of theoretical consideration
has been criticized as running the risk of
operating within its own symbolic order and
ideological fantasy (Biesta, 2005; Bowers,
1991; Ellison, 2009; Ellsworth, 1992; Garcia,
2014; Žižek, 1989). Self-conscious critique is
limited by the distinction between believing
and knowing that requires more faith than
evidence to construct reality (Berger and
Luckmann, 1967; Searle, 1995; Žižek, 1989,
2008). The beauty of critical pedagogy’s her-
itage is its grounding as a pedagogical stance
that, as Kincheloe points out, ‘is always
evolving, changing in light of both new theo-
retical insights and new problems and social
circumstance’ (2004: 49). We should, there-
fore, remain reflective of our positions, theo-
ries, and practices. Postman says, ‘Education
is a culture’s answer to the questions of a
particular era. The hazard of “holding” an
educational philosophy is that you may be
caught with a bag full of right answers to the
wrong era’ (1979: 16). Is critical pedagogy
caught in a similar anachronistic trap? If so,
what can emerging scholars do? Derrida asks,
‘if the specter is always animated by a spirit,
one wonders who would dare to speak of a
spirit of Marx, or more serious still, of a spirit
of Marxism’ (1994: 2). If Marxism is inevita-
bly en route to its own destruction as Balibar
(1991) observes, then what theoretical foun-
dations do we pursue in place of, or comple-
mentary to, Marxism, as it relates to the
foundational past of critical pedagogy and
future constellations?
Critical pedagogy has always had critiques,
but it is not the goal of this chapter to mince
fantastical ideas that remain in ‘infinence
deadlock’ (Garcia, 2018) – a perpetual back
and forth of equal and opposite force and
trajectory that results in no winning over or
surrendering to. Many of the critiques are
fashioned around critiquing the ideological
precepts that become thematic markers across
many prominent ‘theorists’ of critical peda-
gogy. Critical pedagogy has the academic
allure, I would call it ‘intellectual seduction’,
of theoretical masturbation and orgiastic
incest that fuels a cult of personality. To some
degree this critique is warranted as there is a
disjuncture, hypocritical stance, and irony for
those that call themselves critical pedagogy
theorists. However, it is somewhat unfair to
be so simply reductionist since, as McLaren
points out, ‘critical pedagogy is checkered
with tensions and conflicts and mired with
contradictions and should in no way be seen
as a unified discipline’ (2005: 51).
We will not do ourselves any favors in the
legitimacy, relevancy, or advancement of criti-
cal pedagogy as an educational theory by shy-
ing away from harsh criticism. It is through
recognizing and moving through our dark-
est elements and shortcomings that we even
stand the chance to be better and daringly
authentic with humbleness and humility.
 SPECTERS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: MUST WE DIE IN ORDER TO SURVIVE?
Biesta provides a poignant cautionary criti-
cism that is worth quoting in length here:
Critical Pedagogy has to be self-critical. Of course
critical educationalists would be the first to agree
that to be critical precisely means to be self-critical.
Yet I believe that critical pedagogy needs to be self-
critical in a more radical sense. In the end, the only
consistent way forward – and here I am interested
both in theoretical and pedagogical and political
consistency – is by a perpetual challenge of all
claims to authority, including the claims to author-
ity of Critical Pedagogy itself. This implies that such
a challenge cannot be put in the name of some
superior knowledge or privileged vision. Critical
Pedagogy cannot claim, in other words, that it
holds the truth. It can only proceed, so I want to
suggest, on the basis of a fundamental ignorance.
Such ignorance is neither naïveté nor skepticism. It
just is an ignorance that does not claim to know
how the future be or will have to be. It is an igno-
rance that does not simply show the way, but
issues an invitation to set out on the journey. It is
an ignorance that does not say what to think of it,
but only asks ‘What do you about it?’ It is an igno-
rance, in short, that makes room for the possibility
of disclosure, an ignorance that does not want to
know and does not claim to know what or who
the student will be or ought to be – and in pre-
cisely this respect I believe it is an educational and
emancipatory ignorance. (Biesta, 2005: 152)
Critical theory and pedagogy aim to break
open the foreclosed regulation of the sym-
bolic world, which it ascribes to the ideology
of capitalism that is stained by the dialectic
(Althusser, 2008; Freire, 2013; Giroux, 1983;
Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007; McLaren,
2005; Žižek, 1989). This aim is what we call
‘critical consciousness’; however, critical
consciousness is not a totalizing transcend-
ence that raises the individual to a level of
being able to see or know what others cannot,
as Biesta (2005) suggests. In place of a tran-
scendental idea structured like a hierarchy
that is contra Marxist configurations (e.g.,
base/superstructure), perhaps we should con-
sider critical pedagogy and subsequent onto-
epistemological positions beyond the
dialectic that reduces positions to master/
slave, oppressed/oppressor, for/against, and
either/or. Reynolds and Webber conjure the
rhizomatic spirit of Deleuze and Guattari to
163
assert that ‘curriculum theory moves when in
multiplicities and lines of flight, not in dual-
isms or either/ors. Curriculum theory IS not
this or that – defining it leads to this or that’
(2009: 2–3, emphasis in original).
MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN
Between man and other animals there are various
differences, some intellectual, some emotional.
One of the chief emotional differences is that
some human desires, unlike those of animals, are
essentially boundless and incapable of complete
satisfaction. (Bertrand Russell, 1996: 1)
Humans paint every available surface with so much
fucking death and misery, it’s amazing that humans
survive humanity. (Henry Rollins, 2009: 60)
If the life world of human experience that is
painted across Marxist oriented discourses
seems to always be plagued by imbalance,
inequalities, and hierarchies that are attrib-
uted to the logic of capitalism, then we must
ask if there was truly such a time that existed
before capitalism in which the world was
absent of such things? In addition, we should
question if the world after capitalism – be it a
communist tomorrow or an entirely new
‘system’ that has yet to be born and named –
will be better or worse. That such judgment of
better or worse is always obliged to pose
‘Better for whom?’. In such sense we cannot
escape the initial base of inquiry of the dialec-
tic that also implicates a universal exception;
that is, we know who is doing better by the
very fact that we know who those are that are
doing worse. Yet, even in this mode of initial
postulation (i.e., better/worse), we are theo-
retically and philosophically impoverished in
an either/or totality axiom, if we cling to the
dialectic. It is not just constellations (e.g.,
Garcia, 2018) or intersectionality (e.g.,
Crenshaw, 2014) that should be considered
but the unique fractalization of each individu-
al’s life world that is as vast an infinitely
recursive as the universe itself (see
Mandelbrot, 1983; Novak, 2004).
164 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Throughout most histories and cultures
around the world, there has been a great
practice of belief that there is the physical/
material world and a more mystical realm
where higher beings (e.g., God(s)) reign and
originate. Among ‘belief’ (e.g., organization
religions, Indigenous totemism, sectarian
cults, etc.) there tends to be the idea of (1)
transcendence to a higher plane of conscious-
ness (e.g., ‘eastern’ religions like Hinduism,
Buddhism, Confucianism) and (2) ascend-
ance to another world beyond ours (e.g.,
‘western’ religions like Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam). This is not to imply a dialectical
or dichotomous relationship that simplifies
belief so easily. However, even if we were
to pose the essential question of what human
beings are in this comparison among beliefs
(e.g., Coward, 2008; Ward, 1998), we would
still be confronted with (1) addressing the
possibilities and understanding on the level
of (medical and social) science and (2) within
metaphysical considerations that result in
also accepting that our capacity to know and
understand is still with magnificent limita-
tions. Thus, we are obliged to keep in close
conceptual question our epistemology in sev-
eral distinct propositions: (1) known-knowns
or things that we know that we know; (2)
known-unknowns or things that we know that
we do not know yet; (3) unknown-knowns or
things that reside at the level of the uncon-
scious; and (4) unknown-unknowns or things
that we do not know that we do not know
because they lie so far ahead in what we
can simply call ‘the beyond’ (see Rumsfeld,
2002; Žižek, 2008).
For philosophers and intellectuals, the idea
of transcendence is intimately associated with
Kant and enlightenment (see Kant, 2001),
which melds the conceptual field of our
primary physical world and the ‘other’ world
beyond ours, so we have but this material world
at present to embolden (i.e., transcendental
enlightenment) or leave to static primal
practice of subjugation among differing
groups. Within the theoretico-philosophical
axioms proposed and negotiated across a
vast diverse body of projects and works,
the Frankfurt School social theorists tend to
hold firmly that humanity (and the project/
practice of being human) is incomplete or
compromised by the logic of capitalism. For
example, Fromm explains:
The process of history is the process by which man
develops his specifically human qualities, his
powers of love and understanding; and once he
has achieved full humanity he can return to the
lost unity between himself and the world. This new
unity, however, is different from the preconscious
one which existed before history began. It is the
at-onement of man with himself, with nature, and
with his fellow man, based on the fact that man
has given birth to himself in the historical process.
(Fromm, 2004: 53)
Mary Midgley says, ‘The trouble with him
[mankind] is, of course, that he [mankind]
comes half-finished’ (2002: 274). Resonating
with the sentiment of an incomplete human-
ity, Midgley proposes that ‘man is innately
programmed in such a way that he needs a
culture to complete him. Culture is not an
alternative or replacement for instinct, but its
outgrowth and supplement’ (2002: 274).
G. K. Chesterton said, ‘There is no equality
in nature; also there is no inequality in nature’
(2001: 105). The idea of equality, as it per-
tains to humanity, is fundamentally a human
concept, much like time, that problematizes
the ratio and distribution of resources within
the logic of capitalism where such unequal
representation or distribution must be not just
an issue of dominance but also a presupposed
victimization. The physical world and uni-
verse is structured by mathematics and pat-
terns (e.g., fractals, the Fibonacci sequence,
etc.); however, the nature of being human has
rarely found an essential common ground
beyond the basic universal biology of the
human body. It is important to reflect on the
idea of human nature because it is the divid-
ing line between the empirical reality and
fantasy sustained by an infinite and enduring
‘hope’ of the human; even this situating can
be highly debatable. Nonetheless, a proper
critique of critical pedagogy must question
 SPECTERS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: MUST WE DIE IN ORDER TO SURVIVE?
its imprisonment to hope as a buttressing
ideology that sustains its fantasy of a better
tomorrow. As Fromm famously asserts, ‘Man
is the only animal for whom his own exist-
ence is a problem which he has to solve and
from which he cannot escape’ (1990: 40).
Human nature has always tended to repre-
sent a parallax gap (see Žižek, 2006a) in phi-
losophy, religion, and consequently education.
The parallax gap is ‘the confrontation of two
closely linked perspectives between which no
neutral common ground is possible’ (Žižek,
2006a: 4). The empirical reality of humanity
has demonstrated not only the irrationality
of humans but also the paradoxical nature of
humanity’s progress. Marcuse laments ‘the
fact that the destruction of life (human and
animal) has progressed with the progress of
civilization, that cruelty and hatred and the sci-
entific extermination of men have increased in
relation to the real possibility of the elimina-
tion of oppression’ (1955/1966: 86). Badiou
echoes a similar lamentation as Marcuse in that
Man ‘has shown himself to be the most wily of
animals, the most patient, the most obstinately
dedicated to the cruel desires of his own power’
(2001: 59). It is perhaps Freud’s classic work
on Civilization and Its Discontents that best
calls into question any ‘hope’ for humanity:
The element of truth behind all this, which people
are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle
creatures who want to be loved, and who at the
most can defend themselves if they are attacked;
they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose
instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a pow-
erful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their
neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or
sexual object, but also someone who tempts them
to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his
capacity to work without compensation, to use
him sexually without his consent, to torture and to
kill him … Who, in the face of all his experience of
life and of history, will have the courage to dispute
this assertion? (Freud, 1989: 68–69)
Although we may want to believe that
humanity is innately good, but the dark ideo-
logical magic of capital sours it; it is perhaps
the opposite. Have we not conducted enough
experiments (e.g., the Milgram experiment,
165
the Stanford Prison Experiment, MKUltra)
and witnessed history to know that we are all
monsters but most have been domesticated in
the open while others lie dormant waiting to
be let loose?
CRITIQUE OF DIALECTIC
Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is
a characteristic feature of Western theosophy, but
not the confrontation with the shadow and the
world of darkness. One does not become enlight-
ened by imagining figures of light, but by making
darkness conscious. (Carl Jung, 1983: 265–6)
Although the dialectic is most often dis-
cussed in critical theory in reference to Hegel
(1977, 2005), the general concept goes as far
back as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as a
matter of logic and argumentation. The dia-
lectic of biological and intellectual life func-
tions as a conceptualization that two things
are in equal and opposite relation with one
another, and function based on symbiosis.
For example, we know what hot feels like
because of its dialectical relation to cold.
However, if we borrow conceptually from
the second law of thermodynamics, we see
that there is not a fluid balance exchange in
which both (hot and cold) can be origin
points. Rather, to put it in simple terms, cold
is the origin point from which heat will rise
and return to (Bent, 1965). This origin point
holds a special priority in the relationship as
the point of ultimate return and origin. For
example, let us think about counseling psy-
chology in which we use – among many
approaches – dialectical behavior therapy
(DBT) (Linehan, 1993) to frame and distin-
guish the behaviors and thoughts that affect
those with mental health issues. Through
structured exercises and a philosophical
approach, the goal of DBT is to help the
client/patient distinguish those behaviors and
thoughts that are causing problems in order
to help them reduce the escalations of depres-
sion, emotional anguish, anger, etc. In doing
166 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
so, the client/patient will hopefully recognize
that they are not stuck in a particular state or
innately imprisoned in a constant state of
crisis (e.g., catastrophizing). With the second
law of thermodynamics and DBT there is
conceptually one mode (state of B/being)
from which all things rise (i.e., generate) and
return to (degenerate).
The dialectic is useful, but my consideration
of it and critical pedagogy here is predicated
on a much more complicated ‘constellation’
that obliges us to call into question and con-
ceptualize ‘origin points’ as subjective posi-
tionings that assume a ‘moral authority’ and
messianic stance (Bowers, 1991) of what
constitutes the ‘right side’ of the dialectic to
be on. It is useful to look at Schopenhauer’s
proposal of suffering as a conceptual origin
point, which is influenced by eastern philoso-
phies, especially Buddhism:
If suffering is not the first and immediate object of
our life, then our existence is the most inexpedient
and inappropriate thing in the world. For it is
absurd to assume that the infinite pain, which
everywhere abounds in the world and springs from
the want and misery essential to life, could be
purposeless and purely accidental. Our susceptibil-
ity to pain is well-nigh infinite; but that to pleasure
has narrow limits. It is true that each separate piece
of misfortune seems to an exception, but misfor-
tune in general is the rule. (Schopenhauer, 2010: 1)
Schopenhauer suggests a reversal of the con-
ventional ideal of life. That is, if we speak
pedagogically, we learn what we want by
knowing what we do not want. Therefore,
enlightenment is not gained by the inexperi-
ence and absence of challenges, especially at
their worst and most torturous. Rather, it is
through the suffering that we may come to
truly know and appreciate not suffering.
Even in Genesis God began in the darkness
and then created light. God did not begin in
the light to only later encounter the absence
of it in darkness.3 In this example, much like
Schopenhauer’s proposal, it is the dark side
(e.g., suffering) of the dialectic, not the light
side (e.g., not suffering), that is the origin
point. In Dracula Untold (Shore, dir., 2014),
Vlad seeks out the vampire in the mountain
in order to become a vampire and have super-
natural strength to defend his kingdom.
Again, we see the dark side of the dialectic
implicated when the vampire says to Vlad,
‘Sometimes the world no longer needs a
hero. Sometimes what it needs is a monster’.
I am not suggesting that the ‘dark side’ of the
dialectic is always the predicate to the other
side, as Schopenhauer suggests with a kind
of dialectical transcendence. Whereas we
know the second law of thermodynamics
holds true, we cannot say the same for the
dialectic. Although we may be able to judge
one side over another, we are always-already
in a subjective life world that holds a moral,
ethical, and ideological influence that inocu-
lates us with a plague of fantasies that struc-
tures our desires (Žižek, 1989).
IF WE ARE TO SURVIVE, WE MUST
FIRST LEARN TO DIE
Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.
(Carl Sagan, 2006: 196)
People fear death, a death, any death as a fear
of that which has a zero-sum finality to their
life, work, and family. Of course, death is
treated culturally in various ways and the
manner of death usually ushers a question of
judgment (overtly or covertly) – ‘How did
they die?’ – by the living. It is always curious
how people are seemingly obligated by social
etiquette and cultural codes to give respect to
the dead. This most puzzling response can be
observed, for example, where a family
member has passed from cancer; someone,
however, who was considered to be a miser-
able person who always spoke harshly and
degradingly to everyone. The event of death
has the ability to erase and distort the person
one was with an artificial nostalgia that can
hide one’s monstrosity. This process of disa-
vowing the monstrosity or more disturbing
parts of a dead person’s life as a place for a
 SPECTERS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: MUST WE DIE IN ORDER TO SURVIVE?
more benevolent caricature draws parallels
with the treatment of history, especially in
the spirited Leftists that espouse critical
pedagogy, desire a communist tomorrow as
the solution to the world’s impoverished
spirit, and break the world into dialectical
halves between the oppressed and oppressor
(e.g., Badiou, 2010; Dean, 2009; Kachur,
2012; Malott, 2017; McLaren, 2000).
Learning to die and welcoming death
opens up the possibility to transcend stuck
positions and the risk of anachronism. Plato
says, ‘Those who practice philosophy in
the right way are in training for dying and
they fear death least of all men’ (1997: 59).
Philosophers are not adrenaline junkies or
death-defying stuntmen like Evel Knievel.
Rather, philosophers prepare for that which
may possibly only be acquired by the very
real process of death itself. Plato explains:
Many men, at the death of their lovers, wives or
sons, were willing to go to the underworld, driven
by the hope of seeing there those for whose com-
pany they longed, and being with them. Will then
a true lover of wisdom, who has a similar hope and
knows that he will never find it to any extent
except in Hades, be resentful of dying and not
gladly undertake the journey thither? One must
surely think so, my friend, if he is a true philoso-
pher, for he is firmly convinced that he will not find
pure knowledge anywhere except there. And if
this is so, then, as I said just now, would it not be
highly unreasonable for such a man to fear death?
(Plato, 1997: 59)
Death in Plato’s discussion is not a finite noth-
ingness, but an opening into another world
(i.e., Hades). If the only way to achieve a
certain wisdom is to die, then the philosopher
must leap to their death in order to crossover
into the other realm where such knowledge or
wisdom is to be found. This is the premise of
the movie Flatliners (Schumacher, dir., 1990),
where five medical students attempt near
death experiences to see what lies on the other
side and encounter paranormal consequences
from their experiments.
If death in its biological or metaphorical
sense was an issue of singular finitude, then
167
why fear and disavow it? For Baudrillard,
‘The power of the state is based on the man-
agement of life as the objective afterlife. In
this, it is more powerful than the Church, since
the abstract of power of the state is increased
not by an imaginary beyond, but by the imag-
inary of life itself’ (1993: 144, emphasis in
original). Here, the ‘crossing over’ or tran-
scendence is regulated on the uncertainty of
what the ‘afterlife’ is. Therefore, such anxi-
ety over the uncertainty of what happens after
death has the possibility to reduce people to
cling to an ideological enslavement (e.g.,
Plato’s cave) in which life is lived within
the confines of the ‘symbolic order’ (Lacan,
1991). Montaigne supports Plato’s position
that philosophy is learning to die:
We do not know where death awaits us: so let us
wait for it everywhere. To practise death is to prac-
tise freedom. A man who has learned to die has
unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die
gives us freedom from subjection and constraint.
(Montaigne, 2004: 24)
For those that reject this regulation and pos-
sible consequential subjugation, life takes on
a more fluid ideal. Anaïs Nin conceptualizes
life as a ‘process of becoming, a combination
of states we have to go through. Where
people fail is that they wish to elect a state
and remain in it. This is a kind of death’
(1964: 20). The idea of death that Nin points
to here is not just the fear of living but also
the fluidity of life that requires one to die
many deaths. In such a sense, death is
reduced to a plateau that one must move
beyond to continue living. There are those
among us that have succumbed to a staticity
and continue in the world embodying a kind
of intellectual Cotard’s syndrome.4
If we are to survive in the sense of advanc-
ing our own organic intellectualism, onto-
epistemological place, and ‘relevancy’ then
we must learn to die. Such a death would
acknowledge that we have reached a plateau
(or understanding of our limitations) with cer-
tain ideas, especially as they concern notions
of resisting the ideological state apparatuses
168 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
(see Althusser, 2008). Such a death would
foreclose the irrationality of hope, as Cornel
West explains, which ‘is not the same as opti-
mism. Optimism adopts the role of the specta-
tor who surveys the evidence in order to infer
that things are going to get better’ (1997: xii).
If we were to take West’s differentiation here
between hope and optimism, would we really
derive evidence that critical pedagogy is thriv-
ing in K12 public schools and not just among
the publishing orgies of academics? Would
this expose the fetishist disavowal that ‘we
know very well that this will happen at some
point, but nevertheless cannot bring ourselves
to really believe that it will’ (Žižek, 2010: x).
Such a death would force us to confront the
fantasy elements that structure our desires.
That is, the traumatic nightmare when our
fantasies no longer structure our realities:
‘They do not know it, but they are doing it’ [Marx] …
What they do not know is that their social reality
itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a
fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they
misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion
which is structuring their reality, their real social
activity. They know very well how things really are,
but still they are doing it as if they do not know. The
illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlook-
ing the illusion which is structuring our real, effec-
tive relationship to reality. And this overlooked,
unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideo-
logical fantasy. (Žižek, 1989: 32, italics in original)
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus famously
states, ‘There is but one truly serious philo-
sophical problem and that is suicide. Judging
whether life is or is not worth living amounts
to answering the fundamental question of
philosophy’ (1991: 3). We normally under-
stand suicide as an act of killing oneself.
However, there is the literal and metaphorical
suicidal act – killing one’s self – that in
simple terms is an act to end the coordinates
and current constellation of one’s current
circumstance. In this way, death is volitional
and self-inflicted. When one commits ‘career
suicide’ it involves knowingly engaging in an
act of presenting ideas that would end one’s
career or acceptance. But if we must die in
order to survive, this is a suicidal act that
requires a leap of faith that carries with it the
rupture of symbolic coordinates in order to
invite a transcendental moment toward the
beyond. Do we not see the metaphorical
death and rebirth in ‘born-again’ Christians,
which invite a death to their current life in
order to rise like the phoenix from the ashes?
In Vanilla Sky (Crowe, dir., 2001) David
Aames (played by Tom Cruise) is in a cryo-
genic sleep chamber, but he does not know it
until particular ruptures in his perceived real-
ity begin to happen. He is eventually told of
the simulation dream world that he is in due
to his cryogenic sleep in the real world. The
only way he can wake from his cryogenic
sleep is to commit suicide in the dream world
by jumping from a building. Before he makes
his leap of faith to return to the real world, he
says, ‘I want to live a real life. I don’t want to
dream any longer’. In City of Angels
(Silberling, dir., 1998), the angel, Seth
(played by Nicolas Cage), falls in love with a
mortal woman, Dr. Maggie Rice (played by
Meg Ryan), but Seth cannot be with her or
engage in the human experience since he is
not human. By chance Seth meets Nathaniel
Messinger (played by Dennis Franz) in the
hospital where Maggie is a doctor. Messinger
is able to feel Seth’s presence when Seth is in
cloaking mode as an angel. Messinger was an
angel once upon a time that became human.
When Seth learns of this and inquires about
how this is possible, Messinger tells him:
You choose … [t]o fall to Earth. You take the
plunge, the tumble, the dive. You jump off a
bridge. Leap out a window. You just make up your
mind to do it and you do it. You wake up all
smelly, and aching from head to toe. So it’s all real
confusing and painful, but very, very good.
In concluding my thoughts, we should look
at the transcendental possibility of learning
to die that requires a certain suicide at times,
as we take a leap of faith to continue failing
in the best way possible, which will hope-
fully reveal tomorrow and the day after as a
little better than the day before.
 SPECTERS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: MUST WE DIE IN ORDER TO SURVIVE?
Notes
1  It is with honor, respect, and remembrance of my
dear friend Dennis Carlson that I use this con-
ceptual framing. Dennis passed away before our
collaboration of thoughts could be compiled and
published. I now have the opportunity to share
some of what we started. In addition, I owe tre-
mendous gratitude to not only Dennis but also
to Kristopher Holland with whom I have collabo-
rated over 10 years to work through some of the
critiques laid out as ‘the specters of critical peda-
gogy’. Lastly, I owe thanks to David Gabbard,
Justin Twiddy, Jeff Patterson, and Alphonse Rein-
hardt for their support in helping talk through
this chapter and encouraging me to publish it.
To these amazing friends and colleagues, I pay
inexhaustible respect and appreciation for their
friendship and intellectual prowess.
2  I would like to thank my cherished friend and phi-
losopher, Stephanie Koziej, for her emphasis on
‘fluidity’ that has influenced me across my life,
music, and philosophy.
3  Genesis 1: 1–4 (KJV). 1 In the beginning God cre-
ated the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth
was without form, and void; and darkness was
upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of
God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And
God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and
God divided the light from the darkness.
4  Cotard’s syndrome is often referred to as the
‘walking dead’ disorder or ‘delusion of negation’
because people with the disorder deny their ‘own
existence or the existence of the external world …
Schizophrenics who exhibit Cotard’s syndrome
may make statements such as “I’m dead” or “I’m
not here or anywhere”’ (Noll, 2007:108).
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Critical Pedagogy Beyond
the Human
As Elizabeth Ellsworth noted three decades
ago, critical pedagogy’s most enduring
goals – ‘critical democracy, individual free-
dom, social justice, and social change’ –
‘operate at a high level of abstraction’ (1989:
300). For those of us in classrooms at the
P–12 or university levels, or working in non-
school sites of educational praxis, the diffi-
culty of critical pedagogy is to think and live
together in such a way that these goals don’t
‘give the illusion of equality while in fact
leaving the authoritarian nature of the teacher/
student relationship intact’ (ibid.: 306). This
means, as Ellsworth notes in considerable
detail, shifting our focus from abstractions
that often serve as an alibi for teachers to
insist on a single vision of rational delibera-
tion as ‘critical’ politics toward attention to,
and entanglement with, the concrete, histori-
cally specific, and difficult problems that
appear in a particular time and place among
particular groups of participants.
My goal in this chapter is to suggest that the
concrete and the abstract are, in fact, crucially
22
Nathan Snaza
linked and that in order to pursue critical ped-
agogy as an ethos – as opposed to a particu-
lar set of strategies or methods – we have to
expand our abstract sense of what politics and
participation mean in order to better attune to
the specific relations in any given milieu. In
particular, I am going to suggest that a multi-
plicity of theoretical currents in social thought
today – feminist new materialisms, queer inhu-
manisms, posthumanisms, object-oriented
ontology (OOO), affect theory, and nonanthro-
pocentric ecologies – offer concepts and frame-
works for thinking critical pedagogy – and
political encounter more generally – beyond
the human. This requires a recalibration of
critical pedagogy’s conception of politics – no
longer understood as scenes of merely human
deliberation and action – as well as its concept
of the human. While one set of motivations for
these recalibrations comes from an impulse
to draw nonhuman actors into accounts of
what counts as politics – increasingly tak-
ing place on an earth damaged to the point
where innumerable species, ecosystems, and
174 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
even ‘human’ societies face extinction – this
impulse is also about addressing and redress-
ing the histories of Western imperial conquest
in modernity. Colonial settlement, the racial-
ized slave trade, and capitalist economies have
coalesced to make a highly particular version
of the human – Sylvia Wynter (2003) calls this
‘Man’ – seem as if it were simply the human
as such, with horrific results politically and
ecologically. Critical pedagogy, ultimately,
has to re-write its commitments to ‘humaniza-
tion’ (Freire, 2000) in order to valorize local,
multiple, and even experimental forms of per-
forming the human.
Picking up on Paulo Freire’s claim in
Pedagogy of the Oppressed that ‘while the
problem of humanization has always, from an
axiological point of view, been humankind’s
central problem, it now [because of the dehu-
manizing logics of colonialism and capital-
ism] takes on the character of an inescapable
concern’ (2000: 43), most critical pedagogues
have anchored their projects in relation to an
ideal of what it means to be a fully humanized
human being.1 As Ellsworth’s article details,
this means that critical pedagogy’s aims
have often been articulated using language
like ‘human agency’, ‘human betterment’,
and ‘common human interests’ (1989: 307).
While this ‘human’ has often been rhetorically
pitched as the highest possible level of abstrac-
tion and communion – and thus an antidote to
racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and other
political mechanisms of dividing humans
along axes of hierarchized relation2 – it is cru-
cial today to understand how that ‘human’,
when left untheorized as simply an assumed
category whose self-evidence is apparent,
functions as a powerful colonial logic. That
is, commitment to a supposedly universal and
abstract humanity is entirely amenable to log-
ics of capitalist, colonialist, racist, (hetero)
sexist, and ableist politics. Against, this, I will
affirm Wynter’s argument that:
the struggle of our new millennium will be one
between the ongoing imperative of securing the
well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western
bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which
overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself,
and that of securing the well-being, and therefore
the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the
human species itself/ourselves. (Wynter, 2003: 260)
Critical pedagogy, then, has to move from a
belief that there is a single thing called ‘the
human’ toward the decolonial affirmation of
multiple ways of performing the human.
This demand that critical pedagogy move
beyond the Western version of human called
‘Man’ has, as some of us well know, been
sounded before. Sandy Grande’s (2004) Red
Pedagogy offers a sustained critique of the
ways that critical pedagogy’s concepts and
discourses relied upon Western colonialist
assumptions about the human and its (non-)
relations to the rest of the world. Tracking
the ‘deep structures of colonialist conscious-
ness’ (ibid.: 69), Grande offers five beliefs
that structure this manner of thinking, all of
which tend to be imported into mainstream
– or, to use her term, whitestream – critical
pedagogies. They are: ‘1. Belief in progress
as change and change as progress’; ‘2. Belief
in the effective separateness of faith and
reason’; ‘3. Belief in the essential quality of
the universe and of “reality” as impersonal,
secular, material, mechanistic, and relativ-
istic’; ‘4. Subscription to ontological indi-
vidualism’; and ‘5. Belief in human beings
as separate from and superior to the rest of
nature’ (ibid.: 69). These five core assump-
tions drive the curricular and pedagogical
goals of both (settler) colonialist schools and
most ‘critical’ interventions into schooling.
That is, what Grande’s Indigenous critique of
critical pedagogy enables us to understand is
that critical pedagogy often functions entirely
within a horizon of Western humanism that is
the political, ontological, and epistemologi-
cal motor of imperialism.
Grande’s critique, and decolonial knowl-
edge more generally, also offers crucial ways
of conceptualizing critical pedagogy differ-
ently. At the center of these is an ontological
postulation of the human as part of a mangle
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY BEYOND THE HUMAN
of relations called ‘land’. As Glen Sean
Coulthard puts it:
Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism
are best understood as struggles oriented around the
question of land – struggles not only for land, but
also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of
reciprocal relationship (which is itself informed by
place-based practices and associated forms of
knowledge) ought to teach us about living our lives
in relation to one another and our surroundings in a
respectful, nondominating, and nonexploitative way.
(Coulthard, 2014: 60, italics in original)
Land here includes the human – ‘we are as
much a part of the land as any other element’
(ibid.: 61) – and the human is therefore in a
position of learning from the land. That is,
instead of an imperialist dichotomy between
the human as a separate, rational agent and
‘nature’ as a passive background for human
action, land is agential. Land teaches. This is
why Tuck and McKenzie can write that ‘decol-
onization is not just something the humans
(may) do; it is (primarily) something that the
land does on its own behalf’ (2015: 71).3
While Indigenous struggles and pedago-
gies formulate this decolonizing movement in
relation to land, I will now track how various
theoretical frameworks offer a set of concepts
and axioms that can be usefully constellated.
The reason to begin with Indigenous critique
is that it refuses any separation between
ontological claims about how entities relate –
and, in a move very much congruent with
work in feminist materialisms, how entities
emerge only in relation – and political strug-
gle to decolonize and dismantle the (settler)
colonialist state. While some of the theories
I track here are less explicit about, or even
unconcerned with, their investments in that
political project, I would argue that it is, in
fact, the most crucial way to thinking these
critiques of ‘humanism’ in relation. That is,
the movement happening today in social and
political theory ‘beyond the human’ is best
understood, even if individual thinkers do
not position their projects as such, as part
of decolonial struggle. Critical pedagogy, I
175
might propose, comes to be the way of nam-
ing any struggle to decolonize being human
away from Man and its (settler colonial4)
nation-state-based politics.
POSTHUMANISMS
As John Weaver and I argued in the introduc-
tion to Posthumanism and Educational
Research (Snaza and Weaver, 2014), there is
no single discourse called ‘posthumanism’.
Instead, as it has come to be used in the
humanities, social sciences, and even in phys-
ical and biological sciences, this word refers
to any way of thinking that does not take
‘Man’ as the measure (ibid.: 3). Posthumanism
in this broad sense critiques Man and affirms
other ways of being and relating to others in
politics. Although this risks a certain reduc-
tiveness, I would like to define posthumanism
for the purposes of this chapter as those theo-
ries that re-write the human using ideas
emerging in cybernetics and informatics. As
N. Katherine Hayles notes in How We Became
Posthuman, this version of posthumanism, or
more specifically, of ‘the posthuman’, opens
onto both a dystopian and a utopian imagina-
tion of futurity:
If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthu-
mans who regard their bodies as fashion accesso-
ries rather than the ground of being, my dream is
a version of the posthuman that embraces the
possibilities of information technologies without
being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and
disembodied immortality, that recognizes and cel-
ebrates finitude as a condition of human being,
and that understands human life is embedded in a
material world of great complexity, one on which
we depend for our continued survival. (Hayles,
1999: 5)
This ‘dream’ emerges for Hayles in the wake
of the Macy Conferences on cybernetics
between 1943 and 1954. These conferences,
which brought together thinkers from across
a range of disciplines, sought to construct ‘a
theory of communication and control
176 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
applying equally to animals, humans, and
machines’ (ibid.: 7). While these conferences
led to important advances in encryption,
robotics, and Artificial Intelligence, ‘the
result of this breathtaking enterprise was
nothing less than a new way of looking at
human beings. Henceforth, humans were to
be seen primarily as information-processing
entities who are essentially similar to intelli-
gent machines’ (ibid.: 7). Cary Wolfe, in
What is Posthumanism?, writes:
[P]osthumanism names a historical moment in
which the decentering of the human by its imbri-
cation in technical, medical, informatic, and eco-
nomic networks is increasingly impossible to
ignore, a historical development that points toward
the necessity of new theoretical paradigms (but
also thrusts them upon us), a new mode of
thought that comes after the cultural repressions
and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and eva-
sions, of humanism as a historically specific phe-
nomenon. (Wolfe, 2009: xv–xvi)
Understanding the human as an entity on a
continuum with machines and (other) ani-
mals – instead of a being set apart from these
by an ontological rupture – was also a crucial
part of feminist biologist Donna Haraway’s
work from the 1980s forward. In ‘A Cyborg
Manifesto’, originally published in 1985,
Haraway argued that the human/animal,
animal/machine, and physical/non-physical
boundaries have broken down and that these
breakdowns enable new modes of identity
and politics. Drawing on feminist and deco-
lonial theories, and science fiction writing,
Haraway queries whether ‘we can learn from
our fusions with animals and machines how
not to be Man’ (1991: 173).5 At stake, for
her, is a rejection of dualisms as well as ‘uni-
versal, totalizing theory’ (ibid.: 181). Instead
of positing a single vision into which politics
must (forcefully) collate us, Haraway insists
on ‘both building and destroying machines,
identities, categories, relationships, space
stories’ (ibid.: 181). A cyborg politics, then,
is messy, contradictory, shifting, and always
attentive to the specific asymmetries of
power operative in a particular milieu.
As the essays gathered by Jack Halberstam
and Ira Livingston in Posthuman Bodies
(1995) make clear, this version of posthu-
manism resonated persistently in feminist
and queer politics, especially in the wake of
theories of gender performance (Butler, 1993,
2004) and the AIDS crisis. Ranging across
sexual acts, forms of family and community
production, technological prostheses, and
medical/psychiatric disciplines, Halberstam
and Livingston propose that the posthuman
‘queries and queers the ways that the options
are articulated and policed’ (1995: 19). They
reject ‘authentic culture or an organic commu-
nity’ in favor of ‘multiple visibilities’ (ibid.:
18). Importantly, they tie this to various strug-
gles undertaken by those whose humanity has
always been in question during imperialist
modernity: ‘The posthuman marks a solidar-
ity between disenchanted liberal subjects and
those who were always-already disenchanted,
those who seek to betray identities that legiti-
mize or de-legitimize them at too high a cost’
(ibid.: 9). Put differently, the posthuman in
this version is powerfully constellated with
projects that have called attention to Western
humanism’s violences and exclusions.
QUEER INHUMANISMS AND BLACK
FEMINIST THEORIES OF THE HUMAN
Despite Halberstam and Livingston’s inter-
vention (in one of the first books to use the
word ‘posthuman’ in its title no less!), ‘an
uneven attention to race and related axes of
dehumanization persists in many’ posthuman-
isms (Luciano and Chen, 2015: 194). As the
contributors to the special issue of GLQ enti-
tled ‘Queer Inhumanisms’ make very clear,
the theoretical and political impulse to
decenter the human operates very differently
for subjects whose humanity has always been
in question than for those who have easily
gained recognition as Man. At stake is, as
Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen outline in
their introduction the GLQ special issue, how
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY BEYOND THE HUMAN
a certain positing of ‘the human’ risks collaps-
ing it with what Wynter calls Man, a collapse
that ends up factoring out the politics of dehu-
manization that have been the constant con-
cern of feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, and
queer theorists (Chen, 2013; Deckha, 2012;
Russell and Semenko, 2016). They write:
If we accept the framing of the nonhuman turn as
a move ‘beyond’ the merely human concerns of
identity and alterity, we overlook how the very
possibility of making a distinction between the
human and non-human has, historically, been
constructed by the kind of actions and processes
that we have named dehumanization. (195)
Against this overlooking, they propose ‘inhu-
man’ because it ‘points to the violence that
the category of the human contains within
itself’ (ibid.: 196).
To unpack this violence, we could turn
to Judith Butler’s work on gender per-
formativity, which argues that the human is
only legible in relation to the production of
‘constitutive outsides’ that function as its
points of differentiation (1993: 8). Drawing
on Wynter’s writings, Butler argues that ‘If
there are norms of recognition by which the
“human” is constituted, and these norms
encode operations of power, then it fol-
lows that the contest over the future of the
“human” will be a contest over the power
that works in and through such norms’ (2004:
13). Because ‘the category of the “human”
retains within itself the workings of the power
differential of race as part of its historicisty’ in
addition to the differential of gender/sexuality
(2004: 13), what we need is a theory of the
human as a site of contestation that is linked
not only with questions of human/animal/
machine relations and imbrications, but also
of the intra-human differentiations of dehu-
manization that mark our ongoing experience
in the wake of modernity.
Exploring how Hortense Spillers and
Sylvia Wynter offer theories of the human
that diagnose precisely how such dehu-
manizations mark ‘the human’ as a category
of Western colonialist logic, Alexander
177
Weheliye notes that ‘humans create race
for the benefit of some and the detriment of
other humans’ (2014: 26). Weheliye calls
this creation racialization (the production of
race through ‘racializing assemblages’ that
simultaneously produce Man’s constitutive
outsides). He writes:
If racialization is understood not as a biological or
cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of socio-
political relations that discipline humanity into full
humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, then
blackness designates a changing system of une-
qual power structures that apportion and delimit
which humans can lay claim to full human status
and which humans cannot. (Weheliye, 2014: 3)
That is, race – like gender, sexuality, and
ability – is not an ontological given so much
as a ‘system’ that is inescapably linked to the
production of both unmarked ‘humans’ and
marked not-quite-humans.
In his contribution to the ‘Queer
Inhumanisms’ issue, Tavia Nyong’o (2015)
draws on precisely this black-studies critique
to argue that:
[c]olluding with … liberalism, posthumanist theory
has tended to present the decentering of the
human as both salutary and largely innocent of
history. Up until the present time, we are told in
one version of this philosophical fable, we have
incorrectly centered the human. Now we can, and
must, correct this error, if only (paradoxically) to
save ourselves. It is in anticipation of such tales
that black studies has repeatedly asked: have we
ever been human? (Nyong’o, 2015: 266)
This question loops around to the title of
Luciano and Chen’s introduction to the issue:
‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’ While
there are many different viewpoints offered
within the queer, black studies, and decolo-
nial projects of moving away from or ‘beyond’
the unmarked human – Wynter’s Man – that
anchored colonialist modernity, they share a
commitment to asking about human entan-
glements with nonhumans in relation to the
politics of dehumanization (or animalization,
objectification, thingification). To my mind,
this offers critical pedagogy a doubled set of
178 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
tactics: seeking out ways of challenging the
violence attending the human’s policing by
Man, and seeking out ways of attuning to
relations among humans and nonhumans that
don’t prop up visions of conquest, resource
extraction, settlement, and what Mick Smith
(2011) calls ‘ecological sovereignty’ (a con-
cept that re-writes land as ‘property’).
FEMINIST NEW MATERIALISMS,
OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY,
AND AFFECT THEORY
The theoretical currents of feminist new
materialisms, object-oriented ontology
(OOO), and affect theory are similar in that
they foreground the power of objects and
things to act. This focus takes place against
the background of modernist sciences (them-
selves inextricable from the capitalist and
colonialist practices of settlement and con-
quest, as Wynter [2003] has shown), which
often positioned the human as an agent
(imbued with rationality) operating in a pas-
sive world. Taking up what science studies
scholar Bruno Latour has called ‘thing-
power’, Jane Bennett calls for ‘detecting
(seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a
fuller range of nonhuman powers circulating
around and within human bodies’ (2010: ix).
In their introduction to New Materialisms,
Coole and Frost write that this current takes
shape in the wake of decades of work in the
social sciences and humanities which fore-
grounded the social, cultural, and linguistic
construction of reality. They claim that ‘the
dominant constructivist orientation to social
analysis is inadequate for thinking about
matter, materiality, and politics in ways that
do justice to the contemporary context of
biopolitics and global political economy’
(2010: 6). Instead, they propose new materi-
alisms that ‘give materiality its due, alert to
the myriad ways in which matter is both self-
constituting and invested with – and recon-
figured by – intersubjective interventions that
have their own quotient of materiality’ (ibid.:
7). New materialisms, to put this schemati-
cally, look to work in physics, chemistry, and
biology in order to account for nonhuman
agency in ways that open toward new ways
of imagining feminist and queer politics.
Drawing extensively on work in the physi-
cal and biological sciences, new materialist
thinkers foreground how all things have some
capacity to act. Mel Chen (2013) turns to what
linguists call the ‘animacy scale’ to conceptu-
alize this: agency and aliveness are not all-or-
nothing attributes, but spectra. Chen insists
that ‘stones and other inanimates definitively
occupy a scalar position (near zero) on the
animacy hierarchy and they are not excluded
from it altogether and are not treated as ani-
macy’s binary opposite’ (2013: 5, italics in
original). The concept of animacy gives Chen
a way of linking feminist new materialisms,
affect theory, queer theory, and critical theo-
ries of race in order to ‘refuse to categorize
humans, animals, and objects as so very
cleanly distinct from one another’ (ibid.: 19).
In Chen’s account, dehumanization, thingifi-
cation, reification, and objectification cannot
be understood apart from assumptions about
animacy, for they all presume and require
complex acts of sorting those with agency
from those without (or with less). Indeed,
their book opens onto a politics that would
pull the rug out from under these dehuman-
izing processes by refusing to regard things
and objects as somehow outside of politics,
or merely subject to human action. If things
and objects are full participants in worlding
and in politics, then dehumanization’s forces
are radically diminished.
Feminist and queer particle physicist Karen
Barad’s (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway
proposes that most modern theories of sci-
ence, and thus political action, presume that
entities exist as discrete entities which enter
into relation. Using Niels Bohr’s experiments
in physics as a point of departure, Barad
rejects this view and proposes instead that eve-
rything is intra-active: things come into being
as isolatable only through entanglement, and
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY BEYOND THE HUMAN
only appear as such in specific material-
semiotic configurations she calls ‘appara-
tuses’ (which may include lab equipment or
concepts – such as ‘the human’). This leads
to a profound re-writing of agency and ontol-
ogy: ‘Agency is not an attribute but the ongo-
ing reconfigurings of the world. The universe
is agential intra-activity in its becoming’
(Barad, 2007: 141). Despite the complexity of
Barad’s terminology, we can parse this claim
as having two crucial axioms that will have
important consequences for critical pedagogy.
First, agency is always a product of specific
material conditions of relation, not something
that one can ‘have’ (thus, we have to reject a
politics of ‘empowerment’ as based on mis-
taken ontological presuppositions). Second,
although she does not draw this out, this
view connects work in contemporary physics
directly with the claims by Indigenous schol-
ars that land itself decolonizes: this move-
ment is part of what Barad calls the world in
its becoming. I will return to this resonance
below to discuss the political and pedagogical
implications of a critical pedagogy no longer
oriented around ‘the’ human.
What emerges in feminist new mate-
rialisms is a way of seeing all entities as
emergent only in relation to a host of other
entities, where the relations are generative
and even constitutive. This marks a point of
continuity with work in affect theory, and a
point of divergence from OOO. I will sketch
this latter point quickly before drawing out
new materialisms’ resonance with affect the-
ory in more detail. OOO, sometimes called
speculative realism, asserts that objects are
radically independent and that objects should
all be valued equally (theirs is a ‘flat ontol-
ogy’ [Bogost, 2012]. Inaugurated by Graham
Harman’s (2002) re-reading of a hammer in
Heidegger’s Being and Time, OOO tries to
speculate about the existence of objects and
things entirely apart from any human way of
relating to them. While this project shares a
certain family resemblance with new mate-
rialisms, OOO theorists often posit objects
as existing in a ‘withdrawn’ register, entirely
179
apart from any relations. Harman calls objects
‘vacuum sealed’ (2002: 288–96). Thus, while
OOO has produced some extremely provoca-
tive arguments, this rejection of relation has
also prompted a number of responses from
feminists (especially in Behar’s 2016 edited
volume, Object-Oriented Feminism; see
also Bennett, 2015; Sheldon, 2015) charg-
ing it with repeating a masculinist – and, I
might add Man-centered – fetishization of
rigid borders (one that may be true of certain
versions of cybernetic posthumanism that
prioritize ‘autopoeisis’ as well6). The heu-
ristic move of bracketing relation can enable
objects to appear in their alienness to be sure,
but I find a flat ontology of separate and non-
relational things to be far less attractive to
educational thought and practice than one
which foregrounds the historical, political,
and relational emergence of entities in con-
stant intra-action.
Affect theory offers a vocabulary for
describing and attending to the means of this
relationality. As Gregg and Seigworth put it:
‘Affect … is the name we give to those forces
– visceral forces beneath, alongside, or gen-
erally other than conscious knowing, vital
forces insisting beyond emotion – that can
serve to drive us toward movement’ (2010:
1). Affect, especially in its post-Spinoza mode
influenced by the writings of Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, refers to any body’s
capacities to affect or be affected by another.
Scholars working in this field (Clough, 2007)
draw on psychology, neuroscience, trauma
studies, philosophy, and chemistry in order
to construct ways of thinking about rela-
tions among bodies that are material without
having to have recourse to consciousness.
That is, affect theory offers another means
of understanding agency as not simply
human. While some affect theorists parse
affect – as the nonconscious being affected
which stimulated corporeal response before
awareness – from emotion (Massumi, 2002;
Protevi, 2009), others use ‘affect’ in a way
that includes emotions (Ahmed, 2015; Boler,
1999; Brennan, 2004; Deckha, 2012). While
180 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
I would agree that there are projects or prob-
lems that benefit from distinguishing the two,
my own sense is that critical pedagogy ben-
efits from using affect in both ways, some-
times foregrounding the work of emotions in
scenes of politics and learning (a move that
has crucial benefits in discussions of racism,
sexism, and gendered oppression), and some-
times foregrounding our bodies’ capacities to
be affected by things that we seldom attend to
(light, smells, the circulation of pheromones,
the tactile experience of spaces).
It seems to me that affect theory joins a
stream of anthropology ‘beyond the human’
in offering new ways to think about commu-
nication that don’t presume it only happens
among humans. In Eduardo Kohn’s path-
breaking study How Forests Think (2013), he
draws on Charles Peirce’s semiotics in order
to ‘decolonize language’. Through very care-
ful analysis of fieldwork among the Runa in
upper Ecuador, work that attends to the com-
plex entanglements of human and nonhuman
actors in the forest, Kohn argues that ‘life is
constitutively semiotic’ (2013: 9). When read
in relation to affect theory, this allows me to
offer that we might come to see politics as
including any scene of touching among bod-
ies that move, touching that always necessar-
ily includes some aspect of semiosis.
GATHERING THREADS: CRITICAL
PEDAGOGY BEYOND THE HUMAN
I would like to gather together some of the
lessons I take from various currents of con-
temporary theory in order to suggest how they
offer a constellation which might guide criti-
cal pedagogy beyond the human. I will cluster
these ideas to suggest that critical pedagogy
may benefit from holding open the questions
of what constitutes a ‘human’ person, and
what constitutes a scene of politics.
If early work in critical pedagogy some-
times seemed to take the human for granted,
the work in feminist, queer, anti-racist, and
decolonial studies cautions us that this often
allowed for a highly particular idea of the
human to stand in for the human as such.
This logic meant that many people – due to
their race, geography, ability status, sexu-
ality, and gender – were consigned to not-
quite-human or inhuman status. Critical
pedagogy beyond the human takes this as
its starting point, and adds a set of questions
about what it even means to see the ‘human’
as a bounded entity. We might note that most
of our bodies are made up of molecules –
carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. – that have
circulated on earth in other forms long before
our births. Or we might consider how human
life – even of an individual – is impossible
without the agency of trillions of microor-
ganisms on and inside our bodies. These
findings from the sciences would seem to
point strongly toward the necessity of think-
ing of the human, as many Indigenous schol-
ars would see it, as part of land.
Not only are we land, then, but we are also
less liberal, rational individuals than complex
conglomerations of systems which operate at
different scales and with different temporali-
ties (Frost, 2016). As Elizabeth Grosz argues,
‘we need to understand the body, not as an
organism or entity in itself, but as a system,
or series of open-ended systems, functioning
within other huge systems it cannot control,
through which it can access and acquire its
abilities and capacities’ (2004: 3). On this
view, what critical pedagogues have long
taken to be simply ‘agency’ – human agency –
is a subset of a much wider, more dispersed
field of agencies. Indeed, human agency is
something like a belated after-effect of nonhu-
man agencies. This does not mean that human
agency doesn’t matter and cannot be directed
toward important political work, but it means
that we have to be more humble about our
capacities in relation to a world teeming with
agentic matter and systems with which we are
entangled in an ongoing becoming.
This way of thinking also pushes against
the conflation of critical pedagogy with
rational analysis and deliberation. As the title
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY BEYOND THE HUMAN
of Ellsworth’s essay beautifully proposes,
we have to reckon with how we feel in order
to understand politics. Indeed, feminists
and scholars studying race have repeatedly
argued that the dismissal or downplaying
of emotion in thought and political action
serves the project of propping up a disinter-
ested, masculinist concept of the ‘human’
in relation to which women and racial-
ized people are dehumanized (Boler, 1999;
Emdin, 2016; hooks, 1992; Wanzo, 2015).
As Megan Watkins (2010) argues, educa-
tion takes place through the accumulation of
affects across time: how learning feels to us
determines the mood of a classroom. Given
the ways that discourses of ‘safe spaces’
have re-emerged on college campuses in the
United States in the past few years, we need
to remember Ellsworth’s admonishment that
‘acting as if our classroom were a safe space
in which democratic dialogue was possible
and happening did not make it so’ (1989:
315). Shifting our focus from rational dis-
cussion and enabling student ‘voice’ toward
thinking about what feelings we bring to the
classroom and what feelings our interactions
there produce, might offer critical pedagogy
a more practical way of conceptualizing the
work of liberatory education.
We also have to remember that these feel-
ings, or affects, are not just the result of intra-
human interactions but are influenced by
nonhuman agencies. Sara Ahmed’s (2006)
powerful work on ‘orientation’ can help us
see how particular spaces differentiate feel-
ings and possibilities for movement accord-
ing to race, sexuality, gender, and ability.
She thus conceptualizes whiteness and het-
erosexuality as not attributes of an individual
and his/her identity per se, so much as effects
of affective orientation in space. In fact, her
book Queer Phenomenology presents the
possibility that we might think of white-
ness and heterosexuality as forms of repeti-
tive stress injury which might be diminished
were we to transform social and physical
space. This same book calls us to think about
the ‘conditions of arrival’ of any actor to a
181
scene. This idea allowed Debbie Sonu and
me (Snaza and Sonu, 2016) to think about
how practices of policing school borders with
guards and metal detectors are not finally
separate from the education taking place in
schools but rather function as an affective
lesson itself, one that cannot be understood
apart from racialization and the production of
inequalities.
Shifting toward politics, the preceding
paragraphs already offer a first insight: that
critical pedagogy has propped up an overly
narrow sense of what political action means
and of what participation entails. Rational
discussion, ideology critique, and forms of
action that pressure institutions to change
policies are not unimportant by any means,
but they also come to seem like a fraction of
the larger field we might call the political.
Work informed by affect theory that tracks
‘microaggressions’ alerts us to the political
work done by body language, word choice,
and even silences. More importantly, tracking
affects means that everything that happens
below (at a nonconscious level), alongside,
and around discussion and deliberation is
also political.
This more expansive view cannot exclude
nonhumans, nor can it exclude all the human
agents whose labor is materially entangled
with a scene of instruction. For instance,
in any given classroom, the lights, chairs,
whiteboard, markers, walls, pipes, and so on
exert an affective force on the scene. A first,
and in some ways straightforwardly Marxist,
move is to have us consider what forms of
exploitation of labor and land (as ‘resources’)
must take place for the scene to appear as it
does. That is, a phenomenological approach
attentive to nonhuman affects must be sup-
plemented by a way of asking, with Ahmed
(2006), about the conditions of arrival of the
space itself, its design, its maintenance. As
part of the stunning Black Lives Matter activ-
ism on US college campuses between 2015
and the present, many students thought along
these lines to call public attention to how
slavery as a system and the material labor
182 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of slave bodies literally made the spaces in
which their learning transpires. We might
ask: what does ‘liberatory’ education feel
like on a campus that could not exist without
slavery? What does it meant to attend to this
material presence and its haunting affects?
(Gordon, 1997; Young, 2006).
Once we begin to see how any scene of
education is not isolated and self-contained,
we have to ask, without being able to know in
advance what the answer would be: who is part
of our polity? This means considering how our
actions, feelings, and lives are connected with
humans and nonhumans who are not ‘teach-
ers’ and ‘students’ in the present scene.7 It
means asking questions about the ecologi-
cal effects and affects of our daily lives, and
considering our complicities with extraction,
pollution, and pernicious neocolonial logics
of globalized inequality production. It also
means that we have to begin to find ways of
feeling and talking about nonhuman actors as
participants in politics. Jane Bennett, drawing
on John Dewey, argues that the task for a mate-
rialist politics beyond the human is ‘to devise
new procedures, technologies, and regimes of
perception that enable us to consult nonhu-
mans more closely, or to listen and respond
more carefully to their outbreaks, objections,
testimonies, and propositions’ (2010: 108).
This leads me to the question of temporal-
ity and how Man’s conflation of progress and
change (one of the aspects of the colonialist
worldview that Grande outlines) props up polit-
ical action as action that is addressed toward the
(colonialist) nation-state. In Michael Warner’s
Publics and Counterpublics (2005), he thinks
about what it means to foster publics that have
a political investment in their own subordinate
status in relation to a supposedly neutral ‘pub-
lic’. Through studies of radical AIDS activism
and queer movements to publicize sexuality as
political, he hits on the problems that emerge
when such alternative counterpublics become
‘social movements’: ‘they acquire agency in
relation to the state. They enter the temporal-
ity of politics and adapt themselves to the per-
formatives of rational-critical discourse. For
many counterpublics, to do so is to cede the
original hope of transforming not just policy
but the space of public life itself’ (Warner,
2005: 124). Thus, critical pedagogy in its
traditional (humanist) mode might be said to
too easily adapt itself to the state and what
Nyong’o calls ‘the pedagogic temporality of
the nation state’ (2009: 162).
Against this temporality of progress, we
might learn from materialists, posthumanists,
and Indigenous scholars to reject the new,
the progressive, the easy sense of a futurity
grounded on hope (Coulthard, 2014). Such
scholars would remind us that colonialism,
slavery, ‘primitive accumulation’, and set-
tler colonial theft of land are not in the ‘past’
but are ongoing facts of the present, facts
that structure our spaces, our institutions,
our nonconscious corporeal responses to the
world and each other. This caution has to
be reflexively applied to this very essay: as
much as a rhetoric of the ‘new’ populates
writings on politics, research, and systems
beyond the human, this rhetoric belies the
crucial fact that critical pedagogy is not seek-
ing to construct a new world so much as re-
calibrating our attentions and attunements to
this world, to the thick webs of entanglement
which structure every aspect of our lives but
which humanist education has indoctrinated
us not to notice (Boler beautifully calls this
‘inscribed habits of inattention’ [1999: 16]).
As Ahmed insists, ‘we should avoid establish-
ing a new terrain by clearing the ground of
what has come before us. And we might not
be quite so willing to deposit our hope in the
category of “the new”’ (2008: 36). Without
fetishizing the new, we have to seek out peda-
gogical encounters that aren’t oriented toward
a stable imagination of a ‘better’ future so
much as driven by attention to who and what
is entangled, how we arrived, and what pos-
sibilities for action and living together emerge
from that messy entanglement. Grosz writes:
Political activism has addressed itself primarily to a
reconfiguring of the past and a form of justice in
the present that redresses or rectifies the harms of
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY BEYOND THE HUMAN
the past. It needs to be augmented with those
dreams of the future that make its projects end-
less, unattainable, ongoing experiments rather
than solutions. (Grosz, 2004: 14)
This, then, is where I would situate a criti-
cal, decolonial education beyond the
human: experiments with performing the
human in as many ways as possible in com-
plex relations to a host of other agencies
and entities that are entangled with us. It is
a critical pedagogy that never seeks unifica-
tion or totalization but instead is driven by
a desire for experimentation, dispersal,
refusal, and ephemeral modes of being and
belonging.
Notes
1  Bell and Russell have argued that ‘poststructur-
alism, as it is taken up within critical pedagogy,
tends to reinforce rather than subvert deep-
seated humanist assumptions about animals and
nature by taking for granted the “borders”…
that define nature as devalued Other’ (2000:
189).
2  Russell writes: ‘I remain intrigued by who retains
membership in the “and so forth” category.
Who does not quite make it into the lists of those
silenced Others deserving to be heard?’ (2005:
434). There are no easy answers here, except to
say that my list in-text is incomplete, and open to
reconfiguration/extension.
3  See also Simpson’s ‘Land as Pedagogy’, where
she argues that we need ‘not just striving for
land-based pedagogies. The land must once
again become pedagogy’ (2014: 14).
4  Tuck and Yang write: ‘Settler colonialism [prac-
ticed throughout the Americas] is different from
other forms of colonialism in that settlers come
with the intention of making a new home on the
land, a homemaking that insists on settler sov-
ereignty over all things in their new domain …
Within settler colonialism, the most important
concern is land/water/air/subterranean earth’
(2012: 5).
5  Russell notes that ‘even though Haraway’s (1991)
ideas about “situated knowledges” and “partial
perspectives” have gained considerable currency
in feminist poststructuralist approaches to edu-
cation, there has been surprisingly little engage-
ment with the desire expressed in that article and
in her other writings for “learning to converse”
183
(p. 201) with the world beyond humans’ (Russell,
2005: 434).
6  For critiques of autopoeisis, see Shaviro (2014)
and Haraway (2016).
7  This includes thinking about the nonhuman ani-
mals who are directly involved in life in schools,
mostly on the condition that they are dead. See
Pedersen (2009) and Truman (2016).
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Intersecting Critical Pedagogies to
Counter Coloniality
C a t h r y n Te a s l e y a n d A l a n a B u t l e r
Influential critical analyses of the material
and cultural legacies of colonialism have come
to serve as catalysts for counter-hegemonic
thought and mobilisations against racism,
inequity and what has been referred to as
coloniality (Mignolo, 2002, 2007; Quijano,
2007, 2014), or the enduring and constantly
evolving racist, classist and sexist effects of
(neo)colonial modes of domination, oppres-
sion and epistemic injustice (see also Battiste,
2013; Santos, 2014/2017 or Torres Santomé,
2017). Within the field of education, a grow-
ing number of public intellectuals1 have
committed to transforming education into a
more just endeavour by steadily incorporat-
ing anti-colonial, postcolonial or decolonial
perspectives into their critical pedagogical
praxis of researching, writing, teaching and
mobilising.
This heterogeneous assemblage of educa-
tors, whose origins and identities may or may
not stem from historically (and, in some cases,
recently) colonised peoples around the world,
has traditionally found inspiration in a corpus
23
of European social theory rooted primarily
in the cultural Marxism of Antonio Gramsci
(1971/1999) and the Frankfurt School of
Critical Theory (Horkheimer, 1982), a point
of reference which is also present in another
important source: the liberation pedagogy of
Brazilian theorist and educator Paulo Freire
(1970). Beyond these sources, critical edu-
cationists have further drawn from radical
and intersectional feminism;2 critical race
theory (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Taylor, 2017);
and post-structural theory, including Michel
Foucault’s (1969/1972) genealogical analysis
of power, or queer theory, as developed, for
example, by Judith Butler (1990).
What is often missing from such perspec-
tives, however – as many postcolonial3 and
(especially) decolonial4 scholars have pointed
out – are voices whose cultural and epistemo-
logical frames of reference are not necessarily
located in, generated from, or centred on life
in ‘the West’. This is why Indian decolonial
feminist scholar Chandra T. Mohanty wrote
the following about ‘the commodification and
 INTERSECTING CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES TO COUNTER COLONIALITY
domestication of Third World people in the
academy’ (2003: 217):
The sort of difference that is acknowledged and
engaged has fundamental significance for the
decolonization of educational practices. Similarly,
the point is not simply that one should have a
voice; the more crucial question concerns the sort
of voice one comes to have as the result of one’s
location, both as an individual and as part of col-
lectives. (Mohanty, 2003: 216)
It is why Ochy Curiel (2007) researches the
perspectives of critical Black (and Black les-
bian) feminists from her native Dominican
Republic and other Latin American countries.
It is why Argentine feminist María Lugones
(2008) finds ‘coloniality’ more revealing than
‘intersectionality’ for analysing the margin-
alisation of othered voices within feminist
studies – voices that do not meet the White,
Western/Northern, hetero-normative, English-
speaking standard that affords greater access
to a broad academic readership. It is also why
Portuguese decolonial scholar Boaventura de
Sousa Santos (2014/2017) calls for a ‘sociol-
ogy of absences’ for, as he points out, the
resounding perspectivial and epistemological
absences in dominant research and develop-
ment, in the mass media, in history books and
in textbooks, do not occur on their own; they
are actively produced.
True to Freire’s (1970) project of consci-
entização (critical consciousness-raising),
more and more critical scholars and educa-
tors today are consequently contemplating
social and epistemic injustices from subal-
tern5 standpoints emerging from the Global
South and its diaspora,6 as well as from the
so-called Fourth World (Manuel and Polsuns,
1974) in the Global North,7 in which a dispro-
portionately high percentage of Indigenous,
Black and Brown people8 find themselves
merely subsisting within otherwise wealthy
countries. These perspectives highlight the
need to re-situate, nuance and challenge the
Eurocentric premises and applications of
critical theory within the sphere of education.
In this chapter we argue that such efforts have
187
generally enriched and strengthened rather
than detracted from the transformative poten-
tial of what some authors refer to as criti-
cal pedagogy,9 while others prefer the term
critical education.10 Aided by the alternative
standpoints described herein, we examine
coloniality for its imbrications around the
world in local, global and glocal social rela-
tions and educational policies and realities,
and the role critical pedagogy/education can
play in countering its ongoing dehumanising
effects.
CONTESTING COLONIALITY:
SEMINAL WORKS
Before embarking on that task, however,
some preliminary clarifications are in order
concerning the focus on coloniality and the
terminology used to represent the struggles
against it. Some readers may at first question
the relevance of addressing issues related to
colonialism per se if, as social geographer
Joanne Sharp (2009) rightly asserts, by the
mid 20th century, there were virtually no peo-
ples or places left in the world to ‘discover’ or
‘conquer’ by sheer, external, imperial force.
Nonetheless, the military, political and settler
invasions and occupations of territories and
peoples through de jure (legally and adminis-
tratively legitimised) colonisation came to a
formal end in the 1960s, having ostensibly
been abolished as such by the United Nations
(UN) Declaration on the Granting of
Independence to Colonial Countries and
Peoples of 1960.11 The fact remains, however,
that while officially sanctioned forms of colo-
nialism no longer enjoy legitimacy – although
exceptions to this rule do exist12 – other more
tacit and insidious neocolonial means, such as
coloniality, live on. Coloniality transcends
colonialism to the extent that it embodies and
propagates the multifarious (cultural, eco-
nomic and political) legacies of historic colo-
nial rule. As defined by Aníbal Quijano,
coloniality:
188 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
[…] is one of the constitutive and specific ele-
ments of the world pattern of capitalist power. It
is founded on the imposition of a racial/ethnic
classification of the world population as a corner-
stone of said pattern of power and operates in
each of the material and subjective planes, arenas
and dimensions of everyday life and on a social
scale. (Quijano, 2014: 67)13
We argue that tackling coloniality through
education constitutes an essential undertaking
in the struggle to promote anti-racist, anti-
sexist, cross-cultural and socio-­economic jus-
tice throughout the world. And there are at
least three overlapping epistemological
approaches to denouncing and resisting the
racism, classism, sexism and other forms of
oppression and violence so inherent to the
universalist aspirations of the Western/modern
project of coloniality; these three approaches
include anti-colonial, postcolonial and decolo-
nial currents of analysis. Such strategies of
resistance are explored in this chapter, espe-
cially at the points where they converge
through educational and scholarly pursuits.
And while it would prove futile to attempt to
draw any clear and solid epistemological
boundaries between these three currents
(because they coincide in so many ways, as
we shall see), some distinctions can indeed be
identified. Another aim, then, is to shed light
on why and how the various prefixes (anti-,
post- and de-) came into existence in the first
place, and to identify the convergences and
divergences among them in order to forge a
critical pedagogical praxis capable of counter-
ing the neocolonial forces of racism, neolib-
eral capitalism and patriarchy so characteristic
of the dominant world-system (Wallerstein,
2009) of our times.
Anti-Colonial Studies
The first of the three major currents men-
tioned above is largely composed of anti-
colonial theories and projects, which are
conveyed through a body of literature ini-
tially produced under de jure colonialism and
apartheid, mostly by African, Afro-Caribbean
and African American intellectuals and activ-
ists who were strongly influenced by
Marxism and critical theory. Classic works
from this line of thought include Eric
Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery
(1944/1994); Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le
Colonialisme (1950 [Discourse on
Colonialism, 2000]); Frantz Fanon’s Peau
Noir, Masques Blancs (1952 [Black Skin,
White Masks, 2007]) as well as his Les
Damnés de la Terre (1961 [The Wretched of
the Earth, 1963]); or Albert Memmi’s Portrait
du Colonisé précédé du Colonisateur (1957
[The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1991]);
among various other foundational texts.14
These lucid analysts of the devastating and
lasting psychological, socio-cultural, economic
and political effects of the racist institutions
of slavery and colonialism influenced Paulo
Freire’s ground-breaking reflections on edu-
cation in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).
In this text – which serves as a cornerstone of
critical pedagogy – he refers to Memmi’s term
surenchère colonisatrice (1957: 25) or the
‘colonized mentality’ (as cited in Freire, 1970:
49), as one that is echoed in Fanon’s (1961)
observations on the mental obstacles to resist-
ing colonialism. Freire writes:
Submerged in reality, the oppressed cannot per-
ceive clearly the ‘order’ which serves the interests
of the oppressors whose image they have internal-
ized. […] Self-depreciation is another characteristic
of the oppressed, which derives from their inter-
nalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of
them. (Freire, 1970: 62–3)
Decades earlier, Afro-Caribbean statesman
and historian Eric Williams (1944/1994)
presented one of the most revealing critical
analyses of how the slave trade actually died
out, Williams finding it to be much more a
question of economics than of social justice:
The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth cen-
tury developed the wealth of Europe by means of
slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to
create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth
century, which turned round and destroyed the
 INTERSECTING CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES TO COUNTER COLONIALITY
power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its
works. […] Even the great mass movements, and the
antislavery mass movement was one of the greatest of
these, show a curious affinity with the rise and develop-
ment of new interests and the necessity of the destruc-
tion of the old. (Williams, 1944/1994: 210–11)
Overall, these inspirational thinkers from
both the Global South and the racialised and
colonised North put into much needed per-
spective the lasting damage to the other larg-
est part of humanity caused by colonialism.
As Frantz Fanon (1952, 1961) famously
argued, colonialism cast people into two
totalising and racialised categories: that of
the colonisers, whose humanity would
always be fully recognised by the powers that
be, and that of the colonised, whose human-
ity would never be fully recognised by those
same powers, nor even by many of the colo-
nised themselves. Such was, and in so many
ways still is, the depth of the damage.
Postcolonial Studies
A second current pertains to postcolonial
viewpoints, the majority of which are
advanced by diasporic cultural studies schol-
ars with ethnic origins or ties to countries once
colonised (primarily, but not only) by the
British Empire. These theorists tend to reside
and work in the Global North, write in English
and draw from postmodern and post-structural
theory. They are generally focussed on desta-
bilising essentialised and biased conceptuali-
sations of identity and subjectivity, and aim to
promote the idea that cultural/ethnic/racial
hybridity, as well as cross-culturally filtered
forms of interpretation and representation, are
tantamount to the human condition. They con-
sider these epistemological and ontological
perspectives to be a key part of forging anti-
racist, inclusive and cohesive social organisa-
tion, and while their emphasis remains on a
cultural plane of analysis, structural injustices
work their way in through their intersection
with racism, ethnocentrism and sexism.15
189
Some noteworthy examples of the postco-
lonial corpus can be found, for instance, in
Palestinian scholar Edward Said’s magistral
works, the two most influential of which are
Orientalism (1978/2003) and Culture and
Imperialism (1993). Said’s short definition of
Orientalism reads as ‘a Western [discursive]
style for dominating, restructuring, and hav-
ing authority over the Orient’ (1978/2003:
3), and as a means of securing and prolong-
ing Western superiority (that is, coloniality)
vis-à-vis the Arab and Muslim world after de
jure colonialism faded. To counter the one-
sided depictions and truisms of Orientalists,
Said recommended applying ‘contrapuntal
analysis’ (1993: 18) consisting not in replac-
ing one grand narrative with another suppos-
edly more accurate and inclusive one, but in
forging counternarratives that challenge and
disrupt the hegemony of such representa-
tions, much as a musical movement in coun-
terpoint juxtaposes two melodies, this duality
affecting the quality and impact of the overall
movement.
The postcolonial was also forcefully con-
veyed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s highly
influential essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’
(1988), in which she critiqued Western post-
structural theorists such as Foucault or Deleuze
for their de-contextualised representations of
epistemic violence associated with subaltern
others whose historical/geographical/cultural
situatedness, social class, gender and subjectivi-
ties were systematically distorted or overlooked
in their analyses. Spivak noted: ‘If, in the context
of colonial production, the subaltern has no his-
tory and cannot speak, the subaltern as female
is even more deeply in shadow’ (1988: 287). In
a now classic study of cultural hybridity, inter-
pretation and representation, Homi Bhabha in
The Location of Culture (1994) resonates with
both Spivak and Said when referring to Fanon’s
ability to unmask Western modernity itself as a
racist colonial project:
[A]s much as he writes in ‘The fact of Blackness’
about the temporality of modernity within which
the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be authorized[,]
190 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
[i]t is Fanon’s temporality of emergence – his sense of
the belatedness of the black man – that does not
simply make the question of ontology inappropriate for
black identity, but somehow impossible for the very
understanding of humanity in the world of modernity.
(Spivak, 1994: 236–7, emphases in original)
In other words, given that the modern concept
itself of ontology – on being – was advanced
from an understanding of humanity that
excluded Black and Brown people, Fanon
questioned and even rejected its potential for
making sense of human existence.
Decolonial Studies
A third current comprises decolonial per-
spectives and mobilisations that promote
alternatives to Western and modern universal-
ist moulds for knowing, being and power
relations among peoples and with nature
(Grosfoguel, 2013; Mignolo, 2002, 2007;
Quijano, 2007, 2014). According to South
African scholar Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
(2016), decoloniality, as well as a ‘critical
decolonial ethics of liberation’ (2016: xvi),
differ from postcolonial perspectives in that
the former dig further back through history to
contextualise today’s racial injustices and
coloniality. For instance, from the 15th cen-
tury onwards, Europeans came to invade and
occupy distant lands in unprecedented ways,
and to oppress the peoples of those lands.
Those were the times of Columbus’ invasion
of the Americas and the onset of the slave
trade. Postcolonial writers, on the other hand,
tend to focus more on the British imperial
footprint across the globe. Moreover, while
postcolonial scholars prioritise denouncing
metanarratives and ideological dogma, ‘deco-
loniality seeks to attain a decolonized and
de-imperialized world in which new pluriver-
sal humanity is possible. Postcolonialism is
part of a “critique of modernity within moder-
nity”’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2016: 49).
Honduran decolonial feminist Breny
Mendoza (2016) has also noted that postco-
lonial scholarship has not been as receptive
to intersectional and anti-colonial feminist
thought as have salient decolonial thinkers
such as Argentine theorists María Lugones
(2008) or Walter Mignolo (2002, 2007), who
have drawn on the early border thinking of
Chicana lesbian writer Gloria Anzaldúa
(1987/1999). Anzaldúa’s work represents
an intellectual and poetic contemplation
on the hybridity of cultural identities and
how they may constitute invisible borders.
Foregrounding her work is a response to
Eurocentric hegemonic norms and a critique
of coloniality with its vast domination of geo-
graphic, epistemic and psychological space.
Another decolonial scholar, Ramón
Grosfoguel (2013), of Puerto Rican origins,
has also approached Western patriarchy and
domination through the critical lens of colo-
niality, depicting four ‘genocides/epistemi-
cides’ of modernity that started in the 16th
century and include the cruel and fatal perse-
cution of powerful women (North and South)
through witch-hunts, as well as the system-
atic dehumanisation and oppression of three
additional collectives: the Iberian Muslim
and Jewish populations who were brutally
repressed and banished during and after the
Spanish Catholic monarchs’ conquest of the
al-Ándalus in the 15th century; Indigenous
peoples around the world who have suffered
sweeping genocide campaigns; and the mass
enslavement and displacement of African
peoples. These tremendously violent histori-
cal undertakings in turn led to the epistemic
and material privileging of ‘Western Man’
(Grosfoguel, 2013: 86) and his structures of
power and knowledge.
That said, most of these Southern theo-
rists find inspiration in the prolific and illu-
minating (albeit rarely translated) works of
Argentine-Mexican decolonial philosopher
Enrique Dussel. He defines his ‘ethics of
liberation’ (see, e.g., Dussel, 2013a, 2013b)
as ‘transmodern’ (2013a) in nature because
it offers an alternative to the falsely univer-
sal extension of Eurocentric modern episte-
mological and ontological thought, values
and practices to peoples who, from the very
 INTERSECTING CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES TO COUNTER COLONIALITY
start, were excluded from or oppressed by
that same project of modernity. Dussel thus
suggests that by uncovering the ‘pluriverse’
(2013b) of human conditions, many alterna-
tive paths towards ‘transmodernity’ can be
forged. In fact, many other decolonial theo-
rists have emerged from Latin American and/
or Indigenous experiences with, and analy-
ses of, (neo)colonial occupation, exploita-
tion, extraction and ‘development’ (see e.g.,
Doxtater, 2004; Escobar, 2011, 2018; Shiva,
1997; Smith, 1999; Ticona Alejo et al., 2011;
Tuck and Yang, 2012). While their gaze
extends back to the birth of the modern age
in 1492, they highlight the ongoing signifi-
cance of apprehending that historical turning
point in order to decolonise its lasting effects
on the structures and operations of power and
knowing in today’s world.16
In her now classic Decolonizing Method­
ologies (1999), New Zealand researcher of
Maori descent Linda Tuhiwai Smith presents
a critique of Western research methodologies
and, in particular, research practices that harm
Indigenous populations through extraction
and misrepresentation. She argues that many
social science disciplines, such as anthropol-
ogy, are grounded in relations between the
coloniser and the colonised. These unequal
relations of power shape the research prod-
ucts and relegate the colonised subject to the
margins. In a similar but broader sense, Indian
decolonial scientist and ecofeminist Vandana
Shiva (1997) has advanced the notion of
‘biopiracy’ or the neocolonial extraction and
seizure of both local knowledge and natural
resources under the banner of scientific inves-
tigation and ‘development’.
Analysing the situation of Indigenous
nations subject to US cultural, political, legal
and economic impositions, anthropologist
Audra Simpson (2014) problematises the
notion of postcoloniality as she argues that
existing governance and treaties serve to
re-colonise Indigenous people through eve-
ryday activities and structural constraints.
The treaty represents codified European
dominance over the Indigenous other, who is
191
situated both historically and presently. The
legitimacy of such treaty arrangements is sel-
dom questioned, and their legality is affirmed
by the logics of technical rationality. Simpson
(2014) notes that global Indigenous popula-
tions face similar challenges related to the
legality of land seizure within (neo)colonial
frameworks that legitimise such practices.
Simpson’s perspectives run parallel to those
of Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck, who under-
stands decolonisation as something much more
than the mere decolonisation of discourse,
which represents the ‘metaphorisation’ of deco-
lonial work (Tuck and Yang, 2012). That is,
by focussing primarily on the North American
context of settler colonialism – where the
colonisers arrived to stay, and have long
occupied Indigenous lands – Tuck and col-
leagues denounce the fact that much of so-
called decolonial scholarship evades the main
objective of decolonisation in the context of
settler colonialism: that of repatriation of
Indigenous land and life. We will address
this perspective in greater detail in the next
section, where we explore the ways in which
many critical researchers and practitioners of
education are responding to these injustices
through their own intellectual work.
ANTI-COLONIAL, POSTCOLONIAL
AND DECOLONIAL THEORY IN
EDUCATIONAL STUDIES
The destiny of a people is intricately bound to the
way its children are educated. Education is the
transmission of cultural DNA from one generation
to the next. It shapes the language and pathways
of thinking, the contours of character and values,
the social skills and creative potential of the indi-
vidual. It determines the productive skills of a
people. (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples,
1996: 404)
Scholars in the field of education studies have
engaged with anti-colonial, postcolonial and
decolonial theories through problematics
related to intersectional identity, alterity, rec-
ognition, representation and power, and the
192 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

equitable redistribution of social goods frameworks in schooling. She observes that

(social and epistemic justice). These general efforts in the past three decades to increase the
themes are addressed through scholarship on population of Indigenous students in post-
Indigenous knowledge systems; African secondary or tertiary education are nonethe-
Indigenous thought; research on democracy less counterbalanced by the ideology that
and citizenship; diasporic, migrant, subordi- undergirds most Western post-secondary cur-
nated and/or racialised others; and on the ricula: the fact that Eurocentric knowledges
neocolonial dynamics of power and oppres- are considered universal and essential for
sion (domination, occupation, exploitation, everyone. This ‘cognitive assimilation’, as
discrimination, subordination, exclusion) Battiste (2013: 136) terms it, is implicitly fos-
vis-à-vis resistance, transformation and tered throughout the West by its canon of
emancipation through education. Coloniality scholarly literature. For Battiste, then, to
being transversal in nature, and education decolonise education is to restore Indigenous
being an interdisciplinary field, scholars (epistemic and ontological) ecologies.
aiming to reveal, denounce, intercede and Elaine Coburn (2016), feminist scholar
counteract the ongoing violence produced by specialising in international studies at the
coloniality strive to integrate history, political
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
theory, philosophy, sociology, economics, contends that Indigenous studies and schol-
linguistics, literary studies and lived experi- arship remain segregated through divisions
ence in their analyses. This section will focus of academic labour in most institutions. The
on two major areas influenced by anti-/post/ scholarly fields of study that constitute ‘eth-
de/colonial theory in education: epistemic nic studies’, ‘gender studies’ and ‘Indigenous
justice for subaltern peoples and decolonising studies’ are spatially and ideologically mar-
critical pedagogy/education. ginalised from mainstream academic dis-
courses. Attending to the colonial history of
Canada and its role in the dispossession of its
Epistemic Justice and Indigenous, First Peoples, Coburn (2016) cites the work
Diasporic or Racialised ‘Others’ in of Indigenous scholars, observing that colo-
nial relationships of superiority and inferior-
Education
ity shape contemporary discourses around
Indigenous scholars in educational studies Indigenous relationships with systems of
regard colonialism as a violent form of oppres- education, justice, social services and health.
sion that has led to both biological and cul- She also asserts that many Indigenous people
tural genocide on a global scale. For them, are able to resist through resilient practices
decolonising education has the moral and that include reclaiming language, history and
practical obligation of acknowledging histori- traditions denied under (settler) colonialism
cal injustices while simultaneously re-­ and residential schooling.
examining current systems of power and Sherene Razack (1998/2000) is a postco-
thought in order to foreground Indigenous lonial feminist educational researcher and
epistemologies. For instance, Marie Battiste activist of West Indian descent who examines
(2013), education scholar from the Potlotek the relationship between White-settler colo-
First Nation in Nova Scotia, Canada, asserts nialism and Indigenous peoples within the
that we must dismantle the historical inequi- context of legal institutions. Razack (2002)
ties perpetuated through education that firmly implicates racism and the legacy of
resulted in the systemic discrimination against colonialism as causes of Indigenous deaths
Indigenous peoples. This long-standing form within custody, as well as the disproportion-
of injustice is grounded in the transmission of ate number of Indigenous people incarcer-
collective imperialist and colonial cognitive ated. Paralleling Fanon’s (1952: 6) powerful
 INTERSECTING CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES TO COUNTER COLONIALITY
ontological image of the symbolic zone de
non-être (zone of non-being) inhabited by the
colonised Black body, Razack further main-
tains that colonial relationships, which are
perpetuated through educational systems, are
inscribed on the body itself, the Indigenous or
racialised body being marked as less human
or bestial, while the White-settler bodies rep-
resent order and civility. In her more recent
work, Razack (2016) has addressed the
national crisis around murdered and missing
Aboriginal women.
As noted earlier, Eve Tuck has honed in on
the ongoing violence and multiple manifesta-
tions of settler colonialism. Apart from the
genocide, epistemicide and ecological disas-
ter tied not only to the White settlers’ histori-
cal massacre, dehumanisation, enslavement,
displacement and containment of Indigenous
peoples, but to the more recent practices of
mass sterilisation, criminalisation, subordi-
nation and marginalisation – all of which are
inextricably linked to the overarching usurpa-
tion, occupation and spoliation of Indigenous
lands – Tuck and colleagues further expose
settler-colonial operations within the field of
education, among other fields and spheres of
daily life. In reference to educational scholar-
ship, Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013)
claim that:
even as multiple responses have evolved to counter
how curriculum continues to enforce colonization
and racism, these responses become refracted and
adjusted to be absorbed by the whitestream […]
White curriculum scholars re-occupy the ‘spaces’
opened by responses to racism and colonization in the
curriculum, such as multiculturalism and critical race
theory, absorbing the knowledge, but once again
displacing the [Indigenous] bodies out to the mar-
gins. (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013: 73)
This appropriation of decolonial space and
discourse by non-Indigenous scholars of edu-
cation is, once again, a form of colonisation.
By this view, the analysis put forth in this
very chapter is not exempt from potentially
contributing to that process, for as Tuck and
Yang contend, ‘the decolonial desires of
White, non-White, immigrant, postcolonial,
193
and oppressed people, can similarly be entan-
gled in resettlement, reoccupation, and rein-
habitation that actually further settler
colonialism’ (2012: 1). Our attempts to decol-
onise schools, methods and minds, then, can
serve as mere metaphors of decolonisation if
in the process they marginalise Indigenous
scholars and educators and evade the much
more unsettling end-goal of decolonising
Indigenous lands and lives. Tuck and Yang
(2012) acknowledge that there is no easy solu-
tion to this ‘incommensurability’, their aim
solely being to alert non-Indigenous scholars
and educators such as ourselves17 to the pos-
sible effects of our respective positionalities
and purposes in settler-colonial dynamics, and
to advance the cause of Indigenous land and
way-of-life decolonisation.
Non-Indigenous, diasporic or long-standing
subaltern peoples also face ongoing injus-
tices from the legacies of colonialism and
actualities of coloniality. Decolonial scholar
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (2014) main-
tains that education, despite its role in the
reproduction of multiple forms of oppres-
sion, can also allow students to deconstruct
historical relations of power that contrib-
ute to systemic violence. Andreotti (2014;
Andreotti et al., 2015) has been inspired by
Spivak’s (2004) and Santos’ (2014/2017)
critiques of collective complicity in the West
towards epistemic injustice, as manifested in
discursive knowledge production that privi-
leges Eurocentrism. She presents a series of
discursive and epistemological frames and
questions that may offer a solution to the issue
of this complicity in educational studies. We
need to decentre our subjectivities in order to
expand our conceptualisation of educational
thought beyond normative ideologies. The
analysis laid out in Andreotti et al. (2015) in
their cartography of the ‘violence of moder-
nity’ in higher education focusses on interpre-
tations and practices of decolonisation – as
classified into ‘soft-reform space’, ‘radical-
reform space’ and ‘beyond-reform space’ – this
last space resonating with Dussel’s (2013a)
realm of the ‘pluriversal’.
194 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
While not explicitly situated in educa-
tional studies, Himani Bannerji (2002, 2011)
presents a Marxist-feminist discursive anal-
ysis of the language used to reify social rela-
tions under the coloniser/colonised binary.
Bannerji (2002) argues that embedded in the
language referring to immigrants and racial-
ised or ‘visible’ minorities is the encoding of
an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ that influences political,
social and economic relations of power. This
set of colonial social relations has shaped the
formation of many nation-states. John Porter
has identified this as a ‘vertical mosaic’. In a
vertical mosaic, colonised societies position
each ethnic group as occupying a place within
the hierarchy, the top representing those who
are closest to the British or French colonis-
ers. This vertical mosaic has structured ethnic
group stratification by influencing the distri-
bution of social status, power and prestige
(Porter, 1965/2016). In educational studies,
these theories are highly relevant because of
the historical and current marginalisation of
non-European and Indigenous scholarship.
This vertical mosaic influences who may lay
claim to citizenship rights, access resources in
order to achieve social mobility, and achieve
socio-economic and political power.
Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe
(2014, 2016) contemplates the Western influ-
ences in African universities and speculates
on the implications of decolonisation. He
argues against the contemporary neoliberal
frame for higher learning in which university
students are regarded as consumers or clients,
and acknowledges that the Eurocentric canon
present in most global universities tends to
normalise colonialism and colonial relation-
ships. Mbembe (2016) asserts that Western
epistemologies promote a mind and body
dualism that differs from African and other
Indigenous thought about the interdepend-
ence of all living things. Scientific paradigms
that arise out of Western epistemologies fore-
close alternative methodologies and invali-
date other ways of knowing.
Further ontological and epistemologi-
cal lines of analysis of difference in social
organisation and interpretation, pursued as a
means of countering the colonial order of life
today, can be found in the work of George
J. Sefa Dei (2010, 2011), a critical sociolo-
gist of education of Ghanaian descent who
is based in Canada and has written prolifi-
cally from anti- and decolonial perspectives.
He, too, argues that because colonialism is
entrenched in quotidian social relationships,
drawing from Indigenous philosophies to
challenge Descartes’s mind-body dualism
represents an important way of countering
the oppressive effects of modern thought. By
proposing an anti-racist ‘trialectic’ space for
‘dialogic encounter’ where learners of diverse
cultural and racial backgrounds can ‘openly
work with the body, mind, and spirit/soul
interface in critical dialogues about their edu-
cation’ (Dei and McDermott, 2014: 3), Dei
hopes to open up a more just epistemic space.
He also discusses the challenges of claiming
African Indigeneity as an act of resistance
in the face of ongoing colonial efforts that
seek to erase or marginalise African his-
tory. As other researchers reviewed in this
section have argued, Dei (2011) finds that
Indigenous and racialised scholars in the area
of educational studies are marginalised by
coloniser/colonised relationships in global
contexts. Epistemic justice would emerge
from methodologies and literature that value
their knowledge.
Philosophical issues around social cohe-
sion, representation and justice have long
occupied a central place in critical peda-
gogical discourse. Turkish-born American
political philosopher Seyla Benhabib
(1999) – while not directly addressing colo-
niality per se – addresses a series of notions
around belonging, socio-cultural cohesion
and equity, which are also essential cross-
curricular concerns to researchers of coloni-
ality in education. Benhabib (1999) situates
culture and cultural difference within hegem-
onic power relations as a symbolic form of
identity marker which peoples of varying eth-
nic identities may organise around to assert
power or struggle for recognition. Given that
 INTERSECTING CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES TO COUNTER COLONIALITY
such a struggle necessarily involves the chal-
lenge of redistribution of societal resources
as well, and resonating with Nancy Fraser’s
work,18 Benhabib (1999, 2002) contends that,
in order to maximise representation and well-
being within a (modern) polity, recognition
of the particular needs and rights of culturally
marginalised populations depends on the just
redistribution of social goods, and vice versa.
However, in her analysis of multiculturalism
as a social and political philosophy, Benhabib
(1999) raises questions about the legitimacy
of assigning lasting or reified group-based
cultural identity categories, and draws on
Spivak’s (1985/1995) concept of ‘strategic
essentialism’ to account for social and politi-
cal circumstances that may allow individuals
to claim allegiance with a particular cultural
category, albeit for collective gain.
At the same time, however, Benhabib
(2002) – and here is where her theory, while
aligning more closely with decolonial scholar-
ship, still cannot be considered as such – takes
issue with universalism when used to silence
or oppress cultural groups who are either in
need of or demand particular forms of recog-
nition in order to attain equitable wellbeing
within a polity. She thus questions the inter-
pretation and application in France of laïcité,
or the secular public sphere. Since 1989,
laïcité has served to justify banning the use in
public institutions of the Islamic (or culturally
customary) veil by female students of North
African, Arab, Asian and Muslim descent,
thus projecting laïcité beyond its relevance to
the secular institution of public schooling itself
and onto the othered, racialised, subaltern
body. This restricts rather than upholds these
women’s human right to religious freedom.
In what may at first seem to be a parallel
line of argument, Franco-Algerian Indigène
and political activist/writer Houria Bouteldja
(2016) also sees this ban as responding much
more to Islamophobia than to upholding
laïcité. But unlike Benhabib, whose answer
to this particular manifestation of coloni-
ality is ‘a pluralistically enlightened ethi-
cal universalism’ (2002: 36) grounded in the
195
episteme of modern democratic thought,
Bouteldja aligns much more with Dussel’s
(2013b) call to transcend modern thinking
by developing the notion of the pluriverse:
Bouteldja questions integration, inclusion and
social cohesion under coloniality and calls for
strategic alliances among subaltern peoples
worldwide in order to collectively overcome
the racist and gendered cultural/material vio-
lence so deeply ingrained in the transnational
and neocolonial political economy of moder-
nity with its overarching institutions, such as
neoliberal capitalist democracy. Her aim is to
forge alternative approaches to the common
good through what she calls ‘revolutionary
love’. Much as Mohanty in 2003 called for
working with White women feminists from
wealthy Western countries (the ‘One-Third
World’) against the ongoing exploitation and
subordination of all women – but especially
of the ‘Two-Thirds World’ (poor, Black and
Brown) women from the Global South – as
perpetuated by ‘capitalist commodity cul-
ture and citizenship’ (Mohanty, 2003: 196),
Bouteldja calls for working with the White
Western ‘Other’ to achieve dignity and eman-
cipation for ‘Us’ (the subaltern): ‘Dignity is
[…] our capacity to love ourselves and to
love that Other […] Dignity? It’s as simple
as revolutionary love’ (Bouteldja, 2016:126).
Decolonising Critical Pedagogy
and Education
Considering that Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of
the Oppressed (1970) represents a corner-
stone of the fields of critical pedagogy and
critical education (along with key influences
from critical theory, Gramsci (1971/1999)
and Marxist analysis), it would be safe to say
that critical pedagogy/education has been
informed right from the start, if only indi-
rectly through Freire, by the anti-colonial
thought of Frantz Fanon (1952, 1961) and
Albert Memmi (1957), among others. That
said, Tuck and Yang (2012) assert that
Freire’s more abstract categories of
196 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
‘oppressor/oppressed’ diluted Fanon’s focus
on the colonisers and the colonised, for, as
Fanon himself noted: ‘Decolonization never
takes place unnoticed’ (cited in Tuck and
Yang, 2012: 36).
In a complementary line of argument,
critical decolonial scholar Catherine Walsh
(2013, 2017), who has been based in Ecuador
for more than 20 years and at one time
worked closely with Freire, has been devel-
oping ethical, critical and dignifying forms
of resistance to Eurocentric, racist, classist
and sexist coloniality through pedagogy. She
believes that very-other worlds are best sup-
ported through a decolonial pedagogy that
we ‘feel-think’ (2017: 43). She points to the
Fanon-Freire connection in education, noting
that, ‘[b]y advancing a decolonising attitude
and a decolonising humanism (Maldonado,
2009: 305), Fanon happened to turn the soci-
ogenic [highlighted by Freire] into a decolo-
nial pedagogy’ (Walsh, 2013: 45).19
These are powerful arguments. None­
theless, Fanon was not an educationist;
Freire was. Freire’s early critical engagement
with anti-colonial cultural perspectives rep-
resented an initial attempt at nuancing the
more prominent influences in his pedagogi-
cal thought from critical theory and liberation
theology. This process in Freire’s thinking
at minimum served to introduce decolonial
influences into the field of education studies,
and to lay the foundations that guide critical
pedagogy/education away from absorbing
the legacies of coloniality.
Freire (1970, 2013) argued that educators
can improve the human condition by coun-
teracting the effects of oppression through
dialogue, conscientisation (critical reflec-
tion) and action. Although he drew from
Frankfurt School critical theorists such as
Herbert Marcuse (1969), who defended the
ideals of radical social change and liberation
for the oppressed, at the heart of Freire’s
(1970, 2013) pedagogical theory and prac-
tice was a struggle for justice for and with
the oppressed of his native Brazil, a former
colony of Portugal. Freire rejected what he
called the ‘banking’ model of education,
which was and still is – now more than
ever!20 – oriented towards the transmission
of standardised information from teachers
to students, as if such information could be
objectively absorbed and stored in each stu-
dent’s brain equally, only to be accumulated
and equally retransmitted later ‘with inter-
est’, just as an economic investment can
yield gains at a future date. Freire claimed
that critical reflection on practice involves a
dynamic between ‘doing’ and ‘reflecting on
doing’, and that educators following these
principles must examine critically the condi-
tions and causes of oppression. Importantly,
he also argued that the purpose of education
was not to integrate the oppressed into the
structures of oppression, but to transform
the oppressive structure itself (Freire, 1970,
2013), an idea that has also been expressed,
as we have seen, by Dussel (2013a),
Bouteldja (2016), Andreotti et al. (2015),
Dei (2011) and a growing number of other
researchers.
During Freire’s political exile from Brazil
and his academic career in the United States,
his ideas were rapidly absorbed by critical
educators coming from marginalised back-
grounds, especially in terms of race, ethnicity
or social class. For instance, North American
critical educational researcher Henry Giroux
(1988, 2011) was highly influenced by direct
contact with Freire early in his academic
career. For Giroux, Freire’s pedagogy spoke
better than anyone else’s to Giroux’s work-
ing-class background. He thus attributes his
commitment to critical pedagogy to Freire,
and has long argued that a political frame-
work that examines power, systemic cultural
violence and social justice should shape
education in the United States. Other well-
known researchers and educators of critical
pedagogy (McLaren and Kincheloe, 2007)
and critical education (Apple and Au, 2014;
Apple and Buras, 2006) recognise Freire’s
influence in their own work. For instance,
Apple and Buras note: ‘Paulo Freire (1993)
early understood the liberating potential of
 INTERSECTING CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES TO COUNTER COLONIALITY
viewing the world from the vantage point of
those living on the margins’ (2006: 31).
Nonetheless, it is in bell hooks’ and
Antonia Darder’s publications that Freirean
thought comes to be ‘translated’ in ways that
make it highly relevant to the Fourth World
within the North/West, and to anti-racist
education. African American critical educator
and feminist writer bell hooks dedicates a
chapter to Freire in Teaching to Transgress, in
which she writes: ‘There was this one sentence
of Freire’s that became a revolutionary mantra
for me: “We cannot enter the struggle as objects
in order later to become subjects”’ (1994: 46).
She thus notes that teachers and students have
possibilities within the educational structure
to creatively resist the hegemonic control of
institutional power, finding love (like Freire and
Bouteldja) to be a crucial part of the practice
of freedom. Resistance is an idea that Puerto
Rican-American critical pedagogy scholar
Antonia Darder also takes up in her anti-racist
decolonial writing, including her book Freire
and Education, where she conceives of Freire’s
teaching critical literacy – that of ‘reading
the word and the world’ (2015: 103) – as a
decolonising practice. She, too, encourages
educators and public intellectuals to ‘launch
a liberatory pedagogy of love, anchored in
an ongoing commitment to our collective
emancipation’ (ibid.: 170).
The links between anti-racist, critical and
anti-/post/de/colonial pedagogies, then, con-
stitute a space for action. Alastair Bonnett
(2000) asserts that the term ‘anti-racism’ is
a 20th-century creation that did not appear in
regular usage until the 1960s, and we would
add that that period coincided with the end
of formal colonial structures and the rise
of anti-racist leaders such as Martin Luther
King, Jr., Malcolm X or Angela Davis in the
United States. Soon thereafter, in the 1970s,
the Combahee River Collective was founded
by African American queer feminists (Taylor,
2017) who drew from the writings of Angela
Davis (1981), bell hooks (1981), Audre Lorde
(1984) and other Black and Brown feminists,
their work eventually coalescing into what
197
is predominantly referred to today as the
intersectional analysis of multiple, intercon-
necting and mutually constituting forms of
oppression (Carastathis, 2016; Collins and
Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989; Ng, 1993).
As noted earlier, decolonial feminists from
the Global South have found inspiration in
intersectional thought, although some are cur-
rently debating its epistemological viability
for the pluriverse (Lugones, 2008; Mendoza,
2016). For instance, María Lugones (2010)
and others (see Carastathis, 2016) argue that
intersectionality emerged from, and focussed
primarily on racialised women of the Global
North, which has limited its representability
of the plight of the greater majority of sub-
altern Black, Brown and Indigenous women
across the globe. They also contend that the
transformative potential of intersectional
analysis is disappearing thanks to the White
establishment’s appropriation and selective
deployment of this conceptual tool. In fact,
Indigenous decolonial educationist Sandy
Grande takes issue with post-­structural ‘whit-
estream’ feminism in general, asserting that
colonialism itself has been more damaging
to Indigenous women than patriarchy, and
that ‘feminist pedagogies that merely assert
the equality of female power and desire are
accomplices to the projects of colonialism
and global capitalism’ (2003: 346).
Within critical pedagogy and education,
however, other anti-racist decolonial schol-
ars, such as Haitian critical pedagogue Pierre
Orelus (2013) – who analyses his own and
others’ experiences with ‘linguoracism’ (see
also Orelus et al., 2016) – find intersection-
ality to be a powerful analytical tool. What
all of these scholars are concerned with
is the degree to which racist, Eurocentric
and patriarchal practices of dehumanisa-
tion have been integral to the formation of
structural (economic and institutional) dis-
crimination towards Black and Brown peo-
ples. Decolonial thought on the notion of
White discomfort, in Michalinos Zembylas’
words, ‘opens up a realm that situates the
pedagogisation of White discomfort within
198 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
the broader decolonising project of disrupt-
ing White colonial structures and practices’
(2018: 88). And while anti-/decolonial
scholar George Sefa Dei (2000) argues that
anti-racism interrogates and seeks to rupture
the social power, privilege and dominance
accruing to Whiteness, Barbados-born post-
colonial educational researcher Cameron
McCarthy (2013) draws on the work of Stuart
Hall (1992, 1996) to refer to racial identity
as a form of contextual performance that is
historically, geographically and culturally
situated, and suggests that curricular reforms
in education that purport to address diversity
are achieved within the confines of a techni-
cal rationality that isolates knowledge into
siloed disciplines, while ‘diversity’ and ‘dif-
ference’ have been appropriated to fit neolib-
eral ends (see also Dimitriadis and McCarthy,
2001; McCarthy and Kenway, 2014). And
in Spain, Galizan critical educationist Jurjo
Torres Santomé provides a very detailed and
eye-opening analysis of what he terms the
construction of neoliberal and ‘neocolonial/
colonised’ personalities today (2017: 92).
We also find the anti-racist pedagogical
work of African American critical educa-
tion scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings (2014)
to be highly relevant to combating coloniality
despite her not identifying directly with anti-/
post/decolonial studies per se. Several decades
ago, she articulated an educational approach
termed ‘culturally relevant pedagogy’ which,
when effectively developed and employed
in everyday teaching practices in schools,
becomes cultural competence in teachers. For
Ladson-Billings (2014), this refers to the idea
that teachers learn to appreciate and value
their students’ and their families’ cultures.
Several scholars have extended her work, but
it remains informed by critical pedagogy.
CONCLUSION
The majority of perspectives presented in
this chapter converge to form a clear and
resounding message: that the global project
of decolonising education must begin with
epistemic justice that decentres Eurocentric
hegemonic power relationships by valuing
the knowledge production of racialised and
Indigenous others (Andreotti et al., 2015;
Emeagwali and Dei, 2014; Mbembe, 2016;
Quijano, 2014). Pedagogical goals must also
align with non-Eurocentric practices in ways
that demonstrate an ethic of care and respect
for cultural differences, and an ethic of deco-
lonial emancipation and love, in keeping
with Freire, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Dussel,
Bouteldja, hooks, Darder and others. Tuck
and Yang’s ‘ethic of incommensurability’
(2012: 1), on the other hand, represents a
formidable challenge as a demand for restor-
ative justice, one that nonetheless offers a
necessary compass not only to the ‘unfree’,
to use Dussel’s (2013a) term, but to the rest
of us as well, in undoing a violently imposed
historic dispossession.
Both authors of these pages are research-
ers and teacher educators who live to a great
extent in diaspora. We strive to decolonise
our own thinking and praxis, as well as that
produced within the field of critical peda-
gogy on both sides of the Atlantic. Author
bell hooks once wrote about ‘radical open-
ness’ asserting that ‘[t]he will to keep an
open mind is the safeguard against any form
of doctrinaire thinking’ (2003: 110). This
represents another important aim, as does
problematising what is taken for granted
in education, such as (neo)colonial forms
of violence that have become banal – ‘the
new normal’: de facto racial segregation
through neoliberal education policy (school
choice and privatisation schemes) and rac-
ist containment through urban planning
(Shahjahan, 2011; Torres Santomé, 2017;
Tuck and Yang, 2012, Tuck and Gaztambide-
Fernández, 2013); growing Islamophobia in
the West (Benhabib, 2002; Bouteldja, 2016;
Kincheloe et al., 2010); intensification of
meritocratic controls and competition at all
levels of education (Apple and Au, 2014;
McCarthy and Kenway, 2014); and ongoing
 INTERSECTING CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES TO COUNTER COLONIALITY
cultural and epistemic closure and violence
(Andreotti, 2014; Battiste, 2013; Coburn,
2016; Dei, 2011; Orelus, 2013; Tuck and
Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013).
In keeping with the scholars reviewed in
this chapter, we too stand behind the recogni-
tion and reaffirmation of cultural difference
vis-à-vis the norm/universalism that silences
and excludes, and therefore oppresses. We
support a healthy dose of strategic essen-
tialism (Spivak, 1988) or ‘identity poli-
tics’ inasmuch as they work to dignify and
emancipate, and facilitate respect for one’s
own difference and therefore for others’ as
well. We thus encourage fellow educators to
engage critically and dialogically not only
with students’ diverse histories and identities
but with those of other educators and com-
munity members as well, for even the trans-
versal nature of domination and oppression
under neoliberal capitalism is inevitably con-
ditioned by coloniality.
These are some ways in which we as criti-
cal educators can work towards what Dussel
has referred to as ‘Freire’s transmodern peda-
gogy of liberation, by practising “dialogism”
– the discursive action of the community of
subjects in its struggle for liberation – as a
method that allows the unfree to practice their
freedom’ (2013a: 318). This is a major goal,
as is developing Said’s (1993) contrapuntal
analysis, Santos’ (2014/2017) sociology of
absences and Mohanty’s cultures of dissent,
which ‘must work to create pedagogies of
dissent rather than pedagogies of accommo-
dation’ (2003: 217). Intra- and intercultural
dialogue informed by such strategies, as well
as radical openness (hooks, 2003), revolu-
tionary love (Bouteldja, 2016), radical love
(Darder, 2014; hooks, 1994), and forging
more equitable projects for collective well-
being – for example, Sumak Kawsay pro-
jects (meaning ‘Good Living’ in Quechua)
in Bolivia, Ecuador or Peru (Escobar, 2018)
– will help shed light on the intersectional
operations of coloniality (racism, sexism,
classism, epistemicide, occupation, extrac-
tion, subordination and exclusion), and take
199
all of us that much closer to the pluriverse of
coexistence and interdependence.
Notes
1  Public intellectuals are understood here in the
terms proposed by Patricia Hill Collins (2012)
or Henry Giroux (1988) as writers, research-
ers, educators at all levels, cultural workers and
mobilisers who reflect in critical ways on social
justice and coexistence, thus aiming to influence
a broad public through their writings, lectures,
debates, teachings, creations and mobilisations.
We perceive the knowledge they produce as nei-
ther objective nor universally applicable, for it is
always subjectively, geographically and socio-­
culturally situated and embodied – this in keeping
with Patricia Hill Collins’ (2012) description of the
public intellectual.
2  Especially Collins and Bilge (2016), Crenshaw
(1989), Davis (1981), hooks (1981) and Taylor
(2017).
3  See, e.g., Bhabha (1994), Chibber (2013), Dimi-
triadis and McCarthy (2001), Hall (1992, 1996),
McCarthy et al. (2005), Said (1978/2003, 1993),
Sharp (2009), Spivak (1988, 2004) or Young
(2001).
4  See, e.g. Andreotti (2014), Andreotti et al. (2015),
Curiel (2007), Dei and McDermott (2014), Dussel
(1977/1985, 2013a, 2013b), Grosfoguel (2013),
Lugones (2008), Maldonado-Torres (2007), Men-
doza (2016), Mignolo (2002, 2007), Mohanty
(2003), Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2016), Orelus et al.
(2016), Quijano (2007, 2014), Santos (2014),
Smith (1999).
5  In keeping with Spivak’s (1988, 2004) usage
of the term ‘subaltern’ (originally advanced by
Gramsci, 1971/1999), it refers here to peoples
who are perceived through the (neo)colonial gaze
as subordinate or inferior others, or as outsiders
whose alterity is thus dehumanised to various
degrees.
6  The Global South transcends the geographical
dimension to include the symbolic realm of sub-
altern existence under domination, which mostly
occurs in the poorer countries of the southern
hemisphere, but does also occur in wealthy coun-
tries, especially where Indigenous, immigrant
and historically minoritised peoples and nations
are concerned. For more information see Santos
(2014) or Sharp (2009).
7  The Global North extends to rich countries
located in the southern hemisphere as well, such
as Australia or New Zealand. On the various forms
of coloniality experienced by Indigenous peoples,
200 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
see Andreotti (2014), Andreotti et al. (2015),
Escobar (2011, 2018), Shiva (1997), Smith
(1999), Ticona Alejo (2011), Tuck and Gaztam-
bide-Fernández (2013), Tuck and Yang (2012),
Walsh (2013, 2017) or Zinn (1980).
8  This term has been gaining ascendency in
English-language discourse devoted to anti-
racism. See, e.g., Collins and Bilge (2016), or
the on-line campaign ‘Black and Brown People
Vote’ (B&BPV) for the 2016 elections in the
United States, available at: https://www.in
diegogo.com/projects/black-and-brown-people-
vote#/ (accessed 6 October, 2019).
9  See Bartolomé (2007), Darder (2015), Darder
et al. (2016, 2017), Giroux (1988, 2011), Kinche-
loe (2008), McLaren & Kincheloe (2007), Orelus &
Brock (2015).
10  See Apple et al. (2011), Apple and Buras (2006),
Apple and Au (2014), Dei (2011) or Dei and
McDermott (2014).
11  See the United Nations Declaration on the Grant-
ing of Independence to Colonial Countries and
Peoples, at http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/dicc/dicc.
html (retrieved 12/11/2017).
12  For example, the lands originally allocated by the
British Empire to the Palestinian people under UN
Resolution 181 of 1947 have since been steadily
encroached upon by Israeli settlers protected by
the Israeli military.
13  This and all subsequent translations of Spanish or
Portuguese citations are by Cathryn Teasley. The
original citation reads in Spanish as follows: ‘[…]
uno de los elementos constitutivos y específicos
del patrón mundial de poder capitalista. Se funda
en la imposición de una clasificación racial/étnica
de la población del mundo como piedra angular
de dicho patrón de poder y opera en cada uno
de los planos, ámbitos y dimensiones, materiales
y subjetivos, de la existencia cotidiana y a escala
social’.
14  See for instance: W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of
Black Folk (1903) and Africa in Battle Against
Colonialism, Racialism, Imperialism (1960); Amí-
lcar Cabral’s (1970) National Liberation and Cul-
ture; Chinweizu’s (1975) seldom cited The West
and the Rest of Us; or Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s (1986)
Decolonizing the Mind.
15  See Chibber (2013) or Young (2001) for critical
overviews of this scholarship. See also Dimitria-
dis and McCarthy (2001), Escobar (2011), Hall
(1992, 1996), Kumar (2006), McCarthy (2013) or
McCarthy et al. (2005, 2014).
16  Other decolonial authors coming from fields
beyond that of education would include:
Maldonado-Torres (2007), Mohanty (2003),
Santos (2014) or wa Thiong’o (1986), among
many others.
17  Cathryn Teasley is a Californian of Anglo-Italian
extract who has been living in the Galizan Auton-
omous Community of Spain since 1991, where
she works as Assistant Professor of Curriculum
and Instruction at the University of A Coruña.
Alana Butler is an African Canadian Assistant
Professor at Queen’s University who is currently
residing in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
18  See Fraser (2010) for an overview of her own
work on recognition, redistribution and represen-
tation.
19  This is a translation of the following citation pub-
lished in the Spanish: ‘Al avanzar una “actitud
decolonizadora” y un “humanismo decoloniza-
dor” (Maldonado, 2009: 305), Fanon hace de la
sociogenia una suerte de pedagogía decolonial
[…]’
20  The recently elected extreme-right President of
Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, has publically con-
demned, and is attempting to censor, all of Paulo
Freire’s scholarship in Brazil (Otras Voces en Edu-
cación, 2018).
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Locating Black Life within Colonial
Modernity: Decolonial Notes
For some time now, the decolonial question
has been on the pens of certain scholars
(Césaire, 1972; Davies, 2008; Fanon, 1963).
Within these sensibilities, Blackness endured a
precarious relationship with modernity, one
lived and made durable through particular
sociomaterial enactments, well calcified by
way of colonization. Drawing from this rela-
tionship, I am curious about how a sociomate-
rial history of Blackness might contribute to
understanding the contemporaneity of Black
life, sovereignty, land, and the role of language
regarding place. My purpose in writing is to
sift through the flotsam of modernity, to under-
stand how emergent relationships within Black
life come to make possible sociomaterialized
theoretical enactments through the everyday
tensions that have typified these relationships.
Put another way, I am interested in the circum-
stances through which Black life comes
together, remains whole, although sometimes
fragile under historical pressures, to produce
public forces constitutive of knowledge, sub-
jectivities, and multiple modes of identification
24
Marlon Simmons
which come to be organized through a digi-
tized politics of relations in material forms. I
am curious about the doing of Black life, how
acts of love come to be formed (Freire, 1970),
how connections with place come to be, and
what social networks are formed, dissolved, or
made sustainable. How might we come to
know forms of Black life as outside the cir-
cumscription of Western exceptionalism? At
the same time, what do these relationships
mean for decolonial enactments?
My aim is to understand how to come into
conscientization (Freire, 1970, 1985) for
the decolonized future, one that tends to the
intertextual historical encounters of colonial
modernity; an encounter which encumbers
the African-Indigeneity of the Diaspora. My
concern here is with making sense of the rela-
tional experiences of decolonial life, as these
experiences have been cryptically shaped
and embodied through histories of mem-
ory embedded within the African-Diaspora
and plantation geographies of enslavement.
With this sentiment, my pedagogic hope
206 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
(Freire, 2011) imbues a particular writing
cognizant of what places are made possible
through colonial modernity, as they come to
be racially underpinned through the socio-
materiality and epistemic disjunctures of the
African Diaspora, simultaneously culminat-
ing in a peopling that disrupts the Manichean
confines of what it means to be human.
Writing through these epistemological curi-
osities (Freire, 2005), I share some notes I see
as necessary for decolonial sense making.
WAYS OF KNOWING THE
DECOLONIAL QUESTION
As a starting point one might begin to imag-
ine how decolonial as an interpretive frame-
work can offer different peoples a place to
make sense of their historical and daily expe-
riences. Imagining how decolonization as a
practice, as a way of being, as a way of
becoming human helps us to understand
­present-day experiences of Black life through
its civil and cultural enactments, can be a
complex undertaking. How might decoloniza-
tion help with reading, tracing, and compre-
hending coloniality within the concomitant
conditions of globalization in ways that we
can undo dominant forms of performing citi-
zenship? At the same time, if we are thinking
about decolonization as a way of knowing our
relational experiences, we ought to be cogni-
zant about how particular forms of knowledge
come to be made intelligible within Western
educational institutions. How and what fields
of knowledge are endowed with privilege and
installed with discursive authority? In what
ways do we become privileged and simulta-
neously complicit through these disciplinary
educational institutions within the current
epoch of globalization? How do we become
interspersed within educational institutions of
late modernity and simultaneously benefit
materially from these vantage points?
Given these corollaries, one of the con-
cerns here is with writing from, with, through,
out, and against the academy, that is to say,
the tensions of having to write back or be
located through some academic or interpretive
position, the tensions with experiencing the
disciplinary force of having to belong to a par-
ticular intellectual genre or tradition. Beyond
these tensions are the disciplinary edicts in
which the educator becomes accorded and
installed through the hallways of institutions
with intellectual precedence. Yet these intel-
lectual genres or traditions from which we
eloquently write are neither ahistorical, apolit-
ical, neutral, nor innocent. Rather, they come
with their own ethical concerns, entangled and
bound with discursive currency, represented
and positioned through the corridors of educa-
tional institutions, as well as the public, with
discursive capital. As educators, working ethi-
cally to undo these entanglements could be an
impossibility. It becomes a meaningful learn-
ing task when educators implicate the self by
thinking about the ways in which we benefit
through this epistemic privileging.
I have long spent time working through
some of the epistemological questions imma-
nent within decolonial thought to get a sense
of the ethics, politics, and implications of
doing this work. In particular, and with com-
ing to write this piece, I have had to work
through the what and how of the ways in
which I enter into decolonization. What sort
of mindset and orientation of thought are
organizing my decolonization process? In
doing so, I think about where and how knowl-
edge resides. What are the ways in which
knowledge becomes taxonomized through
dissimilar geographic locations? What can
we know from differently placed spatiotem-
poral locations regarding the human, com-
munity, and ecological spheres? In thinking
through these seemingly mundane questions,
I trouble the self, my location as a reser-
voir for knowing, with the focus on what it
means to conceptualize decoloniality through
self as method. Yet in coming to name these
moments, I recognize the flux, temporality,
the uncertainty, and the incommensurability
of coming to know; at the same time, I also
 LOCATING BLACK LIFE WITHIN COLONIAL MODERNITY
recognize the pedagogical necessity of mak-
ing sense of the controversies, contradictions,
intersections, and imbrications of these his-
torical conversations.
To think about decolonial as a way of
doing citizenship involves probing historical
forms of knowledge systems and unearthing
the masked nexus with such conjunctures of
religion, race, gender, sexuality, and able-
bodied, linguistic and techno-bio-diverse
ways of belonging to our planet, as well as the
concomitant production of modes of inclu-
sion and exclusion within particular public
spheres. It involves making sense of how these
constructs of knowledge – through intergen-
erational memory constituted through land,
time, and space relations – and embodiment
of knowledge become documented, recov-
ered, and put into practice differently by citi-
zens through variant methods and dynamic
processes of immersing and engaging the self
with digital technology.
Of interest is the making sense of domi-
nant productions of knowledge, as governed
through institutional forms of education, and
reimagining public spaces for teaching and
learning (Giroux, 2011; Kincheloe, 2010).
The aim is not necessarily with dismantling
educational institutions in the immediate,
but rather with undoing systems of knowing
about the ways in which dominant knowl-
edge becomes constituted; how particular
ways of teaching and learning come to be
experienced as the imposition of a determin-
ing set of values. I should also mention, with
this discussion I am less interested in furnish-
ing or operating calmly in an epistemological
system that has historically negated particu-
lar peoples from being human and simulta-
neously expositing certain peoples as being
the preferred human. I am more concerned
with finding possibilities for understanding
different ways of being detached from the
tacit practices of complying and rewriting the
hegemonic canon of knowledge as installed
by Western systems. Instead, might we
think of decolonization as a creative force,
a creative set of processes that reconsiders
207
rewriting the dominant worldviews that have
come to govern how we experience what it
means to be human, what it means to be a
citizen as organized by the nation-state in late
modernity (Abdi, 2013; Dei, 2017; Escobar,
2007; Grosfoguel, 2007; Maldonado-Torres,
2007; Mignolo, 2014; Quijano, 2007).
In probing the swarm of disciplinary dis-
cursive strategies embedded within the trope
of citizenship we might turn to digital tech-
nologies (Browne, 2015) – to consider how
digital technologies could help with reim-
aging the disciplinary terms and conditions
of knowing and performing citizenship as
installed through the many channels of edu-
cational institutions (Freire, 2005, 2001). In
that, the nation-state citizen becomes a prod-
uct of discourses that over time has fossilized
and been made to appear as some natural way
of being human. Perhaps by unmasking the
variegated performativities of citizenship, we
can bring to the surface some of the dominant
preconditions through which what it means
to be human are made possible. Such knowl-
edge is necessary for coming into the differ-
ent practices of decolonization. Yet in order
for citizenship to be made valid by the nation-
state, it is always already purposed within
a discursive code of conduct. The concern
here with decolonization is with knowing
how and what sensibilities are made possible
when particular technological attachments
become cultural signifiers encoded within
everyday practices to shape and situate citi-
zenship in the public sphere (Browne, 2015).
What aspects of disciplinary forms of power
become uncovered through the differential
operations of technology?
I am suggesting that decolonial ways of
knowing allow for an underwriting which
interprets how sensibilities of being human
come to avow and congruently disavow
negotiations within colonial modernity,
through embodied polities of the archetype
abject human, that of Blackness. Decolonial
ways of knowing involve forms of thinking
of the world which are relational, constitu-
tive, dialectically contoured through place,
208 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
peoples, and incommensurabilities of becom-
ing (Freire and Macedo, 2001; Freire, 2005).
It encompasses historical engagements with
Euro-Enlightenment-knowledge constructs
that come to situate the sociomaterial terms
and conditions of the human within the con-
tinuous hegemonic production of colonial
modernity. Decolonial ways of knowing
involve working through difference; they
involve coming to write and dialogue through
acts of love, with the pedagogic hope of trans-
formative possibilities to undo hegemonic
sociomaterial, incommensurable structures
and procedures within colonial public spheres
(Freire, 2001, 2011, 1970).
In a sense, decolonization concerns under-
standing how power, questions of belonging,
Euro-Enlightenment-knowledge epistemes,
and sensibilities of being human come to be
enacted and simultaneously circumscribed
through the spatial procedures of colonial
modernity (Mignolo, 2015). If as a place-
holder we were to draw from the sensibil-
ity that knowledge becomes socially created
through ensuing relationships of practice, as
well as what Wynter and Scott (2000) call for –
a re-historicization through ethnohistories –
then such knowledge becomes provisional for
different social imaginaries of being human.
What then are the underpinning values and
assumptions with one’s situated knowledge,
and how do these politically laden enactments
become embedded within and inform decolo-
nial approaches? We also need to be cognizant
of how such situated knowledge as experi-
enced through historical forms of oppression
becomes placed within institutions, simultane-
ously forming scaffolded relations with ongo-
ing educational typologies (Freire, 1970).
BLACK LIFE, KNOWLEDGE,
AND THE TEXT
Throughout history, the textbook has played a
particular role in determining the qualitative
conditions regarding Black life. Textbooks
have been installed institutionally within edu-
cational settings, as well as public settings
such as libraries and museums, in ways that
congeal the past and present to shape narra-
tives of Black life. How is Black life enacted,
lived, and made to be remembered through
the temporalities of the textbook? What are
the ways in which Black life remembers or
comes to know the self through the assem-
blage of Atlantic enslavement as textualized
and organized through language, artifacts,
and digitized print? How does such a histori-
cal assemblage become thought of and tacitly
interpreted through Enlightenment narra-
tives? Textbooks give us certain relations
with knowing, with remembering Black life,
with the becoming of Black life, and how
Black life comes to be, giving rise to present
questions concerning the role of memory
regarding belonging in the context of the
nation-state (Freire and Macedo, 2001).
In terms of the text, Black life has been
written and rewritten in ways that have
honed the diminution of belonging outside of
Middle Passage coloniality (Wright, 2015).
Notably, the archived presence of Black
belonging as inscribed through cities, muse-
ums, public spaces, stamps, and libraries has
in some ways methodically been concealed
within state-imbued Euro-Enlightenment
epistemes of modernity (Ferreira da Silva,
2015; Lowe, 2015). The result here is the
representation of Black life through absence
and different frames of inferiority, promul-
gating limiting conditions onto what it means
for Black life to be responsible for their very
said humanness.
Though colonization set out to portray
unbecoming systems of relations regarding
what it means to be Black, Black life yielded
discernible schemas of sensibilities to think
about the colonial forays that bound their
determining terms and conditions (Wynter,
2003; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). These
sensibilities congealed to spatially form epis-
temological Diasporas, and through time
became transoceanically sedimented within
different Black communities (Wynter, 1997,
 LOCATING BLACK LIFE WITHIN COLONIAL MODERNITY
1995a, 1995b). Traversing across geographies
and augured through decolonial, anticolonial,
antiracism, postcolonial, and cultural studies,
within undergraduate and graduate programs
in educational research and social inquiry,
these epistemological Diasporas could pro-
vide sensibilities to think about Black life,
futurities of Black life, as well as the becom-
ing and unbecoming of Black life. Such
sensibilities ought to be interwoven with a
politics that speaks to the Black self in rela-
tion to the historical present and shared ways
of knowing Middle Passage cartographies.
Insofar as Black life emerged from Atlantic
enslavement through colonial modernity, it
comes to be materialized through multiple
instantiations with the world. In that, Black
life is very much embedded with global
overtones, as augured through a sociogen-
esis (Fanon, 1967; Wynter, 2001) that con-
figures the social and the material relations
of the becoming of Black life in which they
are entwined. Black life as inchoate to planta-
tion geographies (McKittrick, 2006), has his-
torically been interconnected to Indigeneity,
indentured labourers from Asia, and African
peoples through colonizer ­ governmentality
(Lowe, 2015; Scott, 1995). Enmeshed in
these complex histories are material relations
of violence as contoured through resistance
narratives, social death, memory, grief, dis-
possession of land, mourning, hauntings, dis-
enfranchisement – all propertized into ritual
enclaves of modernity (Mbembe, 2017).
While these enclaves distributed possibili-
ties for becoming through encoded cultural
beliefs, Black life imprinted multiplicities of
formations to survive colonial apparatuses of
civility, citizenship, sovereignty, and being
human in these emergent geographies.
I am also concerned with what I refer to
as the typology of Black life, which I sug-
gest speaks to the spatial, the temporal, and
relational interactions as they come to mate-
rialize through difference, race, historical
memory, place, peoples, and communities,
and are made durable through a multiplicity of
sensibilities (McDermott & Simmons, 2013).
209
At the same time, one must remain mind-
ful of ethical considerations: there exists a
particular proclivity to reduce Black life to
a singular homogenous read that essential-
izes belonging to sameness. I am more con-
cerned with the folding and unfolding of
Black life in response to existing political
entanglements as enabled through their situ-
ated environments, be it secured, unstable,
or volatile. Underpinning my thinking is the
sensibility of conceptually tracing the what,
how, and where of Black life, its relatedness
and synchronized enactments. This triad
presents a complexity of having to unravel
how this ongoing relatedness within Black
life becomes performed and made durable
through particular conditions. Relatedness
can also open decolonial approaches to the
untold interconnected practices of Black life.
It allows for a reading of Black realities to
understand social, political, and economic
enablement as governed through congeries of
indeterminacy, one that notes the distributive
effects, sites of attachment, modes of interest,
and points of passage, where the becoming of
Black life is enacted.
As the realities of Black life come to be
reshaped through a host of experiences,
belonging for Black life as situated through
different forms of ontology, variably becomes
re-contoured and re-bound, materializing in a
sense through different relations distributed
through its own politics, its own articulations
(Brand, 2001). How then do these politics
and articulations, which embody reservoirs
of Black life (Mbembe, 2017), become
embedded within institutional texts and made
durable in contemporary educational set-
tings? How might we imagine what it means
to teach and learn through these sensibilities
as they become enacted within contemporary
classrooms? What I am suggesting is that the
Middle Passage, as immanent to the African
Diaspora, has provided particular sources for
Black life, wherein which, ways of knowing,
belonging, cultural enactments, and social
growth have come to materialize without
some formal articulation or recall of these
210 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
historic-specific sources (Wright, 2015).
What emerged though, through different
spatial and temporal periodizations of his-
tory (Nimako and Willemsen, 2011; Wright,
2015), were theories as peopled through
resistance movements regarding Black life,
with specific instances to certain geographies,
with distinctive characteristics to the territory
of the colonial Middle Passage. These resist-
ance movements enmesh the epistemological
conduits of theoretical sensibilities embed-
ded within decolonial approaches.
Black life drew upon decolonial sensibili-
ties which yielded a peopling, spirituality,
modes of thinking, acculturation, and soci-
alities, all curated through communities as
vested to ancestral geographies and survival
of Middle Passage journeys (Wright, 2015).
These communities have found new position-
alities within the contemporaneous spheres of
existing Euromodernity. Through these posi-
tionalities, memories of the Middle Passage
became inscribed within Black life, produc-
ing histories and resulting in sociomaterial
enactments such as images, performances,
oral narratives, language, and variant cul-
tural expressions (Iton, 2008; Sharpe, 2016;
Wright, 2015; Wynter, 1992). My inter-
est here is with making salient the relation-
ships with Black life and these sociomaterial
enactments, and how such relations come to
organize the needs of Black peoples in par-
ticular instantiations inclusive of possibilities
and perils (Simmons, 2011, 2010). What are
the experiences of Black life in the present
nation-state context, as these experiences
draw from knowledge of what it means to
be Black through histories of disenfranchise-
ment? What I am suggesting is that Black
life always already experiences their worlds
through the interstices of the past as traced
through events that become implicitly experi-
enced within their governing public spheres.
Thus, Black life becomes determined and
conditioned through different sets of relations
allowing for interconnectivities to the present.
We might think through the obligatory
points of the Middle Passage to get a sense
of the determining conditions of how Black
life comes to understand the self in its con-
temporaneity – that is, to think of the Middle
Passage as being preserved and made durable
in the present in ways that actualize Black
life. You might say the Middle Passage has
all but left us suddenly and quietly, but if
we were to think of the historical present of
Black life, we begin to notice the folding of
regions with vestiges to the Middle Passage
(Wright, 2015). For Black life to make claim
to these incommensurable practices, as such,
involves wittingly or unwittingly being
endowed with cultural attachments yielded
through Diaspora and modernity alike, with
simultaneous recognition of its abject subjec-
tivity within canonized historiographies.
Since the colonization of time, the ubiq-
uity of Black life has been concerning.
Emerging from this ubiquity were theoretical
constructs which responded to the sociomate-
rial worlds of Black life. For when cultures
emerging from the Middle Passage come to
recognize forays of subjugation in its con-
tinuity, they are then forced to look within
themselves, their histories, different ways of
being, and modes of resistance and survival,
to form inextricable nodes of knowledge and
practices that can be situated as theory. Such
knowledge and practices specific to particu-
lar cultures, time periods, geographies, and
generations like the decolonial and anticolo-
nial struggles of the Civil Rights movement
and the Haitian Revolution (James, 1993),
give us variant ways to understand the situ-
ated experiences of Black life and offer pos-
sibilities for change that can translate into
some material good.
For Black lives to compartmentalize or
fragment their social realities from historical
situatedness might not culminate into some
clean extrication from the cryptic assem-
blages of Atlantic enslavement and Middle
Passage determinants. In the everyday con-
text, Black life endures historical colonial
texts and digitized images that have formed
edicts onto how they come to be and know
their existing places within private and social
 LOCATING BLACK LIFE WITHIN COLONIAL MODERNITY
settings, as well as public and institutional
contexts (Browne, 2015). The upshot is
often experienced, I think, through intergen-
erational modes of communication, as these
modes become mediated through tensions of
synchronic and diachronic forms of dialogue.
In that, given the location of the African
Diaspora, Black life comes to know the pre-
sent as distinct from historical connections,
while Black life through other Diasporic loci
comes to know the self through particular
characteristics of a historical present.
Such are the complex entangled incom-
mensurabilites concerning the being of Black
life. But yet, the claim to some existence
as distinct, disjoint, separate from colonial
histories that posit abject modes of being
on to Black life, is in and of itself consti-
tuted through enactments of remembering
relational experiences as immanent to the
African Diaspora. A possible outcome for
Black peoples, then, is to rewrite their situ-
atedness within particular public spheres to
ontologize in some way their modes of being
within their existing sociomaterial realities.
In a sense, these enactments encompass oral
narratives as sedimented within the African
Diaspora through language, culture, place,
and difference. Faced with these enactments,
Black life, well augured within its heteroge-
neity, undertook a series of transfigurations
as accorded through Diasporic conduits of
the Middle Passage.
DECOLONIAL THINKING AS A FIELD
OF KNOWLEDGE
Perhaps we ought to think about how decolo-
nial thought as a field of knowledge has been
installed within particular institutions and
concomitantly endowed with limiting episte-
mological plausiblity. To be cognizant about
how we make intelligible the vagaries
whereby decolonial thought comes to be
necessitated in our contemporary epoch or
the sociomaterial configurations within
211
educational settings. I think collectively in a
reflexive manner; some of the necessary
decolonial work is with making salient the
collaborative roles of educators, social jus-
tice activists, subaltern peoples, and the
wretched of the earth (Fanon, 1963) in con-
structing decolonial sensibilities. I am also
troubling the politics of knowledge, its loca-
tion and myriad signals, as well as the varied
processes involved in how particular forms of
knowledge become embodied and positioned
as legitimate and simultaneously institution-
alized as ‘Truth’ systems. To me this dia-
logue also allows for a conscientization of
our different subjectivities and relational
experiences (Freire, 1970, 1985, 2001, 2005).
It allows us to come into decolonial disposi-
tions. In doing so, we can reflexively situate
our thoughts in existing public sphere envi-
ronments, to delineate historical and contem-
porary gaps with theory and practice
concerning decolonial thought, being mind-
ful that coloniality has a particular interest in
a thinking that conjures oppression as static,
fixed in time, linear, measurable, discontinu-
ous, and remedied through particular state
apparatuses inclusive of public sphere con-
versations, laws, and ad hoc committees.
Often coloniality has been reduced to some-
thing mythic, as operating in the past, result-
ing in synchronic markers installed within
current conversations about historical oppres-
sion. What we have here is a periodization of
history that comes to make sense of itself
through the governing instantiation of experi-
ences, one which operates by way of discur-
sively re-signifying its terms and conditions
to safeguard its own transmission; it is a
sociomaterial performative, discursively
imbued to typify a practice of knowing which
epistemologically guarantees its being.
What decolonial approaches give us are
ways of knowing the complex and interwo-
ven textualities in which they were fashioned
and emerged, with the diachronic capacity of
making sense of the sociomaterial spheres
that they relentlessly strive to intercede. One
of the challenges for those of us willing to
212 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
engage in decolonial work is to recognize the
embodied histories immanent within the dif-
ferent decolonial locations, and how such his-
tories come to be determined and represented
in the present. At the same time, we also
need to recognize how decolonial thinking
as a field of knowledge comes to be installed
and given particular currency in educational
institutions, with the epistemological con-
cern being, – what counts as knowledge? We
ought to be cautious, and think of decolonial
sensibilities as socially, historically, cultur-
ally, and politically situated, embodied and
undertaken through a peopling within a par-
ticular context for a particular purpose. Such
sensibilities demand dignity, respect, and
love, which can yield knowledge credence
within the canonized project of thought
(Freire, 1970). Decolonial thinking has also
troubled the politics of knowledge, institu-
tionalized locations of knowledge, its signifi-
cation practices, as well the varied processes
involved in how particular ways of knowing
become embodied, endowed, and positioned
as singular hegemonic conduits of knowing.
Our ways of coming to know have been
historically apportioned, compartmentalized,
and accessed through textual disjunctures of
positivism, post-positivism, and certain theo-
ries. Within variant academic communities,
and in particular decolonial communities, dif-
ferent forms of epistemic resistance have met
these spatiotemporal moments of alternative
discursive traditions bringing us, I think, to
the place of evidence of knowledge as a par-
ticular site of contestation within educational
research (Denzin, 2011; Kincheloe, 2010).
My thinking on this historical debate on evi-
dence is, in a sense, evidence that speaks to
questions of measurability, repeated-verified
tests and strategies resulting in a sum rela-
tional, rational objective fact that simultane-
ously purports reliability and validity, which
work to organize and inscribe particular
institutions and policymakers. Regarding
decolonial sensibilities, how then do we
posit measurability and repeated-verified
tests or strategies onto data that is not readily
accessible or retrievable? How do we posit
measurability and verified ways of knowing
onto the incommensurability of memory?
Hence, in the everyday moment, doing deco-
lonial work involves disentangling from the
governing colonial complexity, to instead
build creative places in which fruitful dia-
logue might emerge, giving rise to different
acts of love (Freire, 1970).
We also need to be cautious when taking
into consideration how the interests of the
market can unwittingly produce and repro-
duce the terms and conditions of oppressive
educational thought within institutional set-
tings. Institutionalized education that has to
meet the interests of markets often results
in competition and scaffolding relations of
power regarding epistemological content. As
Freire (2005) and Freire and Macedo (2001)
invite, how might we then take up a social
imaginary as imbued through conscientiza-
tion, which draws on historical narratives to
open alternative possibilities that allow one
to make sense of cryptic colonial discourses
present within the text, classrooms, institu-
tions, and contemporary public spheres?
Let us take the example of language and
the construction of Canada as a nation-state
to make sense of how colonial contours of
language come to legitimize enactments
of belonging and citizenry, and the ways in
which language comes to distribute modes
of currency, simultaneously installing social
capital for particular peoples – to think
about civic participation and which language
becomes delegitimized and what particu-
lar cultures, peoples, and relational ways of
knowing become excluded. I think we also
have to be concerned with contemporary
questions concerning civic participation,
public and private engagements, and what or
how decision-making factors come into being
regarding decolonial thought, education, and
teaching and learning practices as governed
within classroom settings. I am suggesting
that in taking up a pedagogy of hope (Freire,
2011), decolonial approaches can be a place
for social action and educational change.
 LOCATING BLACK LIFE WITHIN COLONIAL MODERNITY
BLACK LIFE AND LANDSCAPES
OF RELATIONS
Often enough, Black life remains embodied
through certain polities of relations (Glissant,
2010) in which Black peoples come to par-
ticipate or take up particular performatives or
desires materializing into this hegemonic
corporeality of sport, dance, music, fashion,
apparel, technology, institutional knowledge,
and fixed roles in the media (Iton, 2008;
Weheliye, 2002). Inasmuch, these mediating
materials come to participate within Black
life in generative ways, reflective of commu-
nity, social stratification, scaffold relations,
socialization practices, and oppression and
power. Thinking of Black life in this sense
allows for a reading that can help with trac-
ing how Black life becomes materially entan-
gled and encumbered through nodal points
having diverging and converging forms of
variance. My point is that these performa-
tives or desires, as taxonomized through the
interests of the market, work to form a cogni-
tive registry, wherein Black life becomes, or
is made to be, productive through race-based
edicts of plantation geographies which
govern the corporeality of Blackness.
One might say that to couple Black life
through a material positionality unwittingly
brings disembodied meanings. What I am try-
ing to do, though, is to bring a type of rela-
tional thinking, to say that Black life becomes
constituted and is made contingent in complex
socialities, wherein which particular artifacts
and certain materials come to act as signifiers
or meaning-making processes embedded with
its own politics, ontologies, and epistemolog-
ical upbringing. Decolonial thought threads
through these sensibilities to make sense of
the conditioning of Black life in terms of
people and the material as they appear in the
quotidian context. The hermeneutic chal-
lenge here is with marking and identifying
these everyday interactions that are histori-
cally signified through colonial vestiges, and
how such coloniality comes to fashion Black
life. Another challenge for the writing of
213
decolonial sense making is with noting the
knowledge production schemata and how
such schemata become installed within insti-
tutional settings. I want to insist that decolo-
nial sensibilities embody the human through
a series of knowledge, ethics, values, and
cultural beliefs that link onto constellations of
material signifiers circumscribing the human
within their governing public sphere.
To say survival and resistance were inte-
gral experiences to people who have been
enslaved or oppressed is an understatement to
say the least. Having said that, part and parcel
of decolonial thinking is with denoting how
the situated processes of resistance, ensuing
socializing formations, and organizing princi-
ples become generative of ways of knowing
(Cabral, 2016; Nkrumah, 1970; wa Thiong’o,
1986), which simultaneously become inscribed
into heuristic perspectives counterhegemonic
to colonial narratives which flood everyday
Black life. We ought to be mindful of how
this deluge flows through institutions, pub-
lic memory, and a multiplicity of texts to
set in place an arrangement of thought that
works to ontologically negate Black life. At
the heart of the matter here is the question
of power, more so the hidden circuitous per-
formative of power (Foucault, 1980), how
narratives come to be written, and what sto-
ries of Black life are told through such a per-
formative. How does power come into play
when Blackness negotiates their place within
cities, institutions, local communities, and
the manner in which the terms and conditions
of these negotiations come to materialize in
particular enactments of demeanor, move-
ment, authorship, and the problematization
of everyday concerns of Black life as under-
pinned through racial classificatory systems.
This brings me to the crux of my concerns
with Black life and the necessity for decolo-
nization in the context of colonial modernity.
Here, I am worried about how Black people
assemble and make wholesome the chunks
and remnants of the Diaspora which con-
stitute their becoming; how at times within
their relational experiences they tacitly mark
214 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
moments as being codified through race,
to in turn have this said racial codification
transform into a typification that opens a
fluid heterogeneous assemblage with link-
age to power and self-determination (Davies,
2008; Foster, 2007; Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 2007;
Small, 2018; Stephens, 2005; Walcott, 2014).
I imagine some sensibilities of decolo-
nial thought are always already empirically
grounded within the corporeality of resist-
ance – sensibilities which are contextual,
distributive, interwoven with imbrications,
relational, incomplete, and contestable.
So, consolidation of decolonial thinking
as reduced to a singular sealed panacea is
less the interest here. Rather, decolonial
thinking is unswerving with its politics; it
demands social justice and institutionalized
enablement of its epistemological recogni-
tion involving dissimilar modes of probing.
I would be remiss not to say that as emerging
through geographically specific social move-
ments, decolonial thinking encompasses a
scope of ways of knowing, practices, pro-
cesses, communicative exchanges, materials,
and technologies that traverse through mul-
tiple loci. I should also follow up with the
idea that this scope is produced by way of
events, cultural difference, becoming, resist-
ance, and through a particular set of relations
that are made cohesive across variant encum-
bering, contradictions, and indeterminacy.
This, though, is the potential of decolonial
thought, the capacity to attend to contin-
gent collations as sequenced through onto-
logical difference, while insisting on civic
responsiveness to the experiences immanent
to Black life. Decolonial thought is more
so concerned with the composition of con-
text and power, emergent relational experi-
ences, and the provisionality of resistance
that continuously works through the material
orderings constituted by difference and epis-
temological disjunctures.
Black life has an abundance of ontolo-
gies, ensconced with colonial entanglements,
situated ethics, and political desires histori-
cally interwoven through past, present, and
future. These spatiotemporal junctures hint at
the capacity of Black life to synthesize with
continuity – Diasporic memory as contempo-
raneously lived. Being interpellated through
multiple heritages puts Blackness in a dia-
logue with its compound life forms, at local
and global moments. Here we have diverging
and converging social interactions enmeshed
through intergenerational memory of Black
life. From Black forms of life being governed
through histories of disenfranchisement,
abject subjectivities and political alienation,
we can be attuned to such a traversal, to note
how Blackness and the ensuing assemblage of
relations come to identify with a sense of self,
and make anew life forms amidst the debas-
ing narratives neatly tucked away within the
historiographies of colonial modernity.
Sociocultural and political alienation of
Blackness have this way of presenting them-
selves in a manner where negation of Black
life becomes quotidian, putting in place an
attitude, a way of being, one of compli-
ance to hegemonic narratives, that divests
from the Black self. To help in dispensing
with these narratives, I suggest the follow-
ing questions: how are nation-state forma-
tions of belonging being rendered, and what
are the ongoing assumptions, attributes, and
qualities being engendered in collective or
individualized arrays that are specific to
particular cultural histories? What forms of
belonging continue to be imagined through
particular cultural articulations and ges-
tures? Given the contextual histories, what
regulatory, discursive, and material mecha-
nisms were actively deployed to distribute
such alienating articulations of Blackness?
There is an implicit way in which the hue
of the corporeal is conceptualized, made cer-
tain, accepted, and becomes an instrument of
understanding Black life. Yet hue, as a cog-
nitive instrument, brings forth a materiality
that constitutes a mode of subjectification,
whereby Black corporeality simultaneously
expresses and transmits forms of govern-
mentality onto the self, giving rise to deco-
lonial knowledge where Blackness, as a
 LOCATING BLACK LIFE WITHIN COLONIAL MODERNITY
cognitive tool, circumvents the limitations
and conditions of possibility for meaning
making. What I am suggesting here is that
there exists an ontological alterity, histori-
cally conditioned through Black life, which,
when strategically deployed as a technology
of self (Foucault, 1997), can materialize the
becoming of Blackness, as well as promote
the fashioning of decolonial notes. This also
brings us to one of the challenges of decolo-
nial work, that is, having the capacity to form
community through certain arrays of leader-
ship, which invites thinking differently about
self-determination in the context of sover-
eignty. I am imagining such decolonial work
involves courage concomitant with an ethical
and political logic that offers alternative ways
of understanding what it means to be human
as governed (Mignolo, 2015, 2014) within
Black life.
Inevitably for Black life, decolonization
concerns itself with being human, or should
I say working to free the human of the fixed
colonial readings producing Blackness. In
that, enactments of being human are already
codifed through Eurocentric edicts of moder-
nity (Wynter, 2003). Such a reading has been
well critiqued by numerous scholars from
postcolonial theory, anticolonial frameworks,
Black feminist theory, cultural studies,
Black studies, queer studies, and decolonial
thought. These fields of thought have done
well to broach the temporal estrangement
which coloniality offers when reading con-
temporary political landscapes. Prompting
discontinuous histories, this temporal
estrangement has put into place myriad gen-
erational shifts in terms of viewpoints regard-
ing colonization. With recasting Black Life
through place, space, and time, through tech-
nological embodiment, through difference,
decolonial sensitivities invite formations of
belonging that make sense of being through
the interwoven-ness of power, resilience, and
knowledge production. It offers possibilities
for different peoples to reimagine and rede-
sign their futures through dialogue and dif-
ferent acts of love (Freire, 1970).
215
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Critical Pedagogy and Difference
The emancipatory impetus of critical peda-
gogy has risen-up to protect the agency of the
subject against what is tantamount to a will-
ful regimentation of a correspondence theory
of truth grounding the practice of education;
embodying a reaction against the ideological
interests of pedagogies that serve to bolster
the already well-wrought fetters of social
inequality by reproducing already existing
power differentials in dominant and margin-
alized forms of knowledge. Critical peda-
gogy relates to and originates from within the
material domain of discriminatory educa-
tional practices constituted by the cultural
politics of an exclusionary agenda tending
toward the disequalization of subjectivities.
Difference in relation to an ‘acceptable
norms’ of identity is accorded a pejorative
connotation vis-à-vis highly arbitrary criteria
of judgment that are based on the problem-
atic categories and their representation, for
example, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexu-
ality, ability, and religion. The conscious
disenfranchisement of alternate subjectivities
25
P e t e r P e r i c l e s Tr i f o n a s
is therefore a reductionistic societal produc-
tion. Difference comes to be measured in
relation to cultural ordinances of aspect con-
ceived as a narrowly defined and fixedly
‘qualitative’ measuring of personal or group
‘characteristics’. The singularity thus sub-
sumed under the overarching structure of a
single ‘controlling culture’ has been a key
factor for theories of subjectivity attempting
to explain the social interpellation of the
individual into ‘subject’ (Althusser, 1971).
The question of difference thus comes to be
elided with the question of the effects of a
dominant ideology upon what is selfhood.
The liberatory hope of theorizing a criti-
cal pedagogy has resided in enabling the
subject to free itself of complicity with the
onerous symptoms of a false consciousness
grounded in representations of diversity and
authenticity. And by so doing, the selfhood
of subjectivity would be allowed – or at
least it would be given the opportunity – to
self-consciously reinscribe the meaning of
itself in the difference of a newly achieved
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND DIFFERENCE
awareness of being-in-the-world. To real-
ize such a thing as ‘a nascent disciplinary
trajectory within education that has its roots
in Marxian analyses of class’ (McLaren,
1994: 319), critical pedagogy has crafted
its methodological arsenal from a selective
mixture of first generation Frankfurt School
critical theory, Antonio Gramsci’s idea of
hegemony resistance to ideology, and Paulo
Freire’s dialogic process of conscientization.
By questioning the ground of epistemologi-
cal discourses and the material conditions
of cultural objects and practices, it focuses
upon contextualizing the basis of the pos-
sibilities for social change to bring about a
more equitable ‘new-world-picture’ through
the renewed agency of the subject. Because
the term ‘critical pedagogy’ possesses obvi-
ous semantic connotations associated with
conceptual analysis, the early interpreta-
tions of it were taken to imply a method of
pedagogy used to involve students in overtly
critical exercises. The adjective ‘critical’
within ‘critical pedagogy’ refers to ‘criti-
cal theory’, the Marxist philosophical tract,
upon which, its theoretico-methodological
ends are founded. Critical theorists, such as
Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, have
argued that subjects should strive for social
and intellectual emancipation from the cir-
cumstance of political and economic domina-
tion enshrined by the powers-that-be. Critical
pedagogy emulates the urgency of this core
Marxian tenet by seeking to maximize the
subject’s capacity for a revolutionary move to
such a state of freedom through deconstructive/
reconstructive exercises that clarify ideology,
and exude the potential for an interpretative
plurality within hegemonic discourses by an
illumination of the conditions of the oppres-
sive power of the educational institution. The
idea of a de-reification of power through a
negative critique, or ‘negative dialectics’,
aims at de-subjectifying the false conscious-
ness strangling the singularity of self. A de-
construction of the narrative shell of subjective
identity is a fundamental step to emancipa-
tion from the hegemony of ideology infusing
219
the site of pedagogy. A counter-hegemonic
practice that is well versed in the nuances of
negative critique is the intellectual instrument
for a sustained resistance to the imposition of
meaning from ideologically overdetermined
sources outside the self. To liberate subjec-
tivity, in this sense, does not mean to deny
self-identity, but to assert independence and
control over the homeostatic effects of ideol-
ogy that enslave the subject to a living-through
of the interests and desires of the system.
Much of the canon of critical pedagogy
can be traced to the writings of the Brazilian
philosopher of education Paulo Freire (1970).
The premise was to acknowledge an ethic of
heterogeneity in knowledge and power struc-
tures that would foster an appreciation for oth-
erness and difference through concentrating
upon the contextual formation and depend-
ence of human understandings relative to the
effects of ideology. Freire (1970) maintained
that educational systems should foster an abil-
ity for autonomous thought and independent
action; encouraging educational institutions
to rethink the oppressive structural and con-
ceptual elements of pedagogical practice,
thereby allowing students to actively take part
in the development of their own personal-
ized systems of logic to deal with the knowl-
edge claims thrust upon them. Freire (1970)
advocated teaching-learning environments
that would be conducive to critical reflection
on the representation and curricular content
and representation by teachers and students.
Hence, cultivating the ability of a collective
multiplicity to fervently realize the legitimacy
of ontological and epistemological differences
in an assembly of subjective singularities by
not subscribing to the oppressive structural
arrangements of institutions that were often
organized according to austere doctrines of
manipulation and hierarchization a priori to the
heterogeneity of knowledge and experience.
Freire (1970) theorized open and non-coercive
dialogical teaching and learning environments
aimed at motivating an exchange of per-
spectives and resisting appropriation for the
emancipation of the subject from hegemonic
220 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
constructs. A familiarization with and recog-
nition of the multiplicity of difference for the
enrichment of society overall is crucial to the
outcomes of a ‘critical’ pedagogy. Defusing
the discursive logic of an enforced unity of
identity through either visible or invisible
means of discipline, training, and correction to
‘normalize’ subjectivity (see Foucault, 1977).
Developing in classrooms teaching-learning
situations that are responsive to the essential
reflexivity of such a ‘critical literacy’ for self-
liberation is a crucial undertaking. Dialogue
becomes transformational by encouraging stu-
dents to relay personal experiences, so as to
incite thought and discussion upon their own
discourse and that of others, through which
could be actualized, provisional but intelligi-
bly framed, arguments that are not governed
solely by ideological schemata (Freire and
Faundez, 1989); therefore dislocating the
logic of oppression that culls forth a reifica-
tion of subjectivity. The radical of ethics of
critical pedagogy go beyond the oppositional
schemata of a binary thinking and protects
the inherent differences of subjective identity
against the consensus and consistency of a
dominant discourse.
For Freire (1970), reality is not ‘concrete’
or ‘static’, but a relentless enmeshing of the
contextual factors reshaping its construction
in the conscious and unconscious axiology
of the subject’s perception. Admittedly, inter-
pretations of experience are troublesome if
qualified by the justifiability of each claim
to knowledge as a contingent language of
possibility and not as a dictatorial language
of a master/slave dialectic. Criticism as an
intellectual resource broadens knowledge
through dialogic constructions of the differ-
ences of experience stemming from decon-
structive/reconstructive exercises designed
to synthesize the subject’s return to self, or
conscientization (Freire, 1970). Employing
critical discourse to question and to chal-
lenge the assumptions of the self and of the
other, students can gravitate toward fresh
understandings and can circumvent the
need to reproduce institutionally endorsed
ideologies. Students engage in a purposive
dialogy to uncover more options for them-
selves as equal members of society and to
develop the skill or breadth of a more pene-
trating insight of the cultural remnants of past
myths, through which, the knowledge gained
from institutionalized systems of teaching-
learning is augmented.
It may be said that critical pedagogy has
risen from within a socio-cultural milieu
that has been insensitive to the reality of
the global condition in which a multiplicity
of differences simply exist. On one level,
the subjects of contemporary societies are
characterized in terms of this ‘world of dif-
ference’ where individuals are considered to
be identities constructed from an unceasing
exposure to a diverse array of images, dis-
courses, and codes, etc. On another level,
the heterogeneity of identity is exemplified
in communities of otherness and multiplicity
that is inhabited by individuals who further
embellish the singular differences of subjec-
tivity in complex affiliations integrating an
endless combination of gender, class, race,
ethnic, sexuality, ability, and other orien-
tations. This abundance of the constituent
markers of identity, mapped both with, in,
on, and through the ‘fringes’ of society, is
not always acknowledged or given freedom
of expression within school systems; moreo-
ver, educational institutions are inclined to
enforce subscription to prefabricated norms
and authorized policies of self-representa-
tion. In this case, individual freedoms and
rights are predisposed to the ‘governmen-
tality’ of prescriptive knowledge structures
regulated through the juridical strategies of
supposedly democratic systems that exclude
participants because of inherent or inherited
differences to the common system.
It becomes crucial to question the ‘com-
monizing rituals’ through which the arrange-
ment of schooling structures or educational
systems reproduce intellectual or behavioral
expectations without showing sensitivity to
the knowledge students hold in relation to
personalized subcodes of meaning-making
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND DIFFERENCE
and forms of discourse production. Students
are seen as being forced to comply with the
commodification of knowledge. Intellectual
potential is aimed at the possibility of produc-
ing a predesignated ‘cultural capital’ so as to
ensure success within the hegemony of the
school order. Michael Apple (1990) and Pierre
Bourdieu (1984) have persuasively argued that
a dominant culture both overtly and covertly
transmits a code of value structures within the
practical implementation of curricular dis-
courses as educational programs, therefore
endorsing certain knowledges and behaviors
facilitating the reproduction of the mean, by
championing its superiority over other forms
of understanding to thereby create a hierar-
chy of identities based upon ideological con-
formity. Individuals from groups of lowered
social status entering the school systems are at
an obvious disadvantage from the beginning
of the educational process due to a relatively
limited exposure of dominant forms of cul-
tural knowledge (Apple, 1992). In short, the
reasoning subordinated groups bring to the
traditional school setting are not supported
by the cultural hegemony of an ideological
ordering of school syllabi and curricula. And
an individual’s class, gender, racial identity,
ethnicity, sexual preference, ability, and so
on can work against the attainment of opti-
mum educational benefits from participation
in a schooling system that does not embrace
forms of knowledge subscribed to within
non-dominant world views. Because socie-
ties are amalgams of populations and peoples
embodying multiple multiplicities of differ-
ence, such a phenomenon in the educational
enterprise is destructive due to the fact that it
fails to offer an effective form of pedagogy for
a great portion of groups represented within
and representing society. School systems often
exhibit little appreciation for and sensitivity to
the potentially divergent interests of lowered
or marginalized status groups. Privileging
the multiplicity of difference in educational
contexts brings attention to the need to super-
sede pedagogical theories that locate knowl-
edge within exclusionary totalizations and
221
ideals of subjectivity rooted in hegemonic
ideology. Individual differences are celebrated
when the existence of subjective identities
relative to group membership are critically
engaged and whole-heartedly endorsed. As
Kanpol states: ‘Of course what must be estab-
lished within schools are personal struggles
that are not only separate and different –
by race, class, or gender – given their discur-
sive nature, but also intimately connected by
their commonalities’ (1992: 220). Critical
pedagogy values an ethos of intersubjectivity
within the diaspora of communities of differ-
ence. The mien of educational practices that
pervade the intellectual and ethical environ-
ment of the subject should inculcate an empa-
thy for and not a tolerance of otherness through
critical reflection upon the cultural sites of
discourse production. To illuminate a rhi-
zome of existing realities, critical pedagogy
attends to facilitate this analytic exploration
of perspectives by way of on-going dialogues
with an other. Through open and challeng-
ing interchange, meanings of differences are
more likely to be negotiated, apprehended,
and then woven into interpersonal schemata
or codes of meaning-making to stretch indi-
vidual understanding of alternative ‘possible
worlds’. For the reconstructive phase of this
genre of intercommunicative learning to take
place, the subjective authorities of the stu-
dent and of the teacher must be reinstated
within the institutional scene of teaching-
learning to identify content that is relevant
to the personal experiences of both, and that
is not encased in the educational agendas of
modulated syllabi handed down through pre-
planned and prepackaged curricula. Toward
this end, critical pedagogy does not indicate
‘clear-cut’ or ‘definitive’ learning outcomes
per se, but yields to the interpretative inter-
ests of individuals from which to realize the
central logic of the structuring of concepts
that are presented in areas of study supersed-
ing the confines offered by a given ‘dominant-
group’ reading.
Michael Apple (1990) has highlighted
the indoctrinating power of educational
222 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
institutions by pointing to the tactic of distrib-
uting to school systems ready-made instruc-
tional packages that bypass any critical role
the teacher or student might play in selecting
materials for the teaching-learning process.
This common practice makes teachers and
students appear as mono-dimensional cogs,
lost in a tangled lattice of intra-institutional
paraphernalia. Actors without agency, fit
only to be governed by managerial organ-
izers external to the reality of the classroom
environment. The trend toward pedagogi-
cal accountability or excellence in educa-
tion has re-instated standardized syllabi and
measurable curricular outcomes of learning-
teaching that enforce student and teacher
conformity for meeting the technocratic goal
of producing workers capable of sustaining
the commercial productivity of ‘sustainable
economies’. Such approaches to a ‘back-to-
basics’ education have become mainstream
and tend to undermine the socio-political
interests of marginalized groups because the
competitive edge of the pedagogy secures the
teaching-learning of knowledge as a form of
‘cultural capital’ worth having by reward-
ing its reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron,
1977). This drives the disequalization of the
opportunity to education while claiming its
reduction through the provisioning of an equal
access to education provided to all. Critical
pedagogy enacts a transformation through
dialogue by working to activate in indi-
vidual subjects the potential of their natural
abilities to counter domination. It looks for-
ward to an emancipation of the self from the
need for interiorizing such a ‘rote-learning’
of the system’s teachings.
Henry Giroux – a theorist who has offered
the most systematic theoretical and practi-
cable outline of the parameters and merits
of critical pedagogy after Freire – accents
the educational importance of unveiling the
oppressive element of institutional knowl-
edges. He too advocates a pedagogical sense
of reflexivity situated within experiential
frameworks for an education more suited to
introspections of subjectivity that teachers
can draw upon to heighten students’ aware-
ness of self as a vital source of informational
logic to motivate critical thinking in direct
relation to the communicative act of teaching-
learning. Giroux (1992) envisions a more
equitable institutionalization of education
for crossing the boundaries of culture, the
egalitarian premises of which would assist
all students in the formulation of truly origi-
nal ideas and would protect their democratic
right to voice opinions without having to hide
under a veil of commonality to suppress tacit
knowledges. This process of ‘applied reason-
ing’ or ‘critical thinking’ can be, as Blatz
notes, ‘understood as the deliberate pursuit of
well supported beliefs, decisions, plans, and
actions’ (1989: 107). The ‘genuineness’ of
these pursuits is displayed in the accountabil-
ity of actions to the aspect of logic construct-
ing one’s own subjective understandings as
influenced by race, ethnicity, class, gender,
sexuality, ability, and so on. By expanding
the capability to elaborate upon or to amplify
a unique voice or analytic perspective with
which to add to the classroom presentation,
previously ‘subordinated’ or marginalized
group understandings and perceptions are
given the opportunity in theory to be realized
in full. Critical pedagogy, as a result, teaches
students to be open-minded to an acceptance
of a variety of differing viewpoints, including
their own, by affirming knowledge through a
problematizing of its discursive possibilities
and material conditions. As Peter McLaren
suggests, ‘Critical pedagogy is positioned
irreverently against a pedantic cult of singu-
larity in which moral authority and theoreti-
cal assurance are arrived at unproblematically
without regard to the repressed narratives and
suffering of the historically disenfranchised’
(1988: 73). What is the point of trying to
reproduce the efficient inculcation and man-
ageable consumption of a content of self-
mirroring knowledges? The faith in method
cannot eradicate the dissent or resistance.
Knowledge does not reside in the material-
ity of ‘real-world’ resources or commodi-
ties so as to be given out, ‘consumed’, and
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND DIFFERENCE
verily reproduced for the socio-cultural or
politico-economic benefit of the subject, but
is an entity requiring the painstaking rigors of
involved intellection – an understanding that
stems from a highly personalized grounding
of experience and interpretation.
The democratic goal of critical peda-
gogy is to empower students with the abil-
ity to think and act reflectively as individual
subjects of a society or a culture who have
formed a conscious self-awareness of the
meanings of their multiple affiliations of dif-
ference and the significance of their worldly
transactions with an other. That a platform
for the creative exchange of student experi-
ences must be maintained within the practi-
cable components of a theory of learning is
vital. As Giroux explains:
[S]tudents have experiences and you can’t deny
that these experiences are relevant to the learning
process even though you might say that these
experiences are limited, raw, unfruitful or what-
ever. Students have memories, families, religions,
feelings, languages and cultures that give them a
distinctive voice. We can critically engage that
experience and we can move beyond it. But we
can’t deny it (Giroux, 1988d: 99).
The unevenness of experience alters subjectiv-
ity through the repetition of difference and of
changes in the states of relation of the subject to
it, that in turn, influences the modality of ‘cog-
nitive’ or ‘intellectual’ stances the subject
ascribes to its ‘rationality’. Subjectivity changes
just as the experience of the subject changes
over space and time to affect memory and
understanding. A teaching ethic of difference
welcoming heterogeneity within the scene of
teaching and learning would foster an apprecia-
tion for otherness by concentrating upon the
contextual dependency of human knowledge.
Critical pedagogy aspires to elevate the
consciousness of students to the inter- and
intra-translatability of these ‘living-changes’,
so as to inspire the self-confidence to actively
question concepts and themes set in relation
to an ever expanding difference and multiplic-
ity of understandings. This does not imply that
teachers are stripped of the ‘right to voice’:
223
Indeed, the pedagogical struggle is lessened with-
out such resources. However, teachers and stu-
dents must find forms within which a single
discourse does not become the locus of certainty
and certification. Rather, teachers must find ways
of creating a space for mutual engagement of
lived difference that does not require the silencing
of a multiplicity of voices by a single dominant
discourse; at the same time, teachers must develop
forms of pedagogy informed by a substantive ethic
that contests racism, sexism, and class exploitation
as ideologies and social practices that disrupt and
devalue public life. (Giroux and Simon, 1988: 16)
Discourse serves as the medium from which
students practice the critical power to inter-
rogate concepts for the sake of learning more
about the self, while keeping in mind the
exploitation or alienation that may arise when
knowledge claims are taken to be absolute
and not interpretations to be enriched by the
creative adding of the difference of experi-
ence to a rational possibility. To this end,
teachers work together with students to appre-
ciate otherness and to simultaneously bridge
the discursive abyss of the translatability of
difference through patient re-reading and self-
critical rationality (see Stanley, 1992). Critical
pedagogy engages the need to develop a sen-
sitivity for alterity over a willful submission
to the castigation of cultural metanarratives. It
allows us to reflect on the institutional and
knowledge structures of educational programs
within the difference of everyday conditions
that house the living ethical realm of student
aspirations. Critical pedagogy attempts to
rethink pedagogical methods for the purpose
of empowering students with the intellectual
capabilities that are demanded for the engen-
derment of a confident self-expression of
subjective identity, cognizant of the value of
otherness and the multiplicy of difference.
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Blatz, C. V. (1989). ‘Contextualism and critical
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Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Repro-
duction in Education, Society and Culture,
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Freire, P. and Faundez, A. (1989). Learning to
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Critical Pedagogy Imperiled as
Neoliberalism, Marketization, and
Audit Culture Become
the Academy
What role might education and critical pedagogy
have in a society in which the social has been indi-
vidualized … and education is reduced to either a
private affair or a kind of algorithmic mode of regu-
lation in which everything is reduced to a desired
and standardized outcome? (Giroux, 2018: 211)
Pedagogy is not some recipe that can be imposed
on all classrooms. On the contrary, it must always
be contextually defined, allowing it to respond
specifically to the conditions, formations, and
problems that arise in various sites in which educa-
tion takes place. (Giroux, 2018: 213)
The university as a potential, albeit con-
tested, site of transformative learning1 and
empowerment, where critical and creative
thinking are fostered and honed, where
orthodoxy and systems of illegitimate power
and authority may be exposed, interrogated,
and challenged, is under the growing threat
of extinction. Indeed, it is a matter of utmost
concern for all members of the academy –
and civil society itself – that the transforma-
tive hope of unfettered inquiry, which is
ultimately the academy’s raison d’être, is
26
Marc Spooner
being eviscerated as it undergoes profound
market-oriented and New Public Management
(NPM) restructurings the globe over.
Increasingly weakened and surveilled,
higher education has been – at best – slowly
yet steadily drifting away from its aspira-
tional ideals. At worst, it has taken an active
and alarmingly hasty role in diligently work-
ing towards its own disempowerment. The
university is now at risk of becoming merely
an entrepreneurial training centre for knowl-
edge workers, replete with standardized cur-
ricula, standardized syllabi, and standardized
outcomes testing. Readers brave enough to
peruse their institutions’ increasingly glossy
and corporate ‘Annual Reports’ will have
noted how senior administrators now revel in
marginalizing critical pedagogy, displacing
the teacher-­ bricoleur, and replacing faculty
with precariously employed de facto edu-
technicians. As the confluence of neoliberal-
ism, managerialism, and a pervasive audit
culture actively reshapes campuses and entire
societies, at stake is nothing less than what it
226 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
means to be a student, to be a scholar, to be
educated, and to be an agential participant in
a democracy.
With the global shift towards neoliberal-
ism, NPM, and administrative ‘accountability’
regimes, it is difficult to find any university,
anywhere, that is untouched by the merger of
these inextricably linked, interdependent, and
mutually reinforcing developments (Spooner,
2018). The subjugation of universities to
neoliberal market ideologies has meant that
academics – for centuries conceived as valued,
indispensable partners in higher education –
are now conditioned to think of themselves as
employees complete with a corporate brand
to be managed and sold globally to student-
customers (Ward, 2012).
This chapter examines the profound
changes to universities brought on by neo-
liberalism and NPM – changes that have led
to a disturbing homogeneity among universi-
ties everywhere. Chief among the changes
reviewed are academic capitalism (Rhoades
and Slaughter, 2004; Slaughter, 2014) and
its concomitant branding and ranking fetishi-
zation as well as the spread of audit culture
throughout institutions of higher learning. The
chapter then examines three recent develop-
ments as a result of these changes that threaten
critical pedagogical practices; these include
(1) national teaching excellence framework
(TEF)-type evaluations, (2) entrance and exit
exams (standardized testing comes to higher
education), and (3) outcomes-based teaching.
It concludes with a call for us, as academics,
to resist and denounce any attempt to control,
depoliticize, or neutralize the higher education
teaching and learning experience.
NEOLIBERALISM AND NEW
PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
The term ‘neoliberalism’ is employed to
describe a wide variety of phenomena –
diminishing its precision as well as utility –
but in its present usage:
at neoliberalism’s theoretical core is a rearticulation
and reconfiguration of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth century liberalist argument that market
exchange captures an essential and basic truth
about human nature and the creation and mainte-
nance of social order (Dean, 1999:159; Harvey,
2005). As such, it should become the model for
conducting and managing a host of activities that
were previously deemed ‘outside of’ or ‘above’ the
intrusion of the marketplace.… This new ‘greater
good’ was seen as being brought about not
through cooperation and the governmental leve-
ling mechanisms of the past but through the self-
interested activities of actors each working
independently and unknowingly … empowered
consumers-citizens and taxpayers whose desires
and self-interest would lead them to demand low
costs, accountability and transparency from all of
those who provided them with products and ser-
vices, including the state. (Ward, 2012: 2–3)
Neoliberalism seeks to roll back the state,
offload costs to the individual, and impose
market principles on every aspect of the
public sector, including universities; it is the
ideological framework, or ‘playbook’, from
which administrators carrying out NPM reor-
ganizations continually consult to justify
their ‘reforms’. NPM is taken to generally
consist of: (a) the adoption of private-sector
management practices, (b) the introduction
of market-style incentives and disincentives,
(c) imposing a customer orientation coupled
with consumer choice and branding,
(d) devolving budget functions while main-
taining tight control through auditing and
oversight, (e) outsourcing labour with casual,
temporary staff (a-e: Ward, 2012), (f) unbun-
dling the public sector into units organized
by product, and, (g) emphasizing greater
output performance measures and controls
(Lapsley, 2009; Lorenz, 2012).
By their very nature, these NPM reforms
and auditing procedures are toxic to collegial
governance, academic freedom, and local
faculty and disciplinary authority. As Shore
and Wright explain:
One of the main casualties of this process is the
ethos that previously sustained the traditional
public university. Collegiality and professional trust
are fast being replaced by competition, ­surveillance
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IMPERILED
and managerialism. These are defining features of
what we have elsewhere termed the rise of ‘audit
culture’ in higher education. More importantly,
neoliberalisation has produced an erosion of aca-
demic freedom and the substitution of the idea of
higher education as a public good with the notion
that a university degree is a private investment in
one’s personal career. (Shore and Wright, 2016: 49)
RANKINGS, AND BRANDING AND
THE HOMOGENIZATION OF
UNIVERSITIES GLOBALLY
As neoliberalism and NPM march on in lock-
step, universities around the world have
begun to converge and resemble one another
through at least three powerful homogeniz-
ing processes: (a) coercive, (b) mimetic, and
(c) normative isomorphism (Lewis, 2013;
Parker, 2011). Coercive isomorphism occurs
when organizations are compelled to partici-
pate in similar assessment and ranking exer-
cises via external force applied through the
state or influential funder. Public universi-
ties, dependent as they are on centralized
funding and state-controlled branches of
government, are the most susceptible; the
UK’s Research Excellence Framework
(REF) – formerly the Research Assessment
Exercise (RAE) – is the longest-standing
example. The RAE/REF was imposed on the
UK’s university system in 1986 by the
Thatcher government. The UK government’s
auditing of universities has predictably not
stopped with research; its ‘mission creep’
now includes teaching under the newly
imposed TEF. Mimetic isomorphism operates
when administrators and scholars all com-
pete to mimic organizations perceived to be
the most desirable or successful. As global
university rankings are published and prom-
ulgated (i.e., the Times Higher Education
World University Rankings, Quacquarelli
Symonds [QS], Scopus, the Shanghai Jiao
Tong, etc.), most universities seek to emulate
the practices of those occupying the top rank
(Marginson, 2014). Normative isomorphism
227
occurs when we are all similarly trained and
participate and share in the same overlapping
networks, leading to cultural rules and expec-
tations that ‘become reified as organisation
members’ own social reality’ (Parker,
2011: 435).
Whether the university is motivated by
state financial incentive/disincentive, audit-
ing requirements, ranking and branding
ambitions, or some combination thereof, the
coercive effects are similar as higher edu-
cation institutions are all competing in the
same global marketplace under academic
capitalism (Rhoades and Slaughter, 2004;
Slaughter, 2014). For instance, in one study
examining nationally imposed performance-
based university research funding systems,
Hicks (2012) found that, contrary to what one
might assume, it was not so much the size
of the direct government funding that created
the powerful incentives but rather the compe-
tition for prestige. Indeed, Wright et al. simi-
larly report that, ‘it takes very little money to
achieve big changes in the university sector’
(2014: 29). Going even further, according to
Marginson, ‘ranking has become a form of
regulation as powerful in shaping practical
university behaviours as the requirements
of states’ (2014: 46). In the competition to
attract tuition dollars, universities through-
out the world are re-fashioning themselves to
better compete in national and international
ranking exercises.
AUDIT CULTURE AND
GOVERNMENTALITY
Hallonsten elaborates on the process by
which audit culture works in tandem with
academic capitalism:
As academic capitalism spreads, universities aban-
don traditional meritocratic and collegial govern-
ance to hunt money, prestige and a stronger
brand…. Academic capitalism runs counter to
these ideals, subsuming achievement in research
and teaching to attainment of economic goals and
228 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
quantitatively oriented (and shallow) performance
assessments and rankings. Academic self-­
regulation and vocational autonomy are replaced
with external control by audit and management.
The individual’s struggle for recognition in science
is colonized by university managers, who use the
achievements of scientists and students to accu-
mulate capital (economic, symbolic and cultural, in
Bourdieu’s terms), and thus increase the visibility of
their university. (Hallonsten, 2016: 7)
Technologies of governance (Davies and
Bansel, 2010; Shore and Wright, 2000) are
enforced through a litany of regulatory and sur-
veillance apparatuses and reinforced by an ever-
growing body of incentive and disincentive
mechanisms. What is unique (and troubling)
about audit culture as manifested in higher edu-
cation is that such governance regimes are often
external to the programme, unit, or discipline
with which rests the traditional collegial author-
ity. As such, they are explicitly employed to
challenge a given body of scholars’ traditional
right to determine what is of value, what counts,
and what is legitimate and desirable.
State auditors, quality assessment bod-
ies, and/or university central administrations
themselves are increasingly demanding data
with which they can judge individual, depart-
ment, faculty, and institutional performance.
Too often, such judgements are made by
managers who lack the disciplinary exper-
tise to make meaningfully qualified assess-
ments. Under this regime, value can only be
determined by accountancy: academics are
governed by numbers, incentives, disincen-
tives, and competitive benchmarking (Shore
and Wright, 2015). Examples of the misap-
plied use of accountancy occur any time the
quality of research or teaching, as tradition-
ally assessed by collegial review, is judged
by management criteria that is based on lim-
ited, quantitative numerical proxies used as
poor representations of the actual research
and teaching. Such proxies include general-
skills standardized tests via entrance and
exit exams, discipline-specific standardized
tests, and/or other such examination frame-
works; two current examples of these are the
TEF in the UK, and the entrance and exit
exams being piloted by the Higher Education
Quality Council of Ontario in Canada.
It is not only the case that the reductive
nature of these tests and measurements is a
managerial practice that is coercive per se,
but also that the very reporting systems used
to provide the resulting data have the power
to guide and change our behaviours in sub-
tle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in a
2010 article on academic workers, Bronwyn
Davies and Peter Bansel explain the mecha-
nisms by which audit culture coerces and
constricts scholars:
Audit technologies standardize and regularise expert
knowledges so that they can be used to classify and
diagnose populations of workers and the potential
risks in managing them. Discourses of efficiency and
quality, for example, regularise academic practice,
narrowly defining values and successes in order to
render them measurable. Academics are persuaded
to teach the same way, complete the same forms,
make applications to the same funding bodies,
make links with industry – in short to reproduce the
same practices in order to re/organise themselves to
fit the template of best practice as this is defined by
management. (Davies and Bansel, 2010: 7)
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, BRICOLAGE
VERSUS PAINT-BY-NUMBERS ­
EDU-TECHNIQUES
The art of critical pedagogy is akin to the
researcher-as-bricoleur, where the bricoleur’s
method is an interactive emergent construc-
tion, ‘which changes and takes new forms as
different tools, methods, and techniques of
representation and interpretation [teaching
and learning] are added to the puzzle’ (Denzin
and Lincoln, 2018: 11). To be clear, in this
usage, the terms ‘teacher-bricoleur’ and
‘teaching as bricolage’ are not meant in the
pejorative ‘jack of all trades, master of none’
sense, but rather in their parallel meaning in
research, where they are employed to describe
the process of creatively optimizing the unique
and diverse resources at hand; in this case,
the ever changing body of learners and the
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IMPERILED
unique passions and experiences they bring to
the classroom community. Here the teaching
and learning process resembles the interpre-
tive bricoleur who ‘understands that research
[teaching/learning] is an interactive process
shaped by one’s personal history, biography,
gender, social class, race, and ethnicity and
those of the people in the setting’ (ibid.: 12).
As Kincheloe et al. (2018) highlight, teachers
and students are researchers. They elaborate:
A central aspect of critical teacher research involves
studying with students. Freire argues that all
teachers need to engage in a constant dialogue
with students, a dialogue that questions existing
knowledge and problematizes the traditional
power relations that have served to marginalize
specific groups and individuals…. teachers listen
carefully to what students have to say about their
communities and the problems that confront
them…. This enables the teacher to construct
pedagogies that engage the impassioned spirit of
the students in ways that move them to learn what
they do not know and to identify what they want
to know. (Kincheloe et al., 2018: 241 italics in
original)
A university education ought to equip students
with the capability of responding to an increas-
ingly changing world, where they will be
called upon to contribute as fully engaged,
critical and creative citizens2. It is the univer-
sity’s role to ensure that students acquire the
ability to participate in established systems and
community structures, and be given the oppor-
tunity to question and debate these established
systems and structures. However, even more
importantly, students must also be provided
with the opportunity to challenge and change
systems that reproduce injustice. Indeed, edu-
cators would do well to consider Grande’s
cautionary words: ‘While there is nothing
inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary
about theory, it is one of our primary responsi-
bilities as educators to link the lived experience
of theorizing to the processes of self-discovery
and social transformation’ (2004: 3).
Instead, audit culture renders academ-
ics as auditable subjects, willing us to con-
form to its own (ideological) notions of what
counts as teaching and scholarship. For the
229
purposes of control, it continuously defaults
to what can be easily quantified, tabulated,
standardized, and comparably benchmarked,
relentlessly steering the academy away
from critical pedagogies (Kincheloe et al.,
2018) and towards superficial learning and
the instrumentalist ideals of the workforce.
Raaper highlights ‘neoliberal higher educa-
tion policy discourses [that] promote “entre-
preneurial citizens” for the competitive global
economy. By addressing students as consum-
ers, students are expected to act as “private
investors” who seek a financial return in
the form of enhanced employability skills’
(2018: 2). One can hardly blame students
for adopting a consumer outlook to higher
education; the need to acquire private-sector-
sanctioned skills that lead to employment is a
near-imperative given the increasingly heavy
debt loads with which society burdens them.
As Peter McLaren insightfully posits:
Many students facing higher tuition rates and dismal
prospects for decent employment are sometimes
less likely to want a critical education that more
deeply nests them in oppositional environments. On
many occasions, what they seek is a more pragmatic
and instrumental return on their investment – a job
with a secure future. This is not to say that students
are less likely to join groups that foment opposition
to the neoliberal state, as the Sanders campaign
(modelled less on Marx’s concept of socialism than a
watered-down version of European social democ-
racy) tellingly brought to light, but that universities
have now been so insinuated into the neoliberal
corporatocracy and business models of leadership,
with their increasing demands for a politics of eco-
nomic austerity and debt generation, that they are
now naturalized as part of the subsector of the
economy. After all, economic inequality and insecu-
rity are endemic to capitalism, and the embour-
geoisement of the academy teaches its students
that a university degree is perceived as one of the
few remaining chances for economic advancement.
The focus for too many of our students becomes
getting prepared for the capitalist world rather than
viewing university life as an opportunity to be part
of the struggle to bring an alternative social universe
into being. (McLaren, 2018: 289–90)
A cursory examination of developments in
Canada, the UK, and the United States reveals
at least three threats to critical pedagogy in
230 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
higher education as governments, states, and
university administrators demand to manage
what gets taught, how it gets taught, and how
it gets measured. As the full arsenal of audit
technologies and externally determined and
tested criteria are brought to bear upon profes-
sors, courses, programmes, and university
degree experiences, the traditional university –
a site of transformational learning, where
diverse ideas can be debated and sites of ille-
gitimate power and authority contested – slips
away. In its place rises the managerial univer-
sity, with its focus on domestication, employ-
ability, and entrepreneurship.
AUDIT CULTURE THREATS TO
PROFESSIONAL AUTONOMY,
COLLEGIALITY, AND CRITICAL
PEDAGOGY
There are three separate yet interlocking
developments that scholars everywhere
should be critically monitoring. They all
threaten professional autonomy, collegiality,
and critical pedagogy; they all need to be
confronted, named for what they really are,
and resisted. They are (1) TEFs, (2) entrance
and exit exams, and (3) outcomes-based
approaches to university teaching. Each is an
attempt to extend audit culture’s reach
beyond university research and into the class-
room itself. It is especially important for new
faculty to become aware of how we are being
governed. For many new scholars, this is
their only normal. Only from a position of
awareness, can new and seasoned scholars
alike begin to envisage, or revisit, their own
as well as their collective deprogramming
and de-institutionalization.
TEF-TYPE EVALUATION
FRAMEWORKS
Nationally imposed teaching evaluations,
such as the UK’s TEF (an exercise similar to
the UK’s REF but for measuring and rating
university teaching), rank universities; in the
UK’s case with three ‘scores’ (no doubt
influenced by the Olympics): Bronze, Silver,
or Gold (Teaching Excellence, 2017: 26).
Participation in the TEF for Years 1 (2016/17)
and 2 (2017/18) has been voluntary, however,
beginning with Year 3 (2018/19), it will be
mandatory. At stake, beyond reputation, will
be the amount universities may charge in tui-
tion fees based on the ratings achieved; spe-
cifically 50% of inflation increase for a
‘Silver’ rating and 100% of inflation for a
‘Gold’ rating.
In this simplistic conception of evalua-
tion, three aspects of teaching excellence
are assessed as measured by: (a) Teaching
Quality, (b) Learning Environment, and
(c) Student Outcomes and Learning Gain
(Teaching Excellence, 2017: 24). Table 2
of the TEF assessment criteria for Student
Outcomes and Learning Gain is divided
into two sub-categories: Employability
and Transferable Skills (SO2) and Positive
Outcomes for All (SO3). Tellingly, the cri-
terion for Employability and Transferable
Skills (SO2) is defined as ‘Students
acquire knowledge, skills and attributes
that are valued by employers and that
enhance their personal and/or professional
lives’ (ibid.: 26).
Of greater concern, the government frame-
work specification document for the TEF
(Teaching Excellence, 2017: 24) alarm-
ingly states that new measures for ‘Learning
Gain’ are currently being developed. Being
considered are standardized tests of either
­general-skills and/or discipline-specific skills
(McGrath et al., 2015: 31–3). Adoption of
either a general-skills or a discipline-specific
skills standardized test to measure and reflect
student learning is clearly an affront to our
traditional right to determine what is of value,
what counts, and what is legitimate and desir-
able in terms of course and programme con-
tent and student learning.
Much has been written, and as covered
in my previous work (see, for example,
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IMPERILED
Spooner, 2018), on the manner in which
REF-styled, so-called accountability frame-
works and performance indicators pervert the
very object they set out to measure through
quantification and enforced targeting. Such
simple-minded practices inevitably lead to
gaming, cheating, ‘teaching to the test’, and
generally not seeing the forest for the trees.
By unduly focussing on narrow, atomized
targets, they lose sight of the true end goals of
education. One need ‘look no further than the
mass high-stakes testing craze that has all but
strangled sound pedagogy in so many public
education districts within the United States
and beyond’ (Spooner, 2018: 903).
ENTRANCE AND EXIT EXAMS
Just as the UK is implementing the TEF,
Canada’s most populous province, Ontario,
has piloted its own general-skills entrance
and exit exams through the ominously
Foucauldian-sounding ‘Higher Education
Quality Council of Ontario’ (HEQCO).
HEQCO cites a ‘concern that today’s post-
secondary graduates are lacking critical
employability skills’, and has adopted a com-
puterized test of literacy, numeracy, and
problem-solving, created by the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) and Educational Testing Service
(ETS). These tests were administered to
incoming university students as well as to a
different cohort of graduating students. The
initial pilot for this latest exercise in bureau-
cratic regime-building began in the Fall of
2017. HEQCO is not shy about its ultimate
aspirations for these tests; President and
CEO, Harvey Weingarten states: ‘The initial
goal is that colleges and universities use
these results as instruments for quality
enhancement … If the pilots prove success-
ful, this could become standard practice in
Ontario and beyond’ (HEQCO, 2016).
Once again, to the degree that externally
determined and tested criteria are imposed
231
upon courses, programmes, and university
degree experiences, traditional collegial
authority and autonomy are undermined. How
grossly inadequate standardized tests devel-
oped by either ETS or OECD and promoted
by HEQCO and others can be compared
to a degree programme’s existing course
and programme requirements, each deter-
mined and assessed by expert professionals
and subject-matter specialists, is a question
that perplexes? A standard four-year under-
graduate experience likely includes 20-40
expert ‘-second opinions-’ diagnosed by a
wide variety of professors with a diversity of
knowledge, teaching styles, and assessment
strategies. Why would any unit/programme
submit to a one-size-fits-all, quantified, out-
of-context test administered via computer at
the behest of an external body with little or
no disciplinary and programme knowledge?
Truly, it boggles the mind.
OUTCOMES-BASED APPROACHES
TO HIGHER EDUCATION
Tam highlights that the ‘vogue of outcomes-
based approaches to higher education’ (2014:
159) grew out of the audit or assessment
movement of the 1980s in the United States
‘with government calls to examine the effec-
tiveness of funds invested in public institu-
tions of higher education’ (ibid.: 159).
Outcomes-based higher education is often
described as student-centred; however, to the
degree that outcomes-based targets are exter-
nally measured, they become a fixed and
two-dimensional roadmap that fails to repre-
sent the actual terrain that needs to be sur-
veyed. Such rudimentary maps leave no
room for exploring sites of interest that the
learning community finds relevant and sig-
nificant. (Tam, 2014). These schemes become
a form of paint-by-numbers education where
knowledge goals are exchanged and tested
like consumer goods. Tam states, ‘the out-
comes-based approach [is] considered to
232 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
offer benefits including clarity, flexibility,
comparison and portability’ (2014: 163);
however, even these so-identified benefits also
serve externally imposed standards-based
accountability initiatives, leading to the stand-
ardization and homogenization of courses
within programmes and between universities.
The limitations Tam identifies include legiti-
macy where ‘outcome statements tend to
break down holistic conceptions of learning,
and reduce them to learning abilities or
changes in behavior that are specific, observ-
able and measurable’ (2014: 165); fractiona-
tion where ‘assessment for outcomes could
become too focused on the student’s acquisi-
tion of skills and knowledge that other more
important developmental outcomes over time
are ignored’ (ibid.: 165); and serendipity
where ‘outcomes-based approaches are criti-
cized for their constrained serendipity which
presumes that all of the valued and important
ways that a learner can construct meaning in
the context of a particular discipline or ability
are known in advance’ (ibid.: 165).
Many see ‘stated outcomes’ for every class
as a beneficial teaching technique. In prac-
tice, such outcomes merely serve to standard-
ize every lesson. They move the teacher away
from the role of bricoleur, and towards that of
a functionary adhering to a timetable of pre-
determined educational destinations. Such an
approach is antithetical to the process of criti-
cal pedagogy as so wonderfully described by
Joe Kincheloe:
Freire argued that [T]eachers uncover materials
and generative themes based on their emerging
knowledge of students and their sociocultural
backgrounds. Teachers come to understand the
ways students perceive themselves and their inter-
relationships with other people and their social
reality. This information is essential to the critical
pedagogical act as it helps teachers understand
how they make sense of schooling and their lived
worlds. With these understandings in mind, critical
teachers come to know what and how students
make meaning. This enables teachers to construct
pedagogies that engage the impassioned spirit of
students in ways that moves them to learn what
they don’t know and to identify what they want to
know. (Kincheloe, 2008: 20)
The contrast is striking when compared to
Bagnall’s caution and critique of outcomes-
based education, as referenced by Tam:
[O]utcomes-based education is in fact constraining
and limiting; trivial and mechanical; inflexible and
conservative with too much emphasis on attribu-
tion and consequence; promoting egoistic maximi-
zation of individual self-interests; and not as
empowering to both the students and educators
Outcomes-based approach to quality as it claims
because it dehumanizes students as resources to
be enhanced and promotes dependence of the
learners on the educators. (Tam, 2014: 165–6)
Audit culture imperils critical and imagina-
tive possibilities – the wonder and wander –
inherent in teaching and research. In practice,
accountancy and its methods are end-runs
that allow states, outside organizations, or
university administrations to bypass aca-
demic freedom, often without direct confron-
tation. As in an airport (or perhaps an
industrial farm) we experience a banal herd-
ing of our teacher- and student-‘selves’ as we
funnel through metric corrals, jog along per-
formance walkways, and are bundled through
X-ray scanners. Even when outside agencies
and administrator-managers are not overtly
limiting academic freedom through such
direct interventions, audit culture acts as an
official timekeeper, a stopwatch that leaves
little or no time to follow rewarding paths or
survey new aspects and areas of interest.
Audit culture’s imposition of its own tunnel
vision onto our research findings and teach-
ing methods means it cannot do anything else
but distort and distend the data that it so
stridently claims to measure; inevitably, reli-
ance on ‘outcomes’ and ‘outputs’ produces a
bent and wobbling ‘fun-house mirror’ repre-
sentation of real education.
The dire consequences of audit culture for
the academy include the usurping of discipli-
nary accountability (Brenneis et al., 2005),
the displacement of local/departmental colle-
gial authority (Stensaker and Harvey, 2011),
and the negating of faculty expertise and
autonomy. Academic freedom is limited to
the degree by which the arbiter of standards
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IMPERILED
for academic work is no longer ‘the collec-
tive academic staff in the institution and in
the academic discipline within which the
scholar works’ (Turk, 2014: 15). Teaching
goals and outcomes must be determined by
knowledgeable individual faculty members,
programme committees, and university-wide
senate approval processes. To leave them to
external review bodies with little to no disci-
plinary knowledge is the educational version
of letting the tail wag the dog.
CONCLUSION
Given the profound and deleterious changes
to university functioning brought on by neo-
liberalism, NPM, and audit culture, what can
be done? Whatever our discipline may be, I
would posit that in our present moment, this
is the question we must answer, as scholars
and educators.
First, we need to make ourselves aware
of the dangerous changes to higher edu-
cation that are now underway; changes
that run counter to the academy’s mission.
These include externally imposed TEF, pre-
and post-degree programme tests, and the
push towards o­utcomes-based approaches
to teaching. In a similar manner to how
other accountability measures have been
researched and found to have profound and
distorting effects on scholarship, we must
theorize these current changes to teaching.
Next, we must resist attempts to constrict our
research and teaching through misleading
performance measures and corrosive bench-
marking. To the extent that it is possible, it is
incumbent on us as scholars to call out audit
culture’s false promises, to reassert our aca-
demic freedom, and to get on with the critical
pedagogy and transformational learning our
world so desperately needs.
To effectively confront the forces that
threaten the academy, we need to reinvigor-
ate our engagement with the broader labour
movement and our own local and national
233
representation. We need to reach out and
strengthen solidarities with traditionally
underrepresented campus workers; as Gill
insightfully and rightfully reminds us, there
is a need for ‘ a much expanded understand-
ing of precarity – one that acknowledges
the multiple forms of insecurity, precarious-
ness and dispossession within the academy’
(2018: 209–10).
Moreover, for the sake of our individual
and organizational well-being, we should re-
narrativize concepts like ‘quality’, ‘account-
ability’, ‘efficiency’, ‘professionalism’, and
‘productivity’ (Lincoln, 2018; Shore and
Wright, 2000). We need to view our own
and our colleagues’ teaching from broad and
long-term perspectives that go well beyond
post-term teaching evaluations; teaching/
learning spans an entire lifetime and there-
fore should be evaluated longitudinally. We
must stridently reassert our expertise and
professionalism by reclaiming and defend-
ing our traditional disciplinary and collegial
authority to judge what is of quality, deter-
mine what is of importance, and set out the
manner in which it should be taught and
assessed.
Last, we do well to keep in mind that ‘the
competitive forces encouraged by these new
managerial systems … are highly seductive
in recruiting our behaviour through their
systems of reward and punishment’ (Shore,
2008: 291). In seeking to resist audit culture,
it is crucial for us to assert our traditional
right to act cohesively, as a body of schol-
ars. Top-down systems of managerial control
can only be effectively and safely contested –
avoiding the potential for harmful individual
penalties – if we act collectively.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to acknowledge the generous
assistance of my friend and editor, Evan
Thornton in reading various drafts of this
chapter. I’d like to thank Shirley Steinberg
234 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
for this opportunity and for being so patient.
I dedicate this chapter to the life, work, and
memory of Joe Kincheloe.
Notes
1  From O’Sullivan: ‘Transformative learning involves
experiencing a deep, structural shift in the basic
premises of thought, feelings, and actions. It is a
shift of consciousness that dramatically and irre-
versibly alters our way of being in the world. Such
a shift involves our understanding of ourselves
and our self-locations; our relationships with
other humans and with the natural world; our
understanding of relations of power in interlock-
ing structures of class, race and gender; our body
awareness, our visions of alternative approaches
to living; and our sense of possibilities for social
justice and peace and personal joy’ (2002: 11).
2  To clarify: I am referring to small ‘c’ citizens as in a
participant in a democracy; not a legal definition
of who constitutes a capital ‘C’ Citizen designa-
tion which is a legal and exclusionary concept
that attempts to immorally classify some humans
as legal and some as illegal.
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Critical Pedagogy: Negotiating
the Nuances of Implementation
THEORETICAL CONTEXT
The theoretical work of Michel Foucault,
Chris Weedon, Judith Butler, and many
others has participated in the ongoing consti-
tution of my subjectivication as a critical
pedagogue, producing the ‘I’ of my narrative
discourse. I, as the active agent involved in
that production, have engaged in performa-
tive work, defined by Butler, as any ‘discur-
sive practice that enacts or produces that
which it names’ (1993: 13). To acknowledge
the subjectiveness of theory positions me in
at least three theoretical fields – critical,
feminist, and poststructuralist. Theorists
located among these three fields recognize
that theory is never totally objective and
always serves an agenda. As well, theory is
not stagnant or fixed, but always in the pro-
cess of becoming something else as it
responds to new situations.
Social transformation achieved through
the realignment of power relations operates
as a key concept linking critical, feminist,
27
Jane McLean
and poststructuralists’ thinking. An under-
standing of how and why power/knowl-
edge relations should and can be readjusted
in educational policies and practices also
informs the field of critical pedagogy. These
theories, when invited to shape pedagogical
practices, all seek to address political, social,
economic, and cultural inequities. All three
fields focus on power relations, albeit from
different, but not unconnected, perspectives.
Critical theorists tend to examine economic/
power relations and the impact on class strug-
gles; feminist theorists put more emphasis on
gender/power relations and the impact on
women’s lives; and poststructuralist theo-
rists focus more on discourse/power relations
and the impact on subjectivities or identities.
All three fields have been justly critiqued
and astutely questioned by critical race and
Indigenous scholars for their almost complete
elision of race-ethnicity/power relations.
Such critiques highlight the necessity of
working with all social justice theoretical
paradigms while engaging in critical praxis.
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION
They also help explain why for me personally
feminist influences remain strongest in my
pedagogical thinking and practice. Currently,
although certainly not historically, feminist
theorizing welcomes a multiplicity of voices.
Lorraine Code (2000) highlights this contem-
porary inclusionary feminist perspective:
No feminist at the beginning of the twenty-first
century would speak of a single, essential ‘wom-
en’s experience’, for race, class, sexuality, ethnicity,
religion, age, and ability are just a few of the
myriad differences between/among women that
have become focal points for analysis. Thus femi-
nists have moved to develop theoretical tools for
examining points of convergence and divergence
in women’s lives; for acknowledging the bounda-
ries of commonality and specificity, while recogniz-
ing that there is no pure, untainted, unmediated,
or generic experience. (Code, 2000: xx)
Weiler (2001) suggests feminist theorists
engage in a critical appropriation of male
theorists’ conceptual frameworks for feminist
analyses, problematizing the use of, but not
necessarily rejecting outright, the many useful
ideas that can be re-imagined beyond their
patriarchal origins and applied to feminist
research. In my efforts to engage in critical
pedagogy, I remain vigilant in my awareness
of the limitations of applying White-male the-
oretical constructs to my feminist work, but
not blinded to their usefulness in achieving
political goals. At no point should critical
pedagogues overlook the social reality that
globally, patriarchy is thriving. Men, White
males in particular, throughout the world con-
tinue to dominate and control the spheres of
politics, the economy, education, high and
popular culture, communication, and mass
media. Women of all ages, positioned vari-
ously and differently along the constructed
axes of sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, and
other identity markers, continue to be disad-
vantaged, exploited, and violated in multiple
material and symbolic ways. The struggle for
equity and gender justice is nowhere near
complete, but critical pedagogies, enacted by
educators with strong and diverse social jus-
tice theoretical frameworks, can work to
237
achieve the necessary transformations that
will continue to shape a more equitable world.
Classic critical theory remains strongly
associated with the work of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, both White Euro-males,
who examined how cultural texts are perme-
ated with what they called bourgeois ideolo-
gies – the ideas, beliefs, and values of the
ruling class – for the purposes of legitimiz-
ing ruling class domination and presenting
its norms and values as natural, just, and uni-
versal. A Marxist critique foregrounds and
highlights these ideologies, exposing them
as inequitable, oppressive, and in need of
transformation. Both Marx and Engels saw
cultural texts as vehicles with the potential to
stir the proletariats to recognize their oppres-
sion and resist. An indispensable method of
Marxist criticism involves analysis of how
texts advance class ideologies and reproduce
or perpetuate class hierarchies.
Marxist theory forced me to recognize how
privileged is my position in today’s world, a
recognition that every critical educator must
achieve and openly acknowledge. As an edu-
cated, middle-class, White, non-dis-abled,
English-speaking, heterosexual cisgender
woman living in North America, I have tre-
mendous cultural capital at my disposal,
and this privilege dramatically reduces my
risks of engaging in potentially dangerous
subversive pedagogical practices. Marxist
theory made me interrogate for the first time
my implication in perpetuating and sup-
porting oppressive institutional practices –
such as unproblematically teaching the White
Western Canon in English literature classes,
using standardized tests as a way to sort,
separate, and privilege certain students, and
streaming students according to ‘ability’, a
coded word for class and/or race. Without
the insights of traditional Marxist theory,
I would still be blaming victims for their
failure, rather than examining how various
structural and systemic institutional ineq-
uities create failure as a necessary part of
maintaining and preserving a classed, raced,
and gendered hierarchy. Critical pedagogy,
238 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
informed in part by Marxist theory, teaches
educators to ask the following: how often do
schools reproduce the myth of failure as an
individual flaw, rather than as an institutional
imperative? How often have I, the privileged
White teacher, participated in reproducing
this myth? How do I avoid this reproduction
when I am working within and for the insti-
tution, partially but powerfully shaped by its
discourses?
As educators read and become familiar
with critical theories, if they are open to the
ideologies of social justice, the basic tenets of
these theories will begin to inform and enter
their pedagogical practices. In so doing, daily
experiences in the classroom will change,
and these shifts will position educators to
reflect on their lived realities, a process that
will then reinform the theoretical concepts
guiding their practice. This ongoing negotia-
tion and tension between theory and practice
is called critical praxis:
Narratives of the self … involve looking back at the
past through the lens of the present.… the pur-
pose of self-narratives is to extract meaning from
experience rather than to depict experience exactly
as it was lived. (Bochner, 2000: 270)
CONSTRUCTING CRITICAL
SELF AND PRAXIS
First Step of the Journey
I firmly believe that a catalytic event triggers
the transformation of a teacher into a critical
pedagogue. Something happens that resonates
with the individual, an event that might high-
light the person’s unearned privilege in a new
and unavoidable light, or perhaps expose a
marginalized person’s unendurable oppres-
sion in a way not previously experienced. I
cannot speak for others in terms of what led
them to take up a critical pedagogical position,
but I know exactly how it happened to me.
After teaching for 20 years from what I now
recognize and acknowledge as an oppressive
mainstream position that harmed many stu-
dents (intentionality is irrelevant), I took
my first university critical studies course in
2000. Specifically, while taking this course,
I learned about hegemony, a concept origi-
nally detailed by Italian political philosopher,
Antonio Gramsci. I have read several varia-
tions defining hegemony, but one of the clear-
est can be found in Brookfield’s The Power
of Critical Theory: ‘Hegemony is the process
by which we learn to embrace enthusiasti-
cally a system of beliefs and practices that
end up harming us and working to support
the interests of others who have power over
us’ (2005: 93). A hegemonic culture is ‘suc-
cessful in persuading people to “consent” to
their own oppression and exploitation’ (ibid.:
93). I was a 43-year-old privileged individual
who had never had to endure any sort of overt
discrimination, never suffered physical dep-
rivation, never experienced marginalization
of any significance, and my mind was blown
when I started reading about the hegemonic
structures at play in my life, society, culture,
institutions, and systems. Not only did I now
realize I was a tool used to support hegem-
onic practice, but also I understood that many
of my internalized beliefs and practices were
oppressing me, despite my apparent position
of power and privilege.
As a teacher, I had often grumbled about
certain edicts passed by nameless authority
figures who controlled teachers’ and students’
daily lives in the classroom. I frequently won-
dered aloud at staff meetings why teachers
were viewed as less ‘professional’ than doc-
tors and lawyers. I got irritated when, after
earning a four-year Bachelor of Education
degree and completing several years of teach-
ing experience, I was still being mandated to
teach in a certain way, to use only certain
texts, to administer tests that I knew were
unfair but had no way to express how or why
I knew that. For many years, I shut my mouth
and did my job because I believed the sys-
tem, despite its flaws, was just the way it was,
and I could do nothing to change it. Learning
about hegemony completely transformed my
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION
thinking, making me realize that institutional
discourses work hard to maintain a power-
ful position by convincing teachers like me
that they cannot change the system, so they
should just go along with the practices, even
if they believe/know they are harmful.
At the same time that I was learning about
hegemony and its role in maintaining and
reproducing dominant discourses, I was also
learning about critical race theory, post colo-
nial theory, feminisms, Marxism, poststructur-
alism, and queer theory. Each of these critical
theories intersected in significant ways, with
all of them citing hegemonic ideologies dis-
cursively circulated by dominant groups as
being responsible for the maintenance of
social inequities. The more I learned, the more
appalled I was at my teaching practices, and I
vowed to begin implementing critical changes
whenever and however I could. I would take on
the role of critical educator – asking questions,
disrupting the taken-for-granted assumptions
that shaped classroom routines and curricula –
and transform students’ lives in hopes they,
too, would take up more critically informed
practices.
A Narrative Turn
The good intentions of hard-working people who
ran residential schools in Canada are often over-
looked. (Canadian Senator Lynn Beyak, 2017)
Good intentions do not excuse harmful
actions. I took a course one summer called
‘Teaching the Exceptional Student’. It
explored pedagogical philosophy and prac-
tices that teachers might draw upon when
faced with students ranging in cognitive
abilities. The individuals taking the course
were all practicing teachers from all subject
and grade levels. They were stereotypically
representative of the New Brunswick teach-
ing population: 85% female and 100% visi-
bly White. One day, we were divided into
groups of three and instructed to devise a
short lesson plan that would engage students
who were on the high-functioning level of
239
the academic spectrum. Each group would
then share the lesson plan with the others in
the class, thus achieving one of the favorite
goals of teacher education courses – provid-
ing teachers with concrete, usable material to
take back into their classroom.
As we sat in comfortably padded chairs in
the large, air-conditioned room, surrounded by
tables filled with coffee, juices, and snacks, we
listened to the lesson plans each group had so
carefully designed. Three White female teach-
ers stood up to present their lesson. They had
decided to plan a challenging lesson where
students would research a topic and then learn
about parliamentary debate procedures by
doing a debate on the topic. The particular
topic they selected as a high-level, debatable
issue was ‘The Pros and Cons of Slavery’.
They did not qualify the use of the term ‘slav-
ery’; I am quite sure they assumed everyone in
the room would understand they were refer-
ring to the United States’ historical episode of
White people’s enslavement of African peo-
ples. I shifted in my seat and looked around
at the other teachers. No one seemed to be
reacting. No one seemed to be ready to say
anything. Was I really the only one who had
a swift and visceral reaction to this horrific
idea? The three teachers began to talk about
the outcomes such a debate would meet in the
Social Studies curriculum. I barely heard what
they were saying as my mind was racing, still
trying to grasp that they were actually discuss-
ing the positive impact of enslaving human
beings and NO ONE was objecting.
After about two minutes, I found my voice,
and I quietly, but firmly, interrupted the group.
I asked a number of questions, including
whether the teachers in this room would ever
consider asking students to debate the pros
and cons of Hitler’s Final Solution. I asked
if they would ever ask students to debate the
pros and cons of sex-trafficking and sexual
enslavement. I asked if anyone could actually
justify teaching students that the present-day
economic prosperity enjoyed by a certain sec-
tor of the United States population as a result
of enslaving human beings, a practice that
240 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
resulted in the deaths of millions of Africans,
could be regarded as one of the positives of
slavery. I finished my comments by asking
everyone in the room to reflect on the immense
White privilege and historical ignorance that
would allow any educator to believe that such
a topic was suitable in any way. I then left the
class as I was too emotional to remain.
I returned to the classroom the next day. I
had printed off a few academic articles about
White privilege and White racism, including
Peggy McIntosh’s classic ‘White privilege:
Unpacking the invisible knapsack’ (1988).
I offered these articles to the professor and
asked that she provide photocopies for every-
one in the course. I spoke privately to the three
teachers whose presentation I had disrupted
and challenged. They were all experienc-
ing the guilt, shame, and disequilibrium that
generally accompanies a critical pedagogical
moment such as this. Phenomenologists refer
to these incidents as ‘Ah-ha’ moments. We
talked for about 20 minutes.
I will never know whether other teachers
in that room were thinking the same thoughts
as I was that day. Based on their body lan-
guage and silent voices, I suspect they were
not. Like the three teachers presenting at the
front of the room, these educators had per-
haps never been asked or forced to examine
their racial identity, their White privilege,
their unearned power. I have no way of know-
ing whether any of them read the articles I
brought to class that day; I have no way of
knowing whether any of them internalized
the critical perspective I offered that day. I
do know that I responded as I did because of
the critical knowledges I had internalized and
because of the continuous reflection I do as
a critical pedagogue. I do not pretend that I
have all the answers (as a poststructuralist, I
don’t presume answers exist), nor do I sug-
gest that critical theory is a panacea for all
social injustices. But I do believe that what
I did that day is what educators should be
ready and willing and prepared to do every
day, both in the classroom and in their social
world. Question, challenge, disrupt, resist.
Critical Literacies
Invariably, when I ask practicing teachers –
whether those taking graduate courses from
me at the University of New Brunswick or
those I meet socially – what they think is
meant by the term ‘critical literacy’, I first get
a puzzled look, followed by a definition that
isn’t really a definition. Quite often, I hear that
critical literacy is, you know, literacy that
teaches kids to be critical. Clearly, one cannot
define something using the same words of the
term. As I continue to seek clarification, most
of the teachers take up the discourse of
Bloom’s Taxonomy (because it is still taught
in teacher education courses as the dominant
paradigm explaining cognitive development).
These teachers believe critical literacy involves
teaching students to read using the skills of
analysis. When I press further, they suggest
analysis means the ability to take a whole
apart and see the individual components that
have made it whole. A very, very few teachers
will mention that they have heard that critical
literacy involves questioning, perhaps asking
questions about media or ‘stuff like that’.
They are then quick to go on to say they don’t
have time to teach about media; they teach
Social Studies or Math or Science, and they
have too many curricula outcomes to meet as
it is, and bringing media into the classroom is
really a waste of time, anyway.
Despite The Role of Critical Literacy
(Atlantic Canada English Language Arts
Curriculum, 1998) being part of the mandated
English Language Arts Curriculum Guide since
1998 in Atlantic Canada, the vast majority of
teachers with whom I have conversed with over
the years have no idea what critical literacy is or
what it might look like in the classroom. This
statement is founded solely on my own experi-
ence and my judgments of that experience.
A Never-ending Journey
In no way do I want to trivialize the process
of becoming a critical educator or make it
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION
sound as if a singular epiphanic moment
changed my practice overnight. My journey
has been just that – an almost 20-year jour-
ney at this point, with no end in sight. Living
a critically positioned life is exhausting,
often dispiriting, but also exhilarating and
inspiring. Critical practices, once taken up,
cannot easily be put aside. I can no more
leave my position of criticality than I can
escape the privileges that accompany my
Whiteness. Living as a critical educator can
be tiresome to others; I have been told I am
annoying and not much fun to be around.
Many of my colleagues and acquaintances do
not understand why I ask so many questions,
why I don’t just let things be. The more privi-
leged the individual, the easier it is to con-
tinue to live in a non-critical world. For
privileged people, maintaining the current
inequitable status quo advantages them, so
why would they want to disrupt practices,
systems, and institutions in ways that would
make their lives less comfortable? But when
I realized the harm I was doing to students by
unquestioningly accepting and taking up the
dominant educational deficit discourses that
claim Black people, people of color, people
with dis-abled bodies, and people from work-
ing/lower-income classes are not capable of
achieving high educational possibilities, and
worse, do not deserve those possibilities, I
was sick both physically and emotionally. I
could no longer ignore the harm I was perpe-
trating and reproducing, and while I could
not undo the past, I could begin to prevent
further harm.
Through critical pedagogy, I hoped to
develop teaching activities and a classroom
environment that would assist students in
addressing issues of inequity, social justice,
and oppression beyond the confines of the
school. Every time I read a book or article
about critical pedagogy, I encountered vari-
ous definitions, ranging from the simply
stated, ‘Critical pedagogy is the term used
to describe what emerges when critical the-
ory encounters education’ (Kincheloe and
Steinberg, 1997: 42), to much longer and
241
more theoretically delineated explanations.
For newcomers to the field, an educator
would do well to consider Milner’s succinct
descriptor:
Critical pedagogy has been defined as a form of
instruction, which rejects oppression, combats
injustice, gives voice to marginalized people, fights
the maintaining of the status quo; and critical
pedagogy encourages instruction that promotes
radical action in the classroom and beyond.
(Milner, 2003: 199)
Milner, and others, stresses that this form of
teaching ‘begins with mental understandings
and alterations’ (2003: 199). Unfortunately,
many academics writing about critical peda-
gogy have not necessarily attempted to put into
practice the theoretical conceptualizations that
make up the field of critical theory, leaving
gaps in the understanding and practicality of
moving from theory to practice. Ellsworth
(1989), who criticizes these gaps, suggested
that research on critical pedagogy failed to pro-
vide a bridge from theory to practice, resulting
in an educational discourse that left practicing
and pre-service teachers without substantive
practical knowledge to implement critical ped-
agogy in a real classroom. While I do not disa-
gree with Ellsworth’s conclusions, to be fair,
she was writing during the early phases of criti-
cal pedagogy, and educators have paid attention
to her critique and worked to make the changes
necessary to facilitate deeper understanding of
the intersection of theory and practice.
Critical pedagogy is not so much imple-
mented as it is enacted by the performing criti-
cal educator. No guide or script accompanies
the process. But it must begin with the teacher
being discursively reconstituted by critical dis-
courses and then enacting those discourses in
her approach to curriculum and in her pedagog-
ical practices. I cannot begin to document the
hundreds of changes I have made in my daily
practices as I began to enact critical pedagogy
almost 20 years ago. My efforts were con-
scious, deliberate, and reflective. Frequently,
I engaged in what might be described as sub-
versive activity in order to effect curricula
242 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
shifts or assessment practices. I did not ask
permission when I made certain changes,
preferring instead to create the disruption
and then explain it using critical discourses to
justify the necessity of the disruption. I must
emphasize: I was already a permanent con-
tract teacher with a solid reputation both in the
school community and the broader commu-
nity. I was making these changes from a posi-
tion of power and privilege. As Atwood tells
us in The Handmaid’s Tale, ‘Context is all’
(1985: 144). The power relationships would
be dramatically different for a new teacher, or
for a teacher already discursively constructed
as part of a marginalized group. I am not sug-
gesting that only privileged teachers can enact
critical pedagogy, but I am stressing that tak-
ing it up can be dangerous and may lead to the
dismissal of a teacher who is not protected as
well as I was.
Creating a Space for Critical
Pedagogy
As I continued to engage in critical praxis in
my English courses, I started to imagine a new
course that I could offer, one less restricted by
provincial curricular outcomes. The New
Brunswick Department of Education allows
teachers to develop what is called a ‘locally
developed option’ and teach it for a maximum
of three years, after which the course must be
re-submitted for approval. Over the course of
a few months, I developed a critically informed
feminist-based course I called Women, Media,
and Culture (henceforth referred to as WMC).
My goal was to offer a course that would be
student-driven in terms of topics and research,
but keeping within the broad areas of wom-
en’s issues, media representations, and cul-
tural discourses surrounding women. When I
filled out the application for the Locally
Developed Course, I used terms such as femi-
nism, poststructuralism, social constructions,
power/knowledge relationships, patriarchy,
hegemony, and discursive power, as well as
the term critical praxis to describe the
pedagogical paradigm in which the course
would be contextualized. The course was
approved, and it was offered to Grade 12 stu-
dents for the first time in September, 2001.
Thirty-three young women squeezed into my
classroom on the first day. I didn’t have
enough desks and chairs, nor room for any
even if I had had them, so four or five of them
sat on the broad ledge close to the windows
for the entire semester. And so it began. WMC
is now in its 16th year in the high school
where I started it, as well as offered in seven
other high schools throughout the province.
The teachers who offer it were all Master’s
students of mine at the University of New
Brunswick, and I served as a mentor and criti-
cal colleague as they began their journey into
critical pedagogy. The stories I tell throughout
this chapter all occurred in the WMC classes
over the past 15 years.
CRITICAL TRANSFORMATIVE
PEDAGOGY
A Story of Subversion
[I]f I’m ever able to set this down, in any form,
even in the form of one voice to another, it will be
a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove.
It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was,
because what you say can never be exact, you
always have to leave something out, there are too
many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too
many gestures, which could mean this or that,
too many shapes that can never be fully described,
too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-
colors, too many. (Atwood, 1985: 168)
In our rural area, the traditional practice of
the annual beauty pageant still thrives. Young
girls, usually seniors, who are also dispropor-
tionately White, thin, blonde, and perky, vie
for the title of Miss Beauty Contest in what
is a combination popularity contest and rein-
forcement of a physical appearance that
fits a narrow, media-constructed ideal.
Feminist discourses generally critique the
beauty pageant as a harmful form of female
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION
objectification; a tool used to promote com-
petition, rather than solidarity, between
females; a glorification of a White normal-
ized standard of beauty; and a reinforcement
of the patriarchal notion that females should
be valued first and foremost for physical
appearance.
In the early pre-feminist years of my career,
I actually served as one of the judges on occa-
sion. Like many other non-critical people in
this small town, I saw no harm in this activ-
ity. As I learned about feminist perspectives, I
began to understand just how problematic the
practice was, and I became aware of issues that
I had not previously noted. For instance, the
young participants openly and e­ nthusiastically
supported each other on stage and in the pub-
lic eye. But behind the scenes, small cliques
developed and mean behavior, such as rumor
spreading, isolating the ‘less-than-standard’
pretty/thin contestants, and gossiping, was
happening. I was made aware of these behav-
iors when a few of the contestants who were
being victimized by the more powerful girls
shared with me privately some of the inci-
dents. I also started listening to members of
the audience in a different way while the pag-
eant was underway, filtering those comments
now through feminist lenses. I was shocked
and horrified as I heard audience members
dissect each contestant who did not perfectly
meet the societal definition of female beauty
and body shape.
In 2002, I knew this practice had to be dis-
rupted in order to begin a critical conversa-
tion about it. While my ultimate goal would
be an end to the pageant entirely, I knew that
would not happen easily. I would be content
to do something just to get people, especially
the young women who dreamed of being
part of this tradition, to start thinking about it
from different perspectives. I had spent some
time in the WMC class discussing pageants
using feminist discourses. We had also fin-
ished a unit of study using Jean Kilbourne’s
book Deadly Persuasion (1999), an exami-
nation of advertising and the female body. I
asked students to reflect on how Kilbourne’s
243
ideas might intersect with the practice of
participating in a beauty pageant. Further,
I asked them to consider how we might go
about challenging this sexist tradition. Most
of the students now viewed the pageant as
sexist and troubling, even the girls who des-
perately wished still to participate in it. These
girls experienced tremendous dissonance as
they struggled to align their emerging under-
standing of feminist conceptualizations of
female objectification with their emotional
desire and longing to be part of the spectacle.
I spent many an hour after school having seri-
ous conversations with these young women,
offering advice, trying to help them work
through the contradictory feelings they were
experiencing.
As we engaged in class discussions about
the complexity of the pageant practice, sev-
eral young women kept coming back to two
key arguments: first, participation in the
event built confidence, and, second, it was
fun. Several also reiterated that there was
tremendous family pressure, especially from
mothers, to participate. They did not know
if they could resist and defy their parents’
demands to become contestants, even if they
really wanted to withdraw. My goal during
these class conversations was to work hard
at providing space for all voices to be heard
and to encourage those who were reluctant
to speak to find alternate ways to make their
thoughts known. A critical educator must
always be aware of the oppressive imposition
of critical theories on students, as that is an
abuse of power and authority. While some
students eagerly take up critical discourses
and begin to enact critical practices with
enthusiasm, others are reticent and much
slower to begin the paradigm shift. A few will
never shift positions, in part, because the cur-
rent dominant discourses shaping their sub-
jectivity are too powerful, and, at this point
in time, and perhaps never, they are not ready
or able to challenge them. For some, critical
discourses do not resonate with them emo-
tionally, intellectually, or ethically. The jour-
ney is never the same for any two individuals.
244 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
I kept reminding myself I was 40 years old
before I took up feminist and other critical
discourses, so if a 17 year old isn’t there yet,
that is fine with me. My role is to expose all
my students (not just the ones taking WMC)
to the concepts and arguments of critical dis-
courses in the hope that someday they will be
ready to take them up and engage with them
in an active fashion.
A simple strategy that works well when
trying to include all students’ voices is a
suggestion/question box. I placed one in my
classroom years ago, and when students enter
the class, they all know they will be given a
small piece of paper which they leave in the
box upon exit. Most of the time, students do
ask questions, but sometimes they just write
encouraging comments or observations about
the day’s class. But this is certainly a private
method for giving quieter students an oppor-
tunity to express their opinions in a safe way.
Regarding the pageant, the majority of the
comments left day after day supported our
class taking some sort of action to begin a
school-wide conversation about this prac-
tice. While not everyone stated they would
actually participate in whatever action we
decided upon, over 95% of the students said
they would verbally support whatever action
we took.
As it turned out, circumstances arose that
made our course of action obvious. One day,
three girls in the WMC class came in and told
the class that the pageant organizer, a com-
munity member, not a staff member, had
phoned them personally the night before and
urged them to become contestants. One of
the girls who had been called said she asked
the organizer why she had picked her. The
woman said she had been flipping through
last year’s yearbook and was just randomly
calling girls in hope that they would be inter-
ested. Hearing that information resulted in
a dead silence in the room as everyone pro-
cessed what was happening. The three girls
who had been called were, without excep-
tion, physically stunning and widely popu-
lar among the ‘in’ crowd. Even the few girls
who maintained that the pageant was more
about fun and personality than about appear-
ance were shocked into an undeniable reali-
zation. The girls who had not been phoned
were upset. They did not want to participate,
but they understood how exclusionary the
organizer’s method was. It was time to do
something.
A small group of WMC students, five
females and two males, and I, attended the
next after-school meeting for the pageant
contestants. We hoped to be given the oppor-
tunity to ask questions in an effort to raise
critical awareness around the sexist practice
of objectifying and judging women based
on physical beauty. We particularly wanted
some answers about the organizer’s decision
to call certain girls and pressure them to enter
the pageant. While our demeanor would be
respectful and calm, I certainly anticipated
that the organizer would see this as a personal
attack on her. I explained to the students
before going to the meeting, that she was
as much a product of patriarchal and sexist
discourses as everyone else, and she believed
she was organizing a positive experience
for young women. Our objective was to ask
questions respectfully that would challenge
those discourses and highlight perspectives
that had been overlooked.
The meeting was underway when we
arrived. We took seats quietly and waited
for an opportunity to speak. At one point,
the organizer was explaining to the contest-
ants how important their role as Miss Beauty
Contest would be since they were regarded
as the ‘youth representative’ for the town.
They would be required to attend many pub-
lic civic functions and be the ‘voice’ of the
town’s youth. One of the male WMC students
raised his hand and politely asked why the
youth representative had to be the reigning
Miss Beauty Contest Who had decided this
was a primary role, and wasn’t it discrimina-
tory that males didn’t have the opportunity to
serve as the town’s youth voice. The organ-
izer did not have an answer, other than to say
that was the way it had always been done.
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION
This first question opened the door, and now
we asked about phoning particular girls. By
the looks on the faces of the contestants in the
room, few of them were aware that the organ-
izer had done this. Evidently, she had only
phoned the three in the WMC class. They
were, without a doubt, the three most attrac-
tive and popular young women in Grade 12
that year, and the organizer wanted them to
participate. They were not interested in the
least, in part, I hope, because of the critical
feminist discourses now circulating as part of
their subjectivity. Students pressed the organ-
izer to explain how she came to phone these
three in particular, and she struggled. How
could she admit that she was using stereotyp-
ical beauty criteria to encourage girls to enter
what she repeatedly defended as a personal-
ity and talent event designed to select a youth
representative for the town. She eventually
admitted to using the yearbook to select these
students.
The WMC students quietly left the meet-
ing. They had achieved their goal of ques-
tioning and disrupting a taken-for-granted
practice that they now understood in a more
complex way as harmful to women. The
pageant went ahead that year, but with an
all-time low number of contestants. Three
of them chose, as their talent, to speak about
feminist concerns about impossible beauty
standards for women and of their intent to
use their position, if selected, to talk to young
girls about resisting those standards. I prob-
ably don’t need to mention these contestants
did not win. This happened in 2002, and since
then, the pageant, although still an annual
event, has changed. Fewer girls participate,
and those that do, work hard to reduce the
mean behaviors of the past and create a team-
building camaraderie. Three years ago, a
gender-fluid male-designated WMC student
entered the pageant. No written rule existed
excluding males from the contest, so the
organizer could not deny him entry. He per-
formed femininity flawlessly and highlighted
for this small town Judith Butler’s notion of
gender performance in a way no textbook
245
could ever convey or explain. I attended the
pageant that year, braced for audience back-
lash and prepared to confront it if necessary.
To my pleasant surprise, there was none. No
booing, no heckling, no silences after his
appearances. Instead, polite applause and
some exchanges of looks, but no overt nega-
tive reactions. Small steps, small changes.
Hard work, brave work.
Critical pedagogy isn’t about eliminating
practices that are racist, sexist, heterosexist,
and so on, although it would be wonderful if
that were possible. But it is about creating con-
texts where questions are asked about every-
day, taken-for-granted ideas and practices. It is
about seeing the gaps and the absences in the
classroom, in the textbooks, in the curriculum,
and asking why. It is about respecting conflict-
ing ideologies, but learning how to challenge
them at the same time. It is about recognizing
that some ideologies are harmful, oppressive,
and dangerous, and to be complicit in repro-
ducing and sustaining these ideologies is no
longer tenable. Critical pedagogy demands
action, recognizing that action is risky and
cannot always happen immediately or be taken
up by everyone. A new teacher without a per-
manent contract would want to think long and
hard about how, or if, they might enact critical
pedagogy. Countless strategies and practices
can be taken up that will offer students ways
to shift perspectives without being overtly dis-
ruptive or entering dangerous territories that
may result in dismissal. A fired teacher cannot
help change the world.
I have told a lengthy story about a specific
action my students and I engaged in some-
what successfully. But I performed dozens
of daily mini-interventions in the classroom
which collectively contributed to transfor-
mations in my teaching and in my students’
critical understandings of the world. For
example, my practices included:
• Extending readings of literary texts beyond
formalist theories (New Criticism and Reader
Response) and into critical readings informed by
feminist, poststructuralist, queer, postcolonial,
246 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
critical race, and Indigenous theories in Grade 11
and 12 English courses
• Modeling for students how to read for gaps by
asking who/what is not represented and why
• Discussing the nexus of power/knowledge cir-
culating in discursive practices and texts: who
gets to speak? Who gets to know? What/whose
knowledge is taught? What/whose knowledge
is excised?
• Reading not just the word, but the world in an
effort to recognize privilege, oppression, mar-
ginalization, exclusion, erasure, and asking how
these positions/conditions intersect with equity
and social justice at the individual, societal, insti-
tutional, and systemic levels
• Examining the way texts are produced by and
work to reproduce ideologies and identities
• Working at seeing the ‘self’ as a discursively pro-
duced text with multiple identities and positions
which are contextually constituted
• Modeling and practicing with students ways to
read resistantly by asking questions such as: who
constructed this text? What are the producer’s
values and beliefs? How do we know? For whom
is the text constructed? To whom is it addressed?
What is the text trying to do to the reader/viewer/
listener? How does it do it? Should the messages
be contested, resisted, accepted, rejected? Why?
Beyond the Humanities
In writing this chapter, my audience is high
school teachers, specifically teachers of what
have been historically called the Humanities –
courses such as Language Arts, Social
Studies, History, and World Issues. My own
teaching context has always been located in
this constructed world of language and writ-
ten/visual texts. Engaging critical theories
within these subject areas is certainly easier
than incorporating them into STEM curric-
ula, but the task is not impossible. When I
first started offering in-service sessions for
the high school staff about critical pedagogy,
the math and science teachers were quick to
tell me that such practices were not only
unnecessary in their classrooms, but also too
difficult to work into the curriculum if it
were necessary. My first response was to ask
them which female scientists and mathemati-
cians they included in their curriculum, not-
withstanding Marie Curie. Then I asked
whether they incorporated critical Indigenous
mathematics methods in their classrooms.
Did they ask students to investigate
Aboriginal creation stories to place along-
side evolutionary theories? Had they consid-
ered what impact it might have on
encouraging young women to enter STEM
fields if they learned about the contributions
of women like Hypatia, Sophie Germain,
Ada Lovelace, Mary G. Ross, Alice Ball,
Mae Jemison, the list could go on for pages.
A two-second Google search will bring up
the names and accomplishments of hundreds
of women, White, Black, Indigenous, who
have broken barriers and pushed the bounda-
ries for females in traditionally male fields
like engineering and astrophysics. Invariably,
the teachers of whom I ask these questions
either dismiss my questions outright or tell
me they barely have time to cover the cur-
riculum now, without having to incorporate
‘non-essential’ add-ons. However, a few of
them show interest in how they might extend
their curriculum, and they attend the in-ser-
vice sessions. One step at a time.
I also challenge math teachers to consider
why so much of the material used in class,
including test items, focuses on solving prob-
lems related to money, spending, profit, and
interest rates. While these problems are ask-
ing students to practice specific mathematical
formulas, they also contribute to the hidden
curriculum by which ideological work is
covertly carried out. In this case, capitalism,
consumerism, and neoliberal economics are
presented unproblematically as acceptable
practices. Furthermore, especially at the ele-
mentary level, math word problems have his-
torically reproduced distinct gender and class
stereotypes, a pattern that is slowly, but too
slowly, beginning to change. For example:
John earns 10 cents for every paper he delivers on
his route. He delivers 12 papers every day for five
days. How much money does John earn in five
days?
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION
Sally has $12.00. She spends $2.00 on a dress and
$3.00 on a blanket for her doll. How much money
does Sally spend altogether?
Such examples perpetuate traditional roles
for males and females, as well as endorse
capitalism, consumerism, and a middle-class
life style. While these may be simplistic
word problems on the surface, I would argue
they are more complex than one thinks. A
critical educator would not use such ques-
tions, or, if mandated to do so, would engage
students in questioning the roles assigned to
John and Sally and what this suggests about
what girls and boys are expected to do.
The 2016 publication of Margot Lee
Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures, recently
made into a box office hit film, aptly high-
lights the invisibility of groups who fall out-
side of the White, hetero, male, privileged
center. Few North Americans knew the
story of the West Computing Group com-
prised of brilliant Black female mathemati-
cians working in a segregated building at the
Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory
in Hampton, Virginia. Yet their work helped
achieve NASA’s space goals. Most people
know about John Glenn, but too few know
about Katherine Johnson, the Black ‘com-
puter’ who calculated the ‘go/no go’ trajec-
tory for Glenn’s earth re-entry. Why is that?
When STEM area teachers ask me about
critical pedagogy, I work hard at helping
them first to review the curricular texts they
use and examine both the overt and hidden
curriculums from the perspective of power,
ideology, and hegemony. I then work with
them to ask the critical questions employed
by feminists, critical race theorists, queer
theorists, Marxists, and Indigenous theorists
to see what has been elided. I emphasize that
these critical tasks will not take away signifi-
cant classroom time from meeting the man-
dated outcomes for their courses; instead,
asking students to engage in these tasks will
enrich, broaden, and deepen their ability to
understand the intersections between school
subjects and the world in which we live.
247
The Risks in Taking up Critical
Pedagogy
Teachers who take up critical pedagogy must
be prepared for certain issues that may create
tension in multiple spaces, often simultane-
ously. Critical pedagogy is designed to disrupt
taken-for-granted assumptions and challenge
teachers and students to question what has
traditionally been regarded as the norm and
seek ways to open it to difference and multi-
plicity. An educator who is prepared to do this
has already moved through the journey of
critical personal self-reflection and under-
stands that ‘addressing the effects of White­
ness [and other privileged identity positions]
is a necessary aspect of addressing world
view’ (Marx, 2004: 32). Critical educators are
willing and ready to take on what Ohito calls
a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ (2016: 457), a
process requiring ‘that individuals step out-
side of their comfort zones and recognize
what and how one has been taught to see (or
not to see)’ (Ohito, 2016: 458, citing Zembylas
and Boler, 2002). It is one task to challenge
oneself to question and disrupt the status quo
power positions of Whiteness, Christianity,
heterosexuality, and patriarchy, but it is quite
another step in the process to ask students to
begin this journey. However, critical theories
recognize that ‘classrooms are sites of cultural
and social re-production and therefore cultural
and social hierarchies must be carefully exam-
ined for the ways inequality and injustice are
produced and perpetuated within the curricu-
lum, the classroom, and the school’ (Ohito,
2016: 455, citing Oyler, 2011). The tensions
emerging from such examinations may create
substantial affective anxiety among students,
and critical educators must prepare for this.
To offer clarity and example, I will address
some of the tensions I have experienced in three
of these spaces. Because of the linearity of lan-
guage, I must speak about each space separately,
but it is important that teachers understand the
tensions emerge in all three in what are often
chaotic intersecting moments. My teasing out
of the spaces is artificially contrived.
248 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Within the Classroom
We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the
same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
(Atwood, 1985: 70)
Some students will resist being asked to con-
sider multiple perspectives and engaging in the
constant questioning of commonplace beliefs
and values that are in line with their own com-
fortable, and unacknowledged privileged, dis-
cursive positioning. For example, students who
have been raised in narrowly constructed reli-
gious environments which reduce the world’s
events and ways of being to a simplistic ‘God’s
will’ may strongly resent having this paradigm
questioned or disrupted. Fundamental religious
worldviews are generally patriarchal, misogy-
nous, and structured around a rigid hierarchical
power scheme. However, it is impossible to
predict student reactions. Some of the students
I least expected to embrace critical theories
because of family religious background became
the most transformed activists. Several young
women raised in this type of environment have
reported to me that critical theories gave them a
language to describe and explain how they had
been feeling about what they now understood
as religious dogma working to oppress and
silence certain groups, in particular women and
members of the LGBTQ2I community. While
they may have experienced a sense of release in
having secular concepts, such as hegemony, aid
them in understanding the oppressive aspects
of religious doctrine, they struggled to recon-
cile that understanding with the material reality
of going home and trying to talk to parents and
grandparents about their new worldview.
Students with such a powerful internal-
ized ideological position are more likely to
become silent, ignore, or withdraw when con-
fronted with something like the discussion of
queer theory when examining a literary text
or looking for gaps in a popular film or tel-
evision show. They will perhaps experience
an uncomfortable disequilibrium for which
they are unprepared, and critical educators,
as respectful and caring role models, must be
ready to deal with this discomfort.
Another tension sure to be felt by teacher
and students will be the potential for less suc-
cess on standardized tests, especially those
in the Language Arts area. Critical pedagogy
encourages students to take up multiple posi-
tions, to ask what is missing in a text and
why, to look at text through different, often
conflicting, theoretical lenses, all critical
strategies which eschew the kind of singular,
reductionist responses allowed for in a multi-
ple-choice-type question. Critically informed
students will recognize the falsely constructed
binaries embedded in true/false questions
and work to deconstruct them. They will be
equipped to see the biases built into the ques-
tions and work to challenge and resist them,
rather than simply answer the questions.
Such critical reading strategies work against
these students as they will potentially be par-
alyzed by the pressure of having to make a
single choice. Again, my experience has been
that most critical students do not score well
on these tests overall. Part of the ethical deci-
sion-making a critical educator must consider
is the impact lower scores may have on the
academic future of students. I cannot say how
an educator may work at resolving this ten-
sion; for each teacher, a different approach
may work. But there is no question that criti-
cal pedagogical practices work to disadvan-
tage students in terms of standardized tests
because teaching to the test, a standard prac-
tice in mainstream classrooms, is no longer
a viable option. Again, this is an unsettling
aspect of engaging in critical pedagogy, as no
definitive answers are offered, nor is a single
template of action possible.
Because I am limited by space, I will
address one final element of tension that
emerges within the critical classroom.
Critical educators must be prepared in
advance to cope with strong feelings of
anger, guilt, shame, resentment, denial, fear,
sadness, and hopelessness, to name a few,
that students will experience along their criti-
cal journey. Because privileged students are
generally unaware of their unearned privi-
lege, and very few, if any, will see themselves
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION
as racist, thanks to the ideological work-
ings of hegemony, they respond with deeply
felt emotional conflict and upheaval when
their racism or misogyny or heterosexism is
exposed. An exceptionally skilled educator
who has experienced similar emotional dis-
comfort will be required to help students as
they struggle with their affective responses to
understanding their role and participation in
oppressive actions. This process takes time,
often much more time than offered/available
in a one-semester high school course. While
some students are, indeed, emotionally and
cognitively ready to work through these
sites of discomfort, others are not, and a few
may never be. Admitting one’s oppressing
actions and attitudes is difficult, especially
when one has seen themselves as a non-
discriminatory individual. Wrapping one’s
head around the notion of unearned privilege
that has benefitted one’s life every day takes
time. It also takes a caring, approachable,
non­-judgmental, but critically honest, teacher
to help students start this journey. Facing
this privilege, acknowledging its harm, and
implementing strategies for change must
begin in the critical classroom. Coddling stu-
dents of privilege because their worldviews
have been disrupted is not acceptable.
Not every student in the class will be
positioned in such privileged bodies.
Marginalized, or Othered, students will be
upset and angry at the denial they witness by
their more privileged counterparts. They will
get frustrated and perhaps resentful, rightly
so. It takes an incredibly devoted and com-
mitted critical educator to navigate such
emotional complexity, to listen carefully, to
demonstrate respect and compassion, but at
the same time, to push students past these
minefields and emerge with a stronger under-
standing of each other and self. This is where
I found poststructuralist notions of con-
structed subjectivities most useful. Moving
students to a position where they can grap-
ple with the concepts of power, ideology, and
hegemony, and begin to understand the notion
of discursively constituted subjectivities
249
may help them recognize that harmful and
oppressive discourses can be dismantled and
reconstructed in ways that will transform
subjectivities and work towards increased
social justice. While this is a lovely theoreti-
cal statement, it does not change the material
reality that critical educators must be aware
of the emotional and cognitive ruptures that
will quite likely become part of the classroom
terrain located within a critical paradigm.
Within the School
Critical educators are frequently viewed as
troublemakers by other, more mainstream,
traditional teachers and administrators. While
Ohito specifically addresses the impact of
‘White talk’ in her study, I would argue that
when educators take up ‘critical talk’, they are
met by collegial reactions which ‘derail[ing]
the conversation, evade[ing] questions,
dismiss[ing] counter arguments, withdraw[ing]
from the discussion, remain[ing] silent,
interrupt[ing] speakers and topics, and
collude[ing] with each other in creating a
“culture of niceness” that makes it very diffi-
cult’ to read the dominant world (2016: 457).
Because we encourage students to ask ques-
tions, to challenge hegemonic practices, and
to find what is missing or erased and how that
may be harmful to self and others, critical
educators find themselves being accused of
disrupting the learning environment and creat-
ing unnecessary problems.
Several years ago, the New Brunswick
Department of Education made it mandatory
for every public school to play ‘O Canada’
in the morning over a PA system. Prior to
this, playing the anthem was a local school-
based decision; some schools played it daily,
while others played it only on commemora-
tive occasions, such as Remembrance Day.
The decision to impose daily playing at all
schools was not made without a context. A
critical educator in the southern part of the
province, noting the increasing diversity
of his school’s population, particularly a
250 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
growing number of students identifying as
Jehovah’s Witnesses, decided to stop play-
ing the anthem at the school where he was
part of the administrative team. Along with
citing respect for a range of religious beliefs,
he also alluded to hidden curricular practices,
specifically the use of a national anthem to
inculcate concepts of blind nationalism and
patriotism among the youngest, most vulner-
able minds. He sent a notice home to parents
explaining the decision, and he believed it
was a non-issue. Parents reacted, the media
was contacted, and suddenly a polemic debate
erupted. Long story short: the educator has
since left the field of education entirely; the
province made daily playing of the anthem
mandatory in all schools; and hegemony
remained firmly in place.
While I am not unhappy identifying as a
Canadian, I am not proud of Canada’s his-
tory, in particular, the White Anglo-European
treatment of First Nations’ peoples, the origi-
nal inhabitants of this land. Nor am I proud
of the Acadian expulsion, the World War II
Japanese-Canadian internment camps, or the
still-present racism that continues to reside as
part of the post-9/11 culture of fear of others
in which we exist today. Officially, Canadians
pride themselves on their multiculturalist poli-
cies and façade of fairness and equality, but
a genealogical search into the past quickly
reveals repeated examples of serious oppres-
sion and harm to people perceived as different
from the White, Christian, Anglo norm.
In the September the new policy came into
place, I entered my classroom with no inten-
tion of standing at attention while the anthem
played that day or any day in the future. As
the music started that morning, every student
in my class automatically stood up. I began to
ask my questions: where did this new policy
come from? Why are you standing? What does
the anthem mean to you? Why? How can we
think about the political and cultural objec-
tives of a national anthem in different ways?
For several days, I spent class time discussing
this new policy which translated into the bodily
practice of forcing students to stand at attention
for approximately two minutes every day. We
talked about hegemony, compliance, passiv-
ity, and how to resist these forces should one
desire to do so. We talked about patriotism and
war and who actually serves in wars and who
manages to avoid the front lines. I made it clear
that standing in my classroom was optional. No
one should feel pressured to comply. Students
then shared our discussions with other students.
Those students asked their homeroom teach-
ers about the policy and if they could choose
to remain seated if they felt it was in line with
their beliefs. While a few teachers embraced the
critical learning opportunity these students pre-
sented and embarked on similar conversations
as I had, the majority of teachers were angry
with me and my students. They demanded the
administration do something. They were not
open to viewing the practice through multiple
lenses, and they felt offended as Canadians that
some of us would not stand as a display of our
nationalistic pride. Their outrage demonstrated
the power of ideological hegemony all too
clearly for many of my students.
An administrator met with me, and I
explained the critical position I was ask-
ing students to consider. I asked what con-
sequences would result if we continued to
act in non-compliance with the policy, and I
was told nothing would be done. However, I
would have to continue to discuss my posi-
tion with colleagues and any parents who
might question my pedagogical practices. I
informed the administration that I was more
than happy to continue to encourage people
to think and act more critically.
Students from my critically informed
classroom often carried their developing crit-
ical perspectives into other teachers’ class-
rooms, asking challenging questions about
particular pedagogical practices (testing,
deadlines, length and choice of assignments)
and curricular material (absence of women,
people of color, LGBTQ2I contributions to
the world, eco-literacy, and other gaps they
now noticed). One student almost imploded
when she looked at a 2014 Family Living
textbook in class which defined marriage
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION
exclusively as a heterosexual union of a man
and woman. She demanded to be transferred
out of the class after the teacher flatly refused
to even discuss the possibility of other types
of marital unions. This is in a country where
same-sex marriage has been legal since 2005,
and the provincial education act includes
numerous articles protecting the rights of the
LGBTQ2I community.
Young women I have taught have become
more aware of language in general, but more
specifically in its use in the classroom, in text-
books, and in extra-curricular activities. Coaches
in our area still routinely accuse slower moving
male athletes of ‘running like a girl’, or ‘throw-
ing like a girl’ – expressions that should have
disappeared decades ago, but persist because
those who use them have power and author-
ity, and it is risky to challenge that, especially
when the adult/child, teacher/student, coach/
player binaries are in place. However, many of
the girls I teach, and some of the boys, now rou-
tinely call out coaches on sexist or homopho-
bic comments. Critical pedagogy helps create a
language of resistance and challenge that offers
agency for the less powerful.
Sitting in the cafeteria at lunchtime with
friends, female students from my classes would
now speak out when they heard a sexist, rac-
ist, or homophobic joke. Many recognized that
such jokes had always made them uncomforta-
ble, or worse, had gone unrecognized as offen-
sive because of their own privilege, but they had
learned to either laugh along or remain silent.
Now they understood the hegemonic power at
play and practiced strategies in the classroom
to talk back to such harmful discourses. Even
though they often received a smart comeback
from the joke-teller or disdainful looks from
others in the group, they persevered, know-
ing that every time they spoke out, not only
were they developing political voice and pres-
ence, but also some of those who heard their
objections might come to shift their positions
as well. It would take time, energy, courage,
and action, but these students felt transformed
by engaging in anti-oppressive practices, even
small steps such as these.
251
Beyond the School
Because students in the WMC class submit-
ted weekly journals and were encouraged to
record incidents and conversations that
occurred outside of the school space, I col-
lected, over a 10-year period, a plethora of
material about the myriad ways critical peda-
gogy spills out into other domains. Once
again, while many students wrote about
exciting events that they viewed as transfor-
mation in their social justice action commit-
ment and in developing their sense of voice
and agency, serious conflicts and tensions
also emerged, requiring careful and reflective
navigation by both students and me.
Repeatedly, students would write about
trying to discuss with their immediate and
extended families issues such as racism, sex-
ism, and heteronormative sexism. Many
were devastated by the reactions with which
their critical views were met, especially those
expressed by beloved grandparents. So many
students wrote with anguish that they had
no idea their family members were so rac-
ist, in particular against First Nations people,
but also Blacks and Middle-Eastern groups.
Several students realized, upon reflection, that
they had heard racist and (hetero)sexist com-
ments all their lives, but until now, had never
really stopped to listen or ask family members
why they held such views. Now they were tak-
ing up these conversations, and their critically
informed views caused family disruption and
upheaval. Many were flatly told to stop talking
such nonsense about inequitable power rela-
tions and oppression, to get those foolish ideas
out of their head. In effect, the authoritative
adults in their lives used the standard hegem-
onic strategy: the world is this way, always has
been, and always will be. You can’t change it,
so stop trying.
I recall one female student’s anger at her fam-
ily after she spent the American Thanksgiving
with her relatives in the United States. All the
men were sitting in the living room watching
football, and all the women were in the kitchen
preparing snacks, beverages, and the big meal.
252 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
The men kept yelling at the women to bring
more food, more beer, and so on. Sue (pseudo-
nym) purposely sat in the living room with the
men, and after listening to them shout com-
ments at her mother, grandmother, and aunts,
she spoke out, asking them why they couldn’t
get up and get their own food and beer. Her
uncle told her women have a job and it is in
the kitchen and in the bed, and he suggested
she go join the other women and be helpful.
When Sue spoke back using feminist dis-
courses about equality, respect, independence,
and power, she was immediately and harshly
shouted down by all the men in the room, cul-
minating with her father declaring with disgust
that she had become a ‘femi-nazi’ because of
the stupid course she was taking at school. Sue
felt embarrassed, overpowered, and angry.
She left the room in tears and stayed in a bed-
room for the remainder of the evening. At one
point, her mother came in to check on her, and
she suggested Sue come out and apologize
to her male relatives. Sue used her journal to
vent about the incident, and I spent time with
her after school that week, helping her work
through this emotional event.
Sue’s story is one of the hundreds I could
tell about the intersection of the critical class-
room and the broader community. Over the
years, several of the events the WMC class
hosted or organized were publicly attacked
via letters written to the editor of the town’s
local newspaper. Our challenge of the Miss
Beauty Contest pageant was perceived as an
effort to destroy valued traditions, and mem-
bers of the public sent letters to the school
and local paper chastising the students for
their troublemaking. I personally was the tar-
get of some of the public letters in which I
was attacked for my feminist views and criti-
cal pedagogical practices.
Each semester that I taught WMC, stu-
dents constructed a large wall collage in an
effort to educate other students about the
impact of advertising on women’s, as well
as mens’, self-image and self-esteem. In par-
ticular, the deliberate connections ads create
between male power and female passivity,
with images of violence and sex intersecting,
disturbed students. They believed passion-
ately that this was one of the most important
projects of the course, and students looked
forward to creating their class collage each
term. The posters contained cut-out images
of various ads from commonplace popular
magazines, mostly fashion, and were accom-
panied with a bulleted list of critical readings
of how the images work on the consumer’s
mind. Once the display was hung on a pub-
lic wall in the school common area, students
from the class volunteered time during lunch
hour to be around the collage to answer ques-
tions or engage in conversation with inter-
ested students. This is exactly the sort of
critical activism that critical pedagogy seeks
to elicit in students. Overall, the display was
met with enthusiasm and lively discussion
among students and staff. However, it did not
meet the approval of many parents who hap-
pened to see it while visiting the school. On
at least two occasions, our project was criti-
cized as ‘inappropriate’ and ‘pornographic’
in letters to the editor. Both times, I contacted
the authors of the letters and invited them
to engage in a conversation with the stu-
dents during one of our classes. I never got a
response from either of them.
THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE OF
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
It didn’t happen that way either. I’m not sure how
it happened; not exactly. All I can hope for is a
reconstruction. (Atwood, 1985: 330)
I am not trying to describe a bleak picture for
potential critical educators, nor discourage
them from engaging in critical pedagogy.
Rather, I am attempting to highlight the com-
plexities and multiple directions such prac-
tices may take the educator and students.
Often, critical pedagogy is written about in a
highly theoretical and perhaps utopic dis-
course, emphasizing the excitement of trans-
forming students into critical, questioning,
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: NEGOTIATING THE NUANCES OF IMPLEMENTATION
active subjects. Many educators enthusiasti-
cally internalize simple slogans such as Paulo
Freire’s ‘Reading the world, and reading the
word’, and bell hooks’ ‘teaching to trans-
gress’, only to realize that the material reality
of implementing critical practices is neither
utopic nor simple. Educators must be aware
of the risks, of the potential for material
harm, of the emotional exhaustion that
imbues this pedagogical environment. While
the joy of witnessing celebratory events,
assisting students in taking on agency and
voice, and participating in transformational
moments cannot be denied, neither can the
potential for conflict, tension, and risk.
On a practical level, more qualitative
research, in particular long-term studies, needs
to be done in classrooms where teachers are
implementing critical pedagogies. School
policies and practices need to be written and
performed through a critically informed lens
using critical discourses which educators, stu-
dents, and parents are comfortable working
in because appropriate in-­service and profes-
sional development has been offered to the
entire school community. Much work remains
in order to make space for, and take up on a
daily basis, critical pedagogies at all levels and
across all disciplines in schools.
If my stories can, in some way, add to the
conversation about the daily practices of criti-
cal pedagogy and deepen educators under-
standing of what it can look like both in theory
and practice, I will gladly and freely share
them and offer a small contribution to the field.
REFERENCES
Atlantic Canada English Language Arts Curricu-
lum (High School). (1998). New Brunswick
Department of Education Curriculum Devel-
opment Branch. https://www2.gnb.ca/con-
tent/dam/gnb/Departments/ed/pdf/K12/
curric/English/EnglishLanguageArts-High-
School.pdf Accessed July 30, 2017.
Atwood, M. (1985). The handmaid’s tale.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
253
Bochner, A. P. (2000). Criteria against our-
selves. Qualitative Inquiry, 6(2), 266–272.
Brookfield, S. D. (2005). The power of critical
theory: Liberating adult learning and teach-
ing. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the
discursive limits of ‘sex’. London: Routledge.
Code, L. (Ed.) (2000). Encyclopedia of feminist
theories. London: Routledge.
Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel
empowering? Working through the oppres-
sive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard
Educational Review, 59(3), 297–324.
Freire, P. (1985). Reading the world and read-
ing the word: An interview with Paulo Freire.
Language Arts, 62(1), 15–21.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Edu-
cation as the practice of freedom. New York:
Routledge.
Kilbourne, J. (1999). Deadly persuasion: Why
women and girls must fight the addictive
power of advertising. New York: The Free Press.
Kincheloe, J. L. & Steinberg, S. R. (1997).
Changing multiculturalisms. Buckingham:
Open University Press.
Marx, S. (2004). Regarding whiteness: Explor-
ing and intervening in the effects of white
racism in teacher education. Equity & Excel-
lence in Education, 37(1), 31–43.
McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege: Unpack-
ing the invisible knapsack. www.racialequity-
tools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf .
Accessed July 30, 2017.
Milner, H. R. (2003). Reflection, racial compe-
tence, and critical pedagogy: How do we
prepare pre-service teachers to pose tough
questions? Race Ethnicity and Education,
6(2), 193–208.
Ohito, E. O. (2016). Making the emperor’s new
clothes visible in anti-racist teacher educa-
tion: Enacting a pedagogy of discomfort
with white preservice teachers. Equity &
Excellence in Education, 49(4), 454–467.
Shetterly, Margot Lee. (2016). Hidden Figures:
The American Dream and the Untold Story
of the Black Women Mathematicians Who
Helped Win the Space Race. New York: Wil-
liam Morrow.
Weiler, K. (Ed.). (2001). Feminist engagements:
Reading, resisting, and revisioning male the-
orists in education and cultural studies. New
York: Routledge.

Critical Pedagogies of
Compassion1
In a landmark essay published in 1996 under
the title ‘Compassion: The Basic Social
Emotion’, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum
suggests that a sensible call for education in
(Western) schools should be the study of narra-
tives of suffering. As she advises, ‘public edu-
cation at every level should cultivate the ability
to imagine the experiences of others and to
participate in their sufferings’ (1996: 50). The
suggestion that education should cultivate
compassion for the suffering of others raises a
number of issues about the forms that compas-
sion should take in schools to promote solidar-
ity with others, especially distant others who
suffer (Chouliaraki, 2010, 2012). These issues
concern the sense of compassion that educa-
tion can cultivate among Western students
(e.g. US or European students who are privi-
leged or less privileged to various degrees)
toward any distant sufferer, that is, someone
who suffers far away (e.g. individuals in South
African shanties, Syrian refugees stuck in a
refugee camp in Turkey, or asylum seekers
enclosed in an Australian detention camp).
28
Michalinos Zembylas
Particularly, the focal issue of concern is
whether imagining the lives of others who
suffer moves students to become agentive par-
ticipants (rather than spectators) by engaging
in meaningful action. Despite the increasing
number of publications in the last few years on
the role of education in cultivating compas-
sion (e.g. see Gibbs, 2017; Jalongo, 2014;
Peterson, 2017; Pinson et al., 2010), more
work is needed to theorize the link between
compassion and pedagogies in praxis, particu-
larly whether and how pedagogues can really
teach specific political dispositions (e.g. altru-
ism, solidarity) and compassionate action.
A number of landmark works from vastly
different disciplinary and epistemological
traditions attests to the importance of paying
attention to compassion as a response to suf-
fering (e.g. Berlant, 2004; Chouliaraki, 2014;
Nussbaum, 1996, 2001; Spelman, 1997).
Although coming from different disciplines,
these works ‘variously stress the importance
and ubiquity of personal narratives of suffering
in eliciting compassion’ (Woodward, 2004: 63).
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES OF COMPASSION
However, it has also been argued that narra-
tives of suffering may lead to moralization
of education by removing emotion from the
call to action and by framing the conversation
according to simplistic and essentialist moral
categories such as that of good versus evil
(Chouliaraki, 2012). This moralization takes
place by resorting to a sentimental discourse
of suffering that evokes pity for the sufferers
rather than compassionate action (Boltanski,
1999; Geras, 1999; Cohen, 2001), leading stu-
dents to voyeurism and passivity (Zembylas,
2008, 2013, 2016).
This chapter joins these debates and aims
to accomplish two things. First, it analyzes the
emotional consequences of what Boltanski
(1999) calls the current ‘crisis of pity’, that is,
the crisis of a particular conception of poli-
tics of compassion, where the justification for
action takes place in the name of a sentimental
discourse of suffering. Drawing on this issue of
feminist theories as well as theories situated in
political science, media, and cultural studies, I
suggest that a politics of compassion is both nec-
essary and valuable, albeit situated in practices
that attend to the needs of vulnerable people who
are suffering and address structural inequalities.
Second, the chapter explores the conditions
within which the emotion of compassion in the
classroom can be translated into critical pedago-
gies that inspire protest at injustice, or are trans-
muted into compassionate action that radicalizes
solidarity and does not enact some of the same
violent practices that it attempts to overcome.
This analysis differentiates various modes of
action and engagement and thus suggests that
not just any action is good action. Pedagogies
of compassion also need to be strategic in the
sense that they have to function strategically –
at the right time, manner, and space – if they
are going to create openings which might even-
tually disrupt the emotional roots of pity and
sentimentality – an admittedly long-term and
difficult task.
In general, my analysis in this chapter
foregrounds what I call critical pedagogies of
compassion. Pedagogies of compassion are
critical in that they aim to transform students
255
and teachers as well as the schools and the
communities that they serve, by identifying
and challenging sentimentalist and moralistic
discourses that often obscure inequality and
injustice. This is not a proposition for a new
form of critical pedagogy, but rather a call to
recognize in existing critical pedagogies the
need to explicitly interrogate pity and culti-
vate critical compassion.
THE ‘CRISIS OF PITY’: THE SOCIAL
AND POLITICAL CONTEXT
Ancient and modern Western philosophers –
For example, the Stoics, Aristotle, Hume,
Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and
Arendt to name a few – engaged in unending
debates about the meaning and nature of com-
passion as an emotion as well as a social and
political construct (Nussbaum, 2001). In her
comprehensive review of these philosophical
works, Nussbaum suggests three key cogni-
tive elements of judgment that are considered
necessary for the development of compassion-
ate emotions. First, there is the judgment of
the size (i.e. serious or not) of suffering of
another; second, there is the judgment that the
person does not deserve the suffering; and,
third, there is the judgment of one’s own vul-
nerability of being in the other’s position.
While Nussbaum’s analysis is undoubtedly
valuable, her narrowly cognitivist framework
has been critiqued that it underestimates the
cultural politics of compassion and assumes
a unitary view of the spectator and the inno-
cent sufferer – a view which cannot properly
grasp the ambivalence that is often involved
in compassionate emotions (Hoggett, 2006).
Most importantly, however, Nussbaum uses
the terms pity and compassion interchange-
ably to refer to participation in the suffering
of others, while theorists in political science
(e.g. Whitebrook, 2002), feminist studies
(e.g. Porter, 2006), media and communica-
tion studies (e.g. Chouliaraki, 2012), and
cultural studies (e.g. Berlant, 2004) make a
256 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
crucial theoretical distinction, one that has
significant political consequences. That is,
pity denotes the feeling of empathetic identi-
fication with the sufferer, while compassion
refers to the feeling accompanied by action.
Also, pity requires an object whereas compas-
sion requires a subject; the object of pity is the
innocent victim, without subjectivity, how-
ever, compassion does not necessarily require
innocence (Hoggett, 2006). ‘In compassion’,
writes Hoggett, ‘the other is tolerated in his or
her otherness – someone with flaws, lacking in
some or many virtues, willful but also still suf-
fering, still to some extent a victim of fate or
injustice’ (2006: 156). Thus, while the object
of pity exists primarily within an imaginary
realm that sentimentalizes the other, compas-
sion requires action that shows patience and
tolerance in practice. Consequently, pity and
compassion do not necessarily go together,
although many scholars may use them inter-
changeably (Whitebrook, 2002).
Furthermore, there is an asymmetry
between the spectator and the sufferer that
complicates the decision to engage in com-
passionate action; this asymmetry is not only
an existential one, but also a political and
social condition (Woodward, 2004). Contrary
to compassion, pity retains the asymme-
try between the spectator and the sufferer
and downplays the existing power differ-
entials and inequalities (Boltanski, 1999;
Chouliaraki, 2014). While it is true that being
concerned about the other who suffers has
indeed enabled partially, but significantly, the
alleviation of suffering among large popula-
tions in modern times, it has simultaneously
established a dominant discourse of pity – of
feeling sorry about those who suffer with-
out necessarily taking action to alleviate the
structural conditions and effects of suffer-
ing (Chouliaraki, 2012). This ‘crisis of pity’,
which is grounded in discourses of universal
morality and moralization, resorts to a senti-
mental-oriented discourse of ­suffering – a lan-
guage of indignation or guilt that blames the
perpetrators or a language of sentimentalism
that evokes feelings of appreciation for the
benefactors (Boltanski, 1999; Chouliaraki,
2012, 2014).
Berlant (1998) acknowledges the ten-
sions and contradictions of sentimentality
in narratives of suffering and asserts that the
sentimental framing of suffering wrongly pre-
sumes that such suffering is universal. Thus,
suffering, which is in part an effect of socio-
economic relations of violence and poverty,
is problematically assumed to be alleviated
by empathetic identification and generosity,
namely, pity, a feeling which does not lead to
any action. As Woodward also explains,
the experience of being moved by these sentimen-
tal scenes of suffering, whose ostensible purpose is
to awaken us to redress injustice, works instead to
return us to a private world far removed from the
public sphere. Hence, in a crippling contradiction
[…] the result of such empathetic identification is
not the impulse to action but rather a ‘passive’
posture. […] The genre of the sentimental narrative
itself is morally bankrupt. (Woodward, 2004: 71)
Similarly, Spelman (1997) emphasizes the
importance of recognizing the structures of
injustice and oppression. Writing from a
feminist perspective, Spelman alludes to the
dangers of empathetic feelings confined to
the individual and argues that such feelings
‘may reinforce the very patterns of economic
and political subordination responsible for
such suffering’ (1997: 7) such as the subordi-
nation of women and other minorities. The
over-representation and overvaluation of suf-
fering fixes others as the sufferer-victims, as
those who can overcome their suffering only
when the rest of the world feels moved
enough to empathize with their suffering.
In her contribution to this debate, Nelson
(2004) discusses Hannah Arendt’s tone of
reporting the trial of Adolf Eichmann and
takes on issues of sympathy, suffering, and
politics. As Nelson observes, for Arendt the
overwhelming character of human suffering –
Arendt repeatedly characterizes suffering and
the emotion it stimulates as boundless – threat-
ens to destroy our capacity to think. For this
reason, in her account on Eichmann’s trial,
Arendt sought to hold back the overwhelming
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES OF COMPASSION
emotions stimulated by narratives of suffering
in the trial. Nelson, therefore, makes a point
that is valuable for the purposes of this chapter,
namely, how teachers and students in Western
societies must find ways to take up a critical
stance toward suffering. This stance does not
imply a blind and emotion-less distance from
suffering, just as it does not mean to be over-
whelmed by emotion; both of these stances
will not help our capacity to think and perhaps
take action that eventually makes a difference.
Finally, in her recent books on the poli-
tics of pity in relation to humanitarianism,
Chouliaraki (2012, 2014) shows how media
and communication frame suffering within a
politics of pity that both reflects and reproduces
an inadequacy insofar as it establishes a super-
ficial and sentimental relationship between
the spectator and the sufferer. Through vari-
ous examples from contemporary terrorist and
humanitarian disasters, Chouliaraki demon-
strates that the post-humanitarian sensibility
needs to break with the emotional repertoire
of pity, because such a repertoire ignores the
complex emotional experiences of suffering
and puts aside those structural inequalities that
are responsible for suffering in the first place.
The politicization of pity is precisely the dan-
ger that needs to be tackled, if pedagogues
are going to decipher effectively students’
sentimental responses to images and narra-
tives of suffering in the contemporary world.
The following section, then, highlights more
explicitly the emotional complexities involved
in pedagogical efforts to engage students with
stories of suffering – both students who are
privileged and those who may be less privi-
leged to various degrees.
COMPASSION FATIGUE,
DESENSITIZATION, AND
SELF-VICTIMIZATION
There is no question that teaching about narra-
tives of suffering provokes at times strong
emotional reactions in the classroom (e.g.
257
Berlak, 2004; Boler, 1999; Martusewicz,
2001; Razack 2007; Zembylas, 2008, 2015,
2016). These researchers highlight how and
why students’ feelings block, defuse, and dis-
tract from their engagement with suffering. In
general, the absence of certain emotional
dynamics in a classroom has negative conse-
quences in cultivating compassion and build-
ing solidarity with those who suffer. Teachers
have to find ways to overcome various chal-
lenges – for example, discourses of egocen-
tricity or narcissism; feelings of discomfort or
shock – in order to reach their students, who
may have variable responses to stories of suf-
fering. Importantly, teachers need to establish
trust in the classroom, develop strong relation-
ships and enact compassionate understanding
in every possible manner. In what follows, the
chapter briefly summarizes three types of stu-
dent responses in the classroom; the discus-
sion focuses on the emotional challenges that
arise for students to recognize histories of
injustice and oppression and move from feel-
ings of pity toward critical compassion.
Understanding these possible responses is
necessary, if teachers and students are going to
find ways to move beyond a politics of pity
toward a politics of compassion and action-
oriented solidarity.
Compassion Fatigue
Compassion fatigue is a condition of spectator
indifference towards the suffering of others as
a result of compassion overload (Moeller,
1999; Tester, 2002). Compassion fatigue has
been defined as ‘becoming so used to the
spectacle of dreadful events, misery or suffer-
ing that we stop noticing them’ (Tester,
2002: 13). Studies in the media, for example,
show that overload of information and images
on suffering increase the distance between
spectators and sufferers (Cohen, 2001; Höijer,
2004; Tester, 2002). This distance creates
fatigue manifested in the suspicion for the
sentimental-oriented discourse which often
accompanies representations of suffering
258 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
(Vestergaard, 2008). Possibly, then, the over-
load of images of suffering may bring the
opposite results in the classroom. In particular,
there are two risks that need further attention
in the context of pedagogy: the ‘bystander’
effect and the ‘boomerang’ effect.
The ‘bystander’ effect refers to the indi-
vidual’s indifference to acting on suffering
as a reaction to the overwhelming negative
emotions that instill a sense of powerless-
ness (Cohen, 2001). Undoubtedly, witnessing
human suffering lays a moral demand upon
spectators, which cannot always be satisfied
through direct action (Vestergaard, 2008).
For example, the privileged student who wit-
nesses narratives or images of suffering from
a distance (e.g. in the context of a poor devel-
oping country) may get the impression that
the situation is inalterable and inevitable. In a
classroom that harbors pity and inaction, the
students detach themselves from the reality
of suffering, suspend compassionate action,
and engage in passive empathy (Boler, 1999;
Schertz, 2007; Zembylas, 2008, 2016).
The ‘boomerang’ effect refers to the indi-
vidual’s indignation toward those who try to
purposely instill guilt or shame and may end
up undermining action to alleviate suffering
(Boltanksi, 1999; Cohen, 2001). For exam-
ple, if students are bombarded with material
teaching them that failure to act about the
other who suffers amounts to moral complic-
ity and the perpetuation of human suffering,
then this logic may bounce back and students
may adopt an angry, reactionary approach.
Becoming angry at those who try to instill guilt
in them, students attempt to justify through
their anger why they have no moral or political
commitment to act, and thus the whole effort
to engage students in action through guilt or
shame becomes a boomerang.
Desensitization
Desensitization, just like compassion fatigue, is
a condition of indifference manifested through
an unwillingness to engage in compassionate
action either as a self-protective mechanism or
as a refusal to be concerned for the sufferer-
other through some measure of emotional
identification (Seu, 2003). For example, bour-
geois students as spectators of marginalized
others’ suffering may be irritated by some hor-
rible scenes they see in the media, but some-
how they become unwilling to engage with the
consequences of suffering and injustice. What
is intriguing in this case is how ‘a profoundly
emotional message ends up generating an
absence of emotions’ (Seu, 2003: 186).
Desensitization may take different forms
and involve a range of emotions, yet the bot-
tom line is that it disengages students from
the discomforting implications of suffering
events (Boler, 1999). The spectating student
may initially feel shocked and disturbed by
the frequently televised images of a traumatic
event and may even be evoked to feel pity,
but the repeating scenes of suffering fix the
event in a few images and produce a decon-
textualized view on injustice (Kaplan, 2005).
For example, as Kaplan writes, the visuality
of suffering in catastrophic events – such as
the repetitive images of planes crashing into
the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001
in the United States – is often translated in
such melodramatic or sensationalized ways
that these events hardly seem real. The result
is that students reduce the meaning of such
events in a few superficial or exaggerated
phrases and end up feeling an absence of
compassionate emotions.
But it is not just shock events that may
lead to indifference; teaching about empa-
thy and compassion through positive images
may also lead to desensitization (Zembylas,
2008). Positive images are those images
which focus on the sufferer’s agency and dig-
nity rather than on images of the sufferer as
a victim (Chouliaraki, 2010); rather than the
logic of complicity, the moralizing function
of positive images is grounded in ‘the suf-
ferer’s gratitude for the (imagined) allevia-
tion of her suffering by a benefactor and the
benefactor’s respective empathy toward the
grateful sufferer’ (Chouliaraki, 2010: 112).
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES OF COMPASSION
The danger when the student-as-spectator
renders sufferers as objects of generosity is
to misrecognize the real problems behind
suffering and the power asymmetries. Rather
than enabling compassionate action, this mis-
recognition trivializes suffering and runs the
risk of apathy, that is, of refusing to engage in
action on the grounds that it may be unneces-
sary (Chouliaraki, 2012, 2014).
Self-Victimization
A final challenge comes from the emotional
resistance of those students who feel they are
victims themselves (e.g. students who are
marginalized at various degrees) and entails
feelings of indignation, self-pity, and resent-
ment for paying attention to the suffering of
others. This echoes Chouliaraki’s (2012,
2014) concern about the danger of Western
audiences becoming increasingly preoccu-
pied with their own self-pity rather than the
suffering of others. This tendency for self-
pity may be a reaction against unjust treat-
ment, but attachment to one’s own (perceived
or real) suffering prevents the development
of solidarity with others who also suffer
(Brown, 1995). For Brown, there is a para-
lyzing tendency inflecting the logic of attach-
ment to one’s own suffering; a preoccupation
with one’s own misery forces subaltern sub-
jects to get stuck in a present with no hope
and a future that puts one’s own misery
before everything.
When self-pity becomes the focus of suf-
fering in a classroom, this happens at the risk
of widening the gap between students and oth-
ers, potentially cultivating the perception of
the other as a threat or articulating a discourse
of egocentricity (Vestergaard, 2008) or cul-
tural narcissism (Chouliaraki, 2012). Through
self-victimization, students disengage from
compassionate action toward all those who
suffer for whatever reasons. As Chouliaraki
(2012) notes, self-pity holds the suffering of
the other at a distance; indeed, students may
feel uneasy when they are confronted by signs
259
of their own vulnerability, and this is enough
to make them want to refrain from recogniz-
ing the suffering of others.
EDUCATION AND THE POLITICS
OF COMPASSION
The inadequacy of the discourse of pity is
essentially an inadequacy to activate public
action that alleviates suffering in the world
(Boltanski, 1999). What is needed, therefore,
according to Chouliaraki, is a break with pity
‘in favor of a potentially effective activism
of effortless immediacy’ (2010: 109). In so
doing, it is important to abandon the appeal
to suffering or pity on the basis of universal
morals and suggest a politics of compassion,
that is an account and a process which both
recognizes the politicization of compassion
and leads toward working for changing the
structures which create suffering. This part of
the chapter, then, attempts to delineate some
of the conditions that are needed to prepare
the ground for activating action in schools.
For this reason, three elements which seem
valuable to the formulation of a politics of
compassion are proposed. These elements
are neither the only ones nor the best ones;
yet, they are important components in the
effort to take into consideration possible
reactions – such as the varied student
responses illustrated in the previous section –
in the process of how compassion is politi-
cized both in society and in schools.
First of all, a politics of compassion that
takes into consideration the possible dangers
of compassion fatigue, desensitization, and
self-victimization has to begin from acknowl-
edging common human vulnerability and its
influence in inspiring meaningful actions
that avoid presumptuous paternalism (Butler,
2004, 2016; Porter, 2006; Whitebrook, 2002).
The recognition of one’s own vulnerability
can constitute a powerful point of departure
for developing compassion and solidarity
with the other’s vulnerability (Butler, 2004).
260 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
As Butler asserts: ‘Each of us is constituted
politically in part by virtue of the social vul-
nerability of our bodies […]. We cannot […]
will away this vulnerability. We must attend
to it’ (2004: 29). Butler’s description of the
vulnerable body and self refers to the way we
perform and are performed upon, and part of
what we fear in the other is a projection of
our own selves. Hence, Butler suggests that
recognition of our own vulnerability opens
up the potential for recognition of all human-
ity as vulnerable.
Vulnerability may, therefore, be a more
appropriate term than suffering to ground
the political applications of compassion,
because the focus is not merely on the alle-
viation of material suffering and hence a slide
from compassion to benevolence and senti-
mentality (Porter, 2006; Whitebrook, 2002).
Suggesting this epistemological shift of focus
does not imply, however, that a narrative
which focuses on the alleviation of material
suffering will necessarily result in a slide into
sentimentality. Undoubtedly, the political
applications of compassion cannot be com-
pletely separated from questions of material
suffering. Thus, it needs to be acknowledged
that while the move away from suffering may
be theoretically useful, the shift to a narrative
of common human vulnerability is not com-
pletely unproblematic.
The idea of common vulnerability enables
us – teachers and students in the classroom,
for instance – to explore how we might move
beyond dichotomies that single out the self or
the other as victims and therefore as deserv-
ing someone else’s pity (Zembylas, 2014).
That is, the idea of common vulnerability puts
into perspective the notion of all of us as vul-
nerable rather than the individual-other who
needs our compassion. This notion addresses
the concerns of students, for example, who
seem to be stuck in self-victimization claims
and refuse to acknowledge that others also
suffer. Although the idea of common vulner-
ability does not guarantee any departure from
such claims, it opens some space to prob-
lematize moralistic positioning. In addition,
the notion of common vulnerability attacks
a major emotional ideology grounded in the
view that it is natural or normal to be fearful
of the other, especially if it involves racial dif-
ferences. This is one of the most common and
pernicious emotional ideologies underlying
resistance (especially among White, middle-
class students) to identifying with the other.
However, if vulnerability concerns everyone
and yet compassion is assigned differently
(i.e. students think that some deserve com-
passion while others do not), then it is impor-
tant to explore what it would take for students
to begin imagining themselves as objects of
lesser compassion in an unsuspected vulner-
able moment. Through addressing this issue
in ways that do not reify stereotypes or pro-
mote essentialism, it is possible to respond to
some of the desensitization concerns outlined
earlier, because the dichotomies between
‘we’ and ‘they’ will become meaningless and
unproductive.
Second, compassion serves to reinforce a
strong connection between the personal and
the political and accentuates the inter-­personal
and the inter-relational (Whitebrook, 2002).
Empathetic identification with the plight of
others, then, is not a sentimental recognition
of potential sameness – you are in pain and so
am I, so we both suffer the same – but a reali-
zation of our own common humanity, while
acknowledging asymmetries of suffering,
inequality, and injustice (Zembylas, 2014).
A discourse of vulnerability neither eschews
questions of material suffering nor obscures
issues of inequality and injustice; on the con-
trary, it highlights both the symmetries and
the asymmetries of vulnerability. That is,
although the experience of vulnerability may
be more or less universal, the discourse of
common vulnerability raises important criti-
cal questions such as ‘vulnerable to what?’
and ‘to whom?’ in order to dismiss the possi-
bility of sliding into a sentimental recognition
of potential sameness – which is exactly what
a politics of compassion ardently seeks to
avoid. Without this double realization – that
is, we are all vulnerable but not in the same
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES OF COMPASSION
manner – our actions run the danger of being
a form of charity and condescension toward
those who are systematically and institution-
ally oppressed (Bunch, 2002). If properly
recognized in schools, this double realiza-
tion can potentially address both the concern
about the desensitization of students and that
of their self-victimization, because the dis-
tance between spectator and sufferer will not
be taken for granted anymore, but rather its
multiple complexities will be acknowledged
and interrogated.
In a sense, then, the kind of compassion
that is explored here requires a simultaneous
identification and dis-identification with the
suffering of the other. The simultaneous rec-
ognition of symmetry and asymmetry with
the other removes the arrogance of claiming
that we know and feel their pain and suffer-
ing. This emotional ambivalence of simulta-
neous identification and dis-identification is
needed to focus attention on the suffering of
the other but not becoming too identified with
it – a point raised earlier in Nelson’s (2004)
reading of Arendt’s reporting on Eichmann’s
trial. Students who already endure forms of
suffering, of course, do not need a pedagogy
to enlighten them on how to dis-identify with
their own suffering. This does not imply,
however, that pedagogies which interrogate
pity and encourage critical compassion are
not for them; on the contrary, the critical
awareness that others are vulnerable too is
important in the struggle for action-oriented
solidarity and the avoidance of egocentricity
and cultural narcissism.
Finally, the third element of a politics of
compassion is attentiveness to how the eth-
ics of compassion questions injustice and
inequality. In particular, an important com-
ponent of a politics of compassion that is
critical and justice oriented is how it deals
with anger at injustice (Hoggett, 2006). A
politics of compassion does not intention-
ally seek to cause anger, however, but rather
encourages students and teachers to develop
a critical analysis of anger, as it is likely that
they will experience such feelings when they
261
begin questioning long-held assumptions and
beliefs about other people and social events
(Zembylas, 2007). Anger may call attention
to demands for recognition, but also empha-
size inequalities (Holmes, 2004) and injus-
tices at the civic level (Silber, 2011). Anger
at injustice can be a positive and powerful
source of personal and political insight in
education (Lorde, 1984) because it helps to
move teachers and students out of a cycle of
self-pity, blame, or guilt and into a mode of
action that somehow responds to injustice.
For example, civic anger can be promoted in
the classroom as a form of cultivating indi-
vidual and collective political conscious-
ness and social resistance to injustices in the
students’ community, although anger is not
inevitably emancipatory (Zembylas, 2010).
However, recognizing the positive power
of anger and its link to the struggle against
injustice in one’s own community is valu-
able if teachers want to promote options for
action that may change the conditions of oth-
ers’ vulnerability. The pedagogical challenge
for critical pedagogues is how to encourage
students to become active participants with
a nuanced understanding of the emotional
complexities involved in histories of injustice
and oppression.
TOWARD CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
OF COMPASSION
A number of scholars have already noted the
importance of promoting various aspects of
teaching for/with compassion, both in the
context of teaching (e.g. Jalongo, 2014;
Peterson, 2017; Zembylas, 2015) and that of
teacher education (e.g. Conklin, 2008;
Whang and Nash, 2005). These efforts are
united in their call for retrieving the language
of compassion in education, although there
are differences in their theoretical grounding
of compassion. The idea proposed in this
chapter emphasizes the emotional complexi-
ties of a vision that is construed as advocacy
262 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
for critical, strategic, and action-oriented
pedagogies of compassion. The value of this
idea lies in its analytical implication, namely
that the link between students’ compassion
and action cannot be determined without an
investigation of the differential emotional
ways in which compassion is assigned inside
and outside the classroom.
It has been pointed out that what many
existing pedagogical approaches seem to lack
is a nuanced understanding of the emotional
complexities involved in histories of injus-
tice and oppression (e.g. Boler, 1999; Jansen,
2009; Zembylas, 2015). The main argument
by these scholars is that while critical theory
in education has not entirely ignored emo-
tions, attention to them has been insufficient.
Critical pedagogies of compassion, then – in
the plural, because there are potentially many
possible manifestations of such pedagogies –
are not new forms of critical pedagogies.
Rather, they are existing critical pedagogies
which pay explicit attention to the emotional
complexities of the narratives of suffering
that enter the classroom and interrogate in
particular the trappings of narratives of pity.
Drawn from many theoretical streams
(Darder et al., 2003) but influenced greatly
by the Freirean paradigm (e.g. Freire, 2000,
2001, 2005), critical pedagogies seek to
expose and undo hegemonic values and
taken-for-granted conceptions of truth that
privilege the oppressor and perpetuate domi-
nation and social injustice (Darder et al.,
2003). A central aim of critical pedagogies,
then, is to engage teachers and students in
a critical, dialectical examination of how
power relations (particularly connected to
the construction of knowledge) operate in
schools and society and create or sustain
hegemonic structures, and to equip teachers
and students with the language of critique
and the rhetoric of empowerment to become
transformative agents who recognize, chal-
lenge, and transform injustice and inequita-
ble social structures. As critical pedagogies,
critical pedagogies of compassion engage in
the critical interrogation of power relations
and aim at subverting patterns of subordina-
tion. However, critical pedagogies of com-
passion mark a valuable intervention in the
broad domain of critical pedagogy by focus-
ing more specifically on identifying and
challenging the emotional investments and
emotion-informed ideologies that underlie
possible responses toward suffering – by
students and teachers alike – and seeking to
make a concrete difference in sufferers’ lives
(Zembylas, 2013).
First of all, what distinguishes critical
pedagogies of compassion is their emphasis
on compassion to critique emotional ideolo-
gies and engage students in action-oriented
solidarity and altruism. For example, an
emotional ideology that invests in charac-
terizing any expression of anger as inap-
propriate (including expressions of anger
at social injustices) is unlikely to establish
pedagogical opportunities for compassion-
ate action against individuals or structures
that humiliate or take advantage of fellow
human beings. However, critical pedagogies
of compassion offer an alternative vision of
agency for students because they want to
reclaim altruism by inspiring small-scale
actions of solidarity that constitute students
as active participants of community life. An
example of this would be to investigate what
it means for underprivileged students to have
their neighborhood school close down and
to examine possible actions that could be
taken to convince decision-makers to change
their plans. One small-scale action could be
to learn how to express civic anger through
participation in peaceful community protests.
Problem-posing and critical praxis are essen-
tial aspects of critical pedagogies (Duncan-
Andrade and Morrell, 2008; Freire, 2000,
2001, 2005; McLaren, 2003), so a specific
focus on actions that challenge the emotional
investments and emotion-informed ideolo-
gies that underlie possible responses toward
suffering is an important element of critical
pedagogies of compassion. Hence, it is valu-
able to start from actions that respond to local
problems within one’s own community and
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES OF COMPASSION
cultivate specific political dispositions to
action and then gradually move to initiatives
of solidarity for others suffering far away
(e.g. see Pinson et al., 2010). Needless to say,
not just any action is ‘good’ action; that is, an
important component of critical pedagogy of
compassion is to help teachers and students
differentiate various modes of action and
engagement. Thus, any actions of solidar-
ity need to be constantly evaluated for their
effectiveness to break patterns of subordina-
tion. If these actions are simply repeated over
time under the assumption that they are doing
good anyway, then the dangers outlined ear-
lier (e.g. desensitization) are imminent.
Furthermore, as noted in the previous sec-
tion of the chapter, attentiveness to common
human vulnerability is an important compo-
nent of critical pedagogies of compassion.
Attentiveness to vulnerability resonates well
with investment in humility and curiosity,
another essential aspect of critical pedago-
gies in general (SooHoo, 2015). Students are
enabled to establish and maintain this atten-
tiveness, when they begin to question and
challenge arguments based on binaries like
us/them, citizen/foreigner, friends/enemies,
and good/evil, a stereotyping of groups con-
sidered to be more or less ‘grievable’ (see
Butler, 2004, 2016). For example, students
will learn compassion when they start ask-
ing critical questions and gradually engage
in actions which challenge the taken-for-
granted policy in many countries of keeping
asylum seekers in remote detention camps
(Zembylas, 2010, 2014). These questions
could include the following: do asylum seek-
ers have equal rights or not? Is each and every
human being viewed as an individual with a
history and identity that require respect? If
yes, what can be done to show solidarity to
the suffering of these fellow human beings?
Once again, it is important to start with small
actions of solidarity such as sending gifts,
writing protest letters, and volunteering for
non-governmental organizations that offer
practical or legal help to asylum seekers
(Porter, 2006). Clearly, writing letters does
263
not truly alleviate suffering in any obvious
manner, but it is a step toward helping; these
are smaller gestures that may help lead stu-
dents to becoming critical thinkers who con-
tinue to take action throughout their lives.
Solidarity does not become radicalized from
one day to the next; the intensification of
solidarity comes gradually based on empa-
thy, a community of engaged citizens and
the constant interrogation of various modes
of action and engagement for their effective-
ness to fight injustice and subordination (see
Barber, 1984).
Critical compassion is even further cul-
tivated, if students begin to understand the
conditions (structural inequalities, poverty,
globalization, etc.) that give rise to suffering
and acknowledge some sort of human connec-
tion between themselves and others, specifi-
cally what it might mean for one to encounter
vulnerabilities that students themselves
might experience. But mere understanding
is not enough, as literature on critical peda-
gogy points out (Darder et al., 2004; Giroux,
1988); students will become more susceptible
to affective transformation when they enact
compassionate action early on in their lives
(e.g. from kindergarten; see Jalongo, 2014),
such as becoming more patient and toler-
ant with peers who do not grasp a difficult
concept in language or mathematics. As they
grow up, children are offered opportunities to
enact more complex manifestations of com-
passion that include action to alleviate the
suffering of people who experience difficult
times such as the asylum seekers enclosed
in a detention camp. Thus, Nussbaum’s sug-
gestion that a student ‘must take the person’s
ill as affecting her own flourishing [and]
must make herself vulnerable in the person
of another’ (2001: 317) is merely the begin-
ning. What needs to follow the acknowledg-
ment of common humanity and vulnerability
is taking action that dismisses essentialized
categories of victims and benefactors and
highlights instead the impact of solidarity on
reducing everyday inequalities (Zembylas,
2014, 2016). Recognizing the emotional
264 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
complexities of structural inequalities is nec-
essary but not sufficient; what distinguishes
critical pedagogies of compassion is that they
push students to go beyond that and engage
in actions that show solidarity and altruism
in practice.
Taking a step back to reflect once again
on what makes critical pedagogies of com-
passion distinct and valuable, one has to
acknowledge the multiple ways in which
compassion is assigned differently as it
relates to issues of identity and structures
of inequality. Although there has not been
any explicit research examining the ways in
which identities of students and of sufferers
come into play in the politics of compas-
sion, it has been acknowledged in the litera-
ture that people of color and poor people are
more often blamed for trauma and tragedy
that occurs in their life (see Berlant, 2004).
Pity for these groups is often informed by
this blaming, and consequently structural
inequalities are obscured. Blame develops as
a result of performance, power, and othering;
that is, blame is ideological and therefore it is
important to interrogate the emotional ideol-
ogies in which blaming is grounded. Critical
pedagogues, then, need to address a number
of provocative issues in order to reach their
students and move them beyond deficit per-
spectives and cultural narcissism (e.g. see
Nieto and Bode, 2012). These issues concern
the roots and consequences of blaming indi-
viduals rather than structural inequalities and
the ways in which vulnerability is assigned or
read differently by/for people.
Some individuals and groups are clearly
more vulnerable than others due to societal
structural inequalities and this is something
that needs to be constantly kept in mind. For
example, two people can experience chronic
illness. The person without health care will
be vulnerable in a way that is different from
someone who has health insurance. By sug-
gesting that it is important for students to
engage in action, what is meant is that they
need to work actively to address structural
inequality, which is the foundation of much
suffering. Recognizing, therefore, that com-
passion is assigned differently as it relates to
issues of identity and structures of inequality
and interrogating why this is so, is a valuable
component of critical pedagogies of compas-
sion. The recognition of the multiple ways in
which compassion is assigned differently is
clearly relevant to the issue of the simultane-
ous identification and dis-identification with
the suffering of the other that has been raised
earlier. While students (especially those who
are privileged) become knowledgeable about
other people’s lives – including issues they
have not had to endure, such as sexual slav-
ery, seeking asylum, starvation, torture, or
having a missile hit a marketplace (Porter,
2006) – they also become mindful of how it is
impossible to claim that they fully know and
feel others’ pain. Attentiveness to the issue of
simultaneous identification and dis-identifi-
cation with the suffering of the other involves
cultivating in students the ability to acknowl-
edge the symmetries and asymmetries of suf-
fering. For example, this means that there are
limitations to how far a privileged individual
in a Western society can actually participate
in the suffering of a poor underprivileged
individual living in the favelas of Brazil or
the shanty towns of South Africa. However,
the purpose of critical pedagogies of com-
passion – even if full identification with the
suffering of the other is impossible – is to
create pedagogical spaces in which teachers
and students in privileged societies can take
some action and offer an alternative option
over that of pity and sentimentality. These
spaces include analyzing, for example, how
particular ideologies (e.g. nationalism, rac-
ism) are accompanied by certain emotional
investments that might prevent identification
with the sufferer-other or encourage identifi-
cation only with certain sufferer-others who
are perceived as similar (Zembylas, 2015).
It is important, therefore, to reiterate that
stories of suffering must indeed be heard in
schools; however, the conditions of hear-
ing them must also be interrogated so that
the possibilities for compassion fatigue,
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES OF COMPASSION
desensitization, and self-victimization are
minimized as much as possible. This is
undoubtedly a daunting task for teachers;
it’s not easy to create learning environments
in which students learn to hear the other’s
suffering and respond to this suffering with
compassion and care. Possible responses
can easily lead to emotions of pity for those
who suffer or feelings of apathy and indiffer-
ence. These feelings disengage students from
the mode of care and compassionate action.
However, attentiveness to the different ideas
suggested here provides responses to some of
the emotional challenges that have been iden-
tified. While this attention is critically impor-
tant, it is also helpful to keep in mind that
this approach is far from universal. Teaching
for/with compassion in critical, strategic,
and action-oriented ways has the potential
to enrich possibilities for solidarity with
suffering-others; yet such practice would
necessitate that teachers establish trust in the
classroom, develop strong relationships with
and among students, and enact compassion-
ate understanding in every possible manner.
Note
1  This is a revised version of the article ‘The “cri-
sis of pity” and the radicalization of solidarity:
Towards critical pedagogies of compassion’ pub-
lished in Educational Studies: A Journal of the
American Educational Studies Association 49(6),
2013, 504–521.
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Key Figures in Critical
Pedagogy
No authoritative or definitive account exists
of key figures and their seminal works in the
critical pedagogy movement. Any such
attempt would, of course, be a reification of
the critical pedagogy movement as a compre-
hensive theory and practice. As an ongoing
global phenomenon, critical pedagogy has
never been a wholly singular, linear or back-
ward-looking project. Any backward-looking
considerations have focused on respecting
and learning from the many precedents,
breakthroughs and critiques that have ani-
mated the ‘must do’ of critical pedagogy and
propelled the movement forward (Steinberg,
2007: ix). Here, looking back from the pre-
sent is informed by the movement’s capacity
to engage in a simultaneous process of cri-
tique, learning and renewal (Kincheloe,
2007). The dogmatism and sectarianism of
certain elements of the militant vanguard or
revolutionary left is not a strong force in the
critical pedagogy movement. Indeed, such a
SECTION III
Gregory Martin
stance goes against the grain of open and
constructive dialogue that takes place
between the different, if not sometimes
opposing tendencies, in this ‘big tent’ move-
ment (Lather, 1998: 487). Critical pedagogy,
in all its conceptual–spatial–temporal entan-
glements and enactments, is always in
motion. In this context, dogma and cults of
personality are very much incompatible with
the movement’s promotion of an open and
inclusive ‘criticality’ that is so generative for
its praxis (Kincheloe, 2007: 18).
Nonetheless, some figures in the critical
pedagogy movement have achieved con-
siderable influence, if not celebrity status.
Consider Paulo Freire, who has sold millions
of books, including most famously, Pedagogy
of the Oppressed (1970/1993), which estab-
lished him as an educational icon. Countless
articles and books have been written on
Freire, and his work is venerated by liber-
als and radicals alike, despite his rejection
270 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of transmission models of ‘banking educa-
tion’, the commodification of ideas and the
hero worship of political leaders (McLaren,
2000). Similarly, other figures in the critical
pedagogy movement have achieved celebrity
status, such as bell hooks, even if they have
not actively sought it. What matters for the
critical pedagogy movement, though, is the
substance of their ideas which have resonated
around the world. For example, influential
in his own right, Graham Smith reminds us
of how Freire’s work informed his thinking
about Kaupapa Māori as a form of praxis:
When I first read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed it made absolute sense to me. I only
had to read it once and I got it, because for every-
thing he said I had a practical example from
Aotearoa. It fitted; it described exactly the sorts of
things we were engaging with. His use of the term
‘praxis’ to refer to the inseparability of action and
analysis made sense for our struggle here in New
Zealand. The co-option of his words into my own
work has been quite deliberate. (Smith et al.,
2012: 12)
Clearly, the contributions of such key figures
have been collectively generative for the
praxis of critical pedagogy. However, it is
important not to minimise, if not overlook
and render invisible, the disruptive mix of
theory and practice that characterises the
critical pedagogy movement as a whole
(Darder et al., 2003; Kincheloe, 2007; Orelus
and Brock, 2014). Indeed, the mettle of the
critical pedagogy movement has been crafted,
forged and demonstrated through its common
pool of eclectic resources and a continual
process of critique and reworking that has
informed place-based praxis, as initiated and
enacted by those most impacted by injustice,
across the globe.
As will be evident in this section of the
Handbook, critical pedagogy is, there-
fore, an umbrella term for a broad range
of approaches and standpoints that have
emerged in response to unjust laws, poli-
cies, issues and practices. Despite sometimes
profound political differences, critical peda-
gogy has always been about the process of
instantiating social change through critique
of domination, power or the ‘status quo’, col-
lective learning and the enactment of ‘alter-
natives’ through different paradigms for
action, e.g. ­prefigurative politics. For better
and worse, the arrival of the internet and new
digital technologies have changed the way
that many critical pedagogues are working
to disrupt the public sphere of capitalist pro-
duction as well as the ongoing violence of
colonialism, patriarchy, speciesism and eco-
logical destruction. Increasingly, academics,
teachers and other activists and public intel-
lectuals, whether they self-identify as ‘critical
pedagogues’ or not, are using social media as
a platform to share experiences, to build con-
nections and to learn from and inspire oth-
ers to engage in intentional, scaled action.
What also matters here is that despite some
misconceptions, the critical pedagogy move-
ment extends outside of school classrooms
and academia, and indeed, can be instigated
and/or harnessed to disrupt, re-enchant and
rework what happens within those institu-
tionalised spaces of learning.
Unfortunately, aided and abetted by new
digital technologies, including automation,
machine learning and Artificial Intelligence,
simultaneous processes of disruption are
underway within educational institutions,
which threaten to shrink the pedagogical
possibilities for re-imaging education and
its possibilities for social change (Sellar and
Hogan, 2019). For example, neoliberal ide-
ologies of ‘personalised learning’, under the
guise of technological empowerment and
progress, threaten to delimit the role of edu-
cators as well as the objective and scope of
possibilities for pedagogy (Hallman, 2018:
1; Sellar and Hogan, 2019). Within what is
being heralded as ‘next-generation’ teaching
and learning, venture capital and large cor-
porations such as Pearson are creating and
monetising data, technology and services
that offer to ‘empower’ end-users, whether
this is employees undertaking workplace
training or students completing a traditional
qualification or alternative credential, like
 KEY FIGURES IN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
never before (Sellar and Hogan, 2019: 1, 7).
Witness the roll out of data warehouses, edu-
cational data mining and learning analytics,
dashboards and ‘self-service’ data visualisa-
tion tools that are marketed to assure edu-
cation providers that ‘end-users’, no matter
what their learning needs, background or
context, will receive differentiated, tailored or
‘customised’ content and learning activities
at scale and in a cost-efficient way. Bolstered
by considerable hype, the unfolding ‘educa-
tional revolution’ in personalised learning
promises to improve student engagement and
institutional outcomes which are increasingly
important for market, regulatory and quality
assurance purposes (Sellar and Hogan, 2019:
5, see also Selwyn, 2016). Despite the mar-
keting of technologically enhanced person-
alised learning as a democratic and inclusive
alternative to top-down, ‘one-size-fits-all’
education, Selwyn (2016), Hallman (2018),
Sellar and Hogan (2019) and others remind
us that technology is never neutral and that
such developments have potentially negative
consequences for teachers, pedagogy and
knowledge production.
As form of research and practice, the
critical pedagogy movement must respond
urgently to such new threats, challenges
and opportunities. If the critical pedagogy
movement is, as Kincheloe (2007) put it, to
continue ‘to matter’ then it cannot afford to
draw upon a select set of ideas, resort to for-
mulas or focus on the same set of problems
(ibid.: 10). Kincheloe was a self-professed
‘“vehement critic” of the critical tradition’
and was always quick to point constructively
to its silences and shortcomings (ibid.: 9).
With this in mind, a concern for this section
was not with ensuring an authoritative or
comprehensive representation of key ­figures.
This would be to assume that the critical
pedagogy movement is relatively stable,
uniform and able to be distilled, once and
for all, down to a few key ‘founders’ and/or
their successors, who, taken together, would
be representative of its different traditions
and approaches. Critical pedagogy’s diverse
271
embodiments have never operated within dis-
ciplinary boxes or neat political ­containers.
A key feature and strength of the critical
pedagogy movement is its unruly relation-
ality and its refusal of dogma and formu-
las which opens up the possibility for it to
be continually ‘made and remade’ (Freire,
1970/1993: 30). Consequently, this section of
the Handbook should not be interpreted as an
exhaustive list of key figures or concepts in
the critical pedagogy movement. Rather than
reduce the critical pedagogy movement to a
set of static characters and ideas, key think-
ers and their contributions are considered in
relation to how their work has instigated, re-
imagined or offers to rework the pedagogical
possibilities for praxis.
REFERENCES
Darder, A., Baltodano, M. P. & Torres, R. D.
(2003). The Critical Pedagogy Reader. New
York: RoutledgeFalmer.
Freire, P. (1970/1993). Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. London: Penguin Books.
Hallman, H. L. (2018). Personalized learning
through 1:1 technology initiatives: Implica-
tions for teachers and teaching in neoliberal
times. Teaching Education, 1–20. DOI:
10.1080/10476210.2018.1466874.
Kincheloe, J. (2007). Critical pedagogy in the
twenty-first century: Evolution for survival. In
P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical
Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (pp. 9–42).
New York: Peter Lang.
Lather, P. (1998). Critical pedagogy and its
complicities: A praxis of stuck places. Educa-
tional Theory, 48(4), 487–497.
McLaren, P. (2000). Che Guevara, Paulo Freire,
and the Pedagogy of Revolution. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Orelus, P. W. & Brock, R. (Eds.). (2014). Inter-
rogating Critical Pedagogy: The Voices of
Educators of Color in the Movement. New
York: Routledge.
Sellar, S. & Hogan, A. (2019). Pearson 2025:
Transforming Teaching and Privatising Educa-
tion Data. Education International. Retrieved
272 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

from https://issuu.com/educationinternational/ domestication. New Zealand Journal of Edu-

docs/2019_ei_gr_essay_pearson2025_eng_24
Selwyn, N. (2016). Is Technology Good for Edu-
cation? Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Smith, G. H., Hoskins, T. K. & Jones, A. (2012).
Interview: Kaupapa Māori: The dangers of
cational Studies, 47(2), 10–20.
Steinberg, S. (2007). Where are we now? In
P. McLaren & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Critical
Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (pp. ix–x).
New York: Peter Lang.

Meeting the Critical Pedagogues:
A North America Context
(Paulo Freire and Beyond)
With Paulo Freire the notion of critical pedagogy as
we understand it today emerged … Indeed, all
work in critical pedagogy after him has to refer-
ence his work. (Kincheloe, 2008a:163–4)
One of the most important educators the
world has seen in the last 50 years, Paulo
Freire (1921–97) is that rare human being
whose thought has stood the test of time. To
state this in another way relative to the senti-
ment in the epigraph, McLaren (2000) char-
acterizes Freire as the ‘inaugural protagonist’
of critical pedagogy, propelling him on a
worldwide-influence stage.
In that light and for the purposes of this
chapter, a slice of the world that will be dis-
cussed with respect to Freirean-influenced
critical pedagogues is limited to a North
American context. And even more specifi-
cally, the highlighted pedagogues are those
who emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s
and can largely be considered the central pio-
neering agents to introduce and foster criti-
cal pedagogy in North America. But before
a discussion on these notable figures, let us
29
James D. Kirylo
explore the work of Freire, succinctly capturing
critical elements of his thought.
CRITICAL ELEMENTS OF FREIRE’S
THOUGHT
While in exile in Chile it was the publication
of Freire’s landmark 1968 work Pedagogía
del Oprimido that placed him on the prover-
bial map. Later published in English, in 1970,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been trans-
lated into over a dozen different languages,
with 30 editions in print, and over a million
copies sold, and the book has drawn and con-
tinues to draw an eclectic readership from a
host of people from around the world. Freire
went on to publish a variety of other books,
numerous articles, and was tireless in trave-
ling the world over in spreading a message of
love, justice, and truth.1
Pedagogy of the Oppressed explores mul-
tiple themes related to the exploitive nature
274 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of political, social, religious, and educa-
tional systems that summarily marginalize
groups of people. In addition to ‘denouncing’
oppressive structures, Freire simultaneously
‘announces’ ways in which the oppressed
can be moved to a place of critical con-
sciousness through processes that promote
a democratizing climate. In sum – although
not ­withstanding his numerous later brilliant
works – Pedagogy of the Oppressed is per-
haps the best and most concise presentation
of the critical aspects of Freire’s philosophy,
particularly relative to his making the dis-
tinction between the concept of a banking
approach to education and a problem-­posing
approach and making clear between the
notion of humanization and dehumanization
(Roberts, 2000).
The antithesis of a banking approach to
education (devoid of the learner’s cultural–
socio–historical reality and anti-dialogically
driven) is what Freire characterizes as a
problem-posing education. In this approach,
the driving assumptions are that people are
viewed as conscious beings who are unfin-
ished, but yet are in the process of becom-
ing; liberation occurs through cognitive acts
as opposed to the transfer of information
(Freire, 1990). A problem-posing approach
unfolds in a dialogical setting, which is not to
say that dialogue is simply a ‘conversation’
or a mere sharing of ideas. Rather, embed-
ded in the element of dialogue is criticality
in problematizing the existential reality of
the subject, a process in which students are
presented with problems relative to their rela-
tionship with the world, leading them to be
challenged yet prompted to respond to that
challenge within a context of other interre-
lated problems (Freire, 1990, 1985).
Dialogue and the notion of praxis (the dia-
lectical interweaving of theory and practice)
cultivates Freire’s concept of conscientização
(conscientization) which is an unfolding
process that is filtered through a contextual
framework that intersects the psychologi-
cal–political–theological–social milieu in
the awakening of critical awareness (Freire,
1994). The idea of conscientization is not
static or formulaic, but rather is situated in
historical spaces and times, implying that
the process is not a blueprint to indicate how
it unfolds for every individual regardless of
their society, location, and era (Freire, 1994;
Roberts, 2000).
Freire was aware that he had many ‘fol-
lowers’ which prompted him to clarify that
his literacy program, his critical analysis,
and suggested action to confront oppressive
forces was not something that was driven by
a fixed process. Rather, he argued, ‘In order
to follow me it is essential not to follow me!’
(Freire and Faundez, 1989: 30). In other
words, what Freire fundamentally suggests
is critical thought, just action, and a discern-
ing imagination that dares to dream, while
at the same time contextually considers cul-
tural, historical, social, economic, and educa-
tional realities within each of our individual
efforts to reinventing the intent of a Freirean-
inspired praxis.
A GENERAL WORD ABOUT
THE HIGHLIGHTED CRITICAL
PEDAGOGUES
To the above end, therefore, the following
14 North American critical pedagogues have
been in some way either influenced by Paulo
Freire or have traversed in a parallel praxis-
space as he did. They indeed come from a
variety of backgrounds with respect to race,
gender, ethnicity, and various North American
geographic areas. How each pedagogue
uniquely lives in that tension of confronting
injustice and struggle while concurrently fos-
tering a pedagogy that is humanizing is natu-
rally influenced by their individual experiential
reality, the conceptual thought that enlight-
ened them, the circumstances that surrounded
them, and the conviction that drove them.
Throughout North America (indeed, the
world), there are, of course, hundreds of
well-known and not-so-well-known critical
 MEETING THE CRITICAL PEDAGOGUES
pedagogues from across a variety of disci-
plines and experiences who have significantly
contributed to critical thought and action. In
that light, therefore, the 14 critical pedagogues
highlighted here simply – yet profoundly –
well-represent the tireless, dedicated efforts
of numerous others who are working toward
making a more just and right world.
Moreover, and perhaps it goes without
being said, the highlighting of these critical
pedagogues simply reflects a brief overview
of who each is, with hopes to inspire and to
not only serve as a springboard to engage us
in dialogue about pivotal concepts related to
justice, equality, and opportunity, but also to
hopefully lead us to further explore deeper
into the thought of some extraordinary people.
Michael Apple (1942–)
Shaped by his youth, growing up in poverty,
Apple drew from his lived experiences and
those of his time as a teacher in an urban set-
ting, concretely realizing, as Jonathan Kozol
(1991) describes, the ‘savage inequalities’ in
education. Moreover, as a graduate student at
Columbia University, the disconnect between
student background and experiences with the
curriculum became more crystallized.
Those collective experiences thrust him
into his life’s work toward examining the rela-
tionship between culture and power and the
fostering of justice and equity in education,
particularly with respect to the poor and mar-
ginalized (Apple, 2012; Nganga and Kambutu,
2013). Although ‘officially’ retired, for over
40 years, Apple was a Professor of Curriculum
and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with
numerous influential published books and arti-
cles to his name.
Apple argues that education is a political
enterprise and not a neutral affair, working to
advance the privileged and those in power. In
other words, education in the United States
is inherently unjust, igniting a ‘them v. us’
dynamic as opposed to the cultivation of the
275
common good. In addition, with an emphasis
on a Eurocentric curricula, knowledge and cur-
ricula from non-European traditions are viewed
as having inferior epistemological value – all of
which serves the interests of privileged groups
and, conversely, has a disempowering impact
on historically marginalized peoples (Apple,
2000; Nganga and Kambutu, 2013).
Indeed, as Apple (2000) suggests, when it
comes to the making of curricula and policies,
the exploration of such questions should be,
critically: what counts as legitimate knowl-
edge? What knowledge is of most worth?
Whose knowledge is of most worth? (ibid.:
44). The exploration of these and other ques-
tions is a constant that is examined through a
critical lens, through activism, and is aware
of power dynamics, how domination works,
and how exploitation happens (Apple, 1996).
And then, as Apple puts it, ‘part of the task
of the critical scholar/activist in education
is to make public the success in contesting
the unequal policies, curricula, pedagogy and
evaluation’ (2011: 29).
Stanley Aronowitz (1933–)
Aronowitz is a writer, professor, political
activist, and cultural critic, focusing his
efforts to promote a more just world. Since
1983, he has taught at the Graduate Center of
the City University of New York, where he is
a Distinguished Professor of Sociology, not
to mention numerous other academic posts.
Early on in his work, Aronowitz was aware
not only of the inherent power of education
but also its inherent political nature, and this
influenced the direction of his first book,
Education Under Siege: The Conservative,
Liberal and Radical Debate over Schooling
(1985). Written with Henry Giroux, this text
explores educational policy, school funding,
and ultimately how a conservative ideology
delivered through a corporate model of edu-
cation has an ultimate aim to privatize. The
book goes on to argue that until progressives
present a viable school reform effort that will
276 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
captivate the interest of the public, the corpora-
tization of education will continue – as it seems
to continue up to this day (Morley, 2013).
Aronowitz’s subsequent works continued
to examine the ill-directed corporate model
of education, railing against a K–12 test-
centric schooling environment and the
inequitable funding of schools that are still
leaving the historically marginalized from
enjoying full educational opportunity and
participation. Moreover, as he relates in his
work, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling
the Corporate University and Creating
True Higher Learning (2000), Aronowitz
objects to the movement toward fostering a
higher education system that has moved in
the direction of becoming ‘training centers’
as opposed to being institutions of higher
learning, where the liberal arts is a critical
aspect to the course of study, and where
critical thought is fostered in order to critique
political systems, inequities, and unjust
practices.
Resonating with Freire’s thought,
Aronowitz’s work is much about the fostering
of consciousness-raising, where the learner
becomes a subject of the world, in an edu-
cational climate that cultivates a problem-
posing approach to education, where we are
ultimately in the process of becoming.
In addition to being the founding editor
of the journal Social Text, Aronowitz is the
author of numerous publications and has
written introductions and prefaces for books
on Paulo Freire or for Freire himself.
Lilia Bartolomé (1957–)
Growing up in a barrio in southeastern San
Diego, in a bilingual and bicultural family –
her mother from Mexico, her father with
roots in the Philippines – Lilia Bartolomé
was greatly shaped by her experiences as a
youth; experiences which provided her with
a critical lens in examining linguistics, eth-
nicity, and marginalization as a Professor of
Applied Linguistics at the University of
Massachusetts Boston (Szecsi, 2013). As
Bartolomé puts it,
My love of literacy and learning helped to produce
a proud Mexicana/Chicana who was serious about
her commitment to her community … Life has
taught me that solidarity must extend beyond
one’s particular ethnic group to various groups
who share – even more than skin color – past and
current experiences of subordination and oppres-
sion. (Bartolomé, 2011: 58)
Weaving in the critical thought of Paulo
Freire, Henry Giroux, and Gloria Anzaldúa,
among others, has harnessed influential
forces in channeling the direction of her mul-
ticultural work. And in the context of recog-
nizing the low achievement/graduation rate
of Latino students in the United States,
Bartolomé’s efforts notably examine this
troubling happening. She argues for a bilin-
gual education in which students learn in
their native language, prompting a more
advantageous academic and psychological
environment that will positively impact
growth. Imbued with loving and respect, a
schooling environment that is mindful of cul-
tural and linguistic differences, in which the
background knowledge of students is tapped
into, and their lived reality recognized, aids
greatly in students developing their voice,
self-concept, and cultural identity. Rejecting
the idea that education is a technocratic
endeavor that is driven by uncritical method-
ologies, Bartolomé argues for an emancipa-
tory and humanizing pedagogical approach
that is culturally and linguistically responsive
and democratically facilitated (Bartolomé,
1998, 2008a; Szecsi, 2013).
An important aspect to Bartolomé’s work
is naturally associated to the reformation of
teacher programs where teacher candidates
are overwhelmingly White middle-class
women who for many – consciously or not –
bring discriminatory ideologies which work
further to disenfranchise the marginalized.
Consequently, Bartolomé argues that teacher
education programs must infuse in their
programs an environment whereby teacher
candidates closely examine their ideological
 MEETING THE CRITICAL PEDAGOGUES
leanings, and where necessary work to identify
in practice and thought a counterhegemonic
way of being that is ideologically clear and
ethical, and one that is guided by courage and
solidarity with minority groups (Bartolomé,
2003, 2004 2008b; Szecsi, 2013).
Deborah Britzman (1952–)
It was during Britzman’s experience as a
high school English teacher that she made
the shocking discovery that many of her stu-
dents could not read. Reading Freire’s
Pedagogy of the Oppressed had an influential
impact on Britzman, particularly with the
linking of the psychological, social, educa-
tional, and economic, and the notion of read-
ing the word and reading the world. And
while she worked to assist her students on a
practical level, she was also prompted back
to school to conduct graduate work not only
studying literacy and anthropology, but also
drawn to psychoanalysis. Particularly with
respect to the latter, the trajectory of her
work changed from school teacher to profes-
sor and psychoanalyst (Britzman, 2009a;
Beckers and Hannula, 2013).
The uniqueness of Britzman’s expression
of critical pedagogy is a psychoanalytical
approach which draws from the Frankfurt
School, critical theory, feminist theory, and
queer theory examining the complex world
of the classroom setting. In this examination,
she critically explores the interfacing of cul-
ture, emotions, societal influences, diverse
backgrounds, histories, and myths, which is
happening beneath the daily happenings in
classroom life (Beckers and Hannula, 2013).
In other words, the lives of students are
situated within a larger school context, which
therefore enmeshes a conflictive internal–
external dynamic in search of understanding
self and others. This dynamic can naturally
cause struggle; for on the one hand, the pur-
suit toward personal development is a con-
structive thing, but on the other hand, it can
be fraught with resistance because it may
277
require an examination of painful experi-
ences (Britzman, 1998, 2003, 2006, 2007,
2011).
In that light, therefore, it is critical for
teacher education programs to include a
meaningful component of study in which
human complexity is explored, in which the
expanding of the imagination is fostered,
and personal development is encouraged
(Beckers and Hannula, 2013). In turn, class-
rooms ought to be spaces where students
are encouraged to ontologically explore and
epistemologically examine in an environment
that fosters the affective aspects of being
and the building of relationships (Britzman,
1998, 2003, 2009b).
In the final analysis, Britzman makes clear
that a teacher is one who is in the never-end-
ing process of becoming, while realizing that
this process is aware of complexity when it
comes to life, to teaching.
Antonia Darder (1952–)
Darder’s experience, living in poverty during
the first quarter-century of her life and as a
Latina, has uniquely informed her passion-
ate, courageous, and committed activism and
perceptive scholarship (Pickett, 2013). In her
fervent effort to foster the humanization of
humanity through the enduring lens of hope,
she takes seriously what Freire (2005) char-
acterizes as an ‘armed loved’, meaning that it
is a ‘fighting love of those convinced of the
right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and
to announce. It is this form of love that is
indispensable to the progressive educator and
that we must all learn’ (ibid.: 74). Darder
(2002) would describe the latter as a ‘peda-
gogy of love’ which consists of a political
commitment to social justice and the breaking
of an exploitive, capitalist system.
In her book Culture and Power in the
Classroom: A Critical Foundation for
Bicultural Education (1991), Darder makes
clear that educators engage in the dialecti-
cal interweaving of reflection and action
278 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
(praxis), which greatly assists in examining
one’s belief system, ways of thinking, and
constructive action on behalf of one’s diverse
student population. In other words, engaging
in the dynamic of authentic praxis facilitates
a process in which one can be thoughtful in
viewing privilege, oppression, and hegem-
onic forces. The 2012 edition of that same
text expounds further Darder’s thought, par-
ticularly in a test-centric school environment,
which has worked to narrow the curriculum
and has worked to limit schooling oppor-
tunities, particularly for historically disen-
franchised populations of students. Indeed,
Darder – realizing that education is a political
enterprise – urges educators to be more polit-
ically astute and to become more involved in
the political process.
Another fundamental aspect of Darder’s
work relative to critical pedagogy, is that she
realizes the importance of Freire’s focus on
class and economics as a significant aspect
that greatly plays into facilitating oppressive
systems and marginalization, but equally
so she also argues that racism and sexism –
aside from class and economics – are factors
that contribute to systems of disenfranchise-
ment (Darder, 1998; Pickett, 2013). In other
words, critical pedagogy falls short if it does
not take into account critical race theory.
Darder currently holds the Leavey
Presidential Chair of Ethics and Moral
Leadership at Loyola Marymount University,
Los Angeles, and is Professor Emerita
of Education Policy, Organization and
Leadership at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.
Michelle Fine (1952–)
The daughter of Jewish immigrants and
growing up in New York, Fine learned early
on from her parents’ traditional relationship
where her mother stayed at home and her
father went out to work. That is, she saw in
this dynamic that a woman’s role in the
house was subordinate in nature, which led
her to reflect that it was from this observa-
tion that her feminism commenced (MacKay,
2010).
And it was later, when Fine was taking a
class on women’s studies at Penn State, that
she experienced a crystallizing moment that
enabled her to make sense of her thinking,
experiences, and her own family dynamics as
a youth, all of which thrust her into a career
as a feminist psychologist and a social jus-
tice activist, particularly relative to women’s
rights (MacKay, 2010).
Currently, Fine is a Distinguished Professor
of Critical Psychology, Women’s Studies,
American Studies, and Urban Education at
the Graduate Center, City University of New
York.
As a researcher, though having a keen
interest in quantitative methodologies, much
of her approach to research utilizes a mixed-
methods approach, with an intersecting of
participatory action research (PAR) that
incorporates a social-action-orientated, non-
hierarchical, community-based methodol-
ogy. This approach cultivates a participatory
space in which psychology provides a frame
in a collaborative effort to work with margin-
alized youth, women prisoners, high school
drop-outs, and youth sexuality in which hier-
archies and sources of knowledge are criti-
cally examined (MacKay, 2010).
In one of her latest work’s, Just Research
in Contentious Times: Widening the
Methodological Imagination (2018), Fine,
drawing from the thoughts of Audre Lorde,
Maxine Greene, Gloria Anzaldúa, W. E. B.
Du Bois, and others, looks to challenge our
methodological imaginations in the effort
to collaborate with communities. As one of
the originators of PAR, this book examines
how to integrate queer studies, critical race,
postcolonial, and feminist studies, and what
it takes to utilize research to inform policy
and practice.
In a time where we are witnessing a rise in
hate crimes, the increasing presence of White
nationalism, a rise in inequality, and corpo-
rate greed, Fine argues ‘for critical public
 MEETING THE CRITICAL PEDAGOGUES
science undertaken with and by communi-
ties and movements as a strategy for build-
ing critical consciousness, achieving local
knowledges and forging surprising solidari-
ties’ (2018: xiii). In short, Fine sees PAR as
‘a humble tool in contemporary movements
for justice and democracy’ (ibid.: xiii).
Whether it is themes related to education
policy, prison reform, the school drop-out
rate, critical race theory, feminist psychol-
ogy, Muslim American youth, the LGBTQ
community, or whether it is to be called up
to appear as an expert witness in gender or
race discrimination education cases, a com-
mon thread throughout Fine’s 20 books and
plethora of articles is one that bends the arc
toward justice.
Henry Giroux (1943–)
It was through Giroux’s teacher education
program and early on as a teacher in
Baltimore that he came in contact with Paulo
Freire’s work (and Howard Zinn), providing
a triggering moment, which rooted the trajec-
tory of his life’s work. In the spirit of social
justice work and the thought of critical
theory, Giroux’s work possesses an autobio-
graphical tone to it, particularly evolving
from his working-class upbringing, resulting
in over 60 books and hundreds of articles
(Barto and Bedford, 2013).
His first book, Ideology, Culture, and the
Process of Schooling (1981) was published
while he was at Boston University. Provoking
and insightful, the book critically examines
the flawed character of positivist rationality
and its deterministic, dualistic nature, and
calls for a radical pedagogy in which criti-
cal theory is linked to social action, freedom,
and reconstruction. Despite the influence of
this book and other critical works, Giroux
was denied tenure, led by John Silber, the
President of Boston University, who saw
Giroux’s work as too radical and was appar-
ently threatened by Giroux’s thought and
intellectual capacities.
279
It was during this difficult time of his
denial of tenure that Giroux met Freire for
the first time. As Giroux puts it,
I am convinced that had it not been for him and
Donaldo Macedo, a linguist, translator, and a friend
of both of ours, I might not have stayed in the field of
education. Paulo’s and Donaldo’s passion for educa-
tion and their profound humanity convinced me that
education was not a job like any other, but a crucial
site of struggle, and that whatever risks had to be
taken were well worth it. (Giroux, 2010a: para 10)
The trajectory of Giroux’s life work has been
one that looks to resist the industrialization of
education in which teachers have been turned
into functionaries, as technicians playing out a
semi-robotic role in which the curriculum is
pre-packaged, and standardization and testing
is front and center of practice. This very real
scenario is opposed to the notion of viewing
teachers as public intellectuals, critical think-
ers, and as those having a critical voice in
pedagogical and curricula direction (Giroux,
2010b, 1988). Moreover, the lived experiences
of students and cultural context play a signifi-
cant part in informing curricula, suggesting
that the hidden curriculum must be decon-
structed, which works to cultivate democratic
spaces and civic engagement among students
and teachers (Giroux, 2001, 2011).
Finally, Giroux’s work, particularly with
respect to students of color and low-income
students, also critically works to call out the
school-to-prison pipeline, policies and prac-
tices that parallel prisons, the negation of
critical thought and opportunities, and the
defunding of education (including higher edu-
cation), all working to dismantle the public
square and the furthering of the common good
(Barto and Bedford, 2013). Currently, Giroux
is the Global Television Network Chair in
English and Cultural Studies at McMaster
University in Ontario, Canada.
Myles Horton (1905–90)
Theologically trained under the guidance of
Reinhold Niebuhr, the prominent social-­
progressive theologian, Horton was an
280 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
educator and social activist and was involved
with labor unions, antipoverty programs,
and was especially a leading figure during
the civil rights movement. Through the co-
founding of the Highlander Folk School
(later called the Highlander Research and
Education Center and located in Monteagle,
Tennessee), he taught and worked with civil
rights leaders such as Martin Luther King,
Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Ralph
Abernathy, James Bevel, and others. Under
the leadership of Horton, Highlander devel-
oped an effective literacy program during
the 1950s, which not only focused on the
mechanics of literacy, but also had as its
principal objective to facilitate an approach
that encouraged African Americans to take
their just and rightful place in participating
in a d­ emocratic society, including the regis-
tration to vote.
While coming from two different con-
tinents and cultural contexts, Paulo Freire
and Horton, nevertheless, possessed critical
commonalities and interests, resulting in the
publication of their book, We Make the Road
by Walking: Conversations on Education and
Social Change (1990), which is an autobio-
graphical account of the diverse experiences
of Freire and Horton with reflections and
analysis of authentic freedom, democratic
living, and a liberating education.
Horton’s adult education work focused on a
grassroots effort where community members
were involved in a dialogical process where
comradery was fostered, democratic spaces
were valued, and responsibility was shared. He
fully understood the role education played in
the building of society, and was keenly aware
that economics played a significant part in con-
taining or liberating systems of schooling, thus
pushing citizens to collectively ask themselves
to critically consider the kind of education sys-
tem they desired for its people (Loder-Jackson,
2013). Freirean in spirit and practice, the work
of Myles Horton is arguably underappreciated
in the circles of critical pedagogy and perhaps
should be more critically revisited in terms of
what he can teach critical pedagogues.
bell hooks (1952–)
Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks is
widely known by her pen name, derived from
the names of her maternal great-grandmother.
The lower case spelling of her name is utilized
in order to draw attention to the substance of
her writing and thought as opposed to who she
is. hooks is a writer, teacher, feminist, and
social activist, and her work critically exam-
ines themes related to race, class, gender, and
oppression. Her thought has been influenced
by, among others, the work of Sojourner
Truth, Paulo Freire, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Erich
Fromm, Lorraine Hansberry, Thich Nhat
Hanh, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and
Martin Luther King, Jr. While hooks has
taught at various universities, she is currently
Distinguished Professor in Residence in
Appalachian Studies at Berea College,
Kentucky (bell hooks Institute; Kirylo, 2011).
Although growing up in the segregated
South, hooks’ educational experience dur-
ing her elementary school years was fruitful
as she was mentored by encouraging Black
teachers. It was during her high school expe-
rience, however, when she was enrolled at an
integrated high school that she was subjected
to racist White teachers, sparking an acute
awareness of injustice, but certainly not deter-
ring her from moving forward to receive an
education, all the way to being awarded a PhD
in literature from the University of California,
Santa Cruz (Wisneski, 2013).
While her first book in 1978, And There
We Wept: Poems, was written under the pen
name bell hooks, it was her 1981 work, Ain’t
I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism, that
garnered much attention. And though she had
written that text at 19 years old, the book is a
brilliant exposé of feminist thought (Wisneski,
2013). Indeed, since that book, hooks, who is
a prolific writer and an insightful thinker, has
gone on to publish over 30 books on themes
related to feminist theory, race, gender, sexu-
ality, culture, and class.
hooks’ efforts logically underscore the
point that the work must be one that not only
 MEETING THE CRITICAL PEDAGOGUES
looks to eradicate sexist exploitation, oppres-
sion, and sexism, but it also must be an effort
that is not devoid of a conversation linked to
ethnicity, race, and class. Particularly with
the latter, hooks makes clear that to better
understand the class struggle and to facilitate
an effort to the building of a community, we
must engage the diverse affected voices along
class, racial, and gender lines (hooks, 2000a,
2000b; Wisneski, 2013).
In her work, Teaching to Transgress:
Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994),
hooks particularly draws from Freire’s con-
cept of conscientization, coupled with the
Buddhist thought of Thich Nhat Hanh and oth-
ers, whereby she incorporates a blend of criti-
cal pedagogies in what she characterizes as an
‘engaged pedagogy’ that allows for democratic
spaces to constructively share knowledge.
Indeed, it is also in Teaching to Transgress
that while hooks acknowledges that Freire has
had a significant influence on her thinking, it
nevertheless did not stop her calling him out
with respect to the sexist language he incor-
porated in his early work. To that critique,
Freire received it with grace and as an impor-
tant learning moment, which prompted hooks’
further admiration for Freire’s work in that
he was keenly aware that his thought was not
above reproach and he had still much to learn.
Joe L. Kincheloe (1950–2008)
Kincheloe, along with Shirley Steinberg,
founded The Paulo and Nita Freire
International Project for Critical Pedagogy
housed at McGill University, and in addition
to his teaching positions at various universi-
ties, he lectured in many parts of the world.
Kincheloe was a teacher, social justice
activist, and the author/co-author/editor/
co-editor of countless articles, book chapters,
and books. Drawing from the constructivist
psychology of Lev Vygotsky, the democratic
philosophy of John Dewey, and a wide range
of traditions is what framed Kincheloe’s var-
ied methodological approach in the way he
281
conducts his work. In what he describes as
bricolage, this approach links self-reflection,
self-critical awareness, and personal history
between what a researcher sees and observes
and the social spaces in which he or she finds
her-/himself (Fischetti and Dlamini, 2013).
Moreover, as one who richly contributed to
our understanding of constructivism, multi-
cultural education, and curriculum theory and
making, Kincheloe constructed a cognitive
theory that focused on what is characterized as
a critical post-formal educational psychology,
which keenly examines power relationships
that impact our understanding of cognitive
theory and psychology. Realizing the impor-
tance of contextualization in our efforts to find
meaning, the notion of a liberatory psychol-
ogy of possibility aids in a critical hermeneutic
and a historical epistemological process which
naturally links to learning (Kincheloe, 2008b;
Fischetti and Dlamini, 2013).
Working in the spirit of Freire’s ‘radical
love’, Kincheloe described himself as a ‘vehe-
ment critique’ who saw critical pedagogy as
an approach in which students are enabled
to become subjects of the world, whereby
growth in consciousness and awareness is
cultivated to call out the various forces that
work to oppress and to name structures that
exert domination. In the final analysis, this
approach works to set us free in the critical
effort to question and challenge power struc-
tures that are unjust (Kincheloe, 2008b).
Donaldo Macedo (1950–)
One of Paulo Freire’s closest collaborators,
Donaldo Macedo, a Cape Verdean immigrant
from West Africa, is Distinguished Professor
of Liberal Arts and Education at the
University of Massachusetts Boston. Macedo
has not only worked on translating and edit-
ing numerous texts by Freire, he has also
written several books and articles with him.
Moreover, since the death of Freire, Macedo
has worked very closely with his widow, Ana
Maria ‘Nita’ Araújo Freire.
282 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
In their work, Literacy: Reading the Word and
the World (1987), Freire and Macedo further
discuss the implications of Freire’s problem-
posing approach to education, which is one
that facilitates a democratic learning climate
where student voice is encouraged and val-
ued. At the same time, however, this demo-
cratic setting is not one that is dictated by a
laissez-faire environment, where the educator
is one who abandons her sense of authority;
in fact, that would be irresponsible and would
ultimately serve the purposes of the dominant
power structure. On the contrary, a respon-
sible educator has some kind of purpose, an
objective or direction as to how the learning
environment ought to unfold, which is nec-
essarily one where the learner participates
as subject, whereby the pedagogical direc-
tion lies in the political, epistemological,
and pedagogical presentation of the problem
(Freire and Macedo, 1987). Moreover, in
order for the teacher to explore reality with
the students, she must take every measure
to remove any obstacle that potentially pre-
vents students from critically analyzing that
reality, which implies that the teacher is pro-
fessionally competent, is desirous of study,
and takes her pedagogical practice seriously
(Freire, 1987). In that light, teachers are cul-
tural workers and radical educators who, in
their desire to better understand the discourse
of resistance, are better equipped to provide
their students with the pedagogical structures
to make possible their emancipation (Freire
and Macedo, 1987; Freire, 2005).
In his book Dancing with Bigotry (co-
authored with Lilia Bartolomé) (1999),
Macedo critically discusses the political
nature of language and its place in multicul-
tural education, arguing that the teaching of
tolerance necessitates caution in not rein-
forcing a paternalistic viewpoint that sim-
ply espouses just getting along, as opposed
to cultivating an environment of cultural
awareness and mutual cultural respect. And
perhaps even more relevant today than in
recent history, Macedo denounces racism and
xenophobia, which is quite acute in various
parts of the world and particularly magni-
fied in the United States under the Trump
administration.
To be sure, in the highlighted texts above,
along with still others, Macedo’s work in
examining language, culture, media, and
socio-political power has significantly
contributed to our understanding of criti-
cal pedagogy, which he views as ‘a state of
becoming, a way of being in the world and
with the world – a never ending process that
involves struggle and pain but also hope and
joy shaped and maintained by a humanizing
pedagogy’ (Macedo, 2006: 394).
Peter McLaren (1948–)
McLaren, who is originally from Canada,
taught in an elementary school in Toronto’s
Jane-Finch Corridor. It was this five-year
experience at this inner-city school setting in
which he observed over-crowded classrooms,
minimal curricula resources, and a lack of
programs that were sensitive to the needs of
students, leading him to the writing of his
first book, Cries from The Corridor (1980).
And while at the time, McLaren was not inti-
mately aware of the notion of critical peda-
gogy and the work of Freire and others,
through Cries from the Corridor, he knew he
had ‘an important story to tell of the lives and
struggles of children’ (McLaren, 1998: xiv).
Indeed, the book became a bestseller and
raised the national consciousness regarding
school reform in Canada. That text later
framed the foundation for his book, Life in
Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy
in the Foundations of Education (1998), now
in its 6th edition.
In Life in Schools, McLaren denounces a
capitalistic system that works to exploit and
one that has gripped public education in the
United States; he further challenges progres-
sives to critically consider their praxis. Thus,
he explores the origins of critical pedagogy
and its core beliefs, examining the role of
schools in society, questioning who the
 MEETING THE CRITICAL PEDAGOGUES
purveyors of knowledge are, and whether
schools can be places of social transformation
in dismantling systematic hegemony. Indeed,
in this work, McLaren looks to announce a
more just and right world in which the culti-
vation of the humanization of humanity is at
work (Smith and Rodriguez, 2013).
McLaren’s book Che Guevara, Paulo
Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution
(2000) is the most translated of all his works
in which he brilliantly discusses these two
revolutionaries. And while they were contem-
poraries and possessed some common ideals,
Guevara and Freire – through a revolutionary
critical pedagogy – took two different paths
in confronting a capitalist system that works
to exploit and dehumanize.
While in more recent times, McLaren’s
work explores the foundational place of spir-
ituality and liberation theology relative to
critical pedagogy (as highlighted in his book,
Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection
to Revolution, 2015), over the trajectory of
his career, his thought has been framed in
Marxist humanism, which not only draws
from the earlier writings of Marx and Engels
and their examination of false conscious-
ness, alienation, and historical materialism,
but also the dialectics of Hegel (Smith and
Rodriguez, 2013).
Since the publication of his first book,
McLaren has been the author/co-author/
editor/co-editor of some 40 books and
monographs. Currently, he is Distinguished
Professor in Critical Studies Co-Director,
The Paulo Freire Democratic Project, and
International Ambassador for Global Ethics
and Social Justice, Attallah College of
Educational Studies at Chapman University.
Ira Shor (1945–)
It was during Shor’s formative years in the
1950s and 1960s, growing up in a working-
class setting in the South Bronx, that his poli-
tics and lens on the world took shape. As a
youth, he observed inequities in schools
283
regarding resources, curricula, and opportu-
nities, clearing marking class division. While
he participated in civil rights and antiwar
movements and was richly inspired by the
work of Kurt Vonnegut, it was the work of
Freire that had a clarifying impact on his
thinking.
Currently, Shor is Professor Emeritus at
the City University of New York Graduate
Center Programs in English and in Urban
Education. In his practice as a professor of
rhetoric and composition, Shor aims for
authentic classroom settings in which the
dialectical interweaving of theory and prac-
tice is explored and in which critical thinking
is cultivated in order to realize and subvert
hegemonic, authoritarian, teacher-centered
systems (Reilly, 2013).
Shor’s book Critical Teaching and
Everyday Life (1980) was a result of his teach-
ing of literacy for open admission students at
City University in New York in the 1970s,
becoming the first book-length treatment of
a Freirean-inspired approach to teaching in a
North American context. The publication of
that book prompted a pleasing response from
Freire, sharing in a letter to Shor that he was
thankful for the ‘beautiful words’ and that
wanted to meet (Shor, 2011).
Their meeting lead to the publication of
A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on
Transforming Education (1987), which was
the first collaborated ‘talking’ book that
Freire published. In that book, Shor and
Freire discuss a variety of themes that inter-
sected the role of culture and politics and
how to work toward more liberating, dialogi-
cal, empowering classroom settings.
As Reilly (2013) accentuates, Shor carries
a certain contagious enthusiasm about
his work, simply, but profoundly staying
close to his roots at the City University of
New York for over four decades, in which
he relishes that his ‘classes are diverse in
ethnicity, age, and majors, requiring me to
learn each class’s profile and offering one of
the few multi-racial “contact zones” to test
critical learning in our society’ (2006: 30).
284 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Shor continues to be involved with protest
movements and resistance efforts, pushing
back on neoliberalism and injustice, in addition
to contributing numerous published works.
Shirley R. Steinberg (1952–)
Along with her late husband, Joe Kincheloe,
Steinberg founded The Paulo and Nita Freire
International Project for Critical Pedagogy
where she serves as the Executive Director
(www.freireproject.org/). In addition, she is
the founding editor of Taboo: The Journal of
Culture and Education, and the Editor in
Chief of The International Journal of Critical
Pedagogy.
Steinberg takes to heart the term ‘critical’
and its association to pedagogy, making clear
that teacher candidates enrolled in education
programs must be immersed in an educative
environment that cultivates a deeper under-
standing of the connection between theory
and practice. For example, when it comes
to our understanding of multicultural educa-
tion, it ought to be one that can be penned
as critical multiculturalism, whereby educa-
tors foster a deeply reflective pedagogical
approach that realizes the critical roles of
power, knowledge, identity, and the trajec-
tory of emancipatory practices (Kincheloe
et al., 1997; Larson, 2013).
Kinderculture is a concept that is intro-
duced in her popular book Kinderculture:
The Corporate Construction of Childhood
(2011), where the text critically examines
the current neoliberal education model that is
bent on consumerism and the commodifica-
tion of the very young as opposed to a system
that is developmentally appropriate, cultur-
ally responsive, and constructive. In another
book, Media Literacy: A Reader (Macedo and
Steinberg, 2007), the text is a powerful work
that emphasizes awareness when it comes to
the media in all its shapes and forms in how
it may influence us socially, culturally, politi-
cally, and in other ways. Therefore, being
media literate is one way to provide agency
in discerning what is or is not being conveyed
by the media, and how we can become par-
ticipants, collaborators, and agents of change
in a media-inundated world.
To be sure, through her scholarship and
activism, Steinberg’s commitment to jus-
tice and a more loving world is evident. As
Larson puts it, ‘Steinberg’s scholarship is
ultimately based on an exploration of culture,
social issues, and education, provoking con-
sideration of how educators teach, communi-
cate, and critically reflect upon their work so
that the learner and educator move toward a
deeper understanding of self in the collective
movement toward a more liberated world’
(2013: 119). The author of numerous books
and articles, Steinberg is currently Werklund
Research Professor of Critical Youth Studies
at the University of Calgary.
CONCLUSION
Critical pedagogy is informed by multiple
voices, historical circumstances, new theoreti-
cal insights, challenges, and social situations,
making the notion of critical pedagogy an ever
evolving process of becoming as a concept of
understanding and action (Kincheloe, 2008c).
To put it differently,
Critical pedagogy is an empowering way of think-
ing and acting, fostering decisive agency that does
not take a position of neutrality in its contextual
examination of the various forces that impact the
human condition. And, in particular, when repres-
sive forces are at work dehumanizing, oppressing,
and marginalizing people, critical pedagogues are
those who emerge as powerful humanizing agents
to resist and call for a more just, right, and demo-
cratic world. (Kirylo, 2013: xiv–xv)
In this chapter, beginning with a discussion
on Paulo Freire, the highlighted critical peda-
gogues, to reiterate, are a small representa-
tion of a plethora of known and unknown
critical pedagogues. It is through each of
their unique efforts that we see the remaking
or the reinvention of Freire’s work in the
 MEETING THE CRITICAL PEDAGOGUES
unwavering efforts toward the cultivation of
humanizing humanity.
And while the pedagogues emphasized
here hail from a North American context, it
certainly – if not obviously – does not suggest
that their influence is limited to that context,
but, rather, also extends to other parts of the
world. Conversely, the thousands of critical
pedagogues in other parts of the world (many
of whom are referenced in this Handbook)
are clearly having an influence on the North
American continent.
To be sure, in the collective, people of jus-
tice, people who resist, are framed by a vision
that embraces an inclusive, tolerant, more
loving community that passionately calls for
a more democratic citizenship. Freire puts it
this way,
Citizenship implies freedom – to work, to eat, to
dress, to wear shoes, to sleep in a house, to support
oneself and one’s family, to love, to be angry, to cry,
to protest, to support, to move, to participate in this
or that religion, this or that party, to educate oneself
and one’s family, to swim regardless in what ocean of
one’s country. Citizenship is not obtained by chance:
it is a construction that, never finished, demands we
fight for it. It demands commitment, political clarity,
coherence, decision. (Freire, 2005: 161)
As Freire suggests, being in the world implies
equal opportunity to participate in its move-
ment, which is a central idea in the construct
of critical pedagogy. That is, as Macedo
argues, the concept of critical pedagogy is a
continuous unfolding process of becoming,
where we are active participants, that not only
includes an ongoing process of encountering
pain and struggle, but also a space that is com-
prised of ‘hope and joy shaped and maintained
by a humanizing pedagogy’ (2006: 394).
Particularly in light of the times where we
find ourselves with a Trump cult following
in the United States, and in which its intoler-
ant ideology has disturbingly gained validat-
ing momentum in other parts of the world,
Steinberg reminds us that an aspect of criti-
cal pedagogy provides for us a certain pass
to be angry, an anger that calls out ‘uses of
power and at injustices through the violations
285
of human rights’ (2007: ix). Moreover, Freire
emphasizes that our denunciation of injus-
tice should be framed within what he calls an
‘armed love’ (2005: 74). And where intoler-
ance is at play, where economic injustice is
evident, where violations of human rights
are occurring, where equal access and oppor-
tunity have been subverted, and where free-
doms have been violated, critical educators
should not only examine the impact this has
on students and society as a whole, but they
should also announce it with an honorable
anger and with what Darder characterizes as a
‘pedagogy of love’ (2002: 30).
In the final analysis, whether it is the work
of those critical pedagogues highlighted here
or the work of others, we must all actively
remain immersed in our communities, our
realities, and where injustice is perpetrated
we need to resist and work toward a more
just, right, and loving world.
Note
1  It must be mentioned that Paulo’s widow,
Ana Maria ‘Nita’ Araújo Freire (1933–), was
instrumental in having Paulo revisit his earlier works
in order to ‘reinvent them’ through the luxury of
the lens of hindsight and a different historical
context (Macedo, 2001). Indeed, an intellectual,
an accomplished scholar, a critical pedagogue
in her own right, and with her own publications
(e.g., Chronicles of Love: My Life with Paulo Freire
(2001); Paulo Freire: Uma História de Vida [Paulo
Freire: A History of Life] (2006)), Nita richly provided
detailed footnotes to several of Paulo’s later works
and has been a steadfast force in promoting the
work and legacy of Paulo (Kirylo, 2011).
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Gramscian Critical Pedagogy:
A Holistic and Social
Genre Approach
In the introduction to The Left Hemisphere:
Mapping Critical Theory Today (2013)
Razmig Keucheyan describes the task of
critical theory. He states that
[a] new critical theory is a theory, not merely an
analysis or interpretation. It not only reflects on
what is, by describing past or present social reality
in the manner of empirical social science; it also
raises the issue of what is desirable. (Keucheyan,
2013: 4, my emphasis)
The aim of critical pedagogy must be similar.
It has to effectively describe and provide room
for reflection about the social world and its
expressive political and cultural forms. It has
to provide a basis to analyze culture, society,
and politics but, most importantly, it has to
construct places to which theory may go sub-
sequent to analysis – theory must be directed,
through analysis, toward ‘what is desirable’.
Recently, Mary Breunig (2011) conducted
a qualitative analysis of critical pedagogi-
cal practices. Noting that the conception and
practice of critical pedagogy was not at all
30
R o b e r t F. C a r l e y
homogenous in her literature review, Breunig
discusses the early influence of the new left
and the intellectual influence of the Frankfurt
School on a range of later thinkers. She
describes the emergence, in the 1980s and the
1990s of scholars like Henry Giroux, Roger
Simon, Michael Apple, and Peter McLaren
alongside the early feminist critical peda-
gogy of Caroline Shrewsbury, bell hooks, and
Kathleen Weiler, and how their work was
focused on addressing and challenging both
the institutional framework and traditional and
substantive curricular content (e.g. canons,
genres) across disciplines in the liberal arts.
Interview data from the study demonstrated
that instructors were more likely to teach about
the idea of critical pedagogy or the social
construction of knowledge (constructivism).
Substantively, the ideas that critical pedagogy
addresses focus on ideologies, institutional
roles, exploitation, and oppression (with
explicit attention paid to race, class, and gen-
der). The social construction of knowledge was
often oriented toward the collective practice of
290 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
consciousness raising and active reflection on
the institutional role (as a logic of ends) in fram-
ing and producing knowledge. The ‘practice’ of
critical pedagogy overlapped and also varied
across participants. Breunig states that
[o]verall, the results from my study point to the need
for critical pedagogy to work toward better explica-
tion and communication of its social justice orienta-
tion, alongside its constructivist orientation. There
may still be some work that needs to be done to
encourage educators to recognize that critical peda-
gogical praxis must go beyond a set of teaching
techniques and attend to the political, social, and
economic factors that have conspired to marginalize
people in the first place…. (Breunig, 2011:12)
The goal of introducing a Gramscian critical
analysis for critical pedagogy addresses, pre-
cisely, the critical question or issue that
emerges from Breunig’s study – critical peda-
gogy as praxis. She demonstrates that the
fluidity in interpretations and approaches in
critical pedagogy is valuable and certainly
necessary. This chapter will merely provide
analytical guidelines for an approach to criti-
cal pedagogy through Gramsci’s ideas. The
central idea is to provide a holistic framework,
and that students actively engage in construc-
tivism as a way for critical thought to shift
into a critical lens that transcends pedagogical
limitations. After briefly discussing the focus
of this chapter, I will then provide a brief lit-
erature review and then discuss what I mean
by a Gramscian critical analysis for critical
pedagogy. I will move into specific guidelines
which include political economy, discussion
of analysis, and methods of analysis. I will
introduce the idea of ‘social genre’ as a way
to construct a substantive approach to critical
pedagogy; not a specific approach but as a
way to think about the act of constructing
knowledge with student participation.
GRAMSCIAN CRITICAL ANALYSIS
This chapter uses Gramsci’s ideas to propose
some methodological guidelines for analysis;
a Gramscian Critical Analysis. More specifi-
cally, in this chapter, I propose a method for
critical analysis that locates students within
social and political problematics which must
be addressed discursively or, more pointedly,
through interpretive strategies for reading and
discussion. By linking interpretive practices
to political and social forces (which are, in
turn, mediated textually and discursively)
students find themselves engaging texts as
limitations and potentialities for rendering or
producing effective meanings and meaning
communities. From this position, students
would engage in the possibilities, horizons,
and desires (the latter, the canalization of
politics and action) which are grounded in a
working out of conditions of possibility based
in a broad interpretive framework, encounters
or an engagement with possibilities and limi-
tations presented through a ‘textual and dis-
cursive field’, and imagining, still, alternative
trajectories to realize a society otherwise.
ANTONIO GRAMSCI AND CRITICAL
PEDAGOGY STUDIES
The approaches and methods that enable a
realistic departure point to both imagine and
achieve social worlds that are more broadly
democratic, egalitarian, and beneficial to so
many who, collectively, are victims of accu-
mulation by dispossession (to coin a term
from David Harvey) depend upon considering
what others have contributed to the study of
Gramsci’s role in critical pedagogy. I want to
begin by framing the idea of a Gramscian
critical pedagogy contributing to Keucheyan’s
claim, cited above, with regard to the goals of
a critical theory. Further, the central claim of
this chapter and related methodological
approach is, following Keucheyan, echoed in
the literature on Gramsci and critical peda-
gogy. Both D. W. Livingstone in his studies of
working-class learning and political education
(1983, 2002) and Jerrold L. Kachur (2002)
have pointed toward a Gramscian-based
 GRAMSCIAN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
pedagogy’s goals as nothing short of the
restructuring of social reality. Kachur states,
citing Livingstone, that ‘three ingredients are
required to restructure social reality: an under-
standing of actually existing society, a vision
of the future, and a strategy linking “what is”
to “what ought to be”’ (2002: 307). In fact, in
the literature on Gramsci and pedagogy, a
critical wave emerges from the critique of
Entwistle’s (1979) and Hirsch’s (1996) inter-
pretations and uses of Gramsci’s work to
produce, as Henry Giroux – a significant con-
tributor to this critical wave – notes, ‘a ration-
ale for conservative pedagogical practices as
part of their attempt to redefine the relation-
ship between schooling and society, and intel-
lectuals and their social responsibilities’
(Giroux, 2002: 48).
The critical wave in Gramsci scholarship
is focused on a holistic approach to peda-
gogy that is centered upon Gramsci’s elabo-
ration of hegemony (Aronowitz, 2002; Borg
et al., 2002; Monasta, 2002). Resultantly,
Gramscian-based research in critical peda-
gogy focuses on the political nature of
education with express attention paid to
institutional formations and constitutive
relations. The most important work is con-
cerned with ‘the centrality of politics and
power in our understanding of how schools
work’ (McLaren, 1994: 167). This includes
the traditions of adult education especially
as a post-World War II phenomenon – with
special regard focused on the social func-
tion, political and policy basis, as well as the
potential for introducing worker empower-
ment through more radical approaches to
pedagogy (Livingstone, 1983, 2002; English
and Mayo, 2012). This kind of work is also
present in the culturalist perspective that
informs early British cultural studies, the
Birmingham School: Raymond Williams’
work on adult education, as well as Paul
Willis’ Learning to Labor: How Working
Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977).
Since the concept of hegemony relies upon
other of Gramsci’s concepts to describe the
dynamics associated with the state’s attempts
291
to exercise authority through both public and
private institutions and, also, since education
was, at the time of Gramsci’s writing, and is
still – more or less – predominantly a state
institution, certain concepts are foregrounded,
more than others, in a critical pedagogical
approach. These concepts are hegemony,
historical bloc, common sense, culture, and
intellectuals. They include reference to con-
ceptions of the state, civil and political soci-
ety, institutions, practices, and power.
Recently, Michael Apple (2006, 2012) has
relied on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony
specifically as it pertains to how interna-
tional social movements that are focused on
education intervene in hegemonic relations
to disrupt both authority and consensus and
negotiate reforms. Like Livingstone, Apple’s
focus is on relations, practices, and institu-
tions that specify the nature of how power
is exercised through education and where
and how spaces open or may open to offer
potentially transformative political relations
and pedagogical practices. Apple has made
repeated use of the concept of hegemony, his-
torical blocs, as well as power blocs in society,
senso commune (common sense), and organic
intellectuals in his work on curriculum, teach-
ing, and the role that social movements play
in introducing and attempting to foment con-
ditions (or forces) that enable new relations.
Henry Giroux, whose contributions to crit-
ical pedagogy come from the fields of cul-
tural studies with a specific focus on youth
culture and subcultures, has added several
examples of analysis and important concep-
tual frameworks that come from his reading
of Gramsci. Most expressly, Giroux’s focus
on the dynamics of culture and, also, the role
that institutions play in determining the inter-
action between culture and power help to
demonstrate how hegemony works upon cul-
ture within the boundaries of contemporary
society. In the ‘culturalist’ line in early cul-
tural studies – a line that connects the work
of E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and
Stuart Hall – Giroux understands culture as
a site or space that includes a broad array of
292 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
informality, traditions, objects, institutions,
and practices and introduces the potential for
social transformation.
Following Gramsci’s conception of the
organic intellectual, Giroux looks at the role
of cultural workers that stand in-between
various public and private institutional loca-
tions (e.g. schools, but also, the cinema, youth
centers, and other spaces) and have the ­ability
to mediate the connection between cultural
practices and institutions by introducing
forms of ‘public pedagogy’ (Giroux 1988,
2003). He connects the concept of public
pedagogy to an interpretation of Gramsci’s
category of ‘organic intellectual’ which he
describes as a ‘transformative intellectual’.
Most significant to what I am proposing in this
chapter, Giroux’s ‘transformative intellectual’
engages in a pedagogy of transformation con-
necting subjects of relations of domination
and exploitation to theories, concepts, and
practices focused on contesting unjust rela-
tions. Recently, Peter Mayo has stated that the
transformative intellectual, ‘in short … would
be organic with regard to movements for
social justice-oriented social change; intel-
lectuals influencing the emergence of a set of
more socially just relations, prefiguring a new
form of society’ (2015: 1128).
Giroux’s attention to the commodifica-
tion of everyday life has positioned him as
an important critic of neoliberalism’s role
in stifling or appropriating intellectual crea-
tivity and abrogating critique through a
posture of cynicism (Giroux, 2001). This
cynical posture is due in part to the totality
of neoliberal relations. In The University in
Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-
Academic Complex (2007) Giroux, echoing
the most significant political work of Herbert
Marcuse after 1964, analyzes how cultural
production often supplements the discourse
of the military-industrial complex. He inves-
tigates this relationship in the framework of
neoliberal economic thinking in Against the
Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics beyond the
Age of Greed (Giroux, 2008). Both of these
later books employ similar and very important
critical analyses, again, in the framework of
the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and
most closely to the work of Herbert Marcuse.
Giroux, however, continues the tradition of
looking for potential practices that are coun-
terhegemonic to both the military-industrial
complex and neoliberalism.
The strongest focus on Gramsci’s role
in critical pedagogy is attributable to Peter
Mayo who, in the main, is concerned with
Gramsci’s contributions to adult education.
He (with Carmel Borg and the late Joseph
Buttigieg) produced Gramsci and Education
(2002) which gathers together commentators
on critical pedagogy who are avowed schol-
ars of Gramsci and Marxism, in their own
right, and who can offer a holistic approach to
thinking about pedagogy through Gramsci’s
corpus. More recently, Mayo edited Gramsci
and Educational Thought (2010) which
drew important contemporary contributions
from the fields of linguistics – especially
Peter Ives (2010), social work, and politi-
cal science. Mayo has also written a single-
authored comparative study of Paulo Freire
and Gramsci (1999). Mayo’s most sustained
contribution to using a Gramscian approach
to critical pedagogy is his attention to
‘holism’: to the central aspects of Gramsci’s
concept of hegemony. In a recent review of
Gramsci’s contributions to critical pedagogy,
Mayo states that
[f]or Gramsci, education, viewed in its broader con-
text, incorporates activities carried across the whole
spectrum of ‘civil society’. In Gramscian terms, this
refers to the complex of ideological institutions but-
tressing the state (separations between a state’s
civil and political society, and the ideological and
the repressive, are provided by Gramsci for heuristic
purposes). (Mayo, 2015: 1122)
This quotation becomes the departure point
for what I will be proposing as ‘Gramscian
Critical Pedagogy’. One way to realize a
pedagogical project that seeks to re-envision
and restructure the relations, institutions, and
practices that comprise our social reality is to
embark on an analysis of the key relations in
contemporary civil society which, today, find
 GRAMSCIAN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
their expression in neoliberalism. Gramsci’s
concepts, taken together, provide a necessary
heuristic – a series of methodological guide-
lines for a critical pedagogy. These concepts
must find their way into the neoliberal frame-
work so that students may discover the
means by which to analyze contradictions in
the rhetoric and narratives that comprise the
neoliberal moment.
As Breunig notes above, critical pedagogy
is not merely a series of techniques or the
direct communication of injustices to stu-
dents. It also doesn’t merely ‘involve’ stu-
dents. Rather, students need to be brought
into their current reality with those who
are in the position of instruction so that
both may realize (a collective may real-
ize the way) that it is possible to engage
in transformative work and, also, that it is
an extremely difficult yet a long-term and
persistent effort. As Keucheyan has main-
tained, although description and explana-
tion are necessary without one having their
own vision of what is desirable, without the
Gramscian heuristic, pedagogy is simply
normative (even if it contains critical inflec-
tions). As this review has demonstrated,
Giroux’s concept, ‘transformative intellec-
tual’, signals a constellation of relations that
include a pedagogical orientation toward
multiple sites that a movement may have the
capacity to canalize all at once and that an
intellectual may play a persistent (pedagogi-
cal) role in focusing and directing political
activity. Livingstone (1983, 2002), Apple
(2006, 2012), and Mayo’s empirical focus
on adult and workers’ education is helpful
in many respects; in particular, it shows how
powerful the forces arrayed against critical
education and critical subjects are, while,
at the same time, demonstrating that it is a
possible and viable project; that it can work
even under extraordinary opposition and cur-
ricular and substantive cooptation. Despite
extraordinary opposition, as Giroux’s work
demonstrates, there are opportunities where
counterhegemonic frameworks can develop,
however briefly or extensively.
293
GUIDELINES FOR A GRAMSCIAN
CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Political Economy: Analysis of
the Situation (of Forces)
Gramscian Critical Analysis begins with
determining the arrangement (the levels and
strength) of what Gramsci describes as
‘forces’ which are represented through the
presence and organizational levels of different
formal political parties as well as organiza-
tions not directly internal to the polity (e.g.
social movements, trade unions, occupational
‘groups’ – which may be affiliated directly
with an industry or group of industries –
lobbying firms, ethnic or religious groups,
­
economic and financial interest groups such as
roundtables, as well as informal ‘defense’
groups like the Arditi del Popolo – ‘people’s’
antifascist defense groups, often comprised of
veterans, socialists, communists, and others
who defended their cities against Mussolini’s
fascists squads). Political forces, like these,
must be identified, analyzed, and most impor-
tantly, the relations between these groups,
society, and the polity must be determined
through analysis.
The determination of the interrelations of
political forces produces a mapping of power
relations – a particularly useful heuristic for
political groups and organizations engaged in
class struggle. Without a critical theoretical con-
text for understanding political power, however,
these relationships appear detached from the
societal and economic contexts to and in which
these groups and organizations must respond.
Gramsci advances two principles with regard
to understanding political forces in society. He
frames these principles by noting that analysis,
in this context, must pose the problem of politi-
cal forces in society within the broader theo-
retical framework of the relationship between
structure and superstructure. He states that
[i]t is the problem of the relations between struc-
ture and superstructure which must be accurately
posed and resolved if the forces which are active in
294 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
the history of a particular period are to be correctly
analyzed, and the relation between them deter-
mined. Two principles must orient the discussion:
1. that no society sets itself tasks for whose accom-
plishment the necessary and sufficient conditions
do not either already exist or are not at least begin-
ning to emerge and develop; 2. that no society
breaks down and can be replaced until it has first
developed all the forms of life which are implicit in
its internal relations. (Gramsci, 1971: 177)
Derived from Karl Marx’s Preface to the
Critique of Political Economy (1857), these
principles follow from Gramsci’s discussion
of the relationship between nation states
within the context of international power
(Gramsci, 1971: 176). Here, Gramsci is argu-
ing, similarly to Rosa Luxemburg (1909) and
V. I. Lenin (1914) before him, that the con-
straint that assists the analysis of the relation-
ship between the social structure (determined
by the developmental level of the economy
which includes the technical level of industrial
production and, also, the degree, scope, and
complexity of the social division of labor) and
the superstructure (which contains all the
institutions and groups that express, politically
and culturally, the level of complexity that is
dependent on industry and occupations includ-
ing a robust and complex legal structure to
enshrine, enforce, and expand rights) is how
advanced or nascent are the economic forces
– technical, industrial, skill levels, and occu-
pational diversity – and how, necessarily, the
public and private institutions must act to
maintain and ensure present and continued
development. This is precisely what Gramsci
means when he states that ‘no society breaks
down and can be replaced until it has first
developed all the forms of life which are
implicit in its internal relations’ (Gramsci,
1971: 175–176). The conditions of possibility
to push beyond the limitations to democratic
civil society require that the juridical catego-
ries are fully developed along with societal
categories – maximized through rights and
privileges granted both legally and formally
(Lenin, 1914, 1916). In short, Gramsci is
offering a political economic frame in which
analysis can take place.
Here is the constraint that critical pedagogy
first encounters: political economy represents
the limits (and, implicitly the potential) for
imagining the world, imagining a world
otherwise, and making that dynamic intel-
ligible. The act of evoking a picture of the
world that is at once empirically grounded
and politically and socially determined and,
at the same time, pointing beyond that picture
toward imagining new ways of being in the
world; intimating and connecting desires to
something intelligible that is possible within
but exists outside of the present moment.
Martin Heidegger used the term ‘worlding’
to describe an opening; ways of being-in-the
world otherwise but, also, being in time and
history. Though he attributed ‘worlding’ to
artworks, here it is a necessary component of
a critical pedagogy (Heidegger, 1927, 1971).
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is depend-
ent, in part, upon political economy as a form
of analysis. This is clear from Gramsci’s dis-
cussion of the relations and levels of force
(1971: 180–2). Above, I describe the analysis
of social and political forces as a ‘heuristic’.
Establishing hegemonic forces, though nec-
essary for a Gramscian Critical Analysis,
is sufficient to the substantive or content-
based aspects of the class where this method
is applied. Although Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony is a political theory that describes
the process of revolutionary change attributed
to the political party, Gramsci leaves room, in
his Notebooks (1971), for methods designed
for political analysis and political activities
or opportunities to be used for the analysis of
(historical) texts – this point will be central to
the next two sections of the chapter.
Concrete Situation/Concrete
Analysis: Key Concepts
A concrete situation hones the hegemonic
process into an active and operative context
where power is manifest organizationally
(generally) and politically (specifically).
The analyst identifies the societal and
 GRAMSCIAN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
civil (private) dynamics through which polit-
ical and economic power are and have been
operative. This, of course, implies a concern
with the relationship between society and
political and economic power. Gramsci
frames this relationship with the term ‘effec-
tive reality’. In order to understand effective
reality, which is the combination of eco-
nomic, social, and political forces that pose
an immediate constraint to the present (con-
juncture), any political analysis must concern
itself with questions pertaining to the con-
tents of that reality. Political insights, denota-
tively, mark the passage from analysis to an
operative political subjectivity directed
toward achieving a societal transformation
through the characteristics of political sci-
ence: organizational and administrative
capacity that enables the development of a
plan, strategies, and the collective will to
implement the program tactically.
A concrete situation and the effective real-
ity that determines it is not as high-order a
concept as hegemony or as intensively speci-
fied as a conjuncture (which I will discuss
in the following section). The identification
of a concrete situation within effective real-
ity depends upon the presence of other con-
cepts that help to identify, categorize, and
connect the social and political forces that
have brought us up to our contemporary
moment. Essential concepts and categories
from Gramsci’s thought that help us to better
understand the active and operative context
of power, and have been up to the moment of
analysis, are the following:
Historical Bloc: Locates and frames a concrete situ-
ation. Entails an analysis of the extent and degree
of the specific cultural, economic, and political
integration in a specified timeframe. The strength
(extent and degree) of a bloc depends upon an
organic connection between the majority of
people and intellectuals in all strata of civil and
political society. It explains the specific way that
hegemonic domination is present in a national or
international context. It is the specific arrangement
of class fractions, how they relate socially and
politically to the mode of production, and the
specific expression of their class domination.
295
An example of an historical bloc may entail identi-
fying nations that deploy similar neoliberal policies
and the history of how this bloc developed in a
somewhat (explaining the degree and extent)
united manner.
Integral State (degree of): ‘political society + civil
society, in other words hegemony protected by
the armor of coercion’. Political society marks the
state’s coercive power. Civil society represents the
degree of societal consensus; it marks ‘terrain
upon which social classes compete for social and
political leadership or hegemony over other social
classes’ (Gramsci, 1971: 262–3). The concept of
integral state identifies the state as relational. It
takes a strategic posture toward the integration of
fractions of the capitalist class and a coercive posi-
tion toward fractions of the working class. This
dynamic marks a dialectical position of the state
toward civil society mediated through politics
(strategy and coercion). As such, the state acts
upon a political terrain, which Gramsci – discussing
Machiavelli – describes as effective political reality,
to maintain hegemonic domination and also expe-
riences counterhegemonic contest. The relative
degree of ‘integration’ is the expansiveness and
effectiveness of its strategy toward fractions of the
capitalist class to promote a broad consensus in
civil society. A descriptive example, here, might
focus on the period prior to neoliberalism, begin-
ning after World War II when industrial and public-
service workers enjoyed collective bargaining on a
broader basis, the aggregate wage grew in step
with aggregate profits, consumer debt was low
and well managed, and the state exhibited an
ideology and policy platform of social stability and
limited growth that included working Americans
as an indispensable aspect of economic progress.
Intellectuals (organic and traditional): All intellec­
tuals are organic to – they emerge within institu-
tional frameworks – private and public
organizations. An organic intellectual is a funda-
mental social actor who legitimates, explains, and
justifies the presence of the emergent institutions
(whether it is a firm, hedge-fund, political party,
social movement) in which they are active; that
they have a hand in producing. Traditional intel-
lectuals were organic to institutions that emerged
in past times. They are also significant societal
actors in that by forming relationships to new
institutions – and the intellectuals organic to them,
they help legitimate the continuity of the social
and political shifts or transformations as a normal
progression. In short, they draw a connection
between their own institutional position and new
institutional positions (an example, here, would be
Dick Armey writing a book and speaking on the US
296 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Tea Party as a form of political expression funda-
mental to American history and polity. Armey, an
old establishment Republican, effectively normal-
izes a new conservative political tendency). Briefly,
the array of institutional forms that have made use
of relatively inexpensive digital technologies and
online networks to generate and distribute media
in enormous quantity alongside of alternative non-
amateur media across the political spectrum as
well as cable media and traditional media are
important in this category. Renate Holub has
extended Gramsci’s category of the intellectual to
address aspects of these developments (Holub,
1992). More recently, Kate Crehan (2016) uses
Gramsci’s discussion of intellectuals to help clarify
the role of both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall
Street movements after the economic and finan-
cial crisis of 2008.
Ideology (predominant and ‘historically organic’):
The expressive form of hegemony or the domina-
tion of the capitalist class. Gramsci, however, takes
the definition of ideology beyond the classical
Marxist or Marx and Engels’ definition as an instru-
ment of the bourgeois rule and, also, as the
expression of the complex of superstructures.
Historically, organic ideology signifies the expres-
sive forms of legitimation, explanations, and justi-
fications that mobilize classes within the framework
of an organization necessary to contemporary
society. Placed alongside the definition of intellec-
tuals, above, organizations mark sites where ide-
ologies embedded in institutional frameworks that
serve a contemporary purpose (either private or
political) are articulated either within or against the
framework of hegemony, i.e. the dominant ideol-
ogy. Ideology remains an expressive form. As such,
subtle changes in the various discourses that com-
prise the various ideologies suggest movement.
Identifying shifts as well as actors (intellectuals)
remains an important analytical tool.
Transformism (Transformismo) and Passive
Revolution: effectively describe how hegemony
absorbs seemingly contending political forces into
the state exemplified by the Italian Risorgimento.
For our purpose, transformism explains how seem-
ingly progressive forces in mainstream politics
exhibit a hollow rhetoric of equality, on the one
hand, while advancing a neoliberal agenda (which
works against many forms of equality) on the
other. Transformism, however, describes the period
leading up to the Italian state formation. First,
individual figures in opposition to the state are
absorbed into political forces by being positioned
within the state and then, later, groups and
organizations. Transformism is an important
concept because it marks a distinction between
political transformation and economic and social
change. Passive Revolution is the full theoretical
elaboration of transformism. Similar to Marx’s The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852),
passive revolution involves a ruling class group that
wishes to dominate but not lead. It involves a
popular sentiment for change, including mobiliza-
tions, but no mass participation on the part of
individuals or groups. In short, passive revolution
may pertain to a rearrangement in which class
fraction articulates a program of domination, how-
ever, maintaining hegemony for fractions of the
dominant class.
Although many other concepts can assist in the
concrete analyses of concrete situations, these
concepts help determine that the target for
analysis is moving. Concretization does not
imply stolidity. Rather, as Gramsci states when
he describes the relationship between the party
and the analysis of a concrete situation, ‘One
bases oneself on effective reality, but what is
effective reality? Is it something static and
immobile, or is it not rather a relation of forces
in continuous motion and shift of equilib-
rium?’ (Gramsci, 1971: 172). The concepts
above move from a macro-historical analytical
frame through to mezzo- and micro-political
forces including discursive expressions of
political ideals embedded in states, institu-
tions, and organizations. Taken together, these
concepts determine what is active and opera-
tive in a framework of analysis; what, in short,
comprises the social reality under question.
Conjuncture: Identifying
Conditions of Possibility;
Establishing Social Genres
The concept of the conjuncture in Gramsci’s
work is complex and requires some unpack-
ing. The previous section established ‘con-
cretization’ by defining and describing its
importance in relation to analysis and con-
texts. Conjunctures represent political oppor-
tunities which emerge out of short-term
circumstantial responses to societal prob-
lems. Conjunctures provide opportunities for
groups to raise consciousness, organize,
 GRAMSCIAN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
mobilize, and combine (make coalitions).
Gramsci gives us two important insights with
regard to conjunctures. The first relates to
‘concrete situations’. Gramsci states that
the most important observation to be made about
any concrete analysis of the relations of force is the
following: that such analyses cannot and must not
be ends in themselves … but acquire significance
only if they serve to justify a particular practical activ-
ity, or initiative of will. They reveal the points of least
resistance, at which the force of will can be most
fruitfully applied…. The great Powers have been
great precisely because they were at all times pre-
pared to intervene effectively in favorable interna-
tional conjunctures – which were precisely favorable
because there was the concrete possibility of effec-
tively intervening in them. (Gramsci, 1971: 185)
The connection between a concrete analysis
of power – determining actors (groups and
individuals) that determine and direct soci-
etal forces – and a conjuncture is, plainly,
that any concrete analysis implies that the
analyst has a political goal, effective organi-
zational capacity, the capability to mobilize
the group they represent and allied groups,
and can identify the conditions of possibility
once they emerge. The emergence of condi-
tions of possibility mark the ‘conjuncture’.
As such, Gramsci defines ‘conjuncture’ as
the set of circumstances which determine the
market in a given phase, provided that these are
conceived of as being in movement, i.e. as consti-
tuting a process of ever-changing combinations, a
process which is the economic cycle … In Italian the
meaning of ‘favorable or unfavorable economic
situation (occasione)’ remains attached to the word
‘conjuncture’. Difference between ‘situation’ and
‘conjuncture’: the conjuncture is the set of immedi-
ate and ephemeral characteristics of the economic
situation … Study of the conjuncture is thus more
closely linked to immediate politics, to ‘tactics’ and
agitation, while the ‘situation’ relates to ‘strategy’
and propaganda, etc. (Gramsci, 1971: 177, n.79)
An analysis of the ‘conjuncture’ makes
recourse to the intelligible categories like
occupational strata and the social division of
labor, the level of technological and industrial
development, forms of economic investment,
the development of various interest-bearing
297
capitals to generate private wealth, the extent
of societal institutions and their relationship
to the development of private factors (every-
thing from public and private investments
into scientific research to the forms and loca-
tions of vocational training), etc. These are
some of the most significant (if ‘refractory’)
categories that mark how diversified and
active the market is at a particular moment in
time (e.g. within the framework of a produc-
tion cycle for aggregate industries). Since all
of these categories are social and reactive
upon the market within capitalism, they are
constantly in movement. Branches of indus-
try may be challenged by internal and exter-
nal competitive forms which effect other
categories, for example, occupations and
education. The key to understanding a con-
juncture is that there will be political justifi-
cations to conceal social problems in the
short term. These justifications may take
the form of concrete policies that act upon the
conditions determining the market in a given
phase (e.g. creating opportunities for retrain-
ing for new jobs) or just merely ideological
proclamations. Understanding and differenti-
ating these patterns as they pertain to the
forces extant within a given conjuncture
allows for groups (that are already organized
on the terrain of politics) to agitate and act.
Conjunctures draw attention to the tempo-
ral and variable nature of societies. Despite
limitations on options or what would com-
prise rationally informed approaches to act in
the world, a conjuncture identifies the pos-
sibilities to mount an effective challenge –
to realize one’s criticism – through assert-
ing alternatives into what is both normative,
and also problematic, if faltering, for many.
We can identify texts that give expression to
serious constraints that protagonists or others
face and begin to combine and group these
texts which may express constraints through
vastly different cultural codes but that get at
a similar larger idea, a constellation of forces
that challenge actors’ expectations for their
immediate present and future. Conjunctures,
in short, posit the conditions through which
298 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
it becomes more than merely possible but,
rather, necessary to begin to think otherwise
about the world.
The analysis of groups of texts gives rise
to patterns. Determining the historical context
in which a cultural artifact is produced allows
for the identification of patterns – a socio-
logical insight which can be deployed for the
purposes of interpretation. Context requires
further textual grounding in interdisciplinary
sources that analyze political and social forces
and the varied cultural forms of expression.
Cultural expression is suggestive. It has the
unique ability to produce the logical outcomes
of policy and societal changes that may or may
not take on critical ideological dimensions
while, at the same time, positing new com-
munities, new struggles, and trans-valuations
of existing societal, policy-based, ideological,
and cultural frameworks. This is where criti-
cal interventions into existing genres or the
location or construction of new genres plays
an important role for critical pedagogy.
I want to propose the establishment of a
conjuncture as an act of critical pedagogy.
I’d like to suggest social genres as a practice
of critical pedagogy. I define social genres
as groupings of various texts that pertain to
a contemporary social problem; a problem
with pronounced effects which can be dis-
cerned across various representational media
(i.e. texts). An example of a social genre
would be neoliberalism. The social genre,
then, would be a classification of a group of
texts that are indicative of constraints or limi-
tations to actions, practices, and discourses
(even if framed affirmatively).
SOCIAL GENRE
Social genre is a term borrowed from
linguistic-based educational approaches
­ cally. It demonstrates that neoliberal
(Bruce, 2010); the goal of this approach is, in
many ways, opposite to the approach that I
am proposing here. According to Ian Bruce’s
review of the term’s usage, ‘social genres’ are
constructs that teach conventional usage of
any specific textual form, highlighting their
intended ‘social purpose’ (e.g. editorials,
postcards, research articles, etc.) (Bruce,
2010: 155). For the purposes of a critical
approach, social genre indicates the ideologi-
cal as well as a variety of cultural expressions
describing current institutional forms and
relations, societal relations and identities, and
occupational roles. Taking contemporary
expressive ideology or ideologies as central
articulation points, social genres compile
texts that dramatize social limitations and
contradictions which both circumscribe and
help us to understand the group and individ-
ual relational elements, in this context,
through the expression of a wide range of
experiences. In short, texts that dramatize the
experiences that lie outside of the symbolic
range of an ideology or express the limita-
tions expressed (often affirmatively and posi-
tively) by an ideology comprise the content
of a social genre. Social genres are groups of
texts that express a social problem as a con-
tradiction and limitation through a set of texts
that explore it as completely as possible.
ANALYSIS: EXPLAINING HEGEMONY/
IDENTIFYING CATEGORIES
In order to organize the narrative, it becomes
important within the framework of a social
genre to establish a range of texts that are
constitutive of a situation. As indicated above
in the discussion of a concrete analysis and
concrete situation, a situation hones the
hegemonic process into an active and opera-
tive context where power is manifest organi-
zationally (generally) and politically
(specifically). The political economic narra-
tive, above, frames neoliberalism ideologi-
capitalism is characterized by high levels of
market volatility, which brings along with it
broad and sweeping societal consequences
effecting basic needs like housing. In the
 GRAMSCIAN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
case of neoliberalism one might look at
responses to neoliberalism.
Political responses may encompass policy-
based responses to societal consequences.
This would identify institutional actors in the
state as well as experts who would be attached
to both the state and private industry. Political
responses also encompass the role of political
parties, labor unions, and social movements.
The latter have emerged very strongly as sig-
nificant actors; protest activity has steadily
increased across the neoliberal period begin-
ning in the 1980s (Bailey, 2016). The latter
also unify political responses with societal
responses. Finally, it is also possible to com-
pile cultural responses to neoliberalism. This
might entail textual expressions (e.g. film
and novels) that dramatize the social effects
of neoliberalism on individuals and groups or
that exaggerate the ideological foundations
of neoliberalism through near-future or alter-
nate near-future narratives.
Compiling responses to neoliberalism
hones the hegemonic process by putting
actors into play (e.g. intellectuals, class frac-
tions, social movements, cultural collectives,
etc.) within the framework of neoliberalism
and demonstrates the range of effective chal-
lenges or actual and proposed responses to
the problems that neoliberalism gives rise
to (transformism and passive revolution).
Finally, a focus on the roles of political
actors, which should represent both private
and public actors, demonstrates the degree
of state integration, the durability of the neo-
liberal hegemonic project, and the levels of
consensus, contestation, and coercion that
persist within the framework of neoliberal
hegemony (integral state).
The elements of a social genre are repre-
sented through the guidelines for the inter-
pretations of various, included, texts. In the
case of neoliberalism, the division between
classes is a core structuring point for the
narrative. The integration of specific private
class fractions (especially corporate and
finance) into the state through various means
that represent both an elite group of political
299
actors and the construction of a base through
Christian Evangelicalism poses the political
expression of class division and a solution
to it. The period prior to globalization where
there was a different relationship between
classes dramatizes the shift that neoliberal-
ism introduces regarding class relationships.
The societal changes, which can be repre-
sented through descriptive statistics and dem-
onstrate the changes in the accumulation and
circulation of wealth and debt, are also indis-
pensable. Dramatizing these elements calls
for narratives that exhibit the effects of this
shift. However, any narrative must be placed
in relationship to categorical markers from
Gramsci’s thought, described above, that
show the process by which power operates
by making sense of constraints, demonstrat-
ing the configuration and expression of the
current society so that it is possible to under-
stand what is real, possible, and ideological,
or what is wishful thinking.
DRAMATIZING THE CONJUNCTURE
Conjunctures inaugurate the discourses of
possibilities. They dramatize the role of actors
not simply within the expressive limits of the
textual frameworks that represent them but,
rather, within the framework of the political,
social, and economic conditions that though
present in the text are interpreted through a
broad hegemonic framework and, also, the
concrete analysis of the impact of those condi-
tions upon actors represented in the text. More
pointedly, however, a narrative protagonist
marks both an orienting point through which
to dramatize possibilities and constraints
encountered within the articulation of a con-
juncture as well as a nodal connection to both
class, and other, collectives as well as a con-
nection between student experiences, recogni-
tion of broader collective experience (i.e. class
consciousness and consciousness raising), and
the economic, socially, and historically
embedded aspects of expressive or dramatic
300 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
qualities. It is centrally important that the pro-
tagonist or actor in a text be connected to
contemporaneous social narratives (to allow
students to see precisely what is being drama-
tized is an example of neoliberal relations that
they or others that they know may have expe-
rienced or experience) and to groups (class,
race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc.).
CONCLUSION: FROM TEXTS TO ACTS
There are two concluding points that I want to
make, reiterating issues raised in the introduc-
tion. Effective critical pedagogy is a dialogic
process that generates a patterned and open
discourse, a discourse that is necessarily
framed within the formal aspects of a class in
the context of the university (or other) class-
room. As such, critical pedagogy, like critical
theory, depends upon the persistent generation
of inquiry and ideas that are empirically or
factually grounded, but rather than merely
explaining facts or evidence, must raise the
issue of what is desirable. In order to do that
effectively in the framework of pedagogy it is
necessary to suggest and outline a process
through which to approach the dialogic prac-
tice of engaging within a broader theoretical
discourse. The conjuncture raises the issue of
what is desirable as a necessary and complete
component of a holistic Gramscian critical
pedagogy. It demonstrates what is possible,
what is not, and why.
As Breunig’s (2011) study notes, critical
pedagogy must go beyond constructions and
practices to attend to its praxiological goals,
addressing the economic, political, and social
processes that marginalize the groups to
which critical pedagogy is directed. However,
and as Breunig’s study implies, the practices
of a critical pedagogy directly benefit the
goals of its social justice orientation, specifi-
cally the question or concern with how a crit-
ical pedagogy may be transported beyond the
classroom as a conscious aspect of students’
orientation to the world. I believe that by
demonstrating to students that an ­analytical
framework can help them situate the world as
knowable, bring it close to them, and lastly,
allow them to not only orient themselves
within the world but, most importantly, to
do so with a critical lens so that in orienting
themselves they may understand, also, how
they may orient the world through collective
action. After all, a social justice orientation
is good if it can be taught, but better if it can
be instilled in the conscious lives of a gen-
eration that can unite against racism, sexism,
and economic exploitation.
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Still Teaching to Transgress:
Reflecting on Critical Pedagogy
with bell hooks
No education is politically neutral. (hooks, 1994:
170)
trans·gres·sion
/trans’ɡreSHən/
noun
an act that goes against a law, rule, or code of
conduct; an offense. Ex: ‘I’ll be keeping an eye out
for further transgressions’. (Oxford Dictionary)
BELL HOOKS AND ME
As a self-described ‘accidemic’ (Troutman
et al., 2018) or one who is deeply committed
to knowledge acquisition and knowledge pro-
duction in an organic or Gramscian sense, but
ends up in the (western) academy living life
as a professor, the work of bell hooks is a
meaningful tome on multiple levels. From my
first encounter with her work, Teaching to
Transgress, as a Black single mother and first-
generation graduate student at Penn State, I
knew my perspective would be forever
31
S t e p h a n i e Tr o u t m a n
changed and influenced by her amazing ideas
and creative intellect. Many Black women
specifically, and women of color more gener-
ally, both in and outside of academic spaces,
feel as I do about the contributions of Dr. bell
hooks. As I eagerly consumed the books of
bell hooks and began using her work to
inform and anchor some of my own academic
direction and practice, it never occurred to me
that I might someday meet her – let alone
develop a friendship with her.
After a promising-turned-disappointing
experience on the academic job market in
2011, I settled for a visiting position in a small
rural college. To my shock and amazement,
bell hooks was a Distinguished Professor at
this school. I assumed she worked from afar
and was not in regular residence there. My
assumption was promptly corrected when I
arrived for a campus visit and saw that I was
scheduled to meet with her (at her home!) that
morning, after coffee. If death by fangirling
was a real thing, it would have happened to
me right then and there. I promptly changed
 STILL TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS
my clothes. I was so nervous and excited,
but she was calm and welcoming, and as she
hugged me, we had an immediate connec-
tion. She often refers to this meeting as ‘love
at first sight’. This was most certainly a major
perk of the job I was grateful to have but felt
I was forced to settle for.
During my two years in that space, bell
hooks quickly moved from being my colleague
and mentor to becoming a great friend. I met
her family when they visited, I accompanied
her to speaking and teaching gigs, we traveled
and connected with other Black feminist schol-
ars and artists. These moments and experiences
deepened me personally and professionally –
in ways too numerous to recall. We discussed,
analyzed, and critiqued movies, travel, family,
our institution – and the academy at large. We
shared reading material, and I recall us debating
ideas raised in texts like Melissa Harris-Perry’s
Sister Citizen (2011) and Michelle Alexander’s
The New Jim Crow (2012). We endlessly bick-
ered about Spike Lee’s oeuvre and enjoyed
long discussions of the work of artists Betye,
Alyson, and Lezley Saar. Intellectual stimula-
tion of a political, aesthetic, and creative vari-
ety was always on the menu.
Beyond our shared interests was a mutual
commitment to feminism and truth-telling
and to a belief in the transformative potential
of education to make a better more feminist
and equitable personal life, community, and
world. Our shared love of learning and edu-
cation (not schooling) was and is urgent – and
forms the basis for our continued friendship.
At the heart of our intergenerational, feminist
sisterhood of sorts is a shared knowledge that
education at its best is about truth, connec-
tion, and critiques made in the spirit of love
with an end goal of liberation.
SITUATING BELL HOOKS IN
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
In the inter- and multi-disciplinary educa-
tional field of critical pedagogy, the scholars
are many, though not each of these
303
contributing figures – theorists, practitioners,
and pedagogues – are equally explored or
recognized. While the voices of the critical
pedagogy movement have shifted to reflect a
wider, more diverse representation of schol-
ars over the past decade (see Orelus and
Brock, 2015), one of the earliest, most salient
voices of Black women in the theorizing,
practice, and scholarship of critical pedagogy
is that of Dr. bell hooks. Like her ongoing
work, her legacy attends to examinations of
the contours of teaching, learning, and loving,
deep within the confines of community as
defined by and through intellectual engage-
ments, political commitments, and spiritual
practice. hooks’s critical pedagogy work is
rooted in a distinct, feminist ethos that distin-
guishes it from earlier works in the field –
such that she is credited with challenging
Paulo Freire himself (renowned as the ‘father’
of critical pedagogy) to expand his ideas
about gender and the role of feminist practice
in relation to critical pedagogy. Uniquely, the
body of scholarship that bell hooks has cre-
ated is positioned in (and between) both criti-
cal pedagogy and feminist pedagogy. In fact,
one might argue that bell hooks is responsible
for mapping the location where feminist
pedagogy and critical pedagogy intersect.
TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS AND
THE BELL HOOKS TEACHING TRILOGY
bell hooks’s seminal work in the field of critical
pedagogy is her 1994 book, Teaching to
Transgress. Most scholars, students, teachers,
and educational practitioners hail Teaching to
Transgress as one of the most definitive books
on critical pedagogy because of its significant
global impact on the enterprise of teaching and
learning for freedom and liberation; it also
hailed as a top academic text for its impact and
influence across multiple fields and disciplines –
among them women and gender studies, race
and ethnic studies, education, and many more.
My own encounter with Teaching to Transgress
was as a graduate student at Penn State in
304 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
2006. The way hooks passionately argued for
critical thinking, experiential learning, political
critique, and the power of education was both
healing salve and a game-changer for me. I was
a first-generation college (and at that time doc-
toral) student; a welfare-class, Black single
mother who, despite being ‘gifted’, felt abused,
undervalued, and often despised by and in
school settings. Teaching to Transgress
affirmed my belonging in academic space and
assured me that no matter how difficult it
would be to navigate the social dimensions
(racism, classism, sexism) of the academy, I
would not be broken by it. This helped me to
embrace my positionality and to begin
approaching my own classroom spaces as sites
of untold potential and community.
In Teaching to Transgress, hooks argues
against the banking model of education and
challenges systems of domination within
schools and classrooms. hooks calls for
the re-thinking of schools and educational
settings because she believes that ‘the
classroom with all its limitations remains
a location of possibility’ (hooks, 1994:
195). Functioning as somewhat of a hybrid
homage and companion to Freire’s (1970)
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Teaching to
Transgress also positions feminist politics
and spirituality as critical components in the
movement for liberation and social transfor-
mation. hooks challenges the system of edu-
cation and schooling not only on political
and ideological grounds, but also in regard
to the roles played by students and teachers
in the (academic) classroom setting, stating,
we must continually remind students in the class-
room that expression of different opinions and dis-
senting ideas affirms the intellectual process. We
should forcefully explain that our role is not to teach
them to think as we do but rather to teach them,
by example, the importance of taking a stance that
is rooted in rigorous engagement with the full
range of ideas about a topic. (hooks,1994: 182)
This particular guidance from hooks is a
gem and a cornerstone upon which critical
pedagogy can be realized within schooling
environments.
The continued relevance of Teaching to
Transgress lies within its prescient ability to
forecast the ongoing tension between corpora-
tized, banking models of teaching and learning
in relation liberatory models and progressive
concerns in education and schooling. It is this
continued relevance that nearly a decade later
spawned hooks’s follow-up critical pedagogy
book, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy
of Hope (2003) and ultimately a third book
(making her teaching series a trilogy spanning
almost 15 years), Teaching Critical Thinking:
Practical Wisdom, in 2010. Though the later
books are less popular than Teaching to
Transgress, they offer a great deal of impor-
tant insights and ideas about ways to engage
in critical pedagogy across all spaces of learn-
ing, not just schools and other academic set-
tings, and communicated through stories of
experience and honest appraisals of flawed
social institutions and their negative effects. In
my own practice, I’ve found it helpful to pair
Teaching to Transgress with Teaching Critical
Thinking as a way for graduate students to
have the deep and rich theoretical experience
that the former has to offer, while also being
able to access the brief but poignant lessons in
the latter, as something tangible for their own
teaching practice. While Teaching Critical
Thinking orients them to reflect on their own
positionality within their schooling and aca-
demic experiences, Teaching to Transgress
helps them to fight dominator culture and
oppressive regimes within the classrooms (and
spaces) that they are tasked with creating as
educational leaders. As hooks reminds us,
all of us in the academy and in the culture as a whole
are called to renew our minds if we are to transform
educational institutions – and society – so that the
way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in
cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love
of freedom. (hooks, 1994: 14)
Interestingly, it is the middle book of the tril-
ogy, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of
Hope (2003) that in my opinion offers the best
of both worlds (theory and practice) and is the
most cosmopolitan of the trilogy in scope,
reach, and accessibility. For these reasons,
 STILL TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS
I often teach this book as a standalone text. In
this book, hooks theorizes mostly through
narrative and story-telling and by sharing
reflections and observations collected across a
variety of educational spaces and contexts.
This book moves toward an ethos of commu-
nity grounded in an ethics of justice and
humanity that seeks to embrace all forms of
personhood. In the text, hooks challenges us
to remember and resist,
dominator culture [that] has tried to keep us all
afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk,
sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that
fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our
differences; this is the process that brings us closer,
that gives us a world of shared values, of meaning-
ful community. (hooks, 2003: 197)
This is just one example of many, in which
hooks communicates her vision of critical
pedagogy as an enterprise that has potential
beyond the classroom and outside of schools;
that has the power to help enable us to trans-
gress in social settings and environments.
This transgression, hooks believes, will pro-
vide us with tools and resources needed for
liberation, justice, and social transformation.
hooks intimates,
my hope emerges from those places of struggle
where I witness individuals positively transform-
ing their lives and the world around them.
Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As
teachers we believe that learning is possible, that
nothing can keep an open mind from seeking
after knowledge and finding a way to know.
(hooks, 2003: 14)
Fifteen years after its original publication,
Teaching Community is enjoying renewed
interest, circulating as an important part of
hooks’s legacy in a vibrant afterlife on social
media, in the form of websites, Instagram
posts, memes, blog entries, and Pinterest
posts. One could claim that it is this middle
text of hooks’s teaching trilogy that offers
answers alongside critique.
However, the trilogy’s headliner, Teaching
to Transgress, remains the canonical work
in which critical pedagogy meets Black
305
feminist thought for a profound encounter
that endures. The book, which is 25 years
old in 2019, is among the most notable and
influential books on critical pedagogy ever
written. It is a tour de force that challenges
traditional conceptions and models of teach-
ing and learning, student–teacher power
relations, and racial and gender dynam-
ics at the intersection of teaching, learning,
education, and schooling. Heavily inspired
and influenced by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy
of the Oppressed and hooks’s own friend-
ship and comradery with Paulo Freire him-
self, Teaching to Transgress is the book that
places hooks solidly among the scholars of
critical pedagogy. In 2014, The New School
celebrated the 20th anniversary of the pub-
lication of Teaching to Transgress with a
scholarly residency honoring hooks, entitled
‘Transgressions’, which featured a week-
long series of engagements all focused on
commemorating, updating, and extending
the work of this book. These events were
free and open to the public and were widely
attended (standing room only), and have
enjoyed thousands of viewings on YouTube.
In the opening event of this series,
‘Teaching to Transgress Today: Theory and
Practice In and Outside the Classroom’,
Princeton Professor Imani Perry offered a
reflection on the significance of bell hooks
and her work; Perry stated that upon meet-
ing hooks,
Her voice sounded like home to me…. She had the
sense of play and poetry and grace in her presence
that I took to be my inheritance. It was different
because she was free … free in a distinctive way
that I came to understand as particularly feminist,
intellectual and Black all at once. (Perry, 2014)
I interpret this account by Perry as indicative
of the ways in which bell hooks lives and
models through her living, an ethic of critical
pedagogy. Similar to Perry, I too have been
exposed to and inspired by this side of bell
hooks. Perry went on to outline three crucial
aspects of bell hooks’s call to transgress that
continue to resonate:
306 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
1 Leftist politics (beyond liberal Left) including a
deep critique of capitalism in service of radical
vision to undo our adherence to patriarchy
2 Attention to the emotional lives of people and
emotional wellbeing through commitment to
self-care
3 Recognition and engagement in spiritual work as
critical to refusing binaries of mind/body, reason/
emotion, intellect/affect.
Perry’s lecture set the stage for a robust
reconsideration and appreciation of bell
hooks’s scholarly legacy – broadly, and on a
more specific level, the continued vitality of
Teaching to Transgress as a text. The three
aforementioned aspects outlined by Perry
constitute the signaling of a critical peda-
gogy lifestyle or praxis which should be of
particular interest as we attempt to educate,
grow, and struggle for freedom within con-
tested domains of community and society
against an environment heavily influenced
by geopolitical issues. This feminist, critical
pedagogy lifestyle is the legacy of bell
hooks. Given the assault on public educa-
tion, Perry’s second observation resonates
and takes us back to the text, wherein hooks
states that ‘teachers must be actively
involved, committed to a process of self-
actualization that promotes their own well-
being if they are to teach in a manner that
empowers students’ (Perry, 2014: 17). This
perhaps may be the most important tenet of
a critical pedagogical praxis, as it recog-
nizes that authenticity requires us to ‘prac-
tice what we preach’ (or in this context,
profess) as a way to model and build rela-
tionships that prioritize our optimal wellbe-
ing as we strive for freedom and liberation.
As bell’s former colleague at Berea
College and as her friend and (sometimes)
collaborator, I had the pleasure of speaking to
her about critical pedagogy now – in the post-
Obama era, at a time when critical pedagogy
feels both more important than ever and more
under siege than it did even just a decade ago.
What does it mean to celebrate Teaching to
Transgress, 25 years later in an environment
of conservative values, amoral policies, and
widespread vitriolic attacks on social justice
and democracy? A transcript of our conversa-
tion follows in the next section.
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY Q&A WITH
BELL HOOKS
Q: Define critical pedagogy. Has the definition
changed for you over the years? If so, how
and why?
A: 
Critical pedagogy is deeply defined by its
relation to students and to the idea of the
student – not just teaching facts and ideas but
promoting a way of being in the world that is
centered on critical thinking. I think critical
pedagogy has evolved because people have
become more aware of the dominator system
and cultures of social [US] institutions …
especially in academia.
Q: What do you feel are the most beneficial
aspects of adopting a critical pedagogy
approach to teaching and learning?
A: It is still the best way for those who are
disenfranchised in dominant culture to
construct liberatory subcultures. It offers
much needed alternatives.
Q: What can critical pedagogy tell us about our
world outside or beyond the confines of the
classroom?
A: Critical pedagogy is the only aspect of teach-
ing and learning that is invested in really
looking at ideas that circulate in public dis-
course and ideas that circulate in academe
and how they combine to shape our real-life
circumstances.
Q: In what ways do you feel colleges and uni-
versities have embraced or rejected critical
pedagogies?
A: Overall, I’d say that critical pedagogy is
under assault; what’s fascinating, is that
books like Dark Money [by Jane Mayer,
2016] and other research show how con-
servative wealth made direct interventions
into academe to rid the space of the critical
thinking of dissident voices. Wealth as anti-
everything [progressive] predates Trump.
Still, there are those in the academy who are
more open to critical pedagogy … individual
professors and protest-oriented and margin-
alized students.
 STILL TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS
Q: What lesson/s do schooling and public educa-
tion still need to learn from critical pedagogy?
A: To promote self-actualization that enables
people to discover who they are and find
their voice.
Q: How is critical pedagogy embodied or
expressed in your non-education works?
Where/how do you see it informing your
work as a cultural critic?
A: I embrace a radical perspective in all that I
write; it’s always indicative of critical pedagogy.
Visionary feminist theorizing embodies the
best of critical pedagogy because it is the only
standpoint that addresses intersectionality.
Q: Does critical pedagogy influence in any way
your Buddhist–Christian spirituality – how so?
A: It makes me smart enough to combine the
two! [laughs] It helps me think critically about
which parts are useful and compatible … how
certain aspects of one practice enhance the
other belief system. It gives me ways to ana-
lyze and make choices that promote spiritual
wellbeing because as I said before – critical
pedagogy is a way of life.
Q: In what ways do you think critical pedagogy
could radically transform how we think or
view education in this current cultural
moment – in today’s [2017] political context?
A: Well, we need a more organized body of
critical pedagogy in order to form an inroad
into current political thought. We need it in
order to open more progressive discourse.
Q: Who were the most imaginative critical
thinkers/philosophers/teachers in your life?
A: Generally, no teachers I had engaged with
promoting radicalization. But I was definitely
influenced by Paolo Freire and his work … of
course. And later on I learned a lot from
Cornel West.
Q: Tell me in retrospect about your relationship
with Paulo Freire.
A: I think about Martin Luther King and Malcolm
X – and they were incredibly young … they
both were in the process of an evolution of
consciousness that one can only begin to see
taking place at the time when they died. But
in Freire, who lived much longer, you could
see it! Even as an elderly man he was still
undergoing changes and transformations –
especially around gender, sexism, and con-
cepts like that. It’s funny for me to remember
when I first met him [Freire] because they
tried to keep him away from me at [UC]
307
Santa Cruz. They tried to ban me from the
discussion group. But he invited my voice and
wanted to answer my critiques.
Q: Twenty-plus years later, ‘Teaching to
Transgress’ is still widely taught and highly
influential in college and university class-
rooms across several disciplines – Gender and
Women’s Studies, Education, Ethnic Studies,
and so forth; how does that make you feel?
A: Well, I feel good about that … but sometimes
I experience deep despair when I re-read and
reflect on the book. Who did we [writers,
practitioners/pedagogues, and theorists of
critical pedagogy] educate for critical con-
sciousness? Where are those students now?
Did we reach far enough? I’m filled with a
mixture of sadness and hope. Hope is culti-
vated in the spirit and the academy is limiting
to spiritual work, but it’s a good place for
theory and I see in theory a location for heal-
ing … theory can be radical and life-affirming.
Mostly when I think about the longevity of
Teaching to Transgress and its message, I find
myself awaiting the fulfillment of the prom-
ise of critical pedagogy on a large scale
because it has not yet been fully realized.
EPILOGUE
Since the 20th (now almost 25th) anniversary
of the debut of Teaching to Transgress, bell
hooks continues to do the work of feminist
praxis and ethics. Her more recent work actu-
alizes a rich and extensive application of a
variety of critical pedagogy strategies and
techniques that center dialogue, community
building, and active engagement with multiple
cultural forms. In her continued writing prac-
tice (in multiple outlets) her scholarship mobi-
lizes critical pedagogy techniques to help
understand popular culture from Beyonce’s
‘Lemonade’ to the Amazon Prime show,
Transparent. She has extended her critique to
encompass acclaimed and lauded films, such
as Beasts of the Southern Wild and 12 Years a
Slave. In her residencies at The New School,
she has engaged in dialogue with public schol-
ars, creators, journalists, and celebrities alike,
including Melissa Harris-Perry, Charles Blow,
Janet Mock, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, and
308 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Laverne Cox. hooks published, ‘Dig Deep:
Beyond Lean In’ (hooks, 2013), her critical
response to Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg’s
best-selling women in the workplace mani-
festo, Lean In, online at The Feminist Wire
website (October 28, 2013). hooks gave the
keynote address at the National Women’s
Studies Association’s annual conference in
November 2014, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
hooks was among the Black feminist schol-
ars whose work was honored and highlighted
in a 2016 special issue of Meridians journal
(15:1), dedicated to the scholarship and activ-
ism of social change. The article devoted
to hooks, titled ‘Lessons in Transgression:
#Blackgirlsmatter and the Feminist Classroom’
(Troutman and Jiménez, 2016), combines
hooks’s teaching trilogy with her residency
work (namely her public dialogues) at The
New School, to situate her influence in con-
temporary classrooms and in the lives of
Black womxn students and feminist teachers.
Intergenerational in its approach, this article
also contains a lesson plan for hooks’s work
in high school and college/university settings.
The authors, both teachers, situate themselves
in the continuum of hooks’s powerful work and
legacy to create a piece that truly explores the
transformative potential of combining critical
pedagogy and feminist praxis. hooks contin-
ues to be sought after as a speaker, and has
appeared for two years in a row at the Tucson
Festival of Books, in honor and celebration of
All About Love: New Visions (2000) and its
legacy and continued influence on a new gen-
eration of writers and scholars. In addition to
her appearance at the Festival, hooks partici-
pated in multiple public conversations on top-
ics ranging from Buddhism/Buddhist Studies
to contemporary films like Get Out and I Am
Not Your Negro. These critical community
dialogues were well attended by folks of all
backgrounds and ages: a testament to the pow-
erful legacy of her work and to her status as a
revered and wise elder. To date, her most recent
book, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue
(co-authored by the late scholar and theorist,
Stuart Hall) was published in 2017. The work
of bell hooks remains a vital force and was the
subject of a 2019 New York Times article by
Min Jin Lee, entitled ‘In Praise of bell hooks’,
in which she chronicles her own journey as a
student of bell hooks and as a feminist, woman
of color fiction writer deeply indebted to the
scholarly and intellectual legacy of bell hooks
and her work.
More recently, hooks founded the bell
hooks Institute (the ‘bhi’ for short) in Berea,
Kentucky in collaboration with Berea College,
where she holds the post of Distinguished
Professor. The bell hooks Institute is home to
artifacts from bell’s life, as well as her papers,
artworks she has collected, and other archives.
More importantly, perhaps, is the role of the
bell hooks Institute as an active space of criti-
cal pedagogy centered around critical and
cross-cutting community dialogue; it is a site
for scholarly gatherings, intellectual curios-
ity, and experiential sharing. Some of its more
notable visitors have included Cornel West,
Emma Watson, and Buddhist practitioners
and other artists and writers, as bell advances
her commitment to promoting gatherings
that prioritize trans identity/ies, the celebra-
tion of free, radical, queer men and women,
and pays homage to the sacred and spiritual
in spaces of promise and political transforma-
tion. The bell hooks Institute as an extension
of critical pedagogy and as a site for its appli-
cation and advancement is rooted in a justice-
centered ethic of love. As hooks (2010) reminds
us in Teaching Critical Thinking, ‘to engage
in the practice of love as the foundation of all
social movements for self-determination is the
only way we can create a world that domination
and dominator thinking cannot destroy. Anytime
we do the work of love we are doing the work of
ending domination’ (hooks, 2010: 195).
REFERENCES
Alexander, Michelle. (2012) The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblind-
ness. New York: The New Press.
 STILL TEACHING TO TRANSGRESS
Freire, Paulo. (1970) Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.
Harris-Perry, Melissa V. (2011) Sister Citizen:
Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in
America. Princeton, NJ: Yale University
Press.
hooks, bell. (1994) Teaching to Transgress:
Education as the Practice of Freedom. New
York: Routledge.
hooks, bell. (2000) All About Love: New Visions.
New York: Routledge.
hooks, bell. (2003) Teaching Community: A
Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge.
hooks, bell. (2010) Teaching Critical Thinking:
Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge.
hooks, bell. (October 28, 2013) Dig Deep:
Beyond Lean In. the feminist wire. https://
thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/
hooks, bell & Hall, Stuart. (2017) Uncut Funk:
A Contemplative Dialogue. New York:
Routledge.
Lee, Min Jin. (2019) ‘In Praise of bell hooks’.
New York Times. February 28. https://www.
309
nytimes.com/2019/02/28/books/bell-hooks-
min-jin-lee-aint-i-a-woman.html
Mayer, Jane. (2016) Dark Money: The Hidden
History of the Billionaires Behind the Radical
Right. New York: Anchor Press.
Orelus, Pierre W. & Brock, Rochelle. (2015)
Interrogating Critical Pedagogy: The Voices
of Educators of Color in the Movement. New
York: Routledge.
Perry, Imani. (2014) Lecture. ‘Teaching to Trans-
gress Today: Theory and Practice In and
Outside the Classroom’. The New School bell
hooks Residency. <http://events.newschool.
edu/event/bellhooksTNS_October_Teaching_
to_Transgress_Today#.WzMCIBJKj-Z>
Troutman, Stephanie & Jiménez, Ileana. (2016)
‘Lessons in Transgression: #BlackGirlsMatter
and the Feminist Classroom’. Meridians: femi-
nism, race, transnationalism, 15(1), 7–39.
Troutman, Stephanie, Glover, Crystal P., & Jen-
kins, Toby S. (2018) Culture, Community, and
Educational Success: Reimagining the Invisible
Knapsack. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Ivan Illich and Liberation Theology
Samuel D. Rocha and Martha Sañudo
INTRODUCTION
Who was Ivan Illich? It is easy enough to
confuse him with the protagonist of Leo
Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych.
Unlike Tolstoy’s Ilych, however, Ivan Illich’s
life was not ‘most simple and ordinary and
most terrible’ (Tolstoy, 1909: 10). The latter
may be the subject of some debate among his
critics, but ‘most simple and ordinary’ is a
phrase that no one would apply to the life of
Ivan Illich. Austrian by birth in 1926, he was
educated in Rome, Florence, and Salzburg,
ordained a Roman Catholic priest and made
a Monsignor by age 28, and appointed Vice
Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto
Rico by age 30. The bulk of Illich’s intellec-
tual reputation stems from his years in
Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he ran a lan-
guage school, CIF (Centro Intercultural de
Formación) and then CIDOC (Centro
Intercultural de Documentación), from 1961
to 1976. His 1971 book, Deschooling Society,
32
was of particular and provocative signifi-
cance to educational discourse.
This period of time coincides with the
articulation of Liberation Theology in Latin
America by Gustavo Gutiérrez (2002) in
A Theology of Liberation and, more broadly,
with the enthusiasm for deeper change
brought about in the Catholic Church by the
councils of Medellin and Puebla in 1968 and
1979, respectively. These councils attempted
not only to continue the momentum started in
the Second Vatican Council in 1964, but took
them a step ahead in bringing the Christian
message of salvation into people’s daily real-
ity, particularly by emphasizing the political
vocation of Christians to alleviate poverty and
work for social justice. Theologians in this
tradition include Paulo Freire (who is often
cited as the founder of the Anglophone tradi-
tion of ‘critical pedagogy’) and he, along with
many other theologians, gathered at Illich’s
language school in Cuernavaca during these
years. Illich’s relationship to the Liberation
Theologians was historical and collegial but
 IVAN ILLICH AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY
his theological ideas remained rooted in his
Thomistic training under Jacques Maritain.
For this reason, this chapter’s focus will be
more on Illich while allowing Liberation
Theology to contextualize his ideas. The
ideal chapter for a more fully liberation-
ist theologian would be Freire. However,
Illich’s ecclesial priesthood seems to invite
more overt theological comparisons, and per-
haps for good reason. After Illich voluntarily
closed his center in Cuernavaca in 1976, he
went on to work as an independent scholar
and educator for another three decades, writ-
ing many of his most original works.
One can find many useful historical and
biographical accounts of Illich’s work. Recent
ones include articles by Rosa Bruno-Jofré
and Jon Igelmo Zaldívar (2012) and a recent
book by Todd Hartch (2015), along with the
CBC interviews by David Cayley (1992).
An even wider variety of ­historical and reli-
gious accounts of Liberation Theology exist
as well, including a number of critiques. In
this chapter, by contrast, we will consider
the philosophical significance of Illich life
and thought through a periodic overview in
relation to his most popular educational
book, Deschooling Society (1971), conclud-
ing with parting thoughts on his somewhat
difficult relationship to Liberation Theology
and critical pedagogy.
BEFORE DESCHOOLING
After completing his graduate studies and
being ordained to the Roman Catholic priest-
hood in 1950, Illich left Europe for Princeton
University to study the alchemical works of
the 13th-century Dominican Bishop and
Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, Albert
Magnus. Soon after his arrival in New Jersey,
Illich discovered, and fell in love with, the
first wave of Puerto Rican immigrants set-
tling into the northern Manhattan neighbor-
hood of Washington Heights in New York
City. He left his scholastic work behind and
311
requested to be transferred to do pastoral
work in Washington Heights; his request was
eventually accepted. His support of the
emerging Puerto Rican community in New
York City was such that by 1956 he was
made Vice Rector of the Catholic University
of Puerto Rico and moved to San Juan,
Puerto Rico. It was there that Illich first con-
fronted the realities of schooling in Latin
America. It was also there where Illich began
to think through these issues by dialoguing
with radical educational theorist Everett
Reimer. Reimer’s book, School is Dead: An
essay on alternatives in Education, was also
published in 1971, to somewhat less acclaim
than Illich’s Deschooling Society.
This very brief and partial biographical
progression carries important clues about
Illich, offering us insight into the trajectory
and motivations behind his trenchant cri-
tiques of schooling and modern institutions.
It especially clarifies the negative point that,
initially, Illich’s interests were not primarily
focused on, or related to, educational or insti-
tutional questions in any direct sense. It may
be the case that one can find an oblique or
implied relation to education and schooling
in Illich’s early studies, but it is not contro-
versial to assert that his early interest in crys-
tallography and alchemy, along with studies
in Thomistic theology and philosophy, does
not bear any immediate association or appli-
cation to schools or society. This negative
point also reveals the more positive reality
that Illich’s interest in education, like his
affection for the Puerto Rican community,
emerged from his personal encounter and
communion with people. In the Americas –
from Washington Heights to San Juan – Illich
found a new passion that would eventually
replace his academic interests and even his
public ministry as a priest.
A similarly noteworthy point from this
short biographical account is that Illich
did not bring his intellectual pursuits from
Europe to bear on the social challenges he
encountered in Latin America – his initial
personal motivation was to conduct archival
312 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
studies. That is, he did not export himself
from his native Europe as a colonial mission-
ary or an intellectual philanthropist to Latin
America. To the contrary, Illich’s response to
the social demands of the Americas forced
him to exchange his scholastic studies for the
administrative tasks of vice rectorship and,
after he was dismissed, took him to the task of
operating a language school in Cuernavaca,
Mexico. In other words, Illich’s European
intellectual formation served him well in
many ways, but it did not predetermine or
even significantly inform the signature social
critique he became known for. His more
scholarly and historical works would emerge
later, after Cuernavaca. His social criticism
was built from the ground up after contact
with the social realities of the Americas.
This account of his formative studies
being detached from his pastoral work in
the Americas explains many of the para-
doxes of his work, including his somewhat
tense and even disinterested attitude toward
Liberation Theology and other movements
in Latin America during that time, including
the pedagogical work of Paulo Freire. Illich
was neither an insider, in the sense of being
a Latin American by birth and education, nor
an outsider, by fully accepting his new life in
Latin America which allowed him to sternly
criticize outsiders’ naive ‘good intentions’
and desire to impose modern myths of devel-
opment from industrialized countries into
Latin America. This might help us to under-
stand both the negative and positive terms of
what one might consider his particular rela-
tion to critical pedagogy to be within the radi-
cal pedagogical ideas of his time. This also
suggests the degree to which Illich’s thought,
perhaps more than anyone else, remains enig-
matic and largely misunderstood or ignored
within educational discourse in his own time
to this very day.
There is also an important theological
insight we can take from this account of
Illich’s newfound passion for the Americas
during his years as a young priest. His sud-
den change of direction from Princeton to
Washington Heights to San Juan, bears all the
marks of a profound experience of spiritual
conversion. That is, Illich’s transition from
exegetical studies to pastoral involvement to
educational administration was not merely
a result of new, redirected interests. The
Puerto Rican Catholic community was not
an interesting anthropological or sociologi-
cal phenomenon for Illich to study. He was
not a social scientist. Rather, his encounter
and communion with people and their social
problems transformed Illich as a person and
as a priest. It was nothing short of a religious
conversion. Moreover, Illich was not so much
transformed through the renewal of his mind;
he was transformed through the renewal of
being-with the people of the Americas.
This transformative theme of personal con-
version can be readily found within the tenor
and rhetoric of Illich’s works. However, if
one forgets his personal experience of con-
version, one can easily mistake his works for
an abrasive and detached evangelicalism. For
instance, in ‘To Hell with Good Intentions’,
his provocative address to the Conference
on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP)
in Cuernavaca, Mexico on April 20, 1968,
Illich’s rhetoric is in the prophetic, hyper-
bolic style of a jeremiad. He implores and
convicts his audience:
I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce
exercising the power which being an American
gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, con-
sciously and humbly give up the legal right you have
to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am here
to challenge you to recognize your inability, your
powerlessness and your incapacity to do the ‘good’
which you intended to do. (Illich, 1968: para. 34)
This prophetic passage is not only reminis-
cent of the Old Testament prophets, it is also
deeply Pauline, calling these altruistic volun-
teers from the United States to ‘recognize
your inability, your powerlessness’, to ‘vol-
untarily renounce’, and ‘give up’ ‘freely,
consciously and humbly’ (ibid.: para. 34).
The fire and brimstone – Illich uses the
word hell theologically – of this speech is
remarkable in many ways, but its general
 IVAN ILLICH AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY
critique can be read in fuller detail in his
1967 essay, ‘The Seamy Side of Charity’,
first published in America magazine, also
addressing the concrete missionary effort to
aid Latin America by the Catholic Church in
the United States and Canada. In this essay,
Illich’s strong words were not only directed
outwardly toward the United States through a
critique of secular social development initia-
tives, rather, we find Illich as a vocal critic
of the charitable initiatives of the Roman
Catholic Church. As we will see, this puts
Illich’s critical voice in concert with the spirit
of Liberation Theology of Latin American
during this time but in a somewhat idiosyn-
cratic and even dissonant way.
His essay ‘The Vanishing Clergyman’, first
published in The Critic of Chicago in 1967,
delves further into his internal critique of the
state of the Roman Church, specifically, the
state of the Catholic priesthood. Here the pro-
phetic rhetoric carries the additional aspect of
being deeply futuristic, with Illich rhetorically
foreseeing a number of radical changes in the
future Catholic Church’s organizational com-
position from pastoral clergy to theological
instruction and beyond. It is also notable that
in this essay Illich constantly groups together
philanthropic organizations with multina-
tional corporations like General Motors and
Chase Bank. Instead of making demands or
placing explicit critiques, Illich works in an
aggressive yet oblique way through sugges-
tion and prediction. To many, Illich’s future
church was a hyperbolic expression of his
desire for ecclesial destruction, but in many
respects it was a return to a simpler ideal, not
so different from other notable reformists,
like Francis of Assisi.
Both of the aforementioned essays were
later published in his 1969 collection,
Celebration of Awareness, that in many ways
preceded and prepared his readership for
Deschooling Society in 1971. This book, like
all of his works of social criticism, began as
separate essays and speeches. Today’s explo-
sion of digital think-piece literature, blogs,
and other essayistic popular and journalistic
313
outlets would find Illich’s style extremely
accessible. His chief concern in these works
was to communicate as broadly as possible.
This tone, when added to the specific content
of Deschooling Society, firmly places Illich
into the category of ‘critical pedagogy’, and
in what follows we will outline why by look-
ing to the text that is most commonly placed
within that tradition’s canon.
DESCHOOLING
Few books are so fortunate to be able to
convey in their very title a provocative, new-
fangled worldview. With Ivan Illich’s
Deschooling Society it seems that the title
says it all. So why read the whole book?
Moreover, ask anyone to read a book with
‘deschooling’ in its title and you will often
find a receptive mind with a cheeky facial
expression. How enticing to know that some-
one a long time ago in 1971 has already
attempted to rock the boat of a recurrently
loathed institution!
However, just as an auspicious title has its
rewards, so it has its downfalls. In this case the
drawback has been that many believe to know
the content of Illich’s book, by just interpret-
ing its title. Many progressive minded educa-
tors and concerned scholars around the globe
will recognize the existence of Illich’s book,
but know little more than its title. What is
interpreted by its title varies, but most likely it
would be something such as ‘that schools have
to be eliminated’, ‘that schools are part of the
social problem instead of being its solution’,
‘that schools prevent social advancement’,
‘that schools require a reform’, etc. Yet, the
book contradicts these quick interpretations
and offers many relevant considerations to
today’s pedagogical discussions.
Deschooling Society is divided into seven
chapters, and in most editions (and there have
indeed been many and in many languages)
it is around 100 pages. The first chapter,
‘Why the School Must Be Disestablished’,
314 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
sets the context of the whole enterprise.
Firstly, it tells you what it means by
‘schooled’, which mainly refers to a person’s
participation in an institution, which, either
surreptitiously or straightforwardly, forces
that person to confuse an institutional process
with what are real human values and human
ends. Thus, Illich drastically asserts that
through attending school a pupil confuses:
teaching with learning, grade advancement with
education, a diploma with competence, and flu-
ency with the ability to say something new. His
imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place
of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health
care, social work for the improvement of commu-
nity life, police protection for safety, military poise
for national security, the rat race for productive
work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and
creative endeavor are defined as little more than
the performance of the institutions which claim to
serve these ends, and their improvement is made
to depend on allocating more resources to the
management of hospitals, schools, and other
agencies in question. (Illich, 1971: 1)
The problem with ‘schooling’, for Illich, is
thus set clearly from the very start.
‘Schooling’ is undesirable because it means
the institutionalization of values (which is in
itself controversial), left in the hands of tech-
nocrats accustomed to diagnose and control
processes, with no entrusted concern for the
promotion of creativity and personal inter­
actions that would lead to people’s autonomy
and liberation.
This opening chapter also states several
times that what happens in schools must be
taken as a paradigm of what happens in other
institutions. Among the more succinct summa-
ries is this line, ‘Not only education but social
reality itself has been schooled’ (ibid.: 2).
School was a perfect example for Illich in his
time because nation-states in the 60s were
pushing the political agenda of ‘universal
education’ (ibid.: xix) as a panacea of all
social problems. The claim, popular at the
time and still very much in use by contem-
porary politicians, was that education would
solve the gap of social and economic inequal-
ities. This declaration was, and still is, seldom
an invitation to think together how we can
bring about education for all and particularly
for the unprivileged, but rather functions as
a discussion about how much money should
be poured into the institutions that manage
education. Illich’s focus of criticism is the
institutionalization of values by a bureau-
cracy that monopolizes and manipulates the
social imagination and sets standards of what
is to be socially expected and appreciated.
Therefore, to follow Illich’s argument thor-
oughly means to be an axiomatic critic of
every single institution, not only of schools.
Governments, churches, hospitals, NGOs,
clubs, whatever association of humans there
is that creates a language and an environment
in which humans lose the distinction between
processes and ends, must be held suspect
according to Illich.
This chapter also discloses the alterna-
tive that Illich has in mind to the ‘schooled’
society. That is, in this book there is no ques-
tion that education is a value, since learning
new information or skills allows humans
to display more fully their potential. Later
on, (see, for instance, his 1973 book Tools
for Conviviality) Illich would question the
extreme weight society puts into learning
and education and looks into the historicity
of this overestimated value of education. But
in this book, his interest is in showing that
the institution of schooling is an inefficient
and sometimes pernicious way of packag-
ing education. What alternatives can we
think of? In this chapter Illich briefly depicts
two ­alternatives that he develops later in his
chapter 6, ‘Learning Webs’, matching skilled
teachers with people wanting to learn a skill
and fostering the creativity of people gath-
ered around one common interest.
In chapter 2, entitled ‘Phenomenology
of School’, with philosophical purity, Illich
tells us that instead of theorizing and arguing
over what a school is or searching into the
history of the school system, he will describe
how the school appears a phenomenon. His
description of a school is as follows: ‘the age-
specific, teacher-related process of requiring
 IVAN ILLICH AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY
full-time attendance at an obligatory cur-
riculum’ (1971: 25–6). The chapter, then, is
an analysis of the premises contained in this
definition. Regarding the concept of ‘age-
specific’, Illich asserts that we have become
accustomed to the idea that ‘children go to
school’, but he immediately reminds us that
the category of childhood didn’t exist until the
19th century and its development is tied within
the development of industrialization and the
institutionalization of education. In other
words, he suggests that children were made
for school and schools were made for the
newly invented child. Contrasting the belief
that children need to be schooled, he asserts
that all ages need education and we must ques-
tion the imposition made to infants of meekly
obeying a school teacher. With respect to the
relationship between teachers and pupils,
Illich affirms that most of what we have actu-
ally learned can be tracked to experiences
outside of the schooling system and learnt
often in spite of the teachers; so why insist
that learning must be done through teaching?
About full-time attendance, Illich notes that
teachers spend so much time with infants that
they end up playing many more roles than
educators; they become custodians, preachers,
and therapists. The fault with playing so many
roles, Illich argues, is that the authoritative fig-
ure of the teacher becomes ubiquitous:
Under the authoritative eye of the teacher, several
orders of value collapse into one. The distinctions
between morality, legality, and personal worth are
blurred and eventually eliminated. Each transgression
is made to be felt as a multiple offense. The offender
is expected to feel that he has broken a rule, that he
has behaved immorally, and that he has let himself
down. A pupil who adroitly obtains assistance on an
exam is told that he is an outlaw, morally corrupt,
and personally worthless. (Illich, 1971: 32)
Finally, about an obligatory curriculum,
Illich shows that the content taught in school
is so removed from real life that it creates a
‘primitive, magical and deadly serious’
(ibid.: 32) environment that prevents pupils
from understanding how what is learned can
be of use to real adult life.
315
In chapter 3, ‘The Ritualization of Pro­
gress’, Illich outlines a remarkable charac-
terization of the rituals inside and around
schooling, that allows the perpetration of
prejudice and discrimination even by the best
teachers. To Illich, the school system:
performs the threefold function common to power-
ful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously
the repository of society’s myth, the institutionaliza-
tion of the myth’s contradictions, and the locus of
the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities
between myth and reality. (Illich, 1971: 37)
Phrases like the one quoted make the reader
wonder what will remain standing after Illich
has done away with so many of our accepted
beliefs. Illich illustrates how we have created
myths of the need of schools, of the possibility
of measuring the unmeasurable, of believing
we have a formula for learning difficulties, of
progress, of class and equality, etc. According
to Illich, we have then ritualized these myths to
such extent that it is impossible to stand outside
their scope to challenge them; we are enslaved
to believe that outside the school system there
is no salvation. We are trapped in the schooling
system and its rituals hide the ways in which
we are indoctrinated into their system.
In chapter 4, ‘The Institutional Spectrum’,
Illich attempts to soften the fears of the reader
who may suspect that indeed nothing will
remain standing. In this analysis, Illich con-
fesses that some institutions are worse than
others. An Illichian spectrum is something
to be discerned; in this discernment, hope for
the survival of institutions enters the scene.
He tells us that on the right extreme of the
spectrum is the ‘manipulative institutions’,
whereas on the left extreme, we can place
the ‘convivial institutions’ (1971: 54). The
manipulative institutions sell their clients the
idea that they are being helped or protected in
return for their money, freedom, and even their
lives. These institutions, such as the military,
prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and
orphan asylums ‘provide their clients with the
destructive self-image of the psychotic, the
overaged, or the waif, and provide a rationale
316 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
for the existence of entire professions’ (ibid.:
54). ‘Convivial institutions’ such as subway
lines, public markets, parks, etc., are institu-
tions used without us having to be convinced
in advance of their advantages. We need rules,
Illich claims, to protect these institutions, but
not rules that manipulate our desire to con-
sume them or participate in them. The former
institutions are addictive: the latter ones are
liberating. Now, the spectrum means that there
is a continuum: institutions can develop prac-
tices that takes them from the left or from the
right to the center, or to the opposite extreme
from which one may have naively consid-
ered that they belonged. Take the case of the
highway system that Illich mentions. It would
seem that the highway system belonged to
the left spectrum as a convivial institution,
but Illich points out that since it is a system
that privileges private cars, it becomes the
paragon of what right-wing thinkers’ claim:
the need for individuality, speed, and fashion.
Schooling has similarly deceiving elements;
it appears to be a system open to anyone, but
actually it is open only to those with either
credentials to teach or in need of instruction.
This leads Illich to conclude that:
[s]chools are not only to the right of highways and
cars; they belong near the extreme of the institu-
tional spectrum occupied by total asylums. Even
the producers of body counts kill only bodies.
By making men abdicate the responsibility for their
own growth, school leads many to a kind of
­spiritual suicide. (Illich, 1971: 60)
Chapter 5, ‘Irrational Consistencies’, consists
of a short seven-page essay that Illich delivered
at a meeting of the American Educational
Research Association in New York on February
6, 1971. Its inclusion breaks the flow of the
book and repeats with different analogies and
allusions, ideas that are hinted in the previous
four chapters. He points out to educational
researchers that little will be gained for educa-
tion by elaborating novel programs and inno-
vative packaging of the same product: an
institutionalized process of instruction. His call
is for a radical movement to deschool society
and start research on alternative structures to
create environments in which each person can
define themselves ‘by learning and by contrib-
uting in the learning of others’ (ibid.: 71).
In chapter 6, ‘Learning Webs’, Illich pre-
sents unambiguously what he sees as alterna-
tive to the schooling system. What is at stake
is essentially a social upheaval: ‘a new style
of educational relationship between man and
his environment’ (ibid.: 72). The empha-
sis, Illich asserts, must shift from teaching
to facilitating self-motivated learning. This
would imply the overturn of deeply rooted
ways of organizing society: no imposed cur-
riculum, no certifications of completion of
studies, no imposed definition of progress.
Here one becomes aware of Illich’s ambitious
scheme: deschooling amounts to a politi-
cal revolution more incisive than any other
known so far. Deschooling aims at destroy-
ing the grip that the market economy has on
all of us: capitalists, communists, Indigenous
cooperatives alike. By proposing a different
social arrangement, Illich believes that we
will be able to successfully oppose the con-
temporary belief that we all are consumers
in a world of commodities. His proposal is
to liberate humans from these clutches, free-
ing them to search for the autonomy and
growth each one desires. The different social
arrangements that Illich proposes are encom-
passed in proposing four webs for facilitat-
ing learning: the first to allocate educational
objects throughout communities (i.e., objects
that can be manipulated by anyone want-
ing to understand their inner mechanisms or
logic). These objects can be in any public or
private space, ensuring of course free access
to anyone, and may include activities and
games alluring people passing by to under-
stand their inner workings. The second web
of learning is to interconnect specifically
skilled people with people desiring to acquire
those specific skills. Illich seems to foresee
the possibilities of webpages, Facebook, and
blogs that would bring people with com-
mon interests of learning and passing skills
together. The third web is a wide variety of
clubs where learning happens peer to peer.
 IVAN ILLICH AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY
The fourth web of learning is to bring back
the figure of a master, a true leader of knowl-
edge, that may create a master–disciple rela-
tionship that is mutually rewarding and an
end in itself. These four webs of learning
include administrative, technological, and
legal arrangements of a totally different char-
acter than ones of the schooling system. After
the Internet, YouTube, TED Talks, Coursera,
MOOCs, Makerspaces, etc., one can say that
Illich was a prophet of the democratization of
education present today, but, as we will see,
he was not naïve about the extent to which
‘the system’ is able to gobble up any chal-
lenge to its unsatisfied consumerist stomach.
In the final chapter, ‘Rebirth of Epimethean
Man’, Illich retells the myth of Prometheus,
preferring the virtues of Prometheus’ brother
Epimetheus, who married Pandora. This
mythic storywork bears out the distinction
between the Epimethean uncertainty of hope
(trust in the goodness of nature experienced as
a gift) and the Promethean certainty of expec-
tation (reliance on results which are planned
and controlled by man). He closes the chap-
ter and the book searching for a name: ‘We
need a name for those who value hope above
expectations. We need a name for those who
love people more than products … We need a
name for those who love the earth on which
we can meet the other’ (Illich, 1971: 115–16).
Illich ends this search in homiletic fashion:
‘I suggest that these brothers and sisters be
called Epimethean men’ (ibid.: 116). In final
analysis, Deschooling Society is nothing short
of a call for personal and social conversion
and transformation from expectation to hope,
from greed to generosity, from cynicism to
love for the person, the earth, and each other.
AFTER DESCHOOLING
After the publication of Deschooling Society
in 1971, Illich published a short follow-up
essay titled ‘After Deschooling, What?’ in
1973. This essay first appeared as a pamphlet
317
distributed by the Writers and Readers
Publishing Cooperative (WRPC), was repub-
lished as a book with an introduction by Ian
Lister, and was later published by Harper &
Row in 1973 under the same title, along with
nine essays by educational scholars like Neil
Postman, Maxine Greene, and Herbert Gintis.
Many of these essays are fiercely and even
personally critical of Illich and dismissive of
his idea of deschooling. Greene’s ­contribution,
‘And It Still Is News’, is notably cavalier about
Illich’s popular ideas. Others, by contrast, are
enthusiastic but nonetheless cautious.
It is unfortunate that most of the schol-
ars and intellectuals in the follow-up to
Deschooling Society so poorly understood
Illich’s original proposal and appear to have
not read his titular essay of the collection
either. In ‘After Deschooling, What?’, Illich
cautions using the term ‘deschooling’ as an
empty slogan, added to the heap of slogans
and other empty rhetoric well known within
educational discourse. To avoid this, he sug-
gests a new concept of learning that closely
resembles many of the critiques made by
Paulo Freire. Illich also critiques the notion
of ‘free schooling’, charging it as another
form of elitism and echoing in this case
many of the critiques of constructivism made
by Hannah Arendt in her 1954 essay, ‘The
Crisis of Education’ (Arendt, 2006). After
this follow-up publication, Illich wrote noth-
ing in English about education until 1976,
the same year in which he closed his own
school in Cuernavaca. He did, however, pub-
lish Diálogo in Spanish in 1975 with Paulo
Freire. In this book, Freire and Illich both
critically analyze their respective concepts
of ‘deschooling’ and ‘conscientization’. (For
Frierian scholars, it is notable that Freire has
no issue with using the Spanish term ‘con-
scientización’ in this text, a term that many
Anglophone scholars gnostically insist can-
not be translated from Portuguese.)
In 1976, the WRPC published two
essays, one written by Illich and another he
co-authored with Etienne Verne, under the
title Imprisoned in the Global Classroom.
318 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
In this slim volume, Illich does not merely
warn against the overdetermination of
deschooling; he aggressively attacks the
embrace of deschooling by industry and
describes this as ‘a most dangerous and well-
concealed trap’ (1976: 12) for deschool-
ing. He continues by asserting that ‘[a]s an
embodiment of schooling, a permanent edu-
cation policy will never be anything but a trap
for any plan for deschooling society’ (ibid.:
13). Illich again echoes Arendt’s 1954 essay,
critiquing all efforts to extend education into
adulthood as forms of ‘puerilization’ (ibid.:
14) for adults to make them more docile and
malleable by the interests of the powerful. In
this critique we find Illich making a classic
argument familiar to critical pedagogues.
Illich’s work continued into the 1980s and
the themes of education reappeared often, but
not under the terms of a pet term – deschool-
ing, or otherwise. In 1988, he published with
Barry Sanders ABC: The Alphabetization of
the Popular Mind, where they argue:
Our efforts to understand the effect that parch-
ment and seal, ink and pen had on worldview
eight hundred years ago led us to the discovery of
a paradox: literacy is threatened as much by
modern education as by modern communication –
and yet, adverse as the side effects of compulsory
literacy have been for most of our contemporaries,
literacy is still the only bulwark against the dis­
solution of language into ‘information systems’.
(Sanders and Illich, 1988: Back cover)
This study and its argument does not so
much develop Illich’s deschooling work of
the 1970s as it goes deeper into historical
roots of the problems that Illich outlined a
decade earlier. This particular theme is
repeated by Illich’s 1993 In the Vineyard
of the Text, a commentary on Hugh of
St. Victor’s 1128 Didascalicon, a text that
Illich claims to be the first book written on
the subject of reading. This interest in a
recovery of lost arts of literacy is not only of
historical interest to Illich, he refers to them
as a way to better diagnose the present
threats he sees in modern technology and
society at large. While he does not overly
rely on his term deschooling, and even
expresses his doubts of its value, Illich’s
thought continued to develop and renew
itself until he passed away at the age of 76 in
December of 2002.
CONCLUSION
Liberation is a thread that knits Illich with
the philosophical (see Enrique Dussel) and
theological movements of Latin America.
Liberation Theology and the notion of criti-
cal pedagogy that was coined by Anglophone
readers of Freire can be seen through a
common idea of liberation that is recogniza-
ble both in the historical period and in the
actual ideas of Illich’s life and thought. This
refers to the liberation of a person’s spirit not
only from the chains of a system, an institu-
tion, or an ideology, but also the liberation
that allows a mind to positively engage with
a social conception of justice broadly con-
ceived. For instance, taking on board the
known distinction of Isaiah Berlin of nega-
tive freedom (liberation from) and positive
freedom (liberation for), Illich’s work
reminds us that liberating a person from
schooling is only the first step on the way to
engaging people with the real question of
what it would mean to be a truly free person
in today’s society. There is no Illichian free-
dom without social justice in this formula-
tion, and thus the discussion of ideas geared
toward unmasking social injustices, in any
setting, not only in pedagogy, must inevita-
bly lead us to questioning how are we to best
organize society to diminish this injustice.
These ideas may not be rooted in the exact
same theological tradition that was born in
Medellin and Puebla, but its deeper roots
reflect the common idea of social justice that
grew out of Catholic social teaching from the
19th century forward. While this has not
been the most well-known tradition within
social justice efforts in critical pedagogy and
the secular field of educational research, its
 IVAN ILLICH AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY
relative absence is historic and anachronistic
for an approach that often prides itself on
contextualized and historicized knowledge.
For Illich, this work was never to be done
on the strength of strong words or durable
institutions alone. First and foremost, his
life and thought was conceived in the flux of
social relations in and between Europe and the
Americas. These ideas were lived through his
vocation and shown through the marks of his
deep and dynamic conversion into a deeper
and deeper search for the moral and spiritual
significance that so many then and now feel
to be desperately missing. This anchored
his social criticism and distinguished his
approach from all the others of his time. We
have been unable to mention the many lan-
guages Illich spoke or the full variety of his
works that studied labor and city planning,
critiqued urbanism and technology, analyzed
the economy of gender, and satirized modern
professions, healthcare, and more. Suffice it
to say that among all the eligible ouvres of
radical thought during this period, there may
be none as unique and direct in its intellec-
tual, political, and spiritual powers.
REFERENCES
Arendt, H. (2006). The crisis in education.
In H. Arendt (Ed.), Between past and future
(pp.170–193). London: Penguin. (Originally
published in 1954)
Bruno-Jofré, R., & Zaldívar, J. I. (2012). Ivan
Illich’s late critique of deschooling society:
‘I was largely barking up the wrong tree’.
­Educational Theory, 62(5), 574–592.
Cayley, D. (1992). Ivan Illich in conversation.
Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press Ltd.
Freire, P., & Illich, I. (1975). Diálogo: análisis
critico de la ‘desescolarizacion’ y ‘concienti-
zacion’ en la conyuntura actual del sistema
319
educativo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones
Búsgueda.
Gutiérrez, G. (2002). A theology of liberation:
History, politics, and salvation. Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books. (Originally published in 1973)
Hartch, T. (2015). The prophet of Cuernavaca:
Ivan Illich and the crisis of the west. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Hugh of St. Victor (1961). The Didascalicon
of Hugh of St. Victor: A medieval guide to
the arts (J. Taylor, Trans.). New York, NY:
Columbia University Press. (Original work
­
published in 1128)
Illich, I. (1968, April 20). To hell with good inten-
tions. An address presented at the Conference
on InterAmerican Student Projects in Cuerna-
vaca, Mexico. Retrieved November 21,
2019 from http://www.uvm.edu/~jashman/
CDAE195_ESCI375/To%20Hell%20with%20
Good%20Intentions.pdf
Illich, I. (1969). Celebration of awareness.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company.
Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. New York,
NY: Harper & Row.
Illich, I. (1973). After deschooling, what? In A.
Gartner, C. Greer, & F. Riessman (Eds.), After
deschooling, what? (pp. 1–28). New York,
NY: Harper & Row.
Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. New York,
NY: Harper & Row.
Illich, I. (1993). In the vineyard of the text:
A commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon.
­Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Illich, I., & Verne, E. (1976). Imprisoned in the
global classroom. London: Writers and Read-
ers Publishing Cooperative.
Reimer, E. (1971). School is dead: An essay on
alternatives in education. Harmondsworth,
London: Penguin.
Sander, B., & Illich, I. (1988). ABC: Alphabetiza-
tion of the popular mind. New York, NY:
Marion Boyars Publishers.
Tolstoy, L. (1909). The death of Ivan Ilych. New
York, NY: H. Wolff. (Original work published in
1886) Retrieved October 25, 2019 from
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.
c080984238&view=1up&seq=10

From South African
Black Theology and Freire to
‘Teaching for Resistance’:
The Work of Basil Moore
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AS
TRAVELING THEORY
I would like to suggest another way to go forward
towards a new economy of power relations, a way
which is more empirical, more directly related to
our present situation, and which implies more rela-
tions between theory and practice. It consists of
taking the forms of resistance against different
forms of power as a starting point. (Foucault,
1982a: 210–11)
I understand critical pedagogy as a transna-
tional educational social movement that
brings together concerns for pedagogy with a
commitment to more socially just societies.
All of us who advocate for the project of criti-
cal pedagogy, encounter a version of critical
pedagogy ‘thanks to the nature, the assump-
tions and the professions of some people, but
also thanks to a number of accidental circum-
stances such as the specific nature of the local
milieu, friends and so on’ (Havel, 1986: 85).
In my case, this occurred through an intro-
duction to the writings of Paulo Freire, and
33
Robert Hattam
meeting Basil Moore. Of course, we read and
interpret texts from the massive critical peda-
gogy archive, but then our interpretations of
those texts, and what we do with them in our
practice, are most often reliant on the com-
munities in which we work, and especially on
our teachers; those teachers who live and
teach amongst us, in our time and place. As
such, critical pedagogy can be considered,
borrowing from Said, as a ‘traveling theory’:
Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and
theories travel – from person to person, from situ-
ation to situation, from one period to another.
Cultural and intellectual life are usually nourished
and often sustained by this circulation of ideas,
and whether it takes the form of acknowledged or
unconscious influence, creative borrowing, or
wholesale appropriation, the movement of ideas
and theories from one place to another is both a
fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of
intellectual activity. (Said, 1983: 226)
Critical pedagogy travels ‘from person to
person, from situation to situation, from one
period to another’, and ‘from one culture to
 THE WORK OF BASIL MOORE
another’ (ibid.: 226). This movement ‘neces-
sarily involves processes of representation
and institutionalization’ (ibid.: 226) that are
‘different from those at the point of origin’
(ibid.: 226). Critical pedagogy encounters
conditions of acceptance and/or resistance,
making possible its introduction or tolera-
tion. The fully or partly accommodated
theory [of critical pedagogy] is always to
‘some extent transformed by its new uses, its
new position in a new time and place’ (ibid.:
227). Said (1983) also warns us of the too
easy reflex of proclaiming that ‘all borrow-
ings and interpretations are misreadings and
misinterpretations’ (ibid.: 236). Such a view
means that no theory could ever be passed on
from one generation to another and therefore
all traditions would be untranslatable.
Applying this idea of ‘traveling theory’ to
critical pedagogy thus rejects the view that
transmission of practice lineages involves a
‘slavish copying’ and also rejects a view of
translation as a series of misreadings and
misinterpretations. Instead, and from the
outset, I want to work from the assumption
that critical pedagogy can only be under-
stood as a traveling theory involved in a crea-
tive process that attends to changing historical
circumstances, and often in a different place.
In this chapter I pay homage to one of my
teachers of critical pedagogy, Basil Moore.
The chapter will describe some of Basil’s
biography and briefly introduce what I call
his critical sensibility, which I experienced
as ways of ‘reading the world and the word’
(Freire, 1985a). By way of a very brief intro-
duction though, my first encounter with Basil
was in a Master’s of Education programme
in the late 1980s. I had heard about him and
had fortuitously been taught by his friend and
colleague Colin Collins, as my Sociology
lecturer during my preparation for teaching.
Colin had introduced me to Freire’s (1972a)
book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I learned
that both Basil and Colin were South African
anti-apartheid activists, both ex-priests and
living in exile, and in Basil’s case, because
he had been banned by the South African
321
government at the time. I entered Basil’s
programme being convinced that I was a pro-
gressive teacher. I can remember especially
the first of Basil’s lectures. I was being forced
into the back of my seat with the power of
Basil’s oratory. It wasn’t that he actually
shouted but the power of his words and his
argument was a very visceral experience. His
analysis of the ways that social structures
produce our everyday reality was always
very compelling. I can also remember that I
was deeply depressed for about four months
in the first year of that programme. Basil had
seriously unsettled my sense of satisfaction
with my own teaching. My own credentials
as a progressive teacher were being seriously
questioned and hence my own identity as
a teacher was on the line. In thinking back
about those feelings of deep dissatisfaction,
many years after, I have concluded that such
feelings provided me with a space to work
out what I was going to do with the realisa-
tion that there is no outside of the way power
works. I was one of those teachers who des-
perately wanted to believe that I was in some
power free zone, that everything I did was
inherently good because I believed my inten-
tions were good. But then of course, it is not
that simple, is it? Anyway, as a consequence
of working with Basil that year, it was clear
to me that we are all implicated in the way
our society works; we are all responsible in
some way for poverty, or the oppression of
Indigenous people, and so on; and we can’t
let ourselves off the hook because we’re
good people. As a teacher I was implicated
in the reproductive functioning of schooling.
Coming from a working-class background I
always knew that, but then, how you actually
interrupt that process in meaningful ways is
easier said than done. I guess Basil threw out
a challenge to all of his students: what are
you going to do about it?
The chapter has four sections. After this
introduction, the second section is a portrait,
or lightly edited extract, from an interview
I conducted with Basil about a decade ago.
The section provides an account of Basil’s
322 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
notion of a liberation Black theology for a
post-apartheid South Africa. On drafting
portraits as a textual strategy in academic
writing, I draw on Marcus’ (1998) argu-
ment for innovation in the poetic dimension
of research practice. ‘Poetics’ here refers to
a site for innovation and critique about eth-
nographic writing. Marcus argues for ‘messy
texts’ (1998: 198) or polyvocal or polyphonic
texts, or put simply, ‘saying more by letting
“others” say it’ (ibid.: 36); one of the experi-
ments in messy polyvocal texts is the use of
portraits (Santaro et al., 2001; Smyth et al.,
2004; Smyth and McInerney, 2013). The
third section outlines very briefly an account
of Basil’s development of his version of
‘teaching for resistance’ in Adelaide, South
Australia, in the 1980–90s. This section too
has been drafted out of an interview tran-
script. I conclude the chapter by proposing
that Basil might be understood to be a limi-
nal servant, to borrow from McLaren (1988),
whose key work has been the transmission of
a critical sensibility that I argue allows us to
think about what is central for critical peda-
gogy as traveling theory that works across
time and place.
LIBERATION THEOLOGY FOR A
POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
(FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH BASIL)
Basil: I suppose my politico-intellectual
journey starts about 1961 when I was elected
the National President of the National Union
of Students (NUSAS) in South Africa that
advocated universal franchise. The NUSAS
was very largely a White English speaking
organisation, because the Afrikaaner Whites
were in a separate pro-nationalist student
movement, and Black students were involved
in the youth movements of the African
National Congress (ANC) and the Pan
African Congress. At the time, I was training
for the Ministry and being funded by the
Methodist Church. In 1967, I was studying
for a doctorate and at the same time I was
appointed Chaplain to Rhodes University,
Grahamstown. Along with Colin Collins and
others, we formed the University Christian
Movement (UCM), a non-racial organisation
that was also radically ecumenical and
included Protestant and Catholic members.
In 1967, we decided to hold the very first
conference of the UCM in Grahamstown, and
because we wanted it to be non-racial, we had
to find a place where everybody could live
together. At the same time, as the NUSAS
were meeting, the University wasn’t allowed
to accommodate the Black students, so they
had to go to the township. As a consequence,
Steve Biko led a walkout of the Black
­students from the NUSAS and they moved
across to the UCM gathering. So suddenly,
all the Black students who’d come to the
NUSAS joined up with us and became part
of the UCM, and that brought Steve Biko in.
Then I was appointed President of the UCM,
which was intended to be ecumenical, and I
suppose a fairly liberal progressive humani-
tarian organisation.
But the government then banned the
ANC and the Pan African Congress. So the
Black students all move across to the UCM,
because it’s the only place they can actu-
ally meet. And so suddenly I find myself
President of what I expected to be a sort of
White liberal Christian organisation and find
I’m actually National Secretary of a Black
majority organisation who have not got a lib-
eral progressive agenda at all. Their agenda
is liberation politics. And for a couple of
years, the UCM tried to juggle the sort of lib-
eral, humanitarian, existential stuff, mostly
focused on universities. But increasingly
the UCM became a more activist oriented
organisation and developed a political project
around three themes: literacy, public health
and Black theology. By way of an example,
the literacy programme evolved in response
to the huge levels of illiteracy in the African
population. And if you were going to look for
an adult literacy theorist who was going to
give a liberation orientation there was really
 THE WORK OF BASIL MOORE
nowhere to go other than Paulo Freire. In
which case, literacy education is not just a
skills approach; it had to be integral to our
liberation struggle. At around the same time
some of us attended a conference of the UCM
formed in the United States. Our colleagues
in the United States were also involved in
advancing a liberal humanist theology, but
their project was also being shifted by the
Black Power movement people and we got
to meet James Cone (1970, 1974, 1997), who
introduced us to the notion of Black theology,
which provoked us to develop our own South
African version.
We started writing papers on Black theol-
ogy, which we understood in terms of a her-
meneutics of suspicion and retrieval. A key
defining proposition for such a hermeneutics
is the idea that authoritative interpretations of
biblical scriptures are read through the eyes
of the ruling elite; whilst a hermeneutics of
suspicion reads the scriptures through the
experiences of the oppressed. Sabelo Ntwasa
and I start writing papers and running work-
shops around South Africa on Black theology
and inviting others to contribute to a collec-
tion of essays titled Essays in Black Theology
in 1971 in South Africa which is immedi-
ately banned, of course. It was banned in
its own right. This was republished as Black
Theology: South African Voice as a second
edition, in London in 1973.1
***
Hattam: What follows is a brief explanation on
Black theology. Basil explains Black theology
as ‘a situational theology’ and against the ‘clas-
sical theological method of the West’ (Moore,
1973: 5). Re-reading this work just recently, I
was struck by the reading practices of his her-
meneutics of suspicion and noted this set of
practices could easily be adopted for reading
texts other than biblical texts and provides
some contours for understanding critical liter-
acy that is more broadly understood. To briefly
rehearse Basil’s account here: traditional theol-
ogy, as Biblical Studies, focused entirely on
323
exegesis of texts, ‘history and doctrine of
the early ecumenical councils and creeds, the
Trinitarian and Christological debates of the
third and fifth Centuries and on through
Augustine, the reformation, the Counter-
Reformation, the Council of Trent, St. Thomas
Aquinas, Papal encyclicals and modern theolo-
gies’ (ibid.: 5). For Basil, this meant being
‘irrelevant’, because such a theology has
scarcely considered the real-life problems of
the people whom he was supposed be serving
as a ‘qualified priest’ (ibid.: 5). ‘Black theology
seeks to cut across this classically arid detach-
ment. It begins with the people – specific
people, in a specific situation and with specific
problems to face’ (ibid.: 6). In apartheid South
Africa, ‘it starts with Black people facing the
strangling problems of oppression, fear, hunger,
insult and dehumanisation. It tries to under-
stand as clearly as possible who these people
are, what their life experiences are, and the
nature and cause of their suffering’ (ibid.: 6).
***
Basil resumes: But the shift away from a
liberal Christian humanist project meant that
church support for the UCM started to wane.
Also, Steve Biko formed a Black caucus,
which eventually split with the UCM to form
a Black student organisation, the South
African Student Organisation (SASO). The
UCM then shifted the literacy programme,
the public health programme and Black the-
ology within SASO, and essentially become
defunct. Then I went on to become Director
of the African Independent Churches
Association (AICA), an association of syn-
cretistic Zionist-type Christian organisations.
Most of their leaders were illiterate so it was
felt that what they wanted was a leadership
training programme which included a major
thrust on literacy, and because of my involve-
ment in adult literacy within the UCM, they
thought I’d be great as the Director. AICA
couldn’t afford a seminary, so we had to
develop all these materials, and in seven lan-
guages, so there were seven of us who
324 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
developed this programme. Then the
Methodist Church decided to defrock me and
I think that action removed the slight protec-
tion I had from being a member of a church.
Around this time, Colin Collins who is a
Catholic priest friend who helped form the
UCM, travels overseas to meet and learn
from Paulo Freire in order to help us develop
our literacy programme. And whilst Colin is
overseas, the leaders of the UCM (including
Justice Moloto, Sabelo Ntwasa, myself and
also Barney Pityana and Steve Biko, who
were ex-UCM members and active in SASO)2
are placed under house arrest and banned
under the Suppression of Communism Act
(Houston, 1997; Goddard, 2016).
I was working for the AICA, and the
police walked into my office and just read
out this screed of restrictions that included
things like not being allowed to attend a gath-
ering (and three people constituted a gather-
ing), so I could never be in the company of
more than one person at a time, other than
my own immediate family. So if ever I was
out with my wife, I could never talk to any-
body else. It also meant everything that I had
written was banned. So all of the AICA mate-
rials were banned, which brought the whole
AICA programme to its knees, especially the
whole literacy programme and all the materi-
als. I’ve never found out what happened to
those materials. This means that the AICA
can’t afford to keep paying me because I
can’t be involved in any educational activ-
ity. These restrictions make it very difficult
to find employment, and to earn any kind
of money. I’m banned from any educational
activity. So I couldn’t even take my kids to
school, and they’re tiny at this stage; you
have to walk them on to the property, so the
pre-school where my eldest child attends,
I can’t take him because of this restriction.
Eventually I got a job selling second-hand
cars and unfortunately people wouldn’t
come one at a time, so I had to give that one
away. I was under house arrest which meant
that I was only allowed out of the house dur-
ing daylight hours, but during night hours I
had to be in my house. I lived like this for
about five years, until we eventually decided
that we had to leave the country. I success-
fully applied for Irish citizenship because
my grandparents had come from Ireland and
eventually they let us leave and we lived in
London for two years. Amnesty International
paid for the flights. The Student Christian
Movement in England appointed me as the
Organising Secretary, and they gave us a
house and an income, and we stuck it out for
two years, but we couldn’t stand the cold and
eventually found the politics of the Student
Christian Movement just impossible. This
led to finding work as a Religious Education
lecturer at the Adelaide College of Advanced
Education (ACAE) in Adelaide.
FROM BLACK THEOLOGY TO
TEACHING FOR RESISTANCE
(FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH BASIL)
Basil: We found England unendurable. I
mean it had been bad enough in London, you
know, going to work in the dark in winter and
coming home in the dark and never seeing
daylight except for your luncheon break.
After living in South Africa, we just couldn’t
handle it. And so we looked around. Where
the hell are we going to go from here?
Eventually we discovered Australia, and not
only did we discover Australia, but we also
discovered that Australia had assisted pas-
sage at that time. So we applied for and got
assisted passage to come out to Australia. We
paid ten pounds for the six of us to come over
and when we arrived I took up a job at the
ACAE. My job involved teaching Religion
Studies, to train teachers for this new subject
to be taught at both primary and secondary
school levels.
But religion studies never really took off
in the state-school system at all and so our
student numbers gradually dwindled and
so we had to diversify. I suppose I was the
most expendable one and started becoming
 THE WORK OF BASIL MOORE
involved with the emerging field of curricu-
lum studies. To begin with I was tutoring in
large curriculum studies courses. Eventually
some of us developed a Curriculum
Leadership Master’s degree that was very
much informed by a critical curriculum stud-
ies archive that had been developing globally
for a few decades. At this time, criticality is
very much informed by either neo-Marxism
and the Frankfurt School and especially
Jürgen Habermas and this takes me to social
justice discourses.
Once I got to Adelaide, I had a very strong
need not to be a South African exile, and
hence to be doing something that seemed
to me to be worthwhile in Australia. At
first that involved just pouring myself into
Religious Education (RE) at the College,
but then RE, as a core part of the curriculum,
faded from South Australian schools. It was
never going to be implemented, there were
no longer any students interested in study-
ing RE. So I shifted from RE to Education
Studies and then into Curriculum Studies.
As I get into Curriculum Studies, I translate
my South African suspicion of liberal indi-
vidualism and liberal humanism, and I try
to understand the curriculum from a more
liberationist perspective which is what then
attracts me to critical theory (and in the
same way as Freire made us think about
adult literacy, not as a set of skills, but as an
emancipatory process). So I tried to think
of the curriculum in the same terms and as I
became more involved with research again,
the need to understand research, I gravi-
tated towards action research. I attempted
some critique of local social justice poli-
cies which for me sort of were conservative
and liberal humanist. Liberal humanism has
some kind of fascination with the weak and
the suffering and devises social justice poli-
cies that are shaped around a victim con-
struction (Moore, 1993b). But we needed
to have social justice policies which were
emancipatory, liberatory (Starr, 1991). Then
that gets carried over I suppose eventually
into thinking about pedagogy, or for me,
325
teaching for resistance. Again, once you get
past seeing social justice in terms of caring
for the weak, but as enabling resistance – it
was that kind of motif that I tried to take over
into pedagogy. Theoretically I think I was
reasonably successful with that. But prac-
tically I don’t think I got very far. I mean
we did write up our research (Education for
Social Justice Research Group, 1994), we
did do research around that topic, but you
know the research and the theoretical stuff
was interesting but I think the actual class-
room stuff has a hell of a long way to go,
or had a hell of a long way to go then and
probably still has. For me, resistance, you
see, could be about emancipation, could be
about liberation in a way that I thought that
philanthropy never could.
I was involved with the local teachers
union and helped develop an anti-racist pol-
icy and I was doing the odd lecture on rac-
ism and teaching about racism, but I didn’t
offer any courses in it. The same is true for
social justice – I didn’t offer any courses on
that theme, but it becomes central in my own
thinking about the curriculum. I was espe-
cially impressed with the South American
liberation theology for their work on social
justice including especially Paulo Freire
(1972a, 1972b, 1974), Wren (1977) and
Gustavo Gutiérrez (1973).
I began to look much more closely at
social justice policy and I wrote a set of
papers on the local education and social
justice policy and it began to strike me that
what you had here was a sort of victim con-
struction (Moore, 1993b). The way social
justice was being articulated really was how
the powerful were brutalising innocent vic-
tims. And it struck me then that if you con-
struct the whole process of oppression that
way, any rational response that one makes,
once you’ve constructed a victim, is to offer
help. So there is a help-and-rescue mental-
ity, and hence social justice becomes framed
up as charity work. And these themes have
already been developed in South African
Black theology. South African anti-apartheid
326 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
struggle certainly did not construct Black
Africans as the poor suffering innocents.
For Biko (1971) and the South African
Black consciousness movement, a part of the
struggle was getting free of an internalised
apartheid ideology. Perhaps this notion was
put most powerfully by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
(1986) in Decolonising the Mind. And
these themes are also developed by Freire
(Collins, 1972, 1974; Magaziner, 2010: 128)
and Fanon (1967), whose work informed
the South African anti-apartheid liberation
movements. It is important to remember
here that the South African apartheid gov-
ernment imposed a strict form of censorship
and we did not have access to critical ideas
and hence were very isolated intellectually.
Having said that we knew about the Black
consciousness movement in the United
States. So my emerging theories of social
justice, as a key word for curriculum studies,
were being informed by resistance struggle
in South Africa and especially the Black
consciousness movement. At this time also,
the dominance of the neo-Marxist critique
was crumbling and ideology critique that
foregrounded class struggle was now being
contested by feminism and anti-racism and
post-colonial variations. We were all trying
to work out how to think class, gender, race
and Empire as a complex matrix of oppres-
sions, variously manifesting in different
places and times. From my side, I started to
develop a teaching for resistance approach.
In effect, I was attempting to translate what
I had learned about South African Black
struggle into some insights for thinking
about critical pedagogy in South Australia.
The key idea for the teaching for resistance
approach, informed by our rethinking of
social justice, rejected the focusing on the
bad things that are happening to people, and
instead shifted the focus to examining the
resistances that people are enacting. Where
resistance is going on you understand that
oppression is going on. You do not look for
the oppression-suffering linkage, but instead
for a resistance-oppression linkage.
BASIL MOORE: THE LIMINAL
SERVANT
When I think about Basil as my teacher I am
drawn to McLaren’s (1988) imagining of the
teacher as liminal servant. He borrows the
term ‘liminal servant’ from Holmes’ (1978)
description of the priest. The concept of limi-
nality can be traced to the anthropological lit-
erature, and especially to van Gennep (1960)
and Turner (1974). Liminality refers to a
social state in which the participants are
‘betwixt and between’, literally and temporar-
ily removed from the social structure that is
‘maintained and sanctioned by power and
authority’ (McLaren, 1988: 165–6). This idea
of liminality is used anthropologically to
explain the rites of passage in some cultures,
in which the ritual subjects pass through a
period of ‘ambiguity, a sort of social limbo’
(Turner, 1974: 57). Liminality infers being
liberated from the normative constraints
incumbent upon occupying a social station,
being a member of ‘some corporate group
such as a family, lineage, clan, tribe, or nation,
or of affiliation with some pervasive social
category such as class, caste, sex- or age- divi-
sion’ (ibid.: 75). In the liminal, ‘the past is
momentarily negated, suspended, or abro-
gated, and the future has not yet begun. There
is an instant of pure potentiality when every-
thing trembles in the balance’ (ibid.: 75). For
Turner, this liminal state occurs, ‘where
people can be subverted from their duties and
rights into an atmosphere of communitas’
(ibid.: 76). Communitas is a modality of
human relatedness, only possible outside of
the normative structure, in which ‘people see,
understand, and act towards one another as
essentially “an unmediated relationship
between historical, idiosyncratic, concrete
individuals”’ (ibid.: 76–7). For Turner, liminal-
ity and the resultant communitas is a form of
human experience that is outside of the subject
of the social sciences, understood simply in
terms of ‘people playing roles and maintaining
or achieving status’ (ibid.: 77). The full human
capacity is not defined in terms of
 THE WORK OF BASIL MOORE
egoistic strivings. Liminality and communitas
are suggestive of an alternative conception of
what it means to be human, one in which
human relationships are freely chosen and are
non-transactional, ‘in the sense that people do
not necessarily initiate action towards one
another in the expectation of a reaction that
satisfies their interests’ (ibid.: 77).
McLaren’s imagining of the teacher as
liminal servant invokes what was central
to Basil’s teaching – a working of a dialec-
tic between pedagogy and politics: peda-
gogy is political and politics is pedagogical.
McLaren’s liminal servant ‘releases symbols
and narratives’ of the ‘marginalised, van-
quished and disaffected’ (1988: 171) or those
‘subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, 1980:
81) that speak back to the ‘false harmony that
[appears to] exist between the subject and the
social order’ (McLaren, 1988: 171). These
‘dangerous memories’ are ‘more than a form
of cultural dissonance’ but are also a ‘call for
a new narrative through which a qualitatively
better world can be imagined and struggled
for’ (ibid.: 171). Drawing on Said again,
Basil’s task was ‘to unearth the forgotten, to
make connections that were denied [and] to
cite alternative courses of action’ (1994: 17).
The liminal servant contests the illusion of
autonomy and self-determination and reveals
instead how subjectivity gets constructed
and legitimated through discourses that are
distorted by inequality and asymmetrical
relations of power and privilege. The liminal
servant aims to cultivate an ‘alter-ideology’
or a ‘form of pedagogical surrealism’ that
‘attacks the familiar’ and perturbs those
commonplace perspectives that parade as
innocent and outside of historical and social
struggles. The liminal servant is the ‘tramp
of the obvious’ or the ‘tramp of the demysti-
fying conscientization’ (Freire, 1985b: 171).
The liminal servant reveals the world ‘not
as something that only exists, but as some-
thing that is to be’ (ibid.: 169). As a ‘cultural
worker’ (Giroux and Trend, 1992; Freire,
1998), the liminal servant ponders questions
such as: what is it that this society has made
327
of me that I no longer want to be? In working a
dialectic between critique and transformation,
Basil was wary of moribund intellectualism
and leaned towards lived forms of conscious-
ness instead. In this sense, knowledge is not
merely handed over but embodied in a prac-
tice to develop a collective understanding of
struggling to change oppressive realities.
From Basil, I learned to be ashamed of
being an accomplice of the gross and subtle
forms of dehumanisation that prevail under
the name of freedom, liberty and enlighten-
ment. It is far too easy to live inside of ‘the
illusion of not knowing’ (Levi 1979: 386)
and hence not an accomplice. Rather than
‘wanting not to know’ (ibid.: 386), of turning
away from the suffering of others, the liminal
servant understands that no-one is outside of
responsibility for the poverty, the violence
and the alienation suffered by others. This
insight demands the difficult task of seeing
one’s own place in the order of things and
continually nurturing a critical sensibility.
TRANSMISSION OF A CRITICAL
SENSIBILITY
By way of a personal reflection, and return-
ing again to the notion that critical pedagogy
is a ‘traveling theory’, what is it that Basil
has passed on to me these past few decades?
What has ‘traveled’? I could outline in some
detail a hermeneutic of suspicion that I have
learned, as a critical practice of reading the
world and the word. The key issue here of
course is what it means to be critical. In other
places (Hattam, 2004) I have attempted to
explain criticality in terms of a sceptical sen-
sibility towards reading the world and the
word. Horkheimer (1972) spoke of this scep-
ticism as a ‘critical attitude’, one that is
‘wholly distrustful of the rules of conduct
with which society as presently constituted
provides each of its members’ (ibid.: 207).
In a similar vein, Hunter (1997) argues that
criticality draws ‘on a variety of post-Kantian
328 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

improvisations on the critical thematic’ relation of belonging and presents itself as a task.
(ibid.: 27). The Kantian idea of being critical (Foucault, 1984a: 39)
‘requires a mistrust or suspension of experi-
In contradistinction to traditional theory,
ential judgements as the means to look for
which misrepresents its own reasoning as
their conditions in us’ (ibid.: 28). This post-
dispassionate, objective, disembodied, value-
Kantian notion of being critical is a response
free and having little or nothing to do with
to our own ‘immaturity’ which in this case
ethical questions, a critical sensibility
refers to ‘a certain state of our will that makes
demands that we interrogate rationality – our
us accept someone else’s authority to lead us
own and others – for knowledge interests and
in areas where the use of reason is called for’
to adjust these interests in favour of emanci-
(Foucault, 1984a: 34). Kant developed this
patory possibilities. A critical sensibility
view of the critical as his own diagnosis of his
rejects playing ‘the god-trick of seeing eve-
times. Living during the beginning of what we
rything from nowhere’ (Haraway, 1991:
know as modernity, Kant proposed that a new
189). A critical ‘sensibility’ assumes that
form of consciousness was emerging. And a
knowing is always ‘socially situated’
new form of philosophy was required to make
(Harding, 1993: 53) and is always ‘passion-
sense of it. The Enlightenment inaugurated
ate’ (Du Bois, 1993), perspectival, embod-
a form of reflection or self-awareness (and
ied, has a subjective dimension and
hence philosophy) of the present, ‘of prob-
understands that knowing and reasoning are
lematizing its own discursive present-ness’
positively dangerous unless intimately con-
(Foucault, 1986: 89). The Enlightenment
nected with ethics.
inaugurated modernity’s revolt ‘against the
Because a critical sensibility is motivated
normalizing functions of tradition; modernity
by an emancipatory wish, it is not possible just
lives on the experience of rebelling against
to decide to be critical. Rather, such a sensi-
all that is normative’ (Habermas, 1988: 5). In
bility has to be nurtured and developed. In this
this way, Kant becomes the first to develop
sense then, being critical requires personal
a philosophical discourse of modernity as
transformation. Such a sensibility is never
a critique of impure reason. Such a critique
complete, but constantly in process, and con-
ponders these questions:
stantly being transformed, involving unlearn-
What is the reason we use? What are its historical ing/learning a way of being that ‘emerges in
effects? What are its limits and what are its dan- the struggle against violence and exploitation
gers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortu- where this struggle is waged for essentially
nately committed to practicing a rationality that is new ways and forms of life’ (Marcuse, 1969:
unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers?
25). Thought about in this way, being critical
(Foucault, 1984b: 249)
infers a form of subjectivity, as not only a way
The Enlightenment does not offer us any of reading the word and the world but also a
doctrine to believe in, but ‘rather the perma- way of acting on the world:
nent reactivation of an attitude … that could [I]t has to be considered as an attitude, an ethos, a
be described as a permanent critique of our philosophical life in which critique of what we are
historical era’ (Foucault, 1984a: 42). Being is at one and the same time the historical analysis
critical in the post-Kantian sense is often of the limits that are imposed on us and experi-
ment with the possibility of going beyond them.
understood in terms of an attitude, an ethos
(Foucault, 1984a: 50)
or a sensibility, defined here as:
This last quote encapsulates a view of being
a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a vol-
untary choice made by certain people, a way of
critical that makes the connection between an
thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and ‘analysis of limits’ to the ‘possibility of going
behaving that at one and the same time marks a beyond them’. Critique in this case is more
 THE WORK OF BASIL MOORE
than just a diagnosis of the present as a
description and explanation of our alienation
or lack. Critique also contains an impulse to go
beyond the present, to experiment with the
possibility of going beyond, or to at least imag-
ine how things might be different. Being criti-
cal in this sense has two interrelated moments
of critique and possibility. The moment of cri-
tique ‘consists in seeing what kinds of self-
evidences, liberties, acquired and non-reflective
modes of thought, the practices we accept rest
on’ (Foucault, 1982b: 33). Critique stops
‘treating thought lightly’ (ibid.: 33) and opens
up our reasoning for interrogation:
Criticism consists in driving this thought out of hiding
and trying to change it: showing that things are not
as obvious as we might believe, doing it in such a
way that what we accept as going without saying no
longer goes without saying. To criticize is to render
the too-easy gestures difficult. (Foucault, 1982b: 34)
Upon the basis of such criticism ‘one begins
to be unable, any longer, to think things as
one usually thinks them, transformation
becomes simultaneously very urgent, very
difficult, and altogether possible’ (ibid.: 34).
Hence the moment of critique leads to the
moment of possibility that involves the prac-
tice of hope, of ‘thinking beyond existing
configurations of power in order to imagine
the unthinkable’ (Giroux, 1996/1997: 79).
The practice of hope, born out of a sense of
distress, rebels against the domination of the
past over the future. Against inevitability,
factuality and any faith in the unchangeable-
ness of the social structure, a critical sensibil-
ity promotes a consciousness that rejects any
adaptation to reality, and hence lives with a
certain hostility from those who are con-
vinced of the inevitability of the present.
But how can we apply a critical sensibil-
ity to imagine how critical pedagogy could
be enacted? Given Basil’s biography, it is not
surprising that when he took on an academic
position in Adelaide he applied his own criti-
cal sensibility to contesting racism and out of
that project he devised his teaching for resist-
ance approach.
329
Firstly, Basil understood racism as a process
of racialising social formations, culture and
ideology, consciousness and inter-­ personal
behaviours ‘in such a way as to impoverish,
de-power, disenfranchise, divide, silence and
exclude’ (Moore, 1993c: 5). ‘It is primar-
ily about the use of the concept of “race” to
organise society in such a way as to structure
in the oppression of Black people systemati-
cally’ (ibid.: 5).3 His view of racism rejects
the prejudice thesis of racism which unfor-
tunately dominates the logic of too many
anti-racist interventions, and which promote
a values clarification approach to anti-racism.
Basically, through clarifying our values we can
rid ourselves of racist prejudice and the prob-
lem is solved. The prejudice thesis, which is
deeply entrenched in popular culture and edu-
cational policy asserts that racism is ‘caused
by prejudice, which is related to deviant per-
sonalities and fed by ignorance and irrational
fears and reinforced by negative stereotypes’
(Moore, 1993a: 53). But psychologising rac-
ism in this way ‘consigns racism to the aber-
rant margins of society’ (ibid.: 54) and hence
undermines those theories of institutionalised
racism outlined in much of Basil’s writing.
For Basil, the educational implications of
his analysis involved abandoning a prejudice
thesis as a theory for educational policy and
practice. Secondly, he argued that we need
to cease using ‘race’ as an explanatory cat-
egory and confront ‘vulgar racism’ in schools
with a curriculum that provides accounts of
the ‘social, political, economic and cultural
functioning of racism’ (ibid.: 62). Thirdly,
educators need to acknowledge that racism
will not be overcome ‘simply by young stu-
dents making alternative, non-­racist meaning
of events in their lives’ (ibid.: 62) but requires
schools being much more connected into anti-
racist movements in the community. And as a
corollary to that, finally, anti-racist education
needs to focus on learning about anti-racism
rather than racist logics.
From such a definition, Basil argued for
anti-racist pedagogy that rejects a victim
approach. By psychologising racism, the
330 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
social processes of racism are elided and
hence those most affected are represented as
‘disadvantaged victims’. With no social the-
ory of racism, and with theories that essen-
tially assert the view that ‘society is normal,
healthy, rational and informed by human
beings that are not racist’, there is a ten-
dency to characterise those disenfranchised
as disadvantaged victims who may even be
contributing to their own under-achievement.
Of course, the politics of victim construction
gets played out in disenfranchised communi-
ties who can internalise the logic and ‘live
out a victim mentality’. Basil also suggests
that anti-racist pedagogy needs to confront
the processes of racialised identity forma-
tion. Drawing on Biko and others, resisting
racism involves engaging in identity work
that retrieves knowledge of history, culture
and traditions of those groups oppressed by
raciologies. And most importantly for Basil,
anti-racist pedagogy is about learning from
resistance to racism.
In an attempt to operationalise this set of
ideas into a pedagogical sequence that teachers
could use, Basil and some colleagues devel-
oped what they call an approach to teaching for
resistance. Three key processes are involved in
this approach which are described as:
• consciousness raising – becoming aware of the
nature, causes and effects of injustices and of the
possibility for socially just alternatives;
• establishing contact with actual resistance move-
ments through literature, the media, the arts and
organisations working for social and political
change;
• taking social action to bring about changes, e.g.
lending support to social reform groups and
acting as an advocate for the oppressed.
AFTERWORD
By way of an ending, I have included the text
that was published by Rhodes University on
conferral of an honorary doctorate for Basil
Moore on 8 April, 2011:4
Dr Basil Moore, who received an Honorary
Doctorate in today’s Graduation ceremony
(8 April), also received an apology from the
University for refusing him a lecturing post during
the apartheid regime.
Dr Moore initially enrolled at Rhodes in the early
1950s, returning later that decade to begin formal
training for the ministry. It was then that he
became involved in student politics, culminating in
his election as President of the Student
Representative Council (SRC) and, later, of the
National Union of South African Students (NUSAS).
He took on a role as a part-time lecturer at Rhodes
in 1965. In 1966 he and Fr John Davies, Methodist
and Anglican chaplains respectively, were
approached by Catholic chaplain Fr Colin Collins,
who was propounding the idea of a radically ecu-
menical and non-racial student Christian body.
With the parent churches raising no opposition,
the United Christian Movement (UCM) came into
being. Although committed to non-violence, the
UCM was still regarded with suspicion by the
Rhodes Council, who feared it would act as a con-
duit for Black Power movements and lead to stu-
dent radicalism.
The year 1967 saw the banning of black [sic] politi-
cal parties, and their student wings. In addition,
the government tried to discourage black students
from further participation in NUSAS, leaving them
with no national forum in which to meet and dis-
cuss issues except the fledgling UCM.
At the UCM conference the following year Steven
Bantu Biko called for a black caucus, which recom-
mended the establishment of a new student body
for black students. In response, Biko and Barney
Pityana formed SASO, the South African Student’s
Organisation.
The year 1968 also saw the seizure of Dr Moore’s
passport by the apartheid government; pre-
vented from travelling overseas for research pur-
poses, he applied for a theology lecturing post at
Rhodes and was refused by Council not once but
twice in 1969, despite gaining approval from
Senate.
When Council refused to reveal its reasons for the
decision, and refused to let SRC representatives
address their meeting, a sit-in in the Council
Chambers resulted, leading to the eight-week
suspension of thirteen students and the dismissal
of temporary politics lecturer, David Tucker. This
became known as the ‘Basil Moore affair’.
 THE WORK OF BASIL MOORE
After being refused employment by Rhodes,
Dr Moore completed the research for his PhD, and
spent two years stationed in Carltonville, a strongly
nationalist mining town of which he says, wryly, ‘I
survived two years there. (It) was not exactly the kind
of place for someone with my history and ideas to
try to minister.’ Thereafter he became full-time theol-
ogy director of the UCM, until its closure in 1971.
He was appointed Director of the leadership train-
ing program of the African Independent Churches
Association, but this came to an abrupt halt in
December 1971 when he was banned and placed
under partial house arrest. In August 1972 he was
given permission to leave the country but at the
same time declared a ‘prohibited immigrant’, a
ruling which took him and his family into exile.
His passion for education has not diminished,
however, and he is, he writes, ‘deeply and pas-
sionately involved in our local Aldinga U3A
(University of the Third Age). It keeps me very busy
and keeps the aging brain alert’.
At this graduation ceremony, Rhodes University
honoured not only an alumnus and a former
member of staff, but also a man who helped to
fight the good fight against a harsh and unjust
system; a man who fought for the essential
humanity of all to be recognised.
And to close, here is the final paragraph from
Basil’s speech at the conferral ceremony:
Graduands, I know that you are not theologians and
some of you may not be Christians, but in conclusion
I would admonish you in similar vein. Our task as
intellectuals is still to engage with the victims of
injustice, to analyse their plight, to give voice to their
distress and their hopes. But it is not to do this stand-
ing aloof from their struggle. It needs to be done
from the very heart of that struggle. It is to devise
and implement strategies that will restore to people
their dignity and humanity. Each of you in your own
chosen field is being called upon to become libera-
tion activists for social justice. This is a tough commis-
sion requiring courage, great skill and determination.
I am sure, however, that your experience here at
Rhodes has inspired and skilled you for this vocation.
This is what makes it a great university.
Notes
1  At the time of publishing the first edition, Sabelo
Ntwasa was banned and this forced the group to
331
delete his contribution. Sabelo Ntwasa’s chapter
was re-inserted in the second edition.
2  See http://psimg.jstor.org/fsi/img/pdf/t0/10.5555/
al.sff.document.min19710327.026.009.929_
final.pdf
3  For Moore (1993a), the use of the term ‘black’ is
to invoke a double meaning: first, ‘black’ invokes
a political project as in the black consciousness
movement and is not a descriptive concept
and refers ‘to those who have been oppressed
by ­ racism’, thus linking together those whom
­colonisation and apartheid have tried to divide;
second, it refers ‘to those in this group who have
actively resisted racism’ (1993: 1).
4  https://www.ru.ac.za/latestnews/2011/2011-
04-082004.html
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Coming to Critical Pedagogy
in Spain Through Life and
Literature: Jurjo Torres Santomé
and Ramón Flecha
UNDERSTANDING THE
SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT OF
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN SPAIN
For a number of years, I have worked in the
Spanish-speaking world with scholars who
base their work on principles of critical peda-
gogy. Since I can communicate fluently in
Spanish, I assumed for a long time that we
were speaking the same language when we
used the vocabulary associated with critical
pedagogy. However, conversations with col-
leagues led me to realize that we use the
same terms, albeit in our own languages, but
those terms construct different meanings,
based on different social and political histo-
ries and understandings. I couldn’t articulate
the differences or similarities; I intuited
them. This eureka moment sent me on a
quest to talk to two scholars whom col-
leagues named as leaders in critical peda-
gogy in Spain: Jurjo Torres Santomé at the
University of A Coruña and Ramón Flecha in
34
Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs
the Community of Research on Excellence
for All (CREA) at the University of
Barcelona. As we talked, they shared how
their political and historical backgrounds
have shaped their conceptualizations of criti-
cal pedagogy. I spent time with each scholar,
engaged in conversations in which they
shared their lives and the academic experi-
ences that led them to develop as critical
pedagogy scholars. During our time together,
the resonance among our stories surfaced,
weaving patterns that described life experi-
ences that caused us to seek social justice
during the chaotic years of the 1960s and 70s
and beyond. We shared experiences that
related our personal stories to the world that
surrounded us as we came of age, whether in
high school or university, in our respective
countries. The contrasts in our personal and
national histories led to a deeper understand-
ing of the ways critical pedagogy assumes
different forms in different locations.
Both scholars are consummate storytell-
ers, and they brought to life that time in Spain
 COMING TO CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN SPAIN THROUGH LIFE AND LITERATURE
now referred to as the government-enforced
‘years of repression’ as they came of age
politically during Franco’s dictatorship. In
the United States during the 60s and 70s,
we were experiencing political and cultural
chaos and change as evidenced events such
as the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Lib,
demonstrations against the war in Vietnam,
and the assassinations of Martin Luther King,
Jr in April and Bobby Kennedy in June 1968,
among others. During those same years in
Spain, a culture of fear and silence prevailed
under a dictatorship that restricted individual
liberties and promoted conservative values
espoused by the Catholic Church, repudiat-
ing the freedoms won during the Second
Republic that preceded the Spanish Civil
War. While students in the United States were
participating in protests, in Spain, Jurjo and
Ramón were reading and discussing, then
hiding, forbidden books, developing radical
ideas under clandestine situations. During
the mid-to-late 60s, I developed radicality by
reading and discussing Spanish literature in
my US university classrooms, while outside
of class, I participated in protests and felt the
freedom to speak out against governmental
and societal policies. At the same time, my
Spanish colleagues clandestinely studied the
same literature, and developed an intentional
sense of social justice and a desire to change
the political structure of a repressive dictator-
ship that had been in power since the end of
the Spanish Civil War in 1939.
I heard and consumed their stories, which
filled in many of the gaps of knowledge I had
experienced as I learned about Spain during
those same years while I was an undergradu-
ate, then a graduate Spanish major. As I sought
to understand the years of repression/oppres-
sion they described, I was learning about a
Spain about whose existence I had been
oblivious. Jurjo and Ramón carried me back
to those years with the richness of personal
narrative that resonated with my own story,
while also bringing me to an understanding of
the repressive society in which they formed
their beliefs about education and its power to
335
transform society, and about Spain in the 21st
century. I interwove their narratives with my
own memories and connections, first men-
tally and then verbally, provoking one eureka
moment after another. Our dialogues became
collaborative critical autoethnographies, as
we related the personal to the public social
and political environment (Bochner and Ellis,
2016). I examined our conversations through
the lens of critical autoethnography, which
combines critical pedagogy to interrogate
systemic violence that results in oppression,
with autoethnography, to examine the role of
the Self in establishing hierarchy and un/con-
sciously perpetuating oppression when work-
ing in vulnerable communities (Tilley-Lubbs,
2017). I realized that they related their expe-
riences as members of an oppressed society,
whereas I lived my experiences from the
privilege of freedom to protest and read what
I chose, not through a dictatorship. Jurjo and
Ramón narrated their critical autoethnogra-
phies as I listened and engaged in dialogue
with them. Their quoted words and stories
come from those recorded, transcribed dia-
logues. In this chapter, I have translated the
quotes from Spanish, Catalán, or Galician
into English, the languages of the interviews.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Soon after I began this project to understand
the emergence and conceptualization of criti-
cal pedagogy in Spain, I realized a need to
understand the Spain that existed in 1969, the
year of the first translation of Paulo Freire’s
Pedagogy of the Oppressed from Portuguese
into Spanish. Examining the sociocultural
and sociopolitical climates of Spain and the
United States reaffirmed the knowledge that
Freire’s seminal work had overturned educa-
tional thought in its current state, even though
it sprouted and took root in different circum-
stances in different places around the globe.
I questioned how our different histories and
political environments caused our beliefs and
336 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
performances of critical pedagogy to take
different turns. Considered the foundation
for critical pedagogy as it exists today,
Freire’s book entered a Spain still recovering
from the devastating effects of a Civil War
(1936–39) that pitted neighbors against each
other as bombs dropped by the two Axis
Powers, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany,
devastated the country. As political alliances
formed, constantly morphing and changing,
Francisco Franco’s battle to overthrow the
Second Spanish Republic raged, until his
ultimate conquest in April 1939.
The Second Republic, established in 1931,
had felled a dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera,
supported by then King Alfonso XIII. The
working class regarded the Second Republic,
with its democratic ideals regarding edu-
cation for all people, freedom of speech,
women’s right to vote, freedom to divorce,
and land reform, as the antithesis of the
oppressive dictatorship. Despite these demo-
cratic ideals, strict legislation maintained
the Catholic Church’s control over property
and education, based on traditions that went
back to the unification of Spain as a country
in the second half of the 15th century, fol-
lowing the marriage of King Fernando and
Queen Isabela. The union between Church
and state remained firm, despite the self-exile
of King Alfonso XIII in 1931. Tensions grew
between liberals and conservatives, as the
Republic failed to live up to expectations. As
a result, Franco assumed complete control
of the army following the death of two other
generals, from his post in Morocco. Leading
his troops north through Spain, he attempted
a coup d’état that failed. Despite this fail-
ure, his attempt to reinstate the monarchy
cemented his position with the right-wing
conservatives.
This led to the Civil War as the conserva-
tive rebels led by Franco joined the centrists
who still supported the monarchy to form the
Nationalists. They still received support from
the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany.
On the other hand, the Republicans formed
similar alliances of convenience among
the Anarchists, Communists, Stalinists,
Socialists, and other leftist groups, all
united by their common desire to defeat the
Nationalists. Following Franco’s victory, he
established a dictatorship sanctioned by the
Catholic Church, due not only to his con-
tinuing support of the Church, but also the
fact that the opposition had executed many
priests, and been accused of executing even
more, during the Civil War. This support ena-
bled him to maintain strict control of society
against any ideas of atheism, granting him
further control of a society living in fear.
As dictator, he was known as Generalísimo
Francisco Franco por la gracia de Dios
[supreme leader by the grace of God], a
title that provided evidence of the continu-
ing power of the Catholic Church. This title
reinforced the belief that his heritage con-
tinued the lineage of the Catholic King and
Queen, Ferdinand and Isabela, whose fanati-
cal Catholicism unified the two kingdoms of
Castilla and Aragón into a single kingdom,
Spain. Franco’s dictatorship, now referred
to as the ‘years of repression’, followed the
end of the war, creating a culture of fear and
silence, causing people to work underground
in an attempt to overthrow the government
and establish a free society.
I had studied the Spanish Civil War as a
Spanish major at the University of Illinois
(1964–70). I studied at the University of
Salamanca in 1969, so I thought I under-
stood Spain, especially since the majority of
my professors at Illinois were from Spain.
When I looked back at my Spanish history
books, I found a paragraph in each book
acknowledging there had been a Civil War,
and that Generalísimo Francisco Franco
emerged as the victor, establishing a gov-
ernment in 1939. I knew his government
had lasted until his death in 1975. I didn’t
understand that the use of this title, trans-
lated as ‘Supreme Commander’ over the
armed forces and the country, implied an
acceptance of the totalitarian rule he had
established. These brief summaries of the
Civil War mentioned the various factions
 COMING TO CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN SPAIN THROUGH LIFE AND LITERATURE
that fought, but not with sufficient detail
for me to untangle the complexities of the
alliances, or to understand the implications
of Franco’s victory. There was no mention
of Franco’s dictatorship. I had studied the
theater output of Carlos Muñiz, censored
during Franco’s reign, but apart from that,
I had no idea of the repressive conditions
in place in Spain during those years. Even
when I attended the summer session at the
University of Salamanca, or when I returned
in 1970 to Madrid to work on a disserta-
tion study based on the thematic content of
Muñiz’s plays pre- and post-war, I didn’t
understand the systemic issues involved in
the censorship of his work.
A series of circumstances led me to design
a research project examining Spain during
those years, and as I engaged in conversations
with people about life in that time, they all
referred to the ‘years of repression’. This pro-
ject coincided in time with my goal of talking
to Jurjo and Ramón, whose stories made con-
nections with the sociocultural and sociopo-
litical environment in which they came of age
as critical pedagogy scholars, the period they
also called the ‘years of oppression’. Our con-
versations were informal, with the result that
we also made connections in our own stories
and our coming of age through literature and
political events. What follows are the stories
of two scholars who shaped critical pedagogy
in Spain, beginning with their involvement in
clandestine anti-Francoist groups during what
became a 36-year dictatorship, to the publi-
cation of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1969,
to the present day. Situated on the opposite
coasts of Spain, Jurjo on the Atlantic coast
to the west and Ramón on the Mediterranean
coast to the east, the programs that developed
through their work share similarities, but they
also differ. From their youth, both scholars
worked to change the systemic structures of
oppression that operated during the years of
repression and that have carried into present
day Spain, and in so doing, they have become
leaders in critical pedagogy in Spain and the
rest of the Spanish-speaking world.
337
JURJO TORRES SANTOMÉ
Jurjo identifies as a political activist who
fights for better education. His activism
began when he was a young man with con-
victions that caused him to work against an
oppressive government. He was born in
1951, 12 years after the end of the Civil War.
He begins, ‘I had read two of Freire’s works,
Education as the Practice of Freedom (1967)
and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1969),
which had come to us clandestinely because
Paulo Freire was forbidden’. Although he
found that Freire’s work focused on adults,
the theory appealed to him. He was studying
psychology, and at that time, cognitive psy-
chology was entering Spain, followed by
behaviorism. Jurjo saw education as a ‘politi-
cal process of political socialization and the
construction of a different kind of world’.
With that introduction, he began a passion-
ate recounting of the entry of critical peda-
gogy into a country still recovering from 39
years of a cruel and repressive dictatorship
whose strength and effects were still pre-
sent, albeit occult, in the 1980s world Jurjo
entered as an academic. He said that in order
to educate people at that time, it was neces-
sary to change their mindsets. He found him-
self embroiled in certain dilemmas because
he belonged to leftist organizations whose
priorities believed in the necessity of chang-
ing the political structure before other infra-
structures, such as the educational system,
could be changed. His friends told him not
to get involved in politics, but his parents had
been Republicans who fought for democ-
racy, so he grew up in a politicized environ-
ment. Although his parents were young at the
time of the Civil War, they lived the atroci-
ties that befell the Republicans as Franco’s
army came to Galicia and created chaos by
turning neighbors against each other in fear.
He remembers an attempted coup d’état
on February 23, 1980, only five years after
Franco’s death and the re-establishment of
democracy, the same year that he returned to
La Coruña from the army. The Fascists had
338 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
made a list of the first persons they planned to
eliminate, and when they made the list pub-
lic, Jurjo’s name appeared. He understood
the culture of silence based on the fear still
present in those post-Franco years. Since the
coup failed, everything turned out well, but
he experienced the possibility of death by the
Fascists who attempted the coup.
Jurjo continued struggling with doubts and
contradictions, believing that change could
take place in education despite the fact that
the economic system didn’t change. He saw
that in Spain myriad problems existed about
which most people knew nothing. He began
working on his doctoral thesis, while at the
same time he was working with his wife in
early childhood education, politicized like
everything else, although it was more social.
Jurjo and his wife wanted children to feel
like community members as part of their
cognitive and affective development. As they
worked, he discovered that he and his wife
knew nothing. They needed to learn English
to be able to understand things. His training
had been in French, but by reading English
book titles, he realized that educators were
doing important work in English. He remem-
bered the first book he read in English, a book
by Noam Chomsky, and how much effort it
took to read it, due to his weak English.
Just as he was developing his work, he
received an offer from the University of
Salamanca, which is where he says he ‘began
to be a professor’. While there, he discovered
some books that were more or less interesting
in the field of sociology. He also found new
colleagues with whom he felt aligned ideo-
logically, such as José Gimeno Sacristán, a
scholar in critical curriculum theory.
He also discovered Morata, a Spanish press
that became fundamental in the critical ped-
agogical reform that occurred after the end
of the dictatorship. Morata had been created
during the Second Republic as a Republican
press linked with the left in its publications
of literature in the social sciences. During
the dictatorship, Morata had turned the press
over to the ‘Church of Opus Dei’, the most
conservative arm of the Catholic Church, tied
to the Falangists, Franco’s followers who
were Fascists. Morata changed its emphasis
from education to medicine as Franco closed
down everything not aligned with his Fascist
politics, and with the dictates of Opus Dei.
With the arrival of democracy after Franco’s
death, another generation of the Morata fam-
ily took over, and they were more receptive
to critical work. During that time, Morata
published a book that no other press would
touch since the publishing houses were still
‘all Fascists – that’s how society was’. Jurjo
continued, ‘You can imagine the literature we
were creating – some mind-boggling atroci-
ties. With the little that was being written
about education, it was hard to tell if it was
metaphysical theology or what’. He began
going to London every summer, and at the
educational institution he visited, he could
‘devour other kinds of books in an incredible
way’. Every summer he took enough books
home to Spain to last for the rest of the year.
At the same time, Morata wanted to update
the classics they had. They noticed that Jurjo
was a specialist in matters of early childhood
education and of play, the subjects of his first
works. They asked him to prepare an appen-
dix of reviewed literature in the field as an
updated bibliography. He enjoyed the work,
and from there on, he had a good relationship
with the publisher. He suggested translations
of certain books he had read in English. Jurjo
emphasizes the necessity of understanding
the role Morata played in bringing criti-
cal pedagogy to Spain and Latin America.
They are the only firm with which Jurjo has
published, beginning with his first book, El
Curriculum Oculto [The Hidden Curriculum]
(1991), which he said other presses wouldn’t
have published due to its radicality. The book
sold well, and ever since, he has only pub-
lished with them, feeling a close relationship
to the press that dared take a risk with his
radical work. Morata has served as a com-
patible vehicle for his ideas, aspirations, and
political fights in society and in education.
In a history of the firm (www.edmorata.es/
 COMING TO CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN SPAIN THROUGH LIFE AND LITERATURE
la-editorial/nuestra-historia), Morata men-
tions the works of José Gimeno Sacristán
and Jurjo Torres Santomé as fundamental in
shaping Spain’s transition to democracy with
texts more in line with the moment.
Jurjo reflects on that first book that pre-
sented his ideas about the hidden curriculum.
He explains that no one intentionally wants
to be a bad professor or to teach bad habits
and other worse things to children, such as
lying, cheating, and so on. These ideas led
him to read literature by Bourdieu (Bourdieu
and Passeron, 1970) about cultural reproduc-
tion, and other authors who were part of the
‘Bourdieu School’. Reading Althusser (1976),
he explored ‘all that pedagogy’. He wanted to
understand the hidden curriculum that under-
lay negative behaviors in the classroom.
He began to construct a theoretical frame-
work that would allow him to envision a
more practical and functional way to conduct
research. He read Willis (1977), which pro-
vided him with ethnographic research meth-
ods to understand the world of schooling.
He learned how to conduct research to help
him understand things, rejecting the positiv-
ism that was predominant in Spain. He wanted
to research what was happening in the ‘black
box’, as he described the classroom. From there
he established relationships with people to
exchange ideas. He and his colleagues started
making their research public so people could see
how things were in classrooms. Their discov-
ery of qualitative research created a revolution.
Morata began translating qualitative works, but
it was difficult to do this kind of work in the
ultraconservative ‘official academy’ of Spain.
Translated literature was key to helping them
enter and understand the world of schooling,
which hadn’t been possible when they were
buried in social reproduction theories.
Jurjo talks about his colleagues in
Salamanca, José Gimeno Sacristan and
Ángel Pérez Gómez, whose critical work in
curriculum added to the revolution in educa-
tional research. All three were young, but he
was the youngest and most politicized due
to all his years in clandestine organizations.
339
He was accustomed to having the police seek
him out to find out who the participants were
in those organizations. He had been threat-
ened by the police during that time, so when
things happened to him at the university, it
was nothing. He was used to interrogations
by the Guardia Civil due to his membership
in clandestine organizations and his appear-
ance, with less-than-conservative clothing
and a long beard. He was so accustomed to
more disturbing and life-threatening wars
that he was unaffected by conservative pro-
fessors who tried to scare him. He reflected
that his history saved him from surrender-
ing. He remained a force of resistance. Even
when he stood up to the worst of them, they
backed down. It was very hard, but that’s how
things were during that time.
As Morata began translating books, younger
people began reading them and saying, ‘We
don’t understand this [literature]’. Traditional
unintelligible, verbose work was meaningless,
but it seemed useful to people. The newer,
translated literature showed people ways to
go to the classroom to work and to understand
what was happening. Things began to change,
but traditional groups still existed.
While pursuing his doctorate, the time
came for Jurjo to do his mandatory military
service, but he took advantage of a legal
mechanism that allowed him to request a
deferral to finish his education. He com-
pleted his doctorate quickly, receiving
his degree in 1979, only four years after
Franco’s death. During that time, Franco’s
government still punished people whom
they considered political dissidents by send-
ing them to horrible places for military
service. They sent Jurjo to Melilla to work
toward the decolonization of the Sahara, an
assignment he described as ‘one of the most
dreadful possible, one saved for politicized
people’ like himself. During the last year of
writing his doctoral thesis, he and his wife
had had a daughter, and after he had served
18 months of military service, the govern-
ment passed a new law that exempted fathers
from military service.
340 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
He had hoped that with the doctoral phase
of his life completed, he could leave behind
the opposition he had experienced as an aca-
demic, but political opposition followed him.
When he returned to civilian life, he and his
colleagues developed ‘neo-Marxist peda-
gogy’, which evolved into critical pedagogy.
He still questions what the term critical peda-
gogy means. Does it refer to teacher train-
ing? He describes critical pedagogy as one
of those terms whose meaning no one knows
for sure. People recognize it as an alterna-
tive pedagogy that is critical. Initially the
term ‘critical pedagogy’ was more powerful
because it pushed people to critical education
that pushed against the conservative norm. If
people talked about neo-Marxism, they were
talking about discrimination based on social
class, according to what was coming out of
the analyses they were conducting. Now he
suspects that people use these words to ‘be
in style’.
Jurjo says,
If critical pedagogy becomes stylish, and we say it
started in the middle of the 20th century, the right
will take the term and rob us of our language. The
right will subsume all the powerful words the left
used to mobilize people. They will distort and
change the meanings and convert them into
meaningless phrases.
It’s when you dig deeper to carry out and to
intervene [in education], that change can occur.
With critical pedagogy, and the way it developed
here, the right stole these words. That way they
could more easily and ethically influence people.
Who wasn’t democratic? Even the Nazis said they
were democratic! From that point on, we were
playing with the term, because when we related to
people in critical pedagogy who were critical, we
knew who they were. We knew their work, and it
didn’t matter if they referred to themselves as
critical or not. I would know if they were working
with critical pedagogy as their philosophical base,
and that’s what interested me.
We were writing with critical pedagogy as our
base, and we began to use the term. I recognize
that the term has become confusing in recent
times, since no one is going to claim to not be
critical, even the most acritical and passive person.
What remains clear is that critical pedagogy is a
concept that explains oppression, which lay under-
neath what was and is going in schools.
He questions the cultural criteria educators
are using. He asks, ‘What is being researched
and analyzed?’. He credits the right with con-
tinuing to create the rules determining cur-
ricular content, although its origin is never
known with certainty. He says that curricu-
lum was a fundamental key that led him to
question the system. He wanted to interro-
gate how curriculum was revised; he didn’t
see how the ‘rule books’ were constructed for
curriculum. He believes that is how the right
introduced neo-behaviorism into the educa-
tion system.
In the 1980s, educators talked about con-
structivist or collaborative learning, but,
‘What about the content?’. Jurjo would talk
to the kids, and they would say they were
bored because they didn’t understand what
they were doing. They weren’t interested
because they could see no purpose in what
they were learning. He says, ‘No one ana-
lyzes that dimension of learning’. He argues
that the common educational system always
has held as fundamental that education must
promote learning to live together with certain
constructed common sense.
Jurjo states that so much rests on how
curriculum is determined, on who decides
which knowledge has value, based on which
cultural work is being used. The educational
system has to progress within the construc-
tion of knowledge, even putting into place
‘poly ethos’ pedagogy, rather than organized
knowledge that ignores the possibility of rec-
ognizing the value of other ways of know-
ing. The educator needs to be an architect
who builds foundations that permit students
to deepen their knowledge, building it on
clearly developed and explained structures.
He says that social fights marked him.
During the fascist years, the social prob-
lems were matters of life and death that
helped him to become a person who could
see ordinary problems of daily life. He rec-
ognized that he wasn’t allowed to understand
things, which in turn caused him to develop
a greater curiosity. This curiosity has led him
to develop a body of work that interrogates
 COMING TO CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN SPAIN THROUGH LIFE AND LITERATURE
curriculum within the context of neoliberal-
ism. He travels throughout the world giving
lectures on multiculturalism, neoliberalism,
neocolonialism, and curriculum (2018, 2008,
1991; Paraskeva and Torres Santomé, 2012),
all stemming from his work in those fields,
and all presented through the lens of critical
pedagogy.
RAMÓN FLECHA
Ramón Flecha identifies himself as a ‘pre-
cursor’ of the movement to critical pedagogy
in Spain. Born in 1952, he establishes the
genesis of his trajectory with critical peda-
gogy in 1969 with the arrival of the translated
version of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in
Spain. Ramón begins his story by sharing a
memory of the first time Paulo Freire set foot
in Barcelona. Ten minutes after his arrival in
Barcelona, Paulo began questioning Ramón
about the treason of Ferrer i Guàrdia, which
was what interested him most about Spain.
Ramón explained that Ferrer i Guàrdia
(1859–1909) was a revolutionary Catalán
educator who embodied his work in three
important traditions of the 19th and first part
of the 20th centuries: anarchy, socialism, and
Christianity. His educational ideology devel-
oped alongside his anarchism, beginning
with his realization that prevailing authoritar-
ian influences promoted principles of injus-
tice and exploitation in education. In 1901,
he established the Escuela Moderna [Modern
School] (Ferrer i Guàrdia and McCabe,
2014), a school separate from the Church, to
teach students to have a radical social con-
science during a time of extreme conserva-
tism and Church control of education. This
school served as the origin of an international
network of 32 schools, some of them in
Brazil, which explains Freire’s knowledge of
and interest in the work of Ferrer i Guàrdia.
He was not opposed to religion; he simply
believed that religion shouldn’t be part of
schooling. He believed that schools needed
341
to focus on scientific discoveries and rea-
soning, not on the conservative perpetuation
of authoritarian control, a philosophy that
caused him to clash with the most conserva-
tive powers in the Spanish schools.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the
ruling classes feared any movement that
might compromise their established privi-
lege. The school was closed in 1906 when
Ferrer i Guàrdia was falsely accused and
arrested for presumed involvement with an
anarchist librarian at the Modern School
who attempted to assassinate the king. The
conservatives took advantage of this moment
to declare Ferrer i Guàrdia as the leader of
the movement, although he was not. He was
executed because of his ideas in 1909, dur-
ing Semana Trágica [Tragic Week], a revolu-
tionary week in Spain, by conservatives who
sought to impede his awakening of a ‘free,
critical, and rational conscience’ in people,
making them aware of the hierarchical privi-
lege that existed in society. Ramón says the
group that killed Ferrer i Guàrdia realized
their error within six years of the execution.
Eventually the Ferrer i Guàrdia Foundation
was established, and as evidence of the impact
of Ferrer i Guàrdia on critical pedagogy in
Spain, Ramón related that for the centennial
of the closing of the school, CREA collabo-
rated with the foundation to pay homage to
this pedagogue, who, in Ramón’s words, was
a ‘great person’.
Ramón says that when there are dictator-
ships, clandestine movements against the dic-
tatorship are inevitable, just as happened with
the French Resistance. He became part of such
a movement at a cultural level when he was
a 14-year-old high school student. This anti-
Francoist group mimicked a group headed
by Spanish poet and playwright Federico
García Lorca, who had been executed by the
Francoists in 1936 at the beginning of the
Civil War. García Lorca had been appointed
theater director of a student theater group, the
Teatro Universitario La Barraca [University
Theater The Shack] at the start of the Second
Republic in 1931 with the charge of taking
342 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
radical theater to rural areas. Ramón’s group,
Misiones Pedagógicas [Pedagogical Missions]
took culture and cultural discussions to the
most disadvantaged districts of Bilbao, the
Basque city that was his hometown. ‘Here I
am, a high school student, going to two of the
poorest slums in Bilbao’, he says. ‘It was –
and is – where I am from’.
As they tried to achieve their goal, they saw
people who didn’t know how to read or write.
Then they identified their unanticipated goal
of teaching literacy. They had to search for
how to do this, because none of them under-
stood education. They were all high school or
university students, but none were majoring
in education. Some of their companions were
revolutionaries in Latin America who began
sending them rudimentary printouts of mate-
rials from Paulo Freire that weren’t published
in book form. At that time, 1967, there was
no book, so they used the stenciled printouts
they received. ‘So with that kind of materials,
we came to know the work of Paulo Freire,
his literacy method’. Using those printouts,
they began to teach literacy in the slums of
Bilbao. ‘I don’t plan to dedicate myself to
teaching, but in fact, I start studying it’, he
continues.
All of a sudden, at the university, they cre-
ate a ‘business school’ [here Ramón uses
the English term], the first one in Europe, in
Bilbao, so he plans to major in economics.
He continues with his volunteer work, and he
becomes the university delegate and leader of
the many anti-Francoist movements, which
causes him to become the persecuted victim
of reprisals. In his third year at the university,
he has to escape from Bilbao, and he goes
to Barcelona. At that time, 1972, there was
more repression in Bilbao than in Barcelona,
where a democratic bourgeois protected the
movements to a certain extent. Jesús Gómez,
or ‘Pato’, his friend of many years from play-
ing soccer together, went with him, since he
was also a victim of the reprisals.
Ramón says, ‘We had no intention of stud-
ying in the university because we thought
the university was bourgeois’. Instead, they
wanted to go to the neighborhoods to start a
social movement. They met some girls who
ended up introducing them to their uncle who
was in the midst of starting an anti-Francoist
school for teachers. Marta Mata,1 a leftist
pedagogue, would teach classes. The uncle
managed to convince them that creating a dif-
ferent kind of education was the way to fight
Francoism, so they began studying teacher
education in what is now the Escuela de San
Cugat in the Department of Education at the
Autonomous University of Barcelona. They
were the first students.
From that time on, they became more
and more involved with education, and they
thought more about majoring in education as
a profession. They began to read everything
and discuss all the revolutionary movements
in education around the world up to that time.
Until then, they only knew about Paulo Freire.
They became involved in critical pedagogy
movements, still clandestinely, although they
had decided to dedicate themselves as pro-
fessionals to critical pedagogy. That was the
first time they understood education as social
transformation, as a social movement. Ramón
and Pato became leaders of the educational
anti-Francoist movement. Ramón became the
representative of the most important strike
movement in teaching in Spain, in February
1976, one year after Franco’s death. Together
he and Pato played a leadership role in tran-
sition movements as the dictatorship ended.
However, there was a reaction against those
movements, with the idea they were politi-
cal anti-Francoist political movements. He
and Pato hoped for an anti-Francoist democ-
racy, but in fact, before his death, Franco had
named as king of the democracy Juan Carlos,
the grandson of Alfonso XIII, who claimed
to be the king in exile when Franco began his
uprising. The first president of the democracy,
Adolfo Suárez, had been the president of the
Francoist Movement. Those who had held
positions of power in the Franco dictatorship
still held those positions in the democracy.
People said they wanted to have a democracy,
but without revolutionary movements that
 COMING TO CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN SPAIN THROUGH LIFE AND LITERATURE
‘want to go too far’. Between 1975 and 1980,
there was a great explosion of movements in
the state and in the governments, which the
former Franco supporters tried to eliminate.
Ramón says the Franco supporters told the
movements, ‘It was well and good what you did
during the dictatorship when you had to fight,
but now there is a democracy, so go home.
We don’t need you’. They used that approach
to get rid of the movements, which had two
fundamental currents in education: the repro-
ductionist model, which says that education
can’t transform society because it reproduces
inequalities, as in the Althusser Movement;
and the Postmodern Movement, which was
based on ideas of transformation and a better
world. ‘These were old ideas. Now we have to
go beyond any narrative of emancipation. Any
meta narrative’, Ramón states.
In 1991, with colleagues from different
disciplines, he founded CREA. He was fun-
damental to developing the communicative
methodology that is the basis of CREA’s
public sociology work (https://isapublicso-
ciology.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/marta-
soler-and-ramon-flecha) based on the theories
of Paulo Freire. In the early 1990s, CREA’s
detractors attacked them fiercely. They called
Paulo Freire antiquated, and said that criti-
cal pedagogy was dogmatic and worthless.
During the 1980s, scholars abandoned criti-
cal pedagogy, and detractors called its few
supporters ‘nostalgic’. The greatest insult
occurred when the press referred to them as
‘anchored in the past, in May 1968’, refer-
encing the time when French workers and
students went on strike, and France seemed
to be on the brink of a leftist revolution. They
said, ‘Young people don’t like that. You are
behind the times. Young people want neon
lights. They want discotheques. They don’t
want social movements’.
All of this was a great defeat for criti-
cal pedagogy ‘We tell ourselves we have to
break up this situation’, says Ramón. ‘We
organized the movement they said was out of
style in 1994, which is a key moment in criti-
cal pedagogy’. In that year, they organized
343
the congress, New Critical Perspectives in
Education. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo
attended. When the time came, Henry Giroux
couldn’t come, but he sent a presentation.
They rented the most important conference
center in Barcelona, which held a thousand
people. Everyone laughed at them, saying no
more than four people would attend. The con-
gress would be in Spanish and English. The
book for the conference was also in English
with a prologue by Peter McLaren.
Ramón marks this as a peak moment in
critical pedagogy. A thousand people came,
and they filled the conference center. Their
detractors had said young people weren’t
interested, but a junior researcher from
CREA, Marta Soler, who was 23 or 24 at the
time, opened the conference by reading Peter
McLaren’s prologue. More than half the peo-
ple attending the congress hadn’t even been
born in May 1968. Paulo Freire loved this! He
was enthusiastic because they had been told
that young people wouldn’t be interested, but
they were even more interested than before.
That congress broke down the prejudice
about critical pedagogy as something that no
longer counted, as something from the past.
With this congress, people viewed critical
pedagogy as belonging to the present. From
that moment on, critical pedagogy move-
ments began to resurge in Spain, and they
haven’t ceased up to the present time.
In 1978, Ramón had founded a learn-
ing community for adults called Centro de
Verneda, located in a working-class Barcelona
neighborhood. Following the congress in
1994, CREA transformed the center so that it
was no longer a single school, but rather many
schools. Up to that point, Ramón compared
Verneda to the Highlander Folk School2 or the
Barbiana School3 or Summerhill School,4 but
with the congress and the resurgence of critical
pedagogy, La Verneda became a movement.
From the beginning, CREA had understood
they couldn’t create a revolutionary educa-
tional movement unless it was better than the
schools that had gone before. They wanted to
pick up the torch from Ferrer i Guàrdia with
344 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
his ideas about scientific reasoning and anar-
chism. The Catholic Church still organized
and controlled schools in Spain at this time,
but Ramón founded a dialogic learning com-
munity which would follow a pluralist human-
istic tradition rather than having Christianity
as its base, Verneda increased the prestige of
critical pedagogy in Spain as its greatest char-
acteristic (Flecha, 2000).
Ramón has continued his work in critical
pedagogy, with his sociological theories on
dialogic societies regarded as seminal (Flecha
et al., 2001). His work on alternative mascu-
linities and against gender violence has had
an impact on Spanish universities, as well as
on legislation (Flecha et al., 2013). He con-
tinues to work in marginalized communities.
The Roma community recognized him with an
honorary doctorate from a Romanian univer-
sity. In addition, Roma citizens in Catalunya
granted him a national award and invited him
to be a member of the National Roma Council
to advise the government (Flecha, n.d.). He
travels throughout the world giving lectures
based on his extensive work.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Conversations with both men made it appar-
ent that their distinct paths reflected the soci-
ety in which they came of age, and in which
they currently work. The global influences on
their development as critical pedagogues also
surfaced as they shared their histories, and
they now travel to give lectures globally, com-
pleting the circle. Ramon’s references to the
Highlander Folk School in the United States,
the Barbiana School in Italy, and Summerhill
School in England, all influenced his work.
Jurjo’s summers in England allowed him to
read the literature produced outside the repres-
sive society in which he lived and worked.
Although they have worked in different
ways, both have been spent their lives trying to
change the political structure of society through
education. For both scholars, critical peda-
gogy is a lived theory. They seek to improve
education, and they still fight the government
and Church control of education as they seek
ways to create social justice in society.
As I talked to Jurjo and Ramón, I realized
that my studies as a Spanish literature major
many years ago had set me on a path that
would lead to my current journey to develop
my understanding of critical pedagogy. As
both Jurjo and Ramón talked about their early
involvement in clandestine organizations,
they talked about Federico García Lorca,
Miguel de Unamuno, and Antonio Machado,
to mention a few of the writers who helped to
shape the genesis of our paths. We all devel-
oped according to the circumstances and situ-
ations in which we lived. Although we are all
within five or six years of age, we came of age
politically and educationally under different
political systems and ideologies. Paulo Freire
constantly reiterated that he didn’t want his
work to become reified and iconized. Rather,
he wanted his work to reflect different cul-
tures and societies, which, with these schol-
ars, I suggest happens continuously.
Notes
1 Marta Mata Garriga (1926–2006) was a socialist
Catalán politician and pedagogue whose work
helped to re-establish public education, which had
been repressed after the overthrow of the Second
Republic. In 1965, she worked clandestinely with
a team of teachers to regain what had been lost
during the Francoist dictatorship. She established
la Escuela de Maestros Rosa Sensat [Teachers’
School Rosa Sensat], which focused on public
schools based on Catalán language and culture.
2 Myles Horton (1905–1990) established the High-
lander Folk School in the US southern state of
Tennessee in 1932. As a socialist and activist, he
believed that education should encourage free
thinking and help people to understand systemic
issues that create oppression. He fought tirelessly
for integration and labor organizing. The school,
situated in the segregated south, became a place
where the Civil Rights Movement could be dis-
cussed during the turbulent years of the 1950s
and 1960s, attracting influential leaders such
as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Eleanor
Roosevelt, and so on. He and Paulo Freire held
conversations to share their beliefs about societal
change (Horton, 1998; Horton and Freire, 1990).
 COMING TO CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN SPAIN THROUGH LIFE AND LITERATURE
It would go between the notes about Marta Mata
and Lorenzo Milani.
3 Lorenzo Milani (1923–67) directed the School of
Barbiana in Tuscany, Italy. He based his work and
writings on examining the role of class politics,
imperialism, and the culture of militarization in
education. He also explored ‘themes of learn-
ing and writing, peer tutoring, critical media lit-
eracy, and reading history against the grain’, all
in the spirit of establishing ‘social justice-oriented
critical pedagogy’ (Batini et al., 2014; Borg and
Mayo, 2006).
4 A. S. Neill (1883–1973) founded the school that
became Summerhill School in 1921 as an indepen-
dent boarding school in England based on his edu-
cational belief that both students and faculty needed
to operate by democratic governance (Neill, 1960).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to express my heartfelt thanks to
Jameson Jones and Roger Reguant for tran-
scribing the recordings of these conversations;
to Dan Lubbs, for his constant technical sup-
port and suggestions; and to Shirley Steinberg
for naming and guiding my own journey in
critical pedagogy. Most of all, I express my
deepest appreciation to Jurjo Torres Santomé
and Ramón Flecha for giving me their time,
their thoughts, and their friendship.
REFERENCES
Althusser, L.(Ed.) (1976). Idéologie et appareils
idéologiques d’État. (Notes pour une recher-
ché). In Positions (1964–1975). pp. 67–125.
Paris, France: Les Éditions Sociales.
Batini, L, Mayo, P., & Surian, A. (2014). Lorenzo
Milani, the School of Barbiana, and the
struggle for social justice. New York, NY:
Peter Lang.
Bochner, A. P., & Ellis, C. (2016). Evocative
autoethnography: Writing lives and telling
stories. New York, NY: Routledge.
Borg, C., & Mayo, P. (2006). Critical pedagogy
and citizenship: Lorenzo Milani and the School
of Barbiana. In C. Borg & P. Mayo (Eds.) ­Learning
and social difference: Challenges for public
education and critical pedagogy(Chapter 8).
Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm.
345
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1970). La repro-
duction: Éléments pour une théorie du sys-
tème d’enseignement. Paris, France: Les
Éditions de Minuit.
Ferrer i Guàrdia, F., & McCabe, J. (translation).
(2014). The origin and ideals of the Modern
School. [Kindle Christie Books version].
Retrieved from Amazon.com
Flecha, R. (n.d.). Curriculum vitae. University of
Barcelona, Department of Sociological
Theory, Philosophy of Law, and Social Sci-
ences Methodology. Retrieved from www.
ub.edu/tsociologica/?page_id=254
Flecha, R. (2000). Sharing words: Theory and
practice of dialogic learning. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Flecha, R., Gómez, J., & Puigvert, L. (2001).
Contemporary sociological theory. New
York, NY: Peter Lang.
Flecha, R., Puigvert, L., & Rios, O. (2013). The
new alternative masculinities and the over-
coming of gender violence. International and
Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Sciences,
2(1), 88–113. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.4471/
rimcis.2013.14
Horton, M. (with J. Kohl and H. Kohl) (1998).
The long haul: An autobiography. New York,
NY: Teachers College Press.
Horton, M., & Freire, P. (1990). We make the
road by walking: Conversations on educa-
tion and social change. (Eds.) B. Bell,
J. Gaventa, & J. Peters. Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press.
Neill, A. S. (1960). Summerhill: A radical
approach to child rearing. New York, NY: Hart.
Paraskeva, J., & Torres Santomé, J. (Eds.).
(2012). Globalisms and power: Iberian edu-
cation and curriculum policies. New York,
NY: Peter Lang.
Tilley-Lubbs, G. A. (2017). Re-assembly
required: Critical autoethnography and spir-
itual discovery. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Torres Santomé, J. (2018). Políticas educativas y
construcción de personalidades neoliberales
y neocolonialistas. Madrid, Spain: Ediciones
Morata.
Torres Santomé, J. (2008). Multiculturalismo
anti-racista. Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Morata.
Torres Santomé, J. (1991). El currículum oculto.
Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Morata.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How work-
ing class kids get working class jobs. New
York, NY: Columbia University.
 35
Interviews with Marta
Soler-Gallart and Teresa
Sordé Martí
M a r t a S o l e r - G a l l a r t a n d Te r e s a S o r d é M a r t í

This first interview was conducted by Joe
Kincheloe while we were working in Barcelona
with CREA, the Community of Research on
Excellence for All (originally the Center of
Research in Theories and Practices to
Overcome Inequalities). As mentioned in the
previous chapter by Kris Tilley-Lubbs, CREA
was founded by Ramón Flecha. Joe inter-
Marta Soler: CREA is a research center. It’s a
viewed Marta on her work with CREA and the
importance of the work of Jesús ‘Pato’ Gómez.
The contributions from CREA to not only
Spain, but the European Union, Central and
South America, Africa … the world, have
exemplified critical pedagogy both in stellar,
rigorous research and in real-life, on-the-
ground critical work with marginalized peo-
ples. Working with CREA (http://crea.ub.edu/
index/) is to experience humble, selfless com-
mitment (srs, editor’s note).
MARTA SOLER: INTERVIEWED BY JOE
L. KINCHELOE, BARCELONA, 2006
JK: Marta, it’s great to see you here. I’m inter-
viewing Marta Soler who is the director of
CREA here in Barcelona at the University of
Barcelona. And I’d like just to ask you a few
questions and just to let the world know
what you’re doing here. First of all, would
you just explain to a lot of people who are in
North America in particular and around the
world, what is CREA and what is it that CREA
has been doing in the context especially of
critical pedagogy?
center of research in theories and practices
that overcome inequalities. So, the main goal
of CREA is social transformation. The main
goal is to overcome inequalities. And all the
research and projects that we are conduct-
ing, they are oriented not to study inequali-
ties or the barriers that exclude these
populations have, but how to overcome
those barriers. So, this is the main goal of
CREA and its bigger organization. And
between those inequalities, we are working
on many different diverse inequalities.
For instance, one of the works that we do is
on gender inequality, also culture inequality,
educational inequality. Let’s say for instance
about gender, we have been doing a lot of
work on gender. Within CREA there is a group
on gender issues. The name of women’s group
is SAFO [En., Sappho]. And SAFO is working on
overcoming gender inequality in the broad
sense. For instance, working with other
 INTERVIEWS WITH MARTA SOLER-GALLART AND TERESA SORDÉ MARTÍ
women, women who have been marginalized
or at the border like Judith Butler says, at the
borders of the society.
Also, with gender violence, that’s another
issue with which we work, also neo-­
masculinities, Roma women – these are the
different topics that SAFO is working on. One
of the main topics we’ve been working on is
gender violence, including gender violence at
the university. It’s one of the latest issues that
we have. It has been very contested in our envi-
ronment in Spain and it has got a lot of conse-
quences. If I can keep going a little bit on that?
JK: Yes, please.
Marta Soler: For instance, what we’ve been
doing on gender violence at the university –
well, for us, it is very important as CREA that
what we do in our research is coherent. What
we do in our research center within CREA in
our work, in the university, in our own lives
so that there is coherence between what we
say and the discourse, the critical discourse
that we have and the work that we do, and
that is very important, this kind of coherence.
And because of this coherence, this some-
times, as many critical scholars had happen
the same to them, causes also some people in
CREA lots of problems. I’ve been listening to
you saying that the critical scholars are often
persecuted because they say things and
they’re coherent with what they say, in the
work that they do.
In our case, for instance with the women’s
group SAFO, we broke the silence about
gender violence at university, in campus. So,
that caused a lot of consequences because
many people, they didn’t want us to break
the silence. And the men who supported us,
the women’s group, like for instance, the
former director of CREA, Ramón Flecha, and
Jesús Gómez, ‘Pato’ – they suffered a lot of
persecution because, for instance, Ramón
Flecha – with the institutional position being
a director of a big research center – support-
ing that, he got a lot of attacks for that.
So, these are the consequences of doing
critical research and critical work, critical
pedagogy work. But we think it’s worth it
because we still have many women that are
suffering gender violence, many Roma
people who are being excluded in many loca-
tions. And we should keep with this coher-
ence working like that.
JK: I’m just so impressed with the work of CREA,
the work of Ramón Flecha obviously over
the years, and your work. You’ve done so
many amazing projects over the last decade
or so. How did you come to be a scholar of
critical pedagogy? How did that happen in
your life?
347
Marta Soler: I think that’s a nice story. I was a
student in the field of education myself at
the University of Barcelona. So, I think it was
through Paulo Freire. I was in my second year
at the university and suddenly I had a profes-
sor, Professor Flecha, and he talked about
Freire in class. In my second year, I have never
heard a word of any of my professors about
Paulo Freire.
So, we read Freire. We talked about criti-
cal work and that’s why I discovered the
world of critical pedagogy and transforma-
tive education. And, actually, he [Ramón]
was the one, because when I studied – this
was back in the 80s in Spain but also in
Europe – it was a time of the peak wave of
postmodernism. Like Freire, he had many fol-
lowers in Europe and Spain in the 60s and
70s. But in the 80s, with the wave of post-
modernism, many people said that we didn’t
need the emancipatory discourse. That was
not needed for the new society.
So, we didn’t have to talk about inequality,
we didn’t have to talk about – [we need a]
different kind of discourse. And so, in that
moment, nobody would talk about Freire at
the school of education for instance. So,
Ramón, he was keeping Freire alive. In the
80s, he made possible that Paulo Freire was
awarded Doctor Honoris Causa at the
University of Barcelona. And he’s the only
one honoris causa that we have in the
University of Barcelona in education and that
was very good. And since then because of
this hard work of having critical pedagogy
alive, it has been developed further. That’s
why I came to know that as a student.
JK: So, it was in Ramón’s class that you found
Paulo, in a sense?
Marta Soler: Yes.
JK: And then you met him several times when he
came here and visited and taught and
worked in the following years, right?
Marta Soler: Yes, I met Paulo. It was in 1994 that
CREA organized an international conference
on critical pedagogy. And in this conference,
we invited Paulo and also Donaldo Macedo,
Paul Willis, different scholars from Europe
and from – internationally. So, Paulo was
here, and I met him here.
A good story about this 1994 conference
was that when we opened the conference,
we had been talking a lot in CREA on how,
in that moment, that there was this post-
modern offensive [and] that a critical peda-
gogy needed to be alive; that people were
saying that young people didn’t like this
emancipatory discourse or critical pedagogy.
That was for old people from the 60s, those
of May ‘68.
348 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Then I was a student and had started in
CREA, and Paulo was the one opening the
conference. And I said, ‘Well, many people say
critical pedagogy is for nostalgics of ‘68. I was
not born in ‘68 and I’m here like many young
people who was in the audience’. And that
was big. I remember that Manuel Castells, the
sociologist, he was next to me, and he was
like, ‘Oh, that’s good’. And Freire also, he said
that he liked that a lot, that youth was with
the spirit and the ideas. It’s not a thing about
age, it’s a thing about the ideas.
Well, Freire used to say that, and Pato
(Jesús Gómez), he always says, ‘Freire always
says, “our youth, it’s linked to our ideas, not
the age”’.
JK: That’s beautiful. One of the things that I
wanted to talk to everybody here at CREA
about is Jesús ‘Pato’ Gómez who meant so
much to so many of us and, of course, who
died recently. We all are still not over it and
we’ll never get over it. What did Pato and his
work mean to you? What did you learn the
most from Pato’s critical pedagogy?
Marta Soler: Well, Pato, he was an initiator of
some of the key work that we have been devel-
oping in CREA. For instance, the line of research
on prevention of gender violence – part of this
work is based on the theories of Pato, Radical
Love and what he calls a preventive socializa-
tion of gender violence, how people are social-
ized in different ways of attraction.
So, his theory of love and his support to
the women’s group in the gender violence
fight, or struggle I would say, that was very,
very important for me and also for the
women of CREA and CREA as a group.
Another thing that Pato was developing
strongly along with other scholars like Ramón
and others was the methodology that we
used in our research in CREA, which is critical
communicative methodology.
And most of our research on gender ine-
quality or educational inequality, we used this
approach which is putting into dialogue – I’ve
listened to you talking about this – the scien-
tific community. What we are doing in aca-
demia, combining the knowledge that we
already have with the knowledge that is cre-
ated by grassroots movements and by the dis-
enfranchised, the excluded people that are
also creating knowledge. So, putting into dia-
logue that knowledge; the interpretations
that we have in the scientific community with
the interpretations of the social actors. He
[Pato] was developing this critical communi-
cative methodology.
JK: It’s just amazing to me how brilliant he was
in his work on love, his work on the commu-
nitive methodology will live on forever. I just
want to thank you so much. I hope you know
how much I appreciate you and how much I
respect you and how glad I am that those of
us in the Freire Project in Montreal are going
to be working closely with you here at CREA.
And I look forward to that so much and we
are going to do some good things together.
Marta Soler: Thank you.
JK: Thank you so much, Marta. Thank you.
TERESA SORDÉ MARTÍ: INTERVIEWED
BY FREIREPROJECT.ORG (FP), BAEZA,
SPAIN 2009
Teresa attended the first gathering of the
International Congress for Critical Pedagogy
and Transformative Leadership held in Baeza,
Spain, 10 months after the death of Joe
Kincheloe. The Congress was created to com-
memorate the lives of Jesús ‘Pato’ Gómez,
Paulo Freire and Joe Kincheloe. The three men
were herculean in the world of critical
pedagogy, yet, all three remained humble, vital,
exuberant and dedicated to radical love, educa-
tion for all, equity, literacy and life. To know
these men was to indeed, love them and to
honor them. Teresa’s work in CREA has often
focused on the wellbeing and education for
Roma peoples in general, and Roma women
specifically. Both Marta and Teresa were
inspired by their work with CREA and as a
community, they have participated in essential
legislation and scholarship dealing with ending
gender-based violence (SRS, Editors note).
Teresa Sordé Martí: My name is Teresa Sordé
Martí. I’m from Catalonia. I work at the
Autonomous University of Barcelona as a
Professor at the Sociology Department. But I
also collaborate with CREA for many years.
FP: Tell us what CREA is again.
Teresa Sordé Martí: CREA is the research center
on theories and practices that overcome ine-
qualities. It’s located at the Barcelona Science
Park. This is part of the University of
Barcelona. And it’s – I would say – the largest
 INTERVIEWS WITH MARTA SOLER-GALLART AND TERESA SORDÉ MARTÍ
research center in the Spanish state that
looks at how to overcome inequalities in dif-
ferent areas. So, from gender, from the
women’s group to migration, migrants to
Romani studies and that’s the area where I’ve
been more involved.
FP: How did CREA start?
Teresa Sordé Martí: CREA started – actually,
Ramón Flecha found it. And it just started
as a reading circle, as a seminar. And we are
still doing it. We call it our ‘seminar with
the book in our hands’ because we get to
read from Freire to Vivar to Adam Smith,
Marsh [ph]. Many authors’ classical works
that are important in social sciences but from
a very interdisciplinary perspective.
So, we get together – professors, students,
grad, undergrads, everybody, people from the
community. So, we all have read that book and
we discuss based on the text. So, that’s why we
say that we have the book in our hands.
FP: So, you’re in Department of Sociology?
Teresa Sordé Martí: Yes.
FP: And what’s your area of interest?
Teresa Sordé Martí: I’ve done a lot of work on
Roma and Romani women, like how they
organized themselves at the European level
and how they are organizing to claim and to
transform their community and society. I’ve
done also work in education, social move-
ments, social theory.
FP: Our North American audiences know noth-
ing about the Roma or some will, some will
not. Can you tell us about the Roma? Can
you give us – for somebody who doesn’t
know anything.
Teresa Sordé Martí: The Roma is an ethnic
minority that immigrates from the northeast
part of India around the centuries – we don’t
really know – 9th, 10th, 11th century. And since
then they have spread out all around the
world. So, at the moment it is estimated that
there are 12 million Roma in the world and
10 [million] of them live in Europe. So, that
means that the Roma is considered the most
important ethnic minority in Europe.
FP: And in Spain, are they all across Spain or are
they concentrated in places?
Teresa Sordé Martí: You’ll find Roma communities
all throughout the Spanish state but mostly
the part of Spain where there are more Roma
is in Andalusia. So, where we are. [AUDIO
SKIPS]. And most of them are living – or victim
of many discriminations and are located in
many marginalized neighborhoods.
So, even though they live in Europe, well –
being society and very advanced that we
349
have a lot of wealth, Roma are still an excep-
tion to this. There have been large part of
Romani population that have not had access
to quality education, to quality social services,
to employment, et cetera.
FP: The first time you read Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, do you remember this?
Teresa Sordé Martí: I think that it was in a CREA
seminar that we read it. No, I think I first read
A La Sombra De Este Arbol and then I read
Pedagogy of the Oppressed. But it was at CREA
seminar and then I did my PhD at Harvard, so I
read it again in English and discussing it in the
US context, so that was also interesting. So, I
remember these two times discussing and
reading it and feeling different.
FP: How did you feel different?
Teresa Sordé Martí: Well, I think that the discus-
sions are different because of the history and
the context and the experiences that people
bring in. I remember at CREA, the discussion – in
the US and they were very different, I don’t
know. In the US there was all this praise [ph],
theory behind. And I remember that it was in
a critical theory class. It was very diverse envi-
ronment, so it was different.
FP: I’m really interested because this is one of the
things which gets talked about is the North
American – let’s put a real point on it, I mean,
this sort of American – as Joe Kincheloe, our
project founder, said, this appropriation of
this Brazilian thing. But I wondered, does
Spain feel that way about Paulo Freire’s work
or have those concerns?
Teresa Sordé Martí: That the US has taken…
FP: That the US academia has somehow taken
the ideas of Paulo Freire and applied it to its
situation without maybe – now, maybe the
next wave of critical pedagogy is to go back
outside of its own borders and listen care-
fully to Indigenous people from around the
world.
Teresa Sordé Martí: If this is the case, I think, it’s
good. It’s a positive move because I think that
Freire sometimes is used as a framework to
critique, but Freire does not stop at the cri-
tique. He also proposes. So, I like to have both,
not only how we can overcome oppression but
also how we can construct a better world and
another world. So, I always like to keep in mind
both the critique but also transformation.
So, I feel that sometimes in the US, but also
in Europe, the critique is much stronger than
the constructive part. And at CREA, I think
that we tend to focus on the constructive part,
like how to overcome this. So, that would be a
difference.
350 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
FP: Tell us a little bit more about CREA and the
constructive literacy circles – and you’re
saying a book in hand.
Teresa Sordé Martí: Well, the focus on overcom-
ing inequalities is because we believe that the
reality has already the solution to many of our
problems. So, it’s a question of identifying
them. For instance, to identify how learning
communities are overcoming school failure
among Roma students.
So, to analyze why they are succeeding and
try to extend the strategies that they use in
another context, always in dialogue with the
actors of that community. Never imposing it
or just transposing from one context to the
other, but always what has been considered
that works and how it can be implemented in
another context, but always with dialogue
with the Romani families and the people from
the community, with these two elements.
FP: How big is the Romani community around
Barcelona?
Teresa Sordé Martí: Around Barcelona?
FP: Or is CREA moving around the country?
Teresa Sordé Martí: Yes, even Europe. We work
with European projects that have focus on
Roma. We are also very connected. For instance,
at CREA, we are Roman and Romana research-
ers working on this area. And most of us are
very connected to the Roma rights movement.
We are advising them, having meetings with
them, discussing. So, we are doing a lot of work
supporting the movement.
This collaboration is from the place where
all our research project is tapped because we
would never write a proposal, a research
proposal, without having discussed the
objectives, the work plan and everything
with the communities.
FP: So, tell us more about your work today.
Teresa Sordé Martí: I was presenting today the
work that we are doing with Drom Kotar
Mestipen. That means, in Romano, Road to
Freedom. And this is a Romani association of
women. So, that means that it’s composed by
non-Roma and Roma women from all ages
and from all educational backgrounds.
And this association has been founded ten
years ago [now over 20 years, ed.]. And since
then one of the projects that has been more
successful has been the Romani women
meetings. The idea of creating these meet-
ings arose from the need to overcome the
approaches that were used to overcome
Romani absenteeism at the school.
The idea is always that we need to con-
vince, and we need to talk to the families to
convince them to bring their kids to school.
And sometimes even the governments and
the policy makers use force on families, like
using legal tools or even through the police
to push them to convince [them], because
‘they are the ones who have the problem
because they don’t like school’. I mean, that
there is no challenging of the school system
and why they don’t like it.
So, the idea of these meetings was to listen
to them, to create a space where Romani
women could speak up and could express
what changes they think that should be made
at the school level for them to be successful at
the school. So, the Romani women meetings,
we’ve been organizing 15 of them. They are
always organized in predominantly Romani
neighborhoods and always a local organizing
committee is setup. They are the ones decid-
ing everything – from the food, from the
agenda of the meeting, from the place, eve-
rything is decided by these women.
And from these meetings – from these local
organizing meetings – many Romani women
associations have been created. So, it’s also a
way to organize them throughout the terri-
tory. And these meetings, it’s Saturday, that
Romani women from all ages like grandmoth-
ers to children to girls get together and they
have a whole day to discuss and to speak.
So, that means that only women are invited,
and Romani women have preference to speak
over non-Roma because we have many
spaces to speak about our problems as pro-
fessionals, and they don’t. So, this space is
very protected for them to speak and we
listen – the professionals. We listen to their
proposals.
So, normally, there is a round table of role
models like Romani women and Romani girls
who have achieved some level of education,
someone who has got to the university, who
had finished high school, et cetera, and then
we split in working groups. And these are
the places where Romani women from all
ages speak and discuss which changes need
to take place at the school for being a differ-
ent place that really serve their needs and
their expectations towards the school.
FP: I guess maybe this is a North American ques-
tion, but is feminism something that you’re
introducing to the Romani women or is this
something that’s natural, that you’re already –
what’s the dialogue on feminism?
Teresa Sordé Martí: Well, I don’t think that we
introduce it. It’s already there. And that’s
what they call Romani feminism. And Romani
 INTERVIEWS WITH MARTA SOLER-GALLART AND TERESA SORDÉ MARTÍ
feminism is defined from the Romani culture.
And in a sense, they are giving us lessons of
how to combine tradition and opportunities
and how to [re]concile both their own way.
So, you can see Romani grandmothers
who are illiterate encouraging the younger
ones to go to school and to continue with
their personal lives and creating spaces
where you can – you then need to choose
between one thing or another and both can
be possible, like personal and professional.
They are already feminists, we are not intro-
ducing feminism. They have the Romani
feminism at the core of these meetings.
FP: And just talking about the work that CREA is
doing as well concerning gender violence.
And since you’ve been to North America, can
you compare some of the gender issues and
issues of feminism in Spain and North
America? Where is Spain now?
Teresa Sordé Martí: Well – you mean the gender
violence issue?
FP: Well, the gender violence but this must
surely be associated with issues of feminism
in the academe …
Teresa Sordé Martí: Spanish universities are
changing a lot. We say that now we are under-
way, the first revolution. We have finished
with the feudal system. And that has been
made mostly because of CREA’s women’s
group because we were the ones denouncing
that gender-based violence was also at the
universities. Something that no one would
imagine at the university, our ivory tower.
These things don’t happen at the university –
but they do and we all know.
So, the work that we’ve done from this
women’s group has made it possible, for
instance, to denounce cases of gender vio-
lence at the university that we’re hiding that,
that we’re silenced by the legal services, the
university legal services, from the president
of the university. There was complot, like a
secret pact of silence that everybody was sup-
posed to just ignore what was happening
and just play the game in order for these
351
cases that we were denouncing to come up
and to go public.
So, in a sense, I think that many of the
changes that you find at the Spanish universi-
ties are due to this kind of work of speaking
up and saying what is really happening.
FP: So Pato, can you tell me a story or two or
how’d you get to know him or…
Teresa Sordé Martí: I first met Pato when I was a
research assistant at CREA in 1997. And I
remember that he came to the office and he
was always happy and cheerful and make
everybody laugh. So, that’s my memories of
the first time I met Pato. But then we shared
many things and many experiences that I
wouldn’t know how from where to start.
Pato is always remembered because he
was very funny and because he was very gen-
erous. But behind this, there was a really
great man who helped so many people
throughout his life. He was always thinking
how to help people but in a very diverse way
like talking about our private life, our profes-
sional life, our well-being. He was an amaz-
ing person. I’m so glad that we are doing all
this work not to forget him because I think
it’s worth for the humanity to keep him alive
like we do, like the same for Joe and Paulo.
FP: What’s the lesson of Pato’s life? Is there a
pedagogy of his life?
Teresa Sordé Martí: Pedagogy. I think that it’s
just that he was always giving everything,
but not only taking you out for dinner. When
I’m saying giving, it’s giving all his happiness
and all his advice, all his knowledge or his
experience. He was always sharing with all of
us. I remember that he used to say to me that
I was very lucky because – and I feel lucky – I
got to talk and to discover the radical love
very early in my life, not like him that he
discovered later but he did. He did discover
it, of course, with Lydia. But I remember that
he used to say that I was very lucky because I
could talk and discover and experience radi-
cal love early in my life, so I would say that
this could be a good memory.

Interview with Henry A. Giroux
Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid McAuliffe
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
When Henry Giroux is in dialogue, when he
is riffing, he’s at his most powerful. This
conversation took place at The University of
the West of Scotland after Giroux received an
honorary doctorate. As an homage to critical
pedagogy it was appropriate that he speak in
a dialogic fashion. Henry’s work is always an
encounter. And if you haven’t felt like it was
an encounter, you haven’t read it well enough.
It’s not safe, it’s not simple, it’s not soft and
it’s not complacent. When we encounter
Henry’s work, it demands that we acknowl-
edge histories, failures of our own education,
perhaps our own pedagogies, and certainly
we start to understand how power and posi-
tion work in society. We begin to understand
that teaching and pedagogy is an active
resistance for teachers and for and with our
students. We begin to understand that teach-
ing and pedagogy is theoretical, complicated
and intellectual. As an encounter with
36
Giroux, we find that it reminds us just how
important our work is in classrooms, in com-
munities and in our society. We must contin-
ually expect to challenge the norm, to stand
up for justice and equality and equity and to
work in solidarity with those who are also
resisting. We must begin to understand what
it is we know by knowing what we don’t
know, that knowledge is both tentative and
fluid, that change is part of pedagogy and
that pedagogy above all else is a political act.
It has been almost three decades since I met
Henry on a cool autumn day at Miami
University of Ohio. I realized at that first
meeting that Henry embodies his own words
and teachings, he is the man we hope he is
when we read his work. That first read is a
special moment. He’s always provocative,
always engaged. He is a public intellect. His
work challenges. It disturbs. It incises. It
influences. It stimulates. It inspires, and it
makes the difference. (SRS, Editors note)
 INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX
Diarmuid: Shall we start? Okay. We’re going to
go right back to 1983 to your publication.
Yes? Theory and Resistance.
Henry: That’s okay but it makes me seem very old.
Diarmuid: Well our technical team will sort
that. You essentially took off where
Pedagogy of the Oppressed left off… And
we are assuming that Paulo Freire was a
mentor to you in your 15-year or so relation-
ship. I want to actually refer to the fore-
word to Theory and Resistance. And let me
just read what Paulo Freire said of your
work at the time: ‘The seriousness of the
writing, its clarity, its rigor, all had a deep
impact upon me’. And this is Freire talking.
‘I read it, reread it with the same seriousness
with which it had been written. Afterwards,
I wrote to the editor of the journal stating
that in my view, this article should have
been published day before yesterday’. So
the urgency that is in your work, we’ll see
here this evening. Pedagogy of Opposition,
as Theory and Resistance, was taking off
from Pedagogy of the Oppressed as we’ve
just said, looking back at this now. Yesterday,
you talked about how memory produces
hope for the students graduating: powerful.
In what way do you see your memory of the
early formative work that went on in Theory
and Resistance producing any hope for you
now? How do you see this work now look-
ing back at it?
Henry: First, for me, just to say something to the
audience, I just want to thank you all for
being here. I know that many of you have
traveled enormously long distances. I’m just
really humbled and grateful for that. I think
that one of the things that you have to
understand, at least I tried to understand,
was that Theory and Resistance was a reac-
tion to a very specific historical context in
which I saw people engaging in a discourse
that was opening up in new ways to show
how domination works very specifically in
schools. They were trying to shatter myths
about meritocracy. They were trying to shat-
ter the myths that school somehow was a
dream machine in which matters of class and
power and inequality were not really opera-
tive. And they did that well. There were
people like Gintis and Bowles with Schooling
in Capitalist America, and a whole range of
other people who were writing in a similar
vein. But there was something about the
language that was mired in the discourse of
domination. I wanted to challenge that dis-
course because it seemed to me that in many
353
ways, what it lacked was a realistic assump-
tion that with resistance has to come hope.
And schools weren’t simply just boxes of
domination. They weren’t just simply pris-
ons. The prevailing discourse seemed to sug-
gest that schools were iron boxes. And I
often thought to myself, ‘What do you say to
teachers who are working in those schools,
right? Are they simply just prison guards?’
There was an enormous underestimation of
the way in which people within very specific
relations of domination often found spaces
to challenge that domination. So I was
increasingly concerned with how, within
structures of domination there were oppor-
tunities to challenge, at the very least, forms
of resistance both within those structures
and outside of those structures. Now if you
fast forward whatever it is, 40 years,
I think we find ourselves in actually a more
urgent place because it seemed to me in
the 1980s… when I wrote Theory and
Resistance…
I wrote that book by hand, by the way. You
know, writing and throwing pages away and
trying to reformulate ideas. It wasn’t an era
where information so overwhelmed you, that
it was by its very nature fractured. There was a
space for thoughtfulness. There was a space to
sort of comprehend in a more totalizing way
how ideas came together. There was a way of
relating specifics to a larger sort of issues. And
I think today that space is shrunken. And I
think it’s much more difficult today to have a
more comprehensive view about politics, about
the various modes of resistance and how they
interrelate, and more importantly how in fact
diverse modes of resistance can be mobilized. It
seems to me possibilities that are enormously
important at this particular time in history are
more difficult to imagine. Today we have to
contend with the power of powerful dis-­
imagination machines. It is important to
remember that C. Wright Mills wrote about
cultural apparatuses and how powerful they
were, right? He understood that domination
never existed without ideological and affective
dimensions. It is not just about economic struc-
tures, a position that the left it seems to me has
reproduced for years and to their great disad-
vantage. But I think today we have something
else going on. And I think today, the question
of ideology, the question of emotion, the ques-
tion of affect, the question of identity, the
question of identification, the question of
being able to put things together, the question
of what it means to somehow move beyond a
354 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
culture of immediacy and a culture of sensa-
tionalism offers a far more dangerous and
poisonous notion of domination and makes
resistance all the more difficult. We see it all
over the place. I mean, especially as neoliberal-
ism has exhausted its own ideology, right?
Especially as the culture has become so hard,
especially as fascism now has come out of the
closet and now moves from the fringes of soci-
ety to the center of society. These ideologies
are right in your face. They’re not hiding any-
more. But that’s all the more reason to re-the-
orize not just simply resistance, but I would
think to re-theorize the notion of politics itself
and what it means. And I don’t think you can
do it without the question of memory. I don’t
think you can do it without a sense of historical
consciousness. I don’t think you can do it… I’ll
give you a classic example. There’s this enor-
mous debate going on in the United States. An
enormous debate going on whether he’s a
neo-fascist or whether Trump is a clown or
whether we’re really in a new era of fascism
per se. And it seems to me that what that
debate misses is that fascism doesn’t stand still.
It emerges in different forms. That the ele-
ments of totalitarianism as we saw them in the
1920s, the 1930s, are not reproducing them-
selves in ways that are mimicked exactly, but
they are reproducing the principles of the
social relations that we often find that add up
to what I call new forms of authoritarianism. I
think that Theory and Resistance is interesting
in the title and also in the implication. And that
is… forgive me for this, but we can’t have
resistance without theory, I’m sorry. You have
to think through in some way what you’re
going to borrow from history, what you’re
going to learn from history, what is it about
history that teaches us something about what
it means to be an agent in a new set of social
and political contexts so we can act on that
knowledge thoughtfully. There is an enormous
degree of mystification that takes place politi-
cally today which confuses experience with
knowledge. Experience has to take a detour
through theory. It has to take a critical tour
through theory itself. Experience does not
speak for itself. And when politics collapses
simply into experience, it means the only poli-
tics you have is the politics of the personal, and
I think we have to be very careful with that,
and I think that that title in some way repre-
sents a challenge to that position.
Graham: You’re running ahead into my second
question. You’re way ahead of me, about
five miles ahead of me. That’s kind of what I
expected.
Graham: That’s alright. One argument about
education is that it’s always about the
future because it’s about enabling people
to face the future. And in your recent
work, you present a vision of the future
which is frankly pretty dystopian. If things
don’t work out well, disposable futures, we
see whole populations, young people, the
disabled, people of color, poor people writ-
ten off, just kind of left to fester while
minorities get richer, etc. I want to just
explore a couple of things. Firstly, what do
you think are the consequences of this atti-
tude that regards people as disposable,
because obviously that runs counter to all
the things any mainstream educator would
say. All educators will hold up this idea of
equal opportunity, every child born equal,
every child born into a state where they
might have… We want as educators for
people to reach their potential. But we’re
facing a society which, if you’re right, is
writing off those people almost before
they had a chance to even get to one years
old. So that thing about the centrality of
pedagogy and education to politics. And
secondly, there’s this question of the rela-
tionship of the past and the present and the
future that we have to deal with as educa-
tors. We’re kind of always pivoting on that.
I mean that’s why I’ve said you’re five miles
ahead of me because you’ve kind of
explained it already, but you were always
pivoting on that question of how do we
work with the past and the present, which is
all we’ve got, but we then work to try and
face the future as educators. So, disposabil-
ity and the future.
Henry: Let me take the first question first. I
think that when somebody says to me that
your work is enormously dystopian, I think
that my first response is that my analysis is
of a new dystopia that has an urgency that
needs to be addressed in ways that necessi-
tate a sense of hope and possibility. You
can’t fight what you don’t see. And it seems
to me that you have to recognize the chang-
ing historical conditions that are producing
new forms of domination in order to address
them in ways that would be effective. My
argument about a new dystopia or dysto-
pian forces is that they have taken on ele-
ments of a notion of domination that are
more intense and expansive than anything
we’ve seen before. Because when we talk
about injustice today, we’re not just talking
about the old Marxist line about exploita-
tion, you know that workers are being
 INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX
exploited. We’re talking about people being
literally excluded, you know literally seen as
excess, being seen as disposable. And
whether you want to talk about the new
technologies, you want to talk about the
ruthlessness of financial capital, you to talk
about the rise of artificial intelligence and
what that portends, you should also talk
about the fact that you have 3 people in the
United States who control half of all the
wealth or you have 8 of the richest people
in the world controlling half the world’s
wealth and clearly what that represents for
power is another question. But I think that
unless we confront that notion of dystopia
and how it changes, we find ourselves
seduced by a logic that drives all forms of
what I would call oppression, and that is to
make power invisible, if not normalized.
And you have to make power visible. You
can’t confront it unless you have a sense of
what it does. And I think we’re in a new
period where it… politically… my argu-
ment… and this is not my argument. A lot of
people have talked about this, everybody
from Bauman to Balibar. But you know,
we’re in a period in which because of the
rise of the financial sector, power is global
and politics is local. I mean these people
don’t care about anything regarding the
state except the state has now two func-
tions: to manage their financial interests
and to punish people who basically don’t
agree with their market driven world view.
That’s why in the United States for instance,
you have the two biggest forces in the
United States are the military and prisons.
They complement each other. They’re both
sides of the death of the social state and the
rise basically of the punishing state. And so
that notion of dystopia is far from dystopian
in the sense that you’re talking about… I
think you’re suggesting in terms of how
people would read it, it’s really an attempt
to in some way come to grips with
these new forces that we find ourselves con-
fronting.
  The second part of the question, is that
one of the things that is new politically in
terms of its acceleration and that we see that
has much greater valence and intensity is the
power of neoliberal ideology and its its ability
to depoliticize people. I’ll tell you a two-min-
ute story about something that changed my
mind that was very helpful in my understand-
ing what I’m about to tell you. I had operated
under the assumption that a lot of young
people because of the terrible conditions in
355
which they find themselves will automatically
be resisting a kind of neoliberal affect that
individualizes everything. All problems are
reduced to problems of character. You’re
homeless because you like to be outdoors. If
you’re poor, your poverty is cool. If you’re
unemployed, it’s because you don’t have time
to fill out an employment application. This is
a collapse of the public into the personal. This
is a refusal to translate private issues into
larger systemic considerations. It forces upon
people the horrible, horrible assumption that
whatever they have to confront, they have to
blame themselves for. They’re responsible for
whatever condition they find themselves in.
There’s a book called Coming Up Short which
is an ethnography that was done of four, five
communities in the United States in which
the author went in and talked to working-
class kids. I thought these kids, man, they
have to be on the cutting edge of politics,
right? I made a terrible mistake, and the mis-
take was that harsh and cruel capitalist rela-
tions have a good chance of opening up
progressive political insights. And it doesn’t.
And I found that out in particular with this
book. Every one of those kids blamed them-
selves. Living in dire conditions, on welfare,
they can’t get jobs. All the conditions that
trap people into a notion of time in which
time is entirely a burden. A burden. One of
the great myths of neoliberalism is that
choice is like a drug you can take that liber-
ates you. But you cannot talk about choice, if
you don’t talk about constraints. If you elimi-
nate the constraints, and choice becomes an
abstraction that simply imposes violence on
people because it hides the concreteness of
the events that bear down on their lives that
don’t give them much choices. It seems to me
that what struck me reading Coming Up
Short that is more urgent and something
that I have been writing about for 40 years, is
that education is central to politics. If we don’t
know how to change consciousness, if we
don’t know how to provide a language that’s
accessible, if we can’t speak and write and
work with people in which they could recog-
nize their problems in the languages that
we’re producing, we’re going to lose them
and they’re going to find a sense of commu-
nity and hope somewhere else. And they
found it in the Trumps. They find it in a kind
of right-wing populism that is saying ‘Hey,
look, the financial elite have let you down. Be
angry at Blacks’. This is all about the politics of
displacement. And it seems to be that this sug-
gests there is something about the notion
356 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
that education that is central to politics that is
so radical because it upends a whole range of
assumptions that a lot of leftists have in some
way believed in for years. And that is that
these structures are so oppressive, they often
say things like this: they say, ‘Well, let the
conditions get so objective and so bad that
people will automatically work on the left’.
Not only is that position wrong. It’s cruel. I
mean, it’s just cruel. The other side of this is
that it means in some way you have to move
into context in which there are real people. I
mean, this is what serious educators do. I
mean, you actually talk to people. You under-
stand what the forces are that is shaping their
lives so you don’t bring the problem to them.
They bring the problem to you so you can
both try to theorize this in ways that make
sense to their lives. I told you this story last
night. If you don’t mind them… I’m sorry. I
hope I’m not boring you. But my father… he
worked in a factory, right? He made chemi-
cals, a working-class guy. And he came home
one day and he said, ‘Henry, these guys from
SD something came to the factory’. You know,
SDS, right? (Students for a Democratic Society.)
But they came to the factory and he said,
‘They’re talking about some guy named Mao
Tse Tung. And they’re talking about how he
put the alphabet in the back of people who
are fleeing in the mountains’. And I tried to
explain what this is about. And he asked,
‘Why don’t they talk to me about the fact that
the factory’s polluted? Why don’t they talk to
me about the fact that we’re underpaid here?
Why don’t they talk to me about the fact that
we’re being exploited and the union is being
destroyed? Why don’t they talk to me about
the fact that we have no wages and we’re
barely surviving?’. That’s the question, right? I
mean, the question is how do you touch peo-
ple’s lives in a way that doesn’t allow them to
believe you simply narrating yourself in a way
that mimics one’s own stooge. He’s talking
about alternatives and fake news. What hap-
pens when the abstract actually evolves into a
form of violence?
Graham: Well you’re prefiguring the next
question.
Diarmuid: I think anyone that saw that first slide
and you’ll see it again at the end of the session,
you will see how you’ve used visuals very effec-
tively to kind of illustrate a point or two in your
books. If we just look at this next slide, which is
hard or to realize in a way… [indicates towards
slide of Grenfell Tower in flames]
Diarmuid: I want to take you to this notion of
making power visible. You talk about it in
your most recent work. Is this critical peda-
gogy in action? If you think about what hap-
pened in the deep South when the levees
broke, they immediately…institutions such as
Teachers College in New York embarked upon
a curriculum project called Teaching the
Levees, and others. I was very impressed with
that, I was thinking, really, as teachers, should
we be responding in this kind of way? For
example, what might teaching Grenfell Tower
look like? If we’re really serious about critical
pedagogy, what about the application?
Henry: I’d be happy to answer that question.
What happens when you’re a student in a
school and you turn on the media after you
leave, and there’s a building burning in your
neighborhood and people are jumping out
the windows. And you go back to school the
next day and there’s a kind of silence about a
form of violence that has taken place, in which
people literally have been murdered because
of the inexcusable irresponsibility on the part
of people wedded to a form of neoliberal
capitalism that thrives on creating unsafe con-
ditions for people in some of the most extreme
examples, that stuff becomes visible. School
becomes irrelevant. It becomes dead time. I
don’t know what it means to separate peda-
gogy from questions of economic and social
justice while not collapsing them into simply
that. And I also don’t know what it means not
to be able to teach in a way in which teaching
has some relevance to the kind of experiences
that kids in some way engage in their every
day lives. For instance, the academy it seems to
me has become, in the United States and
increasingly across Canada, incredibly irrele-
vant. It’s not just old. It’s just irrelevant. I mean
people are writing books for five other people.
The language of theory has become the lan-
guage of a kind of secular religion rooted in
narrow orthodoxies that ignore the obligation
of educators to write and address social prob-
lems that move the public and make clear that
education is a public good. We have new
forms of theocracy emerging in the disciplines
that strike me as both narrow in focus and
irrelevant when it comes to addressing the
public good. And I think that that question
goes to the heart of the most central question
of all, and that is what’s the role of education?
In this case, institutionalized education. And
what’s the role of pedagogy? What does it do
that makes a difference? I mean, how do you
make something meaningful in order to
make it critical and transformative. This is
right out of Theory and Resistance. Probably
the best sentence in the book for me.
 INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX
That is, how do you make something mean-
ingful to make it critical, to make a trans-
formative? How do you do that? What kind of
pedagogical challenges does that suggest
without reducing it simply to a pedagogical
issue? How do you change the structure of the
school? How do you fight the forces that are
imposing austerity measures on the school?
How do you work with other teachers to
create an environment in which a formative
culture exists that’s vibrant and alive and
sparks kids’ imagination? What do you do to
in some way teach, to convince young people
that they don’t have to be simply consumers,
that they can also be socially engaged citi-
zens? Because remember in the end, peda-
gogy is a fight over modes of agency, not just
the future. It’s a fight over how we’re going to
define, how relationship to ourselves, others,
and the larger world, how people are going to
be agents in the world in which they are going
to inhabit when they leave that school and
what it’s like in that school. I grew up as a
working-class kid in a public school. It was
called Hope High, ironically. I’ve walked into
them and told them to change to Hopeless
High. We were enormously tracked. I was in
the lowest group. We understood the violence
of that school. I mean the only hope I had and
the only reason I went to college was because
I had a basketball scholarship. But there was a
kind of recognition of symbolic and intellec-
tual violence in that school that we under-
stood but we didn’t have the language to
articulate. And it seems to me that when you
ask that question, and I’m not being… I’m
sorry. I’m trying to connect something here. I
mean when you ask that question about well,
what do we do about this? I mean, I guess
there are three issues for me. One, in light of
legitimized violence, what role does the school
have to address that? Secondly, what role
does the school have to inculcate in students
the need to struggle over what it means to
fight for a democracy that is never given? And
thirdly, it seems to me there’s the question of
how are we going to educate young people to
be able to translate private issues into larger
public concerns. And maybe fourthly, how are
we going to convince them they can never just
do it alone, that this is a collective endeavor.
This is about modes of solidarity. Especially as
they grow up in a culture which says that the
only obligation of citizenship they have is to
shop and to use their iPhone, and go online.
That’s a real challenge.
Graham: I want to take you on actually,
because again, you’re anticipating slightly
357
where we’re going, which is great. When I
read Border Crossings, I’d have to say
it completely changed my conception of
what being a teacher and educator could
be.
Henry: You are being too kind.
Graham: Seriously, it’s a great book. And we
were talking about this last night. It was
certainly 15 years ahead of it’s time and it’s
still very, very current. And arguably, since
1993, our institutions have become even
more porous, even more slippery, and
we’ve all, as teachers, educators, activists,
social workers, whatever we are, have had
to become even more slippery shapeshift-
ers in order to survive as well, because
we’re working across even more borders
and even more boundaries. There are even
more borders constantly having to be
crossed partly in order to do this work,
because it’s about a connective kind of
politics. On the one hand there is enormous
potential for new forms of pedagogic part-
nership, engaged pedagogy out there, get-
ting people out of institutions and into
society, those connective pedagogies that
you describe in the book. And technology
facilitates that through media, internet,
etc. Also, we can acknowledge the fact that
inclusion in education has brought more
people in. The idea is, you know, our uni-
versities are more diverse than they were
15, 20 years ago. There are more people
going. So, on one hand, that’s really posi-
tive. On the other hand, there’s this abso-
lute tightening of focus where any kind of
education is regarded as kind of an indi-
vidual career investment, a privatization of
the self and the privatization of education.
It’s Freire’s banking model. So we have this
kind of tightening of vocational focus. At
the same time, there’s an opening up of
the possibility of what education could be.
So how do you reclaim that idea that of
education as a space of possibility for acts
of radical imagination, because that’s
where you can find that utopian stuff.
What kind of border crossers do we need to
be now?
Henry: I think that’s a question that suggests
something about the shifting nature of his-
torical contexts. And I think that in
many ways maybe the first response to that
would be we no longer should assume that
education and schooling are the same
thing, that education is now so powerful
and so widespread that there’s been a
fusion of power, politics, and culture in
358 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
everyday life that now has become truly an
apparatus of domination. And yet at the
same time, it seems to me that it suggests…
we’re not really talking about borders any-
more. We’re talking about walls. I think if I
were to write that book today, maybe the
title would be Crossing the Walls,
Demolishing Walls. Whether we’re talking
about Israel or we’re talking about the
United States, this logic of exclusion and
disposability is very clear, whether we’re
talking about mass incarceration, or whether
we’re talking about the refugee crisis.
Clearly, there is an attempt on the part of
the punishing state to reinvent a notion of
exclusion that becomes normalized while
it’s rooted in the most despicable language
of hate and bigotry. And I think that’s one
side of that dystopian imagination that we
have to address. The politics of disposability
is more widespread. It’s more open. It’s more
visible. It’s more arrogant. And it has no
interest in self-reflection or critique. It serves
very powerful interest. The other side of this
is that the spaces of resistance are actually
multiplying in ways that suggest two or
three modes of opposition that I’m particu-
larly concerned about. One is, what does it
mean not to run away from the structures of
domination that already exist and to work
within those structures with one foot in and
one foot out? To say, ‘Hey, look, we need to
keep the resistance alive. This is a long-term
goal. This is not about reform. It’s about
restructuring. But we need to in some way
be able to mobilize people in those struc-
tures because the people who are in them,
the consequences for them are everyday’.
It’s like saying, ‘Well, you really want to sup-
port the welfare system when that might
support capitalism?’. I don’t want people to
starve tomorrow. I’m sorry. I realize it when
people are taking more food stamps within
a week, you have people who are making
the choice between taking their medicine
and eating food. So yeah, I am concerned
about that in the most immediate sense, but
to be concerned about that in the immedi-
ate sense is not to say that you give up in
the long-term sense about being able to
actually restructure the system, fundamen-
tally change the system. So, one foot in and
one foot out. The other system is that we
need to educate young people. We need to
educate people to be cultural producers and
not just simply be called critics. And I think
we need to do that because the technology
that now exists has a possibility for a multi-
plicity of public spheres that basically offer
for the first time, opportunities for dis-
courses that were impossible 30 years ago.
When I first started teaching and writing,
when people like Noam Chomsky, Stanley
Aronowitz, Carol Becker, Angela Davis, and
others were producing important theoreti-
cal work and important forms of criticism
that were both comprehensive and accessi-
ble. I mean when this was all the start of an
important democratic movement in the
United States that signified at the very least
two things. In the 1960s, there was a demo-
cratic revolution across a whole range of
institutions, that signaled not only that
there were enormous opportunities to
mobilize people around questions of resist-
ance, whether you’re talking about civil
rights, you’re talking about gender equity,
you’re talking about the gay rights move-
ment, but also that you can create your own
spaces to do this. You don’t have to work
then establish spaces in order to do this. We
didn’t have the internet. The media was
completely dominated by conservative and
corporate interests making it difficult for
those of us on the left to get published. I
was publishing in journals that had circula-
tions of like ten. I mean nobody read them…
It was almost impossible to get our work
out. And the liberal journals hated what we
did. I mean they wouldn’t publish Chomsky.
The Nation, which is really as radical as
Ivanka Trump, published one review of my
book in 35 years. ‘Common Dreams’, if you
plug it in there, put my name, search it.
Nothing. Nothing. This is the liberal media
now. But you go to Truthout, CounterPunch,
Truthdig, Rise up Times, and Alternet. The
circulation of my work, and this is as a public
issue, not a private issue, if I published my
articles today, in the first week, I sometimes
get about 5,000 hits. Five thousand. When I
was publishing in the 70s and the 80s and
up until the early 90s, if 50 people read any-
thing I wrote, I felt good. There is a differ-
ent kind of space available today. And
here’s the third issue. The third issue is that
these spaces offer modes of collaboration
for people to make different interventions
and to produce new forms of cultural peda-
gogical work that I think are astonishing. I
mean, what you showed me last night (work
from a graduate student1)…I mean my God,
going in with this visual media, taking pic-
tures of slums or so-called ghetto areas and
portraying people as only disposable and
only victims of no sense of agency, using
 INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX
those images tend to talk to people and say,
What do you think about this representa-
tion? And how can we use this? How does
this offer a dialogue? It’s a new world for
the possibility to educate people. I’m not
pessimistic to be honest with you. I’m not
going to underestimate the fact that fascism
is emerging in places all over Europe, in the
world, but It seems to me at the same time,
there are other forces emerging. Politicians
such as Bernie Sanders are moving towards
socialist issues, which is remarkable for the
United States at this time. I think that when
you see the emergence of young people
who are saying, ‘Why have we been written
out of the script of democracy? Why are
people telling me that I have to live with my
parents for the next twenty years in their
basement, maybe playing video games?
Why do I have to have a life burdened by
loans that will take away any sense of public
service forever. Why do I have to find myself
living in a world in which the notion of self-
interest is elevated to the only value that
matters?’. They were not buying it, you
know, and they don’t think in silos. They
think collaboratively. They think, they break
down the interdisciplinary barriers. The
questions that students ask me today are so
much more sophisticated than the questions
they asked me 30 years ago, because I’ll tell
you why. They don’t realize even now how
worldly they are. For all the forces of pri-
vatization, commodification, and deregula-
tion, these kids are worldly in a cosmopolitan
way that needs… how do you say it? A more
formative kind of theoretical apparatus to
bring that stuff together.
Diarmuid: Literacy strategy running in Ayrshire.
Diarmuid: Ayrshire, which is just that territory
over there where we have a campus,
our School of Education is based there.
They’ve adopted this notion of making
thinking visible. They’ve tried everything in
terms of literacy strategies, and they’ve
failed. These are really poor neighbor-
hoods we’re talking about. So they’ve
looked at the arts to help out and to see if
you do make power visible, if you do make
thinking visible, what impact can it have on
children’s literacy in a sense if that’s not too
particular?
Henry: You want to ask that question?
Diarmuid: I do want to ask. I do. It’s this idea of
privileging image over a text we talked
about earlier. It might get us somewhere.
Henry: Let’s begin with something basic and
fundamental regarding a dominant percep-
359
tion of literacy and then I want to move to
that question specifically. A lot of people
think that literacy is about learning skills and
simply about learning knowledge. To me,
that’s only a precondition for what literacy
really means, and I can thank my mentor
Paulo Freire for this. What it really means is
that you provide the positions in the forma-
tive culture; the knowledge and skills and the
values for young people to be able to inter-
vene in the world and learn how to govern
rather than be governed. That’s a very differ-
ent notion of literacy. Literacy in this sense
always is a political act. It’s a political act
which means that one appropriates, learns,
and gauges, uses the tools that expands the
possibility of both relating to the self, to
others, and to the larger world. I think the
other side of this, while there are many,
many programs that are concerned about
literacy, these programs seem to be more
concerned about getting people to think
critically than to act responsibly. And I think
what that means is that they individualize
these programs in ways in which they don’t
talk about critical consciousness. They talk
about critical thinking. They’re still talking
about a skill. Deconstruct this, understand
that text, how do you read this against that?
There’s nothing wrong with that. But it
seems to me that for many kids, (a) that stuff
is often almost entirely grounded in print
culture, a culture that many kids now have
some trouble with. And secondly, it’s it
doesn’t expand the possibility for moving
from what I would call an isolated sense of
agency to a more collective sense of agency.
One that sees the world not as a recipe of
methods that we call literacy instruction, but
as a way of reading the world in a compli-
cated way that’s visual, that employs print
culture, that somehow uses the tools of tech-
nology to somehow relate actually to kids’
lives. But you also have to remember, we are
talking about literacy as one fundamental
element of what I would call the formative
culture that we need to produce, to undo the
dis-imagination machine, to liberate the
imagination rather than kill it. And I wouldn’t
want to suggest that literacy is basically the
only tool that does that. I think it’s one tool
of many that has to be put in place. You
understand what I’m getting at? I think
when you focus too heavily on one tool,
regardless of how expansively you want to
define it, that often can be a recipe for fail-
ure, because I’ll give you an example.
Teachers find themselves in school saying,
360 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
‘This notion of literacy is fabulous. I’m going
to make these interventions in my class-
room’. It’s like the vice principal that I used
to have, right? This is really revolutionary: I
used to put kids in a circle and rent films
from the Quakers. And then we’d watch
these films and talk about them. He’d come
in and pull me out of the class, come to me
at the end of class, and he’d say things like,
‘I don’t want kids in a formative circle, they
should be sitting in rows’. This kind of neo-
fascist nonsense. Pedagogies of oppression,
that’s all they really were. They were disci-
plining pedagogies. And it was very clear to
me that I couldn’t do this alone. That as
important as these approaches might be, I
had to create in solidarity with other teach-
ers the room to be able to challenge these
structures that limited what I did. And when
you look at the emergence today in coun-
tries all over the world of these audit cul-
tures…the culture of education has now
become the culture of business. Makes a very
powerful ideology that operates at multiple
levels of power and embraces multiple social
relationships. I mean, you have to have col-
lective struggles to change those structures
to make those interventions more than
simply remote…how might we say it?
Aestheticized, romanticized pedagogical
interventions.
Graham: And those are rich pedagogical inter-
ventions themselves. We’re living in this
utterly saturated kind of media scape, which is
very, very bamboozling, even for the best of
us trying to figure out how to kind of navi-
gate it. And if you think about media almost
in a McLuhan sense of central nervous system,
and to me I think is often governed much by
emotions, we’ve talked about this a little bit
before, the people are tweeting and retweet-
ing and responding incredibly quickly. When
we have a politics based on that kind of emo-
tional logic which goes back to, I guess, things
like Reagan’s 1984 ad, ‘It’s morning again in
America’, which was, on one level, a vacuous
kind of portrayal of an imaginary future, and
at another a very powerful pull on peoples’
emotional heartstrings, which generates a
certain kind of hope, I guess. You’re talking
about how we build alternative media, alter-
native structures. In a sense, we’re battling it
out in this spectacular society with these
mediascapes and people like him [pointing to
image of Fox News presenter Sean Hannity
on screen] screaming that we’re all left-wing
lunatics for even thinking that we could chal-
lenge it. What do you think? What forms of
media can cut through this? Where are the
media strategies? And literacy is a strategy.
Literacies, archives, memories. There’s a whole
set of tactics and strategies that people can
use to challenge this hegemonic ideological
apparatus that we’re all subject to.
Henry: I think we’re in an age when the possibil-
ity of being guerilla pedagogues is probably
more optimum than it ever has been before. I
love the reference to Reagan. He’s just a poli-
tician who hates the public, hates notions of
solidarity in the interests of the common
good, and believed in a view of society that
enshrines isolated entrepreneurship. But
Reagan was smart. Reagan used the notion of
hope in an emotional appeal to basically
cover up a very dystopian understanding of
the social order. I mean, you know, he hated
Blacks, he hated poor people, he hated stu-
dents. Like that long legacy that’s informed
the Democratic and Republican party. This is a
party of financial elites–this is the party of
Goldman Sachs. I mean, you know, I think we
have to go back to something even earlier to
understand this. Remember, something hap-
pened in the 60s that launched new forms of
what I call the counterrevolution. And what
happened in the 60s was that all of a sudden,
you had an enormous number of groups
wanting to democratize the university, want-
ing to democratize all kinds of public spaces.
An enormous philosophy of the cultural revo-
lution, in a way that Mao would never have
anticipated—much more democratic, much
more intense, much more widespread. And I
think that out of that, you have in the 1970s,
the emergence of something called the
Powell Memorandum. Then you have the
Trilateral Commission. The Powell Memo was
written by conservatives in the 1970s who
were saying things like, ‘There’s been an
excess of democracy in the United States. We
have to stop this. We have to stop this. And
we stop it because we’re going to fight on the
battleground of ideas. We’re going to create
anti-public intellectuals, we’re going to create
all kinds of conservative institutions and foun-
dations, the Olin and Heritage Foundations.
These are going to be global, we’re going to
take over the media’. And they actually said
this. If you go back and read the Powell
Memo, it’s all right there. It’s very clear. Only
about four or five pages. And then you have
the Liberals, the trilateral commission comes
along, and says, Wow, we have to stop this
because the writers considered any form of
 INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX
militant democracy as dangerous. The only
relationships that really matter are commer-
cial relationships. And we have to keep Blacks
and minorities really out of positions of
power. With that said, now the question
becomes what kind of magic tricks do you
perform in the realm of a battleground of
ideas that fed people what Huxley called
soma, a drug that made people happy while
putting them in a kind of ideological coma.
That would actually allow them to believe
stuff that is antithetical to any sense of possi-
bility for emancipation or agency, and they
did it. They really understood how education
works in the worst possible sense. They cre-
ated the era of dis-imagination machines,
machines that basically stripped the imagina-
tion of any sense of possibility while at the
same time imposing in the name of hope a
dystopian logic that was dreadful for every-
one—for the planet, for Blacks, for minorities,
for working people. But they got it, right. I
mean, they understood that with the lan-
guage of critique, there had to be a language
of hope, because they knew that as time went
on, there would be a hardening of the cul-
ture. And they knew that somehow a lan-
guage that was emerging that was so cruel,
‘The poor people are stupid. People on wel-
fare are lazy’. They took the question of char-
acter, they individualized the social, and they
created an ecology of oppression around a
wide ideological spectrum that actually
worked. It seems to me now in reference the
way you go with that is that not only does
that language have to be challenged. Think
about what they did with the language with
the left. They took questions like freedom
and reduced it to the freedom to consume.
The freedom not to be involved with govern-
ment except when it serves elite financial
interests. They took the language and they
repositioned it to serve their own interests.
What happens at a time in history when one
of the great challenges that we face is putting
substance back into language? What does it
mean when language has been so emptied
out, that it becomes either meaningless or
misrepresents the truth? Does that mean that
we need a resurgence of a kind of ideological
struggle that in some way can be both critical
and hopeful rather than doctrinaire? Does it
mean that we have to create social relation-
ships that in some fundamental way repre-
sent the concrete alternative invisibility of
what that hope looks like? Does it mean that
in some way we need to reinvent new motions
361
of solidarity? And does it mean that we need
to invent the politics that’s not just simply
local but also global? I think so.
Diarmuid: This following quote, Henry, really
does resonate with me. And I’ve used it in a
recent piece of writing I’ve been doing for
Scottish teachers. And I quote, it’s from
Border Crossings, 2005. ‘No tradition should
ever be seen as received because when it is
received, it becomes sacred. Its term suggests
reverence, silence, and passivity. Democratic
societies are noisy. They’re about traditions
that need to be critically re-evaluated by
each tradition, each generation even’. For
the next generation of educators, how do we
make it troublesome, noisy, and difficult?
Because in fact, that’s a question that we
really struggle with here in Scotland.
Graham: We’ve got a lot of very fearful people,
and I think people working…young people
starting out in these slippery difficult institu-
tions with all these neoliberal regimes
they’ve got to navigate, with one foot in,
one foot out. We’re all aware of the politics.
We know what it takes to kind of survive in
these institutions. So, where does the cour-
age come from?
Henry: I’ll tell you I’m going to be giving a story
to answer that, and the overall category I’m
going to use is called flipping the script. I
think when you grow up in a society where
people define you entirely by your deficits,
the language of hope rings hollow. And I
think that in many cases, and I’ll give an exam-
ple of how that worked for me. I was a
working-class kid who just didn’t have the
language. I just, largely and really believed
what they said about me, that I was dumb, I
was stupid, too emotional, angry, all the kinds
of things that they say about working-class
kids male and female, that really is not only
an attack on identity but really an attack on a
very powerful sense of self-esteem, and a very
powerful sense of what it might mean to be
able to use what is considered a deficit, as an
asset. Something happened in my life in
which… and I’m not going to go to the par-
ticulars, but at some point, what became clear
to me is that what they defined as worst parts
of me were the best parts. I grew up in a
working-class neighborhood, we had a sense
of solidarity, we looked out for each other.
When people got sick, families came together
and they fed them. We never acted as if we
were alone. We were part of a larger commu-
nity. We were always humble. We realized
that people intervened in different ways with
362 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
different narratives. And we understood
that…but at the same time, we didn’t roman-
ticize, we knew there was violence, there was
racism, there was sexism. But as I increasingly
moved away from that and flipped the script,
I became more self-critical about my own past
and the complicated nature of that past, but
the best sides of that were redeemed. And
that’s a great challenge for educators. The
challenge is to create the formative culture in
which you can basically flip that script for kids
and say, ‘Cut the crap. You don’t want to
believe this stuff. You’ve got an enormous
sense of possibility and agency and a… great
capacity for creativity. You can do this. You
will do it with other people’. We have to work
hard. We have to focus. We have to learn
skills. And we’ll do it, because if we don’t do
it, we’re going to be implicated in systems of
domination that’s going to not just ruin our
lives, they’re going to ruin our kids’ lives.
They’re going to ruin future generation’s
lives. And it seems to me that if I been
impressed by anything in the last 40 years, I’ve
always been impressed by the way in which
working-class people respond with passion
and a sense of struggle to the problems they
face as opposed to people who basically go
home at night, there’s a coffin open, they put
a cigarette in their mouth, they close the door,
they come out in the morning, and then they
manage a university.
AUDIENCE QUESTIONS
Speaker 1: I want to ask how we reimagine the
curriculum we actually have, not the curricu-
lum…the utopian curriculum we dream of. In
the example of Grenfell, I suggested a couple
of weeks ago at the European Curriculum
Studies Conference that what the children of
Kensington and Chelsea should do is not boy-
cott schools the way the Sandy Hook kids did
in New York. They should go back and study
King Lear, text for A level English, because
King Lear is a play about homelessness, of an
unaccommodated man written after the pas-
sage of the first vacancy acts in England. How
do we carry on that kind of meaningful tasks
that teachers and learners can perform every
day in our schools?
Henry: I think the first thing we have to fight for
is to recognize that there is a curriculum in
place as you would say, already, that really is
part of what I would call the horror of a
pedagogy of disciplinary oppression, that it
doesn’t liberate the imagination. It doesn’t
allow teachers to have the autonomy to be
able to work with Shakespeare or any other
text in which they can make that come alive
for kids in a way that relates to their lives.
And I think to the degree that those struc-
tures bear down and what we do as teachers
and prevent us from doing that, there’s not
only a great injustice being committed
against both the autonomy of teachers, the
notion of a democratic school, and the pos-
sibility of what kids could learn, but there’s
also a refusal to take traditional forms of
knowledge in the past and reinvent them.
I’m not somebody who believes that the only
thing you can begin with is experience and
talk about that. Experience has to be
informed. It has to be rooted in other tradi-
tions. It has to wrangle with those traditions.
Nothing can be sacred. And I don’t mean that
we don’t have reverence, right? I mean the
highest form of legitimacy, the highest form
of what I would I would call respect, is the
ability to ask questions, is the ability to work
in a culture of questioning in which we’re
allowed to take the practice of freedom seri-
ously. Remember, pedagogy under Paulo
Frere was not simply about critical conscious-
ness. It was about the practice of freedom.
That’s different. That’s a different concept.
That’s about creating a whole range of con-
ditions in which people can learn from each
other, people can ask particular kinds of
questions, people can experiment with text.
It also means that we break down the bor-
ders and the barriers that say that, ‘Well, that
text belongs in so-and-so. That text is for
English teachers, that’s not for me’. I don’t
understand what it means not to mind the
past to the best that we can and use it in the
best possible way. I want kids who are his-
torically informed. I want to see kids who are
literate in the broadest possible way. I want
to see kids who have an understanding of
the world in which when they talk about
technology, they can place it within a context
that’s informed for them so that they cannot
just talk about it in instrumental rational
terms, they can also talk about it in ethical
and political terms. And I think that that’s
what that kind of pedagogy does.
Speaker 2: I teach journalism. I’m really inter-
ested in discussions around the spaces which
you talked about that technology is enabling
 INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX
us as a society to create, to extend discourses.
Because what I sometimes find quite trou-
bling is that any spaces that we have created,
that now exist for us, where freedom of
expression is a fantastic thing, but it can also
give rise to alarming expansions of bias, big-
otry, and racism. It strikes me that the media
landscape at the moment, the news media
landscape has become enormously self-
regarding, and that does not necessarily
always serve with practices of democracy
well. What we need is a journalism that
remains itself in society. That has to be
‘other-regarding’. It has a public sense of
duty in some respects. And this question is
more about how we keep on teaching,
because I’m teaching students to be journal-
ists with responsibility. So where do you
think we sit in terms of enabling these young
people to understand this?
Henry: I don’t think that when we’re talking
about democratic spaces, we’re talking about
balance. We’re talking about commitment
and truth. I think that’s different, right? With
a small t. And I think that when you talk to
young people and you say, ‘Look, how do you
want to use your resources? What does it
mean to use your resources in a way that
extends and deepens the possibility of democ-
racy?’. That’s a lot more than simply saying
that we have to tolerate all modes of expres-
sion. That’s not to say that we have to shut
them down, but I think it means that we have
to move away from a politics of shaming to
pedagogical interventions in which they could
be challenged. I’m against the politics of
shaming. I’m against saying that people are
stupid and we shouldn’t allow them in a
room. I think that young people learn by
interrogating. I want to hold people account-
able for what they say. And I think that jour-
nalism at its best does. It both holds people
accountable and it imagines a future in which
those modes of accountability deepen and
extend the possibility of democracy in the very
notion of justice and agency itself. I don’t
want to say that’s a biased mode of journal-
ism. I want to say that’s a journalism that mat-
ters. I’m against journalism that doesn’t
matter, and I’m against journalism that in
some way distorts the truth. I’m against jour-
nalism that believes in false equivalences. I’m
against a journalism that so isolates issues,
that when they talk about schools that are
run-down and poor and not talk about the
way in which the state defunds public goods
that they commit an active injustice. I want to
363
broaden the notion of justice around journal-
ism, and I want to broaden it in a way in
which journalists can take chances and not be
punished for that. That to me is an active civic
courage. And I think it’s such a great
question, thank you. I think it’s so important
because we take risks. We can’t believe in a
sense of commitment and not take risk. We
have to teach students how to take a risk. Two
short stories if I may, forgive me. I was fired in
1981. I was at Boston University and I had
gone through the tenure process unani-
mously. And the president intervened, and he
denied me tenure. Then he called me to his
office. He wanted to talk to me. He was a
right-wing goon. I don’t mean to be too
hyperbolic. And we sat down, and the first
thing he said to me was, ‘I hear you’re such a
great teacher. Why do you write s***?’. That
was an inviting question, and of course that
ended the conversation in many ways. But
since then people have often asked me, ‘Well,
if you knew that what you were writing was
going to get you in trouble…’. Howard Zinn
was my mentor and friend. You know who he
is? The late historian Howard Zinn. I had cited
Zinn a lot in my work. And people have often
said, ‘Well if you didn’t do that, you would
have gotten tenure’, because he actually took
the conversation further which I haven’t told
you. He said to me, ‘I’ll make a deal with you’.
This is written up if you don’t believe me. He
said, ‘If I can become your private tutor for
two years in philosophy, education, and sci-
ence’, he said, ‘I will increase your salary for
two years, but at the end of two years, we’ll
reconsider you of tenure’. And I looked at him
and I said… you won’t know the reference
but I’ll explain, ‘What to do you want to do,
turn me into George Will?’. George Will was a
very conservative commentator in the United
States. He then turned, he faced the wall, and
I left. I went back to the school. They’re all the
janitors were there that I had been working
with, and we have a party. I get terribly drunk
and then went home the next day and real-
ized what had happened. But in the midst of
all of that, if they ask me, ‘Would you do it
again?’, I give them a very simplistic answer.
Would you rather live on your knees or live
standing up? I want to live standing up. I want
to take risks. I’m going to challenge those… I
hate to see people suffering. I think that
when I see this unnecessary suffering in the
world and this enormous power—hard,
cold, cruel, lack of compassion, the inability to
exercise any kind of empathy—that’s a
364 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
psychopathic mind set. I mean this has to be
challenged. I mean, there’s no choice. Silence
is complicity. And I think that when you come
across teachers like yourself who just ema-
nate, you know, this wonderful sense of,
‘Wow. How do we do this? How do we chal-
lenge this?’. The thing that we can’t fall back
into is the call to be on our knees, and then
figure that out. And then good for you.
Speaker 3: I’m currently writing a chapter called
‘The University as a Form of Border Control’.
And what the chapter is about is a history of
the collaboration of the university with the
police and the Home Office. And the way
that manifests itself just now in our univer-
sity is through the T4 Visa regime which
requires us as tutors and academics to moni-
tor our international students and report
that information back to our home office,
and via PREVENT legislation, which obviously
is about reporting our students’ beliefs and
behaviors to the police and to the Home
Office. My question is about the encroach-
ment of border practices in our universities, is
it unprecedented in the history of our educa-
tional institutions? So that’s the first ques-
tion, and the second question is have you
come across any productive resistance to this
kind of border practices in your experience?
Henry: That’s a fabulous question. It’s a fabu-
lous question that has a universal kind of
content to it, because I think all across
Europe and across the United States and
particularly in the United States, we’re
seeing something very different. And what
we’re seeing is the emergence of something
called punishment creep. And what that
means is that the model of the prison now
becomes the model of social services. The
model of the prison now becomes the model
of schooling. All of a sudden, instead of
teachers dealing with students who violate
a dress code, we bring in the police, they get
arrested, and they’re all of a sudden pro-
cessed through the criminal justice system. I
think the real here in light of that specific
example is how do we theorize that in ways
that allow us to understand its connection
particularly to modes of neoliberalism, that
while they attack the social state are increas-
ing the reach of the punishing state. We
have to see that in a larger totality in order
to really understand what it does and why
it’s happening. Secondly, it seems to me that
the first response to that often is that we
have to somehow attack police violence. It’s
a form of police violence, it’s a terrible
thing. And of course we do, but I think that
what we really need to do is to understand
something about the defense of schooling
as a public good, and what it might mean to
have a theoretical argument so that we can
make very clear that that’s antithetical to
any notion of democracy itself. And that the
presence of the police in school undermines
the school as a public good that it really has
to be fought at every level—local, state, and
national. We have to talk about that in
terms that are destroying the very formative
cultures in some of the most important civic
educations in any society, on the basis of a
mode of punishing that is transforming that
society as a whole and not just punishing
teachers and students into something. I
don’t need totalitarian. I mean, we know
what totalitarian societies do. They go after
intellectuals first. They go after ideas. They
burn books. They shut down the possibilities
for intellectual ideas to spread. And then
what happens secondly is all those intellec-
tuals who had been irrelevant in the first
place now become neo-Nazis and become
part of the stuff. And I think that if we can’t
defend the institution, public higher educa-
tion as a civic good, we have no starting
point except for moral outrage. Moral out-
rage is not enough. You have to politically
be able to understand these forces in order
to attack them within a broader system of
assault. That makes sense?
Speaker 4: Wonderful evening. Like you, I spent
quite a long time teaching in high school
before I came into the university.
Henry: Before you got demoted?
Speaker 4: I know; and it seems to me there has
been a long war between those who see
universities as a public good, something that
should be involved with our communities,
something where there should be the free
reign of ideas, somewhere the student
should be challenged and developed, and of
course neoliberalism. And neoliberalism has
seen the student as a consumer, the student
as somebody who buys our services, who
doesn’t care what he or she gets as long as he
or she gets a good degree. For those of us
who have tried to argue the public good
case. Up until recently, I think it’s been very,
very difficult because we have ourselves
embroiled in a system where analytics and
measuring and performativity are the key
things that we’re all involved in, much as we
don’t think it really develops the idea of the
university as a public good. And I think that
 INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX
is problematic for us, this is why I liked your
idea of the one leg in, one leg out, or we
have our heads in the clouds. We want to
imagine and develop a better future, or we
have to somehow try and struggle in the
here and now against it.
Henry: Terrific question. It really resonates with
me. People often tell me that I write about
neoliberalism too much, but actually I don’t
think I write enough about it, because I
think it’s so widespread. It reaches into
every aspect of our lives. And it’s not to say
that it’s the only form of domination and I
don’t believe that. And I understand that it
comes in very different forms. But I think
around the university, something very spe-
cific has happened that’s both structural and
ideological. And I think that when we talk
about the takeover of the university, we’re
not only talking about the eradication of
teachers as agents that in some way have
some power over the institution itself. In the
United States, 70% of all faculty now are on
non-tenure tracks. They live in constant fear.
They have no security in many ways. And
this is spreading all over the place. There’s
an attempt in some way to capitalize on
their labor while at the same time making
them expendable. Secondly, it seems to me
as you well know, this audit culture that has
come in, that commercializes every relation-
ship suggests something about the rise of
the managerial relationship and its complic-
ity with neoliberalism that has effectively in
many ways so undermine the mission of the
university as a public good, that we now are
on the verge of losing higher education as a
civic institution. We really are on the very
verge of losing it. I think that that suggests
a number of things. The first things it sug-
gests to me is we have to learn from young
people about how they’re struggling against
the university that in many ways produces
an enormous amount of violence on them.
We have to listen to young people. They’re
struggling. They hate the loan situation.
They hate the fact that the education that
they’re getting has very little to do with
what it means to be in the world in a way
that matters. They hate the fact that they’re
being isolated. And at the same time, we
have to deal with faculty who for some
reason have been so isolated for so long, so
removed from public life that they really
don’t know how to reach out and be able to
mobilize communities who basically can
work with them because they can make the
365
argument that university is such an impor-
tant public good, you eliminate it, you may
not have a democracy. There aren’t a lot of
places that have the power to create the
formative cultures that inspire and energize
people to be critical and democratic agents,
right? We haven’t done our job in convinc-
ing people how important we are to democ-
racy itself and that’s a great loss and that
has to change. Thirdly. It seems to me that
in the age of social movements, in the age
of an intensification of labor movements, a
rethinking of what labor can do, we have to
make education central to politics. We have
to do that. And we have to do it by both
talking about how we can restructure in a
democratic fashion an institution that
already exists and how outside of those
institutions we can work to build alternative
institutions that become models for those
institutions.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for a stimulating
and perplexing evening. I was a primary
school teacher for many years, I’ve worked
in communities and the inner city in Dublin,
and I’ve been working in the university
system now for 15 years. And what really
concerns me now having worked at differ-
ent levels of different spaces in education is
how higher education itself has been incor-
porated, but in the pedagogies that we try
to experiment with, with our students, and
how we try to listen to them, that somehow
the scientification of education, and the
commodification through technology has
become very hard to resist. I’d say at primary
and secondary level and a third level as well,
the big companies are offering and sponsor-
ing education to the extent that in fact we
see these institutions can no longer exist
without that kind of private sponsorship.
And it’s really hard then, for the individual-
ized intellectual or teachers to resist that
because they’re trying to survive with, as an
earlier person said, we’re in a curriculum
that we have already. We’re also in institu-
tions that as the previous speaker said, we
owe them some allegiance in terms of what
we understand as the public good. But at
the same time they may not be in fact for
the public good. I suppose that’s what I
wanted to address. Are these institutions
really for the public good or are they
incorporated?
Henry: Again, a wonderful question. I don’t
know if you read The New York Times
recently where Google, Facebook—all
366 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
these major media corporations are now
going to the schools. And what they’re
doing is offering free technology, but
not… they’re actually sending personnel in
to be able to shape the curriculum in a way
that in some way of course means that
they’ll be training students to work at
Microsoft or Google or Facebook. This is an
assault unlike anything we’ve ever seen
before but it’s an assault that has to be
understood within what has happened to
education and its relationship to the state
under neoliberalism. As schools are
defunded, as they lose money, as they can’t
support themselves, they become more vul-
nerable to these kinds of pressures in which
all of a sudden, you know corporations are
coming in. You know this. You know, we
say, ‘Can we put our name on the gym?
How about the Microsoft gym? We’ll give
you $50,000 to put our name up there’.
And people are buying this because they’re
desperate. The real issue is not simply that
schools are being instrumentalized. The
real issue is that they have no way to pro-
tect themselves because they don’t have
the resources any longer to do it. Sure we
can mobilize in the meantime, we can have
social movements involved, we can work
with local communities and get parents
and young people to challenge it. And they
have challenged it. In Florida, there was a
prison group, private prison complex—can
you imagine?—wanted to give us—
University of South Florida I believe,
$60,000 to put their name on the football
field billboard. And they fought it and they
won. And that’s okay. It proves that resist-
ance can happen. But this stuff is sympto-
matic of much larger issues, the utter
defunding of the public good, the utter
destruction of the welfare state, the utter
attack on those spaces where the very ves-
tige of critical thought can germinate and
grow and the conditions that provide it.
And that’s the kind of connection we have
to make because it’s going to be very diffi-
cult to fight these organizations. They are
not simply about technology. These are
ideological political organizations that
have a view of the world that views the
question of social responsibility and critical
thought as being very dangerous because
we would then be able to hold them
accountable. I mean when I turn on
Facebook, do I really have to see a page
that says, ‘Here are your memories for the
last 10 years’. You’ve gotta to be kidding
me. I mean all of a sudden, the surveillance
state is dressed up as entertainment. We’re
doing you a favor. We’re making sure we
could let you know that we’re monitoring
all your memories so that when we talk to
you about Big Brother, you think it’s only a
reality TV show. When I say we have talked
about new forms, how we have to reinvent
the political. I mean think about the emer-
gence of the surveillance state. I mean,
think about East Germans that they’ve
talked to recently who said, ‘We dreamed
about what you’re doing now. We dreamed
about this technology and the way it’s
being used’. And what I see is that the ide-
ology of privatization and the individuali-
zation of the social has become so powerful
that I have students to whom privacy is a
burden. They can’t hit the exit fast enough
to put everything they have on Facebook.
When I hear about young women, you
know, basically doing cosmetic surgery
because they want to improve the 200 self-
ies that they’re taking every day, some-
thing is terribly wrong. That there is an
ideology at work here that is so dangerous
and so disconnected from public life, that
we can no longer recognize the visible
signs of oppression because they are far
more sophisticated given the technology
and given the sales pitch. This is for you.
This is free. This is where the question of
freedom becomes an abomination because
it’s not about freedom, it’s about slavery,
and it works in such a way as to be far more
complicated than the kind of visible stuff
that we saw 30, 40 years ago. It’s an impor-
tant question and it suggests an important
way to re-theorize the notion of the political
self.
Henry: Just one last thing I want to say. I know
that these are very difficult times and I know
how hard it is for all of us because the forces
that separate us are more powerful than the
forces that bring us together. And it seems to
me that we have to find new ways to create
modes of solidarity in which the most vulner-
able become our neighbors, become our
friends, in which we can realize that their
plight is our plight. And this fight has to con-
tinue. It just has to continue. We cannot give
up on this. We’re all involved. And I would
certainly believe that the people here in the
forefront of those kinds of… so just be brave.
Be courageous. And don’t believe it’s going
to happen tomorrow. Thank you.
 INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX
Note
1  This refers to work contained in Dr Ben Parry’s
PhD: Cultural Hijack: critical perspectives on
urban art intervention (University of the West of
Scotland, 2014).
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Balibar, E. (2016) Citizen Subject: Foundations
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Bauman, Z. (2011) Collateral Damage: Social
Inequalities in a Global Age, Cambridge:
Polity Books
Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in
Capitalist America: Educational Reform and
the Contradictions of Economic Life, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul
Crocco, M. (2008) Teaching the Levees: A Cur-
riculum for Democratic Dialogue and Civic
Engagement to Accompany Documentary
Film Event, Spike Lee’s When the Levees
Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, New York:
Teachers College Press
Freire, P. (2018): Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
50th anniversary edition, New York: Blooms-
bury Academic
367
Giroux, H.A. (2001, revised and expanded ed.)
Theory and Resistance in Education: A Peda-
gogy for the Opposition, London: Bergin &
Garvey
Giroux, H.A. (2005, 2nd ed.) Border Crossings:
Cultural Workers and the Politics of Educa-
tion, Abington: Routledge
Goldwin, R. (ed). (1971) How Democratic Is
America? Responses to the New Left Chal-
lenge. An Official Statement of Students for
a Democratic Society, and Essays by Water
Berns [and Others], Students for a Demo-
cratic Society, Chicago, Rand McNally
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul
Parry, B. (2014) Cultural Hijack: Critical
Perspectives on Urban Art Intervention, avail-
able at www.academia.edu/18707853/Cul-
tural_Hijack_Critical_Perspectives_on_
urban_art_intervention (accessed 18.10.19)
Silva, J.M. (2015) Coming Up Short: Working
Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty,
Oxford: Oxford University Press
Zinn, H. (1990) Declarations of Independence:
Cross-Examining American Ideology, New
York: Harper Collins

Interviews with Joe L. Kincheloe
and Peter McLaren
Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren
These interviews both took place in Montreal,
about a year after Kincheloe became the
Canada Research Chair in critical pedagogy.
One of the mandates of the center founded
for his chair was to archive the voices and
works of those who discovered and nurtured
critical pedagogy. McLaren, then Kincheloe
were engaged in critical work in the 1980s
stimulated by Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux.
The first interview contextualizes Joe
Kincheloe and his determination to create a
global and virtual center in which critical
pedagogy would thrive, change and grow.
The second interview is a perfect example of
the two brothers in theory and humor. It
reminds us that while critical pedagogy takes
education, criticality and social justice seri-
ously, that there is always time for levity and
humor. Much like their mentor, Freire, and
followed by Giroux, Joe and Peter under-
stand the essential nature of laughter as they
transverse the political. Their consistent
homage to rock and blues also reminds
us that personal passion, artistic passion,
37
ideological passion, merge in the attempts to
create wholeness within the tentative (srs,
editor’s note).
JOE L. KINCHELOE: INTERVIEWED
BY THE FREIRE PROJECT,
MONTREAL, 2008
Joe Kincheloe: I’m Joe Kincheloe. I’m the Canada
Research Chair at McGill University in the
Department of Integrated Studies and
Education and the founder of The Paulo and
Nita Freire International Project for the study
of Critical Pedagogy.
FP: What brought you to Canada?
JLK: Well, I was at the City University of New
York in the PhD Program at the Graduate
Center and had a wonderful job. I’d been
able to help put together a doctoral program
and create the framework, its purpose and
curriculum, I had a wonderful situation.
I wasn’t looking to leave that but when a
Canada Research Chair came open, there was
a possibility of applying for that, that really
 INTERVIEWS WITH JOE L. KINCHELOE AND PETER MCLAREN
changed my mind. I interviewed for the job
and it was just obviously a wonderful fit.
There was a great group of people to work
with, an amazing group of students and the
possibility of forming a critical pedagogy
center, The Paulo and Nita Freire International
Center for the Study for Critical Pedagogy, so
I took the opportunity.
I’m the Canada Research Chair for critical
pedagogy. And so, critical pedagogy is
basically – in the most simple, quick sense –
the study of oppression in education, the
study of how issues of race class, gender,
sexuality, colonialism will shape the nature
of what goes on in education, shape the
purpose of education.
In this context, what I’m doing is putting
together an international center, an interna-
tional project where we can bring people
from around the world. We can create an
open access internet space where we have
people contributing to the critical pedagogi-
cal conversation. I oftentimes am really wor-
ried by the fact that critical pedagogy is a
North American white boy appropriation of
a South American thing.
And so, the purpose of the center is to
make sure that it’s a worldwide thing that
people from North America listen carefully to
what people from Asia, from Africa, from
South America – obviously – and from
Indigenous peoples all around the world
have to say about the notion of oppression
and how to fight it.
The center really is – as much as anything –
a manifestation of my respect for Paulo Freire
and his wife – his widow now, unfortunately,
Nita Freire. And in my life, just thinking about
my intellectual influences, Freire was just such
an important figure. In 1970 he had a book
come out in English. It’d been written in
Portuguese originally 1967. The book was
called The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
I read it in 1970 and have been reading
and working on Paulo’s work ever since that
time. And I think that Paulo certainly will be
remembered. I want to help him in making
that happen as the greatest educator of the
20th century – almost a saintly man in many
ways. He was a wonderful scholar, completely
dedicated to the eradication of human suf-
fering and just very, very human and funny
and wonderful. It was a wonderful combina-
tion for a human being to possess. I want to
do everything I can to honor his memory.
As I said, I studied Freire for years and years,
put together a study group for studying the
369
work of Paulo in 1975, 1976, never thinking I’d
have a chance to meeting him. Just through
the luck of being involved in the field and get-
ting to know people – it’s all about always
who you know – but getting to know people,
I was linked to him. And my good friend,
Donaldo Macedo invited Shirley [Steinberg]
and myself to come to Boston while Paulo was
there. And Shirley and I, and Donaldo and
another friend of ours, went out to Paulo’s
favorite Portuguese restaurant in Boston and
sat for four hours and he talked about radical
love and critical pedagogy. And it was just one
of the most fascinating four hours.
We bonded immediately because he was
from the poorest area of Brazil and I was
from the poorest area of the US. And we just
had such similar resonating stories about our
childhood and about how we came to our
ideological and pedagogical positions.
And so, from that moment on, it seemed
foreordained that we would work together
with Paulo. We met his wife and we just
loved her dearly. And Shirley and I were
seeing him as much as possible, seeing Nita
as much as possible, went and visited them in
Brazil, had a wonderful time there.
There’s so many stories I can tell about this
but just to be with Paulo, and coming from
where I had come from in a very poor area of
the country and not thinking that I would
ever have a chance to be around somebody
like Paulo Freire, his friendship and his men-
torship and his genius changed my life in so
many ways.
And wow, how many people have an
opportunity to build a kind of enduring
shrine? Although, Paulo would hate that term
because he always hated the cult of celebrity
and very much was an ideal that I hold dear of
a humble, humble intellectual scholar.
Paulo would say, ‘You can build the pro-
ject around me but you must critique my
work and take it to the next level. Do not
make me some type of icon’. And so, as much
as I try, I will not make him an icon – though
I love him and respect him dearly – I know
that he would not want that.
And so, the Freire Center is to study
Paulo’s work, study critical pedagogy, have
an evolving critical pedagogy that encoun-
ters new discourses, new peoples with new
ideas, and continues to move forward in the
21st century.
What’s going on in education around the
world is part of what I oftentimes called a
recovery movement – a recovery of dominant
370 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
power – whether it be colonial power with
new forms of colonialism, whether it be gen-
dered power with the recovery of new forms
of patriarchy, whether it be racial power with
new forms of the recovery of white suprem-
acy, whether it be class power with the recov-
ery of new forms of class elitism and a
globalized empire that exists.
And unfortunately, I think the evidence is
pretty clear that no matter where we go
around the world now, education plays the
role of helping support that imperial behe-
moth and all of these recovery movements
that are embedded within it.
And as I go to schools – whether they be in
Johnson City, Tennessee or Baton Rouge,
Louisiana or Edmonton, Alberta or NDG in
Montreal – I see schools that many times
unconsciously are arranged and developed in a
way that simply perpetuates this behemoth,
that punishes questions about subjects that I’m
talking about here that would raise the issue
of what’s the purpose of schools, what type of
people are we turning out, how do they fit
with these power relationships, are they better
equipped to address and help end human suf-
fering than if they hadn’t gone to school.
Those are not questions that are typically
talked about or asked in contemporary con-
versations about education. We’re talking
about raising test scores. And the raising test
scores is in the sense of a smoke screen in a
way, I think. It diverts our attention from these
questions about what is the role of education
in a democratic society, what kind of people
do we turn out and how do they relate to this
power behemoth that I’m talking about.
If we concentrate only on memorizing
fragmented pieces of often untrue data and
regurgitating them on a test score, we certainly
are not talking about the very heart and soul,
the 800-pound gorilla with bad breath that’s
sitting in the room with us. Wow, education
has got to come to grips with the fact it’s
being employed to serve the purposes of
something that is not good in the world.
There’ve been a number of books and lots
of articles written on the theme of the conti-
nuity of education despite changing tech-
nologies and changing zeitgeist and
changing this or changing that. I mean, the
world has changed dramatically in the last
150 years, yet when we go into the schools,
we see – there’s obviously differences, but
generally speaking – the same types of edu-
cation occurring in 2007 that we did 150
years ago.
And most importantly in that lack of
change, that continuity, is that we still don’t
ask questions. We don’t challenge students
to ask questions about the types of power-
related issues, about the purposes of school-
ing, about questions concerning what does it
mean to be an educated person, what’s the
purpose of doing this. We just simply mind-
lessly go in, recapitulate the status quo, teach
the same data without questioning where it
came from, that we’ve taught, that we’ve
dealt with, for the last 150 years.
And so, in that way, education has remarka-
bly stayed the same. And so, I’m really excited –
even though I’m depressed at the same time – I’m
really excited about new questions that we can
bring up in education, that we can bring new
disciplinary perspectives, new ways of thinking
about how we go about educating teachers to
induce schools and students to think about
these things, to induce teachers themselves to
think about these things.
I think teaching is one of the hardest, hard-
est, hardest jobs in the world – no doubt
about that. It’s hard. Yet, at the same time,
we do our teachers a tremendous disservice
when we don’t integrate them into the ques-
tions that drive the very nature of life at this
time in human history. Those are almost sepa-
rated from the process of educating teachers.
And so, what a critical pedagogy that I
imagine does is engages teachers, school dis-
tricts, parents, politicians in really rethinking
the nature of the very questions we ask
about schooling, about the nature of mind,
about the possibilities that human beings
can aspire to, about human potential itself,
the idea of the mind and its possibilities and
the cognitive abilities that we can develop.
God, that excites me. I am so excited about
that, yet you never hear that talked about in
a public conversation on education.
What’s going on there that would have
that kind of chasm between those thoughts?
They should be directly related to each other
and yet we’re not even talking about them.
My god, that’s the amazing thought. There’s
a lot of things that we can do if we just use
educational and social imagination.
FP: So, with all that in mind, what is normal?
JLK: What is normal is just absolutely a social con-
struction. It’s constructed in a variety of lin-
guistic, social, cultural, political linguistic types
of ways. And I believe that it’s nothing more
than that, and it’s nothing less than that.
Now, at the same time I say that, we need
to understand what that is and what it
 INTERVIEWS WITH JOE L. KINCHELOE AND PETER MCLAREN
means for us in our present lives and the lives
of other people. How does it contribute to
human suffering? How does normal contrib-
ute to the quality of our lives?
And then if we know that normal is simply a
social construction, then that gives me tremen-
dous hope. It gives me hope in the sense that,
‘Hey, we can remake it’. The Matrix can be
reloaded. We can begin to make something
that was unimaginable in this notion of normal-
ity in the coming years around issues of sex,
race, class, gender; rethinking the nature of
colonialism and undermining it, getting rid of
it, looking at how people are suffering around
the world and alleviating that suffering.
I think the last thing on earth I’d want to be
is normal. I like to be around people that are –
in a sense – transcendent of normal; that
notion of conforming people which pedagogy
often does into a certain form of normality.
And I’m not talking about just in elemen-
tary school or in high school, I’m talking about
bringing them into the normality of being a
scholar or being an intellectual, [or] being a
public knowledge producer is such an unsa-
vory process for me, where certain types of
behaviors and certain types of thinking are
allowed within that kind of construction of
being a normal professor that you have to
express yourself in a certain way that writing,
you have to write with a certain voice, ad
infinitum. We could go on and on with that.
But the idea of being even normal on the
level of what it is that we’re supposed to be
as public intellectual professors to me is
repugnant. And I work really hard to try not
in a trite way – and I certainly don’t always
succeed with this as you well know – but I try
very hard to try to construct different notions
of what it means to be an intellectual that
again is always transforming and always
evolving as the world evolves itself.
And so, in that context, the notion of what
a scholar might be is so far from anything that
has traditionally been thought of as normal
within hyper reality, within this particular
zeitgeist that normal professors are dinosaurs.
They’re just dinosaurs, they’re antiques.
I think I had always wanted to teach as
long as I could remember but I quickly grew
disillusioned with becoming a teacher once I
found out what school was. I certainly didn’t
want to be a teacher in a school. And the
situation the moment that I realized that I
did want to do it, I was thinking about doing
a lot of other things. But the moment that I
realized I can do this, I will do it, is when I
371
read Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo,
that I said there’s someone else in the world
that actually thinks about school and thinks
about the possibilities of school and being an
educated person in the same way that I do.
That just was such a reassuring moment. It
was not just an intellectually stimulating but it
was just a psychologically reassuring moment
that, ‘Yeah, I could go and be who I wanted to
be and do the types of things that I wanted to
do and to develop the pedagogical imagina-
tion that I wanted to develop and actually go
to an institution called a school and do that’.
That was quite a remarkable moment for
me because I didn’t think that that could
happen. Of course, once I did it, I realized
that the education imagination that I had
was always somewhat of an impediment in
me trying to become a teacher.
Time will pass without me even realizing
that I could talk to a student for an hour and
it feels like ten seconds. I love teaching
classes. I don’t think of it as work. Shirley will
say, ‘Did you get any work done today?’, and
I will have taught class and had six hours of
meetings with students, and I’ll go, ‘No, I
didn’t do any work today’. And I realize,
‘Well, that’s what my job is’, but I don’t think
of that as work.
I think of my writing as work, and my
research. And even though I say it’s work, I
find as I use that term because it is such a
demanding and all-encompassing process
and I’m exhausted when I get through, but
as far as my love of it, I love it just as much as
I love the other dimension.
So, the idea of being a researcher-writer,
getting a chance to talk to students, teaching
classes – they’ll have to carry me out. I’ll never
retire, I’ll never retire.
PETER MCLAREN: INTERVIEWED
BY JOE L. KINCHELOE, MCGILL
UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL, 2007
Joe Kincheloe: Peter, just one of the things that
I’d like to talk to you about is the nature of
critical pedagogy. And so often, we know that
there’s – as you’ve said many times – critical
pedagogies and not just a critical pedagogy.
Peter McLaren: That’s right.
JLK: In your opinion, when we talk about critical
pedagogies, what are we talking about? If
you were talking to a group of people who
372 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
had never encountered this animal, what is it
that you’d say to them?
PM: That’s a great question. I’d start talking
about critical pedagogy, then I would move
into a discussion of some of the distinctions
among the various critical pedagogies that
are being developed across North America.
But I would begin my answer with an ethical
imperative of trying to live one’s politics,
trying to develop a coherency between the
ethics that you profess, the theories that help
to guide you in your life in thinking about
your experiences and how you actually are
living – are being and becoming – in the
world, your being in the world. Now I’ll be
the first to admit that I have been at various
times in my life an utter failure in living the
way I believe that I should, but it’s important
to pick yourself up and to keep trying, with
no guarantee that you will succeed.
So, in a sense, critical pedagogy is a way of
learning to be self-reflexive about what you
do, learning to be critically self-reflexive
about how you behave, with yourself, with
others and in relation to the larger social
relations that constitute the milieu or the
social context in which you are living your
politics – and that of course makes demands
on you, and oftentimes the weight of those
demands taxes you beyond what you feel
you care bear. And those demands have to
do with becoming familiar with various lan-
guages, discourse, histories of political strug-
gles and theories – social theories, cultural
theories, economic theories – so that you can
make sense of your life by discovering how
your life is mediated by all these languages,
these political and economic formations,
social relations, institutions and, of course,
the environment. I call these structures of
mediation, with the environment constrain-
ing the social forces and social relations of
production, with these constraining our
political formations, and with these con-
straining – pulling and pushing against – our
human nature. These structures or relations
of mediation create us as we reproduce
them. But we don’t simply reproduce them,
we can modify and transform them because
we have the ability to discern which actions
we can take to help build more democratic
social relations and institutions. And if you
read only the bourgeois social theorists and
philosophers you will likely develop a certain
kind of social and political agency, and we
could call this progressive. If you read the revo-
lutionary literature on politics and economics
you will have a chance to engage in a more
focused attempt on challenging capitalism at
its roots as many socialists have been doing
for centuries.
And so, in fact, you become able to
answer the question. How have I come to be?
Who am I? How have I been produced his-
torically, culturally, sociologically, ethically?
How have I been produced? And that means
how have you become knowingly and
unknowingly complicit in reproducing those
historical social relations that constrain
rather than enable democracy and emanci-
pation from oppression. Here I am not
restricting myself to liberal or representative
democracy, but I mean participatory democ-
racy, direct democracy, creating democracy
from below.
So, you have to understand that process.
And when you’re able to do that, then you
can make more critical choices how you live,
and you can make better decisions and you
can be more authentic and more consistent.
JLK: I think that oftentimes people really miss
the point that there is this ‘way of being in
the world’ aspect of critical pedagogy and
think of it undoubtedly within methodologi-
cal terms within educational policy terms.
Not that those points are unimportant –
obviously, they’re very important – but it
seems to me – and I agree with you com-
pletely – that fundamentally, it really is
about being in the world. With that in mind,
how has it changed your being in the world
to be a critical pedagogue?
PM: Well, for one thing, it’s made me more aware
of the contradictions that plague my life as a
citizen living inside a capitalist behemoth and
it’s made me, I think, a little bit harder on
myself. I’m always ferreting out and trying to
overcome the contradictions that render me
much more ineffective than I would like to be
when dealing with institutions, when dealing
with groups, other people and policies, prac-
tices – both pedagogical and political.
So, it’s made me a critic of myself that’s
both good and bad. It can be debilitating, it
can be paralyzing sometimes because I tend
to be hard on myself but I think it’s also
important to accept the fact that you’re
going to learn constantly throughout your
life, that we are all unfinished human beings,
that we are in the liminal state of becoming,
and hopefully we can pick up the pieces of a
life shattered by capitalism and learn to make
better choices and to be more effective as an
agent for social change and social justice.
 INTERVIEWS WITH JOE L. KINCHELOE AND PETER MCLAREN
So, I think that it’s made me a lot lonelier
because I’m brought together with like-minded
people who also feel the sense of anomie and
alienation, and at times a heightened, pulsat-
ing desperation, who feel that they’re anguish-
ing about the world while other people are
simply in the world to enjoy it and to take
advantage of whatever situation they can in
order to further their own interests.
Sometimes it’s almost incapacitating
because you’re so aware of structures of
oppression and mediation. Every time you
pick up a newspaper, you can just see the
propaganda. Every time you have a discussion
with someone in the coffee shop, you get a
sense of how they’ve been positioned to
answer questions or to think about things in
certain ways. You being to see manifestations
of the structural unconscious of society –
what we could call the macrostructural
unconscious. The structural unconscious is a
sepulcher of repressed memories whose
function is to protect the oppressed from the
trauma of their struggle against capitalism.
We are living the horror of history’s barba-
rism towards the working-class. And we
would do well to uncover the sites where
these repressed memories lay buried and
expose them to critical scrutiny, and pay
homage to the victims of our aggression. We
need to understand the roles that capital/
labor relationships play in our society. Every
high school and university class should have a
required course on the history of capitalism,
and certainly material written from the vic-
tims of capitalism, not the victors, because
we are in a war, a class war, and we’ve been
in this war since we left feudalism behind.
Some might even call today’s transnational
capitalism a form of neo-feudalism, and they
wouldn’t be wrong in doing so.
As an ethnographer, you can engage in all
kinds of lengthy discussions with people and
get a sense of why they might be thinking
the way they are. And it can make you angry
at times because you want to create a situa-
tion where people have an opportunity to be
self-reflexive since our society, very often,
doesn’t provide those opportunities system-
atically, even in universities, certainly, in public
schools. So, that’s where my struggle is.
I guess I’m lucky because I do have an
opportunity to spend time with grad stu-
dents as well as with activists that I meet in
my travels, in my journey. So, I think I’m
luckier than some in that respect. Because,
Joe, we do all share a common commitment
373
to social justice, but day-to-day life can be
overwhelming as I’m sure you know.
JLK: That’s beautifully put. One of the things that
just comes to mind when you say that is the
notion that’s really informed me as I think
about that in my own life is the blues aesthetic,
right?
PM: Right.
JLK: And think about it just for a second that
one of the things that the blues has tradi-
tionally done in African-American music is
saying like, ‘There is horrible stuff going on
in the world yet at the same time we’re
going to talk about it’ like Helen Wolfe talk-
ing about, ‘I’m here on death row getting
ready to be killed, yet at the same time I’m
singing about it’.
And so, we’re talking about the horror of
the world – the horror in the world – and
then concurrently, celebrating the fact that
we’re alive and that there’s possibility in
being alive. And to me, that’s so inspirational.
PM: Within every structure and practice of
oppression, there is a moment where we can
seize and try to create something good out of
that moment. There is always a leak in the
fabric of hegemony, there is always a sliver of
light in the darkest gloom. Roots shoot out
from cracks in the sidewalk. But the blues of
course has been something that has been so
important to me as I know it has to you, Joe.
JLK: That’s right.
PM: I grew up listening to the blues as a young
man. I took guitar lessons from a Toronto
guitar player named David Wilcox and learned
to do some Robert Johnson licks. And I was
never very talented, but it was very cathartic
for me. Even today, I will put on an album,
whether it’s Muddy or Howlin’ Wolf even Paul
Butterfield Blues Band – East–West – and
listen to Mike Bloomfield, Elmore James, John
Hammond Jr., Billie Holliday, Etta James and
Buddy Guy…
JLK: Buddy Guy! [laughs in agreement]
PM: … just to get back in touch with that sense
that life is a horror, but within that horror,
we can find spaces to celebrate and to affirm
our humanity and it’s that kind of dialectic
support. Yesterday is a memory; tomorrow is
a vision – but today is one hell of a pain in
the ass.
JLK: And one of the things that – I’ll run into
people who know you from your speeches or
know you from your books. And one of the
things that always surprises me – because I
know you so well – is that I don’t think that
they see in just the public persona that you
374 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
have some time, that dialectic – that blues
dialectic – because honestly, I find you not
only one of the most brilliant people that I’ve
ever known, but you’re honestly one of the
funniest people I’ve ever known. And I’ll say
that to people and they’ll go, ‘I didn’t know
that about Peter’.
PM: He’s a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.
JLK: That’s right. ‘I Put a Spell on You’.
PM: Well, that’s interesting because there are
people who have said to me after getting to
know me for a while, ‘You’re a pretty funny
guy’. It’s interesting because in my writings I
seem to terrify people and it’s a real in your
face song.
It’s all out and I don’t really hold back.
Sometimes I try to be a little bit more gentile,
but my words come across as sandpaper cov-
ered with a fine velvet. The velvet being the
academic language that takes the edge off
the sandpaper. But the sandpaper is very
coarse and even though I’m covering it with
a velvet glove, you can feel the sandpaper
underneath and sometimes it scratches right
through the velvet. It’s mean not to leave an
abrasion on your civilized sensibilities but to
literally rub you the wrong way. My words
are meant to be uncomfortable, even if, as
some say, they sound as if they’ve been
dipped in a fine, vintage whiskey. So, I tried
to do that, I put that veneer on my work but
it’s very, very raw and I find the academic
discourse softens that rawness a little bit.
But humor is really important. I do some-
times feel I’m just – every day is a battle for
your sanity and every day is a battle to make
sense of the world and to keep yourself
together, and humor certainly does help. I have
a kind of absurdist view of the world, I think.
JLK: Critical data is an…
PM: I’m very much a surrealist at heart. I mean,
at academic wine and cheese parties or at
official gatherings I feel I am the Duchamp
urinal in the museum.
JLK: [laughs] I’ve always thought of you that
way, right?
PM: Right. And it’s really me in a urinal costume.
But no, I think that I’ve always been drawn to
the surreal, and often the absurd aspects of
life, I’m the Dada piece in a hall full of
Renaissance paintings. I’ve always enjoyed that
and I love the sense of performance. The very
serious Marxists who will monitor my work are
little concerned about me at times. But at the
same time, I take Marx very seriously.
They think that the performance aspect of
me detracts from the theoretical pristineness
that they’d like me to display and that they
feel I do display at times. But that’s very much
me. I really like to get my whole body
involved and it’s very much like spoken word
now. And I think the reason I’m connecting
with young people in my work quite a bit
these days is because they appreciate that
performative side of me – the tattooed, crazy,
older guy who’s just refusing to grow up in
certain ways. I suspect that I will have regrets
as I get older and I am better prepared to
attempt to interrogate life under capitalism.
JLK: And redefining what it means to age.
PM: Redefining, I think, what it means to age.
And the possibilities that we can have.
There’s always a danger of becoming the old
fool. It’s the question of how you can get
your message out and who will likely listen. I
think the message of Paulo Freire, and Marx,
and bell hooks, Henry Giroux, and Maxine
Greene, are of great importance, and I try to
connect their work with different audiences.
Which is not to say I don’t respect established
venues and the formal academic talk, since
I’ve learned much from visiting speakers,
nationally and internationally. And I was a
Junior Fellow at Massey College where we
were required to wear gowns and sit at high
table dinners. Now that’s a performance! But
one that keeps the status boundaries neatly
in place.
JLK: Of course.
PM: And I’m sure I have stepped into the per-
formative arena far too many times – after
reading Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life, you know what I mean
by that. And let’s not forget Augusto Boal’s
Theater of the Oppressed, or Bertolt Brecht’s
alienation effect. And I did play one act as
Hamlet in college, and not very well. But it’s
just that you push on, you speak up, you try
not only to speak truth to power but to find
ways to reshape power relations, such as
transforming relations of patriarchy, homo-
phobia, heteronormativity, white supremacy.
It’s not enough to speak truth to power – you
need to transform relations of oppression to
relations of mobilization for social justice. At
the same time, you try not to be immobilized
by the embarrassment you may have caused
yourself and others or the pain sometimes.
You learn from your mistakes. And Myles
Horton has said that you only learn from the
experiences that you learn from. Sounds a little
strange but there’s a lot more packed into that
idea than at first blush. And you just try to
keep on moving ahead, learning as you go.
 INTERVIEWS WITH JOE L. KINCHELOE AND PETER MCLAREN
You make the road by walking, as Antonio
Machado would put it – Caminante no hay
camino se hace camino el andar.
JLK: Keep on keeping on.
PM: Keep on keeping on.
JLK: I think Mr. Zimmerman might have used
that phrase.
PM: Ah, yes, Bob Dylan. Well, he might have. I
was reading about his performance with
Pope John Paul II and how the current Pope
just did a book about his predecessor, and he
cited in his book that he disapproved of John
Paul inviting Bob Dylan to a major sort of
concert. And he’s gotten rid now of the
Vatican ‘pop event’ because he’s much too
involved in classical piano concertos.
JLK: [laughs] That’s funny. I saw that too. He
just…
PM: I just think of him as a Peanuts character –
the new Pope – like … [mimes striking a
piano keyboard]
JLK: Schroeder.
PM: Schroeder.
JLK: Pope Schroeder.
PM: Well, we should rename him Pope Schroeder.
JLK: That’s funny. Let’s start a movement for
that.
PM: We’re on record here, Pope Benedict, but you
should rename yourself – reanoint yourself –
as Pope Schroeder. And I say that as a practic-
ing Catholic, but one who supports liberation
theology, which Benedict helped to destroy
with the help of Ronald Reagan and the US
military.
JLK: The XVI.
PM: The XVI.
JLK: That’s right. And that’s the side of you that
people, I think, I don’t see a lot of times. It
just…
PM: Well, no…
JLK: Please…
PM: …no, I was just saying that I can remember
one story about how that occurred to me in
Mexico. There was a dean of a school of edu-
cation at a university – a pedagogical univer-
sity. I can’t remember what city in Mexico
because I’m there frequently and visit in
order to make political alliances in many dif-
ferent places. But she was so nervous about
meeting me that she threw out her back and
it was because of the strident militancy of
some of my writings.
They know you because people read your
books and they haven’t met you and they
think you might just be an angry old gnat –
it’s amazing the amount of people that meet
me who express how surprised they are that
375
I am friendly or they’re surprised that I even
just will chat for, like, 15 seconds while I’m
going to get my coffee. And this Rector of
the university was really upset, so I said to
some of the doctoral students, ‘Let’s go visit
her. Let’s go to her house’.
And so, we went upstairs and I jumped on
top of the bed along with a half dozen stu-
dents and faculty. And we’re sitting there
just talking on the bed and they were taking
photographs. And she was saying, ‘God, if I’d
known you were this nice, I never would
have thrown my back out in the first place’.
Some think my persona does not fit the
seriousness of my message. But that’s some-
thing that they need to deal with, not me. If I
were as angry in person all the time as I am in
the pages of my books, I wouldn’t want to
spend much time with me, either. So I try not to
preach, but to dialogue. I start with a conversa-
tion with the hope that it turns into a dialogue.
JLK: That’s fantastic. On this personal part,
which I really wanted to capture with this –
not that we want to ignore the gravitas of
your work, as you think of yourself now –
we’re doing this in March of 2007 – by March
of 2012, what will you have wanted to
accomplish in the next five years? What is it
that you – if we were to come back to McGill
University and we were to have the same
interview and we were to review the last five
years, what would you want to tell me?
PM: Well, that’s a great question. Well, I would
like to say that I’m still in Venezuela in sup-
port of the Bolivarian Revolution and that
great gains had been made. And that we
have successfully repelled US imperialism and
gotten the US to withdraw 700 plus bases
from around the world and…
JLK: Amen.
PM: … got the US to dismantle its nuclear pro-
gram and its program to build ‘weapons of
mass destruction’ as well as ‘weapons of mass
distraction’ that we confront every time we
turn on the television or visit social media.
That would be something. But that’s, of
course, just a pipe dream but the latter part
of that with the US administration. But I’d
like to start an institute in Latin America. I
was hoping to start it in Ensenada near the
border – near La Linea, near La Frontera –
between the United States and Mexico.
I’d like to start an institute so the people
from Latin America and North America could
meet just across the border in Mexico and we
could have an institute of world peace. And
that’s something I’ve been thinking a lot
376 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
about is how to go about creating that kind
of institute. It would be very different from
what the La Fundacion McLaren that exists in
Tijuana. It could be affiliated with that
organization, possibly. Athough that Institute
is doing some amazing work, under the lead-
ership of Sergio Quiroz Miranda.
It’s interesting because my big weakness is
knowing how to get funding. One weakness I
have as a professor, and I have many I am
sure, is in bringing sizeable grants to benefit
my graduate students. And so, I often think if
I just knew how to approach people to create
things like an institute for global peace, I
could probably do it, if I just knew how to do
it. And my biggest regret is that I just haven’t,
as yet, tried to get this off the ground.
However, Instituto McLaren has been estab-
lished, but the credit for that goes to the
professor and students in Mexico who always
continue to garner my appreciation and
respect for their hard work and their incisive
understanding of how capitalism works.
JLK: Well, I think of all the major figures in criti-
cal pedagogy in the US in particular and
think about the fact that how little any of us
that have worked in the US in critical peda-
gogy have been funded for the type of work
that we’ve done.
That’s just not you, we could go through a
whole range of people and the fact that I had
to come to Canada in order to get funded for
critical pedagogy, is – I think – very indicative
of the situation we find ourselves in. So, I
don’t think that’s unusual at all. I think that
you can be excused for that failure because
we all have failed in that type of place.
PM: I just haven’t tried, that’s my point. You’re
right, I think you’re probably right. I wouldn’t
be very successful at this venture but I’m
thinking of a global institution and a global
institute that could have some impact and
bring the best folks in that could try to
analyze what’s happening in neo-liberal
capitalism, finance capitalism, and things
we’re going to need to do. There are similar
institutes but this one would be directed at
teachers and educators and hopefully it could
affect curriculum.
I was invited recently to join a project –
that might interest you – that involves devel-
oping a global curriculum for social change
and I think that’s really important.
JLK: That’s so interesting.
PM: Critical pedagogy for a global future. I hope
there is a future for the world, given the envi-
ronmental peril we are in, and given the world
historical challenges facing the survival of
democracy.
JLK: Actually, I was just thinking about funding
in the US for critical pedagogical work. We
can certainly have ‘the Dick Cheney Center
for Critical Pedagogy’. That would work very
well in these political times.
PM: Well, the states now – with what happened
to me and UCLA and things are still crazy
there with the junkyard dogs of our political
system.
JLK: You are the poet laureate of the educational
left.
PM: Thanks, Joe. I live in Hollywood, people
have nicknamed me the Hollywood Marxist.
But it’s interesting how many political activ-
ists you do run into in places like Hollywood.
They are not out for the glory, they are in it
to help people who have been victimized by
the political system, the state, and the social
relations of production that oil the gears of
state enterprises.
And it’s a really surreal place, so it really
helps with that surreal side of me. But there’s
a lot going on politically, too, and a lot of
social movements, a lot of political activism
takes place in California. I’m currently a
member of the Industrial Workers of the
World [Wobblies], but unfortunately I haven’t
been very involved in the union given the
crazy schedule I live with.
I hope to change that. That’s another
thing I’d like to do. I’d like to come back and
say I’ve been able to do more work on the
ground with the Wobblies or other organiza-
tions. But just fighting this Bush administra-
tion right now is so taxing of my energies;
here we are in 2007, I’d be curious as to what
the state of the world will be like when you
invite me up to the Great White North for
another conversation (I miss Canada, as you
know, I was born and grew up in Toronto
and lived in Winnipeg as a youth). But I must
say that UCLA – at least up to this point – has
been relatively supportive with respect to the
attacks on me – well, at least they haven’t yet
used the attacks against me.
JLK: And I wanted to ask you about the ‘Dirty 30’
in that context.
PM: The Dirty 30 was a list of professors that was
created by a small right-wing group known
as the Bruin Alumni Association, an organiza-
tion not officially part of UCLA but they used
the word ‘Bruin’ so that they would sound
more official. This group egregiously offered
$100 to students to secretly audio-tape me or
other radical professors, and $50 to provide
 INTERVIEWS WITH JOE L. KINCHELOE AND PETER MCLAREN
notes they took in our classrooms. And that
made the worldwide press because of the
money transaction, I think, and the resem-
blance to the McCarthy Era in US history.
The head of the Bruin Alumni Association
had a bake sale called the ‘Affirmative Action
Bake Sale’ where baked goods were sold to
minority students at cheaper prices.
JLK: Yes.
PM: The founder of the organization was racial-
izing the bake sale, mirroring affirmative
action as he saw it; it was a political stunt
that was meant to be attention-grabbing but
was ultimately repugnant.
JLK: They did it all over the country.
PM: The head of the Bruin Alumni Association
got some press for that, so then he thought
that he may be have a chance of becoming
Karl Rove number two when he gets a little
older – he’s in his early 20s – he cooked up an
organization of bullies that schemed to find
dirt on leftist professors, and offered to pay
students money to spy on radical professors.
And so, the stories came out. I started get-
ting attachments in my email, newspaper
attachments from Italy, Japan, Greece,
Canada. So, it was a story that was picked up
by numerous news outlets – and I should
point out that the Bruin Alumni Association
put me on top of the list as UCLA’s most dan-
gerous professor – and it was rather discon-
certing when I found out it was a serious
organization with Republican money back-
ing it up. I’d heard about this group and I’d
heard about this list and initially I thought it
was a joke. I mean, there was a sad humor to
this whole stars and stripes spectacle.
I was ready to give some talks at the World
Social Forum in Venezuela. And this was, I
think, the day before I was to leave for
Caracas and I was doing some last-minute
preparation in my office. Suddenly, outside
my office door, the mass media had assem-
bled. I gagged, left abruptly, and before I
knew it they were chasing me across campus.
I’m used to appearing on academic hit lists,
but this organization was just plain nasty,
and the ideas they represented were flat-
lined from the outset. Apparently, if you use
critical pedagogy in your classes – especially
the variant I developed that was punctuated
by the work of Paulo Freire, Marx, Gramsci,
and the Frankfurt School, as well as philoso-
phers from Latin America such as Enrique
Dussel – then you are un-American. Can you
even imagine that term, ‘un-American’? I
can’t imagine Canadians calling someone un-
377
Canadian. Can you? You have the tall poppy
syndrome here – but I don’t hear criticism
that professors are un-Canadian. Critical ped-
agogy in the classroom is what I called enact-
ing critical patriotism, not the knee-jerk
patriotism of standing for allegiance before
school starts, or before, say, a football game.
And this is a time that the country – the
United States – is so polarized, it’s quite fright-
ening. And the frenzy with which the fanati-
cism which the right attacks you now means,
‘No holds barred. You are Satan. You are
destroying the country. You must be purged
from the system’. It’s so virulent. It’s like the
country is fighting the Civil War all over again.
I remember Christmas Day getting up and
the first thing I read was an email sent to me
with the names of all of those that were exe-
cuted in Cuba by a firing squad led by Che
Guevara in La Cabaña right after the revolu-
tion. It didn’t mention that those executed
were, many of them, rapists and murderers. It
was done deliberately to attack my associa-
tion with the life and teachings of Che
Guevara. I did a book which I thought gave
Che considerable praise as an educator, leader,
philosopher and thinker. And you can’t do
that in the US without getting some pretty
serious backlash going. Now to clarify, I am
personally against the death penalty; I never
celebrated or condoned executions in which
revolutionaries such as Che may or may not
have participated. But at the same time Che
was a heroic guerilla fighter whom, in my
opinion, deserves respect. I do not believe the
‘foco’ – or small group of armed guerillas –
would be a feasible means today to begin a
revolution. But I remain a supporter of the
Cuban revolution and of Che’s participation. I
would only participate in violent activities if
my family or my comrades were under direct
threat, and I would like to think I would have
the courage to defend vulnerable groups
against fascist regimes who were engaged in
murderous repression of the popular majori-
ties. One of my heroes is Archbishop Romero
of El Salvador who was gunned down in 1980
as he was participating in a celebration of the
mass. Today, I still mourn the Jesuits, their
housekeeper, and the housekeeper’s daughter
who were slain in 1989 in the Central American
University in El Salvador by a Salvadorean
death squad – the Atlacatl Batallion – trained
in the United States. Lieutenant Guerra gave
the order to kill the priests, Ellacuría, Martín-
Baró, Montes, López, Lopez y Lopez, and
Moreno. The housekeeper, Julia Elba Ramos
378 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and her 16-year-old daughter, Celina Mariceth
Ramos were also killed.
JLK: That’s right. What’s the best book you’ve
ever written?
PM: The best book I’ve ever written, that’s inter-
esting. I think, probably, there are two books
that stand out. The book that everyone
seems to know is Life in Schools …
JLK: That’s right.
PM: … and I wrote that book as a corrective to a
diary I published in Canada in 1980 called
Cries from the Corridor. I hate that book and
I wrote that book as a corrective to that
book; includes that book but criticizes that
book.
So, that’s, I think, my favorite book in the
sense that it’s constructed as – it’s a peda-
gogical book. It’s meant to bring you into the
conversation and then jar you out of the
conversation then bring you back in again.
So, I like the way it’s structured – I love the
structure of that.
JLK: I do too.
PM: You’ve done the intro to the most recent
version, which I think is the best version of
that book to date. Hopefully there will be
more versions. But I like Che Guevera, Paulo
Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution.
I think that’s a good book. Che’s daughter
told me there’s a few biographical errors and
she told me that just about three weeks ago
in Havana. So, I hope she will send me those
corrections.
But I’ve been asked to do another volume
of that and expand it. And I’m thinking of
addressing some questions which I didn’t do
sufficiently in the first, like the whole ques-
tion of violence. And how do we begin to
think about that as critical educators? There
are all kinds of things we don’t talk about, it
seems, in our work because they’re contro-
versial topics. But that’s precisely why we
need to engage those issues because as pro-
fessors we are public intellectuals are we
not? And I think some of us are a little nerv-
ous to pursue those questions, just some-
times, for fear of what we might arrive at.
Certain things that we don’t explore as much
as we should. And I think I’m going to look at
the whole question of violence.
JLK: I think that’s fair. What is the – gee, I forgot
the question I was going to ask. There was
some good question to add around that. And
a lot of things that I’m asking you about now
are things that you didn’t talk about the other
day. And so, that’s where I’m going in a lot of
this, but – oh, I know, just as I look over and
see the picture of myself and Paulo Freire –
Peter, I [remember] I was going to ask you,
what is the impact of Paulo Freire in your life?
PM: It’s been a profound impact – absolutely
profound impact. I was in Toronto doing my
PhD work and I missed a visit from Paulo
Freire and I regret that, but I managed to get
the tape that they made. And I think it was
around in the early 80s, let’s put it that way.
I still have it – it’s an old three-quarter-inch
tape. I audited a class with Michel Foucault
and should have recorded the classes – there
must be recordings somewhere.
You couldn’t make out really what Paulo
was saying in that tape as he was developing
his English. But I had an opportunity to meet
him for the first time when I went to the US in
1985. My contract was not renewed at Brock
University, where I had a one-year appoint-
ment, I could not find a job in Canada any-
where. So, I received a wonderful opportunity
to work with Henry Giroux when he was teach-
ing at Miami University of Ohio and he intro-
duced me to Donaldo Macedo, and both of
them introduced me to Paulo Freire and that
was quite a remarkable event, I remember.
And Paulo was aware of some of my work
and that shocked me because I had no idea
that Paulo knew my work at all. One thing
made a powerful impact on me, is when
Paulo’s wife, first wife Elza died. I’ve got a
letter from Paulo and it said that the first
reading he’s been able to do since she died
was some passages from one of my books.
JLK: Amazing.
PM: Well, I was surprised that Paulo felt moved
to write me especially during this time in his
life. I was delighted to know that Paulo had
this organic connection to some of my work
and I was a little nervous about that letter.
Now, this is an interesting story, I remem-
ber I was sitting in my office at UCLA and I
came across the letter which I put it in one of
those plastic file folders, and the letter was
secured in that folder. And I said, ‘I hope that
I’ll lose this because I’d hate to ever be
tempted to publish this because it would
seem a little self-serving if I did’.
And so, I was always worried about it –
what might happen to that letter.
And by midnight that night, I’d lost it, per-
manently. I’d taken it and I was going to Xerox
it. And I thought, ‘Well, I hope I’ll lose it, but I
still want to Xerox it’. It was kind of a contra-
diction, but I remember by that evening, I had
actually lost it and I’ve never been able to find
it. And I think it might’ve been thrown out in
 INTERVIEWS WITH JOE L. KINCHELOE AND PETER MCLAREN
the trash. And I can’t find the copy, either. I’m
glad because the temptation to publish such
an intimate letter is no longer there.
JLK: Incredible.
PM: And I did look really hard for it, for months
after that very evening, I decided that it’s
probably a very good thing to have lost it.
JLK: You’ve traveled all around the world, and
you’ve travelled certainly all around Latin
America and then from Finland to Ramallah
to wherever it might be. What is the most
profound experience that you’ve ever had in
your travels?
PM: My goodness, that’s an amazing question. I
think that, searching my memory there’s a
number of things.
I think traveling to Venezuela, to Caracas
a few years back, meeting Hugo Chavez at
Miraflores Palace because we were in an
office adjacent to Chavez’s office, and I had
recognized the scenery from watching the
movie, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,
which showed the inside of Miraflores Palace,
and we were in an office adjacent talking to
Luis Bonilla and Marta Harnecker who were
working for Chavez at that time.
And when Chavez moves around the
palace, there’s kind of a lock down until he
gets into his office. Agents come out, ‘Chavez
is coming’. But you’re not – it really locked
you down but you’re not supposed to leave
the office because everyone would go out
just to be able to get near him.
And so, we were watching from the window
in the office just to catch a glimpse and sud-
denly he started walking towards our office,
opened the door, came in and he started talk-
ing to the secretary who is about 18. And in
that conversation with the secretary he had
asked her, ‘Why are you here working? You
should be in a university’. He started wanting
to know why she was here and why she didn’t
go on the university and he was emphatic that
she should be in school. It was quite amazing.
379
I was taken by Chavez’s charisma as well as
his courage. So, that was a powerful moment
because I didn’t expect it to happen. And
that was quite a precipitous time to meet
someone who’s creating such an impact
around the world. He thanked us for peda-
gogical work we’ve been doing – so he knew
that – and he remarked that a monster was
living in the White House. He was referring
to Bush. He was correct in his assessment.
JLK: El Diablo.
PM: We will have to defeat that monster. And he
said that…
JLK: I can smell the sulfur, just …
PLK: I can smell the sulfur.
JLK: …you’re bringing it up.
PM: We should work harder as a result of being
inspired by the Bolivarian Revolution. So, it
was just quite a wonderful time. But there’s
been so many experiences. There has been
new people I’ve met that shared very moving
moments of their lives with me – I remember
I was in Pakistan and someone told me there
a story about meeting Che just before he
went to Bolivia. It was very touching to meet
people whose lives have intersected with
these great historical figures and they’ll trust
you enough to bring you in and share those
stories with you. Those are always very won-
derful moments.
Meeting the shack dwellers and the shack-
dwellers’ movement in Durban, South Africa
was a powerful moment for me, as was
spending time with the Indigenous move-
ment in Mexico. Having the opportunity to
watch them practice their activism was an
inspiration. They’ve all been incredible expe-
riences and they continue.
JM: Peter, thank you so much. Obviously, you
are my brother and I appreciate all of the
things that you’ve shared with us. And one of
the things that I look forward to is you
working closely with the Freire Institute here
at McGill.

Influenced by Critical Pedagogy:
Interviews with Critical Friends
In the dialogic fashion of Paulo Freire, our work
in the freireproject.org has centered on collect-
ing the words, writings, voices and knowledges
from those who have influenced the field of
critical pedagogy. To this end, it was important
for our work to casually interview a range of
critical scholars in order for different communi-
ties to have access to not only the scholarship,
but the personal words of those who have made
a difference … influenced the field. These
change-makers, Earth-shakers, these beloved
people are critical friends. Understanding con-
text and positionality, the four people inter-
viewed come together bound by their
commitment to a socially just pedagogy which
names, recognizes and identifies power. They
are teachers and community members who
respect history, narrative and continue to ‘make
the road by walking’. These short interviews
were done by our project in our attempt to bring
together both the personal and the political for a
larger audience. It is my privilege and honor to
know and love each of the interviewees; each
one of them is not only a mentor to me but has
38
Shirley R. Steinberg
been a close friend for at least two decades. An
essential benefit to working in
critical pedagogy has been an unexpected
one – yet, possibly the most cherished – the
friendship and solidarity one finds with other
teachers and community workers who attempt
to work together to create a global (yet tentative)
pedagogical way of knowing.
Prefacing each interview, I have written a
short piece (italicized) to contextualize the
interview and my personal reflections on each
beloved person. My prefaces are personal,
reminding me as I wrote them, that in critical
pedagogy, the personal and the professional
are interchangeable. I’ve edited and organized
each of the interviews, sometimes adding an
italicized editorial comment or an update with
the permission of the interviewee. Our deep-
est appreciation goes to the members of freire-
project.org who conducted the interviews, and
to Deborah Britzman, Rochelle Brock, Ivor
Goodson and Handel Wright for their permis-
sion to use the text of the interviews. Note:
interviews follow alphabetically.
 INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS
INTERVIEW WITH DEBORAH BRITZMAN,
UNIVERSITY OF COLUMBIA,
VANCOUVER, JULY 2009
Dayton, Ohio, sometime in the early 90s, I
spied Deborah Britzman talking casually to
a group of friends. Having just purchased
her book, Practice Makes Practice, I was
verklempt. I remember being somewhat
speechless when she was introduced to me,
I’d hoped to make a brilliant remark about
her book, instead I shook her hand and
stared; my star-struck silliness was rooted
in the fact that Deborah was the first Jewish
critical pedagogy-type person I’d met – that
seemed important to me. We became
acquaintances, conference friends, doing
the occasional writing project together –
but it was a decade later, after Kincheloe
had died, when Deborah and I were both
teaching at the University of British
Columbia for the summer, when I realized
the personal treasure of being Britzman’s
friend. A day with Deborah Britzman is pre-
dictably unpredictable – she is dry and
observant, funny, with gourmet food and
wine opinions and is a cerebral shopper.
Deborah’s humor is dead-on; her Freudian-
informed read on anything grabs hold and
becomes one of those re-visited remarks.
Deborah doesn’t force advice or pedagogy
upon a listener; it infuses within her ways of
being, makes one walk away with knowing
she is a presence without being one. Never
sentimental, she is honest with sentiment, in
short – a fabulous human being, the ulti-
mate mensch (srs, editor’s note).
Deborah Britzman: I did my graduate work at
the University of Massachusetts in Amherst –
both the master’s and the doctoral work. I
was a high school teacher before that. And
before that, I did my undergraduate work at
the University of Massachusetts. I finished my
doctoral studies in 1985 and then I went to
the State University of New York at
Binghamton. I was there for seven years.
Then I went to York University and I’ve been
at York University now for 17 [now over
25 years, ed.]
381
FP: Why did you return to academia after being
a high school teacher?
Deborah Britzman: It was quite accidental,
really. After teaching in high school for seven
years, I began to understand all that I didn’t
know. I’d had nightmares, actually, about
teaching and felt that there was something
that I had to think about differently outside
of the school.
So, I took a year off and just read, and then
went to graduate school, originally, to do a
master’s degree in reading because my area
was English. I was an English teacher and one
of the things that shocked me – I don’t know
why that was the case, but I was quite
shocked that a great many of my students
couldn’t read. And I was also more shocked
that I didn’t know how to help them.
So, originally, I went to do a master’s
degree in reading and anthropology and I
thought after that I would go back to the
school and at that point, I thought maybe in
administration. I found that schools are closed
shops. It’s very, very hard for an outsider that
doesn’t live in the neighborhood, that doesn’t
come from anywhere to just suddenly go
somewhere, to work at the school.
I decided that I might as well stay at the
university, and for the doctoral work, and
studied ethnographic research and continued
in looking at reading and literacy. And when I
finished the doctorate, I applied to higher
education and received my first job at the
State University of New York at Binghamton
as an Assistant Professor. That was in 1985.
FP: And when did you start to first get interested
in psychoanalysis?
Deborah Britzman: I began to think about psy-
choanalysis differently probably in my fourth
or fifth year teaching at the university at
SUNY Binghamton; began to read Freud.
And then when I moved to Canada, I realized
that all of my ‘areas of expertise’ were irrel-
evant because they were so grounded in the
US context. And so, I needed to create a new
area of study that wasn’t dependent upon
nation and then I became more and more
interested in psychoanalysis.
I started reading psychoanalysis, I went into
my own analysis and then decided during my
analysis that I would like to know more about
the clinical side. I was very interested in the
theoretical side of psychoanalysis, but I was
also very, very interested in the clinical side.
So, I decided to train as an analyst.
I began to train as a psychoanalyst, which
first involved doing work in a clinic. I started
382 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
working with a team in a clinic that serves
parents and kids. And I worked with a team
of people – psychiatric students, social work-
ers, people interested in learning more about
the clinical practice, psychologists, psychoan-
alysts. And we were involved in assessing
kids, which was a very long and drawn out
process. But of course, when you’re working
with kids, you’re also working with their
families.
I began to learn how to listen psychologi-
cally to people’s experiences in their lives and
how they make sense of it. I entered a psy-
choanalytic institute and began training in
earnest and started a small private practice,
finished the program in 2009, and now have
the designation psychoanalyst as well as the
Distinguished Research Professor which is my
title at York University.
I carry a very small private practice and I
also teach at the university and I do quite a
bit of writing. I’ve written a number of books
on the topic of psychoanalysis with educa-
tion. Two of those books have had as their
focus Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein.
Both are about what has happened to the
concept of education in psychoanalysis. My
current project is a book-length study called,
When History Returns: Thoughts on the
Making of Psychoanalysis.
FP: When did you first encounter Paulo Freire?
And tell us your experiences in the early days
of Critical Pedagogy.
Deborah Britzman: In 1972, I went to the
University of Massachusetts as an under-
graduate. I had spent two years at the
University of Cincinnati and when I went to
the University of Massachusetts, I met some-
one – a friend of mine who is still an old
friend of mine – who introduced me to two
ideas: anarchism and Paulo Freire. And she
gave me a present right after we met, a little
book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
That was a book that was so surprising
because so much of education was oriented
towards, I would say, a technocratic under-
standing and the compliance to the mecha-
nisms of school life. No one really had talked
about the idea that education oppresses. We
felt that way, but the idea that there was an
existential dilemma to the problem of educa-
tion and to the problem of literacy and to
the problem of being able to tell your own
story in very general terms – it wasn’t an idea
that I had thought about before.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed came out in
1970 in English from the Portuguese and I
don’t know how to say it, but it was a book
that made a terrific difference in the way in
which I started to think. And, it was a very
hard book, not because the sentences were
long and complicated but because of what
Freire was trying to talk about. And that was
the idea of a prison house that was created
socially, that was internalized.
In this sense, it’s a very psychological study
of what it means to not be able to read. And
the reading wasn’t a reading that was physical
reading, because we could read the words,
but the actual problem was meaning in edu-
cation. The paradox of education is that you
can spend years and years there and come out
thinking you’re stupid, or you can spend years
and years there and feel nothing means any-
thing, or you can spend years and years there
and hate reading. You can spend years and
years there and feel that you don’t belong.
With Pedagogy of the Oppressed, sud-
denly, what enters into education is lan-
guage, the problem of language, the
problem of speech, which wasn’t ever spoken
about in that particular way because reading
was seen – normally speaking – as a technical
endeavor. And Freire offers the idea that
there’s an existential, libidinal relation to the
ways in which we take in meaning. And it
matters to not only how we live our lives but
in how we can see the world.
And so, he’d liberated reading from print
and put it into the problem of interpretation
and therefore made literacy an interpretive
art, which is very close to what Freud did
with language as well. I think about that
now. I don’t see those two views as at odds
with one another. Freire, I think, was very
interested in the psychological world of the
subject and the ways in which that world is
made small and thoughtless by social pro-
cesses and censorship, and reason, I suppose.
So, the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
was really a very central text for my own
thinking. It led to Marcuse, it led to Erich
Fromm, it led to Hannah Arendt, it led to
Herman Melville, it led to a world of litera-
ture and a deep abiding interest for the
status of the conflict in education.
I finished my undergraduate work and it
was a very radical education that I had at the
University of Massachusetts. There were no
grades. It was a time of experimentation; the
school was desegregated. It was run by a
dean by the name of Dwight Allen and
Dwight Allen was of the Bahá’í Faith, and the
Bahá’ís are quite interested in integration.
 INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS
And so, when Dwight Allen got there at
the University of Massachusetts – it was a
very conservative education faculty before
Dwight Allen – there was a rule that the
dean could not inaugurate new courses. The
only power that the dean had was that he
could cancel courses. So, when Dwight Allen
got there, he cancelled every single course in
the faculty of education except one, inde-
pendent study.
He then invited all of the faculty that he
wanted to keep on a trip to talk about the
reinvention of education. The ones he didn’t
want, he didn’t invite, and eventually, they
became isolated and left. He brought in
people from New York – people from the
New York school system, people who were
very key in desegregation – Roberta Flack
went there – people that were thinkers, art-
ists, people out of prison. It was a very lively
and interesting and radical place.
We had courses like, ‘Education is love’,
‘Sexism, racism and education’. This was in
the 70s. And feminism was alive and well,
Black liberation. The problem of the politics
of education was a very key idea.
FP: Did Paulo ever come and visit you?
Deborah Britzman: Well, Freire was a faculty
member at the University of Massachusetts
and so was Ralph Tyler. So, we had the right
and the left visiting. When I returned for
graduate school – and that was in 1983 –
Paulo had a yearly seminar which I began to
attend. And so, I went to his seminars.
Whenever he was there, I went to his semi-
nars and got to know him very well. He was
very friendly, very open.
I remember the first class I went to, every-
body was afraid. He walked into the first
class and he sat down, and he spent a long
time telling us how important it was to take
notes. He described his procedure of taking
notes and the little notebooks that he carried
with him and that he would have an idea
and he would write it down and then he
would play with the idea and he would take
some more notes and he would listen to peo-
ple’s conversations and he would take
snatches of notes. And from these notes, he
began to write.
And so, there were no assignments in the
seminar, there were no grades, and no
requirements and no attendance, and one
just came. The people in the seminar was
interesting. There were people in teacher
education. They were mainly people in adult
education, people in development, people
383
working in Latin America, in Africa, in Europe
and we all came from very different van-
tages. There were many languages spoken in
the seminar. He worked in Spanish and
English and French and we were just talking.
The entire seminar was just … whatever
was on our minds is what we talked about
and tried to make some sense of. One of the
things I remember about Paulo is sometimes
he talked about his depression and what he
did when he was depressed. And it’s proba-
bly what we all do: if we’re lucky, when
we’re depressed, we go shopping.
So, he was very dapper, he was very hand-
some, he cared about his dress. He was very,
very interested, he was very, very funny, he
was very, very serious. He had a long beard.
He was just a very approachable, interesting
… ‘My friend, my friend’, he would say hug-
ging people and so on and made us all very
comfortable until finally, we could have
meaningful discussions with him.
In 1986, I worked with a couple of my
friends, Catherine Walsh and Juan Aulestia,
who … we were in graduate school together
and had all finished around the same time.
They’re now living in Ecuador, they’ve been
there for probably about 20 years [now 35
years, ed.] – Catherine Walsh today known
for her scholarship in postcoloniality and
decolonizing education and Juan known for
his work in Indigenous education. But we
decided – in 1985 – to make a working con-
ference and we called it The First Working
Conference on Critical Pedagogy and we
held it at the University of Massachusetts.
It had three strands. And we brought
together areas that were seen as quite sepa-
rate in education. Adult education, which –
primarily, the people in adult education and
literacy education were very keen on com-
munity education and were very keen on
Paulo Freire. Teacher education which didn’t
really do much with Freire unless there were
people that were very interested in Freire.
The third strand was feminism and African-
American studies.
We brought all of this group together. So,
we decided to invite people that were very
known in the area. In Canada, it was Roger
Simon who was invited; and Maxine Greene,
Paulo Freire, Madeleine Grumet, Elizabeth
Spelman, John Bracey, Henry Giroux and
Peter McLaren – I don’t think I’m forgetting
anybody. But what was interesting was that
this group of people rarely were in the same
room together. And those folks did keynotes
384 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and then in addition, we had panels and
Paulo Freire. And the keynotes, of course,
also came to the panels and moderated the
panels and so on.
So, I handled the strand in teacher educa-
tion. It was there that I gave a paper that
ended up being a very popular article pub-
lished in the Harvard Ed. Review called ‘Cultural
Myths in the Making of a Teacher: Reality and
Social Structure in Teacher Education’ (1986)
and some really interesting work came out of
that. Harvard had actually published a special
issue about the conference.
Maxine Greene had a paper called ‘In
Search of a Critical Pedagogy’, which is a sort
of opening moment of thinking about criti-
cal pedagogy as a project as opposed to a
thing you did; critical pedagogy as some-
thing to search for, something that you could
find in the national literature, that you could
find in art, that you could find in people’s
conversations. It wasn’t something that was
brought to someone, but it was something
that was made and discussed and pondered
over and thought about. It was my pleasure
to introduce Maxine to Paulo, and it’s some-
thing Maxine often talked about.
Those years were really a time when criti-
cal pedagogy was in the process of becoming
defined. It was a term that was shocking. It
was as shocking to us as Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. It’s hard to believe because now
critical pedagogy may be so normalized,
where people speak about it all the time.
Although, even today, people think about
pedagogy and they say, ‘Well, what’s that?
Why don’t you just say teaching, or, why do
you say pedagogy? What is pedagogy?.
So, it’s a word that decenters us that we
don’t know what that word means. And that
sometimes we associate it with children, but
mainly we associate it with our own educa-
tion, with our own capacity to learn as the
basis of how it is that we teach, that is, that
we teach our style of learning.
I learned that from Paulo. He didn’t teach
us content, he presented us with a style,
similar I would say to how Lacan teaches –
Lacan’s work is all oral. And his seminars are
great – Lacan seminars. His 25 seminars that
he held from, I would say, 1953 to around
1980, he would come in and say, ‘Well, this
year, the topic is, say, ethics and psychoanaly-
sis’, and he would spend the year talking
about one thing.
It would be transcribed, and it would be
handed out, and there’ll be pirate copies,
and it would be translated. Our seminars
from Lacan are his oral teaching. And I would
say that Paulo as well – we could say – based
his work on his oral teaching. He talked
about his work in the favelas and he talked
about how people approached the word,
similar to the signifier in Lacanian psychoa-
nalysis. So, our words and things, as Freud
would talk about. Words and things bother
people.
FP: What common ground do Freire and Freud
share?
Deborah Britzman: I guess I make a leap. Freire
of course talked about consciousness and
Freud, of course, talked about the uncon-
scious. But what brings them both together is
their understanding of the status of meaning
in human life, in the emotional world.
Freire always admitted that education is
an emotional situation. And this question of
the emotional situation of the human. The
human condition is an emotional situation.
The human having desire. All of those are
quite psychoanalytic questions.
I think Freire was deeply impressed by
Frantz Fanon, who was a psychiatrist and
both a deep admirer of Freudian thought
and a deep critic of Freudian thought. And I
don’t think the contradiction of being both a
critic and an admirer is a problem: we have
to say yes and no to our knowledge, mainly.
I think that what Freud was interested in,
isn’t what the state kept from you but what
you, yourself, don’t know. The subject is
unconscious in the Freudian approach, but the
subject suffers. And that question of suffering
is very key in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
And what eases the suffering – if I under-
stand Freire and if I understand Freud – is our
capacity to think, because thinking is an
experimental form of action. Thinking is the
way in which we imagine what isn’t here,
and that question of the imagination is really
the grounds of our capacity to read, to pro-
ject, to take in the world, to construct some-
thing that has never existed before in the
mind, to want, to desire. And this question of
desire, I think, is very key in Pedagogy of the
Oppressed.
Now, Freire was most interested in the
existential problem of how to live, how to
choose freedom, how to let go of constraints,
how to risk love, how to work. Those are the
key problems that education inherits, and
whether or not there can be a way for educa-
tion to allow for those kinds of existential
explorations is one thing.
 INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS
Freire felt that reading was allowing
that procedure whether there were institu-
tional supports or not; that reading was
the thing that freed the psyche or allowed
the ego its grace and its flexibility and its
imagination. So, the status of ideas you
could see across all of these great thinkers,
that thinking mattered, as Foucault asked
in that great question, ‘Is it really impor-
tant to think?’.
And without thinking, without the capac-
ity to bring things together, to see relation-
ships, to put oneself in another’s place, to
imagine our own feelings, to represent, to
put things into words … all of those proce-
dures feed love. And I think that Freire was
quite interested in questions of education
and love.
He was quite interested in the cure of
reading; reading as a way of reading the
world, of moving into the latency of mean-
ing – which brings us back to Freud. And in a
way, one could say – if you know a lot about
Freud – that Freud’s work of interpretation
of dreams is another way of talking about
how to read.
And so, this question of reading at the
20th century, this question of literacy, this
question of literature, this question of the
poetics of thought, would link all of these
thinkers together although we could say that
they have such great differences between
them. But the capacity to see, to bring into
relief, I guess, what is latent in their work
and to create some new ways of relating to
these folks is something I’m quite interested
in thinking about.
FP: Describe your experience of knowing Freire
Project founder, Joe Kincheloe.
Deborah Britzman: Well, I’ve known Joe for a
very, very long time and very, very sad – his
sudden death. I met Joe in 1987 in front of an
elevator at an educational conference. At the
time, he was quite skinny and he had blond
hair, and I didn’t know him. So, I was stand-
ing by the elevator – this was an American
Educational Studies Association conference
– and he comes up to me and he says, ‘I’m
making a little book and I want you to write
a chapter for me and the topic will be, “Are
teachers as good as they used to be?”’, and I
thought, ‘Well, this is quite interesting’. He
was happy, he was laughing, it was a funny
question. He says, ‘Just a few pages is all I
want. There are ten questions that are always
asked about education. I think this is going
to be a really good book’.
385
I was with Magda Lewis at the time. We
were standing there together and we both
smiled and we both said yes but we thought
he was kidding. And then I get a letter from
him and he says, ‘No. This is when we want
it’. And that started my relationship with Joe.
And I’ve contributed to many of his collec-
tions of his books and he’s been always just
really sweet and generous and generative.
He published in his series – I think I was
number 300, my book, Novel Education that
came out in 2006 with Peter Lang Publishing.
And he published a piece in the old Taboo
(Taboo: The Journal of Culture and
Education), Joe and Shirley Steinberg were
editing. Of course, I met Joe and Shirley at
Bergamo, AERA [American Education
Research Association conference], and I went
to his music.
Joe opened the field of education in a way
that allowed people their idiom. And he pub-
lished both new scholars and older scholars
and in that sense gave legitimacy to the
newer people coming up by making sure that
there were established names in his many
series.
The Education Researcher journal had a
discussion of Joe because Joe was such a
writer. I mean, the guy was always working,
he was always writing. He had a talent of
taking small objects like the hamburger and
creating a story of education. He had a great
educational imagination, and generous and
funny and loved life, and that was evident in
everything that he did.
He built something but didn’t infuse it
with a rigid ego, if I could put it that way. He
was very, very interested in other people’s
ideas and took a great deal of pleasure in the
world of ideas. And you can’t ask for any-
thing better than that in education. If we
don’t love ideas, if we don’t love freedom, if
we don’t love struggle, if we don’t love each
other, it’s as if we’ve never been here before.
And I think that Joe made a great work of art
in his life and his publications.
The people that are after Joe, the people
that know Joe will always miss him. We’ll
always remember Joe as one of the fine, fine
thinkers in our field, and an innovator in
education.
FP: How would you like to see the future of
critical thinking in education evolve?
Deborah Britzman: What I hope is next – maybe
for me. I don’t know what’s going to be next
for other people. But one of the preoccupa-
tions that may be gaining some renewed
386 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
interest is the status of emotional life in
learning and in ethics.
I would hope that psychoanalysis would
become a very interesting preoccupation for
education to begin to notice the emotional
world of the student as the basis for their
understanding of themselves and others.
And I would imagine that for teachers in
particular, understanding a very specific
dilemma in the profession of education – and
this is the case for the university as well – and
that is, because we were once children who
grew up in education and return to this field
as adults, we bring to this field our childhood
of education and our infantile theories of
learning.
These infantile theories of learning are
often attacks on the capacity to think. So, I
would hope that one would think about the
emotional situation of critical pedagogy.
Critical pedagogy not only as a set of ideas
about critiquing the world and an under-
standing of how ideology works and under-
standing of problems of inequality, but also
an understanding of fantasy and sexuality
and desire as also significant to the capacity
to think. And not just about thinking about
ideas, but being able to tolerate the frustra-
tion of being with others, to tolerate conflict
in education as a constitutive feature of edu-
cation as our split subject and so to begin to
think about critical pedagogy not as a set of
things to carry out but as an emotional situ-
ation that people must work through.
That would allow us to begin to tolerate
all of our differences and see what’s impor-
tant and what’s unimportant. I think we’re
still at that place where we’re not quite sure
what’s important and what’s unimportant so
we’re still, sort of, we could say, in the
Hamlet complex, ‘To be or not to be’, or we
want to begin to think about what the
unconscious means in critical pedagogy as
well as in life.
So, I would say that critical pedagogy is
now ready to begin to think about itself as
an emotional situation, as much as an intel-
lectual project, as much as a political project
and begin to whittle away binaries of either
its emotional or its intellectual blah-blah-
blah and to begin to see that these processes
as needed and necessary for each of the
other’s intelligibility.
FP: Any additional thoughts?
Deborah Britzman: So much has changed since I
began as a student, as a teacher, as a profes-
sor. One of the big ones, of course, is the
Internet and the accessibility that people
now have to ideas.
One of the more difficult dilemmas that
education will now inherit will be how to
think through the thicket of information and
superstition that are associated with these
technological innovations and the immedi-
acy of knowledge.
I often wonder what the high-speed men-
tality does to our capacity for patience and
for tolerating not knowing, for being suspi-
cious of knowledge in new kinds of ways and
to question the entertainment features of
our pedagogical situation. And so, these are
things that I very much wonder about – how
that will affect our capacity to think and to
deal with absence when things are so pre-
sent. This is really one of the big questions I
have about the condition of mental and
emotional life right now.
INTERVIEW WITH ROCHELLE BROCK,
MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL, 2009
State College, Philadelphia, probably 1995.
After a phone call from a former colleague in
Miami, we offer to host her friend, Rochelle,
in our home, as she investigated the Penn
State doctoral program in curriculum.
Originally from Akron, Ohio, Rochelle had
graduated from UC Berkeley and was teach-
ing in the South Florida area. Not sure what
we both thought of one another – Kincheloe
was a glue in our relationship – he worked
with her to find a place at PSU and became
her supervisor. I was struck by Rochelle’s
direct delivery and her rye observations about
our ‘White People House’, overrun by multi-
ple big dogs – making the point, she went on
to tell us escaped slaves were often chased
and retrieved by dogs, and about her belief
that many African Americans had an intuitive
fear of dogs. Rochelle’s knowledge of Black
History and the essential nature of narrative
in educating for equity and critical pedagogy
is instinctive to her. She creates artful illustra-
tions as she breathes and as she teaches, she
is the ultimate contextualizer. When she
started teaching undergraduate classes at
 INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS
Penn State, our daughter, Meghann, was in
her class. Meghann had been raised in a clois-
tered Southern Alberta town of 1,500 people
and endeavored to become more world-aware.
Rochelle as teacher, as mentor, as advisor, as
artist, as resource, facilitated an awakening
for Meghann, and years later, Meg still regards
Rochelle as an Elder, a keeper of knowledge,
and attributes her own sociological, political
evolution to her class (srs, editor’s note).
FP: Can you talk about being a Black woman
graduate student and your history in the
academic setting?
Rochelle Brock: Being a Black female graduate
student … was interesting. There were some
really hard times where I felt invisible and I felt
that in various classes that professors weren’t
hearing me, or if they heard me, it didn’t make
a damn bit of difference what I said.
I think one of the really great things about
being a Black or being a graduate student
was that there was a cohort of Black, Brown,
gay, critical students and that we all hung
out together; we became each other’s sup-
port because all of us ran the problem of not
being heard in class or not being seen in class
or just feeling very alienated in the whole
academic setting. So, we were able to talk to
each other and depend on each other and
lean on each other.
When I was writing my dissertation, there
were two other Black females writing theirs
at the same time and we actually had a little
study group. We called ourselves ‘The
Colored Women’s Dissertation Writing
Group’.
When we met, we didn’t do anything with
our dissertations, but it was about talking,
food and fellowship. But that’s what you
need. That’s what we found that we all
needed just to survive being a graduate stu-
dent in the environment where we were.
FP: And just in general about being a Black
female professor, how do students react to
it? How do faculty react to it?
Rochelle Brock: Interesting question. Reminds
me of something. I was at a conference some
years back and one of the professors, a Black
female professor, I believe she was at LSU
[Louisiana State University] at the time, made
the statement that she felt like the ‘tit’, stu-
dents would come to her office to talk about
personal issues, or they would come to her
office to get that mothering that she was
387
very good at. But they wouldn’t come to her
office to ask academic questions, or ques-
tions about scholars or theory or whatever.
That as a Black female, she was looked at as
the suckling tit, and she said she was so tired
of that.
And I think that that is something that a
lot of Black professors run into – I know, I run
into it constantly and more so at my previous
university where I was the professor that
students could come to and talk about fash-
ion. Of course, I consider myself a very fash-
ionable person…
So, they could come and talk about fash-
ion or they could come and talk about what-
ever, but they would not ask me a question
about Freire, or they would not ask me a
question about critical pedagogy, or ‘What
do you think about this?’, or questions that
were really framed by what they did and
what they were trying to study.
Sometimes it would upset me, sometimes I
would just laugh it off. One of the other
problems in being – challenges, I won’t say
problems. One of the other challenges in
being a Black professor, I can remember sit-
ting in meetings with my colleagues, and my
colleagues talking to each other and just
ignoring me even though the meeting was
about my program or our program together.
Again, I guess going back to graduate
school, just that sense of invisibility and
alienation – it’s hard, it’s trying, it personifies
being the other and people just don’t get it.
One of the things that I found being a
Black professor, really creating a community
mostly with my graduate students, I think
some of my best friends to this date really are
those individuals that were my graduate stu-
dents. The collegial relationship was prob-
lematic in many ways because of the things
that I just discussed.
It was the graduate students that I really
found that sense of home with. Being a Black
professor is – it just is. It’s what I am. So, I find
ways to work with it. I find ways to work
through it. Sometimes it’s just leaving campus
and batting your head up against the wall,
and it’s like, ‘Why the hell am I doing this?’.
I think it’s tiring. I’ve talked to other
African Americans who are in the academy
and one of the things that we constantly talk
about is sometimes we’re just damn tired. It’s
a struggle to be heard. It’s a struggle to be
seen in faculty meetings. It’s a struggle to
have your research understood. And not so
much understood as respected. It’s just a
388 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
c­ onstant struggle. So you really have to have
an armor to defend yourself against the crap
that you constantly have coming at you.
FP: I know a lot of students that I deal with, a lot
of colleagues, are like, ‘Well, it’s all about
diversity and things are better now’. Do you
feel things are better? Have you seen a
change within the past ten years in terms of
how students react to you?
Rochelle Brock: I’ve seen a change only
because of where I’ve been. I’ve seen a
slight change. I directed an Urban Teacher
Education Program. And the majority of my
students were in my program because they
wanted to teach urban education. So, that’s
one battle I didn’t have to get over, I didn’t
have to get past. So, at least when they
came into the program, they knew what
we’d be talking about, what we’d be deal-
ing with, and it was what they wanted to
learn.
At the same time, I still have some stu-
dents, and specifically some White students,
that I still get that battle. ‘You’re Rochelle.
You’re not Dr. Brock. You’re Rochelle. And
you really can’t tell me anything because
you’re a Black female in front of the class’.
So, they still look at me through that stereo-
type that they’ve always had about who a
Black female is and who really should be in
front of the class giving them the great bits
of wisdom.
So, no, it’s hard to say that things have
really changed. Stereotypes still exist.
Feelings of the other still exist. Prejudice –
everything is still there. I think there are a
couple of differences – in some ways, what’s
out there is more covert than it has been in
the past.
And then maybe one of the other things
that has changed – I just know how to deal
with it. I had a student giving me crap in class
a couple of weeks ago about – just every-
thing. And, as much as I want to just reach
out and scream, I dealt with it, I shut them
down where they needed to be shut down.
And then I went home and I called a friend
and for an hour, we talked and laughed on
the phone about what happened. And we
also theorized what happened and why. So,
now, I think I have more coping mechanisms.
It’s not that they’ve changed or anything has
changed in society. I’ve changed and know
how to deal with it.
FP: So, in terms of critical pedagogies – obviously,
you are a critical pedagogue – how do you see
critical urban education?
Rochelle Brock: Critical urban education – what
I try to do in my program – is about making
sure that those future teachers that are
going out there into urban schools have the
tools that they need in order to truly under-
stand that child in the urban classroom, both
from a – I guess – philosophical as well as a
socioeconomic standpoint.
And importantly, they know how to give
those tools to the students that they’re
teaching. I think an important part of criti-
cal urban education really is giving our kids
the tools to change their environment in
order to have that agency that they are the
masters of their destiny, even taking into
account those obstacles that are in front of
them.
Those obstacles of race, those obstacles of
economics, just the daily shit that you have
to deal with – but you have the tools, first of
all, to understand where it comes from and
to understand that it’s not you. It’s out there.
But not making it internal like, ‘This is hap-
pening to me because I am bad, because I am
nothing, because I deserve it’.
So, they know the reality of the situation.
And importantly, they know what they need
to do in order to change the situation. I think
that one of the things that I really try to do
with my students, that piece of critical peda-
gogy that talks about radical love, I think
that is so important working with urban
education, working with urban students, the
love and the passion that has to be part of
education and has to be part of what you do
in front of the classroom.
Urban students especially – remember,
those are the students that I’m concerned
with – need to feel that connection. It’s a lot
about relationships and it’s a lot about
respect. And I think when a teacher goes in
and they understand that and they can begin
to develop that relationship with their stu-
dents – they have that going for them, then
the pedagogy follows.
Part of the obstacles that urban students
are dealing with, some things as simple as
just not having a good breakfast in the
morning, some things like having a full
night’s sleep, having text in the household to
read. Just so many different things that some
are in their control and some are out of their
control. But again, making that teacher –
that pre-service teacher, that in-service
teacher – aware of what those issues are,
aware of what those obstacles are, and then
how they can get past them, overcome them,
 INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS
knock them – knock the obstacles out of the
way.
FP: So, in terms of Rochelle, who’s influenced
you in terms of scholars or academics in gen-
eral. Are there any people that you really
respect and admire for their work and if
they’ve influenced you in any way?
Rochelle Brock: Yes. I used to call her my ‘warrior
goddess’. When I was writing my disserta-
tion, I grounded my dissertation – now,
I ground a lot of, I think, just my total exist-
ence on Patricia Hill Collins. And the reason
that I called her my ‘warrior goddess’, is
when I was at Penn State where I did my
graduate work, I taught a class called the
‘African American Woman’ and Black
Feminist Thought was a book that was used
in the class the semester prior to my teaching
it.
And I picked up the book and I read it and
it was like there was someone out there who
put voice to what I had been thinking, some-
one who articulated a lot of my feelings and
angst and my questions. And so, I try to read
as much of her as I possibly can. I love the
writings of Patricia Hill Collins. She’s defi-
nitely one of the scholars that I read and I
listen to.
A lot of scholars dealing with Black feminist
theory from Collins to Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Of
course, Joe Kincheloe being my advisor and
my great friend, I read a lot of Joe and listen
to mini-Joe stories and learn so much from the
Joe stories. And then Shirley Steinberg with
immediate theory, popular culture.
Pedro Noguera, who was at the urban
program at NYU. I like Pedro’s writings and I
use a lot of his writings in my class because
it’s the nuts and bolts of urban education
and the nuts and bolts of funding – the ineq-
uities in funding – and school systems. I like
what he has to say and I think the students
really appreciate it because, again, it’s ‘this
happen and then this happen and then this.
And this is why these things took place’.
Of course, there’s Freire. I’d say most of
the critical pedagogues in critical theory I
read, but I always bring in the African
American perspective, and I think that it has
gotten better. At one point, I really felt it
missing from critical theory.
I see more of it, much more of it now, but
I bring in a lot of African Americans scholars
that probably would not call themselves
critical pedagogues even though that’s what
they do and that’s what they’ve always done.
They have another name for it – could just be
389
natural, could be critical race theory. I mean,
there are a lot of different names out there
for what we do.
FP: So, in terms of you as a teacher, what are
your goals? What do you hope that your
students, when they leave your class, leave
with? Like what?
Rochelle Brock: I hope they leave with saying,
‘Rochelle was the best damn professor I ever
had’.
FP: I’m sure they do.
Rochelle Brock: Besides that, I hope they leave
my class with a sense of purpose. I hope I
instill in them that passion. And I know I
drive them crazy throughout the classes with,
‘You got to be passionate about education
and you have to passionate about learning.
And you have to figure out ways to infuse
that passion in your teaching and make sure
that your students feel it and become it’.
So, I hope they leave my class, I hope they
leave my program, with that sense of pas-
sion. I hope they leave my teaching with a
commitment to social justice as an extremely
important part of urban education in what
we do. I hope they leave my class knowing
that what happens in the classroom from
7:00 to 2:30 or whatever the school day is,
that pedagogy’s beyond those seven hours,
that learning takes place all around. So, I
want them to leave class with that.
As a teacher, I guess my main goal is to be
the type of teacher that I want my students
to become. I want them to be passionate as
I’ve said countless times, I want them to be
caring, I want them to understand the sense
of social justice, I want them to put 150% in
daily to their teaching, I want them to be
researchers, I want them to constantly work
on making themselves better and work on
developing more knowledge about what
they’re doing and why they’re doing it and
how to do it better. So, again I just try to be
who I want them to be.
FP: Are there any other comments or anything
else you’d want to add that we haven’t asked
you?
Rochelle Brock: Education should be messy when
we’re talking about the types of subjects that
we’re talking about. It needs to be messy and
it needs to be uncomfortable when you need
to figure out ways to work through it.
I think that’s an important part of all of the
questions that you’ve asked because there are
no easy answers. There’s not an easy answer
to what it’s like to be a Black professor, there’s
not an easy answer to what it was like to be a
390 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Black graduate student, or to critical urban
education, or any of those things.
But understanding that the messiness in
education is also the joy in education and
then in teaching. And there are fields that I
could be in that I would make more money –
probably a lot more money. But the feeling
that you get from getting through to that
pre-service teacher, and you know that
they’re going to go out there and do what
they need to do in the classroom – it’s just
such a wonderful feeling.
The feeling that you get from going out
and working with students, and you get
through to them and you know you’re
making a difference. That’s a great feeling
that money really can’t buy. I know that
sounds damn corny but it’s true.
INTERVIEW WITH IVOR GOODSON,
AERA CONGRESS, BAEZA, SPAIN,
2008
Somewhere in the United States at an aca-
demic conference – I can’t recall how I first
met Ivor. Was it the year he pushed Falmer
Press to pay for our flights to AERA to cele-
brate Kincheloe’s new book? Was it the year
I asked him to be on a panel with us on lit-
eracy and narrative? What I do know, is that
Goodson will know the day and year we met.
He is a keeper of facts, he is a networker, he
is a narrator, he is a consummate teacher
and colleague. I can say without exaggera-
tion, that most of how I have conducted my
professional life, my publications and par-
ticularly, my speeches and workshops, has
been informed and guided by whom I quietly
call Uncle Ivor. Along with knowing more
about rock ‘n’ roll than most anyone, he has
a plethora of facts and linkages. If Ivor
doesn’t know, he knows someone who does.
His enthusiasm for life, learning, knowing
and sharing has informed my everyday
scholarship, my pedagogy and my own nar-
rative. Without ego, he is confident without
patriarchy, he parents without fear, he is
honest. When Joe died, we celebrated his life
at the first Congress of Critical Pedagogy
and Transformative Leadership in Baeza,
Spain. Inviting about 100 people, we weren’t
sure who would actually show up to this tiny
town in the middle of sweltering Andalusia.
The Congress had begun, and the first day
was finishing up, and I was called to come to
the lobby. I spotted a hot and red-faced Ivor
sitting on a stool, smiling. We had no idea he
was coming. Indeed, his decision to come
was kept secret, and instead of contacting my
office to get assistance, he took a boat across
from the UK and grabbed a taxi to the
Congress. Over 400–500 Euros lighter, Ivor
charmed all. I asked what had possessed him
to come so far and he replied that he had to
see me in person to let me know how much
Joe meant to him. Two days later he was
gone, I still don’t know how he got home
(srs, editor’s note).
Ivor Goodson: I’m Ivor Goodson and I’ve spent
the last 36 years [now 45 years, ed.] in what is
called the academy, and spent the first ten
years at the University of Sussex running a
thing called the European Schools Unit which
was trying to develop policy for the European
Commission because England joined in 1976
and I was involved a lot in Brussels in develop-
ing egalitarian policies for the EU.
And then in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was
appointed [UK prime minister] and in 1985,
there was a thing called the miners’ strike in
England and I vowed if the miners were
defeated, I would leave England. So, they
were defeated, and I was offered a chair at
the University of Western Ontario which is just
south of Toronto. And I went there and set up
a research unit there called RUCCUS – Research
Unit on [Classroom Learning and] Computer
Use in School, actually – got shedloads of
money for the next ten years and did a lot of
work and created a lot of projects and
built up a decent research program which
subsequently became a PhD program –
they didn’t have one before.
In 1996, I was offered an endowed chair at
the University of Rochester and moved – well,
it’s a complicated story, but my wife and son
did not want to go and work in America.
They have always had a thing about America.
They refused to leave Ontario which seemed
fair, because they’d been dragged all the
way, they didn’t want to make another move.
 INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS
I actually did a halftime deal where I did
halftime at Rochester, halftime still in Ontario.
Then I had a sabbatical, and it was 1996, and I
suddenly got the drift that the [UK] Labour
Party was going to get into power. During the
sabbatical, I was offered a chair at the
University of East Anglia which is a center for
applied research where action research
started, and the teachers’ researcher move-
ment started. It was a great, great place. And
my mentor Lawrence Stenhouse was there
and I was subsequently offered the kind of
chair that was the same chair he had had.
I went back halftime to East Anglia, halftime
to Rochester, which I did for seven years, pretty
exhausting actually and difficult because I had an
apartment in Rochester, a house in England –
two tax systems, all the rest.
And then in end, in 2002, I resigned the
Rochester post and was offered a Research
Associate’s post at Cambridge and continued
at East Anglia, and then was offered – this is
a long story but whilst I was in the pub back
in Brighton during my sabbatical, I was
offered a chair at Brighton. And so, I’m now
Brighton–Cambridge and probably settled
for good now in Brighton, and we have a
little place out in the country and we all like
it. That’s probably it.
Again, a little bit more history going back
before when I was at Sussex. I was a history
lecturer at the University of London. So, I was
in the academy from 1967 onwards. And in
1968, read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, read
a lot of Basil Bernstein and decided to resign
from university life and become a school
teacher; interesting thing to do, not many
people do that now, but it was 1968.
A year went on and so I went to work in a
very radical school where Freire was very
much part of the ethos. And the English
equivalent of Freire in a way was this man I
just mentioned earlier, Lawrence Stenhouse,
who ran a thing called the Humanities
Curriculum Project, which is about develop-
ing a pedagogy for the oppressed, basically.
I worked at that school for four years and
then moved to another, and set up a
Humanities Department there, and then
moved to Sussex. I spent six years in English
comprehensive schools at the time when they
were being started. That was a very interest-
ing time to work through inclusive pedago-
gies, which has always been my interest.
Going back even further, my parents were
manual workers, so I’ve always been commit-
ted to a sense of how one develops an
391
­ ducation for that particular oppressed group.
e
I have a very specific interest – which has
remained with me right throughout my life –
which is how we help people from the English
working class and English underclass to get a
curricular understanding of the world. So,
pretty Freirean, early on.
FP: When did you read The Pedagogy of the
Oppressed?
Ivor Goodson: Penguin – probably late 60s, I
think.
FP: Was it somebody who gave it to you? Do you
remember?
Ivor Goodson: Interesting question. No, I bought
it. I bought a range of stuff around ‘68 on
pedagogy and became convinced that’s what
I should do. It all started in 1970 and we cer-
tainly ran into Freire then, so maybe early on.
It was a red Penguin book, I’ve still got it.
FP: Maybe this was in the United States too
when it came out. So, did you ever meet
Paulo?
Ivor Goodson: No, never. No. Of course, I mean,
all the guys I respected – I mean, Joe
[Kincheloe], I’ve known a long time now and
Shirley [Steinberg]. So, they would talk a lot
about him; Peter McLaren talks a lot about
him, of course.
And so, a lot of people I was meeting at
AERA from the 80s onwards were Freirians,
but that’s a little later. I mean, in my own
pedagogic practice as a teacher, critical peda-
gogy was important, before I’ve met any
American Freirians.
FP: So, take us back to your original work and
tell us a couple more stories of this sort of
opposition you’re dealing with in England at
that time.
Ivor Goodson: It’s interesting because again, his-
torically, you’re going into a period where
there’s a huge struggle in England in 1970s –
you’ve still got Labour Government, you see,
which is – 1965, it gets rid of all the privileged
grammar schools and creates comprehensive
schools.
You have a government diktat which says
all schools should become common schools
where everybody is mixed together – a fasci-
nating experiment, just up my street. I
wanted to be in one of those schools. And
the most radical school in England of all
those common schools was where I taught, in
the Midlands.
That’s where I shipped off to when I left
the university – straight up to the Midlands
to this school which opened in 1970.
Essentially, my interest was in developing a
392 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
pedagogy of the oppressed. I got particularly
interested in the nature of the curriculum
and how there was a deliberately constructed
curriculum which delivered what I called
structured inequality – you could call it
oppression – which delivered oppression
unproblematically and normatively. It was
the kind of curriculum I had had in school
which I hated, which was completely alien-
ated from the world I’d grown up in. I grew
up in a working-class area. The kind of cur-
riculum I had to do was Latin, ancient history,
which was just of no interest whatsoever to
me. It was guaranteed – in other words – to
oppress me, fail me. It was delivering struc-
tured inequality.
When we got the common school system,
a group of us set about creating a new cur-
riculum to develop, in a sense, a pedagogy of
inclusion. We developed new subjects. I
developed urban studies, environmental
studies, community studies. And these new
subjects began to change who succeeded
and who failed in the school.
Actually, the oppressed began to succeed,
so much so that in 1972, the then education
secretary, who was called Margaret Thatcher,
ordered a special inspection of the school.
Not because we were failing but because we
were succeeding so dramatically – and in
their [Conservative government] sense disas-
trously – with working-class children.
We were getting large numbers of people
through O-level. When only 20% should’ve
passed, we were getting much larger numbers
through. So, it was a fascinating time. And
then what I began to see was that actually if
you challenge the subject hegemony, that was
the place at that time to challenge oppression,
so you had to develop another curriculum.
Shirley wanted me to talk a bit about this
and I will. I got very interested in what I
called Curriculum History, which is why are
school subjects as they are, and, when you
create new ones which bring in inclusion,
why are those subjects not deemed to be
proper subjects, was the question. I went
back to Sussex in 1975 to do a PhD, which
became the book School Subjects and
Curriculum Change, which is still in print – it’s
in its 5th edition – and it’s about an attempt
to introduce environmental studies and how
the conventional subjects fight against it and
how that actually means oppression is deliv-
ered in different ways.
I did that PhD and then I started to run
this unit I talked about, the European Unit.
But at the same time, again, the theme run-
ning through this is most of my key network-
ing, most of the key meetings, appeared to
be in pubs. So, I’m in a pub one night – The
Swan in Falmer – and I meet this guy and we
have a few beers, and we talk and we like
each other. And at the end of the evening, he
says, ‘I really enjoyed this evening. I run a
publishing company, do you fancy working
for me?’, and I said, ‘Yes, sure, it will be nice’.
Well, it turns out – this is 1979, I think –
this is the seeds of what became Falmer
Press. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but
it was a reasonable deal for a while. Sir
Malcolm [Clarkson] and I started to talk, and
in 1982 I became executive director, he was
managing director.
And in 1983, we were taken over by Taylor
and Francis and they pumped shedloads of
money in and said, ‘Go out and conquer
America’, was what Malcolm said. So, there’s
these two guys sitting in a pub in England.
Falmer, if you’ve ever looked at the books,
they have two swans on, that’s the pub – The
Swan. Now you know why there are two
swans on the book. We’re sitting in a pub
and he’s saying to me, ‘Actually, I think what
we should do now is just conquer America’. I
said, ‘Fine, let’s do that. That’d be great, do
you want another pint?’, and that was it.
So off we go, 1984, our first year at AERA.
We arrived with five books on the table, but
we have one of those booths, so we’ve cre-
ated all sorts of mock ups of potential books
but we’ve actually only got five books in.
And I remember, I said, ‘We should have a
party’. So, we got some really big names. I
remember I shuffled around and I talked to a
few people and said, ‘Who should I invite?’.
And they said, ‘You should invite Tom
Popkewitz’. And these people turned up to
this party. And because it was an English
party, it was a great party. There was booze
everywhere and Malcolm gave a speech and
this was a start. I mean, what we set about
doing actually – playing an Anglophile card,
really – was to create desire of a particular
kind. But it was going to be an elite
Anglophile club where you came, you had
lots of booze and food and you joined the
club and you wrote a book.
I did that rather consciously. I remember
saying to him, ‘We need to create a kind of
desire here. This is not a conventional pro-
ject. We want to create a radical press here,
but we’ve got to get the key players in
America involved. We can’t do that with
 INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS
money, we got to do that with Anglophile
desire that they’ll want to be part of this club
where we have great speeches and great
food and great booze. And that’s how we’ll
deliver it’.
It became a fairly big deal. In the end, we
went from producing five books a year to
100 books a year, and then it became one of
the biggest publishers of critical pedagogy in
education in America, right through until, I
guess, 2000. I just had to give the funeral ora-
tion at Malcom’s funeral. He died of
Parkinson’s a few years ago.
That was part of the kind of public intel-
lectual work I spun off from my own peda-
gogical interest. So, the whole idea of Falmer
for me was to create a press which would
carry these messages. It was a real chance to
be, in my terms. a kind of global organic
intellectual and do something quite good in
terms of the means of production. Actually,
we stole the means of production and pro-
duced a press which I think still is an enor-
mous repository of interesting work.
FP: Ivor, can you tell us some of the most influ-
ential books that came out of Falmer?
Ivor Goodson: I think for a start, there was a
huge series on Curriculum History, my thing.
So, I actually in a sense mobilized my own
work to get. So, we had Barry Franklin’s book
on Building the American Community, Tom
Popkewitz’s book on School Subjects, we
produced a lot of Michael Apple’s work,
Giroux’s work, Kincheloe’s work, Steinberg’s
work, we did most of Eisner’s work.
And all of this work, we basically mobi-
lized. We had a series on Curriculum History,
we had a thing called the Falmer Teacher’s
Library which teaches qualitative research.
Virtually, all the big names that you can think
of, we did the most of work, we had other
series.
FP: Did you do the Paulo and…
Ivor Goodson: Yes, of course. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, I
mean, you can see how in a way we were
holding the line for a whole raft of fascinat-
ing work. And at the time, there weren’t
many other publishers you could go to.
FP: We actually have Henry Giroux on tape talk-
ing about the lockdown.
Ivor Goodson: Do you?
FP: Yes. So, this is a nice time …
Ivor Goodson: We did Henry’s first book, you
see. Back in ‘78, something like that, we did
Henry’s book in England when he was
unknown in England at the time and we just
took a punt on him. And McLaren was
393
another one that we took early. So, I was, in
a sense, going around the world.
Another example was, I fetched up in
Auckland – I was traveling the world all the
time at this time, lecturing but also working
for Falmer, in a way. And I was a Visiting
Professor at Auckland, I remember, and I
walked into Auckland that night and went
into a pub again and got talking to a guy and
I said, ‘What do you do?. He said, ‘Well, actu-
ally, I’m a literacy scholar’.
We had few more beers, we had too many
beers. And I said, ‘Why don’t you write a
book called Literacy, Schooling, and
Revolution?’. He said, ‘I’ll do it.’ And it was
Colin Lankshear, and he delivered the book
six weeks later. I mean, he was just an obses-
sive, wonderful guy. And he won prizes.
And that literally came out of the kind of
conversations that you have in pubs where
you’re talking in an engaged way. It was a
really good example of what I tended to try
and do as I went around the world, so a lot
of Australians I’d picked up, we did all the
critical scholars from Australia.
Basically, all of the people who are inter-
ested in pedagogies and inclusion and
oppression, I think began to come to Falmer.
So, that was our kind of niche, if you want to
put it in those crass marketing terms. If you
think about it as a formulation of the role
that I was playing, I think it’s the only time I
can think of – although I’m being immodest
here – where an academic who is himself
working as a professor and doing all that
stuff is, in a sense, ‘insider trading’ inside.
Because the great advantage I had was that I
knew the view of all those inside the acad-
emy because I was inside the academy,
whereas, normally, publishers come and
they’re trying to find that out – I kinda knew
it.
I knew the lifestyle. I knew Joe Kincheloe,
I knew he would deliver, I knew everything
about him. I didn’t need to take him out to
lunch and wine and dine him to say, ‘Joe,
what would you like to do a book on?’. I
mean, we just had the intellectual conversa-
tion at that level and we just piloted it into
books. It’s normally publishers come to you
and try to understand the academic world
and take you out and talk about it. Whereas
here, it was just what we did.
I remember Shirley [Steinberg] dedicated a
book to me, she said, ‘To Ivor Goodson, for
whom this is just rock and roll’. What she
meant by that I think was it was just what she
394 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
did. You didn’t have to set yourself up as a
publisher, you had all those roles integrated.
In a classic, what I think would still be the
right public intellectual way to go, if you
wanted to be a public intellectual. You inte-
grate all of your roles and you seize the
means of production in terms of publishing
and of you go.
That was great, interesting time – fascinating
25 years. And at the same time, I was ­founding
journals as well because we ran journals and
founded the Journal of Education Policy
which is well past 30 years, and has more
impact on citations then the Harvard Ed.
Review. So, it’s a leading European journal –
and loads of other journals.
I was involved in founding Qualitative
Studies in Education, Critical Studies – all of
them. All of these I would say I got to do
from the inside – help from the inside. Social
Epistemology was another journal I was
involved in. So, I was in a very, very intriguing
position within a publishing company which
allowed me to push my intellectual agenda,
which, as we’ve said, is inclusive and con-
cerned with issues of social justice.
So, in a sense, it’s doing what one always
does. It’s traveling around having conversa-
tions about these issues. But it’s a difficult
time I think to be a progressive intellectual. I
think you can see the dilemmas of an Obama.
Audacious hope is hard to deal with in the
current political situation. And I have to stop
myself being pessimistic because partly I feel
pessimistic, but it’s important to have auda-
cious hope still and to have Utopian dreams
and to take those right through your life.
But as you get older, it does get harder. My
own political position is probably to the left
of what it was when I was 20. So, I’ve gone
the opposite direction to most people. I do
not age and go to the right; I age and go to
the left.
FP: My dad’s line always was, ‘If you’re not a
socialist before you’re 30, you haven’t lived.
If you’re a socialist after you’re 30, you have
learned’.
Ivor Goodson: Yes, I know. Well, I haven’t
learned, then. But I think, actually, I’ve
learned a hell of a lot. And I think the ones
who haven’t learned are the ones who go
the other way. I don’t think you could really
seriously point to right-wing Republicans and
say, ‘This is a group of learned’. I think this is
a group who will poison the planet in their
absence of learning. So, if you want a clear
line on who’s learning and who isn’t, that
bunch aren’t learning, they’re not going to
learn.
FP: What do you have coming up?
Ivor Goodson: Well, I’ve just finished writing. I’ve
finished a book on narrative learning. What
I’m writing about is life politics, how we
make moral decisions within our own life
program. And created a lot of work on life-
long learning in England, a project called
Learning Lives – a five-year project funded by
the Labour Government. And I’ve done an EU
project on professional knowledge – four-
year project funded by EU.
And both of those are leading onto other
books. I’ve written on narrative pedagogy.
I’m increasingly spending my time writing
rather than keynoting and floating around
the world. So, it’s the first time in my life – my
wife tells me – I’ve stopped traveling obses-
sively. We’ve got a place in Sussex that we
both like. And so, I write most days in the
study. It’s a study where Greenpeace was
founded, actually. And I was sitting last
night, thinking that the Rainbow Warrior
Campaign was organized in my study.
So, it’s a nice place to sit, with its own
legacy. And so, a little more at peace with
the world, writing more – haven’t changed
my mind at all. I’m still in exactly the same
place, arguing for exactly the same thing
that I’ve believed for 50 years – an unchang-
ing non-learner.
INTERVIEW WITH HANDEL KASHOPE
WRIGHT, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH
COLUMBIA, JUNE 2009
The first time I heard the name, Handel
Wright, was when Kincheloe noted to me that
his alma mater, The University of Tennessee,
had hired an African assistant professor in
cultural studies. A double significance in the
1990s: first, that an African professor would
be hired in Vols Country, Knoxville,
Tennessee, and second, that there was a cul-
tural studies program. In those days, cultural
studies was a unicorn, known to we critical
theorists and random English programs, but
certainly not a staple to a faculty of educa-
tion. Clearly, this Dr. Wright was going to be
impressive.
 INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS
And, he was … he is tall and engaging,
Handel is the epitome of warmth, laughter,
seriousness and knowledge. He has been
instrumental in literally and figuratively
changing the face of education in an important
Southern university, and has gone on to create
essential spaces for diversity, multicultural-
ism, youth studies and curriculum in both the
United States and Canada. Generous in time,
scholarship, listening and teaching, Handel
is respected and known for his contributions
to his students and colleagues. I often meet
a student who has worked with Dr. Wright
and gone on to become a successful scholar/
teacher, always noting the importance of his
tireless contributions and advice to their own
lives. As a friend he is tireless, one who knows
what to say, how to be. When Joe died, I was
in a mist – in Montreal, clearly not coherent.
My family was staying with me at a hotel, and
I walked into a common room on the 2nd-floor
mezzanine, Handel was standing there … to
be there … to be a friend (srs, editor’s note).
Handel Wright: My name is Handel Kashope
Wright. I’m Sierra Leonean. I was born in
Sierra Leone, which is – I have to explain to
some people – a small country in West Africa.
I did my undergrad studies in Sierra Leone. I
did an honors degree in English and I was a
high school teacher for two years. I taught
A-level literature and came to Canada for
graduate studies. I did a master’s at the
University of Windsor and then went back
home, and worked with a teacher education
program for a year doing some editing stuff
for their publications.
And then came back to Canada and did a
second master’s degree, this time in educa-
tion and stayed on and did a PhD. When I
finished my PhD, I taught in the States at the
University of Tennessee for ten years and was
attracted back to Canada with the Canada
Research Chair offer.
So, I’m here at the University of British
Columbia. I’ve held several different posi-
tions. I was Canada Research Chair for cul-
tural studies, the David Lamb Chair for
multicultural education, and am presently
director for the Center for Culture, Identity
and Education.
And my area, one of my biggest areas of
interest, is in the field of cultural studies. And
395
I’m fascinated by the intersection of cultural
studies and the field of education – what
some people are now calling cultural studies
of education or cultural studies in education.
I look at this as an opportunity to do work
in cultural studies in education. But most
specifically the project that I developed to do
as Canada Research Chair involved a com-
parative multiculturalism because I had been
in Canada for about a decade and spent
about another decade in the US. So, I’m fas-
cinated by the similarities and differences
between Canadian and American forms of
multiculturalism.
And I’m interested in education of course,
and in youth. I also look at how youth think
of themselves and how they fit into multicul-
turalism. But I didn’t want to look at just all
youth. I’m looking at a comprehensive cate-
gory that I’m calling ‘new youth’. And the
category that I’m calling new youth involves
basically three types of youth and relatively
new categories.
One is recent immigrants or refugees. So,
‘new’ in the sense of being literally new to
the country, and how they feel that they fit
or don’t fit into Canadian multiculturalism
whether there’s a sense of belonging there
or not belonging.
I’m also looking at another category, say
queer youth. By that I don’t just mean gay
and lesbian youth, but gay, lesbian, bisexual,
transgender, youth that feel ambivalent
maybe even about sexuality. And what that
says about their identity and how they feel
that they fit in or don’t fit into Canadian and
American forms of multiculturalism.
And the third category is multiracial
youth. And these are not necessarily new in
the sense of, well, there’s a new set of people
who are multiracial. They’ve never been mul-
tiracial people. They’ve always been multira-
cial people, but it’s used to be the case that
people had to be pigeonholed into one or
another identify.
So, in the United States for example, the
one drop of blood rule meant that it didn’t
matter how light skinned you were, just
having any amount of Black blood in you
made you a Black person. Whereas now,
there are people who are coming to the fore
and taking up multiraciality and multiethnic-
ity as a new kind of category of identity in
and of itself. So, I’m fascinated by that as
well.
So, those three different kinds of catego-
ries of people are what I’m calling new youth
396 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and part of my research is to look at how
new youth fit into community. And commu-
nity could be anything from the nation – the
nation of the US and Canada – to cyber com-
munities, to raves, more social youth kind of
organized spaces – what some people are
calling youthscapes.
FP: Having spent time in both the United States
and Canada, can you compare the two, spe-
cifically from urban education and youth
culture perspectives?
Handel Wright: Part of what’s happening with
this project is I’m already shifting and think-
ing of this much more internationally than a
comparison between Canada and the States.
Because when it comes to a comparison
between Canada and the States, I think
Canadians are very big on that comparison.
Whilst the States – the States almost thinks of
Canada as a vague continuation of the US.
It’s another vague state somewhere up north
that they don’t quite know enough about.
And that’s a reductionist statement, but
for some Americans there is that idea of
Canada as not being necessarily a very sepa-
rate country or if it is a separate country,
then it’s just a vague country to the north.
Whilst Canadians on the other hand are very
aware of America. So, they have these images
of being in bed with the elephant and all of
that sort of thing, and the proximity of this
very large influential country. Canada is large
in terms of space but not in terms of popula-
tion.
So, you find that the culture is in some
way very similar, but Canadians would like to
really emphasize the differences. But I am
not sure that I’m finding a lot of very, very
stark differences between Canadian and
American youth. I find that it’s a continuum
and there’s more to be found around
regional differences. So, there’s a more dis-
tinct kind of West Coast feel to youth culture
that might stretch all the way from Vancouver
down to San Diego, for example that might
be different from a kind of Toronto or New
York continuum.
And so, there are little bits of difference
but they are not as significant as one would
want to think. And I think that the spaces of
unity, for example, in cyberspace, in social
networking, in groups like Facebook and et
cetera, et cetera, and what people upload
onto YouTube, et cetera, et cetera, there’s
very much a continuum. So, sometimes
people stress the differences but I find a lot
of similarities as well.
For me now, part of this is shifting into,
well, what other discourses are coming to the
fore as alternatives to multiculturalism. In
Europe, for example, there’s a big turn
towards interculturalism as a new discourse
for dealing with difference and diversity.
And in Canada we actually do have intercul-
turalism. So, one of the differences might be,
for example, if you want to talk to kids in
Quebec, you want to know about how they
feel about interculturalism as opposed to
multiculturalism because Quebec has official
interculturalism as policy.
I’m finding that there are little bits of dif-
ferences but what might be more interesting
is how do North American kids think about
themselves or youth in general compared to,
say, British youth or Australian youth or
youth in other parts of the world. But for
now, I’m opening up the project to look at
other ‘Western’ countries.
Australia is a dubious one because
Australia is now positioning itself more and
more, beginning to realize it’s more and
more related, has more proximity with Asia.
So, Australia is an interesting example of a
kind of country in transition between think-
ing of itself as ‘Western’ with strong ties to
England and to Britain in general, and
Australia as part of Asia.
But I’m also interested in the comparison
between that and, say, how British youth not
only in England but also how, for example,
youth in Ireland – and this is not Northern
Ireland but the Republic of Ireland – because
they have official interculturalism as opposed
to the British who don’t yet have official
interculturalism.
So, what’s going on there in terms of
policy, what does interculturalism mean for
shifts in thinking about and dealing with
diversity and society, and how different is it
from multiculturalism? So, one of the new
sorts of questions that I’m moving some of
my research towards.
FP: What is interculturalism?
Handel Wright: Interculturalism is a relatively
new discourse which is strongly about dia-
logue. So, the premise of interculturalism –
and it depends on which version of
interculturalism one is speaking about. So, it
is about the relationship. It’s about getting
different groups in society to come into dia-
logue with one another in order to create a
more harmonious society. That’s basically
what it’s about. But it takes on different
forms in different contexts.
 INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS
So, for example in Latin America, in
Mexico for example, there is a form of inter-
culturalism that is very distinctly about
Latinos and their relationship with
Indigenous people. So, that form of inter-
culturalism is about the empowerment of
Indigenous people for them to have agency,
for them to have a voice, for them to ‘come
to voice’ as bell hooks would put, it in their
own affairs and in having a greater voice in
society. So, that could be one form of inter-
culturalism.
And a very different form of intercultural-
ism exists, for example, in Quebec, which is a
kind of interculturalism that is almost in
some ways a reaction to Canadian multicul-
turalism. And that form of interculturalism is
one that says there is a Quebecois culture
and society and French as the language of
Quebec. And these are given – they’re not
really up for negotiation.
And the idea is that people who come to
Quebec would be, in a way, integrated into
society. And those people would bring some-
thing to Quebec and Quebec will make rea-
sonable accommodation – which is this term
that’s really been used and tossed around
quite a bit – reasonable accommodation of
the differences that people bring. So, that’s
different from multiculturalism which says
there’s no real such thing as Canadian culture
and society, but it’s what people bring and
we put all together that creates this mosaic
of Canadian culture.
Now, whether that actually works in fact
or not is a whole different thing. Some
people might think that there’s a bit less flex-
ibility in Quebecois interculturalism than
there is in Canadian multiculturalism, but I
would argue that Canadian multiculturalism
in fact, a lot of a time, operates as a version
of Quebecois interculturalism but just does
not admit that to itself. So, that’s another
kind of interculturalism altogether.
And I think that in Europe there’s been a
reaction to multiculturalism especially after
bombings, terrorism, et cetera, et cetera.
There’s been this shift to say that multicultur-
alism hasn’t worked, so we need another
kind of discourse. And so I see more of a
rigidity to European – what is emerging as
European – interculturalism? A lot of it is
about dialogue, but what is not being asked
is a basic critical pedagogic question which is,
dialogue amongst whom and what power
differential exists between those groups? I
don’t feel that those questions had been
397
asked strongly enough in what is emerging
as European interculturalism.
And if people had a background in critical
pedagogy, they would know this is one of
the first questions to ask – who has power
here? I mean, on what basis do people come
into dialogue? So, there are different ways of
thinking about dialogue, and intercultural-
ism is very big on dialogue. But I would say
that there are things to be critiqued about
this new model of interculturalism because I
think some of it is starting from a place
where in fact multiculturalism has been – in
Canada, for example. And multiculturalism
has overcome some of the issues that are
now being confronted by interculturalism. So
in some ways, in my mind, interculturalism is
a kind of reinvention of the wheel. And as
people begin to ask more critical questions,
then people are going to shift into a version
of interculturalism that begins to look like
versions of multiculturalism that Canada and
other countries have already moved through.
And that’s just my take on some of this.
But again, I see the way that I answer that,
part of what I had to draw on was what I call
basic critical pedagogy. And the kind of
premises that critical pedagogy comes from,
which underlies a lot of the work that I do, a
kind of neo-Marxist take that society is not
fine the way that is. There is discrimination,
exploitation and these things need to be
addressed, not only through education but in
education as well. And that has not left me
as the foundation of any kind of work that I
do. I think a lot of what I do is still very, very
much grounded on the premises, very basic
premises and tenets of critical pedagogy.
FP: How do interculturalism and critical peda-
gogy relate to one another?
Handel Wright: Interculturalism is something
different again from critical pedagogy. One
of the fascinating things, I think, is the differ-
ent discourses that are all aimed at getting at
a more just and equitable society and world.
And for me, I’m fascinated by the connec-
tions and the delineations we might make
between them. So, I would think of critical
pedagogy as one kind of discourse; I would
think of multiculturalism as another kind of
discourse, and I would think of intercultural-
ism as a kind of discourse that’s related to
multiculturalism but not so much to critical
pedagogy.
The interesting thing would be to look at
how something as distinctive as critical peda-
gogy doesn’t have very, very neat edges
398 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
anymore. It was very distinctive as Freirean
pedagogy. Or people talk then about a move
towards from Freire to a critical pedagogy,
which is kind of movement that Freire him-
self was part of, the evolution from a strictly
Freirean set of thinking. So, how that’s
linked, for example, with Theatre of the
Oppressed, Augusto Boal and that sort of
thing.
So, there’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
there’s Theatre of the Oppressed. And how
those things might be linked to other dis-
courses. So in the 90s for example, at OISE, at
the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
when I was a student there, there were
points of intersection but also points of ten-
sion between critical pedagogy, feminist
theory and research and practice and activ-
ism, antiracism and antiracist theory, et
cetera, et cetera.
Part of how I got my head around some of
this is that with some of the feminist work,
some of it opened up beyond strictly looking at
gender in a homogenized way, and that led a
bit closer to critical pedagogy. In the same way
that antiracism was critiqued when multicul-
turalists and others – there was a backlash
against antiracism in the same way that antira-
cism is a result of a backlash against multicul-
turalism. So, that people then said not
everything is about racism. There was the
development of a more integrative antiracism.
So, an integrative antiracism that takes
into account gender, sexuality and social class
begins to look very much like a critical peda-
gogy, just what critical pedagogy was saying
from – not necessarily from the very begin-
ning, from the very beginning it was about
social class. Then, so I’m really interested in
forms of social difference. So, how issues of
race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and
age overlap and intersect. And critical peda-
gogy was very strong in at least bringing
three of those to the fore in early crit ped
work, and that I thought was its advantage.
Critical pedagogy did talk about race,
gender and class in a way that early antira-
cism work did not, in a way that second wave
feminist work, for example, did not. And so,
the fact that these other discourses are now
being more integrative and now dealing
with other forms of different than the one
that is supposedly primary, means that
they’ve moved towards where critical peda-
gogy already was.
And then it then becomes, ‘Well how
much has critical pedagogy moved itself?’,
because some other discourses have come to
the fore that you could say could be used to
critique even integrative antiracism, or what-
ever, and feminism work, et cetera, et cetera,
including cultural studies which is another
overlay.
So, for me, it’s very interesting to get
people to think of these different discourses,
firstly as being individual discourses, but to
think of what Henry Giroux would have
called in the 90s, the ‘larger project’. What is
the larger project? Are we married to these
very specific discourses or are we really inter-
ested in getting at a more equitable, just and
representative society, community, locally in
schools, internationally, and so forth.
And for me, I’m thinking that maybe it’s
the borrowings between these, the creation
of almost new hybrid discourses that don’t
rely just on the outlines and the boundaries –
the policed boundaries – of each of these
individual discourses that might be sort of
the way of the future.
FP: Was critical pedagogy born out of a post-
colonial moment/movement or was it a North
American academic invention?
Handel Wright: That’s really interesting to talk
about. I don’t think it’s one or the other
because, I mean, to introduce a little bit of
post-modernist take on things, there usually
aren’t definitive individual histories of dis-
course, but rather things been taking up in
different places at different times. So, I think
there is very much a post-colonial streak to
critical pedagogy and that’s almost like one of
the trajectories of crit ped – all of this coming
out of Freire, of course. And even that is
debatable, so by the time we begin to call
what we’re calling critical pedagogy, one way
of looking at the history of that – the origin of
that – is directly from the work of Freire.
Another way of thinking about it is
through the Frankfurt School and the kind of
work that came out of there.
And so, there is a kind of Latin American
post-colonial version of critical pedagogy.
And that’s true, and maybe other people can
give a better, a more accurate account of
that history. But that history is very much
there. And even that has gone interestingly
back to the colonizer because when I went to
Portugal, for example, people wanted to
interview me about critical pedagogy. So,
this is the language of the colonized now
being taken up by the colonizer in order to
do critical work within the center rather than
just in the periphery, which I think is really
 INFLUENCED BY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY: INTERVIEWS WITH CRITICAL FRIENDS
fascinating. And that’s one way of historiciz-
ing critical pedagogy.
Another way of historicizing critical peda-
gogy is to look at when critical pedagogy
was taken up in North America. And a lot of
people think that you can go back directly to
Henry Giroux – like there was a handover
from Freire to Giroux, to McLaren and
Kincheloe and Steinberg or something of
that sort. And that’s an awkward way to
think about histories but these are the kind
of easy ways that we want to historicize
things to central figures and to central dis-
courses.
Another way to think about this, and a
kind of history of critical pedagogy which is
not well enough known, is the fact that
Freire’s work was taken up by people like
Edmund O’Sullivan and Roger Simon at OISE.
There’s another kind of direct Canadian way
of historicizing critical pedagogy which is not
often spoken about when people historicize,
partly because America is so dominant in
terms of the discourses study. People think of
North American critical pedagogy as, kind of,
having originated in the States when in fact
we could make another kind of argument for
a distinctly Canadian origin of critical peda-
gogy being taken up in the 80s and early 90s,
by O’Sullivan, by Roger Simon – very strongly
by Roger Simon.
I was one of Roger’s students, and for a
time there, he was all about critical peda-
gogy until he began to do his own critiques
of critical pedagogy and moved on to what
he called a ‘pedagogy of possibility’, which
was somewhat distinct from critical peda-
gogy.
And so, critical pedagogy has evolved and
part of what we now have through AERA
and other venues is the meeting of, one, that
kind of post-colonial version of critical peda-
gogy which is heavily Latin American and,
[two], a kind of more North American version
of critical pedagogy which is, as I said, not
acknowledged enough as being Canadian
but is supposedly heavily American and with
a scattering from elsewhere in the world as
well. Places that Freire’s work had touched,
from Guinea-Bissau – you know his letters to
people in Guinea-Bissau – to people in
Europe, people in England, who were
attempting to do critical work. So, rather
than saying there is an origin of critical peda-
gogy, I would say, more interestingly, the
several different histories of critical peda-
gogy and the discourses have come together
399
in a way to formulate where we are with
critical pedagogy.
And I think people can learn a lot from
one another. I mean, there are people who
adhere still to a very, almost narrow Freirean
notion of critical pedagogy who are sort of
purists, in a way. And there are others who
are doing intersections of critical pedagogy
with post-modernism, with post-colonialism,
with other ways of theorizing; asking ques-
tions that are coming out of either post-
modernism, post-structuralism, strongly out
of feminism, how does cultural studies inter-
sect with some of this?
So, that’s what I mean by the porousness of
these discourses. We can talk about a history
of critical pedagogy but it’s hard to speak
about one definitive history. I think, to my
mind, that does a disservice to what critical
pedagogy actually is in its multiplicity and
richness.
FP: Can you tell us something about your work
as it pertains to Africa?
Handel Wright: Sure, I can take you to Africa.
I’m African myself, so part of what I’ve done
here and part of what I haven’t lost sight of
is the African continent. So, for me, part of
the academic activism that I did as soon as I
came to UBC [University of British Columbia],
one of the first things I was very shocked to
discover was that there wasn’t African stud-
ies at UBC.
So, one of the first things I got involved
with at UBC was a movement of faculty, but
especially students, who were advocating for
setting up African studies at UBC. There’s a
group called Africa Awareness that has been
at the forefront of this work, together with a
smattering of faculty, Margery Fee and the
English department and some others. And I
immediately gravitated towards that work.
So, we’ve really pressured the university to
the point now where there has been estab-
lished an undergraduate minor in Africa
studies at UBC. I think it’s shaky, I think it
could be a lot stronger, I think it could be
better, but at least, it’s there.
And within the Faculty of Education, I
have for example done, through my Center,
a symposium on African education. We had
Ali Abdi come in and give a keynote address
for that symposium and we’ve published two
journal issues out of that. So, there’s work
through the center that has helped to bring
Africa and ‘Africanness’ to the center of
some of the work that’s being done in the
Faculty of Education.
400 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
One of the things I will say about BC is
that it’s a pretty tough place in which to do
Black studies in general, let alone continental
African studies. And in my own work, part of
what I do, apart from cultural studies of edu-
cation, is African cultural studies.
So, I’ve been involved in trying to develop
what we might want to call ‘African cultural
studies’. I mean, I’ve written one book about
it, I collaborate quite a bit with Keyan
Tomaseli, who’s in South Africa at the
University of Natal – KwaZulu-Natal now –
and he and I have been sort of, I don’t want
to say at the forefront, but have done a lot
of work to represent Africa within the field
of cultural studies.
I was on the international board for the
Association for Cultural Studies, one of the
representatives of Africa. Keyan has moved
on, I’ve still continued that work and I’ve
brought in somebody like Boulou de B’béri
to also be on that. And that’s the interna-
tional board that is representing all of cultural
studies.
So, in the field of cultural studies, I’m
doing quite a bit of work on Africa and its
diaspora in terms of creating the kind of cul-
tural studies work. And even in the work
around multiculturalism, part of what I want
to shift some of that work into – because I’m
starting first with the country that could
have that official multiculturalism or have a
strong history of dealing with multicultural-
ism as a discourse, that’s why I’m dealing
with the US and Australia and England, et
cetera, et cetera and Canada. But part of my
intention is to look at, further down the
road, what forms of ways of addressing
diversity are countries like South Africa using
and other countries in Africa as well, and
other third-world spaces.
So, I am really interested in Africa but I
don’t focus solely on Africa, but at the same
time it never falls out of the range of things
that I do and work on. So, there’s a lot of
work to be done. And even Freire, because
we tend to forget that there is an African
connection to Mozambique, to Angola, to
Guinea-Bissau, between Freire’s work and
what we now call critical pedagogy.
And those of us who do critical pedagogy
work, I don’t think have done enough to con-
nect with the African continent and with the
kind of projects that are taking place. I think
popular theater, theater for the oppressed,
has more of a presence than the discourse of
critical pedagogy does. And I think some of
that is a pity.
So, part of the work might include bringing
in some of those voices, bringing in some of
those kinds of ways of thinking and how that
might look different from a kind of post-
colonial Latin American version of critical
pedagogy. It might be very exciting to think
about what a kind of post-colonial African
version of critical pedagogy might be.
But again, the focus is always on what
kind of society do we live in, what kind of
community do we live in, whether it’s the
local community, whether it’s the school,
whether it’s our institution, and always fight-
ing for that to be better. Better in terms of
representation of different groups, better in
terms of being more just, better in terms of
addressing forms of discrimination, better in
terms of creating more harmony between
people because of difference, because we
have a rich diversity of people.

Global Perspectives
As this Handbook unfolds, a transnational
trend is leaving its characteristic mark of
discrimination, inequity and exclusion on
education systems throughout the world:
far-right forces are on the rise in both the
global North and South,1 and are impacting
curricular contents – or what and how chil-
dren learn – through the power/knowledge
dynamics present in all learning environ-
ments (Agnello and Reynolds, 2016; Apple
et al., 2009; Darder et al., 2015; Kincheloe
et al., 2017). Riding the tide of a worldwide
political economy whose roots date back
more than four decades, recent ultra-con-
servative and neo-fascist forces have been
propelled and emboldened by a neoliberal
political/economic undercurrent (Brown,
2017; Giroux, 2018; Harvey, 2005; Roy,
2014) that minimises state controls on indi-
vidual choice, capital accumulation and
competition in order to advance the global
‘free market’ as an allegedly ideal social
organising principal and policy.
SECTION IV
Cathryn Teasley
This agenda began to take root in highly
industrialised petroleum-dependent coun-
tries shortly after the United Nations had
condemned colonial rule in 1960, and after
several Southern and Eastern oil-producing
countries – which had long been occupied
and impoverished by European imperial and
colonial forces – formed the Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
that same year.2 In that postcolonial scenar-
io, OPEC made a strategic move to help its
member states regain sovereignty over their
natural resources, internal development and
wealth, given the fact that the rich countries
of the global North had never ceased to ex-
tract their oil (through various multinational
corporations), despite having officially termi-
nated colonial rule. The prosperity enjoyed
by such wealthy countries was then, and still
is, largely the product of a combination of
historical slavery and the ongoing economic
exploitation – or neocolonisation – of former
colonial occupation around the world. But in
402 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
the early 1970s, OPEC managed to bring the
imperial North to its knees through two key
moves: limiting production in order to raise
the price of crude oil, and imposing an oil
embargo against the United States from 1973
to 1974 as a means of censuring US support
of the Israeli government’s intentions and
actions in the Middle East at the time. As a
result, an existential panic of sorts broke out
in Western countries, but especially in the
United States, with its particularly acute de-
pendency on petroleum.
In reaction to the ensuing ‘oil crisis’ of
the mid 1970s, neoliberal ideology quickly
gained legitimacy among US and European
politicians (Harvey, 2005). The neoliberal
turn in capitalist democracies has since be-
come a lasting reality, one which relentless-
ly diminishes political commitment to the
Welfare State, that is, to solid public invest-
ment in social security, including education,
healthcare, pensions, unemployment, civil
protection and many other public services
that guarantee that all people’s most basic
human rights and needs are covered, collec-
tively. Instead, ever greater wealth is flowing
into fewer and fewer hands at the expense
of the immense majority of inhabitants of
the world, especially in the South, and free-
dom of movement is now more applicable
to capital than to people.3 Neoliberalism is
thus propagating inequality and, in turn, xe-
nophobia, White supremacism and hate in
weakened democracies of the North where
growing sectors of the White working - and
middle classes see their relatively more
privileged quality of life dwindling. In the
meantime, Black, Brown and non-Christian
peoples of the North and South are increas-
ingly blamed for the former’s woes, despite
the fact that the majority of people of non-
European descent have family members (if
not they themselves) who have been dis-
placed or have chosen to migrate as a result
not only of the poverty left behind by the
colonial plundering and occupation of their
historical lands, but also because of the cur-
rent neocolonial mechanisms of unbridled,
transnational, capitalist warring, exploitation
and supplanting of traditionally sustainable
local markets.
We educators work today within this partic-
ularly predatory world-system (Wallerstein,
2004), one steeped in epistemological, so-
cio-cultural and economic expressions of
violence: supremacism, subordination, mar-
ginalisation, bias and negation. Under such
conditions, people are measured and judged
according to some arbitrarily established
standards of individual merit, this despite
world-system dynamics that condition peo-
ple’s orientations and abilities in very inequi-
table ways. Meritocracy thus encroaches on
democracy, paving the way for authoritarian
controls over the social ‘order’ (as opposed
to social organisation). The growing influ-
ence on education from non-democratically
established global institutions such as the
World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization
(WTO) or the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation Development (OECD), includ-
ing its Programme for International Student
Assessment (PISA), testify to this turn. A
patent example can be found in the ‘solu-
tions’ former IMF economists came up with
in 2015 for Puerto Rico to pay back the bil-
lions it still owes hedge fund billionaires: lay
off teachers and close public schools (Neate,
2015). As Naomi Klein (2018) asserts, be-
tween 2010 and 2017, approximately 340
public schools were shut down in Puerto
Rico, its educational system downsized and
private and charter schools opened as a neo-
liberal means of paying off foreign debt owed
to lenders based mainly in the neocolonial
‘parent’ country (the United States).
Thanks, however, to the undaunted ef-
forts of mobilisers such as teacher unionist
Mercedes Martínez, many Puerto Rican edu-
cators and families have become critically
aware and are pushing back against the work-
ings of such ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein,
2018), which preys on catastrophes such as
Hurricane María’s razing of Puerto Rico in
2017. A staunch promoter of neoliberalism,
 GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES
Milton Friedman, shortly before he died, un-
leashed one of the first such projects of sys-
temic educational privatisation in the United
States, in the poor Black and Brown commu-
nities of New Orleans following the mass
destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina in
2005 (Klein, 2018).
Nonetheless, these cases represent just one
of the structural dimensions of the world-
system’s effects on education; on the cul-
tural front, ideological struggles are growing
throughout the world. In Spain, for instance,
the subject of Citizenship Education, follow-
ing its implementation in 2006, came under
constant attack from right-wing ideologues
and politicians who censured the eman-
cipatory ways critical teachers addressed
(through that subject) nationhood vs. state-
hood, religion, immigrant rights, sexuality,
abortion, gender diversity and types of fami-
lies, among various other issues. That battle,
however, is not yet over.
The international contributors to this
section of the Handbook address similar
­operations and effects of this transnational
‘order of things’ in education, and what
we critical educators can do about it. In
keeping with Freire’s notion of conscien-
tização (1970), the authors employ criti-
cal pedagogies to resist what Joe Kincheloe
(2008) called the FIDUROD: Formal,
Intractable, Decontextualized, Universalistic,
Reductionistic and One-Dimensional modes
of knowledge production and dissemina-
tion. By questioning authority and putting
into practice various (including decolonial)
forms of ‘critical hermeneutics’, ‘literacies
of power’ (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 2010)
and community projects, we enable students
to expose the relation between power and
knowledge and confront the underlying vio-
lence of the world-system.
Notes
1  For instance: Bolsonaro in Brazil, Macri in
Argentina, Trump in the United States, Orbán
in Hungary, Vox in Spain, the Northern League in
403
Italy, the UK Independence Party, Golden Dawn
in Greece, the Sweden Democrats, the Party for
Freedom in the Netherlands, among many others
across the globe.
2  The founding member states included Venezu-
ela, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Today,
the OPEC also includes: Algeria, Angola, Ecua-
dor, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Libya, Nigeria,
the Republic of the Congo and the United Arab
Emirates (Qatar and Indonesia having recently left
the organisation; see the OPEC webpage at:
www.opec.org [Accessed 27/04/2019]).
3  According to the on-line report ‘Global Inequal-
ity’ by Inequality.org: ‘Inequality has been on
the rise across the globe for several decades.
Some countries have reduced the numbers of
people living in extreme poverty. But economic
gaps have continued to grow as the very rich-
est amass unprecedented levels of wealth’.
Furthermore, ‘[t]he world’s richest 1 percent,
those with more than $1 million, own 45 per-
cent of the world’s wealth. Adults with less than
$10,000 in wealth make up 64 percent of the
world’s population but hold less than 2 percent
of global wealth’ (see https://inequality.org/
facts/global-inequality/ [Accessed 16/10/2019]).
REFERENCES
Agnello, Mary Frances & Reynolds, William M.
(Eds.) (2016). Practicing Critical Pedagogy:
The Influences of Joe L. Kincheloe. London:
Springer.
Apple, Michael W.; Au, Wayne & Gandin, Luis
Armando (Eds.) (2009). The Routledge Inter-
national Handbook of Critical Education.
New York: Routledge.
Brown, Wendy (2017). The Big Picture:
Defending Society. Public Books, 10 October.
Accessed 28/04/2019 from: www.
publicbooks.org/the-big-picture-defending-
society/
Darder, Antonia; Mayo, Peter & Paraskeva,
João (Eds.) (2015). International Critical Ped-
agogy Reader. London: Routledge.
Freire, Paulo (1970). Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. New York: The Seabury Press.
Giroux, Henry (2018). Neoliberal Fascism and
the Echoes of History. TruthOut, 8 August.
Accessed 28/04/2019 from: https://truthout.
org/articles/neoliberal-fascism-and-the-echoes-
of-history/
404 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Harvey, David (2005). A Brief History of Neolib-
eralism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Kincheloe, Joe L.; McLaren, Peter; Steinberg,
Shirley R. & Monzó, Lilia D. (2017). Critical
Pedagogy and Qualitative Research: Advanc-
ing the Bricolage. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S.
Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Quali-
tative Research, 5th edition (pp. 235–260).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kincheloe, Joe L. & Steinberg, Shirley R. (2010).
Why Teach against Islamophobia?: Striking the
Empire Back. In J. L. Kincheloe, S. R. Steinberg &
C. D. Stonebanks (Eds.), Teaching against
Islamophobia (pp. 3–27). New York: Peter Lang.
Kincheloe, Joe L. (2008). Knowledge and Critical
Pedagogy: An Introduction. London: Springer.
Klein, Naomi (2018). The Battle for Paradise:
Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists.
Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Neate, Rupert (2015, 28 July). Hedge funds tell
Puerto Rico: Lay off teachers and close schools
to pay us back. The Guardian. Accessed
30/04/2019 from: www.theguardian.com/
world/2015/jul/28/hedge-funds-puerto-
rico-close-schools-fire-teachers-pay-us-
back
Roy, Arundhati (2014). Capitalism: A Ghost
Story. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Wallerstein, Immanuel (2004). Wallerstein, I.
(2004). World-Systems Analysis: An
Introduction. Durham (NC): Duke University
Press.

From Theory to Practice:
The Identikit and Purpose
of Critical Pedagogy
INTRODUCTION
This chapter is based on my research and
teaching in southern Italy; my intention is to
describe the meaning, purpose, value, and
importance of critical pedagogy, to locate
this within my current practice, and to illus-
trate how the theoretical apparatus of this
paradigm promoted educational interaction
in this setting.
To begin, I will examine some long-­
standing but still topical questions concerning
pedagogy, such as what the relations between
pedagogy, education, and training are. In the
second section, I will introduce the pedagogi-
cal ideas of Joe L. Kincheloe as well as my
personal attempt to implement his concepts
and approach in my work as a teacher in higher
education. My reading of Kincheloe allowed
me to ‘critically’ question the different forms
of teaching and learning used by myself and
others, and to ponder the role of education as a
personal and interpersonal event. It compelled
me to question myself about who the subject is
39
Domenica Maviglia
when placed under the tutelage of educators,
including the complex and recurrent question
concerning the best way to help individu-
als discover themselves as human beings. It
allowed me to consider what kinds of practical
interventions, modalities, times, and places (all
of which are elements affected by historical
transitions in mentality, habits and, customs)
could be exploited to carry out educational
actions, and to think about what kind of skills
educators must have and use in order to help
students become ‘fully grown individuals’ in
the light of a democratic, fair, responsible,
and empowering telos (Cambi, 2006).
PEDAGOGY, EDUCATION, AND
TRAINING: IDENTITY, STRUCTURE,
AND FUNCTION
In order to grasp the potential of critical
pedagogy it is crucial to trace its etymologi-
cal origins. This evaluation will provide a
406 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
particular picture of modern education,
which, as is generally acknowledged, faces a
more and more fragmented and multiform
reality. Contemporary education is held
accountable for the provision of the vital life
skills needed in today’s world: the ability to
live in situations characterized by precarious-
ness, diversity, and a multiplicity of experi-
ences and knowledge, as well as the ability to
organize knowledge, move in reticular con-
texts, and tear down the obstacles that exist
between disciplines, with the aim of finding
the ‘part-to-whole’ relations and the feed-
back loop between every phenomenon and
its context (Chiosso, 2002: 12). The word
‘pedagogy’ appeared in ancient Greece and
Rome and pedagogy is recognized as the
most ancient form of knowledge. It was
developed as a tool to analyze, reflect, pro-
pose, and act in order to establish educational
and formative processes. One of the first
examples of its use can be found in a tragedy
written by Euripides and already in Homeric
poems there is a reference to ‘Phoenix,
Achilles’ pedagogue’. The ‘pedagogue’ was
an educated slave or freed man who had the
duty of tutoring the child (παις) outside the
school and the gymnasium by teaching,
counselling, and mentoring (ago) him. From
the beginning, pedagogy was configured as a
theoretical–practical discipline that anchored
its discourse on the educability of women
and men. In the realm of the human sciences,
pedagogy might be understood as the science
of education; the only discipline that focuses
entirely on the education of the subject. It
encompasses the scope, content, means, and
methods that support subjects in the
extremely difficult task of building a sound
‘existential project’ (Portera, 2006).
Portera (2013) defines pedagogical dis-
course according to its three features: peda-
gogical anthropology, which includes all
disciplines devoted to the study of human
beings; pedagogical teleology (object), which
encompasses all the reflections concern-
ing who a human being should be accord-
ing to the purposes of education (as a set of
shared ideals and values); and pedagogical
methodology (method), which encompasses
the studies of the pathways that should be
­followed and the tools that should be used in
order to support the promotion of the person.
Pedagogy is thus a paradigm focused on the
pondering over the educational act; in other
words it is the synthesis of theory (reflec-
tion on education) and practice (education)
(Mariani, 2006). Accordingly, the term ped-
agogy refers to the knowledge concerning
education (all theories developed in the field
of education, its ‘theoretical apparatus’) and
the management of the educational action
(organization of the actions through which
the educational process takes place, its ‘prac-
tice’) (Nosari, 2013).
Within the core of the definition of the
term, it is clear that pedagogy may be con-
figured as a practical knowledge through
which the ‘shaping process’ of education
may be both analyzed and designed; it is a
form of knowledge that addresses the dou-
ble need raised by a new generation’s right
to education and the duty of educational care
resting on the older generation, while at the
same time it recognizes the shared value rep-
resented by the uniqueness of each human
being. According to Flores d’Arcais, this
uniqueness is emphasized by the fact that
‘subjects involved in educational processes
are always an exception and cannot pro-
vide guidelines for others, because they are
unique, individual’ (1982: 909).
Having examined the structure and mean-
ing of pedagogical science we can begin to
think about the dialectic of education and
training. From an etymological point of view,
the term education stems from the Latin
word exducere, which literally means to
take (ducere) out (ex). Education is a general
formative process that involves subjects for
their entire lives, from the moment of their
conception to their deaths, for the simple
reason that learning never stops. According
to Mariani (2006: 76), ‘the term education
refers to all actions (individual and social)
that promote the physical, intellectual, and
 FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: THE IDENTIKIT AND PURPOSE OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
ethical development of human beings, lead-
ing to self-awareness, the full control of
one’s own actions, and the ability to mutu-
ally answer the needs of communication and
social cooperation by committing to the same
values’. Therefore, education is a process
that produces changes in human beings as
such. Because of the ‘educability’ of human
beings, ‘life is seen as a space of change and
transformation’ (Nanni, 1995: 57), ‘a space
where human beings not only survive or exist
in a pre-established condition, but rather,
where they have the possibility of testing
themselves’ (Nosari, 2013: 25). There are dif-
ferent scenarios that can spur change. Human
beings can change in order to adapt to the
stimuli of the environment surrounding them
(Skinner, 1948: 253) or respond to significant
emotional events by changing their behavior
(Rogers, 1969: 128). They can change in the
context of an interpersonal relationship guided
and regulated by the principles of reciprocity
existing in communication (Postic, 1979), or
they can change because of their c­ o-­existence
in a social context that forces them to choose
between conscious and unconscious changes
(Mead, 1934). ‘The transformation of human
beings might hence take place as a progres-
sive process of construction, in which every-
one commits to a series of adaptations and
compensations, showing all its potential rich-
ness’ (Nosari, 2002a: 45). Considering all
this, human beings should be educated so that
change could become a genuine self-building
process through the ‘creation of a sense that
projects them in the future’ (Stein, 1990: 41).
For these reasons, the scope of education
should be considered, analyzed, and meas-
ured in terms of evolution, development,
growth, training, customization, and sociali-
zation; an evolution seen as a dispersion and
integration mechanism or a spontaneous and
always innovative action that continuously
creates and enriches itself (Bergson, 1907).
Educability is seen therefore as a change
that, on the one hand, manifests itself in
forms of growth and development, and on the
other hand represents a form of personal and
407
creative expression that marks the spontane-
ity, originality, and uniqueness of the subject
in defining his/her self-realization (Nosari,
2002a: 47).
In this reflection on human educability,
teacher practitioners should recognize that
their specific task is to enquire into the ‘trans-
formation process of the subject’ by focus-
ing not only on the contents of educability,
but also on its ‘form’, the journey on which
subjects embark in order to ‘take shape’
as human beings, which is represented by
training.
The concept of training therefore inter-
twines and overlaps with the concept of edu-
cation. It represents the complete maturation
of human beings; an open, dynamic process,
always in fieri that aims at different goals,
in order to restore the specificity, unity, and
uniqueness of every subject.
In Italian, the concept of training is
expressed with the word formazione, a
word composed by two Latin words: forma
(beauty) and agere (action). To understand
the value of this term and the process at the
basis of every formative action in the frame-
work of a training process, it is worth men-
tioning the answer provided by Michelangelo
to one of his pupils when the master was
asked how he was able to provide such a
beautiful ‘shape’ to one of his masterpieces,
the Pietà. The answer of the sculptor was
quite simple: to create the statue, he just had
to take away everything that was super­fluous
in the marble slab, because the ‘shape’ of
the statue already existed in the marble, it
was embedded in it. In the ‘shaping’ process
defined by the limits of the educative project,
subjects move coherently to be-towards the
definition and the development of their per-
sonal identities and projects, which must be
seen as possibilities and therefore forms of
internships to openness, dynamism, adven-
ture, and plurality (Rossi, 1994: 21). From
this point of view, training does not repre-
sent an ‘external mechanism’ for the subjects
involved; it is not a compulsory, functional
transition that turns incomplete, shapeless,
408 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and incoherent human beings into complete,
educated, and perfect subjects. It rather rep-
resents the most profound essence of human
beings, their ‘innermost and most fundamen-
tal’ part (Nosari, 2002a: 50).
In this ‘shaping’ process, human beings
are considered subjects who educate and train
themselves; subjects whose becoming (shap-
ing and therefore training) takes place in order
to build their own identity, suggesting the
existence of a pedagogical shape embedded
in the essence of every individual (Guardini,
1955: 27), their ontological dimension as
human beings. As Nosari argues, human
beings represent ‘subjects in becoming’
(time perspective) and ‘subjects in relation’
(encounter perspective) (2002a: 4–55). Time
and encounter are the two main features of
educability – its main t­ riggers – and they must
be sought in the daily lives of human beings.
Time (past, present, and future) ­represents the
place where human beings evolve and trans-
form themselves, aiming only at one goal:
self-shaping. With time, every human being
becomes what he/she is by devising his/her
own project and taking his/her (individual)
shape, without applying pre-established or
pre-determined identities. In fact, this shap-
ing process does not represent the execution
of a more or less complicated sequential plan
in which education and training become a
strategy of control and assistance. It is rather
an original and fundamental journey that does
not limit the identity of the subject involved
to one definition, as if it were the result of the
sum of the personality traits of the individual.
On the contrary, it opens up the identity of
every individual to every moment that could
lead to full self-expression, which causes
self-discovery and self-realization.
In these terms, education becomes a pro-
ject, an operative modality of the ‘being-
towards’ of every human being. As such, the
educative journey is an activity that defines
the self-realization and self-becoming of sub-
jects in the future. In this ‘to be in-becoming’
experienced by human beings, in addition to
time there is also the principle of encounter,
which breathes life into the time principle
of educability by adding to it the relational
dimension. On their formative journey, human
beings continuously configure ­themselves in
relation with themselves and o­ thers, looking
for possibilities to stand out, express them-
selves, measure themselves, and evaluate
the people surrounding them. Human beings
become masters and witnesses of reflection to
promote the creation of an identity in-becom-
ing. The need of being includes a dimension
that places human beings in front of a must
be that concretely requires them to respect
their genuine identity as human beings. From
this perspective, Rousseau’s paradigm sug-
gests that the true value of human educa-
tion is provided by its originality, seen as the
spontaneity to live naturally the basic human
condition. For example, individuals should
be educated following the path dictated by
their own individuality, by ‘seeing with their
own eyes and following their own hearts’,
giving them the opportunity to freely and
fully show and express their character with-
out being affected by educators (Rousseau,
1762: 82–4). Education means paying atten-
tion to the particular journey on which there
is always the possibility to look for or to test
something new, provided that it can enhance
the process of shaping a genuine subject. The
idea of educability therefore outlines a form
of being that represents a must be and mani-
fests itself as a might be. This means that edu-
cation becomes reality only if implemented
as a unified expression of the relationship
between the subject in education and the edu-
cator, considering also their situation and con-
text. The unity and harmony of these elements
build the reality, sense, and concrete values of
the educational journey. Change in human
beings is always accompanied by a reflection
that inevitably focuses on a series of sensible
questions; ‘being able to think and act in the
framework of what is “sensible” means being
able to acquire a richer and more nuanced
level of human awareness, and the deeper this
sense is, the more significant the human expe-
rience will be’ (Nosari, 2002b: 84).
 FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: THE IDENTIKIT AND PURPOSE OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
GLOBALIZATION, MULTICULTURALISM,
AND CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION
IN POSTMODERNITY: TOWARDS
A WORKING MODEL OF CRITICAL
PEDAGOGY
From the outset of the new millennium, a
number of profound crises and radical
changes have affected our society, influenc-
ing it from an economic, financial, political,
cultural, and – more importantly – educa-
tional point of view. Combined with an
increase of the intensity of migration flows,
the phenomenon of globalization (i.e. free-
market values and practices) has led to the
creation of complex, multicultural societies,
also characterized by distinctly postmodern
features. These features of postmodernity
incorporate, for example, my themes of time
and encounter outlined above. For example,
Bertman (1998) coined the terms ‘hurried
culture’ and ‘nowist culture’ to describe how
life in Western societies is affected by haste,
absence of time, and unilateral glorification
of the present. At the same time, Bauman
(1998) highlighted the emergence of a post-
geographic world characterized by a growing
deterritorialization of practices – not only of
economic and social nature, but also cultural
ones – that are now completely independent
of national borders. In the postmodern age,
such changes have effected a severe crisis
regarding one of the most fundamental ele-
ments of the educational process: its final
purposes (Portera, 2013: 9–11). It would be
possible to identify educational purposes by
defining a model to which education should
aim in order to ‘measure’ itself. What kind of
indications could be given to allow the
formative process to take place, in order to
promote a journey of sense and, more impor-
tantly, value? Which image of human being
should education take into account in order
to guide individuals, without cancelling the
originality of their personal journey?
Having unraveled a wide range of ideas
that describe the meaning and sense of
409
pedagogy from the past to the present, I will
now turn my attention to the specific peda-
gogical paradigm that combines theoretical
and practical aspects of contemporary peda-
gogical thought and educational practice: Joe
Lyons Kincheloe’s critical pedagogy. This
paradigm stands out as a viable scholarly
tool for engaging a variety of issues in edu-
cation that represent a personal and commu-
nity challenge, particularly for those who see
education as a fundamental process of human
life, and hold it close to their hearts.
In my opinion, Kincheloe’s critical peda-
gogy provides both a framework and meth-
odology with which to assess and address
these issues, since it represents a theoretical
practice that simultaneously plays a theo-
retical function (analysis, synthesis, etc.) and
an ethical function (empowerment, demo­
cratization, etc.) in the educational process.
Critical pedagogy enables its practitioners to
investigate how theory affects practice, and
vice versa, through a critical analysis of the
different facets of education as a phenom-
enon. Furthermore, this paradigm allows us
to turn the ‘contemplation’ of an action into
a genuine action that continuously triggers
reflection, hence creating a ‘virtuous cycle’
(Mariani, 2006: 49). In other words, we face
a ‘theoretical practice’ that refers to a d­ ouble
and symmetrical level: active, intentional,
contextualized, self-reflective, reflective, and
meta-reflective. One needs the other, because
educational issues must be tackled in prac-
tice without forgetting about theory (Mariani,
2006: 49).
Kincheloe (1950–2008) was an American
pedagogue committed to the defense and
dissemination of the ideas of equality and
social justice in the field of pedagogy. He
was an interpreter of the Western intellec-
tual world who explicitly supported efforts
to promote decolonization at every level.
His pedagogical proposal was based on the
study of oppression in education, focusing
in particular on issues of race, class, gender,
sexual preference, colonialism, and religious
belief; highlighting how these aspects and
410 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
other social–political–cultural ­ interrelations
shape the nature and purpose of educa-
tion (Kincheloe, 2008). Kincheloe’s critical
pedagogy might be defined as an approach
that aims at developing a democratic criti-
cal consciousness with which to identify
and understand the impact, correlations, and
subtle influences that multiple and shifting
dynamics of orders and processes of domi-
nation have on the theory and practice of
education. It begins with the premise that the
purpose of education is to face and transform
the social and oppressive conditions of those
who accept them with excessive passivity
and fatalism, with the purpose of promoting
social justice and empowerment among mar-
ginalized peoples. To be more specific, this
approach pays particular attention to the sys-
tematic modus operandi of the numerous and
multiple disguises of domination and power
that construct oppressed human identities and
groups, generated and structured via complex
processes of racism, religious intolerance, or
hateful labels of sexual orientation, gender,
and social status (Kincheloe, 2008). Hence,
the empowerment of the human subject is
presented by Kincheloe as the key element
of every pedagogical project. His concept of
critical pedagogy emphasizes the role played
by the transformation of spaces – particularly
the educational space – where it is possible
to find experiences of human oppression,
with the aim of promoting change in terms of
social justice, minority rights, and the impor-
tance given to topics such as difference or
marginalization.
Following the work of Kincheloe and his
contemporaries (Kincheloe, 2008; McLaren
and Kincheloe, 2007), critical pedagogy has
become an acknowledged theoretical field of
study where pedagogy is the core and engine
of a transformational project to ‘democratize
culture’ and to develop a progressive, creative,
and democratic society by following a princi-
ple of active and pluralist citizenship. In other
words, the project proposed by Kincheloe is
a form of intercultural education that pro-
motes the authenticity of human beings, the
originality of the person and the diversity of
humankind. It is an education that questions,
raises awareness, and aims at breaking the
shackles of fatalism in order to enable indi-
viduals to understand that their existence and
self-realization cannot be pre-established by
others, because all human beings are archi-
tects of their own destiny, without consider-
ing their geographical, cultural, and religious
origins (Kincheloe, 2008).
Critical pedagogues therefore investigate
the complexity of the educational phenom-
enon, not through universal explanations
of different pedagogical elements, but by
providing a series of rigorous tools for
investigating the multiple manifestations of
education in different places and among dif-
ferent peoples. In this way, that is, through
intercultural and interdisciplinary exchange,
critical pedagogues aim to develop a new
roadmap for educational practice that takes
us to a different place in our theoretical and
pedagogical analyses. At the same time, criti-
cal pedagogues emphasize the complexity of
multiple forms of knowledge, the variety of
research methodologies, the goals of exist-
ing educational practices, and the nature of
their results. Specifically, the critical peda-
gogic approach invites us to stop and reflect
on what Kincheloe refers to as the ‘fake
democratic nature’ of educational practices
that falsely present themselves as processes
oriented towards the respect for the value of
democracy and justice, but which actually
form part of numerous subtle and ambigu-
ous cultural practices that silently support,
through their systematic exploitation of
prevailing dominant structures, the survival
of totalitarian and oppressive educational
regimes (2008: 1–43). In fact,
too often when examining curriculum develop-
ment and school operation, critical teachers
observe modes of knowledge distributed to teach-
ers and students that feign neutrality but covertly
support particular political interests. Students are
not encouraged to study multiple points of view or
learn that both within US society and around the
planet there are profoundly different i­ nterpretations
 FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: THE IDENTIKIT AND PURPOSE OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
of historical, scientific, literacy, political, social, and
economic issues than the ones offered in their
textbooks, content standards, and curriculum
guides. Students are typically not taught about the
complex nature of interpretation and the assump-
tions embedded in and power imprinted on all
knowledge. (Kincheloe, 2008: 108)
Critical pedagogues are thus concerned with
the goal of unmasking forms of domination
and oppression by making them understand-
able, that is, by exposing them through a
series of processes and tools of deconstruc-
tion that identify and name their parts (colo-
nization, ethnocentrism, ideology, and so
forth), as they affect contemporary thought
and practices of education.
Critical pedagogy therefore represents an
interdisciplinary pedagogical approach that
deals with fundamental issues of human
rights such as democracy, oppression, social
justice, global economy, poverty, migration,
multiculture, interculture, the destruction of
the environment, fair and just development,
and peace. In simple terms, this calls for an
education for the future, encouraging indi-
viduals to responsibly commit themselves
to the creation of a global society by pro-
viding them with the necessary tools to lay
the foundations of a thought and an action
that could be both fair and global. Critical
pedagogy is based on values and processes
that respect human dignity and that consider
social justice a condition of human survival,
highlighting in this way the importance of
the role played by altruism in safeguard-
ing human dignity itself (Cambi, 2006).
From this point of view, critical pedagogy
adopts a guiding role, revealing its signifi-
cance as a fundamental discipline that can
challenge and change teachers’ values and
practices. This implies an activity aimed at
‘cultivating humanity’ (Nussbaum, 1999); it
requires human beings to avoid the tempta-
tion of ruling the Earth, asking us instead to
become the main custodians of its resources,
beauties, and different forms of life. In our
educational actions, it is possible to find the
basic concepts of care for the existence and
411
acceptance of others, and care for the present
in order to preserve the future. According to
Mariani (2006: 34), we are approaching new
front lines of global co-existence that must be
established, ­interiorized, spread, and shared
as common front lines.
PONDERING OVER THE REFLECTIVE
STATUS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY:
A SEMINAR EXPERIENCE
Given that critical pedagogy interacts with
education and training in a dynamic, open,
and critical way, it is particularly suited to
detecting the critical–regulative perspective
that concerns the complexity of implement-
ing an active education from a democratic
and collective point of view.
Considering the ‘purposes-­responsibilities’
of the critical pedagogy approach, I decided
to introduce my students at Messina to the
critical pedagogy paradigm as understood
from my readings of Kincheloe.
During the second semester of 2012, I was
invited to organize a 12-hour seminar for a
group of 20 students of a degree course in
education and training studies, within the
framework of a 30-hour module on com-
parative education. The professor in charge
of the teaching module had developed a cur-
riculum based on three books; one of them
was Educate to critical thinking: History
and development of Joe Lyons Kincheloe’s
Critical Pedagogy, a monograph that I pub-
lished in 2011 (Maviglia, 2011). My passion,
interest, and belief in this pedagogical cur-
rent of thought, as much as the love for my
students and for the art of teaching, pushed
me to accept the offer and I decided imme-
diately that the main topic of my seminar
would be critical pedagogy. This decision
was based mainly on three reasons. First,
the professor had decided to have my book
in the curriculum of the course; second, the
fact that I had written my PhD thesis on
critical pedagogy, a subject that is still at
412 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
the center of my research activity; and third,
because as member of the examining panels
in the disciplines of general pedagogy, inter-
cultural pedagogy, the history of pedagogy,
and comparative education in Messina, I had
frequently noticed how unable (or perhaps
unwilling) students seemed to be in the use
of their critical sensibilities and how much
they seemed uninterested in knowing or pon-
dering over the many social issues that char-
acterize our social context. I often wondered
why this was the case and, after due consid-
eration, I came to the conclusion that we – as
­teachers – are the ones mainly responsible for
this situation. The reader might think that my
standpoint is too simplistic and hefty, but it is
informed by my personal experience as a stu-
dent for 20 years, and as a teacher and tutor
during my PhD and unpaid postdoctoral stud-
ies for a further 7 years. During this period,
I have often asked myself: who is principally
responsible in southern Italy’s schools and
universities for the quality of teaching or the
skills, knowledge, and other competences
that should be taught critically to young peo-
ple in different educational institutions? Who
might be considered responsible for the bad
academic performance or the high dropout
rates, when classes are structured according
to the social status of students and teachers
publicly accept and perpetrate discrimina-
tory and dismissing attitudes that jeopardize
the personal sensibilities and civic morals of
students? Or when there are teachers who
publicly call them ‘animals’, ‘geese’, or
‘chickens in a roost’ and blame their failures
at school on their colleagues in other edu-
cational ­institutions in order to avoid at any
price, the possibility of questioning their role
and ­figure as teachers?
For me such questions served to highlight
the crucial role played by teachers and the
fundamental responsibility we hold to pro-
mote the moral, civic, and human growth
of current and future generations. For this
reason, I decided to invite my students to
ask themselves the same questions and pon-
der over their answers, because in a near
future, those among them who will decide
to become teachers will have to shoulder
the same responsibility. I decided to intro-
duce critical pedagogy to the students placed
under my tuition. The experience proved
interesting and constructive for them and for
me, which also eventually provided me with
a great sense of satisfaction.
The class was composed of 20 students
aged between 22 and 28, of whom 18 were
female and 2 male. One of the students was
originally from the island of Salina, 4 among
them were from the region of Calabria,
while the remaining 15 came from the city
of Messina and its province. To begin with, I
devoted four hours to a general introduction
on the epistemological status of pedagogical
science. By making full use of a hermeneu-
tic, argumentative, and critical methodology,
the class engaged in a dialogue about the
concepts of pedagogy, education, and train-
ing, using passages taken from the books of
Chiosso (2002) and Mariani (2006). Then,
I decided to involve the students in reading
and analyzing some passages (which I trans-
lated) taken from Critical Pedagogy Primer
(Kincheloe, 2008). In order to do so, I divided
the class into four working groups and asked
them to analyze different parts of the book.
During a lesson of one hour and a half, each
and every member of a group had to identify
and explain critically to the other members of
his/her group the main themes and keywords
encountered. Then, by standing in front of the
entire class and through a dialogical interac-
tion, each group would present to the oth-
ers what they had discovered and what they
thought about the concepts encountered.
The attitude of the students surprised me,
because after overcoming a layer of preju-
dice towards the topics and issues ­analyzed –
such as oppression, neocolonialism, the
relationship between political power and
education, and the discrimination based on
culture, religion, gender, or social class –
and in some cases what seemed a sense of
shame and almost fear of speaking, express-
ing their opinion, or even being judged
 FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: THE IDENTIKIT AND PURPOSE OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
for it – often, when students had to introduce
their ideas, they would start by saying ‘I’m
not sure, maybe I’m saying something silly’;
‘maybe you will think that I’m too harsh’;
‘maybe what I’m about to say doesn’t have
any sense’; ‘I could be wrong but I believe
that’ – the students became eventually more
actively involved and ‘critical’ about the top-
ics addressed. For example, some of them
were able to overcome the shame they felt
and share the first-hand experiences they had
in relation to the topics addressed. A student
told the class about his experience of discrim-
ination and marginalization at the university
because of his sexual orientation, an experi-
ence that fueled in him a strong sense of dis-
comfort, rage, and fear during his studies.
Another student, this time female, told about
her experience in a nursery classroom where
she was working as an intern and where she
witnessed a situation in which a teacher
verbally attacked and discriminated against
some children originally born in Indonesia.
Another female student told the classroom
that, while attending high school, she was a
victim of the discrimination perpetrated by
her philosophy teacher, who said that she had
a very low IQ because of her social class and
family origins. According to her, the words of
her teacher strongly lowered her self-esteem,
causing her to constantly think about the
­possibility of dropping her studies and take
on whatever job she could find.
Within this methodological framework
I had two different tasks: that of a critical
researcher (Kincheloe, 2008), and one of
an intellectual who does not play the sim-
ple role of a transmitter of information, but
who endorses a critical teaching method and
develops a democratic critical conscious-
ness among his/her students (Kincheloe,
2008: 125). Following this approach, I suc-
ceeded in endorsing an educational maieu-
tic practice, allowing also the class to gain a
general critical vision of the political–social
and educational–cultural reality that char-
acterized life in 2012, after almost 20 years
of Berlusconi’s government. As a matter of
413
fact, by analyzing the topics identified by the
students in the texts I had provided them, we
were immediately reminded of the situation
in Italy. We started therefore a dialogue about
the lowering quality of public education dur-
ing Berlusconi’s government, which followed
a policy based on a logic of ‘reduction’ (fewer
rights, fewer resources, less education for all)
that favored the few against the many, widen-
ing the gap among social classes and regions,
attacking the rights of students, and reducing
the possibilities of active citizenship. After
reading and discussing the content of article
64 of Law no. 133 approved on August 6,
2008, which introduced the possibility of fin-
ishing compulsory school also through voca-
tional training, and the main concepts of the
Gelmini reform (Law no. 169 of October 30,
2008), which aimed at reforming the whole
Italian school system, we came to the conclu-
sion that the education policy brought forward
by Berlusconi was based on an education and
training model that was deeply classist and
elitist. As Fiora Luzzato highlighted (2013),
at first glance Law no. 133 could have looked
like a good way to support teenagers who did
not wish to attend school, but ultimately it
put an end to equal opportunities because it
embodied the idea that public Italian schools
wanted to give up on the students who expe-
rienced difficulties at school. At the same
time, the Gelmini reform was heavily criti-
cized for keeping the same level of public aid
for private schools while reducing year after
year the support given to public schools, cut-
ting also the total number of teaching hours,
investment in facilities and infrastructure,
and even the support provided to disabled
people. These measures led to the situation
that ISTAT (Italian National Institute for
Statistics) recorded in 2012, with two million
people aged between 15 and 29 years who
were classified as NEETs (Not in Education,
Employment, or Training). At the same time,
data provided by the Ministry of Education
on February 17, 2012, clearly showed that
22% of young boys dropped school before
obtaining a qualification. Finally, already in
414 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
2012, the OECD ranked Italy at the second-
last place for its level of education in a group
composed of 30 developed countries and
third-last place for its level of investment in
education, with a rate of young unemploy-
ment of 35% compared to a European aver-
age of 22%.
The dialogue about the political and cul-
tural situation left by the Berlusconi govern-
ment and its effects on education allowed my
students to rediscover the value of criticism,
seen as the ability to reflect, analyze, interpret,
compare, and reinterpret our local context.
This is why I firmly believe that we – as par-
ents, teachers, educators, and pedagogues –
should do everything in our power to promote
the development of this fundamental skill in
young people, hence taking care not only
of the well-being of the subject, but also of
the general and collective well-being, since
human beings can achieve their full develop-
ment only when they decide to take charge
of their responsibilities both for the common
good and their own personal wealth.
Obviously, all this implies a double com-
mitment. On the one side, the commitment of
politicians to avoid decisions that could turn
schools, universities, and research institu-
tions into assets in the hands of private inves-
tors or subject to market mechanisms. On the
other side, the commitment of professionals
to the practice of a truly critical and reflec-
tive pedagogy that requires long periods of
dialogue with students and a higher level of
awareness by pedagogical professionals, who
should be responsibly active for the good of
future generations.
Schools, universities, and research institu-
tions are a common good; they belong to all
citizens and exist for all citizens. They influ-
ence the life project of every individual and
the democratic future of the whole country.
Schools and universities are a place where
individuals are trained and common know­
ledge is nurtured; where the skills related to
criticism are developed, and where people
are educated to a democratic comparison
of ­differences. They represent, therefore, an
anchor of peace and of the idea of a country
strongly committed to solidarity – the value
of culture and knowledge as common asset.
CONCLUSION
The pedagogical paradigm of critical
pedagogy – by orienting its educational
­
action towards the empowerment of the
­subject – allows us to experience ‘in real
time’ the anthropological–cultural challenges
of our age. It is a form of pedagogy that
analyses the educational relationship, the
role of teachers, the role of culture in educa-
tion, the educational institutions, the expro-
priations created by politics, the interiorized
anthropological structures, the indoctrination
as a degenerated form of teaching, with the
aim of defining a dialectic concept of human
education (Mariani, 2006: 98).
Following this line of thought, it is clear
that it is the teaching that professional teach-
ers, professors, educators, and pedagogues
carry out that leads to the form of educa-
tion and training described in the previous
paragraphs. In addition to all these aspects,
there are other issues that these profession-
als often need to face in their daily activi-
ties: the care for the person placed under
their tuition, the assistance relationship, the
educational relationship, the interpersonal
communication process, the need to listen
and respect the feelings of students, common
good, the sense of life, the values and moral
choices, culture, freedom, empowerment and
­authoritarianism, authenticity, and intercul-
ture. Therefore, the ability of understand-
ing the moral and deontological importance
and cultural, social, and political meaning
of all these aspects, and the one that allows
us to connect these elements to other fields
of knowledge by following interdisciplinary
approaches, highlight the identity and pur-
pose of critical pedagogy as fundamental
knowledge to educate and train students as
well as teachers (Mariani 2006: 84).
 FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: THE IDENTIKIT AND PURPOSE OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
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Reimagining the University
as a Transit Place and Space:
A Contribution to the
Decolonisation Debate
Colin Chasi and Ylva Rodny-Gumede
INTRODUCTION
In South Africa, following the #RhodesMustFall
and subsequent #FeesMustFall campaigns,
facilitation of access, promotion and recogni-
tion of diversity of cultures and languages,
and transformation of curricula have been
put on priority agendas, under the all-
embracing heading of ‘decolonisation of the
university’. Little emphasis, however, has
been put on the transformation of university
campuses themselves as an embodiment of
colonialism and the exclusionary politics
thereof. In fact, we propose that the univer-
sity campus can be used as an analogy for the
role that higher education can play in facili-
tating decolonisation and the kinds of social
transformation that is envisioned through
such projects. In this sense the university
campus can constitute a critical pedagogy in
and of itself. We argue that discussions on the
decolonisation of the university are incom-
plete until they also encompass critical and
creative thinking about the places and spaces
40
in which university work, practices and lives
happen and are fulfilled. We propose doing
this through reimagining the campus as a
‘transit space’.
We know that education is mediated and/or
framed by the spaces in which it takes place,
and spaces are in turn influenced by cultural,
political and social concerns about teaching,
learning and the students (cf. Darian-Smith
and Willis, 2016). From within sites which
also function as guides and landmarks of colo-
nial, apartheid, anticolonial and antiapartheid
historical arrangements, facts and processes,
it is opportune to ask what role the place and
space of the university campus itself plays and
can play in a broader transformation process,
and in enabling knowledge acquisition, agen-
tial development and empowerment?
We know that architecture and buildings
have an impact on the learning experiences
of students, and that school buildings provide
the literal structure that enables a conducive
learning environment (McLeod et al., 2016;
Mayer, 2010; Burke and Grosvenor, 2008).
 REIMAGINING THE UNIVERSITY AS A TRANSIT PLACE AND SPACE
Building on this we argue that, universities
are known as places that produce, assess,
distribute and legitimate knowledges for
uses associated with how ‘educated people
belong’ and are identified through cultures
and processes with implications for gains that
may be claimed and denied in job markets
and in other spheres of cultural expressions
and work. Inter alia, it has become normative
to argue that universities should (1) produce
innovations that enable societies to overcome
the most challenging social, economic and
technological challenges facing societies,
(2) teach students to think, work or operate
in ways that address the challenges of their
epochs and (3) certify the rank and worth of
knowledges and of those who lay claim to it;
equally, it can be argued that university cam-
puses and the buildings they house, as exten-
sions and essential parts of the university
itself, should provide a literal structure that
enables a conducive learning process aligned
with all of the above (cf. Tanner, 2000).
At the very least, as Xing et al. say, ‘As
more universities embrace strategic plans that
assimilate digital technology and introduce
more active learning in traditional lecture
halls, they have also reconfigured their physi-
cal surroundings to spur these teaching and
learning shifts’ (2018: 180). In one instance,
[t]o meet this requirement, UJ [University of
Johannesburg] has built a mock mine environment at
its Doornfontein Campus, which includes a 180-
meter-long haulage connected with a 32-meter-high
elevator shaft and a workshop complex. Such emu-
lated facility can simulate real mining conditions that
offer students an authentic mining learning experi-
ence through practical engineering, construction,
and observation methodology during laboratory and
tutorial sessions. (Xing et al., 2018: 195)
To this end, it is necessary that university
spaces and places are changed so that the
legacies of colonialism and apartheid are
overcome in ways that enable people to exit
zones and traps of colonialism to instead enter
zones of freedom and liberation. It is in this
sense we argue that universities must become
transit spaces. The discussion that follows
417
will tap into some of the debates around what
is known about the significance of place and
space and their relation to the roles and func-
tions of higher education.
THINKING ABOUT THE PLACE OF
THE UNIVERSITY
In a classic book on leadership, Carlyle (1908)
presents education as a heroic practice by
which researchers and teachers transform the
worlds in which they find themselves.
Elsewhere, Ortega y Gasset (1944) has pre-
sented the role of the university as one of
shepherding societies through the travails of
their times by discovering and teaching the
most advanced answers, questions and sys-
tems of problem solving that their human
cultures have developed. In short, there is
much that has been written to suggest, as
Tomasello (2009) can be read to say, that
education, and with it universities, is a key
aspect of the human ‘cultural ratchet’ and the
ability of human beings to cooperatively
learn, teach and progressively innovate in
order to overcome problems of living in the
world with increasing sophistication. Taking
this thinking into account, we hold that dis-
cussion of the place of universities in this
postcolonial and post-apartheid era must sit-
uate the university in relation to the problems
of our world. In this regard, there are many
that argue that there is a crisis in higher edu-
cation that is being occasioned by a poor fit
between what universities stand for and how
they are configured vis-à-vis societal needs
(Kromydas, 2017; Cloete and Maassen, 2015;
Burke, 2012).
Without doubt, higher education finds
itself in severe crisis. Under the sway of a
global economy in steady decline, with blue-
and white-collar labour markets being dis-
rupted by technological advancements and
by global political insecurities, higher edu-
cation, once the privilege of a few and later
the beacon and foremost tool of economic
418 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
growth in both capitalists and welfare states
around the world, finds itself at multiple
cross roads. With rising unemployment
among graduates, questions can be asked
as to whether a higher degree is necessarily
an assurance of job security, let alone a job,
and whether it still serves as a ticket of entry
to a society that places trust, value and cre-
dence in the academy. Equally questions are
raised as to whether the academy can claim
it holds the key to a higher order knowledge
and a truth believed to have structured and
informed the order of the pre-globalisation,
pre-internet era. And, with the cost of univer-
sity access rising and university bureaucracy
and administrative imperatives emphasised
at the behest of knowledge production and
teaching and learning, traditional residential
universities find themselves increasingly hav-
ing to compete with ‘new’ offline and online
degree offers.
While these factors might be triggers for a
global debate about the role of the academy,
the crisis of higher education in South Africa
is even more complicated and acute. A dec-
ade and a half into the new democracy, much
remains to be done to overcome the inher-
ited and continuous legacies of colonialism
and apartheid. And while much debate in
the global North has focused on the advent
of new technology and the opportunities that
new technology has created for 21st-century
learning models, debates in the global South,
and postcolonial societies in particular, have
focused on rectifying the injustices and
imbalances of the past; this with ‘diversity’
and ‘diversification’ as the main policy con-
cern (cf. Cross, 2004). The legacies of colo-
nialism and the continuous inequities it has
created has made sure that state formation,
politics and socio-economic development in
the postcolony has remained premised on
divisions of race. In essence ‘race continues
to be a marker of social difference, hierarchy
and pain’ (Frassinelli, 2018: 4), and the for-
mal end of colonialism or apartheid did not
bring an end to the socio-economic injus-
tices, power hierarchies and suppression of
Indigenous and local knowledges that these
systems created (ibid.). South Africa sadly
stands as a stark example of this as one of
the most unequal countries in the word, with
income gaps between rich and poor steadily
increasing (Sulla and Zikhali, 2018).
We cannot detail how power, knowledge
and being is historically and currently con-
stituted in and through higher education and
the ways in which higher education, universi-
ties and campuses themselves are embedded
in the colonial project. This said, we know
that higher education still provides limited
access to students from working-class, and
rural poor social origins, with the social com-
position of academic staff remaining largely
White and institutional cultures dominated
by historical traditions that limit decoloni-
sation, de-racialisation and de-gendering of
knowledge production. This with the result
of denying Black students’ identities, histo-
ries and cultures (Badat, 2009: 455; Luckett,
2016: 417). All highlighted by recent calls
for the decolonisation of higher education
(Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013).
The tragedy is that, in the context of post-
colonial South Africa, as throughout the
postcolonial world, higher education and a
university degree constitute an entry ticket
to social uplift and a chance to transform and
turn the clock back on centuries of disadvan-
tage. Overall, higher education serves multiple
purposes and needs to be developed and con-
ducted recognising a multitude of overlapping
imperatives. Technological, social, political
and other changes indicate that a 21st-century
ideal is for people to be freed and capacitated
to live experiential lifestyles in which they
can creatively learn and produce, study and
work on lifestyles and cultures to yield mul-
tidimensional individualities and multifaceted
communities.
What is apparent is that for those think-
ing about the university in this fast evolving
social and technologically disrupted time, the
question of the place as well as space of the
university is of strategic importance. How
the physical space of universities is designed
 REIMAGINING THE UNIVERSITY AS A TRANSIT PLACE AND SPACE
should be carefully thought of in order to
enhance the educational experience of stu-
dents (Coulson et al., 2015: 117). Not only
do university places and spaces form ‘the
ideological terrain on which competing ideas
are played out and educational purpose made
manifest’ (Locke, 2015: 596–7), solidified
and materialised through physical walls and
demarcated spaces, they are also ‘active con-
stituents of social relations that intersect in
dynamic and fluid ways’ (ibid.). The physi-
cal space and place of a university creates
the borders from within which teaching and
learning are defined and a stage for the shap-
ing and reification of knowledge, ideas and
identities takes shape. Equally, it provides a
framework for a re-shaping and reimagining
of the same.
The places and spaces that make up the
university campus provide the physical arena
in which learning and research activities take
place. From a psychological perspective, they
create the backdrop for the social interaction
and collective and individual memories that
are fundamental to the university experi-
ence (Coulson et al., 2015: 121). Overall, a
university campus needs spaces designed to
generate interaction, collaboration, physical
movement and social engagement as primary
elements of the student learning experience
(Jamieson, 2003: 121).
UNIVERSITIES, PEOPLE,
PLACE AND SPACE
The human cultures that connect objects,
people and practices are what concern us
when we try to understand what places and
spaces have to do with higher education. This
is for at least two reasons. First, cultures pro-
duce the patterns of significance within which
objects and practices are ruled to have differ-
ent and qualified meanings. Second, higher
education is fundamentally tied to expressing,
enhancing and sharing culturally defined
notions of excellence and by extension,
419
notions of belonging as well as exclusion.
This in some respects explains why the
#RhodesMustFall movement was galvanised
around the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, a key
founder of colonial rule in South Africa. The
statue signposted the cornerstone role of colo-
nial thought and resources arrangements in the
ongoing architecture of dominance and oppres-
sion that guides South Africa today. Thus, for
example, what was the Rand Afrikaans
University’s (RAU) campus in Auckland Park,
now University of Johannesburg (UJ), was in
its design an ode to the apartheid regime’s own
exclusionist interpretation of modernism. At
this university and elsewhere in the apartheid
state, ‘modern architecture became the style
and visual language’ of apartheid (Murray,
2007: 51), making heavily cemented political
statements about Afrikaner belonging to
Western culture, and equally about who to
exclude1.
More often than not, and with the ‘aesthet-
ics, styles, and organization of space, campus
architecture has been complicit in reproduc-
ing dominant ideologies and social relations
of society, undermining diversity and its
possibilities’ (Dutton and Grant, 1991: 40).
Amid the calls for a decolonisation of higher
education, examination and rethinking of this
aspect seems to have been somewhat ignored
and underrated despite protests against, as
well as the literal removal and defacing of
artefacts and physical places connected to
the university and a colonial heritage. Given
the above, it is legitimate to ask how cam-
puses can embrace and facilitate access, and
conducive learning environments, for stu-
dents from all socio-economic, cultural and
language groups. More precisely, it is worth
asking about the range and form of transform-
ative change that campuses must undergo to
become places and spaces for university prac-
tices that are decolonised.
Architecture itself does not determine the
possibilities for belonging and ownership of
places. Instead, what will reform the postco-
lonial and post-apartheid campus is neither a
demolition nor rebuilding, of whatever scale.
420 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
More significant, will be the claim-making,
appropriation and direction-giving acts which
make the university a transit point towards
decolonisation and goals that African peoples
recognise and value, and that have a bearing
on the societies they inhabit. As Matshikiza
(2007: 284) noticed, an ironic lesson from
the South African experience, is that many
parts of ‘White’ colonial and apartheid archi-
tecture have now been taken over by a wide
span of Africans whose practices and actual
belonging have Africanised areas while post-
apartheid developments, irrespective of the
architects and occupants, have often been a
pale mimicry of Western (Tuscan and other)
ideals. What we point to is that the political
vision of the African university of the future
should, as Matshikiza (2007: 285) can be read
to suggest, become a transit place in which
the multitudes of people who are associated
with it (the African university) are recognised
and dignified.
As South Africa struggles, negotiates and
transitions from the inequity and injustice of
its colonial and apartheid histories, it is also
engaged in a process that mitigates against the
estrangement of the past. Remember that to
colonise involves setting people apart in order
to then dominate them, and that apartheid
entails the production and reproduction of
patterns of alienation. South African history
shows just how cutting apart and separating
people so that they occupy different places
has been put at the very heart of political
policies of the race-based social engineering.
Separate locations for different people were
followed by differentiated services delivery
and universities, and higher education insti-
tutions were no different in this regard. Tiers
of university education were created based on
language and race. Such divisions still inform
the educational landscape in South Africa dat-
ing back to the 1959 Extension of University
Education Act, which outlined a master plan
for higher education in South Africa based
on the apartheid ideology of ‘separate but
equal development’. Far from equal though,
the Act provided access to highly unequal
education based on race and ethnicity, ensur-
ing that historically White institutions served
the educational, ideological, political, cul-
tural, social and economic needs of White
South Africans, while establishing second-
class higher education institutions geared
at feeding the economy of the Bantustan or
Black homelands with a semi-educated Black
middle class. These divisions still plague the
South African higher education landscape
despite a major higher education reform in
1996 to address inequities by merging former
designated ‘Black’ higher education institu-
tions with designated ‘White’, English and
Afrikaans language instruction institutions.
While some formerly designated White
English speaking universities resisted these
perceived enforced mergers, often marked by
huge distrust and power inequities between
academic staff members (cf. Makgoba and
Seepe, 2004), other formerly White English
and Afrikaans speaking universities and
designated Black universities and/or tech-
nikons have undergone major transforma-
tions through the merger reform. This is
evidenced through massive increases in stu-
dent numbers, substantial growth in students
from previously disadvantaged backgrounds
and in particular first generation university
students2, a diversification of languages
spoken, and increased needs for expanding
teaching venues and student services such as
accommodation, sports and leisure facilities.
And as in many other countries around the
world, the increase in student numbers have
forced university management and planners
to adopt space planning models and tech-
niques focused around calculations of stu-
dent intakes and the maximising of space
to accommodate rising student numbers
(Temple, 2008: 229–30). However, little do
these calculations factor in other institutional
objectives of research, teaching and learn-
ing practices and provisions for both inter-
nal and external services to students and staff
(ibid.: 230). In South Africa, all of these plan-
ning needs come with the additional need for
addressing equity, institutional cultures and the
 REIMAGINING THE UNIVERSITY AS A TRANSIT PLACE AND SPACE
reimagining of place and space to make the
university accommodating to students from
diverse cultural backgrounds and with differ-
ing needs in terms of services, often based in
huge socio-economic disparities among the
student population.
The ‘new’ institutions created by the uni-
versity mergers are interesting examples of
continuing legacies, this as former ‘White’
institutions took on the role of ‘benevolent
hosts’ of the historically underprivileged
‘Black’ universities and technicians, creating
big brother scenarios in which the ‘host’s’
institutional culture, language of instruction
and most importantly location, often urban,
has set the frame from which education is
conducted. Jansen (2016) articulates the
implications and significance of place when
he addresses the psychological and spiritual
obstacles to change faced by the university
from within the context of its history and
location. Amid several horrific racially moti-
vated crimes at the University, Jansen (2016)
conducts an analysis of letters to the editor
published in the local paper the Volksblad in
response to these crimes and shows how the
surrounding community influences, preserves
and legitimates the continuation of separatist
politics and ideologies of racism, all with var-
ying degrees of resonance at university cam-
puses in South Africa. All in all, university
campuses reify ideas around education, youth,
gender, class and race (Yanni, 2012: 348).
Thus, there is need to state the urgency
of how the place, i.e. the geographical loca-
tion of the university and its relationship to
surrounding communities, and the space,
i.e. architecture and grounds of university
campuses, can be reimagined and reconfig-
ured in ways that mitigate such reifications
and instead form places and spaces in which
transformation is exercised and education
mediated in ways that enable knowledge
acquisition, empowerment and agential
development. We argue that universities must
be recognised as, and become, what we will
term quintessential ‘transit places’, i.e. places
in which people can pass or conveyance over,
421
or beyond, or across, or from, or through
what previously existed, to some other state.
The process of decolonisation is of course in
itself a process of transitioning from one state
to another.
THE UNIVERSITY CAMPUS
AS A TRANSIT SPACE
The view of the university as a transit place is
consistent with how education is itself pri-
marily linked to the metaphor of change; that
it is, for example, associated with the trans-
ference or communication of information
from one to another in ways that create a
desired change in another (cf. Low, 2008). As
transit places universities function as nodes in
which people are, and even society itself is,
transformed. In a sense, universities arise
here as places and analogies of spaces in
which rhizomic network possibilities are pro-
duced through educational processes (includ-
ing those to do with research and community
engagement) that enable societies to develop
requisite varieties of innovations and capa-
bilities with which to cope with fast changes
in the world. These changes are widely asso-
ciated with new communication technologies
that disrupt old ways of living with the conse-
quence that, in what Giddens (2000) famously
called a ‘runaway world’, it becomes increas-
ingly difficult for people and their cultures
(material and otherwise) to achieve
belonging.
This is made ever more pertinent in postco-
lonial and post-apartheid spaces, where peo-
ple have not been allowed to find ways to ‘feel
at home’, and as such the consequences of
these disruptions are likely to be more intense.
Remember that oppressed peoples, in colo-
nial and apartheid arrangements, are ‘bound
to the power structure like a slave to a mas-
ter’ (Mbembe, 2001: 31) in a ‘civilizational’
logic that regards the reclaiming or regain-
ing of human dignity and recognition by the
oppressed as disruptive (Gordon, 2000: 51).
422 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
The reverberations of technological disrup-
tions are therefore more fearsome in the pre-
sent. However, new technologies are also tied
with the prospect of ‘technological leaps’
by which societies may disrupt the flows
of resources and opportunities in ways that
restructure the world, hopefully rendering
the distribution of global and national wealth
fundamentally less characterised by inequity
and injustice. What technologies disruptively
do to make and unmake the university as a
transit place is worth serious investigation.
Pertinently, traditional forms of teaching
and learning are being outpaced by the veloc-
ity, i.e. by the speed and the direction, of
the 21st-century digital revolution (Coulson
et al., 2015: 116). As online education as well
as other forms of off-site education becomes
more accessible, higher education institutions
will struggle to attract students to more costly
residential options for obtaining a degree.
Within this climate, the campus environment
will gain strategic importance through what-
ever additional services and facilities they
offer that will serve as their competitive edge
in attracting and retaining the best students
and staff (ibid.: 117–21).
The latter becomes ever more important
in the postcolonial context of South African
universities, whereas, as previously set out,
the place and space of the university cam-
pus have made statements of belonging and
exclusion in equal measures. Instead, the
strategic direction of South African univer-
sity campuses must be to make statements
about a new set of ideologies and values and
serve as a transit space for the re-appropriation
of cultural production and reproduction.
Thus, what makes universities transit spaces
is that the coincidence or meetings that they
occasion frame cultural trajectories by shap-
ing opportunities for learning. The university
serves as a place where people of different
generations and genealogies meet. Through
the meeting of people, the university is also
placed to connect multiple epistemic schema,
disciplines, knowledges, ideas and systems
of thought.
The university is a nexus structure whose
sustainability is predicated on how it ena-
bles requisite varieties of relational configu-
rations to emerge with speed and minimal
difficulties. The configuration of places is
both materially and socially determined,
so the varieties of uses and adaptations are
informed by material and social interplays.
University places can be adapted to reflect
changing relational patterns between learn-
ers, teachers, communities, markets, internal
environments, external environments, etc. As
the world changes rapidly and greatly due to
economic, technological and cultural factors,
sustainable universities should have a wide
variety of multi-purpose spaces that are open
to various lifestyles, work, learning, teaching
and other uses. Universities that are able to
offer diverse sections of places that requi-
sitely address contingent needs are likely to
be more capable of satisfying this complex
and contending variety of needs.
The key point here is that the ‘transit’ met-
aphor captures the transformation ideal of a
university that changes society through its
educational, research and other endeavours.
It coheres with the idea of a university that
breaks the yoke of colonialism and moves to
replace colonial norms and forms with orders
that are relevant to the needs of the communi-
ties in which it is founded. The transit meta-
phor suggests that the ideal of the university,
as a place of advancement through teaching
and research, is best met when the univer-
sity itself is informed by the environments
on which it is based. South African univer-
sity campuses, like their counterparts around
the world, are all products and embodiments
of the political and social agendas of their
time. Around the world, the post-war era
brought the construction of large numbers of
universities characterised by bold modern-
ist architecture and rigid layouts planned to
host much smaller student populations which
are ill-suited for today’s large surge in stu-
dent numbers and the changing demands of
21st-century education, ideally characterised
by the flexibility of evolving technological
 REIMAGINING THE UNIVERSITY AS A TRANSIT PLACE AND SPACE
developments, changing teaching methods
and a greater need for interactions between
students and staff and the surrounding com-
munities (Coulson et al., 2015: 117–20).
Thus, there is an imperative to reimagine
and reconfigure the physical campus space
in order to not only accommodate larger stu-
dent numbers, but to create a campus that is
centred around a holistic and equal learning
experience that provides for both formal and
alternative teaching and learning modalities,
and also creates a sense of socio-cultural
belonging for all students, most importantly
a diverse student body. Our argument is that
in order to create a learning environment that
is conducive to a ‘future-fit’ university, and
to create a learning space that talks to and
considers a South African/African cultural as
well as a socio-economic context, it is impor-
tant to rethink, reconstruct and re-practice
campuses in ways that mediate transforma-
tion. Imagining campuses as transit points
allows us to think about how spaces can be
reconfigured to become virtual as well as
literal transit-hall channels in which social
transformation is enabled. Thus, campuses
as transit points can open up to processes
that are conducive to individuals, societies,
nations and the world itself being reimag-
ined, reconfigured, transformed and hence,
decolonised. Taking all of this into account,
we argue that there are three main areas in
which campuses can be reconfigured as tran-
sit spaces.
First, campuses can work as transit points
that link people to multiple and varied pos-
sibilities for socio-cultural belonging. It
is interesting to note that in South African
universities that have undergone mergers,
academic staff have perceivably undergone
a shift from apartheid constructed ideas of
a professional identity lodged within and
shaped by allegiances to institutions based
on racial and/or language identification, to
a professional identity much more linked to
disciplines and professional fields (Beelen,
2007). Organisational identification (OI)
refers to individuals perceiving that they
423
belong to and are one with their organisation
(Breytenbach et al., 2013). Beelen (2007)
shows that what the university mergers have
successfully managed to deconstruct as
well as construct is a professional academic
identity that is moving away from a former
apartheid higher education system in which
academic identities were formed by an alle-
giance to an institution shaped by and prem-
ised on the apartheid ideology of belonging
and exclusion. And while academic staff ini-
tially identified with their former institutions
classified as either White English/Afrikaans
speaking universities or their former Black
universities, as per apartheid classifications
of higher education institutions, their focus
of identification has shifted towards their
profession. In other words, their professional
identification is enhanced as a result of a
decrease in OI.
Equally, a study by Breytenbach et al.
(2013) of OI among students at a post-
merger university in the Eastern Cape shows
that students’ race, campus, university tenure
and residence have a significant influence on
students’ levels of OI. Overall, the OI with
the new post-merger university was high, in
reference to the findings of Beelen’s (2007)
study of academic staff having undergone a
re-orientation of their professional identities
due to conscious efforts to change the over-
all identity of the university after the merger.
However, the study by Breytenbach et al.
(2013) also found that new students, mainly
from the formerly Black institutions, having
been incorporated in to the formerly White
university, generally had higher levels of OI
than students of other races and students who
studied longer at the university. Furthermore,
resident students had a greater level of OI
than those who stayed off-campus (ibid.).
What the study shows is that students should
be encouraged to adopt the core values of
the post-merger university to ensure that OI
levels increase. Importantly, the study also
shows that university management should
implement action plans for those student seg-
ments that exhibited low levels of OI (ibid.).
424 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
This shows us that a conscious restructuring
and reimagining of the place of the university
and those who inhibit it can create new ways
for people to reimagine their identities.
Second, universities can decolonise by
enabling and providing extended educa-
tional, professional and social services. For
South African universities, the extended stu-
dent base (Hornsby and Osman, 2014) has
increased the needs for extended educational,
professional and social services including
recreational facilities. And with campuses
essentially built to host much smaller student
numbers, many institutions are hard-pressed
to reconfigure, rebuild and construct new
lecture venues, student accommodations,
and recreational spaces. The University of
Johannesburg here provides an example as a
university built to host approximately 10,000
students but, as of 2019, has a student popu-
lation of approximately 55,000 students.
With dwindling funding, new and innova-
tive solutions to space constraints are much
needed.
In this context it is important to consider
what the residential university can offer by
way of facilities, services and learning expe-
riences that online/off-campus alternatives
cannot. And most importantly, could the resi-
dential campus be reimagined in ways that
cater for all three tiers of students, as set out
above? Could the residential university cam-
pus be actuated in ways that contribute to an
educational experience that goes beyond the
sheer transfer of knowledge? Could univer-
sity campuses contribute holistically to the
teaching and learning experience in ways
that are aligned to a broader societal trans-
formation project? Can we think of how the
spaces and places of the campus can be ena-
bled to make vital contributions to the ways
in which social interactions are carried out
in the service of decolonisation and trans-
formation of the university and of societies
at large? We propose that university spaces
should embody requisite varieties of access
and exit points if they are to sustainably
and attractively negotiate social, economic
and technological adaptations. We think
this is paramount, remembering that people
are powerful agents who participate in how
mediascapes and landscapes intermesh in
the cultural construction of just and unjust
arrangements by which it is determined who
gets what, from whom, when and how. The
emergence of new media technologies, how-
ever, presents new options for how people
may act, changing the horizons of signifi-
cance within which information, knowledge,
wisdom, legitimacy, meaning, etc. are situa-
tionally engaged with practices that variously
evidence both freedom and subjugation.
Third, campuses can decolonise by rec-
reating and facilitating decolonised rela-
tionships between the university, the city/
surrounding community and broader socio-
economic policies and imperatives nation-
ally, regionally and globally. It is argued that
to be useful to Africa and the world, African
universities have to be grounded in African
communities and cultures (cf. Makgoba
and Seepe, 2004: 19), and that as Kwame
Nkrumah put it already in 1956, ‘The
African university draws its inspiration from
its environment, as an Indigenous tree grow-
ing from a seed that is planted and nurtured
in African soil’, and with a ‘consciousness
of an African identity from which it derives
and celebrates its strengths and assesses
those strengths to its own comparative and
competitive advantage on the international
stage’ (Nkrumah, 1956). Further, transfor-
mation and decolonisation projects will have
to take seriously their broader stakeholder
relationships and make stakeholders key to
the transformation agenda of the university
and give them real and tangible stakes in the
facilities and services of the campus. Thus,
university campuses must be configured in
such a way that, unlike, for example, US uni-
versity campuses, that have been structured
as a ‘place apart’ (cf. Haar, 2011) and built
as microcosms of cities (Yanni, 2012: 348),
they instead become a place that is part of the
surrounding community, rather than ‘apart’
from it3.
 REIMAGINING THE UNIVERSITY AS A TRANSIT PLACE AND SPACE
CONCLUSION
Universities mediate and connect people in
innumerable ways that constitute opportuni-
ties for university managements and for con-
stituent members to rethink and remake
education. We have contended that university
places and spaces can and should be config-
ured to enable people to have requisite varie-
ties of options for entry, exit and progress in
ways that both recognise the best of extant
cultures and exceed them. For this we have
used the transit metaphor.
As transit places and spaces, universities
can act as vital nodes for the transitions South
Africa envisions in order to advance decolo-
nisation. To do so, it is necessary for those
who think and act for the decolonisation of
the university to remove structural, material
and other barriers that would limit the extent
to which the university functions optimally as
a transit place and space. This rethinking will
surely challenge architects, planners, univer-
sity leadership, academics and students, as
well as other stakeholders of the university
to fundamentally rethink the campus and the
roles it should fulfil. Ultimately, how uni-
versities are constituted as places that are
entered and exited has something to say for
how people live, teach, learn and research,
with consequences for the relationship of
the university to societies and their histori-
cally formed material and other needs. Thus,
how places are constituted and socially given
meaning say a great deal about how decoloni-
sation of the university will transpire.
Notes
1  The main building of RAU, with its horseshoe
formation, harks strongly to the tradition
of Afrikaner settlers forming a ‘laager’, i.e.
positioning their wagons into a protective
formation to barricade themselves from feared
threats posed by the ‘natives’ on whose land
they took occupation. Like much architecture of
its time, what is now UJ provides an example not
only of the apartheid state’s misguided and racially
425
exclusive ideological flirtations with modernism,
but also its commitment to grow the economy,
at the benefits of whites only, through the use of
cheap and readily available cement. And of course,
most concretely, no pun intended, the University
was built to accommodate a much smaller, and
at the time, exclusively white student fraternity.
While South Africa is not alone in having seen
epochs of architectural manifestations of political
ideologies in the fascist or brutalist tradition so
enamoured with concrete, it created its own form
of architecture best described as a ‘neo-fascist
concrete brutalism’ enmeshed in, and informed
by, the apartheid regime’s obsession with defence
against the ‘total onslaught’. This is made most
visible in the architectural design of the University
of South Africa (UNISA) in the South African capital
Pretoria, built not only as a university but also as a
fortress and defence against an attack on the city.
2  Students from families where no one holds a ter-
tiary degree.
3  The ideals and vision set out in many mission
statements of South African universities, as
exemplified through the vision and mission state-
ments of several South African universities’ talk
of recognising South Africa as an African country
located and oriented towards the African conti-
nent, must be made to form strategies of action,
in that, ‘An international University of choice,
anchored in Africa, dynamically shaping the
future’ (University of Johannesburg), ‘towards the
African University shaping futures in the service of
humanity’ (University of South Africa, emphasis in
university statement), ‘UCT aspires to become a
premier academic meeting point between South
Africa, the rest of Africa and the world’ (Univer-
sity of Cape Town), ‘Building lives, transforming a
nation, advancing a continent’ (University of the
Witwatersrand). Most importantly, these vision
and mission statements must be given ‘concrete’
meaning through the way in which the place and
space of campus is configured.
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When I Open My Alas:
Developing a Transnational
Mariposa Consciousness
INTRODUCTION
During one of my many trips to my home-
land, I decided to search for books on gender
studies and masculinities in Panama. After
visiting several bookstores, I realized these
places lacked information about masculini-
ties. When I asked one of the associates at El
Machetazo about books on masculinities, the
woman looked at me as if I were an extrater-
restrial. Still interested about the topic, the
next day I decided to visit another bookstore.
This time I walked to Vía Argentina until I
found Portobelo Bookstore. When I entered
the bookstore, there were two middle-aged
men chatting about things they could do to
bring more clients to the bookstore. Seizing
on the opportunity, I decided to approach
them and share my quest for books on gender
studies and masculinities in Panama. However,
the most interesting thing about my visit was
how these two gentlemen understood gender
sexual orientation in Panama, although I tried
to explain to them that masculinity was not a
41
J u a n R í o s Ve g a
single and homogeneous word and that some
heterosexual men happen to have sex with
other men and still claim to be straight men.
Instead, society understands ‘being gay’ as a
term for men who look and act very effemi-
nate, like to be penetrated, and feel and dress
like women. As expected, these two gentle-
men mentioned some examples of being gay
in Panama, perpetuating the idea that gays are
usually labeled as hair stylists, dressmakers
for carnival and beauty pageants, or those
who dance ballet. Later, I shared with them
that in Panama there is a double standard
when people refer to sexual orientation – they
usually associate it with HIV and AIDS; how-
ever, on the other side, when gays are openly
out, corporations and local channels use them
as commodifiers to make fun of them and/or
to increase their ratings.
It was that overwhelming trip and my con-
stant struggles with my queer of color and
gay identities that prompted me to write my
testimonios about being gay in my home-
land. It is through my writing that I made my
 WHEN I OPEN MY ALAS: DEVELOPING A TRANSNATIONAL MARIPOSA CONSCIOUSNESS
personal experiences political by meeting
other queers of color and jot@s (term used
in Mexico to refer to the LGBTIQ commu-
nity) in the United States, and some other gay
Panamanian writers and activists.
LITERATURE REVIEW
As a scholar, I have experienced some
frustration with not finding a voice within
queer studies, a voice that could speak about
the gay experience of Latino males,
especially in Panama. Reading Hames-
García’s (2011) article titled ‘Queer Theory
Revisited’ allowed me to find a niche in
traditional queer studies. I learned that I was
not alone on my quest to address Latino/a
queerness from a non-traditional ontology.
For example, Hames-García posits that even
though White queers have been using
‘theories of color’ (2011: 26), they have only
been used as part of their footnotes to
support their claims. He argues that queer
theory and lesbian and gay studies have not
been able to address ‘theories of color’
correctly; they have only become part of
queer genealogies for strategic purposes.
Hames-García argues that race, gender,
sexuality, and class are constantly interrelated
and not occasionally intersected like other
scholars have theorized. He claims that
queer theory lacks an analysis of race and its
interrelations with other identities (2011:
29). Kumashiro agrees, stating that an
identity only has meaning when it is related
to other identities; there can never be an
identity that is all-inclusive (2001: 6).
Hames-García claims that even though most
of the canonical works of queer theory
portray people of color as ‘colorful’, without
ever completely integrating an analysis of
race into the primary frameworks, the
contributions of people of color are necessary
since they can provide a look into how their
topics relate to race and how race is
interrelated to other identities (2011: 29).
429
The lack of relevant analysis on queers of
color and in-depth discussions of race, gen-
der, and sexuality led to a new split within
queer studies called ‘queer of color critique’
(Ferguson, Aberrations, cited in Hames-
Garcia, 2011: 37). Drawing from women of
color feminism, lesbian feminism, transfor-
mational feminisms, radical philosophies,
US Third World feminism, and anticolonial
theorists, queer of color critique develops a
better understanding of how race, sexuality,
gender, and other forms of oppression are
interrelated. Queer and non-queer scholars
challenge dominant (White) epistemolo-
gies in order to analyze oppression and the
marginalization of people of color, espe-
cially queers of color, by sharing their own
histories, counter-narratives, and testimo-
nios while giving birth to new epistemolo-
gies. Some scholars of color have decided to
expand on gay, lesbian, and queer studies in
order to raise their voice in academia while
others have decided to move away from a
queer identity. A queer of color critique has
dismantled and keeps dismantling how queer
sexualities were normalized in places like
Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, and
also how ‘queer sexualities [have] persisted
despite US colonialist practices’ (Kumashiro,
2001: 7). In order to analyze how those queer
sexualities were normalized as a result of
colonialism, queer scholars have drawn a line
and call it ‘colonial difference’ and ‘modern
sexuality’ (Hames-García, 2011: 40).
Within that ‘colonial difference’
approach, scholars have unveiled how some
‘“native” cultures traditionally viewed gen-
der and sexuality in very different ways
than the binary system that predominates
Euro-American thought: a system that stipu-
lates that we are male or female, masculine
or feminine, straight or gay’ (Kumashiro,
2001: 7). As a result, queers of color schol-
ars have invested their time to understand
how queers of color have resisted oppression
and marginalization as part of the coloniza-
tion, immigration, slavery, capitalism, and
post-colonialism.
430 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
A Transnational Mariposa
Consciousness
Like the story of the Ugly Duckling, it was
not until I attended and presented the genesis
of this paper at the Association for Jotería
Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS)
conference in Phoenix, Arizona in 2015 that
I discovered a safe space where queer schol-
ars and community activists voiced their
personal and communal stories using a jote-
ría epistemology. Hames-García claims, ‘As
jotería, our bodies and our selves are lived
legacies of colonialism, racism, xenophobia,
homophobia, sexism, and heterosexism’
(2014: 136). Within jotería studies the political
becomes personal, meaning we cannot ignore
our personal experiences while decolonizing
traditional epistemologies and advocating for
social justice.
Drawing from queers of color epistemolo-
gies, jotería studies, and Daniel Enriquez
Pérez’s (2014) ‘mariposa consciousness’,
I analyze a transnational mariposa con-
sciousness as a Latin American man who
self-­identifies as a queer of color in the United
States, but through constant trips to my home-
land of Panama, my identity shift pushes me
to adopt a homosexual identity. It is based on
these geographical borders as a transnational
that I share my personal experiences as an
immigrant/Latino man of color that make the
political (gay) something personal (maricón,
cueco, loca, pato) (derogative terms to refer
to homosexuals in Panama). It is important to
understand that in order to develop my own
transnational mariposa consciousness I need
to know my own history and embrace all ele-
ments of my shifting identities. I understand
that I cannot feel ashamed of who I am or of
what I do naturally.
I use mariposa as a symbol of traveling,
border-crossing, critical-lens resiliency, and
advocacy. Pérez claims that many Chicano/a
and Latino/a artists and writers have used
butterfly imagery to develop a mariposa
consciousness as a decolonizing theory and
as ‘a symbol of transformation, life, death,
resiliency, migration, and the soul’ (2014: 99).
As a transnational mariposa, I keep crossing
territorial and social borders that sometimes
leave me tired and hopeless; this border-cross-
ing that makes me wonder about my own self
as someone who can claim to be a queer of
color in one space and homosexual in a dif-
ferent space. It is this transnational identity
shifting that always reminds me that I live in
what Anzaldúa referred to as ‘borderlands, a
vague and undetermined place created by the
emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’
(2007: 25), making me realize that I belong
to ‘los atravesados’ (the stubborns). It is this
transnational consciousness that allows me
to develop my own mariposa consciousness.
I learn to be a queer of color in the United
States, but also become consciously aware
of my flesh and soul as gay in Panama. As a
transnational mariposa, I experience oppres-
sion and discrimination for being an immi-
grant of color in the United States, and in
Panama, I struggle in witnessing how homo-
phobia, sexism, racism, classism, and other
layers of discrimination are understood by my
own people as normal. I understand that I have
to face homophobia and a double standard
society in Panama and a racist and xenopho-
bic space in the United States. Like Anzaldúa’s
mestiza, I have a ‘struggle of borders, an inner
war’ (2007: 25). While living in two different
cultures and countries, I get different mes-
sages from people: in the United States, I can
be oppressed for having a brown body and an
accented English, whereas in Panama, I experi-
ence oppression because of my mannerisms or
for being labeled maricón o cueco and/or for
never being married at my age. It is that con-
stant reminder about my incompleteness as a
man. Hearing my loved ones ask, ‘Are you still
single?’, ‘When are you going to get married?’,
or using homophobic slurs against others.
As Anzaldúa’s (2007) mestiza, my trans-
national mariposa consciousness makes me
more reflective about my self and my iden-
tity shifting. I take this identify shifting as my
constant transformation of a mariposa con-
sciousness. It is during this transformation
 WHEN I OPEN MY ALAS: DEVELOPING A TRANSNATIONAL MARIPOSA CONSCIOUSNESS
that I open my alas (wings) and find libera-
tion; it is my writings, my testimonials, that
allow me to experience resiliency. For Pérez,
Having a mariposa consciousness is to recognize
‘our inner and outer beauty and strength; it is about
being yourself in your true nature, in your own
words, in all your mariposada – the full splendor of
your beauty, strength, gender expression, and sexu-
ality. It is about knowing your history and yourself
fully, and embracing all aspects of your identity. It is
about maintaining a physical and mental equilib-
rium so that you can soar in all your glory. (Pérez,
2014: 102)
21ST-CENTURY HOMOSEXUALITY
IN PANAMA
Even though conversations about sexual ori-
entation and same-sex relationships have
always been a taboo topic in society, it has
pushed the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgen-
der, and intersex (GLBTI) group to develop
its own subculture. Being openly gay and
lesbian is still punishable and seen as an
immoral act in society. For example, gays
and lesbians are not allowed to have access to
certain human rights, cannot find decent
jobs, and are sometimes marginalized by
families and society at large. In the case of
the National Police Department, gays and
lesbians are not allowed. Instead, they are
considered dangerous toward others, aggres-
sive, unintelligent, alcohol addicts, and/or
physical abusers. On the other side, there
have been some reports of police officers
becoming verbally and physically abusive
toward transsexuals and transgender. Gays
are victims of sexual assaults, violent and
aggressive treatment, and some have been
asked to pay illegal fees to police officers
(R. Beteta Bond, personal communication,
July 2, 2016).
The local media also discriminates against
gays and lesbians with derogatory and dis-
criminatory arguments, perpetuating a dou-
ble standard society. For example, a gay guy
might be rejected by society and religion for
431
being openly gay. At the same time, the same
individual might be accepted as long as he
defines what the majority interprets as being
gay or lesbian: a man who is effeminate, a
hair stylist, fashion designer, or somebody
who loves beauty pageants and carnival
queens. This double standard society pushes
many self-identified gays and lesbians to
keep their sexual orientation as something
private. Unfortunately, this type of oppres-
sion toward the GLBTI group and an internal-
ized homophobia by most closeted gays and
lesbians are usually interpreted as normal. In
a recent study, Castillero (2012) found that in
Panama, the GLBTI group still experiences
positive and negative issues. For instance,
on the negative side, self-identified GLBTI
individuals find a lack of representation and
equality in professions such as police offic-
ers, engineers, and architects. Self-identified
GLBTIs, in this case, men who happen to
have sex with other men, are not allowed
to be blood donors. In addition, the word
‘gay’ cannot be used to advertise or to mar-
ket businesses in Panama since it contradicts
Panamanians’ moral values. On the positive
side, since April 2002, by law the Republic
of Panama grants protection to individuals
who have been discriminated against due to
their sexual orientation. In addition, since
2006, the Dirección General de Cedulación
del Tribunal Electoral (Vital Records Office)
allows a legal attorney to help an individual’s
claim to change his/her sex on his/her birth
certificate based on the individual’s gender
self-identification. Finally, Executive Law
#332 of July 29, 2008 eliminated Article 12
of Law 149 of May 20, 1949 that penalized
sodomy (word used to name homosexuality
before 1973) (translated). Although things
seem to change for the better in Panamanian
society toward a more inclusive GLBTI
group, there are still some institutionalized
norms and regulations based on religious
beliefs, a double standard society, and politi-
cal agendas that hinder the creation of a State
law that protects and grants legal rights to the
GLBTI group.
432 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
TESTIMONIO
Beverley argues, ‘testimonio represents an
affirmation of the individual subject, even of
individual growth and transformation, but in
connection with a group or class situation
marked by marginalization, oppression, and
struggle’ (2004: 41, emphasis added). It is
the narrator who speaks for or in the name of
his community or group. Testimonio also
calls for self-reflection, social justice, and
action. It includes political, social, historical,
and cultural histories based on one’s life
experiences by bringing change through crit-
ical thoughts, ‘bridging individuals with col-
lective histories of oppression, a story of
marginalization is re-centered to elicit social
change’ (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012: 364).
For Tuhiwai Smith Indigenous testimonies
talk about ‘extremely painful events’ (2002:
144). In my testimonio, I am the testimoni-
ante (Latina Feminist Group, 2001: 13),
where I am both the researcher and subject.
My testimonio is communal because it is a
contribution to the collective of the experi-
ences of other gays in Panama, their identity
conflicts, heteronormativity, family rejec-
tion, and a homophobic society. As a Latin
American immigrant to this country, my tes-
timonio challenges the idea of a homogene-
ous and static Latino culture in the United
States. Instead, my testimonio is placed
within a queer Latinidad. Rodríguez defines
queer Latinidad as ‘a particular geopolitical
experience but also contains within it the
complexities and contradictions of immigra-
tion, (post)(neo)colonialism, race, color,
legal, status, nation, language, and the poli-
tics of location’ (2003: 9–10). It is my posi-
tion as a homosexual Latin American
immigrant to the United States, who happens
to be a scholar making use of his queer
Latinidad, sharing my testimonio on my last
trip to my homeland. It was a very emotional
and painful trip. Emotional because it is
always good to reconnect with family and
friends, but painful when I spent some time
witnessing how my homosexual comrades
are still marginalized and silenced by a soci-
ety that prefers to ignore how issues of
racism, classism, sexuality, and gender shape
people’s lives. Today, as a Latin American
queer of color living in this country, I feel the
courage to voice this experience as testimo-
nio that ‘travels’, looking for a larger audi-
ence that can observe, witness, and feel
solidarity for my community (Cruz, 2012).
Like other queer scholars of color, I truly
believe that the future of theories of queers of
color will depend on moving away from a White
gay male ontology. The history of queer theory,
under the umbrella of feminist studies, allowed
me to place queer theory in time. It helped me
to better understand how it started, its founders,
and their claims; however, my encounter with
a queer of color critique and jotería studies led
me to find a new scholarship where I can raise
my own voice as a queer scholar of color. It is
through the use and interpretation of ‘a queer
of color critique’ where I can analyze race and
sexuality alongside the violence of European
colonialism and Indigenous resistance, slavery,
imperialism, and post-colonialism (Hames-
García, 2011). It is through a queer of color
critique that I can claim that my ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, and other forms of oppres-
sion are interrelated and not interconnected as
many other scholars have claimed. Ocampo
(2012) argues that different factors shape the
lives of Latino gay men (nationality, genera-
tional status, class, race/ethnicity, and location)
that allow gay Latino men to perform differ-
ent masculinities. It is through the exploration
of those factors where I can challenge domi-
nant binaries of male/female, man/woman,
top/bottom, pasivo/activo, macho/loca within
the pan-ethnic Latin Americans (Mexicans,
Salvadorans, Argentinians, Panamanians) who
also self-identify as queers, gays, bisexuals,
transgender, lesbians, or straights. It is through
a queer of color critique and a queer Latinidad
that I claim identities are neither static nor
homogeneous. Instead, identities keep chang-
ing, adapting, and resisting whenever they are
in contact with other identities as they relate to
context and space.
 WHEN I OPEN MY ALAS: DEVELOPING A TRANSNATIONAL MARIPOSA CONSCIOUSNESS
VISITING PANAMA
La Discoteca Gay
I think the day after I arrived, I reunited with
my friend Eduardo (pseudonym). I don’t
remember the last time I saw him, but thanks
to social media we saw each other one more
time. It was ten at night when I took a cab that
took me to the place where Eduardo was sup-
posed to pick me up. I was there; the place
was dark and looked dangerous. It was a
lower-middle-class neighborhood in Panama
City. Finally, my friend showed up and I got
in his car. We talked and laughed, making
memories of our stories when we used to
work as English teachers in the same school.
On our way to a gay bar, Eduardo shared with
me that he was still living with the same man
for over 20 years, ‘mi chombo’ (depending on
context it could be a derogatory or affection-
ate word to refer to Afro-Panamanians), but
that he always had adventures with other men
besides his long-term relationship. He told
me that his new boyfriend was waiting for us
at the gay bar. He also told me his boyfriend
was the computer teacher at his school.
The place was not that nice, its smell was
pretty bad, and it was humid and dark. However,
I felt like a boy in a candy store. I was there sur-
rounded by locas, maricas, pajaros, viraos,
cuecos, los del otro lado, los que se les moja la
canoa, los delicados, las bellas, las divas, and
also los manachos, las tortilleras, and las les-
bianas. I, la loca (gay man), was visiting my
country and was so excited for being in a space
where everybody in a certain way or another was
sharing their togetherness, their homosexuality.
After some drinks of rum and coke,
I decided to talk to a young guy who kept
looking at me constantly, like trying to tell
me something. I guess alcohol allowed me to
take the first step. We talked and danced many
times. Then he asked me to buy him a drink,
a beer. I immediately realized this young guy
was a gold-digger. Later I realized that this per-
son lived in one of the most marginalized and
seedy areas in the city. The funny story is that
433
he kept asking me over and over where I was
from since my accent in Spanish has changed
due to the influence of the English language
in the States. Later on, he introduced me to his
friends, and one of them told me his friend’s
real name and where he lived. Honestly, I
wasn’t really surprised that the young guy
had given me a fake name and address. It is
very common in those places where poor and
young gays or straight people go to hook up
with somebody for free drinks or sex. After
that incident, I went back to where my friend
and his boyfriend were hanging out. My
friend told me that he was waiting for el show
de la Ñata, a famous Afro-Panamanian gay
man who dresses and performs as a woman.
She is a gay icon in Panama.
Before the show started, I approached La
Ñata (it is a colloquial word used to refer to
the nose; however, in this case it has been
used to name a drag performer) and talked
to her about my research on issues of homo-
sexuality in Panama. I asked her for her
e-mail address so I could contact her later.
She kindly shared it with me. At the end
of her performances, La Ñata thanked the
audience, especially me. She said, ‘I want
to thank a Panamanian who is here visiting
our country now’. I felt so special for it that
I ended up joining her on stage and gave her
a tip for her excellent job. After the show, my
friend asked one of his friends at the bar to
take me back to my relatives’ house.
El Bar en San Miguelito
Months before visiting Panama I got in touch
with my friend Carlos (pseudonym). We both
studied together but I was a year ahead of
him. I always felt a platonic love for Carlos
but never told him. He used to be very slen-
der, almost six feet tall, with hazel eyes, so
for me it was like reaching a star with my
eyes. I always thought I was not good-looking
enough for him. Carlos and I decided to meet
at a local mall in the city. After searching for
him for almost an hour, I finally found him.
There he was seated at a table waiting for me
434 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
to arrive and worried because his cell phone
had run out of battery. Carlos did not look that
handsome to me anymore, as he had done 20
years ago, but his hazel eyes still enchanted
me like something magical. I don’t know
why but Carlos decided to carry on our con-
versation in English. I followed his game and
thought he probably wanted to test my
English or maybe he just wanted to practice
his English. Carlos and I talked about every-
thing. He talked to me about his affair with a
foreign male public figure who was also a
writer and married with children, but because
of a financial problem, he was in jail back in
his country. Carlos also talked to me about
his first sexual intercourse with an Indigenous
man from the Embera tribe in Darien. I shared
with him about my 11-year relationship with
Jesse (pseudonym).
After two hours of chatting, Carlos sug-
gested we have some cervezas (beers). He
shared with me that he didn’t like to go to
the gay bars any more. So we ended up in a
straight bar in San Miguelito, a popular and
dangerous area filled with prostitutes, drug
dealers, beggars, and even thieves. But any-
way, it was just part of my adventure of being
on my tierra y recordar los viejos tiempos (in
my old haunts). The bar was almost empty
and dark. There were a few men at some
tables. It looked like the working- or lower-
middle class stopped by that bar on their way
home after working all day long. There were
a few senior and middle-aged men like me,
or maybe younger, at the counter. Something
interesting happened when I was talking to
Carlos about my favorite books. I felt a man
was staring at me; however, I tried to ignore
him. Then Carlos said to me, ‘I think some-
body is interested in you’. I faked that I
didn’t know what was going on. Then Carlos
let me know that the man was trying to tell
me something, but I did not show any inter-
est this time. After a while, Carlos told me he
had to get up early to take some of his college
students to donate some Christmas presents
but encouraged me to stay in the bar, espe-
cially since that man was interested in me.
Honestly, I felt so scared, being in that place
by myself and knowing that something bad
could happen to me if I decided to spend the
night with that stranger. I didn’t know if he
could have killed me or maybe it would be
hard for me to find a way to get back to my
relatives’ house. So I asked Carlos to drop me
off where we had met earlier so I could drive
the car I had rented. If this experience had
happened to me 10 or 15 years ago, for sure
I would have spent the night with that man,
risking my life for a moment of sex, but this
time I decided that going home was a bet-
ter choice. It is probably because I am more
mature now or maybe because I am more
consciously aware of my country’s lack of
laws that protect homosexuals. Also, I have
known of former professors and friends who
have been killed by other men and the author-
ities have done nothing about it. Even though
the whole country talks about it behind cur-
tains, nobody does anything to fix it. So I try
not to risk my life that much whenever I go
back home.
Once I came back to North Carolina,
I continued my search to find Panamanian
writers who discuss sexual orientation issues
in Panama. To my surprise, I found Javier
Stanziola, a well-known writer, and Pablo
Ernesto Salas Fonseca, a playwright and
director, one then living in England and the
other in Panama, who gave me excellent
inputs about this topic. Both writers have
won awards for writings that address issues
of sexual orientation and homophobia in
Panama. Unfortunately, as mentioned ear-
lier in this chapter, authors and other profes-
sionals like Stanziola have no choice but to
immigrate to other spaces where our sexual
identities are not criticized and/or marginal-
ized. Stanziola states, ‘I decided not to come
back to live in Panama after university so I
could liberate myself from insile, caused
in part by local homophobia. I decided that
amongst all the things that I am, my sexual
identity was non-negotiable’ (2013: 868). By
the time I finished writing this essay, Stanziola
and his husband returned to Panama to raise
 WHEN I OPEN MY ALAS: DEVELOPING A TRANSNATIONAL MARIPOSA CONSCIOUSNESS
their son and to advocate for the GLBTI com-
munity. Since then Stanziola has been invited
to multiple talk shows and radio stations to
talk about his writings on sexual orientation
and homophobia in Panama.
DISCUSSION
Gay spaces (borders) have always become like
neutral places for gays and lesbians where
issues of classism are more evident than racism
since it is more institutionalized. A good
example happened when my friend Eduardo
referred to his partner as ‘Mi chombo’, which
was considered a very derogatory way to refer
to Black Panamanians. Nowadays, most
people still use the word ‘chombo’, claiming it
is not racist; however, its racist and historical
meanings have been internalized by the major-
ity of Black Panamanians as normal.
Gay places in Panama (not that many)
attract all kinds of people, sometimes non-
gays and lesbians. In the case of straight
men who like to have sex with other men,
gay bars are excellent places for them to get
easy money, sex, and sometimes drugs. It
is very common to see low-income straight
men visiting seedy places like this particular
bar, befriending gay men and then asking for
free drinks, sex, and money. In other situa-
tions, you can also witness young gay men
looking for older men with a higher income
and financial status. When they are individu-
als with a foreign accent then things can turn
into a fetish. Cantú (2009) claimed that when
sexuality, as a dimension of power, intersects
issues of race, gender, and class, privileging
some groups more than others, the privileged
group becomes more visible. Unfortunately,
most Panamanians have the tendency to value
newcomers more than their own kind as out-
comes due to colonization and American
imperialism in the isthmus during coloniza-
tion and US expansionism.
Panama, like most double standard soci-
eties, have learned to accept some openly
435
gay men as long as they follow the maricón
stereotype, that is, an effeminate man who
is very passionate about carnival queens,
beauty pageants, or who is a hair stylist;
dresses as a woman; or is willing to have sex
with any straight man. La Ñata has become
an icon in a small town in Panama called
Las Tablas, famous for its carnival and infa-
mous for its large number of gay men. Like
any other carnival in the world, Las Tablas
attracts gay men from all over Panama and
sometimes overseas. Even though La Ñata
is not known as an advocate for gays and
lesbians in Panama, his characterization on
stage at gay bars and his active participation
during the carnival has made him one of the
most outstanding gay men in the country.
Although La Ñata has become an openly
gay man and a role model to many other gay
men in Panama, due to local reality shows,
his character has been used to perpetuate the
stereotypical image of gay men.
Men having sexual encounters with other
men does not only take place in gay bars but
also public spaces like cantinas. I still recall
one of my best gay friends telling me how
much he enjoyed going to cantinas to meet
straight men for sex. San Miguelito district is
a popular district within Panama city created
by families who moved from the countryside
looking for a better future and opportunities,
but, as mentioned earlier, the area has become
very dangerous and unsafe. However, as a
transnational Panamanian, it is always inter-
esting to see how people interact and survive
in a country that is led by corrupt politicians
and religious beliefs. Like many cantinas in
San Miguelito, it is normal to see a lot of
prostitution, drugs, and men having sex with
other men. It seemed to me that it was not the
first time my friend Carlos was in that place.
He already knew its culture and how to read
straight men’s body language who wanted
to have sex with other men. Most of those
straight men are married and have children.
Most of them are living a double standard life
in order to fulfill a man and woman binary
roles. These men can pass as straight to their
436 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
families and friends, but once they have visited
neutral places like gay bars or cantinas they
realize that their manhood has not been tested,
and they externalize their inner and repressed
feelings of having sex with another man.
As Cantú argued, ‘the norms, reproduced in
daily activities, since childhood, marginalize
not only men with “feminine” characteristics
but also those able to pass, who were instilled
with a fear of discovery’ (2009: 140).
When I was growing up, it was common to
see how gay men had to leave their parents’
houses to avoid society’s comments about
someone’s son being gay or lesbian. Due to
a religious and double standard society, this
was considered normal. In my case, I left
my mother’s house to pursue higher educa-
tion, but also to find a place where I could fit
in. I always knew I was different, or people
around me reminded me that I was different.
Being raised in a Catholic house was not an
easy task, since our lives are so tied to being
a sinner who will go to hell for being gay.
However, many gay Panamanians decide to
stay close to their parents and to battle fam-
ily and society. Although most gays and les-
bians never address their sexual orientation to
their parents out of respect or in case of caus-
ing them any health problems, most of them
decide to continue this double standard atti-
tude of calling their partners ‘my friend’, even
when everyone in the family and friends know
they are a couple. Cantú (2009) claimed that
it is in the family and the home where gender
rules and sexual conduct and performance are
learned on a daily basis. Unfortunately, due to
homophobic ideas, most people and society
in general usually think about the sexual act
when they think about same-sex couples or
who plays which role when having sex, limit-
ing a same-sex relationship to sex.
Class status makes also a remarkable dif-
ference, especially when you are gay in
Panama. Your social status and higher educa-
tion can allow you to gain more acceptance in
Panama’s society. However, if you are openly
gay (effeminate), poor, Indigenous, and/
or Black, your chances to experience triple
discrimination becomes the norm. Cantú pos-
ited, ‘Groups that are marginalized as sexual
minorities are constrained by discrimination
and prejudice that may limit their socioeco-
nomic opportunities’ (2009: 132). It is com-
mon to hear gays and lesbians saying things
like, ‘my parents know I am gay or lesbian
but they never say anything to me about it’.
It seems to me that some parents believe that
being gay or lesbian is a momentary phase
and that once you get older you will stop
being that way. It could be the mutual feel-
ing of talking about something that could end
up separating families. It is part of this dou-
ble standard engraved in Panama’s culture
to understand sexual orientation in Panama
as a sexual preference (something someone
chooses or adopts momentarily) or a life
exploratory phase. As a result, some parents
start taking their children to psychologists or
to church so they can be cured or saved.
CONCLUSION
Over the past 18 years since I came to live in
the United States, Panama’s economy has
grown more than any other country in the
region, having a large influx of immigrants,
especially from Central and South America
and other parts of the world, due to the con-
struction of new locks in the Panama Canal
and its growing economy. These changes have
also brought the creation of grassroots organi-
zations (with the support of international
organizations) that advocate for historically
oppressed groups. Over 20 years ago, a group
of concerned Panamanians, led by Ricardo
Beteta Bond, founded Asociación de Hombres
y Mujeres Nuevos de Panamá (AHMNP;
Association of New Men and Women of
Panama). AHMNP’s mission is to better the
quality of life of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and
transgender and intersexuals (gays, lesbianas,
bisexsuales, transgeneros e intersexuales –
GLBTI), men who have sex with men (hom-
bres que tienen sexo con hombres – HSH), and
 WHEN I OPEN MY ALAS: DEVELOPING A TRANSNATIONAL MARIPOSA CONSCIOUSNESS
women who have sex with women (mujeres
que tienen sexo con mujeres – MSM). This
grassroots organization offers training on
health issues, counseling, and education
focused on advocacy and respect of individu-
als’ human rights and Panama’s diverse popu-
lation. Throughout the years, AHMNP and
Ricardo Beteta Bond have become the face of
the GLBTI group in Panama. Unfortunately,
because of homophobia, ignorance, a double
standard society, and a lack of government sup-
port for this marginalized community, GLBTI
is still fighting for better treatment of the
GLBTI group and the creation of a State law
against discrimination in Panama. Ricardo says,
Although many people say that discrimination
does not exist toward GLBTI people and that
Panama has a lot of tolerance in this respect, the
truth is that discrimination and homophobia are
still present in our daily lives; they are both
ingrained and accepted. As a result, some people
do not even realize they have experienced discrimi-
nation and homophobia. Discrimination and hom-
ophobia occur even in government establishments
(translated). (R. Beteta Bond, personal communica-
tion, July 2, 2016)
Throughout the years, AHMNP has learned to
overcome multiple social and government
hurdles; it has developed international expo-
sure, which is one of the reasons why I decided
to include them in my essay. Some of the most
relevant AHMNP accomplishments and events
include the elimination of the law that penal-
ized homosexuality in 2008, the Gay/Lesbian
Film Festival in July, the International Day
against Homophobia in May, El Gran Huevo
Rosa (The Big Pink Egg) – an annual award
given to a local individual who has used his/
her position to vocalize homophobic beliefs –
the gay pride parade which has taken place
for over 12 years, two diagnostic studies on
HIV in gay men and HSH, and an annual
award to companies that support the organi-
zation. AHMNP has also become the spring-
board to support the creation of other
grassroots groups that provide health ser-
vices and counseling to the GLBT group.
Some of those grassroots support groups
437
include Nuevos Horizontes (New Horizons),
Asociación Panameña de Personas (Trans
Panamanian Association of Trans People),
and Mujeres con Dignidad y Derecho de
Panama (Women with Dignity and Right of
Panama; R. Beteta, personal communication,
May 27, 2016).
Even though there have been significant
changes that involve advocacy for the GLBTI
community in Panama, there is still a lot to
be done. For instance, there is not a State
law that protects GLBTI individuals against
homophobic practices by the police, and in
hospitals, jobs, and other government insti-
tutions. It is important to highlight that even
when Panama officials attend and sign inter-
national compromises to protect individuals
against any type of discrimination, including
sexual orientation, in practice, those rights
are not put into place.
Panama, like most Latin American coun-
tries, shapes people’s lives through double
standards – open sexual orientation is not
socially accepted, unless you have a good
last name and/or possess a good financial
status. However, the poor, Indigenous, and/or
Black gays who are open about their sexual
orientation are commonly used by the media
as commodifiers to increase their profits dur-
ing the carnival and beauty pageants, per-
petuating the idea of the gay as a man who
acts and/or wants to feel like a woman. Local
media usually increases its rating by bully-
ing and/or stereotyping gay Panamanians.
Panamanian authors like Beleño (1991),
Britton (1999, 2002), and Pulido Ritter
(2005) have addressed homosexuality, how-
ever, their interpretations of sexual orienta-
tion perpetuate the traditional assumption of
an effeminate man or a man-like woman. It is
saddening to witness how gays buy into this
idea of getting what I call ‘spatial’ accept-
ance, making people laugh about them while
using their bodies (mannerism) and language
to show off their gayness. It is also common
to hear locals warning single men who visit
Las Tablas during carnival not to get drunk
for they will end up in bed with another man.
438 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Panama and its citizens at large, espe-
cially those in the media and leading posi-
tions, need to educate themselves about the
GLBTI population. Government officials
should advocate and pass a State law against
any act of discrimination against this vulner-
able group. Instead, they should advocate
for a law that protects and accepts individu-
als who do not conform to heteronormative
definitions and the elimination of homopho-
bic practices taken as normal by the society
at large. It is my goal that my essay will
join Stanziola, Beteta, and many other new
Panamanian literature and advocacy groups
to claim for social justice and respect toward
the GLBTI group.
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Britton, R. M. (1999). Teatro. Panama, Panama:
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Britton, R. M. (2002). Laberintos de orgullo.
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Cantú, Jr., L. (2009). The sexuality of migration:
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Critical Pedagogy and the
Acceptance of Refugees in Greece
Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina Stefanidou
and Constantine Skordoulis
INTRODUCTION
This chapter is simultaneously a review and a
case study of how Greece, a country hit in
recent years by the austerity measures of neo-
liberal capitalism, has accepted hundreds of
thousands of refugees. The educational policies
that followed, as well as the ways radical edu-
cators, inspired by critical pedagogy, resisted
government policy, both on the institutional
level and through teaching practice, serve to
exemplify the power of critical pedagogy.
The chapter is structured as follows: in the
first section, an account of the major interna-
tional policy issues is given. These include:
(i) international conflicts and wars responsible
for the continuous influx of refugees to the
south-eastern part of Europe; (ii) the policies
of the European political institutions which
determine quotas for the number of refugees
accepted in each country; and (iii) the attitudes
of European governments and their actions in
preventing refugees from crossing into their
territory, thus creating the so-called ‘Fortress
42
Europe’, which resulted in around half a
million immigrants and refugees becoming
trapped in Greece. In this first section, the
important role that critical pedagogy can play
in educating young students (both refugees and
local residents) about anti-racism, inclusion
and global social justice is also highlighted.
In the second section, we present: (i) the
policies of the Greek government; (ii) the atti-
tudes of local populations in villages and cit-
ies neighbouring the immigrants’ camps, hot
spots or detention centres, thus shedding light
on the widespread feeling of Islamophobia
fuelled mainly by the actions of neo-Nazi
groups that are flourishing due to economic
austerity and social corruption; and (iii) the
structure and function of the refugee camps,
as well as internal tensions in the camps, cases
of rebellions/insurgences among refugees and
the role of non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) in this scenario. In this second sec-
tion, actions of solidarity with the refugees –
initiated mainly by radical left-wing groups on
behalf of local Greek people – are discussed.
440 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
In the third section, the focus is on the offi-
cial policies developed by the Greek Ministry
of Education, which are interpreted here as
segregationist in that they aim to isolate refu-
gee children in afternoon classes, separating
them from the Greek student population. The
critical pedagogy perspective and correspond-
ing solidarity initiatives are analysed, along
with how they compare to NGO programmes.
Finally, the fourth section is dedicated to
praxis – and particularly to the resistance
practised by critical educators who, despite
government policy, support multicultural and
democratic education as well as education
for social justice. Within this context, a case
is studied: that of the cooperation between
refugee students from the Elaionas refugee
camp and the students attending a secondary
school located in the centre of Athens. This
section will also discuss the relevance of the
creation and implementation of a teaching
intervention consisting of activities related to
science and technology developments which
functioned as meeting points between differ-
ent civilisations throughout human history.
The overall aim of this chapter is to trigger
interest in the educational needs of refugee
children, as well as thoughts and perspectives
concerning anti-racist education in general.
It is also the authors’ intention to highlight
teachers’ contributions as decisive agents in
shifting the attitude of the wider educational
community by addressing in particular the
catalytic role that critical educators can play
in that shift. Once more, the terms ‘agency’
and ‘teacher empowerment’, as key elements
of the foundations of critical pedagogy, are
suggested and discussed as key alternatives.
GEOPOLITICAL CONFLICTS AND
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
The continuous and immense inflow of refu-
gees towards Europe and especially towards
its south-eastern regions is one of the major
historical and social issues of the first and
second decades of this century (Reich, 2010).
Thousands of people, coming mainly from the
Middle East and specifically from Syria,
Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, arrive at the
European borders each month, and many
more never make it, losing their lives enroute
(Zimmerman et al., 2011). It is a phenomenon
that has definitively altered the anthropogeog-
raphy of today’s societies (Holmes and
Castañeda, 2016) – as well as the economies
of most European countries – while, at the
same time, not leaving the North American
and Oceanian countries unaffected.
Thus, the so-called ‘21st-century refugee
problem’ possesses some specific character-
istics (Guild, 2009). A central issue is that
the aforementioned people are not leaving
their native lands in order to search for bet-
ter jobs or due to financial problems, so they
do not belong to the much older migration
phenomenon. Nor are they environmental
refugees, which is another broad category.
The vast majority of the refugees arriving in
Europe, North America or Australia in our era
are refugees forced to leave because of wars,
internal conflicts or political persecution and
violence; the term ‘war-refugees’ is often
used in a broadened sense to describe this cat-
egory of immigrants. A second differentiating
characteristic is that this is the first time in
centuries that refugees have come to Europe
from other continents and not from Europe
itself (Kosovo being the only exception).
Three major reasons are identified here
for the consolidation and growth of the refu-
gee problem. First among these reasons are
wars, internal conflicts and dictatorships; a
varied category of political riots that cause
people to forcibly leave their countries. The
protagonists of these situations are usually
either the installed regimes in each coun-
try or specific persons or groups of per-
sons – though the remaining international
community (other countries) also plays an
important role by allowing said situations
to continue without intervention. The inter-
national community – and, in particular, the
‘Superpowers’ – selectively terminate some
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF REFUGEES IN GREECE
wars and regimes while allowing others to
continue to flourish, either from a wish to con-
trol or financially exploit. Such situations lead,
obviously, to extremely large waves of refu-
gees. Needless to say, the international organi-
sations responsible for, among other things,
the restoration and preservation of peace and
democracy – such as the United Nations (UN)
and the European Union (EU), to name but
two – have turned into mere figureheads.
The various policies of the international
institutions concerning the reception and
treatment of refugees in Europe is a further
factor that affects the problem in question.
Although theoretically and abstractly in
favour of accepting refugees, institutions such
as the EU, the European Parliament (EP),
the European Central Bank (ECB) and oth-
ers have, in practice, actually been against
their reception. These organisations have set
quotas on the number of refugees accepted
by each country, and have done little to sup-
port economically weak countries take on the
burden of hosting new arrivals. Additionally,
European and other international institutions
provide selective financial support to some
NGOs while not to others, significantly ham-
pering the effectiveness of those overlooked.
The third component of the European
refugee problem concerns the governments
and the politics of the European countries
involved. Those countries raise barriers –
both legislative and physical – to the inflow
of refugees and impose limits on the time
they are allowed to stay in their territories.
Despite the Dublin III Regulation (Brekke
and Brochmann, 2015), many countries do
not accept or accept very limited numbers
of refugees. This has created the so-called
‘Fortress Europe’, and has tacitly encouraged
attacks on refugees by ultra-right or neo-Nazi
political groups. In addition, many European
countries have exacerbated the situation by
allocating very limited welfare benefits and
resources to the refugees finally accepted in
their territories. It can be argued that the cur-
rent climate goes against civilised values and
is a disgrace to Western societies.
441
Critical pedagogy can play an important
role in the treatment of the refugee problem
and its three major aspects. To begin with,
critical pedagogy is committed to analysing
the relations of power and control that exist
between people and societies (Kincheloe,
2005, 2008; Macedo, 2018; Shor, 1996).
Refugee students educated in a critical peda-
gogy context will, thus, be well informed of
the reasons behind the situations that they
have experienced. Wars, civil conflicts and
dictatorships are the results of the actions and
choices of people and groups of people (in
particularly social classes); they stem from
and create power relationships and, in almost
every case, reasons of social and financial
inequality are in the substratum. Thus, refu-
gee students can come to critically understand
how they became refugees, and what should
be done in the future to prevent others from
suffering the same fate. Critical pedagogy is
a key framework for analysing the oppressive
behaviour of classes and social groups over
others (McLaren, 2018) – something which,
in turn, is central to the explication of the
refugee problem in Europe.
Furthermore, critical pedagogy is gov-
erned by an internationalist, against-borders
spirit (Giroux and McLaren, 2014), which
would make clear both to the refugee students
and to students in the receiving countries
that the ‘foreigners’ (the ‘others’) should be
accepted without restraints. As many critical
pedagogy educators and theorists have often
stated (Giroux, 1988; McLaren, 2016), criti-
cal pedagogy is dialectic by nature, since it
blunts the differences between national tradi-
tions, cultures and worldviews, while at the
same time valuing them. Within the educa-
tional context of critical pedagogy, there is
an inherent rhetoric in favour of peace and
against war (Bajaj, 2015; Giroux, 1997), and
students are taught that conflicts and dicta-
torships can and should be stopped by move-
ments of the people.
A subtle, final but still basic capability of
critical pedagogy as a theoretical framework
is that it possesses means of explaining and
442 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
illuminating: (i) state policy (‘governmen-
tal philanthropy’); or (ii) the dubious role of
many NGOs, in terms of post-colonial prac-
tices or in light of the great economic inter-
ests behind both (Au and Ferrare, 2015; Hoff
and Hickling-Hudson, 2011).
THE POLICY OF THE GREEK
GOVERNMENT TOWARDS REFUGEES
The policy of the Greek government towards
refugees/victims of war is determined by three
major factors: (i) the geopolitical balance of
forces in the region and on the international
scene; (ii) the political balance of forces in the
interior of the country; and (iii) the effects of
the economic crisis and the financial relations
established between Greece and the other EU
countries, with the memoranda being a key
aspect of these.
Faced with the largest movement of popula-
tions towards Europe since the end of World
War II (Louis, 2016), the Greek government
first had to find ways to cover their basic needs
(safety, warmth, food, etc.), and then to place
them within the framework of the educational
system. The influx of refugees was determined
by specific international conditions. Some of
these include: the fact that the Turkish govern-
ment, which has millions of refugees detained
in its territory, threatened to allow them to
cross the Aegean Sea towards Greece; the
fact that, for most refugees, Greece was only
an intermediate station on a journey towards
Western (or Eastern) Europe and only a tiny
minority wished to settle down there; and the
fact that many European nations – some of
them very close to Greece – were either tre-
mendously hostile towards the installation of
refugees or extremely unsafe for them.
In accordance with general humanitarian
guidelines and ethics regarding the acceptance
of refugees (Singer and Singer, 2010; Ypi,
2010), the Greek government accepted all
arrivals. However, it made no serious effort –
initially – either to record their numbers, or to
distinguish between those who sought perma-
nent settlement in Greece and those who used
it as a transit point to other countries within the
EU (Rozakou, 2012). As a result, thousands of
refugees were gathered in the detention areas
or camps (mainly on the Aegean islands and in
areas in northern continental Greece) with no
clear intention or policy as to what was to be
done with them, not least what should be done
about the education of their children.
As other European countries gradually
started to harden their stance towards the
incoming waves of refugees, direct passages
from Africa, Asia and Asia Minor to other
countries in Europe, as well as routes and
passages through Greece, gradually started
to close. This created an ‘iron curtain’ to
the north and to the west of Greece, which
took the Greek authorities by surprise. As a
result, the numbers of refugees accumulat-
ing Greece for indefinite time intervals sky-
rocketed. No clear plan existed, and this led
to explosive situations both on the Greek and
the international political scene. Due to the
ensuing overcrowding and uncertainty, the
living conditions in both the detention areas
and the camps began to deteriorate (Cheliotis,
2013; Triandafyllidou and Ambrosini, 2011).
The attitudes of local populations, both in
the cities and villages adjacent to the refugee
camps and in the rest of Greece, also began
to change. On one hand, there were strong
movements of support for the acceptance of
refugees in Greek territories. On the other
hand, there was an increase in intense activi-
ties and even terrorist actions against not only
refugees but also those who supported them,
initiated by a growing far-right and neo-Nazi
political wave, which clearly related the
inflow of refugees to the country’s increasing
levels of unemployment, to the degradation
of the public health service and to breakouts
of violence or criminality in the involved
territories. Islamophobia became a major –
sometimes prevailing – characteristic of the
racist argument.
The third aspect of the refugee problem in
Greece is the conditions of detention and living.
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF REFUGEES IN GREECE
There are different kinds of refugee camps:
the ‘detention centres’, which refugees are not
allowed to exit; ‘hot spots’, which are identi-
fication centres for refugees who are awaiting
relocation; and the ‘Refugee Accommodation
Centres’ (RACs), which allow refugees to exit
the camp. Some refugees live in solidarity struc-
tures (‘City Plaza’ is the most prominent among
them) and a very few of them live in apartments
managed by the municipal authorities.
The health conditions were and still are
horrific in the camps, since they contain a vast
number of people and healthcare provision is
poor. Outbreaks of disease were not uncom-
mon, and refugees could not – and, very often,
still cannot – satisfy even their basic needs as
there was (there is) a severe shortage of nec-
essary goods and comforts. All these issues
resulted in riots and even insurgences among
the refugees. Within the camps, volunteers
and NGOs tried to help, but their roles have
been in many cases ambiguous, both for invol-
untary but also for intentional reasons. Many
volunteers were young people, not trained for
such situations, who had never faced simi-
lar circumstances before. The NGOs, on the
other hand, although under a remit to help,
on many occasions intervened just to receive
money and funding from the European and
international institutions and authorities.
One positive element, however, was the
response of Greek citizens and educators,
coming mainly from the political left, who
constantly supported the refugees, worked
intensively to shift the attitude of the local
communities towards supporting them and
even intervened in the camps, in any way that
they could, in order to better the living condi-
tions and improve the relations between the
people there.
EDUCATING REFUGEE CHILDREN
IN GREECE
Since the school year of 2016–17, the Greek
Ministry of Education has taken several initia-
tives and implemented a programme for the
443
education of refugee children. This programme
concerned the education of children living in
Refugee Accommodation Centres (RACs) and
those living in other structures in urban regions.
Although a law was passed, guaranteeing the
education of all refugee children, regardless of
their type of residence, the programme in ques-
tion was focused almost exclusively on refu-
gees living in RACs, namely Reception
Facilities for Refugee Education (RFREs). For
the implementation of the programme, 62
Refugee Education Coordinators (RECs) were
appointed at 50 RACs.
Under this programme, student refugees
are provided with special afternoon recep-
tion classes that are usually close to RACs.
This special kind of primary and secondary
school runs from 14.00 to 18.00 – immedi-
ately after the normal school-day has come to
an end. From October 2016 to March 2017,
107 RFREs were founded, in 7 of the 13 edu-
cational regions of Greece, and 2,643 school
children attended classes. Overall, as of April
2017, 111 RFREs, with 145 classes, were in
action. These covered 37 RACs in all regions
of the country except for the islands.
According to the report ‘Refugee Education
Project – Scientific Committee in Support
of Refugee Children – April 2017’ (Refugee
Education Project, 2017), a lot of problems
have arisen in the RFREs. To begin with, the
teachers assigned to the RFREs work with
flexible working relationships, meaning they
are not permanent employees. Because of
the uncertain nature of this position, there is
a high turnover, and this creates a discontinu-
ity in the already difficult educational process
and in students’ everyday lives. In addition, the
teachers assigned do not have the necessary
training to cope with the particular difficulties
of the situation: students that have been out of
school for many years, students with traumatic
experiences of wars and separations, students
who speak little or no Greek and students from
different countries and cultures. To make the
situation even worse, classes are overcrowded
(more than 20 students), and many students are
registered in classes that are inappropriate for
444 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
their age (due to false statements from their par-
ents). Such a demanding environment requires
educators experienced in multicultural and
socially vulnerable classes. In addition, there is
no framework for cooperation between RFREs
and the corresponding morning schools, which
has made the existing dividing lines between
the two even more rigid.
The problematic nature of the RFREs can
be seen in particular from the high school
dropout rates for refugees. Here, of course,
we must acknowledge that the student popu-
lation of the RACs is constantly changing; by
the time some students are enrolled in RFREs,
other students have been deleted due to relo-
cation or change of residence (e.g. outside of
the RAC). Moreover, a large percentage of
refugees, for economic and social reasons,
have been out of school for several years
before coming to Greece. RECs group the
factors that affect school dropout into those
related to the refugees’ attitudes towards and
expectations of education, and those concern-
ing the organisation of RFREs. It becomes
clear that the most important factor deter-
mining dropout or attendance is the prospect
of leaving or staying in Greece. The great-
est school dropout rates and discontinuity of
attendance is observed in Arab-speaking stu-
dents, particularly Syrians, who are looking to
relocate and hope that they will manage to do
so. On the other hand, groups that do not have
this outlook, such as Afghans, have a more
stable attendance at RFREs. Another reason
suggested for non-systematic attendance is
concerns about the quality and effective-
ness of the education provided: ‘They do not
consider it a regular school, they think it is a
school for refugees’; ‘They do not think their
children are learning. Maybe it has to do with
the fact that some of them come from much
more traditional and authoritarian pedagogi-
cal systems. As a result, they do not recognise
the more democratic pedagogical methods
of the Greek school as effective and reliable’
(Refugee Education Project, 2017: 58).
Furthermore, the special condition stipu-
lated by the programme of cohabitation
both in the RAC and in the school (RFRE)
contributes to the problem, because students
have no ‘place’ to go to escape the tension
of school life: ‘At school, children mock and
tease each other, as is always the case. But
here they return to the RACs where the fights
and the mockery continue, because they live
together. If they lived in their own homes and
enjoyed their privacy, this would not happen’
(Refugee Education Project, 2017: 59). In
many cases, it is reported that children bring
the tensions and conflicts that occur between
the different groups in the RACs into the
classroom with them.
Another factor that, to some extent, nega-
tively affects attendance at school is the edu-
cational activities organised by NGOs in the
RACs. Such activities often coincide with the
RFRE programme (although there are explicit
restrictions against this), which means that
they are in direct competition. From this, it is
clear that RFREs and NGOs do not cooperate
effectively. While the latter ask for a lot of
information and assistance from the RECs,
they are not willing to provide them with the
necessary information for their work.
Finally, there is no educational framework
for children over 15 years of age, i.e. children
who do not belong in compulsory education.
These are children still of a sensitive age,
who have often been out of school for many
years in their home countries. This oversight,
combined with the poor living conditions in
RACs, means that, for such children, social
integration is made much more difficult.
The Ministry of Education’s refugee edu-
cation programme has left many gaps in both
quantitative and qualitative terms. The main
problem has been that refugee students who
do not live in RACs do not, in practice, have
access to education. Despite the law enti-
tling all refugee children to attend morning
school reception classes (Law 4251/2014),
the Ministry explicitly states in relevant
documents that, in order for a refugee stu-
dent to go to morning school, he or she
should already have certain Greek-language
skills. Failure to meet the required level will
mean that he or she must continue to attend
classes at the RFRE. A decision to extend the
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF REFUGEES IN GREECE
RFREs’ functioning after the school year of
2016–17 further implies that the future inclu-
sion of student refugees in the regular morn-
ing schools is not guaranteed. It seems to be a
clear political choice to keep the RACs away
from urban areas, and then to ensure that the
refugees and their children remain isolated
from the local population. At a board meeting
of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) Teaching Federation
in Greece on 17 February 2017, it was offi-
cially calculated by a UNHCR representa-
tive that ‘the number of children currently
enrolled both in RFRE and morning recep-
tion classes is extremely limited (just 7% of
refugees in RFRE and around 3% in morn-
ing reception)’. Student refugees who live
in certain structures (other than RACs) on
the islands have been excluded from school
entirely. Specifically, out of a total of about
20,000 children in Greece, only approxi-
mately 1,500 have access to the educational
programme (RFRE) (UNHCR (B)).
The Critical Pedagogy Perspective
It is evident that critical pedagogy can play a
prominent role here, since a totally new – not
pre-existing – curriculum based on critical
pedagogy principles (Bajaj and Bartlett, 2017;
Darder et al., 2003; Giroux, 1988) could be
designed for children hurt by war. This cur-
riculum would respect the linguistic, cultural
and way-of-life particularities of these chil-
dren and not try to integrate or assimilate
them abruptly into the Greek educational
system. As an intercultural, contextualised
form of education, critical pedagogy would at
first address the notion of ‘trauma’ for these
children, in an attempt to respect and resolve
the psychological and health issues created by
the terrible situations they endured. This
relies, according to Zembylas (2012), on a
pedagogical approach that draws on Jansen’s
(2009) concept of ‘troubled knowledge’, i.e.
knowledge coming from the ‘profound feel-
ing of loss, shame, resentment, or defeat that
one carries from his or her participation in a
445
traumatized society’ (Manca et al., 2017:
112). Trauma (e.g. post-war trauma or politi-
cal prosecution-generated trauma) is
addressed in various frameworks within criti-
cal pedagogy curricula and contexts. This
treatment could be achieved with the help of
experts.
Once this traumatic stage has been left
behind, these children should not have pro-
longed ‘treatment’ as a ‘vulnerable’ group
but should be treated as equal to native chil-
dren. Thus, a curriculum should be designed,
overriding the drawbacks of any ‘hidden cur-
riculum’ (Giroux and Penna, 1983; Talbot,
2013). This curriculum would have as traits:
the elimination of all distinctions and rela-
tions of power and subordination in the
classroom between the ‘old ones’ (native
students) and the ‘newcomers’ (refugees), a
respect for cultural differences, fair and equal
treatment from the educator, the recognition
of the achievements of their nation (Arabic
mathematics and Islamic science are typical
examples) and intensive efforts to overcome
linguistic barriers. As Joe Kincheloe writes:
‘In a racial context, oftentimes the notion of
saving students involves a paternalistic effort
to help them become more white’ (2005:
25); this is something that critical educators
should always take into consideration.
At the second stage comes the action of
‘empowered’ educators, who carry out ‘agency’
and fight against racism, Islamophobia and
notions of White supremacy, both among
students (within the classroom) but also in
the local community. It is the duty of critical
pedagogy-informed educators and teacher
­
unions to fight against fascist or neo-Nazi
groups in adult societies, explaining the role
of refugees and standing by them – and, hav-
ing studied critical pedagogy, they possess the
tools to perform these acts. It lies in the foun-
dations of critical pedagogy that a teacher
can help to politically reshape local society
(or the wider society).
The third stage is also prescribed in critical
pedagogy. Teachers – or teacher collectives –
are supposed to enter the ‘hot spots’. They
would perform agency, first of all by diffusing
446 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
the possibility of education in these places.
Let us remember the Freirean first Brazilian
communities, in the villages, where the adults
created groups and the literate ones educated
the rest of the group. Greek teachers could
also help by improving the health condi-
tions in the camps, by contributing materials
or calling – and cooperating with – doctors.
They could also raise money or goods to
cover all the basic needs of the refugees. This
would create – among other things – a much
calmer situation in these areas.
Solidarity Initiatives and the NGOs
Solidarity organisations, coming from the
broader left, have been active in favour of
refugee education ever since the first few
months. Their concept of education was,
however, very different from that of the
Greek government, as they supported the
early inclusion of student refugees in the
morning schools. Refugee and Migration
Coordination, one of the most active collec-
tivities, along with many other unions, is
actively involved in the integration of refu-
gees into the morning school programmes,
and one of its actions has been the publica-
tion of a special electronic edition informing
parents and citizens about refugee rights and
giving direct answers to many questions and
concerns that have arisen.
Claiming refugees’ right to education is to
claim the right to education of every weak,
oppressed and poor man. School is a key
player in socialisation, in the development
of various important skills and is an essential
part of the multifaceted and smooth devel-
opment of children. Particularly for socially
vulnerable groups such as refugees, public
school is a source of regularity in a child-
hood that is otherwise spent in camps and
other structures and has already endured war,
foreign lands and a dangerous journey across
the Aegean Sea. A harmonious coexistence
with schoolmates is particularly important
for refugee children, not only for their own
development, but also for the creation of the
society in which we want to live: a society
of solidarity, humanity and multicultural-
ism, not a xenophobic and racist society. The
problem is that, of the approximately 60,000
refugees currently living in Greece, only
17,000 will be able to leave Greece (at least,
legally); the rest are forced to stay here. For
every child, regardless of his/her residence
period and the legal framework determining
this stay, the state should ensure participation
in a Greek public school.
Refugees could easily and quickly join the
school environment if supporting structures
(reception classes, integration departments
and, in particular, teaching reinforcements)
were to be set up. The authors’ experiences
inside schools have shown that, in such
cases, not only is the educational process
not negatively affected, but the integration of
these children works positively because their
peers support and reward them. Schoolmates
‘unconsciously’ choose the path of solidarity
and coexistence, in sound contradiction to
those who maliciously and xenophobically
argue the opposite.
As far as language learning is concerned,
refugee pupils develop language skills faster
and better through constant and daily com-
munication with their classmates than in seg-
regating environments such as those found
in RFREs. In addition, our goal must be for
refugee students to integrate, and this can
only be achieved by letting students (refu-
gees, migrants and natives) interact freely
in order to establish relationships of mutual
respect and mutual support. Therefore, teach-
ing and learning in the segregated afternoon
schools (RFREs), separated from the social
context, can only lead to both the cognitive
and the psychological deterioration of refu-
gee pupils, and leave them feeling isolated,
restricted and undesirable, while encouraging
natives to view them as strangers and ‘differ-
ent’. As our experience has shown so far, the
particular needs of refugee pupils, like those
of every child, can and should be covered
in the morning school. Greek schools have
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF REFUGEES IN GREECE
a long tradition of managing multicultural
classes; from Crete to Thrace, thousands of
foreigners and migrants have attended Greek
schools harmoniously, while some of them
have continued their studies in Greek univer-
sities or technological institutions.
In order to integrate as many refugees as
possible into the morning schools, teachers’
unions and other collectivities of the broader
left have attempted to help refugee parents to
complete the necessary supporting documents
for their children’s enrolment. Refugees have
also been given information translated into
their own language about the benefits of enrol-
ment. The overwhelming majority of refugees,
although locked up in the RACs, displayed a
sense of hope and possessed a willingness to
do their best for their children. Supported by
the educational associations and especially
by the Refugee and Migration Coordination,
many refugee parents approached morning
schools and education offices in order to fight
for their children’s right to education and,
thanks to their insistence and the solidarity
they received from the local community, hun-
dreds of children who would otherwise have
been overlooked have since registered for and
attended morning school. However, there is
much more to be done; most refugee children
in the country are still deliberately excluded
from school or only attend RFREs within
camps during the afternoons. There has seem-
ingly been a coordinated effort by the Greek
state to keep refugee students out of educa-
tion, and to prevent teachers’ associations
from acts of solidarity and from informing
refugees about their right to education.
At this point, it is necessary to emphasise
the role of NGOs. Their presence is indica-
tive of the Greek state’s perspective on refu-
gee management, as well as that of the EU.
Neo-liberal politics releases the state from its
obligations to citizens, instead assigning them
to NGOs as contractors. An NGO is a form
of speculation, a form of private enterprise
that exploits the social good and maximises
its profits through the unpaid work of its vol-
unteer members, tax breaks and reductions in
447
the cost of social care – leading ultimately to
its deterioration. It goes without saying that
any NGO financed by the EU or by banks
is particularly dubious and unreliable, as the
state has no control over the funds available
to meet social needs. Furthermore, there are
often interrelated interests between the bank-
ing system, the state apparatus and NGO
executives, as the latter often hold impor-
tant and parallel positions on the former. As
Cho (2013) states, using Wallerstein (2004)
as a resource and engaging the lens of criti-
cal pedagogy: NGOs, while they started as
broad social movements opposing the prac-
tices of the state, have, in many cases, gradu-
ally turned into globalised organisations,
practically converging with the aims and the
objectives of those groups with large financial
interests worldwide. In Greece, NGOs are
currently particularly involved in the refugee
issue, in which they act in lieu of the state, and
multinational-type NGOs that act as umbrel-
las for smaller NGOs have already been set
up. It is ironic that the sustainability of these
businesses is directly dependent on the main-
tenance of the problems and crises they come
to cover; to put it simply, they are immoral
organisations that speculate on people’s pain.
NGOs have spread and become active in
many social spheres aside from the refugee
issue, and are now involved in, for example,
schools, where they increasingly implement
training programmes and educational initia-
tives. Their expansion into these areas can be
viewed as a step towards the dissolution of the
state, and their activities consume money that
would be better and more valuably distributed
as part of the state budget.
A SCIENCE TEACHING PROGRAMME:
RESEARCH DESIGN AND PROCEDURE
In this section, we will consider a study
designed and carried out by one of the
authors, Constantina Stefanidou, in a state
secondary school in Athens. This study
448 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
aimed to investigate the possibility of a coop-
eration between two student groups (15 stu-
dents from the school and 15 from the nearby
Elaionas Refugee Camp) and encouraged
students from the school to consider the
plight of refugees, and, in particular, their
education. It was a case study, forming an
educational proposal for strengthening anti-
racist education (rather than a research pro-
ject, the results of which could be generalised),
and it followed on from a four-year campaign
for anti-racist education and education on
human rights – specifically a series of theat-
rical plays related to human rights and poli-
tics, such as Biological Immigrant by Arkas
(school years 2013–14 and 2016–17), The
Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht (school year
2014–15) and Copenhagen by Michael Frayn
(school year 2015–16) – and a drive to
increase awareness of celebrations such as
the International Holocaust Remembrance
Day, the International Day Against Racism
and Fascism, International Women’s Day,
etc. The specific research questions raised in
the study were: (i) are students from a state
secondary school able to coexist creatively
and collaborate with peer students from a
refugee camp – namely, the Elaionas camp
– within the regular school programme?; and
(ii) can history and philosophy of science be
an appropriate framework for achieving
communication?
The school chosen for the study was
located in the centre of Athens, in an urban
environment, very close to an industrial zone.
It had a high percentage of students from
vulnerable social groups, and the overall
educational outcomes of the school reflected
this. Due to high levels of poverty and unem-
ployment in the area, a considerable number
of students and parents took a conservative
stand towards refugees and their difficulties,
meaning that anti-racist action and aware-
ness was particularly pertinent and necessary
to prevent students from adopting extreme
attitudes or behaviours. Over the four years
prior to the study in question, anti-racist
education had included the aforementioned
theatrical performances, educational visits
by Amnesty International, events dedicated
to the International Day Against Fascism
and Racism and other activities designed to
promote solidarity. With moderate optimism,
it can be said that this particular school had,
despite the difficulties, built what could be
called a culture of anti-racism.
The study carried out by Stefanidou lasted
for a whole school year (2016–17). It was
conducted as part of the curriculum, under a
subject called ‘Project’, and formed one two-
hour lesson per week. Needless to say, given
the established school atmosphere of anti-
racism, the programme received great support.
Overall, 30 students, males and females,
actively participated in the project. Half of
these were students randomly selected from
the secondary school, aged around 16 years
old. Many of these students were second gen-
eration immigrants themselves, from families
coming mostly from the Balkans.
The other half of the students who took
part in the project were refugee students who
were staying at the RAC located in Elaionas,
just a kilometre away from the school. They
included boys and girls between the ages of 13
and 16, and came from many different coun-
tries of origin, including Syria, Afghanistan,
Iraq and Iran. Many of these students had
abandoned school due to conflicts, wars and
the constant movement of their families, and
had been deprived of education for a long
time. At the time of the study, all members of
the Elaionas group were attending classes at
the refugee evening school (RFRE).
The project covered three phases. During
the first phase, students learnt about refugees
and their rights, and studied the situation
in Greece (UNHCR (A)). This raised many
issues regarding the mechanisms that gener-
ate refugees and the role of Europe in dealing
with the situation. Students’ research then
focused on the type of education provided to
refugees in Greece. They studied the RFRE,
and realised that refugees only had access
to education under certain conditions and
special circumstances. This finding was the
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF REFUGEES IN GREECE
starting point for the third part of the project,
which will be analysed later.
During the second phase of the project,
anti-racist activities were organised, in which
students from all over the school partici-
pated. The activities aimed at raising aware-
ness among students and actively engaging
them with solidarity issues. One such activity
involved making calendars for the New Year,
which were given to anyone who donated
clothing to the refugees of the Samos Camp.
This activity proved to be very success-
ful; most students actively participated, not
only by bringing clothing for the refugees in
need, but also by engaging with the issue and
expressing an interest in becoming informed
about the living conditions, the ages of people
in the camp, the prospects for improving their
situation and, in particular, expediting asylum
legislation. Students also organised a three-
hour school activity for the International Day
Against Racism and Fascism on 21 March.
The activity was called ‘We are all refugees’,
and it aimed at highlighting the difficulties
refugees have to face.
The third phase of the project concerned
the cooperation between the refugee students
from the Elaionas camp and the students
from the school. When the secondary school
students were informed about the refugees’
‘special’ school, they expressed their dis-
satisfaction. They believed it was unfair for
refugees to be isolated from the local popula-
tion and attend a separate school outside of
normal school hours. They called for a meet-
ing with a group of students from Elaionas
and, after a strenuous effort focused mainly
on tackling bureaucracy, this was achieved.
The cooperation of the two student groups
was aimed at the acquaintance of the students
and the acquisition of common experience.
A six-hour educational programme was
designed and conducted, consisting of activi-
ties related to Arabic science and technology
which functioned as meeting points between
different civilisations throughout human his-
tory. The refugee students visited the second-
ary school during morning hours on three
449
separate occasions to take part in this pro-
gramme. This gave them the opportunity to
attend a ‘regular’ school, interact with their
peers, and to participate in and carry out sim-
ple experiments and educational activities.
Moreover, the secondary school students had
the opportunity to become acquainted with
and converse with refugee students of their
own age, and to work together on a series of
educational activities such as: (i) Match the
numbers (Arabic and English ones); (ii) What
is science? Ask questions and suggest experi-
ments that facilitate the answers; (iii) Camera
obscura: study and then construct one; and
(iv) Newton’s colour disc and rainbow.
During the first phase of the project, stu-
dents studied the 1951 Refugee Convention
(UNHCR (A)) about refugees’ rights. They
also studied and discussed the situation in
Greece, using as a reference the site of the
Refugee and Migration Coordination (n.d.).
Students were informed about the real con-
ditions under which refugees live and their
problems with seeking asylum, while also
receiving daily feedback about the conditions
in the camps.
During the second phase of the project, in
order to make the calendars, students drew on
issues from ‘Monologues across the Aegean
Sea’. This is a collection of testimonies from
unaccompanied refugee children from Syria,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Morocco and
Egypt, who were forced to leave their home-
lands and travel alone to Greece, across the
Aegean Sea. Their stories were recorded in
the book Monologues across the Aegean Sea:
The journey and dreams of unaccompanied
refugee children, which was published in
Greek and English by the Hellenic Theatre/
Drama & Education Network and the
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency (Hellenic
Theatre/UNHCR, 2016).
During the third phase, students studied
the context in which Arabic science and tech-
nology developed, using the book entitled
History of Science and Technology (Arabatzis
et al.), which is targeted at secondary school
students and was published by the Greek
450 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Ministry of Education. They also studied the
educational material of ‘1001 Inventions’,
an award-winning international science and
cultural heritage organisation with particu-
lar relevance – in 2010, the London Science
Museum hosted an exhibition entitled ‘1001
Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in
Our World’. Students studied and drew ideas
and activities from the corresponding teacher’s
guide (1001 Inventions, 2017), which they
then implemented with the refugee group.
The results of this empirical study are
reflected on at least three interrelated lev-
els. The first is the students of the secondary
school who were involved in organising the
project. The second is the school unit and
the local community, and the third level con-
cerns the refugee students. The school and the
local community realised that the refugees of
Elaionas were like their ‘own’ students, had
the same needs and expectations and that the
two groups were able to coexist in the same
school. Through the sustained solidarity
actions that resulted in the refugees visiting
the school, the majority of students and teach-
ers, as well as the local community, moved
from theory to action. This was an unprec-
edented experience for all those who were
involved either directly or indirectly in the
project, and it stimulated the anti-racist spirit
of both the school and the neighbourhood.
As far as the students are concerned, both
groups – that from the secondary school and
from the Elaionas camp – gained a unique
experience of coexistence and cooperation.
Despite the difficulties that both groups
faced – in particular, linguistic and cultural
differences – their willingness to help their
peers and gain ‘normal’ life experiences
made them work together harmoniously.
Both groups of students expressed an interest
in further cooperation.
This study brought to light what was ear-
lier referred to as ‘significant cross-cultural
differences in the way people conceptu-
alise and interact with the natural world’
(Hodson, 1999: 780). However, while there
is a profound incompatibility between the
worldview of Western science and that of the
Asian refugees, there is evidence, from this
project, that history and philosophy of sci-
ence can provide students from different cul-
tures an effective springboard and necessary
framework for communication.
EPILOGUE
The thrust of our argument is that, in light of
the formidable social injustices faced by
child refugees of war in Greece, critical
pedagogy can provide the most effective and
relevant framework for their education. What
is more, critical pedagogical perspectives
could serve educators seeking to promote
more equitable, humane and just living con-
ditions and outlooks concerning refugees in
other European countries as well.
Critical pedagogy plays a manifold role
in that its epistemological basis helps educa-
tors shed light on the political and economic
rivalry responsible for creating refugees
in the first place. It serves as a frame that
encourages educators to explain the ideologi-
cal tenets upon which certain political actions
are taken, such as those pursued by European
governments and institutions. Furthermore,
its promoters welcome all ‘different’ and
‘post-traumatic’ human beings into all edu-
cational settings.
Apart from its analytical and explanatory
role, critical pedagogy could provide agency
and solutions for the aforementioned children
through the development of a more suitable
curriculum, and by seeking to improve their
daily lives, to resolve their severe survival
issues, and to restrict Nazi and fascist reac-
tions towards them. In the activities outlined
in this chapter, the role of the teacher as a
unit, or teachers’ collective actions, become
extremely important, thus validating the
identity of ‘transformative intellectuals’ that
critical pedagogy attributes to them.
To avoid mere theoretical negotiation, this
chapter has also offered a concrete example of
educational praxis, where critical pedagogy
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF REFUGEES IN GREECE
was applied in a Greek secondary school in
Elaionas as the basis for the education of a
group of refugees. The results of this attempt
and the difficulties faced have also been dis-
cussed in order to explore new horizons for
future applications.
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Indigenous Critical Pedagogy
in Underserved Environments
in India
INTRODUCTION
Children in underserved environments are sus-
ceptible to malnutrition and lack of opportuni-
ties for education, the very reasons that keep
them chained in cycles of poverty. Poverty is
not just an economic reality, it is also a social,
cultural, emotional and psychological con-
struct often resulting from rampant exploita-
tion of people and resources. Millions of
Indian children’s necessities concerning food,
clothing and shelter, apart from education and
development opportunities, are simply not
met. This number corresponds to an astound-
ing 31% of the world’s children (The Hindu,
2017). While there has been progress in bridg-
ing gaps in access to food, clothing and shelter,
education and health have remained grossly
neglected aspects. India spends only about
3.71% of its GDP on education as compared to
approximately 6% by Brazil and South Africa,
its peer countries (Shukla, 2017). The burden
that the word ‘underserved’ carries along
with its own connotation deprives millions of
43
Madhulika Sagaram
children access to quality education and edu-
cational opportunities.
Since only the underserved send their chil-
dren either to the free schools run by the gov-
ernment or to low-income private schools,
parents as well as children are shortchanged
in receiving quality education due to a lack of
awareness and illiteracy. The government-run
schools and the private underserved schools
function with a hierarchical outdated system
wherein the subjects and material taught were
relevant long ago, but now are limited to the
compiled textbook culture. The methods and
approaches to teaching and learning are anti-
quated with very little interaction between
the teacher and student (Bagla, 2008). Rote
learning or ‘parrot training’ is the predomi-
nant form of teaching and learning (Mayer,
2002). Many Western researchers have attrib-
uted rote memorization as an age-old problem
in the Indian education system; they suggest
that probably the roots of the system are in
the ancient Brahmanical system of learning
(Scharfe, 2002). Students are continuously
454 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
provided with facts that must be memorized
and regurgitated. Such an environment nei-
ther fosters critical thinking nor encourages
creativity. However, it is important to note that
India had its own pedagogy aligned with its
way of life which was destroyed due to coloni-
zation over a period of 200 years. The reasons
that can be attributed to the abysmal decline
in the quality of education in India in contem-
porary times are discussed in the next section.
The purpose of the chapter is to elucidate
the compelling reasons behind the use of
accelerating learning at an extremely rapid
pace. The narrative also enquires into the
relationship of emotional development with
learning and cultural contexts. Learning in
any culture should be based on relevant con-
texts, otherwise the content being provided
does not aid in the development of an appro-
priate form of knowledge construction. The
external conditions around children, com-
munities and schools determine the types of
lived experiences that form their perceptions
and conditioning. Central to this chapter is
the study of an accelerated learning program
undertaken in Hyderabad. In the study, the
children created educational opportunities
for themselves by using resources at their
disposal, which resulted in a service-learn-
ing project that benefitted several causes
as well as a public pedagogy installation at
the intersection of mathematics, art, design,
anthropology, science and history. The shift
in power structures between teacher and
learner formed the building block of the pro-
gram followed by a shift in power between
and among the children. When this dual shift
was superimposed with learning rooted in
local culture, art and craft, unbelievable shifts
occurred in the emotional development of
children. These shifts in power that resulted
from the cultural reconstruction of lived
experiences dissolved a good part of the bur-
den of economic, social and psychological
poverty. While the physical reality remained
the same, and the financial poverty is sys-
temically generated and imposes itself on the
children’s immediate environment, emotional
and mental constructs of poverty were none-
theless shattered. Children were facilitated
to constantly reframe their stories and narra-
tives from a lack of opportunity and resources
towards the potential and possibilities that
can be created from what was available. The
pedagogy that resulted out of the accelerated
learning program was a melting pot of several
constructivist approaches, such as arts-based
learning, place based learning, social con-
structivist approaches and varied Indigenous
approaches in India. Implementing the peda-
gogy in critical ways required very few exter-
nal resources; most of the resources were
inherent talent, cultural perspectives, free-
dom of expression and sharing of power. As
soon as the pyramid of power was reversed,
social agency and a change in perspective
emerged out of the shift. Helpless acceptance
of circumstances transformed into empow-
ered zeal to reach one’s own potential.
EROSION OF INDIGENOUS
PEDAGOGY OF INDIA
Indigenous Indian pedagogy was rooted in
the association of ideas and continuity of
experience (Singanapalli, 2017). While the
method of transfer of knowledge through oral
history had been predominantly in use in
India since ancient times, it was not to pro-
mote rote learning. Students memorized
verses, but the meaning of the verse was
never taught to them in keeping with the two
approaches of association of ideas and conti-
nuity of experience. The meaning of the verse
occurs in a flash to the learner through lived
experiences at different points in time, i.e.
across space and time, often guiding the
learner and reminding the individual of their
life and connection to learning. A parallel to
such pedagogy could be drawn with Currere,
which, as described by Pinar (2004), is a verb
denoting ‘lived experience’, an autobiograph-
ical method of thinking and being. It is the
process of the reconstruction of educational
 INDIGENOUS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN UNDERSERVED ENVIRONMENTS IN INDIA
Figure 43.1 The progression of association of ideas and continuity of experience in
Indigenous pedagogy across India
experiences based on remembering the past
(regressive), imagining the future (progres-
sive) and living simultaneously in the past,
present and the future (Pinar, 2004).
A pedagogy that was deep rooted for many
millennia has been reduced to the memori-
zation of a bunch of facts without any focus
or relevance to life and lived experience.
Indian education now requires that students
are continuously provided facts in com-
piled textbooks that must be memorized
and regurgitated as expressed therein. Such
an environment neither fosters engagement
with life nor leads to the growth and devel-
opment of the individual. This approach also
leads to homogenization of learning and lived
experience; the homogenization of learning
systems developed over ages by a highly het-
erogeneous population of more than a billion,
who are rooted in a complex social structure
and vary in culture and religion (Rao, 2004),
has created both inequity and a lacuna in
Indian education. Learning has always been
a social process in India, which is quite vis-
ible through its fairs, festivals, celebrations,
art and craft forms and cultural rituals, and
this form of learning was placed in a certain
455
cultural context or a social process embedded
in lived experiences.
Several progressive philosophers and
researchers in the West have focused on
the social process of learning in their own
social and cultural contexts. The social con-
structivist approach to learning, situated in
experiential learning, has been a pedagogy
that seems very relevant to Indian learning
environments and cultural requirements. The
pedagogy used in the study described in the
chapter approaches learning as a social pro-
cess involving engagement with the environ-
ment as described by John Dewey and later
expounded by Vygotsky. Several aspects of
the later manifestations of social constructivism,
such as David Sobel’s ‘place based education’,
can also be glimpsed throughout the work.
The separation of nature, life and lived
experience in education has been critically
acknowledged in the West by researchers like
Sobel. Place based education is the process of
creating a safe environment in the community
that is conducive to learning. The pedagogy
creates learning environments by connect-
ing people to nature and culture and building
interrelationships between and among them
456 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
(Sobel, 2005). It is interesting to note that
Sobel (2005) describes place based education
as using the local community and environment
as a starting point to teach, engage and learn,
through all disciplines, various concepts that
are entwined in themes across the curriculum.
This paradigm of learning is quite like the
Indian systems of learning that have been dis-
carded in favor of a homogenized education
system. Uprooting from cultural context is one
of the major outcomes of the kind of cultural
hegemony now rampant across all learning
settings in India. A fine example of cultural
context to learning is elucidated below:
During the formative years of the National Institute
of Design in the sixties in India, Professor Hancock,
a British expert, was a consultant to setting up an
ultra-modern design workshop. He took on the
task himself of teaching scientific methods for
using tools to artisans. He saw that they were used
to sitting on the floor and holding the wooden
tools with their legs while sawing or chiseling.
Therefore, he instructed them sternly to use the
work benches starting the next day, and failing to
do so would mean being sacked. The next day, he
was surprised to see all the artisans obediently
using the work benches but not standing or sitting
in front of them but sitting on top of them as they
sat on the floor with their tools handled by their
feet. (Singanapalli, 2017: 334)
This example explains the importance of
cultural context over homogenization, which
has been an inevitable outcome of modern
industrialization and mass production. When
children are exposed to a homogenous edu-
cation that does not acknowledge their cul-
tural identity, their way of life, it results in a
void of learning opportunities. A gap arises
between their way of life and what happens
at school. The child, parent and teacher, then,
are all forced to accept homogeneity without
understanding the core of disciplines and
how they are interconnected. Memorization
has become the norm as it provides an easy
passage to homogeneity and even accommo-
dates it. Lack of heterogenous insights have
eliminated multiple perspectives; basing
learning on the memorization of the word in
compiled textbooks, along with cutting out
lived experiences with a sole focus on educa-
tion for a job, has led to a destruction of the
various value based Indigenous learning sys-
tems across India.
POWER DYNAMICS DUE TO
SOCIO-CULTURAL HEGEMONY
The shared assumptions, values and beliefs
of a group of people which result in charac-
teristic behaviors/habits form the develop-
ment of culture. Uprooting from these shared
values, assumptions and beliefs has many
implications for life as such and education at
large. Cultural uprooting has also decontex-
tualized social structures and learning in
India. Socially, India is a hierarchical society
with complex class and caste structures,
meaning there is significant power distance
between people based on class, caste, age and
profession. Hence, there is bound to be an
impact on the teacher-student relationship.
Learners and teachers are expected to
assign status based on age, class, gender, edu-
cation, etc. As a result, students are expected
to engage in one-way interactions with teach-
ers due to the hierarchy involved. Students
cannot question teachers in many situations,
as questioning a superior is considered disre-
spectful. Based on seniority and superiority,
the learner almost never has a final say or a
voice in the learning process.
The hegemony in Indian learning environ-
ments includes a socio-cultural hierarchy on
the one hand and an imposed Eurocentric
content on the other. While socio-cultural
hierarchy based on superiority due to age,
caste and creed robs children of equal oppor-
tunity in education; Eurocentric content and
approaches to learning do not anchor their
learning in their own cultural context. Since
the Eurocentric content is not relevant to lived
experience, disengagement with learning
occurs. Children are forced to memorize con-
tent instead of developing an understanding as
it is not relevant to their culture or way of life.
 INDIGENOUS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN UNDERSERVED ENVIRONMENTS IN INDIA
Contemporary India, with its movement
towards English as the medium of instruc-
tion, is preparing its youth for a global mar-
ket without pondering over a small nuance:
education is not just about finding a job; it is
about life. As a result, mass populations of
people across the country are being forced to
learn all disciplines in a language they do not
think, feel or express emotion in.
Whether it is the Indian learning systems
rooted in lived experience or the progressive
approaches such as constructivist pedagogy
from the West, the common thread has been
the same: understanding learning as a social
process. Learning is a social process rooted
in local culture rather than a mass production
mechanism with the objective of procuring a
job. It is important to highlight that the pur-
pose of education is towards a fulfilled and
meaningful life no matter which cultural and
social construct we place ourselves through-
out the wide world.
LACK OF TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
AND RELATED ISSUES
The most limiting factor in the power dynam-
ics in learning environments in India is possi-
bly ill-prepared and underprepared teachers
and teacher leaders. The teachers are left to
fend for themselves without any source for
training or empowerment or a proper direction
(Bagla, 2008). Most teachers lack passion and
involvement in their profession because they
lack any input or contribution in devising the
content or the syllabus for the classes they
teach. The syllabus is provided by government
education boards in the form of compiled text-
books, and the teachers impart the content as-is
from the textbooks. Teachers are not ade-
quately trained to disseminate information or
facilitate learning in the classroom. There are a
few poor-quality development opportunities
available for teachers for their professional and
personal development, offered mostly during
summer months (Chitnis, 1993).
457
While governments are focused on
improving the quality of the infrastructure
and regulations, there is a huge lacuna in the
qualitative areas of development of pedagogy
and instructional approaches relevant to local
communities. It is the need of the hour to
engage with pedagogy suitable to local cul-
ture, teacher and student development, and
to focus on community engagement with
schools and learning centers. Only when edu-
cation becomes relevant to the way of life in
the local, social, cultural contexts, and only
when it connects to the larger global perspec-
tive, will it become acceptable in marginal-
ized communities. The study described in
the following section is one such journey into
the issues such as described above.
STUDY BY ADHYA EDUCATIONAL
SOCIETY, HYDERABAD, 2012–15
The work that the study engaged with can be
co-constructed in communities in India, as it
helps children and parents in underserved
and marginalized communities reverse power
structures and create a dynamic that gives
rise to solutions and issues surrounding their
lives. When education becomes a lived expe-
rience, parents become convinced about
sending their children to schools, teachers
are motivated to facilitate the appropriate
learning environments, and children perceive
education as a means of overcoming and
shattering their drudgery. Through this study,
we chose improvement in the quality of edu-
cation as the means and the mode to address
the breakdown of hegemony and hierarchical
power structures in the society, thereby ena-
bling underserved communities to take
charge of the various possibilities open to
them and understand their own potential.
In the study, 120 children at an under-
served government school in Hyderabad,
India, were engaged in a study over a period
of three years by a nonprofit organization,
Adhya Educational Society, from 2012 to
458 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
2015. In June 2012, it was found that 80%
of 7th grade children were at grade 1 level or
below and 20% of children were at grade 2
level. This is a trend that one notices across
India in underserved schools and commu-
nities. It is a grave situation, as there is no
possibility of wasting several years again to
bridge children to the required proficiency
levels. The study doubled as an after-school
program for the children for two hours every
day. An approach to learning and pedagogy
was constructed based on local culture and
the acceleration of emotional development.
Because of the shift in learning environment
and engagement, children were bridged to
7th grade English proficiency by the end of
grade 7. Likewise, the following year, they
were bridged to 8th grade mathematics profi-
ciency and the final year of acceleration saw
them being bridged to 9th grade proficiency
in science.
Accelerated learning programs (ALPs)
are age appropriate, flexible programs
complementing or supplementing schooling
Figure 43.2 The approach used to accelerate children at a rapid pace in Hyderabad, India
opportunities. ALPs are programs that pro-
mote access to learning and quality educa-
tion in an accelerated time frame for children
in disadvantaged situations and underserved
environments. They are most suitable for
youth that are out of school, over-age chil-
dren and those that do not have access to
resources and quality learning opportunities.
Sometimes, ALPs are implemented to fill a
crucial and critical gap in essential educa-
tional services in crisis situations or under-
served conditions (Menendez et al., 2016).
The factors that went into such rapid accel-
eration (Figure 43.2) have been discussed
below as physical aspects in the form of
proprioception and kinesthetics; emotional
experiences through art, culture and heritage;
emotional development through complicated
conversations, perceptions and sublime envi-
ronments; and the integration of body, mind,
emotion and energy facilitated through the
pedagogy grounded and rooted in ancient
Indian Indigenous ways of life and lived
experiences.
 INDIGENOUS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN UNDERSERVED ENVIRONMENTS IN INDIA
PROPRIOCEPTION AND
KINESTHETICS
Our senses and outward sensory perceptions
can be used to enhance our engagement with
learning environments. All our experiences
emanate from within us and our body and our
limited understanding of sensory perceptions
emanating from the body can become barri-
ers that can confuse ‘clarity, originality and
authenticity’ (Sagaram, 2017: 217). It is thus
imperative that our senses and their percep-
tions are clearly understood so sensory
engagement is involved appropriately in
learning environments. One such powerful
aspect of sensing is proprioception, the per-
ception that provides us with an understand-
ing of relative positioning and movement of
the body. Proprioception has been defined as
the sensing that happens in relation to stimuli
that are produced and perceived within an
organism, especially in connection with the
position and movement of the body (Jha
et al., 2017). Sensory receptors, found mainly
in muscles, tendons, joints and the inner ear,
detect the motion or position of the body or
the limbs by responding to stimuli arising
within the organism (Jha et al., 2017). Hence,
proprioception is also about balance and
equilibrium in a child’s growth and develop-
mental process. Charles Sherrington used the
term proprioception in 1906, to describe the
relative movement of the body and body sec-
tions in space (Sherrington, 1910). Henry
Bastian refers to ‘the body of sensation
which results from or is directly occasioned
by movements’ as kinesthesis (Jha et al.,
2017). It is now commonly agreed upon that
by means of this complex of sensory impres-
sions we become acquainted with the posi-
tion of our limbs and their relative motion in
space around us. Some researchers define
proprioception as the sensing of joint posi-
tion only and kinesthesia as conscious aware-
ness of such movement (Jha et al., 2017).
Indigenous learning systems in India have
always allowed for proprioceptive sensing to
be an active part of learning. For example,
459
yoga is a fantastic way of understanding the
positioning of the body and so are many of our
classical art forms. The use of mudras (hand
gestures based on yoga) in Indian classical
dance forms is a great way to understand the
proprioceptive sense of various body parts.
Indian percussion instruments like the tabla,
dhol, dapli, etc. are based on understanding
one’s own proprioceptive sense. Traditional
games that involved climbing, jumping, slid-
ing, etc., allowed for a proprioceptive sense
to develop, as did activities like weaving,
knitting, sewing, etc. Understanding the rela-
tive positioning of the body allows for bal-
ance between mind and body to set in, and
the development of the ability to handle emo-
tions as the child grows up. Children create
knowledge through the alignment of body,
mind, emotion and energy in a natural and
tacit manner. However, the modern education
system does not allow children to engage
with their proprioception and instead makes
them passive consumers of content.
ART, CULTURE, HERITAGE AND
EXPERIENCES
The approach followed in the three-year
study used arts-based learning to facilitate
interconnections between mind, body, senses,
consciousness and kinesthetic learning. Arts
release creativity, imagination and a passion
for education, which serves as the doorway
for citizenship, common good and as the
platform for educational reconstruction and
reform (Greene, 2000). Arts-based education
was used as a tool during the three-year study
to recontextualize learning environments
using elements of visual theory.
We take our senses for granted and our
perceptions to be true all the time. Our senses
and outward sensory perceptions can be used
to enhance our engagement with our environ-
ments. All our experiences emanate from our
internal environment because ‘experiences’,
as such, are actually our perceptions of the
460 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
developments or situations occurring around
us or affecting us, but not the developments
themselves. For when we see something, the
image is inside our eye; what we hear as sound
is a vibration inside our ear. All that we see,
hear, smell, touch and taste is a perception
that is internal to our body, and our limited
sensory perceptions can become barriers that
cloud clarity, originality and authenticity. It is
very important that our senses and their per-
ceptions must be clearly understood to engage
them appropriately in living and learning envi-
ronments (Sagaram, 2017). Everything we
feel, think, perceive, remember – all our lived
experiences – is always vying for our attention.
Any experience that is generated by the senses
in terms of emotion, thought, memories is
internal and in relation to an external stimulus.
What we pay attention to will grow and mani-
fest into perception and conditioning; what we
withdraw our attention from will wane and
disappear (Sagaram, 2017). It is essential that
children understand their own emotions and
interpret them. This enables them to learn to
focus on emotions such as compassion, love,
kindness, interconnectivity in the world and
a sense of purpose. In our study, engagement
with the senses and perception was facilitated
through arts-based learning and place based
learning as the pedagogy, with a focus on the
process of the art form rather than the physical
manifestation of it. Since the understanding of
energy is rooted in art, culture and heritage,
the approach can be contextualized to any
place and its people in the world.
PERCEPTIONS AND SUBLIME
ENVIRONMENTS
The following three aspects, namely, content,
form and context, are filters for the height-
ened perceptions and awareness occurring in
the learning environment because of the asso-
ciation of ideas and continuity of experience.
Content (vishay or vishayam in Sanskrit)
refers to the meaning making process. In the
case of a learning environment, it refers to
the association of emotional or intellectual
messages. Content also refers to the sensory,
subjective, psychological or emotional prop-
erties we experience in the learning environ-
ment. Content in this scenario is not just a
description of the subject matter (Stinson
et al., 1994); content also encompasses all
the emotional and sensory triggers that lead
to a pattern of perceptions manifesting them-
selves as experiences, initially, then trans-
forming into continuity of experience.
Context (sandharbh or sandharbham in
Sanskrit) refers to How does the meaning
mean what it means? The set of circum-
stances or facts that surround the learning
environment could include ‘when, where,
how and for what purpose’ questions (Stinson
et al., 1994).
Form (aakar or aakaram in Sanskrit) refers
to What do I see or hear or smell or taste and
touch? Essentially, it is the arrangement of all
the visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and
tactile elements. The form determines the
composition of the experience and the learn-
ing environment.
Of all the factors being discussed above
and focused on, emotional development was
of paramount importance. On a broad scale,
children were disconnected with their emo-
tions, which manifested in the form of lack
of expression and low proficiency levels of
learning. Lack of space for learning was a
factor that weighed in figuratively as well as
literally. There were four aspects that were
used pedagogically to accelerate learning:
the emotional development of children was
addressed through complicated conversa-
tions to help them dissolve their barriers;
the children were empowered to enhance
their perceptions through the connection
of senses, emotions and kinesthetic activ-
ity; learning environments were reconcep-
tualized using visual theory; and hegemony
in the classroom was addressed in several
ways to make it a conducive social environ-
ment. All of the above aspects are described
in detail below.
 INDIGENOUS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN UNDERSERVED ENVIRONMENTS IN INDIA
ENHANCING EMOTIONAL
DEVELOPMENT AND ACCELERATING
LEARNING
Using the study described in this chapter, it
was possible to facilitate proficiency develop-
ment in English in a very short period using
local cultural contexts. Phonics were situated
in Indian languages and sounds. The English
curriculum is based on enhancing emotional
development rather than a sole focus on con-
tent. Children learn English in the most natu-
ral and intuitive manner without a feeling of
stress or dislike. This is made possible by
linking the known to the unknown and embed-
ding learning in local culture and language.
Apart from a lack of English proficiency, it
was identified that learning mathematics was
a hindrance because of a poor understanding
of English as the medium of instruction as
well as a mismatch of learning approaches.
The majority of children learn through touch-
ing, feeling and experimenting with mate-
rials. However, the predominant form of
facilitation of mathematics in India has come
to be the logical problem-solving approach
using formulae, without any focus on under-
standing of concept. Children are expected
to memorize formulae without knowing or
understanding the basis of the formula or
its application. This study has attempted to
change this approach to learning mathemat-
ics, and has been quite successful. Origami,
paper-bead making, painting and tribal art
were used to connect mind, body, heart and
senses together to help children internal-
ize the process of learning. The whole body
engages in learning and, during the study,
several approaches were developed that
engaged the children. Several fine motor
skills development activities were linked to
the development of mathematics proficiency.
The development of science education is in
the nascent stages in India. For a long time,
science has been facilitated as fancy English
involving science terminology. Neither the
method of science nor the scientific tempera-
ment is a part of the learning of science in
461
India. Critical thinking, analysis and infer-
encing are not components of the learning
of science yet. Hands-on learning involv-
ing everyday materials and life around us
is key to being involved with science and
its learning. This study has made learning
science possible through approaches based
on observation, reflection, critical thinking
and interconnections.
EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
THROUGH COMPLICATED
CONVERSATIONS
Because of the approaches used in the study,
children can make connections between pro-
cesses, procedures, concepts and disciplines.
Freedom of thought, speech and creation of a
safe space to discuss and converse about
complicated issues and make suitable infer-
ences has been central to the approach. The
study provided a means to empowering chil-
dren and teachers to take ownership of their
own learning in ways and means relevant to
their life. Language is central to understand-
ing and processing information. When chil-
dren are unable to express themselves, their
learning is limited and hampered due to
faulty constructs. Emotional development
and language proficiency are clearly related.
When an individual is stunted emotionally,
they are unable to develop higher-order profi-
ciency in a language. It was observed very
early on that children are not able to express
themselves in their native languages either.
So, the focus was on improving their emo-
tional development ahead of addressing the
issues of learning native languages. The study
employed the cultural contexts from the chil-
dren’s lives: celebrations, festivals, ways of
life and family histories to bridge proficiency
development in native languages.
When children learn in their own cultural
contexts, they can make connections with life
around them. They are not stressed or out of
place or left out of the process of learning.
462 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
The pedagogy in the study engages children
with local art and craft and anchors their life,
education and learning in one triad. Children
in underserved schools are deprived of quality
learning experiences as well as educational
materials. With the focus on English-medium
schools, now parents are particular about
proficiency in English: neither the teach-
ers nor the parents themselves can express
themselves in English. As a result, children
are forced to memorize all the content with-
out any engagement with it. The study made
a concentrated effort to replace learning that
has become synonymous with memorization
and regurgitation of facts in complied text-
books with lived experience. The pedagogy
implemented in the study was used to link
learning to life and restructure the school.
Children are encouraged to express emo-
tion in English through various engagements
and interactions. A negotiation process estab-
lishes the exchange of expression between and
among children. Language development that
happens in this manner is very much like the
process of learning their native language and
enables them to develop the confidence to use
it. When children learn in a tactile manner,
they continuously associate their learning with
lived experience. This premise was central to
the pedagogy developed during the study.
INTERCONNECTING EMOTIONS,
THOUGHT, SENSES AND KINESTHETIC
LEARNING: MINIMIZING BAGGAGE
Association of ideas is considered important
in Indigenous Indian pedagogy: firstly,
because perception takes place in relation to
the senses distributed across the body, experi-
ences and messages received from all sensory
perceptions are stored across the body; and
secondly, perception leads to the recognition
of an object or experience through a cumula-
tive series of interactions or continuity of
experience. This approach to learning or peda-
gogy is based on allied complementation with
incrementing meaning and value through con-
tinuous learning throughout life. If the asso-
ciation of ideas and continuity of experience
are to be designed and facilitated as education,
then the learning system must be flexible
across thematic and interconnected lived
experiences (Singanapalli, 2017). The learn-
ing environment in our three-year study at
Adhya Educational Society facilitated the
association of ideas as well as continuity of
experience (see Figure 43.1).
Another parallel to Indian Indigenous
pedagogy based on the association of ideas
and continuity of experience has been that of
transformative or transformational learning.
According to Merriam et al. (2007), trans-
formative learning is characterized by dra-
matic, fundamental changes in the way we
see ourselves and the world we live in. Of the
many aspects of transformational or trans-
formative learning that Mezirow talks about,
predominant is ‘frame of reference’. Frame
of reference is the meaning perspective with
two dimensions to it: a habit of mind and a
point of view (Mezirow, 1992, 2000). The
‘habit of mind’ is described as the set of pre-
oriented dispositions or conditioning that
act as a filter for interpreting the meaning
of experiences (Mezirow, 2000). ‘Point of
view’ is described as consisting of meaning
schemes which in turn can be described as
sets of beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and value
judgments that can be changed easily in com-
parison to the habits of the mind (Mezirow,
2000). Greater awareness has been associated
and attributed to ‘points of view’ than ‘habits
of mind’ and the relative ease of transform-
ing points of view than the habits of the mind
(Mezirow, 2000). Transformational learning
is described to occur when there is transfor-
mation in beliefs or attitudes, i.e. the mean-
ing scheme or the entire perspective meaning
‘habit of mind’ (Mezirow, 1997, 2000).
Both points of view and habits of the mind
decide how the learner associates ideas in an
environment where continuity of experience is
possible. How we make sense of the world or
learn is through a process of finding similarity
 INDIGENOUS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN UNDERSERVED ENVIRONMENTS IN INDIA
in what we have experienced through points of
view and habits of the mind. This is followed
by differentiating within experiences and con-
tinuing learning experiences and activities to
further fine-tune our understanding. We then
find the patterns that group our varied lived
experiences together.
As children, we have a way of being atten-
tive to everything around us without any spe-
cial focus on an event. This means that we are
capable of an awareness of everything that is
happening around us without being attentive
to any one thing. This way we record eve-
rything that is happening around us without
storing them purposely, but keep observa-
tions available if required. Everything is
recorded through the senses and, as and when
we encounter something similar again, we
recall our earlier experience and a connection
is made through the association of ideas. This
recollection does not have to be based on
similar experiences or on an individual basis.
Such connections and associations could be
made through any of the varied sensory expe-
riences (Jinan, 2017).
What this means is that children differen-
tiate between what they have bracketed as
similar. For example, even though there is a
grouping based on similarity in color there
need not be any similarity in form. At another
level, they differentiate between what they
have bracketed as similar. This is an ongoing
and an involuntary and subconscious process:
connecting the similar, finding differences
between the similar patterns or groupings,
followed by finding what is similar in what
they have differentiated, and again further
differentiating, even finely, within the pat-
terns and groupings. This is a continuous pro-
cess of experience and learning that results
in the self-organizing capacity in children
(Jinan, 2017). Children organize information
that is made available to them automatically.
As a result, there is never a conscious effort
in creating knowledge. What this alludes
to is that there is no conscious reasoning to
understand, but that reasoning works in the
background effortlessly. Reasoning is a tacit
463
and natural process occurring along with
continuous experience and without it, the
organization of knowledge would not hap-
pen. This also means that the role of the mind
and senses distributed across body is there
to receive the self-organized understanding
(Jinan, 2017).
What children engage in is non-focused
attention or a non-judgmental experience. So,
they do not focus attention while seeing but
they engage in continuous sensing through
experience and awareness. This is the pro-
cess used for understanding the physical
world, social world, language and even the
two-dimensional world of books. Children
explore the physical world – i.e. form, shape,
color, function, process, structure, move-
ment, time, space, etc. – by re-experiencing
and reconceptualizing the world (Jinan,
2017). This is the mode of engagement with
the social world too often called as play by
adults. Children explore the world by remak-
ing the form of things or any other attribute
they have experienced. They imitate one
aspect and innovate the rest in very imagi-
native ways. As all this happens in the real
world and not in terms of language and
words, there is no fragmentation or sequen-
tial construction or linearity in learning. The
integral approach of integrating body, mind,
senses and consciousness and the simultane-
ous nature of real experience keeps the chil-
dren holistic and integrated (Jinan, 2017).
Learning as a process also pertains to the
domains of senses, intelligence of the body
and human consciousness. Sensory percep-
tions and lived experiences cannot be turned
into words; it is these lived experiences that
create the framework for learning in any cul-
tural context. For example, a story about a
child helping an old man can never substitute
the lived experience of a child helping an old
man in a real-life situation. In the former, the
child may or may not imagine the experience
because the description is outside of their
experience, but when one really becomes
a part of the lived experience, the memory
and emotion of that moment lingers forever.
464 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
By assuming and accepting that lived experi-
ence can be easily turned into words, the cur-
rent education system in India is focused on
theoretical engagement and superficial learn-
ing that do not contribute or convert into civic
responsibility or engagement.
The following shifts from traditional rigid
power-centered and teacher-centric envi-
ronments to diffuse and fluid transmission
between learner and facilitator enabled accel-
erated learning.
RECONTEXTUALIZATION OF
LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
Context of learning was shifted from memori-
zation of content to lived experience in a con-
text. For example, in the study done by the
Adhya Educational Society, there were many
such instances where the context of learning
had to be recreated time and again. A very
powerful example is that the of the 9th grade
children learning the European Renaissance.
While this topic is relevant to Europe, when
Indian children must learn it without any
learning of art and sculpture from their own
culture, this content becomes imposed from
outside of lived experience. Pedagogy that is
situated in the local understanding of culture
and history was therefore applied. Children
were asked to research and find out what was
occurring in the local area during the same
times as European Renaissance. They came
back with inputs about Buddhist art and cul-
ture being prominent in the area. Then this
learning was compared to the history from
their own villages and native places. Finally,
it was interpreted through European theater,
Indian traditional theater and role playing to
contextualize a topic that was outside of their
lived experience.
The form of the composition of the expe-
rience and the learning environment were
aligned in content as well as context. For
example, children could move several grades
in just a short period, as they were able to place
the content and context together. Otherwise,
the content and context were not fitting with
each other and the form of the resulting learn-
ing was distorted. This distortion of form
manifested in the form of a schism between
physical and emotional development, with
the latter lagging and rendering the content in
a non-understandable condition for the child.
It is imperative that the content to be
learned be aligned with the cultural context
for learning, the failure of which will distort
an understanding of the surrounding world.
In the study described in this chapter, the con-
tent provided to children through their com-
piled textbooks was contextualized to local
culture using Indigenous pedagogy resulting
in a form that was in line with the way of life
of the children and their community. Not only
does the distortion of form misalign children
and learning, it also impacts the sublimity of
the learning environment.
The word ‘sublime’ has very similar con-
notations as an adjective and a verb. As an
adjective, it refers to unparalleled excel-
lence and beauty, while as a verb, it refers to
elevation to the highest degree of excellence
(Sagaram, 2017). The study also focused on
creating sublime learning environments with
the creation of excellent spaces and experi-
ences that elevate learning beyond sensory
perceptions. A major learning from the study
has been understanding the balance of fea-
tures between the arrangement of the learn-
ing environment and sublime perceptions.
For instance, if the learning environment is
too logical involving only convergent think-
ing, the arrangement of the learning process
will be fantastic, but the experience will be
superficial. If the learning environment is too
perceptive with sublimity involving diver-
gent thinking alone, the experience of learn-
ing will be fantastic, but the arrangement
of the learning process will be in disarray
(Sagaram, 2017). The balance between logic
and sublime perception is the key to creat-
ing a sublime learning environment; in other
words, a balance between convergent and
divergent processes is key.
 INDIGENOUS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN UNDERSERVED ENVIRONMENTS IN INDIA 465

FOSTERING A CULTURE OF concept of ‘critical literacy’ as an investiga-

INNOVATION AND CULTURE-SPECIFIC tion of classroom practices. The application of
PEDAGOGY: PHYSICALITY TO SOCIAL critical pedagogy challenges the knowledge
ENGAGEMENT and, thus invariably, the power of the bour-
geoisie class. McLaren and Leonard (2004)
state that Freire locates his pedagogical prac-
The reconceptualist Currere model, devel-
tices in a capitalist context, questioning the
oped by William Pinar, develops learning
constitution and construction of systematic
across themes with energy and learning
education in the overall picture of capitalist
focused outward and inward rather than
development. Capitalism as a context is essen-
upward in a linear trajectory. Educational
tial for understanding Freire’s ideas about
experience based on this nonlinear process
critical literacy and his pedagogical strategies.
requires autobiography, a review of one’s
What this created in the context of classroom
own educational experience, a phenomeno-
practices and pedagogy is giving students the
logical description of the individual’s present
critical capacity to understand exploitation
situation and historical, social and physical
and to challenge both capitalist culture and the
life world. An individual’s learning spread
authority of the bourgeoisie class (McLaren
out over space and time (development) and a
and Leonard, 2004). While Friere’s work has
record of the subject’s response, associations
a worldwide appeal, it cannot be practiced as
and intellections, with relevant connections
it is in many hierarchical contexts and cul-
to literature, form the core of the process.
tures. Critical pedagogy as outlined by Friere
The autobiographical approach that Pinar
has to become the inspiration for many other
(2004) talks about is very important not only
offshoots that can be culture-specific and con-
from the perspective of the individual delv-
texualized to accommodate local contexts and
ing into the past and imagining the future
social expectations. The Hyderabad study is a
but also in that the understanding of his/her
fine example of the amalgamation and contex-
own understanding from the past, and mak-
tualization of Friere’s critical pedagogy in the
ing connections between the past and the
Indian context.
future, is a learning experience. The auto-
Pluralistic citizenship and respect for diver-
biographical approach also helps individuals
sity in all its forms is an important compo-
and groups understand themselves in refer-
nent that determines the quality of education
ence to past events and with relevance to the
(Holladay et al., 2003). Teachers who ques-
future. In the process, an individual or group
tion their own assumptions will educate their
can learn from the stories, the narratives of
students to understand and respect diversity.
others, and help each other in connecting the
Also, diversity training empowered teachers
dots. Currere contextualized to Indian cul-
and, further down the line, students, to make
tural contexts was the approach used to help
careful choices and decisions in understand-
teachers and facilitators gain an understand-
ing the social justice concepts of ‘equality’
ing of themselves and the hegemony they
and ‘equity’ (Ross-Gordon and Brooks,
bring to the learning environment.
2004). It is important for teachers and facili-
tators to understand that ‘one size does not fit
all’ when it comes to learning and education.
ADDRESSING HEGEMONY IN THE India is a multicultural, pluralistic society
CLASSROOM: SOCIAL ASPECTS and participants (whether students or teach-
ers) have diverse backgrounds. This diversity
Paolo Freire and the critical pedagogy move- has an impact on the creation of all-inclusive
ment fostered by others that followed his learning environments for students. The use
work in the United States have developed the of a variety of teaching and learning practices
466 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
promotes the opportunity for equitable learn-
ing for all participants in the classroom. The
diverse backgrounds of students can enhance
and enrich learning for everyone, includ-
ing the teacher. It is important that teachers,
especially those in schooling, are trained to
recognize and create such all-inclusive class-
room environments. Inequity exists in edu-
cational settings in India; minimizing these
inequities can lead to the realization of the
collective learning experience that is desir-
able in educational settings in India. This is
exactly what was envisioned and constructed
in the three-year study done by the Adhya
Educational Society.
Dewey (2009) described education as a
continuous reconstruction of experience with
emphasis on the social life of the child rather
than individual subjects. It is this reconstruc-
tion of experience connecting the learning of
the body, mind, senses and collective con-
sciousness aligned with cultural contexts
that created an avenue for power dynam-
ics to shift between teacher and student as
well as among the students. When children
in underserved environments could access
socio-cultural equivalents through education,
it transformed their perspective of life. The
emphasis on hands-on, real world learning
experiences via the medium of place based
education increased academic achievement,
synergy and built stronger interrelationships
within the community, with the leadership
and generated a heightened commitment to
service and contributing citizenship (Sobel,
2005). Because of the synergy created, both
students and teachers are involved in solving
real world problems, teaching and learning as
knowledge creators instead of being consum-
ers (Sobel, 2005).
CONCLUSION
Mere adoption of Western ideas and practices
may not be beneficial in the long run, it leads
to a lack of progress and unimpressive
results. Instead, a thorough analysis of the
resources available, the needs of the learners
and the culture of the community is what is
helpful in devising appropriate pedagogies,
reconceptualized curricula and sublime
learning environments.
Active citizenship is rooted in a social
consciousness of value and civic responsibil-
ity towards the community. When the mem-
bers of the community empathize with each
other, respect diversity and have compassion
for all life, then the purpose of education is
realized. The work done through this study
in education, learning and development is at
the intersection of cultural context and social
consciousness. Children and schools become
empowered to engage with the communi-
ties in and around them and the boundaries
between schools and communities dissolve.
When boundaries within communities dis-
solve, we can engage with diversity and
develop an understanding of a different per-
spective. When children, teachers and schools
find themselves reflected through the cur-
riculum, they find social agency in life. The
approach that was used in the study contextu-
alized education to real-life issues, enabling
connections between lived experience and
the process of education while bridging the
required proficiency levels in short periods
of time. The engagement of schools through
paradigms of transformation based on tradi-
tional wisdom and cultural contexts is what
enables them to become active citizens and
solution providers instead of remaining mere
problem solvers.
When schools become platforms for the
engagement of the community at large to
create a space for multiple perspectives, then
real transformation happens in society. The
focus of the innovation in education through
this study is on the importance of education
for human development with perspectives
on transforming self, ideas and surround-
ings, and creating interdependence through
an understanding of the connected world.
Such an empathetic understanding forms the
basis of active citizenship and responsibility
 INDIGENOUS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN UNDERSERVED ENVIRONMENTS IN INDIA
towards social coexistence and life issues.
The approach engages children and schools
to transform bias, hate and prejudice into
compassion through forgiveness and compli-
cated conversations. This work with schools,
teachers, parents and children is invested in
translating their instincts and powers into
social equivalents. The approach facilitates
the formation of a learning paradigm with
learning as a personal construction no mat-
ter what the social experience. It is based on
the expansion of personal experience in the
external world to include appreciation of all
life and life forms, respect for the earth and
environment, a sense of service and belong-
ing. Because of the synergy created, schools
are involved in solving real world problems,
as knowledge creators instead of consumers.
The approach releases creativity, imagination
and a passion for education, which serves
as the doorway for citizenship, the common
good, and serves as the platform for educa-
tional reconstruction and reform.
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(Dis)Ruptive Glocality Through
Teacher Exchange: Realizing
Pedagogical Love in the
Chilean Context
K e n n e t h J . F a s c h i n g - V a r n e r , M i c h a e l a P. S t o n e ,
and Marco Montalbetti Viñuela
Reading pre-note: throughout the chapter
we will draw upon lyrics from Florence and
the Machine’s ‘All This and Heaven Too’
(Welch and Summers, 2011) as we explore
the concepts of glocality, love, and culturally
relevant approaches to learning how to teach
through participation in a teaching-abroad
program in Chile. The lyrics are presented as
‘breaks’ and appear italicized.
And the heart is hard to translate
It has a language of its own
It talks in tongues and quiet sighs
And prayers and proclamations
In the grand deeds of great men and the
smallest of gestures
And short shallow gasps
Caroline, a 19-year-old elementary education
major, hesitantly raises her hand to ask what is
probably the most commonly asked question
each year at our first meeting with new partici-
pants in the Teach in Chile (TiC) program –
‘Are you sure I don’t need to speak any
44
Spanish?’. Since 2004, 221 students have par-
ticipated in this three-week teaching internship
at a primary and secondary school in urban
Concepción, Chile. Participants are paired with
Chilean partner teachers with whom they col-
laborate to teach Pre-K through 12th-grade
students. Each participant is also matched with
a Chilean host family into whose home they
are welcomed for the duration of the experi-
ence. Our participants imagine that their lack
of Spanish fluency will be an insurmountable
barrier to communication during their time in
Chile. We have seen year after year, however,
that it is precisely within the gaps of spoken
language that the most profound and trans-
formative engagements take place. When
words fail, successful communication becomes
an act of patience and love, relying on finding
the value in unfamiliar ways of thinking, feel-
ing, and being, as we embrace readily and
universally shared human emotions. Translating
between Spanish and English becomes second-
ary to finding meaning in the gasps, sighs,
prayers, and proclamations of the heart.
470 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
A baseline assumption of this chapter is that
contexts are neither solely national nor solely
international, but are always and already
(int[er][ra])national or glocal (Hampton, 2010;
Sharma, 2009; Wellman, 2004). The concept
of glocality suggests that one’s international
context is someone else’s national or domes-
tic context, and that one’s work in their own
locality can, and we strongly believe should,
be informed by a broader range of contexts
and ideas beyond ‘home’. Initially prominent
in business, marketing, and telecommunica-
tions research, glocality is increasingly drawn
upon by numbers of critical-education schol-
ars, who acknowledge the necessity for people
to not only ‘understand the interconnection of
all living things, but also the inequalities and
the disparities that characterize today’s world’,
but also ‘have the skills to address these dis-
parities’ (Sklad et al., 2016: 325).
Common-sense ideas of what it means to
live in a flat world, with constant and quick
access to goods, services, and travel that his-
torically separated people, infused with signif-
icant technological developments in a growing
global economy, have created a call to under-
stand the role of education and the potential
for educational transformation that interna-
tionalization may provide (Marginson, 2006;
Edwards, 2018; Held et al., 2000; Friedman,
2005; Darling-Hammond, 2012). Our interest
here, however, is to ponder how the cultural
competence aspect of the Culturally Relevant
Pedagogy (CRP) framework (Ladson-Billings,
1994) might be enhanced through the lens of
our international internship in Chile when
focusing on love (hooks, 2000, 2001, 2003) as
an action of wholeness and personal growth,
informed by a pedagogy of thinking and feel-
ing (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis, 1997;
Rendón, 2009).
We would be remiss to omit the growing
threats to culturally competent teaching from
contemporary popular and political discourse.
In 2018, media credibility was called into
doubt on a seemingly daily basis by many of
the highest-ranking members of the US gov-
ernment, giving platforms to pundits who had
been relegated to lurking beneath the surface
during the Obama era. Neo-conservative echo
chambers now overflow with implications that
‘equate a focus on social justice and multicul-
turalism with a lowering of academic stand-
ards’ working to ‘divert attention from the real
influences on the problems in school’ which
include ‘the underfunding of public education,
the lack of access to affordable housing, trans-
portation, healthcare, and jobs that pay decent
wages’ (Zeichner, 2017: 50–1). As Kincheloe
and Steinberg rightly argued, engagement
becomes complex given that ‘individuals can-
not separate where they stand in the web of
reality from what they perceive, particularly
since our understanding of the world and our-
selves is socially constructed’ (2000: 3). Truth,
as a result, cannot ‘be investigated outside of
its historical, geopolitical, or sociological situ-
atedness or contextual specificity’ (Steinberg,
2016: 154). The current moment of 2018 was
marked by rampant hostility toward difference,
rises in xenophobia and White nationalism,
and a space where political leaders perpetu-
ated violent resistance to a free press. Like
Kincheloe and Steinberg, we believe that with
the complexities of now, it is more important
than ever that we ‘devote special attention to
the differing ways individuals from diverse
social backgrounds construct knowledge and
make meaning’ (2000: 3). From our perspec-
tive, the way forward is modeled in TiC by
attending to difference in a way that allows
pre-service and in-service educators to explore
truth and knowledge in an authentically diverse
context. We write this chapter with a sense of
urgency given that the intersection of these
social and political times is complex and the
macro-emphasis appears to move away from
the engagement difference.
CULTURALLY RELEVANT PEDAGOGY
Hannah, a 21-year-old student teacher par-
ticipant in the 2010 TiC program, wrote in
her first daily journal entry,
 (DIS)RUPTIVE GLOCALITY THROUGH TEACHER EXCHANGE
I didn’t even make it through introducing myself
without sticking my foot in my mouth. Gisela [her
Chilean partner teacher] told me to tell the class a
bit about myself. I talked about my friends, family,
and hobbies, and everything was going great.
Then I started to tell them what my favorite
American foods were. I didn’t even make it to
grilled cheese sandwiches before one of the girls
raised her hand to ask me what I meant by
American. I didn’t know why she didn’t under-
stand. I told her American meant something from
back home in America. I told her I was American,
just like she is Chilean, and then everyone just kind
of stared at me. After what felt like an eternity,
Gisela finally told me that Chile is part of America,
and that it is offensive to Chileans when people
from the United States assume they are the only
Americans. I apologized right away, but I’m kick-
ing myself for the whole thing. I’ve taken enough
social studies classes that it should have been obvi-
ous to me that thinking only people from the US
can be Americans means I’m ignoring the entire
continent full of people who are just as American
as I am. After class, I thanked the girl who asked
the question for helping me understand. As awful
as it was to upset everyone on my first day, I guess
I have a new way to connect with future students
who see themselves as [words crossed out in
Hannah’s journal] actually ARE American too.
In Hannah’s subsequent journal entries, it was
clear she approached her remaining time in
Chile with a heightened sense of reflection and
reflexivity. Like many other program partici-
pants, she pursued ESL (English as a Second
Language) certification upon her return. Even
those who do not pursue such certification
report a significantly altered approach to their
pedagogical decisions with respect to lan-
guage learning, acquisition, and a general
sense of community within their classes.
But with all my education I can’t seem to
command it
And the words are all escaping, and
coming back all damaged
And I would put them back in poetry if I
only knew how
I can’t seem to understand it
Ladson-Billings (1994, 1995, 2009) intro-
duced CRP as a pedagogical framework cen-
tered on significant expectations for academic
471
achievement, cultural competence, as well as
socio-political commitment, while Gay estab-
lished thoughts about ‘culturally responsive
approaches’ as drawing upon five essential
elements including: ‘developing a knowledge
base about cultural diversity … demonstrating
caring … building learning communities, com-
municating with ethnically diverse students,
and responding to ethnic diversity in the
­delivery of instruction’ (2000: 106). Both CRP
(Ladson-Billings, 1994, 1995, 2009) and cul-
turally responsive approaches (Gay, 2000,
2002) fundamentally recognize that when
­disconnection happens between teachers and
students, bridging those differences requires
­
teachers to engage in a reflexive introspection.
Since coming to the academic literature in
the mid 1990s, much attention has been placed
on invoking the label ‘culturally relevant’ both
in practice and scholarship (Mellom et al.,
2018; Zygmunt et al., 2018; Walter, 2017;
Jensen et al., 2016; Thomas and Warren, 2013).
What is actually revealed in practicing teach-
ers’ approaches, however, often articulates
either only vague and lofty goals of being cul-
turally relevant without discussing means, or
focuses on micro-pedagogic tools and strate-
gies labeled culturally relevant to the exclu-
sion of a larger practice or outcome of cultural
relevance (Dixson and Fasching-Varner, 2009).
As of October 2019, Ladson-Billings’ ‘Toward
a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy’
(1995) has been cited nearly 6,234 times and
her book The Dreamkeepers (1994) has been
cited some 9,697 times, while Gay’s (2000)
Culturally Responsive Teaching has been cited
over 9,890 times in academic literature. These
citation statistics force us to consider why aca-
demic gains for students of color have remained
stagnant and flat despite the significant schol-
arly attention to this pedagogical approach.
CHALLENGES TO CULTURALLY
RELEVANT PEDAGOGY
We recognize a fundamental disconnect
between belief and commitment to CRP and
472 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
the realities of a free-market economy that
purposefully and necessarily selects and sorts
(Bonoli, 2010; Terranova, 2000). Selecting
and sorting is particularly pernicious in a
service economy where the service often
requires a cheap labor force to execute the
supply-and-demand balance. As we explore
our program in Chile, our hope is to focus not
on the pathological aspects of modern educa-
tion, but instead to show that there are options
that do result in culturally relevant approaches.
To accomplish that task, though, we must
briefly acknowledge some of the limits and
challenges to CRP to gain clarity in our
exploration of what we are doing with TiC.
First is the issue of the pervasiveness of
stereotype threat (Steele and Aronson, 1995;
Ford, 2010; Ford and Harris, 2000; Davis
et al., 2006; Reed, 1988). The United States,
for example, is few among nations that view
knowledge of multiple languages from his-
torically marginalized immigrant groups
within deficit lenses, leading to a stereotype
of English Language Learners (ELLs) as aca-
demically deficient, slow, unable to learn or
process, and in need of remediation to assim-
ilate into the United States. These stereotypes
further isolate immigrants and their children
from feeling connected and included.
Second, we see hostility in both class-
room and community interactions toward
difference (Hale et al., 2011; Stevens and
Stovall, 2010: Fasching-Varner and Hartlep,
2015). In the wake of this hostility there is a
heightened level of confusion and anger sur-
rounding the consequences of ­accountability –
accountability designed ostensibly to help
reduce gaps and divides in achievement.
Teachers often blame students different from
the teacher’s own identities to account for the
teacher’s struggles and pressure related to
odd accountability measures like standard-
ized testing. Teachers often frame teaching as
impossible and blame the population of stu-
dents as inherently deficient, and ultimately
resistant to learning.
Third, as adults internalize their own dis-
comfort, they often leave the classroom,
and children often end up feeling unwanted
in educational spaces. Turnover and teacher
apathy are significant concerns often caused
by the stress of their working context, which
in turn causes students to feel disconnected
from adults who quickly enter and exit their
lives. In the case of second language learn-
ers these issues are intensified by a series of
other difficulties in adjusting to new life and
language contexts.
Fourth, even well meaning teachers simply
lack the preparation and authentic experi-
ences needed to connect across difference.
A significant number of our participants, for
example, have never left the United States
and have little idea of ‘other’ contexts. What
they do hear too often appears to come
from filtered news sources and friends and
families with their own lenses, and which
may be influenced by fear, ignorance, or
confusion. We struggle to imagine how
teachers can teach well without having counter-
experiences of their own privileges and per-
spectives. Teacher preparation programs
appear to seldom promote or facilitate study
abroad or otherwise structure experiences
that help their candidates engage in necessary
counter-experiences.
TAKING ACTION WITH LOVE
And I would give all this and heaven too
I would give it all if only for a moment
That I could just understand the meaning
of the word you see
’Cause I’ve been scrawling it forever but it
never makes sense to me at all
The language of CRP is often evoked by
educators to describe their practices, even
though the practices that manifest appear
more as abstract ideals of CRP without
action or ‘actions’ disconnected from a larger
vision of the aims of the work of CRP
(Dixson and Fasching-Varner, 2009; Hayes
and Juarez, 2012; Fasching-Varner and
 (DIS)RUPTIVE GLOCALITY THROUGH TEACHER EXCHANGE
Dodo-Seriki, 2012; Fasching-Varner, 2006).
We explore how the infusion of love as a verb
might provide a deeper expansion of the cul-
tural competence that is required of teachers
to engage historically marginalized students.
Cultural Competence and Love
Love, structured as a verb, has the pedagogi-
cal possibility of supporting cultural compe-
tence (hooks, 2000). Love is essential to our
human capacity for engagement. As an
object, love is too easily commodified, mini-
mized, and decontextualized, whereas mani-
festing as an action, love has the possibility
to ‘nurture our own and another’s … growth’
preventing approaches that are ‘hurtful and
abusive’ (hooks, 2000: 6). hooks (2000,
2001, 2003) and Lawrence-Lightfoot and
Davis (1997) argued that love is, in part, the
ability to build caring bonds with both one’s
self and with others, seeing the full potential
in others, and imagining each other in like-
ness to ourselves as opposed to deficient,
pathological, or culturally strange. Teachers
who find full potential in their students or
others generally draw upon a ‘participatory
epistemology that connects students to the
learning experience, eliciting greater aware-
ness about the subject matter, about them-
selves as learners and as human beings’
(Rendón, 2009: 96). Our hope is that a
pedagogical orientation to cultural compe-
­ that allow an individual to contribute to inter-
tence informed by love focuses on educa-
tors ‘seeing hope and possibility as well
as becoming compassionate humanitarians’
(ibid.: 101).
Radical love, lauded and enacted by criti-
cal scholars such as Kincheloe (2008, 2011),
Gómez (2015), and Freire (1970, 2002), as
examples, bolsters the verb even further, char-
acterizing it as ‘an act of courage, not fear …
a commitment to others … [and] to the cause
of liberation’ (Freire, 1970: 78). Kincheloe
acknowledged that ‘Freire’s notion of Radical
Love has permeated all dimensions [toward
the] understanding of critical pedagogy’
473
(2008: 178). Gómez detailed five conditions
that must be met to competently practice rad-
ical love in educational contexts: solidarity,
multiculturalism, coherence, knowledge, and
choice of method (2015: 118). By modeling
these conditions in our study abroad program,
we establish a point of reference for partici-
pants who will enact radical love pedagogies
in their future classrooms.
Many stereotypes about groups of learn-
ers are linked to a disconnect between one’s
dominant privilege and their understand-
ing of those who do not share those aspects
of their identity (Yee, 1992; James, 2011;
Bodenhausen, 1990; Xiang et al., 2017;
Martinez, 2011). The less one knows about
himself or herself, the more likely the person
is to exhibit ignorance about groups of oth-
ers (Fasching-Varner and Mitchell, 2013).
A love-based approach starts by recogniz-
ing one’s own strengths and weaknesses,
and building meaningful relationships as one
comes to know her/his own privileges, pri-
orities, and opportunities as a fellow human.
Pedagogical love may reflect the action of
how we use teaching and experience toward
the project of working toward justice while
embracing difference (Kirylo and Boyd,
2017). As the emotion and emphasis of love
is felt, the response to the other motivates a
shared space and experience of care, where
once defined differences between peoples
become blurry lines, and joint actions emerge
changeable events of cooperativeness within
a community (Salmela and Nagatsu, 2016).
As teachers attempt to make sense of stu-
dents’ differences from themselves, they
often widen the asymmetrical distance
between themselves and students, focusing
on what they perceive to be either the strength
and power of their own identity or, more com-
monly, the weaknesses and powerlessness of
the identity of the ‘other’. Because domina-
tion relies on fear many educators engage
fearing the unknown in difference. Their own
decontextualized reality ‘promotes the desire
for separation’ from others (hooks, 2000: 83).
474 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Freire’s radical love closes the distances
through dialogue, which ‘cannot exist … in
the absence of a profound love for the world
and for people. Love is at the same time
the foundation of the dialogue and dialogue
itself’ (1993: 89). Our potential to love ‘can
happen only as we let go of our obsession
with power and domination’ (ibid.: 87).
Love Abroad
And it talks to me in tiptoes
And it sings to me inside
It cries out in the darkest night and breaks
in the morning light
Many of the participants in our study abroad
program in Chile have never left the country,
and for those who have left, few have been in
a context where they were not retaining domi-
nant power. Many students travel to spaces
where they were still among the majority, or
vacation as an outsider invoking dominant
privilege. As a vacationing tourist, particularly
in beach-resort-style vacations, it is unlikely
that one can build caring bonds that disrupt
traditional power dynamics. The TiC program
is the polar opposite of a beach vacation. First,
students live with host families who volunteer
to host participants. The families participate
because of the high value they attribute to the
cultural exchange, such as listening to new
perspectives in politics, education, values, and
ways of life, as well as learning and exploring
to understand the other. Maria, one of our host
mothers, shared in an interview,
We see the US on television and movies, but for
three weeks my daughter gets the incredible expe-
rience of interacting with someone from that cul-
ture and I think in the end we all learn about each
other – both ways, you know.
When our students arrive at the airport a
family is waiting for them, total strangers,
embracing them and inviting them into their
homes and lives. With the exception of time
at the school, all afternoons, evenings, and
weekends are spent with the families and the
children during the teaching exchange.
Beatriz, a host mother said,
It is amazing how much we were able to do
together in three weeks – well maybe it is
BECAUSE we know it’s only three weeks, we treat
it like three years. We have so little time and every
minute is precious because you have this great
window into someone’s life and soul and you just
want to eat and drink it all in.
Participant Jessica paralleled these sentiments,
I’m still not sure how it’s possible, but in three
short weeks I have a whole new family. Not just
my host brothers and parents, but all of their
extended family, too. Last night at my going away
party, my host mom’s mother gave me a huge hug
and called me her ‘guagua gringa’ [‘guagua’ is a
Chilean colloquialism meaning ‘baby’, but it is also
term of endearment between a mother and her
youngest child, regardless of age]. I couldn’t love
them more if we were actually related by blood.
These comments indicate that the context for
these home stays is a unique combination of
a desire to engage, nestled with a loving-
kindness generosity that is impossible to
‘teach’ as a method in a traditional teacher
preparation course our program.
Many times, the child in a host family is
the only person who speaks both Spanish and
English. Each year as program leaders, we
watch with great joy as the once dominant-
group participant becomes dependent on a
child or young adolescent for nearly every
aspect of communication. When they have
to rely on their host sibling/s and parent/s,
our participants cognitively reframe their
previously held positions that students in
the United States should only learn English.
While we discuss the value of language as
social capital in the teacher preparation pro-
gram, it is difficult for the concepts to mean-
ingfully ‘set in’ within the decontextualized
setting of the preparation program itself. The
candidates see the value of being multilingual
and how children who serve as the language
intermediary between home and school are
valuable allies in this program, and they inter-
nalize a lesson about the pedagogical value of
difference over its pathologizing alternative
 (DIS)RUPTIVE GLOCALITY THROUGH TEACHER EXCHANGE
conceptualization. By these social forces and
exchanges, participants are obliged to pay
specific attention to the individual, the family,
and the community’s environment, including
their values, beliefs and behaviors, and, if pos-
sible, to arrive at a mutual understanding and
respect for the host family. One student, Beth
Ann, illustrated this point when she shared,
The first two weeks Camilla was at my side and
made sure I understood everything. Then it hap-
pened. Camilla was like ‘I am going out to the mall
with friends’ and before I could say, ‘Okay, me too’,
my host mom was like, ‘Have fun. We are going to
take Beth Ann to dinner’. At first, I was stressed
because Camilla always made sure I could commu-
nicate. I was terrified we’d spend the entire night
just staring at each other awkwardly. There was a
lot of pointing and repeating, and one time my
host dad had to draw a picture, but we managed
to communicate. My host parents are so patient
and kind, but it was obvious we all missed Camilla
there to help. It’s kind of funny that as an adult I felt
utterly helpless without the support of a teenager.
But the better lesson, in the shame of my own
language limitations, is that so many of my future
students at home will have these multilingual skills
and I have to make sure I do more than acknowl-
edge those skills but make them very valued.
Camilla’s parents too gained so much respect in
knowing how much their daughter knew. So, it
was like the dinner of awareness where the adults
walked away like, ‘Hey, there’s bunches we don’t
know and so much the next generation does
know’. Definitely a role reversal from what I came
in thinking about how important it would be to
make sure bilingual kids in my own classes quickly
learn English. It’s amazing what kids are capable of
when they know we trust their abilities.
Such comments have been voiced since the
project started in 2004. Within this study abroad
context our participants learn to love and value
what a child has to offer because, and, many
times, the roles of who is ‘in charge’ or the
‘knowledge possessor’ have been reversed. In
the United States, these teacher candidates are
in command of their own understandings and
their own decisions; relying on a child as a life-
source your perspective inherently changes
who that child is and what they have to offer.
For our students, the time with families also
means that they incorporate into the social net-
work of the family, engaging in a variety of
475
contexts where the families spend time. These
contexts include daily routines and social
engagements with the host families’ peer
groups by going out for dinner and drinks,
having friends over, participating in the fami-
lies’ celebrations, and being engaged in debate
and dialogue about a variety of issues. During
the course of immersion in these experiences,
our participants begin to understand that these
families are more like their own families than
they are different. Participants see the univer-
sal nature of hopes, dreams, and aspirations.
Participants also see that the families are part
of strong social networks where they are val-
ued members of the community similar to
how they position their biological families and
personal social networks. Participants quickly
learn to navigate a repertoire of cultural skills,
verbal and nonverbal competencies, attitudes
and behaviors, and interactional styles if they
wish to push through their discomfort in this
new context. In these moments, the ‘just right’
amount of tension becomes a purposeful and
powerful lesson about love’s desire for inclu-
sion and the battle between inner and outer,
The inner landscape is related to self – who we are,
what we hold most dear, and our sense of purpose
and meaning. In education outer is what we do
with our minds, and is usually associated with
intellectualism, rationality, and objectivity. The
inner privileges subjectivity, intuition, emotion,
and personal experience. In higher education we
have learned to divorce the inner from the outer.
We have learned to numb our emotions and to see
everything in bits and pieces disconnected from
the whole (Rendón, 2009: 7).
Our participants reflect deeply about their
future students in the United States, asking
questions about what it must be like for stu-
dents in their classrooms who are outside of
dominant circles, whether based on ethnicity,
race, gender, sexuality, ability, or any combi-
nation thereof.
No, words are a language
It doesn’t deserve such treatment
And all of my stumbling phrases never
amounted to anything worth this feeling
476 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Participants in TiC engage their subjective
and intuitive feelings centered within an
emotional sphere. The dissonance they feel
in a ‘strange place’ with a ‘strange language’
and ‘new cultural norms’ is instructive,
because it gets at hooks’ (2001) conceptual
urging to break down one’s own power and
privilege. Participant Sarah shared,
I have had to really struggle whenever my family
takes me to social events. They go out of their way
to include me in whatever they are doing, but I feel
lost when everyone around me is speaking Spanish
to each other and I don’t understand. Whenever
somebody laughs, I worry that it might be about
me. I just laugh too because I don’t know what
else to do. Feeling so lost makes me think about
the kids in our classrooms who might also feel lost.
It would be easy for me to think it’s only the lan-
guage learners, but this experience has also made
me think about other students who just might not
understand what or why something is going on in
school or in their lives. I have a huge obligation as
a teacher to make sure my students feel included
AND understand. My family here includes me but
we just don’t have the language skills for me to
understand. Now that is my task, figuring out how
to bridge understanding even without language.
Sarah’s response, more extended than most
participants, echoed the sentiments of many
participants over the course of our program.
Participants value feeling loved through their
inclusion in the host families’ lives, but real-
ize that there are some profound limits to how
much they can understand. The dilemma
provoked by this global experience serves to
significantly inform the local application of
the lesson upon participants’ return. At least
in part, this glocality is an experience of
actively melding the global experience into
the local context of one’s life and work
(Voskressenski, 2016; Doyle, 2018). The les-
sons, insights, and experiences gained
through interaction with cultural others
cannot be known directly without the oppor-
tunity for actual engagement. The relation-
ship with the host families is characterized
mostly by kindness and reciprocity, and many
of the participants experience love quite vis-
cerally, beginning to see in concrete ways
how their perspective prior to the experience
has been steeped in privilege, ignoring the
strengths and values that the students and
their families bring. For example, Mike said,
Today I needed help to find a phone charger in the
mall. I just kept speaking English to the clerk until
another customer offered to help translate. So
now when I get back I will never just walk by when
I think someone is lost or needs help or wonder
why aren’t you speaking English.
As previously suggested, the international
context creates glocality in that it bridges a
distinct global context with a local reality of
how the pre-service teacher engages the act
of teaching upon their return, as well as the
confrontations of their own privileged stand-
points. These polarities in the experience
abroad contrast with their experience at
home and reveal a particular ‘dynamic, inte-
grative center, [in] which one … unveils a
larger reality’ (Rendón, 2009: 68). In such an
engagement we ‘surrender old belief systems
and working with our growth edges …
uncover a larger truth that joins two realms of
reality’ (ibid.: 68).
By the end of the experience, journals shift
from participants’ own fear and concerns to
pondering what they might have missed at
home about their own students’ social contexts
outside of school. For example, Cassie said,
I have so much to think about when I get home – I
thought I was ready to teach, and I guess I have
the skills, but those skills mean nothing if I can’t
connect – that is what I learned in Chile.
From a cultural-competence perspective, the
love that they exhibit and receive in this
experience propels a different set of
exchanges with students when returning
home as they grow excited about what the
cultural differences will be in their class-
rooms, and develop empathetic approaches
to working with all of their students, espe-
cially those not from the United States.
CRP has continually sought to have edu-
cators embrace cultural competence (Bonner
et al., 2017). This quest often falls short because
the focus is on ‘others’ to the exclusion of
what one needs to know about oneself both as
 (DIS)RUPTIVE GLOCALITY THROUGH TEACHER EXCHANGE
a thinker and feeler – one who has the capac-
ity for love (Warren, 2017). The combination
of love within this international context places
the focus on deconstructing and reconstruct-
ing one’s own sense of self, at the same time
that participants develop an awareness, appre-
ciation, and value for others. Consequently,
we argue that hooks’ notion of love provides
a nuanced contour and texture to the potential
for educators to be culturally competent.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
All this heaven never could describe such a
feeling as I’m hearing
Words were never so useful
So I was screaming out a language that I
never knew existed before.
Rendón suggested that ‘diverse forms of con-
templative practice become conduits to elicit
deep awareness, focus, compassion, social
change, transformation, creativity, and inspi-
ration, as well as intellectual understandings’
(2009: 134–5). Engaging students in any
form, and particularly through a culturally
relevant lens, has had roadblocks, some of
which we articulated early in this chapter.
The connection between our international
context and Chile’s local/domestic context
produces a type of culturally relevant
approach that is glocalized – that is, there are
profound benefits in the local or domestic
contexts for each group under the umbrella
of internationalization that are also a reality
for both groups when interacting with differ-
ent ‘local’ peoples. Stepping out of our com-
fort into the fully glocalized world has
profound effects not only for those whom we
serve, but also for ourselves. By expanding
our worldview and perspectives we open new
horizons for engagement. It would be disin-
genuous, however, to imply that educational
policies currently working against CRP and
pedagogies of love are a phenomenon solely
of the post-Obama era – disconnects have
existed for as long as differences between
477
peoples have existed. Still, we cannot ignore
the urgency of pushing back against the divi-
sive discourse and policies which have found
increasing popular and political support in
Trumpdom. If we are to resist the effects of
the neo-liberally driven ‘educational reform
industrial complex’, for example, we must
begin to acknowledge and work against the
ways in which our identities, as cultural,
epistemological, and ontological standpoints,
are privileged, and must actively walk out-
side of who we are and into who others are.
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127–139.

The Sun Never Sets on the
Privatization Movement: A Return
to the Heart of Darkness in a
Neoliberal and Neoimperialist World
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means
the taking it away from those who have a different
complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves,
is not a pretty thing when you look into it too
much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at
the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an
idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – some-
thing you can set up, and bow down before, and
offer a sacrifice to.
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad1
In this essay, I frame the global privatization
movement as a new and modern form of impe-
rialism (neoimperialism) enveloped with a
fictional subtext conveyed in Joseph Conrad’s
classic literary work, Heart of Darkness. My
intent is not to create an equivalence between
contemporary privatization movements and
the psychological madness and violence
depicted in Conrad’s 1902 novel. Conrad did
not and could not anticipate the imperialistic
forms of privatization taking place today.
Rather, my intent is to analyze the parallels
that do exist between the imperialistic and
ethnocentric motives behind the contemporary
45
Brian Dotts
global privatization movement and Conrad’s
depiction of imperialistic forces infiltrating
the Congo, what Lionel Trilling (1999: xli)
referred to as Conrad’s ‘radical critique of
European civilization’, and what Chinua
Achebe (1999: xlv) intimated as ‘the image of
Africa as “the otherworld”, the antithesis of
Europe and therefore of civilization’; parallels
that foreground the privatization movements
taking place globally include motives to colo-
nize new markets for profit. Without the
‘horror’ depicted in Conrad’s novel, a constant
appears to be present in privatization efforts,
perhaps best described by Stephen Ball who
declared, ‘in policy rhetorics which laud “the
private” there is deafening silence in relation
to the role of the profit motive, and a system-
atic neglect of business failures, and of busi-
ness ethics’ (2004: 3). This chapter focuses on
the role of the profit motive fundamentally
driving the global privatization movement, a
motive intensely expounded in Heart of
Darkness, but it is a motive that transcends
time, place, and classic literary works.
 THE SUN NEVER SETS ON THE PRIVATIZATION MOVEMENT
Hannah Arendt refers to the Western impe-
rial project as ‘a by-product of capitalist pro-
duction’, a ‘system [and its representatives]
that relentlessly produced a superfluity of
men and capital’ (1973: 189, 314). Being
forthright, the profit motive serves as the
single most essential motive in any capital-
ist endeavor, regardless of other motives that
may exist or the consequences that may result.
The search for profits serve as capitalism’s
raison d’être. Even if the goal is to serve a
positive and beneficial need for society, the
capitalistic enterprise must eventually profit
from its work in order to sustain survival.
Many incorrectly perceive the economic sys-
tem of capitalism as apolitical and amoral, a
system composed of ‘natural laws’ (i.e., the
laws of supply and demand) that operate in
non-ideological ways. Such an application
results from a long tradition of inappropri-
ately applying positivistic natural science
methods where they do not belong or are ill-
suited to providing us with the whole picture.
A review of recent research focusing on
the goals of the neoliberal global education
efforts (the imperial project) appear to sup-
port Arendt’s conclusions while exemplify-
ing Conrad’s literary narrative. For example,
Fazal Rizvi (2017:1) asserts that ‘the neolib-
eral imaginary of globalization has re-cast
the purposes and governance of education,
viewing it in human capital terms while sup-
porting individual self-interests in an increas-
ingly competitive society’ (2017: 1). In other
words, neoliberalism perceives students as
capital investments, much like machinery,
equipment, land, and real estate, and if prop-
erly trained and skilled, can serve as profit-
able outlays. As a result, ‘most policies and
programmes of educational reform are now
framed, justified, and promoted on a widely
held belief that aligning educational policies
and practices with the profound economic,
political, and cultural changes that globaliza-
tion signifies is necessary’ (ibid.: 1). In addi-
tion, while the focus of this essay is not Africa,
although Nigeria is included among a variety
of countries experiencing the effects of school
481
privatization, my focus is on the broader neo-
liberal purposes motivating the privatization
of schooling. I will begin by giving a synopsis
of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, followed by
the parallels that exist in the neoliberal move-
ment to colonize new profitable markets in
public education, today’s neoimperialist
project. What makes this imperialist project
new is that public schooling serves as a new
marketable means to serve imperial interests.
Beyond the traditional imperialistic exploita-
tion of natural resources (described in litera-
ture like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) public
schooling now serves as a new market to
exploit for profitable ends, profits often sub-
sidized by taxpayers resulting from political
and corporate complicity. The global move-
ment to privatize public schooling parallels
what David Harvey describes as ‘using pub-
lic resources to build appropriate infrastruc-
tures for business … coupled with subsidies
and tax incentives for capitalist enterprises’
(2007: 47). In other words, ‘corporate welfare
substituted for people welfare’ (ibid: 47). The
market, rather than a democratic political sys-
tem, serves as the focal point of neoliberal-
ism. Moreover, the political system is utilized
as a means to pursue corporate interests.
CONRAD’S CRITIQUE OF
IMPERIALISM IN HEART OF
DARKNESS
In his literary masterpiece and critique of
imperialism, Conrad’s main character, Charlie
Marlow, is hired by a European company in
the late 19th century (referred to in the novel
simply as ‘the Company’) in order to relieve
Kurtz, a well-educated, virtuous, European
known for extracting ‘as much ivory as all
the [traders] put together’ and whose work
in the Congo made him a ‘first-class agent’ for
the ‘Administration’ (1999: 50). Kurtz’s char-
acter serves as a symbol of ruthless imperial-
ism, despite his initial good intentions. At
first, Kurtz is perceived as ‘an emissary of pity
482 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and science and progress … a “universal
genius”’ to fellow imperialists and God-like to
natives. Kurtz ‘came to them with thunder and
lightning … and they had never seen anything
like it’ (ibid.: 30, 33, 70). During his journey
to meet Kurtz in the jungle’s inner-station,
Marlow comes face-to-face with the horrors
of imperialism; namely, the violence and
exploitation inflicted on the Congolese natives
by Kurtz and Company in the extraction of
ivory for profit. Marlow’s experience in the
heart of darkness gives rise to his deepest psy-
chological conflicts when the brute force of
imperialism is realized in all its ‘horror’.
‘Civilized’ man, according to Marlow’s cul-
tural construct, is represented by Europe and
European culture while developing countries
like the Congo are depicted as backward and
savage, in need of ‘civilizing’, typical ration-
ales for colonial and imperialistic pursuits. As
the novel opens, the narrator describes a group
of passengers cruising down the Thames, a
river that symbolizes the height of European
civilization. ‘The sea-reach of the Thames
stretched before us like the beginning of an
interminable waterway’, explains the novel’s
narrator. ‘The water shone pacifically; the
sky, without a speck, was a benign immen-
sity of unstained light’ (contrasted with the
darkness of Africa), he continued. ‘The old
river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the
decline of day, after ages of good service done
to the race that peopled its banks, spread out
in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading
to the uttermost ends of the earth’, As the sun
set during their cruise, the narrator declares,
‘What greatness had not floated on the ebb
of that river into the mystery of an unknown
earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of
commonwealths, the germs of empires’
(ibid.: 3–5). Once a dark place, says the narra-
tor, it is now the model of civilization, refined,
commercial, diplomatic, modern, ‘an object
of veneration for good men, who see it “in the
august light of abiding memories”’, accord-
ing to Lionel Trilling’s (1999: xliii) review
of Conrad’s fiction. The Thames represents
the accomplishments of civilization that had
evolved from an ancient history of Roman
and Gaul barbarity. By positioning European
culture as ‘evolved’ and other cultures as ‘un-
evolved’, Conrad sets the stage, the anecdote,
for the colonial, imperialistic horror about to
take place in the Dark Continent.
Africa is depicted as ‘“the other world”,
the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civi-
lization, a place where man’s vaunted intel-
ligence and refinement are finally mocked by
triumphant bestiality’, according to Chinua
Achebe (1999: xlv). Africa, and specifi-
cally the Congo, are depicted as the Heart
of Darkness, the antithesis of light and cul-
tural illumination. European ethnocentrism
juxtaposes two races of men; one deemed
‘civilized’, the other as ‘savage’, and two soci-
eties; one with ‘the devotion to efficiency’,
according to Conrad (1999: 7); the other
as disorganized and chaotic. Such cultural
constructs, as we know too well, rationalize
exploitation, colonization, and imperialism
of the Other, in this case, the ‘dark’ continent
to which the cruising yawl navigates from
the Thames to the Congo in 1890. Initially
aloof to the depths of exploitation he would
witness later in the novel, Marlow consid-
ered himself ‘one of the Workers’ for the
company, ‘with a capital’, ‘something like an
emissary of light, something like a lower sort
of apostle,’ he thought, as another person in
the Company declared the missionary impor-
tance of ‘“weaning those ignorant [natives]
from their horrid ways”’ (ibid.: 14–15).
Nevertheless, after administrative for-
malities and a physical conducted by the
Company’s physician, during which Marlow
‘began to feel slightly uneasy’, feeling as
if ‘something ominous [was] in the atmos-
phere’, a ‘conspiracy … something not quite
right’ (ibid.: 12), he navigated ‘upward of
thirty days’ in the Company’s steamship
toward the Congo along ‘a mighty big river
… resembling an immense snake uncoiled,
with its head in the sea, its body at rest
curving afar over a vast country, and its
tail lost in the depths of the land’ (ibid.: 9).
Marlow describes navigating the immense
 THE SUN NEVER SETS ON THE PRIVATIZATION MOVEMENT
snake-like river through ‘the silent wilder-
ness surrounding this cleared speck of the
earth [which] struck me as something great
and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting
patiently for the passing away of this fan-
tastic invasion’ (ibid.: 27). And, in the inner-
depths of extraction, ‘the word “ivory” rang
in the air, was whispered, was sighed’, he
thought. ‘You would think they were pray-
ing to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew
through it all, like a whiff from some corpse’
(ibid.: 27). Marlow and crew were stealing
quietly into a schism inaugurated by the
clash of two incompatible Worlds.
Once Marlow neared the Congo, he
described ‘the edge of a colossal jungle, so
dark-green as to be almost black, fringed
with white surf … far, far away along a blue
sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping
mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to
glisten and drip with steam…. in what looked
like a God-forsaken wilderness’ (ibid.: 15).
But as the accountant told Marlow, once he
arrived at the first inner-station, their work in
ivory was ‘to make money, of course’ (ibid.:
24). No matter how virtuous, how ‘civiliz-
ing’ their efforts may have been understood
abstractly, ‘the devotion to efficiency’ was
a hallmark of British colonialism; efficiency
and making money (ibid.: 7–8). As Kurtz
tells Marlow toward the end of the novel,
‘You show them you have in you something
that is really profitable, and then there will
be no limits to the recognition of your abil-
ity’ (ibid.: 85). ‘The conquest of the Earth’,
or taking ‘what they could get for the sake
of what was to be got’ was ‘something you
can set up, and bow down before, and offer a
sacrifice to’ (ibid.: 85, 7–8).
Conrad’s novel ends with Kurtz’s death, a
high fever resulting from an unknown virus
contracted in the jungle, symbolic perhaps of
his ultimate downfall brought on by his mer-
ciless turn into the darkness of violence and
murder, which Kurtz himself refers to in his
last breath, as ‘the horror, the horror’ (ibid.:
96), committed by his (and the Company’s)
imperialistic pursuit of profit in Africa. The
483
character of Kurtz personifies the potential
horror that can be committed when a search
for profits is cloaked in the garb of ‘civiliz-
ing’ missions that objectify human beings
as mere instruments in the pursuit of self-
interest. For Kurtz finally realized while dying
that the entire exploration for profit became
such a focus of his interest, something that he
‘bowed down to’, that he became willing to
objectify, dehumanize, and kill natives in his
pursuit. Despite any good intentions, despite
the occasional positive outcome, and despite
the humanitarian rhetoric espoused by imperial-
ists, we should always acknowledge that what-
ever the effects of privatization, its motivations
necessarily and fundamentally rest upon profit-
making, a requirement that must be realized for
any other secondary motivation to be successful.
Any policy that rests ultimately on the
profit motive, regardless of any positive
or negative outcomes of that policy, must
remain suspect, particularly when this root
motive directs public goods and public ser-
vices toward those ends. The profit motive,
based on seeking self-interest, which is not
often equivalent to the public interest, must
always remain dubious and liable to strong
regulation and oversight in order to protect
the public good. But even with these con-
straints, making education and other tradi-
tional public services susceptible to the profit
motive remains doubly problematic because
privatization removes public responsibility
over schooling while making schools highly
vulnerable to risk-taking and mismanage-
ment. An unregulated capitalism knows only
one constraint, the loss of profits.
EXAMPLES OF GLOBAL
PRIVATIZATION AND
UNIMPRESSIVE RESULTS
The following sections provide examples of
school privatization efforts in a number of
countries. Since my focus is on trying to
understand the underlying purposes of school
484 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
privatization and its outcomes across a number
of nation states, I provide only a brief descrip-
tion of each country’s involvement in this
movement. The countries I chose as a focus
for this chapter were listed in UNESCO’s
working paper titled, The Privatization of
Education in Developing Countries: Evidence
and Policy Implications, authored by Pedró
and Watanabe (2015: 1–11). Not all the coun-
tries listed in this report were used due to
length restrictions, but I did choose five coun-
tries in order to contextualize a variety of
examples: Chile, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and
Uganda. Moreover, the scholarly literature
that I reviewed also provided occasional refer-
ences to generalizations that have been made
by researchers across countries and regions
with other studies showing a number of pat-
terns that have developed in underdeveloped
countries’ attempts to privatize their schools.
Chile
While the extraction of ivory (qua Conrad) is
not the direct focus of modern-day imperial-
ism, the privatization of schooling, often
imposed by external actors in a given coun-
try, is now a fundamental activity taking
place throughout the globe. Numerous coun-
tries continue to experiment and adopt pri-
vatization schemes that are focused on human
capital development for the fundamental
purpose of creating a workforce capable of
fulfilling profitable motives. According to
Dennis Beach, for example,
Neo-liberal restructuring is leading to the creation
of apparatuses through which education is objecti-
fied for economic accumulation through an out-
sourcing of functions that were formerly carried
out within first domestic and voluntary, and then
state arrangements to capitalist enterprises. This is
part of a successive privatisation of education services
for processes of capitalisation. (Beach, 2008: 195)
Recently, Naomi Klein (2018) has written
about the privatization efforts underway in
Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in
2017 that parallel post-Katrina in New Orleans.
Namely, privateers are using the crisis in
Puerto Rico to develop charter schools and
school vouchers in order to replace the coun-
try’s public education system with an appara-
tus friendly to privatization efforts. Privatization
of education offers new territory for imperial-
istic opportunities whether of production or in
investments. As Kurtz declares in Heart of
Darkness, when ‘you have in you something
that is really profitable … then there will be no
limits to the recognition of your ability’ (1999:
85). Not only can the natural resources of a
country be targeted for profitable consump-
tion, privatized schooling offers new opportu-
nities for profit-making by colonizing
traditional government services. In other
words, as I’ve argued elsewhere (Dotts, 2018),
the notion that private education companies
are operating in a free market is simply an
ideological façade, an incorrect application of
free-market terminology in the absence of a
free market,
While advocates of privatization pursue their
objectives under the guise of a free market frame-
work, there is little congruence between a free
market and privatization of public schools. The
privatization of public schools, not unlike the pri-
vatization of public prisons, is more accurately
described as contractual agreements entered into
between government entities – state agencies,
legislatures, or local governmental units – and pri-
vate companies. These agreements maintain public
funding of schools (much like the privatization of
prisons and military security operations), but the
companies that manage them profit from these
agreements, and the agreements are rarely subject
to market competition. (Dotts, 2018: 500)
In Chile, school privatization schemes were
implemented in the 1980s during the authori-
tarian rule of Augusto Pinochet, who began
his regime after a military coup in that country
in 1973 with US backing. While the research
focusing on the effects of privatization show
insignificant educational gains achieved by
affluent Chilean families, poorer families were
harmed by the changes in education reform,
exasperating the already existing inequality in
educational achievement in that country. This
‘growth in inequality was driven by losses by
 THE SUN NEVER SETS ON THE PRIVATIZATION MOVEMENT
the least-advantaged classes rather than by
gains by the most privileged’, according to
Florencia Torche (2005: 225). Moreover,
school privatization reform was enacted
during a period of ‘retrenchment of the [coun-
try’s] safety net, coupled with an economic
crisis’, which ‘resulted in growing unemploy-
ment, poverty, and inequality’. While Torche
admits that privatization schemes did not
‘create … educational inequality’, she accu-
rately points out that schooling ‘became a
relevant arena in which inequality was actual-
ized and reproduced’. In other words, Torche’s
analysis illustrates ‘that school sector [privati-
zation] adds to, rather than mediates, the effect
of socioeconomic status on educational attain-
ment’. How is this stratification amplified?
According to Torche, it is related to ‘a selec-
tion effect’, which includes ‘unmeasured char-
acteristics related to education outcomes, such
as motivation, ability, or social networks, that
may be higher among those who migrate to
[privatized schemes of schooling] than among
those who stay in public schools’, as well as
possible ‘peer effects resulting from school
sorting’ (ibid.: 334–5). Not only has Chile
experienced greater stratification and inequal-
ity, Juan Pablo Valenzuela et al. (2014: 217–
41) have confirmed the increased segregation
that has resulted from the private voucher and
tuition schools that exist in that country.
Martin Carnoy compared school privatiza-
tion reforms in both Sweden and Chile, con-
cluding ‘that national voucher reforms’ in both
countries ‘fail to do what their proponents
claim, even when the conditions demanded
by the purest voucher advocates are met, such
as reducing teachers’ collective bargaining
power in Chile’ (1998: 335–7). Moreover,
the voucher system in Sweden resulted in
no change in private enrollment ‘because of
the strong ideological ties Swedes have with’
(ibid: 335) their system of public education,
generally. On the other hand, Chileans con-
sidered private schooling ‘as better than pub-
lic [schools] before reform’ (ibid: 335) took
place. According to Carnoy’s comparisons
of these two countries, ‘the effect on public
485
education of a voucher plan depends on the
position public education holds in a society’
(ibid: 335). Interestingly, Carnoy concludes
that ‘in both Chile and Sweden, vouchers
for private education were intimately con-
nected with political agendas related to public
services’ (ibid: 336) the intentions of which
included ‘dismantl[ing]’ public education in
Chile and ‘circumvent[ing]’ the public sys-
tem of education in Sweden. Unlike Chile and
other countries that have attempted to imple-
ment school privatization reforms, Sweden
responded to the voucher system by increas-
ing public ‘spending on education’ and by
‘focusing on low-income students’ (ibid: 337)
in its public schools. Pinochet’s regime in
Chile, however, opened the doors to neolib-
eral interests as lobbying by ‘right-wing think
tanks’ justified privatization schemes aug-
mented by a depressed economy, according to
Kenneth Saltman (2007: 9). Universities too
‘were increasingly regulated while the world
of business was increasingly deregulated’,
according to Carlos Alberto Torres (2011: 185).
In Latin America generally, privatization
schemes have not been well received, accord-
ing to Juan Carlos Molleda, who points out
that ‘the adoption of market-driven economies
by inefficient and corrupted governments’,
and the shifting of traditional government
responsibilities to ‘private for-profit and non-
profit organizations’ has had more detrimental
consequences among the high-poverty popu-
lations. However, many of these privatiza-
tion schemes, which focus on ‘deregulation’
and ‘efficiency’ have not only made many
‘situation[s] worse’, they have also resulted
in a backlash by citizens who ‘are becom-
ing more outspoken and active in seeking a
better quality of life and demanding greater
participation’ (2000: 523–5). Molleda quotes
Mexico’s laureate writer, Carlos Fuentes, who
explains this backlash in the following way:
‘We are transferring our culture, our passion,
our history, our love … to civic society organ-
izations, to environmental and human rights
groups, to labor unions and agrarian coopera-
tives, to universities and the press’ (ibid: 485).
486 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Chile’s privatization movement resulted
in virtually no change in academic achieve-
ment gains among more affluent Chileans
while worsening inequality in that country.
Unfortunately, investing in private compa-
nies to educate more students in Chile with
better results drained revenues from the
public schools by redirecting them to pri-
vate education companies. Gains might have
been achieved had the Chilean government
invested this money in its public education
system. Nevertheless, the privatization move-
ment there has been disappointing.
India
The impact of school privatization reforms in
India appear to be abysmal, according to Das
and Singh (2014: 7), including the impact of
privatization on higher education. Any bene-
fits accruing from the privatization of school-
ing have been enjoyed solely by ‘the elite’,
which has ‘posed greater challenges and
threats’ to the education system in India.
While the authors conclude that privatization
schemes have ‘the potential to improve the
quality of education’ while ‘reduc[ing] …
cost [and] access to education for all’, they
present enormous challenges in India. Other
privatized methods of schooling ‘may end up
becoming money-making’ strategies that
have no real interest in improving ‘the qual-
ity of education’ (ibid.: 10).
Sangeeta Kamat (2004: 268–71) concludes
that school privatization reforms in India and
elsewhere,
are stunningly uniform across countries and conti-
nents and appear once again to signal the ‘end of
history’, the universalization of social and eco-
nomic systems and the power of international
institutions to exceed those of the nation state …
justified on the basis of radically upgrading access,
equity and efficiency of educational services.
(Kamat, 2004: 268–71)
However, rather than focusing on the neoliberal
goals of school privatization, Kamat analyzes
the cultural or nationalistic responses to global
neoliberalism, concluding that ‘framing the
local as cultural and the global as political eco-
nomic obscures the mutually constituting rela-
tion between the two levels’, resulting in ‘new
nationalisms’ overlooked in other critiques that
‘romanticize … the local’. This ‘new national-
ism’ in India, according to Kamat, ‘clearly
grasp[s] the pivotal role of schooling in build-
ing mass culture’ (ibid: 270, 271), as illustrated
by the country’s Curriculum 2000 framework,
which has been used in India’s primary and
secondary system of schools identifying a shift
from ‘anti-colonial’ nationalism to a contempo-
rary ‘cultural nationalism’.
But what Kamat describes is a shift from
post-colonial nationalism to a new national-
ism, the latter is probably more prevalent
throughout the global community where
colonization did not occur. Specifically, this
new nationalism, understood as developing ‘a
national consciousness, a national spirit and
national unity’ (ibid: 282), which is viewed
as necessary for developing ‘national iden-
tity’, is more or less described in the United
States as neo-conservatism. What Kamat
describes is a common tension that has devel-
oped between the attempts to maintain tradi-
tional cultures while also trying to navigate
the effects of globalization that continually
weaken and fragment such social coher-
ence, illustrating polarized objectives. Kamat
appears to agree in her conclusion. India’s
‘Curriculum 2000 may be understood not
purely as the ideological expression of the
Hindu nationalist government but the efforts
of a populist state mediating the contradic-
tions of increased poverty and social unrest
with the demands of economic liberalization’
(ibid: 282). Likewise, ‘globalization does not
represent the triumphant journey of the sover-
eign nation state, but a traumatic ordeal for the
postcolonial nation’, she declares (ibid.: 282).
Beyond the 2000 Curriculum, neoliberal
educational reforms have ‘supplant[ed] tra-
ditional educations’ by ‘erod[ing] traditional
learning practices and promot[ing] values and
knowledge at odds with young people’s own
communities’, according to Rashmi Pramanik
 THE SUN NEVER SETS ON THE PRIVATIZATION MOVEMENT
and Minaketan Bag (2013: 411). ‘Curricula
are being increasingly geared towards global
economic needs’ in the ‘hope of gaining
employment’, Pramanik and Minaketan Bag
assert. Furthermore, privatization’s impact on
school curricula ‘marginalize[s] certain groups
from the educational system, leading to high
drop-out rates or poor overall performance
in conventional institutions’. Paralleling the
effects of school privatization reforms in
Latin America, Pramanik and Minaketan Bag
(2013) conclude that private schools in India
have ‘become the institution of first choice for
the children of the elite and even of the middle
classes’ (ibid: 413), which has increased class
stratification and inequality in that country.
It remains to be the case following privati-
zation efforts in India that the country still has
approximately eight million children without
access to elementary education, according
to Geetha B. Nambissan and Stephen J. Ball
(2010: 327). But despite the enormous short-
fall, Nambissan and Ball argue that the interest
groups who have been successful in the privati-
zation reforms implemented in India were part
of a campaign built on ‘symbolic politics’, as
cited by Nambissan and Ball from the work of
Keck and Sikkink (Nambissan and Ball, 2010:
329). The authors point out that these inter-
est groups include The Heritage Foundation,
the Philanthropy Roundtable, The Wall Street
Journal, and the Cato Institute, all ‘inter-
linked through the Atlas Economic Research
Foundation “Freedom Network”’ (based in
Arlington, Virginia), but also involve ‘invest-
ment companies and venture capitalists looking
to new market opportunities in India’. As part
of the typical deregulatory process these groups
seek, they attempt ‘to free education from “the
control of bureaucracies and regulating bodies”’
(2010: 329–30) in the same way that they seek
to deregulate government controls in markets.
Moreover, in 2007, ‘the “philanthropic arm”
of Orient Global, a Singapore-based investment
firm, established an education fund of $100
million’ in order ‘to target the market for private
schooling for children from low-income fami-
lies in India’ by creating ‘a pilot chain of budget
487
private schools for the poor’, based on informa-
tion reported by Andrew J. Coulson, the for-
mer Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for
Educational Freedom (ibid.: 330, 332). In fact,
Nambissan and Ball include a graph in their
published research that illustrates the massive
and complex network of ‘intellectual entrepre-
neurs and advocacy organizations’ that rivals
some of the largest such networks throughout
the globe. According to Nambissan and Ball,
‘Atlas has launched or nurtured 275 such think
tanks in 70 nations around the world’, obvi-
ously ‘a formidable network of power, influ-
ence, ideas, and money’, all of whom ‘share …
libertarian values’ (339–40).
Pakistan
Sajid Ali referred to the privatization practices
in Pakistan with similar alarm. ‘The education
policy [there] supports growth of [privatiza-
tion] and discourages (or fails to improve)
public provision’ for schooling, which he
views ‘at odds with the principles of social
justice’ (2014: 78). He defines social justice as
‘ensur[ing] the wellbeing of the individual as
well as collectivity, where both are inter-
dependent’, and that ‘justice in a society can
be achieved through equitable distribution of
benefits and responsibilities’ (ibid.: 81).
Unfortunately, Pakistan’s privatization
reforms, according to Ali, ‘became an instru-
ment of sustaining social stratification, with
the only difference of replacing colonial
power with local elites’ (ibid.: 82). And today,
students ‘have to go to private schools to get
the kind of education that we were able to
get from public schools for almost free’, and
‘the poor assessment results of public schools
from official sources attest that the quality of
learning has declined in [Pakistan]’ (ibid.:
83). According to Ali, an obvious contributor
to this outcome is related to the fact that the
Ministry of Education decreased its annual
expenditure for education, in 2009 total-
ing approximately 1.9% of GDP, compared
with previous years’ 2% of GDP, resulting in
488 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
‘Pakistan reflect[ing] the worst performance
within the South Asian region’ (ibid.: 83). He
cites K. Bacchus who concludes ‘that in post-
colonial countries (mostly third world) …
small elite group[s]’ have ‘taken control of
the power and even state machinery is being
used to consolidate and maintain … hegem-
ony’. Consequently, ‘education is being
geared to legitimize stratification and power
structure[s] rather than challenging [them]’,
heightening the need for ‘critical teachers and
[critical] teaching’. Ali proposes a challenge
that most national schools face, namely, to
‘challenge the status quo and … the existing
power structures of our society’ (ibid.: 84–5).
Related to Pakistan’s public-private part-
nerships, which were established in the 1990s,
Iffat Farah and Sadaf Rizvi conclude that they
too contribute to class stratification, and are
used most often as a ‘temporary … transi-
tion to privatization’, which ‘make them an
unlikely strategy for a sustained increase in
the chances of access to good-quality school-
ing for the poor and disadvantaged’ (2007:
339). Moreover, one of the key motivations
behind this privatization scheme, which began
in 1979 and is similar to charter management
organizations in the United States, is to pro-
mote efficiency in the delivery of public edu-
cation services managed by private companies
and to improve quality (339–40, 344).
These public-private partnerships in
Pakistan, according to Farah and Rizvi, resulted
in an unequal power relationship between local
authorities on the one hand and funding agen-
cies and non-governmental organizations on
the other whereby the latter exercised greater
power in ‘negotiat[ing] the terms of the vari-
ous partners’, and ‘communit[ies]’ were ‘the
least empowered, since [they were] obliged
to receive and accept the responsibilities
given, if [they] wanted a school’ (2007: 345).
Moreover, while ‘a desired goal of this type
of partnership’ was to empower ‘parents and
women’, the latter ‘were rarely represented
in Village Education Committees’ (ibid: 345)
that were set up for this purpose. Other ‘local
government education officers felt alienated’
as well, which created an ‘operationally weak’
(ibid: 345) and skewed partnership.
Nevertheless, Pakistan’s public-private
partnerships resulted in very modest edu-
cational ‘access in urban areas, where par-
ents were able to pay a reasonable tuition
fee and where experienced school operators
ran schools’, but the partnerships were dif-
ficult ‘to sustain in rural areas’ (ibid.: 347).
Likewise, while there were also modest gains
in academic achievement in urban areas, the
authors conclude that these ‘partnerships are
often unequal and retain many aspects of
hierarchical governance’, they tended to be
‘transitory’, and were often used to develop
a full-fledged privatized school wherein a
school would eventually be ‘owned, financed
and managed by private or community groups
or individuals’ (ibid.: 350). While the authors
provide additional examples of public-private
partnerships, they conclude that all of these
partnerships needed to have stronger and
more reliable state involvement and respon-
sibility, at the very least, in ‘financing and
quality assurance[s]’ if basic education pro-
vision is to be successful (ibid.: 352).
Nigeria
According to Ige Akindele Matthew, who
served as the Deputy Director in Nigeria’s
Ministry of Education in 2015, ‘education
has become an issue that cannot be managed
and financed solely by the government’ of
Nigeria. Due to the government’s inability to
fund even basic schooling to meet the
demands of a growing population, ‘a collabo-
ration of government and the private sector is
thus necessary to achieve its effective man-
agement and improved funding’ for educa-
tion. In Nigeria, privatization of early
childhood education includes a ‘majority
of … schools … owned by churches,
mosques, individuals, and corporate organi-
zations’ (2015: 371, 376).
As in any country, finite national budg-
ets must compete for funds, and schools
 THE SUN NEVER SETS ON THE PRIVATIZATION MOVEMENT
represent only one of many demands from the
‘manufacturing, agriculture, transportation,
and health’ (ibid: 371) sectors in Nigeria,
according to Matthew. The private sector has
stepped in to fill the demand in schooling,
which has become ‘a very lucrative business’
(ibid: 372), but the privatization of early
childhood and elementary schools has also
resulted in a number of problems stemming
from private companies not upholding the
minimum regulatory standards established by
the government, including appropriately pre-
pared teachers, curricular goals adhering to
the nation’s developmental standards, nutri-
tion, health, and language needs (English is
often taught in these schools and native lan-
guages ignored), as well as the government’s
inability to monitor and effectively remedy
these problems. ‘Many private schools evade
inspection’, and avoid paying the required
government fees for licensing. ‘Some propri-
etors’, according to Matthew, ‘even lack the
educational qualifications, experiences, and
skills recommended for effective operation
and management of schools’, despite the fact
that these private entrepreneurs ‘charge exor-
bitant fees’ (ibid.: 371–3).
After years of experimenting with privat-
ized schooling in primary schools, Matthew
underscores the fact that Nigeria’s system
of schooling, like other countries mentioned
in this chapter, have become ‘essentially a
privilege for the elite, wealthy, and expatri-
ate population’, which has made a mockery
of Nigeria’s cultural belief that high quality
schooling should be ‘a right for all children’
(ibid.: 373). The advantages that do exist in
the provision of schooling, such as increas-
ing access for a privileged minority, do not
outweigh the fact that private proprietors
are cutting costs in order to ‘maximize their
financial gains’, according to Matthew whose
conclusion is based on other reports pub-
lished on privatization in Nigeria (ibid.: 375).
‘The caregivers in most schools lack the basic
qualification while more than half have no
formal education’, which violates Nigeria’s
‘National Policy on Education’. In addition,
489
beyond the problematic response to public
schooling generated by privatization efforts,
a fundamental problem in Nigeria is rooted
in the nation’s poor infrastructure, including
its schools, the lack of safety this presents,
and the lack of available land for school use
(ibid.: 375–6). To put it in Conradian terms,
‘there were no external checks’ on the profit-
seeking ventures in Nigeria (Conrad, 1999: 26).
Another pattern presented by school pri-
vatization in Nigeria that appears to tran-
scend individual countries is the fact that
private schooling offers financial gains for
private interests with little or no improve-
ment in schooling. While Nigeria improved
access resulting from the establishment of
numerous new private schools, privatization
in Nigeria has evidently provided no other
benefits than achieved by traditional public
schools. Privatization efforts appear to sig-
nificantly enhance profits for the proprietors
involved. As Sharon Subreenduth concludes
in her analysis of privatization in South
Africa, ‘choice seems to be articulated only
within the limits of one’s means and individ-
ual networks of relations’ (2013: 597).
Uganda
Uganda’s interest in achieving widespread
public schooling is relatively new and far from
realization, particularly since schooling con-
tinues to be viewed by many of the country’s
leaders as a private service enjoyed by those
who can afford tuition. However, ‘Uganda is
touted as making commendable progress’ in
its attempts to achieve ‘Education for All
(EFA)’ since implementing ‘its 1997 Universal
Primary Education (UPE) policy’, according
to Mayengo et al. (2015: 293). Mayengo and
colleagues conducted an ethnographic study
of a rural, ‘low-fee’, private school in Uganda,
which was established on the basis of the
World Bank’s ‘cost-sharing … educational
principles’. Their research focused specifi-
cally on ‘parental choice’ within the context of
privatization efforts and ‘the extent to which
490 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
neoliberal ideas pervade parents’ and proprie-
tors’ talk about choice in a context where
choice is limited and privatization is more
about hope than individual prosperity owner-
ship’. These researchers refer to parents’ per-
ceptions of ‘knowledge aid’ in the World
Bank’s practices. Mayengo et al. (2015:
293–4) conclude that the ‘conception of choice
is simply not meaningful in rural Uganda’,
where one is unlikely to find any school,
public or private. Their focus on rural Uganda
was intended to illustrate the limitations of
private choice often celebrated in neoliberal
discourse. Including similar research findings
from Nambissan and Ball (2010) and Lincove
(2012), Mayengo et al. (2015) make an
extremely important conclusion with regard to
the privatization efforts of international organ-
izations like the World Bank,
The privatisation of schooling in Uganda and other
poor countries rides on the backs of hardworking
individual proprietors without business capital whilst
public schools are being largely funded by supra
capital [World Bank] whose inevitable ‘business’
involves investment in poorer nations. [World Bank]
investment depends on the development of capital
in those countries (Lincove, 2012). Thus, in very
specific ways the development of education is inex-
tricably linked with the development of capital
whose fiscal mechanisms are directly linked to gov-
ernment-aided schools. (Mayengo et al., 2015: 295).
Because enrollments have increased signifi-
cantly in Uganda’s primary schools since the
passage of the UPE, ‘a rush by investors/
entrepreneurs to open up private schools’ has
taken place, often with the perception that
‘entrepreneurs are … helping the govern-
ment’ remedy problems (ibid.: 296).
Although Mayengo et al. (2015) focus solely
on one rural school in Uganda, they conclude
their ethnographic study by pointing out that,
(citing Molla, 2014), ‘an active endeavor to
fill “the knowledge gap” from the top (World
Bank) down (local instantiation of policy)
rushes in to supplant the steady in-country
knowledge growth more organically emerg-
ing’, and that ‘the lived contradictions of the
“knowledge aid” work against what is in the
best interest of Ugandans’. Moreover, ‘the
weakening of “local knowledge regimes”
and the uncritical “acceptance” of neoliberal
principles are unintended consequences of
this knowledge aid’ (ibid.: 305).
In short, the production of knowledge is
occurring from a top-down approach and
without the involvement of natives in the
transmission and development of their native
knowledge and culture. While access did
improve as shown in these authors’ ethnog-
raphy, UPE schools’ ‘financial indebtedness
to the [World Bank] … tether public schools,
rather than private schools, to market eco-
nomics and the business model of privatiza-
tion for profit with corporate sponsorship/
administration like we find in the West’
(Mayengo et al., 2015: 306). The authors
also quote Walford, who concludes that, ‘[t]he
obvious, but quite unrealistic, answer is
that less economically developed countries
should improve their government schools’.
However, this normative expectation ‘is unre-
alistic simply because most of these countries
are swimming in corruption so that a great
deal of funding simply does not reach the
schools and much of what does is misused’
(306, citing Walford, 2011). On the ground,
parents often considered themselves as being
responsible in ‘choosing’ their children’s edu-
cation despite the fact that choice was non-
existent, illustrating an adaptation by parents
of the neoliberal language of choice while no
choice existed (Mayengo et al., 2015: 307).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
John Kenneth Galbraith declared that,
‘When the modern corporation acquires
power over markets, power in the commu-
nity, power over the state and power over
belief, it is a political instrument, different
in degree but not in kind from the state
itself’ (2001: 143). Although asserted in
1973, at the beginning of the global privati-
zation movement, Galbraith’s quote reflects
 THE SUN NEVER SETS ON THE PRIVATIZATION MOVEMENT
the degree to which neoliberal thinking has
saturated, if not eclipsed, the traditional
functions of the nation state. Privatization,
the transferring of government responsibili-
ties and services over to the private sector
has clearly spread across the globe, the
impetus of which has been managed by
international governmental and non-govern-
mental organizations. For example, accord-
ing to Saltman, ‘USAID [United States
Agency for International Development] and
the World Bank’ have ‘participate[d] in the
newest incarnation of American-led imperi-
alism’, and he provides the example of their
involvement in textbook production in Iraq
following the US invasion, ‘textbooks …
full of vitriol and Baathist party propa-
ganda’, as an endeavor focused on ‘selective
censorship’ (2007: 102–3). Private corpora-
tions like Creative Associates, which con-
tracts with the US government to provide
educational development overseas ‘appear
integral to US economic and military strat-
egy around the world’ (ibid.: 72). This gives
the impression that privatized school
reforms funded by the United States are not
about improving learning for the sake of
learning Indigenous culture, but more about
preparing a significant level of human capi-
tal available for imperialistic pursuits. Like
Conrad’s depiction of ‘the Company’
throughout Heart of Darkness (1999), the
corporation’s interests in profitable educa-
tion ventures are typically justified by
“weaning those ignorant millions from their
horrid ways’, albeit cloaked in more subtle
and affable marketable language.
And Dana Burde’s 2014 book, Schools
for Conflict or Peace in Afghanistan,
uncovered textbook development practices
funded by USAID that not only undermined
US propaganda efforts in that country, but
also (and more importantly) produced text-
books for Afghan children that were inap-
propriate and unethical. Burde quotes a
USAID staff member who’s experiences
in Afghanistan revealed that ‘unequal dis-
tribution of resources and development’
491
among local groups ‘is not only going to
cause conflicts, but it’s also going to cre-
ate problems for them’ (2014: 96). But
beyond the use of international government
and non-governmental organizations to
improve schooling worldwide, many efforts
that have been successful; neoliberal ideol-
ogy has developed a new ethos devoted to
seeking new profitable markets in school-
ing, often not in opposition to government,
but in cooperation with governments who
have either been co-opted by market inter-
ests or for a variety of structural reasons
remain dependent on them.
USAID’s mission consists of ‘develop-
ment’, which is one of a three-pronged
approach commonly referred to as ‘the three
Ds of US national security policy’, according
to testimony given before a House subcommit-
tee in 2009. The other two prongs are ‘defense
and diplomacy’ (2009: 1). According to the
former Deputy Administrator of USAID for
Iraq and Afghanistan, James Kunder, USAID
had ‘1,600 American personnel … in Africa’
alone along with ‘460 officers scattered
across all of Africa’ (ibid.: 41).
During the subcommittee’s hearings,
USAID’s global involvement came under
scrutiny and former directors of USAID’s
operations were questioned. The Chair of
the subcommittee, Representative Diane
Watson (D-Rep), for instance, asserted dur-
ing the hearing that she was ‘struck … by
the number of US Government agencies that
plan and implement foreign assistance pro-
grams [including education]’, which ‘have
become so numerous that the Department of
State and USAID control a little over half
of the US foreign assistance budget’ with
‘USAID … alone … manag[ing] just over
40 percent of the total US foreign assistance
programs’. The result, she continued, is ‘a
patch-work of different programs with dif-
ferent strategic objectives’ (ibid.: 1–2) that
is difficult to oversee.
Another member of the subcommittee,
Representative Brian Bilbray (R-Rep), was
more specific in his criticism asserting,
492 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
One of the things that I feel really concerned about
is that a lot of our foreign aid goes in under the
guise of teaching capitalism, teaching independ-
ence, and teaching productivity. What we end up
doing, then, is teaching [host countries] corrup-
tion, mismanagement, and all the negative things
that we point to [in] other countries. (USAID, 2009: 3)
Bilbray also criticized the deception that
often occurs when identifying for-profit
companies as non-profits, which gives the
impression that the latter ‘are exempt from
all the temptations that apply to for-profit
[companies]’ (ibid.: 82). And Gerald
Connolly (D-Rep), another member of the
subcommittee, complained about the ulterior
motives of these ‘humanitarian’ efforts,
asserting that, ‘our foreign aid must be
closely linked to our national security objec-
tives but must not be perceived as entirely
self-interested’ (ibid.: 4–5). While companies
like Coca Cola have been successful in obtain-
ing exclusive rights to sell its products in
public schools globally, Coca Cola (and other
corporations) is in the business of preparing
pre-packaged, standardized school curricula.
As Kenneth Saltman pointedly describes:
Coca-Cola participates in undermining democracy
by shifting power from people to corporations in
four basic ways: (1) by working to privatize public
goods and services, (2) by propagating ideologies
favorable to corporate management of the planet,
(3) by promoting the kinds education that fail to
link the production of knowledge to the wielding
of power, (4) by embracing curricula that actively
erase the material and symbolic struggles waged
by different individuals and groups over work,
consumption, and culture. An example of Coke’s
anti-public, pro-privatization agenda in education
is its involvement in the First Book national literacy
campaign (www.firstbook.org) (2004: 157).
Moreover, many of these ‘humanitarian’
efforts take place in virtual secrecy; agree-
ments are made between governments and
private companies and non-governmental
organizations without much publicity until
after the fact. And it is often the case that the
ulterior motives driving private companies in
this new, modern form of imperialism, rest
upon their search for new profitable markets,
what Conrad refers to in Heart of Darkness
as the ‘Eldorado Exploring Expedition’,
which conducted its work in ‘secrecy’, and
whose ultimate goal was ‘to tear treasure out
of the bowels of the land … with no more
moral purpose at the back of it than there is
in burglars breaking into a safe’ (1999: 36).
The examples provided above reveal pat-
terns related to privatization efforts devel-
oped in a number of countries. The single
positive outcome across all examples appears
to be improvements in increasing access to
education as a result of newly developed pri-
vatization schemes or through shared public-
private ventures. But access to schooling
means little to underdeveloped nations that
desperately need strong systems of mass
schooling. The evidence also appears to
support the unfortunate conclusion that the
primary beneficiaries of privatized school-
ing are the financial investors and entrepre-
neurs who either receive government funds to
manage public schools or receive funds and/
or tuition fees to operate their own schools,
many of which are underdeveloped, poorly
organized, staffed with unqualified teachers,
haphazard curricula, and lack a variety of
basic requirements we usually tend to asso-
ciate with good schools like safe, comfort-
able, and healthy environments. Children and
their parents who do benefit from privatized
arrangements, if at all, tend to be middle-to
upper-middle-class or privileged students, a
small minority of students whose parents are
able to pay the fees associated with privatized
education services. Furthermore, as Richard
Wolff concluded, ‘the costs of controlling
foreign societies are increasingly socialized’
(1970: 230), such as ‘the complex economic
costs’ associated with state funding and
resources that are often devoted to imple-
menting privatization schemes, as well as tax
revenues that are often sacrificed in order to
incentivize private entrepreneurship today.
The most effective way to respond to the
educational needs of developing countries
is to assist in the development of govern-
ment schools and to help governments reach
 THE SUN NEVER SETS ON THE PRIVATIZATION MOVEMENT
as many students as possible, and to facili-
tate local community involvement in those
schools. If a country is going to enjoy a lasting
effect in education and schooling, it must be
established as a public system. Margaret Stuart
astutely applies Edward Said’s work in her
discussion of the totalizing narrative of human
capital production in international develop-
ment. ‘Government policy … require[s] spe-
cial vigilance … [in] … critiquing the attitudes
and perceptions such policy texts advance
about a globalized world view, a universaliz-
ing of experiences that assimilate all into the
one symphony’ (2016: 146). And as Stephen
Ball asserts, ‘In fetishizing commodities, we
are denying the primacy of human relation-
ships in the production of value, in effect eras-
ing the social’ (2004: 4). But the privatization
movement seeks more opportunities to invest,
to construct, to school, where the goals of
each project and each outpost are presented as
‘a beacon on the road towards better things, a
centre for trade of course, but also for human-
izing, improving, instructing’, as described by
Conrad (1999: 40).
In Samoff’s discussion of colonial schools
in Africa, ‘schools were not expected to be
liberating or self-actualizing but rather to
serve an instrumental colonial need’ (2012:
122). With the contemporary school privati-
zation movement in Africa and elsewhere
today, we are witnessing the same kind of
instrumental efforts pursued under a new
neoliberal, neoimperialistic, privatization
guise. Despite any good intentions, the enor-
mous failures to achieve mass schooling that
reflect the local needs of Indigenous popula-
tions, and despite the public subsidization of
private profits, students of global privatiza-
tion might quietly reflect, as Marlow did in
the Congo, that ‘this stillness of life did not
in the least resemble a peace. It was the still-
ness of an implacable force brooding over an
inscrutable intention. It looked at you with
a vengeful aspect’ (Conrad 1999: 41–2, my
italics). But for the profiteers, privatization
of public goods rings in the air much like
‘the word “ivory” rang in the air’ in Conrad’s
493
novel. The pursuit of profit is so powerful,
‘You would think they were praying to it’
(1999: 27). Perhaps Raymond Morrow said it
best when he described the neoliberal hegem-
ony that is taking over traditional public insti-
tutions, including education at all levels:
The great benefactor of the desacralization of the
university as a cultural institution has been the
increasing penetration of market forces into higher
education and the reorganization of university
governance around ‘playing the game’ of aca-
demic capitalism.… In this context the market
becomes the Trojan horse for undermining aca-
demic autonomy by ostensibly nonideological and
noncoercive means based on the interest of the
‘consumers’ of education and research. (Morrow,
2006: xxvi–xxvii)
In much the same way that ‘all Europe con-
tributed to the making of Kurtz’ neoliberal-
ism has contributed to a cultural paradigm
shift endowing the market with God-like
features that bring ‘thunder and lightning’ to
those who have ‘never seen anything like it’.
But this new form of imperialism – the neo-
liberal project to privatize public goods and
services – appears to be better depicted by
the old parable of merely ‘putting old wine
into new bottles’ (Conrad 1999: 61).
Note
1  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness & Selections
from The Congo Diary with an Introduction by
Phillips, C. New York: The Modern Library, 1999,
pp. 7–8. All direct quotations hereafter are from
this edition.
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Teaching Global Affairs:
Problem-posing Pedagogy and
the Violence of Indifference
I teach in a global affairs program at a state
university with one of the most diverse student
populations in the United States. Introduction
to Global Affairs is offered as a university-
wide elective that fulfills a general education
‘global understanding’ requirement. It is a
challenging course to teach, not only given the
scope and scale of the dynamics of a globaliz-
ing world, but also because we have to allow
for students with a wide swath of political,
cultural, and religious differences. The course
is underscored by a focus on social justice and
positive peace. I argue that Global Affairs, as
an emerging interdisciplinary field of study,
should incorporate critical pedagogy in its
approaches to teaching, learning, and knowl-
edge production. In particular, I pull from Joe
Kincheloe’s complex critical pedagogy
(Kincheloe, 2004). Kincheloe calls for a more
sophisticated and nuanced understanding of
the conditions and contexts under which and
through which teachers teach and students
learn. Such an approach also foregrounds sev-
eral key concerns. These include, but are not
46
Kathalene A. Razzano
limited to, social justice and equality, that
education is political, the alleviation of human
suffering, interest in student wellbeing, and
cultivating the intellect, marginalization, and
resistance to dominant power (Kincheloe,
2004). These concerns are also shared by our
class, both in terms of course content, but also
in terms of relationships between students
themselves, students and teacher, and students
and their social/cultural worlds. One of the
forbearers of this approach is Paulo Freire
whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published
in 1970, first introduces the problem-posing
model for critical pedagogy. In this chapter, I
will articulate the goals and design of the
‘Introduction to Global Affairs’ course, Freire’s
problem-posing pedagogy as an approach, the
key concepts we use, and, finally, proffer an
example of how this comes together around
what I call the violence of indifference.
The course is designed to acquaint stu-
dents with the concept, manifestations, and
experiences of globalization, as well as what
it means to be a global citizen. It seeks to
 TEACHING GLOBAL AFFAIRS
give dimension and shape to the individuals,
organizations, and governments whose inter-
actions and dependencies are intensified
under globalization. We examine the role
of technology – especially in terms of com-
munication, finance, health/medicine, manu-
facturing, transportation, and weaponry – in
facilitating the movement of people, money,
ideas, and objects around the globe. And so,
we should understand that these interactions
and forms of global connectedness have dif-
ferent consequences for different people. We
identify the major players in globalization
including organizations such as the United
Nations, the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund. We examine the economic,
cultural and political processes of globaliza-
tion and their effects on real people and their
lives, including our own. For example, we
explore the uneven consequences of neolib-
eral policies and ideologies that encourage
the privatization of water as well as the forces
which push back against those ideologies,
and instead argue that water is a human right.
As part of the ‘global understanding’ gen-
eral education requirement, we work towards
achieving the following outcomes:
• Develop an understanding of global patterns and
processes and their interaction with society
• Demonstrate an understanding of the intercon-
nectedness, difference, and diversity of a global
society
• Apply an awareness of global issues to a consid-
eration of individual or collective responsibilities
within a global society
• Devise analytical, practical, or creative responses
to global problems or issues
Students come into the class with a varied
understanding of these processes of globaliza-
tion. Some, usually immigrants, children of
immigrants, or foreign students, come in with a
sophisticated understanding of many aspects of
globalization. Others come with a willingness
and openness to have a broader understanding
of global processes. And still others, who very
often come with/from privileged positions are
quite content with the status quo. While all my
497
students’ lived experiences are enmeshed and
inseparable from globalization, not all of my
students are consciously aware of their relation-
ships to the global, and that these relationships
are influenced by varied forms of power, ide-
ologies, geographies, labor, and capital. The
question for the educator, then, is how to guide
these students to the above general education
outcomes, while also providing them with the
critical thinking skills to recognize and chal-
lenge diverse, global forms of oppression,
injustice, and inequality. One of the very first
terms we discuss is dignity – how to honor,
maintain, respect, regard, and bestow it. What
might it look like, feel like, be like to lose one’s
dignity? We pull from Maya Angelou’s defini-
tion of dignity as a starting point. She says:
Dignity – the word itself – has come to mean dif-
ferent things to different people, as many words
do. It doesn’t just mean always being stiff and
composed. It means a belief in oneself, that one is
worthy of the best. Dignity means that what I have
to say is important, and I will say it when it’s impor-
tant for me to say it. Dignity really means that I
deserve the best treatment I can receive. And that
I have the responsibility to give the best treatment
I can to other people. (Azzam and Angelou, 2013)
In our class discussions we seek to maintain
the dignity and humanity not only of the
populations and people we encounter, but of
all of us in the classroom. It is here, I argue,
that we can look to the work of Paulo Freire
and the field of critical pedagogy.
Freire’s work provides a language and an
approach to anchor ourselves in the funda-
mental recognition of the humanity and dig-
nity of ourselves and others. In his Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, Freire (2000) explores the
relationship between ‘oppressors’ and the
‘oppressed’. He argues that both the oppressed
and the oppressors are dehumanized through
the violence of oppression, which can be
physical, psychological, and/or institutional.
The oppressors, in their acts of oppression,
dehumanize themselves as they dehumanize
others. Thus, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed
seeks to illuminate and challenge dehumani-
zation in all its forms:
498 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
The central problem is this: How can the oppressed,
as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in
developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only
as they live in the duality in which to be is to be
like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this
contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the
oppressed is an instrument for their critical discov-
ery that both they and their oppressors are mani-
festations of dehumanization. (Freire, 2000: 48)
He further argues that the liberation of the
oppressed must also be accompanied by the
return of the oppressors’ humanity. Here, Freire
helps set the stage whereby students can recog-
nize and interrogate distant oppressor-oppressed
relationships, for example, post-colonial
African states, but they also begin to under-
stand their own positioning as oppressor or
oppressed (or both) in local and distant con-
texts. In the classroom, we can see this play out
with respect to students’ experiences of gender,
race, and nationality, as well as students’ con-
nections to labor, and to the people who labor
to create the goods and services they use.
Freire contrasts two models of education in
order to demonstrate how we might develop
and engage with a pedagogy of the oppressed.
The first he calls the ‘banking model’. Here,
we can imagine the teacher making knowl-
edge deposits into the student. The student is
not asked to examine or reflect on this mate-
rial. Rather, the student’s evaluation will be
based on whether she or he is able to return
this deposit on an exam. In contrast, Freire
advocated for what he calls a ‘problem-pos-
ing’ education. This form relies on dialogue
and collaboration between the students as well
as the teacher, where ‘the teacher presents
material to the students for their consideration,
and reconsiders her earlier considerations as
the students express their own’ (2000: 81).
Through this dialogic process, students begin
to see the world as a set of interconnected sys-
tems and flows, and come to recognize their
lived experiences as valid and important forms
of knowledge. In my global affairs courses, I
let students know that I do not have the answer
to many of the questions I am going to ask
them, but rather together we will explore and
understand the complexity of some of these
global issues, tensions, and contradictions. For
example, I ask my students whether human
rights exist. Are they God-given and inalien-
able? Or are they a social construct that only
exists if agreed to by people and governments?
And, in either case, how do we protect and
enforce them? These kinds of questions link
students to larger issues of global governance,
security, and privilege, as well as to actual
lived examples and experiences of human
rights violations. According to Freire:
Students, as they are increasingly posed with prob-
lems relating to themselves in the world and with
the world, will feel increasingly challenged and
obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they
apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other
problems within a total context, not as a theoreti-
cal question, the resulting comprehension tends to
be increasingly critical and thus constantly less
alienated. (Freire, 2000: 81)
Much of the pedagogical work here takes
three forms. Chris Barker, borrowing from
Cornel West, identifies these as deconstruc-
tion, demythologization, and demystification
(2002: 179). Deconstruction works at the level
of individual texts and ‘involves a reading of
texts that challenges the tropes, metaphors and
binaries of rhetorical textual operations … the
objective of deconstruction is to open to view
the operations and assumptions of texts,
including their world-views or “ideologies”’
(Barker, 2002: 179). Here, I might have stu-
dents look at water conservation campaigns
around the globe and ask them how water is
represented in these campaigns – as an object,
a resource, a commodity? Are ownership
claims being made? Who do the campaigns
target – individual users, office spaces, indus-
trial uses, agricultural users?
Demythologization builds upon the work
of deconstruction. Once we begin to see the
constructedness of the metaphors, languages,
and tropes in texts and their connection to
particular world views, we can ‘highlight the
social construction of metaphors that regu-
late descriptions of the world and their pos-
sible consequences for classifying the social’
(Barker, 2002: 179). The fundamental work
 TEACHING GLOBAL AFFAIRS
of demythologization is how it ‘indicates
to us the plasticity of identities’ (ibid.: 179).
Students begin to make connections in and
between these socially constructed metaphors,
again, often when discussing race and gender,
and test the flexibility and durability of these
metaphors. This also opens space for alternate
social and cultural constructions which might
challenge the status quo and call out oppres-
sive ideologies. Indeed, according to Freire,
demythologization is one of the critical tasks
of problem-posing education. He writes, ‘In
problem-posing education, people develop
their power to perceive critically the way they
exist in the world with which and in which they
find themselves; they come to see the world
not as a static reality, but as a reality in process,
in transformation’ (2000: 83, emphasis Freire).
West introduces demystification as the
macro-level critical structural analysis of cul-
ture and institutions and the ways in which
the ‘cultural politics of difference’ operate in,
through, and around them (1990: 105). Here,
we begin to see the ways in which policy
decisions made by organizations such as the
World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) impact the everyday lives of
people around the world. For instance, how
do structural adjustment programs requir-
ing privatization of water impact Indigenous
populations, women, those in poverty, those
reliant on natural water systems, and rural as
well as urban populations? What becomes
key here is that students who may have seen
their place in and experience of the world as
fixed and immutable now understand it as
dynamic and capable of being changed.
In my approach to problem-posing
pedagogy, I first ask my students to think
conceptually by introducing a com-
mon vocabulary. From Manfred Steger’s
Globalization: A Very Short Introduction
(2013), we pull three key ideas:
• Globality – ‘a social condition characterized by
tight global economic, political, cultural and
environmental interconnections and flows that
make most of the currently existing borders and
boundaries irrevelant’ (8, emphasis Steger).
499
• Globalization – ‘a set of social processes that
appear to transform our present social condition
of weakening nationality into one of globality’
(9, emphasis Steger).
• Global Imaginary – concept referring to people’s
growing consciousness of belonging to a global
community (10).
And to these we add Campbell et al.’s concept
of a global citizen: ‘People who see their local
actions as having global consequences and
who have accepted that they have a responsi-
bility to work to better the conditions of the
world and its people’ (2010: 4). We move
forward then with the idea that global citizens
should be informed, ethical, and responsible
(ibid.: 26). Key here is understanding globali-
zation as a plurality of processes rather than a
monolithic, amorphous process. These pro-
cesses work from the top down as well as
from the bottom up, and they work to foster
globality, even as globality then shapes these
processes. Global imaginary and global citi-
zen link together as a way for my students to
position themselves in the world and to begin
to think about their relationships with people,
objects, and ideas. How do their actions and
ideas impact global communities? How are
they impacted by global communities? One
of the ways we work through these concepts
is to think about the material outputs of labor.
Whose hands have touched your phone before
it got to you? Who are the people involved in
the development, production, distribution,
and disposal of the plethora of commodities,
objects, things we encounter in our everyday
lives? What are the conditions of the workers’
employment (including pay, hours, work-
place, laws, culture)? What are the rules of
trade and the market? Who decides those
rules? Under what conditions? To whose ben-
efit? To whose detriment? These questions
call for a discussion of ideology –
what it is, who has it, and how it works.
Freire shows us that ideology is best first pre-
sented as examples rather than by name. And
so, we investigate the sites of neoliberal pro-
jects, like water privatization, to examine the
participants, ideas, interests, and implications
500 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of these projects. Further, we can get to ideol-
ogy when we discuss the role of debt, as a con-
cept and as a material reality. Students begin
to question and examine the cultural, political,
and economic manifestations of debt, whether
it’s nations going into debt to build dams for
hydropower, or families going into debt to get
clean water, or students going into debt for a
college education. Using films like The Take
(2006) (about factory recovery and the coop-
erative movement in Argentina) and Flow:
For the Love of Water (2008) (about the politi-
cal, economic, and cultural uses of water), we
come to see how debt works at an individual,
local, regional and state level. We also see
how the 20th–21st century ‘financialization of
daily life’ (Martin, 2002) and the correspond-
ing explosion of debt is linked to a particular
ideological project known as neoliberalism.
We then examine neoliberalism, with its
doctrine of privatization, deregulation, free-
market, and race-to-the-bottom labor prac-
tices, as an ideological formation and the
dominant economic model of our time.
Presenting material this way sometimes
has its downside, however. Usually about
halfway through the semester, students begin
to feel overwhelmed with the challenges,
contradictions, disasters, and dangers we face
as a global community. For all that problem-
posing reveals, disrupting hegemonic ideolo-
gies comes with a sense of hopelessness and
helplessness. Indeed, one semester we had a
guest speaker from the development sector
who gave a talk about population, consump-
tion, and jobs. During the question portion, a
student raised his hand and asked, ‘Are we all
screwed?’. She replied, ‘Yes, although some
of us more than others’. This speaks to the
challenge of this course. What is to be done
when confronted by the scope and scale of
global conflicts, crises, and structural vio-
lence, and the ways these manifest in peo-
ple’s lives? How, as an educator, do I keep
my students, and myself, from falling into the
dark abyss of indifference? Here I link their
complicity to their agency through what I call
the violence of indifference.
The violence of indifference argues that to
know about things like human-rights viola-
tions, ecological changes/climate change,
resource exploitation, and structural vio-
lence, and to do nothing makes you complicit
in that violence. It defines violence broadly
to include not only physical violence, but
also psychological, emotional, and institu-
tional violence. My thinking about indiffer-
ence borrows from Elie Wiesel. He writes:
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indiffer-
ence. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indif-
ference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s
indifference. Because of indifference, one dies
before one actually dies. To be in the window and
watch people being sent to concentration camps
or being attacked in the street and do nothing,
that’s being dead. (Wiesel, 1986: 101)
Wiesel powerfully articulates the necessity of
not only holding on to our compassion and
humanity, but also realizing our responsibil-
ity to act, disrupt, intervene, challenge, and
change. Wiesel’s ‘being dead’ here corre-
sponds to Freire’s understanding of dehu-
manization. The violence of indifference
refocuses us on issues of humanity and dig-
nity. To remain indifferent erases the human-
ity of others as well as our own. And what are
we without our humanity? Still, we live in a
world overwhelmed with physical and struc-
tural violence, with genocide, disease, and
land degradation, with gender-based vio-
lence, resource depletion, and corruption,
with children fleeing violence across deserts
and oceans seeking safety. We have to
acknowledge the limits of our abilities to act.
This is to say that we cannot take on every
struggle, every fight. What is to be done?
How do we proceed?
One of the ways we might answer that
question is through an engagement with
Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (1997). One
of Gordon’s fundamental concepts is that of
complex personhood. She writes, ‘Complex
personhood is about conferring the respect
on others that comes from presuming that
life and people’s lives are simultaneously
 TEACHING GLOBAL AFFAIRS
straightforward and full of enormously subtle
meaning’ (1997: 5). This is our acknowledg-
ment that people’s lives are messy, contradic-
tory, collaborative, beautiful, joyful, violent,
carefree, constrained, lonely, and heartbreak-
ing. And in this acknowledgement, we also
see that there are few simple solutions to
many of the challenges facing us today; not if
we want to respect the humanity and dignity
of ourselves and others. Complex person-
hood informs and helps guide problem-pos-
ing pedagogical practice. It also insists that
we acknowledge the lived experiences of the
‘other’. For example, complex personhood
insists that we demythologize and demys-
tify discourses and institutional practices
that frame refugees and migrants as danger-
ous, malicious, infectious, and burdensome.
Understanding complex personhood allows
us to ground ourselves in the web of rela-
tionships, acknowledge the dynamism, and
see the potential sites for intervention and
change. For Gordon, ‘We need to know where
we live in order to imagine living elsewhere.
We need to imagine living elsewhere before
we can live there’ (1997: 5).
Gordon uses the metaphor of haunting
to think about moments of disruption where
ghosts emerge as present–not present specters.
The ghosts can be labor – think again about
the hands that haunt our smartphones, or all
the hands that have touched the seat you last
sat in, or are sitting in right now. All the peo-
ple putting in the labor from resource extrac-
tion to disposal haunt these objects. Similarly,
ghosts can be the resources themselves. The
oil, metal, water, animals, plants, and min-
erals used to make our plastics, machines,
food, and other commodities leave their own
imprints, their own traces, on environments
and on people as they move through extraction
to disposal. Here we can think of the effects of
pollution, of land use, and of climate change.
Ghosts sometimes make themselves appar-
ent and insist on being acknowledged, for
example, the children of Flint, Michigan.
Flint was a booming automobile manufactur-
ing city until many of the factories closed due
501
to downsizing and offshoring of production.
Made famous by Michael Moore’s documen-
tary Roger & Me (1989), Flint came to rep-
resent the many American industrial cities
that globalization left behind – characterized
by poverty, unemployment, urban decay, and
structural violence. After the global economic
crisis of 2008–9, Flint was deeply in debt. In
2011, the state of Michigan took over Flint’s
finances. One of the cost-saving solutions
enacted by the emergency manager was to
switch municipal water sources. Doing so
meant temporarily sourcing water from the
Flint River. The management team opted not
to add erosion controls (which would cost
$100/day), a violation of federal law. The
water from the Flint River was so corrosive it
rusted pipes and leeched lead into the water.
Researchers found 40% of the homes in Flint
were exposed to high levels of lead, and three
of Flint’s schools also tested positive for high
levels of lead (CNN, 2019). At the same time,
a local pediatrician found that the number
of children with elevated lead levels in their
blood had doubled, and in some neighbor-
hoods, tripled (CNN, 2019). Children exposed
to lead may develop a wide array of irreversi-
ble neurobehavioral changes, including dimin-
ished intelligence and behavioral conditions,
as well as cardiovascular and renal dysfunc-
tion (WHO, 2010). The children of Flint haunt
the city, the state, and the nation. The long-
term impact on the children’s health and life
possibilities is not yet known. Their existence
renders apparent the workings of structural
violence, of how a population can become an
abstract, dehumanized object rather than a col-
lection of actual people. Further, they provide
another way to understand the importance of
clean water for human dignity and health. This
is an idea that links Flint to water movements
across the globe, such as India, Bolivia, China,
South Africa, and Palestine.
But, ghosts can also be particular and spe-
cific to an individual. Sometimes a ghost
may call just to you, speak to a particular
aspect of your own history and experience.
For example, in the Japanese film Nobody
502 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Knows (2004), the main character, a 12-year-
old boy, is wearing a t-shirt from the board-
walk arcade I frequented as a kid on vacation
in Ocean City, Maryland. In the film, this
character has been abandoned by his mother
and left to care for three younger siblings. I
was struck by the t-shirt’s presence on the
screen, in the narrative, and in the literal
space of the film set captured by the camera.
This ghost spurred my own interests in the
global circulation of second-hand clothing.
What Gordon’s conception of hauntings and
ghosts offer us are starting places for our own
actions in combating the violence of indif-
ference. You start where you’re called. Find
your ghost and follow it. There is enough
injustice to go around.
In my Introduction to Global Affairs
course, I have a two-part assignment that
employs problem-posing by asking students
to first define the violence of indifference and
structural violence. Then they are asked to
take their definitions and analyze the Global
Citizen website. Global Citizen’s main page
states, ‘Global Citizen is a community of
people like you. People who want to learn
about and take action on the world’s biggest
challenges. Extreme poverty ends with you’
(Global Citizen, n.d.). This assignment gives
students some play with the ideas, and allows
them to focus their definitions around their
own interests. Some of the themes include
hunger/food security, patriarchy, immigration,
fast fashion, poverty, and climate change. The
second part of the assignment gives them the
opportunity to use deconstruction, demythol-
ogization, and demystification in assessing
the Global Citizen website. I ask them a series
of questions, such as whether the website is
an example of the violence of indifference as
they’ve defined it, or whether it combats the
violence of indifference. What is the website
doing right? What is it doing wrong? Does
it address structural violence? How does it
ground its campaign against global poverty?
What cultural forms and forces does the web-
site mobilize? Students are asked to determine
whether the website is an effective campaign
against global poverty. I assign the students
this website because I myself find it both
hopeful and problematic. Hopeful because
of its mission and its articulation of complex-
ity. It understands the interconnectedness of
our global challenges such that to end pov-
erty means making sure everyone has access
to clean water and making sure girls get an
education. It is problematic in its clicktivist
approach to engage global citizens. One stu-
dent’s critique was that they are only engag-
ing with people who agree with them already.
Another student said they doubted whether
politicians will pay much attention to a peti-
tion composed of people who aren’t their con-
stituents. This assignment requires them to
contemplate on what it means to take action,
to not be indifferent. They begin to focus on
the challenges, but also the possibilities. They
have to account for globalization, economics,
political power, and people power.
The next development here is the Violence
of Indifference Project. It begins with a return
to global citizenship (ethical, informed, and
responsible). The first step is to gather infor-
mation. Students are to immerse themselves
in the materials that frame and discuss their
area of interest. The second step is to exam-
ine the discourse. Here we return again to
the deconstruction, demythologization, and
demystification model. The third step is to
find sites of intervention, to change the con-
versation (discourse), and start project devel-
opment. Even if students never get to project
development, they are working towards what
Gordon calls an alternative diagnostics, ‘of
what has been done and what is to be done
otherwise’ (1997: 18). It is an imaginative
and speculative practice that is guided by the
problem-posing model.
I tell my students that they could become
solution ambassadors and talk about game-
changing ideas to help shape the conversa-
tions. For example, we are currently seeing
the discourse on single use plastics and pol-
lution erupt into the mainstream. People
are having conversations about it on social
media, in the news, and in their homes and
 TEACHING GLOBAL AFFAIRS
schools. For example, the social media move-
ment #stopsucking takes on the plastic straw.
However, those behind this movement argue
that the straw acts as a ‘gateway plastic’:
To us, it was the ‘gateway plastic’ to the larger,
more serious plastic pollution conversation. Plus,
plastic straws are social tools and props, the per-
fect conversation starter. In starting the conversa-
tion by pairing something playful alongside our
gross human over-consumption (‘500 million con-
sumed daily in the United States alone’) we aimed
to nudge people toward understanding the issue.
(Ives, 2017)
This campaign demonstrates for us how
important it is to shape the discourse around
solutions and the potential for solution
ambassadors to have an impact.
In the five years that I’ve been teaching the
violence of indifference, I have found that it
holds real promise in terms of getting students
thinking about their relationships to people,
objects, and ideas. I’ve had one student organ-
izing a protest of Forever 21, a fast-fashion
retailer based in the United States that pro-
vides cheap, fashionable clothing primarily
for young women (although they now also
have men’s and girls’ departments). My stu-
dent was disturbed by their labor practices,
and she believed her personal boycott of the
store wouldn’t really challenge the violence
of indifference. Her goal was to bring to light
the unjust labor practices and resource exploi-
tation involved in fast fashion. Another stu-
dent, a year after taking my class, messaged
me that he spent his Saturday on The Mall in
Washington, DC with a group handing out
information on the genocide of the Yazidis, an
ethnoreligious group living in Iraq, by ISIS.
The Mall is the epicenter of DC politics and
tourism with the Capitol Building on one
end and the Washington Monument on the
other, and the Smithsonian Museum buildings
in between them. The White House is also
nearby. This student is an avid news consumer,
but that hadn’t previously prompted him to
act. Thinking of himself as a global citizen in
connection with the violence of indifference
provided the motivation to join this protest
503
and work towards bringing the plight of the
Yazidis into the public discourse. Indeed, he
said the violence of indifference haunts him.
In this chapter, I’ve argued for the value
of critical complex pedagogy and of using a
problem-posing pedagogical approach when
teaching Global Affairs. This is three-fold.
First, it creates a classroom environment
which encourages dialogue, and collaboration
as well as imaginative and speculative think-
ing. The classroom becomes a generative
space of knowledge production rather than
knowledge consumption. Students see their
contributions and experiences as important
and valuable. We interrogate the wold around
us, conceptualize the global imaginary, and
learn with and from each other. And, per-
haps most importantly, it models a mode of
inquiry that acknowledges Kincheloe’s com-
plexity and Gordon’s ‘life is complicated’.
This is a model that students can take with
them beyond this course. Second, Freire’s
articulation of the oppressed-oppressor
dynamic and its foregrounding of human-
ity and dignity provide a framework through
which we can take up the many challenges
of our time – from climate change, to armed
conflicts, to gender-based violence, to post-
consumer waste, to global health, to refugees.
It also gives us the opportunity to think about
our own positionalities in oppressed–oppressor
relationships. For some students, their experi-
ence as an oppressed person is validated and
reframed. For other students, this is the first
time they understand themselves as an oppres-
sor. Although, I remind all my students that
they have at least this one thing in common – by
their very presence as a student in an American
university classroom, they are among some
of the most privileged people on the planet.
Third, problem-posing sets the tone in which
and through which I am able to propose the
violence of indifference to my students. It
provides a language to articulate that tension
between knowledge and (in)action. It offers us
ways of thinking about our local, regional, and
global challenges, as well as our responsibility
for and responses to these challenges.
504 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
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Promoting Critical Consciousness
in the Preparation of Teachers
in Colombia1
Jaime A. Usma, Oscar A. Peláez,
Yu l i a n a P a l a c i o , a n d C a t a l i n a J a r a m i l l o
INTRODUCTION
Colombia is going through a crucial time in its
history due to a number of political, economic,
social, and educational events. The govern-
ment has secured a groundbreaking peace deal
with the largest leftist group of the country,
promising to end a war that racked the country
for more than half a century, killing tens of
thousands and displacing millions. As a conse-
quence of this already accomplished peace
negotiation, Colombians are facing a crucial
moment where some are optimistic and cele-
brate an upcoming new era appearing on the
horizon, yet others lean more towards pessi-
mism, attached to a more conservative concep-
tion of justice and a belief that the government
should not be so generous in embracing such
negotiation processes. These differences have
led to higher levels of polarization in the coun-
try between those who are in favor of the peace
process and those who are against it. Perhaps
the most salient aspect of current Colombian
society relates to its political transition from an
47
administration that was able to secure peace, to
a right-wing, conservative government that is
attempting to modify the most contentious
components of the deal signed.
During recent years, negotiations of bi-
national trade agreements with the United
States and other countries in Europe, Asia,
and the rest of the Americas, as well as pro-
found examination and restructuring of the
national government to become a member of
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD), have involved the
acceptance of economic and political reform
packages. As is evident in recent policy
documents and reform agendas in Colombia
(OECD/IBRD/World Bank, 2012), current
models of education and language policy in
the country include the enforcement of new
accountability tools and indicators, the adop-
tion of international standards, the recognition
of the Programme for International Student
Assessment’s (PISA) exams as a worldwide
indicator of local and transnational education
quality, and the promotion and enforcement
506 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of English as an international language across
the whole educational system. From this per-
spective, education and language reforms
not only respond to globalized agreements
on what education means today, but also to
international pressures connected to eco-
nomic and political agendas.
At the same time, state officials have
adopted international models of reform by
introducing a far-reaching set of education
and foreign language policies that include the
National Bilingual Program 2004–2019, the
National Program for the Strengthening of
Foreign Languages 2010–2014, the National
Law of Bilingualism in 2013, and more
recently, the National English Program 2015–
2025, and Bilingual Colombia 2014–2018.
Programs and policies like these have made
evident the special interest of the central gov-
ernment in promoting, improving, and regu-
lating foreign language teaching, learning,
and certification processes in the country in
an effort to look more attractive to foreign
investment in times of economic globaliza-
tion, transnational policymaking, and inter-
national competitiveness (Peláez and Usma,
2017). As government officials have stated,
the main purpose of these policies and pro-
grams has been to educate good and com-
petitive citizens who will be able to interact
with the world through the use of a foreign
language (Ministerio de Educación Nacional,
2014). These reforms contribute to the intro-
duction of new discourses about bilingualism
in Colombia; the import and definition of
standards for all academic levels; the evalu-
ation and certification of local teachers, stu-
dents, and language programs according to
these standards and views; and the promo-
tion of international models for professional
development within the country.
Some researchers have pointed out that
these reforms mainly respond to the trans-
national political and economic agendas that
Colombia has undertaken in recent decades
(Usma, 2009a, 2009b), which have gener-
ally imported monolithic and homogeneous
discourses on reform (Guerrero, 2008) at
the expense of local knowledge (González,
2007). More recently, some papers have
described limitations in implementing these
policies in urban and rural communities
(Correa et al., 2014; Maturana, 2011; Peláez
and Usma, 2017; Usma, 2015), while oth-
ers have emphasized the multiple challenges
of imposed policies that do not recognize the
active role that different educational actors
should play for a more successful introduc-
tion of these reforms in the country (Bonilla
and Tejada, 2016; Cárdenas, 2006; Correa
and Usma, 2013; Guerrero, 2010; Peláez and
Usma, 2017).
According to a report written by the OECD
in 2016, Colombia has made education a main
priority to improve the economic and social
prosperity of the country, but the challenge of
achieving educational quality continues. Thus,
as the country enters its historic post-conflict
era, it is vital to respond to new challenges
such as closing gaps between rich and poor and
especially offering educational possibilities to
the whole country. According to this report,
the average number of years of education in
rural areas is 5.5 years, while in urban areas
this number goes up to 9.2 years, demonstrat-
ing inequality in the educational opportunities
offered to Colombian residents. In addition to
that, only two out of ten high school graduates
in rural areas manage to enter higher educa-
tion immediately following graduation.
In the country’s transition out of decades
of war and social exclusion, education plays
a decisive role as it opens citizens’ minds to
embrace their reality and become active actors
in its transformation. The road to peacebuild-
ing demands an education that contributes to
forming citizens able to resolve conflicts peace-
fully, strengthening reflection and dialogue, as
well as stimulating respectful coexistence. As
pointed out by Paulo Freire decades ago:
The time of transition involves a rapid movement
in search of new themes and new tasks. In such a
phase, man needs more than ever to be integrated
with his reality. If he lacks the capacity to perceive
the ‘mystery’ of the changes, he will be a mere
pawn at their mercy. (Freire, 2005[1974]: 6–7)
 PROMOTING CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS IN COLOMBIA 507
In context, teachers are called to become
actors for social transformation. This situa-
tion requires analytical standpoints that move
beyond the purely linguistic and technical
views that characterize the field of education,
encouraging us to move into critical views
that examine the sociocultural, economic,
and political implications of schooling and,
more specifically, foreign language teaching,
learning, and certification in Colombia. This
calls for open spaces where alternative views
can be openly discussed, and where different
school actors can express their concerns,
conceptualizations, and proposals in continu-
ous connection with national and interna-
tional conversations.
With this purpose in mind, some universi-
ties have formulated and implemented courses
on foreign language and education policy in
their curricula. Through their courses, these
universities have sought to explore the cul-
tural, economic, political, socio linguistic,
and pedagogical implications of the reforms
while also promoting discussion and interac-
tion among the colleagues from the different
universities participating in the initiatives.
This chapter reports on the universities’
endeavors, including how the language edu-
cation policy courses attempt to prepare
preservice and inservice English teachers as
policymakers and active agents of change
able to respond to the challenges posed by the
current situation in Colombia. The following
sections elaborate on the main concepts guid-
ing this study, the program that was proposed
and implemented in the three universities,
and the findings of these programs.
EDUCATING PRESERVICE TEACHERS
AS FUTURE POLICY ACTORS
At a time when international reforms attempt
to accommodate educational systems to eco-
nomic and political demands and interests,
teachers continue to play an active role in the
formulation and critical appropriation of
policies across countries. As reported in mul-
tiple studies (see e.g., Ball, 1998; Ball et al.,
2012; Brown, 2010; Davis, 2014; Hart, 2002;
Paciotto and Delany-Barmann, 2011; Pease-
Alvarez and Davies, 2012; Steiner-Khamsi,
2004; Sutton and Levinson, 2001; Tochon,
2015; Usma, 2015), more than simple imple-
menters of official government discourses
and policies, teachers act as policymakers by
reshaping state social, educational, and lan-
guage policies. Thus, while the government
officially mandates policy in an attempt to
homogenize school systems, teachers enact
these discourses and plans according to the
needs and possibilities of their school com-
munities. They turn initial directives into
diverse curriculum initiatives that reflect the
particular conditions of the educational set-
tings where they serve (Hornberger and
Johnson, 2007; Levinson et al., 2009;
Menken and García, 2010; Ricento and
Hornberger, 1996; Shohamy, 2009, 2010;
Spillane, 2004; Sutton and Levinson, 2001;
Usma, 2015). This is how the initially linear
policymaking plan becomes a highly unpre-
dictable and complex endeavor across coun-
tries, educational systems, institutions, and
classrooms, while teachers become determi-
nant policy actors dealing with uncertainty,
complexity, and frustration as initial propos-
als reach the implementation stage.
Teachers require both initial and continu-
ous teacher education programs that provide
them with opportunities to get familiar with
the conceptual and practical tools to face
increasing or changing demands. Preservice
and inservice teachers need to examine the
multiple implications, challenges, and possi-
bilities available or to be explored with stu-
dents, school communities, and educational
actors in general. As suggested by Varghese
and Stritikus, in the midst of current reforms
impacting school communities, teachers are
never conduits of a particular policy, while
‘teacher education and teacher training, espe-
cially in relation to bilingual teachers, must
specifically address the role of teachers as
policy makers’ (2005: 84). This is where the
508 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
intentional and explicit preparation of teachers
as political actors must be guided by their pro-
fessional capacity as effective policy interpret-
ers and negotiators (Heineke et al., 2015), and
where an effective study of policy is more than
required. As policy actors, teachers are faced
with personal, political, cultural, and social
decisions, and become critical agents playing
a crucial role in the construction of democratic
societies, for which their preparation needs
to respond to these demands (Heineke et al.,
2015; Menken and García, 2010).
Aware of these demands and reflecting a
Latin American tradition in critical teacher
education and pedagogy, our approach to
teacher education and language policy stud-
ies in Colombia draws on Paulo Freire’s calls
for critical consciousness and action. For
this Latin American thinker and pedagogue,
teachers need to respond to extended oppres-
sion and societal concerns through a sustained
process of critical reflection and action. From
this perspective, conscientização represents
the development of the awakening of criti-
cal consciousness, which does not appear
naturally, but as part of an educational pro-
cess (Freire, 1970, 2005[1974]). As pointed
out by Freire’s education for consciousness,
we all relate to our world in a critical way
as we intervene in reality in order to change
it. This critical process includes gaining
acquired experience, creating and recreat-
ing, integrating ourselves into our context,
responding to its challenges, and discerning,
transcending, and entering into the domain of
history and culture. In this manner, integra-
tion, as a human activity, differs from adapta-
tion. Integration results from the capacity to
adapt to the world plus the critical capacity
to make choices and transform reality. In this
manner, as human beings relate to the world
by responding to the challenges of the envi-
ronment, we master and humanize reality.
From this angle, it is the role of education to
develop the individual and collective capac-
ity to develop a flexible and critical capacity
to respond to the evolving nature of society.
Problem-posing education thus involves a
constant unveiling of reality and the continu-
ous search for the emergence of conscious-
ness and critical intervention in reality.
In his 2012 book on language teacher edu-
cation for global change, Kumaravadivelu
takes this critical approach and argues for
a teacher education model that responds to
contemporary needs for social transforma-
tion. He introduces the three central operating
principles of particularity, practicality, and
possibility and argues for teacher education
programs that focus more on teacher agency,
flexibility, and freedom, not just imposed
acceptance of authority; that focus more
on the production of personal knowledge
instead of reproduction of given wisdom;
that emphasize more teacher research rather
than conventional knowledge that does not
respond to local realities and students’ needs,
lacks, and wants; and that highlights the role
of teachers as transformative intellectuals,
not passive technicians and language instruc-
tors (Kumaravadivelu, 2012). This approach
to teacher education connects to a num-
ber of challenges and issues elaborated by
Contreras (1997), Usma (2007), and Peláez
and Usma (2017), as they call for teachers,
as critical intellectuals, to exercise their pro-
fessional autonomy and move beyond instru-
mental and rational notions of education,
teaching, and learning, disconnected from
the construction of a more inclusive society.
This approach also aligns with local calls for
teachers to exercise their autonomy as they
act as policymakers, which requires teachers
to be familiar with language policy and enact-
ment (Usma, 2015). The following sections
elaborate on how these principles are being
integrated into teacher education programs in
three universities in Colombia.
RESEARCH METHOD
This chapter reports on a project aimed at the
promotion of critical consciousness and
action in the preparation of teachers as
 PROMOTING CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS IN COLOMBIA 509
policymakers. The authors worked with three
groups of students taking courses on lan-
guage education policy and reform as part of
their preservice and inservice programs in
three universities in Medellín, Colombia.
The courses on language education policy
and reform were created and taught by two of
the authors of this report, while the whole
team examined the impact on students’
understanding and action at the ground level.
With this project, the authors attempted to
respond to the challenges faced by English
teachers in the midst of standardization and
market-based reforms being adopted in
Colombia while at the same time teachers
also need to respond to the construction of a
more equitable and peaceful country at times
of peace agreements, reconciliation, and
quests for social justice.
The authors carried out a multisite case
study that systematically examined the effect
of these language education policy courses
on students’ critical consciousness and
actions. The participants included groups of
10 students from each university who volun-
tarily provided information during and after
the courses’ implementation. From a quali-
tative perspective, and in order to guarantee
trustworthiness and validity in the findings,
researchers incorporated different types of
sources, participants, and voices in the data.
Participants included inservice and preser-
vice teachers as well as experienced and
novice teachers who were connected to both
public and private institutions in the city of
Medellín. All the participants spoke Spanish
as their mother tongue and provided their
written reflections and individual and group
interviews in Spanish during and after the
courses. The authors translated the responses
selected for the paper.
To obtain effective and systematic analy-
sis data, researchers employed NVivo 10 and
combined inductive and deductive approaches
to data analysis, moving from open and the-
matic coding to memoing, interpreting, vali-
dating, and reporting (Glaser, 1978, 1998;
Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Throughout the
study, the research team observed and main-
tained the strictest standards of informed con-
sent, respect, and protection of participants’
identity, integrity, privacy, and confidentiality
when interacting with them and with insti-
tutions as well as when handling the data,
always following the international standards
of research ethics proposed by the American
Educational Research Association (AERA,
2011) and the Central Ethics Committee at
each university. To ensure privacy was safe-
guarded when the data were handled, they
were protected with an access code that
allowed only the research team to have access
to the collected data and analyses. The final
section of this report presents the findings of
this study and its main contributions.
FINDINGS
This section gathers the traits of the language
and education policies courses and its impact
on inservice and preservice teachers’ critical
awareness of Colombia’s current and ongo-
ing language and educational reforms. It also
comprises a description of the actions teach-
ers were empowered to take in terms of cur-
riculum development as well as continuous
analysis of the programs and policies that
position them as active political actors in
their school settings.
The Courses and Their
Development
The courses described in this study aimed at
providing preservice and inservice language
teachers with a broad overview of past and
current language and education policies at
the national level and the extent to which
they are connected to international reform
trends. In doing so, students were required to
analyze policy documents, identify different
dimensions of reforms, examine advances
and limitations of official plans, and consider
510 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
alternative courses of action. In this manner,
the course attempted to raise awareness about
the social and political role that teachers play
in society and how they can act as policy-
makers that critically enact initial policy texts
in multiple educational contexts.
A number of strategies were employed by
the teachers in and out of class in order to
accomplish the goals of the courses. These
included assigned readings, class discus-
sions, video analysis, guest speakers, mind
and concept map creations and analyses, and
student projects. All these activities allowed
students to make a connection between poli-
cies, literature, and the local realities; explore
different perspectives towards the class top-
ics and issues; and listen to different voices
and experiences. All along the development
of the courses, the teachers in charge of them
in each of the three universities maintained
continuous collaboration and communica-
tion in order to share advances and concerns
and provide peer support to consolidate the
course proposal.
Course content and sequencing was focused
on language education policies regarding
teaching languages in Colombia, starting
with an overview of international reforms in
the context of globalization and moving into
national and local policies and programs.
During the course, initial plans for some
classes were modified in order to respond
to relevant political, economic, cultural, or
educational events that occurred in Colombia
and that warranted careful scrutiny in class.
Important events such as the presidential and
local elections, developments, and implica-
tions of the peace processes with Colombia’s
major guerrilla groups, and economic and
political reforms being proposed by the gov-
ernment were included as part of the course
agenda. This content was accompanied by
a series of reaction papers that allowed stu-
dents to convey their points of view on the
topics discussed in class and effectively use
the arguments they were exposed to with the
readings and class discussions to support
their positions. Moreover, students carried
out a final project in which they analyzed a
local issue affected by language and educa-
tion policies. In what remains of this essay,
we will describe the impact of these courses
on the students’ critical awareness of reform,
on their role as curriculum developers in their
school settings, and on their critical response
to relevant current trends.
Raising Critical Awareness about
Reforms and School Realities
The preservice and inservice teachers
reported in their interviews that they valued
the approaches, content, sequencing, and
strategies proposed and implemented as part
of the courses. They appreciated the opportu-
nity to familiarize themselves with the chal-
lenges teachers face across the educational
system, from public to private institutions,
rural to urban schools, and language centers
to universities. Participants recognized that
incorporating this course content into their
studies made them feel better prepared as
professionals and critical intellectuals. In the
words of two participants:
We had a panorama of how these current lan-
guage policies influence or show how English is
currently perceived in our country. That is, what is
English for?
I would say that the course provided me with
knowledge, but also criteria to know the laws and
analyze them, to propose, but from arguments,
being objective and not subjective, not from criti-
cism driven by opinion. Because every time we had
a discussion, a writing assignment, or even the
final task, the teacher always propelled our reflec-
tions to be grounded in arguments and supported
with examples drawn from the policies, books and
projects. It’s through this process that a change
can be proposed. How can we propose changes if
we don’t know enough about these policies?
For some inservice teachers working in elite,
private institutions at the time of the course,
the readings, activities, and special guest
speakers made them aware of how most of the
schools in the city and country differed from
 PROMOTING CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS IN COLOMBIA 511
the reality they were immersed in every day.
They learned how to identify similarities and
differences among public and private schools,
thus becoming aware of how, no matter where
teachers work, we are part of a broader system.
Two participants shared the following:
I was able to see the existing breach between the
public and private sector.
Well, for me, it made me more critical about this
matter, so to speak, toward that ideal space where
I work. So, eventually that environment grows on
you and then somehow you forget about the
other context that is there in the country that is
not as privileged or perfect.
Teachers who were working in elite private
schools also wondered what they were edu-
cating their students for: the Colombian
people or the international job market.
According to some of them, instead of follow-
ing the national agendas, they were following
international education models. Then, many
of their students leave the country to study
and work abroad. This is one of the reasons
why teachers’ critical awareness of the cur-
rent reforms in the country and school system
becomes essential; it is so they can be more
than functional English instructors – critical
agents that reflect on the role of teachers,
education, and English in Colombian society.
The language and education policy course
also gave aspiring language teachers a broad
overview of the current and previous language
and education policies in the national con-
text and how they are connected to broader
international agendas. After learning about
and analyzing the global context in which
Colombia and its education system exist, one
of the participants ended up questioning the
country’s current policy approach:
These policies are not taking into account the con-
text in which our country is immersed. They are
not taking into account that these policies were
adopted, without any adaptation. They were
adopted, simply taken from somewhere else.
Teachers also recognized the importance of
this critical awareness in teacher education
programs in Colombia. As some of them
observed, teachers in different education set-
tings not only have to understand these
reforms but should also initiate conversations
with their own students about them and their
many dimensions in Colombia. One teacher
argued that:
[…] students should also be aware of these poli-
cies. If we are educating students, who have a
critical standpoint and who are participants in their
own process, it’s good for them to know at least
the generalities of the regulations which they must
follow for the teaching and learning of English.
These are just a few ways in which the
course contributed to the participants’ criti-
cal awareness and understanding of current
language and education reforms in Colombia
and how this knowledge and critical con-
sciousness served as a basis for future
actions as critical agents who need to take
both an active and proactive role in the con-
struction of a more inclusive education
system and society. One of the participants
shared his interpretation of this multilayered
process and its implications, which con-
firms the importance of such endeavors in
education settings. He manifested:
With the Language Policies course, I also see a
slightly bigger but necessary challenge, in which
one must have in mind what must be taken into
account for his or her own development. One
should keep in mind that, from a social standpoint,
we have, as members of a society, that political
aspect that we cannot reject or put aside. We can’t
say: ‘I’m not into politics’. It’s not about getting into
politics or supporting candidate X or Y; it’s about
having a critical viewpoint in regards to what’s hap-
pening politically, and not accepting everything
happily, or saying ‘Yes, I believe in the National
Bilingual Program, it’s good and it will work for
everyone’. No! We must have the capacity of taking
a step back and seeing to what point these policies
that are being implemented are positive, to what
point they can affect what is going on in society,
and from there, see how things can be improved. I
have always looked at things more from the per-
spective of how they can be improved, instead
of saying ‘This policy is bad, this policy is good’.
We should first look at what is failing and, from
there, how things can begin to be constructed.
512 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
This course provides us with a capacity for develop-
ing that type of thinking or that type of criticism,
but from a constructive point of view, not from a
destructive one.
The development of a more sensitive, criti-
cal, and politically active teacher starts with
an effort to raise their critical awareness on
these crucial matters that affect teachers,
students, and education communities in their
daily lives. As we have seen in the previous
excerpts, a course such as the one in this
study may contribute to these goals and may
significantly benefit participants directly and
the communities they serve indirectly. In the
following section we will elaborate more on
these potential benefits.
Participating in Curriculum
Development
The participation in the language and educa-
tion policy courses allowed participants to
become more qualified to participate in cur-
riculum design and adaptation. The course
provided teachers with an extensive list of
official documents related to language policy
and curriculum development as part of
Colombia’s reforms. This can be used to
strengthen future curriculum adaptation at
their schools, and during the course it pro-
vided them with a number of opportunities to
discuss the documents and examine their
implications and possible uses across educa-
tional settings. As expressed by two of the
participating teachers:
What I wanted to show the teachers in my little
presentation was that we could adapt those pro-
jects, that we didn’t have to follow the book step
by step. Instead, depending on the audience we
are teaching to, we could adapt it according to the
needs and resources their institution had. In gen-
eral, it was a nice experience. It was very helpful
for me.
I work in a school on Saturday, in a workshop they
have what is called: Let’s Communicate in English,
and we are currently modifying the curriculum for
adolescent groups.
In other cases, teachers tried to share ideas
at their schools but were rendered powerless
in the face of negative answers from their
managers. One teacher lamented the follow-
ing situation:
In fact, when I talked to my boss, I said to her,
‘Why don’t we think about doing it this way?’. She
almost always said no. She said the government
was the one giving us the money and that they
were the ones who actually ruled.
Participants in these courses recognized the
importance of the materials and activities
carried out in class, and how the study of
language policy and reform can be crucial for
curriculum development inside schools. One
teacher concluded:
We have to know what’s going on beyond matters
related to the didactics of language teaching. We
have to know what there is and what is being
talked about among those in power, so we can
take that to the classroom, to implement it, for
example, into a school or institute curriculum.
This is how, regarding decision making, we
could evidence how the course provided teach-
ers with the knowledge and tools that allowed
them to make more beneficial decisions in
terms of curriculum design and appropriation.
As it is clear from these excerpts, preservice
and inservice teachers’ level of participation in
policymaking and their development of critical
thinking skills as they pertain to their students
was enhanced by their participation in the uni-
versities’ policy courses.
Responding Critically to Current
Language and Education Reforms
Another impact of the course was that teach-
ers expressed that they felt more empowered
to act and make decisions. They learned that
it was possible to consider the environment
and context in their teaching, and adapt cur-
ricula based on their students’ needs. They
also learned that they can plan their classes
not only with the school’s established
requirements but also with new ideas of their
 PROMOTING CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS IN COLOMBIA 513
own curriculum design purposes. As one
participant mentioned:
It shows a teacher as an active agent at the work-
place, being able to act based on the knowledge
they acquired from the course.
I think this course helped me to be a little revolu-
tionary and to not simply be gullible, and to know
how we can adapt these policies. So, I am very
thankful.
Throughout the course, students became aware
of the process they went through in order to
become critical intellectuals. One teacher told
about how, at the beginning of his career, he
focused his attention on learning the language.
Then, he found out that learning the language
was not enough, and he had to acquire all the
pedagogical skills that would allow him to
teach the language. Finally, after taking the
course in this study, he concluded that learning
the language and knowing how to teach it were
just a technical vision of what being a teacher
means. That is how he came to think about the
importance of knowing about the regulations
and policies that govern his practice and reflect-
ing on them, which will help him to become a
critical intellectual who both reflects and acts in
order to change his practices and consequently
his students. He concluded:
I think that the most important thing is that it cre-
ates the necessity of being participative agents of
change in the construction of policies contextual-
ized to the needs of the citizens.
The teachers who participated in the study
recognize themselves as political agents who
play an active role not only in their teaching
process but also towards Colombia’s language
policy. They found that they became more
reflective, analytical, and participative actors
in the education field. Two teachers confirm
that finding with the following comments:
I think that we should, as students or teachers, exer-
cise our role as policy actors. We should have a more
active role in regards to this. We shouldn’t think that
we’re only simply teaching English. Everything we
have discussed about language policies and educa-
tion reforms, national and international, helped us
to have a better understanding of our profession,
and it especially contributed to helping us see
beyond our noses.
We were always focused on what ‘you, as a
teacher, what can you do?’. So it was a reflection
from a political standpoint, as teachers and politi-
cal agents.
The participants also improved their ability
to differentiate between being critical and
being pessimistic, that the former means
being able to explore further possibilities and
spaces for action. In this sense, one of the
participants recognized that, instead of criti-
cizing only to find fault and becoming pes-
simistic about the situation the education
system is in, teachers in the course started to
take a more active role and consider a large
number of possibilities for improving it. She
expressed herself in these words:
The policies provide a critical viewpoint, and when
I say critical, it’s not just about criticizing as one
could first think of it; instead, it’s about recogniz-
ing the good aspects and what can be improved,
what has worked and what hasn’t. Also, one
should have an aim towards the future as to what
can be done and what can be improved.
In line with the above, preservice teachers
talked about who they wanted to be as pro-
fessionals and how that decision is going to
impact their students. Teachers reflected on
this decision not only in terms of themselves
as teachers but also where and how they
aimed to generate change through their prac-
tice. Thus, they decided to continue looking
into the policies and their implications for:
[…] deciding what kind of teacher I want to be,
how I want to exercise my teaching, in what places
I want to do so, and, above all, what change and
what level of participation I want my students to
have in this process.
One of the biggest contributions this course
made to the professional development of the
student teachers was to get them to think about
the importance of identifying and responding to
the contextual needs of their students and com-
munities. They became aware of what many
514 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
teachers already know: although the same poli-
cies may reach them, schools, classrooms, and
student situations can differ greatly. Ideally,
teachers recognize the particularities in their
context and adapt a given policy to it in order to
make it relevant and suitable for their specific
situation. One participating teacher, for exam-
ple, raised a question about students with spe-
cial needs and how policies sometimes exclude
them. Others recognized themselves as politi-
cal agents who play an active role not only in
their teaching process but also towards the lan-
guage policy in the country. One of the partici-
pants expressed:
So, I think this doesn’t end simply in a seminar of
a number of hours, not exactly; instead, it tran-
scends, too, our own interest of change and
research and also other courses because you arrive
here with a discourse already and some arguments
that help you position yourself in regards to teach-
ing English in your context, in your school, in your
practicum and that is tied to integral development
in the university. Not just from the teaching pro-
gram, but also from what we are as people – criti-
cal, democratic and participative beings.
For me, personally, what I take away from this course
as a reflection is that, logically, all these standards
and these language policies are trying, I think, to
divide societies. And what you mentioned earlier,
education for the poor, and if you can reach it and,
like, come out to the surface, OK, but if you can’t
then you are just not going to, like, be part of this.
As previously mentioned, the courses’ impact
on preservice and inservice teachers was evi-
dent from different perspectives. First of all,
they raised the teachers’ critical awareness
about the country’s recent reforms and policies
and how disconnected they have been from
Colombia’s many and varied academic con-
texts and realities. Thus, the course contrib-
uted to the empowerment of teachers in terms
of curriculum development and by giving
them tools to be active actors in their schools.
Finally, the course operated as an educational
process towards critical consciousness, a
major component of critical pedagogy that
involves awareness of the role we as teachers
play in the world we inhabit and the responsi-
bilities we inherit in contributing to the
transformation, through education, of an
unjust society to a more humane and culturally
sensitive place to live, especially given the
opportunities Colombia finds itself with under
its present circumstances.
CONCLUSION
Through a systematic analysis of data gathered
about language and education policy courses in
undergraduate and graduate programs in three
different universities, we demonstrated the
importance of including language policy
courses in the curricula of language teaching
programs and how these courses may impact
teachers’ critical consciousness and action. We
have described how the courses offered in these
three universities have enhanced the teaching
practices of both preservice and inservice
teachers with broader and deeper insights
regarding their conceptualization of teaching,
and the implications of such reflective studies
on teachers’ praxis in the contemporary
Colombian transformation. These courses have
helped teachers grasp a new understanding of
autonomy and how it can be used to further a
commitment to the community and critical
reflection by dialectically understanding reflec-
tion and action as teachers exert their agency in
the quest of humanization.
Contreras (1997) highlights as qualities of
the teaching profession commitment to the
community and professional competence.
In this sense, autonomy opposes externally
prescribed monitoring without understanding
the meaning of what is done in the broader
context, that is, without a vision of what the
overarching objectives of education are. If
teachers do not want their role to be that of
passive reproducers of the status quo, they
must create a critical distance between them-
selves and the objectives and purposes of
education as it is established and promoted
by policies and reforms. Evidence from the
study showed that participants moved from
analysis and study of language policies and
 PROMOTING CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS IN COLOMBIA 515
education reforms to areas of contestation,
where they see themselves as far beyond mere
implementers of language policies or techni-
cians of the education system to players com-
mitted to exert their power as policymakers
and social actors. From this perspective, pro-
fessional autonomy (Peláez and Usma, 2017)
involves an aspiration to a more just, egalitar-
ian, participative society as well as a devel-
opment of relationships with others in which
these values are experienced. An autonomous
being, then, makes independent but justified
decisions with an educational and social pur-
pose to encourage a more dignified life for
all citizens and promote their participation in
public life, including education.
Contreras introduces what he calls the trans-
formative intellectual. Teachers exhibiting these
characteristics exercise their autonomy as long
as they promote and live out their professional
duties in accordance with the search for emanci-
pation that is the social liberation from oppres-
sion (Freire, 1970, 2005[1974]), overcoming
elusively tyrannizing ideological distortions that
narcotized and impeded the capacity to think
disapprovingly. Critical awareness autonomy
as a collective process aims at transforming the
institutional and social conditions of teaching.
Teachers, as expressed by Contreras (1997),
exert their moral obligation which is evident in
the fact that it is the teacher who has to make
immediate decisions in complex situations in
the classroom that require the exercise of their
capacity for interpretation and judgment. This
does not mean that the teacher must make deci-
sions unilaterally, by virtue of being the expert,
nor that they do not have to account for their
actions. On the contrary, autonomy, like moral
values in general, is not an individual capacity,
it is not a state or an attribute of people, but an
exercise, a quality of life that they live. We will
have to speak, therefore, of processes and social
situations in which people conduct themselves
autonomously and, in that process, construct
their ethical identity (Contreras, 1997).
This is the crucial challenge, the motiva-
tion and justification for courses like the
one described in this study, especially given
the fact that Colombian society, like those
of other countries in Latin America and
worldwide, makes its transformation con-
tingent upon education. As we conclude, we
want to introduce what a student in one of
these courses expressed. As he said, being
an English teacher in Colombia and abroad
is not just about being a language instruc-
tor, but being a critical and integral human
being. That, as he said, is what he learned in
these courses:
I think the most important thing was that [the
course] gave us a profound insight into these
policies. I had done this in other courses, but it
was very shallow, so I didn´t fully understand it. I
realized that, as a teacher, I am also governed
under policies. What are those policies? Why are
they happening? How can I adopt and adapt
them? So, I liked it. I think this insight was the
most important thing, and it’s a basis on policies
that this course provides. We sometimes give too
much importance to learning or teaching. But,
what about policies? We are also political actors,
and we are also social actors. The social aspect is
nested inside the political one; the political aspect
is nested inside the social one. Everything is per-
meated. So, I consider these insights to be of
great value as they provided us with a different
point of view. Also, something great about this
course is that it invites us to, after finishing the
course, look further into these topics, and it also
helps you understand what happens inside
schools, the reasons for the ways things are or
aren’t accomplished. And it also helps to have
certain ideas regarding where we can move
towards bettering institutions, language learning
processes, in students.
What I have learned, not only with the Language
Policy course, but with other courses as well, is
that a teacher must be an integral construct of
various aspects, and that has been the gift, so to
speak, the privilege that I had in this course.
Note
1  This chapter reports on a project developed by
members of Grupo de Investigación Acción y Eval-
uación en Lenguas Extranjeras, (GIAE) (Research
Group on Evaluation and Action Research), and
its research line on language education policy
and school reform. It was funded by the School
of Languages, Universidad de Antioquia, and
Universidad Católica Luis Amigó.
516 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
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Vietnamese Students
and the Emerging Model
Minority Myth in Germany
Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo Bui
ASIANS AS THE MODEL MINORITY
Scholarly literature suggests that Asians or
particular subgroups of Asians in the United
States are often stereotyped as the model
minority (Model Minority Stereotype Project,
2019). Scholars have also written about the
existence of the Asian model minority stereo-
type outside of the United States, such as in
Canada (Ho, 2015; Pon, 2000), New Zealand
(Hannis, 2015), and Asian countries such as
South Korea (Hartlep, 2015) and China (Fang,
2009a, 2009b). Other scholars have examined
the stereotype’s existence in European coun-
tries, including Bradbury (2015), whose work
examined the Asian model minority in the UK.
This chapter explores the model minority ste-
reotype vis-à-vis Asian immigrants in a differ-
ent European country: Germany.
Our chapter offers new information and
an international perspective when examin-
ing Asians as the model minority. We exam-
ine the Vietnamese in Germany and posit
that the Vietnamese have been treated as an
48
Asian model minority there. Acknowledged
for their diligence, educational success, and
inconspicuousness, they have been held up
as a model of successful integration, and
even called ‘Das Vietnamesische Wunder’
[The Vietnamese Miracle] (Spiewak, 2009).1
We put the stereotype of quiet, hard-working
Vietnamese immigrants into a historical con-
text and explore their strategic contributions to
their collective images and impact on youth.
Model Minority
A look at public portrayals of Vietnamese
immigrants and youth in Germany over the
past decade indicates that something akin to a
model minority stereotype may be developing
in Germany.2 The stereotype of a ‘model
minority’ can be harmful in at least three ways:
1 It reifies the essentialist concept of ethnicity by
claiming that some aspect of the minority group’s
culture allows them to succeed where other
groups fail.
 VIETNAMESE STUDENTS AND THE EMERGING MODEL MINORITY MYTH IN GERMANY
2 It vilifies minorities who do not fit the stereotype,
placing blame on their culture and them as indi-
viduals for not fitting into the host society. This
can deprive immigrants of resources and justify
racist speech and actions against them.
3 It glosses over issues within the so-called ‘model
minority’ group, potentially depriving people
(including youth) of needed services.
It’s important and urgent to sound the alarm
about a nascent model minority stereotype in
Germany because the country is in the midst
of integrating a million new immigrants3
from Syria and Africa. Migration is one of
the hottest topics in public debate in Germany
and Europe. The debate about how to respond
to the dramatic migration unleashed after the
Syrian Civil War has impacted national elec-
tions and contributed to the rise of far-right
political parties (Galston, 2018). A model
minority stereotype may harm new immi-
grants and youth by creating unrealistic
expectations. It may hinder the chances of
Germany successfully integrating them. On
the other hand, a nuanced analysis of how the
model minority stereotype was constructed
may offer valuable lessons and pointers
about how to successfully integrate immi-
grants into German society.4
The stakes are high: the rest of Europe is
watching Germany’s integration program.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bold assertion
in August 2015 that Germany is a ‘strong
country’ that can provide shelter to Syrian
refugees will be tested over and over again
in the coming decade. The UK’s ‘Brexit’
decision to leave the EU in part because of
the mandate to integrate refugees is a cau-
tionary tale of the price of a government not
being prepared for immigration. Meanwhile,
violent acts committed by asylum seekers
and mass killings by suspected terrorists in
public spaces in Germany, France, and the
UK stimulate a climate of fear and urgency
for everyone in Europe, regardless of citi-
zenship status. The extreme opposite of the
model minority stereotype is the radicalized
terrorist – someone so marginalized that he
or she physically attacks random members
519
of the society. When terrorist attacks occur,
almost inevitably someone will comment that
the failed integration of an ethnic immigrant
community is to blame, or that the govern-
ment should clamp down on immigration.
The model minority stereotype is an indica-
tor of a society’s tendency to suppress or even
criminalize difference.
The first vivid outlines of model minority
stereotype of Vietnamese youth in Germany
appeared in a January 2009 article in Die Zeit,
a highly regarded, national weekly newspaper
known for its in-depth coverage and analysis
of news, culture, and politics.5 The author,
Martin Spiewak, is a respected reporter in
the field of education. His article garnered 76
comments from registered readers, an unusu-
ally high number for articles about education at
the time, which typically garnered less than 20
comments. The headline ‘Das Vietnamesische
Wunder’ [The Vietnamese Miracle] and subti-
tle ‘Die Kinder von Einwanderern aus Vietnam
fallen durch glänzende Schulnoten auf’ [The
children of immigrants from Vietnam stand
out due to glittering grades] highlighted the
surprising accomplishments of Vietnamese
high school students. The article elaborated
on why these students’ educational success
was so striking that it merited coverage in the
premier newspaper of Germany’s progressive
intellectual elite.
Keine andere Einwanderergruppe in Deutschland hat
in der Schule mehr Erfolg als die Vietnamesen: Über
50 Prozent ihrer Schüler schaffen den Sprung aufs
Gymnasium. Damit streben mehr vietnamesische
Jugendliche zum Abitur als deutsche. Im Vergleich zu
ihren Alterskollegen aus türkischen oder italienischen
Familien liegt die Gymnasialquote fünfmal so hoch.
»Die Leistungen vietnamesischer Schüler stehen in
einem eklatanten Gegensatz zum Bild, das wir sonst
von Kindern mit Migrationshintergrund haben,
« sagt die brandenburgische Ausländerbeauftragte
Karin Weiss. (Spiewak, 2009)
[No other immigrant group in Germany has more
success in school than the Vietnamese: over 50
percent manage the leap into [university-bound]
high school. That means more Vietnamese youth
strive for a high school degree than German
[youth]. Compared to their peers from Turkish or
520 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Italian families, the number of high school stu-
dents is five times as high. ‘The accomplishments
of Vietnamese students are significantly opposed
to the image that we usually have of children with
a migration background,’ says Karin Weiss, the
Commissioner for Foreigners’ Affairs of [the state
of] Brandenburg.]
Education and immigration experts were
very surprised to see 50% of Vietnamese
youth ‘leap into’ Gymnasium, the most aca-
demically rigorous of the three types of high
school education offered in Germany.
Comparable to a prep school in the United
States, Gymnasia grew out of humanistic
movements in the 16th century, emphasizing
Greek, Latin, and other classical subjects
(Hammerstein and Buck, 1996). They offer
advanced curricula aimed at college-bound
students. Students must apply to enter, and
they typically start at age 10. During the
2009–2010 school year, just 35% of high
school-aged students attended Gymnasia
(German Federal Statistics Office, 2011: 13).
Half of the students attending Gymnasia
come from the most affluent levels of German
society (Ehmke et al., 2004). Thus, Gymnasia
are the proving ground of the society’s elite.
The percentage of Vietnamese students enter-
ing Gymnasium was especially remarkable
because testing results across the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) countries in the early 2000s had
found that the children of immigrants fared
less well on tests than the children of German
parents. This difference was especially pro-
nounced in Germany, Belgium, and
Switzerland (Ramm et al., 2004: 257).
Furthermore, the study showed that children
of Turkish and Yugoslav immigrants living in
Germany did worse on the tests than the chil-
dren of Turkish and Yugoslav immigrants in
Austria – where school is also taught in
German (ibid.: 268).
Spiewak’s article mentions that the suc-
cess of Vietnamese students creates new
challenges for school administrators (and
impacts youth), such as figuring out how to
pronounce students’ names.
Relativ neu ist dagegen das Problem, die Namen der
ausgezeichneten Schüler korrekt auszusprechen.
Hieß die Gewinnerin in der Klassenstufe sieben nun
Tran Phuon Duyen oder Duyen Tran Phuon? Und
wie war es mit Duc Dao Mihn aus der Zehn?
Schmidt-Ihnen steht öfter vor dieser Herausforderung:
17 Prozent der Schüler an dem Gymnasium im
Stadtteil Lichtenberg stammen aus einer vietnamesis-
chen Familie, in den unteren Klassen sind es mehr als
30 Prozent. »Gerade in den Naturwissenschaften
und in Mathematik sind viele von ihnen stark«, ber-
ichtet der Rektor. Auch der Schulbeste in Mathe ist
vietnamesischer Herkunft. (Spiewak, 2009)
[A relatively new problem is how to pronounce the
names of the outstanding students. Was the
winner in Grade 7 Tran Phuon Duyen or Duyen
Tran Phuon? [sic] And what about Duc Dao Mihn
[sic] in Grade 10?
Schmidt-Ihnen encounters this challenge often: 17
percent of the students in the Gymnasium in the
Lichtenberg neighborhood come from Vietnamese
families, in the lower grades, it’s more than 30
percent. ‘Especially in science and math, many of
them are strong,’ says the principal. Also, the
school’s top student in math comes from a
Vietnamese background.]
For anyone familiar with the model minority
stereotype of Asian Americans in the United
States, the mention of Vietnamese youth being
called ‘strong’ in science and math is eerily
familiar. The theme of over-achieving students
who have a special gift for math and science is
strikingly similar to TIME Magazine’s cover
strapline from August 31, 1987: ‘Those Asian-
American Whiz Kids’ (Brand, 1987). The
principal’s struggle to pronounce the students’
names highlights how different they are from
the mainstream students. Both students’ names
are misspelled in the article. When Spiewak
refers to a parallel phenomenon in the United
States, he points to another foreign factor:
Confucian mentality. ‘Das zeigt sich seit
Jahren bereits in den USA, wo überpropor-
tional viele Studenten aus asiatischen –
genauer: von der konfuzianischen Mentalität
geprägten – Nationen die amerikanischen
Spitzenuniversitäten besuchen’ (Spiewak, 2009).
[It’s been demonstrated for years in the USA,
where disproportionately many students from
 VIETNAMESE STUDENTS AND THE EMERGING MODEL MINORITY MYTH IN GERMANY
Asian nations – or more precisely, nations
imprinted with a Confucian mentality – are
attending the top American universities]. With
this reference, Spiewak could easily be describ-
ing the cover photo of a special issue of
Newsweek magazine published in April 1984
(Givins, 1984). It was inscribed: ‘On Campus –
Asian-Americans, The Drive to Excel’. It
depicted four young people standing around a
sandstone column. Three were holding books.
The fourth wore a Stanford sweatshirt. The
accompanying article argued that family expec-
tations and hard work fueled Asian American
success in top colleges. This article typifies the
model minority perspective in 1980s American
journalism (Hartlep 2013: 240). Twenty-five
years later, Spiewak virtually photocopies the
image of an Asian model minority from US
colleges onto German high schools.
Spiewak’s article further explains that the
students are children of Vietnamese contract
workers, many of whom experienced a dra-
matic plunge into unemployment and poverty
as well as being the targets of racial hatred
in the years following German reunification.
And yet, the academic success of the young
generation was beginning to compensate
for those experiences: ‘Ihre Kinder jedoch
sind nun dabei, mit ungeheurem Fleiß und
Bildungsdrang die deutsche Gesellschaft zu
erobern’ (Spiewak, 2009). [Their children,
however, are in the process of conquering the
German society with their industriousness
and educational drive]. As noted by American
commentator Smaran Dayal (2014), this
kind of portrayal of hard-working immi-
grants climbing the ladder of social success
in the host society is reminiscent of William
Petersen’s 1966 (January 9) New York Times
Magazine feature, ‘Success Story, Japanese-
American Style’, an article that was seminal in
shaping the American model minority myth.
Soon after Spiewak’s article was pub-
lished, some Germans with Vietnamese
ethnic backgrounds received attention for
remarkable accomplishments. They seemed
to be fulfilling Spiewak’s prediction that the
next generation of Vietnamese youth would
521
‘conquer’ German society. For example,
Philipp Rösler, a Vietnamese orphan who
was adopted and raised in Germany, became
the first person of Asian descent to serve as
a cabinet minister. He served as Germany’s
Minister of Health in 2009, then Federal
Minister of Economy and Technology, and
Vice-Chancellor in 2011. Marcel Nguyen, a
biracial Vietnamese-German man, competed
for Germany at the 2012 London Olympics,
winning two silver medals in gymnastics. At
the same time, Germans with other kinds of
ethnic backgrounds were also making strides
and entering cherished German institu-
tions, such as getting elected to regional and
national government positions and competing
on the beloved national soccer team, which
won the World Cup in 2014. The German
national team included Ghanaian-German
Jerome Boateng, Tunisian-German Sami
Khedira, and Turkish-German Mesut Özil.
And yet, the idea that Vietnamese-
Germans were special in terms of educa-
tional achievement lingered. For example,
researcher and pedagogy professor Olaf
Beuchling repeated the claim that the chil-
dren of Vietnamese refugees were more
likely to complete the Gymnasium degree
than German children, or children from
other immigrant groups. He attributed this
difference to cultural factors including
Confucianism.6 In another example, a 2015
study focused on parenting styles in ethnic
German, Turkish, and Vietnamese families
as a determining factor in educational attain-
ment. This was part of a research project to
investigate ‘why minorities of different ori-
gin are differently successful in the educa-
tional system’ (Nauck and Lotter, 2015). The
study of 1,523 mother-child dyads found
that 54% of Vietnamese mothers practiced
an ‘authoritarian’ parenting style, whereas
the predominant parenting styles for German
mothers was ‘indulgent’, and for Turkish
mothers was ‘neglectful’. This hierarchi-
cal reasoning and judgmental nomenclature
aligns with the ‘Tiger-Mother’ trope popu-
larized by Amy Chua in her 2011 memoir
522 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which
fierce Asian American mothers are credited
with their children’s educational success.
As experts in educational pathways for
working class immigrant children, Aladin
El-Mafaalani and Thomas Kemper (2017)
caution against using the label ‘miracle’ to
describe the large numbers of Vietnamese
students attending Gymnasium despite obsta-
cles such as low household income, lack of
social capital, and lack of household knowl-
edge about the German educational system.
They suggest that a determining factor may
be how well the Vietnamese parents’ belief
that students must work hard to attain success
matches the attitude of the German school
system. Surprisingly, although they note
that the percentage of Vietnamese students
attending Gymnasium varies substantially
by location – with three eastern German
states consistently reporting rates around
70% – they do not call for research into what
schools in those states are doing differently
that might drive these results.
About 10 months after the publica-
tion of Martin Spiewak’s seminal ‘Das
Vietnamesische Wunder’ article (2009),
Germany plunged into what is now called
the ‘Sarrazin Debate’ (Goebel, 2018). Thilo
Sarrazin was an economist whose career
encompassed positions at the state and national
levels. In a long-form interview published in
the culture magazine Lettre International,
Sarrazin made blatantly derogatory remarks
that earned him condemnation across the
political spectrum, and eventually forced
him to resign from his position at Germany’s
central bank. Demanding that Sarrazin apolo-
gize for his comments, Zeit Online (2009)
published an excerpt of the interview. Stern
magazine (Schönfeld, 2009) also published
an excerpt, arguing that Sarrazin was right.
Ich muss niemanden anerkennen, der vom Staat
lebt, diesen Staat ablehnt, für die Ausbildung
seiner Kinder nicht vernünftig sorgt und ständig
neue kleine Kopftuchmädchen produziert. Das gilt
für 70 Prozent der türkischen und 90 Prozent der
arabischen Bevölkerung in Berlin. (Schönfeld, 2009)
[I don’t need to recognize anyone who lives off of
the State, rejects the State, doesn’t take sensible
care of the education of their children, and con-
stantly produces new little headscarf girls. That’s
true of 70 percent of the Turkish and 90 percent of
the Arabic population of Berlin.]7
While vilifying Arabic and Turkish immi-
grants in Germany for failing to integrate,
Sarrazin praised Vietnamese and other immi-
grants for their willingness to integrate.
Die Vietnamesen: Die Eltern können kaum Deutsch,
verkaufen Zigaretten oder haben einen Kiosk. Die
Vietnamesen der zweiten Generation haben dann
durchweg bessere Schulnoten und höhere
Abiturientenquoten als die Deutschen. (Schönfeld,
2009)
[The Vietnamese: the parents could barely speak
German, sold cigarettes or owned a kiosk. The
Vietnamese of the second generation have consist-
ently better grades and higher rates of high school
graduates than the Germans.]
This comment demonstrates that Sarrazin was
aware of the relatively high rates of second-
generation Vietnamese immigrants attending
Gymnasium. He was also aware of some of the
struggles of first-generation Vietnamese immi-
grants. Following Sarrazin’s ouster from the
central bank, he toned down his comments
only slightly. By August 2010, he published his
theories as a book, ‘Deutschland Schafft Sich
Ab’ [Germany Does Away with Itself]. It claims
that Germany’s population is shrinking and
dumbing down due to a declining birthrate in
the upper classes, failed schools, and an
increasing population of poor, mostly Muslim
immigrants whose culture drives them to refuse
to integrate, while living off the largesse of the
welfare state. Based on financial and demo-
graphic data drawn from Berlin, he projected
that Germany would be majority Muslim
within 80 years. The book sold 1.5 million
copies in 2010. As of 2018, it is in its 9th print-
ing. It has more than 900 reviews on Amazon’s
German-language website. Some of the reviews
are essay-length, showing the deep resonance
of the debate on Sarrazin’s assertions. Various
editions of the book occupy places #1, #2, and
 VIETNAMESE STUDENTS AND THE EMERGING MODEL MINORITY MYTH IN GERMANY
#4 in the multicultural section of Amazon.de.
Sarrazin has been accused of making radical
racist ideas palatable, contributing more to the
rise of far-right parties than even the Nazi
underground. In 2013, the United Nations’
Committee on the Elimination of Racial
Discrimination reprimanded Germany for fail-
ing to carry out an effective investigation
against Sarrazin (Keilani, 2013).
The Sarrazin debate raged on for months
in mainstream media and in political forums,
with critics decrying his statistical methods, his
racist, elitist, and eugenicist beliefs, his incen-
diary and alienating remarks. Meanwhile,
Vietnamese-German intellectuals grappled
with suddenly and unwittingly finding the
contours of their collective experience high-
lighted against the backdrop of what Sarrazin
called people who are ‘unwilling and incapa-
ble of integration’. The influential Vietnamese-
German author and cultural commentator
Pham Thi Hoai points out that the relatively
small population of Vietnamese immigrants
(and youth) in Germany only became noticea-
ble in mainstream German discourse ‘because
we don’t wear headscarves and we’re better at
school’ (Cicero, 2014). Khue Pham (2010), a
young Vietnamese-German woman, explained
that the so-called Vietnamese success story is
a story of sacrifice and estrangement.
Thilo Sarrazin hat mich gelobt, ich bin Vietnamesin.
Eine von denen, die gut in der Schule waren und
Deutsch früh gelernt haben, es lag wohl an den
guten Genen. Wir Vietnamesen sind ja sehr
beliebt. Kaum macht einer wie Sarrazin der
Fremdenfeindlichkeit verdächtig, zitiert er unseren
Erfolg: ‘Guckt euch diese fleissigen Menschen an!
Wenn sie sich hocharbeiten können, warum
können es die faulen Muslime nicht?’
Mit seinem Lob wollte Sarrazin beweisen, dass er
nichts gegen Einwanderer hat. Er hat uns wie einen
Joker gezogen in seinem Gute-Migranten-schlechte-
Migranten-Spiel. Offentsichtlich kennt er uns
genauso schlect wie sie; das vermeintliche vietnam-
esische Erfolgsmodell lässt sich nicht exportschlager-
mässig auf die Muslime übertragen.
Meine Eltern, die hier in den siebziger Jahren ein-
wanderten, brachten mir bei, dass ich besser as ’die
Deutschen‘ sein müsse, um als gleich anerkannt zu
523
werden. Eine Zwei auf dem Zeugnis war eine
Enttäuschung. Wenn ich sagte, dass das ‘gut’
bedeutet, sagten sie zu mir: ‘Du sollst dich nicht mit
den Deutschen vergleichen. Du bist anders als sie’.
Es klang so wie: ‘Du bist nicht so viel wert wie sie’.
(Pham, 2010)
[Thilo Sarrazin praised me, I’m a Vietnamese. One
of those people who are good in school and
learned German early on, probably due to those
good genes. We Vietnamese are very beloved. As
soon as someone like Sarrazin could be suspected
of xenophobia, he cites our success: ‘Look at these
diligent people! If they can work their way up, why
can’t the lazy Muslims?’
With this praise, Sarrazin wanted to prove that he
doesn’t have anything against immigrants. He pulled
us out like a joker in the game of Good Migrant–Bad
Migrant. Obviously, he knows us as little as them; the
supposed Vietnamese success model can’t be trans-
posed onto Muslims like an international hit song.
My parents, who immigrated here in the 70s,
taught me that I had to be better than ‘the
Germans’ in order to be recognized as equal.
Getting a ‘2’ grade on a report card was a disap-
pointment. When I told them that ‘2’ means ‘good’,
they told me: ‘You should not compare yourself to
Germans. You are different than them.’ That
sounded like: you are not worth as much as them].
With dazzling irony, Khue Pham illuminates
just how Sarrazin’s spotlight on Vietnamese
immigrant students blindsides them, masks
their struggles, and casts a shadow on both
them and other immigrants. Sarrazin’s praise
for the Vietnamese immigrants does not mean
he knows any of them or understands anything
about who they are. Instead, this kind of praise
distances all immigrants, Vietnamese and oth-
erwise. The Vietnamese immigrants are used
like a pawn in a game that plays marginalized
members of the society off against each other
in order to uphold an oppressive racist hierar-
chy. Later in her essay, Pham mentions that
it’s not just Sarrazin who offers praise in this
manner: ‘The Germans often praise me,
because I speak perfect German. These words
of praise imply that I will remain different, no
matter how much I try’ (2010). Back-handed
praise is not the work of one notorious racist,
but rather a common norm, an indicator of
widely held race-based assumptions.
524 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
The themes of diligence, hard work, sac-
rifice, and guilt thread throughout Pham’s
essay, for example, when her parents tell
her that a ‘good’ grade is not good enough.
Unlike some of the Germans Pham encoun-
ters, her parents withhold praise. Their
ensuing explanation is an opportunity to per-
petuate internalized alienation and oppres-
sion. Their solution to the problem: work
harder! This resonates with the point made by
the education researchers El-Mafaalani and
Kemper (2017): Vietnamese parents’ attitude
that hard work is the path to success aligns
well with the value that the German higher
education system places on diligence. In fact,
diligence turns out to be a pivotal theme for
both first- and second-generation Vietnamese
immigrant students in Germany.
Without actually using the term ‘model
minority’, Pham’s essay describes the con-
tours of what could be considered a model-
minoritizing dynamic. She notes that the
supposedly successful Vietnamese model of
integration is far from perfect. She says it can-
not necessarily be replicated by other immi-
grant groups. It comes at a huge price in terms
of stress, and it does not guarantee parity or
closeness with mainstream society. In her dis-
cussion of the perils of positive stereotypes,
journalist Tran Quynh (2017) deliberately
uses the term ‘model minority’. She points
out that in the United States, the term is often
used to highlight immigrants who seem to
have achieved above-average socioeconomic
success. For Vietnamese immigrant youth
in Germany, successful integration has been
defined as academic success in the second
generation. Any mention of economic success
is very modest – remember Sarrazin’s words:
‘They sold cigarettes or owned a kiosk’
(Schönfeld, 2009: 522). Instead, successful
integration is demonstrated by the incon-
spicuousness of first-generation Vietnamese
immigrants, the ‘unremarkableness that is
presumed to accompany adaptation’ (Tran,
2017: 229). In other words, it is acceptable,
and even commendable, for some immigrants
to be visible, to stand out – for example,
when they are achieving greater academic
success than German students. It’s even pos-
sible that their success is being highlighted
to goad German youngsters into working
harder. On the other hand, it is commendable
for their parents to not stand out, to blend in
with their surroundings. Tran’s article appears
in a compendium that aims to bring grass-
roots ‘Vietnamese-German Realities’ into
the mainstream discourse. It is aptly entitled
‘UnSichtbar’ or ‘InVisible’, a reference to the
inconspicuousness of Vietnamese immigrant
youth in German society.
The Sarrazin debate of 2009–10 seeded
a thesis that grew throughout the following
years, especially once hundreds of thousands
of people from Syria and northern Africa
began seeking refuge in Europe in 2015: the
idea that Germany is being overrun by non-
White immigrants. Although most German
citizens support the idea of welcoming refu-
gees and tolerating difference, expressions of
outrage can flare up when non-Whites break
social norms. For example, when young men
sexually assaulted (White) women during New
Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne and other
cities in 2015; a terrorist attack on a Christmas
market in Berlin in 2016; several stabbings in
small towns in early 2018; and when dozens
of asylum seekers battled deportation police
in Ellwangen in 2018. In these cases, the per-
petrators committed violent acts, and those
actions made them exceedingly visible. On talk
shows and town councils, people debated how
to tamp down the violence: whether to stop
admitting refugees into Germany; whether to
isolate them in barracks outside of towns; or
whether to spread out their housing so there
would be less potential for conflict in one place
(Goebel, 2018). Germans may not have known
exactly what they were hoping for in terms of
successfully integrating new immigrants, but
these hyper-visible violent incidents were
definitely not it. What we can learn from the
Sarrazin debate and these later incidents is that
there is popular consensus building around the
idea that there is a ‘right way’ for immigrants
to integrate into German society.
 VIETNAMESE STUDENTS AND THE EMERGING MODEL MINORITY MYTH IN GERMANY
THE CURRENT MODEL FOR
SUCCESSFUL INTEGRATION
IN GERMANY
What follows in this section is based on com-
ments about Vietnamese immigrants during
the 2009–10 ‘Sarrazin debate’.
Diligence + Inconspicuousness =
Integration
The emphasis on inconspicuousness among
first-generation Vietnamese immigrants is
no accident. There are very specific histori-
cal reasons why these immigrants worked
hard to avoid being noticed; and when they
must be visible, to show up as diligent and
hard-working. In the 1990s, this representa-
tional strategy – choosing to be as invisible
as possible – was the key for many
Vietnamese to be able to live and work
in Germany.
According to the German Federal
Statistical Office, there are 167,000 people
of Vietnamese descent living in Germany
(2017). They outnumber people of Chinese
descent (157,000) but still comprise less than
1% of Germany’s total population of more
than 82 million. If you ask a person living in
Germany today if they know anything about
Vietnamese people in Germany, chances are,
they will say no. They have never noticed
them. This is especially true of western
Germans, because the strategy for integrat-
ing Vietnamese immigrants into western
Germany was to disperse people across
many small towns in order to prevent them
from forming an ethnic ghetto (Blume and
Kantowsky, 1988). On the other hand, in east-
ern Germany and eastern Berlin, Vietnamese
immigrants are one of the largest groups of
migrants (German Federal Statistical Office,
2017: 129–32). In fact, due to their numbers
and concentration in the hospitality and retail
sector, the person-of-color you are most
likely to meet in this part of the country is a
Vietnamese immigrant.8
525
Germany – A Country of
Immigrants?
Germany has not historically considered itself
to be a country of immigrants. Despite a long
history of small Germanic kingdoms and city-
states, Germany only coalesced as a nation in
the 1870s. Throughout the 19th century, thou-
sands of people from various German-
speaking states emigrated to North and South
America. In other words, Germans were
immigrants in other countries. After 1945,
Germany was divided into two countries –
East and West Germany – and remained that
way throughout the Cold War.9 Allied troops
occupied Germany until the 1990s, with
American, British, and French troops in the
west, and Russian troops in the east. Following
World War II, East and West Germany shoul-
dered the responsibility for resettling 4.5 mil-
lion ethnic Germans from eastern Europe. As
the Cold War continued, West Germany
accepted and even encouraged political and
religious refugees from East Germany and
eastern Europe to immigrate. Many of these
immigrants spoke some German, shared cul-
tural traditions, and were classified as
Germans rather than foreigners. For these
immigrants, West Germany created free ‘inte-
gration classes’, including language instruc-
tion and information about the German legal
system, culture, and history (Goebel, 2018).
German citizenship was guaranteed for those
who could prove that at least one grandparent
was German, so nationality focused more on
hereditary than geographic qualifications.
In 1965, West Germany began creat-
ing regulations to manage non-German
immigrants (Gesley, 2017). Starting in the
1970s, labor shortages in both East and
West Germany forced those countries to
recruit foreign temporary workers, with the
express intention that they would not settle in
Germany. In 1990, the Act on Foreigners spe-
cifically drew on the premise that Germany
was still not an immigration country, that
Germany’s capacity to take in immigrants
was limited and that preference had to be
526 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
given to immigrants of German heritage, for-
eigners fleeing political persecution, and EU
citizens taking advantage of their freedom of
movement. West Germany’s constitution had
guaranteed asylum to any person persecuted
for political reasons, but with the end of the
Cold War and the breakup of Yugoslavia, a
then-record high of 440,000 people applied
for asylum in Germany in 1992. This led to
the Asylum Compromise of 1993, which
allowed Germany to expedite asylum deci-
sions within the transit zone of airports, and
to return asylum seekers to safe third coun-
tries and safe origin countries. It was not until
2005, with the adoption of the Migration Act,
that the government finally recognized that
Germany had become an immigration des-
tination. For the first time, people born in
Germany to immigrant parents were granted
automatic German citizenship. Before 2005,
people born in Germany were not auto-
matically citizens, even if their families had
resided in Germany for generations. The
Integration Act of 2016 created a two-tier
naturalization system, with a fast-track to
citizenship for immigrants who demonstrate
willingness to integrate, and reductions in
benefits for those who do not cooperate with
integration efforts.
The Divided History of
Immigration from Vietnam
to Germany
Vietnam’s divided history lay the groundwork
for two different migration pathways from
Vietnam to Germany in the 1990s (Bui, 2003,
see also Hillmann, 2005). Ruled by feuding
dynasties until the early 19th century, Vietnam
was then colonized by the French. Following
Japanese occupation during World War II,
nationalist forces defeated French re-occupation
by 1954. The peace accords divided Vietnam
into northern and southern halves, with the
north evolving along a Marxist–Leninist
model and the south evolving through a suc-
cession of military dictators, supported by the
United States and allies. A ceasefire agree-
ment was signed in 1973. In 1975, northern
Vietnamese troops invaded the southern capi-
tal of Saigon, uniting the country as the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Like Vietnam, Germany has been divided
and reunified within the past century. During
the post-war period, German territory was
divided into four quadrants administered by
each of the allies (Fulbrook, 2015). The for-
mer capital, Berlin, located deep within the
Russian-occupied zone, was also divided into
quadrants. In 1963, East Germany built a
containment wall around their sector. Known
as the Berlin Wall, it symbolized the stand-
off between western capitalism and eastern
communism. In autumn 1989, reform move-
ments in East Germany toppled the govern-
ment and introduced democratic and market
economy reforms. In November 1989, the
Berlin Wall was opened. The following July,
the two Germanys entered into a monetary
union, and by September the eastern German
states joined West Germany.
Migration from Vietnam to Germany
started in the 1950s, with a small number of
Vietnamese citizens who participated in edu-
cation and training programs in both East
and West Germany (Schaland and Schmiz,
2016). Due to the Vietnam War in the 1960s,
West Germans began to hear about Vietnam
as a result of the worldwide student protests
against American involvement in the war.
East Germans, on the other hand, were urged
by their schools, workplaces, and unions to
gather donations and supplies to bolster the
Vietnamese war effort (Spennemann, 1997).
In 1973, the year of the ceasefire agreement in
Vietnam, East Germany pledged to train 10,000
Vietnamese citizens within a decade, as a show
of international solidarity. A few years later,
West Germany offered to resettle 40,000 peo-
ple (of an estimated one million) from Vietnam,
Laos, and Cambodia who were fleeing war as
well as ethnic and political discrimination.
In 1980, Vietnam signed agreements with
East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the
Soviet Union, and other eastern bloc countries
 VIETNAMESE STUDENTS AND THE EMERGING MODEL MINORITY MYTH IN GERMANY
to provide multi-year training for large con-
tingents of Vietnamese workers at enterprises
in Europe. In 1987, the pace of the program
increased dramatically, with groups of 10,000
to 30,000 per year arriving for on-the-job train-
ing in East German factories (Spennemann,
1997). By 1990, Vietnamese contract workers
constituted the second-largest group of for-
eign nationals residing in East Germany after
the Soviet occupation troops. At the time the
Berlin Wall fell, there were 60,000 Vietnamese
citizens in East Germany, most of whom were
enrolled in the trainee contract worker pro-
gram. There were approximately 35,000 peo-
ple of Vietnamese origin in West Germany,
most of whom had arrived as refugees.
With impending German reunification and
the dissolution of the Soviet Union, thou-
sands of Vietnamese migrants from eastern
Germany and Eastern Europe crossed into the
West. From 1990 to 1993, an average of 10,000
Vietnamese citizens who had been working in
Eastern Europe applied for asylum in Germany
annually. The safe third countries regulation
dramatically reduced asylum applications
by Vietnamese citizens from 1994 onward
(Spennemann, 1997). Meanwhile, enterprises
in the former East Germany laid off the vast
majority of Vietnamese participants in the labor
training program in order to make their busi-
nesses viable for a market economy. By June
1991, a mere 4,000 Vietnamese citizens were
still employed on their contracts, down from
60,000 a year and a half earlier (Spennemann,
1997; Hermann, 1992)! The bilateral agreement
was amended to allow either the employee or
employer to terminate the employment con-
tract, providing financial compensation to the
Vietnamese employee, and the choice of either
returning to Vietnam with a bonus payment
or residing and working in Germany for the
remainder of their five-year contract. In 1993, a
new regulation allowed people who had entered
as part of the labor-training program to obtain
a special work permit and extend their resi-
dency permit beyond the five-year period speci-
fied in their original contracts, provided they
met certain conditions: they had to withdraw
527
any application for asylum, demonstrate they
had not returned to Vietnam with a parting
bonus, and show proof of adequate earnings,
living space, and a clean criminal record.
These requirements were very challenging to
meet, considering the massive social and eco-
nomic upheaval in the early 1990s in Eastern
Europe and Germany. By 1995, about 15,000
Vietnamese citizens were able to meet the
requirements to become naturalized German
citizens (Berger, 1996). However, about a third
of the estimated 97,000 people of Vietnamese
descent residing in Germany by 1995 were
barred from attaining permanent residency
rights and were scheduled to be deported to
Vietnam (Deutscher Bundestag, 1995).
These migrants were a political hot potato,
between the German and Vietnamese govern-
ments for much of the 1990s. After the mas-
sive deportations from East Germany in 1990,
and up until July 1995, the Vietnamese gov-
ernment refused to re-admit Vietnamese citi-
zens from Germany, including those whose
asylum applications had been denied and
even some who wished to return voluntarily
(Bui, 2003). This stance came at a time when
Vietnam was busy re-integrating 70,000 peo-
ple from refugee camps in Hong Kong and
Southeast Asia, and was scheduled to re-
integrate tens of thousands more. Germany
was also overwhelmed by migration chal-
lenges. Starting in 1989, West Germany
received more asylum applications than at any
time since World War II, peaking at 610,000
in 1992. This made German institutions eager
to deport the 33,600 Vietnamese nationals on
their deportation roster. To force a deporta-
tion agreement, Germany halted its develop-
ment aid to Vietnam in 1994 and lobbied for a
European aid embargo in 1995. A repatriation
agreement was signed in 1995, but bureau-
cratic delays dragged out the deportation pro-
cess through 1997 (Hillman, 2005).
In summary, the seven years from 1990 to
1997 were tumultuous and deeply disruptive
for everyone in eastern Germany, and espe-
cially for the thousands of Vietnamese citi-
zens living there.
528 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Black Market Cigarettes
This is the specific historical moment in
which the trope of the Vietnamese cigarette
seller entered mainstream German discourse
in the mid 1990s. State actors seized on the
idea of Vietnamese people peddling smuggled
cigarettes and drew links to violent crime in
order to help push through the repatriation
program to rid Germany of tens of thousands
of ‘illegal’ migrants (am Orde, 1996). A dra-
matic storyline took shape in 1996 as gang
violence escalated, with Vietnamese people
as both perpetrators and victims, and German
law enforcement struggling to get the prob-
lem under control. This narrative helped
manufacture consent for the repatriation pro-
gram by highlighting the program’s promise
to deport Vietnamese criminals.
As an example of this discourse, a fea-
ture article in the national magazine Der
Spiegel clearly drew this line of reasoning
(Der Spiegel, 1996). Starting with mug shots
of seven of the nine Vietnamese men who
had recently been murdered in the Marzahn
neighborhood of Berlin, the article explains
the evolution of Vietnamese people’s involve-
ment in the black market for cigarettes and
violent crime.
Die Zigaretten-Mafia is ein postsocialistisches
Kriminal-Phänomen. Mitte der achtziger Jahre
hatte die DDR-Regierung Zehntausende von viet-
namesischen Vertragsarbeitern ins Land geholt. Mit
der Wende wurde ein Großteil von ihnen arbeits-
los; wer nicht das Glück hatte, etwa einen Job als
Hilfskraft in der Gastronomie oder auf
Wochenmärkten zu finden, nahm schnell das
Angebot von Landsleuten an, künftig sein Geld mit
dem Verkauf von unversteurten Zigaretten zu ver-
dienen. … Einen Teil ihres Profits investieren die
Kriminellen, ganz legal, in Immobilien, Asia-Shops
oder Gaststätten. … Die Hilflosigkeit der Justiz
veranlaßte einen Berliner Richter, im Herbst vergan-
genen Jahres in einer Urteilsbegründigung ganz
offen von ‘der Kapitulation des deutschen
Rechtsstaates’ zu sprechen. Weil die Strafverfolger
den ‘mafiaähnlichen Einschüchterungen einiger
vietnamesischer Landsleute’ wenig entegegen-
zusetzen hätten, könne in Detuschland ‘bedenken-
los gemordet und erpresst werden’. … In ihrer Not
fordern nun Politiker wie Berlins Innensenator Jörg
Schönbohm (CDU) die konsequente Abschiebung
straffällig gewordener Vietnamesen. … Allein im
vergangenen Jahr sollten 2500 Vietnamesen
Deutschland verlassen – bis heute wurde gerade
mal 65 Menschen die Wiedereinreise in ihre Heimat
genehmigt. (Der Spiegel, 1996)
[The Cigarette Mafia is a post-socialist crime phe-
nomenon. In the mid 80s, the GDR government
fetched tens of thousands of Vietnamese contract
workers into the country. With the Wende, many
of them became unemployed; whoever was not
lucky enough to find a job as an assistant in a res-
taurant or at a farmers’ market, quickly took on the
offer from compatriots to earn money by selling
untaxed cigarettes.… The criminals invested part of
the profits, completely legally, into real estate,
Asia-Shops or restaurants. … The helplessness of
the courts caused a judge in a judgement justifica-
tion made last fall, to speak openly of ‘the capitula-
tion of the German state based on rule-of-law’.
Because prosecutors have little to counteract the
intimidation of some Vietnamese compatriots, it
was possible in Germany to ‘murder and blackmail
without a second thought’. In their distress, politi-
cians like Berlin’s domestic senator Jörg Schönbohm
(of the conservative Christian Democratic Union
party) are demanding consistent deportation of
convicted Vietnamese. … Last year alone, 2,500
Vietnamese should have left Germany – to date a
mere 65 people have been allowed reentry to their
homeland].
The argument of the article is that a sophisti-
cated and violent mafia is manipulating and
threatening the many comparatively helpless
Vietnamese people living in eastern Germany
and Berlin. Although the victims of violent
crimes are Vietnamese people, the article
contends that the violence also undermines
the German justice system. By referring to
the investments in restaurants and shops,
which are clearly visible to German neigh-
bors, and by mentioning that 2,500
Vietnamese are due to be deported, the arti-
cle implies that more than just a few mafia-
bosses are implicated. It’s understandable
that someone might shy away from a
Vietnamese-run restaurant, after reading an
article like this. The images and reasoning in
articles like these were so powerful that they
spilled over, leading virtually all Vietnamese
people in Germany to feel branded by the
 VIETNAMESE STUDENTS AND THE EMERGING MODEL MINORITY MYTH IN GERMANY
image of the illegal, violent, cigarette seller
(Bui, 2003). Not without reason: in May
1996, Berlin’s special investigative unit
assigned to stamp out black market cigarettes
had been renamed ‘Vietnam’ rather than
‘Tobacco’ (am Orde, 1996).
As demonstrated in contemporary inter-
views and testimonials, mainstream press
coverage of the black market in cigarettes
made many Vietnamese people living in
Germany, and especially eastern Germany,
believe that their identity as Vietnamese had
been tainted. Vietnamese organizations noted
that Vietnamese people living and work-
ing legally in Berlin were exposed to dis-
crimination, and Vietnamese snack bar and
clothing stand owners reported decreased
revenues following news of the 1996 murders
(Berliner Zeitung, May 25, 1996). An inter-
view with a Vietnamese family published in
the east Berlin newspaper Berliner Zeitung
shows how much they felt their reputation
was harmed by the dominant image of a
Vietnamese cigarette mafia (Berliner Zeitung,
July 5, 1996): ‘Chu and Nguyen recount that
the Mafia has brought all Vietnamese into
disrepute. “Ever since they have struck ter-
ror in people’s hearts in Berlin, the Germans
look at us with different eyes.” Chu observes
this in glances “that are no longer friendly”’.
In reaction, the family makes itself as invis-
ible as possible, living in a small cheap
apartment on a loud street. Chu works as a
cleaning woman despite her degree in eco-
nomics, opting not to have a second child for
fear she might lose her job and thus the right
to remain in Germany. In the short ethnog-
raphy of this article, Chu and Nguyen dem-
onstrate what it looks like to be law-abiding
Vietnamese immigrants: they repudiate the
criminals’ abhorrent behavior; they content
themselves with less than what others have
in terms of jobs, living quarters, dignity, and
security; and they hope to earn their right to
the lowest rung of society by working hard.
Vietnamese migrants and their advo-
cates exercised agency. Against the images
propagated by state actors, they tried to
529
convey their own alternative representations.
They countered the image of the cigarette-
selling criminal with strategic recapitulations
of collective migration history. In western
Germany, immigrant advocates put forth a
unified history of Vietnamese ‘boat people’
who braved the open sea on rickety boats to
get to the West. One example, out of many, is
the following excerpt published in September
1996 in the respected Frankfurt-based news-
paper Frankfurter Rundschau. It was part
of a report about a celebration organized by
the German human rights organization Cap
Anamur, which had rescued hundreds of
Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s.
The little boy would probably not be alive if the
German refugee ship Cap Anamur had not fished
his parents out of the South China Sea 15 years
ago and brought them to Germany. The fully over-
loaded fishing boat belonging to the southern
Vietnamese had bobbed up and down for three
days and nights before help arrived. Like this family,
who lives in Bochum now, the ships of the Cap
Anamur Committee rescued thousands of people
by 1987 who fled from the Communist regime in
their home onto the open sea … They all found a
new home with their families in Germany – in West
Germany. (Published in translation from the origi-
nal German in Bui, 2003: 114–15)
This excerpt casts South Vietnamese as
worthy due to the lengths they went to in
order to find democracy and freedom. It casts
West Germans as saviors and guardians of
democracy and humanity. The storyline reso-
nated with West Germans’ understanding of
their own post-war struggle, rising from the
ashes of a devastating war, rebuilding a soci-
ety that values freedom, democracy, and anti-
communism. In this way, the narrative of
South Vietnamese boat-people refugees
aligned with and affirmed the narrative of
West German identity.
Meanwhile, immigrant advocates in east-
ern Germany were also hard at work creat-
ing a history of Vietnamese migration to East
Germany that cast them as worthy of resi-
dency rights and respect. For example, the
organization Union of Vietnamese in Berlin
and Brandenburg put together an exhibit
530 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
about the experience of Vietnamese living in
the eastern Berlin neighborhood of Marzahn.
The exhibit consists of artifacts including
press clippings, letters, photographs, copies
of documents, and interpretive text, mounted
on 11 large posters created between 1993 and
1998. Some of the posters have titles that sum
up their content, including:
#2 Vietnamese in the GDR – For Five Years gives
details about the labor contracts;
#3 Working in Berlin – Living in Berlin illuminates
daily life in East German factories and dormitories
which housed the workers;
#5 The New Situation – shows positive develop-
ments around the time of the fall of the Berlin
Wall, but also some of the racist violence in East
Germany after 1990;
#8 The Struggle for the Right to Stay shows photos
of Vietnamese people protesting and documents
demanding their rights;
#10 Results points to achievements including the
1997 revision to the Immigration Act granting
permanent residency rights to former contract
workers;
#11 Unbroken Will toward Integration highlights
the enduring commitment of Vietnamese people
in Marzahn to become a productive part of
German society.
The titles of the posters describe the narrative
arc of a story about people who came to East
Germany with high hopes, who encountered
heavy-handed regulations, racism, and years
of active political struggle to re-gain the abil-
ity to live and work legally in Germany. It is
an eloquent example of how Vietnamese
people transformed themselves from migrants
into immigrants, from victims of violence and
repression into people who persevered through
struggle to create a new space for themselves
as part of German society. This story reso-
nates with East Germans’ successful move-
ment for reform, and transition from a socialist
into a democratic model of society.
The collective histories of Vietnamese ‘boat
people’ and Vietnamese ‘contract workers’
are ‘immigrant origin narratives’ that clearly
delineate a trajectory from place of origin to
integration in the host society (Bui, 2003:
175). They leverage the theme of overcoming
nearly insurmountable challenges to explain
how immigrants have earned their place in
the host society. They fend off the trope of the
cigarette seller, while answering the perennial
question posed by members of the host soci-
ety to anyone they detect as different: ‘where
are you from?’. Immigrant origin narratives
are an epi-national strategy that inscribes
Vietnamese migrants into a German national
framework, against a dominant discourse that
shows Vietnamese people as roving Mafiosi
outlaws and marginalized petty criminals.
The ‘boat people’ and ‘contract worker’
immigrant origin narratives have allowed
Vietnamese migrants in Germany to affirm
a sense of belonging, activate empathy, and
secure rights from the host society, and also
to distance the shameful stereotype of the
black market cigarette dealer. The origin
narrative strategy counters the stereotype by
providing explanation and facts as well as an
emotional appeal for empathy based on the
experience of hardship and struggle.
Partial Masking
While immigrant origin narratives seek to
provide information to counter a negative
stereotype that all Vietnamese migrants in
Germany are implicated in the black market
cigarette trade, a different strategy has taken
shape among a subgroup of Vietnamese
entrepreneurs: partially masking their ethnic
identity by calling their businesses ‘Asian’ or
‘Chinese’, rather than ‘Vietnamese’. It is no
accident that in the late 1990s, nearly every
eastern German city boasted ‘Asian’ grocery
stores, snack bars, and restaurants. The low-
priority work permits issued to former con-
tract workers after 1990 severely hampered
them from obtaining jobs in the regular labor
market, but obtaining employment was a
prerequisite for maintaining a residency
 VIETNAMESE STUDENTS AND THE EMERGING MODEL MINORITY MYTH IN GERMANY
permit. Starting their own businesses was the
only viable option. A 1995 survey of 500
Vietnamese living in eastern Germany by the
Federal Labor Ministry found that more than
half were self-employed. Of those who
started their own business, 68% said the
reason was ‘couldn’t find any other job’.
Although Asian eateries were not the most
common form of self-employment for
Vietnamese migrants, they were highly visi-
ble: many started out as food trucks located
on public plazas. Moreover, in the eastern
German landscape, ethnic cuisine was rela-
tively rare into the late 1990s. Ethnic restau-
rants and grocery stores capitalize on the
owners’ physical appearance of difference to
market their goods. Interviews with several
Vietnamese eatery owners inquired why they
called their businesses ‘Asian’ or ‘Chinese’.
Some responded that they thought it would
be impossible to market Vietnamese food to
Germans unfamiliar with that cuisine, and a
few remarked that Vietnamese cuisine is too
labor-intensive to be profitable. Instead, they
opted for a relatively cheap menu of fried
noodles and rice dishes. One interviewee
explained another reason:
[B]ecause Vietnamese, here is such a, I believe that
was after the Wende, with this cigarette story,
because not all Vietnamese deal in cigarettes. But
predominantly back then, and the illegal
Vietnamese, they did trade in cigarettes. There is
also the story of the Mafia dealing with cigarettes
or organizations and so on, and they get short-
term profits, as with drug smuggling. And so many
Germans, who cannot grasp it, they think all
Vietnamese deal in cigarettes. So assume that –
look at my place for example, a guy outside thinks,
‘He certainly has dough from cigarette deals and
then he opens up a restaurant’. That is absolutely
not at all correct! And – but for Germans, just
throw all in one basket. … And if Germans think:
‘Vietnamese, that is not for real’. And: ‘A
Vietnamese certainly has dealings with the Mafia.
Let’s not go there’. We are afraid of such a thing.
Even though that is not correct. We don’t at all
trade in cigarettes! My – our people, yes, but we,
we business-people, not. We have nothing to do
with that. We have precisely not even contacts
with those people. What should we do with those
people? We get into trouble if they get into our
531
apartment or if we have contact with them, maybe
we will get into trouble some time. We are cl- not
clean people, but we do have our work. We simply
cannot do that.10
The vehemence of Hung’s reaction shows
how much he feels the sting of the ethnic
stigma resulting from the discourse around
Vietnamese cigarette dealing. It also demon-
strates his fear of violence, and his strategy
for attracting customers despite his own and
their fears. Hung believes that if he included
‘Vietnamese’ in the name of his restaurant,
passers-by would suspect that he was
involved in the black market cigarette trade,
a suspicion that he tries hard to dispel, both
in the interview and in everyday life. The
strategy of substituting an Asian identity for
his Vietnamese one does the double duty of
explaining Hung’s otherness to prospective
customers while also distancing the stereo-
type of the Vietnamese cigarette mafia. The
partial mask that Hung dons when he calls
his restaurant ‘Asian’ instead of Vietnamese
is a way to ward off fear so that German
strangers will dare to cross his threshold.
But Hung knows that is just the first step in
a long process of getting to know one
another better and justifying his place in
German society. Hung hopes that he can
contribute a small part to debunking the
cigarette-selling stereotype by demonstrat-
ing his work ethic, something that he believes
the Germans closest to him will eventually
notice and respect.
We must prove, I personally have to prove, so that
the people think to themselves: ‘Look, he works
from morning until night and every day there. And
he works in the restaurant, from A to Z, he cleans
up himself, cleans the windows himself, and cleans
the garden himself. He goes along the street and
cleans there. He does all that alone. He takes the
garbage out and so on. He has worked there for
years. He has nothing to do with those other
people!’. … And besides, eventually some of the
German people, the customers, can gradually dif-
ferentiate, whether some people work sensibly or
some people, who do certain deals. … I just take
care of my business. And my character. And my
reputation, or the reputation of all Vietnamese, yes.
532 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Hung hopes that by conducting their busi-
nesses in this way, he and other Vietnamese
entrepreneurs will be able to work off some
of the stigma surrounding Vietnamese
migrants. By representing themselves in their
daily activities as diligent small-business
owners, by going the extra mile, picking up
trash on the public street in addition to clean-
ing their own stores, Hung and the other
owners of highly visible stores and stalls are
trying to change the perception of Vietnamese
migrants in Germany. Another restaurant
owner, Lan, commented that she believes that
Germans think of her and others like her as
‘hard-working, work all the time, even more
hard-working than the Germans!’.11 For Lan
and Hung, hard work is the pathway to earn-
ing respect and eventually integration in
German society. By strategically deploying
friendliness and diligence, they intentionally
combat racism and negative stereotypes
among their customers, neighbors, and even-
tually, the larger public. Twenty years later, it
seems that they may have succeeded.
CONCLUSION
Freire (2005) wrote about the importance of
citizens to become critically conscious and
avoiding naïve consciousness. Conscientization
(or conscientização in Portuguese), accord-
ing to Freire (2005) was related to achieving
an in-depth understanding of the world.
Although the model minority stereotype is
an academic term, reading the proverbial
academic word and the world, a concept
developed by Freire (1985) is a necessary
component to achieving critical pedagogy
and also conscientization.
Violent crime and black market cigarette-
selling became widely associated with
Vietnamese migrants in Germany in the mid
1990s, at a time when German and Vietnamese
authorities clashed over deporting thousands
of Vietnamese nationals from Germany to
Vietnam. Eventually, the deportations pro-
ceeded, and violent crime was tamped down,
but the trope of the Vietnamese cigarette mafia
remained, affecting Germans’ perceptions of
Vietnamese migrants, and the migrants’ per-
ceptions of how they were perceived. To coun-
ter their sense of ‘spoiled identity’ (Goffman,
1963: 3), rescue their dignity, and ensure their
acceptance in society, Vietnamese migrants had
to invent ways to deal with this ethnic stigma.
Immigrant origin narratives can function as
an effective strategy for identity management
in the face of ethnic stigma. The narratives of
Vietnamese boat people and contract workers
provided a powerful advocacy tool in secur-
ing rights and services for close to 55,000 of
the estimated 97,000 Vietnamese migrants in
Germany in the 1990s. They helped to distin-
guish ‘legitimate’ categories of immigrants,
distancing them from the stereotype of the
black market cigarette vendor and the dis-
course around deporting Vietnamese nation-
als. The narratives also served and continue to
serve in everyday interactions between immi-
grants and natives to explain migrants’ differ-
ences from the host society through the lens of
a legitimate, accepted, collective experience.
The practice of partial masking, that is,
calling themselves or their businesses ‘Asian’
or ‘Chinese’ rather ‘Vietnamese’, was another
strategy migrants wielded to deflect the ciga-
rette vendor stereotype. This strategy bought
Vietnamese migrants the time and space to
make a more favorable first-hand impression
through their hard work. This everyday man-
agement of their reputation, coupled with
many conversations, helped start the process
of breaking down ethnic stigma.
What can be learned from the appar-
ent success story of Vietnamese migrants,
especially with a new wave of refugees
seeking to integrate into German society?
First, it is helpful if leaders can avoid creat-
ing an ethnic stigma. In the case of recent
migrants from the Middle East, leaders must
continue to emphasize that the refugees are
not Islamic terrorists. They must work to
ensure that refugees have a clear pathway to
residency rights and work permits. Housing,
direct contact with German neighbors, lan-
guage courses, meaningful work, and most
 VIETNAMESE STUDENTS AND THE EMERGING MODEL MINORITY MYTH IN GERMANY
importantly, a way for migrants to demon-
strate their eagerness to contribute to society
will go a long way toward integration. The
work of shaping an immigrant origin narra-
tive for the thousands of refugees from Syria
has already begun, with the stirring images
of risky crossings on the Mediterranean and
the hardships of crossing southern Europe.
These new immigrants and their advocates
should make sure to include in the narra-
tive some of the tropes that resonate with
Germans’ own experience, such as surviv-
ing the bombardment and near-total devas-
tation of their cities, as Germans did after
World War II. Resiliency, a willingness to
work hard, a high value on education, and
tolerance for different views are some of the
things that Syrian refugees may find will
provide common ground for starting empa-
thetic relationships with their German hosts.
The phenomenon of Vietnamese Wunder in
Germany today shows how the model minority
stereotype of Asians is highly portable, regard-
less of country. As Dayal (2014) points out, the
‘“model minority” discourse […] has begun
instrumentalising certain communities of colour
in Germany minoritised as “Asian”’ (para. 2).
It is important to push against the Asian model
minority myth so that culture does not become
an excuse for failing to implement sensible and
equitable integration policies.
Notes
1  DW-TV’s English-language video, available on
YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
ag2S8sd6HV0 (Accessed March 3, 2018)) high-
lights the Vietnamese in Germany who are aca-
demically successful.
2  It is important to bear in mind that the term
‘minority’ has a different meaning in central
Europe than in the United States. It has generally
referred to Indigenous ethnic minorities whose
past and current living spaces do not necessarily
align with current national borders, such as Roma
and Sinti (Weller, 2005). Recognized minorities
are guaranteed certain rights under international
agreements. In this chapter, we will use ‘minority’
to refer to a group that is non-dominant in terms
of population, social status, and power.
533
3  According to the German Interior Ministry, Ger-
many experienced a record 890,000 asylum appli-
cations in 2015; 280,000 in 2016; and 186,644
in 2017. Cited in www.dw.com/en/refugee-num
bers-in-germany-dropped-dramatically…
/a-42162223 (Accessed March 3, 2018). The
German Federal Statistics Office put the num-
ber of Syrians in Germany in 2017 at just under
700,000. https://www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFak-
ten/GesellschaftStaat/Bevoelkerung/Migration/
Integration/AuslaendischeBevolkerung/Tabellen/
StaatsangehoerigkeitJahre.html (Accessed March
3, 2018).
4  We use the general term ‘migrants’ to refer to
people who have crossed an international bor-
der, and the more specific term ‘immigrants’ to
indicate intention to stay permanently. German
government demographers now use the term
‘people with a migration background’ to refer to
people in Germany with at least one parent who
was not born as a German citizen.
5  This was not the first national press on the topic
of Vietnamese student success. Karin Weiss had
advocated studying the phenomenon because
she observed Vietnamese students attending
Gymnasium in Brandenburg at rates up to 74%,
as reported in 2008 in the news magazine Der
Spiegel. Her intention was to show that immi-
grants could perform as well or better than eth-
nic Germans on tests. She noted the significant
difference in academic achievement among chil-
dren of immigrants in the eastern German states
compared to western states and the national
average. She called for more studies and pointed
to factors outside of ethnic background that
might impact academic success, such as widely
available public preschool for children of immi-
grants (Mai, 2008).
6  This explanation is contrasted to historian Jochen
Oltmer’s assertion that a proactive welcoming
approach by the host society was the decisive
factor (de Swaaf, 2016).
7  Unless otherwise noted, this and all other transla-
tions in the text are provided by Pipo Bui. Part of
this passage appears in an English translation in
Spiegel Online (2010).
8  With the exception of Berlin, eastern Germany’s
population includes less than 7% migrants, com-
pared to 34% in western Germany. In this part
of the country, Vietnamese migrants are out-
numbered only by Poles, Syrians, Russians, and
Kazakhs.
9  The Federal Republic of Germany was commonly
called West Germany. The German Democratic
Republic was called East Germany.
10  Interview with Hung conducted in German on
June 22, 2000. Author’s translation. Interviewee
names have been changed to ensure privacy.
534 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
11  Interview with Lan conducted in German, on May
19, 2000. Author translation. Interviewee names
have been changed to ensure privacy.
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integration/komplettansicht

Revisiting Hurricane Katrina:
Racist Violence and the
Biopolitics of Disposability
Hurricane Katrina did not begin with a natural
disaster. It began with the hatred that flared
among White people in response to a civil
rights movement that challenged White
supremacy in American society. It began with
a racist backlash that erupted with the killing
of Emmett Till and continues to this day.
Moreover, it made visible the predatory nature
of disaster capitalism and its willingness to
turn a disastrous event into a Petri dish for the
forces of neoliberalism. Katrina launched a
new era in the politics of disposability.
The ghost of Katrina, which is more rele-
vant today – in an era that some still describe
as ‘post-racial’, even as Black men, women,
and youth are gunned down in routine acts of
state-sanctioned violence – than when it was
first written. Moreover, Hurricane Katrina
has proven prescient given the racist dis-
course, taunts, and insults hurled by Trump’s
White nationalist administration at the resi-
dents of Puerto Rico following the death and
destruction caused by Hurricane Maria in
September 2017.
49
Henry A. Giroux
In the long aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,
people in the United States and globally are
still struggling to draw the correct conclu-
sions and learn the right lessons from that
horrific catastrophe. Initially we were led to
believe that Katrina was the result of a fateful
combination of a natural disaster and govern-
ment incompetence. The perfect storm of bad
luck provided one more example of the gen-
eral inability of the Bush administration to
actually govern, let alone protect its citizenry.
Yet, with some distance and sober reflection,
such assessment seems a bit short-sighted, a
little too localized.
In truth, Katrina offers a number of rel-
evant lessons not only for US citizens, but
for Canadians and citizens all over the world
who must grapple with the global advance of
what I call a politics of disposability. First,
Katrina is symptomatic of a form of nega-
tive globalization that is as evident in Ottawa,
Paris, and London, as it is in Washington DC
or New Orleans, or any other city through-
out the world. As capital, goods, trade, and
538 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
information flow all over the globe, mate-
rial and symbolic resources are increasingly
being invested in the ‘free market’ while the
social state pays a terrible price. As safety
nets and social services are being hollowed
out and communities crumble and give way
to individualized, one-person archipelagos,
especially under a Trump presidency, it is
increasingly difficult to address as a collectiv-
ity, to act in concert, to meet the basic needs
of citizens, or maintain the social investments
needed to provide life-sustaining services. As
nation-states fall under the sway of the prin-
cipal philosophy of the times, which insists
on the end of the era of ‘big government’ in
favor of unencumbered individualism and
the all-encompassing logic of the market, it
is difficult to resurrect a language of social
investment, protection, and accountability.
Second, as Katrina made perfectly clear,
the challenges of a global world, especially
its growing ecological challenges, are col-
lective and not simply private. This suggests
that citizens in New Orleans as well as in
Vancouver, Halifax, and Toronto – coastal
and inland – must protect those principles of
the social contract that offer collective solu-
tions to foster and maintain both ecological
sustainability and human survival. Certainly,
Canadians have done much to ensure envi-
ronmental protections, especially in compari-
son with their neighbours to the South, but
there is much, much more that has to be done
to curtail the threat of global warming and
numerous ecological disasters.
Third, as Hurricane Katrina vividly illus-
trated, the decline of the social state along
with the rise of massive inequality increas-
ingly bar whole populations from the rights
and guarantees accorded to fully fledged citi-
zens of the republic and who are increasingly
rendered disposable, left to fend for them-
selves in the face of natural or man-made
disasters. Nowhere is this more evident than
in the anti-immigration policies, assault on
health care, the return of the mass incarcera-
tion state, and attack on the rights of transgen-
der people under the Trump administration.
This last challenge is difficult, for here we
must connect the painful dots between the
crisis in the Gulf Coast and that ‘other’ Gulf
crisis in the Middle East; we must connect the
dots between images of US soldiers standing
next to tortured Iraqis forced to assume the
additional indignity of a dog leash to images
of bloated bodies floating in the toxic waters
that overwhelmed New Orleans city streets
after five long days of punctuated govern-
ment indifference to the suffering of some of
its citizen populations.
If we continue to squander the world’s natu-
ral resources, prioritize free markets over free
people, or beggar populations already in need
because of financial debt, is it not then likely
that we will have to endure more ‘natural’
catastrophes, more terrorist threats, along with
media images that punctuate our own loss of
humanity, whether this involves US soldiers in
Afghanistan or Iraq? In earlier eras, imagery
of racist brutality and war atrocities moved
nations to act and to change domestic and for-
eign policy in the interests of global justice.
These contemporary images moved all of us,
but only it seems for a time. Why is that?
Emmett Till’s body arrived home in
Chicago in September 1955. White racists in
Mississippi had tortured, mutilated, and killed
the young 14-year-old Black boy for whistling
at a White woman. Determined to make vis-
ible the horribly mangled face and twisted
body of the child as an expression of racial
hatred and killing, Mamie Till, the boy’s
mother, insisted that the coffin, interred at the
A. A. Ranier Funeral Parlor on the South Side
of Chicago, be left open for four long days.
While mainstream news organizations ignored
the horrifying image, Jet magazine published
an unedited photo of Till’s face taken while he
lay in his coffin. Shaila Dewan points out that
mutilated is the word most often used to describe
the face of Emmett Till after his body was hauled
out of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. Inhuman
is more like it: melted, bloated, missing an eye,
swollen so large that its patch of wiry hair looks
like that of a balding old man, not a handsome,
brazen 14-year-old boy.1
 REVISITING HURRICANE KATRINA
Till had been castrated and shot in the head,
his tongue had been cut out, and a blow from
an ax had practically severed his nose from
his face – all of this done to a teenage boy
who came to bear the burden of the inherit-
ance of slavery and the inhuman pathology
that drives its racist imaginary. The photo not
only made visible the violent effects of the
racial state; it also fueled massive public
anger, especially among Blacks, and helped
to launch the Civil Rights Movement.
From the beginning of the Civil Rights
Movement to the war in Vietnam, images
of human suffering and violence pro-
vided the grounds for a charged political
indignation and collective sense of moral
outrage inflamed by the horrors of pov-
erty, militarism, war, and racism – even-
tually mobilizing widespread opposition
to these antidemocratic forces. Of course,
the seeds of a vast conservative counter-
revolution were already well underway as
images of a previous era – ‘Whites only’ signs,
segregated schools, segregated housing, and
nonviolent resistance – gave way to a troubling
iconography of cities aflame, mass rioting,
and armed Black youth who came to embody
the very precepts of lawlessness, disorder, and
criminality. Building on the reactionary rhetoric
of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, Ronald
Reagan took office in 1980 with a trickle-down
theory that would transform corporate America
and a corresponding visual economy.
The twin images of the young Black male
‘gangsta’ and his counterpart, the ‘welfare
queen’, became the primary vehicles for sell-
ing the American public on the need to dis-
mantle the welfare state, ushering in an era
of unprecedented deregulation, downsizing,
privatization, and regressive taxation. The
propaganda campaign was so successful that
George H. W. Bush could launch his 1988
presidential bid with the image of Willie
Horton, a Black man convicted of rape and
granted early release, and succeed in trounc-
ing his opponent with little public outcry over
the overtly racist nature of the campaign. By
the beginning of the 1990s, global media
539
consolidation, coupled with the outbreak of
a new war that encouraged hyper-patriotism
and a rigid nationalism, resulted in a tightly
controlled visual landscape – managed both
by the Pentagon and by corporate-owned net-
works – that delivered a paucity of images
representative of the widespread systemic
violence.2 Selectively informed and cynically
inclined, American civic life became more
sanitized, controlled, and regulated.
Hurricane Katrina may have reversed the
self-imposed silence of the media and pub-
lic numbness in the face of terrible suffer-
ing. Fifty years after the body of Emmett Till
was plucked out of the mud-filled waters of
the Tallahatchie River, another set of trou-
bling visual representations emerged that
both shocked and shamed the nation. In the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, grotesque
images of bloated corpses floating in the rot-
ting waters that flooded the streets of New
Orleans circulated throughout the main-
stream media. What first appeared to be a
natural catastrophe soon degenerated into
a social debacle as further images revealed,
days after Katrina had passed over the Gulf
Coast, hundreds of thousands of poor people,
mostly Blacks, some Latinos, many elderly,
and a few White people, packed into the New
Orleans Superdome and the city’s conven-
tion center, stranded on rooftops, or isolated
on patches of dry highway without any food,
water, or any place to wash, urinate, or find
relief from the scorching sun.
Weeks passed as the flood water gradu-
ally receded and the military gained control
of the city, and more images of dead bodies
surfaced in the national and global media.
TV cameras rolled as bodies emerged from
the flood waters while people stood by indif-
ferently, eating their lunch or occasionally
snapping a photograph. Most of the bodies
found ‘were 50 or older, people who tried to
wait the hurricane out’.3 Various media soon
reported that over 154 bodies had been found
in hospitals and nursing homes. The New York
Times wrote that ‘the collapse of one of soci-
ety’s most basic covenants – to care for the
540 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
helpless – suggests that the elderly and criti-
cally ill plummeted to the bottom of priority
lists as calamity engulfed New Orleans’.4
Dead bodies, mostly of poor Black people,
were left uncollected in the streets, on porches,
in hospitals, nursing homes, electric wheel-
chairs, and collapsed houses, prompting some
people to claim that America had become like
a ‘Third World country’ while others argued
that New Orleans resembled a ‘Third World
Refugee Camp’.5 There were now, irrefuta-
bly, two Gulf crises. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) tried to do
damage control by forbidding journalists to
‘accompany rescue boats as they went out to
search for storm victims’. As a bureau spokes-
woman told Reuters News Agency, ‘We have
requested that no photographs of the deceased
be made by the media’.6 But questions about
responsibility and answerability would not go
away. Even the dominant media for a short
time rose to the occasion of posing tough ques-
tions about accountability to those in power in
light of such egregious acts of incompetence
and indifference. The images of dead bodies
kept reappearing in New Orleans, refusing to
go away.
For many, the bodies of the poor, Black,
brown, elderly, and sick came to signify what
the battered body of Emmett Till once una-
voidably revealed, and America was forced
to confront these disturbing images and the
damning reality behind the images. The
Hurricane Katrina disaster, like the killing of
Emmett Till, revealed a vulnerable and des-
titute segment of the nation’s citizenry that
conservatives not only refused to see but had
spent the better part of two decades demoniz-
ing. But like the incessant beating of Poe’s
tell-tale heart, cadavers have a way of insinu-
ating themselves on consciousness, demand-
ing answers to questions that aren’t often
asked. The body of Emmett Till symbolized
overt White supremacy and state terrorism
organized against the supposed threat that
Black men (apparently of all sizes and ages)
posed against White women. But the Black
bodies of the dead and walking wounded in
New Orleans in 2005 revealed a different
image of the racial state, a different modal-
ity of state terrorism, marked less by an overt
form of White racism than by a highly medi-
ated displacement of race as a central concept
for understanding both Katrina and its place
in the broader history of US racism.7 That is,
while Till’s body insisted upon a public rec-
ognition of the violence of White supremacy,
the decaying Black bodies floating in the
waters of the Gulf Coast represented a return
of race against the media’s insistence that this
disaster was more about class than race, more
about the shameful and growing presence of
poverty, ‘the abject failure to provide aid to
the most vulnerable’.8
Till’s body allowed the racism that
destroyed it to be made visible, to speak pub-
licly to the systemic character of American
racial injustice. The bodies of the Katrina
victims could not speak with the same direct-
ness to the state of American racist violence,
but they did reveal and shatter the conserva-
tive fiction of living in a color-blind society.
The bodies of the Katrina victims laid bare
the racial and class fault lines that mark an
increasingly damaged and withering democ-
racy and revealed the emergence of a new
kind of politics, one in which entire popu-
lations are now considered disposable, an
unnecessary burden on state coffers, and
consigned to fend for themselves. At the
same time, what happened in New Orleans
also revealed some frightening signposts of
those repressive features in American soci-
ety, demanding that artists, public intellectu-
als, scholars, and other cultural workers take
seriously what Angela Davis insists ‘are very
clear signs of … impending fascist policies
and practices’, which not only construct an
imaginary social environment for all of those
populations rendered disposable but also
exemplify a site and space ‘where democracy
has lost its claims’.9
Katrina reveals that we are living in dark
times. The shadow of authoritarianism
remains after the storm clouds and hurricane
winds have passed, offering a glimpse of its
 REVISITING HURRICANE KATRINA
wreckage and terror. The politics of a dis-
aster that affected Louisiana, Alabama, and
Mississippi is about more than government
incompetence, militarization, socio-economic
polarization, environmental disaster, and
political scandal. Hurricane Katrina broke
through the visual blackout of poverty and
the pernicious ideology of color-blindness
to reveal the government’s role in fostering
the dire conditions of largely poor African-
Americans, who were bearing the hardships
incurred by the full wrath of the indifference
and violence at work in the racist, neoliberal
state. Global neoliberalism and its victims
now occupy a space shaped by authoritar-
ian politics, the terrors inflicted by a police
state, and a logic of disposability that removes
them from government social provisions and
the discourse and privileges of citizenship.
One of the most obvious lessons of Katrina –
that race and racism still matter in America –
is fully operational through a biopolitics in
which ‘sovereignty resides in the power and
capacity to dictate who may live and who
may die’.10 Those poor minorities of color
and class, unable to contribute to the prevail-
ing consumerist ethic, are vanishing into the
sinkhole of poverty in desolate and aban-
doned enclaves of decaying cities, neigh-
borhoods, and rural spaces, or in America’s
ever-expanding prison empire. Under the
Bush regime and extending into the Obama
administration, a biopolitics that was and has
been driven by the waste machine of what
Zygmunt Bauman defines as ‘liquid moder-
nity’11 registers a new and brutal racism as
part of the emergence of a contemporary and
savage authoritarianism.
Any viable attempt to challenge the biopo-
litical project that now shapes American
life and culture must do more than unearth
the powerful antidemocratic forces that now
govern American economics, politics, educa-
tion, media, and culture; it must also deepen
possibilities of individual and collective
struggles by fighting for the rebuilding of
civil society and the creation of a vast net-
work of democratic public spheres such as
541
schools and the alternative media in order to
develop new models of individual and social
agency that can expand and deepen the real-
ity of democratic public life. This is a call for
a diverse ‘radical party’, following Stanley
Aronowitz’ exhortation, a party that prior-
itizes democracy as a global task, views hope
as a precondition for political engagement,
gives primacy to making the political more
pedagogical, and understands the importance
of the totality of the struggle as it informs and
articulates within and across a wide range of
sites and sectors of everyday life – domes-
tically and globally. Democratically minded
citizens and social movements must return to
the crucial issue of how race, class, power,
and inequality in America contribute to the
suffering and hardships experienced daily by
the poor, people of color, and working- and
middle-class people. The fight for equality
offers new challenges in the process of con-
structing a politics that directly addresses
poverty, class domination, and a resurgent
racism. Such a politics would take seriously
what it means to struggle pedagogically and
politically over both ideas and material rela-
tions of power as they affect diverse individu-
als and groups at the level of daily life. Such
struggles would combine a democratically
energized cultural politics of resistance and
hope with a politics aimed at offering work-
ers a living wage and all citizens a guaran-
teed standard of living, one that provides a
decent education, housing, and health care to
all residents of the United States.
Biopolitics is not just about the reduction
of selected elements of the population to the
necessities of bare life or worse; it is also poten-
tially about enhancing life by linking hope and
a new vision to the struggle for reclaiming the
social, providing a language capable of trans-
lating individual issues into public considera-
tions, and recognizing that in the age of the
new media the terrain of culture is one of the
most important pedagogical spheres through
which to challenge the most basic precepts of
the new authoritarianism. The waste machine
of modernity, as Bauman points out, must be
542 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
challenged within a new understanding of
environmental justice, human rights, and dem-
ocratic politics. Negative globalization with its
attachment to the mutually enforcing modali-
ties of militarism and racial segregation must
be exposed and dismantled. And this demands
new forms of resistance that are both more
global and differentiated. But if these struggles
are going to emerge, especially in the United
States, then we need a politics and pedagogy
of hope, one that takes seriously Hannah
Arendt’s call to use the public realm to throw
light on the ‘dark times’ that threaten to extin-
guish the very idea of democracy. Against the
tyranny of market fundamentalism, religious
dogmatism, unchecked militarism, and ideo-
logical claims to certainty, an emancipatory
biopolitics must enlist education as a crucial
force in the struggle over democratic identi-
ties, spaces, and ideals.
Central to the biopolitics of disposability
is the recognition that abiding powerlessness
atrophies the public imagination and leads to
political paralysis. Consequently, its policies
avidly attack critical education at all levels
of cultural production in an all-out effort to
undermine critical thought, imagination, and
substantive agency. To significantly confront
the force of a biopolitics in the service of the
new authoritarianism, intellectuals, artists,
and others in various cultural sites – from
schools to higher education to the media –
will have to rethink what it means to secure
the conditions for critical education both
within and outside of the schools. In the con-
text of formal schooling, this means fighting
against the corporatization, commercialism,
and privatization of public schools. Higher
education has to be defended in the same
terms. Against the biopolitics of racial exclu-
sion, the university should be a principal site
where dialogue, negotiation, mutual under-
standing, and respect provide the knowledge
and experience for students to develop a
shared space for affirming differences while
simultaneously learning those shared values
necessary for an inclusive democratic society.
Similarly, both public and higher education
must address with new courage the history
of American slavery, the enduring legacy of
racism in the United States, and its interface
with both political nationalism and the endur-
ing market and religious fundamentalisms at
work in contemporary society. Similarly, rac-
ism must be not be reduced to a private mat-
ter, a case of individual prejudice removed
from the dictates of state violence and the
broader realm of politics, and left to mat-
ters of ‘taste, preference, and ultimately, of
consumer, or lifestyle choice’.12 What must
be instituted and fought for in higher edu-
cation is a critical and anti-racist pedagogy
that unsettles, stirs up human consciousness,
‘breeds dissatisfaction with the level of both
freedom and democracy achieved thus far’,
and inextricably connects the fates of free-
dom, democracy, and critical education.13
Hannah Arendt once argued that ‘the pub-
lic realm has lost the power of illumination’,
and one result is that more and more people
‘have retreated from the world and their obli-
gations within it’.14 The public realm is not
merely a space where the political, social,
economic, and cultural interconnect; it is also
the pre-eminent space of public pedagogy –
that is, a space where subjectivities are
shaped, public commitments are formed, and
choices are made. As sites of cultural poli-
tics and public pedagogy, public spaces offer
a unique opportunity for critically engaged
citizens, young people, academics, teachers,
and various intellectuals to engage in peda-
gogical struggles that provide the conditions
for social empowerment. Such struggles can
be waged through the new media, films, pub-
lications, radio interviews, and a range of
other forms of cultural production. It is espe-
cially crucial, as Mark Poster has argued, that
scholars, teachers, public intellectuals, art-
ists, and cultural theorists take on the chal-
lenge of understanding how the new media
technologies construct subjects differently
with multiple forms of literacy that engage
a range of intellectual capacities.15 This also
means deploying new technologies of com-
munication such as the Internet, camcorder,
 REVISITING HURRICANE KATRINA
and cell phone in political and pedagogically
strategic ways to build protracted struggles
and reclaim the promise of a democracy that
insists on racial, gender, and economic equal-
ity. The new techno culture is a powerful ped-
agogical tool that needs to be used, on the one
hand, in the struggle against both dominant
media and the hegemonic ideologies they
produce, circulate, and legitimate, and, on the
other hand, as a valuable tool in treating men
and women as agents of change, mindful of
the consequences of their actions, and utterly
capable of pursuing truly egalitarian models
of democracy.
The promise of a better world cannot be
found in modes of authority that lack a vision
of social justice, renounce the promise of
democracy, and reject the dream of a better
future, offering instead of dreams the pale
assurance of protection from the nightmare
of an all-embracing terrorism. Against this
stripped-down legitimation of authority is
the promise of public spheres, which in their
diverse forms, sites, and content offer peda-
gogical and political possibilities for strength-
ening the social bonds of democracy, new
spaces within which to cultivate the capaci-
ties for critical modes of individual and social
agency, and crucial opportunities to form alli-
ances to collectively struggle for a biopolitics
that expands the scope of vision, operations
of democracy, and the range of democratic
institutions – that is, a biopolitics that fights
against the terrors of totalitarianism. Such
spheres are about more than legal rights guar-
anteeing freedom of speech; they are also
sites that demand a certain kind of citizen
informed by particular forms of education, a
citizen whose education provides the essen-
tial conditions for democratic public spheres
to flourish. Cornelius Castoriadis, the great
philosopher of democracy, argues that if pub-
lic space is to be experienced not as a private
affair, but as a vibrant sphere in which people
learn how to participate in and shape public
life, then it must be shaped through an educa-
tion that provides the decisive traits of cour-
age, responsibility, and shame, all of which
543
connect the fate of each individual to the fate
of others, the planet, and global democracy.16
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the
biopolitical calculus of massive power differ-
entials and iniquitous market relations put the
scourge of poverty and racism on full display.
To confront the biopolitics of disposability,
we need to recognize the dark times in which
we live and offer up a vision of hope that cre-
ates the conditions for multiple collective and
global struggles that refuse to use politics as
an act of war and markets as the measure of
democracy. Making human beings super-
fluous is the essence of totalitarianism, and
democracy is the antidote in urgent need of
being reclaimed. Katrina should keep the
hope of such a struggle alive for quite some
time because for many of us the images of
those floating bodies serve as a desperate
reminder of what it means when justice, as
the lifeblood of democracy, becomes cold and
indifferent in the face of death.
Looking back over the last decade, it is
clear that Katrina was not simply a natu-
ral disaster but a political disaster, one that
signalled and made visible a new era in rac-
ist tyranny and the politics of disposability.
The plague of racism accelerated as police
violence against Black youth intensified,
and with impunity. The names of Trayvon
Martin, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray,
among others, stand as signposts to a soci-
ety that after Katrina allegedly entered into
the fog of what Whites were all too willing
to call a post-racial society. With the current
rise of the new extremism, particularly with
the ongoing attacks on Muslims, immigrants,
and those deemed other in the United States,
Katrina stands as an early warning signal of
the impending threat of totalitarianism that
was emerging in the United States, marked
not only by an upsurge in racist violence but
also by the assault on every public sphere that
provides a foundation for critical thinking,
dissent, and collective action.
With the election of Donald Trump to the
presidency of the United States, a resurgent
nationalism, racism, and discourse of hate
544 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
have moved from the margins to the center
of power. This is evident not only in terms of
the increasing visibility of White supremacists
and the anti-immigrant fundamentalists who
back Trump, but also the inclusion in his cabi-
net of politicians who long to make America
White again. Not only would this include for-
mer Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but also
the unapologetic White supremacist, and for-
mer Chief White House advisor Steve Bannon
and White nationalist, Stephen Miller, the
diabolical force behind Trump’s assault on
undocumented workers. At the same time, the
plague of racism, White supremacy, a toxic
nationalism has produced a series of policies
and statements that speak to the rise of a new
authoritarianism in the United States. This
include the militarizing of the police, Trump’s
call for violence by the police against potential
criminals, the proposed revocation of immi-
gration laws such as DACA (Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals), and the attempts to
bar people from entering the United States on
the basis of their religion and country of ori-
gin. In the current historical moment, shades
of Katrina can be found in a more ruthless
politics of disposability, especially visible in
the Trump administration’s slow response to
the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
Weeks after the Category 5 storm hit, thou-
sands of people lacked electricity, clean water,
and adequate health care. As Paul Krugman
observed, ‘What we’re actually witnessing,
in effect, is the betrayal and abandonment of
three and a half million of our own people….
The simple fact is that millions of our fellow
citizens are facing catastrophe. How can we
be abandoning them in their time of need?’.17
Trump responded to the misery and suffering
of the Puerto Rican people by insulting them.
He told them to stop complaining, indicated
that they are costing the US government too
much money, and to take responsibility for
their own plight. At the root of these insulting
Tweets and statements is the racist notion that
Hispanics don’t have the character and forti-
tude to address the horrendous conditions they
faced in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and
that they do not deserve the same level of aid,
treatment, and support received my mainland
White Americans.
What is different at the present moment is
that the politics of disposability is not seen by
many people, especially the young, as simply
a natural disaster. They are well aware that
the real crisis is political and is the result of a
savage capitalism that views the poor, Blacks,
workers, immigrants, and young people as
excess, expendable, and no longer worth
investing in as part of the obligations of the
social contract and democracy itself. The good
news is that young people all over the United
States and other parts of the globe are remem-
bering Katrina not simply as a tragic histori-
cal event but as a rallying cry for developing
radical social movements such as Black Lives
Matter as part of a call to action to build a soci-
ety in which events which followed Katrina
never happen again. The memory of Katrina
speaks not just to the past but to a future in
which human rights matter, equality matters,
justice matters, and democracy matters.
Notes
1  Shaila Dewan, ‘How Photos Became an Icon of
the Civil Rights Movement’, New York Times
(August 28, 2005). Online: http://www.wehai-
tians.com/how%20photos%20became%20
icon%20of%20civil%20rights%20movement.
html (Accessed January 24, 2017).
2  Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1992).
3  Dan Frosch, ‘Back from the Dead’, ALTWeek-
lies.com (September 28, 2005), pp. 1–3.Online:
http://www.altweeklies.com/gyrobase/AltWeek-
lies/Story?oid=oid%3A151104 Accessed Octo-
ber 18, 2018
4  Cited in David Rohde, Donald G. McNeil Jr.,
Reed Abelson, and Shaila Dewan, ‘154 Patients
Died, Many in Intense Heat, as Rescues Lagged’,
New York Times, (September 19, 2005). Online:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/19/us/
nationalspecial/154-patients-died-many-inin-
tense-heat-as-rescues-lagged.html Accessed
December 30, 2006
5  Rosa Brooks, ‘Our Homegrown Third World’, Los
Angeles Times (September 7, 2005), pp. 1–2.
 REVISITING HURRICANE KATRINA
Online: http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/
print.cgi?file=/views05/0907-24.htm (Accessed
January 28, 2017).
6  Terry M. Neal, ‘Hiding Bodies Won’t Hide the
Truth’, Washington Post (September 8, 2005).
Online: http://www.washingtonpost.com
(Accessed January 25, 2017).
7  For a brilliant analysis of the racial state, see
David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Mal-
den, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001). On the
post-racial state, also see David Theo Gold-
berg, Are We All Postracial Yet? (London:
Polity, 2015).v
8  Eric Foner, ‘Bread, Roses, and the Flood’, The
Nation (October 3, 2005), p. 8.
9  Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond
Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven
Stories Press, 2005), pp. 122, 124.
10  Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby
Meintjes, Public Culture 15:1 (2003), pp. 11–40,
here 11–12.
545
11  Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London:
Polity, 2000), p. 1.
12  Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 146–7.
13  Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love (London: Polity,
2003); Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (London:
Polity, 2005), p. 14.
14  Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), p. 4.
15  Mark Poster, What’s the Matter with the Internet?
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
16  See, especially, Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Greek
Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, Philosophy,
Politics, and Autonomy: Essays in Political Philos-
ophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),
pp. 81–123.
17  Paul Krugman, ‘Let them eat paper towels’, New
York Times (October 12, 2017). Online: https://
www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/opinion/trump-
tweets-puerto-rico.html?_r=0 Accessed October
15, 2017
This page intentionally left blank
 The SAGE Handbook of
Critical Pedagogies
SAGE was founded in 1965 by Sara Miller McCune to support
the dissemination of usable knowledge by publishing innovative
and high-quality research and teaching content. Today, we
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a charitable trust that secures our continued independence.

Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

 The SAGE Handbook of
Critical Pedagogies

Volume 2

Edited by
Shirley R. Steinberg
and Barry Down
Assistant Editor
Janean Robinson
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Library of Congress Control Number:
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ISBN 978-1-5264-1148-8
Introduction © Barry Down and Shirley R.
Steinberg, 2020
Editorial arrangement © Shirley R. Steinberg
and Barry Down, 2020
Section 1 Introduction © Shirley R. Steinberg,
2020
Chapter 1 © SAGE Publications, 1983
Chapter 2 © Lilia I. Bartolomé, 2020
Chapter 3 © John Willinsky, 2020
Chapter 4 © Deborah P. Britzman, 2020
Chapter 5 © Ramón Flecha, 2020
Chapter 6 © William H. Schubert, 2020
Chapter 7 © David Geoffrey Smith, 2020
Chapter 8 © Hermán S. García, 2020
Chapter 9 © Marcella Runell Hall, 2020
Chapter 10 © Arlo Kempf, 2020
Chapter 11 © Paul L. Thomas, 2020
Chapter 12 © Christine E. Sleeter, 2020
Chapter 13 © William Ayers, 2020
Chapter 14 © Luis Huerta-Charles, 2020
Chapter 15 © D’Arcy Martin, 2020
Section 2 Introduction © Paul R. Carr and Gina
Thésée, 2020
Chapter 16 © Joe L. Kincheloe, 2020
Chapter 17 © Benjamin Frymer, 2020
Chapter 18 © Soudeh Oladi, 2020
Chapter 19 © Philip M. Anderson, 2020
Chapter 20 © Rodney Handelsman, 2020
Chapter 21 © Antonio Garcia, 2020
Chapter 22 © Nathan Snaza, 2020
Chapter 23 © Cathryn Teasley and Alana
Butler, 2020
Chapter 24 © Marlon Simmons, 2020
Chapter 25 © Peter Pericles Trifonas, 2020
Chapter 26 © Marc Spooner, 2020
Chapter 27 © Jane McLean, 2020
Chapter 28 © Michalinos Zembylas, 2020
Section 3 Introduction © Gregory Martin, 2020
Chapter 29 © James D. Kirylo, 2020
Chapter 30 © Robert F. Carley, 2020
Chapter 31 © Stephanie Troutman, 2020
Chapter 32 © Samuel D. Rocha and Martha
Sañudo, 2020
Chapter 33 © Robert Hattam, 2020
Chapter 34 © Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs, 2020
Chapter 35 © Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa
Sordé Martí, 2020
Chapter 36 © Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid
McAuliffe, 2020
Chapter 37 © Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter
McLaren, 2020
Chapter 38 © Shirley R. Steinberg, 2020
Section 4 Introduction © Cathryn Teasley, 2020
Chapter 39 © Domenica Maviglia, 2020
Chapter 40 © Colin Chasi and Ylva Rodny-
Gumede, 2020
Chapter 41 © Juan Ríos Vega, 2020
Chapter 42 © Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina
Stefanidou and Constantine Skordoulis, 2020
Chapter 43 © Madhulika Sagaram, 2020
Chapter 44 © Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner,
Michaela P. Stone and Marco Montalbetti
Viñuela, 2020
Chapter 45 © Brian Dotts, 2020
Chapter 46 © Kathalene A. Razzano, 2020
Chapter 47 © Jaime Usma, Oscar A. Peláez,
Yuliana Palacio and Catalina Jaramillo, 2020
Chapter 48 © Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo
Bui, 2020
Chapter 49 © Henry A. Giroux, 2020
Section 5 Introduction © Four Arrows and R.
Michael Fisher, 2020
Chapter 50 © R. Michael Fisher and Four
Arrows, 2020
Chapter 51 © Ann Milne, 2020
Chapter 52 © Jeremy Garcia, 2020
Chapter 53 © Shashi Shergill and David
Scott, 2020
Chapter 54 © Jennifer M. Markides, 2020
Chapter 55 © Adrienne Sansom, 2020
Chapter 56 © Renee Desmarchelier, 2020
Chapter 57 © Perry R. James, 2020
Chapter 58 © Rose Marsters, 2020
Section 6 Introduction © Robert Hattam, 2020
Chapter 59 © John Smyth, 2020
Chapter 60 © Tricia M. Kress, 2020
Chapter 61 © Concepción Sánchez-Blanco, 2020
Chapter 62 © Sandro Carnicelli and Karla
Boluk, 2020
Chapter 63 © Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila
E. Villaverde, 2020
Chapter 64 © Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A.
Solyom and Bryan Brayboy, 2020
Chapter 65 © Haggith Gor Ziv, 2020
Chapter 66 © Teresa Anne Fowler, 2020
Chapter 67 © Sheryl J. Lieb, 2020
Chapter 68 © Barry Down, 2020
Section 7 Introduction © Barry Down, 2020
Chapter 69 © David Zyngier, 2020
Chapter 70 © Khadija Mohammed, Lisa
McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz, 2020
Chapter 71 © Revital Zilonka, 2020
Chapter 72 © Gang Zhu and Zhengmei
Peng, 2020
Chapter 73 © Phillip Boda, 2020
Chapter 74 © Guofang Li and Pramod K.
Sah, 2020
Chapter 75 © Galia Zalmanson Levi, 2020
Chapter 76 © Ramón Flecha and Silvia
Molina, 2020
Section 8 Introduction © Michael B.
MacDonald, 2020
Chapter 77 © Silvia Cristina Bettez and
Cristina Maria Dominguez, 2020
Chapter 78 © Awad Ibrahim, 2020
Chapter 79 © Maria Padrós and Sandra
Girbés-Peco, 2020
Chapter 80 © Elbert J. Hawkins III, 2020
Chapter 81 © Shuntay Z. Tarver and Melanie
M. Acosta, 2020
Chapter 82 © Toby Rollo, J. Cynthia McDermott,
Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel, 2020
Chapter 83 © Tanya Brown Merriman, 2020
Chapter 84 © April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams, 2020
Chapter 85 © Sherilyn Lennon, 2020
Chapter 86 © Annette Coburn and David
Wallace, 2020
Section 9 Introduction © Michael Hoechsmann,
2020
Chapter 87 © Jeff Share, 2020
Chapter 88 © Michael Hoechsmann and
Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín, 2020
Chapter 89 © Sabrina Boyer, 2020
Chapter 90 © Brian C. Johnson, 2020
Chapter 91 © Tony Kashani, 2020
Chapter 92 © Juha Suoranta, 2020
Chapter 93 © Cherie Ann Turpin, 2020
Chapter 94 © Ki Wight, 2020
Chapter 95 © SAGE Publications, 2011
Chapter 96 © Gerald Walton, 2020
Section 10 Introduction © Leila E. Villaverde
and Roymieco A. Carter, 2020
Chapter 97 © Gregory Martin, 2020
Chapter 98 © Leila E. Villaverde & Roymieco
A. Carter, 2020
Chapter 99 © Judith Dunkerly-Bean and
Kristine Sunday, 2020
Chapter 100 © I. Malik Saafir, 2020
Chapter 101 © Michael B. MacDonald, 2020
Chapter 102 © Claire Robson and Dennis
Sumara, 2020
Chapter 103 © Peter R. Wright, 2020
Chapter 104 © Mary Drinkwater, 2020
Chapter 105 © Lalenja Harrington, 2020
Chapter 106 © Christopher Lee Kennedy, 2020
Section 11 Introduction © Shirley R. Steinberg,
2020
Chapter 107 © Douglas Kellner and Roslyn M.
Satchel, 2020
Chapter 108 © Andrew Hickey, 2020
Chapter 109 © Priya Parmar, 2020
Chapter 110 © Dawn N. Hicks Tafari and
Veronica A. Newton, 2020
Chapter 111 © Tony Edwards and Kerry J.
Renwick, 2020
Chapter 112 © Paul L. Thomas, 2020
Chapter 113 © Nwachi Pressley-Tafari, 2020
Chapter 114 © Mark Helmsing, 2020
Chapter 115 © Teresa J. Rishel, 2020
Chapter 116 © Jo Lampert and Kerry Mallan, 2020
Section 12 Introduction © Renee
Desmarchelier, 2020
Chapter 117 © Stephanie L. Hudson, 2020
Chapter 118 © Joseph Carroll-Miranda, 2020
Chapter 119 © Sarah E. Colonna, 2020
Chapter 120 © Edmund Adjapong, 2020
Chapter 121 © Jennifer D. Adams, Atasi Das
and Eun-Ji Amy Kim, 2020
Chapter 122 © Shawn Arango Ricks, 2020
Chapter 123 © Constance Russell, 2020
Chapter 124 © Marissa Bellino, 2020
Chapter 125 © Jodi Latremouille, 2020
 We dedicate this set of books to the notion of social justice in education…to making a
difference, to causing a fracture, to reading between the lines…to criticalizing the work we
do as educators. And to the memory of Paulo Freire, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Jesús Pato
Gómez, who paved the way…leaving us far too early.
Shirley and Barry
 Contents

Dedication v
List of Figures xvii
List of Tablesxix
Notes on the Editors and Contributorsxx
Acknowledgementsxxxix
Introduction to the Handbookxl
Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg

VOLUME 1

SECTION I READING PAULO FREIRE 1

Shirley R. Steinberg

1 The Importance of the Act of Reading 3

Paulo Freire; translated by Loretta Slover

2 Linking My World to the Word 9

Lilia I. Bartolomé

3 Freire Contra Freire: An Interplay in Three Acts 13

John Willinsky

4 A Note on Free Association as Transference to Reading 17

Deborah P. Britzman

5 Dialogic and Liberating Actions 20

Ramón Flecha

6 In the Spirit of Freire 22

William H. Schubert

7 Fake News and Other Conundrums in ‘Reading the World’ at Empire’s End 29
David Geoffrey Smith

8 Freire’s ‘Act of Reading’: Inspiring and Emboldening 38

Hermán S. García

9 In Gratitude to Freire 40
Marcella Runell Hall

10 Of Word, World, and Being (Online) 42

Arlo Kempf
viii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

11 The Critical Redneck Experience 46

Paul L. Thomas

12 On Learning to Claim Text 48

Christine E. Sleeter

13 ‘I Am a Revolutionary!’ 51
William Ayers

14 The Importance of Paulo Freire in the ‘Act of Reading’ 59

Luis Huerta-Charles

15 Share and Sustain: Two Steps to Paulo 62

D’Arcy Martin

SECTION II SOCIAL THEORIES 67

Paul R. Carr and Gina Thésée

16 Critical Pedagogy and the Knowledge Wars of the 21st Century 75

Joe L. Kincheloe

17 The Frankfurt School and Education 94

Benjamin Frymer

18 The Nomad, The Hybrid: Deconstructing the Notion of Subjectivity

Through Freire and Rumi 104
Soudeh Oladi

19 The Reader, the Text, the Restraints: A Cultural History of the Art(s)
of Reading 118
Philip M. Anderson

20 Deleuzeguattarian Concepts for a Becoming Critical Pedagogy 135

Rodney Handelsman

21 Specters of Critical Pedagogy: Must We Die in Order to Survive? 157

Antonio Garcia

22 Critical Pedagogy Beyond the Human 173

Nathan Snaza

23 Intersecting Critical Pedagogies to Counter Coloniality 186

Cathryn Teasley and Alana Butler

24 Locating Black Life within Colonial Modernity: Decolonial Notes 205

Marlon Simmons
 Contents ix

25 Critical Pedagogy and Difference 218

Peter Pericles Trifonas

26 Critical Pedagogy Imperiled as Neoliberalism, Marketization, and

Audit Culture Become the Academy 225
Marc Spooner

27 Critical Pedagogy: Negotiating the Nuances of Implementation 236

Jane McLean

28 Critical Pedagogies of Compassion 254

Michalinos Zembylas

SECTION III KEY FIGURES IN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY 269

Gregory Martin

29 Meeting the Critical Pedagogues: A North America Context

(Paulo Freire and Beyond) 273
James D. Kirylo

30 Gramscian Critical Pedagogy: A Holistic and Social Genre Approach 289

Robert F. Carley

31 Still Teaching to Transgress: Reflecting on Critical Pedagogy with bell hooks 302
Stephanie Troutman

32 Ivan Illich and Liberation Theology 310

Samuel D. Rocha and Martha Sañudo

33 From South African Black Theology and Freire to ‘Teaching for

Resistance’: The Work of Basil Moore 320
Robert Hattam

34 Coming to Critical Pedagogy in Spain Through Life and Literature:

Jurjo Torres Santomé and Ramón Flecha 334
Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs

35 Interviews with Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí 346

Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí

36 Interview with Henry A. Giroux 352

Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid McAuliffe

37 Interviews with Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren 368

Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren

38 Influenced by Critical Pedagogy: Interviews with Critical Friends 380

Shirley R. Steinberg
x THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

SECTION IV GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES 401

Cathryn Teasley

39 From Theory to Practice: The Identikit and Purpose of Critical Pedagogy 405
Domenica Maviglia

40 Reimagining the University as a Transit Place and Space:

A Contribution to the Decolonisation Debate 416
Colin Chasi and Ylva Rodny-Gumede

41 When I Open My Alas: Developing a Transnational Mariposa Consciousness 428

Juan Ríos Vega

42 Critical Pedagogy and the Acceptance of Refugees in Greece 439

Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina Stefanidou and Constantine Skordoulis

43 Indigenous Critical Pedagogy in Underserved Environments in India 453

Madhulika Sagaram

44 (Dis)Ruptive Glocality Through Teacher Exchange: Realizing Pedagogical

Love in the Chilean Context 469
Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Michaela P. Stone, and Marco Montalbetti Viñuela

45 The Sun Never Sets on the Privatization Movement: A Return to

the Heart of Darkness in a Neoliberal and Neoimperialist World 480
Brian Dotts

46 Teaching Global Affairs: Problem-posing Pedagogy and the Violence

of Indifference 496
Kathalene A. Razzano

47 Promoting Critical Consciousness in the Preparation of Teachers in Colombia 505

Jaime A. Usma, Oscar A. Peláez, Yuliana Palacio, and Catalina Jaramillo

48 Vietnamese Students and the Emerging Model Minority Myth in Germany 518
Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo Bui

49 Revisiting Hurricane Katrina: Racist Violence and the Biopolitics of

Disposability537
Henry A. Giroux

VOLUME 2

SECTION V INDIGENOUS WAYS OF KNOWING 547

Four Arrows and R. Michael Fisher

50 Indigenizing Conscientization and Critical Pedagogy: Integrating Nature,

Spirit and Fearlessness as Foundational Concepts 551
R. Michael Fisher and Four Arrows
 Contents xi

51 A Critical, Culturally Sustaining, Pedagogy of Whānau 561

Ann Milne

52 Critical Indigenous Pedagogies of Resistance: The Call for

Critical Indigenous Educators 574
Jeremy Garcia

53 Ethical Relationality as a Pathway for Non-Indigenous Educators to

Decolonize Curriculum and Instruction 587
Shashi Shergill and David Scott

54 Flooded, between Two Worlds: Holding the Memory of What Used to

Be Against the Reality of What Exists Now 604
Jennifer M. Markides

55 Dance and Children’s Cultural Identity: A Critical Perspective of the

Embodiment of Place 630
Adrienne Sansom

56 Indigenous Knowledges and Science Education: Complexities,

Considerations and Praxis 642
Renee Desmarchelier

57 Navajo Sweat House Leadership: Acquiring Traditional Navajo

Leadership for Restoring Identity in Our Forgotten World 658
Perry R. James

58 The Navigator’s Path: Journey Through Story and Ngākau

Pedagogy664
Rose Marsters

SECTION VI EDUCATION AND PRAXIS 677

Robert Hattam

59 A Critical Pedagogy of Working Class Schooling: A Call to

Activist Theory and Practice 681
John Smyth

60 Critical Pedagogy as Research 694

Tricia M. Kress

61 Poverty and Equality in Early Childhood Education 704

Concepción Sánchez-Blanco

62 Critical Tourism Pedagogy: A Response to Oppressive Practices 717

Sandro Carnicelli and Karla Boluk
xii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

63 Queer(ing) Cisgender Normativity: Reconsidering Critical Pedagogy

Through a Genderqueer Lens 729
Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila E. Villaverde

64 Culturally Responsive Schooling as a Form of Critical Pedagogies for

Indigenous Youth and Tribal Nations 743
Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A. Solyom and Bryan Brayboy

65 Feminist Critical Pedagogy 758

Haggith Gor Ziv

66 Schooling, Milieu, Racism: Just Another Brick in the Wall 771

Teresa Anne Fowler

67 An Existentialist Pedagogy of Humanization: Countering Existential

Oppression of Teachers and Students in Neoliberal Educational Spaces 783
Sheryl J. Lieb

68 Vocational Education and Training in Schools and ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ 797
Barry Down

SECTION VII TEACHING AND LEARNING 811

Barry Down

69 Critical Pedagogy, Social Justice and Contesting Definitions of

Engagement in the Classroom 815
David Zyngier

70 Critical Pedagogy and Anti-Muslim Racism Education: Insights from the UK 828
Khadija Mohammed, Lisa McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz

71 Pedagogy of Connectedness: Cultivating a Community of Caring,

Compassionate Social Justice Warriors in the Classroom 841
Revital Zilonka

72 Counternarratives: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Critical Caring

in One Urban School 854
Gang Zhu and Zhengmei Peng

73 ‘More than an Educator but a Political Figure’: Leveraging the Overlapping

Intersections of Disability Studies and Critical Pedagogy in Teacher Education 869
Phillip Boda

74 Critical Pedagogy for Preservice Teacher Education in the US:

An Agenda for a Plurilingual Reality of Superdiversity 884
Guofang Li and Pramod K. Sah
 Contents xiii

75 Teaching Social Justice 899

Galia Zalmanson Levi

76 Creating Global Learning Communities 909

Ramón Flecha and Silvia Molina

SECTION VIII COMMUNITIES AND ACTIVISM 923

Michael B. MacDonald

77 Moving from Individual Consciousness Raising to Critical

Community Building Praxis 927
Silvia Cristina Bettez and Cristina Maria Dominguez

78 Arab Spring as Critical Pedagogy: Activism in the Face of Death 941

Awad Ibrahim

79 Schools as Learning Communities 950

Maria Padrós and Sandra Girbés-Peco

80 Love Unconditionally: Educating People in the Midst of a Social Crisis 961

Elbert J. Hawkins III

81 ‘We Do It All the Time’: Afrocentric Pedagogies for Raising

Consciousness and Collective Responsibility 974
Shuntay Z. Tarver and Melanie M. Acosta

82 Critical Pedagogy, Democratic Praxis, and Adultism 989

Toby Rollo, J. Cynthia McDermott, Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel

83 Presence and Resilience as Resistance 1003

Tanya Brown Merriman

84 African American Mothers Theorizing Practice 1016

April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams

85 Deploying Critical Bricolage as Activism 1025

Sherilyn Lennon

86 Critical Community Education: The Case of Love Stings 1036

Annette Coburn and David Wallace

VOLUME 3

SECTION IX COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA 1055

Michael Hoechsmann

87 Mediating the Curriculum with Critical Media Literacy 1059

Jeff Share
xiv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

88 Empowerment and Participation in Media Education: A Critical Review 1074

Michael Hoechsmann and Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín

89 Dangerous Citizenship: Comics and Critical Pedagogy 1083

Sabrina Boyer

90 It’s ‘Reel’ Critical: Media Literacy and Film-based Pedagogy 1097

Brian C. Johnson

91 Critical Media Literacy 1115

Tony Kashani

92 Critical Pedagogy and Wikilearning 1126

Juha Suoranta

93 Diversity in Digital Humanities 1139

Cherie Ann Turpin

94 Missing Beats: Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in Post-secondary

Media Production Programs 1146
Ki Wight

95 A Shock to Thought: Curatorial Judgment and the Public Exhibition of

‘Difficult Knowledge’ 1157
Roger I. Simon

96 In a Rape Culture, Can Boys Actually Be Boys? 1175

Gerald Walton

SECTION X ARTS AND AESTHETICS 1187

Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter

97 Critical Public Pedagogies of DIY 1191

Gregory Martin

98 OASIS – (Re)conceptualizing Galleries as Intentionally Pedagogical 1206

Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter

99 Critical Pedagogy and the Visual Arts: Examining Perceptions of

Poverty and Social Justice in Early Childhood Research with Children 1220
Judith Dunkerly-Bean and Kristine Sunday

100 Performance Pedagogy Using the Theater of Justice 1233

I. Malik Saafir

101 Thanks for Being Local: CineMusicking as a Critical Pedagogy of

Popular Music 1242
Michael B. MacDonald
 Contents xv

102 Critical Life Writing for Social Change 1255

Claire Robson and Dennis Sumara

103 Towards a Critical Arts Practice 1269

Peter R. Wright

104 Theorizing a New Pedagogical Model: Transformative Arts and

Cultural Praxis Circle 1279
Mary Drinkwater

105 Through a Rhizomatic Lens: Synergies between A/r/tography,

Community Engaged Research, and Critical Pedagogy with Students
with Intellectual Disabilities 1294
Lalenja Harrington

106 The Pedagogical Afterthought: Situating Socially Engaged Art as

Critical Public Pedagogy 1313
Christopher Lee Kennedy

SECTION XI CRITICAL YOUTH STUDIES 1327

Shirley R. Steinberg

107 Resisting Youth: From Occupy Through Black Lives Matter to

the Trump Resistance 1329
Douglas Kellner and Roslyn M. Satchel

108 Where Does Critical Pedagogy Happen? Young People, ‘Relational

Pedagogy’ and the Interstitial Spaces of School 1343
Andrew Hickey

109 Lyrical Minded: Unveiling the Hidden Literacies of Youth Through

Performance Pedagogy 1358
Priya Parmar

110 ‘They Laugh ’Cause They Assume I’m in Prison’: HipHop Feminism as
Critical Pedagogy 1365
Dawn N. Hicks Tafari and Veronica A. Newton

111 Young People, Agency and the Paradox of Trust 1374

Tony Edwards and Kerry J. Renwick

112 Excavating Intimacy, Privacy, and Consent as Youth in a Hostile World:

A Critical Journey 1386
Paul L. Thomas

113 Art and Erotic Exploration as Critical Pedagogy with Youth 1400
Nwachi Pressley-Tafari
xvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

114 Youth, Becoming-American, and Learning the Vietnam War 1411

Mark Helmsing

115 The Bully, the Bullied, and the Boss: The Power Triangle of Youth Suicide 1421
Teresa J. Rishel

116 Pedagogies of Trauma, Fear and Hope in Texts about 9/11 for Young
People: From a Perspective of Distance 1439
Jo Lampert and Kerry Mallan

SECTION XII SCIENCE, ECOLOGY AND WELLBEING 1451

Renee Desmarchelier

117 Critical Body Pedagogies in Technoscience 1455

Stephanie L. Hudson

118 Computer Science Education and the Role of Critical Pedagogy in a

Digital World 1464
Joseph Carroll-Miranda

119 Where the Fantastic Liberates the Mundane: Feminist Science Fiction
and the Imagination 1476
Sarah E. Colonna

120 Conceptualizing Hip-Hop as a Conduit toward Developing Science Geniuses 1486

Edmund Adjapong

121 The Crit-Trans Heuristic for Transforming STEM Education: Youth and
Educators as Participants in the World 1497
Jennifer D. Adams, Atasi Das and Eun-Ji Amy Kim

122 Who Hears My Cry? The Impact of Activism on the Mental Health of
African American Women 1508
Shawn Arango Ricks

123 Fat Pedagogy and the Disruption of Weight-based Oppression: Toward

the Flourishing of All Bodies 1516
Constance Russell

124 Forwarding a Critical Urban Environmental Pedagogy 1532

Marissa Bellino

125 An Ecological Pedagogy of Joy 1543

Jodi Latremouille

Index 1559
 List of Figures

43.1 The progression of association of ideas and continuity of experience in

Indigenous pedagogy across India 455
43.2 The approach used to accelerate children at a rapid pace in Hyderabad, India 458
53.1 A cyclic perspective on the historical relationship of Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal people in Canada 594
54.1 Highwood River 605
54.2 Water at the level of the train bridge 606
54.3 Mud tracked out 609
54.4 Waiting for a bin 609
54.5 Trapped moisture 610
54.6 Farewell to art 1 610
54.7 Farewell to art 2 611
54.8 Three bins in three days – throwing it all away 611
54.9 Jacked up 612
54.10 Rotting on the inside, right next door 614
54.11 Sporting goods store – facade 615
54.12 New pub and hardware store – fronts615
54.13 Delivery in 30 minutes or … never616
54.14 Dentist office, now launderette 616
54.15 Posters to mask the empty insides 617
54.16 Mmm ... noodles 617
54.17 Antiques or roadhouse? 617
54.18 Hardware – not fixing anything 618
54.19 Real art gallery, ‘not fake’ 618
54.20 Fake bake shop, (really) for lease 618
54.21 ‘WE ARE STiLL CLEANG UP PLEASE DON’T TOUCH OUR
SUPPLYs AND FURNiTURE’ 620
54.22 Diner – a permanent fixture 621
54.23 Little Big Bear Gifts – a facade on a facade 621
54.24 Going nowhere 624
54.25 No news 625
54.26 Filming today 625
54.27 From hardware, to workwear – false advertising, no sales to be had 626
54.28 Roadhouse/Antiques/Roadhouse – rotating facades 626
54.29 Diner, rear view – a facade on all fronts (Markides, June 2018) 627
54.30 Low and slow 627
63.1 Intersectionality versus assemblages 737
63.2 Gender as a rhizome 740
72.1 The conceptual backdrop 856
81.1 Course activities within a Diversity of Human Services course that illustrates
Village Pedagogy 982
xviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

81.2 Preservice teacher learning activities from a literacy methods course

framed around the Black Studies Critical Studyin’ pedagogical framework 985
85.1 The cycle of inquiry extending the bricolage to incorporate community
activism1029
85.2 A particularly troubling and well-known local image 1031
85.3 My public critique of the logo 1032
86.1 Pat’s collage 1039
86.2 Sam’s collage 1039
86.3 Creative conversations at the collage table 1040
86.4 Collaborative dialogue at the collage table 1040
86.5 Jane’s collage 1044
96.1 The tweet of Nathaniel Prince 1179
S10.1 The interplay between art, aesthetics and critical pedagogy 1188
99.1 Money machine 1226
99.2 Pedagogy of a new childhood redesign cycle 1229
104.1 Transformative Arts and Cultural Praxis Circle (TACPC) 1282
108.1 The Bike Build workshop space 1346
108.2 Teasing-out where next to proceed 1349
108.3 A scene from a typical discussion 1349

 List of Tables

56.1 The impact of the construction of the neoliberal subject on classroom

implementation of curricula inclusive of Indigenous knowledges 651
62.1 A summary of our critical rethinking of tourism education 724
87.1 Conceptual understandings and corresponding questions 1062
111.1 Purpose statements from state and national curriculum documents 1378
120.1 Students’ science-themed raps 1494
121.1 Crit-Trans heuristic1506
 Notes on the Editors
and Contributors

THE EDITORS

Shirley R. Steinberg considers herself somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd generation of
critical pedagogy. Originally an American, she discovered critical pedagogy in Alberta, Canada
as a student of David G. Smith and Julia Ellis. Her high school teaching career took a radical
left turn after only a year and she determined to complete a doctorate based on the criticalizing
of media using bricolage, a philosophical research methodology she refined with
Joe L. Kincheloe (2nd generation). Expanding her idea of pedagogy into cultural studies, her
work blended the critical with the pedagogical and cultural. The author and editor of many
books and articles, her research interests have generated (often with Kincheloe) Critical
Multiculturalism, Christotainment, Kinderculture, Critical Bricolage, and Postformal thinking.
As Research Professor of Critical Youth Studies at the University of Calgary, she engages local,
national, and global community work with and for youth, refugees, immigrants, and other
disenfranchised groups.

Barry Down is Professor of Education at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. In

2003 he was appointed the City of Rockingham Chair in Education (2004-2013) at Murdoch
University, the first such position funded by a local government in Australia. In this period, he
worked on a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Projects investigating
issues of student engagement, school-to-work transitions and early career teacher resilience.
He has co-authored seven books (with long time collaborators John Smyth and Peter
McInerney) including Critically Engaged Learning: Connecting to Young Lives (2008);
‘Hanging in with Kids’ in Tough Times: Engagement in Contexts of Educational Disadvantage
in the Relational School (2012); and The Socially Just School; Making Space for Youth to speak
Back (2014). His most recent book is entitled Rethinking School-to-Work Transitions: Young
People have Something to Say (with John Smyth and Janean Robinson). His research interests
focus on young people’s lives in the context of shifts in the global economy, poverty, class,
school-to-work transitions and student dis/re/engagement.

THE SECTION EDITORS

Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa) (aka Don Trent Jacobs) is Professor, School of Leadership Studies
at Fielding Graduate University and the author of numerous publications on ‘Indigenous world-
view’, including Unlearning the Language of Conquest, Teaching Truly and Point of Departure.

Paul R. Carr is a Full Professor in the Department of Education at the Université du Québec
en Outaouais, Canada, and is also the Chair-holder of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy,
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxi

Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT)(uqo.ca/DCMT/). His latest book,

with Gina Thésée, is “It’s Not Education that Scares Me, it’s the Educators…”: Is There Still
Hope for Democracy in Education, and Education for Democracy?.

Roymieco A. Carter is Director of the Visual Arts Program and University Galleries at North
Carolina A&T State University. He teaches courses on graphic design, digital media, visual
literacy and theory, and social criticism. He is a graphic designer of print, web, and motion-
based media. He has written articles on graphic design education, art education, critical peda-
gogy, Black studies, gaming, human computer interaction and graphics computer animation.

Renee Desmarchelier is the Associate Dean Learning, Teaching and Student Success for the
Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts at the University of Southern Queensland. Her
scholarly interests include Indigenous knowledges, critical pedagogy and participatory and
Indigenous research methodologies. Her research has centered on how teachers negotiate
Indigenous knowledges in their classroom praxis and the cultural interface between Indigenous
and non-Indigenous ways of knowing.

R. Michael Fisher, a member of the Adjunct Faculty, Werklund School of Education,

University of Calgary, is an educator, artist and fearologist who has been at the forefront of fear
studies curriculum development for 30 years. He has published five books, including World’s
Fearlessness Teachings, an original resource for leaders.

Robert Hattam is the Professor for Educational Justice in the School of Education, University
of South Australia and he leads the Pedagogy for Justice Research Group. His research has
focused on teachers’ work, critical and reconciliation pedagogies, refugees, and socially just
school reform. He has published numerous books on critical pedagogy and educational ine-
quality in vulnerable communities.

Michael Hoechsmann is an Associate Professor and the Program Chair in the Faculty of
Education at Lakehead University, Orillia. His research focuses on digital and media literacies,
cultural studies and education in formal and non-formal settings. He is a co-Investigator on two
SSHRC (Canada) funded research grants, a board member of Media Smarts: Canada’s Centre
for Digital and Media Literacy, and the co-chair of UNESCO GAPMIL North America.

Michael B. MacDonald is an Associate Professor of music at the MacEwan University Faculty

of Fine Arts and Communications in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His research areas include
popular music scenes, screen production research, ethnographic film theory, ciné-ethnomusi-
cology, and audiovisual ethnomusicology. Michael is the founding program chair of the
MusCan Film Series held annually at the Canadian University Music Society conference and
serves on the editorial board of the journal Intersections.

Gregory Martin is an Associate Professor in the School of International Studies and Education
at the University of Technology Sydney. His work is transdisplinary with a focus on critical
pedagogies, spatial politics and participatory methodologies, including the power of storytell-
ing to promote learning and change.

Cathryn Teasley is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of A Coruña.

Her research on anti-racism, socio-cultural justice, nonviolence and gender equity in teacher
xxii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

education is informed by critical pedagogies, decolonial studies, peace studies, queer theory
and feminisms. Her latest contribution is to the Handbook of Theory and Research in Cultural
Studies and Education.

Gina Thésée is Full Professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Faculty of Education,
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and is also Co-Chair of the UNESCO Chair in
Democracy, Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT) (uqo.ca/DCMT/).
Her latest book, with Paul R. Carr, is entitled “It’s not Education that Scares Me, it’s the
Educators…”: Is There Still Hope for Democracy in Education, and Education for Democracy?

Leila E. Villaverde is a Professor in Cultural Foundations at the Department of Educational

Leadership and Cultural Foundations, Dean Fellow in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UNCG
and Senior Editor of The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. She teaches courses on
curriculum studies, history of education and critical pedagogy, gender studies, visual literacy
and aesthetics, and critical inquiry.

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Melanie M. Acosta is an Assistant Professor in the department of Curriculum, Culture, &

Educational Inquiry at Florida Atlantic University. Her scholarship is focused on critical issues
in teacher learning and preparation to support African American educational excellence. Dr.
Acosta began teaching as an elementary school teacher and a community organizer for a grass-
roots parent empowerment group.

Jennifer D. Adams is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor at The
University of Calgary holding a dual appointment in the Department of Chemistry and
Werklund School of Education. She researches creativity and science, teacher identity, and
informal science education and environmental education. Her work centers critical, decolonial
and sociocultural approaches.

Edmund Adjapong is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Studies Department at Seton

Hall University. He is also a Faculty Fellow at The Institute for Urban and Multicultural
Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and the author of #HipHopEd: The
Compilation on Hip-Hop Education (Volume 1 & Volume 2).

Philip M. Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Education at Queens College and the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. He has published extensively on reader response,
the literature curriculum, censorship and cultural aesthetics in education and society.

William Ayers is a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the
University of Illinois at Chicago (retired) has written extensively about social justice and
democracy. His books include A Kind and Just Parent; Teaching toward Freedom; Fugitive
Days: A Memoir; Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; To Teach: The
Journey, in Comics; and Demand the Impossible!

Lilia I. Bartolomé is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts

at Boston. Her research interests include the preparation of effective teachers of linguistic
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxiii

minority students and the exploration of teacher beliefs about minoritised students.
Dr Bartolomé’s publications are extensive and include notable books such as Ideologies in
Education: Unmasking the Trap of Teacher Neutrality and Dancing with Bigotry: The
Poisoning of Cultural Identities (with Donaldo Macedo).

Marissa Bellino is an Assistant Professor of Education at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ),
where she teaches social foundations and science methods to preservice teachers. Her teaching
interests include environmental sustainability and science education through a critical lens.
Marissa’s research interests explore youth experiences in urban environments, environmental
education and participatory research.

Silvia Cristina Bettez is a Professor in the Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations
(ELC) Department at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she teaches about
issues of social justice in a graduate program. Her scholarship centralizes social justice with a
focus on fostering critical community building, teaching for social justice, and promoting
equity through intercultural communication and engagement.

Phillip Boda is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University. He holds a PhD in

Science Education and an EdM in Teacher Education from Teachers College at Columbia
University. Phillip’s work investigates the overlapping intersections of cultural studies/disability
studies, urban teacher education and STEM education. He is the editor of the book Essays on
Exclusion: Our Critical, Collective Journey Toward Equity in Education.

Karla Boluk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at
the University of Waterloo. Karla’s scholarship examines how to bring criticality and creative
pedagogy to the classroom in order to enhance sustainable tourism education.

Sabrina Boyer is an Associate Professor at Guilford Technical Community College in English

and Humanities. Her research interests include queer theory, LGBTQ2+ studies, Feminist
theory, LatinX studies, critical pedagogy and media studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational
Leadership and Cultural Foundations and a Post-Baccalaureate in Women’s, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies from The University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Bryan Brayboy is President’s Professor, Special Assistant to the President for American
Indian Affairs, and Director of the Center for Indian Education at Arizona State University. His
research focuses on the experiences of Indigenous students, staff, and faculty in institutions of
higher education.

Deborah P. Britzman teaches at York University in Toronto. She is Distinguished Research

Professor, holds the York University Chair of Pedagogy and Psycho-social Transformations
and is a psychoanalyst. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the author of
numerous books and articles, with her main contribution being to the field of psychoanalysis
with education.

Pipo Bui holds a PhD in European ethnology from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She
holds a Bachelor of Arts in communication from Stanford University. Pipo currently works as
Director for Corporate and Foundation Relations at EarthCorps, a nonprofit organisation that
cultivates emerging environmental leaders from more than 90 countries.
xxiv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Alana Butler is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University in

Canada. She has taught in a range of settings that include preschool, English as a Second
Language, adult literacy, and university undergraduate. Her research interests include the aca-
demic achievement of low-socio economic students, race and schooling, equity and inclusion,
immigration and settlement studies, and multicultural education.

Robert F. Carley is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University. He

is the author of Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and The Politics of Practice and Autonomy,
Refusal, and The Black Bloc: Positioning Class in Critical and Radical Theory.

Fred Chapel is a member of the faculty of the Education Department at Antioch University,
Los Angeles. He was a middle school science teacher for 25 years and brings a wealth of expe-
rience in inquiry-based pedagogy to his teaching.

Sandro Carnicelli is a Senior Lecturer in Events and Tourism at the University of the West of
Scotland. Sandro has been developing research in the fields of tourism in Brazil, New Zealand
and Scotland for over ten years. His main research interests are adventure tourism, tourism
education and outdoor learning.

Joseph Carroll-Miranda is an Auxiliary Professor at the Graduate Studies Department of the

College of Education of the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras Campus. He is a strong
advocate of both Computer Science and STEM education as issues of social justice. His
research interest include youth culture, teknoculture, hacker culture, critical pedagogy and
transforming traditional classrooms as spaces of creation and innovation.

Angelina E. Castagno is a Professor of Educational Leadership and Foundations, and the

Director of the Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators at Northern Arizona University. Her
teaching and research centers on equity and diversity in US schools, and particularly issues of
Whiteness and Indigenous education.

Colin Chasi is Professor in Communication Studies and the Head of the Department of
Communication Studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa. His latest research
is focused on the transformation of higher education, in view of the contemporary decoloniza-
tion debate. He is rated as a nationally recognised researcher by the National Research
Foundation of South Africa.

Annette Coburn is Senior Lecturer and Programme Lead in Community Education at the
University of the West of Scotland (UWS). Following 23 years as a community education and
youth work practitioner, Annette began teaching in Higher Education in 2003. Her on-going
youth and community research has examined aspects of border pedagogy, equality, social jus-
tice and well-being.

Sarah E. Colonna is Associate Program Chair of Grogan College at The University North
Carolina, Greensboro and Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests
include feminist thought and pedagogy, equity and diversity, leadership and young adult literature.

Atasi Das is an educator activist and doctoral candidate of Urban Education at The Graduate
Center, City University of New York. Her research focuses on critical numeracy − a framework
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxv

examining numbers as social and political activity. She collaborates with Spark Teacher
Education Institute on advancing a liberatory praxis − learning and doing to collectively create
an equitable society.

Cristina Maria Dominguez is a doctoral student in Educational Studies with a concentration

in Cultural Studies at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and serves as a graduate
assistant in the department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations. Dominguez’s
current research interests include: critical pedagogy, social justice education, and everyday
relational social justice teaching, learning and action work.

Brian Dotts is an Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of

Georgia. He is the author of Educational Foundations: Philosophical and Historical
Perspectives and The Political Education of Democratus: Negotiating Civic Virtue during the
Early Republic.

Mary Drinkwater is a Lecturer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto,
Canada. Her research focuses on issues of arts and cultural practices for democratic and trans-
formative education. She was lead editor and chapter author for Transnational Perspectives on
Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights and Peace Education.

Judith Dunkerly-Bean is an Associate Professor of Literacy, Language and Culture and

Co-Director of the Literacy Research and Development Center at Old Dominion University.
Judith’s research is situated at the intersection of critical literacy, social justice and human
rights.

Tony Edwards has been a teacher educator in Australia and more recently Canada. He has
contributed to the learning and professional development of preservice teachers in a range of
contexts. His research is primarily focused on the possible impacts upon an individual student’s
habitus as they are presented with support to explore possible futures.

Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner is Associate Professor of Literacy at the University of Nevada,

Las Vegas. The author of over 70 publications, Varner’s expertise centers on race and critical
international engagement.

Ramón Flecha is Doctor Honoris Causa of the West University of Timişoara and Professor of
Sociology at the University of Barcelona. He is a researcher of the projects WORKALÓ (FP5),
INCLUD-ED (FP6) and IMPACT-EV (FP7). He has published in Nature, PLOS ONE,
Cambridge Journal of Education, Harvard Educational Review, Qualitative Inquiry, Current
Sociology and Journal of Mixed Methods Research.

Teresa Anne Fowler is a doctoral candidate at Werklund School of Education, University

of Calgary. Teresa’s research interests lie with Whiteness, masculinities, anti-racist peda-
gogy and critical pedagogy. Her doctoral dissertation explores how Whiteness reproduces
in schools and how this leads to a radicalisation of White boys and manifestations of
violence.

Benjamin Frymer is Professor in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State
University, and previously taught at Columbia University’s Teachers College, UCLA, and
xxvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Trinity College. He writes in the areas of education, self and society, and cultural studies focus-
ing on the study of film education, contemporary alienation, violence, and ideology.

Antonio Garcia is an independent researcher, founder and organizer of the International Žižek
Studies Conference (est. 2012), executive director of the Žižekian Institute for Research,
Inquiry, and Pedagogy, and co-editor with Rex Butler for the Žižek Studies Book Series. In
addition to being a Žižek scholar, he has focused on developing his own original theoretical
work called constellar theory.

Hermán S. García was a faculty member at Eastern Washington University, Texas Tech
University, Texas A&M University and New Mexico State University. He is currently Regents
Professor/Distinguished Professor Emeritus at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces.

Jeremy Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Education and is Co-Director of the

Indigenous Teacher Education Project at the University of Arizona. He is a member of the
Hopi/Tewa Tribes of Arizona. His research focuses on decolonisation, critical Indigenous cur-
riculum and pedagogy, Indigenous teacher education, and critical and culturally sustaining
family and community engagement within Indigenous education.

Sandra Girbés-Peco is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Department of Teaching and

Learning and Educational Organisation at the University of Barcelona. She is also a researcher
at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA), where she develops work on
gender studies, community involvement and educational actions to overcome poverty.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public
Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished
Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. The author of hundreds of articles and books, including The
Terror of the Unforseen and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism. He is a
columnist for Truthout.

Aristotelis Gkiolmas has a BSc in Physics and a Masters and PhD in Science Education. He
is member of the Laboratory Teaching Staff of the Department of Primary Education,
University of Athens. He has participated in numerous international conferences on critical
pedagogy and is a member of the editorial board of the journals The International Journal of
Critical Media Literacy and Green Theory and Praxis.

Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín is a Full Professor of Education at the University of Valladolid.

(Spain). His interests are in media literacy, digital competence and teacher training. He has
been involved in different European projects related to media education and he was the lead
organizer of the first and third International Conferences of Media Education and Digital
Competence in 2011 and 2017.

Rodney Handelsman is a founding teacher of a public alternative high school in Canada. He

has taught K-12 and worked in the field as a researcher, teacher educator (McGill, OISE,
UKZN), pedagogical consultant and curriculum writer.

Lalenja Harrington received her PhD in Educational Studies and Cultural Foundations from
The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she is currently Academic Director for
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxvii

the Integrative Community Studies certificate. She is most interested in exploring the intersec-
tions between art, community-engaged research and pedagogical approaches with the potential
for engaging marginalised folk as scholars and researchers.

Nicholas D. Hartlep holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in Urban
Education (Social Foundations of Education). He is currently the Robert Charles Billings
Endowed Chair in Education and Chair of the Education Studies Department at Berea College.
You can follow his work on Twitter at @nhartlep or at his website, www.nicholashartlep.com.

Elbert J. Hawkins, III is a native of North Carolina who resides in Jamestown. Currently, he
is a doctoral candidate, a professional high-school counsellor, nationally certified through the
National Board for Certified Counselors (National Board Certified Teacher–School Counseling/
Early Childhood through Young Adulthood).

Mark Helmsing is Assistant Professor of Education and an affiliated faculty member in the
Department of History and Art History and the Folklore Studies Program at George Mason
University. Mark’s work uses critical theories of affect and emotion to explore how people feel
about the past and how the past makes people feel.

Andrew Hickey is Associate Professor in Communications at the University of Southern

Queensland. Andrew publishes in the areas of critical pedagogy, public pedagogies and eman-
cipatory social practice and has undertaken large-scale projects with departments of education,
schools and community groups internationally.

Stephanie L. Hudson is a Doctoral Student in educational studies, concentrating on cultural stud-

ies and women’s and gender studies, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Stephanie
is a Teaching Associate in the Cultural Foundations Program. She teaches, researches and writes
across disciplines in biology, cultural foundations of education and feminist studies. Stephanie’s
research interests include curriculum studies, feminist theories and pedagogies, teaching and
learning in virtual spaces, feminist cultural studies of technoscience and critical body studies.

Luis Huerta-Charles is an Associate Professor of Multicultural Education at New Mexico

State University. He is a Nepantlero border-crosser that aims to prepare teachers as social activ-
ists in order to transform our unjust and unequal society into a more just one.

Awad Ibrahim is an award-winning author and a Professor at the Faculty of Education,

University of Ottawa. He is a curriculum theorist with special interest in critical pedagogy, hip-
hop studies and Black popular culture, cultural studies, applied linguistics, social justice,
diasporic and continental African identities and ethnography.

Perry R. James is an educator who lives and works in the Navajo Nation. A fluent speaker of
his language, he was brought up with the traditional ways of the Ni’hokaa’ Diyin Dine’é.
Currently a doctoral candidate at Fielding Graduate University, his research uses Indigenous
Interpretative Autoethnography to prepare Navajo leaders.

Catalina Jaramillo is a teacher educator at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Colombia

and an EFL teacher in a public school. She has served as a research assistant at Grupo de
Investigación Acción y Evaluación en Lenguas Extranjeras (GIAE) in the line of language and
education policies at Universidad de Antioquia.
xxviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Graham Jeffery is Reader in Arts and Media at the University of the West of Scotland. His
work spans participatory and community arts practices, creative pedagogies, cultural policy,
urban studies and community development. He has led numerous action research projects with
diverse communities in different places around the world.

Brian C. Johnson earned his PhD in Communications Media and Instructional Technology
from Indiana University of PA. An avid film fanatic and scholar, his book Reel Diversity: A
Teacher’s Sourcebook was recognised by the National Association for Multicultural Education’s
2009 Chinn Book Award.

Richard Kahn is an anarcist educator at Antioch University, Los Angeles,whose primary inter-
ests are in researching social movements as pedagogically generative forces in society and in
critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness.

Tony Kashani is an American author, educator, philosopher of technology, and a cultural critic.
He holds a PhD degree in Humanities with emphasis on culture studies from California
Institute of Integral Studies. He is the author of five books including Movies Change Lives: A
Pedagogy of Humanistic Transformation. His interests are interdisciplinary scholarship and
pedagogy on humanities in the digital age and social justice.

Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA and is
author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture. He is the author of The
American Horror Show: Election 2016 and the Ascendency of Donald J. Trump, and American
Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism, and the Collected
Papers of Herman Marcuse.

Arlo Kempf is an Assistant Professor of Equity and Education in the Department of

Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the
University of Toronto. Arlo’s research interests include teachers’ work, anti-racism and
anti-colonialism in education, and critical perspectives on educational standardisation and
neoliberalism.

Christopher Lee Kennedy is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York, who creates
site-specific projects that examine conventional notions of ‘Nature’, interspecies agency and
biocultural collaboration. Kennedy is currently Assistant Director of the Urban Systems Lab at
The New School University.

Eun-Ji Amy Kim is Lecturer at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia in the School
of Education and Professional Studies, her area is social diversity and Indigenous education.
Her research interests are Indigenous science education, ReconciliACTION through
relationship-based and land-based teaching

Joe L. Kincheloe was the Canada Research Chair of Critical Pedagogy at McGill University
in Montreal, and the founder of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical
Pedagogy. Born in the mountains of Tennessee, he was raised to recognize inequities within
society and became the humble champion for the oppressed. The author of 60 books and
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxix

hundreds of articles, he is to be remembered as a rock n’ roll musician, father, partner, and

friend to many.

James D. Kirylo is Professor of Education at the University of South Carolina. Among other
books, he is the author of Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife, Paulo Freire: His Faith,
Spirituality, and Theology (with Drick Boyd) and Teaching with Purpose: An Inquiry in the
Who, Why, and How We Teach.

Tricia M. Kress is an Associate Professor in the Educational Leadership for Diverse Learning
Communities EdD programme at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, NewYork. Her research
uses critical pedagogy, cultural sociology and autoethnography to rethink teaching, learning
and research in urban schools. She details this approach in her book Critical Praxis Research:
Breathing New Life into Research Methods for Teachers.

Jo Lampert is a Professor of Education at La Trobe University in Melbourne. While she also

researches in the area of children’s literature, most of her daily work is in teacher education for
high-poverty schools.

Jodi Latremouille completed her doctorate in Educational Research at the Werklund School
of Education, University of Calgary. She is a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Education at
Thompson Rivers University. She also taught high school French Immersion and Social
Studies. Her research interests include hermeneutics, ecological and feminist pedagogy, social
and environmental justice, life writing and poetic inquiry.

Sherilyn Lennon is a Senior Lecturer in the Education and Professional Studies faculty at
Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Her research interests include literacy, gender,
rurality and emerging qualitative and post-qualitative research paradigms. She is the author of
numerous publications including the monograph, Unsettling Research, published in 2015 as
part of the Critical Qualitative Research series.

Galia Zalmanson Levi is a critical pedagogy and feminist teacher educator in seminar
Hakibbutzim College and in Ben Gurion University in Israel. She was co-founder of the teacher
education program for social justice and peace education. Galia combines activism and leading
social change in the public education system with academic research.

Guofang Li is a Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Transnational/Global Perspectives

of Language and Literacy Education of Children and Youth in the Faculty of Education, University
of British Columbia. Her research interests are longitudinal studies of immigrant children’s bi-
literacy development, diversity and equity issues and teacher education for diverse learners.

Sheryl J. Lieb is Adjunct Professor at Grogan Residential College and Humanities Lecturer in
the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies programme at The University of North Carolina,
Greensboro. Her areas of specialisation and research interests include philosophy of education,
critical pedagogy, ethics and intellectual virtue development, existentialism (as philosophy and
pedagogical practice) and cultural studies.

Kerry Mallan is Professor Emeritus at Queensland University of Technology. Her work is

cross-disciplinary, with a focus on children’s literature, youth and popular culture and digital
xxx THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

media texts and practices. Kerry was the founding director of the Children and Youth Research
Centre at QUT.

Jennifer M. Markides is a Métis doctoral candidate in the Werklund School of Education at

the University of Calgary. Her graduate research examines the stories told by youth who have
transitioned from life-in-schools to life-out-of-school within the same year as experiencing a
natural disaster. She is also an educator, researcher, and author in the area of Indigenous educa-
tion, and the editor of three books on Indigenous ways of knowing and research.

Rose Marsters is of Cook Island descent and is a Ngākauologist, a practitioner who is profi-
cient and drives a movement in Ngākau (heart) pedagogy and intelligence. She serves both the
Pasifika and Māori communities including her employed tertiary role, at the Waikato Institute
of Technology, Wintec. Her interest is on enhancing capabilities of practitioners in appropriate
culturally responsive practice.

Teresa Sordé Martí is a Serra Húnter Associate Professor of Sociology at the Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona. Her work focuses on the Roma ethnic minority in Europe looking at
social mobilization, women’s rights, education, and health. She has worked on projects with
the European Commission and is a member of CREA.

D’Arcy Martin is a veteran labour movement educator, having created, administered and
facilitated courses within unions across Canada and internationally for over four decades.
D’Arcy has extended his popular education practice to community, policy, academic and other
activist settings, and has written widely, including the book Thinking Union: Activism and
Education in Canada’s Labour Movement.

Domenica Maviglia is Doctor of Philosophy in Intercultural Pedagogy at the Department of

Cognitive Science, Psychological, Educational, and Cultural Studies of the University of
Messina. Her work focuses mainly on critical pedagogy and the theoretical and historical
research in the field of pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of education,
the history of pedagogy and the history of education.

Diarmuid McAuliffe is the academic lead for Art-in-Education at the School of Education and
Social Sciences, University of the West of Scotland. His research includes developing critical
school art pedagogies and runs a series of public seminars in this area, most recently for the
Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.

Lisa McAuliffe is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Inclusive Education in the
School of Education and Social Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland. Her main
research focus is the interface between inclusive education policy and practice. Lisa is particu-
larly interested in the role of teacher education in promoting inclusion and social justice.

J. Cynthia McDermott is a Professor of education and the Regional Director of two Antioch
university campuses in California and is a two-time Fulbright recipient. She has been a class-
room teacher K-12.

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies,

Chapman University, where he co-directs the Paulo Freire Democratic Project, he is Fellow of
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxi

the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce (London, UK). He is the author and editor of over 50
books including Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of
Education, now in the 6th edition.

Jane McLean. Currently an Academic Instructor at the University of New Brunswick,

Dr McLean is a retired educator with 35 years’ experience teaching English Language Arts. In
2001, she developed and implemented a critical feminist course for Grade 12 students called
Women, Media, and Culture, now taught in high schools throughout New Brunswick, Canada.

Tanya Brown Merriman has taught in public, parochial and charter schools; she has taught
nearly every grade level from Pre-K to doctoral students; and she has served as an administra-
tor and designer of new schools and curricular programmes. She teaches at the University of
Southern California, she is the author of Those Who Can: A Handbook for Social Reconstruction
and Teaching.

Ann Milne is a White educator who led the Kia Aroha College community’s almost 30-year
journey to resist and reject school environments which alienate Indigenous Māori and Pasifika
learners, to develop a critical, culturally sustaining learning approach centered on students’
cultural identities and to develop their critical consciousness, which she discusses in her book,
Coloring in the White Spaces.

Khadija Mohammed is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Social Sciences, at the
University of the West of Scotland. She is Programme Leader for Early Years and is also a
Teacher Educator. Her doctoral work centers around race equality, exploring the experiences of
Black and Minority Ethnic Teachers in Scotland. Khadija supports educators to become confi-
dent and empowered to promote equality, preventing and dealing with racism. She is also the
co-founder and Chair of the Scottish Association of Minority Ethnic Educators.

Silvia Molina is Associate Professor at the Department of Pedagogy at the Rovira i Virgili
University and a Researcher at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA).
She has published in journals such as Qualitative Inquiry, Frontiers in Psychology and Higher
Education Research & Development.

Veronica A. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Race in the Department of Sociology at

Georgia State University. Her research focuses on how Black undergraduate women experience
gendered racism at White universities. Her research interests include Black feminist thought,
critical race feminism, trap feminism, hip-hop feminism and hip-hop.

Soudeh Oladi is a Postdoctoral Fellow and SSHRC Project Manager at the Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Dr Oladi’s foundational research focuses on
interdisciplinary scholarship and is deeply rooted in critical pedagogy, philosophy of educa-
tion, social justice education and Eastern and Western educational philosophies and spiritual
traditions.

Maria Padrós is an Associate Professor at the Department of Teaching and Learning and
Educational Organization at the University of Barcelona and a Researcher at the Community
of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA). She has published in journals such as Teachers
College Record, European Journal of Education and Qualitative Inquiry.
xxxii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Yuliana Palacio is a Foreign Language Teacher from the School of Languages, Universidad de
Antioquia in Colombia. She completed her graduate studies in Educational Leadership and
Policy Studies at Boston University. She is a member of the Grupo de Investigación Acción y
Evaluación en Lenguas Extranjeras (GIAE) research group in the line of language and educa-
tion policies.

Priya Parmar is an Associate Professor of Secondary Education at Brooklyn College-CUNY.

Her scholarly publications and books center on critical literacies, youth and hip hop culture and
other contemporary issues in the field of cultural studies in which economic, political and
social justice issues are addressed. She is the author of Knowledge Reigns Supreme: The
Critical Pedagogy of Hip Hop Artist KRS-One.

Oscar A. Peláez is a teacher educator and researcher. He coordinates the research field in the
ELT programme at the School of Education, Universidad Católica Luis Amigó in Colombia.
He is also an academic adviser to the university’s undergraduate and graduate students in the
area of education language policy.

Zhengmei Peng is a Professor of Comparative Education and the Director of the Institute of
International and Comparative Education at East China Normal University. His expertise
includes comparative education, German pedagogy, Western educational philosophy, theory of
knowledge and curriculum studies.

Kathalene A. Razzano holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. She
currently teaches in the Global Affairs Program at George Mason University, and the Media &
Communication Studies Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She spe-
cializes in cultural studies, feminist social theory, political economy, critical pedagogy, critical
legal studies, and media studies.

Kerry J. Renwick is a teacher educator with experience working with preservice teachers in
both Australia and Canada. Her research interests focus on social justice experienced and
developed at the personal level and in the context of the family.

Nighet Riaz is an early career researcher and associate lecturer at the School of Education and
Social Sciences in the University of the West of Scotland. Nighet’s research explores moral
panics and the perceived disaffection of young people, with a particular focus on Black and
Minority Ethnic and Muslim communities and youth.

Shawn Arango Ricks is the Assistant Vice President for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and
an Associate Professor of Race and Ethnicity Studies at Salem Academy and College in
Winston-Salem, NC. She is an intuitive healer, licensed mental health and addictions counsel-
lor, and life coach in private practice focused on helping Women of Color on their healing
journeys.

Teresa J. Rishel researches child and adolescent suicide in exploring sociocultural relation-
ships, student alienation, bullying, diverse students, hidden curriculum and leadership roles in
schools. She focuses on critical theory and pedagogy, curriculum theory, and social justice. She
works with organizations interested in sharing experiences or difficulties of suicide-related
school issues.
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxiii

Claire Robson’s federally funded postdoctoral research at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver)
investigated the potential of arts-engaged community practices. A widely published writer of
fiction, memoir, and poetry, Claire’s book, Writing for Change, shows how collective memoir
writing can effect social change.

Samuel D. Rocha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the

University of British Columbia.

Ylva Rodny-Gumede is the Head of the International Office and Professor in the School of
Communication at the University of Johannesburg. Ylva is a former journalist with experience
from both print and broadcast media. Her current research focus is on transformation and inno-
vation in higher education. Ylva is rated as a nationally recognised researcher by the National
Research Foundation of South Africa.

Toby Rollo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lakehead University.

April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams is an instructor in the African American and African Diaspora
Studies program at The University of North Carolina,Greensboro. Her research interests focus
on African American mothers, educational equity, and social justice.

Marcella Runell Hall is the Vice President for Student Life/Dean of Students and Lecturer in
Religion at Mount Holyoke College. She was the founding Co-Director for the Of Many
Institute for Multifaith Leadership and program advisor/founder for the minor in multifaith and
spiritual leadership at New York University. Marcella has written for Scholastic Books, the
New York Times Learning Network, VIBE, and various academic journals, including Equity
and Excellence in Education.

Constance Russell is a Professor in the Faculty of Education, Lakehead University in Thunder

Bay, Canada. She co-edited the award-winning book The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging
Weight-Based Oppression through Critical Education, edited the Canadian Journal of
Environmental Education from 2004–16 and currently co-edits a book series, (Re)thinking
Environmental Education.

I. Malik Saafir is President and CEO of The Southern Renaissance in Little Rock, Arkansas.
He trains education, business, government and nonprofit leaders how to end poverty in the
African diaspora. Previously, he was Visiting Lecturer of African/African American Studies at
the University of Central Arkansas.

Madhulika Sagaram is the founder and President of Adhya Educational Society, a nonprofit
engaged in improving the quality of education in underserved government and private schools.
She is also the founder of Ajahn Books and the Ajahn Center for Pedagogy. She has a vision
to develop research, engaging with the theory, practice and outreach of pedagogical perspec-
tives in education across socio-cultural diversity in India and the world.

Pramod K. Sah is a PhD candidate and Killam doctoral scholar in the Department of Language
and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia. His research work is driven by the
core values of social justice with a focus on class and ethnicity and English-medium instruction
(EMI) policy in multilingual Nepal.
xxxiv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Concepción Sánchez-Blanco has been Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer of Curriculum,

Instruction and School Organization at the University of A Coruña since 1995 (Faculty of
Educational Sciences). Her research focus is on the pursuit of justice and equity in early child-
hood education through ethnography, action research, case study, critical pedagogy, anti-bias
teacher education, social inclusion and anti-violence.

Adrienne Sansom is a Senior Lecturer in Dance and Drama at the University of Auckland. Her
academic interests include social democracy, social justice and social change through the arts,
and her research and writing focus on the body and embodied knowing in education, critical
pedagogy and cultural studies.

Martha Sañudo is Full Professor of Philosophy at Tecnológico de Monterrey at Centro de

Investigación en Humanidades.

Roslyn M. Satchel is the Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Communication at Pepperdine

University and is an affiliate faculty in Seaver College’s Social Action and Justice Colloquium
and at Pepperdine’s School of Law. Her research focuses on social justice, intersectional com-
munity organizing among marginalized groups, and critical cultural/race/media literacies —
especially, as relates to law, religion, and media.

William H. Schubert is Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of

Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he held professorial and administrative positions from 1975
to his retirement in 2011. At UIC, he received numerous awards for scholarship, teaching, and
mentoring. Schubert has published 18 books, over 250 articles and book chapters, and has
made approximately 300 scholarly presentations.

David Scott is an Assistant Professor in the Werklund School of Education, University of

Calgary. His scholarly work involves investigations into how educators interpret and peda-
gogically respond to new educational curricular mandates including calls to engage with
Indigenous histories, experiences, and philosophies.

Jeff Share is a Faculty Advisor in the Teacher Education Program at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research and practice focus on transformative education;
preparing K-12 educators to teach critical media literacy for social and environmental justice.
His published work includes Media Literacy is Elementary: Teaching Youth to Critically Read
and Create Media.

Shashi Shergill is an Assistant Principal at Connect Charter School in Calgary, Alberta,

Canada. Shashi was a 2015 recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Excellence in
Teaching History. Shashi is currently undertaking her doctorate in education at the University
of Calgary exploring ethical and cultural relationality in forming partnerships between
Indigenous and non – Indigenous schools.

Roger I. Simon was Professor of Sociology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in
Toronto, Ontario and founder of the Association of Critical Pedagogy in Canada. Over his forty
years of teaching and writing, he influenced generations of professors and public educators in
Canada. Simon authored numerous articles and seven books, the last, A Pedagogy of Witnessing:
Curatorial practice and the pursuit of social justice.
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxv

Marlon Simmons is an Associate Professor at the Werklund School of Education, University

of Calgary. His scholarly work is grounded within the diaspora, decolonial thought and com-
municative network practices of youth. Marlon’s research interests include schooling and
society, governance of the self in educational settings and the sociology of education.

Constantine Skordoulis is Professor of Epistemology and Didactical Methodology of Physics

at the University of Athens and Academic Director of the postgraduate programme ‘Secondary
Science Teachers Education’ of the Hellenic Open University. He has published extensively on
issues of history of science, science education and socio-scientific issues with a critical per-
spective.

Christine E. Sleeter is Professor Emerita in the College of Education at California State

University Monterey Bay, where she was a founding faculty member. Her research, published
in over 150 articles and 23 books, focuses on anti-racist multicultural education, ethnic studies
and teacher education.

David Geoffrey Smith is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.
His teaching and research have focussed on interculturality in curriculum through critical glo-
balization studies. His books include: Pedagon: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Human
Sciences, Pedagogy and Culture; Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization,
Empire and the Crises of Pedgogy; Teaching as the Practice of Wisdom; and CONFLUENCES:
Intercultural Journeying in Research and Teaching: From Hermeneutics to a Changing World
Order.

John Smyth is Visiting Professor of Education and Social Justice, University of Huddersfield,
Emeritus Research Professor Federation University Australia, Emeritus Professor of Education
Flinders University of South Australia, Elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences
in Australia, a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar and the author of 35 books.

Nathan Snaza teaches English literature, gender studies and educational foundations at the
University of Richmond. He is the author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the
Politics of Humanism and the co-editor of Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and
Curriculum Studies and Posthumanism and Educational Research.

Marta Soler-Gallart is Full Professor of Sociology at University of Barcelona and director of

CREA. She is President of the European Sociological Association and has served on the
Governing Boards of the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities, the
ORCID Board of Directors, and as the Expert Evaluator for the EU Framework Programme of
Research.

Jessica A. Solyom is an Assistant Research Professor at Arizona State University in the Center
for Indian Education. Her recent publications have explored postsecondary education for
American Indian and Alaska Native students, critical research methodologies, and American
Indian college student activism for education rights.

Marc Spooner is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. His
research interests include homelessness and poverty, audit culture and the effects of neoliber-
alisation and corporatisation on higher education, social justice, activism and participatory
xxxvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

democracy. He is co-editor, with James McNinch, of the award-winning book Dissident

Knowledge in Higher Education.

Dana M. Stachowiak is the Director of the Gender Studies and Research Center and an
Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
Her research interests are in transgender studies, equity education, and literacy curriculum.

Constantina Stefanidou was born in 1976 in Athens. She is a physicist who obtained her PhD
in 2013 in History and Philosophy of Natural Sciences in Science Teaching. After 12 years in
secondary education, she is currently Faculty Member at the Department of Education of the
University of Athens as Teaching and Laboratory Staff. Her research interests are in science
education, historical and philosophical perspectives of science and didactics of science.

Michaela P. Stone is Assistant Professor of Early Childhood at the University of Northern

Vermont. Her scholarly interests includes mathematics, critical disability studies and the role
of differentiation and engagement in cross-cultural contexts.

Dennis Sumara is Professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary, Alberta,
Canada. His areas of research include curriculum theory, teacher education and literacy educa-
tion, as oriented by conceptual interests in hermeneutic phenomenology, literary response
theory and complexity science.

Kristine Sunday is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and Learning at Old Dominion

University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early childhood education.
She holds a PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in Art Education. Kristine draws from
post-structural theories and qualitative research methods to pose questions about children,
learning, and the visual arts in early childhood classrooms.

Juha Suoranta is Professor of Adult Education at Tampere University. He has published exten-
sively on critical pedagogy and public sociology. His latest books are C. Wright Mills’
Sociological Life and Paulo Freire: A Pedagogue of the Oppressed.

Dawn N. Hicks Tafari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at Winston-

Salem State University. Her research interests include Black boys in public schools, Black
feminist thought, Black male elementary school teachers, hiphop culture’s influence on social
and individual identity development, hiphop feminism, critical race theory, composite counter
storytelling and narrative research.

Nwachi Pressley-Tafari, a native New Yorker, has been a developmental educator for over
20 years and is now Adjunct Professor of Diversity, the Humanities, and College Success for
ECPI University. He holds a certification in life coaching and is a licensed New Life Story
coach.

Shuntay Z. Tarver is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University in the Department of

Counselling and Human Services. He is committed to social justice with a particular focus on
the experiences of African Americans within various ecological systems (i.e. schools, justice
systems, and families).
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxvii

Paul. L. Thomas, is Professor of Education at Furman University. He taught high-school

English for 18 years in South Carolina before moving to teacher education and teaching first-
year writing. He is the author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays
Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means. Follow him at http://radicalscholarship.wordpress.
com/ and @plthomasEdD.

Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs is Associate Professor, Social Foundations, Virginia Polytechnic

Institute and the author of Re-Assembly Required: Critical Autoethnography and Spiritual
Discovery. Her research in Spain for a critical autoethnography examines life under Franco’s
dictatorship following the Spanish Civil War. She is also investigating critical pedagogy in
teacher education with colleagues in Spain and Mexico.

Peter Pericles Trifonas is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University
of Toronto. His areas of interest include ethics, philosophy of education, cultural studies, and
technology. His books include: Deconstructing the Machine (with Jacques Derrida);
International Handbook of Semiotics; Roland Barthes and the Empire of Signs; and Umberto
Eco & Football.

Stephanie Troutman is a Black feminist scholar, mother and first-generation college student.
She is the Associate Professor of Emerging Literacies in the English Department at the
University of Arizona. She serves as affiliate faculty in Gender & Women’s Studies, Teaching,
Learning & Sociocultural Studies, Africana Studies and the LGBT Institute.

Cherie Ann Turpin is an Associate Professor in the English Program at University of DC. Her
publications include the book How Three Black Women Writers Combined Spiritual and
Sensual Love, as well as articles in various journals and anthologies. She is completing
Afrofuturism and African spiritual traditions, as well as Digital Humanities and Diversity.

Jaime Usma is a Teacher Educator and Researcher at the School of Languages, Universidad
de Antioquia in Colombia. In his recent publications and studies, he examines language and
education policies being adopted in Colombia and their social, economic and political implica-
tions for different educational actors, ethnic groups and communities.

Juan Ríos Vega is an Assistant Professor at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, Department
of Teacher Education, where he teaches courses on English as a second language (ESL) and
diversity in education. His research interests include K-12 Latinx students in education, queers
of color critique, and LGBTIQ+ populations in Panama.

Marco Montalbetti Viñuela is an independent scholar and photojournalist with over 20 years
of experience, five of which were spent documenting the teaching-exchange programmes
described in his article in this Handbook.

David Wallace is lecturer in community education at the University of the West of Scotland.
For the better part of 40 years he has been a passionate advocate for social justice through
informal, collaborative and community-based education. His research and teaching interests
have mirrored an engagement with distinctively Scottish practices in community education and
with an overarching concern for social justice.
xxxviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Gerald Walton is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University in Canada.

His research focuses on school-based bullying as othering and he speaks and writes on
Whiteness, free speech, masculinity, gender expression and identity, sexuality, and rape culture,
among other topics. He edited the 2014 collection, The Gay Agenda: Claiming Space, Identity,
and Justice, published by Peter Lang Press.

Ki Wight is an instructor at Capilano University in Vancouver in the Communication Studies,

Women’s and Gender Studies and Motion Picture Arts programmes. Her doctoral work, at
Simon Fraser University’s Equity Studies in Education Program, looks at the relationship
between media education and systems of oppression.

John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, as well as

Professor of Publishing Studies at Simon Fraser University. He directs the Public Knowledge
Project, which conducts research and develops open source scholarly publishing software in
support of greater access to knowledge. His most recent book is The Intellectual Properties of
Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke.

Peter R. Wright is an Associate Professor of Arts Education at Murdoch University, Perth,

Western Australia. He works across the arts with a commitment to personal, social and cultural
inquiry, agency, education and expression, health and wellbeing, and Creative Youth
Development. His interest is in teacher development in the Arts, Teaching Artist pedagogy,
ArtsHealth, socio-aesthetic pedagogy, and social justice.

Michalinos Zembylas is a Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the

Open University of Cyprus, and Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University in the Chair
for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation. He has written extensively on emotion
and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human
rights education and citizenship education.

Gang Zhu is currently an Associate Professor at the Institute of International and Comparative
Education, East China Normal University. His expertise encompasses teacher education, com-
parative education and urban education. His publications, in both English and Chinese, have
appeared in Compare, Journal of Education for Teaching, The Asia-Pacific Educational
Researcher and Computer-Assisted Language Learning.

Revital Zilonka is currently a 4th-grade teacher at the Neve Hof elementary school in Rishon
Le’Zion, Israel. She received her PhD in Cultural Foundations from The University of North
Carolina, Greensboro.

Haggith Gor Ziv is a Senior Lecturer Seminar Hakibutzim Teachers College of Education in
the Early Childhood department Special Education Program, Tel Aviv. She teaches courses in
critical feminist pedagogy, disability studies and inclusion. She has facilitated Jewish and Arab
dialogue groups, and published Critical Feminist Pedagogy and Education for Culture of Peace.

David Zyngier is Associate Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia. A former teacher
and school principal, he has written extensively on student engagement, social justice, democracy
and education and pedagogies that enhance achievement for all students but in particular those
from communities of disadvantage. He established the Public Education Network in Australia.
 Acknowledgements

When we first proposed the idea of a Handbook on critical pedagogies, our global friends and
colleagues displayed remarkable passion, inspiration and commitment that allowed the book to
evolve. They generously created space in their busy lives to share something about the emotional
and intellectual labor involved in doing critical pedagogy in diverse and challenging contexts. We
invited over 160 colleagues from 6 continents to contribute to our project, these scholars, educa-
tors and community activists all shared a deep understanding of the radical possibilities inspired
by Paulo Freire. Their stories open us up to multiple ways of knowing, interpreting and acting in
the world based on context with diverse theoretical, methodological and practical approaches.
We thank them for their exceptional contribution, patience and solidarity. Individually and col-
lectively these are some of the most outstanding scholars in the field. We appreciate their willing-
ness to support this project from conception to completion. Their contribution is a powerful
illustration of the kind of solidarity that lies at the heart of critical pedagogy.
Our Section Editors provided guidance and expertise in their chosen fields often at short
notice. Paul R. Carr, Gina Thésée, Greg Martin, Cathryn Teasley, Four Arrows, R. Michael
Fisher, Rob Hattam, Michael MacDonald, Michael Hoechsmann, Leila E. Villaverde, Roymieco
A. Carter, and Renee Desmarchelier responded to our requests, assisted with reviews, collabo-
rated and assisted our authors, often at short notice or tight deadlines…we cannot quantify how
invaluable their participation was, and continues to be. Members of the editorial board have our
gratitude; not an easy task, editing such diverse articles…some academic, some storied, some
autobiographic, some historic: all critical pedagogies. Acknowledgment to Dara Nix-Stevenson
for her early contribution to our venture.
We acknowledge with reverence and respect, our dear friends and colleagues both past and
present who have played a crucial role in advancing the development of critical pedagogy. Their
influence has been profoundly important in shaping the lives of so many contributors to this col-
lection. We will hear a great deal from and about them in the chapters to follow. Paulo Freire’s
ground-breaking work provides our foundation, his work permeates the thoughts and actions
shaping this collection. The seeds for this collection of work was sown by Joe L. Kincheloe,
whose vision of tentative critical pedagogies and unique radical love paved the way for that
fateful day when James Clark from Sage Publishers showed interest and faith in our massive
volume proposal. There aren’t enough synonyms to thank James: his authenticity and conscien-
tiousness in dealing with a Yank, an Aussie, and scores of global critical pedagogues for three
years deserves a shout-out.
We wish to offer our deep appreciation to Janean Robinson, our Assistant Editor. Janean
somehow managed to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the editors, the various technologies and
tracking systems, thousands of emails, hundreds of reviews and all sorts of crises but always
with good humour and grace. Thank you Janean, you are loved, you are respected, you are
appreciated and acknowledged.
Without our families, life partners – David and Jenny, children and friends closest to us…
over the past three years, without you, none of this would be possible. This has been a complex
and challenging project that could not have happened without your love, care and support.
Barry wishes to thank his institution, Murdoch University for providing him with the space and
resources to undertake this important work.

Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg
THE LEGACY OF PAULO FREIRE
In 1970, the first English-language edition of
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo
Freire, was published. For a half a century,
the book has been translated into scores of
languages, championing a call for radical
change in schooling and a humane, social
shift to contextual education. Henry Giroux
claims that the book changed his life, and,
indeed, it certainly changed his career.
Giroux’s paradigm-shattering book Theory
and Resistance in Education, published in
1983, named Freire’s revolutionary philoso-
phy as critical pedagogy. Throughout the
1980s and early 1990s, critical pedagogy
became the counter-narrative to traditional
‘banking’ approaches to education. The book
challenged the epistemological foundations
of transmission models of teaching and learn-
ing and the institutional structures and social
practices which hold it in place.
In the past 50 years, critical scholars
have re-formed education through sustained
Introduction
critical pedagogical analyses and discourse.
Indeed, some publishing houses have cen-
tered their entire education lists around this
intervention. Many outstanding books have
been published on critical pedagogy, build-
ing upon Freire’s work and expanding it to
include analyses of contemporary socio-
cultural shifts and global transformations
(e.g., Britzman, 2003 Leistyna et al., 1999;
Darder et al., 2003; McLaren and Kincheloe,
2007; Duncan and Morrell, 2008; Kincheloe,
2008; Apple et al., 2009; Giroux, 2011;
Malott and Porfilio, 2011; Smyth, 2011; and
Emdin, 2017).
This book assembles over 160 scholar
activists from 39 countries who are deeply
engaged with advancing Freire’s transfor-
mational project for the purpose of creat-
ing a more humane and socially just world.
In communion with Freire’s writing (e.g.,
1970/2000, 1998, 2000, 2007, 2014), they
share a commitment to the values of criti-
cal curiosity, democracy, dialogue, respect,
dignity, humility, hope, justice, solidarity,
 INTRODUCTION
commitment and compassion as the corner-
stones of a new social imaginary beyond the
‘mutating’ value system of global capitalism
(McMurtry, 1999).
The task of critical pedagogy becomes
even more urgent in these dark times
(Arendt, 1973). The rise of populist authori-
tarianism, fascism, war, violence, poverty,
hunger, slavery, genocide, Islamophobia,
environmental degradation, child labour,
post-truth, forced migration and cruelty have
provided a point of existential crisis in the
world. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by
the historical, economic and social defects
of the world driven by the destructive forces
of global capitalism and neoliberal ideolo-
gies, including privatization, commodifica-
tion, commercialization, consumerism and
individualism (Harvey, 2007). It can lead to
a sense of fatalism and determinism as there
appears to be no alternative to the way things
are (Bourdieu, 1998: 29). The absurd, irra-
tional and cruel are normalized in an era of
relentless social-media propaganda promot-
ing a range of neoconservative and neoliberal
ideologies perpetuated by what Henry Giroux
(2014: 9) describes as the ‘disimagination
machine’, which perpetuates antidemocratic
and authoritarian forces by ‘distracting,
miseducating, and deterring the public from
acting in its own interests’.
In this context, Freire (2004: 105) pro-
vides us with a language of both critique
and possibility which involves a dialectic
between ‘denouncing’ the dehumanizing
conditions under which we are living as well
as ‘announcing’ that another world is pos-
sible. Critical pedagogy is central to this
broader political project because it helps
us to question common-sense assumptions,
beliefs, values, rituals and practices that
serve to mask hierarchical power relations.
It provides a way of interrupting the seduc-
tive power of corporate/popular culture and
the effects of what Donaldo Macedo (1993)
describes as ‘literacy for stupidification’.
Over 70 years ago, Adorno and Horkheimer
(1944/2000: 15) warned about the illusionary
xli
and deceptive impact of the culture industry,
which encouraged people to ‘forget suffer-
ing’ and ‘the last remaining thought of resist-
ance’. Indeed, these ‘interferences to critical
thought’ (Shor, 1980: 49) only serve to depo-
liticize and distract people from the real task
of becoming more fully human through crea-
tive practice. It is the process of reclamation
of the critical, self-reflective, moral and dem-
ocratic purposes of education that lies at the
heart of Freire’s legacy.
In response, this collection brings together
an impressive global network of scholars,
educators and community activists commit-
ted to the moral vision and practice of criti-
cal pedagogy to alleviate human suffering.
To this end, the book attempts to provide a
coherent and purposeful international conver-
sation by moving from a singular or universal
critical pedagogy to multiple pedagogies and
perspectives. Freire was concerned that his
work not be turned into a dogma, a paradigm
or a singular methodology, hence our desire
to promote a plurality of approaches and per-
spectives held together by the radical love of
Paulo Freire.
In the Foreword to Freire’s Pedagogy
of the Heart, Martin Carnoy explains how
Freire addresses progressives everywhere,
urging them to remain ‘active, authentic,
democratic, non-sectarian, and unifying’
(Freire, 2000: 8). In the Freirean tradition, he
argues that
progressives must continuously examine their
underlying strategies. New conditions demand
new answers to some of the same old difficult
questions: What is the role of progressive politics
in the world system, now a new global-informa-
tion economy? What is the role of progressive
intellectuals? And what is the role of democratic
education, again now in the information age?
(Freire, 2000: 8)
Addressing these kinds of questions is what
animates the individual and collective work
of the authors in these volumes.
For this reason, we begin with a set of per-
sonal reflections from friends and colleagues
xlii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
who have worked with or been profoundly
influenced by Freire’s ideas (Volume 1, Part I).
We invited them to respond to a formative
piece of Freire’s (1983) writing entitled The
Importance of the Act of Reading. Here, Freire
reflects on his own childhood in the neigh-
bourhood of Recife, Brazil to explain how
the ‘act of reading the word and the world’
are inseparable: one infers the other. For him,
the act of reading cannot be separated from
context or lived experience and is, therefore,
‘laden with the meaning of the people’s exis-
tential experience’ (Freire, 1983: 10). Pivotal
to Freire’s work is the understanding that
reading is foremost a political act, never neu-
tral nor objective, but capable of generating
‘difficult knowledge’ (Britzman, 1998) for
the purpose of resisting all forms of oppres-
sion and creating a better world.
In pursing these aspirations, Freire
(1974/2007: 12) believes that critical or
problem-posing education places people ‘in
consciously critical confrontation with their
problems, to make them the agents of their
own recuperation’. What Freire is advocating
is the responsibility or duty to fight against
fatalistic discourses that may not always be in
our own best interests. In Daring to Dream:
Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished, Freire
(2007: 4–5) explains how we are called ‘to
transform and re-form the world, not to adapt
to it. As human beings, there is no doubt that
our main responsibility consist of intervening
in reality and keeping up our hope’.
To this end, Freire (2007: 25) speaks about
dreams and utopia as a fundamental neces-
sity for human beings. For him, ‘There is
no tomorrow without a project, without a
dream, without utopia, without hope, without
creative work, and work toward the devel-
opment of possibilities, which can make
the concretization of that tomorrow viable’
(Freire, 2007: 26). In short, Freire (2000:
100) believes that ‘Our historical inclination
is not fate, but rather possibility’. Herein lies
the rationale for our work and those who have
contributed to it through their own unique
stories, circumstances and experiences.
Our authors bring their own particular his-
tories, experiences, languages, cultures and
perspectives to the struggle for social justice.
Their work (as well as that of many others
not included here) is intimately grounded in
the critical pedagogies which have emerged
in particular social, political and cultural
contexts. In reading these accounts we gain
a sense of how each of the authors take up
Freire’s challenge to not only ‘speak about
the limits of education’ but to engage with
what can be accomplished ‘where’, ‘how’,
‘with whom’ and ‘when’ (Freire, 2007: 64),
and in the process we see how our work as
educators ‘is not individual, but social, and
that it takes place within the social practice
he or she is a part of’ (Freire, 2007: 64–5).
Finally, we are interdisciplinary scholars,
educators and community activists who do
not seek to create a unilateral doctrine; that
would be antithetical to Freire’s intention.
Instead, we seek to learn from traditional crit-
ical pedagogical paradigms and from those
working between these paradigms, working
in the tentative, the elastic, the ever-changing
margins of revolutionary and scholarly peda-
gogy articulated so clearly and passionately
by Freire.
WHAT IS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY?
Drawing on the legacy of Freire and the tra-
dition of democratic education (Dewey,
1916/1944) we bring together scholars and
practitioners committed to the realization of
Freire’s vision and practice of critical peda-
gogy. What emerges in the three volumes is
the understanding that critical pedagogy is
not something easily defined in terms of a
particular theory, curriculum or method,
which would be anathema to Freire’s prob-
lem-posing approach to education
(1970/2000: 79–86). As Gregory Martin
points out in his Introduction to Part III of
Volume 1, critical pedagogy is ‘an umbrella
term which captures a broad range of
 INTRODUCTION
approaches and standpoints that have
emerged in response to unjust laws, policies,
issues and practice’.
Like our dear friend and mentor Joe
Kincheloe (2008: 8), we find it difficult to
define critical pedagogy in a brief and com-
pelling manner because it asks so much of
the educators and students who embrace
it. Given the complexity and breadth of the
body of work in this handbook it is apparent
that there is a lot to comprehend in terms of
knowledge, pedagogy, politics and culture.
Therefore, a reasonable starting point might
be to share a set of basic concepts identi-
fied by Kincheloe in his book Knowledge
and Critical Pedagogy. By way of summary,
Kincheloe says critical pedagogy is:
• Grounded on a social and educational vision of
justice and equality
• Constructed on the belief that education is inher-
ently political
• Dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering
• Concerned that schools don’t hurt students –
good schools don’t blame students for their
failures or strip students of the knowledges they
bring to the classroom
• Enacted through the use of generative themes
to read the word and the world and the pro-
cess of problem posing – generative themes
involve the educational use of issues that are
central to students’ lives as a grounding for the
curriculum
• Centered on the notion that teachers should be
researchers – here teachers learn to produce
knowledge and teach students to produce their
own knowledges
• Grounded on the notion that teachers become
researchers of their own students – as research-
ers, teachers study their students, their back-
grounds, and the forces that shape them
• Interested in maintaining a delicate balance
between social change and cultivating the intel-
lect – this requires a rigorous pedagogy that
accomplishes both goals
• Concerned with the ‘margins’ of society, the
experiences and needs of individuals faced with
oppression and subjugation
• Constructed on the awareness that science can
be used as a force to regulate and control
xliii
• Dedicated to understanding the context in which
educational activity takes place
• Committed to resisting the harmful effects of
dominant power
• Attuned to the importance of complexity –
understands complexity theory–in constructing a
rigorous and transformative education
• Focused on understanding the profound impact
of neo-colonial structures in shaping education
and knowledge.
(Kincheloe, 2008: 10)
Thus, a fundamental feature of critical peda-
gogy is the preparedness to interrupt com-
mon-sense ways of seeing the world with
which people have grown so comfortable
(Kumashiro, 2004). At the root of critical
pedagogy, then, is the willingness to confront
injustices and relations of power which hold
them in place. This requires a fundamental
transformation in the ways in which knowl-
edge is produced and legitimated and by
whom. This critical intellectual work requires
a shift, or ‘repositioning’, whereby we ‘see
the world through the eyes of the disposed
and act against ideological and institutional
processes and forms that reproduce oppres-
sive conditions’ (Apple et al., 2009: 3). The
task of rethinking requires a new language
and set of theoretical tools capable of helping
us to ‘think anew, to think otherwise … away
from convention and cant’ (Burbules and
Berk, 1999: 60). As Arendt (1958/1998: 5)
argued in her effort to comprehend the evils
of totalitarianism, what the modern world
requires is a ‘matter of thought’ that opposes
the kind of ‘thoughtlessness’ which leads to
‘the heedless recklessness or hopeless con-
fusion or complacent repetition of “truths”
which have become trivial and empty’ and
remain one of ‘the outstanding characteristics
of our time’.
In this context, we find Kincheloe and
McLaren’s (2005) notion of ‘evolving criti-
cality’ especially useful. For them, critical
pedagogy ‘is always evolving, changing in
light of both new theoretical insights and new
problems and circumstances’ (Kincheloe
and McLaren, 2005: 306). This spirit of
xliv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
criticality seeks to comprehend diverse forms
of oppression including class, race, gender,
sexual, cultural, religious, colonial and abil-
ity-related concerns. Roger Simon sums it
up pretty well when he states that criticality
involves figuring out:
why things are the way they are, how they got that
way, and what set of conditions are supporting the
processes that maintain them. Further … we must
be able to evaluate the potential for action that [is]
embedded in actual relationships. To think these
tasks through requires concepts that can carry a
critique of existing practice.
(Simon, 1998: 380)
Of course, criticality can be sometimes ‘vio-
lent and destructive’ because it endeavors to
disrupt some deeply entrenched ‘truths’ and
taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs,
values and practices (Ball, 2006: 1). The
contributors to this handbook do exactly this.
They draw on a range of critical theories to
help them challenge existing injustices and
oppressive institutional arrangements as they
attempt to transform inequitable, undemo-
cratic or oppressive policies and practices.
Thus, critical pedagogy involves a twofold
move: first, to develop a critical sensibility
about the way things are and, second, a will-
ingness to take action to change the status
quo. It is this desire to engage in forms of
social criticism as well as activism that are
the hallmarks of critical pedagogy.
Delving into each of the chapters we gain a
greater appreciation of the complexity of this
work. Each of the authors, in their own unique
way, draw on a range of critical theories to
guide their thinking and action. While these
critical theories have their own intellectual
histories, points of emphasis and explanatory
power, together they highlight both the com-
monalities identified by Kincheloe (2008)
and the differences within the tradition of
critical pedagogy. It is beyond the scope of
this introduction to rehearse these theories in
any detail, although a cursory overview does
provide a sense of the rich multiplicity of the-
oretical influences deployed by our authors.
Most notably, the Frankfurt School of Critical
Theory (Giroux, 2003); progressive educa-
tion (Dewey, 1916/1944; Kozol, 1967, 2005;
Postman and Weingartner, 1969); schooling
and the political economy (Bowles and Gintis,
1976; Harris, 1979; Apple, 1982; Carnoy and
Levin, 1985); feminism (hooks, 1981/2014;
Gore, 1993); anti-racism (Gillborn, 1995),
critical race theory (Ladson-Billings and
Tate, 1995; Leonardo, 2005); Indigenous
knowledges (Smith, 1999); critical media
and literacy (Macedo and Steinberg, 2007);
critical youth studies (Ibrahim and Steinberg,
2014); critical multiculturalism (Sleeter and
McLaren, 1995; McLaren, 1997); libera-
tion theology (Gutiérrez, 1971/1988; Freire,
1985: 121–42); and critical ecopedagogy
(Kahn, 2010), to name a few.
While Freire provides a set of founda-
tional, and even necessary values (moral,
ethical, political and pedagogical), critical
pedagogy itself is far more expansive than
his work alone. As Freire (1970/2000: 90)
himself insists, critical education is a process
which endeavors to continually ‘make and
remake, to create and re-create’ the world
in a spirit of epistemological curiosity, dia-
logue, humility, solidarity and love. Herein
lies the major strength of critical pedagogy: it
is never static, formulaic or complete but per-
petually in motion, or, in the words of Horton
and Freire (1990: 11), ‘a permanent process
of searching’. This collection seeks to add,
no matter how modestly, to a rich archive of
critical pedagogy inspired by Paulo Freire
around the world. We are mindful that our
work builds on the spirit of generosity and
hard labour of thousands of scholars, teach-
ers and activists who engage in the struggle
for social justice daily.
HOW IS THIS BOOK ORGANIZED?
This Handbook consists of three volumes
divided into 12 sections, four per volume. In
total there are 125 chapters. The book is
 INTRODUCTION
intended to be a central resource for multiple
audiences, including academics, pre-service
and in-service teachers, postgraduate stu-
dents, educators, social workers, artists,
activists and community workers. For this
reason, the book offers multiple points of
entry depending on one’s interests. From the
seminal writing and influence of Paulo Freire
and social theories to the enactment of peda-
gogical insights and practices in universities,
colleges, schools, classrooms, communities
and non-formal spaces, readers are encour-
aged to engage with the ideas, debates and
practices in critical pedagogy. We now pro-
vide an overview of each volume and some
context for each of themes that will be
extended through a series of provocations by
the section editors.
Volume 1
In Section I: Reading Paulo Freire, we begin
with a set of 14 short personal responses to
Paulo Freire’s (1983) piece The Importance
of the Act of Reading. We deliberately chose
this article because it provides a starting
point for the conversations to follow. The
notion of ‘reading the word and the world’
seems to be a pivotal moment in compre-
hending the power and significance of
Freire’s work. Indeed, as we read these per-
sonal responses from a range of eminent
scholars and activists we gain a much deeper
insight into the ways in which Freire’s ideas
have profoundly influenced their lives. From
the moment we invited our colleagues to
share something about their encounters with
the writing of Freire, there was an immense
sense of excitement, passion, joy, generosity
and love as each of the contributors reflected
on their own personal intellectual and peda-
gogical journey. What they describe in their
own particular ways is the power of ideas,
commitment, dialogue, justice and action to
create a more humane and socially just
world. We believe these kinds of stories
reveal a great deal about two fundamental
xlv
questions which preoccupied Freire’s work –
namely, what does it mean to be more fully
human and what does it mean to be edu-
cated? We are sure readers will find these
encounters interesting and informative on
many levels.
In Section II: Social Theories, we provide
an opportunity for the authors to open up a
range of social theories that have shaped
their thinking and practice. The intention is
not to provide some kind of definitive shop-
ping list of social theories but to indicate the
ways in which the authors use different criti-
cal theories to illuminate their understanding
of injustice and what might be done about
it. In this sense, we begin to see how theory
and practice (praxis) interface to generate
new insights with which to address persistent
problems, questions and concerns in multiple
contexts. Importantly, it opens up opportu-
nities to engage with a range of theoretical
orientations and to appreciate how different
authors respond to the challenges posed by
Freire’s desire for dialogue and his acknowl-
edgment of the ‘incompleteness’ of the
human condition.
In Section III: Seminal Figures in Critical
Pedagogy, we examine the contribution of a
number of influential thinkers in the field.
For obvious reasons, this section of the
Handbook presented a number of dilemmas.
We are mindful of not eulogizing particu-
lar individuals over others; this would be a
fraught task, as Gregory Martin points out in
his introduction. Rather, we wanted the con-
tributing authors to provide a sense of how
a range of critical thinkers have influenced
their own work. As such, this is by no means
an encyclopedia of ‘key figures’ in critical
pedagogy: it offers a number of provoca-
tions to engage with some important writers
and ideas. We endeavor to extend this con-
versation through four additional chapters of
interviews (Chapters 34–7) to provide some
personal insights into the ways in which peo-
ple who have worked in critical pedagogy
understand the intellectual, emotional and
political nature of their work, which may not
xlvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
always be accessible through normal publish-
ing outlets.
In Section IV: Global Perspectives, the
focus shifts to the global context of critical
pedagogy. With the emergence of ‘global
capital and the new imperialism’ (McLaren
and Farahmandpur, 2005), critical peda-
gogy takes on new and important work as
it seeks to comprehend the seismic shifts in
the global economy and the implications for
nation states, the economy, education, teach-
ers’ work and students. The contributors in
this section draw attention to the fallout from
what Sasson describes as the ‘new logics of
expulsion’, which is a way of not only cap-
turing the growing levels of inequality but
‘the pathologies of today’s global capitalism’
especially its ‘brutality’ and ‘savage sorting’.
Each of the contributors in this section under-
takes a critical analysis of how these forces
play out for marginalized communities,
groups and individuals, and in the light of
these experiences they identify the kinds of
pedagogical responses required to alleviate
suffering.
Volume 2
In Section V: Indigenous Ways of Knowing,
the editors, Four Arrows (aka Don Jacobs)
and Michael Fisher, explain the synergies
between the aspirations of critical pedagogy
and Indigenous peoples around decolonizing
and Indigenizing movements in education. In
this section, Indigenous knowledge and
knowing are used as a form of resistance
against oppressive colonial policies and prac-
tices which have for far too long subjugated
Indigenous voices and ways of knowing. As
Linda Smith explains so lucidly, Indigenous
peoples around the world have had ‘to chal-
lenge, understand, and have a shared lan-
guage for talking about the history, the
sociology, the psychology and the politics of
imperialism and colonialism as an epic story
telling of huge devastation, painful struggle
and persistent survival’ (1999: 19). As part of
this ongoing struggle, the authors describe a
range of critical pedagogies grounded in
deep listening, storytelling, integration with
nature, spirituality, justice, human rights and
a spirit of ‘fearlessness’.
In Section VI: Education and Praxis, sec-
tion editor Rob Hattam frames the discus-
sion by reminding us of the temporal nature
of critical pedagogy, which is ‘an unfinished
project’ on three levels: first, ‘taking up pow-
erful diagnoses of the times’; second, ‘taking
up readings of the places we live in’; and,
finally, ‘responding to philosophical investi-
gations’. Drilling down into this framework,
the contributors examine the implications for
understanding praxis, including the classed,
racial and gendered dimensions of education.
Each of them brings their own unique take
on the diagnosis of the problem under inves-
tigation, its particular context and alternative
strategies and tactics. What ties these takes
together is an unwavering belief in the eman-
cipatory potential of education to address
unjust policies and practices, which serve to
demean and denigrate the most marginalized
in society.
In Section VII: Teaching and Learning,
the emphasis shifts to the terrain of teaching
and learning in schools and communities. In
the context of unprecedented levels of inter-
ference from ‘right wing’ ideologues and
their prescriptions (standardization, back-to-
basics, scripted lessons, high-stakes testing,
accountability, competition, commodifica-
tion and privatization) to fix the so-called
educational crisis, teachers, schools, commu-
nities and students are under assault. These
‘backlash pedagogies’ (Gutiérrez et al.,
2002: 335) blame teachers, progressive ideas
and linguistically and culturally diverse and
poor children for the perceived problems of
education and society. According to Giroux,
this ‘pedagogy of stupidity’ is focused on
‘memorization, conformity, passivity and
high stakes testing’ (2013a: 2) rather than
the ‘practice of freedom’ (Freire, 1970/2000:
80). In response, the authors provide exam-
ples of alternative pedagogies based on a
 INTRODUCTION
more hopeful and optimistic vision of edu-
cation that draws on notions of inclusivity,
engagement, social justice, connectedness,
learning communities and culturally respon-
sive pedagogies.
In Section VIII: Communities and
Activism, there is a fundamental recognition
that the work of critical pedagogy occurs in
multiple sites beyond formal institutions like
schools, colleges and universities. Indeed,
Freire’s (1970/2000) book Pedagogy of the
Oppressed advanced the view that educa-
tion can be a radical tool for social change
if linked to the needs, desires and aspira-
tions of local communities and their ‘funds
of knowledge’ (Gonzalez et al., 2004). In
this context, the work of community activ-
ists like Saul Alinsky (1989) reinforces the
pivotal role of community organization,
Indigenous leadership and collective action
in the fight for social justice. Each of the
contributors to this section recognizes the
necessity of building local knowledges, net-
works, capabilities and power through the
development of critical awareness and activ-
ism, both locally and in association with
wider social movements.
Volume 3
In Section IX: Communication and Media,
the focus is on the proliferation of mass com-
munication and media in shaping the iden-
tity, needs and desires of young lives, for
better or worse (Rosa and Rosa, 2011). Doug
Kellner and Jeff Share (2007) explain how
experience and everyday life for young
people in the 21st century is vastly different
from that of our own childhood. They argue
that today’s world is ‘media saturated, tech-
nologically dependent and globally con-
nected’ in ways previously unimagined
(Kellner and Share, 2007: 3). Therefore, it
would be irresponsible not to equip students
with media literacy skills and critical aware-
ness of how ‘media construct meanings,
influence and educate audiences, and impose
xlvii
their messages and values’ (2007: 4). Critical
media literacy is a significant pedagogy not
only in countering the pervasive influence of
corporate/popular culture in producing con-
sumer-citizens but in ‘deepening and extend-
ing the possibilities for critical agency, racial
justice, and economic and political democ-
racy’ (Giroux, 2000: 171). These critical lit-
eracy strategies are brought to life by the
contributors, who draw on critical literacy
theories to investigate a variety of media
including film, comics, public exhibitions
and Wikilearning and analyse the implica-
tions for critical citizenship and democracy.
In Section X: Arts and Aesthetics, there
is a turn to affect (emotions, feelings, rela-
tionships and love) to understand the revo-
lutionary potential of artistic endeavor and
aesthetics in creating a more participatory,
connected, sensual, creative and humane
world. There is an appreciation of what it
means to be alive through creative practice.
In an interview with Donaldo Macedo in
1985, Freire spoke about the things he likes
to do. His response reveals a great deal about
the profound importance of affect in people’s
lives: “I love to eat; I love music; I love to
read; I love sports; I love the sea, the beaches;
I love to receive letters; I love children; I love
simple things, common, everyday places;
I love Elza; I love to write” (Freire, 1985:
197–8). In this short exchange, Freire man-
ages to not only capture the essence of being
human but also identify the dynamic rela-
tionship between the emotional and intel-
lectual dimensions of knowledge production.
In this section, our authors, activists, artists,
educators, describe how they use arts-based
processes to raise critical awareness and
commitment to social justice (Beyerbach and
Davis, 2011). They identify spaces and places
where they can connect to young people’s
lives, harness their creativity and imagination
and change context. These artists/educators
appreciate that there are multiple ways of
knowing and interpreting reality (e.g., imagi-
native, creative, intuitive, empathetic, kinaes-
thetic and aesthetic) beyond the limitations of
xlviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Western scientific rationality and objectivity
(Kincheloe, 2008: 224–6).
In Section XI: Critical Youth Studies, the
contributing authors address two interrelated
questions: first, how are young lives being con-
structed and consumed under global capital-
ism. Second, what kinds of counter-narratives
are possible? There can be no doubt that young
people today are the casualties of a period of
unbridled free-market individualism and com-
petitiveness, with devasting effects captured
in the stark language of ‘collateral damage’
(Bauman, 2011), ‘cruelty’ (Giroux, 2013b) and
‘disposability’ (Giroux, 2009). In this ‘rapidly
mutating and crisis-ridden world’ (Best and
Kellner, 2003: 75), the authors provide a set of
counter-narratives to illustrate the emancipa-
tory potential of critical pedagogy. At the heart
of this pedagogical work is a commitment to
working with young people as co-researchers/
participants capable of producing knowledge
relevant to their own lives and circumstances
(Cammarota and Fine, 2008). These ‘warrior
intellectuals’, as Kincheloe describes them,
develop the ability to think critically and ana-
lytically and in the process ‘use their imagina-
tion to transcend the trap of traditional gender,
racial, sexual, and class-based stereotypes and
the harm they cause’ (2009: 388).
In Section XII: Science, Ecology
and Wellbeing, section editor Renee
Desmarchelier sets the scene by calling out
the challenges facing the planet, human soci-
eties, the natural environment and individu-
als. She goes on to argue that what is required
is a fundamental shift away from dominant
ways of knowing in the Western scientific
tradition of positivist epistemologies and
cultural imperialism and towards cultivating
the different ways of knowing found in mar-
ginalized and subjugated knowledges of the
oppressed. The authors in this section take
up the challenge by providing a critique of
the dominant approaches to science educa-
tion. They use the lens of feminist readings
as well as developing alternative approaches
to an ecological pedagogy of joy, health and
well-being.
IN READING THESE VOLUMES
As editors and authors, we do not endeavor
to name, define nor place critical pedagogy.
Rather, we have attempted to collect the
works, stories and research of those who
engage within the tentative notion of critical-
izing education both in and out of schools.
We hope for a fluidity of thought within our
work and honour Freire’s intent to create an
ongoing dialogue which we continue to
revise, augment, argue with, contemplate and
celebrate. Critical pedagogy did not evolve
to become orthodox; indeed, we embrace the
unorthodox and hope to add to these pedago-
gies as they continue to evolve and develop.
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Indigenous Ways of Knowing
More than a decade ago The Handbook of
Critical and Indigenous Methodologies recog-
nized the alignments between critical inquiry,
counter-hegemonic democracy and Indigenous
ways of knowing. In looking at critical
approaches to research as a way to counter
growing Euro/Americentrism, neoliberalism
and globalism, the book’s editors wrote about
how emancipatory pedagogies move ‘directly
into the spaces of indigenous peoples’ (Denzin
et al., 2008: 28). One of its chapters,
‘Indigenous Knowledges in Education:
Complexities, Dangers and Profound Benefits’
(Kincheloe and Steinberg, 2008) is most rele-
vant to this section of our book. Moving
beyond research methodology per se, it fore-
saw the vital alignments that now manifest in
the decolonizing and Indigenizing movements
in education, while also being aware of its
slippery slopes. Beyond any romantic idea-
tion, there is the reality Indigenous knowledge
too often becomes viewed by ‘agents of
Empire’ as a threat and/or as a commodity.
SECTION V
Four Arrows and R. Michael Fisher
They write about a critical ‘multilogical con-
text’ for knowledge, in which Indigenous
knowing is accessed sensitively and produced
both to allow for Indigenous emancipation,
while at the same time providing ‘compelling
insights into all domains of human endeavor…
and to provide acumen in dealing with the
challenges of contemporary existence’
(Kincheloe and Steinberg, 2008: 135).
Indigenous knowledge and knowing are
essential steps towards the deeper core pur-
pose of ethical and authentic epistemologies
and pedagogies of understanding in a holistic-
integral way (Meyer, 2008). In adjoining
critical pedagogy, critical multilogicality and
Indigenous worldview as contexts, Kincheloe
and Steinberg advised that the purpose of
Indigenous ways of knowing and contem-
porary Indigenous education and research
overall do not get trapped in trying to ‘save’
Indigenous people but help ‘construct condi-
tions that allow for indigenous self-­sufficiency
while learning from the vast storehouse of
548 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
indigenous knowledges’ (Kincheloe and
Steinberg, 2008: 135), which are increas-
ingly required as humanity faces impending
and cascading crises on Mother Earth today.
If we think of critical pedagogy as becoming
critically conscious of schooling’s hegemonic
goals, then we might consider Indigenous
knowledges as ways to replace such goals with
multi-dimensional morality on behalf of inter-
connectedness and reciprocity.
The chapters in Section V about critical,
moral, sustaining, dancing and resistive ways
of knowing well embody and reflect for future
generations the wisdom that guided human-
ity for 99% of human existence. However,
they can no longer be considered as merely
early warnings about such challenges ahead.
Indigenous knowledges that have been ignored
for far too long are now vitally needed for
human survival. Noam Chomsky, Professor
Emeritus at MIT and Laureate professor at the
University of Arizona, and the leading social
critic of our times, stated it bluntly in a back-
cover review of Teaching Truly: A Curriculum
to Indigenize Mainstream Education (Four
Arrows et al., 2013): ‘[T]he grim prognosis
for life on this planet is the consequence of
a few centuries of forgetting what traditional
societies knew and the surviving ones still
recognize….This must be one of our highest
values or we are all doomed’.
Chomsky, a pioneering linguist, does not
use the word ‘doomed’ lightly. Indeed, today
many top scientists of the Anthropocene ar-
gue that even saying we are entering into a
sixth mass extinction fails to capture the true
extent of the problems we are facing today.
For example, a 2017 study published by the
National Academy of Sciences (Ceballos
et al., 2017) wrote that ‘biological annihila-
tion’ is a more appropriate term. The study
reveals that a third of vertebrate animal spe-
cies have seen their ranges seriously shrunk
and populations diminished over the last
century. Large regions in all continents have
lost 50% or more of their populations of the
studied mammals. In their ground-breaking
study, Strona and Bradshaw (2018) described
how ‘co-extinction processes’ and ecologi-
cal dependencies amplify the direct effects
of environmental change on the collapse of
planetary diversity by up to 10 times what
has been previously predicted.
Thus we offer this small section on Indigenous
Ways of Knowing as part of our Handbook of
Critical Pedagogies, with the reminder that
our educational systems can no longer look at
‘decolonizing’ and ‘Indigenizing’ education
nor at critical pedagogy and counter-­hegemonic
democracy education without a serious and
courageous commitment to re-adopting our
planet’s Indigenous worldview. We can no
longer allow legitimate concerns about misap-
propriating traditional ways or feel that non-
Indian scholars have no right to promote them.
If ever there was a reason to expand uncompro-
misingly the Lakota prayer Mitakuye Oyasin
and its recognition that we are all related and
interdependent, it is now. The ‘compelling
insights into all domains of human endeavor’
that Kincheloe and Steinberg considered in
2008 are now imperative requirements for our
collective survival. For all the critical peda-
gogues who have selected this important hand-
book for studying and implementing, we share
this section with you to show some ways that
our Indigenous wisdom is inseparable from the
goals of critical pedagogy.
This sense of urgency for all educators to
adopt Indigenous worldview precepts without
letting the challenges of the ‘dangers and com-
plexities’ prevent so doing does not mean we
recommend ignoring the rights of Indigenous
Peoples. To the contrary, re-Indigenizing our
systems is a both/and proposition. Indigenous
rights, territories and sovereignty must be an
equal commitment. Respect for those who still
speak their original languages and have not lost
traditional place-based knowledge demands we
seek out, as priority, their counsel. However,
the urgency and practicality is that all of us
who are ‘Indigenous’ to this planet must move
into place-based knowledges (Cajete, 1999) by
starting with those common worldview pre-
cepts that the great variety of First Nations offer.
For example, we refer to Indigenous alternatives
 Indigenous Ways of Knowing
to anthropocentrism; fear-based motivation;
loss of generosity as a priority; deceitfulness;
male-dominance; conflict resolution as other
than return to community; complementarity,
and many more that are addressed in books
such as Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First-
Nation Know-How for Global Flourishing
(Narvaez et al., 2019) and Sacred Instructions:
Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-based
Change (Mitchell and Dossey, 2018) and
via resources such as the Global Center for
Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways.
REFERENCES
Cajete, G. (Ed.) (1999). A people’s ecology.
Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.
Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P. R., & Dirzo, R. (July,
2017). Biological annihilation via the ongoing
sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate
population losses and declines. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, 114 (30)
E6089–E6096; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/
pnas.1704949114
Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S. & Smith, L. T. (2008).
The handbook of critical and indigenous
methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
549
Four Arrows (aka Jacobs, D. T.) (with England-
Aytes, K., Cajete, G., Fisher, R. M., Mann, B. A.,
McGaa, E. & Sorensen, M.) (2013). Teaching
truly: A curriculum to Indigenize mainstream
education. New York: Peter Lang.
Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (2008).
Indigenous knowledges in education:
Complexities, dangers and profound benefits.
In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln & L. Smith (Eds.),
The handbook of critical and indigenous
methodologies (pp. 135–48). Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Meyer, M. A. (2008). Indigenous and authentic:
Hawaiian epistemology and the triangulation
of meaning. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln &
L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and
indigenous methodologies (pp. 217–32).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Mitchell, S., & Dossey, L. (2018). Sacred
instructions: Indigenous wisdom for living
Spirit-based change. Berkeley, CA: North
Atlantic Books.
Narvaez, D., Four Arrows, Halton, E., Collier, B., &
Enderle, G. (Eds.) (2019). Indigenous
sustainable wisdom: First-nation know-how
for global flourishing. New York: Peter Lang.
Strona, G., & Bradshaw, C. (November, 2018).
Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life
during extreme environmental change.
Scientific Reports 8 (16724). https://www.
nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35068-1
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Indigenizing Conscientization and
Critical Pedagogy: Integrating
Nature, Spirit and Fearlessness as
Foundational Concepts
R. Michael Fisher and Four Arrows
INTRODUCTION
Critical philosophy, theory and its concomi-
tant liberation pedagogies are a wonderful
means designed for good ends. Yet, when left
unquestioned or unchanged they may carry
dubious worldview assumptions and ideologi-
cal inscriptions that do not fully serve worthy
intentions, or may even undermine them. Like
any emancipatory praxis, Critical pedagogy
(CP) requires rigorous ongoing consideration
of relationships that are not routinely intrinsic
to the ‘dominant worldview’ (e.g., Four
Arrows, 2016a) that birthed CP. Such relations
invoke due diligent response-ability to all
stakeholders, including humans, other-than-
humans, the eco-commons and the whole of
the Natural world. This more holistic respon-
sibility is inherent in the ‘Indigenous world-
view’ (e.g., Four Arrows, 2016a). Four Arrows
noted that ‘Christopher Columbus even while
he was initiating his genocidal policies [wrote
of the Indigenous people] “They are the best
people in the world, and the sanest. They love
50
their neighbors as themselves”’ (Setién, 1999:
50; cited in Four Arrows and Miller, 2012: 9).
Such neighborly embracing all relations for
equitable consideration is characteristically
devalued and sadly under-represented in
modern technological societies, and too often
by CP theory and practice.
Critical theories of development and learn-
ing also require a transformation in the direc-
tion that truly values the spiritual dimension,
which includes what Abram (1997: 7) refers
to as ‘more-than-human worlds’ undergirding
human knowing and existence on this planet.
With current accelerated conditions tipping
toward chaotic unsustainability of social and
ecological life systems, the naming of the
Anthropocene era by scientists (e.g., Davies,
2016), among other factors disturbing and vio-
lent that we witness each day, there needs to
be conscious decolonizing initiatives to ensure
equitable and ‘ethical space’ (Ermine, 2007) is
created within CP discourses for engaging all
cooperating and contesting voices and perspec-
tives. This process includes those perspectives
552 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

negated and relegated to the CP shadows of the theory’ (Four Arrows and Miller, 2012: 6) and
hegemonic approaches to CP (e.g., Freirean- self-reflective ‘metacognitive device’ (Four
based), of which a number of critics of CP Arrows, 2016b: 4) that describes a predator
have previously described, as we reveal later. (CAT) and its potential prey (FAWN) oper-
We believe, for example, Henry A. Giroux, ating with a dialectic bonding of a hyphen-
a leading Freirean critical theorist-pedagogue, ated form. This indicates a basic integration
made a good recent attempt to upgrade CP by of opposites in complementarity – being a
identifying five core ‘registers’ for today’s com-
foundational principle of the ‘Indigenous
plex cultural politics and anti-oppression work worldview’ and its central valuation of
(Jandric and Giroux, 2015). These also speak balance and harmony as he has described
to our concerns as critical educators/activists.(e.g., Four Arrows, 2016a).
However, even these omit foundational aspects, CAT refers to a heightened state of con-
among them the absent declaration of the cru- sciousness/awareness, which can be induced
cial role of Nature, spirituality, Fearlessness,by varied stimuli and situations, for exam-
Indigenous Peoples and the more-than-human ple, meditation, singing, dreaming and/or a
aspects that co-inhabit Mother Earth. To begin shock. Fear (and/or trauma) is a large cause
to remedy this absence, we offer a unique com- of CAT as well, and constitutes the ‘F’ factor/
plementary set of five core Indigenous-based force in FAWN. Because of his training as a
‘precepts’, what Four Arrows (2016a: 2) calls hypnotherapist, animal trainer and athletic
CAT-FAWN perspective, in order to enhance performance coach, Four Arrows, like the
CP theory and praxis, while enabling modern Indigenous Peoples of the ‘old ways’ in pre-
humans to better face the near future chal- point of departure times2, knows that when
lenges of cascading calamity. people are in CAT they are in a light-to-heavy
trance. At this time, the human brain (includ-
ing the brain of other-than-humans) is hard-
wired to attend with extra-sensory awareness
OVERVIEW OF CAT-FAWN to the subtle and gestalt ‘co-conscious’ com-
munications and realities (Jacobs, 1998: 139,
CAT-FAWN consists of five primary ‘pre- 144) of one’s self/environment and does so
cepts’ grounded in traditional understandings initially, virtually unconsciously.
from Indigenous cultures operating from CAT has inherent positive potential to con-
within a general Indigenous worldview1: nect with and produce what Four Arrows calls
(1) Trance-based learning and CAT = ‘primal awareness’ and/or intimate connec-
Concentration Activated Transformation, tivity to Nature’s teachings and wisdom. It
(2) Fear (including courage and Fearlessness), catalyzes a healthy preparatory state of action,
(3) External Authority (including self-­ for example, a fight–flight reaction among
authority), (4) Words (including communica- other possibilities – all intended for qual-
tive expressions like language, art, music) and ity (non-Fear-based) ‘Defense Intelligence’
(5) Nature (through engagement with the via growth-based operations via the ‘spirit
Natural world) (Four Arrows, 2016a: 2). of Fearlessness’ (see Fisher, 2010: 231, xvii,
Some will intuitively recognize what CAT- respectively). And bottom line, CAT catalyzes
FAWN is and may use it, typically only in basic survival strategies, if needed. Instinct,
part, without naming it, and often without intuition and primal awareness intertwining
even knowing it. Thirty years in its develop- are core processes to CAT, as are hypnosis
ment, according to its conceptual originator and/or ‘Trance-based Learning’ (TBL) (Four
(Four Arrows aka Don Trent Jacobs), CAT- Arrows, 2016a: chapter one). Through CAT,
FAWN is a mnemonic metaphor, a new ‘the- we are heightened in potentia for transforma-
ory of mind’ (Jacobs, 1998: 130), ‘visionary tive learning, growth, healing and survival.
 INDIGENIZING CONSCIENTIZATION AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
However, Four Arrows claims that the
problem comes when we enter CAT (trance)
without noticing or knowing what is causing
it. Thus, if largely unconscious to CAT, we are
highly susceptible to inputs from the environ-
ment that may condition us – that is, hypnotize
us and implant ‘messages’ that are harmful
to us. These trance-based messages, even
when unconscious and subliminal, are deeply
memorized and held in the nervous system,
so goes the theory of hypnosis in a nutshell.
A quick example of creating a negative CAT
in the child is when a frustrated parent first
scares a child, say by unexpectedly yelling at
them with loud anger, and follows by telling
the child they are stupid. It is unfortunately so
common today. We also have the equivalent
of this negative (Fear-based) CAT patterning
of TBL happening in societies as a whole; for
example, the media showing repetitive and
traumatizing images of the 9/11 World Trade
Center towers on fire and collapsing. Then
media, and nation’s presidents and/or dicta-
tors, give ‘messages’ (i.e., propaganda) when
people are in a shock state. They construct
a cultural trance. Messages driven into our
systems by these means, like most traumatic
events, are very difficult to change and, worse
yet, the ‘bad’ messages continue to negatively
influence our general perception, affect, atti-
tude, values, beliefs, thinking and behaviors
for a lifetime in some cases. Oppression–
repression dynamics, for the most part, are
intimately linked with this negative (Fear-
based) mostly unconscious CAT experience.
The world requires a systematic restorative
and transformative curriculum/pedagogy of
conscious de-hypnotizing and concomitant
decolonizing, which first involves better man-
aging the TBL hypnotic messages implanted
and, second, learning a ‘de-hypnotizing
technology’ (e.g., CAT-FAW/N, according
to Fisher, 2017a). ‘We can learn to avoid
such misleading influences and use them to
work for us’ (Jacobs, 1998: 148). This effort
would offer a way to resist colonizing mes-
sages via re-circuiting the unwanted nega-
tive (Fear-based) TBL messages that lie. As
553
well, self-empowered active agents/learners
can put in place new positive (love-based)
messages that speak truth when in states of
CAT, and thus invigorating courage and even
Fearlessness as their modus operandi. The
aim is for one to learn how to bring about
CAT and/or how to recognize it when it occurs
spontaneously in daily life. ‘[I]t does appear
that Indigenous people whose primal aware-
ness of the CAT-FAWN concept has been sus-
tained, generally do not expose their children
to such ideas [like negative use of shock and
fear as punishment]’ (Jacobs, 1998: 160).
Appropriate advocacy and implementation
of CAT (TBL) is not merely a technique or
method but as an epistemologically ‘virtuous’3
way of critical reflection. It is held-up to the
context of a ‘primal model’, as Four Arrows
cautions those who are merely looking for tech-
niques and do not look deeper and/or embrace
the Indigenous worldview and its most expert
practitioners, that is ‘primal people’:
Using primal people to exemplify the importance of
CAT awareness for significant learning is appropri-
ate only if we agree that traditional Indigenous
people were and are relatively successful in learning
to live harmoniously. Some people do not agree
with such assertions. (Jacobs, 1998: 148)
An eclectic life-long learner and practitioner,
Four Arrows draws on several career tracks
and diverse interdisciplinary knowledge,
knowing and understanding to offer his find-
ings. Although implicit CAT-FAWN dynam-
ics are ancient, tried and true by Indigenous
Peoples, the new elaborated synthesis by Four
Arrows is the result of new scientific knowl-
edge on the brain, emergency management
training, psychological clinical knowledge,
animal and athletic performance training,
ethnographic research with Mexican Rarámuri
shamans and other practices from spiritual-
based Indigenous wisdom teachings com-
bined. In this sense, CAT ought to be seen as
sacred within the spiritual context of ances-
tors, including ‘all relations’ as teachers of
how best to survive within the laws of Mother
Earth. How different parenting, schooling and
554 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
CP would be, for example, if they took shape
under this respectful ancestral legacy within
the Indigenous worldview.
With limited space in this brief summary,
we turn to the other half of the mnemonic –
FAWN. Literally, F = Fear, A = Authority, W =
Word(s) (and music) and N = Nature. This
stands for what Indigenous Peoples of the
‘old ways’ always knew were ‘four influ-
ences on CAT’ (Four Arrows, 2016b: 7) that
shape our lives, for good or ill, depending on
our awareness and skillful management of
them. Fear (with a capital)4 is taken as very
primal (‘a major force’, wrote Jacobs, 1998:
157) in both inducing CAT and joining with
CAT (e.g., CAT-Fear) as a powerful twosome
able to bring about amazing courage as a vir-
tue (for example) or just as easily to bring
about panic and (Fear-based) ‘rationality’
(= irrationality) as a vice. Great character/­values
are built on the former and shabby destructive
values built on the latter. To reach our highest
human potential(s) one has to learn to manage
CAT-Fear well by ‘becoming ­connoisseurs of
Fear’ (Jacobs, 1998: 156) – without doing so,
this can undermine all the good potentials of
the other four major forces/precepts. At the
collective level, without a quality holistic-­
integral and critical Fear management/educa-
tion, the result is a contaminating ‘culture of
fear’ dynamic that Fisher (2007/2011), for
example, has documented to be a serious con-
cern of many critical educators today.
Authority is also very powerful because it
can use Words (for example) to hypnotize.
Four Arrows concluded that
Words are powerful. Word power, [is recognized]
both [by] the Indigenous and the western
approaches to language. [and] ultimately find[s]
their source of power in CAT. Whether an illusion
or an enhancement of reality, the potency of
Words comes from their [cross-] influence on
Concentration Activated Transformation [and, he
cautions that coerced] persuasion or deception is
most effective when used in the light of [excess]
Fear and Authority. (Jacobs, 1998: 204–5)
Humans as a social species are particularly
hard-wired through evolution to follow
authoritative (powerful) individuals, groups,
organizations, nations and ideologies.
Therefore, one has to be very aware when in
a CAT state of consciousness of their rela-
tionships going on via CAT-Authority and
CAT-Word, in order to ensure positive learn-
ing, growth and healing outcomes. Equally,
CP has to be very aware of the pedagogue’s
power-differential to learners and how CAT
(TBL and hypnosis) may be un-carefully and
unconsciously utilized to negatively promote
CP agendas and hidden ideologies.
The last of the five precepts or forces
of this de-hypnotizing technology is most
foundational to the entire CAT-FAW com-
plex. Fisher (2017a) prefers to write the
formula (theory) as CAT-FAW/N. Which is
saying that the common denominator and
most influential factor is N = Nature. It is
the most encompassing macro-level benign
aspect of the Natural forces that can res-
cue, resist and renew our being from the
onslaught of Cultural oppression–­repression
dynamics. And the legacy of the West’s over-­
dominating treatment of Nature has not been
good, as the progressive theologian-psychol-
ogist Sam Keen once wrote: ‘One way to
define modernity is to trace the process by
which nature has been desacralized and God
has moved indoors’ (cited in Jacobs, 1998:
224). Although the Indigenous worldview
and CAT-FAWN’s ideal philosophy posi-
tions the Natural and Cultural domains as
one continuum not separate, Four Arrows’
research indicates a strong trend historically
that many Indigenous Peoples recognized
the problematic relationship even before
the point of departure. Cultural processes
embedded within egocentric and/or ethno-
centric consciousness (e.g., see Wilber, 1995)
create potential dissociation of Culture from
Nature. This easily leads to Fear-based mis-
guided and unhealthy (even pathological)
results. Four Arrows (2016b: 1) wrote:
Indigenous-based virtues can better link human
culture to nature rather than continuing an attitude
of separation [where Cultural values and laws are
privileged over Natural values and laws].
 INDIGENIZING CONSCIENTIZATION AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
Without more detailed reasons for articulat-
ing Nature as the common restorative denom-
inator, many of us know how powerful it can
be to connect with Nature when we are ‘off-
center’ or ‘hurting’ and/or ‘terrified’ by the
human institutionalized oppressive world.
Few modern non-Indigenous people go further
to adopt Nature as ultimate ‘teacher’. The
Natural world, in general, is our benign
‘Mother’ (Source) for earthlings. Today some
eco-groups of modern people know this, as
well as the Indigenous Peoples of this planet
that have lived in relative harmony with Nature
‘for “99%” of human history’ (Narvaez, 2013;
cited in Four Arrows, 2016b: 2), which is the
basic premise supporting Four Arrows’ ‘point
of departure theory’ (Four Arrows, 2016a: 5)
and CAT-FAW/N praxis.
In summary, humans, especially during
the point of departure era, are easily uncon-
sciously hypnotized. When FAW/N connec-
tion is utilized in ‘good’ (positive) ways for
recovery, healing, growth and transforma-
tion, then we mature as integrated healthy,
relatively liberated and sane humans. When
FAW/N is made meaning of and utilized in
‘bad’ (negative) destructive ways for creat-
ing anxiety and oppressive control, order,
manipulation tactics etc., then we shrink and
remain immature and very dubious creatures
with seemingly only self-centered interests
and a relative floating and undependable
moral compass. As authors/teachers we know
modern humans can do better than fall ‘vic-
tim’ to hypnotic TBL, especially of ill-intent.
We may get ‘caught’ now and then – but then
catch ourselves and use the CAT-FAW/N
mnemonic to recall what we need to do to
unravel any potential destructive hypnosis
going on, consciously or otherwise. It is not
paranoid, we don’t think, to assume that most
leaders of the dominant worldview already
well know how to control and manipulate by
creating CAT and using FAW/N negatively
with it (e.g., propaganda). We invoke read-
ers to co-participate in critically asking why
they believe what they believe – as essential
to the Indigenizing of CP, and envisioning a
555
renewed perception of Paulo Freire’s consci-
entização (i.e., critical consciousness) as core
to CP praxis.
Four Arrows (2016b) concluded that,
[i]n order to rebalance world systems, an effective
solution starts with realizing why we believe what
we believe.… Recognizing and implementing the
ancient pre-departure beliefs will enable us to
understand that we are truly connected, and allow
us to realize peace, respect, and sustainability
again for the benefit of all human and non-human
beings. It would be a mind shift from mutually
assured destruction to mutually assured survival.
… Our worldview, not our technologies, can save
us. (2016b: 4, 11–12)
CAT-FAW/N MITIGATES 12 GENERAL
CRITIQUES OF FREIREAN-BASED CP
Some of our specific concerns of the signifi-
cant bias of Freirean-based CP and conscienti-
zation have, in part, been covered in critiques
already published: for example, Bell and
Russell (2000), Bowers and Apffel-Marglin
(2005), hooks (1993), Ohliger (1995). For pur-
poses of this article, we offer our own brief
interpretations of some of these critiques of CP
based on our hybrid renderings of Indigenizing
and Fearlessnessizing. Overall, we identify 12
thematic interrelated critiques below, of which
we briefly apply our critique via an Indigenous
worldview and CAT-FAW/N.
CP and Freirean-based conscientization has
1 an absence of an authentic and reliable broad
‘spiritual’ interconnectedness woven into its phi-
losophy and psychology, which gives inadequate
attention to the communications from and within
the ‘invisible world’. In Indigenous thinking, the
invisible world refers to power (i.e., knowledge,
knowing, understanding5) accessed via dreams,
ceremony, visions, intuition, spirit energies, non-
explainable feelings for decision-making based
on reciprocity with the Natural world, etc. CAT-
FAW/N offers opportunities for accessing all of
these. Realizing that non-consensual reality via
alternative consciousness opens doors to medita-
tive or hypnotic beliefs can open doors not only
556 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
to unconscious interpretations from past ‘visible’
experiences, but also from such other sources as
are listed above. Additionally, reasons for Fear,
acceptance of Authority figures, the power of
Word vibrations and the teachings of the Natural
world as represented by engaging FAW/N and
its connection to CAT open doors for intentional
access to a more spiritual-based partnership with
critical thinking and teaching.
2 shown it believes and privileges critical rational
reflections and literacy as more important than
sharing traditional sacred wisdom across genera-
tions and traditions. Sacred Indigenous wisdom
gives ultimate Authority to one’s own honest
reflections on lived experience, including the
ethical imperative for truthfulness when using
Words. Sacred wisdom also reveals that quality
holistic learning must take place via different
brainwave frequencies and/or levels of con-
sciousness/awareness, such as that achieved via
disciplined and intentional use of ceremony.
3 an absence of a learning theory that recognizes
and values Trance-based Learning (TBL) and
CAT. CP relies almost exclusively on cognitive
skills; although it fully recognizes the influence
of hegemony and the consequences of uncriti-
cal acceptance of its message, it assumes that
hegemony can be overcome by pedagogy based
on critical thinking alone. CAT-FAW/N shows
that both cognitive and hypnotic (or TBL) work
are equally required in decolonizing not only our
minds but the unconscious deeper dynamics of a
colonizing worldview.
4 not critically investigated beliefs about ‘primal
awareness’ and the holistic integration of the
five ‘precepts’ (i.e., CAT-FAW/N) dynamic in lib-
eration work. With a notable exception in Joe
Kincheloe’s approach to CP (it is no coincidence
that he deeply embraced Indigenous perspec-
tives), there is virtually no systematic engage-
ment with notions of primal awareness and/or
TBL as a way to tap into ancient natural instincts/
wisdom for understanding and transforming
oppression and injustice. Although Kincheloe
(2008) wrote about ‘fourth dimension research’
that incorporated intuition and consciousness as
a human construction guided by some epistemo-
logical assumptions of a Western worldview, he
did not go as far as to make specific connections
to TBL and its relationship to CAT-FAW/N technol-
ogy in whole or in part per se. As referenced in
the next critique, Bell and Russell rightly note the
problem of ignoring other-than-human aspects
in CP; there is not a practical integration via
unconscious learning, primal awareness, and
an understanding of Fear, Authorship, Words or
Nature that leads to a significant way to reduce
humanism in CP.
5 been overly biased in the ‘dominant worldview’
and reflective thinking, infiltrated with and repro-
ductive of insidious anthropocentricism. Bell
and Russell (2000: 188) concluded that ‘critical
pedagogy, even as inflected by certain postruc-
turalisms, tends to reinforce rather than sub-
vert deep-seated humanist assumptions about
humans and nature by taking for granted the
borders that define nature as the devalued Other’.
Albeit a laudable effort to direct CP away from
total dependency on the dominant worldview,
there is no referencing to the ancient alternative
non-anthropocentric worldview that guided us
for 99% of human history. A more embracing
complementarity with the Indigenous worldview
is needed as relates to all five precepts of the
CAT-FAW/N metacognitive/TBL tool.
6 overly supported Eurocentric humanistic-based
Western Enlightenment individualism. Western
and Indigenous cultures are often contrasted, with
the former being considered individualistic and
the latter being collectivistic. However, in actuality
Indigenous cultures emphasize a strong individual
autonomy and independence (self-authorship) far
more than most dominant worldview cultures. The
difference is that Western mainstream thinking
prioritizes individualistic goals for the sake of the
individual in a cultural hierarchal system, while
Indigenous thinking emphasizes individualistic
goals for the sake of the group in a non-hierarchal
cultural system that cherishes independent think-
ing. CAT-FAW/N epitomizes such independent
thinking by taking control of how hypnotic man-
dates, conscious and unconscious, from external
Authority and concomitant Fear-based vulner-
ability, make people overly dependent on the will
of others. The emphasis on the teachings and
alignment with Nature, on the other hand, brings
critical awareness (and a revised CP) to a place
where all living beings are seen as equal and
worth respecting as opposed to an exclusive
emphasis on humans and their goals.
7 emphasized and inflated a ‘Solar’ (e.g., phallo-
centric) archetypal patterning over a ‘Lunar’ (e.g.,
matrixial feminine6) patterning. ‘Twin-hero’ arche-
typal and mythic stories in dominant cultures
 INDIGENIZING CONSCIENTIZATION AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
historically over-emphasize the value and power
of the Solar dynamic and suppress the Lunar. The
solar twin sometimes even murders the lunar,
as in Cain and Abel or Romulus and Remus.
Hercules is famous for his physical strength but
his maternal half-twin Iphicles, who was known
for the strength of his soul, is virtually unheard
of in history books and today. In Indigenous
cultures, twin-hero stories also abound but in
them the twins work according to strong com-
plementary partnerships, as with the Navajo story
of Monster Slayer and Child Born of the Water.
Such complementarity rarely emerges within CP,
which tends to look at relationships involved with
injustice and oppression through an ‘us versus
them’ binary lens. For example, using CAT-FAW/N,
whereby one asks: What Authority and practices
have diminished my ‘balance’ of self-Authorizing
and other-Authorizing, my balance of ego and
soul, of masculine and feminine – and, what
is required to restore ultimately a radical trust
in the universe? The process is one of moving
toward a complementary of relationships, even
those that seem polarized, such as victims and
oppressors.
8 assumed and supported modernism and the
acceptance of a colonial-influenced conceptual
imaginary of political hierarchies across evolu-
tionary, historical and developmental strands
of ontological existence. CP tends to critically
conceptualize social systems as hierarchical edu-
cational hegemony, which tries to rationalize the
power inequities it causes until oppressed indi-
viduals learn to recognize their false understand-
ings or consciousness. CP thus sees problems of
injustice shaped exclusively by power-politics
and hegemony. The Indigenous worldview rather
focuses on the powerful interactive influences
(individually and collectively) of Fear, Authority,
Words and Nature in regard to an ontologi-
cal and epistemological basis for learning and
resistance that largely relates to the problem of
unawareness of TBL dynamics (CAT) in the trans-
formation and liberation process.
9 assumed Indigenous (primal, original) cultures,
as a perceived ‘marginalized’ and ‘victimized’
category/group (‘the Other’), are too distraught,
unaware, disempowered (oppressed) to liberate
themselves (e.g., Freire and Macedo, 1987: 55).
Certainly a number of CP theorists have chal-
lenged this, notably Kincheloe and Steinberg
(2008) and Grande (2015). However, in spite
557
of calling for recognition of place-based under-
standings and honoring the power of Indigenous
identity as a force to be respected, ways for
accommodating both Indigenous and non-Native
Peoples to actually use Indigenous worldview
for such liberating transformations such as via
CAT-FAW/N do not effectively emerge from such
prior challenges.
10 privileged the non-Indigenous teacher-intellectual
(pedagogue) over the learner in finding lib-
eration. CAT-FAW/N distinctly challenges this
general CP approach with its focus on criti-
cal reflection and pedagogical and intellectual
dependence on external Authority figures (e.g.,
CP ‘teachers’ and ‘theorists’) for the ‘best’ way
to liberation. Self-autonomy for the community,
with elder ‘teachers’ of many kinds, including
the invisible ancestors and Nature, are primary
guides of the ‘best’ way to liberation.
11 over-emphasized the humanistic and/or
Christian religious virtues of human ‘love’ and
its concomitant conceptualization(s) of ‘hope’.
Writing on the negative influence of colonial
Christianity and the stifling of Indigenous political
will, Four Arrows (2014: 4) wrote: ‘Unremitting
evangelism and Christian hegemony has led to
silencing or compromising authentic grassroots
voices of too many Indigenous people’. Equally,
‘Probably one of the most prominent commissions
in the critical pedagogical approach to education
at this juncture of its formation is the lack
of attention to ecological [and Indigenous]
issues’, as O’Sullivan (2009: 411) concluded.
Citing authors including Robert Warrior and
Waziyatawin, Four Arrows (2014) made the point
that the codified sanctions of species-hierarchies
that place humans (and their love and hope)
above non-humans in the world continue to
block any legitimate liberation of Indigenous
Peoples. Although CAT-FAW/N does not
specifically refer to this, making the connection
between Nature and use of ‘fearless’ learning
from the greater-than-human other ‘teachers’
automatically mitigates the anthropocentric
problems inherent in a too easy acceptance by
CP with its underlying Christian affiliations and
concomitant biased conceptualizations of love
and hope.7 Liberation via an Indigenous way
requires a deconstruction and reconstruction of
such concepts, with a more nuanced and critical
understanding of Fear and Fearlessness (see
point 12) via CAT-FAW/N.
558 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
12 left a paucity of specificity and nuance regarding
the complex, dialectical, critical and postmodern
(i.e., integral-holistic) conceptualization of Fear
(‘Fear’) and Fearlessness in liberation work. With
a 21st-century reconceptualist curriculum called
for, within the insidious context of a rapidly bur-
geoning ‘culture of fear’, Fisher (2006) proposed
a new field of ‘Fear’ Studies as a way to a radical
ethical revision of modernist notions of ‘emotion’
generally, while offering attention to the power-
ful role of fear (‘fear’) specifically, in the 21st
century. Despite Freire’s insistence on ‘the over-
riding necessity of [radical] love. … his account of
emotion – and its relationship to reason [and cul-
ture] – remains underdeveloped’ (Roberts, 2010:
18–19). Fisher (2017b) posited Fearlessness as
the needed trialectic aspect between CP’s binary
dialectic discourses on Love and Fear. CAT-FAW/N
is a potent complex and nuanced theory of
Fear unlike any other available and literally and
metaphorically constitutes a 21st-century ‘”fear”
vaccine’ (Fisher, 2016). Fearlessnessizing CP, like
Indigenizing CP, ought to involve the Indigenous-
based conception of understanding, at least,
that Fear is best understood as a dynamic part
of a FAW/N dynamic related to CAT and TBL. Its
liberation aim is: (a) a behavioral turning of Fear
into a virtue, (b) taking a soul-path of becoming a
‘connoisseur of Fear’, whereby All beings, visible
and invisible, dead or alive (and Nature itself),
serve as our best Fear management/transfor-
mation ‘teachers’ (Jacobs, 1998: chapter eight)
and (c) developing a concomitant Indigenous
conception of Fear, courage and Fearlessness
(Four Arrows, 2016a: chapter two). The ‘spirit of
fearlessness’ (Fisher, 2010: 109), which Freirean
conscientization omits (theoretically), invokes a
radical trust in the universe that is the highest
path on behalf of peaceful relations with All.
CONCLUSION
This chapter is based on an Indigenous per-
spective and an underpinning sense of urgency
to recalibrate Western assumptions behind CP
in general. We offer 12 themes of critique
with indicators of how to proceed with five
‘precepts’ (Four Arrows’ CAT-FAW/N theory/
praxis) for Indigenizing and Fearlessnessizing
CP. In doing so we realize we have targeted
Freire’s foundations for CP to a large degree,
in spite of a number of subsequent enhance-
ments. Yet we believe the 12 themes incorpo-
rate a selection of issues that are problematic
to CP effectiveness because they share the
dominant worldview that is challenged by
Indigenous worldview.
Some see the diversity of Western perspec-
tives as positive. Roberts (2010: 1), for exam-
ple, suggested: ‘Freire’s work provides fertile
territory for [critical] reflection and investiga-
tion from a variety of perspectives and disci-
plines’. Referring to a field of study allowing
for ‘a variety of’ perspectives, however, does
not in itself take us to any deeper decolonizing
assessment of CP and its role in transforma-
tion and liberation in the cascading crises of
the 21st century. Such Western modern and
postmodernist expressions of ‘inclusion’ via
pluralism are thus inadequate for address-
ing the deeper ethical problem of misguided
‘worldviews’. Pierotti (2010: 205) wrote:
The future of Indigenous Peoples lies not in the
greed – and fear-based concepts of the Renaissance
and the ‘Enlightenment’ of Western European
tradition, which are likely to lead the human spe-
cies to destruction. … There is much work to be
done wresting Indigenous studies programs from
the underlying philosophy and worldview to which
the American university typically conforms. We
propose this wresting is equally or even more
important as relates to all people and to all levels
and kinds of education.
CP and Freirean conscientization must face
the difficult reality that only one (original)
worldview (the Indigenous) is a healing par-
adigm; all others are coping paradigms – the
latter too often end up reproducing the same
problems as those CP sets out to resolve. As
a way to begin embracing a pragmatic shift
in CP and education, we propose the meta-
cognitive device CAT-FAW/N, which can
bring an authentic place-based orientation as
a way that rebalances life systems. An
Indigenous (e.g., Jacobsian) conscientization
complements and rebalances Freirean con-
scientization and CP.
 INDIGENIZING CONSCIENTIZATION AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
Notes
1  With acknowledgement that it is problematic
to use any generic label for diverse multiplicities
among Indigenous Peoples – for example, poten-
tially stereotyping and reproducing a destructive
monocultural/colonialist perception for readers of
any group of peoples, their cultures, and identi-
ties – Four Arrows, as an Indigenous scholar, has
carefully gathered research from many Indigenous
people and scholars in order to create some uni-
versal ‘truths’ about what can be called a generic
(pre-point of departure) ‘Indigenous worldview’.
See Four Arrows (2016a: 3–7) for a summary of
characteristics of ‘Indigenous worldview’ (contra
‘dominant worldview’), and rationale and clarify-
ing citations from other scholars regarding the
nature of ‘worldview’ as a unique category for
critical analysis.
2  According to Four Arrows (2016a), this is likely
around 9–10,000 years ago; see ‘point of depar-
ture theory’ (2016a: 5–8).
3  For example, ‘epistemic virtues’ for quality inquiry
include (among others) open-mindedness, and
tolerance of difference, conflicting views, and the
unknown, strange and fearful (see Kidd, 2014).
4  ‘I use Fear in the broadest [and deepest] sense to
include any feeling of risk to perceived well-being.
The context in which I use this word as a major
force influencing learning is not limited to its
emotional context’ (Jacobs, 1998: 157). Fisher has
added significantly to developing a more complex
and nuanced set of postmodern (and integral)
contexts in which ‘Fear’ is utilized to comple-
ment Fear used by Four Arrows. This is elaborated
in Fisher (2018) but one can also consult Fisher
(2010) for a complex construction of the Fear
Problem and why the need to go beyond merely a
Western individual psychological and/or emotional
context for ‘fear’ (with small letter). Because of the
dialectical nature of the pair of concepts, and Four
Arrows also having used capital on Fearlessness,
Fisher maintains the capitalized critical version as
complex, holistic-integral and unique (e.g., Fisher,
2010) – any other use without capital is the com-
mon usage by most people.
5  See the Hawaiian Indigenous epistemology of
distinction we adopt in this chapter, based on the
distinction of these three aspects (Meyer, 2010).
6  The relationship of phallocentric (Solar) and
matrixial (Lunar) is theorized in particular from
a relationship complementary standpoint by the
artist-psychoanalyst Ettinger (2005). Four Arrows
first began to discuss this solar–lunar dynamic in
ancient cultures in Jacobs (1998: 21–2) based on
the work of his colleague Dr Howard Teich, a psy-
chologist and mythologist.
559
7  Fisher (2010) has suggested the conception
of ‘fearlessness’ is a mature and emancipatory
replacement of Western notions of ‘hope’ for
managing fear (2010: xxix, 40, 178, 240).
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A Critical, Culturally Sustaining,
Pedagogy of Whānau
INTRODUCTION
As the former principal of Kia Aroha College,
the author has a deep understanding of the
school’s journey to develop a critical, ‘cultur-
ally sustaining’ (Paris and Alim, 2017) cur-
riculum and learning environment for its
Māori and Pasifika students, an approach the
school calls a Critical, Culturally Sustaining,
Pedagogy of Wh ānau. This chapter will
describe two examples of the critical research
of students, who investigated government
initiatives or policies that impact their educa-
tion. The findings of their research have been
presented to national academic audiences by
these ‘Warrior-Researchers’.
In the national election in 2017 in New
Zealand the government changed. The previ-
ous government had implemented sweeping
neoliberal education reforms that privileged
standardisation, data-driven accountability,
competition, and compliance that aligned with
the experience of other countries engaged
51
Ann Milne
in the Global Education Reform Movement
(Sahlberg, 2011). The incoming coalition
government promised an end to the neolib-
eral agenda, the scrapping of the contentious
‘national standards’, and a focus on a broad
curriculum, qualitative and formative assess-
ment for learning and individualised learning.
At the time of writing, we have yet to see how
this will play out, or how much time it will
take to phase in this change in direction. The
student research described in this chapter was
carried out in 2015 and 2017 and focused on
initiatives and policies under the neoliberal
regime.
In 2016, Māori children made up 24% of
the total school population in New Zealand.
Although 10% of Māori children participate
in bilingual, Māori-medium education, just
3.8% of these learn in Kura Kaupapa Māori
(Māori-language immersion schools where
the philosophy and practice reflect Māori cul-
tural values) (Ministry of Education, 2016).
The majority of Māori learners therefore are
562 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
in Whitestream (Milne, 2013, 2016) pub-
lic New Zealand schools which have sys-
temically failed to understand or meet their
learning needs and where, therefore, Māori
learners feature at the bottom of every indica-
tor in the country’s educational outcomes and
their Māori identity continues to be compro-
mised and assimilated.
KIA AROHA COLLEGE
New Zealand’s education system experi-
enced a major upheaval in 1989 with the
advent of Tomorrow’s Schools (Department
of Education, 1988), a reform that devolved
the responsibility for school governance to
individual school communities through
­community-elected Boards of Trustees.
As a result of this reform each New
Zealand school has the autonomy to develop
its own charter within the boundaries of a
mandated broad national curriculum, and
each community has the power to shape
a school in the way they want for their
children. However, very few schools break
away from the colonial model. The process is
deliberately convoluted, requiring consensus
and determination from a school’s community
to dismantle the barriers the bureaucratic
system puts in the way.
Kia Aroha College did push these bound-
aries and restrictions to become what is
described in the legislation as a ‘designated-
character’ Years 7 to 13 (Grades 6–12) sec-
ondary school (high school) located in the
community of Otara, in South Auckland,
New Zealand. The aims of the special char-
acter of the school include honouring the
Treaty of Waitangi1, and providing a learn-
ing environment where Māori and Pasifika
(Pacific nations) cultural identities, custom,
languages and knowledges, and the philoso-
phy and practice of whānau, are the norm.
Critical, culturally sustaining pedagogy is
at the heart of the school’s approach. The
mission of Kia Aroha College is to develop
students as ‘Warrior-Scholars’ – which the
school defines as young people, secure in
their own identity, competent and confident
in all aspects of their cultural world, critical
agents for justice, equity, and social change,
with all the academic qualifications and
cultural knowledge they need to go out and
change the world.
THE MĀORI CONCEPT OF WHĀNAU
To translate the meaning of the Indigenous
Māori word whānau as simply ‘family’, or
‘extended family’, is to diminish the com-
plexity and richness of the concept. As is the
case for all families, in all cultures, there are
many more layers and variables. In fact, a
report made to New Zealand’s Ministry of
Education that attempted to analyse the
­characteristics of whānau in Aotearoa New
Zealand found that ‘the influence of continu-
ing social change and the general flexibility
of the family structure makes an acknowl-
edged global meaning for family a difficult
if not impossible task’ (Cunningham et al.,
2005: 13).
Eminent M āori psychologist Sir Mason
Durie (2003: 15) distinguishes three types
of wh ānau in contemporary M āori society:
whakapapa wh ānau to describe those who
descend from a common ancestor, statis-
tical wh ānau referring to the practice of
using the terms wh ānau, household, and
family interchangeably in data collection,
and kaupapa wh ānau to describe individu-
als ‘who may not be descended from the
same ancestor but share a common mission
and behave towards each other as if they
were wh ānau’.
Clearly then, a school and its wider com-
munity constitute a kaupapa whānau. In
many schools in New Zealand the word
whānau is widely used. Modern learning
environments often include ‘whānau spaces’
to denote places where people might gather
or work. The ‘whānau class’ is often used as
 A CRITICAL, CULTURALLY SUSTAINING, PEDAGOGY OF WH  ĀNAU
a descriptor for the Māori dual-medium bilin-
gual class within a Whitestream school envi-
ronment. However, in spite of the regular use
of the word, most often school practice that
is based in White supremacy and Eurocentric
notions of learning and knowledge, where
the adults change at the end of each year, or
even during each day, is the antithesis of an
authentic whānau.
The concept of whānau, with its associ-
ated concepts of cultural principles, values,
and obligations, is central to Māori conscien-
tisation, resistance, and transformation, and
is fundamental in the small number of Kura
Kaupapa Māori, but seldom found in the reg-
ular Whitestream school system, where over
95% of Māori children learn. Smith (1995)
aligns the concept of whānau with knowl-
edge, pedagogy, discipline, and curriculum
in the school setting. Central to the concept is
the understanding that core Māori values that
are taken as given, and the Māori worldview,
is reflected, normalised, and reproduced
within the school. This understanding guided
decisions about all aspects of Kia Aroha
College’s programme and practice.
Whānau at School
Kia Aroha College is organised and struc-
tured to reflect what the school believes
about whānau, and whānaungatanga (authen-
tic relationships), in a school setting. In all
parts of the school, several age levels work
together throughout the day, in the same
classes, and stay with the same small group
of teachers for at least four years. The Māori
concept of tuakana–teina is a key learning
process – this means that older students are
expected to be responsible for younger ones,
more able students are expected to support
less able, and learning is cooperative and col-
laborative, sometimes independent, but rarely
individual. Teachers work across several
classes of students in a flexible team-teaching
organisation. Students work in small groups
on tasks that are usually inquiry-based, and
563
which give them a wide range of choices and
options. Timetabling is also flexible and
teachers typically allow time to work inten-
sively on the current study. There is minimal
whole-class, teacher-directed instruction.
Kia Aroha – Through Aroha
Teachers in research by Duncan-Andrade
(2007: 629) describe their decision to be a
consistent presence in the school community
and in the lives of the students and their
families – to be in solidarity with their
students, as opposed to empathy. That shift in
perspective is fundamental in the concept of
whānaungatanga. It marks the shift from
seeing students as victims, to an emphasis on
empowerment and authentic caring – aroha in
Māori terms, alofa in Samoan, ‘ofa in Tongan,
aloha in Hawaiian, and aroa in most Cook
Islands Māori dialects. It is important not to
see these concepts as a ‘soft’ option. With
every privilege inherent in whānaungatanga
comes corresponding responsibilities,
expectations, and accountabilities.
This understanding is implicit in the
choice of the name Kia Aroha for the school.
Loosely translated by the school community
as ‘through aroha’, a literal translation of the
word ‘kia’ is ‘be, or let be, indicating it is
desirable for something to occur’ (Moorfield,
2011), as in kia kaha (be strong) and kia
ora (be well). In this sense the school name
makes clear that aroha is the expectation as
the foundation for critical, authentic practice
that sustains students’ cultural identities.
Sustaining Culture
Placing culture at the centre of curriculum
design at Kia Aroha College meant changing
to a curriculum that is integrated, not just
across subject disciplines, but with students’
lives, and realities (Beane, 1997). This inte-
grated curriculum approach, already built
around issues of social concern which are
564 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
specifically relevant to students’ families,
communities, and cultures, later widened to
incorporate youth participatory action research
(Akom, Cammarota, and Ginwright, 2008;
Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, 2008; Romero
et al., 2010), and learning through a critical,
social justice framework.
Two youth participatory action research
projects undertaken by a group of Kia Aroha
College Warrior-Researchers in 2015 and
2017 are described in this chapter. Both
investigate a government education initia-
tive or policy that impacts on them as Māori
or Pasifika learners in regular New Zealand
schools. In each project the government ini-
tiative is described first, then the students’
research is presented, much of this provided
as quotes from their actual work.
WARRIOR-RESEARCHERS 2015
In 2015, the school received an invitation
from the national M āori Principals’
Association, asking for a group of students to
speak at their national conference in
Auckland. Their short presentation was a
resounding success and resulted in an invita-
tion to submit a proposal to present their
research as a 90-minute symposium at the
New Zealand Association for Research in
Education national conference which was to
be held later in the year. The group worked
together to submit the proposal, which was
later accepted. The six students in the group
ranged from Year 10 (Grade 9) to Year 13
(Grade 12).
The Government Strategy:
‘As Māori’
Durie (2003: 199) asserts that education
should enable Māori to ‘live as Māori’. This
goal subsequently became the vision for the
New Zealand Ministry of Education’s
strategy for Māori education, Ka Hikitia:
Accelerating Success 2013–2017 (Ministry
of Education, 2013a). However, in the vision
of Ka Hikitia: ‘Māori children enjoying and
achieving education success, as Māori’, the
two key words ‘as Māori’ are the words most
ignored by Whitestream schools who have no
understanding of what ‘as Māori’ might be.
Inevitably, ‘as M āori’ becomes another
‘White space’ (Milne, 2016), in that it is rein-
vented, and seen as no different from, ‘as
everyone else’, and more specifically as the
dominant, White majority. The default posi-
tion is to ignore the words ‘as Māori’, and
work towards the completely different goal of
‘Māori children enjoying and achieving edu-
cation success’ – with no attempt to explore
notions of ‘success’ from a Māori worldview.
‘Success’ and ‘achievement’ then become
interpreted as the academic outcomes of
Māori learners.
Durie (2003) is specific about the words.
‘As Māori’, he states, means to have access
to te ao Māori (the Māori world) – access to
language, culture, marae (traditional gather-
ing places), tikanga (customs), and resources
(2003: 199). He argues:
If after twelve or so years of formal education
Māori youth were totally unprepared to interact
within te ao Māori, then, no matter what else
had been learned, education would have been
incomplete. … Being Māori is a Māori reality.
Education should be as much about that reality
as it is about literacy and numeracy. In short,
being able to live as Māori imposes some
responsibilities upon the education system to
contribute towards the realisation of that goal.
(Durie, 2003: 199, 200)
In a similar vein, the vision of the New
Zealand Ministry of Education’s strategy for
Pasifika education, The Pasifika Education
Plan 2013–2017 (Ministry of Education,
2013b), is ‘Five out of five Pasifika learners
participating, engaging and achieving in edu-
cation, secure in their identities, languages
and cultures and contributing fully to
Aotearoa New Zealand’s social, cultural and
economic wellbeing’.
 A CRITICAL, CULTURALLY SUSTAINING, PEDAGOGY OF WH  ĀNAU
The 2015 Research Project
Speaking out ‘as’ Us: Māori and
Tongan Secondary Students
Investigate Our Education System’s
Vision for Māori and Pasifika
Learners
The goal of the research project was to clar-
ify the meaning of these words, ‘as Māori’ or
as Tongan, as Samoan, from the perspective
of Māori and Pasifika students, families, and
community. The student researchers decided
on three research questions:
1 What does success or achievement ‘as Māori’ –
or as Tongan, as Samoan, actually mean?
2 Are Māori and Pasifika youth really experiencing
that type of success in our schools?
3 If we are, what does that look like – to us?
They conducted two surveys with students,
ex-students, and staff of Kia Aroha College
as well as parents, grandparents, and staff
and students from other schools. The group
also asked Māori educators and researchers
what those two words ‘as Māori’ meant to
them. They read the online reports of the 82
schools in the city of Auckland that were
reviewed by the government audit agency,
the Education Review Office (ERO), between
February and August 2015 and analysed their
responses to the ERO question: ‘How effec-
tively does the school promote educational
success for Māori, as Māori?’ The following
excerpts from their findings demonstrate the
depth of their research and thinking.
Throughout, the students refer to their adult
sources of information using Māori terms of
respect: ‘Whaea’ (mother/aunt) and ‘Matua’
(father/uncle).
Matthew looked at the difference between
‘as Māori’ and ‘of Māori’:
In a 2006 paper to Treasury about Māori well-
being, Sir Mason Durie makes it very clear that
participation of someone who is Māori is different
from participation as someone who is Māori. We
think that the Government’s vision has very little to
do with ‘as Māori’ and is mainly about the results
OF us as learners who just happen to be Māori.
565
Whaea Leonie Pihama told us that firstly ‘as Māori’
means that within Aotearoa there are two differ-
ent societies, Pākehā society and Te Ao Māori. They
co-exist on Māori land. However, they do not co-
exist equally. The focus for everyone is to participate
in Pākehā society, with little validation of Te Ao Māori
[the Māori world]. She says that what Sir Mason
Durie has always advocated is that living ‘as Māori’
means we can ‘be Māori’ in any place and space in
Aotearoa. As a Year 11 Māori learner I strongly
believe those places and spaces have to include our
schools. Our research shows us that is not the case.
(Matthew, in Pirini-Edwards et al., 2015)
Ebony’s story, from her personal experience,
described a scenario all too familiar, of low
expectations, deficit, and racist attitudes
towards Māori students:
The paradox that disrupts the Ka Hikitia strategy is
that we have created an education system covertly
designed to fail Māori and marginalize indigenous
knowledge. Actually, as I read more about our
education history I’ve decided I need to change
that word to ‘overtly’ because I don’t think it has
been hidden at all. The system’s failure for us as
Māori learners is blatantly in our faces, over gen-
erations. Māori achievement outcomes and our
participation in education are consistently, sys-
temically, and historically below that of non-Māori.
There is a fundamental fault in our education
system that allows this situation to continue in our
mainstream schools. Let’s face it, if these results
were for generations of Pākehā learners, people
would lose their jobs and there would be marching
in the streets!
I came to Kia Aroha College at the beginning
of this year – moving away from my home and my
whānau. Last year I was in Year 12 in a secondary
school in the north, where I had completed 103
NCEA2 Level 1 credits and almost no Level 2 cred-
its. This was due to the low expectations, and
assumptions I believe teachers made about my
capabilities based on my ethnicity and what they
thought they knew about other members of my
extended whānau. Did I imagine this? Might I have
been wrong? No! A teacher once told me to go
home to get a pen, in spite of the fact half of the
class had no pens. He added that I should call in to
WINZ3 on my way home to tell them how much of
a loser I was. That’s a direct quote!
I was told at the end of last year that I could
not be in Year 13 this year, ‘because I wouldn’t be
able to handle it,’ and that I would need to repeat
Year 12. At Kia Aroha College, 10 months later,
I am four credits away from completing the NCEA
566 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Level 3 I was told I ‘couldn’t handle,’ and I will
complete University Entrance requirements by the
end of the year. I am here, speaking to you at a
national research conference, and my applications
to enrol in conjoint Bachelors’ degrees in Laws and
Arts have been accepted by both Victoria University
and the University of Waikato. Not too bad for the
‘loser’ my previous teacher saw! What is the differ-
ence? I am able to be Māori at Kia Aroha College,
and my teachers have high expectations of me in
everything I do. There has never been any expecta-
tion that I would fail! (Ebony, in Pirini-Edwards
et al., 2015)
Gayleen concluded, from her analysis of
school ERO reports, that the Education
Review Office’s single focus on the literacy,
numeracy, and National Certificate of
Educational Achievement (NCEA) results of
Māori learners, cancels out all of the achieve-
ment and success Māori students could enjoy
as Māori. She also questioned the capacity of
White ERO reviewers to make these deci-
sions, then focused on what was omitted
from the ERO reports:
We’ve heard what matters to the Government,
through the Ministry of Education. We’ve seen
what matters and what is considered effective to
ERO, but what else matters, and what matters to
us? Our student surveys told us clearly that rela-
tionships matter, that cultural identity matters, that
language matters – and that these matter first and
matter most! However, what else matters, and
what else is not mentioned in Ministry or Education
Review Office reports? Two weeks ago, the New
Zealand Herald ran a series of articles on equity in
New Zealand schools, using Auckland schools as
examples (Johnston, 2015). One article quotes the
book, Twelve Thousand Hours: Education and
Poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand (Carpenter and
Osborne, 2014), where Massey University academ-
ics Ivan Snook and John O’Neill have concluded
that home background is responsible for up to 80
percent of a child’s school success.
Our Minister of Education doesn’t agree with
this. In the same article, she said, that although the
impact low socio-economic factors have on stu-
dent outcomes is a concern, she thinks that these
factors are often overstated. Our group read the
articles and held a debate. The moot was: ‘Poverty
matters to our learning.’ The boys took the affirm-
ative and we girls had to argue the negative.
Although I hate to say it, the boys won, because
our hearts just weren’t in our side. We all agreed
in our discussion later, of course poverty matters to
every one of us. (Gayleen, in Pirini-Edwards et al.,
2015)
Kiwa contacted well-known Māori academ-
ics and elders to find out what Māori think ‘as
Māori’ means. He asked, ‘What good is an
education that completely diminishes your
cultural right to know who you are, what you
are, where you’re from and what blood runs
through your veins?’
I think the Government definitions make it per-
fectly clear that our people are still assimilated in
Whitestream schools achieving Pākehā academic
standards, mostly with no clue of their cultural
heritage, or little importance placed on this by
their schools. But we don’t realize this because we
trust that the goals for success and a better chance
of wellbeing for our whānau lie in our modern
education system. I am not saying that people are
blind to the depth of what really is happening to
young Māori in schools, but what I am saying is
that to live ‘as Māori’ in the education system
should be to fully understand both Pākehā society
and Te Ao Māori, and your education should
enable you to continually become stronger in the
knowledge of your cultural heritage and identity.
In our history, the introduction of Western ideas
of individualism marginalized Māori whānau – and
education was a devastating tool in this practice.
Dr Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1986) refers to New
Zealand’s ‘Native School’ system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ –
schools built inside Māori communities which
deliberately targeted Māori whānau as a site of
colonization. The colonization and assimilation
which targeted our ancestors, and our grandpar-
ents, continued in our parents’ generation – and in
ours. (Kiwa, in Pirini-Edwards et al., 2015)
‘Aisea, the Tongan member of the group,
took the government’s plan for Pasifika edu-
cation to task, exposing the rhetoric in that
document in his research:
The Pasifika Education Plan spells out what Pasifika
success will look like which is, ‘demanding, vibrant,
dynamic, successful Pasifika learners, secure and
confident in their identities, languages and cul-
tures.’ However, when you get to Page 7 of the Plan
and the section on Schooling, the language
changes. Now, it states that, ‘The focus is on accel-
erating literacy and numeracy achievement and
gaining NCEA Level 2 qualifications as a stepping
stone to further education and/or employment.’
 A CRITICAL, CULTURALLY SUSTAINING, PEDAGOGY OF WH  ĀNAU
What happened to our identities, languages and
cultures? Apparently, if we look at the Ministry of
Education’s ‘Progress against Pasifika Education
Plan targets’ on the Education Counts website
(Ministry of Education, 2015b), they must be
hiding under some of these headings: literacy,
numeracy, NCEA, suspensions, expulsions, exclu-
sions, and whether our parents are on Boards of
Trustees. This sounds like the Pālangi [the Tongan
word for a European/White person] Education Plan
to me. (‘Aisea, in Pirini-Edwards et al., 2015)
Jacob, the youngest member of the group,
asked, ‘So how can schools counter that
hegemony? That thinking that sneaks into
our heads and makes us also put Māori or
Pasifika knowledge on a lower level – or just
not think about it at all?’ He presented the
outcomes of the group’s student surveys, and
also examined research about Kia Aroha
College by independent researchers.
So did our students come to school already strong
in their understanding of Māori knowledge? Not
according to our survey. In fact it seems 61% of
students in our survey came into Te Whānau o
Tupuranga with very little understanding of their
Māori identity and state strongly that the way we
work, our whānau environment, our relationships
with teachers and the way we learn, strengthened
and continues to develop our identity ‘as Māori.’
Far fewer of the students in other schools had this
experience.
Kia Aroha College’s special character is whānau-
based, Māori and Pasifika-centered education. It
sets out how we are different from regular state
schools, but I think it’s about how we are fighting
to be fully human. What does being fully human
mean you ask? We learned about Paulo Freire who
argues that oppression relies on a process of dehu-
manization. Changing that, means our education
has to be about full control over what we want to
do, think and most of all it has to be about self-
determination/Tino Rangatiratanga. Our graduate
profiles make very clear what success ‘as’ Māori,
looks like at Kia Aroha College. What we hope we
are showing you today is the outcome of our
graduate profile – Warrior-Scholars, make Warrior-
Researchers! (Jacob, in Pirini-Edwards et al., 2015)
Finally, Jasmine summarised the group’s
findings in the form of an achievement
assessment of everyone they had investi-
gated. Their report cards on ‘the efforts and
effectiveness of those who think they are
567
delivering education achievement and success
“as Māori” or “as Pasifika”’ used the Ministry
of Education’s own National Standards’
assessment terminology – finding the Ministry
of Education and the Government ‘well below
standard’ and schools and the Education
Review Office ‘below standard’.
WARRIOR-RESEARCHERS 2017
In 2017, I was in the privileged position of
having retired from my role as principal, but
still welcomed by the school to work with
staff and students. Three of the 2015 Warrior-
Researcher group were still at school and
immediately responded to my call for anyone
interested in working on another research
topic. They gave heartfelt warnings to the
new members about the amount of work they
would have to do.
The students had been involved in a
school-wide critical study on the topic of
their community. Different aspects of this
topic included an investigation of the ‘shop-
ping trucks’ that prey on communities like
Otara offering exorbitantly priced goods on
payment plans, resulting in massive debt for
many families. Other groups had explored
Otara’s history as a site of struggle and pro-
test, and provided counter-stories to the prev-
alent negative media attention the community
regularly experiences. We wanted a research
topic that extended their exploration of the
idea of community, and the Government’s
education initiative for ‘Communities of
Learning’ (COL) was an obvious choice of a
policy that impacted their learning.
The Government Initiative: COL
Investing in Educational Success (IES) was
an initiative announced by the New Zealand
National Government at the start of the
2014 election year with an investment of
NZ$359 million over four years, and then
568 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
NZ$155 million each year after that. IES is a
top-down, one-size-fits-all model which
requires schools to cluster locally in COL.
According to the Secretary for Education, the
promise was that COL would create a system
based on collaboration across the education
pathway connecting students with learning
and would be focused on progress and qual-
ity teaching and leadership and support to
meet those needs (Cormick, 2017).
Initially secondary and primary (elemen-
tary) teacher organisations were split over
the policy, with 93% of primary members
opposed to the idea of paying lead princi-
pals and some teachers significant additional
salaries to work across the cluster of local
schools. Against this strong opposition the
initiative was forced to undergo fine tun-
ing. On the surface, terminology for leader-
ship positions changed and membership of
COL became optional for schools. In prac-
tice, many schools have joined COL because
of the significant funding for professional
development that schools can only access
once they have joined a cluster, and after
the Ministry of Education has endorsed their
learning goals or ‘achievement challenges’.
In a model which has prided itself on the indi-
vidual autonomy of schools and accountabil-
ity to their unique communities, this initiative
was seen as a process of control over schools
and an enforced compliance with the narrow
focus on literacy and numeracy, which the
achievement challenges were required to tar-
get. Overwhelmingly, these targets focused
on Māori children.
In a 2017 survey by the New Zealand
Principals’ Federation (Cormick, 2017),
principal respondents spoke of COL being
over-loaded with new functions other than
professional collaboration to improve learn-
ing and teaching for young people. Several
commented that in respect of COL they are
‘operating in the dark, building the plane in
flight’. Many principals were struggling with
the inflexibility of the leadership structure,
uncomfortable with the notion of a few roles
taking all the money, and the ‘rigidity of the
funding being mostly tied up in salaries’.
Principals did not trust that the model was
genuinely about collaboration and learning,
but was rather ‘a managerial system which
will completely undermine the relationship
between a school and its community’.
With Māori and Pasifika learners under the
spotlight for their perceived learning deficits,
and the threat that COL could certainly under-
mine the work the school and community had
put in to develop the unique character of Kia
Aroha College, the government initiative was
a perfect choice for the Warrior-Researchers
in 2017.
The 2017 Research Project
Beyond Māori Boys’ Reading
and Writing: Reading and
Writing our World
The 2017 Warrior-Researcher Group com-
prised nine Māori, Samoan, and Tongan stu-
dents in Years 11 to 13. They interviewed
students, teachers, and Māori principals of
schools who were COL members or COL
leaders, as well as Māori principals whose
schools who were resisting COL member-
ship. Students took different aspects of the
research, with the overall title: Beyond Māori
Boys’ Reading and Writing: Reading and
Writing our World and the research question,
‘Who is defining our community?’ The first
two groups investigated the community and
the school, and the last three groups focused on
the government policy and its impact.
Reading Our Community
Arguing that young people need to read their
world before reading the word, Freire and
Macedo (1987: 127) claims that educators
‘need to use their students’ cultural universe
as points of departure, enabling students to
recognize themselves as possessing a spe-
cific and important cultural identity…[this]
requires respect and legitimation of students’
 A CRITICAL, CULTURALLY SUSTAINING, PEDAGOGY OF WH  ĀNAU
discourses… which are different but never
inferior’. Pilisi, a Year 13 Tongan researcher,
took on the task of reading the community of
Otara. She wrote:
In our group we have a total experience of eighty
one years of life in Otara. It’s our world! Some of
our wider group have been students in other
secondary schools before we came to Kia Aroha
College, but most of us have been students in Kia
Aroha since leaving primary school and entering
Year 7.
This presentation explores the community of
Otara as a site of struggle, and a site of resistance –
the Otara that we experience, and is our daily
reality. On the one hand, the struggle: colonisa-
tion, assimilation, racism, and the loss of language,
culture, and cultural identity, and the symptoms of
that loss we see in poverty, escalated by the gen-
trification of our community, and in issues like
domestic violence, poor housing, homelessness
and a youth gang culture. On the other hand the
richness of our cultural heritage, maintained
against all the odds, a pride in our community, our
churches, our talented youth, our elders, and our
people – and a history of fighting back. (Pilisi, in
Katipa et al., 2017)
This presentation makes very clear that
‘Without our culture we have no identity, and
without our identity we have no community’.
Reading Our School:
A Counter Story
Foloiola ‘read the world of the school’ and
its difference from other Whitestream
schools. She wanted to know how that differ-
ence worked for them as learners and how
could the community, and the whānau that is
Kia Aroha College, cluster with other schools
which have very different philosophies:
I surveyed 60 current students of Kia Aroha
College, in our Samoan and Tongan units. 21 of
these students had also attended other intermedi-
ate or secondary schools prior to coming to Kia
Aroha College. In answer to the question, What
does success ‘as’ Māori or ‘as’ Pasifika (or as your
own cultural group) mean to you? Fifty-five per-
cent were very clear that success was directly con-
nected to their cultural knowledge and their
cultural identity.
569
The feeling of belonging in Kia Aroha College is
confirmed by 99.9% of the Pasifika survey partici-
pants, who said that they could be Tongan or
Samoan or their own culture all day, every day at
school and felt that is really valued. Not only that, but
they shared how they felt comfortable in using their
own language in any place or any setting throughout
the school day. (Foloiola, in Katipa et al., 2017)
Reading The Word: Who Is
Defining Our Community?
COL are required to identify the ‘achieve-
ment challenges’ their cluster of schools
face, by asking the questions: (1) What is our
vision of success for our students? (2) What
are the common challenges across our COL?
(3) What do we know about possible reasons
for these challenges and how do we know,
and (4) What support will be needed and
what resources are available to help? Their
answers to these questions identify chal-
lenges, which then require endorsement by
the Ministry of Education in order that the
COL can access the funding to resource their
targets. Matthew, a Year 13 Māori researcher,
painstakingly worked his way through the
Endorsed Achievement Challenges of 77
COL published on the Ministry of Education
website (Ministry of Education, 2015a).
He analysed these in terms of how many
targeted Māori boys’, or Māori girls’, or
Pasifika students’ reading, writing, and math-
ematics. Then he searched for goals that men-
tioned culturally responsive pedagogy or ‘as
Māori’. Fewer than one third of COL passed
his culturally responsive test, and only 18%
his ‘as Māori’ analysis. It didn’t escape his
notice that a number of COL statements began
with rich descriptions of their Māori location,
but then said nothing else that responded to
that knowledge. Matthew wrote:
Using the idea of whitewater rapids, Charteris and
Smardon (2017) write that ‘fish don’t see the
water’ and state that ‘it is difficult to recognise the
machinations of neoliberalism when one is swept
along in it.’ At Kia Aroha College we use the term
‘White Spaces’ (Milne 2013, 2016) to explain how
570 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
schools don’t see the Whiteness that is all around
us, and that drives our education system and alien-
ates Māori and Pasifika learners. The sweeping
‘White’ water idea is used to explain that neolib-
eral initiatives, that treat schools as competing
businesses, were firstly resisted by educators, but
as schools were swept along in the rush to make
change, these became accepted, normal, and ‘the
way we do business around here.’
The reason for this change is not that schools
suddenly changed their minds, but because we are
in a system that ‘systematically dismantles the will
to critique’ – in other words it becomes harder and
harder to resist the white water when the initiative
is presented as a ‘done deal’ with little consultation,
when schools whose funding is already frozen, just
can’t hold out against the funding offered as the
reward for complying, and when promotion and
higher salaries tempt some to join in – and others
are also persuaded. Charteris and Smardon argue
that educators and researchers have to be the critics
and the conscience of education.
From our perspective that doesn’t seem to have
worked too well for us – so we are taking on that
role for ourselves. (Matthew, in Katipa et al., 2017)
Matthew described himself as ‘shocked’ by
the outcome of his analysis of the achieve-
ment challenges. He found that of 77 COL
‘Endorsed Achievement Challenges’ pub-
lished on the Ministry of Education website,
99% target Māori boys’ writing, and 96%
Māori girls’ writing. He observed: ‘It seems
like our Maths ability is only slightly better
than our writing, and our reading is not too
great either. 87% of these COL want us to
achieve NCEA Level 2.’
Now, I’m surrounded by Māori boys and girls in my
school, and in my life. I don’t know any who can’t
read and write, or calculate! I completed NCEA
Level 3 a full year early at the end of Year 12 and
had my University Entrance requirements early this
year in Year 13. So did many of my peers. So what
is going on? Where are all these non-writing, non-
counting, non-reading Māori youth? Obviously in
these 77 communities that stretch right across the
country. So I have some questions:
• We know we are not less intelligent than
Pākehā, so how come these schools and teach-
ers don’t know how to teach us?
• You would think these 77 COL schools would
ask why they are achieving these results – or
do they think it’s our fault?
• Why is NCEA Level 2 the goal? Are Pākehā
whānau happy with that goal?
• Isn’t this just racist? (Matthew, in Katipa et al.,
2017)
Jacob, a Year 12 Māori student, conducted
face-to-face interviews with five Māori prin-
cipals who could bring together both a pro-
fessional view and a Māori understanding of
COL. Three of these principals had already
joined a COL, and two of them were the lead
principals in these groups. One was consider-
ing joining, after a lengthy period of holding
out against the pressure to join, and one had
decided he would not join his local cluster.
Jacob also spoke to three Māori teachers who
had key leadership roles across and within
schools in their COL. He asked all partici-
pants about their views on COL, what had
influenced them to join, or not, did they have
goals for Māori learners beyond literacy and
numeracy, and if so, what were they? He then
analysed his data using the four common
themes that had arisen from his interviews:
1 The dilemma: To join or not to join
2 The pressure to join
3 Inconsistencies
4 Leading a school ‘as Māori’ (Jacob, in Katipa
et al., 2017)
His interviewees all described the decision to
join as being difficult. Those who had joined
COL spoke of ‘being at the table’, and influ-
encing other schools in their community,
rather than having decisions made for them.
All had faced pressure to join, both from
repeated requests from the Ministry of
Education, and from their dire need for
resourcing and funding for teacher profes-
sional development, and feeling they could
not justify not taking advantage of this fund-
ing. Of particular interest to the students’
research was the fact that some schools can
form a ‘community’ if they have a common
philosophy, regardless of where they are
located, whereas others cannot. This is the
case, for example, for Catholic Schools, and
Rudolf Steiner Schools, and in some places,
 A CRITICAL, CULTURALLY SUSTAINING, PEDAGOGY OF WH  ĀNAU
for Kura Kaupapa Māori. However, it is not
possible for a school with a philosophy for
Māori and Pasifika-centred learning, like Kia
Aroha College, to cluster with like-minded
schools in other locations. COL must be
formed within the same geographical loca-
tion, and provide a pathway for learners, so a
secondary school must be included. This
seems inconsistent and unfair. When it
impacts most on schools providing differ-
ently for Māori, the student researchers con-
cluded it was also racist. All of the Māori
principals and teachers interviewed agreed
that they struggled as Māori educators to get
other schools in their communities to see the
need to change their practice.
Timitimi, a Māori researcher in Year 12,
analysed COL using a tino rangatiratanga
(self-determination, sovereignty) framework.
He took the five guiding principles of the
government’s strategy for Māori education,
Ka Hikitia. He wrote:
Ka Hikitia has five guiding principles: The Treaty of
Waitangi, a Māori potential approach, Ako – a
two-way teaching and learning process, the
understanding that identity, language and culture
count, and productive partnerships. So it would
follow surely that initiatives from the government
that impact on Māori learners would adhere to
these principles to ensure our mana (prestige,
authority, power) is upheld. Isn’t that the purpose
of guiding principles – that they guide our think-
ing, our actions, and our behaviour? (Timitimi, in
Katipa et al., 2017)
He applied these principles to analyse the
achievement target of 99% of COL to
improve Māori boys’ writing, and concluded
that he found:
Zero connection to the guidelines of Ka Hikitia –
the very guidelines that the Ministry of Education
say are central to their vision and their strategic
planning for our education: no tino rangatira-
tanga, no partnership – under the Treaty, or other-
wise, deficits instead of potential, ako [both to
learn and to teach] going one way only (what are
teachers learning?) and very little sign that our
identity matters. My mana [prestige, authority]
does not feel enhanced. It feels belittled. (Timitimi,
in Katipa et al., 2017)
571
His group had taken the questions the
Ministry of Education suggests that COL ask
when identifying their achievement chal-
lenges, and conducted a survey of fellow
students, staff, and family members using the
same questions. Timitimi reports:
Our survey participants’ ideas about success
included being critically conscious and having
strong cultural knowledge. Their answers were
diametrically opposed to those of the Communities
of Learning’s vision of success in Matthew’s analy-
sis. Our community’s version of success is ‘to be
proud to be Māori, to be able to fluently speak Te
Reo Māori, to question everything,’ and ‘to know
who we are.’ (Timitimi, in Katipa et al., 2017)
Jasmine, a Year 13 Māori student, investi-
gated how else the ‘outrageous $824 million’
invested in this initiative since 2014 could
have been spent. Her survey participants
opted for more equitable resourcing, making
Māori language compulsory in schools and in
teacher training, and ‘the teaching of New
Zealand history, especially the oppression of
19th century Māori as a compulsory part of
the school curriculum’. Her summary of the
issue states:
Our group’s research has shown that from our
perspective, teachers, schools, our education
system, our Ministry of Education, and our gov-
ernment, are on the wrong track. And while this
is the case, initiatives like Communities of
Learning that focus intensively on the symptoms,
instead of asking what the root causes are, will
continue to marginalise us as learners. Writing
policy and developing initiatives for us, from
positions of privilege, without talking to us about
our realities and our perspectives cannot become
any sort of community. (Jasmine, in Katipa
et al., 2017)
Matthew spent several days trying to put his
final feelings into his speech. He told me he
was searching for something powerful that
would sum up the personal impact his analy-
sis of the COL achievement challenges had
made on him, and answer his question about
why schools are failing Māori learners. He
finally asked me if I could help him find a
quote ‘about the boot’ he had heard ‘Matua
572 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Jeff’ (Duncan-Andrade) make on one of his
visits to the school. Matthew wrote:
I’m reminded of a Matua Jeff quote about the
accumulation of stress that comes from having to
constantly adjust to fit into a system that wasn’t
designed by us or for us, from the impact of colo-
nisation, assimilation, and racism, from loss – of
land, language, culture and identity over many
generations. This build-up of stress feels to us like
constantly having a boot on your neck. The answer
is not to strengthen our necks – or in the case of
Communities of Learning, strengthen our reading
and writing, the solution is dealing with the boot
that is keeping us in this position – and that boot is
the why schools are failing us, and why Communities
of Learning won’t make a difference. While schools
continue to look to the wrong place they will con-
tinue to lose the opportunity to make any change –
so my analysis of the endorsed achievement
challenges, and everything else I have learned
about COL leads me to think they are wrongly
named. My acronym would be COLO – Communities
of Lost Opportunity – not our loss, but the loss of
our education system to open their minds to the
truth. (Matthew, in Katipa et al., 2017)
I think Matthew sums up the situation per-
fectly and powerfully. How do we explain the
failure of our education systems to provide
equitable outcomes for all our learners? Do we
think White boys have an additional writing or
reading gene that our Māori boys missed out
on? Or could it be that the whole system, the
way we set up and structure schools, our
teacher training, our obsession with copying
failed policy from other countries which also
marginalise their Indigenous learners, the
knowledge we value – and measure – is also
White, and it therefore benefits the children
whose values match, and whose values are
embedded in and reproduced by, our schools?
Our Māori children have no reason to trust
we know what we are doing, when we prove
with our outcomes each year that we clearly
don’t and, worse still, when we tolerate this as
‘normal’. We need to learn to read the world
of our Māori children and craft our pedagogy
around that world. It’s not Māori boys’ literacy
that needs fixing. It’s our own, and that’s the gap
in our understanding that a Critical, Culturally
Sustaining Pedagogy of Whānau fills.
Notes
1  The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between
the British Crown and more than 500 Māori tribal
chiefs, made New Zealand a colony of Britain and
Māori became British subjects. The Treaty is generally
considered the founding document of New Zealand
as a nation. Despite this, the rights guaranteed to
Māori have been ignored. New Zealand schools are
expected to provide education to Māori that is ‘con-
sistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi’.
2  National Certificate of Educational Achievement –
New Zealand’s senior secondary school qualifica-
tion. NCEA is a three-level process which begins
in Year 11. Eighty credits, achieved through either
internal moderation or examination, are required
to pass each level.
3  Work and Income New Zealand – the govern-
ment unemployment agency.
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Critical Indigenous Pedagogies of
Resistance: The Call for Critical
Indigenous Educators
My story is really the story of the making of an
Indigenous teacher by reclaiming an Indigenous
heritage of thinking, teaching, and learning. My
story is also about the quest to regain the Indigenous
voice of teaching in the context of community and
its ecology of soul. (Cajete, 2015: 13)
I begin this chapter with reflections on what it
is we are after within Indigenous1 education. I
am privileged to have been invited to share, to
be with, and learn from many Indigenous
communities to discuss the strengths, chal-
lenges, and aspirations of education for
Indigenous youth, families, communities, and
nations. It is within these dialogues that I have
witnessed the goals of engaging an Indigenous
education that is rooted in community, land,
language, and culture. It is an education that
includes ceremony in relation to knowledge
and values affiliated with community and
sacred sites. It is an education that embodies
the socio-political realities that shape the con-
text of our contemporary Indigenous identi-
ties. It is a critical form of education that
leads to sustaining and protecting what our2
52
Jeremy Garcia
ancestors have gifted us. As I replay the stories
shared with/by youth, elders, teachers, leaders,
and community members, I am reminded of
Gregory Cajete’s point that such stories are
about ‘reclaiming an Indigenous heritage of
thinking, teaching, and learning….[and are]
a quest to regain the Indigenous voice of
teaching in the context of community and its
ecology of soul’ (Cajete, 2015: 13). Given this
stance, what then must be the process by
which we begin to think about how Indigenous
knowledge and values sustain, revitalize, and
promote the well-being and lifeways of our
communities? Can critical Indigenous peda-
gogy enact spaces of empowerment to restore,
and revitalize, how Indigenous communities
will respond to ongoing pressures of corpora-
tization and settler colonialism?
To begin thinking about these questions,
I find it essential that we consider stories of
emergence and humanizing relations to land
as a way to contextualize a worldview that
defines our existence. Thereafter, I highlight
several key environmental issues challenging
 CRITICAL INDIGENOUS PEDAGOGIES OF RESISTANCE
Indigenous connections to sacred landscapes
which inform the urgency for engaging criti-
cal Indigenous pedagogies. In relation to the
environmental issues, I provide a brief analy-
sis of how critical Indigenous pedagogy pro-
vides a restorative lens that opens our spirit
and minds to engage a critical and community
consciousness that is decolonizing. The chap-
ter concludes with key aspects that inform the
making of a critical Indigenous teacher who
embodies the notion of Indigenous teachers
as Nation-builders.
Before I engage this work, I would like to
clarify the use of the term educators. Within
Indigenous cultural contexts, educators
are inclusive of community members with
multiple roles and responsibilities, such as
elders, parents, aunts, uncles, clan and cultural
advisors, and relatives serving Indigenous
youth. Western systemic processes have
made clear distinctions of who can be a
teacher (e.g., individuals who have met
state certification criteria). Considering the
premise of critical Indigenous pedagogies,
I use the term educators to be inclusive of
the broader community of educators, with
a particular emphasis on teachers working
in classrooms serving Indigenous youth,
families, and communities.
HUMANIZING EPISTEMOLOGIES:
RELATIONSHIPS, RESPECT,
RECIPROCITY, RESPONSIBILITY
Stories of Emergence and
Relations to Land Matter
Indigenous peoples are defined by their con-
nection – their stories – to place, land, the
cosmos, and sacred sites. These stories of
place hold the power of our existence. For
Indigenous peoples, they are both ancient
and contemporary. Contemporary in the
sense that in any given space that I find
myself (ourselves) in the United States, I am
walking among footprints that have been left
575
before me. I am among a landscape that has
seen many forms of life and has answered
prayers before my existence. There are mark-
ers or symbols that tell the stories of how
Indigenous peoples thrived and continue to
thrive. Understanding the connections to
place is the core of being a critical Indigenous
educator. How will we know what it means
to be a critical Indigenous educator if we
don’t know our stories of emergence and our
stories of survivance?
Stories of emergence matter: Hopi. For
the Hopi people, our epistemology is gener-
ated from understandings of how we came
into living within this fourth world. At this
time, we entered agreements with Màasaw –
a belief that we hold with high regard. Dennis
Wall and Virgil Masayesva (2004) offer an
extended narration of this:
After their Emergence into the Fourth World, the
clans that would one day comprise the Hopi
people approached the Guardian Spirit, Masaw, in
the region that is now northwest Arizona and
asked his permission to settle there. Masaw recog-
nized that the clan people’s former life, which they
knew was not bringing them happiness, had been
given over to ambition, greed, and social competi-
tion. He looked into their hearts and saw that
these qualities remained, and so he had his doubts
that the people could follow his way. ‘Whether
you can stay here is up to you,’ he told them.
Masaw warned the clan people that the life he had
to offer them was very different from what they
had before. To show them that life, Masaw gave
the people a planting stick, a bag of seeds, and a
gourd of water. He handed them a small ear of
blue corn and told them, ‘Here is my life and my
spirit. This is what I have to give you.’ (Wall and
Masayesva, 2004: 435)
This was the beginning of what would shape
our epistemological orientations to what is
now the Hopi tutskwa (land-base). Certainly,
there is more that underlies this narrative of
entering this world, and in many respects, it
is held close to specific clans, societies, and
sacred sites.
Stories of emergence matter: Anishinaabeg.
In her reflection on stories of being on the
front lines for environmental justice, Winona
LaDuke (2016) begins her work by centering
576 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
her relation to the place of the Anishinaabeg.
She writes:
Long ago, during the time of prophecy, the
Anishinaabeg were told to follow Migis shell which
appeared in the sky, and from our eastern home-
land, along the great water, we would stop seven
times, ending finally at Moningwunakaauning Minis
[home of the golden-breasted woodpecker]. It is
here on this island that we flourished and spread our
wings as Anishinaabeg people. (LaDuke, 2016: 7)
LaDuke further notes, ‘Moningwunakaauning
Minis became a center of our Midewewin
Society, our most powerful religion which
connects us to the four layers beneath the
Earth and the four layers above’ (2016: 8).
Stories of emergence matter: Diné. In
reclaiming Diné history, Jennifer Denetdale
(2007: 10) centers the Diné origins in rela-
tion to the four sacred mountains that cross
states in the southwest: ‘Sisnaajini in the
east; Tsoodzil in the south; Dook’o’osliid in
the west; and Dibe nitsaa in the north’. She
expands on the Diné origins:
We Diné trace our origins into Dinetah by a jour-
ney from the First World into this present one. The
Holy People created the world as we know it
today. From the Holy People, the Diné received
knowledge, material gifts, and rituals and ceremo-
nies for a proper life. The Holy People also pro-
vided knowledge on proper relationships between
the world and all beings. (Denetdale, 2007: 10)
It should be noted that the creation stories
shared here are extremely condensed versions
of much deeper and complex systems of
coming to be. There are many beautiful stories
of emergence that matter across Indigenous
communities. They are the beginning orienta-
tions to thinking critically and centering notions
of sustaining cultural protocols that give life to
communities. Such relations reaffirm our epis-
temological and ontological existence. ‘Place
name makes theoretical notions concrete; they
offer us tacit meaning. Stories, like name-place
legends, give comfort and grounding, and offer
a warmth of belonging’ (Kovach, 2009: 62).
This ‘warmth of belonging’ is what draws
many of the Indigenous communities to push
forward in thinking about how they will not
only continue to transfer Indigenous knowl-
edge to the next generation, but to do so in
ways that reaffirm an identity that embodies
deep accountability to land, relationships,
people, and ways of being.
Indigenous Knowledge:
Sustaining and Revitalizing
Our Relations
Learning comes from being related, and being
related brings learning.
(Cajete, 2015: 197)
As we seek to know more about our reality as
Indigenous peoples, it requires that we work to
sustain, rebuild, and consciously engage with
our Indigenous communities by drawing upon
expressions of epistemology unique to our
communities. ‘Indigenous peoples throughout
the Americas have developed a number of
symbolic-metaphoric expressions that reflect
the metaphysical, ecological, and cultural con-
structs of Indigenous epistemology’ (Cajete,
2015: 205). Indigenous epistemology is con-
tingent upon the interrelationships that come
with being members of respective clans, vil-
lages, sacred societies, and spiritual landscapes
that inform and define our existence – an
Indigenous ontology. Considering the deep
nature of our reality is embedded in relation-
ships, we must understand the degree of
respect and reciprocity that comes with being
good stewards of Indigenous epistemologies
and ontologies that have been offered to shape
our reality and identity.
For me, in honor of conceptualizing the
significance of activating critical Indigenous
pedagogy within Hopi teachers, I use
the philosophical framework of the Hopi
people – kyaap-tsi, na-mi-na-ngwa, paa-sí-
na-ngwa, and su-mí-na-ngwa – to signify a
formal commitment that defines and guides
Indigenous education with (and for) Hopi
people. Kyaap-tsi is contextualized as respect.
 CRITICAL INDIGENOUS PEDAGOGIES OF RESISTANCE
Na-mi-na-ngwa is taking care of yourself and
helping others without being asked. Paa-sí-
na-ngwa is being intentional/cautious about
what you do. Su-mí-na-ngwa is helping one
another for the good of all the community/
interdependence (cited in Black Mesa Trust,
2009).
Kyaap-tsi, na-mi-na-ngwa, paa-sí-na-ngwa,
and su-mí-na-ngwa suggest a deeper com-
mitment to honor the spirit of our ancestors
who worked tirelessly to create a space
grounded in hope and survivance (Vizenor,
1994) of our own Indigenous epistemology,
ontology, language, and education. ‘The sur-
vivance narratives of Indigenous peoples are
those that articulate the active recovery, reim-
agination, and reinvestment of Indigenous
ways of being’ (Grande, 2015: 243). When
we work mutually and inclusively, we c­ reate
a level of moral responsibility grounded
in strong partnerships, hope, sacrifice,
good intentions, and a shared commitment
to coexist collectively. The intentions to
(re)conceptualize Indigenous education is not
an isolated effort but is inclusive of the voices,
concerns, struggles, and optimism shared
by fellow Indigenous peoples and educators –
past, present, and future – working to define
our own destination for our own reasons and
conditions.
In this process, Cajete’s point of ‘Learning
comes from being related, and being related
brings learning’ (2015: 197) is essential to
understanding the complexities of where
Indigenous knowledge rests and the layers
of responsibility and accountability embed-
ded within. We can begin to observe the
intersection of our creation stories, stories
of emergence and survivance, and relation-
ality as a source of sustaining Indigenous
epistemologies and ontologies through vari-
ous Indigenous community efforts to protect
what is sacred and to resist on-going pres-
sures to disrupt what defines our existence.
Unfortunately, many of our sacred sites and
items are under threat of being destroyed and
exploited. While protecting what is sacred to
577
us is a space of resistance, it is also a space
of learning that reinforces our relations and
responsibilities in safeguarding our land and
connections to ancestral knowledge, which I
turn to next.
SITES OF RESISTANCE, PRAYER,
UNITY, AND KNOWLEDGE
Within this section, I briefly highlight a key
environmental issue that is impacting
Indigenous communities – the Bears Ears
National Monument. Certainly, this is not the
only space of resistance. It is within these
contexts that we witness why it is critical for
our Indigenous youth to be given a space to
dialogue and engage in meaning making
around various environmental and socio-
political issues impacting their communities.
Within these sites of resistance, it makes
clear the pedagogical implications for seeing
Indigenous education (and the spaces where
learning takes place) as a sacred landscape
(Garcia and Shirley, 2012), which is a sacred
space of engagement shaped by Indigenous
knowledge systems, values, languages,
prayer, and unity.
Hoon’Naqvut, Shash Jáa, Kwiyagatu
Nukavachi, Ansh An Lashokdiwe: Bears
Ears National Monument:
Rising from the center of the southeastern Utah
landscape and visible from every direction are twin
buttes so distinctive that in each of the native
languages of the region their name is the same:
Hoon’Naqvut, Shash Jáa, Kwiyagatu Nukavachi,
Ansh An Lashokdiwe, or ‘Bears Ears’. (Obama,
2016)
On December 28, 2016, President Barack
Obama recognized The Bears Ears Inter-
Tribal Coalition’s proposal for the Creation
of a Bears Ears National Monument in
Utah. The Inter-Tribal Coalition includes the
Hopi, Navajo, Uintah and Ouray Ute, Ute
Mountain Ute, and Zuni Tribal Governments.
578 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Pursuant to the Antiquities Act of 1906,
President Obama ‘set aside 1.35 million
acres for permanent protection’ (Obama,
2016: 1). This was a momentous decision
that would protect ancestral sites, petro-
glyphs and pictographs, migration trials,
access to medicine, sustaining the creation
stories, and protecting 3,500-year-old Hopi
and Zuni villages. Several statements refer-
enced below from the Proposal to President
Obama for the Creation of Bears Ears
National Monument (Bears Ears Inter-Tribal
Coalition, 2015) capture the relationship and
responsibility of being good stewards of the
land from an Indigenous perspective. I find
this knowledge from Indigenous community
members and elders to hold an abundance of
value and it deserves to be recognized at
length. If we pay close attention, we can
begin to understand the power of being in
relation to a place.
Malcolm Lehi, Ute Mountain Ute
We don’t manage land. The land manages us….
We can still hear the songs and prayers of our
ancestors on every mesa and in every canyon.
(2015: 3)
Phillip Vicenti, Zuni
The importance of Bears Ears for our people is
through our ancestral sites that were left behind
eons ago by our ancestors. They documented the
sites by using oral history, pictographs, and by leav-
ing their belongings. When we visit Bears Ears, we
connect with our migration history immediately
without doubt. With that, we must preserve, manage
and educate our future generations. (2015: 10)
Herman Honanie, Hopi
The Hopi people made a solemn covenant to
Maasaw to protect the land by serving as stewards
of the Earth. The land is a testament of Hopi stew-
ardship through thousands of years, manifested by
‘footprints’ of ancient villages, migration routes,
pilgrimage trails, artifacts, petroglyphs, and the
buried hisatsinom, ‘the People of Long Ago,’ all of
which were intentionally left to mark the land as
proof that the Hopi have fulfilled their covenant.
The Hopi ancestors buried in this area continue
to inhabit the land, and they are intimately associ-
ated with the clouds that travel out across the
c­ ountryside to release the moisture that sustains all
life. (2015: 35)
Joseph Suina, Cochiti Pueblo
We go with offerings to our sites. We knock on that
wall and say our names – just like you should – you
make your entry properly, and address those that
reside there as grandmothers and grandfathers as
they are. There is no dimension of time in the spirit
world. It’s good to come here to the sites, to your
grandmothers’ homes, you remember how it was
to be there. With an offering, perhaps some corn
meal, you identify yourself, you sing a song and the
children dance, and we just speak our language.
Your name, your clan, your kiva. (2015: 9)
Ruby Ross, Navajo
My grandmother told me the story about how my
grandfather took them hunting for deer around
Bears Ears. My family members still hunt the area
near Bears Ears and I was taught the different
medicinal plants; this was my classroom, I am now
a Navajo traditional herbalist (2015: 3)
Across each of these stories of being in
relation to Bears Ears, there is a powerful
connection to sustaining identity in relation
to land, spiritual beings, symbols, and history
that remind us of who continues to be
affiliated with this landscape. It is where
Indigenous peoples return to as a source of
knowing, to offer prayers, and to reaffirm
their identity.
On December 4, 2017, Donald Trump
would reverse Obama’s decision by reduc-
ing these protected lands by 85% (1,150,860
acres) (Trump, 2017). Once again, this would
lead to protectors rising in solidarity and
releasing official statements of resistance and
legal action from tribal nations. The Native
American Rights Fund is supporting the Inter-
Tribal Coalition’s lawsuit3. In addition, nine
conservation organizations are being repre-
sented by Earthjustice in a lawsuit against
this decision4. This decision to remove the
protection of 85% of the proposed land-base
endangers Indigenous ancestors, epistemolo-
gies, histories, and the natural ecosystems; it
allows for increased vandalism of petroglyphs
and looting of ancient artifacts.
 CRITICAL INDIGENOUS PEDAGOGIES OF RESISTANCE
A RESTORATIVE LENS: CRITICAL
INDIGENOUS PEDAGOGY
When we consider the struggles and points of
resistance to the exploitation of sacred
landscapes by settler colonialism and
corporatization, it is without question that
Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies are
about sustaining worldviews that underscore
the value of being stewards of the land. There
is a powerful message inherent in examining
injustices occurring in places like Bears Ears
(#SaveBearsEars), Oak Flat in San Carlos
Apache (#SaveOakFlat), and Lake Oahe-
Missouri River of Standing Rock Sioux
(#NoDAPL). It is clear our Indigenous
struggles are about protecting and sustaining
our right to exist. Though such struggles can
be contextualized within notions of inequities
and injustice, we must also acknowledge the
strength inherent in our reactions to rise up
and protect. In Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s
conceptualization of Indigenous struggles for
social justice she notes: ‘Struggle is a tool of
both social activism and theory. It is a tool that
has the potential to enable oppressed groups to
embrace and mobilize agency, and to turn the
consciousness of injustice into strategies for
change’ (2012: 199). If we look closely across
these spaces of resistance, we not only see
elders, knowledge keepers, and community
members enacting agency, we also find
Indigenous youth offering their interpretations
and perspectives.
For example, I had the opportunity to
learn from and be in support of Alayna
Eagle Shield, founder of the Mní Wičhóni
Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa (Defenders of the Water
School) located at the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ
Camp during #NoDAPL at Standing Rock
Sioux. Coincidentally, we met a year just
before the protectors began resisting the
pipeline in Standing Rock. I would soon be
reconnected with her due to this moment
of resistance. The creation of Mní Wičhóni
Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa emerged as a result of
the children and youth who joined their fami-
lies in solidarity to resist the Dakota Access
579
Pipeline. While the students were not heavily
involved in the direct action on the front lines,
they were witnessing a movement that would
activate a critical Indigenous consciousness
(Lee, 2006). I continue to be moved by Mní
Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa student Kenji
Chambers’ (Rosebud Sioux’s) reflection:
The people who are doing that [praying and at the
frontlines], in my opinion, they’re making a big
difference and they’re helping stop the pipeline. So
we’re not going to use our fists and use like all
those weapons to get it off our land, we’re going
to have to use peace…We don’t want to use our
hands. We’re tired of it. It’s not the old days, it’s
the new days. We need to start using our words,
we need to start praying.…We stand with many
Nations as one…we’re going to stop this. We
stand behind Standing Rock to kill the black
snake….we got to defeat that thing. (CATV 47
news clip, October 26, 2016)5
Kenji, along with other Indigenous youth
such as Naelyn Pike6 and Autumn Peltier7
have a critical Indigenous consciousness that
is reflective of the learning contexts they have
encountered within sites of resistance. Much
of this is at the crossroads of traditional
knowledge, stories, language, and education
that is grounded in/with the land (L. Simpson,
2014). Within Western schooling spaces, edu-
cation for Indigenous youth, generally, has
not reflected the deep connections to Indigenous
epistemologies rooted in community-based
contexts and landscapes. Even more so,
Indigenous youth may have limited interac-
tions with critical Indigenous pedagogies that
offer a restorative lens on how they see the
world. A restorative lens that opens our spirit
and minds to engage a critical and community
consciousness (Cajete, 2015; Freire, 2002;
Lee, 2006) that guides our pathways to decol-
onization and informs how we respond to our
contemporary struggles and sites of resist-
ance. Resistance in this context is built on
preserving, sustaining, and reclaiming the
Indigenous values, languages, and world-
views that have been dehumanized, altered,
and, in many cases, exploited for material and
corporate gain. Earlier works by Donna
580 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Deyhle, Karen Swisher, Tracy Stevens, and CRITICAL INDIGENOUS EDUCATION

Ruth Trinidad Galván (2009) suggest:
Strategic resistance evident in Indigenous commu-
nities across the globe has been to reclaim educa-
tional theory and practice by creating or adapting
curriculum and pedagogies that better reflect
Indigenous worldviews, that maintain Indigenous
culture, and that resist assimilating cultural and
political forces. (2009: 336)
AND PRAXIS: THE CALL FOR CRITICAL
INDIGENOUS TEACHERS
What then is the potential of education as an
instrument, or technique of consciousness, that
can stretch beyond the curricular and into personal
and political zones of responsibility and service, to
each other and to land? (A. Simpson, 2015: 80)

Engaging in critical Indigenous pedagogy

Indigenous scholars continue to expand this
and praxis creates a pathway that embraces
notion of engaging strategic forms of resist-
Indigenous epistemologies and the struggles
ance to settler colonialism through critical
and spaces of resistance, thus generating a
Indigenous studies of Red Pedagogy (Grande,
pedagogy of hope, agency, and commitment
2015), Safety Zones Theory (Lomawaima
to our relations. It offers a restorative lens
and McCarty, 2006), Tribal Critical Race
that makes clear the (un)known tensions that
Theory (Brayboy, 2006), Decolonization
we feel as we witness and experience the
(G. H. Smith, 2000, 2003; L. T. Smith, 2012),
exploitation and unjust circumstances
Indigenous knowledge systems (Cajete, 2015;
impacting Indigenous communities. It offers
Battiste, 1998, 2000, 2008, 2013), Critical
a unique and empowering space for
and Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing
Indigenous youth and communities to engage
Pedagogy (McCarty and Lee, 2014), and
in dialogue about their own struggles, goals,
Indigenous Social Justice Pedagogy (Brayboy
and aspirations.
and McCarty, 2010; Shirley, 2017). Though
For Indigenous peoples, these efforts are
each have differing origins, these proposed
not limited to the individuals, but involve
critical Indigenous theories inform our collec-
the collective consciousness and solidarity
tive consciousness and assist in moving our
of educators and communities (Cajete, 2015;
communities in the direction of an education
Grande, 2015; G. H. Smith, 2004, 2017).
rooted in decolonization and transformative
By utilizing the conceptual tools and analy-
possibilities. Critical Indigenous pedagogy
sis critical Indigenous theories offer, we can
‘understands that all inquiry is both political
begin to see a resurgence (L. Simpson, 2014)
and moral….and it seeks forms of praxis and
of Indigenous epistemologies and ontolo-
inquiry that are emancipatory and empower-
gies guiding our curricular and pedagogical
ing’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2008 2).
choices. Guided by Nishnaabeg intelligence,
However, John Tippeconnic (2015)
Leanne Simpson suggests:
reminds us that, while such critical theo-
ries are essential, ‘there remains a notice- We simply cannot bring about the resurgence of
able disconnect between critical theory and our nations if we have no one that can think
kindergarten to twelfth-grade education in within the emergent networks of Nishnaabeg
intelligence. We cannot bring about the kind of
public and BIE [Bureau of Indian Education]
radical transformation we seek if we are solely
schools’ (2015: 40). This disconnect is a reliant upon state sanctioned and state run
call for efforts to continue to engage criti- education systems. (2014: 13)
cal Indigenous pedagogy in K-12 educa-
tion to restore, revitalize, and sustain how Herein lies the challenge posed to Indigenous
Indigenous communities will respond to educators, schools, community members,
ongoing pressures of corporatization and set- and tribal nations. The calling to do this work
tler colonialism – in essence it calls for the is not easy but it is a beautiful (re)awakening
emergence of critical Indigenous teachers. to be in relation with Indigenous knowledge,
 CRITICAL INDIGENOUS PEDAGOGIES OF RESISTANCE
ancestors, spiritual beings, ceremonies, and
land that have been waiting for us to return;
not only as a simple act of physically being
present but to do so in ways that enact lessons
learned to facilitate survivance and sustain
the vibrancy of Indigenous peoples. The fol-
lowing are key aspects that I suggest inform
the making of a critical Indigenous teacher.
Knowing and Living Our
Creation Stories: Indigenous
Epistemologies and Ontologies
To begin, the strength and value of knowing
our creation stories or stories of emergence
set in motion the spirit of this work. When
Indigenous teachers begin with conceptual-
izing what it means to be of place through
such stories, it offers a renewed relationship
to their community. Such stories embody the
roots of what it is to be Indigenous in relation
to place. It is a different history, a different
story, that predates our colonial encounters.
Returning to the homelands of Bears Ears,
Alfred Lomahquahu of the Hopi nation
reflects:
Cedar Mesa is a part of our footprints, a path that
tells a story. History is crucial to man because it
tells us of who we are. Those who lived before us
have never left. Their voices are part of the rhythm
or heartbeat of the universe and will echo through
eternity. (cited in Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition
Proposal, 2015: 10)
This notion of ‘history telling us who we are’
and that ‘their voices…will echo through
eternity’ is the beginning of shaping a critical
consciousness that leads Indigenous teachers
on the path to being intentional about privi-
leging Indigenous knowledge and values in
their curriculum and pedagogy. Such stories
define our relations as a community and most
certainly how we interact within schooling
spaces. For example, it is common to find
Hopi and Diné students acknowledging their
clan affiliations within the classroom. In this
case, when/if Hopi and Diné teachers contex-
tualize such relations in our creation stories,
581
we can see a powerful space of engagement
among the youth that reclaims our relations
in humanizing ways.
I am reminded of our8 efforts to support
Indigenous teacher candidates in the pro-
cess of engaging critical Indigenous peda-
gogies and notions of decolonization. The
Indigenous pre-service teachers within
our Indigenous Teacher Education Project
were asked to generate a curriculum that
emerged from an environmental issue fac-
ing their home community. As they prepared
to develop the curriculum projects, the pre-
service teachers found themselves engaging
in critical analyses of how they would engage
youth in thinking about certain environmen-
tal injustices. In each case, they could not
see themselves engaging their curriculum
projects without beginning and returning to
our creation stories. They collectively valued
the notion that in order for Indigenous youth
to understand the injustice occurring in their
Indigenous community, the youth needed to
know their relations to land through such sto-
ries of emergence.
Understanding the Context:
Problematizing Western
Schooling Systems
It is important to understand the varying con-
texts of where Indigenous students learn and
the schools they attend. Within the United
States, according to the National Indian
Education Association, there are approxi-
mately 644,000 students in K-12 systems,
with about 90% of American Indian/Alaska
Native students attending public schools and
4% attending Bureau of Indian Education
(BIE) schools (National Indian Education
Association, 2018). If we are to reach these
students, there are several points of analysis
that Indigenous teachers must take into con-
sideration. The initial being that there is a
great need for Indigenous teachers to bring
critical Indigenous pedagogies to public
schooling systems. This includes BIE or
582 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
tribally controlled schools who are operating
under Western schooling constructs – when
in fact they should be the spaces where
notions of self-determination and sovereignty
are modeled. Given this context and knowing
that schools were the colonial tactic and tools
used to erase and replace Indigenous lan-
guages and value systems (Lomawaima and
McCarty, 2006), there is a great urgency to
reconceptualize how Indigenous teachers can
enact agency within such educational sys-
tems. Thus, it is critical that Indigenous teach-
ers work to understand the ways in which
their curriculum and pedagogy can disrupt the
hegemonic structures of schooling.
Contemporary Spaces of
Resistance: Curriculum and
Pedagogy as Sacred Landscapes
Let’s take a moment to reflect on what we
know about the injustices occurring across
Indigenous lands. Consider the spaces of
resistance occurring at Bears Ears, #NoDAPL
at Standing Rock, #SaveOakFlat in San
Carlos Apache, and #SaveTheConfluence in
the Grand Canyon. Braided across each of
these contexts, there is a clear premise to
why Indigenous peoples are moved to Defend
the Sacred. It is an act of agency that is
informed by Indigenous epistemologies. It is
an indication that our identities in relation to
such places are thriving. However, it is also a
concern that our spaces of prayer and the
stories that emerge from within are also in
need of continued protection. Jim Enote of
Zuni assists us in understanding the signifi-
cance of defending the sacred. He shares,
‘We hope to go to Bears Ears to learn. Our
history lies within the landscape and when
we go there we find missing chapters of our
book’ (cited in Bears Ears Inter-Tribal
Coalition Proposal, 2015: 19). These are
chapters that cannot be found on the shelves
of our public schools.
I return to a point made earlier, in that when
we engage these sites of resistance, it makes
clear the pedagogical implications for seeing
Indigenous education (and the spaces where
learning takes place) as a sacred landscape
(Garcia and Shirley, 2012). A sacred space
of engagement shaped by Indigenous knowl-
edge systems, values, languages, prayer, and
unity. Elsewhere, I continue to expand on the
concept of Indigenous education and schools
as a sacred landscape (Garcia, forthcoming)
through the guiding questions of: What do
current forms of resistance to exploitation of
natural resources, land, and sacred sites mean
for schools, curriculum, and pedagogy serv-
ing Indigenous youth? Can defending sacred
sites be the impetus for redefining how
Indigenous educators and schools conceptu-
alize curriculum?
For Indigenous teachers, this is the space
of hope and liberation. Much like we witness
Indigenous peoples on the frontlines protect-
ing what is sacred, for Indigenous teachers,
the frontlines are rooted in sustaining a criti-
cal Indigenous consciousness (Lee, 2006)
that embodies decolonizing pedagogies
and is generative of curriculum that honors
Indigenous knowledge systems and values,
and engages youth in enacting agency. By
drawing upon sites of resistance and sacred
sites, Indigenous teachers are encouraged to
identify how Indigenous epistemologies are
activated, and inform/become curriculum
and pedagogy. In doing so, Indigenous teach-
ers can begin to see, as Cajete suggests, how
‘Indigenous epistemology guides our peda-
gogy, and our pedagogy models our episte-
mology’ (2015: 204).
Indigenous Teachers as
Nation-builders: Reciprocity
through Accountability
[Indigenous accountability] is rooted in Native prin-
ciples of sovereignty and self-determination – the
belief in the right to determine locally the direction
and method of delivery of education to native stu-
dents and communities, whether these students
attend mainstream public or tribally controlled
schools. (Tibbetts and Faircloth, 2008: 153)
 CRITICAL INDIGENOUS PEDAGOGIES OF RESISTANCE
Indigenous teachers have the capacity to
impact the next generation of care takers of
our Indigenous communities and tribal
nations. This process requires a working con-
ceptualization of what it means to strengthen
our cultural identity and ways of being while
focusing on relationships through the
Indigenous principles of sovereignty and
self-determination. Indigenous teachers serv-
ing Indigenous students can be the catalyst
by which sovereignty, self-determination,
and self-education can be endorsed as they
strive to find autonomy in regards to the
learning experiences (i.e., curriculum, peda-
gogy, Indigenous knowledge) they create for
Indigenous youth. Consequently, such a level
of accountability extends beyond the Western
canon of state standards and testing meas-
ures. I encourage Indigenous teachers to
reclaim what it means to be accountable to
our Indigenous nations and to see the deep
relationship it has to reciprocity. It is an
Indigenous accountability that moves our
Indigenous youth to see themselves as
transformative change agents who contrib-
ute to Nation-building. Importantly, Bryan
Brayboy, Amy Fann, Angelina Castagno, and
Jessica Solyom suggest: ‘Indigenous nations
cannot successfully engage in nation-building
projects that are driven by sovereignty and
self-determination unless they develop inde-
pendence of the mind by taking action to
restore pride in their traditions, languages,
and knowledge’ (2012: 15). The notions of
‘independence of the mind’ and ‘restoration
of pride’ are inclusive of Indigenous teachers
embodying a critical Indigenous conscious-
ness, a restorative lens, that guides their
pedagogical decisions to lead youth on the
path toward Nation-building. Indigenous
teachers are contemporary knowledge keep-
ers who – in partnership with Indigenous
elders and youth – can sustain the vibrancy
and well-being of our Indigenous communi-
ties in ways that engage the truth-telling
practices (Shirley, 2017) of our histories and
injustices, and are guided by the trust in our
knowledge systems.
583
CONCLUSION
I’ve been able to run for not just myself, but I’ve
been able to run for water. Our fight for clean
water here on Hopi. I’ve been able to run for advo-
cacy around all our natural resources and sacred
sites. And of course, for the health and well-being
of individuals and our people. It’s very important to
me and helps to balance the work that I do.
Because a lot of the work that I do is not just edu-
cating in the classroom but educating outside of
the classroom in our community awareness events.
So I just really feel that it’s a large part of who I am
and continues to guide me and be there for me.
(Samantha, research participant)
In closing, I wish to honor the critical
Indigenous educators, like Samantha and
other Hopi/Tewa educators, I have had the
privilege to learn with as we navigated criti-
cal dialogues regarding Indigenous educa-
tion. In the opening passage, Hopi/Tewa
community educator and 2nd-grade teacher
Samantha provides insight to the intersec-
tions of running and critical Indigenous ped-
agogies within a tribally controlled school.
Samantha’s running and prayers for water led
her to address a student’s question of ‘why
does my grandmother have to buy water? We
have a faucet; why can’t we use that water?’.
The community in which she lives and works
is suffering from high arsenic levels in the
water. Eventually, the 2nd-grade class led an
initiative to draft and deliver a letter to the
Hopi Tribal Council requesting this issue be
addressed – they listened and efforts to con-
front the issue have started.
Indigenous educators, like Samantha, are
tirelessly working the educational frontlines
on behalf of our Indigenous communities.
I believe Samantha is speaking firmly to
Sandy Grande’s notion of reciprocity. Grande
states: ‘Through the ethic of reciprocity, we
need to remind ourselves that accountability
to the collective requires a commitment to
engage, extend, trouble, speak back to, and
intensify our words and deeds’ (2018: 61).
Many Indigenous educators are engaging
Indigenous youth in decolonizing pedago-
gies that speak to revitalizing our Indigenous
584 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Nations through community projects that
activate an understanding of what it means
to be Indigenous. They are disrupting the
pressures of state mandates that dismiss the
knowledge, values, and history found in our
relations to land, our knowledge systems,
ceremonies, and cultural practices.
Notes
1  I use the terms Native American, Native, American
Indian, and Indigenous peoples interchangeably
throughout this proposal. Native American and
American Indian refer specifically to Indigenous
peoples of the United States. Indigenous peoples
reflects people joining in the global effort to
decolonize their worldviews and reposition our
epistemology and ontology.
2  Throughout this work, I include myself and my
Indigenous Hopi community within the phrases
of ‘we’, ‘I’, ‘our’, and ‘us’ to include ourselves in
the context of Indigenous peoples.
3  See Bears Ears Complaint, Case 1:17-cv-02590,
filed December 4, 2017.
4  See Bears Ears Complaint, Case 1:17-cv-02606,
filed December 7, 2017.
5  CATV 47 visits Mni Wiconi School at Standing Rock,
October 26, 2016. Retrieved November 1, 2016 from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.
be&v=AZwhq1z11Nw&app=desktop
6  Naelyn Pike has been an active youth protecting the
San Carlos Apache sacred site located on Oak Flat.
7  Autumn Peltier is a Canadian youth advocating
for water. She addressed the United Nations
General Assembly in the spring of 2018.
8  In this case, I am referring to my colleague
Dr Valerie Shirley, who is the Director of the
Indigenous Teacher Education Project at the
University of Arizona. I serve as the Co-Director.
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Ethical Relationality as a
Pathway for Non-Indigenous
Educators to Decolonize
Curriculum and Instruction
Shashi Shergill and David Scott
Following the final report of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC)
on Indian Residential Schools (2015a), pro-
vincial and territorial jurisdictions of educa-
tion in Canada have been called on to
undertake curricular reforms that make the
history of residential schools, Treaties, and
the historical and contemporary contributions
of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples to
Canada a mandatory educational requirement
for all K-12 students (Call to Action 62.i).
Established in June 2008 with a mandate of
five years, the TRC sought to provide public
forums for survivors to share their stories,
whereby the greater Canadian public could
bear witness to the profoundly destructive
legacies of the residential school system.
Over the last decade, jurisdictions of edu-
cation in Canada have introduced a range of
curricular initiatives explicitly responding to
the TRC’s calls to action (Alberta Education,
2019; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2019;
British Columbia, 2019). But despite these
positive developments, research suggests that
53
teachers feel a great deal of ambivalence and
uncertainty towards such curricular directives
(den Heyer and Abbott, 2011; Donald, 2009b;
Kanu, 2005; Milne, 2017; Scott, 2013; Scott
and Gani, 2018; Tupper & Cappello, 2008).
Specifically, research has found that many
educators choose either to ignore curricular
mandates to engage Indigenous knowledge
systems, ways of knowing, and histories,
or address them in a largely tokenistic man-
ner, where aspects of Indigenous culture are
explored in superficial and trivial ways. In a
study examining how teachers in the province
of Manitoba were addressing Indigenous his-
tory and experiences in the classroom, Kanu
(2005), for example, found that although there
is an ‘expressed openness among teachers
to include Aboriginal perspectives into the
school curriculum, in practice little headway
was being made except in a few unique cases’
(2005: 57). Research suggests that little has
changed in the ensuing decade. A more recent
study suggests that while teachers, in this case
in the province of Ontario, wanted to teach
588 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
about residential schools and Indigenous cul-
ture, they were uncertain about what to teach
and how (Milne, 2017).
These findings should not come as a sur-
prise. The teachers in Canada – the vast
majority of whom are of Euro-Canadian
descent (Johnston et al., 2009: 2) – now being
directed to teach the unique philosophies,
historical memory, and traditions of specific
First Nations, Métis, and Inuit nations are
products of an educational formation that has
ill prepared them for this task. An extensive
body of literature has documented the ways
mainstream systems of education have either
ignored Indigenous participation and pres-
ence in Canadian society (Donald, 2009b), or,
when included, positioned Indigenous peo-
ples as frozen in the past (Francis, 1992), or
an impediment to European progress (Clark,
2007; Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, 1977).
Murray Sinclair, chair of the TRC, affirmed
this point, noting that at the same time resi-
dential schools were working to eradicate
the culture and language of Indigenous peo-
ples, Canadian students were being told that
Indigenous people ‘were inferior, they were
pagans, that they were heathens and savages’
(Sinclair, as cited by Kennedy, 2015: para. 7).
During the unveiling of the TRC’s recom-
mendations in Ottawa, Commissioner Marie
Wilson articulated the specific omissions that
have taken place in Canadian classrooms:
Think about your Canadian history classes. Did the
story of Canada begin only shortly before Europeans
came up the river this city is built on? … How frank
and truthful are we with Canadian students about
the history of residential schools and the role our
governments and religious institutions played in its
systematic attempt to erase the cultures of
Aboriginal people? (Wilson, as cited in Curry and
Galloway, 2015: Education section, para. 2)
Educators now confronted with a mandated
responsibility to address the reality of
Canada’s colonial inheritance are, as Donald
(2009b: 4) noted, ‘naturally finding it diffi-
cult to relinquish the more comfortable sto-
ries of Canada that they have been told and
grown accustomed to telling’. In this regard,
the teaching of the histories, memories, and
experiences of Indigenous peoples has meant
that educators must now grapple with ‘diffi-
cult knowledge’ (Britzman, 1998: 2) related
to histories of colonial practices that disrupt
popular narratives of Canada as a raceless
society and human rights leader, which are
central to many educators’ personal sense of
identity (Mackey, 2002).
Wishing to place Indigenous memory, histo-
ries, and experiences at the center of curricular
and pedagogical classroom engagements, an
increasing number of non-Indigenous educa-
tors are actively seeking to counter this destruc-
tive legacy of exclusion and misrepresentation.
In what follows we outline one such attempt
to undertake this work involving a month-long
inquiry into the historical relationship among
Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in
the place now called Canada. Seeking to bet-
ter appreciate what it might mean to teach for
reconciliation, we outline the differing ways
this term is understood in the literature, includ-
ing in the TRC’s final report (2015a, 2015b).
Highlighting key resistances educators have
had towards carrying out curricular mandates
aligned to the TRC’s (2015a) calls to action,
we demonstrate how the work of Indigenous
scholarship (e.g., Royal Commission on
Aboriginal Peoples [RCAP], 1996; King,
2003, 2012), and in particular Donald’s notion
of ethical relationality (Donald, 2009a, 2009b,
2012), offers a conceptual framework for non-
Indigenous educators to carry out this work
in ways that are relational, implicative, and
critical. As part of this process, we surface the
key principles that guided our work over the
course of this month-long inquiry.
POSITIONING OURSELVES
IN THIS WORK
We would like to give thanks to the people of
Treaty Seven including the Blackfoot
Confederacy made up of the Siksika, the
Piikuni, and the Kainai, as well as the Tsuut’ina
 ETHICAL RELATIONALITY AS A PATHWAY
and the Stoney Nakoda First Nations, whose
traditional territories we are privileged to live
and work on. We additionally acknowledge
that the territory on which we reside is home to
Métis Nation Region III.
Before proceeding, it is also necessary
to position ourselves in this work. The first
author of this chapter is I, Shashi, a settler of
East Indian origin from the northern region of
Punjab. Born in England, I lived the majority
of my life in the West Midlands region up until
17 years ago, and have since made Alberta,
Canada my home. Upon arriving in Canada,
I quickly understood that amidst the beauty
and charm of the landscape of this country lay
the entangled roots of European colonization.
Forging a path towards decolonizing educa-
tion, and the pursuit of a more just and demo-
cratic society, is where I find my place in the
conversation on reconciliation. These efforts
are empowered partly by my own personal
and professional experiences through trans-
formative moments that have contributed to
an ongoing understanding of the complexities
of what it means to teach for social justice.
The second author of this article is I, David. I
can most accurately be described by Mackey’s
(2002) term Canadian–Canadian: an English
speaker of European descent who, having lim-
ited connection to their European ancestry,
identifies first and foremost as Canadian. As
a White Canadian, the process of teaching for
reconciliation has involved coming to terms
with the historical reality that it only became
possible to live in this place I call home through
a historic chain of events, perpetrated by my
ancestral forbearers, involving theft of land and
a trail of broken promises. As a teacher educator
involved in this work for the last decade, I have
been fortunate to gain insights from Elders and
Indigenous scholars who have provided guid-
ance on how to take up this work in a good way.
Terminology
Throughout this article the use of the term
Aboriginal is consistent with language used
589
in the province of Alberta’s social studies
program (Alberta Education, 2005), as well
as the Constitution Act of 1982 where
Aboriginal people are defined as First Nations
(Indian), Métis, and Inuit peoples (Government
of Canada, 2015: 2). It is important to note,
however, that many Indigenous people are
increasingly rejecting the term Aboriginal.
The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, along
with the Anishinabek of Ontario, have
recently argued that the term is an English
one that has been imposed on their people. In
this regard, they note that although most
people assume Aboriginal means first inhabit-
ants, the Latin prefix ‘ab’ means ‘away from’
or ‘not’, and therefore could equally mean
‘not original’ (as cited in Marks, 2014: para. 4).
As a consequence, when speaking to the
Canadian context, rather than Aboriginal,
when not referencing particular documents,
we adopt the term Indigenous; or where
appropriate, the names of particular
Indigenous nations such as the Blackfoot and
Plains Cree. Throughout this article, when we
use the term Indigenous, we refer to members
of communities, not only in the place now
known as Canada, but all over the world, who
have inhabited particular territories for long
periods of time (Dei, 2000: 114).
THE CONTESTED NATURE OF
RECONCILIATION
As has been well documented in the literature,
based on a belief that Indigenous cultures and
traditions were ‘primitive’ and inferior, in
1876 the Canadian government introduced
the Indian Act (Canadiana, 2015), which
gave the Ministry of Indian Affairs the legal
basis to forcibly remove First Nations, Métis,
and Inuit children from their families and
communities and intern them in church-run
residential schools (Miller, 1996). The perni-
cious and assimilationist intentions of these
schools were expressed in 1920 by Duncan
Scott, the deputy minister of Indian Affairs,
590 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
who asserted: ‘Our object is to continue until
there is not a single Indian in Canada that has
not been absorbed into the body politic, and
there is no Indian question, and no Indian
department’ (as cited in Miller, 2004: 35). By
1920, attendance at residential schools was
compulsory for all status ‘Indian’ children.
When the last school was closed in 1996, it is
estimated that 150,000 First Nation, Métis,
and Inuit children went through the Canadian
residential school system (TRC, 2015a: 2).
Following many years of pressure from
Indigenous peoples and activists, in 2008
the then Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen
Harper, made a historic statement of apol-
ogy in the House of Commons to former stu-
dents of Indian residential schools. During
the government’s official apology, Harper
stated: ‘The government now recognizes that
the consequences of the Indian residential
schools policy were profoundly negative and
that this policy has had a lasting and damag-
ing impact on aboriginal culture, heritage and
language’ (Government of Canada, 2010:
para. 4). As part of this apology, the Harper-
led government promised a settlement pack-
age to compensate First Nations, Métis, and
Inuit people who had experienced emotional,
physical, or sexual abuse as a result of the resi-
dential school system. In addition, the govern-
ment launched the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC) of Canada to provide a
public forum for survivors to share their sto-
ries around the profoundly destructive legacies
of these schools.
While a large number of Canadians saw
these measures as a significant step for-
ward towards a new era of reconciliation
between Indigenous people and settlers, many
Indigenous activists, scholars, and writers
have argued otherwise. The Indigenous writer
Thomas King (2012), for instance, contended
the official government apology was quite
limited: ‘there was nothing about treaty vio-
lations. Nothing about the theft of land and
resources. Nothing about government incom-
petence, indifference, and chicanery. Nothing
about the institutional racism that Aboriginal
people have endured and continue to endure’
(2012: 122–3). More recently, the notion that
Canada is genuinely in an era of reconcili-
ation was further troubled by the rise of the
Idle No More movement in 2012 protesting
the Federal Government’s legislative abuses
of Indigenous treaty rights.
In addition, the recent government inquiry
into the high numbers of missing and mur-
dered Indigenous women and girls came
under intense criticism from the victims’
families, who felt they had not been ade-
quately consulted (Clancy, 2017).
For many Indigenous activists, the actions
of the federal government and the greater
Canadian society reflect misrecognition
of what reconciliation entails. Indigenous
scholar and activist Haydon King, for
instance, argued that popular understand-
ings of reconciliation suggest that ‘we can
all get along if we hold hands’ (as cited in
Andrew-Gee, 2017: chapter 5, para. 17). He
contrasts this with what Indigenous com-
munities need. Namely, significant transfer
of land and resources, as promised in treaty
agreements, that would work to address struc-
tural poverty, grossly inadequate social ser-
vices, and substandard living conditions on
many reserves. Ultimately, such work would
involve re-establishing rights of sovereignty
and self-determination of Indigenous nations.
For Alfred (2017), undertaking this work will
require Canadians to ‘ask themselves some
hard questions and be prepared for some seri-
ous sacrifices if we are ever going to free our-
selves from the grip of the past and the racism
and patriarchy that the Indian Act represents
and perpetuates’ (2017: para. 9).
The contested nature of reconciliation was
similarly present within the TRC (2015b)
itself. The commission noted that Elders and
knowledge keepers asserted that there was
no specific word for reconciliation in their
languages. However, pointing to Indigenous
understandings of reconciliation, the Elders
shared many words, stories, as well as sacred
objects, such as peace pipes and wampum
belts, ‘used to establish relationships, repair
 ETHICAL RELATIONALITY AS A PATHWAY
conflicts, restore harmony, and make peace’
(TRC, 2015b: 12). Flowing from these
ancient understandings, the Commission
defined reconciliation as ‘an ongoing process
of establishing and maintaining respectful
relationships. A critical part of this process
involves repairing damaged trust by making
apologies, providing individual and collective
reparations, and following through with con-
crete actions that demonstrate real societal
change’ (2015b: 11). Noting that education is
key to reconciliation, in the summary report
the Commission called on provincial and ter-
ritorial jurisdictions of education to work with
Indigenous communities and organizations
to develop and introduce age-appropriate
curriculum on the history and impact of resi-
dential schools and Treaties, as well as First
Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples’ historical
and contemporary contributions to Canada
(TRC, 2015a: Call to Action 62.i).
ETHICALLY RELATIONAL
POSSIBILITIES FOR TEACHING
FOR RECONCILIATION
While ministries of education across Canada
have made substantive moves to carry out the
TRC’s calls to action for education, research
suggests that many educators in Alberta (den
Heyer and Abbott, 2011; Donald, 2009b;
Scott, 2013; Scott and Gani, 2018), and in
other jurisdictions of education in Canada
including Manitoba (Kanu, 2005, 2011) and
Ontario (Milne, 2017), have resisted such
efforts. One of the key themes around why this
has occurred involves an argument that
because educators are not Indigenous, it is
inappropriate for them to engage their students
around themes outlined in the TRC’s calls to
action. In a study with teachers from Alberta,
for instance, one participant asserted: ‘And
there’s always that danger, right? I’m an Irish
Canadian talking about Aboriginal perspec-
tive. Am I really the best person to do that?’
(as cited in Berg, 2017: 156). This belief
591
system is reflective of what Donald (2009a: 32)
termed the ‘cultural disqualification’ argu-
ment, where teachers ‘retreat behind the com-
forting shelter of real or passive ignorance’
that disqualifies them from participating in
curricular mandates designed to engage with
Indigenous histories and ways of knowing.
The cultural disqualification argument
points to tensions that arise when the major-
ity of teachers tasked with carrying out cur-
ricular mandates aligned with the TRC’s calls
to action are themselves not Indigenous and
have, moreover, received very little formation
around the philosophies and histories they are
expected to teach. This argument additionally
points to concerns that, in attending to this
mandate, a primarily non-Indigenous teaching
population is in danger of taking possession
of the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the
same way Europeans once took possession of
their territories (Kanu, 2005: 59). Grounded
in a belief that discussing Indigenous issues
constitutes a dangerous minefield of identity
politics, educators in Canada have expressed
concerns that their attempts to represent
Indigenous philosophies and memory will
lead to accusations that they are culturally
insensitive, and even racist.
Donald (2009a, 2009b, 2012, 2013), a
descendent of the Papaschase Cree, has pro-
vided substantive insights into the source and
origins of this common justification for not
attending to Indigenous curricular mandates.
Donald (2009b) traces the cultural disqualifi-
cation argument to stories of Canada genera-
tions of students have been taught in schools
that have worked to deny and marginalize the
historical, temporal, spatial, and legal rela-
tionship among Indigenous peoples and set-
tler populations. As a result of this dynamic,
many educators have come to see Indigenous
ways of knowing and being as something
that is fundamentally unknowable to outsid-
ers, and thus incompatible with formal public
education (Donald, 2009a: 36).
Along these lines, Donald (2009b: 20)
maintained that manifestations of what he
terms ‘colonial frontier logics’ deeply inhabit
592 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
mainstream systems of education, curriculum
documents, and current approaches to teach-
ing Indigenous perspectives. For Donald
(2009b: 20), colonial frontier logics involve
‘those epistemological assumptions and pre-
suppositions, derived from the colonial pro-
ject of dividing the world according to racial
and cultural categorizations, which serve to
naturalize assumed divides and thus contrib-
ute to their social and institutional perpetu-
ation’. One of the key teachings of colonial
frontier logics is that Indigenous peoples and
Canadians live in different worlds.
To explain how this situation has come
about, Donald (2009b) draws on the promi-
nence of the fort as an image that has become
a mythic symbol in Canada. Recounting his
experience of visiting Fort Edmonton Park,
Donald explains how the fort, regardless of
its location in Canada, ubiquitously sepa-
rates Indigenous peoples and the newcomers.
Recounting his experience, Donald (2009b: 2)
notes that the space outside the fort walls
where the Indigenous people were located
‘was clearly an anthropological realm – a
museum-like exhibit’, whereas the inside of
the fort inhabited by Europeans ‘was a more
industrious place where newcomers labored
in the interests of civilizing a country and
building a nation’ (2009b: 2). As a result of
this process, Donald (2009b) contended that
the logic underpinning the fort creation story
has fostered a social and spatial organization –
demarcated by the palisades of the fort walls –
that positions Indigenous peoples as outsiders
and settler communities as insiders.
In seeking a model whereby Indigenous
memory, traditions, and experiences could
be engaged within classroom contexts in
ways that refuse the colonial frontier logics
of the fort, Donald (2009a: 24) has called
for a ‘decolonizing form of curriculum that
conceptualizes Aboriginal and Canadian
perspectives as relational, inter-referential,
and mutually implicative’. To realize this
relational vision, Donald (2012) draws on
Ermine’s (2007) notion of ethical space.
According to Ermine (2007), ethical space
constitutes the area between two entities.
Like two trees growing close to each other
in a forest, ethical space can be seen as the
points of contact where their root systems
entangle and enmesh. For Donald (2012),
these points of contact hold the potential of
becoming a meeting place where Indigenous
peoples and settler communities can ‘revisit
and deconstruct their shared past, and engage
critically with the realization that their pre-
sent and future is similarly tied together’
(2012: 44). In this way, ethical space is predi-
cated on an ecological understanding of the
world that seeks to appreciate more deeply
how our different histories, life experiences,
and perspectives position us in relation to
each other (Donald, 2012: 45). An ethical
space that honors the organic continuance of
Indigenous traditions only becomes possible
for Donald (2012), however, if Indigenous
and Euro-Western knowledge systems, per-
spectives, and worldviews are treated as
distinct.
Insights from Donald share affinities
with the work of Indigenous scholars and
allies in other contexts (Four Arrows, 2013;
Kuokkanen, 2007; Snelgrove, Dhamoon,
and Corntassel, 2014). Following an ethi-
cally relational orientation, Snelgrove and
colleagues (2014) highlight the importance
of a more relational and self-implicative
approach to decolonizing education. In this
regard, they argue that non-Indigenous edu-
cational allies must reject the Free Tibet
Syndrome, whereby they magnify and focus
on the impacts of colonialism (e.g., the dis-
position of land) in other far-off places,
but fail to engage how they, as settlers, are
complicit in colonial processes in their
local context (Snelgrove et al., 2014: 22).
Calling on educators to attend to the impor-
tant question regarding ‘how are you enter-
ing Indigenous homelands?’, they argue for
an educational commitment to Indigenous
resurgence involving the ways Indigenous
nationhood and sovereignty can be regen-
erated, and ultimately restored (Snelgrove
et al., 2014: 4). Paralleling colonial frontier
 ETHICAL RELATIONALITY AS A PATHWAY
logics, Four Arrows (2013) argues that non-
Indigenous educators cannot respectfully
and authentically Indigenize curriculum
and instruction without understanding what
he terms ‘anti-Indianism’ (Four Arrows,
2013: 20). Evident in the way the United
States still honors Christopher Columbus with
a national holiday, Four Arrows (2013: 20)
asserted that such policies and practices foster
an ‘educational hegemony designed to maintain
status quo benefits for the ruling elite [which] is
by definition a form of anti-Indianism’.
Taken as a whole, this work shares many
commitments of critical pedagogy. For
instance, through the concept of multilogical-
ity, Kincheloe and Steinberg (2012: 341) argue
that educators require deep encounters with
diverse knowledge systems that can coun-
ter ‘the hegemonic and oppressive aspects of
Western education’. Through helping students
better appreciate the emphasis of Indigenous
knowledge systems on ‘relationships of human
beings to both one another and to their ecosys-
tem’, educators can counter Western scientific
understandings of the world (Kincheloe and
Steinberg, 2012: 342). This concept of critical
multilogicality affords teachers and students
with the ability to challenge previously held
knowledge, whereby ‘the single photograph
of Cartesian thinking is replaced by the mul-
tiple angles of the holographic photograph’
(Kincheloe and Steinberg: 2012, 345).
ALL MY RELATIONS INQUIRY
In what follows we examine how a set of key
principles guided our collaborative work
over the course of a month-long grade 9
inquiry into the historical relationship
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
peoples in the place called Canada. Entitled
‘All My Relations’, the inquiry was situated
within the Alberta social studies program of
study (Alberta Education, 2005), which
explicitly calls for the teaching of Aboriginal
perspectives in relation to larger thematic
593
topics examined at specific grade levels. The
program states that ‘for historical and consti-
tutional reasons, an understanding of Canada
requires an understanding of Aboriginal per-
spectives [and] Aboriginal experiences’
(Alberta Education, 2005: 4). As part of this
process, all K-12 teachers are directed to
help students ‘appreciate and respect how
multiple perspectives, including Aboriginal …
shape Canada’s political, socio-economic,
linguistic and cultural realities’ (2005: 2).
Under the larger organizing topic of collec-
tive rights, the grade 9 program (Alberta
Education, 2007) specifically directs educa-
tors to address, among other elements, ‘the
various effects of government policies on
citizenship and on Canadian society’ (2007: 3),
along with the ways ‘Treaty 6, Treaty 7 and
Treaty 8 recognize the status and identity of
Aboriginal peoples’ (2007: 4). Through
investigating historically significant events
that have impacted Indigenous and non-
Indigenous relationships over time, the unit
sought to deepen students’ understanding of
Indigenous perspectives, especially the affir-
mation of collective rights grounded in his-
toric treaties.
The title of this inquiry was inspired by
the work of Indigenous author Thomas King
(1990), who wrote: ‘all my relations is at first
a reminder of who we are…it also reminds us
of the extended relationship we share with all
human beings’ (1990: ix). Framed in this way,
we drew further inspiration from the Royal
Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ (RCAP,
1996)1 understanding of the historical relation-
ship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
people in Canada. Asserting that the historic
relationship has gone through a down cycle, a
low point, and then an up cycle, as represented
in Figure 53.1 (RCAP, 1996: 40), the RCAP
(1996: 41–4) identified four main stages
in this relationship: (1) Separate Worlds,
(2) Contact and Cooperation, (3) Displacement
and Assimilation, and (4) Negotiation and
Renewal.
Conceptualized through this cyclical and
relational framework, a series of curricular
594 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Original
Rela�onship

Up Cycle Down Cycle

Low Point

Figure 53.1 A cyclic perspective on the historical relationship of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
people in Canada
Source: Reprinted from Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996: 40). Copyright 1996 by the Royal Commission on
Aboriginal Peoples.

encounters were created to help students
better understand the various phases of this
historic relationship. This included a series
of blog reflections and classroom discus-
sions in response to provocative videos and
guest speakers, including a presentation by
Dr Dwayne Donald. In the final task, students
were invited to work in small groups to iden-
tify one significant event, along with a series
of four adjectives, which were emblematic of
a particular stage in the historic relationship.
These two elements then formed the basis for a
final artistic representation presented at an end-
of-unit showcase where students shared their
insights with pre-service teachers at two local
universities. It is important to note here that
the classroom teacher (Shashi Shergill) had
worked with this group of students for nearly
two years when the inquiry began. Throughout
that time, a way of being in the classroom had
been established, grounded in trusting and
respectful relationships. This allowed for the
emergence of a space for conversations where
students could make sense and meaning of dif-
ficult histories and stories that have been too
often hidden and occluded from view.
KEY PRINCIPLES GUIDING
OUR WORK
Over the last two decades Indigenous schol-
ars have sought to identify and enact more
culturally relevant and authentic forms of
curriculum and pedagogy for Indigenous
students (e.g., Battiste, 2013; Cherubini,
2014). This is important work. However, in
our reading it is primarily focused on con-
texts with high numbers of Indigenous stu-
dents, and therefore provides limited guidance
 ETHICAL RELATIONALITY AS A PATHWAY
for educators teaching in contexts, including
the one where this inquiry took place, where
there are no Indigenous students. Thus, in this
inquiry, rather than a focus on culturally rele-
vant or responsive pedagogies, we drew on our
still emerging understanding of Donald’s theo-
rizing around colonial frontier logics and ethi-
cal relationality to guide our work. This
scholarship points to a number of key principles
around how non-Indigenous educators can carry
out the TRC’s calls to action in ways that are
critical, implicative, and potentially transforma-
tive. These principles overlap and interrelate
with one another, and share, in many instances,
common themes. Thus, rather than seeing these
principles as separate and distinct, we under-
stand them as, to use Marker’s (2011: 98) meta-
phor, ‘intersecting paths up a mountain’.
Honoring Indigenous voice through a storied
approach. Following Donald’s (2009a, 2009b,
2012) insights into ethical relationality, the first
principle that guided our work included the
necessity to honor the voice of Indigenous peo-
ple in ways where we do not attempt to speak
on their behalf or for Indigenous communities
or people. In seeking an authentic voice not
filtered through our own settler subjectivities,
where possible, we invited knowledge keepers
and community members to come speak to our
students. In upholding this principle, we were
additionally aided by the work of Indigenous
­writers, ­artists, and journalists, who, through
documentaries, art, newspaper articles, and
books, offered rich insights into the nature
of Indigenous philosophies, worldviews, and
experiences. In bringing this work into our
classroom, we were conscious of the ways in
which stories, and storytelling, offer one of the
primary means that Indigenous people and tra-
ditions impart important teachings (Archibald,
2008). In line with Indigenous story telling
traditions, many of the stories presented to
students had no ‘discrete beginnings, middles,
and endings that readers expect of written lit-
erature’ (Schorcht, 2003: 31).
Adopting a storied approach where the
logic of linearity was refused, in the early
stages of the inquiry we listened to excerpts
595
of the audio book The Truth About Stories
by Thomas King (2003), which takes up
themes around who and what has value,
and why. In ‘What Is It About Us You Don’t
Like?’ (King, 2003: 121), through interwo-
ven narratives using a classic expository
format interspersed with personal stories,
King highlighted the ways the Canadian and
American governments have sought to leg-
islate Indigenous people out of existence. In
an earlier chapter, we engaged in a discus-
sion around the analogy and symbolism used
when Coyote, the trickster, lies to the Ducks
in order to steal their magnificent feathers
(2003: 14–18). In line with exposing students
to stories recounting the historical relation-
ship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
people through narratives devoid of a Euro-
Western gaze, we also watched the documen-
tary Muffins for Granny (McLaren, 2007),
which weaves the unvarnished stories and
experiences of six residential school survi-
vors, alongside the filmmaker’s own journey
trying to come to terms with the experiences
of her late grandmother in residential schools.
Offering her audience glimpses into the
schoolhouse of the residential school system,
McLaren juxtaposes traditional songs and
stories against fragile and painful vignettes
of an ongoing colonial reality.
In another instance, we showed the TED
talk by poet and author Chimimanda Adichie,
titled The Danger of a Single Story (2009).
Through the use of personal examples and a
discussion on colonialism in relation to the
African context, Adichie alerts audiences to
the critical misunderstandings and danger that
arise from only hearing a single narrative. For
many students, this was a transformational
piece of storytelling and a turning point in
their understanding, as it challenged the ways
in which they themselves had constructed the
story of Indigenous people they had come to
believe. This message allowed classroom con-
versations to emerge that aligned with King’s
(2003) insight concerning how stories shape
who we are, and how we understand and relate
to one another. Through this process, students
596 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
gained a deeper understanding and insight
into the history and experiences of Indigenous
people and how this history has shaped the
relationship today. It further provided stu-
dents the opportunity to ‘reread and reframe’
the stories that shaped their understanding
of Indigenous people (Donald, 2009b: 4).
Drawing on King’s (2003) reoccurring phras-
ing within The Truth About Stories, in seek-
ing to realize this possibility, we sought to
message to students: ‘Don’t say in the years
to come that you would have lived your life
differently if only you had heard this story.
You’ve heard it now’ (King, 2003: 29).
Learning from Indigenous experiences and
philosophies. Bringing an authentic Indigenous
voice into the classroom allowed us to see the
introduction of curricular initiatives seeking to
realize the TRC’s calls to action as an oppor-
tunity to ‘to learn from Aboriginal perspec-
tives rather than as a government-imposed
requirement to learn about Aboriginal peoples’
(Donald, 2009a: 29). This conceptualizing
of the ethical place and nature of Indigenous
voice in the classroom stands in contrast to
the commonplace desire to integrate or infuse
Indigenous perspectives within classroom con-
texts. Reflecting colonial frontier logics, Donald
(2013) has argued that the language of infuse
and incorporate – ‘a process or action whereby
a smaller component of something is put into
a larger body or component’ (2013: para. 5) –
reflects the assumption that Indigenous per-
spectives must be brought inside the fort walls
of the classroom so that they can be understood
and reconciled within Euro-Western lenses.
In seeking to avoid the underlying log-
ics of an infusion and integration model of
engagement, we were careful to avoid the
equally common tendency among many non-­
Indigenous educators to defer all the respon-
sibility of mediating Indigenous philosophies
and memory to invited guests such as Elders
and knowledge keepers. When this occurs,
educators ultimately position this work as liv-
ing outside themselves and the sole responsi-
bility of those who are Indigenous. However, in
seeking to genuinely engage with Indigenous
philosophies and histories, we were forced to
abandon the Euro-Western assumption that
we as educators must be experts in full control
of the information we present to our students.
Rather, we strove to position ourselves as co-
learners standing alongside our students in
ways that signal that together we have much
to learn from Indigenous memory, experi-
ences, and traditions. Distinct from Euro-
Western ways of knowing, this included
insights from Indigenous philosophies and
ways of knowing passed down by Elders
whose ‘teachings [have] remained constant
in the ways of their people’ (Treaty 7 Elders
and Tribal Council, 1996: 15). Learning from
Indigenous memory also involved encounter-
ing difficult narratives involving colonial his-
tories that challenge many popular ideas of
Canada as a beacon of moral progress and a
raceless multicultural society. However, learn-
ing from these stories and histories ultimately
offered possibilities for re-conceptualizing
and renewing Indigenous-Canadian relations
in more ethical ways (Donald, 2009b: 4).
These themes were evident at a number of
key curricular moments over the course of
the inquiry. Early on in the inquiry, students
were shown the 8th Fire documentary series
where, in the episode ‘Whose Land Is It
Anyway?’ (CBC, 2015), Wab Kinew argues
that land is at the heart of almost every con-
flict between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
people. Here, students were able to see some
of ways that First Nations have achieved eco-
nomic prosperity through business relation-
ships with settler communities that reflected
constitutional recognition of Aboriginal rights
on their traditional territories. It also shows
the bleakest possible picture of what can
happen when a First Nations community –
Attawapiskat – is denied these collective
rights. These episodes enabled students to see
examples and models of successful attempts
to renew and repair Indigenous–Settler rela-
tions in Canada, while highlighting that there
is still much work to be done.
Beyond videos, we were fortunate to access
the insights of two Indigenous scholars who
 ETHICAL RELATIONALITY AS A PATHWAY
countered a predominantly colonial narra-
tive that most students had encountered in
schools. Hearing from Indigenous scholars
further disrupted colonial narratives by intro-
ducing students to Indigenous people in roles
beyond stereotypical depictions. Blackfoot
scholar Terri-Lynn Fox was invited to speak
to students, who offered insights aligned with
the relational and decolonizing approach
through which we sought to take up this
inquiry. Terri-Lynn Fox’s presentation intro-
duced students to Blackfoot understandings
of the spirit and intent of treaties includ-
ing the ideas that the Numbered Treaties of
1877, from the Blackfoot perspective, are
not an ancient artifact of no relevance to
contemporary society, but an ongoing bond
that requires rights and responsibilities to be
assumed on both sides.
Deepening student’s understandings of
these themes, Dr Donald facilitated a sym-
posium at the school for all of our grade 9
students, and a contingent of pre-service
teachers from the University of Calgary,
where, through images, stories, and provoca-
tive videos, he interrupted the official history
of Canada with the experiences, memories,
and stories of Indigenous peoples (Donald,
2009a: 31). This included showing clips from
the Making Treaty 7 Cultural Society video
(2015), where the opening scene begins with
a Tsuut’ina mother, speaking to her baby in
1877 about the positive change that would
come about by entering into the Treaty with
the newcomers. The scene then abruptly
shifted to the same women today, homeless
on the street, begging for change.
This brought forth questions around how
this situation had come about, and on what
basis the Canadian government has sover-
eignty over the land where this discussion
was taking place. This provocation led to
discussions around Blackfoot and Plains
Cree understandings of treaty relationships,
which according to Donald (2013: 2), call on
Indigenous and settler communities to work
together in ways that bring benefits to all peo-
ple who live together on this land. Here, he
597
highlighted the notion that such treaty relation-
ships offer an ethical space for two different
peoples, worldviews, and knowledge systems
to live together (Donald, 2015: Classroom
Lecture). In highlighting this point, he
emphasized that Blackfoot and Cree tradi-
tions understand treaties as stretching beyond
only human relationships, but also with the
network of more-than-human relationships
that sustain us and give us life (Donald, 2015:
Classroom Lecture).
Implicative learning. Flowing from our
emergent understanding of foundational
Indigenous philosophies and worldviews,
we have sought to create curricular engage-
ments that go beyond the acquisition of facts
and information, which by its nature creates a
distance and a sense of detachment. Drawing
from the work of Britzman (1998), Donald
(2009a: 30) asserted that, in contrast, learning
from Indigenous knowledge requires educa-
tors to implicate themselves in such knowl-
edge. In this regard, Donald (2009a: 34)
suggested that if educators ‘could come
to see that they, as Canadian citizens, have
a personal and family history that already
implicates them in Aboriginal issues, then
the realization and interpretation of these
inherited relationships could begin to break
down these resistances’. Implicative curricu-
lar encounters in this regard seek to access
what Indigenous scholar Ottmann (2010: 29)
termed ‘the affective domain of teaching
and learning’, which contrasts with the more
rational qualities of knowledge and skill
development. Ottmann (2010: 30) wrote:
‘While the cognitive and psycho-motor
domains of learning represent the knowledge
and skills taught and achieved in the class-
room, the affective domain represents aspects
such as feelings, attitudes, and values’.
In adopting this stance, we sought to chal-
lenge students’ preconceived thoughts and
ideas on their relationship with a group of
people they knew very little about. In a class-
room activity designed to implicate what stu-
dents already know about Indigenous people,
students were asked to write down on sticky
598 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
notes, and post on the board, what they knew
about Indigenous people. Through this pro-
cess, three typologies emerged. Firstly, many
students saw Indigenous people frozen in
the past, invoking an image of fur trappers.
Secondly, many students invoked images of
the imaginary Indian (Francis, 1992) – the
romanticized notion of spiritual people and
protectors of the land. Finally, many students
were honest in putting forth the negative
stereotype that many Canadians hold about
Indigenous people. For example, a number
of students spoke to a group of people who
do not pay taxes and survive on govern-
ment handouts. The question was then posed
where they had learned these things about
Indigenous people. Most students admitted
that they had limited relational contact with
Indigenous populations within their school,
home, or wider community. Although one stu-
dent remembered having a boy on his hockey
team one year, not a single person in the class
had an Indigenous friend or acquaintance,
or had visited an Indigenous community.
Despite this, they had very strong representa-
tions of what they understood, or perceived
to have understood, about Indigenous peo-
ple. This in turn provided an opening into the
veracity of the beliefs they held.
Over the course of the inquiry, each student
was asked to set up a reflective blog as a way
to give voice to how they were making sense
and meaning of these topics and to reflect upon
their learning. Through the use of prompts and
guided questions students were able to share
personal and critical perspectives, rather than
just a retelling or summarizing of events and
activities. In this way, they were able to artic-
ulate and document their evolving under-
standing around a series of major themes.
Due to the sensitive nature of the discussions
we chose to keep the blogs private and stu-
dents only shared them with their teacher
and, if they wished to, their parents. This pro-
cess of ongoing debriefing and reflection was
integral to their emerging understanding and
provided an outlet for students to articulate
the difficult histories and stories to which they
were being introduced. Through some of the
discussions and reflections students had many
more questions; some were upset about what
they themselves described as a superficial
understanding of Indigenous people. They
had learned about the buffalo, and the fur
trade, and thought they had understood what
residential schools were. Others questioned
whether their own families were implicated
in any of this history.
Through reflecting on the ideas and insights
presented by guest speakers and provocative
videos curated for this inquiry, many blog
post reflections demonstrated a realization
that the opinions students had held about
Indigenous people were misguided. After
watching Muffins for Granny (McLaren,
2007), one student commented that ever
since he was old enough to form opinions for
himself he had viewed himself as being supe-
rior to Indigenous people. He revealed that
these opinions had been formed from stereo-
typical depictions he had heard from family
and friends. He acknowledged that although
he knew little about them he had believed the
story that had been told to him. Similarly,
another student shared that his relationship
with Aboriginal people (or lack thereof) had
been influenced by the attitude of his father,
and other relatives, commenting that was just
how he was raised.
These blog posts also began to surface the
ways Indigenous philosophies and perspec-
tives are different from Euro-Western ones.
In reflecting on their understanding of trea-
ties, a student noted, for instance, that for
Indigenous people, these agreements were
not just a document or piece of paper, but a
promise that both parties in the relationship
would care for the land and have a mutual
peace. This sentiment was further reflected in
another blog post where a student recounted
how the Canadians saw the land as a com-
modity and something that could be owned,
whereas Indigenous people saw the land as
a communal and public space that belonged
to everyone and should be shared. In these
examples, students were demonstrating a
 ETHICAL RELATIONALITY AS A PATHWAY
shift beyond a sense of detachment created
by only accessing knowledge as facts and
information, towards developing understand-
ing through a more ethical and empathetic lens.
Historical consciousness. Insights from
Indigenous notions of time suggest that
teaching for reconciliation requires a pro-
found attunement to the historical legacies
that continue to shape Indigenous and non-
Indigenous relationships in the place called
Canada. As the RCAP asserted:
It is impossible to make sense of the issues that
trouble the relationship today without a clear
understanding of the past….We simply cannot
understand the depth of these issues or make sense
of the current debate without a solid grasp of the
shared history of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
people on this continent. (RCAP, 1996: 36)
In seeking to attend to this insight, we were
additionally conscious of how, within
Indigenous notions of time, ‘the past occurs
simultaneously in the present, and deeply
influences how we imagine the future’
(Donald, 2012: 39). In this way, we were
attempting to have students understand the
relationship between the events of the past,
and the impact that these events have on the
relationship today. As Donald (2009b: 7)
asserted, it is an ‘ethical imperative to recog-
nize the significance of the relationships we
have with others, how our histories and expe-
riences are layered and position us in relation
to each other, and how our futures as people
similarly are tied together’. This is at the
heart of what we were trying to achieve
through this work. In positioning ourselves
(students and teachers) through an approach
that involved vulnerability, openness, and
honesty, it was an acknowledgement and
recognition of the methodology through
which we can take up this work in ethical
ways.
To achieve this curricular vision of histori-
cal consciousness, students were invited to
consider the historical context of treaty rights
through engaging in a timeline activity requir-
ing them to consider both the perspective of
599
the Canadian government and Indigenous
people in relation to the Number Treaties. In
exposing students to differing interpretations
of the past, we sought to deepen their appre-
ciation of how, as articulated by the Métis
scholar Gaudry, within the context of the
Plains, Indigenous histories tell a story where
the newcomers ‘were invited into pre-existing
territories as treaty partners, as brothers and
sisters to share in the bounty of the land, to
live peacefully with one another and to envi-
sion relationships where we all benefitted’,
which ran counter to what actually occurred,
involving ‘a settler colonial dynamic where
Canadians have benefitted largely at the
expense of Indigenous peoples, our territory
and the value that our territory generated,
which comes with monetary wealth’ (as cited
in University of Alberta, 2017: para. 11).
While this activity may have reinforced
Euro-Western chronological and linear
notions of time, throughout the unit we
attempted to introduce students to Indigenous
understandings of time and temporality
where the past, present, and future are seen as
intimately connected (Donald, 2009b, 2012;
Marker, 2011; RCAP, 1996). As noted, the
final task in the inquiry was orientated around
critically examining the cyclical stages of
the historical relationship as outlined by the
RCAP (1996).2 Working in small groups, stu-
dents were specifically tasked with identify-
ing one event within their assigned historical
period that was significant to the relationship
at that time. Further, students were asked to
identify four adjectives that described the
relationship during this period. These two
elements then formed the basis for a final
artistic representation.
Through this activity, students came
to appreciate that during the Contact and
Cooperation phase of the relationship, accord-
ing to the RCAP (1996: 12), ‘Aboriginal
nations in most circumstances welcomed the
first newcomers in friendship’, and moreover,
in many cases the Europeans would have died
without the aid of Indigenous communities
and people. As further reflected in the RCAP
600 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
(1996), during this period Indigenous nations
and the newcomers were able to recognize ‘each
other as equal, coexisting and self-governing
nations and govern their relationships with
each other by negotiations, based on the pro-
cedures of reciprocity and consent, that…
[were] then recorded in treaties and treaty-
like accords’ (Tully, 2008: 226). Surfacing
this period of the relationship in turn helped
students connect to the peaceful, harmonious,
and sacred nature of how Indigenous people
understand treaty agreements; a model that
could guide relationships in the present.
Ultimately, we hoped that students were able
to better understand their role in this relation-
ship, specifically that ‘we are all treaty peo-
ple’ (Chambers, 2012).
CONCLUSION
Throughout this article, we have attempted to
show how Donald’s (2009b, 2012) notion of
ethical relationality offers a viable pathway
for non-Indigenous educators to attend to
Indigenous memory, experiences, and phi-
losophies in ways that seek to meaningfully
carry out the TRC’s (2015a) vision for teach-
ing for reconciliation (Call to Action 62.i). In
undertaking this work, it is essential that
educators honor the voice of Indigenous
people, but also avoid the tendency to posi-
tion this work as living outside themselves
and the exclusive responsibility of those who
are Indigenous. Through outlining this pro-
ject, we hoped to show the ways critical
scholarship could be guided by Indigenous
philosophies that continually emphasize the
ways we are all related. By emphasizing the
historical nature of the relationship through
the lens of Indigenous memory, we were able
to have students grapple with colonial stories
of displacement and assimilation. However,
Indigenous memory and philosophies equally
offer viable models both past and present,
concerning how settler communities can
more ethically act and relate to Indigenous
people and nations in the present. The need
for this relational ethic to guide this critical
work stems from the reality that, as Blackfoot
elder Andy Blackwater said, the first peoples
and the newcomers all ‘live together in the
same place and their tipis are held down by
the same peg. Neither is going anywhere’ (as
quoted in Chambers and Blood, 2012: 50).
Notes
1  According to King (2012: 170), ‘The Royal
Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was formed
in 1991 … [and] was originally budgeted at
$8 million for three years, but the research ran to
five years at a cost of $58 million. The commission
visited 96 communities, [and] held 178 days
of hearings around the country on reserves, in
community centres, and in jails’.
2  This included: (1) Separate Worlds, (2) Contact
and Cooperation, (3) Displacement and Assimi-
lation, and (4) Negotiation and Renewal (RCAP,
1996: 41–4).
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Flooded, between Two Worlds:
Holding the Memory of What
Used to Be Against the Reality
of What Exists Now
PREAMBLE
re – (preposition): with regard to : on the subject
of : regarding or concerning
re – (prefix) 1: again : anew
re – (prefix) 2: back : backward : back to an
original place, condition, etc. (entries compiled
from Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, re,
2019)
I have chosen to use re throughout this work
to signal the turning to and returning to expe-
riences, stories, and interpretations relating
to my experience of the 2013 High River
flood. Each day, I am forced to (re)visit, (re)
member, (re)press, (re)live, (re)story, (re)tell,
(re)embody, (re)interpret, and (re)negotiate
aspects of my life from before, during, and
after the event. In so many ways – as a survi-
vor of a natural disaster – I (re)experience the
trauma again, anew.
Attending to ‘re’ is not a new idea. In
Kathy Absolon and Cam Willett’s (2005)
discussion of location within Indigenous
54
Jennifer M. Markides
research, ‘re’ became a salient part of their
discussions around why positioning oneself
is an integral part of Indigenous research. In
their words:
‘Re’ means to redo; look twice, and is the teaching
of respect in the West direction of the Medicine
Wheel. In our dialogue and through our process of
considering knowledge creation and research, we
found ourselves inadvertently returning to the
notions of respectful representations, revising,
reclaiming, renaming, remembering, reconnecting,
recovering, and researching. All of these ideas are
associated with looking again to uncover, unlearn,
recover, and relearn how and why location is a
fundamental principle of Indigenous research.
(Absolon and Willett, 2005: 108)
Further to my pronounced location as an
Indigenous researcher (Markides, 2018a), the
physical location of my place in High River
has become integral to my learning about the
experience of living through a natural dis-
aster. Through photography, I unwittingly
entered into dialogue with my surroundings.
In this way, I acknowledge location as both a
 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Figure 54.1 Highwood River (Markides, June 2017)
situating of self, and as a dynamic partner in
my research conversation.
Akin to Ted Aoki’s (1986/1991/2005)
notion of indwelling, where teachers live
between the two worlds of curriculum-as-
planned and curriculum-as-lived, I use ‘re’
as a way of demarcating the liminal space
between past and present, where flood survi-
vors live between the two worlds of a town-
as-remembered and a town-as-exists. ‘Re’
signifies the in-between – a space of flux and
change, with the conscious recognition of
movement: sometimes smooth and effortless,
and sometimes jarring.
(RE)POSITIONING
From an Indigenous methodological per-
spective, I know that it is important to intro-
duce myself, upfront – to put one’s self
forward (Absolon and Willett, 2005; Kovach,
2009) – sharing who I am and where I come
from in relation to the research. The practice
605
of situating myself is the basis for forming
relationships, deepening connections, and
promoting accountability.
I am Métis, with connection to the Red
River settlement from the early years of
colonization. Much of my family immi-
grated to Canada from Scotland, England,
Sweden, Ireland, Wales, and Belgium; they
came here in search of a better life. Some
of my ancestors were here much longer.
My Cree and Coast Salish relatives are
the descendants of peoples who have lived
on this land – Turtle Island – since time
immemorial.
I was born in Prince George, British
Columbia at the confluence of the Nechako
and Fraser Rivers; and raised in the town of
Smithers, nestled beside the Bulkley River.
Since 2010, I have been a resident of High
River in the province of Alberta. My home is
one block from the Highwood River.
The river last overflowed its banks in June
2013. This catastrophic flood put our town
into a state of emergency, resulting in a mass
evacuation order and a large-scale rescue
606 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Figure 54.2 Water at the level of the train bridge (Markides, June 2013)
effort (see 2013 Alberta Floods, n.d.: ‘High
River’, n.d.; Massinon & Fraser, 2014). I was
one of the last people to cross the bridge at
the centre of town that day, as north- and
south-bound traffic were rerouted to the high-
way shortly thereafter. The water was higher
than I had ever seen it – high enough for me
to stop to take a picture.
(RE)ORIENTING
On June 19th, 2013, I became a flood
victim – displaced and broken. Years later, I
am still (re)living the losses of the flood – the
damage lingers. Though I survived, my life
and town have changed forever. High
River, as remembered – while ravaged, under
repair, and in renewal – is the site of
my research, the central focus of my doctoral
studies. I am concerned with the experiences
of natural disaster, both personal and shared.
In preparation for this journey, I consider
my-self fully in this work and my deep con-
nection to this research. I am both researcher
and research site, carrying the lived – and
living – experience (Husserl, 1970) with
me in every encounter, question, conversa-
tion, interpretation, and presentation. I am
inextricably bound to the experience of the
flood – I cannot be outside it. Therefore I
seek to acknowledge and examine my subjec-
tivity at the outset and throughout my work
(Peshkin, 1988). What are my emotional
responses to the stories I share about myself
and my community?
Employing bricolage (Denzin & Lincoln,
2018; Kincheloe, McLaren, Steinberg, &
Monzó, 2018; Steinberg, 2012), I use the
methods that best suit my research purposes.
As bricoleur, I piece together images, stories,
and literature to form and inform my under-
standing of living through the flood. I take
up a critical, autobiographical, arts-based
approach in this chapter.
 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
I have been a critical and reflective prac-
titioner throughout my life and teaching
career, to the point where my engagement
in generative cycles of critical reflection
and action are deeply entrenched in my way
of being and are indicative of how I make
sense of and react to my experiences in the
world. Through a praxis informed by critical
pedagogy – based in Marxian practices of
bringing to light the cross-purpose workings
of political structures and societal needs –
my research attempts to raise critical con-
sciousness by naming hegemonic structures
and oppressive powers, addressing inequali-
ties, and confronting the insidious culture of
domination (Freire, 1970/1993). In terms of
the 2013 High River flood, I look at the rela-
tionships of power that emerge in the wake
of disaster, specifically regarding insurance
companies, government buyouts, and the
politics of capitalism.
As one of the main data sources and
research sites, I begin by sharing pieces of
my flood story. In critical self-interrogation,
I (re)visit the experiences and encounters that
pushed, frustrated, and haunt me to this day.
I do not wish to avoid the hard truths, nor
do I want to be self-indulgent. To the con-
trary, I am naming the moments, entities, and
remembrances that hold power over me in the
hopes of gaining emancipatory insights, for
myself and others. In Joe Kincheloe’s (2005)
discussion of post-formal autobiography, he
describes how autobiography that is taken
up through critical ontology brings together
aspects of William F. Pinar’s (1994) currere –
a purposefully reflective process that leads to
the critical construction of consciousness –
and complexity theory, informed by the
work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela (1987), such that ‘postformal auto-
biographers can begin to build theoreti-
cal pathways to get around the Cartesian
limitations on the ontological imagination’
(1987: 14). Taken in this way, post-formal
autobiography holds promise to uncover
and open up new pathways of understanding
towards a greater flood literacy.
607
Through critical accounting and recount-
ing, I put forward my contextually relevant
interpretations of life in High River since the
flood; I unpack my experiences and question
the lingering sediments of tribulation that
have rendered me hardened and/or power-
less; I consider the ways the flood eroded my
sense of security in relation to place, and how
it undermined the buildings and businesses
within the community, physically and finan-
cially; and I explore the tensions and optics
of control in the flood recovery process.
All this in an effort to better understand the
challenges that victims of natural disasters
face and to bring about positive change for
the survivors in my community.
(RE)AWAKENING
Community-based researchers offer something
quite different because they are so well placed
within a community to document what is happen-
ing at a local level over long periods of time. They
have the advantages and disadvantages of being
eye witnesses to events and their aftermath; they
lend a different kind of evidentiary authority
because of the immediacy of their context.
(Tuhiwai Smith, 2012: 224–5)
As a resident of High River, I am well situ-
ated as an insider (Innes, 2009; Madden,
2010; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012) to share my
observations and insights through autobiog-
raphy. I combine aesthetic elements of pho-
tographs and story with critical engagement
(Greene, 2001) to deeply interrogate the
power structures at work on myself and my
community, as victims of disaster. By (re)
orienting my self to the town, I am able to
question my beliefs, biases, and presupposi-
tions about the post-flood experience. I seek
to navigate the space between self and culture
(Denzin and Lincoln, 2018) – between my
self and the post-disaster culture of my com-
munity. I recount, (re)interpret, and (attempt
to) reconcile my experiences – pressing in and
projecting out.
608 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
When I started taking the photographs, I
did not know that they would become such an
integral part of my research. The photo I took
from the bridge (Figure 54.2) was one that
became a touchstone for me; it symbolized a
foreshadowing and hindsight of sorts. I took
the picture knowing (and not knowing) how
very powerful the river had become. The riv-
er’s full force was both revealed all at once,
and then recurrently – in each new emergence
and remembering – over time. The image of
Hudson Sports (Figure 54.11) was one I took
out of sheer excitement and anticipation of a
new store in the bleak downtown. I texted it
to family and friends as the signs were being
hung outside. Within days it became clear
that it was not a real store, and the empti-
ness set in, again – loss anew. Looking back,
I understand that these ruminations were the
beginnings of my photographic study of High
River in the wake of the floods.
Susan Finley (2012) states:
At the heart of arts-based inquiry is a radical,
politically grounded statement about social justice
and control over the production and dissemina-
tion of knowledge. By calling upon artful ways of
knowing and being in the world, arts-based
researchers make a rather audacious challenge to
the dominant, entrenched academic community
and its claims to scientific ways of knowing.
(2012: 72)
Arts-based inquiry opens spaces for dialogue
and exists in the liminal margins between
art and social science, ‘people and politics,
imagination and action, theory and activism’
(Finley, 2012, p. 73). For people who have
experienced flood, this liminal space has
echoes of living in the tension between what
once was and what is now.
For residents of High River, we had been
living with a (false) sense of security, along a
peaceful river that betrayed us. Some victims
of the flood were let down by their insurance
companies, where loopholes and fine print
clauses protected the companies from pay-
ing out – though they still want you to keep
paying in, and rates continue to climb if you
have been deemed part of the flood fringe.
Insurance companies are recouping their
losses and profiting, while amplifying the
damages sustained by their clients. Homes on
the floodway were bought up. Buyouts were
smaller for smaller homes – considered lucky
to get anything really; their fault for building
on a floodplain. Buyouts were bigger for big-
ger homes – the ‘government buyouts’ were
in the millions for the millionaires. Not sur-
prisingly, there was a lot of money given to a
few, and a little money given to many. After
the flood, losses were more than monetary.
People lost jobs, homes, support systems,
loved ones, businesses, community, and faith.
Everyone experienced loss differently, but we
all lost.
RECALLING
In the days after the flood and mandatory
evacuation, it seemed as though time stood
still. We did not know if our house had taken
on water, or not. We watched a lot of news,
but the reel did not change often enough. We
found ourselves watching the same footage
used again and again across multiple news
hours and over many news channels. Even if
I leaned in, straining to see a new angle, the
camera panned George Lane Park and the
Highwood River, with our neighbourhood
just out of view. Why didn’t the cameraman
shoot more footage? Why didn’t the net-
works show more of the town? Why didn’t
they film the damages street by street?
(RE)ORGANIZING
Life after disaster involves a multi-faceted
recovery. Some aspects are within our
hands, such as renovating our houses,
replacing possessions, and choosing to stay
or to move. Money becomes a determining
factor of one’s post-flood autonomy. People
with resources have more control over the
speed and shape of their recovery.
 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Figure 54.3 Mud tracked out
(Markides, July 2013)
Figure 54.4 Waiting for a bin (Markides, Canada Day 2013)
609
Those with less means are at the whim of
social programs and charitable supports.
Other facets of flood recovery are out of the
hands of individual community members;
these include repairs to the roads and infra-
structure, rehabilitation of stores and the local
economy, and the influx of people coming
into the town for financial gain. The one con-
stant is change; but rather than the regular
ebbing and flowing that gradually (re)shapes
communities over time, High River changed
in and after a torrent. The slow changes of a
place are usually influenced by choices and
needs, industry and people. Natural disasters
do not consider what communities need or
want, what businesses exist or who lives in
which homes. The forced changes are undis-
cerning and indiscriminate. It happens in a
blink. I ask, how might survivors – living
through disaster – navigate between the world
they remember and the one that exists now?
How do they negotiate the aftermath, dealing
610 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Figure 54.5 Trapped moisture (Markides, 2013)

with the pieces that are within their control

and those that are not?
I am the site, source, and curator of my
flood residues. Some of the damage was
forcibly exposed and then further brutalized
by the insurance company – recount your
losses and get nothing. Other violations are
more easily suppressed like mud-soaked
keepsakes – love letters, photographs, and
childhood artefacts – covered over in silt
and buried deeper with time. The emotional
deposits range from prolonged anger incited
by the former, to lingering sadness quelled by
the latter. I took some pictures before throw-
ing cherished items away – an old badge
and certificate from my husband’s Beavers
troop, my children’s finger paintings done
on canvas, a cluster of wrestling medals, a
Roy Henry Vickers print and a signed Sue
Coleman print I had won curling, and water-
logged Christmas ornaments that had been
gifts from my students. This art was not ther- Figure 54.6 Farewell to art 1
apeutic. Capturing each image served as a (Markides, 2013)
 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS 611

solemn send-off for my ill-fated belongings –

invaluable.
At every stage, it has been easier to take
photographs of the town. I did not want to
write a list of what was lost, because I knew
that it would be inherently incomplete. Little
did I know that I would be remembering the
losses for years to come. I would see Disney
DVDs on a shelf in a classroom during a
school visit and think, I have…had those. My
momentary excitement would be replaced
with deep sadness over the most trivial of
personal items.
Insurance refused to cover two claims. The
company – TD Meloche Monnex – chose
our sewer backup policy valued at 50,000.
I changed our plan mere weeks before the
flood. At the end of May, I had called to
add contents insurance to our plan as we
were storing all of our life’s possessions in
Figure 54.7 Farewell to art 2 the basement, and renting our house out
(Markides, 2013) while we planned to teach overseas for two
years. After waiting most of an hour to speak

Figure 54.8 Three bins in three days – throwing it all away (Markides, 2013)
612 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
with an agent, I finally got through. The lady
on the other end asked what we estimated the
total value of our contents to be. Engaging
in a brief discussion, we settled on 80,000
to cover the value of all furniture, house-
wares, sporting equipment, tools, electron-
ics, etc. Then, she said, I think that I can save
you some money on your plan. You have a
platinum (or gold) level sewer backup policy
which covers 100,000 dollars in the event of
sewer backup; if you want, I can change it
to the silver-level policy which would cover
50,000 dollars for repairs to your home.
Would 50,000 be enough to cover the dam-
ages if the sewer backed up into your base-
ment? I consulted with my husband again and
we determined that 50,000 would be enough
to cover the cost of repairing damage caused
by sewer backup, in addition to the 80,000
for contents if anything were ruined in the
storage; we felt confident that we could make
the change to our plan. But before I gave
the woman the go ahead, I asked: But what
if there is a flood? She quickly replied that
Figure 54.9 Jacked up (Markides, July 2013)
it wouldn’t matter because nothing would be
covered in the event of a flood. No insurance
carriers offered flood insurance, so it would
not matter. She summarized the changes to
our policy: we were adding 80,000 in con-
tents insurance, and reducing our sewer
backup from 100,000 to 50,000 – correct?
I thanked her for saving us the extra money
just before we hung up. The call haunts me
to this day.
The flood happened. The government
pressured the insurance companies to honour
their policies. We received the sewer backup
policy, but nothing for our contents. Thank
you for saving us money. Thank you for
saving us from having an additional 50,000
dollars in coverage that would have helped
replace our contents, when all was lost. Your
money-saving suggestion was one I would
never have thought about, and now it is one
that I will never forget.
Media shots of boats on train tracks,
houses askew, and dramatic rescues prolifer-
ate the Internet. The images are sensational
 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
and shocking. Despite the prevalence of
images already, I was compelled to take my
own shots. Initially I documented the scenes
that were obviously sublime, such as a rail-
way tie wedged under a car that showed the
sheer force of the moving water. Over time,
my subject matter became less overt.
In the year after the flood, we moved away
from High River. It felt as though we were
living in a state of suspended animation,
waiting to return to the town and to our home,
waiting to rebuild after the loss and to begin
living again. Upon returning, we entered into
a state of hyperreality; our town had become
a vibrant landscape of facades, with a strug-
gling smattering of businesses. There is a tan-
gible tension between the desire for the town
to look thriving and for it to actually be thriv-
ing. How does this wear on the emotions of
the town’s residents as they work to rebuild
their lives?
I have taken pictures in and around the
town, walked the streets, lived in and against
the backdrops of construction, movie sets,
and interminable disrepair. I have collected
narrative accounts and formed understand-
ings over time. These support my sense mak-
ing of the disaster.
RECOUNTING
Some stories I tell and retell – polished and
smoothed in the telling like river rocks worn
over time (Strong-Wilson, 2008). Others, I
shy away from; consciously or uncon-
sciously, I do not want to relive them. I con-
sider my audience. Do they really want to
hear my story, or have they asked as a pleas-
antry? If someone asks me, how long have
you lived in High River?, I know that they are
really asking me, were you there for the
flood? I can give them/me an out by saying:
not long. This response satisfies most people.
They asked: I answered. Moving on. I have
likened my flood stories to those of a person
with a broken arm. How many times do they
613
want to explain how it happened? The story
gets really slick in the retelling – empty and
repetitious. They might have multiple ver-
sions: the short version and the long version.
How much time do you have? How detailed
of an account do you want to hear?
There are times when I go to retrieve
something from the basement to find that it is
gone – a thing I remember having, but forget
losing. It feels like it is still there, until I am
forced to see that it is not. These losses are
like metaphoric phantom limbs. Each time I
realise that something is not there, the pain of
that loss washes back over me. I live between
two worlds where everything exists in mem-
ory, and little survived in actuality.
When I tell my story – with all of the drip-
ping details – my voice wells with emotion
and loss. The telling pains me. It is not slick
or smooth or empty or easy.
(RE)INTERPRETING
The house beside us is still boarded up. One
neighbour shovels the sidewalk in the winter
and mows the front grass in the summer, but
the house sits empty – lifeless on the inside.
There are more birds and squirrels in the
backyard these days, without the dogs to
chase them away.
Living through the flood, I see things that
people from other places might not see. I
see storefronts sitting vacant where mer-
chants and service providers used to be –
our dentist’s office, the jewellers, a cloth-
ing store, a flower shop, a u-brew wine
shop, two bakeries, two clothing stores,
my old hairstylist’s salon, and so many
more businesses that lined our downtown
streets, gone – closed or moved on. There
is an overabundance of space for lease.
New businesses open: an antique shop, two
second-hand furniture stores, many new
restaurants, a dollar store, a gift shop, a
reclaimed furniture shop, and various oth-
ers; some make it, some don’t.
614 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Figure 54.10 Rotting on the inside, right next door (Markides, August 2016)
Like many other High River residents,
I hold the memory of what used to be,
against the reality of what exists now. In
the years since the flood, the town of High
River has seen widespread rebuilding,
recovery, and revitalization. The renewal
is visible, in private residences and pub-
lic parks, replacement of sewer drainage
pipes and perpetual road re-construction.
For long-time residents, these projects are
reminders of the loss and devastation that
swept through the town. The sight of some
new development also holds the memory of
what was there before, in our town and in
our homes.
Adding to the sense of reality disjunction,
the downtown’s storefront facades create
another layer of hyperreality. The film indus-
try has long used the town’s quaint streets and
historic buildings as sets and backdrops for
television and movies. The influx of activity
in the flood-ravaged vacancies has formed a
Baudrillardian simulacra (1988) of a new and
vibrant town against which the town’s inhab-
itants simulate living.
RECONCILING
In a dialogic manner, the town of High River
speaks to me. Each day I leave my house: to
walk my boys to school, to drive to the uni-
versity, or to simply carry out the tasks of a
typical day in a typical life. I drive or walk
through town – as we all do, as we all must –
and face the daily remembrances of flood,
damage, and loss. In the two blocks between
my house and the downtown, I pass the
empty lots where seven houses once stood.
One is now a parking lot for the church. One
was kept as a garden – the plants in the yard
survived, but the house did not. Lots have
‘FOR SALE’ signs, others have been sold
and sit empty.
The roads still do not have a top lift, but
instead have deep dips and grooves. There
are tall metal fences around the vacant com-
mercial lots – the buildings torn down, but not
replaced. Empty storefronts line the streets –
‘FOR LEASE’ or ‘FOR SALE’ – having been
foreclosed or abandoned. The sidewalks sprawl
out as they make High River the most walkable
 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS 615

Figure 54.11 Sporting goods store – facade (Markides, November 2015)

Figure 54.12 New pub and hardware store – fronts (Markides, September 2016)
616 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
town in Alberta, with very little to walk to,
from, or between. I used to walk to the cof-
fee shop regularly. I shopped locally for most
clothes, gifts, and housewares. Those familiar
shops are gone, and the services too. Our den-
tist moved her practice to the next town. The
optometrist closed up shop and moved across
town. Sometimes it looks like businesses are
moving in, with elaborate signage and new
paint – these are mostly just facades – a veneer
of renewal over a reality of ruin.
The film industry has come to shoot movies
and television series in High River for years.
Producers and directors now take advantage
of our empty buildings to create settings for
imagined lives, while residents of High River
carry out their real lives against the backdrop
of an imagined world. What effects might this
have on the people living here? Of course, I
recognize that the movie industry must be
good for the town, economically speaking.
The people who own and lease the buildings
Figure 54.13 Delivery in 30 minutes or …
never (Markides, September 2016)
are certainly making money; in fact, they
must make enough money that they do not
need to lease or sell their buildings between
filming engagements. The large movie trucks
and trailers fill vacant land and parking lots,
and the crew members increase the lines in
coffee shops and local restaurants, though
most of the food on the sets is catered by out-
side companies. In truth, the industry people
do not really need our hotels, restaurants, or
services, but they must be boosting the econ-
omy in fits and spurts, or at least one coffee
at a time. During filming, the town appears
more industrious and bustling. The ‘new’
businesses look promising. What are the
emotional costs of seeing revitalization that
is not really there? I wonder deeply about the
impact, as I get excited for the new: road-
house, trading post, pizzeria, noodle house,
sporting goods shop, hardware store, mas-
sage parlour, liquor store, launderette, and
more – overpromised and undersold.
Figure 54.14 Dentist office, now
launderette (Markides, September 2016)
 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS 617

Figure 54.15 Posters to mask the empty insides (Markides, September 2016)

Figure 54.16 Mmm … noodles Figure 54.17 Antiques or roadhouse?

(Markides, September 2016) (Markides, June 2017)
618 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Figure 54.18 Hardware – not fixing anything (Markides, June 2017)

Figure 54.19 Real art gallery, ‘not fake’ Figure 54.20 Fake bake shop, (really) for
(Markides, June 2017) lease (Markides, June 2017)
 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
For the real businesses that open in the
empty spaces in-between, they are quick to
put up signs reading: ‘not a movie set’ and
‘not fake, real gallery’. Despite their clear
signage, most of the businesses that open up
between the facades struggle to stay open.
More have closed down within the first year
than remain open now. I know that there are
other factors at play in this scenario. People
in our community might have less financial
means to support the downtown businesses
than they did before. However, the need for
the businesses to advertise their real-ness
speaks to their experienced obstacles of
being on set.
For many residents and business owners,
the act of living in High River means (re)
experiencing the losses every day and dwell-
ing in remembrance – both subconsciously
and consciously. People are trying to rebuild
amidst the empty reminders of what once
was…a vibrant town. How does this help
to heal, restore, or erode one’s spirit? How
might we see our town anew – to (re)build –
from imagined to real?
As the years pass, I note that in my pho-
tographs I am seeing the same ‘new’ stores
again and again – series contracts renewed
for another season – and it begins to feel that
the project of actual downtown renewal may
never happen. Looking for High River for
answers, I wonder what can be learned from
other communities that have experienced
disaster?
(RE)FACING DISASTER
Disaster is never terribly far away. Knowing
how people behave in disasters is fundamental
for knowing how to prepare for them. And
what can be learned about resilience, social and
psychological response, and possibility from
sudden disasters is relevant as well for the
slower disasters of poverty, economic upheaval,
and incremental environmental degradation as
well as the abiding questions about social
possibilities.
(Solnit, 2009: 22)
619
In her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The
Extraordinary Communities that Arise in
Disaster, Rebecca Solnit (2009) describes
phenomena that occur in the aftermaths of
disasters, including the 1906 San Francisco
Earthquake, the 1917 Halifax Explosion, the
1985 Mexico City Earthquake, the 2001
September 11 attacks (also known as 9/11),
and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. She tells of
the resilience of people as they create camps
and communities to serve the most basic of
human needs. These places become larger
than the losses, remembered as joy-filled
sanctuaries given playful names on make-
shift signs. People finding love amidst the
devastation. Other accounts are less rosy, as
Solnit describes the effects of martial law and
senseless killings that take place in areas
where people – seen as unruly and mob-like –
seek ways to meet their basic needs.
Corruption and opportunism are also exposed
as common occurrences in the wake of disas-
ters. Solnit writes how the ‘unfulfilled prom-
ises of evacuation and aid day after day
turned Katrina into a social crisis’ (2009: 239),
also noting that:
Many of the people left behind in New Orleans
were elderly, ill, or otherwise frail, mothers and
young children or extended families who couldn’t
bring themselves to split up for an evacuation or
leave some members behind. Though much blame
was heaped upon those who did not evacuate,
many lacked the resources to do so: a car, or gas
money, or a place to go. (Solnit, 2009: 239)
Solnit’s work points to many of the issues
underlying these crises, but does not name
the perpetrators. Specifically, the government
failed the people through inaction; worse yet,
the government took a ‘blame the victims’
mentality which caused greater hardship for
the survivors as many citizens felt justified
in ignoring those in need. She touches on the
issue of racism, without naming ‘racism’, as
she recounts:
Many trapped in the city believed they had been left
to die, some believed that it was because they were
black [sic]. There was some truth to those beliefs.
620 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Figure 54.21 ‘WE ARE STiLL CLEANG UP PLEASE DON’T TOUCH OUR SUPPLYs AND FURNiTURE’
(Markides, March 2017)
Even television news commentators noted that an
affluent white community would not have been
left to suffer for so many days while the federal
government dithered. (Solnit, 2009: 239)
While the political climate and race rela-
tions of Canada may appear less hostile, the
prioritization of aid to support the predomi-
nately wealthy, predominately white victims
of the 2013 Alberta floods is apparent in the
disproportionate government spending to
buy out the luxury homes in Calgary’s elite
neighbourhoods (CBC, 2014). In this exam-
ple, the aid was dispensed swiftly and deci-
sively for a few, while the majority of flood
survivors were tasked with providing item-
ized lists of their losses not covered by insur-
ance and waiting for decisions of monetary
allotments from the Disaster Relief Program.
Government buyouts of homes were not an
option for the vast majority, with the excep-
tion of the Wallaceville neighbourhood in
High River. The request for government buy-
outs was initiated by the town and the overall
process took years to complete. The inequity
is apparent; but like most issues of power,
the people with the power benefit and those
without power are helpless to change the
situation – even in our fair and just country.
(RE)NAMING DISASTER POLITICS
In his online article ‘The Politics of
Disposability’, Henry Giroux (2006) revis-
its the lessons learned from Hurricane
Katrina’s devastation in New Orleans, from
one year after the event. He compares the
racism exposed in the brutal killing of
14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 with the
media images of waterlogged dead bodies
taken in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane
and flood disaster. Giroux described the
victims of the latter as ‘the bodies of the
poor, black, brown, elderly, and sick’ (2006:
para. 20, line 2), left lying in the streets or
found deceased in care facilities, such as
nursing homes and hospitals. Although
many people like to believe that society has
become less racist since the 1950s, Giroux
counters with examples of the ineffectual
 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS 621

Figure 54.22 Diner – a permanent fixture (Markides, October 2015)

Figure 54.23 Little Big Bear Gifts – a facade on a facade (Markides, February 2018)
622 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
government response and failed humanitarian
efforts to save or show dignity for the most
vulnerable populations in New Orleans –
poor people of colour, especially the elderly.
While Giroux’s perspective is bleak, it is
honest and telling of the societal view
towards marginalized and demonized groups
as disposable people. Much of his article
focuses on events in the United States but he
cautions that many Canadian cities are also
at risk, and ‘must protect those principles of
the social contract that offer collective solu-
tions to foster and maintain both ecological
sustainability and human survival’ (2006:
para. 4, line 2).
Giroux’s work shows the power that
government and media have to tell stories
about people – to paint groups in a certain
light – to develop narratives that serve their
goals and purposes, whether these plans
are to cut funding for social programs or to
perpetuate fear and hatred of various races
and cultural groups. In writing about my
experience with the insurance company,
accounts of government buyouts, and
photographic encounters with the film
industry, I am providing supplemental
narratives of the flood.
My stories might, at times, trouble the
existing mainstream narratives. Prominent
media stories focused primarily on finan-
cial losses and large government payments,
including the buyouts in the wealthiest neigh-
bourhoods; heroic rescues; acts of altruism
and volunteerism; conspiracy theories of why
it took so long for residents to be let back
into the community; and mud-covered photo
ops from government officials and television
personalities. In the case of the latter, I am
more attuned to these opportunistic public-
ity events, as they happen again and again
in other communities hit by disaster. I now
see through the veneer of the politicians’ and
celebrities’ efforts to aid in disaster relief.
Images of their momentary ‘work’ on the
ground takes attention away from the sus-
tained efforts needed for recovery. The media
propaganda creates a false sense that aid is
being given from people in power, when in
reality they are gone before any real work has
been done.
(RE)ENGAGING COMMUNITY
Looking next to the work of John Ackerman,
Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Bridie
McGreavy, and Leah Sprain (2016), ‘The
Skunkwork of Ecological Engagement’ pro-
vides an example of insights gained from
informal spaces of community engagement
after a flood disaster. As the authors describe,
‘ecological engagement is about attending
to the possibilities of dwelling in a place;
skunkwork is a way of orienting this dwell-
ing’ (2016: 75). Specifically, the term ‘skunk-
work’ is used ‘to describe informal spaces of
learning, creativity, self-coordination, and
transformation’ (2016: 77). Using confer-
ence workshops as sites of informal research
with resilient communities, Ackerman,
Druschke, McGreavy, and Sprain explore
proximity, movement, ecological narration,
and weak theory as four emergent attributes
of skunkwork for ecological engagement that
may inform academic scholarship and com-
munity engagement advocacy.
Within the scope of proximity, the authors
‘disturb the obviousness and thus invisibil-
ity of dwelling near water, in pipe or stream,
an obviousness that points to an endangered
condition in late modern life’ (2016: 80).
Water is endangered, commodified, and
monitored by various jurisdictional organi-
zations for different purposes. Through the
workshops, different groups came together
and found that they had common interests in
sustainability and flood recovery.
In the dwelling in place study, movement
was taken up similarly to the Aristotelian
sense of peripatesis of learning while walk-
ing beside a sage; in this study, the creek
became the sage that the researchers and
participants were learning alongside. In their
words: ‘Peripatesis, by necessity, reveals an
 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
authority given place, and there could be
the inklings of a kind of ecological wisdom
learned over time then re-acquired through
movement near, through, and toward earthly
and worldly ecologies’ (2016: 84). Walking
along the creek became an integral part of the
workshops and a touchstone for the learning
that extended beyond the experience.
Considering ecological narration, the
authors noted that participants wanted to tell
stories of similar happenings from their per-
sonal histories or connections to their home
communities. Extrapolating from their ideas
and respecting that they could not share the
experiences of the participants from the
workshops, Ackerman and colleagues (2016)
offer examples of ecological narration from
their own lives. Each account is descriptive
and centred around a single place; their sto-
ries are layered as they grow first from a sin-
gle memory, to a sense of the place over time;
and the sharing moves from personal reflec-
tions and learning, to reflexive practices
where societal implications are explored.
The idea of weak theory is described
by Gibson-Graham (as cited in Ackerman,
et al., 2016) as the demystifying of power
in favour of recovering diverse, local econo-
mies. With regard to the skunkwork of eco-
logical engagement, weak theory represents
the movement away from structure-bound,
strong theories with one way of doing and
knowing, towards community-engaged prac-
tices that invite multiple approaches and
understandings; specifically, the skunkwork
‘dislodges the self and the arrogance of mas-
tery over either social or ecological scenes’
(2016: 89).
As a point of commonality, the Boulder
Creek flood that is central to the skunkworks
article happened the same year as the High
River flood that is central to my research;
both floods took place in 2013. The idea of
proximity resonates with the reality of a river
as an ever-present but often over-looked dan-
ger, as waters flow through many communi-
ties. Communities build near waterways, to
be near the resource needed to sustain life.
623
Property near water is also desirable for the
natural views. The ‘obviousness’ and ‘invis-
ibility’ of place-dangers is also echoed in the
name of our community, ‘High River’, an
irony that many poked fun at in light of the
flood event – the name is an obvious indica-
tion of the potential dangers, yet the joking
becomes an all-too-painful reminder of the
previously invisible truth it revisits.
With the notion of movement, the scholars
make reference to peripatesis as an experi-
ence of learning from the ecology of place.
Moreover, the idea of being attentive to and
learning from the land has been known to
Indigenous peoples and practised for thou-
sands of years. Relationships with land
require attention, care, and effort, like other
kinds of relationships. Being in a relationship
brings an innate sense of responsibility as
well. Julie Cruikshank (1990) speaks to the
power of place to signal memories of teach-
ings and stories. For many people, we have
forgotten to pay attention to our surround-
ings in any deep or meaningful way, which
gets in the way of our ability to read the
signs, to learn from place, and to remember
what the land has taught us over time. The
Blackfoot knew the area as Ispitzee, which
means ‘place of high trees along running
water’ (High River, n.d.: ‘History’ para. 1).
The ‘high trees’ are black cottonwood trees,
which are known to grow along floodplains.
Why was no one listening to the land?
The concept of ecological narration
became particularly salient for me as it relates
to my interest in taking images of the river
and gathering stories of the flood – stories
told about a specific place where the learning
speaks back to society in meaningful ways.
McGreavy writes of the low pools of water
that formed in the spring behind her child-
hood house near the Saco River. She recalls
the chorus of frogs, and later learned about
a phenomenon that she now associates with
these memories. As McGreavy describes:
Big Night is that evening when we step out into
the rain and can feel spring seep into our lungs.
624 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
This is the night when we can, in a bodily way,
remember the movement of our planet around its
sun. This remembering is, as I imagine it, similar to
how frogs, salamanders, and other sentient beings
remember their migrations: navigating by stars
and smells and other sensate cues. When frogs
sense the seasons shift, they start to sing. The
chorus, for me, has become one way of keeping
time following a different rhythm: embodied,
sonic, cyclical. (Ackerman et al., 2016: 85)
McGreavy’s story is personal, educational,
and memorable; it speaks beyond the context
of eastern and western Maine, highlighting
our interconnectedness with the rhythms of
Mother Earth.
Stories of flood factor heavily into Sprain’s
ecological narration. She notes that her con-
nection to floods began four years before she
was even born, with Colorado’s deadliest flash
flood. When she married in late August 2013,
it was a time of historic rainfall. The friends
and family who gathered wore newly pur-
chased rainboots. The ‘2013 flood “ravaged”
Figure 54.24 Going nowhere (Markides, June 2018)
the riverside park where [she] got married …
the park has not yet reopened’ (Ackerman
et al., 2016: 88).
Sprain’s experience of post-flood life
echoes with my own. She writes, ‘dwelling
in Colorado now means talking about the
flood, rebuilding and recovering, recogniz-
ing how flood damage has not been shared
equally’ (2016: 88). She goes on to note that
not everyone returned home after the flood.
This was also true for the residents of High
River. Each person’s experience was differ-
ent, damage varied from home to home, and
some people choose never to return to the
town.
With regard to weak theory, Ackerman,
Druschke, McGreavy, and Sprain acknowl-
edge that there is wisdom in the world beyond
written texts, and propose ‘radical listening
to everyday places. The rare birdcall…. The
flash flood. The interruption that opens your
ears and minds. [They] suggest that academia
 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS 625

(RE)IMAGINING

The research ideal of benefiting society is an

important ideal. Interestingly it is a very activist
notion because it implies that societies will change,
that they will be improved and that lives will get
better. Research is expected to lead to social
transformation.
(Tuhiwai Smith, 2012: 226)

Through my critical autobiographic and

arts-infused (re)counting, (re)interpreting,
and reconciling, I share the conscious
choices I have made in the telling of my
stories, and the pain these stories can revisit
upon me; the insider perspective of having
ever-present markers of what existed before
and is now gone; and the emptiness at the
heart of town, not readily apparent from an
outsider’s perspective. My stories and inter-
pretations may or may not have bearing on
Figure 54.25 No news (Markides, June 2018) the experiences of others; perhaps, my
personal narratives will help validate the
experiences of others – to know that they
has a too highly developed sense of talking are not alone.
and a less fostered sense of listening’ (2016:
91). Since the flood, I have been practising
my radical listening along the berm in High
River (Markides, 2018b). It is with a similar
belief about academic work – focusing too
highly on speaking, rather than listening –
that I humbly conduct my research, from a
weak position.
I have not entered into post-disaster study
to follow a well-charted map or path, or to act
as a guide that shows others the way. Instead,
I maintain an openness, as I continue to learn
from the flood stories told by survivors,
images, and my ongoing encounters within
and between locationalities. Through radi-
cal listening and by exploring multiple path-
ways of experience, I hope to contribute to
the critical discourse of disasters, speak truth
to power as it relates to immediate responses
and long-term recoveries, shed light on the
beliefs and happenings of post-flood life
from multiple perspectives, and build on the
skunkwork of ecological engagement as it Figure 54.26 Filming today
pertains to flood ravaged areas. (Markides, March 2018)
626 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Figure 54.27 From hardware, to workwear – false advertising, no sales to be had (Markides,
May 2018)

Figure 54.28 Roadhouse/Antiques/Roadhouse – rotating facades (Markides, June, 2018)

 FLOODED, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS 627

Figure 54.29 Diner, rear view – a facade on all fronts (Markides, June 2018)

Regardt J. Ferreira, Fredrick Buttell,

and Sandra B. Ferreira (2015) contend that
research conducted with disaster-affected
populations may be of significant benefit,
as a means ‘for participants to reflect on
their personal growth and resilience, and to
articulate their disaster-experience narrative’
(2015: 34). In this way, my work may hold
promise – at least for me – to bring greater
awareness of my evolving relationship with
the town over time. I continue to negotiate
the tensions between opening up and shutting
down, much like the businesses around me.
Is it safe for us yet? Will we be supported?
Or become empty once more?
From massive floods and raging fires, to
truth and reconciliation, natural and man-
made disasters create deep scars and devas-
tating legacies. The traumas carry forward in
the stories that are told, echoing of prolonged
hardship, hope, and healing. For many com-
munity members whose lives have been
touched by disaster, the challenges of daily Figure 54.30 Low and slow
life are amplified immensely. (Markides, September 2016)
628 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
As the occurrences of severe weather
events and natural disasters increase each
year, the long-term processes of recovery
should be considered on both the individual
and community level. Is it better for the dev-
astation and recovery to be visible – long-
term reminders of what is lost? Prolonged
vacancies are obvious and visible to potential
inhabitants and visitors. By way of facades,
High River appears bustling to outsiders,
while posing an empty veneer for those liv-
ing through the flood.
With further study, I will seek to under-
stand the potential benefits and/or damag-
ing effects of living between two worlds. Do
vibrant simulacra (Baudrillard, 1988) stand
in for a thriving town – as placeholders – and/
or subsume the town’s potential for renewal?
Or, are they a more-than-real reminder of
what once was? By understanding the rela-
tionship between pre- and post-disaster
worlds – remembered and real – and the
power struggles and imbalances involved in
recovery, I hope that we might better shoul-
der the extraneous debris and reinforce the
weary supports for other survivors and their
communities.
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Dance and Children’s Cultural
Identity: A Critical Perspective of
the Embodiment of Place
INTRODUCTION
Employing the concept of place as a concep-
tual framework and using a critical and phe-
nomenological lens, this chapter proposes to
convey how children who attend a Māori-
medium early childhood center maintain their
cultural heritage and assert their Indigenous
rights through dance during their embodied
encounters with place. Concomitantly, the
chapter endeavors to explore the underlying
tensions and critical perspectives inherent in
working toward a bilingual and bicultural
nation as illustrated by the Māori-medium
center’s Kaupapa Māori philosophy, to con-
front the oppressive regimes of colonialism
that still pervade both society and education
and impact the revitalization of Māori ways of
knowing and doing. In so doing, the chapter
addresses the teachers’ (kaiako) adherence to
creating a place where the children (tamariki/
mokopuna) and their families (whānau) can
stand (their tuˉrangawaewae) and declare, and
how this may be achieved in some way
55
Adrienne Sansom
through dance, including Māori dance such as
haka, a dance form that was once (and con-
ceivably still is) seen as grotesque from
Westernized perspectives. Does engagement
in dance, together with an affiliation with the
spiritual or Indigenous perception of place,
promote a deeper understanding of cultural
heritage and help Māori to re-affirm their
beliefs and values that have for so long been
denied under the guise of colonization? In a
similar vein to Freire (1970), who championed
the development of a critical consciousness or
conscientization for the purpose of achieving
democracy and freedom through liberatory
literacy, Māori have also fought for their right
to speak their own language and pursue their
cultural traditions and art forms. As bell hooks
asserts: ‘Representation [whether this is
through dance or other art forms including
language and literacy] is a crucial location of
struggle for any exploited and oppressed peo-
pled asserting subjectivity and decolonization
of the mind’ (1995: 3), and I would add, the
decolonization of land and culture.
 DANCE AND CHILDREN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY
AN OPENING VIGNETTE – THE HAKA
A small group of children aged between two
and five years of age slowly enter the audito-
rium where an award function is about to take
place. The auditorium is filled by adults,
mostly international students from Japan and
their teachers, together with other family
members both local and international. The
children, who come from the Māori-medium
early childhood center located nearby on the
university campus, are accompanied by sev-
eral teachers (kaiako). They edge toward a
side wall near the front of the auditorium and,
on instruction from the teachers, sit down on
the floor – sometimes looking around at
others in the auditorium, sometimes looking
down at the floor or at each other. The chil-
dren have been invited (as they are often
invited from this center) to perform a Māori
haka for the guests. When it comes to their
turn to perform the haka, one young Māori
boy takes the lead using a call-and-response
mode – ‘ka mate, ka mate, ka ora, ka ora’ –
and his voice fills the entire room, loud and
strong, defying his age and size, dwarfed as
he is by those around him. As he leads the
haka you can sense the confidence he emits,
not only in his voice but also in his body
actions, stamping his feet (waewae takahia),
and performing the strong thrusting actions in
forward and downward directions using his
arms and hands (ringa ringa). The other
young children join in the haka and chant,
some with great energy, others a little less so,
seemingly still daunted by the number of
adults in the room and the awesomeness of
the occasion. Some of the children pick up on
the confidence of the leading boy, who knows
every word and every action of the haka.
Performing the haka as part of an award cer-
emony is a great honor. It is also a traditional
custom long held by Māori, and the center
and the teachers uphold these traditions
(tikanga) as part of the Kaupapa Māori phi-
losophy of the center. If a child takes on the
role of leading the haka, it becomes part of
the tikanga and the kaupapa that is followed,
631
whether it is for a powhiri (ceremony to wel-
come people into a place and honor one’s
ancestors), hui (meeting), or mihi (greeting)
for manuhiri (guests or visitors).
THE M ĀORI-MEDIUM CENTER AND
KAUPAPA MĀORI PHILOSOPHY
As mentioned earlier, the children and teach-
ers in the above scenario come from an early
childhood educational center that is located
on a university campus. The early childhood
center is described as a Māori-medium early
childhood center because it focuses on all
things Māori (tikanga and te reo Māori) but is
not full-immersion te reo Māori, or Māori
language, which, therefore, differs from
Kōhanga Reo, which are early childhood
centers with full-immersion te reo Māori. The
Māori-medium early childhood center oper-
ates under a Kaupapa Māori philosophy or
framework, which encompasses the concepts
of whānaungatanga (responsibility and recip-
rocal obligations toward others), manaaki-
tanga (caring for others), kaitiakitanga
(stewardship over land and resources), wairu-
atanga (spiritual interconnectedness), tua-
kana/teina (looking after each other), and
mana tangata (being able to stand confidently
in both worlds) (Pohio, Sansom, and Liley,
2015; Ritchie, 2015). The principles of
Kaupapa Māori encourage mokopuna (the
young children) to become committed learn-
ers using te reo me ngā tikanga Māori me ngā
akoranga o te ao whānui (holistic learning for
all – or more accurately, the wider world – in
this case, the Pākehā/tauiwi world). In te ao
Māori, the Māori world, the values of aroha
(love) and manaakitanga imply an obligation
to care for other people, while kaitiakitanga
extends this same expectation to the natural
world or the places in which one lives.
A Kaupapa Māori philosophy creates a pro-
gram that elevates Māori beliefs and values,
which become the basis of teaching and learn-
ing and underpin all facets of the curriculum,
632 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
including visits to local landmarks of signifi-
cance such as the nearby mountain that over-
looks the center, noho marae or Māori meeting
places or communities where people live or
stay, and environments such as native bush
and forests, lakes, oceans, and historical Māori
sites. The relationship between the environ-
ment and those who inhabit the space, in this
case the children and teachers, together with
their whānau (family), creates a ‘pedagogy
capable of embodying ways of knowing and
being [which] requires a sense of conscious-
ness, a union of mind and spirit, the mauri (life
force) and wairua (spirit)’ (Penetito, 2009: 20,
cited in Ritchie, 2011: 57).
As outlined in Te Whāriki, He Whāriki
Mātauranga mō ngā Mokopuna o Aotearoa,
the early childhood curriculum of Aotearoa
New Zealand, a Kaupapa Māori philoso-
phy draws on Kaupapa Māori theory, which
focuses on:
Māori ways of knowing and being [and] assumes the
normalcy of Māori knowledge, language and cul-
ture. It gives voice to Māori aspirations and expresses
the ways in which Māori aspirations, ideas and learn-
ing practices can be framed and organised. …
Kaupapa Māori theory is situated within the
land, culture, history and people of Aotearoa New
Zealand, constituting a distinctive, contextualised
theoretical framework driven by whānau, hapū
and iwi understandings. (Ministry of Education
[MoE], 2017: 61)
The above-mentioned M āori values and
beliefs, drawn from the te ao Māori world,
underpin New Zealand’s early childhood
curriculum, Te Whāriki (MoE, 1996, 2017).
The conceptualization of the curriculum is
discussed in the following section together
with Te Whatu Pōkeka, the Māori assessment
framework, which acts as an accompanying
guiding document.
TE WHĀRIKI AND TE WHATU PŌKEKA
The advent of Te Whāriki came into being
during a time of social, economic, and
political change during the 1980s and 1990s.
The strong early childhood union voice at the
time was instrumental in advocating for the
first national and international bicultural
early childhood curriculum (Pohio et al.,
2015). As a bicultural and bilingual curricu-
lum, Te Whāriki supports tino rangatiratanga
(self-governance or self-determination) for
all Māori people (Ritchie and Rau, 2010),
while at the same time affording all children
in Aotearoa New Zealand the right to experi-
ence not only the bicultural nature of the
curriculum, but also the multicultural society
in which children and their families or
whānau live. This is made clear in the New
Zealand early childhood curriculum, which
states that ‘all children should be given the
opportunity to develop knowledge and an
understanding of the cultural heritage of both
partners to Te Tiriti o Waitangi’ (MoE, 1996:
9). The Treaty of Waitangi is an important
part of the history of Aotearoa New Zealand
(as referred to later in this chapter) and the
early childhood curriculum reflects this part-
nership in its composition. In addition, the
2017 version of Te Whāriki states that ‘the
Treaty has implications for our education
system, particularly in terms of achieving
equitable outcomes for Māori and ensuring
that te reo Māori not only survives but
thrives’ (MoE, 2017: 3).
A particularly significant contribution to
the formulation of the curriculum was from
Māori. The principles upon which Te Whāriki
is founded, especially the overarching princi-
ple of empowerment, were decreed by Māori
educators Tamati and Tilly Reedy (Hill and
Sansom, 2010), occasioning ‘a national cur-
riculum whose conceptual framework was
based on the cultural and political beliefs of
the minority Indigenous people’ (Te One,
2003: 36). It is the principle of empowerment
(whakamana), in association with the other
principles of holistic development (kotahi-
tanga), family and community (whānau tan-
gata), and relationships (ngā hononga) that
provides an essentially Māori focus to the
early childhood curriculum. The title of the
 DANCE AND CHILDREN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY
curriculum, Te Whāriki, meaning mat, was
suggested by Tilly Reedy as a metaphor – a
whāriki, which was seen ‘as a woven mat for
all to stand on’ (Te One, 2003: 33).
Te Whāriki acts as an important concep-
tual and philosophical framework for a re-
conceptualizing of the early years curriculum
in Aotearoa New Zealand, especially when
making connections to the land and culture
as indicated under the strand of Exploration
or Mana Aotūroa:
• familiarity with stories from different cultures
about the living world, including myths and leg-
ends and oral, nonfictional, and fictional forms;
• working theories about Planet Earth and beyond;
• a knowledge of features of the land which are
of local significance, such as the local river or
mountain;
• theories about social relationships and social
concepts, such as friendship, authority, and social
rules and understandings;
• a relationship with the natural environment and a
knowledge of their own place in the environment;
• respect and a developing sense of responsibility
for the well-being of both the living and the non-
living environment;
• working theories about the living world and
knowledge of how to care for it (MoE, 1996:
90); and
• a sense of responsibility for the living world
and knowledge about how to care for it (MoE,
2017: 47).
In addition, identity, language, and culture
are particularly important, as indicated in the
2017 version of Te Whāriki:
Learner identity is enhanced when children’s home
languages and cultures are valued in educational
settings and when kaiako are responsive to their
cultural ways of knowing and being. For Māori this
means kaiako need understanding of a world view
that emphasises the child’s whakapapa connection
to Māori creation, across Te Kore, te pō, te ao
mārama, atua Māori and tipuna. All children
should be able to access te reo Māori in their ECE
setting, as kaiako weave te reo Māori and tikanga
Māori into the everyday curriculum. (MoE, 2017: 12)
Te Whāriki offers early childhood educators
in Aotearoa the opportunity to heighten the
633
focus on ecological sustainability and an
ethic of caring for self, others, and the
environment.
Te Whāriki, He Whāriki Mātauranga mō ngā
Mokopuna o Aotearoa, the New Zealand early
childhood curriculum (MoE, 1996), contains a
vision for early childhood care and education
pedagogies that implicitly serves an ethic of social,
cultural and ecological justice. (Ritchie, 2015: 41)
In conjunction with Te Whāriki, the Māori
assessment framework, Te Whatu Pōkeka
(MoE, 2009), provides another avenue to
address the ecological ideals stated above. A
whatu pōkeka is a baby blanket made of
muka (fiber) from the harakeke (flax) plant.
Albatross feathers are carefully woven into
the inside of the blanket to provide warmth,
comfort, security, and refuge from the ele-
ments. The pōkeka takes the shape of the
child as it learns and grows. It represents a
metaphor for all the experiences a child
becomes involved in where the development
of what occurs is determined and shaped by
the child. The principal focus of Te Whatu
Pōkeka is the assessment from a Māori per-
spective of children’s ways of knowing. This
approach ensures that the children’s voices
are heard and their cultural heritage is
acknowledged (Pohio et al., 2015). Embedded
within Te Whatu Pōkeka are the Māori prin-
ciples of Te Whāriki (MoE, 1996, 2017). One
key principle – whānau tangata – acknowl-
edges the relationships children have with
place and their cultural and historical inherit-
ances. This takes the form of ‘making links
to everyday experiences and to special events
celebrated by families, whānau, and local
and cultural communities’ (MoE, 2017: 20).
In accordance with the principles and
strands/goals outlined in the early childhood
curriculum Te Whāriki, the center at the heart
of this chapter explores practices that support
social, cultural, and ecological justice. A par-
ticular component of its program is regular
visits to the nearby mountain (maunga) that
overlooks the center. It was because of these
excursions to the mountain, which occurred
634 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
every second week, that I became acquainted
with the kaupapa of the center through par-
ticipating in these visits as part of a research
project. The visits to the mountain provided
prime opportunities for engaging with the
land and space and enabled the young chil-
dren to literally embody the environment.
In particular, the art forms of dance, drama,
music, and visual arts became pivotal con-
duits as modes of rediscovering the history,
stories, and sensations of the maunga, as well
as the actual physical space of the mountain.
The land provided enriching variances in ter-
rain, materials, textures, climatic conditions,
vistas, and people – all prime catalysts for
art-making endeavors.
Before embarking on encounters with
dance as observed during the visits to the
maunga undertaken by the children, teachers,
and whānau of the center, a brief overview of
the history of Aotearoa is presented to situ-
ate both the Māori and colonial history of
New Zealand and to explain how this history
becomes a significant factor when affiliated
with the land and the oppression of Māori
culture, their tino rangatiratanga or self-
determination. Incorporated within this history
are the origins of Māori dance.
THE HISTORY OF AOTEAROA
NEW ZEALAND
As previously indicated, Māori have a strong
affiliation to the land and the places they
occupy or live in. This has been important
throughout history, from the time Māori set-
tled in Aotearoa in the 1700s. Māori co-
habited the land alongside the flora and fauna
and, thus, the land provided a form of spirit-
ual solace that serviced their physical, emo-
tional, and spiritual well-being (Penetito,
2009, in Ritchie, 2015).
When Māori became the first settlers on the
shores of Aotearoa, the transmission of tra-
ditional Māori knowledge and practices was
conveyed orally through the Māori language
(te reo Māori). This was until New Zealand
came under foreign rule by the British Crown
in 1769 and was colonized by missionaries
in 1814, who converted Māori to Christianity
(Hill and Sansom, 2010). In 1840, the Treaty
of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) was writ-
ten and signed by British representatives
of the Crown and Māori chiefs to signify a
partnership between the people of Britain
(the colonizers) and Māori in Aotearoa New
Zealand. As signified earlier, the Treaty of
Waitangi is an important part of the history of
Aotearoa New Zealand because it was writ-
ten as a contract between the Māori people
and the British Crown, which in return for
New Zealand sovereignty guaranteed specific
rights for Māori (Hill and Sansom, 2010).
The Treaty of Waitangi continues to be a cru-
cial document, not only as a political treatise
for the everyday functioning and future aspi-
rations of Aotearoa New Zealand as a bicul-
tural and, consequently, multicultural nation,
but also as a reminder of a nation’s ethical
and moral obligation to all children and their
education. A component of those rights was
the acknowledgement and appreciation of
Māori ways of knowing or cultural episte-
mologies and ways of being (Ritchie, 2001);
rights that have only been partially honored.
Despite this promise to acknowledge
Māori ways of knowing (including the use of
Te Reo Māori), by 1840 the English language
became an enforced requirement in both edu-
cation and society (Ritchie, 2015), which
imposed difficulties for Māori to uphold not
only their language, but also their traditional
knowledge and practices. It was not until the
1980s that the revitalization of the Māori lan-
guage began its resurgence, thanks to Māori
elders who refused to let their language die.
Together with the resurrection of the Māori
language, a renaissance of Māori traditions
and associated values and beliefs began,
although this did not happen without the
absolute determination of the Māori people.
One of these initiatives was the development
of Kōhanga Reo, or full-immersion Māori-
language early childhood centers (Hill and
 DANCE AND CHILDREN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY
Sansom, 2010). These centers ensured that
the Māori language would be re-introduced
into young children’s lives with the aim
that the children would become bilingual
speakers using both Māori and English. In
1987, te reo Māori was declared an official
language in Aotearoa New Zealand by the
Māori Language Act, which brought about a
new challenge for the nation and especially
for those involved in education. As pointed
out by Ritchie (2015), educators were now
required to learn about Māori traditions and
stories related to the land, including stories of
Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother, and Māori
cosmology, which sees all living creatures as
descendants from Papatūānuku and Ranginui
the Sky Father. These stories also pertain to
the waiata (songs) and haka (dances) for the
whenua (land) and the tamariki/mokopuna
(children/grandchildren) and include learn-
ing the Māori language, which connects peo-
ple to the land and their ancestors.
THE ORIGINS OF M ĀORI DANCE
One way of becoming acquainted with Māori
traditions is through dance, especially haka.
Haka is steeped in history and tradition – it
calls upon some of the deepest roots of
ancestors together with other forms of Māori
dance, e.g. taiaha, poi, and waiata-ā-ringa.
From a te ao Māori or Māori world view, the
interconnection between all living things,
whether human, animal, plant, earth, or sky,
is inseparable. Everything Māori are involved
in, and that includes dance, maintains this
interconnection to the life force or mauri of
all living things past and present. Although
there has been a burgeoning connection to
the environment through dance and other
areas of learning in latter or contemporary
times, dance has always been an expression
of the whenua (land and people) for Māori.
Māori see themselves as the kaitiaki (guard-
ian or caretaker) of the land, from which
some Māori dance originates. For instance,
635
Māori dance incorporates a form of symbol-
ism such as the wiri, or quivering of the
lower arms and hands, sometimes referred to
as aroarowhaki, to simulate the shimmering
waves of heat coming up from the ground, or
‘the attitudes and movements representative of
the whole process of planting the potato, and
afterwards of digging them out of the ground’
(Shennan, 1984: 2). Māori dances were often
performed to honor the Māori gods, such as
Tane Mahuta, god of the forest and bush, or
Tangaroa, god of the sea or ocean. Other
Māori dances depict the rowing of a waka or
canoe, and incorporate slow, intense, but
graceful movements related to the action of
rowing, sometimes also illustrated through the
use of the poi. The term kanikani, meaning
dance, evolves from the word kani, which
means dancing, or, ‘in the figurative sense,
dancing through life’ (Shennan, 1984: 6).
The Māori dance form of haka is prob-
ably the best known internationally because
of the immense exposure given to the haka
being performed before every rugby game
played by the New Zealand Rugby team, the
All Blacks. The haka is synonymous with
the All Blacks and rugby. But what does the
haka mean to Māori? According to Potatau
Te Wherowhero, ‘haka exemplifies … the
coming and merging of the “many nations”,
represented by the “black, white and red
threads”, into the “eye of a needle”, Aotearoa’
(cited in Kaiwai and Zemke-White, 2004:
140). Traditionally, the haka (as with other
forms of Māori dance) was learned alongside
more experienced elders, often on the marae,
but these opportunities to learn haka could
occur almost anywhere and were certainly
not learned in a more formal or conventional
way. Jan Bolwell (1998) cites Keri Kaa (a
Māori expert in traditional forms of Māori
dance), who explains the process of learn-
ing Māori dance, which was handed down
through the generations:
We sing and dance because we must … and you
learn because your granny teaches you, or your
grandad, and you soon learn to keep the beat
when the old lady pinches your leg and says ‘E tu
636 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
(stand), dance now.’ … Who taught me? Nobody
taught me; I just listened and watched by being part
of the scenery. (Kaa, quoted in Bolwell, 1998: 82).
As Bolwell (1998) articulates, the Māori art
form of dance is a holistic venture not sepa-
rated from voice, chant or song and, thus, the
use of te reo Māori. These dances go beyond
the physical or creative expression to become
a means of identifying one’s tribal (iwi) and
family (whānau) connections, and become
strong markers of identity.
Other more recent accounts also reiterate
these beliefs.
Wiremu stand still. Stop fidgeting around. I want a
straight back, chest out, chin up, legs apart. Boy
don’t you dare look at the ground or else! Look at
the audience and be strong. You are a descendant
of a chief, show me that you are. Look at the audi-
ence and single one of them out. Stare at them.
Show them how good you are. Show them how
manly you are. When you pūkana, big eyes,
tongue out, gritty teeth. And stop smiling! Haka is
not about smiling. If you want to smile I’ll put you
in the front row of the women and give you a poi.
Do you want that? So there I was being like my
brothers, staunch and proud, with my eyes to the
front, chest out, straight back and standing tall.
(Barbour, 2011: 112)
As indicated by Matthews (2004: 10, as cited
in Barbour, 2011: 114): ‘The portrayal and
attainment of ihi is considered to be the
achievement of excellence in performance. Ihi
is a psychic power that elicits a positive psy-
chic and emotional response from the audi-
ence’. Furthermore, as Wiremu continues:
You know that feeling, when your body is amped,
muscles flexed, staunch, sharp actions, intensity,
speed, precision … and your back is straight, head
held high and chin parallel with the floor, giving it
all. You can’t captivate the crowd without having
excellent movement. Us men pride ourselves on
our staunchness and showing the body and our
muscular attributes. No one would believe you,
even if your words were good, if you looked like an
idiot. ‘Kia kōrero te katoa o te tinana’ (the entire
body has to speak). (Barbour, 2011: 115)
As referred to earlier, with the arrival of the
European settlers in the 1700s, Māori cus-
toms, culture, and the rich resources of the
land and sea were both plundered and confis-
cated by the colonizers under the auspices of
the British government, with continued
assimilation occurring well after 1840, which
was a clear breach of the Treaty of Waitangi.
As a result, there was a significant loss of
Māori culture, including the origins of haka.
From the co-mingling of ‘new threads’ in the
early 1900s, the dance form of kapa haka
evolved, combining Māori and European
influences. Thus, ‘Kapa Haka can be seen as
a new form of structured concert dance that
developed in response to colonial musical
influences, rather than being “traditional” in
the sense of ritualized marae practices’
(Barbour, 2011: 116). Kapa haka, therefore,
is an amalgamation of Māori and Occidental
cultural influences. As further substantiated
by Kaiwai and Zemke-White (2004: 140);
‘This mediation of Māori and Occidental
cultural influences was an important dynamic
in the sustainability of M āori language,
values, and customs – and these cultural
practices continue to exist in song and dance.’
The advent of kapa haka can be seen as a way
to express cultural identity in an innovative
fashion, or as a form of reverse appropria-
tion, while coming to terms with cultural loss
(Kaiwai and Zemke-White, 2004).
Kapa haka is a generic term used today to
describe Māori-associated musical traditions,
which are based around the performance of
haka (dance), the modern poi (the poi dance),
and waiata-ā-ringa (action song). Haka is
defined as dance, or a song accompanying
a dance. Kapa is a rank or row; thus kapa
haka is performed in a line (men standing in
one row and women in another row). This
combined form of kapa haka is a more recent
construction (Kaiwai and Zemke-White,
2004). Cultural dances can become fused
or blended with other popular dance forms,
which establish ‘an embodied social identity
that we are not always conscious of’ (Barbour,
2011: 118) – a type of dance fusion.
In the past, the preservation of Māori
traditions was often maintained because of
remoteness, where certain tribes resisted or
 DANCE AND CHILDREN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY
contested being assimilated into Pākehā soci-
ety. Colonization threatened traditional Māori
customs such as haka (dance), as well as other
customs including whaikōrero (formal speech
usually made at a powhiri), waiata (song),
and poi, which were performed in wharenui
(meeting houses) on the marae. As referred to
previously, haka was viewed as grotesque from
a European viewpoint and more often than not,
tourists were offered performances of waiata–
ā-ringa and poi, because they were seen as less
threatening and appeased the growing local
and tourism markets (Kaiwai and Zemke-
White, 2004). The propagation of kapa haka
was firmly established in the 1920s to 1940s
and became a flourishing art form, bringing
together both Māori and European musical
styles and aesthetics. Following World War II,
professional refinements became more and
more evident among kapa haka groups in a
growing climate of kapa haka competition.
Because of the increased migration to urban
areas especially in the 1950s and 1960s, Māori
found themselves dispossessed from their
land and cultural traditions; thus kapa haka
became a potent symbol for Māori youth as
an experience that enabled Māori to rekindle
their cultural heritage. As noted by Kaiwai and
Zemke-White (2004):
Tradition has been essential to Māori cultural sus-
tainability by ensuring cultural continuity and
pride. This repositioning of Māori cultural tradi-
tions and consequent development is vitally impor-
tant to a rethinking of New Zealand’s colonial
history, making any future Māori cultural develop-
ment tasks a holistic and embodied process.
(2004: 157)
In this sense, the phenomenon of kapa haka
spans the past and the present. Dance prac-
tices like haka and poi have their roots in
mātauranga Māori or Māori knowledge and
beliefs. ‘Songs and chants were used to
record tribal histories and genealogies’
(Kaiwai and Zemke-White, 2004: 157). As a
consequence, kapa haka has become an
important symbol of Māori identity. Kapa
haka, as a musical and kinesthetic expression,
is evidence of this proactive initiative and
637
thrives today in kapa haka competitions,
which are held nationwide every year during
Polynesian Dance Festivals.
The fusion evident in areas such as kapa
haka raises further questions about the ‘inter-
cultural appropriation of dance by one cul-
ture, and its propensity to appear as emergent
in form and/or expression from the borrowed
culture’ (Ashley, 2012: 161). However, this
is only one component of acculturation.
Innovation or appropriation of cultural dance
forms also originate from within cultures
themselves, and thus can be viewed as intra-
cultural. As outlined by Linda Ashley (2012:
161–2), ‘In the development of competitive
forms of Māori performing arts, the issue
of how much tradition to disregard and how
much to take forward was raised by Māori
scholar and kapa haka authority Pita Sharples
(2005)’.
When aligned with the performance of the
haka by the New Zealand rugby team, the
All Blacks, it is clear to see how the Māori
haka provides an example of cultural misun-
derstandings. As stated earlier, the percep-
tion of the haka as grotesque or aggressive
(a trait which is particularly evident in the
haka performed by the All Blacks before a
rugby game) did a disservice to the origins and
purposes of the haka, which centered around
important cultural traditions and customs or
occasions such as marae powhiri (welcomes)
or gatherings, harvest, births, and deaths, as
well as for battle. Charles (2005: 4, as cited in
Ashley, 2012: 232) provides a fitting descrip-
tion of haka, aligning the haka with the con-
cept of an orchestra: ‘It’s an ensemble of
hands, slapping, body movement, voice pro-
jection, tongue and eyes and they all coalesce
and form this nexus to produce this beautiful
thing called haka’.
Today, haka plays a vital role in helping
youth who may otherwise be failing in the
education system or society to reconnect
with their heritage or ancestry, which goes
far beyond the more menacing view of haka
as seen on the rugby field or the grotesque
account of haka decreed by early British
638 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
arrivals to the shores of Aotearoa. There
are significant social and cultural meanings
inherent in the haka and other Māori forms
of dance, which can be easily overlooked,
such as pertaining to the wiri, as discussed
earlier. Another example is a traditional
waka-­hauling chant used as a haka powhiri
to welcome people onto the marae. This haka
symbolizes the pulling of the waka (canoe)
out of the water so that the visitors arrive
safely on land. The same haka chant was also
used more recently to welcome a new popu-
lation of endangered tuatara (New Zealand
native lizard) onto an island free of predators
as part of a conservation initiative (Ashley,
2012). Haka represents togetherness and
an awareness of the te ao Māori, or Māori
world, and has sacred significance.
THE MAUNGA – A PLACE
TO LIVE AND DANCE
For all of the reasons mentioned above, it is
not surprising that the haka features largely
in the young children’s dance experiences at
the Māori-medium early childhood center, as
depicted in the opening vignette. For the
young children from the M āori-medium
early childhood center, the haka and other
forms of embodied engagement take place on
a regular basis, especially when connected
with place or land via the center’s regular
trips to the nearby maunga (mountain) and
other places of significance such as noho
marae. Māori traditional dance such as haka
can create an opportunity for ecological and
spiritual (ancestral) connections. This bur-
geoning connection to the environment and
dance links back to early dance, especially
for Māori, which occurred in the open, at
maraes on the atea (open area where gather-
ings take place), and has always been about
the whenua (land and place) and people. It
seems fitting, therefore, that the children
perform haka and other traditional Māori
dance forms such as poi and taiaha out in the
open environment and on the mountain
during their visits as a form of gifting to the
mountain for its protection, sustenance, and
spiritual presence or life force.
The Māori cultural dances provided a
ritualistic form of thanks to the mountain.
These dance experiences engendered a con-
nection between the children and the moun-
tain and thus strengthened the children’s
cultural identity, helping them to develop a
sense of belonging (mana whenua) and well-
being (mana atua) or wairuatanga, which is ‘a
source of spiritual and emotional well-being’
(Ritchie, 2015: 43). The children were often
heard to say when dancing on the mountain,
‘This is my mountain’, and to raise their
voices in chanting ‘ka mate, ka mate, ka ora,
ka ora’ while performing the haka.
Connectedness with the earth as the source
of life and as a place to honor one’s ancestors
has been an unceasing value for the Māori
people. This aligns with Nel Noddings’
(2003) focus on an ethic of care, whereby
there is a relational understanding of people
and their alliance with all things living, and
with those who have lived and are not forgot-
ten. Hence the obligation to act responsibly,
and to care for the other, becomes an essen-
tial component of the children’s conscious-
ness during their visits to the mountain and
other places of importance; a consciousness
that can provide intuitive, mystical, and spir-
itual understandings that arise through dance.
As a consequence, this provides the opportu-
nity to fulfill the Kaupapa Māori philosophy
of the center, which encourages tamariki/
mokopuna (the young children) to become
engaged learners using te reo and tikanga
Māori (Māori language, protocols, and cus-
toms), as well as the possibility to thwart the
specters of colonized oppression as the chil-
dren learn to embrace their cultural identity.
These include the sharing of a special karakia
or prayer for the mountain and the observance
of the aforementioned Māori values and
beliefs of ‘whānaungatanga (responsibility
and reciprocal obligations towards others),
manaaki (respectful relationships), tuakana/
 DANCE AND CHILDREN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY
teina (to look after each other), and mana tan-
gata (to be able to stand confidently in both
worlds)’ (Pohio et al., 2015: 105), which are
all inherent in the concept of relatedness. It
is because of the teachers’ belief in the value
of drawing on te ao Māori perspectives that
a sense of relatedness to all living things – to
the earth, the planet, and the cosmos – ena-
bles children and their whānau to become
kaitiaki, or stewards of the earth.
As stated at the beginning, this chapter
proposed to convey how the children main-
tain their cultural heritage and assert their
Indigenous rights through dance during their
embodied encounters with place. In order
to capture something of the essence of how
the children’s cultural identity, and thus
Indigenous rights, could be seen manifested
in dance, I finish with a phenomenological
interpretation of a child dancing on the moun-
tain. One young boy had a distinctive style of
dance that he would perform during his vis-
its to the mountain. In his dance, there were
Māori haka-like movements, such as waewae
takahia (stamping actions) and strong down-
ward arm movements punching outward and
toward the ground as he took command of his
dancing on the mountain. There was a sense
of freedom or liberation in his movement as
his entire body became energetically engaged
in the full-bodied actions of the haka.
In recalling this event I return to the ques-
tions posed earlier: Does engagement in
dance, together with an affiliation with the
spiritual or Indigenous perception of place,
promote a deeper understanding of cultural
heritage and help Māori to re-affirm their
beliefs and values that have for so long been
denied under the guise of colonization? Can
children enhance their own cultural identity
through their embodied engagement in dance
and, in particular, reverse the colonial cloak
of oppression to proclaim their Indigeneity
and self-determination through Māori dance
such as haka? Whether or not I can answer
these questions with the absolute convic-
tion that the answer is yes, I can attest that
the young boy’s rendition of the haka in the
639
opening vignette and my phenomenologi-
cal interpretation of the boy’s dance on the
mountain are testimony to the legacy and
place of Māori dance such as haka as a liv-
ing and culturally significant event in these
children’s lives. Indeed, hopefully this can be
the case in the lives of all children who have
this opportunity to experience an embodied
relationship with their land (whenua), their
tūrangawaewae, and cultural connections to
their ancestors. At the same time, it is impor-
tant to ensure that these cultural connec-
tions offer Māori the opportunity to become
empowered in order to affirm their tino ran-
gatiratanga or self-determination for the pur-
poses of attaining freedom, democracy, and
equity, as promised in the Treaty of Waitangi.
GLOSSARY OF MĀORI TERMS
aroha–love
atea–open space
atua–god
belonging–mana whenua
haka–Māori dance form
hapū–sub-tribes or wider extended families
harakeke–flax
hui–meetings or gatherings
ihi–energy
iwi–tribe
kaiako–teacher
kaitiaki–guardian or caretaker
kaitiakitanga–stewardship over lands and
resources
kanikani–dance
kapa haka–Māori dance in a line
karakia–spiritual incantation or prayer/worship
kaupapa–focus, topic, subject, philosophy
kaupapa Māori–Māori philosophy
Kōhanga reo–full-immersion M āori early
childhood centers
kōrero–to speak
kotahitanga–holistic
Māori me ngā akoranga o te ao whānui–
holistic learning for all
mana aotūroa–exploration
640 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
mana tangata–to be able to stand confidently
in both worlds
manaakitanga–caring for others
manuhiri–visitors
marae–traditional Māori meeting place
mātauranga Māori–Māori knowledge
maunga–mountain
mauri–life force
mihi–greeting
mokopuna–grandchildren
muka–fiber
ngā hononga–relationships
noho marae–Maori meeting place where
people live or stay
Pākehā–European, White person
Papatūānuku–the Earth Mother
poi–small ball on string
powhiri–welcoming ceremony
pūkana–facial expression
Ranginui–the Sky Father (Papa)
ringa ringa–arms and hands
taiaha–spear
takahia–to stamp
tamariki–children
Tane Mahuta–god of the forests
Tangaroa–god of the seas or oceans
tauiwi–foreigner
te ao Māori–the Māori world
te ao mārama–natural light/day
te kore–creation
te pō–night
te reo Māori–Māori language
tikanga–Māori culture and values
tino rangatiratanga–self determination,
self-governance
tipuna–ancestor
tuakana/teina–to look after each other
tūrangawaewae–place where one stands
waewae–legs/feet
waiata–song
waiata–ā-ringa–action song
wairua–spirituality
wairuatanga–spiritual interconnectedness
waka–canoe
whaikōrero–formal speech usually made at
a powhiri
wellbeing–mana atua
whakamana–empowerment
whakapapa–genealogy
whānau–families
whānau tangata–family and community,
people
whānaungatanga–responsibility and recipro-
cal obligations toward others
wharenui–meeting houses
whāriki–mat
whatu pōkeka–baby blanket
whenua–land
wiri–quivering of the lower arms and hands,
sometimes referred to as aroarowhaki
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Indigenous Knowledges and
Science Education: Complexities,
Considerations and Praxis
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES
AND SCIENCE
The push to teach Indigenous knowledges
and ways of knowing through school curric-
ula is not new. Many colonizer countries have
government-based initiatives to purportedly
­ onized countries often requires a largely
better cater for Indigenous students through
including Indigenous knowledges and per-
spectives in curriculum and pedagogy or to
promote more understanding relationships
between non-Indigenous and Indigenous pop-
ulations. In particular, New Zealand, some
jurisdictions in the United States, Australia
and Canada have official initiatives that
include Indigenous knowledges in the science
curriculum (Aikenhead and Michell, 2011).
These initiatives may receive large rhetorical
support but little action and implementation
in classrooms, particularly in ‘Whitestream’
(Grande, 2000) classrooms catering largely
for non-Indigenous student populations.
As stated in the United Nations Declaration
of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United
56
Renee Desmarchelier
Nations General Assembly, 2007), Indigenous
peoples have the right to have the dignity
and diversity of their cultures appropri-
ately reflected in education (Article 15/1).
The representations of Indigenous knowl-
edges/cultures/peoples in education in col-
non-­Indigenous teacher workforce (such as
myself) to effectively and respectfully engage
with knowledge systems they may be unfa-
miliar with. Opportunities for students to
come to understand the historical and social
contexts that have marginalised Indigenous
knowledges and peoples can potentially be
deployed in Whitestream classrooms inclu-
sive of Indigenous ways of knowing. The
potential of this curricula inclusion to make
tangible contributions to Indigenous sov-
ereignty movements cannot be overlooked
(Aikenhead and Michell, 2011).
The profound benefits and complex chal-
lenges of including Indigenous knowledges
in education have consistently been recog-
nized across multiple educational sectors and
 INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES AND SCIENCE EDUCATION
national contexts for the last two decades. In
the opening pages of Semali and Kincheloe’s
(1999) edited volume What is Indigenous
Knowledge?, the authors acknowledge the
contested and complex nature of social,
cultural and political contexts surround-
ing Indigenous knowledges in the academy.
Indigenous knowledges have been represented
as ‘the primitive, the wild, the natural’ (1999:
3) and viewed with condescension by Western
observers. Despite recognition that the study
of Indigenous knowledges can place academ-
ics ‘on dangerous terrain’ (1999: 3), Semali
and Kincheloe encouraged embracing this
uncertainty, saying ‘we perceive the benefits
of the study of Indigenous knowledge suffi-
ciently powerful to merit the risk’ (1999: 3).
The richness of Indigenous knowledges is
seen in providing multi-dimensional intellec-
tual evocation that challenges and encourages
interaction between Indigenous and Western
epistemologies for the purpose of finding
new ways to produce knowledge.
The richness of Indigenous knowledge
systems lies in their ability to address eve-
ryday challenges of human survival (Sefa
Dei, 2011) and interrelate knowledge, cul-
tural beliefs and history to enhance lives
(Semali and Kincheloe, 1999), while mak-
ing no claims to universality that attempts to
validate other ways of knowing (Kincheloe
and Steinberg, 2008). Indigenous knowledge
systems have been accumulating observa-
tions over extremely long periods of time
(Dentzau, 2018). Such knowledge systems
are dynamic and undergoing constant rene-
gotiation as people and communities exist
in complex relations with land, culture and
society (Sefa Dei, 2008). The ever-changing
trends of modernity and post-modernity have
influenced Indigenous knowledge systems to
evolve in line with contemporary challenges
(Sefa Dei, 2011). Sefa Dei (2011) describes
that Indigenous knowledges are found within
the contexts of Indigenous communities in
story, myth and folklore, as well as in forms
of material culture like symbolic ornaments,
body wear and cultural artefacts. In addition,
643
Sefa Dei includes pharmacology, food sus-
tainability and environmental management,
as well as cultural norms, systems of social
organization and cultural ceremony/festivals
as examples of Indigenous knowledge.
The term Indigenous Knowledge is not with-
out contention. An artificial division between
Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science
is often proposed (see Agrawal, 1995), and
there is recognition that both are constructed
categories that emerge from particular, often
colonial, historical constructs (Ramnath,
2014). As Smith et al. (2016) point out in rela-
tion to mātauranga Māori (Indigenous knowl-
edge in Aotearoa New Zealand),
there is an easy tendency to oversimplify the way
IK mātauranga is defined in opposition to western
knowledge and science and then to make claims
about how IK mātauranga is produced. Hierarchies
of knowledge and knowing also re-inscribe false
binaries between one form of knowledge and
another, and therefore between one kind of indig-
enous subjectivity and another. (2016: 133)
Smith et al. (2016) highlight that the knowl-
edge that sits behind practices such as ‘medi-
ating the material and spiritual world,
escorting a spirit on a physical and spiritual
journey, binding ancient genealogies with
contemporary realities, sustaining relation-
ships while healing collective grief, seeking
visions and teachings from our ancestors, or
cleansing people and spaces’ (2016: 32) has
historically been the subject of research
rather than being applied to knowledge crea-
tion in the academy.
Notwithstanding the recognition of false
dichotomies, it is often a clash in epistemolog-
ical and ontological roots (Kincheloe, 2009)
that is cited as driving perceived incompat-
ibilities between Indigenous knowledges and
science. The central role of Cartesian dual-
ism in science allows for the separation of the
knower and the known and the separation of
humans from nature, leading to the possibil-
ity of observing objective reality (Semali and
Kincheloe, 1999). This allows for science’s
internally endorsed validation system – if
644 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
science is objective and logical, how can it
be wrong? This could be viewed as a reduc-
tion of reality to that which is accessible to
Western science, because as Nandy (1992)
contends, from an Indigenous perspective it
negates the possibility of unobservable spir-
itual and metaphysical forces. Through dual-
ism, objectivism and colonialism, science
has become a system of domination that is
privileged in public spheres because of peo-
ple’s media and educational socialization into
accepting its authority or power.
For science (and other) teachers to chart a
course through such contested ground remains
a challenge in most educational contexts.
Epistemological conflict in terms of science
and Indigenous ways of knowing, being and
doing is only one of the challenges facing
teachers grappling with classroom implementa-
tion. Enacting critical pedagogical praxis based
on multiple cultural understandings requires
a political consciousness and will to teach in
emancipatory ways as well as willingness to
engage with ideas about what science ‘is’.
A ‘Standard Account of Science’
In order to consider different cultural ways of
understanding the natural world, it is first
necessary to consider what science ‘is’. In
the modern era science claims a collective
perceiving of rationality via the scientific
community and the authority, though scien-
tific method, to produce universal knowledge
in the form of scientific theories. Implicit in
an understanding of science are quantitative
data, hypothesis testing and causation
(Dentzau, 2018). Western Modern Science
(WMS) operates on the basis of a Cartesian
materialistic world that is both reductionist
and mechanistic (Ogawa, 1995). The acro-
nym WMS has also been taken to represent
‘White Male Science’ (Pomeroy, 1994, as
cited by Aikenhead, 1996), reflecting its
Eurocentric, male history.
Cobern and Loving (2001: 58–60) have
attempted to define a ‘standard account of
science’. These authors contend that science
is a ‘naturalistic, material explanatory sys-
tem used to account for natural phenomena
that ideally must be objectively and empiri-
cally testable’ (2001: 58). Contained within
this statement are the ideas that science
describes nature in a way that is empirically
testable, that is objective, and that provides
a systematic explanation of natural phenom-
ena. Cobern and Loving take these ideas
further to define science as ‘grounded in
metaphysical commitments about the way
the world “really is”’ (2001: 60, emphasis in
original). This statement acknowledges sci-
ence’s presupposition of the possibility of
knowledge about nature and the existence
of order and conformity in nature, as well
as the essential premise of cause and
effect. In conjunction with these points, the
authors also acknowledge the role of consen-
sus within the scientific community in deter-
mining what science ‘is’ and what qualifies
as science.
Scientific theories describe widely
accepted laws, methods, applications and
foundations that have been formulated and
can apply to situations other than those in
which they were derived (Rosenberg, 2006).
That is, the theories are universally applied,
and operate independently of human thought.
This universalist view can recognize that
there may be some cultural considerations
that influence science; however, these do
not determine the truth claims of science
(Matthews, 1994). For example, culture,
gender, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation
of the knower is irrelevant, as the knower
and the known are separated (Stanley and
Brickhouse, 2001). Working in this way, sci-
ence constructs theories and the behavior of
the natural world is seen as the ultimate proof
of these. Cobern and Loving’s presentation
of the ‘Standard Account of Science’ is one
that provides a basis for the operation of the
scientific community, science in educational
institutions and in the public domain. It rep-
resents a view of science that is part of the
public consciousness.
 INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 645

Science and Indigenous Peoples The documentation and storage of Indigenous

knowledges in databases located within aca-
The history of scientific knowledge produc- demic institutions (for example, gene banks
tion about Indigenous peoples has served to and electronic networks) from an Indigenous
rationalize an array of liberal capitalistic standpoint may look similar to former colo-
practices worldwide (Nakata, 2008). Early nial enterprises that took possession of land,
anthropological documentation of Indigenous resources and labor for economic self-interest
peoples used extensive empirical field data to (Nakata, 2002).
describe the physical, mental and social char-
acteristics of Indigenous peoples on a com-
parative basis to people in Western
communities (Nakata, 1998, 2002, 2008). Intersecting Knowledges
These studies are an example of the cultural
Indigenous knowledges and science do not
embeddedness of science and how a particu-
have to sit in opposition and can be seen as
lar knowledge achieves legitimacy and
complementary rather than separate realities
authority at the expense of other knowledge
(Aikenhead and Michell, 2011). In seminal
systems (Nakata, 2002). There has been a
work, Agrawal (1995) argues that to commit
shifting basis of inquiry about Indigenous
to a dichotomy between Indigenous knowl-
peoples but ‘knowledge production about
edge and science is to reproduce the dilem-
Indigenous people still works within a wider
mas of earlier debates, where anthropologists
set of social relations that rationalize, justify
such as Malinowski were able to relegate
and work to operationalize a complicated
Indigenous knowledges to primitive status
apparatus of bureaucratic, managerial and
through showing their distance from Western
disciplinary actions that continue to confine
scientific knowledge. It is important to
the lives of Indigenous people’ (Nakata,
understand what happens to Indigenous
2008: 189, my emphasis).
knowledges when they are conceptualized
While Indigenous knowledge systems are
simplistically and opportunistically from the
increasingly acknowledged in scientific areas
perspective that they are everything that is
of study, especially in regard to sustainable
not science (Nakata, 2008). Aikenhead and
development practices, often these enter-
Michell (2011) offer a way of understanding
prises have everything and nothing to do with
the two systems as differing primarily in
Indigenous peoples (Nakata, 2002). Western
terms of knowing and experiencing nature:
scientists claiming value in Indigenous
‘this cultural difference may be expressed as
knowledges can often tacitly decontextualize
follows: the way scientists see the world can
and relegate it to a lower order of knowledge
clash with the way Indigenous Elders inhabit
(Semali and Kincheloe, 1999) through sug-
the world’ (2011: 8). With these considera-
gestions of a lack of rigor and imprecision
tions, Nakata’s (2002) notion of the cultural
(Dentzau, 2018). By labelling Indigenous
interface becomes a useful way of conceptu-
knowledge systems as ‘ethno-science’ such as
alizing the interactions between Indigenous
ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, ethnomed-
and Western systems of knowledge:
icine and so on, Indigenous ways of know-
ing are situated as culturally grounded, while This notion of the Cultural Interface as a place of
Western science is represented as transcul- constant tension and negotiation of different inter-
tural or universal (Semali and Kincheloe, ests and systems of knowledge means that both
1999). In addition, categorizing Indigenous must be reflected on and interrogated. It is not
simply about opposing the knowledges and dis-
knowledges in Western scientific terms frag- course that compete and conflict with traditional
ments the holism inherent in Indigenous ones. It is also about seeing what conditions the
ways of understanding the natural world. convergence of all these and of examining and
646 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
interrogating all knowledge and practices associ-
ated with issues so that we take a responsible but
self-interested [from an Indigenous standpoint]
course in relation to our future practice. (Nakata
2002: 286)
OFFICIAL KNOWLEDGE,
CURRICULUM AND IDEOLOGY
In order to effectively engage the synergies
and intersectionalities of WMS and
Indigenous knowledges in science teaching,
an understanding of the ways in which
knowledges are structured in curricula is
necessary. Principles of social and cultural
control are strongly related to which knowl-
edges become important in classroom set-
tings (Apple, 2004). Some knowledges
achieve the status of ‘official knowledge’,
being defined as worthwhile to be passed
onto future generations (Apple, 2000b).
Recognizing the power these knowledges
then hold within schooling, and therefore
society more broadly, is important to the
context of considering Indigenous knowl-
edges in curricula.
Problematizing the ideological basis of
curriculum construction is a necessary step
to reveal the power imbalances between
Western and Other knowledges in schools. In
this respect, Apple’s (2004) questions about
the selective tradition of knowledge in cur-
riculum are important: ‘Whose knowledge
is it? Who selected it? Why is it organized
and taught in this way? To this particular
group?’ (2004: 6). These ‘simple questions’
speak to the complex and at times contradic-
tory relationships ‘among “legitimate” (and
at times “sacred”) culture and “popular” (and
at times “profane”) culture’ (Apple, 2018:
63). The mere act of asking these questions
is not sufficient, however. One is guided, as
well, by attempting to link these investiga-
tions to competing conceptions of social and
economic power and ideologies.
Apple denies the supposed neutrality of
curriculum generated through institutional
epistemologies. He contends that there is
‘evidence that the institution of schooling
itself is not a neutral enterprise in terms of
its economic outcomes’ (Apple, 2004: 7).
Apple recognizes that there it is more than
economic capital at stake; schools also dis-
tribute and preserve cultural capital. In this
way, dominant groups do not have to resort
to overt methods of domination as schools
can create and recreate official knowledge
that preserves hegemonic culture and elic-
its social control. All curricular reforms are
rooted in particular histories and are driven
not only by ‘technical considerations, but
also profoundly by cultural, political and
economic projects and by specific and often
unquestioned ideological and valuative
visions of what schools should do and whom
they should serve’ (Apple, 2018: 63).
However, importantly Apple (2000b)
reminds us that ‘the powerful are not that
powerful. The politics of official knowledge
are the politics of accords or compromises’
(2000b: 10). These compromises occur at
different levels, through political and ideo-
logical discourse: at the level of state politics,
at the level of what is taught in schools, at
the level of the daily activities of teachers
and students in classrooms, and at the level
of how we are to understand all of this. As
such, they are not impositions but represent
how dominant groups try to create situations
where the compromises favor them.
Indigenous Knowledges
in Science Education
The culturing of knowledges within science
education has been recognized in literature
since at least the mid 1990s (Agrawal, 1995;
Aikenhead, 1996; Bechtel, 2016; Chigeza,
2007; Lewis and Aikenhead, 2001; Roth,
2009). Drawing on Phelan et al.’s (1991) defi-
nition of culture, Aikenhead (1996) catego-
rizes canonical scientific knowledge as cultural
‘beliefs’ and recognizes science as ‘itself a
subculture of Western or Euro-American
 INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES AND SCIENCE EDUCATION
culture’ (1996: 9). Science has its own set of
values, terminology and way of discussing,
publishing and engaging in research (Bechtel,
2016). When science is recognized as a sub-
culture, learning science can be viewed as
cultural acquisition. Aikenhead argues that, as
a sub-culture, science exhibits a well-defined
system of symbols and meanings that have
their origins in a Western male history. The
project of acquisition of the sub-culture of
science may necessitate a cultural ‘border-
crossing’ (Aikenhead and Jegede, 1999). For
people from non-Western cultures, making
the crossing into Western science requires
assimilation that can marginalize or replace
their own worldview. Similarly, those of a
Western background are also required to cross
cultural borders between their life-world and
the world of science (Aikenhead, 1996, 1998).
Treating science as a cultural enterprise
represents a radical shift in thinking for some
science educators (Aikenhead, 1996). The
argument for the cultural nature of science
is succinct: ‘Science does have norms, val-
ues, beliefs, expectations, and conventional
actions that are generally shared in various
ways by communities of scientists’ (1996:
9). School science is a sub-culture which
expects students to acquire these norms and
values and make them part of their world to
varying degrees. Often, school science pro-
vides stereotypical images of science that are
suggestive of an ability to generate absolute
truth through socially sterile, non-humanistic
methods. This form of scientism acts like a
hidden curriculum, emphasizing the need for
students to think like scientists (Aikenhead,
2001). The goal of science education’s cul-
tural transmission runs into ethical problems
when Western culture in the form of science
is forced upon students who do not share its
system of meanings, resulting not in encultur-
ation but assimilation and a form of cultural
imperialism (Aikenhead, 1996). This does
not deny that border crossings are also nec-
essary for many Western students who iden-
tify with sub-cultures that are non-masculine,
humanities orientated and non-Cartesian.
647
Given the emphasis that science has in cur-
ricula and in the jobs market, Aikenhead’s
(2001) position is particularly salient because
when students reject the assimilation into
the Western culture of science, they become
alienated from science, which is a major
global influence on their lives. When students
do not attain the cultural capital associated
with scientific understanding, they are lim-
ited in their ability to participate effectively
in Western society (Aikenhead, 2001). Often
in the case of Indigenous students (or other
marginalized groups) this perpetuates a ‘dis-
course of deficit’ around educational, social
and economic achievement.
UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEXITIES
OF CLASSROOM IMPLEMENTATION
Teachers often have concerns about their
abilities to successfully deliver classroom
teaching inclusive of Indigenous knowledges
and perspectives. There are some well-­
documented teacher apprehensions that are
common across different national contexts.
For example, some teachers (usually non-
Indigenous teachers) feel they do not have
the relevant knowledge and expertise about
Indigenous knowledges and cultures to incor-
porate these into their teaching in a non-
tokenistic way (Baynes, 2016; Baynes and
Austin, 2012; Kanu, 2011; Quince, 2012).
Students coming into Initial Teacher
Education programs tend to have low levels
of content knowledge about Indigenous
issues or histories which may not be added to
significantly or effectively through their
studies (Moodie, 2019). Where teachers do
not see science as a cultural enterprise, it is
difficult not only to see the curricular connec-
tions between Indigenous knowledges and
science but also to mitigate the cultural border
crossing necessary to not relegate Indigenous
knowledges to lower status than science
(Bechtel, 2016). Schooling system level
decisions and attitudes can also influence
648 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
teachers’ confidence in implementation.
Where teachers feel alienated from discus-
sions around integration and lack resources
or struggle with a lack of school support and
perceive racist attitudes in students, col-
leagues and administration, implementation
is stifled (Desmarchelier, 2016; Kanu, 2011).
At the level of the teacher, a range of
factors influence the ways in which a
teacher might choose (or not) to engage
with Indigenous knowledges in their teach-
ing praxis. As already outlined, epistemo-
logical clashes can exist between scientific
and Indigenous worldviews. The impact of
such clashes on teaching is often cited as a
major contributing factor to how/if teachers
reach classroom implementation (Baynes,
2016; for an in-depth discussion of scien-
tific epistemological positioning see Cobern
and Loving, 2008). However, advancing to
classroom implementation, or choosing not
to implement, depends on more than just a
teacher’s scientific epistemology.
Considering the interconnectedness of
epistemology, pedagogy and politics offers
a way of understanding how and why teach-
ers might come to particular strategies for
praxis (Desmarchelier, 2016). A more mul-
tifaceted understanding of epistemology
drawn from diverse theoretical fields – like
scientific considerations, personal epistemol-
ogy and critical epistemology – contributes
to a more nuanced understanding of teacher
positioning. Linking these with pedagogical
approaches, and understanding the need for
teachers to have the will to act politically, can
result in a deeper appreciation of what it takes
for a teacher in a school to deploy a critical
educative approach to Indigenous knowledges
in science education (Desmarchelier, 2016).
Considering how teachers’ personal epis-
temologies influence their approaches to
curriculum and pedagogy in the classroom
is central to understanding how teachers
may engage with curriculum initiatives that
contain unfamiliar knowledge and episte-
mologies. Schraw and Olafson (2003) offer
a general definition of epistemology from
a personal epistemology perspective: ‘the
study of knowledge and knowledge acquisi-
tion’ (2003: 180). There is a growing body
of psychology and educational psychology
literature that quantitatively and qualitatively
analyzes and describes teachers’ personal
epistemological stances and relates these to
how they teach in the classroom (Brownlee,
2001; Schraw et al., 2011). Where teachers
are positioned epistemologically relates not
only to their perspectives on what knowledge
‘is’, but impacts their willingness to include
diverse ways of knowing in the classroom.
From a critical epistemological perspec-
tive, knowledge is never neutral or objec-
tive but ordered and structured in particular
ways. What constitutes ‘official knowledge’
is connected to the powerful position of dom-
inant cultures in a society (Apple, 2000b;
McLaren, 2007). A critical epistemology
is intimately related to the ability to deploy
critical pedagogical approaches. In order
to enact a critical epistemology of prac-
tice, Kincheloe (2010) recognizes that there
must first be a rich, nuanced, historically
grounded understanding of the self. This type
of self-reflection allows for an examination
of how practice is shaped by our own, and
others’, socio-cultural conditions. This posi-
tion embraces the complexity of the nature
of being in the world, rather than seeking
to reduce this complexity to its constituent
parts. The impact of this type of self-analysis
for teachers is social and pedagogical trans-
formation through thinking in new ways.
A critical perspective holds that all deci-
sions about what knowledges are taught and
how such knowledges are taught represent
political choices (McLaren, 2007). Being
political in this context does not mean engag-
ing in party politics or participating in the
electoral process, but instead relates to rec-
ognizing the power in our actions, thinking
and social conventions (Carr, 2008). As Freire
(1985) reminded us, ‘washing one’s hands of
the conflict between the powerless and the
powerful means to side with the powerful,
not to be neutral’ (1985: 122). Being able
 INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES AND SCIENCE EDUCATION
to critically analyze the power dynamics at
play in knowledge production is a necessary
first step to being able to deploy a critical
epistemology (and therefore pedagogy) in
teaching inclusive of Indigenous knowledges
(McGinty and Bang, 2016; Moodie, 2019).
Pedagogical change inspired by curricu-
lum change contains inherent risks for teach-
ers. In the case of the inclusion of Indigenous
knowledges, some of this risk is associated
with taking a political position about the con-
struction of knowledge, particularly scientific
knowledge, which might be questioned by
colleagues, students and their families, par-
ticularly if these parties do not see their own
positions as political (Desmarchelier, 2016).
Risk is a socially constructed phenomenon
that different teachers will consider differ-
ently in terms of what is seen as a risk and
to what degree (Le Fevre, 2014). In the case
of pedagogical change that is linked to a spe-
cific political and epistemological context,
and designed to have socially just outcomes,
the perceived risks in increasingly conser­
vative and neoliberal schooling systems may
be high.
Engaging with Indigenous knowledges
may lead to discussions of Indigeneity and
racism, and acknowledging the existence
of racism in the classroom may disrupt a
teacher’s sense of self (Carson, 2005). This is
of particular salience when Indigenous con-
tent and perspectives are mandated through
curriculum. Where teachers are reluctant to
engage politically with an issue, finding an
epistemologically and politically safe space
may influence their pedagogical choices. In
this case, a pluralist approach where Western
science acts as ‘gate-keeper’ and other
knowledges are used as examples (Chigeza,
2007) is a likely result. This gives a teacher
safe ground through not compromising the
perceived integrity of a dominant knowledge
system, in this case science, or necessarily
needing to confront issues such as racism and
privileging of certain ways of knowing. This
approach has the potential to lead to tokenism
if it results in a ‘bolting-on’ of Indigenous
649
knowledges to already established pedagogi-
cal approaches.
In order for teachers to be successful in
implementing classroom praxis inclusive of
Indigenous knowledges in science education,
all three areas of epistemology, pedagogy and
politics need to be engaged appropriately and
their interactions considered (Desmarchelier,
2016). Critical epistemologies, influenced by
scientific and personal epistemologies that
are open to multiple ways of knowing the
natural world, need to be embraced in order
for critical pedagogies to occur in the class-
room. Critical pedagogies rely on a personal
political stance that motivates teachers to
work in a critical way, a school political envi-
ronment that allows teachers to enact critical
pedagogies, and the national-level political
environment to produce policies that give
legitimacy to this praxis.
NEOLIBERALISM, CURRICULUM
AND BACKLASH
Giroux (2004) described neoliberalism as
‘one of the most pervasive and dangerous
ideologies of the twenty-first century’ (2004:
495). At its core, neoliberalism holds the
market as the central organizing principle, and
that individuals within a society should be
able to manage their own lives in a way that
can lead to personal profits based on fair and
equal competition (Kanu, 2011). In a similar
way to the internal validation system of
science (if science is objectively constructed,
how can it be wrong?), neoliberalism is
validated through its own assumptions and
perspectives in relation to market forces
and the value of goods and services (Morgan
and Cole-Hawthorne, 2016). This leads to the
focus of the individual to be generating wealth
and consuming, and the role of schooling
being narrowly defined as to ‘get a job’
(Down, 2009).
Neoliberal tenets informing science edu-
cation has profound implications. The focus
650 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of equity in science education becomes the
freedom to participate in an educative pro-
cess focused on developing good neoliberal
subjects (Tobin, 2011). Where the focus of
schooling is to ‘get a job’, and systemic racism
exists within that job market, such a science
education reinforces current inequalities and
privileges particular types of students to suc-
ceed in economically defined ways. Science
education and curriculum could instead be
harnessed to promote a more widely defined
freedom and democracy through connecting
and privileging Indigenous ways of knowing
in understandings of environment, protection
of species (including humans) and protection
of collective rights (to name a few).
The narrowing of science curricula through
a neoliberal framing can make focus more
about human capital production and compet-
itive national and global economies (Carter,
2017). From the 1990s there has been a shift
in focus within science from the public good
to the market good (Krishna, 2014). Krishna
argues that ‘public good versus market good
are based on two different opposing logics:
that of open disclosure of research and thus
enabling free circulation of knowledge; and
that of suppressing information from reach-
ing the public for making a profit’ (2004:
141). This focus on the production of wealth
works to further marginalize those already
oppressed politically, socially and economi-
cally to maintain the status quo in terms of
wealth and knowledge distribution.
Neoliberalism frames how curriculum ini-
tiatives to include Indigenous knowledges
and perspectives are situated in a schooling
system. The neoliberal state holds a par-
ticular view of schooling in which market-
driven values are produced and legitimated
(Giroux, 2004). Through the implementa-
tion of accountability measures, schooling
is exposed to market forces in terms of more
parental choice and competition between
schools as accepted ways of driving up stand-
ards (Lingard, 2011). Down (2009) argues
that this type of restructure shows instru-
mentalist values and results in a narrowly
conceived version of education. Some cur-
riculums operate from the explicit position
that students need to have desirable skills
and dispositions as global citizens and work-
ers in an interconnected global community,
placing curricula within a neoliberal frame
(Camicia and Franklin, 2015; Lingard and
McGregor, 2014).
In order to be able to change lived realities
in humanizing ways, Freire (2009) outlined
the imperative to ‘name the world’ (2009: 88).
It is through naming the forces of power that
reside in a society that it becomes possible to
reflect upon them and act otherwise. Naming
is a precursor to dialogue. Without naming the
world, there is no way to engage in the act of
creating a new way of being, that is, enacting
praxis. Denouncing reality through naming
it also announces the possibility of a better
world (Freire, 2004). As such, it is important
to recognize and name the overarching
influence of neoliberalism as one that can act
to confine and constrain teachers’ abilities to
implement different ways of knowing in the
classroom.
Davies (2005) contends that there are
several definable elements of individuals
‘appropriately subjected within neoliberal
discourses’ (2005: 8) (in italics in the fol-
lowing discussion). The first is consump-
tion, seen as the definition of the self in
terms of income and the capacity to purchase
goods, which constitutes subjects’ identities
in term of their jobs. Second is the notion
of individual responsibility leading to the
possibility of each person within a society
being responsible for their own wealth gen-
eration. Coupled with this is a removal of
individuals’ dependence on, and links with,
the social. This results in individuals being
set adrift from values, and with the focus on
individual responsibility, less commitment is
generated for outcomes linked to the social
good. The development of a humanist self is
less important than individual skills for sur-
vival linked to generating income. Within this
neoliberal constitution of self, surveillance
becomes key due to a lack of trust between
 INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES AND SCIENCE EDUCATION
individuals generated by ‘the heightened
emphasis on the individual’s responsibility
and the de-­emphasizing of inner-values and
commitment to the social good’ (2005: 10).
However, an illusion of autonomy is created.
While the emphasis is on individual respon-
sibility, more surveillance is introduced in
forms such as accrediting bodies. Davies
summarizes her view of neoliberalism as:
• a move from social conscience and responsibility
towards an individualism in which the individual
is cut loose from the social;
• from morality to moralistic audit-driven
surveillance;
• from critique to mindless criticism in terms of
rules and regulations combined with individual
vulnerability to those new rules and regulations,
which in turn press towards conformity to the
group. (2005: 12)
Drawing on Davies’ (2005) characterization
of the neoliberal subject, Table 56.1 outlines
specific examples of the influence of neoliber-
alism on teachers’ engagement with Indigenous
knowledges and perspectives in education.
Table 56.1 The impact of the construction of the neoliberal subject on classroom
implementation of curricula inclusive of Indigenous knowledges
Davies (2005) category Explanation
Consumption Defining self in terms of capacity
to purchase (wealth)
Individual Responsibility primarily for self
responsibility and own wealth generation
Set adrift from Focus on individual responsibility
values over collective good
Surveillance Lack of trust in individuals,
leading to increased
accountability measures
Illusion of autonomy Autonomy in classrooms
overshadowed by
accountability measures
651
(This analysis is drawn from Desmarchelier,
2016.)
In colonizer countries where Indigenous
populations represent relatively small percent-
ages of national populations, emphasis in class-
rooms on the neoliberal purpose of education
to ‘get a job’ can result in overshadowing of
initiatives to include Indigenous knowledges.
Where teachers perceive their role as primar-
ily to assist students to individually achieve
economic wealth (consumption), through par-
ticipation in the workforce, initiatives that are
linked to the ‘collective good’, such as reconcil-
iation between non-Indigenous and Indigenous
populations, may not be prioritized. Where the
inclusion of Indigenous knowledges is linked
to advancing one particular group of students –
Indigenous students – who are a small minor-
ity or perhaps even absent from Whitestream
classrooms, it may be even less likely that
school administrations and teachers see such
initiatives as important.
Combining the push to make students job-
ready with increased accountability and sur-
veillance measures, teachers may experience
Factors impacting classroom implementation
• Focus on Indigenous economic outcomes
• Education framed as ‘to get a job’
• Pathologisation of Indigenous students’ lack of
educational achievement – it is an individual’s
responsibility to successfully engage in education
• Reluctance to implement curriculum inclusion when
perceived as for one particular group
• Suspicion of the intent of such curricula inclusions
• Difficult for some teachers to be seen as acting politically
• Focus on teachers’ responsibility to educate to ‘get a job’
rather than for the greater good
• Prioritizing of other initiatives over the inclusion of
Indigenous knowledges
• Lack of time for teachers to work towards implementation
due to need to produce accountability evidence
• Acts to shift teachers’ concerns from social good to their
own individual responsibility of reporting
• Threat of deskilling through enforced unit/lesson plans
• Invisibility of influence of accountability on teachers’ own
professional choices
652 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
internal pressure to meet their individual
responsibility to ensure students do well on
standardized tests, meet standardized curricu-
lum and receive mandated reports. This can
place significant time pressures on teachers.
Once teachers feel pressed for time, the illusion
of autonomy can be created through teachers
seemingly choosing to privilege attention to
accountability measures to meet their individ-
ual responsibility. The time spent on account-
ability due to the surveillance measures
teachers are subjected to then means there is
less opportunity to engage in the often signifi-
cant amount of professional learning required
to feel confident in teaching Indigenous
knowledges in science classrooms. While,
on the face of these measures, some teachers
persist with such inclusions to successfully
deliver critical pedagogical approaches to
Indigenous knowledges in science education,
the neoliberal education system acts to confine
and constrain their determination.
PRESERVING THE KNOWLEDGE
STATUS QUO
Through returning to Apple’s (2000b) point
that official knowledge is the politics of
accords and compromises, the rhetorical
inclusion but practical marginalization of
Indigenous knowledges can be theorized.
Curricula inclusion of Indigenous knowl-
edges and perspectives show where dominant
groups have seemingly taken the concerns of
the less powerful into consideration. Without
specified institutional funding and support,
which are often not given, these inclusions
may be nothing more than rhetoric. The pres-
sures of a neoliberal schooling system often
outweigh teachers’ intentions to commit to
the collective good through critical pedagogi-
cal approaches to Indigenous knowledges in
science education.
The conflict between rhetoric and practical
implementation and the impact of sustaining
the curricula knowledge status quo can also be
theorized through the work of Freire (2009)
and Darder (2011). Apple (2000a, 2000b,
2004) points to the importance of recognizing
the context surrounding educational practice
and policy and the impact on which knowl-
edges are being legitimized. Also important
is Freire’s (2009) concept of ‘false generos-
ity’, where those in power profess sympathy
for oppressed peoples but fail to address the
structural forms of inequality present in the
system. Extending on Freire’s concept of
false generosity, Darder (2011) recognizes the
political backlash that happens when main-
stream ideologies are threatened. Each of
these theoretical frames has relevance when
considering the positioning of Indigenous
content and perspectives in curricula.
When considering the politics of ‘official
knowledge’, powerful groups maneuver edu-
cational policies to promote their knowledge
as legitimate knowledge. The construction
of the ‘right type’ of neoliberal subject as
described by Davies (2005) relates to the type
of knowledge that is considered legitimate and
worthy in many Western curricula. The knowl-
edge selected for inclusion in curricula may
be framed by concerns of globalization while
showing recognition of a diversity of cultures.
The vision of what science education can
be with the inclusion of Indigenous ways of
knowing is in the educational imagination
(and sometimes in the actuality) of teachers
and schools (Baynes, 2016). However, as
Apple (2000a) attests, ‘while the construction
of new theories and utopian visions is impor-
tant, it is equally crucial to base these theo-
ries and visions in an unromantic appraisal of
the material and discursive terrain that now
exists’ (2000a: 229). It is important to rec-
ognize the ‘openings for counter-hegemonic
activity’ (Apple, 2000b: 10) that have been
created through the ‘compromise’ of the
inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in cur-
ricula. The possibility of change only exists
with the tactical analysis of knowledge and
power relationships and what is necessary
to actually bring about pedagogical change
in the classroom. If we fail to contest power
 INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES AND SCIENCE EDUCATION
and the neoliberal stance, listening to diverse
standpoints can only be seductive and end up
actually affirming the dominance of particu-
lar forms of knowledge (Sefa Dei, 2011).
False generosity can be seen in the gap
between rhetoric and classroom implementa-
tion. Where teachers are lamenting their lack
of knowledge about Indigenous knowledges/
peoples/cultures, systematic and institutional
support is necessary in order to progress to
implementation. Often, there is a dearth of
information available to educators to assist
with practical unit and lesson planning activ-
ities (Moodie, 2019). Teacher capacity in
terms of knowledge, attitude and pedagogical
considerations can be the largest determining
factor in successful classroom implementa-
tion (Kanu, 2011). Without structural sup-
port from education authorities and sustained
commitment to providing guidance to these
aspects of curriculum, teachers may struggle
to understand what was required of them.
Attacks on the perceived legitimacy of
Indigenous knowledges in science education
may be read as a politics of backlash. Faludi
(1991) identified backlash in terms of reactions
against feminism and described how insidious
politics framed the issues of women’s rights
in its own language. Darder (2011) identifies
that ‘the response to losing power as a con-
sequence of shifting entitlement and privilege
within schools can elicit a feeling of threat or
displacement’ (2011: 152). Moves to be more
inclusive of Indigenous issues, knowledges
and ways of knowing can threaten the legiti-
macy of a purely Western way of considering
the world. Darder also argues that these types
of biased and uncritical responses are rooted in
radicalized notions of intelligence, extending
in this case to the legitimacy of knowledges
produced by Indigenous groups. In this way,
the renormalizing of the reproductive function
of schooling is achieved (Hattam et al., 2009).
In addition, policies that aid in ‘expanding
institutional opportunities to diverse popu-
lations’ (Darder, 2011: 153) threaten the
neoliberal system through potential positive
class and economic impacts for marginalized
653
populations. In these ways, a context can be
created that does not value teachers’ imple-
mentation of Indigenous knowledges as being
equally important as other curriculum areas.
This can be apparent in the overshadowing
of such initiatives by neoliberal educational
demands linked to ensuring students are ready
for the workforce, particularly in a canonical
subject such as science which is seen as a cor-
nerstone of the modern economy.
CHALLENGING TEACHER IDENTITY
FOR PRODUCTIVE PROFESSIONAL
DEVELOPMENT
Recognition of the pervasiveness of neoliber-
alism, the politics of official knowledge,
false generosity and backlash does not negate
the hope and successes of some schools and
classrooms in including Indigenous knowl-
edges in science education. The possibility is
still present for teachers to be agentic, to
resist the neoliberal discourses and to imple-
ment different ways of knowing in the sci-
ence classroom. Examples of successes in
Indigenous majority and minority classrooms
can be found (for example, Aikenhead and
Michell, 2011; Cajete, 2000, 2008a, 2008b;
Chigeza, 2007; Gondwe and Longnecker,
2015; Jacobs, 2013; Kim, 2016).
Teachers’ re-interpretation of who they are
professionally and the roles they are expected
to play enables them to cope with educational
changes (Le Roux, 2011). In many curricu-
lum change initiatives, teachers are seen as
the subjects in educational reform. This
reduces teachers to being only the install-
ers of curriculum, rather than the origina-
tors of curriculum (Carson, 2005). Allowing
extended professional development (for
example, through engagement with Action
Research and Participatory Action Research)
has been highlighted as a way of enabling
teachers to regain some agency in terms of
their pedagogies related to curriculum initia-
tives (Burridge et al., 2012; Moodie, 2019).
654 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
By attending to the question of identity in this
process, Carson (2005) argues that
we begin to shift discourse away from ‘the what’
of what is to be implemented, i.e. the change as
‘some-thing’ (in the form of an idea, policy, theory
etc.) to be put into practice. Instead, we come to a
notion that change involves a conversation
between the self (identity) and new sets of circum-
stances that are external to the self. For educators,
these new circumstances come into play from a
variety of directions, only one of which is the offi-
cial curriculum. (2005: 3)
Applying Carson’s (2005) point to the idea of
engaging with teachers’ epistemology, peda-
gogy and politics, extended professional devel-
opment programs may be able to engage
teachers to renegotiate their identities (Kanu,
2011). Teachers’ subjectivities are formed
through their own personal and national histo-
ries and these factors impact on how a teacher
will engage with the curriculum to affect the
desired change (Carson, 2005). Teachers’ iden-
tity positions are constructed within social
norms and school structures. This often results
in maintaining and giving authority to Western
cultural values and ways of knowing (Kanu,
2011). Unease with epistemological, pedagogi-
cal and political issues has the potential to chal-
lenge teachers in terms of understanding their
own identity and their identity locations within
the education system. This challenge may be
what is necessary to engage positively within
the Cultural Interface, stand up to neoliberal
pressures and be able to plan science lessons
with Indigenous knowledges and perspectives
without lapsing into tokenism. Of course, the
challenge in this approach is to find (perhaps
subversive) ways to get the neoliberal system to
provide the financial and educational resources
to support such teacher professional learning.
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Navajo Sweat House Leadership:
Acquiring Traditional Navajo
Leadership for Restoring Identity
in Our Forgotten World
Many experiences have influenced my life
and shaped my character. The most important,
however, have occurred in traditional Navajo
ceremonies, especially one of the most impor-
tant ceremonies, the Nihook’áá Diyin Dine’é
bi Táácheeh (The Navajo Sweat House).
Throughout my life, learning the Táácheeh
(Sweat House) practice has served as a pur-
pose for my life and has also influenced my
life in many ways. I know it has made me the
leader I am today. Through Táácheeh learning
about discipline, preparation, manhood, lead-
ership, songs, prayers, and spiritual experi-
ences, I have developed a better understanding
of how to live a good life; how to respect
ecological systems; and how to know my
authentic self. According to Navajo philoso-
phy, such knowing comes from the heart and
the head. Understanding multi-faceted truths,
rejecting falsities, accepting the mysterious,
and always walking with Hózhó, the Navajo
concept of balance and beauty on behalf of
all, is the Nihook’áá Diyin Dine’é (Navajo)
way of living life.
57
Perry R. James
I give appreciation to my family for putting
me on this path that includes the Táácheeh
(Sweat House). I was trained by Shi Cheii (my
grandfather), a man who spoke no word of
English but spoke only his Navajo language.
He had great knowledge about Táácheeh and
lived according to it. I have been blessed to
learn about the life of my Cheii (grandfa-
ther) in different times and places and have
much gratitude for his introducing me to his
Nihook’áá Diyin Dine’é philosophy. His phi-
losophy, built from the traditional elements
of his life, embodies how to make sense of
and understand life, oneself, leadership, land,
and the world. In other words, he taught
me the Indigenous Nihook’áá Diyin Dine’é
worldview. Redfield (1956), considered to
be the first social anthropologist (from the
University of Chicago), states:
‘Worldview’ differs from culture, ethos, mode of
thought and national character. It is the picture the
members of a society have of the properties and
characters upon their stage of action. … ‘Worldview’
attends especially to the way a man in a particular
 Navajo Sweat House Leadership
society sees himself in relation to all else. It is the
properties of existence as distinguished from and
related to the self. It is in short a man’s idea of the
universe. (Redfield, 1956: 30)
Ultimately, my Cheii was fostered to exist in
a world guided by spiritualism where the
sacred was not separated from all else.
Eventually, Cheii expressed this worldview
to me at Táácheeh. Although my Cheii has
passed on, I still practice the Táácheeh regu-
larly, and it has become an integral part of
my life as a leader. Through his leadership of
teaching, I came to appreciate the authentic
knowledge about Táácheeh leadership,
songs, prayers, and the meaning of life.
I believe, considering the out-of-balance
lives of so many people in my nation and
throughout the world, it is important for me
to share this knowledge. In particular, I write
this with hopes that our Navajo leaders might
return to the traditional Sweat House teach-
ings about leadership so they might be more
effective in helping bring balance back to our
People and prevent loss of language and tra-
ditional ways. I believe my story and ideas
about this approach to learning leadership
will help address the many problems on
Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é Bikéya (Navajo
Nation) and those that exist in most First
Nations owing to the misguided lifeways that
surround them.
So what learning and learning processes
dependent on the traditional Táácheeh should
be relevant to Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é lead-
ers? And why, in spite of the potential of
Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é traditional ways
that have been essential for my living a bal-
anced, healthier, and meaningful life, do
many Navajos reject these ways? One major
reason for the rejection relates to a loss of
Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é identity and is one
of many problems facing our society. The
term Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é, as stated by
Shi Cheii (my grandfather), a traditional-
ist, is defined as ‘The Sacred People of the
Land’. Denny, a traditional Navajo medicine
man, validates this: ‘I am Nihokaa’ Diyin
BK-SAGE-STEINBERG_DOWN_V2-190308-Chp57.indd 659
659
Dineé. I am proud to say my mind is still of
the Diné framework. I haven’t been brain-
washed (Lerma, 2017: xiv). Today, as a soci-
ety, Navajo identify themselves as ‘Diné’
only and exclude ‘Nihookáá Diyin’, the most
important element of the name that was given
us by Diyin Dine’é (Holy People).
This is where the confusion arises. Too
many seem to no longer see the Diné world-
view as sacred and ourselves as sacred
human beings. Certainly much of this comes
from a long history of oppression and colo-
nization but it continues with state education
and media influences that reflect a different
worldview, one that leads to unhealthy prac-
tices such as:
• personal health: according to a 2018 public health
assessment of the Navajo Nation, serious health
problems including substance abuse, mental
health, and suicide were among top concerns. For
example, ‘In 2016 the rate of deaths related to
alcohol in Navajo County was four times higher
than the rate for Arizona’ (Singleton, 2018: 7);
• harmful extraction of resources from Nihoosdzáán
Nihimá (our Mother Earth) (Jalbert, 2011);
• rejecting the Diné language or using it in disre-
spectful ways (Allan, 2015);
• profiting from sacred ceremonies (Crank, 2018);
and
• violence against women (Wilson, 2007).
I propose these can be reversed if we return
to regular use of our traditional beliefs and
ceremonies. Our individual identity and lead-
ership roles as Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é men
and women are clearly defined at Táácheeh
and play a powerful role in guiding our
people toward a more sacred view of self,
others, life, ecological sustainability, and the
Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é way of living. For
example, the epic stories of the twin brothers
Naayéé’ Neizghání (Killer of Monsters);
Tóbáyizhchíní (Born of Water); ‘Asdzᾴᾴ
Nádleełii (Changing Woman) mother to
Naayéé’ Neizghání; and Yoołgaii Asdzaan
(White Shell Woman) mother to Tóbáyizhchíní,
who are all considered leaders of heroes and
heroines for protecting our people from harm
05/02/20 8:05 AM
660 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and danger long ago, are taught at Táácheeh.
Epic oral traditions of stories such as the above
are characters I learned about at Táácheeh to
combat modern-day battles (alcoholism, obe-
sity, sickness, poverty, deceit, and domestic
violence) with fearlessness, which serves as
a practice embedded in oral traditions.
One of the epic stories I acquired at
Táácheeh is when Naayéé’ Neizghání and
Tóbáyizhchíní (Twin Brothers) journeyed
to Jóhonaa’áí, the Sun, their Father. Their
fear of the journey increased their awareness
and physical avoidance of many dangerous
obstacles encountered to reach the home of
Jóhonaa’áí. Jóhonaa’áí, himself, was an
obstacle once they arrived at his home. He
imposed on them four sets of challenges to
their fear before entering His home. At the
first entrance of their Father’s home were
two Tłiish Tsoh (Big Snake) who shook
their rattlers and showed their fangs and
would not allow them to enter. The Twins’
fearlessness acknowledged Tłiish Tsoh by
their sacred names, introduced themselves,
and offered prayers and songs to honor
them. Tłiish Tsoh calmly responded to the
songs and prayers and laid their heads down
and allowed the Twins to enter the second
entrance. Next, two Átsintłiish (Lightning
Bolt), flashed, struck, and shook the ground
at the entrance. Again, the Twins acknowl-
edged them by their sacred names, intro-
duced themselves, offered prayers and songs
to honor them, and allowed to them to enter
the third entrance. Third, two Nashdóii Tsoh
(Mountain Lion) displayed their growl and
sharp fangs and whipped their tails. Again,
the Twins acknowledged them by their
sacred names, introduced themselves, offered
prayers and songs to honor them, and allowed
them to enter the fourth and final entrance.
At the final entrance, two Ma’ii Tsoh (Big
Wolf) displayed their growl and sharp fangs
and whipped their tails. Again, the Twins
acknowledged them by their sacred names,
introduced themselves, offered prayers
and songs to honor them, and were finally
allowed to enter the home of Jóhonaa’áí.
The fact of just entering their Father’s home
with fearlessness became an element in prac-
ticing great virtues of generosity, courage,
patience, fortitude, humility, and honesty.
Through the journey of the Twins, many
such lessons are taught. In the above episode,
the Twins’ fear increased their awareness
and physical avoidance of many dangerous
obstacles. Second, they also showed how
our spiritual authority subdued the fearsome
creatures. Third, the Twins’ words of prayers
and songs were powerful and were carefully
utilized to express generosity; and fourth, the
Twins saw the importance of Nature, in this
case the cosmos, the home of their Father the
Sun, which demanded their respect.
In learning this epic story, I recall my
grandfather saying that this story is about
leadership responsibilities. He told me that as
a leader you must constantly be aware of the
people you are leading; you must let spiritual-
ity guide you; you must pray and sing for your
people; and you must remember that every-
thing is connected to nature, and learn from
what nature has to offer. I learned this is why
leadership is considered sacred and demands
respect. In this way, the concepts for living
a balanced, healthy, and meaningful life can
be appreciated and achieved. The Twin Hero
stories at Táácheeh served as a setting for tra-
ditional education to instill in me my identity
and leadership roles and responsibility to my
family, community, and nation. They taught
me about fear and how it can either cause us
to react in ways that are unhealthy, or with
courage we can allow it to be a teaching.
This idea of knowing and respecting fear is
expressed by Four Arrows in his text Point of
Departure: Returning to Our More Authentic
Worldview for Education and Survival (2016):
Indigenous views of fear are [sic] quite different.
First, we do not let go of any critical faculties and
are aware of the potential of hypnotic influence.
Second, once the emotion of fear stimulates
awareness and immediate physical avoidance of a
danger, fear becomes a catalyst for practicing one
of the great virtues such as generosity, courage,
patience, fortitude, humility or honesty. (2016: 36)
 NAVAJO SWEAT HOUSE LEADERSHIP
Four Arrows talks much about Indigenous
approaches to fear and how the dominant
worldview understanding of fear, authority,
use of words, and attitude toward nature has
essentially hypnotized modern man into a life
of imbalance and offers non-Indian educators
a way to learn Indigenous precepts that reverse
this (Four Arrows, 2013: 252–3). R. Michael
Fisher has written an entire book analyzing
Four Arrows’ work on how an Indigenous
understanding of these concepts can put us
back into balance (2018). In it they dialogue
about the idea of ‘fearlessness’ and how in
traditional ways once courage to act is under-
taken, the traditional Indigenous teachings
allow for individuals to be able to move into
a ‘trusting of the universe’ such that they no
longer need to maintain courage, but rather
are fully committed to action. I think this is
what my grandfather was teaching me in his
own way when he said that spirituality should
guide me.
Shi Cheii’s epic narration of Naayéé’
Neizghání and Tóbáyizhchíní’s fearlessness
offer a chance for all Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é
to acquire traditional knowledge and leader-
ship that is different from the current main-
stream leadership utilized by most Nihookáá
Diyin Dine’é. The epic story and definition
above are accurate, and Shi Cheii and Four
Arrows make no distinction between man
and nature, or between nature and the spirit
world. It is all one world, made up of nature
and filled with spirits as well as people.
Learning the practice of Táácheeh allows
me to share this unique culture with all peo-
ple as well as giving me a sense of personal
reward beyond words. Moreover, the leader-
ship skills I learned from the practice help me
to orchestrate my life and the need to negoti-
ate two worlds. They have helped me in my
military experience, as a teacher, as a father,
and hopefully as a leader of my People to find
myself and undergo and understand my per-
sonal transformations.
Lerma, in his interview with Denny (2017),
takes a Navajo traditional perspective in deal-
ing with ‘Ha’at’iish be anáhóóti’ (translated
661
as ‘What is the problem?’). I propose this to
be an excellent approach for ‘Indigenous crit-
ical pedagogy’. It first identifies the problem
and determines whether it is at home or in the
larger community context. It then assumes
that the answers are to be found in the Diné
epic oral traditions to problem solving that
are still available for access today. Denny
states, ‘I say the answers to our questions
are already in place’ (Lerma, 2016: xvii),
and ‘It is up to humans to pay attention, be
patient, and learn from plants, animals, and
the Four Sacred Elements, which are fire,
water, air, and pollen (2016: xvii). I learned
these sacred elements at Táácheeh. They are
geared toward traditional leadership princi-
ples in how I govern myself. Several exam-
ples are: rising early every day and praying
to acknowledge the elements, and running
for mental and physical strength to face daily
challenges and be victorious. The mental
conception is, if I do not acknowledge all life
and take care of myself, how could I possibly
care for others?
Individual traditional leadership principles
then transcend into leading siblings, family
members, and livestock; producing crops;
tending to the land; attending ceremonies for
spiritualism; organizing the home setting;
constructing the home; and Táácheeh. Such
formulations above must then be blessed and
protected with blessing and protection songs
learned at Táácheeh. Again, if I cannot care
for myself and lead at home, how could I pos-
sibly lead my community or tribe? Individual
principles of traditional leadership teachings
further define the sovereignty of the Navajo
Nation. Our culture embedded in language,
leadership, ceremonies, spiritualism, and
identity earned us the status of sovereignty
since time immemorial. Serving as a basis
for my argument, it is important to restore
Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é traditional identity
for state to state, nation to nation, and global
relations to improve the lives of all people,
especially Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é. If we do
not utilize the Four Sacred Elements of our
culture at home, community, and tribal level,
662 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
our sovereignty will be diminished to the
fullest extent of extermination.
McPherson (2012) writes about the Holy
People such as First Man, Talking God, House
God, Black God, and First Boy, as well as
about the many animals in human form met
in the Táácheeh. He explains how they shared
their thoughts about the future and how
things should operate. Such Táácheeh stories
discuss leadership and planning for the future
and how things should be done today. They
teach how our sacred mountains still serve as
our leaders today. In the course of the pre-
sent day, our Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é leaders
do not protect, bless, sing, pray, listen, give
stability, give life, and serve us. They can-
not withstand any obstacles. I submit that
this is why our current Diné leaders have
not achieved sufficient goals for the Nation.
Ultimately, if our current leaders want to
solve issues plaguing our people, they will
come to remember that within Táácheeh, the
answers are there waiting. In my studies at
Fielding Graduate University I hope to show
how and why this authentic ancient practice
of Táácheeh has been largely rejected and
relegated to obscurity by too many Navajo
political leaders today. As a result, Nihookáá
Diyin Dine’é are not able to find simple solu-
tions to combat and correct identity and lead-
ership issues from a traditional perspective.
The irony is that the current and past admin-
istrations of the Navajo Nation have stressed
the importance of restoring and revitalizing
the Diné culture. Arviso (2006) writes that the
Navajo Nation’s government continues to pre-
serve Navajo language and culture. However,
I contend that our government’s actions too
often contradict this goal. For example, the
Navajo Nation currently owns and operates
a coal mine and extracts natural resources
from Nihoosdzáán Nihimá (Our Mother
Earth), thereby desecrating our fundamental
respect for Her. Also, President Ben Shelly
signed legislation clearing the way for the
Navajo Transitional Energy Company to buy
the Navajo Coal Mine located on the Navajo
Nation (Locke, 2014: A1). I hope and pray that
my words in this piece along with the other
chapters in this section will help bring about
transformation that will prevent such contra-
dictions and more in the near future, not only
for Nihookáá Diyin Dine’é society but for all
Indigenous nations. Moreover, with the grow-
ing evidence that our original Indigenous
worldview and the great variety of place-based,
laws-of-Nature-oriented Indigenous cultures
are a solution to the growing climate and
extinction-rate problems, I hope Indigenous
leadership via the traditional values I describe
can help guide all nations back into balance.
I close with a reference to my having recently
hosted an amazing guest whose Indigenous
culture was successful in its own counter-
hegemonic decolonizing efforts. My guest, a
50-year-old man named Girardo Tununbalá,
from the Misak Nation of Columbia, stayed
at my house and participated in Táácheeh
ceremony with me. He is a Spiritual leader of
his 11,000 or so people and came to speak at
an educational conference at Window Rock,
Arizona. In the 1970s, during a time when
oppression and attacks on Indigenous Peoples
in Colombia all but destroyed their original
spiritual ways of being in the world, the Misak
organized peaceful resistance and decolonized
their educational systems. Early on, leaders
were assassinated but they continued to fight
for sovereignty over their own education.
Today 95% speak their language and have
revitalized their traditional land-based knowl-
edges. They now have more wellness, more
productive agriculture and husbandry, and
happier people with more hope for the well-
being of future generations (Tununbalá, 2019).
REFERENCES
Allen, E. (2015, May 21). Reasons why I did
not learn Diné Bizaad. The Navajo Times,
pp. A1–A2.
Arviso, C. (2006). Revitalization of Navajo
language and culture. (Master Thesis).
Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertation and
Theses Global. (UMI No. 10679879).
 NAVAJO SWEAT HOUSE LEADERSHIP
Crank, J. (2018, April 20). Traditional Navajo sweat
lodge. Seed of life institute LLC organization.
Fisher, R. M. (2018). Fearless engagement of
Four Arrows. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Four Arrows (2013). Teaching truly: A curriculum
to indigenize mainstream education. New
York, NY: Peter Lang.
Four Arrows (2016). Point of departure:
Returning to our more authentic worldview
for education and survival. Charlotte, NC:
Information Age Publishing.
Jalbert, K. (2011, August 23). Navajo nation
energy industry. GK12 Triple Helix Program at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
Retrieved from www.3helix.rpi.edu/?p=2653.
Lerma, M. (2017). Guided by the mountains:
Navajo political philosophy and governance.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Locke, K. (2014, January 7). Navajo energy
company buys coal mine. Navajo-Hopi
Observer, p. A1.
663
McPherson, R. S. (2012). Dinéjí na’nitin: Navajo
traditional teaching and history. Boulder,
CO: University Press of Colorado.
Redfield, R. (1956). Peasant society and culture:
An anthropological approach to civilization.
University of Chicago Press.
Singleton, L. (2018, December 4). Substance
abuse, mental health, suicide and poverty
top issues. White Mountain Independent.
https://www.wmicentral.com/news/latest_
news/substance-abuse-mental-health-suicide-
and-poverty-top-issues/article_a924cd89-
b829-5084-b848-b3ac3e94b406.html
Tununbalà, G. (2019, April 15). Educación propia
Misak. https://youtu.be/CxT31vxrPxMUNDP
Wilson, S. J. (2007). Navajo warriors, men and
women, fight domestic violence. Indian Coun-
try News. https://www.indiancountrynews.
com/index.php/culture.food-health/1084-
navajo-warriors-men-a-women-fight-domestic-
violence-8-01

The Navigator’s Path: Journey
Through Story and Ngākau
Pedagogy
Ru is a superhero known through Polynesian
oral history. He was the chief navigator of his
people in Avaiki (ancestral lands). The stories
of Ru are clearly strewn across the Pacific. Like
all stories about superheroes, his tales shared
incredible feats such as separating the earth and
sky, his partnership through travel with his
sister Hina and leading over 200 people across
challenging seas to settle in a new land; they
involve descriptions of his characteristics, skill,
strategic planning, communication, forward
thinking and transformative action. Ru was
multi-skilled and he knew the sea. Oral history
shared by tumu korero (tutor in wisdom) stated,
‘I, Ru, know all the secrets of the sea’ (Low,
1934: 17). Ru was a symbol of entrepreneurial
performance, resilience, fortitude and creative
genius. The recipient of generational trans­
mission of knowing and spiritual pedagogy
through living and lived experience –
transformed into a Polynesian spearhead for
evolution and change.
My introduction to Ru was through my
grandmother Tutanna Nelio Marsters (Nēna).
58
Rose Marsters
She explained in ‘maroro Māori’, a broken
English mixed with home-grown language
intonation and words. She had been taught
about Ru, just as her mother had been taught
that the ‘Onu (turtle) represented Ru and all
our ancestors before us; the word ‘Onu can
be used in both a singular or plural context
that captures all or one ancestor. Nēna said
we could talk to them about anything, espe-
cially things that would benefit our people,
our kōpū tangata (extended family). When
being told this story I do remember thinking
how cool it would be to come back to life,
be a turtle or share the same strengths as
my ancestors including Ru. It is profound to
think that what I know, who I am and how I
do things could influence the development of
an epistemological and pedagogical frame-
work determined by my past, people, events
and environments I have experienced, right
back to stories of Ru.
The ‘Onu provides a solid philosophical
framework in my practice, Ngaki ma te kai –
caring for others through food. The symbol
 THE NAVIGATOR’S PATH: JOURNEY THROUGH STORY AND NG  ĀKAU PEDAGOGY
of my Indigeneity that links together key
aspects of my Indigenous practice; it provides
a clear link to the land and sea that announces
my akapapa’anga, or genealogy, my know-
ing and identity. ‘The turtle’s evolutionary
history stretches back to the late Triassic
period, over 200 million years ago, when the
world was a very different place than the one
we know today (Jackson, 2011: 4). Key ele-
ments to my Indigenous philosophical frame-
work also stretch back generations and have
evolved into my current practice with people.
My philosophical framework depicted in
the symbol of an ‘Onu is one that incorpo-
rates the view of an Indigenous practitioner
working within a Western construct. The
framework of the ‘Onu also incorporates areas
of focus, Manako (mind), Ngākau (heart)
and Kōpū (belly). My aim in developing the
framework is to try to encapsulate as much
knowledge as possible within lessons pro-
vided by my kōpū tangata (immediate and
extended family) and intrinsic messages
received by a cosmic force known only to me
through my thoughts, senses and dreams. It
can be noted that this philosophical frame-
work has a fluid and flexible diversity. It
promotes a productive pedagogy that extends
in the four dimensions described by Chapuis
(2003), who had over 25 years of teach-
ing experience in humanities and integrated
curricula. Chapuis (2003) discussed the rel-
evance to pedagogy under the titles of intel-
lectual quality, relevance and connectedness,
supportive environment and the recognition
of difference. The argument here could be
that this pedagogy would have related more
toward teaching children as opposed to adults
in the form of andragogy. My rebuttal is, we
are the children of Tangaroa and Hinemoana
(Polynesian deities of the sea) and evidence
of these pedagogical practices have been pro-
ductive in teachings for and to generations.
The practice principles to be discussed
have guided, facilitated and provided seen and
unforeseen lessons for me in my Indigenous
practice. They are innate, born out of a know-
ing, similar to that described by Pale Sauni,
665
who is of Samoan heritage, in his efforts to
describe his ‘sixth sense’, his knowing as
Lagona (lah-ngor-nah) when validating what
works and does not work when alongside
Māori and Pasifika students in education.
Sauni states:
Lagona describes an indigenous and time-validated
way of knowing and learning. Where there is
intrinsic knowledge about the cultural principles,
mores and processes for making teaching and
learning accessible, Lagona illuminates these
learning structures by intuitively validating the
unseen and subtle cultural spaces that students
are armed with when they reach the classroom.
Lagona guides pastoral care and supports the
retention and success of Pasifika students in higher
education. (2014: 135)
The vehicles or processes of ‘Piri’anga (con-
nection in relationship), Ngaki (care) and
Aro’a (love) in fact validate my lessons. All
are practices that guide many Indigenous
practitioners in their caring frameworks.
Practice-based frameworks that have been
developed through time, experience and
wisdom developed in these principles by those
who have come before us, those who reside by
us, and those who are yet to come.
It must be noted here that reference and
relevance to practice, both in Cook Island
Māori, Māori theories, and context, support
the author’s current role. It also reinforces the
commitment made to these communities in
relation to the current practice of serving oth-
ers. The development of my role hinges on
the fact that as a ‘home-grown’ practitioner
there may be subtle differences between me
and ‘our relations’ when working alongside
and serving others. ‘Our relations’ in the con-
text of this contribution is the word I use to
identify those who would be seen as non-
Māori or non-Pasifika peoples. I prefer the
term ‘our relations’ as I can connect with,
relate to, or have a relationship with a ‘rela-
tion’ which is relevant when this contribution
involves topics and information important
to three communities: Cook Island Māori,
Māori, and my tertiary institute, which has
diverse cultures of people.
666 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
It is the transmission of knowledge from my
ancestors and experiences that has supported
my current knowing. It is this combination
of learning developed through home-grown
theory that enables me in my practice. This
knowing that provides me with the founda-
tion skills to work alongside and serve diverse
communities. This is what makes my prac-
tice unique in comparison to our relations.
I feel, utilizing my knowing, as opposed to
just applying logic and reasoning. I explore
the motivations of others and can challenge
their intentions. I am not afraid to fail as it
gives me opportunity to succeed. I do not fit
the stereotype of the conventional lecturer in
tertiary education who delivers content.
The practice principles that support this
pedagogy are pivotal foundations for proto-
col in action. Piri'anga is about people, time
spent, endured, invested in each interaction,
and time in context. Through this approach
a developing culture could occur where both
home-grown and our relations could walk
together in the best practice interests of all
students. A focus on Māori and Pasifika
achievement within tertiary institutes, prac-
tising with integrity, humility and shared
responsibility through Ngaki to serve others,
in a gifted practice and reciprocity. Its deliv-
ery determined by the strength and wise prac-
tice of the home-grown practitioner born into
the experience nurtured by knowledge passed
down, and knowing. A practice I have deliv-
ered adhering to the etiquette and protocol
shown to me by my kōpū tangata (extended
family) and mentors. Aro’a is a layered con-
cept and practice that involves self and oth-
ers. A practice steeped in spirituality and
protection. Protection for self and for others,
of knowledge and knowing and ever evolv-
ing. My grandmother was an excellent role
model of these principles in practising this
Indigenous Pasifika pedagogy.
Tutanna Nelio Marsters, my grand-
mother, was a jack of all trades and the dis-
ciplines required in the field of learning; she
was a vessel of knowing and knowledge.
Lotte Hughes, a Kenyan researcher who
is of African descent, stated in relation to
Indigenous peoples that ‘people often practice
mixed livelihoods; someone may be pastoralist
as well as a hunter-gatherer and cultivator, and
cash in other ways too’ (2003: 25). My grand-
mother was a teacher, a scholar in Indigenous
or home-grown knowledge and literature.
Indigenous knowledge is transmitted through
oral tradition in societies, ‘not written down
[directly]’ (Maurial, 2002: 64). She could share
her philosophical lessons with me. These les-
sons are multilayered in approach and define
my worldview, knowing and identity.
Developing a confidence in identity,
through knowledge and wisdom defined in
the practice of utilizing love, Aro’a, is a key
element to building relationships with oth-
ers, including our relations. As Manulani
Aluli Meyer, an Indigenous Hawaiian
woman and Doctor of Philosophy has stated,
‘Love is imperative to one’s physical, men-
tal and emotional welfare’ (Meyer, 2014:
163). Meyer discusses the holistic nature in
which the principles in Indigenous practice
are presented. She also refers to the prac-
tices of knowing that have an intuitive nature
and differ from the aspect of knowledge.
Meyer supports my practice style in having
a holistic view and approach when working
with my students and my peers. This is also
supported by Joe Kincheloe (2004) when
exploring the impassioned critical educator
and the use of love: ‘Critical pedagogy uses
it [love] to increase our capacity to love, to
bring the power of love to our everyday lives
and social institutions, and to rethink reason
in a humane and interconnected manner’
(2004: 3). Having insight into an individual’s
strengths and understanding their needs pro-
vides a gateway for them to accept ideas and
options of support that have had divine inter-
vention or an intuitive prompt. It promotes a
relationship built on trust. It can also cater to
the pastoral needs that may influence posi-
tively on their potential teaching and learning
opportunities and critical pedagogy.
Dr Rangimarie Turuki Rose Pere (1982),
a Māori elder of Tuhoe descent, writes about
 THE NAVIGATOR’S PATH: JOURNEY THROUGH STORY AND NG  ĀKAU PEDAGOGY
Ako, kaupapa Māori principles and practice
that form educational pedagogy. Ako prin-
ciples and practice gives life to a framework
called Te Wheke, an octopus. Pere states:
‘Aroha is the commitment of people related
though common ancestry; loyalty; obliga-
tion; an inbuilt support system; stability; self-
sufficiency; and spiritual protection’ (Pere,
1982: 6). Pere’s work resonates with my own
understanding and experience. For example,
Pere describes clearly how the principles that
are put into practice interweave and have
clear outcomes determined by self, relation-
ships and responsibilities with others, and
wairua or spiritual component, an overarch-
ing umbrella that envelops all the Indigenous
principles required to serve others.
My grandmother told me how I would need
to think, use my mind, manifest the power
of Manako, to determine the best course of
action in relationships, and facilitate a sixth
sense that would connect Manako, Ngākau
and kōpū. This connection would confirm
my course of action. Confirmation can come
with simple decisions about whether we
should enter an environmental space or not.
The shiver down the spine happens in situ-
ations like this; then the second thought that
would prompt the question: Is this the best
idea? She could also tell a story through a
massage technique through touch of my kōpū,
a practice I was wary of, that had an uncanny
and spiritual connection to those around me,
those who fed me, or those I needed to feed.
Of course, this context was not necessar-
ily by feeding through a physical kai (food)
source. This too had a connection to Manako
(kai for the mind), Ngākau (kai for the heart)
and Vaerua (kai for the spirit). Kenny (2012)
cites Archibald: ‘Stories provide many of the
guiding lights to show us our way on Earth –
to lead truly good lives (Archibald, 2008)’
(Kenny, 2012: 4). My grandmother was a
proficient leader in utilizing stories to sup-
port wellbeing.
She would tell tumu korero (oral tradi-
tions) while completing daily tasks like mix-
ing a bowl of poke (por-keh). A professor
667
of social and political relations, a ta’unga
(expert) on reciprocity, her lessons brought
forth ngākau aro’a (loving heart), ngākau
tiratirat ū (honest heart), ngākau tā’aka’aka
(respectful heart), ngākau maru (kind heart),
ngākau parau (proud heart), ngākau tae
(generous heart) and ngākau toa (courageous
heart). Similarly, Douglas R. D. K. Herman
who wrote about the Indigenous Anishinaabe
tribe (from Canada and the United States)
and their traditions of the Seven Grandfather
Teachings, told about a boy and his jour-
ney. Herman stated: ‘Seven grandfathers in
animal form teach the boy important les-
sons for being fully human: love, honesty,
respect, truth, bravery, humility, and wis-
dom’ (Herman, 2013: 61). Although my
grandmother’s philosophical lessons rarely
presented through animals, I do see our
similarity of connections with environment.
Whether it be in the form of stones from the
garden, or stones that form the marae (gath-
ering place) on our enua (land), there are
similarities. The use of story, the weave of
grandparent teaching the grandchild, devel-
oping values, its practices and protocol, in my
own experience resonates with what Herman
has shared. My kōpū that connects to my cur-
rent family who are present with me today,
the kōpū tangata (extended family) that are
connected with those passed, current or yet
to come. Environmental connection through
that of the banana gifted from mother earth to
make the mix of poke. That kaikai (food) that
feeds people and brings them together. The
connection is there.
My return to Aitutaki, Cook Islands led this
philosophical inquiry and search to under-
stand the spiritual pedagogy presented to me
through my ānau. It was a return to my roots,
and what my father’s family, our knowledge,
history, land, experiences and Indigeneity
have introduced to me. I return to where our
‘Onu (turtles) come to talk to us. I think about
my grandmother and her return to me in that
form. By giving due weight to the traditions
of the Anishinaabe and their philosophy, such
as: ‘Deceased family members can be deified
668 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and in turn can manifest as sharks, owls,
and other forms, and this appearance of the
spiritual in the material is not abnormal’
(Kimmerer, 2013: 69), I see how our ‘Onu
has always had significance in our Indigenous
stories. The stories of our home, journeys,
practices and values are our symbol of our
Indigenous or home-grown significance.
I think about the sharing by my grand-
mother, in oral history, practice, in being,
and agree: ‘In Indigenous epistemologies,
knowledge is derived mainly from, and is
rooted in, individual and collective experi-
ences’ (Kuokkanen, 2007: 18). I am a prod-
uct of an Indigenous system. Our collective
has endured many challenges presented by a
mainstream discourse in my time, my grand-
mother’s time and those who have come
before her. The mainstream is a migration
away from an enua (land) that was rich and
fertile not just with the means to live, but
that also provided sustenance and energy
that supports identity and a space and place
to be. ‘Many Indigenous communities claim
in their histories and myths to have either
literally sprung from their lands, and thus
to have been created by or from the land, or
to have themselves created their territories’
(Ross et al., 2010: 22). Clifford stated that
‘In the most straightforward formulation of
the term, “Indigenous” peoples are “native”
to a particular place, original to their lands
rather than having migrated from elsewhere
(Clifford 2007)’ (as cited in Ross et al.,
2010: 21). We know that the land holds an
akapa’anga (genealogy) of generations of
Indigenous people, their journeys, their trials
and tribulations.
There are connections with the atua
(higher beings) and those passed generations.
‘Indigenous knowledge is almost invariably
informed by reference to elusive spiritual
beings such as gods, ghosts and ancestors’
(Ross et al., 2010: 35). Through history, and
stories, the land was never set apart from
the sea. The sea connected with all lands
of other people. My people are Indigenous
or home-grown through their akapapa’anga
(genealogy) to the sea. Navigators of the
tides, children of Tangaroa. This is my truth,
a truth validating Indigeneity. We are navi-
gators, like the ‘Onu led by a spiritual con-
nection that mimics the sea in practice; that
is felt, like the throbbing waves that keep
us afloat or can submerge us. To navigate
the depths the eyes cannot see but can be
felt by an undercurrent that shifts a person’s
direction, similarly to the Western processes
and systems set to determine our success or
failure.
Nicole Bell (2013) has a Master’s in
Education and is a Doctor of Philosophy and
Anishinaabe for First Nations. Home-grown
peoples in Quebec shared elements of her
experience that reflect and compare well with
my regard for the philosophies, facilitated by
my grandmother. Bell (2013) notes that les-
sons could be led and created by others in
the community who were kin, and those who
were not.
Learning begins with vision – of self, of goals, of
the whole, of the direction a task is to go in. It is a
process that goes through the stages of ‘seeing’
(vision), ‘relating’ to what it is, ‘figuring it out’ with
heart and mind, and ‘acting’ on findings in some
way (behavior). (Bell, 2013: 93)
My Indigenous practice is Ngaki ma te kai –
caring for others through food. This is not
just food in the physical sense, but food for
teaching, learning and practice facilitated by
the gift of reciprocity. ‘In anthropology, the
gift is usually treated as a mode of exchange
between groups (or individual representing
groups)’ (Kuokkanen, 2007: 51). Kuokkanen
indicates that a gift may be of a material
nature. In my practice, the gift may be in the
act of reciprocity itself. I share my practice,
my knowing, by supporting individuals to
explore who they are, define their own
strengths and capabilities, and grow in a self-
determined confidence of expressing who
they are. A natural exchange of stories, ideas,
opinions and experiences, with a purpose to
connect, takes place. We make connections
with ourselves, our kōpū tangata, the land,
 THE NAVIGATOR’S PATH: JOURNEY THROUGH STORY AND NG  ĀKAU PEDAGOGY
the sea and the universe – supporting the
statement that ‘in indigenous worldviews
that foreground multilayered and multidi-
mensional relationships with the land, the
gift is the means through which the socio-
cosmic order is renewed and secured’
(Kuokkanen, 2007: 58).
In my Indigenous practice within the
Western constructs of my teaching and learn-
ing institution, I recognize how the philoso-
phies of Manako, Ngākau, kōpū and Vaerua
have manifested in different time, spaces,
places and experiences. I am not the first
home-grown practitioner to speak to the
Western hegemonic discourse that questions
who I am and why I practise the way I do.
Although I am aware that I can be categorized
in context as ‘they’, referring to the home-
grown peoples, I am unique; my experience
echoes the view that ‘Indigenous peoples
are generally referred to in the plural. There
are many different groups who make up the
entire global tapestry of Indigenous peoples’
(Hughes, 2003: 11), but it is also here that I
can articulate the philosophies in practice
within my Western institution that can support
me in defining my own particular Indigeneity.
‘In this context it is important to avoid the
essentialist tendency to lump together all
Indigenous cultures as one, yet at the same
time maintain an understanding of the nearly
worldwide oppression of Indigenous peoples
and the destruction of Indigenous knowl-
edges’ (Semali and Kincheloe, 2002: 17).
MANAKO (MIND)
Manako as a philosophy is stimulus of self-
determination; a self-determination that
comes with knowledge and knowing who
you are in your home-grown culture, identity
and belonging. A self-determination that pro-
motes being motivated, proactive and
engaged in our own learning journeys, and
hinders being influenced by the constructs of
our relations through process or protocol.
669
A self-determination set in our minds,
through a transmission of knowledge. ‘It is
through the decolonization of our minds and
the development of political clarity that we
cease to embrace the notion of Western
versus Indigenous knowledge, so as to begin
to speak of human knowledge’ (Macedo,
2002: xv). My grandmother’s lessons regard-
ing self, and determining the best practice
options when dealing with people, involved
sharing strong epistemological practice and
pedagogy enveloped in the values passed on
through the generations.
Being able to function in both worlds of
Indigeneity and Western constructs allows a
practitioner to develop the true Indigenous
leadership qualities that can promote change,
whereby ‘being self-critical and reflexive as
well as open to new ideas and change can
allow Native peoples to be conservatively
progressive’ (Fermantez, 2013: 109). The
conservative progression presents in just
living the practice of looking inwardly,
as opposed to open ‘rocking the boat’
opportunities. Being proud of who you are
and where you come from can be presented
}in quiet practices of reciprocity in serving
others. ‘Fundamental to the Anishinaabe
world view is the link between individual
responsibility and community well-being’
(Bell, 2013: 99). The hope is that through
home-grown practices of reciprocity a
paradigm shift occurs with our relations
positioned in a Western framework: ‘The logic
of the gift foregrounds a new relationship –
one that is characterized by reciprocity
and by a call for responsibility toward the
“other”’ (Kuokkanen, 2007: 28). Anne Ross,
whose research relates to anthropology and
archaeology, refers to Milton (1996):
Milton develops an alternative paradigm for
understanding how people see the world: [N]ot
everything that exists in people’s minds is ‘con-
structed’. At least some of what we know, think
and feel about the world comes to us directly
through our experience, in the form of discovered
meanings …. these meanings, these ‘perceptions’
are part of culture. (Ross et al., 2010: 27)
670 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
My home-grown practice exists in facilitating
a paradigm shift with others, strengthened by
an epistemological framework of self-­
determination, steeped in values and belief.
‘In order to transform one’s own way of
being, let alone that of an organization or a
whole social movement culture, one must
have clear leadership intentions, intentions
that strengthen and sustain their commitment’
(Gutiérrez, 2012: 102). A framework facili-
tated through a practice of self-­determination,
invigorated through Manako, and connected
to Ngākau, kōpū and Vaerua.
NGĀKAU (HEART)
Carolyn Kenny, of Choctaw and Ukrainian
descent, is a professor of human develop-
ment and Indigenous study with a focus on
leadership and change. She shares in her
writing regarding leadership theories and the
power of story that ‘Stories are bridges that
connect our histories, our legends, our senses,
our practices, our values and, in essence, our
sustainability as people’ (Kenny, 2012: 7). It
is possible that Kenny’s tupuna (ancestors)
shared their story in the same way as my
grandmother did with her tupuna. The stories
of Ngākau shared are clear foundations in my
Indigenous practice. These stories highlight
the gift of reciprocity and responsibility.
There is varied context spread between my
teaching and pastoral practice with the stu-
dents within my Western tertiary institute.
Connections between seen and unseen ele-
ments when connecting people with places
and experience, needs consideration. ‘People
make sense of their experiences, claim identi-
ties, interact with each other, and participate
in cultural conversations through storytelling’
(Langellier and Peterson, 2004: 2).
In this philosophical practice, story pro-
vides avenues to expose Ngākau. Enabling
our relations to support a paradigm shift in
home-grown pedagogy, just by purely par-
ticipating: ‘Teaching protocols and cultural
values, even when applied within a limited
timeframe enhance student’s experiences
as they begin to develop their own leader-
ship potential’ (Young Leon, 2012: 62).
Maximizing every interaction with others,
the environment and the unseen, and hav-
ing the opportunity to facilitate vānanga, or
events to share knowledge on marae stays
(Maori gathering space) for students, pro-
vides the opening for me to facilitate this
learning. To facilitate opportunities for them
to understand service to others, responsibil-
ity, to develop a confidence in one’s self and
one’s capabilities. It also provides experience
in being part of a collective, as opposed to
catering solely to an individual need.
It is a courageous effort for any person to
practise from Ngākau, let alone one who has
a home-grown ancestry working within our
relations’ construct. Essentially, a practice of
a political stance within our relations’ world-
view. Home-grown practitioners can deter-
mine the social norms required as an educator
and official pastoral carer in a home-grown
context as opposed to our relations’ context.
In my experience, it takes a courageous heart
to do this as the consequence of this action
is formulated in questions around profes-
sional conduct and capability. As Ashcroft
et al. (1995) stated: ‘To refuse to operate out
of fear of Europeanization reflects a view of
Indigenous culture as an authentic, uncon-
taminated artifact that must be hermetically
preserved regardless of the needs of living
Indigenous people’ (as cited in Semali and
Kincheloe, 2002: 21). I practise with unique
tools provided to me through story, shared in
space, time and experience. However, I am
also mindful that
before the academy can recognize the gift of
indigenous epistemes, it will have to profoundly
transform itself; it will not be enough merely to
include indigenous epistemologies (i.e., indigenous
systems of knowledge or ways of knowing) in
pedagogies and curricula. (Kuokkanen, 2007: 28)
Ngākau gives premise to a pedagogy in
teaching, learning and practice that is
 THE NAVIGATOR’S PATH: JOURNEY THROUGH STORY AND NG  ĀKAU PEDAGOGY
home-grown and Indigenous, multilayered in
its outcomes of delivery and multidimen-
sional with its connections. One is driven by
emotion yet can be harnessed by experience.
‘Today it is accepted (in academic world at
least, if not in folk perceptions) that emotions
play an important role in “rational” thinking
and in positive social interactions’ (Corcoran
and Tormey, 2012: 197). The pedagogy of
Ngākau, a skill identified as emotional intel-
ligence by our relations, has always been a
gift acquired by the home-grown, an innate
instrument that connects. A layered and tex-
tured gift handed down by our ancestors
through a transmission of knowing and
knowledge, one that can be shared with our
relations.
Lessons in Ngākau pedagogy can be pro-
vided in different contexts; it is a fluid and
flexible pedagogy that provides transforma-
tive learning opportunities that can shift the
direction of someone’s learning journey. We
have all had a time in our life when someone,
a Kaveinga (car-veng-ar) Ngākau (authentic
facilitator of heart), has enabled a learning
moment that has made a significant differ-
ence in the way we say, see, share or practice.
A meaningful moment, that made us look at
ourselves and how we impact on the world.
An experience that becomes part of our liv-
ing narrative, one that we can recite to others
and share an animated retelling or reflection
of the venture, the journey lived through
Ngākau pedagogy.
Ngākau Aro’a (Loving Heart)
Practising Ngākau aro’a provides opportunity
to action meaningful engagement, build rap-
port and retain connection with people. A
genuine, intimate engagement can only be
done in Ngākau aro’a as it announces an
integrity in nature and authenticity of charac-
ter. It sets foundations for relationships that
are intended for life, not just for the set part of
a learning journey. This pedagogy in practice
provides a vulnerable versatility in strength
671
that disarms people as it is their senses that
leave them wondering: is this person for real?
Authenticity is the key here. Being your true
self is required. ‘That is, when individuals
come to know and accept themselves, includ-
ing their strengths and weaknesses, they dis-
play high levels of stable, as opposed
to fragile, self-esteem’ (Walumbwa et al.,
2008: 6). The key in practice is that with every
interaction Ngākau aro’a takes precedence
and leads in thought, speech and actions.
Ngākau Tiratirat ū (Honest Heart)
Taking ownership comes to mind when con-
sidering Ngākau tiratiratū. It is a practice
where there is a need to be responsible, walk
the walk and take ownership of challenges
and/or issues that occur due to your partici-
pation, or lack thereof. Understanding your
responsibility extends far beyond the person
or people you are interacting with in the pre-
sent moment. Every word, thought and action
leaves an accountability and responsibility to
your family, extended family and community
and those of your generations that are yet to
come. A farfetched concept for some to even
consider how their current daily contribu-
tions may affect their future generations, but
a consideration that determines the practice
of Ngākau tiratiratū.
Ngākau Ta’aka’aka
(Respectful Heart)
‘Ākono’anga is a word in Cook Island lan-
guage to describe customs or protocols.
These are determined by culture and values
attached to practices that provide systemic
procedure of how things are and should be
done. When Hirini Moko Mead (2003) dis-
cussed tikanga (protocol), he stated: ‘tikanga
Māori controls interpersonal relationships,
provides ways for groups to meet and inter-
act, and even determines how individuals
identify themselves’ (2003: 5). To practice
672 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Ngākau ta’aka’aka (respectful heart) is to be
disciplined in your own protocol of under-
standing yourself and what your role is while
performing said custom, etiquette or protocol.
The role in question is not the one you are
employed to do. The role in question is the
one your tupuna (ancestors) have prepared
you for. This is determined through stories
provided through your family, the narrative of
your own story, or a combination of both.
Ngākau Maru (Kind Heart)
Modelling and integrity are crucial to Ngākau
maru (kind heart). To be kind in the context
of Ngākau pedagogy provides an opportunity
in relationships with all living things, spaces
and places to promote an organic reciprocity.
Ngākau maru is transformative in nature. It
provides insight into understanding how all
things are connected, and how all things can
re-connect. It is sensory and simplistic in its
examples, yet more complex to describe. To
be kind in practice as an example means to
consider, when interacting with one individ-
ual, the impact that interaction has on others
who are present or observing. Modelling in
consistency with Ngākau maru declares an
unconditional acceptance of an individual,
who they are and what their contributions
are. The definition of contribution is not
determined through how small or large, as
this concept does not exist when practising
Ngākau maru. The reciprocity comes through
an acceptance of receipt of any contribution.
Ngākau Parau (Proud Heart)
Being true to self and having a voice are cru-
cial features of Ngākau parau. Understanding
the evolution of self comes with both profes-
sional and personal growth and provides
occasions to be open to new learning.
Ranga’ao (research) provides avenues to
explore your self, your practice, and the
needs of your community. The methods
involved are in informal contexts by sur-
rounding yourself with other human resources
that position themselves to challenge, extend
and motivate growth. Prospects that are more
formal also involve sharing voice – an
Indigenous voice. ‘Knowing why we are car-
rying out research – our motive – has the
potential to take us to places that involve
both the head and heart’ (Kovach, 2009:
120). Establishing and locating yourself and
your sense of belonging in any context,
including within a Western construct, can be
practised through Ngākau parau.
Ngākau Tae (Generous Heart)
Ngākau tae, the opportunity to share. Although
the focus may be on sharing information, as
a collective, Ngākau tae focuses on the
attempts or action of sharing itself. The
means to share or to connect in different
ways with other individuals supports the
developing symmetry that occurs with shared
knowledge between a diverse collective.
Sharing is not limited to or exclusive of
information, energy, presence, or action. To
share through Ngākau tae confirms that there
exists a mutual power and understanding and
acknowledgement of knowledge.
Ngākau Toa (Courageous Heart)
Ideas and Strategies
Ngākau toa encapsulates the moments that
resonate with our minds, hearts and soul
when an epiphany occurs and an idea is
seized; a creation that sparks a new strategy,
invents a new tool, or consolidates a plan for
a new creative outlet. ‘We talk about story,
purpose, self, and the relevance of being
holistically true to one’s worldview’ (Kovach,
2009: 120). Ngākau toa gives permission to
be different, to be diverse and unique. Ngākau
toa is the most inspiring element within
Ngākau pedagogy, as it means actioning your
truth in areas of indifference; the spaces that
 THE NAVIGATOR’S PATH: JOURNEY THROUGH STORY AND NG  ĀKAU PEDAGOGY
encourage the norm, where Western con-
structs say it must be done this way – so you
go ahead and do it your way. Ngākau toa
thrives on diversity, creativity and change. A
true measure of transformative praxis and
driver of self-determination.
KŌPŪ (BELLY)
Jay Johnson, of Cherokee descent, is an asso-
ciate professor of geography and Indigenous
studies, one of his many Indigenous foci on
cultural survival. He observes that ‘in an
Indigenous context, introducing one’s self is
place-based, and sharing knowledge is often
accompanied by protocols that take more
time than the fifteen-minute presentation and
five-minute question and answer sessions’
(Fermantez, 2013: 111). I smile when I read
the wisdom of other Indigenous practitioners
who have been able to articulate clearly a
problem in connection between people and
places. I relate to this insight in my Indigenous
practice, taking time, the protocol required to
connect akapapa’anga, a place to connect
with, or facilitate a connection, a defined
genuine intent to connect with people, and
determine their needs to best serve through
the gift of reciprocity.
I have a clear sense of who I am through
my connections of akapapa’anga and the
people connected to this, my ānau. Although
I am not versed in the structure of all the rela-
tionships that have formed to create me, I am
versed in the practices of serving others. I
am aware that within our relations’ context
it is common practice to be labelled and to
categorize roles and responsibilities. Taylor’s
(1994) work states:
Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its
absence, often by the misrecognition of others,
and so a person or group of people can suffer real
damage, real distortion, if the people or society
around them mirror back to them a confining or
demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.
(Taylor, 1994: 98)
673
My practice negates the distortion and pro-
motes an acknowledgement that is home-
grown. It fosters a connection with others
that supports their identity and enhances their
self-determination. Sometimes simply a con-
nection with names in introductions leads to
storytelling about place, or places, significant
to that individual. I think about my grand-
mother’s words to me regarding an interaction
with a person. A clear reminder that when
connecting with that person you not only
address who is in front of you physically, but
those who have passed, and those who are
yet to come.
In practice, I provide places for people
to gather. Places that can promote a sense
of belonging. The use of kai as the physical
learning source facilitates the connection of
kōpū in practice. In a teaching, learning and
pastoral context with the students, I support
my tertiary institute, noting, however: ‘It’s
always amusing to go to academic gatherings
where there is food, because in the native
context there is a different understanding
of what food is and means’ (Fermantez,
2013: 111). Providing open events to gather
as a collective and share stories. To build
strength in developing a self-­determination
with individuals who are exploring,
enhancing and/or developing journeys
for their Indigenous identity also. We do
this because we can. ‘Indigenous peoples
themselves claim the right to define who they
are, and reject the ideas that outsiders can do
so’ (Hughes, 2003: 11).
Utilizing the environment as a third teacher
or natural resource gives the premise to be
as creative as possible to connect with each
other. This is similar to the works discussed
by Bell (2013) in relation to the ‘sacred tree
teaching’: ‘regardless of the method of teach-
ing, spirituality was embedded in each strand
of the learning process’ (2013: 92). Through
the gift of reciprocity and responsibility, non-
Indigenous people can participate and benefit
from this practice. Phyllis Blumberg cited
Fink (2003) when exploring how to enhance
and improve teaching skills: ‘When students
674 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
reflect together, they also build a sense
of community, which enhances the qual-
ity of the learning experience (Fink, 2003)’
(Blumberg, 2013: 37). Developing a sense of
family can support the holistic needs of a stu-
dent and provides a foundation for teaching
and learning moments through story. ‘Family
is a human communication practice – as
much a way of “doing things with words” as
it is a set of ties and sentiments’ (Langellier
and Peterson, 2004: 34). Stories will lead to
life lessons brought forward through inquiry
and experience and supported in reflection,
both facilitated and natural. ‘Reflection –
unlike reasoning, which requires a system-
atic process that is evidence based – allows
the students to engage in mental inquiry
meant to help develop self-discovery rather
than help them arrive at the correct answer’
(Kanoy et al., 2013: 5). This is why I practice
in reflection.
VAERUA (SPIRIT)
Reflection has fuelled the path of my learn-
ing journey. An emotional journey, where
‘emotions matter in learning, in teaching and
in learning to teach’ (Corcoran and Tormey,
2012: 197). Whether we are engaged in
laughter or tears with the people we serve, I
realize this is my strength, my area of ‘intel-
ligence’. Encouraging, promoting and facili-
tating learning moments through emotion.
These are the lessons learnt through a cul-
tural transmission facilitated by my tupuna.
Moments facilitated through Vaerua.
Vaerua is the food of spiritual nutrition
that connects a pathway to my ancestors in
the past, and to my world today, that provides
understanding and enlightenment. It holds a
consciousness of being aware, and being pre-
sent. It protects the opportunity to talk about
moemoea (daydreams) and akairo (signs/
omens) that support a determined action
and decision. Vaerua has been the key bind-
ing ingredient in the recipe for developing a
teaching, learning and practice framework
steeped in a spiritual pedagogy.
I believe a movement is required. I believe
we need to encourage a move away from the
metaphoric monument that educators hide
behind with their stand-and-deliver tech-
niques and practise the freedom required to
support home-grown learners. Developing
and implementing a teaching practice that
engages and promotes a learner’s knowing,
I believe Ngākau pedagogy can facilitate
meaningful learning moments for both teacher
and learner. ‘Self-knowledge is one of the
most powerful influences on productivity for
academics in all three major responsibilities
of teaching, research, and service (Blackburn
and Lawrence, 1995)’ (as cited in Blumberg,
2013: 51). It is here in my reflections that
I realise, like Ru, that convincing the masses
to join me in a journey of unknown waters
takes courage, resilience and time.
My roles and responsibilities lead me to
present resilience, drive and fortitude. I am the
mokopuna (descendent) of a people that were
fearless in their travel across the seas; how
could I not take on the challenges required to
support my growth and learning as well as that
of others? The need to role model this action
to my mokopuna is imperative. The necessity
to rise up in adversity is non-negotiable. The
requirement to continue my action within
the practice is inevitable. Authentic and
emotional intelligence leadership develops
my knowing to a space where I just know. A
space where knowledge has become wisdom.
A space immersed in navigated Ngākau
intelligence, an intelligence layered with the
elements of a cosmic order only home-grown
people understand. It advances a confidence
in who, what and how I do things. It supports
the narrative of my people, my ānau and
my communities through a transformative
pathway of teaching, learning and care.
We need to ‘live the practice, practice the
living’ (personal communication, Kowhare,
5 November 2016).
I complete this writing with a response
shared by my ‘Yummy Darling’ when I posed
 THE NAVIGATOR’S PATH: JOURNEY THROUGH STORY AND NG  ĀKAU PEDAGOGY
a question provided by my kaiako (teachers)
who facilitated my learning journey. The
question was provided to stimulate thought
in philosophy and practice. What is the dif-
ference between living and being alive? My
husband’s response: ‘having lived’. Through
my lived experience, I am a practitioner of
Manako, Ngākau, Kōpū and Vaerua. Like the
‘Onu, I am a navigator of my experiences. I
move swiftly in the depths of the sea, diving
deeper to discover meaning and purpose and,
like the ‘Onu, I still tread cautiously on the
land of our relations.
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Low, D. (1934). Traditions of Aitutaki, Cook
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Macedo, D. (2002) Decolonizing Indigenous
knowledge. In Semali, L., & Kincheloe, J. L.
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Marsters, R. (2016). The navigator’s path: A
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Ngākau (heart), Kōpū (belly) and Vaerua
(spirit). (Unpublished Master’s exegesis). Te
Wananga o Aotearoa. Aotearoa, NZ.
Maurial, M. (2002) Indigenous knowledge and
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Mead, H. M. (2003). Tikanga māori: Living by
Māori values. Wellington, NZ: Huia Publishers.
Meyer, M. A. (2014). Indigenous epistemology:
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global indigenous knowledge (pp. 151–166).
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Sauni, P. (2014). My sixth sense tells me… . In
Tuagalu, C., Cram, F., Sauni, P., & Phillips, H.
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Semali, L., & Kincheloe, J. L. (2002) What is
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Canada: UBC Press.

Education and Praxis
This Handbook, or course, loudly asserts that
critical pedagogy studies is an unfinished
project. And unfinished in multiple ways:
(i) critical social theory is always partial,
flawed and lagging in both diagnosis and
hope; and (ii) social change demands that we
keep open the question: what is an ethico-
politics for our time? In which case, critical
pedagogy studies, as that immense archive of
commentary on the relationship between
education and struggle for more just societies,
can never be finished per se and requires
ongoing rejuvenation, both theoretically and
practically, and also demands reformation of
policy.
Theoretical rejuvenation for critical
pedagogy takes different modalities, which
include: (i) taking up powerful diagnoses
of the times as provocation for educators;
SECTION VI
Robert Hattam
(ii) taking up readings of the places we live
in; and (iii) responding to philosophical
investigations.
Some diagnoses of our times, that I am
especially moved by, include the following:
• Under neoliberal political philosophy, which
is so dominant now, there is a trend towards
de-democratisation (Brown, 2015) and authoritarian
forms of governmentality (Lazzarato, 2015).
• There is now growing economic inequality and
intensification of precarious work (Standing,
2014), which manifests differentially and has
a more profound impact on those regions that
have a history of socio-economic disadvantage
(Bauman, 2004).
• Old and new forms of colonisation are very active
in countries such as Australia (Povinelli, 2002),
and continue to rely on (neo)racism as a key
strategy (Balibar, 2014).
678 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Some readings of schooling in my place that
are provocations for my thinking about critical
pedagogy (Hattam, 2018) include:
• Schooling in the regions of Adelaide that I
study is still working well, if we assume that
schooling as a system functions to produce social
stratification and hence educational inequality
(Teese, 2000). It is through schooling that the
nation organises all manner of sorting and sifting
of its young people, with the inevitable result that
‘educational inequality is the proper business of
schools performing their function of reproducing an
unequal social order’ (Connell et al., 1982: 189–90).
• Privatisation of teacher professional learning
and curriculum work; schools now mostly buy
in market solutions for curriculum development
and teacher professional development (Hogan
et al., 2015).
• Residualisation of public schools; the policy of
school choice in Australia is now residualising
public schools (Vickers, 2015).
• Teachers are now confronted with super-diverse
classrooms in Australian public schools and
hence the usual white-washed curriculum and
pedagogy is now failing too many young people
(D’warte, 2016).
Some philosophical investigations that are
rejuvenating critical theory/pedagogy include
the following:
• The relational turn in the social sciences: against
a mechanistic version of reality, the social sci-
ences has turned to think about phenomena in
relational terms, and hence the emergence of
relational onto-epistemologies, renewed interest
in Indigenous and religious cosmologies, and
or processual philosophies, and theories of net-
works, assemblages and ecologies of practices.
• The affective turn in the social sciences: against a
western Enlightenment, hyper-rational rendering
of the human being, an affective turn is enabling
us to rethink the subject (or subjectivity) in terms
of both cognition and affect; to put back together
thinking/feeling; and to make sense of social life
through consideration of what’s happening on
the terrain of affect.
On the policy front, unfortunately, our times
are characterised by a serious dissonance
between the logic of education policy,
understood here to be framed up by the
Global Education Reform Movement
(GERM; Ball, 2012), and the existential
challenges of the times. The GERM, put
simply, is a nasty aggregation of the Teflon-
coated axioms of neoliberalism, in cahoots
with the School Effectiveness and School
Improvement paradigm (SE/SI) (Thrupp and
Lupton, 2006). Neoliberalism, which has no
claims to educational knowledge, asserts
dangerous propositions such as: market com-
petition is the best way to improve outcomes;
private schools are better than public schools;
and capitalist managerialist forms of leader-
ship work in all contexts. And the SE/SI para-
digm provides a dangerous version of mostly
positivist educational evidence-based policy –
a policy of ‘what works’ (Biesta, 2007) – that
now shapes curriculum, pedagogy and assess-
ment through discourses that: (a) define the
what (intended curriculum) in terms of nar-
rowly defined outcomes; (b) pushes teachers
towards highly scripted forms of pedagogy
(ritualised forms of practice that disavow the
unique and singular character of every class-
room) (Hayes et al., 2017); (c) assert stand-
ardised versions of the ‘good’ teacher that
inform performance management and promo-
tion (Connell, 2009); and (d) force ‘cruel
accounting’ (Thomson, 1998) onto schools and
teachers through pernicious forms of national
testing and school reviews (Au, 2008). Put
more bluntly, this regime offers decontextual-
ised knowledge that purports a disembodied
objectivity whilst offering little insight into
schools that actually exist.
By way of examples, education policy
fails to respond in any meaningful way to
rising economic inequality (Piketty, 2014), as
policy further entrenches the ways schooling
contributes to social stratification. Perversely,
this policy regime has little evidence that
it improves learning outcomes (even on its
own terms) and, in fact, ignores the evidence
that this regime actually advances the social
stratifying function of schooling in multiple
ways, including: asserting a market solution
whilst ignoring the fact that most parents
 EDUCATION AND PRAXIS
cannot choose; dumbing down the system;
residualising public schooling; narrowing
what counts as literacy; asserting weak ver-
sions of citizenship; and reframing inequal-
ity as an individual problem and hence those
without choices get to blame themselves.
Meantime there are also global outbreaks
of various forms of ethno-nationalism that
are supported by elected politicians and given
voice in the public sphere by the likes of the
Murdoch press (Thussu, 2007; Gitlin, 2013),
often in the form of dog whistle politics
(Manning, 2004), which shift the blame for
economic inequality onto cultural diversity,
hence further entrenching racism in everyday
life, the workplace and the way realpolitik
gets played. Equality gets reframed as the
right to be a bigot; we’re forced to give up
our freedoms for national security; and sup-
port for ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation’ is now
a front for mainstreaming White supremacy.
By way of a hopeful conclusion, some col-
leagues and I (Hattam et al., 2018) have recently
outlined a manifesto that can be borrowed for
thinking about critical pedagogy studies into
the future. We argued for this programme:
• Building an international community committed
to ‘just education’
• Intervening in the ways in which education contrib-
utes to social stratification
• Supporting the professional autonomy of teachers
• Researching with educators
• Supporting students as researchers of their own
communities
• Supporting ‘educational’ leadership in educa-
tional institutions
• Reforming teacher education programmes.
REFERENCES
Au, W. (2008). Unequal by Design: High-stakes
Testing and the Standardization of Inequality.
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Ball, S. J. (2012). Global Education Inc: New
Policy Networks and the Neo-liberal Imaginary.
London: Routledge.
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Balibar, E. (2014). Equaliberty. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted Lives: Modernity
and its Outcasts. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Biesta, G. (2007). Why ‘what works’ won’t
work: Evidence-based practice and the
democratic deficit in educational research,
Educational Theory, 57(1), 1–22.
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos:
Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New
York: Zone Books.
Connell, R. (2009). Good teachers on dangerous
ground: Towards a new view of teacher quality
and professionalism, Critical Studies in
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Connell, R., Ashenden, D., Kessler, S. &
Dowsett, G. (1982). Making the Difference:
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(eds) Super Dimensions in Globalisation and
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Hattam, R. (2018). Researching the ‘North’:
Educational ethnographies of a (sub)urban
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W. Sawyer (eds) Resisting Educational
Inequality: Reframing Policy and Practice in
Schools Serving Vulnerable Communities.
(pp. 214–224) London: Routledge.
Hattam, R., Gannon, S. & Sawyer, W. (2018).
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W. Sawyer (eds) Resisting Educational
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(pp. 294–301) London: Routledge.
Hayes, D., Hattam, R., Comber, B., Kerkham, L.,
Lupton, R. & Thomson, P. (2017). Literacy,
Leading and Learning: Beyond Pedagogies of
Poverty. London: Routledge.
Hogan, A., Sellar, S. & Lingard, B. (2015).
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the TLC in soft capitalism, Journal of Education
Policy, 31(3), 243–258.
680 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Lazzaroto, M. (2015). Govening by Debt.
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Manning, P. (2004). Dog Whistle Politics and
Journalism: Reporting Arabic and Muslim
People in Sydney Newspapers. Australian
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of Technology, Sydney.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-first
Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Povinelli, E. A. (2002). The Cunning of Recognition:
Indigenous Alterities and the Making of
Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press.
Standing, G. (2014). The precariat and class
struggle. http://www.guystanding.com/files/
documents/Precariat_and_Class_Struggle_
final_English.pdf (Date accessed: 12/12/2018).
Teese, R. (2000) Academic Success and Social
Power: Examinations and Inequality. Carlton
South, Victoria: Melbourne University Press.
Thomson, P. (1998). Thoroughly modern
management and a cruel accounting: The
effects of public sector reform on public
education. In A. Reid (ed.) Going Public:
Education Policy and Public Education in
Australia. (pp. 9–17) Canberra: Australian
Curriculum Studies Association.
Thrupp, M. & Lupton, R. (2006). Taking school
contexts more seriously: The social justice
challenge, British Journal of Educational
Studies, 54(3), 308–328.
Thussu, D. K. (2007). The ‘Murdochization’ of
news? The case of Star TV in India, Media
Culture Society, 29(4), 593–611.
Vickers, M. (2015). Neglecting the evidence: Are
we expecting too much from quality teaching?
In H. Proctor, P. Brownlee, & P. Freebody (eds)
Controversies in Education: Orthodoxy and
Heresy in Policy and Practice. (pp. 81–9)
Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing.

A Critical Pedagogy of Working
Class Schooling: A Call to Activist
Theory and Practice
INTRODUCTION
This chapter unfolds around six moves. First,
there is a brief excursion into the political
economy of exclusion as a way of seeing into
the deep ruptures being caused by unre-
strained capitalism. Second, we confront
directly the imperative to name what is being
made increasingly invisible – the matter of
social class. Third, it follows that the increas-
ing social stratification occurring around the
world is gouging some lives, leaving them
deeply scarred by the way schools are being
used to serve the needs of capitalism.
Pursuing this a little deeper, in the fourth
move, I point to a number of quite specific
ways in which the artifice of the neoliberal
school demonstrably works against the inter-
ests of working class children. The fifth
move presents some of the unique disposi-
tions of working class life that might inform
a reinvention of schooling. Finally, in making
a call for an activist theory of working class
schooling, the chapter concludes with the
59
John Smyth
beginnings of a geography of a ‘set of condi-
tions’ that place the educational interests of
working class children first.
In sociology, as in life more generally, we
have a huge unresolved issue around social
class, and we can see this being given expres-
sion in its most grotesque form in Brexit and
the election of Donald Trump. This is a not
inconsiderable issue in the way it impacts
schooling, and it requires our urgent atten-
tion. As Reay (2006) poignantly put it, class
is the ‘zombie stalking’ our classrooms, and
if left unattended it will remain the ‘trouble-
some undead’ that will become a ‘monster
that grows in proportion to its neglect’ (2006:
289). The standout message from Reay
(2006: 288) is that ‘social class [is] a central
concern within education and we continue to
ignore it at our peril’.
After more than half a century of blaming
the victim and the mischievous misconstrual
of the nature of problem, the fiction about
working class schooling is no longer sustain-
able. Blaming working class children, their
682 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
families, backgrounds, neighbourhoods and
communities for their increasing failure to
succeed at school is being exposed for the
gigantic hoax that it is. Working class chil-
dren do not succeed at school, not because
of the reasons just cited, but because schools
actively conspire against working class
children. Schools are only one of the social
institutions that have been captured in recent
times by elites in wealthy western countries,
but the working class has had enough and is
speaking back forcefully to their exclusion
by elites.
It is not really possible to meaningfully
understand a critical pedagogy of working
class schooling, without first having some
familiarity with the wider political economy
at work, in the form of Brexit in the UK and
the election of Donald Trump in the United
States – and similar nascent populist revolts
underway in other countries.
A SHORT EXCURSION INTO THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EXCLUSION
In their editorial introduction to a discussion
forum in the Socio-Economic Review
(O’Reilly et al., 2016), the editors argued that
the ‘unprecedented geopolitical shift result-
ing from Brexit [and we might add Trump]
reflects deep socio-economic fault lines’
which both Brexit and Trump have ‘brought
to the surface in a way that has given ‘public
voice to socio-economic divisions that were
deeply embedded, sometimes illogical, but
until now had either been ignored or hushed
out of “respectable” public debate’ (O’Reilly
et al., 2016: 807).
Often typified in terms of ‘taking back
control’ (O’Reilly, 2016: 812), especially in
respect of migration by groups who feel they
have increasingly been ‘left behind’ (Froud
et al., 2016: 816), Warhurst (2016) argues
that ‘unpacking [this] toxic mix’ (2016: 820)
has more to do with the long proliferation of
‘bad jobs’ (Froud et al., 2016: 815) that have
increasingly become ‘skewed towards…
the worst jobs’ (Warhurst, 2016: 820) that
are low paid, menial, insecure, zero-hours
contracts – or what Taylor (2017) typifies
as ‘demeaning’, ‘stressful’, ‘high surveil-
lance’, ‘call centre work’ that has been fos-
tered and co-exists, at least in Britain, within
‘the shadow welfare state’ (Davies, 2016: 1).
Warhurst (2016: 820) points to ‘job polari-
zation’ and the increase in ‘non-standard
employment generally’ when he referred to
the inevitability of ‘a change gonna come?’
(2016: 824):
Brexit may have been accidental but it was an
accident waiting to happen. Jobs have been
created in the UK post-crisis but the quality of
those jobs has been ignored by government. Too
many bad jobs are being created and which, in
themselves, are also getting worse. Moreover too
many UK born workers are getting stuck in these
jobs alongside migrant workers to the UK.
(Warhurst, 2016: 824)
One of the more colourful tropes is that of
the ‘excluded’ who are portrayed as being
engaged in ‘a mutiny against the cosmopoli-
tan elite’ (Calhoun, 2016). According to
Calhoun (2016: 5), both Brexit and the elec-
tion of Trump were phenomena ‘driven by
resentment, frustration and anger…’. They
were both ‘emotional and expressive’ and
part of a ‘wider populist surge that expresses
frustration with radically intensified inequal-
ity, stagnant incomes and declining eco-
nomic security for middle class and working
class people in ostensibly prosperous coun-
tries’ who see themselves as having been
‘bypassed by globalization’ (2016: 5).
A Caveat – Class as a
Verboten Topic
One of the main reasons class has become
largely invisible in polite conversation,
except in its more recent political eruptions,
is that it is not a respectable topic to talk or
write about. As Skeggs (1997: 77) says, to
take on the process of investigating how class
 A CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF WORKING CLASS SCHOOLING
works is an ‘emotional’ process because it is
a reminder of ‘social positioning’ – it is much
less discomforting to claim to be ‘classless’.
Rather than face up to the discomfort, Skeggs
(1997: 77) says that people engage in ‘refusal’,
‘denial’ and ‘disidentification’, but the effect
of this is to obscure how power works, and
as Skeggs puts it, ‘class is primarily about
inequality and exploitation’ (1997: 75). What
we need, she says, are analyses of ‘how ine-
qualities are consolidated, reproduced and
lived as power relations’ (1997: 75).
Skeggs (1997) says that writing about
class is an ‘excruciating’ process because of
the way in which it is so heavily ‘invested in
respectability’ (1997: 15). Nobody wants to
confess to inferiority, and to acknowledge
that one is working class – except, as Skeggs
says, perhaps academics (acknowledging
colleague Lynne Pearce), who have the lux-
ury of being able to tout their working class-
ness as a badge of honour ‘once they [have]
been given middle class citizenship [enabling
them to] … take pride in one’s roots and not
be ashamed because “what I was is not what I
now am”’ (1997: 97). All of this having been
said, ‘talking about class, is somewhat differ-
ent from living it’ (Skeggs, 1997: 77), and in
what follows I want to draw attention to some
of the ways in which working class education
is ‘lived’ in the context of schooling.
Schools have become quintessentially neo-
liberal institutions – that is to say they have
become pre-occupied with acquisitiveness,
or as Skeggs (2011: 508) puts it, places in
which students exploit the opportunities to
‘load … themselves [up] with value that is
convertible into capital for themselves and
[the economy] more generally’. Within neo-
liberalism, and the neoliberal school in par-
ticular, ‘the person is now a key unit of value’
(2011: 508) – meaning, that the raison d’etre
of schooling has become an exchange rela-
tionship in which students don’t just leave
school equipped to sell their ‘labour power’,
but rather they come to the ‘exchange already
loaded with capacities and potential for find-
ing and increasing value across a number of
683
domains’ (2011: 508). The significance of
this is that students have to make themselves
‘more amenable to capital’, but they are
doing this in a context in which the process
by which this occurs has become ‘hidden and
psychologised’ (2011: 508). What is equally
disturbing about this process is that
not all people want to engage in, or can access,
the value practices necessary for becoming a capi-
tal loaded fetish form of value. They may have
better things to do with their time and energy.
(Skeggs, 2011: 508)
This latter point is a sobering reminder that
when working class children reject school, it
is because they largely see schools as irrele-
vant places in which to do identity formation
(see Smyth et al., 2000, 2004).
The challenge then, to give the final word
to Skeggs (2011) for the moment, is how to
‘build a picture of an autonomist working-
class set of values that produce different rela-
tionships, different forms of attention, very
different desires and very different value prac-
tices’ (2011: 507) as these might be expressed
in schooling. This might, for example, take
forms that focus more on ‘personal integrity
and the quality of personal relationships and
a very different form of sociability’ to the
grotesque displays demanded by the neolib-
eral school of ‘self-centredness, conceit, pre-
tentiousness and exploitation’ (Skeggs, 2011:
507) that foster an entrepreneurial self. But
before I go there, I need to do some ground
clearing that focuses somewhat more on the
dysfunctional aspects of extant schooling for
working class children.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH EDUCATIONAL
POLICY AND SCHOOLING FOR
WORKING CLASS CHILDREN?
What is occurring more widely in prosperous
societies, as exemplified in Brexit and Trump,
is not leaving young people and their school-
ing unaffected. To borrow from and build
684 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
upon Mills (1971 [1959]), there is a kind of
‘sociological imagination’ (Mills, 1971
[1959]) going on in schools that is occurring
behind the screen, out of sight, and largely
unacknowledged, in contrast to the main
game. The real game is being made invisible
and obfuscated by the dominant neoliberal
educational policy trajectory that schools
exist primarily to do economic work, and that
‘failing schools’ and ‘failing students’ are
endangering national security because of the
way they are impeding international eco-
nomic competitiveness. To invoke Bright
(2016) and Gordon (2004, 2008 [1997]),
there is a kind of ‘social haunting’ going on
in respect of the education of working class
children, in which aspects of the past are
being hidden or repressed for political rea-
sons. Gordon (2008 [1997]: 7) argues that in
order to study social life we ‘must confront
the ghostly aspect of it’, and she proffers by
way of illustration Taussig’s (1992: 4) claim
about ‘the phantom objectivity of capitalist
culture’ (p. 31, emphasis in original). Gordon
describes ‘social haunting’ as the ‘turmoil
and trouble’ that occur
when things are not in their assigned places, when
the cracks and rigging are exposed, when people
who are meant to be invisible show up without
any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings
cannot be put away, when something else, some-
thing very different from before, seems like it must
be done. (Gordon, 2008 [1997]: xvi)
In other words, in order to sustain its claim to
legitimacy, capitalist culture and its attendant
neoliberal paradigm needs to be engaged in
what Gordon (2008 [1997]) calls ‘distrac-
tions’ (1997: 31), ‘pretence’ (1997: 32) and
‘transference’ (1997: 42). Capitalism needs to
construct a fictional narrative, and schooling
is a fertile place within which to do that. If we
start with Skeggs’s (2011) idea that class is a
phenomenon that is constructed through
images and formations of ‘personhood’, then
even a cursory glance reveals schools pay
scant attention to notions of working class
personhood, erasing them instead with a
middle class palimpsest that celebrates com-
petitive and ‘possessive individualism’ (2011:
498), citing Macpherson (1962).
To put these notions another way, schools
are adept at constructing what is deemed to
be valuable, in terms of individuals who are
seen to be capable of ‘stand[ing] outside of
[themselves]’ (2011: 498), as evidenced by
success in developing the capacity to acquire
skills and forms of knowledge that enable
them to ‘make something of themselves’. We
see this frequently rehearsed, for example, in
the often heard refrains of teachers who chas-
tise their working class students as being ‘a
waste of space’, as being incapable of ‘mak-
ing anything of themselves’, and who teach-
ers regard as being feckless and indolent,
destined to become ‘failures’. These kind
of comments are more than mere frustrated
utterances on the part of teachers – they are
symbolic of a deeper institutional view held
by schools towards those students it regards,
because of family background and upbring-
ing, as not having been properly socialized
into the middle class norms of domestication,
docility, abstraction and a willingness to delay
gratification – that is to say, students who are
variously labelled as ‘at risk’, ‘vulnerable’,
from ‘low socio-economic background’, or
‘disadvantaged’ – all of which are codes,
masks or euphemisms for ‘working class’.
To extrapolate from what Skeggs (2011)
is saying – attributes of diligence, aspiration,
self-discipline and institutional docility, and
compliance to regimes of testing, sorting,
sifting, verification and subjugation are all
educational markers indicative of the kind of
‘performance of personhood’ expected to be
displayed by students who have developed
the qualities with which to ‘publicly legiti-
mate themselves as good and worthy sub-
jects’ (2011: 496) according to the rubric of
the school and as legitimated by the domi-
nant society. Students who present as trou-
blesome, disruptive, disengaged, recalcitrant,
or who distinguish themselves by ‘speaking
back’ to what they regard as the irrelevance
of the curriculum or the stupidification of the
 A CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF WORKING CLASS SCHOOLING
pedagogy of the school, are positioned ‘out-
side’ of, or exiled from, school literally and
metaphorically. In Skeggs’s (2011) schema,
working class students are positioned outside
the ‘theoretical imaginary’ (2011: 496) of the
‘dominant’ symbolic culture of personhood
that schools are trying to construct. That is
to say perforce, the school as an exclusionary
social institution is making ‘personhood’ an
‘exclusive resource predicated on construc-
tion by exclusion’ (2011: 496).
Schools are, therefore, active players
involved in multiple processes ‘where limits
define the norm, the margins the centre, and
the improper the proper’ (Skeggs, 2011: 496).
Working class students thus find themselves
being defined, and defiled, in terms of the
inherent pathologies they bring with them
to schools, and that they demonstrate while
there, that warrant their exclusion from ‘the
possibilities of accruing and attaching value
to themselves, [and] who are positioned
outside of the dominant symbolic as the
constitutional limit for the proper self’
(2011: 496). Unpacked, what this means is that
when working class children fail to acquiesce
to or comply with the values of mainstream
school, then they are demonstrating publicly
their circumscribed capacity to develop the
appropriate ‘conditions for [a middle class]
personhood’ – which is to say, a ‘proper self’
in terms of the school (2011: 496). Quite
simply, they have failed to develop an appro-
priate learning identity. One of the most tan-
gible effects, Skeggs (2011) says, is that the
working class are ‘filtered out of the educa-
tion system’ in circumstances where ‘jobs
rather than careers are a more likely temporal
imaginary’ (2011: 506).
Publicly funded schools – that supposedly
exist for all students – are able to ‘residual-
ize’ working class students in various ways,
including through the use of visible high-
stakes testing. But there are less visible and
more sinister ways in which the ‘neoliberal
school’ – which is the dominant version in
many western countries – can do this. In the
marketized times we live in, the prevailing
685
policy expectation is that schools will operate
like businesses, engaging in the competitive
cut and thrust to secure ‘market share’ – that
is to say, getting students through the doors,
with schools being rewarded financially on
the basis of numbers of students they attract.
This is an inevitable and intended outcome of
requiring that schools embark upon a compet-
itive urge in the way they envisage themselves
and the ways they organize their activi-
ties. What becomes crucial in this business-­
oriented turn is that schools have to operate in
ways that sustain, maintain and enhance their
positional image in the education market-
place, when ‘choice’ of school is the primary
animating force. Preserving and constructing
an image of the school which is attractive to
middle class parents involves constructing a
narrative of the school around success, merit,
rigour and discipline as features that will
enable the progeny of the middle class to be
amply rewarded in later life as a result of wise
parental choice. The corollary of this press for
consumerist standardization is that schools
have to be purged of any students likely to
impugn this market image – or to put it most
directly, ‘the kids who make the place appear
untidy!’ Most frequently, the ‘untidy kids’ are
those from working class backgrounds who
may have encountered interferences to their
educational pathways, have learning difficul-
ties, may come from homes where there are no
educational role models, or who are variously
labelled by the school as incapable or trouble
makers. Whatever the explanation, these are
the children who have to be made ‘invisible’
lest their presence and underperformance will
undermine the school’s marketing strategy. An
example from the state of Victoria, Australia,
the place that has led the push to the neoliberal
school, reveals something about the insidious
class-based process that ensues.
Like other places, Victoria has for some
time had educational pathways for students
who find it difficult or stressful to handle the
competitive ethos of mainstream schooling.
What these students are offered instead are
educational experiences and credentials that
686 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
may be more vocational in nature and, while
seemingly more humane and user-friendly
to these students, they end up nevertheless
being terminal forms of education in that they
do not allow students to proceed with further
education that will give them access to univer-
sity entrance and higher-paying occupations.
Where this process is becoming unravelled is
that these lesser pathways are being used as
places in which to dump students whose edu-
cational performance, if they were in academic
strands, would be likely to reflect badly on or
impugn a school’s performance rankings in
league tables – and schools obsess over these
rankings as if they were stock market indi-
ces. As a consequence, schools use various
strategies to countenance less able working
class students out of academic strands, advis-
ing them not to take up academic subjects, or
simply refusing to allow them to enrol. By not
having these students included in the school’s
published competitive test scores, schools are
able to propagate a false and rosy picture of
the school, but at the expense of degrading
the options available to ‘supposedly’ less able
working class students. In other words, these
‘students are lock[ed] out’ (Jacks and Cook,
2017) of any possibility of educational mobil-
ity, but the reputation of the school is sustained
and kept intact, under the ruse that less able
students have been hived off to pursue edu-
cational options better suited to them. Reality
is, of course, that this is a thinly veiled class-
based form of exclusion designed to maintain
institutional reputational status, at the expense
of the lives of these students. The ‘marketized
school’ clearly works against the interests of
working class students.
HOW DOES THE NEOLIBERAL SCHOOL
MILITATE AGAINST THE INTERESTS
OF WORKING CLASS STUDENTS?
I am not aware of anyone who has actually
coined the term the ‘neoliberal school’, but I
shall invoke that term here as a heuristic with
which to discuss how mainstream schooling
is being re-invented against the interests of
working class students. To be clear, I am not
referring to the much more specific examples of
publicly provided schools that have effectively
been totally privatized, in the form of acade-
mies, free schools, or charter schools. Rather,
my concern is with what the neoliberal reform
policy process is doing to ordinary publicly
provided schools that are making them inhospi-
table places for working class children.
To discharge the definitional issue as expe-
ditiously as possible, Wendy Brown (2015)
has portrayed neoliberalism as the ‘stealth
revolution’ that is undoing democracy. Brown
(2015) argues that in its most expansive form,
neoliberalism is a ‘peculiar form of reason
that configures all aspects of existence in
economic terms’ (2015: 17). The organiz-
ing logic of neoliberalism is that it is a form
of governmental and social rationality that
espouses the ‘deregulation, marketization
and privatization of all public goods’ through
‘a forthright attack on the public sector’ by
recasting all ‘human endeavour and activity
in entrepreneurial terms’ (Brown, 2011: 118).
In other words, individuals are regarded as
being ‘entrepreneurs of their own needs and
desires’ (Brown, 2011: 118), and they con-
sume and invest accordingly. Neoliberal
rationality, therefore, ‘disseminates the model
of the market to all domains and activities…
and configures human beings exhaustively as
market actors…’ (Brown, 2015: 31, emphasis
in original).
There are a number of qualities or disposi-
tions that mark out the neoliberal school, and
I will adumbrate those, while seeking after
that to try and disentangle how it is they are
damaging working class children.
Here are 13 qualities or dispositions of
the neoliberal school that I have been able to
discern:
1 The primary focus in the neoliberal school is upon
the unit of the individual and individualism.
What this means: is that individual students
and schools are directly responsible for their
 A CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF WORKING CLASS SCHOOLING
own success or failure however that is
measured. Whether they succeed or not is an
indicator or marker of how good students and
schools are at constructing and deporting
themselves as effective players in the
educational marketplace – whether that be in
promoting and selling themselves, what they
have available, or in consuming what is on
offer to them.
2 Competition is the source of all individual and
institutional inspiration and improvement.
What this means: is that competing against
others academically is the animating or
driving force which provides the impetus
with which to innovate, excel, and that
distinguishes oneself from others who are
less meritorious.
3 Delayed gratification is crucial in the production
of meritocratic rewards in the future.
What this means: in the neoliberal school
satisfying immediate urges clouds or
obscures the potential rewards or benefits
that accrue as a result of carefully crafting
and contriving longer-term goals. Immediacy
in the neoliberal school is code for profligacy
or licentious behaviour, and this kind of
labelling is applicable to students as well as
their families.
4 Failure follows from lack of effort, application
and individual dysfunction – it is deserved.
What this means: is that whether we are
referring to students or the school as a larger
collective, success is measured in the extent
to which there has been a serious application
of effort, application and innovative verve –
failure is due to the absence of these
qualities.
5 Privatization of the self is the way out of the
mediocrity of the collective and the way to foster
innovation.
What this means: is that when individuals
and institutions strive for ‘excellence’ and to
be ‘the best they can’, as stand-alone entities,
by out-competing others, then this kind of
demeanour extirpates ‘group think’ which is
687
the true enemy of innovation. Privatization,
as the epitome of pursuing one’s own self-
interests, is the means by which to move
beyond a dulling of the senses, and thus con-
stitutes the true hallmark of ‘quality’.
6 There is no such thing as an unlevel playing
field – only opportunities forgone or lack of
aspiration.
What this means: according to this disposi-
tion, is that there is no such thing as socially
constructed obstacles or impediments –
merely an impoverishment of thinking about
how to productively grasp opportunities
and turn them into personal/institutional
successes.
7 The engine for sorting out educational worth and
value resides in the exercise of choice.
What this means: is that in the neoliberal
school, the only meaningful arbiter of worth
or value is the extent to which students, their
families and the school avail themselves of
choices – whether that be the selection of an
appropriate school, subject choices within
the school by students, or the choice by stu-
dents of career pathways for the future.
8 Education has to be future-focused rather than
becoming mired in immediacy or acquiescing to
emotionality.
What this means: is that the neoliberal school
quintessentially regards itself as acting objec-
tively and rationally, in which case students’
(and their families’) emotional lives have no
place in the school. Issues that bring imme-
diacy, and that have a history, are deemed
irrelevant in the neoliberal school.
9 Stratification is a desirable, crucial and inevitable
outcome of the differential application of effort.
What this means: is that the neoliberal school
proudly proclaims its transparency in reveal-
ing rankings, because without hierarchies
choice is not possible – by parents of schools,
by students with regard to their desired
futures, further education providers in select-
ing the most able, or by potential employers
in recruiting workers. Such hierarchies are a
688 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
direct reflection of the past application of
diligence and effort.
10 Educational context is unimportant – place is a
neutral concept of no educational significance.
What this means: is that in the neoliberal
school, social forces are regarded with scep-
ticism. While there are attempts, at the mar-
gins, to ameliorate ‘disadvantage’, any such
measures are highly circumscribed, and only
for the most ‘deserving’ minorities.
11 The way to deal with differences in ability is to
sort individuals into tracks or trajectories best
suited to innate ability – hence the importance
of calibration and measurement.
What this means: is that sorting students into
pathways such as ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’,
and even school types, is the only feasible
way of handling differences in ability,
aspirations and application. Testing and
measurement are the neutral means by which
discriminations have to be made and
legitimated.
12 The final stage in any attempt to sort, rank,
compare and contrast value involves providing
a sobering lesson to those who are deemed
‘unfit’ because of their ‘market failure’, and the
unequivocal message it gives on where they sit
in the constructed hierarchy. The takeaway lesson
is on the necessity of them ‘fitting into place’
(Taylor, 2012).
What this means: is that the neoliberal school
regards the hierarchical ordering it produces
as being the consequence of deliberate indi-
vidual action/inaction, and the message must
be heeded.
13 Lastly, the neoliberal school creates the space
within which leaders are freed from bureaucratic
shackles and are able to exercise ‘heroic’ leader-
ship (Kulz, 2017) in acquiring all of the visionary
benefits that come from having autonomy.
What this means: hovering above all of this –
indeed, implicit in everything that the neolib-
eral school does – are leaders who understand
how to avail themselves of the autonomy
granted to them, and how to create a com-
mensurate school culture for students,
teachers and parents. Such leaders are seen
as being ‘heroic’ in the way they unleash the
unbridled potential of everyone in the school.
This rough parody caricature of the neo-
liberal school provides a robust basis from
which to look at how the existential lives of
working class students ‘speak back’ to an
entity that is essentially alien to their being.
The basis of my argument is that the dispo-
sitions of the neoliberal school are not only
inconsistent with young working class lives;
indeed they are highly antagonistic to them,
in manifest ways.
WHAT THEN OF A WORKING CLASS
EDUCATIONAL SENSIBILITY?
Crafting a critical pedagogy of working class
schooling requires that we get up close to
what it is that is unique about working class
lives, and the implications this might hold for
working class schooling. Michèle Lamont
(2000), in her study of US working class
males, refers to what I am pitching towards
as ‘dignity’, or the way the working class
does ‘boundary work’ in constructing and
affirming who they are. Dignity is a good
way of suturing together what I have depicted
(Smyth and Simmons, 2018) as an ‘ensemble
of working class dispositions’. Central to
Lamont’s (2000) notion of dignity is the
‘work ethic’ and sense of ‘responsibility’ that
is given expression in the working class drive
to ‘make it through’, which is to say, surviv-
ing and ‘keep[ing] their world together in the
face of economic uncertainty…and the gen-
eral unpredictability of life’ (2000: 23). We
hear much the same refrain expressed
by Lisa McKenzie (2015) in her study of
working class informants living on council
estates in Britain, expressed as ‘getting by’.
Because they are continually ‘preoccupied
with issues of security’ and do not have the
luxury of a ‘buffer’ from the unexpected in
hard times, it is not surprising to find a strong
sense of what Lamont (2000: 36) refers to as
 A CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF WORKING CLASS SCHOOLING
‘straightforwardness’ and ‘personal integ-
rity’ that takes the form of ‘standing up for
oneself’ (2000: 37) – this straightforward-
ness often comes across as not pussyfooting
around, and facing issues directly.
The notion of ‘dignity or ‘respect’ (Sennett,
2003), or their opposite ‘disrespect’ and
‘lack of recognition’, Honneth (2007) argues
resides at the heart of inequality – and for our
purposes here this is a helpful point of entry
into what lies at the centre of any attempt to
devise a critical pedagogy of working class
schooling. In its essence, Honneth’s (2007)
argument is that any approach that purports
to be a critical theory of society must have as
its ‘normative core’ notions of justice that are
‘always constituted by expectations of respect
for one’s own dignity, honour or integrity’
(2007: 71). Put another way, what Honneth
is saying is that when ‘human subjects are
denied the recognition they feel they deserve’
then what they experience are moral feelings
of ‘social disrespect’ (2007: 71). All of this
feeds precisely into my argument here that
what is occurring with the middle class insti-
tution of schooling, which has been radically
recast in the form of the neoliberal school,
is that it has been made alien, inhospitable
and disrespectful of the histories, cultures and
experiences that working class students and
their families bring to the school. Indeed, the
tenets of the neoliberal school operate in ways
that ride over the lives of these children, refuse
to accord them recognition, are derogatory,
demeaning and disparaging, and in the end
seek to accommodate them by giving them a
middle class makeover.
There are several notions in particular that
can be used to exemplify my point.
First, notions of individualism, atomism
and self-responsibilization, in the animating
sense it is propagated and celebrated in the
neoliberal school, may not be immediately
recognizable to working class students who
have a much stronger relational connection
to immediate family (fractious though that
might be in some instances), than their mid-
dle class peers. Working class children, often
689
regardless of how traumatic their lives, still
have a strong sense of affinity, belonging,
connectedness and loyalty to family, which
also extends to neighbourhood and commu-
nity. These strong relational bonds of affilia-
tion and belonging are qualitatively different
from the sense of a highly individualistic and
self-responsible self being propagated by
the neoliberal school. We often see this, for
example, in what is called ‘postcode pride’,
where working class children and their fami-
lies express strong pride in their communities,
even when widely disparaged by the middle
class in all manner of derogatory ways. So,
place and locality are seen as being crucial
in the framing of a working class persona –
something not always understood by schools
that are trying to cultivate a more cosmopoli-
tan albeit atomistic agenda.
Second, because they have to continually
live and survive with the vicissitudes of imme-
diacy, uncertainty, unpredictability and inse-
curity that so strongly frame their existence,
these factors militate against their formation
of long-term views, except in unrealistic or
fanciful ways. A good example of this is the
way many children come to school unfed and
hungry. Schools try to ameliorate the worst
instances of this by providing things like
breakfast programmes. Other students suffer
from the insecurity of not knowing whether
they have a home to go to at the end of a
school day, because of family dysfunctions
or domestic violence, and sometimes have to
be placed in short-term refuges. Under these
conditions, the immediate demands over-ride
the agenda of the school in trying to formu-
late longer-term goals.
Third, issues of dignity, pride and a strong
sense of the necessity to ‘speak back’ to per-
ceived injustices that are personal in nature,
along with a predilection to call things for
what they are – viz. honesty and straight-
forwardness – do not always co-exist well
with school rules and regulations that require
conformity, that are often formulated in
ways in which there is no participation, and
where the rationale behind their formulation
690 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
remains opaque. Often matters of fairness
and justice as expressed forthrightly by work-
ing class children are not well-understood by
the school, and the perpetrators are labelled
as ‘trouble makers’. The response to this
deep cultural trait is rather too individualis-
tic. Sometimes, children have been raised in
families where the adults are continually hav-
ing to deal with what they see as the authori-
tarianism of government welfare agencies,
and they witness at first hand the way adults
around them respond in muscular fashion.
Fourth, the whole issue of ‘choice’, which
so powerfully frames the rationale of the
neoliberal school, amounts to a ‘poverty of
choice’ (Woodcock and Toscano, 2016). For
starters, working class parents, at a pragmatic
level, have neither the time nor the vehicular
resources with which to ‘shop’ their children
around schools so as to get the ‘best deal’.
Furthermore, exercising choice of school
requires a modicum of skill and the ability to
locate, access, process, interpret and act upon
the ‘liquified forest of metrics’ (Woodcock
and Toscano, 2016) required to feasibly
exercise choice – something that is simply
beyond the realm of the practical for most
working class parents. Under these condi-
tions, the notion of working class students as
‘client-consumers’ immersed in a ‘landscape
of metricised competition’ (Woodcock and
Toscano, 2016) is simply a nonsense. There
may be a rhetoric of choice, but such rhetoric
has a completely hollow ring to it for the work-
ing class – reality is rather a poverty of choice.
A CALL FOR AN ACTIVIST THEORY
OF WORKING CLASS SCHOOLING
By this point, it is time to look at the more
general architecture of what a critical peda-
gogy of working class schooling might look
like, and here I want to frame this around
questions, rather than prescriptions or
answers. Taking the lead from Paulo Freire,
the approach will be to give precedence to a
‘pedagogy of the question’ over the ‘peda-
gogy of the answer’. As Bruss and Macedo
(1985), in an interview with Paulo, put it:
The pedagogy of the question requires that [we]
distance [ourselves] from [our] bureaucratic daily
existence, while [we] become more aware, through
reflection, of the mythical facts that enslave [us].
(1985: 8)
As I have argued elsewhere (Smyth et al.,
2014), it is a more ‘humbling experience’
and ‘takes a lot more courage’ to come up
with questions and perplexities rather than
provide answers. What I have to say next in
terms of the ‘conditions for working class
schooling’ should therefore be treated as
provisional and as ideas to be tried and
debated in practice – which is not to say
that being provisional and democratic is to
accept a situation where anything goes. Far
from it!
Taking a lead from Patrick Finn (1999),
working class schooling needs to position
itself as taking a stand against the dominant
status quo, through what he calls ‘literacy
with an attitude’. In other words, it needs
to be informed by a ‘defiant imagination’
(Kenway and Fahey, 2009: 9) in which work-
ing class schooling consist of more than
teaching children to ‘sit still and listen’ (Finn,
1999: chapter 9). In his quite raunchy book,
Finn (1999) argues that for the working class
to reclaim their rights to a meaningful educa-
tional experience, a number of things need to
occur: literacy needs to be ‘made dangerous’
(chapter 13); there needs to be an upending of
the ‘entrenched school’ (chapter 6); notions
of neutrality and detachment need to be jet-
tisoned in favour of an avowed process of
‘taking sides’ (chapter 14); there needs to be
a pervasive intent on constructing an ‘oppo-
sitional identity’ (chapter 4); and in the end,
there needs to be an interruption to the situ-
ation of schools continuing to serve only the
middle class, and the working class needs to
get ‘as mad as hell’, maintaining the rage,
and loudly proclaim that they are ‘not taking
it any more’ (chapter 15).
 A CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF WORKING CLASS SCHOOLING
Here are some starting points for a set of
conditions.
• Place and context are important in working class
education: rather than expunging, ignoring or
demeaning the importance and immediacy of
place in these young working class lives, along with
history and culture, the educational experience
might be significantly enriched if context is used
as an orienting focus. Questions that might be
asked might include:
{{ what kind of community do we live in?
{{ how did it come to be like this?
{{ what are its strengths?
{{ how does it differ from other communities?
{{ how might we celebrate its differences?
{{ what would learning look like that started
from within working class lives?
• Relationships are important in working class
education: given what we know about the crucial
role relationships play in working class lives,
some pedagogical questions that might inform
learning could include:
{{ who are the most important people in our
lives? Why?
{{ what do we know about how these people
came to be important to us?
{{ how does knowing about these relationships
help us?
{{ what do we need to know more about?
{{ do all people have relationships like ours?
{{ how do we relate to other people, and how
do they relate to us? How does this feel?
{{ are relationships at the centre of what happens
in this school? How?
{{ is there anything we would want to be different
about our relationships?
{{ what would the world be like if we
changed…?
• Success-oriented learning: one thing middle class
schooling does is that it persistently reaffirms
hierarchical ordering, and for working class
students, their families and communities, the
repeated lesson is that they are on ‘the lowest
rung’ (Peel, 2003). The strategy that lies behind this
is that of artificially rationing educational success
(Gillborn and Youdell, 2000), and the means
for doing that is educational testing. Puncturing
this cruel hoax requires starting from a different
position: that working class children have strengths
that need to be acknowledged, celebrated and
rewarded. They need to be given agency rather
691
than accorded victim status through continual
failure. Orienting questions might include:
{{ what strengths do these students bring to
school?
{{ how might the school actively recognize and
affirm these working class cultural assets?
{{ what form would a more socially just and
inclusive curriculum take?
{{ what might a different form of assessment
take that does not have competitive individu-
alism as its singular focus?
{{ how might the school reinvent itself so
that it actively endorses and rewards the
success and achievements of working class
students rather than highlighting, solidifying
and entrenching their deficits?
• Acknowledging the place of emotions: students
and their families have emotionally laden lives,
and these are often not left at the school gate
or the classroom door, and for working class
students directness and honesty means emotions
are never far from the surface. Schools often
attempt to handle emotional issues by recasting
them as behavioural issues requiring ‘behaviour
management policies’. Questions that might give
a different inflection might include:
{{ when a school responds to what it regards as
emotional issues, whose interests are really
being served?
{{ how might the school handle emotional
issues as a ‘curriculum’ issue rather than a
‘behaviour management’ issue?
{{ what then might a more educative approach
to deal with emotions look like that goes
beyond ‘management’ and what would this
mean for working class students?
Finally –
• Authentic rather than thin synthetic forms of
leadership: leadership in middle class schools
has become obsessively pre-occupied with manu-
facturing images, impressions and deceptions
around forms of self-aggrandisement largely for
marketing purposes. Some questions to interrupt
this unproblematic trajectory might include:
{{ how can schools detach themselves from
synthetic processes of image and impression
management?
{{ what would it mean to a school if resources
currently wasted by schools trying to improve
their ‘market share’ were able to be used
692 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
instead to improve the learning of the least
advantaged students?
{{ indeed, what would a radical and provisional
view of leadership look like that took seri-
ously the need to actively listen to the com-
munity in which the school was located?
{{ instead of a top-down view of leadership
vested in high office, how could leadership
be recast so as to be exercised by whoever
possessed expertise on a particular issue?
Conclusion
Anything less than the kind of analysis pre-
sented here can only continue to leave a grossly
distorted education system uninterrupted, with
working class students continuing to be pushed
to the educational margins – something that is
surely unacceptable and unsustainable!
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Critical Pedagogy as Research
INTRODUCTION
In my explorations of the literature about
critical pedagogy and in my interactions with
students and colleagues, I have noticed a
common misconception about the origins of
Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy. It is often
assumed that Freire’s literacy project in which
he taught 400 Brazilian workers to read was
the starting point of critical pedagogy, that he
somehow thought up this method, and then
tried it out with adult workers, yielding tre-
mendous success. However, this abbreviated
version of Paulo Freire’s work takes his phi-
losophy and practice out of the context of his
biography, which imparts a false mysticism
upon critical pedagogy as a philosophy and a
false sense of instrumentalism about critical
pedagogy as a method. Less widely known is
the story of how Paulo Freire came to his
philosophy of critical pedagogy, which he
then implemented in his famous literacy cir-
cles. Prior to this notable event, Paulo Freire
worked for the Social Service of Industry
60
Tr i c i a M . K r e s s
(SESI), an organization that provided social
services and education for workers and their
children in Recife, Brazil. It was during this
time, what Freire calls his ‘formative time’
(Freire, 1996), when his ideas about dialogue,
praxis, and conscientization began to emerge
as he engaged in inquiry as the head of the
Department of Education and Culture.
For Freire, naturalistic inquiry was funda-
mental for developing his knowledge in order
to improve upon the educational opportunities
SESI provided for workers and their children.
This early inquiry, what Freire (1992) called
learning with the people, was not only founda-
tional to the development of his famous philos-
ophy and practice, but also remained essential
for developing his praxis throughout his life
after his famous literacy circles had concluded.
Indeed, throughout Freire’s writings, critical
pedagogy was described as an inquiry process
for teachers, learners, and leaders alike. When
writing of his work at SESI, he frequently
uses words like ‘research’, ‘observe’, ‘evalu-
ate’, and ‘theorize’ (Freire, 1996). Yet it is
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AS RESEARCH
atypical for critical pedagogy to be categorized
as a research method.1 It is also atypical for
research to be thought of as a pedagogical pro-
ject; even though, for Freire, this was exactly
the purpose of his research. By positioning
himself as a researcher, he was assuming the
stance of a learner alongside those for whom
he served as teacher or administrator. This
early iteration of Freire’s dialogic learning was
firmly rooted in naturalistic inquiry. For Freire,
critical pedagogy and educational research
were not separate and discrete activities.
As a researcher of critical pedagogy and
urban education and a doctoral professor, I
have come to understand this phenomenon –
the divide between ‘doing’ education and
‘doing’ educational research – as part of a
legacy of modernist tendencies toward classi-
fying and categorizing organic parts of human
life into tidy categories that can be easily
examined via Western conceptualizations of
‘scientific research’. The goal of research of
this type is to feed into the larger Western
humanist project of ‘progress’, that is, seek-
ing out the ‘truth’ of phenomena in order
to replicate, perfect or otherwise ‘fix’ pro-
cesses that either ‘work’ or are ‘inefficient’
or ‘broken’. This particular logic is predi-
cated by a legacy of Enlightenment thinking
that prioritizes instrumentality, reductionism,
distance, disinterest, and, ultimately, same-
ness.2 Research methods built upon these
logics are artificial and can be a hindrance
to scholar-practitioners who wish to conduct
more organic, immersive, practice-based
research. They also run counter to the tenets
of critical pedagogy as a way of being, which
encourage an inquisitive, relational ontology
through which to develop new understand-
ings of self and other with and in the world.
In this regard, conceptualizing research
about critical pedagogy paradoxically disal-
lows the organic, embodied knowledge of
being a teacher–learner–inquirer in a criti-
cal pedagogy learning context/relationship to
enter into and influence the research process.
Likewise, the research process is divorced
from the organic teaching–learning–inquiry
695
process, which becomes objectified, or in
Freire’s term, dehumanized, in order for it
to be examined and then worked upon from
the ‘outside’. This creates an epistemologi-
cal schism for scholar-practitioners of criti-
cal pedagogy who do not see their work as
bifurcated in this way. The resulting contra-
dictions between how scholar-practitioners
understand themselves as teachers–­learners–
researchers and hegemonic assumptions
about what it means to embody and enact
scholar versus practitioner personas delimit
who is considered knowledgeable, what
can be known, and how one comes to know
(Kincheloe, 2003). In the sections that fol-
low, by using Paulo Freire’s firsthand
accounts of his time of inquiry at SESI3 in
parallel with recollections from my own work
as a teacher-researcher with urban youth,
I trouble this false binary of doing critical
teaching–­learning and researching about criti-
cal ­teaching–­learning. By providing examples
of how inquiry is simultaneously within and
about critical teaching–learning, I blur the
modernist boundaries between subject and
object and offer an alternative view of critical
pedagogy as a methodological–­pedagogical
praxis that includes and values complex,
holistic, and embodied scholar-practitioner
knowledge.
TEACHING-RESEARCHING FROM
THE ‘INSIDE-OUT’: INQUIRY
AS ITERATIVE PROJECTS
My inquiry about the Young Researchers Club
began well before the after-school club was even
conceived of. I was invited by one of my doctoral
advisees to co-teach an elective class in his high
school. The class, Social Activism, was designed to
engage students in thinking critically about society
by introducing them to various theoretical texts
and guiding them in conducting critical social
research. The students read Ain’t No Makin’ It
(MacLeod, 2009), kept personal journals, and
discussed social reproduction theories that were
described in the book. After this reading and
writing, the students worked collectively to
696 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
generate a research topic and questions that they
would then investigate by using various
ethnographic research methods. The topic they
chose was, ‘Why do students come to Urban High
School?’ They created and administered surveys to
students and teachers in the school and they
conducted individual interviews with students and
faculty. After their data was analyzed, they
presented their findings to the school in a town
hall forum. The class was very successful, and
students were engaged and energized by their
work. However, at the end of the school year
when the school was restructured because of its
failing status, the class was eliminated. Thus was
born the idea for the Young Researchers Club, an
after-school inquiry group to fill the gap left by the
cancellation of Social Activism. My co-teacher and
I knew that some powerful learning had taken
place in the class, and the after-school club was an
opportunity to continue that learning and to
document it.
In Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life
and Work, Paulo Freire (1996) describes in
detail the ‘projects’ that he and others
engaged in as they sought to reform the edu-
cation and service provisions of SESI. His
goals were very pragmatic but also very
ambitious – he wanted to democratize the
organization from top to bottom, including
the daily administrative activities and the
working relationships between employees.
His vision for a democratic education went
well beyond the classroom walls because he
believed that no education could ever be truly
democratic if the organization in which it
was embedded was undemocratic and did not
value and include the knowledge of its work-
ers. So with the help of others he worked
with, Freire would target a particular place
where he wanted to make changes and begin
to implement reforms. Every time his team
would initiate one of the reform projects, he
would engage in a detailed process of docu-
menting and evaluating what happened. He
would then discuss the results of these activi-
ties with his collaborators, and they would
reflect on the experience and engage with
theoretical literature to think not only about
what happened but also why it happened;
what were the underlying theories that guided
their decisions? With this knowledge, he and
his collaborators were able to reveal the
hidden philosophies that guided their com-
monsense assumptions and actions, which
often ran counter to their professed goals of
democratic participation. His recollections
about his own missteps are refreshingly
honest as he recounts the ways that reform
was, at first, undemocratic, though steeped in
good intentions. For example, he refers to
professional development for teaching staff
and workshops for parents that were designed
to meet these groups’ needs and address
topics that would be useful to them, but only
actually met their needs coincidentally
because they were not designed with parents’
and teachers’ direct input.
Through trial and error, Freire and his
team came to realize that they needed to
educate themselves while also being system-
atic in documenting and critically reflect-
ing on their reform efforts. It was through
his team’s inquiries – what he refers to as
‘observations’ and ‘evaluations’ – that
they were able to gain the knowledge they
needed in order to authentically engage par-
ents, teachers, and co-workers in reforms
that emerged from various stakeholders’
interests and desires as participants in the
learning or working environment and in
society more broadly. It is important here to
note that when Freire refers to these inquiry
activities, they were not separate from the
day-to-day workings of the reform projects.
Each project depended upon generating rela-
tional knowledge in dialogue with various
SESI stakeholders. Freire explains how his
co-worker Heloisa Bezerra, a social worker
for SESI, would document these dialogues,
and this documentation served as the data
that informed their critical reflections and
enabled them to amend their theories and
practices such that the two became better
aligned. Never did he discuss an a priori plan
to collect and analyze data. Instead, engag-
ing in the dialogue groups and documenting
and reflecting on this dialogic knowledge
exchange was the research, and it was this
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AS RESEARCH
research that informed Freire’s praxis. As he
explains in detail,
I was convinced during that time, and my lived
experience later confirmed my belief, of the funda-
mental importance of education in the process of
change. In other words, knowledge guides change.
Thus, it became necessary to add educational prac-
tice to our attempts to expand the sphere of deci-
sion making within the SESI clubs. This educational
practice was informed by the stimulus of episte-
mological curiosity. It was necessary to keep our
eyes open to avoid the development of dichoto-
mies between doing and thinking, between prac-
tice and theory, between acquiring skills and
knowing the raison d’etre behind the technique,
between politics and education, and between
information and education. (Freire, 1996: 99)
Freire did not parse out research as something
that happened outside the larger reform efforts.
Rather, research and dialogue to Freire were
one and the same. The documentation
allowed a means of capturing what happened
so that it could be reflected upon later as he
and his collaborators continued developing
their praxis.
Most research genres, or at least the way
research genres are explained in methods
texts, do not account for the natural inquiry
processes that educators engage in on a daily
basis (Kress, 2011). Teachers observe, ask
questions, document, reflect, make hypoth-
eses, try out experiments, and make adjust-
ments to their practice (Kincheloe, 2003).
They do this, often, without even thinking
about it because it is engrained in their ways
of being as teachers who want to create posi-
tive and productive learning experiences for
their students. Typically, these actions are
more like a reflex, an enacting of one’s habi-
tus (Bourdieu, 1990), rather than intentional
and discrete research activities that are eas-
ily categorized as ‘research’. As such, these
inquiry practices are necessarily messy,
improvisational, and entangled in teachers’
day-to-day lives in schools. In fact, they are
very much like teaching itself. Even though a
teacher might enter the classroom with a les-
son plan, it is often necessary to improvise in
order to meet students’ needs in the moment.
697
In this regard, critical pedagogy as research
method mimics Freire’s ‘project’ approach to
education reform. Teachers pick a spot where
they want to make change and they work on
finding out more about it so they can improve
it, but this happens in the moment, and the
process is ongoing and iterative, organically
leading the teacher-researcher into the next
‘project’ as classroom life unfolds.
As a result, one of the greatest challenges
of a teacher-researcher who wishes to do
research in the academy is trying to disen-
tangle teaching and research. In my own
example above, like in the discussion of
Freire’s ‘projects’, research is ongoing and
always both within and about teaching and
learning. My teaching-researching within
and about the Social Activism course turned
Young Researchers Club (YRC) started from
the moment I set foot in the Social Activism
classroom and I began listening to and inter-
acting with the students. Not all of these stu-
dents wound up being part of the club, but
the learning I engaged in with them greatly
informed my later work with the YRC. As a
university faculty member and a doctoral pro-
fessor, I have been trained and likewise train
my students to think of research as having a
beginning and a conclusion and being located
in particular research ‘sites’. Classic research
conceptualizations start with either the iden-
tification of a problem or the generation of a
hypothesis, and then a population and/or prac-
tice is examined in order to make truth claims
about them/it to draw forth implications for
further research. Yet my own experience with
teacher-research and my secondhand experi-
ence working with doctoral students who are
teacher-researchers illuminates the artificial-
ity of these geo-spatial–temporal boundaries
that we are asked to identify. Research, like
teaching, is bound up in our histories, pre-
sent, and multiple possible futures, and so
as we attempt to ‘see’ our inquiry projects
through the eyes of researchers, we will still
always ‘see’ through our teachers’ eyes as
well. This is why what I saw from working
in the Social Activism course, specifically
698 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
how very capable the students were of doing
intellectual work despite the fact that they
were attending a ‘failing’ school, led me to
wonder what would happen if students were
provided with opportunities to engage in this
type of intellectual work outside the bounda-
ries of the typical school day. Just like Freire
and his co-workers would see each ‘project’
as contributing to their knowledge and lead-
ing into their next project, such was the case
for me with the YRC. Contrary to the more
traditional means of beginning research with
a problem or hypothesis, that starts from the
outside and looks in on the learning environ-
ment, this kind of research begins from inside
the teacher by locating their purpose. The
teacher-researcher considers what he or she
wants to accomplish – in my case this was
providing a space where students’ knowl-
edge was valued and honored while doing
scholarly work – and then they work from
the inside-out to ask questions about that
work and its significance. The work is very
personal because it requires the teacher to be
fully present as a co-participant in all aspects
of the teaching–learning–research process.
ATTENDING TO THE AFFECTIVE
DIMENSIONS OF RELATIONAL
ONTOLOGY
I sat in the back of the classroom while my research
group students sat at desks configured in a
horseshoe. The students were proud to be sharing
their work with the Assistant Superintendent of the
school district. Spock narrated their slideshow,
which detailed their research questions, data
collection, analysis, and findings. The data showed
that most students attended the school because
they wanted to learn and get an education. Most
teachers wanted to teach and to support their
students in their learning. Yet the students and
teachers both felt that they didn’t care about
one other or about the students’ education. This
gave rise to an interesting question: if they shared
the same goals, why did they think they didn’t care
about each other or about teaching and learning?
Clearly, there was a problem with communication
and connection. Students and faculty both
expressed feelings of being ‘disrespected’. When
Spock was finished speaking, she sat in the
horseshoe with her research team, and the
Assistant Superintendent, who was working on his
own doctoral research at the time, stood up to
address the group. As he began speaking, the
students’ proud expressions began to change. My
stomach clenched as I felt the anger starting to
swell amidst the group. The administrator began
to lecture the students in research basics. He asked
them, ‘how many of you know what quantitative
means? Do y’all know that word ‘quantitative’?,
stressing the last word and sounding it out in an
exaggerated way. The students sat in silence.
‘Come on now, does anyone know?’ he asked
again. Spock set her jaw and looked away. Kirk
pushed his chair back, leaned his elbows on his
knees, put his head in his hands, and looked down
at the floor. Of course they knew. They had been
conducting mixed-methods research for the better
part of a year. They had just presented their
quantitative data from a school-wide survey they
had designed, administered, compiled, and
analyzed, and yet he somehow missed it.
Afterward, the students and I debriefed, and I tried
my best to temper their anger and disappointment.
Spock, especially, was furious. ‘How can he just do
that?’ she asked. ‘Like we’re a bunch of stupid
kids! Like, yo, that wasn’t even normal! Who talks
like that?’ Who indeed, I wondered, as I held back
anger and disappointment of my own.
While I have published several articles about
the YRC, this is the first time I am recounting
this particular incident in a publication.
Throughout my work with the YRC, we
shared with each other not just our ideas
about education, research, and social justice,
but our feelings about how these things
impacted our lives in very real ways. Over
time, we developed a deep respect for each
other and saw each other as both teachers and
learners, and all of us together were inquirers
of the world. On more than one occasion,
I invited YRC students to be guest lecturers
in my doctoral seminars where they taught
doctoral students, all in-service teachers and
administrators, about critical social theory
and ethnographic research. Outside the club,
Spock worked with me independently on
theorizing about the nature of knowledge
production. So imagine our surprise when
the Assistant Superintendent failed to
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AS RESEARCH
recognize the depth of their knowledge of
research, even as they presented their research
to him. The students received this lack of
acknowledgment as a form of disrespect,
which immediately caused them to shut
down. His behavior triggered disappoint-
ment, anger, and deep sadness. They thought
this man was supposed to be both a research
peer and an adult role model, but instead he
showed himself to be no different than any
other adult who viewed them as deficient.
Teaching and learning, whether in a formal
classroom setting or in an after-school club
like this one, is an emotional process.
Teaching critically and dialogically is espe-
cially so because of the ‘all-in’ way that
teachers and students learn to connect with
each other in their quest for social justice
through education. Conducting research
about this type of relational experience can
be equally charged with emotion that in mod-
ernist conceptualizations of research would
cast doubt on the research quality, position-
ing the work as ‘unreliable’ and ‘invalid’
because it is ‘biased’.4 In part, this is why I
have not written about this incident before.
Yet, many years later, the pain is still palpa-
ble; this moment lives on, as Freire (1996:
94) has said, in ‘my body’s memory’.
In his reflections about his work at SESI,
Paulo Freire (1996) repeatedly invokes the
significance of relationships, emotions, and
embodied knowledge. First and foremost, he
recognized that people’s lived experiences
mattered and had a significant impact on
the day-to-day functioning of educational
organizations, which impacted classroom
teaching and learning. The sensations of the
body when people are living in poverty, when
children are attending dilapidated schools,
and when workers are treated as insignificant,
are important. Furthermore, the emotions
evoked by these day-to-day experiences
cannot be removed from teaching, learning or
working in these organizations. Freire wrote
in great detail about the impact other people’s
embodied experiences had on him while in
SESI. For instance, in Letters to Cristina,
699
published more than 30 years after he
worked at SESI, he wrote, ‘If I were a painter
I could easily draw some of those pained
faces, whose strong traits reappear in my
memory’ (1996: 94). In one specific example
of a reform project where emotions proved
significant, Freire described the professional
development dialogue in which Francisco,
a janitor, spoke about his daily experiences
with others in the workplace. Freire recounts
Francisco’s story about how he was treated
as insignificant by others, which evoked
emotions that forced his co-workers to come
face-to-face with their own acts of elitism
and dehumanization. He writes:
One could sense in the silence, in the fidgeting of
bodies on chairs, the discomfort that Francisco’s
comments had caused those who had never said
good morning to him or thanked him for his
services. (1996: 97)
For Freire, incidents like these, ones that
‘moved’ him, were important to recollect
because they indicated a shift in knowledge
and a direction for transforming practice.
And while he is careful to express that he
tried not to let emotion cloud his recollection
of the details of events, he does not downplay
the role that the affective dimension has on
engaging in inquiry for transformative praxis.
Indeed, attending to emotions was central to
developing strong relationships through
which learning and change could take place.
Given the interconnected relationship
between teaching–learning–inquiry in the
critical pedagogy classroom, teachers and
learners become invested in each other and
their collective learning and well-being. In
traditional conceptualizations of research,
there is no room for the intense affective
knowledge that emerges from working closely
with students in a teaching–learning–research
relationship. Yet teacher-researchers will know
that some of the most profound moments
of learning and insights for research occur
in these emotional spaces. Before even
discussing what happened in the incident
with the Assistant Superintendent, I had a
700 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
pretty good idea of what the students were
feeling and why. This is because we had
come to know each other pretty well, and I
understood their feelings about how they
were often treated as if they were stupid by
adults in schools. I shared their sadness and
disappointment, which further solidified my
commitment to them long after they had
graduated from their school. To this day,
I am still in contact with some of them,
and the emotional connection we shared
re-emerges when I see updates about their
accomplishments as adults. This type of
embodied knowledge is traditionally seen
as detrimental to using research to identify
‘truth’ about the students’ experiences in
school. But in critical pedagogy as research,
while accurate reporting of what happened is
important, identifying ‘truth’ is almost beside
the point. What happened and how we felt in
that moment and throughout the research and
beyond is our truth, and it necessarily has
impacted us from thereon. These moments
were often catalytic, informing what we
did next and why, and because memories
reside in and re-emerge from the body in our
emotions, they have had a lasting impact in
our lives outside of the school and beyond the
timeline of this particular project.
DISRUPTING TEACHING–
RESEARCHING BOUNDARIES:
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AS RESEARCH
METHODOLOGY
Part of me felt like an imposter. I knew what ‘real’
research was supposed to look like. I preached
about it in my doctoral courses and held my
students to textbook descriptions of ‘research
quality’. But that was definitely not what I was
doing in my own research. As I went to the high
school to work with my ‘participants’ after school,
I knew when I got there that in my own practice as
a teacher-researcher, these research quality criteria
would quickly dissolve. I could not step outside
what it meant for me to enter into this space.
I could not ‘bracket’ my own history and deflect
the impact it would have on how I would see and
know the young people I worked with and their
school. First and foremost, I was in a teaching–
learning relationship with students who lived very
different lives from what I had lived as a young
person. Like them, I grew up in an urban area, but
as a White middle-class female living in a relatively
affluent area of the city, I didn’t experience the
emotional and physical hardships they dealt with
daily. I could not know what it meant to have
brown skin in a historically racist and deeply
segregated city. I could not know what it meant to
live in poverty and work a part-time job after
school in order to pay my family’s electric bill.
I could not know what it felt like to be silenced
because my first language was devalued in a
classroom. I could not know what it felt like to
pretend I was stupid in order to get a passing
grade in a class that was ‘dumbed down’ and
beneath my academic capabilities. All this, as I
traveled through a decrepit school building with
metal detectors at the front door, non-working
bathrooms, broken windows, and an ancient
heating system that often broke down in the cold
and damp New England winters. Because I could
never know these embodied experiences, I needed
to better come to know how my students
experienced these things. And they needed to
know me too, as a person, a teacher, a researcher,
and as someone they could trust to not reproduce
these very same experiences they had been
subjected to throughout their histories in school.
This relational knowledge was secondary to my
research objectives as described in my application
to my university’s Institutional Review Board, but
as a critical teacher-researcher, they needed to be
my foremost priority.
There is a significant emotional burden that
comes along with prioritizing practitioners’
natural ways of engaging as inquirers in the
world because ‘traditional’ research genres
disregard this type of inquiry as ‘not research’
or ‘not scholarly’ enough. Traditional research
is supposed to be disinterested and tidy. Data
collection is supposed to be systematic and
orderly. But any teacher knows that learning
environments are unpredictable; moreover,
not everything that is worth knowing about
the classroom is located within the walls of
the classroom and not everything worth
knowing about learning is located in students’
brains. Teachers’ and students’ lives outside
the classroom cannot be separated from the
learning that happens inside the classroom
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AS RESEARCH
and what happens inside the classroom nec-
essarily impacts our lives outside. As I
worked with the young people in the exam-
ple above, my instincts as a teacher often led
me to set aside the detailed research plan I
had crafted for the Institutional Review
Board and to instead allow us space for dia-
logue and learning even though I knew this
was not what I ought to be doing as a
researcher. My needs as a researcher could
not usurp the needs of the collective because
if they did, I would be reproducing oppres-
sive circumstances in these young people’s
lives. What’s more, if I shoehorned a detailed
research plan into our learning environment,
I would force an artificial distance between
myself and my students. If collective learn-
ing was our goal, I couldn’t allow my per-
sonal research goals to stand in the way.
Even upon our first meeting, I could tell this
would be a mistake that would ultimately
cost all of us an opportunity to engage in
democratic learning together. I could not be
an effective researcher of this learning envi-
ronment if I was an ineffective participant in
the teaching and learning relationship.
As I reflect upon Paulo Freire’s work at
SESI and his description of his philoso-
phy of critical pedagogy in Pedagogy of the
Oppressed (Freire, 2007), I cannot help but
wonder how much is missed by thinking
about critical pedagogy in an abstract, philo-
sophical way and thinking about research
methods as external to the process of teach-
ing and learning. Pedagogy of the Oppressed
is undoubtedly inspiring. It is a text I go back
to over and over, and each time I see some-
thing new and I learn more from it. It helps
me to think about and then rethink what I
presume to be true about teaching and learn-
ing for social justice. Yet if we think about
Pedagogy of the Oppressed in the context of
Paulo Freire’s biography, we cannot ignore
the fact that this was written out of context.
This is significant because in 1964, nearly
20 years after his foundational time at SESI,
Freire was imprisoned and forced into exile.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written while
701
Freire was in Chile, is an abstraction of the
philosophy embedded in his practice when he
was in Brazil. It necessarily needs to be recon-
textualized by readers in order to put his ideas
into practice. Likewise, any methods text that
teacher-researchers read are also decontextu-
alized; they are manuals in which research-
ers say ‘why’ and ‘how’ to use particular
research approaches, and they must be recon-
textualized as teacher-researchers attempt to
conduct their own research. In this case, both
critical pedagogy and research methods are
assumed to be processes that start from the
outside-in rather than the inside-out, which
runs counter to Freire’s philosophy: critical
pedagogy always starts with the learner as
a knowing subject who reads the word and
the world. The teacher-researcher becomes
‘thingified’ (i.e., dehumanized) (Macedo,
1994) when research methods are construed
as ‘tools’ that are imparted upon them from a
text. This is parallel to what Freire called the
‘banking method’ of learning (Freire, 2007).
Yet, when my doctoral students sit in front
of me in my philosophy of research class,
most assume that research is something that
happens before, after, in addition to, and out-
side of daily practice. Even research genres
that are by nature more organic, for instance
narrative genres like autoethnography or por-
traiture or participatory methods, still seem
to absorb the modernist logics of ‘scientific
research’ once they are positioned within gen-
res and subgenres and classified as particular
research methods. For example, as I ask my
students to develop systematic research plans,
I have already asked them to remove the act
of research from what they do on a daily basis
as educators. Their research methods might
not be fundamentally different from activities
they perform in their daily practice, but they
are extracted from their context, reorganized,
and systematized into operationalizable data
collection and analysis techniques. Through
this process of distillation, much of the
power of organic inquiry practices gets lost,
and much of the knowledge that is generated
through the relational processes of teaching
702 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and learning or engaging in dialogue with
others goes unaccounted for or is cast aside
as ‘biased’ or tangential. What’s more, cer-
tain activities that are designed to ensure that
students know how to conduct ‘high-quality’
research are built into the academic culture
and have high stakes for doctoral students.
Doctoral benchmarks, dissertation proposals,
and the like can prove to be impediments for
students whose research desires are not easily
abstracted from their professional identities
and day-to-day classroom practices. This is
because teacher-researchers are asked to look
at their very personal work from the outside-
in and in fractured ways that are fundamen-
tally oppositional to their ways of knowing
and being as teachers. This can easily result
in research plans that are inauthentic and arti-
ficial because they are divorced from their
values as teachers.
As I consider the relationship between
methods imparted from the outside in and
what Freire called ‘banking education’ (i.e.,
when teachers deposit outside knowledge
into learners’ brains), a number of questions
arise that could prove useful for generating
more holistic scholar-practitioner identities
and practices:
• How might research be more authentic and mean-
ingful if teacher-researchers were encouraged to
think about critical pedagogy as research?
• What would happen if instead of looking outside
their classrooms for methods, teachers looked
inside?
• What are the practices that teachers use to make
sense of their worlds and how might we leverage
them to afford new knowledge about teaching
and learning?
By asking these questions, I don’t mean to
imply there is nothing that teachers can learn
from methods texts, just as Freire’s concep-
tualization of dialogic learning did not imply
that students had nothing to learn from their
teachers. Throughout Freire’s life leading up
to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his practice
and inquiries were so closely intertwined that
they led him to writing this famous book
which was, essentially, the ‘findings’ of dec-
ades of teaching and learning. Perhaps
attending to these questions would allow
teacher-researchers and doctoral advisers like
me to embrace the messiness of practitioner
research and the impossibility of disentan-
gling research and practice, especially for the
practitioner-researcher who is striving toward
developing a critical praxis. Perhaps this
messiness is not a problem but an indication
that the work is deeply embedded in teaching
and learning, and is therefore having a direct
impact on the lives of all those involved in
the pedagogical-research project. This more
organic conceptualization of critical peda-
gogy as research methodology is immersed
in pedagogy as pedagogy is immersed in
research, affording a holistic teacher–learner–
researcher identity in the classroom.
Notes
1  There are some notable exceptions of authors
who have written about research as or for praxis,
including Lather (1986), Kemmis (2010), Kincheloe
et al. (2011) and Kress (2011) (among others).
However, the discussions of critical pedagogy as
a form of research in its own right have not yet
been articulated to date. Rather, texts tend to
deal with critical research and critical pedagogy
as separate activities that at times intersect or
work in tandem.
2  In this chapter, I did not draw distinctions
between quantitative or qualitative research.
While typically reductionist tendencies in research
are associated with quantitative research, it
would be false to say that qualitative methods are
less problematic for critical pedagogy researchers
than quantitative methods. The position I am
taking here is less about the particular methods a
researcher chooses and more about the purpose
that drives that person’s choices. Qualitative
and quantitative methods are both useful for
engaging in critical pedagogy as research because
the world is not easily divided into qualitative and
quantitative phenomena. Likewise, both kinds of
methods can be used for extractivist purposes
that artificially divorce research from practice and
data from world.
3  While there were several moments in Freire’s life
that may have yielded robust points of analysis
for this chapter, I selected his time at SESI for two
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AS RESEARCH
primary reasons. First, Freire himself identifies
SESI as especially significant for the development
of his philosophy articulated in Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. Freire’s work at SESI was a catalyst for
everything that he developed thereafter. Second,
he discusses his work at SESI at length in numer-
ous writings spanning nearly 30 years after he
was exiled from Brazil, which indicates the sig-
nificance of this time for his thinking in 1964 and
beyond. The extent to which he discusses this
period in his life, above any other, also provides
extensive data from which to generate claims
about the role of research in Freire’s work.
4  The tensions that arise from a relational ontology
in research have long been taken up by feminist
researchers (see for example Fonow and Cook,
1991, among others). In this chapter, I choose to
focus on critical pedagogy as a philosophy and
potential research methodology in its own right
because it allows for a theoretical dexterity that
feminism doesn’t. Critical pedagogy starts from
the student’s, teacher’s and/or researcher’s world-
view, which leaves room for innumerable identities
which may or may not reflect a feminist worldview.
The points of entry into unpacking and dismantling
oppression therefore may look different and may
or may not engage with gender as a primary lens.
While there are points of overlap and resonance
with feminist research methodologies, critical
pedagogy as research could start with gender as a
focal point, but this may not always be the case.
REFERENCES
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
703
Fonow, M. M. & Cook, J. A., eds. (1991).
Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship
as Lived Research. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving
Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY:
Bloomsbury.
Freire, P. (1996). Letters to Cristina: Reflections on
My Life and Work. New York, NY: Routledge.
Freire, P. (2007). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th
Anniversary Ed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Kemmis, S. (2010). Research for praxis: know-
ing doing. Pedagogy, Education and Praxis,
18(1): 9–27.
Kincheloe, J. L. (2003). Teachers as Researchers:
Qualitative Inquiry as a Path to Empowerment,
2nd Ed. New York, NY: Routledge.
Kincheloe, J. L., McLaren, P., Steinberg, S., &
Monzó, L. D. (2011). Critical pedagogy and
qualitative research: Advancing the Bricolage.
In N. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln, eds. The Sage
Handbook of Qualitative Research, 5th Ed.,
pp. 235–260. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kress, T. M. (2011). Critical Praxis Research:
Breathing New Life into Research Methods
for Teachers. Dordrecht, The Netherlands:
Springer.
Lather, P. (1986). Research as praxis. Harvard
Educational Review, 56(3): 257–278.
Macedo, D. (1994). Literacies of Power: What
Americans Are Not Allowed to Know. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
MacLeod, J. (2009). Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspira-
tions and Attainment in a Low Income
Neighborhood, 3rd Ed. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.

Poverty and Equality in
Early Childhood Education
Concepción Sánchez-Blanco
INTRODUCTION
In Spain, as in the rest of Europe and the
world, families fall victim to the injustices of
a global capitalist system that is founded on
social Darwinism. The financial problems
experienced by families as a result of struc-
tural unemployment and/or unstable employ-
ment undermine their well-being and their
ability to meet their most basic needs. Often,
the neoliberal policies supposedly designed to
alleviate recessionary suffering have divided
the poor and set communities against each
other in the scramble for ever more limited
financial supports. In public education, under-
privileged children from different social
groups find themselves at greater risk of con-
flict owing to competition between families
for financial assistance from public and pri-
vate institutions, thus fuelling economic
racism and negative stereotypes among the
poor themselves. The effect of this is to mask
the fallout of a perverse economic system of
unrestrained waste and consumerism, in
61
which subjects are simultaneously deprived of
the means to achieve their materialistic ambi-
tions (Klein, 1999; Kravets & Maclaran,
2018; Sánchez-Blanco, 2018).
These tensions are merely a smokescreen,
however, used to deflect attention and debate
away from the real problem: the threat posed by
the increasing socialization of children in the
ethos of market consumerism, and the wors-
ening situation of economic inequality and
injustice among them (Macrine et al., 2010;
Shor, 1996; Steinberg, 2011). When young
children bring objects of their own to school,
a situation of exclusion and economic dis-
crimination can be the result. It is vital, there-
fore, that schools pull together in the initial
stages of education to guard against the con-
struction of economistic subjectivities from
the earliest years of childhood. Early child-
hood education requires critical pedagogical
projects committed to social change and the
development of critical thought and practice
among young children and teachers (Agnello
& Reynolds, 2016). Poor children deserve
 POVERTY AND EQUALITY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
to have their stories heard, as does anybody
who has known hardship and deprivation in
their lives. Creating a debate in schools around
their experience would help to alleviate the
intense distress associated with the ‘derivative
fear’, vulnerability and insecurity described
by Bauman (2006) of a population living
under the constant threat of dire poverty or, at
a minimum, exclusion from consumption.
THE PROJECT: PARTICIPANTS
AND OBJECTIVES
The group chosen for this study consisted of
a class of 17 boys and girls aged 4–5 years
from a public sector primary school in a
coastal town in the province of A Coruña,
Galicia (Spain). In a community already hit
hard by unemployment, the years of the pro-
ject saw levels rise to an alarming high of
over 60%, which affected families and pupils
alike. The recession has resulted in a general
increase in the number of families requiring
state and/or family assistance to survive. In
order to protect the anonymity of partici-
pants, all names have been changed and no
details have been given that might reveal the
specific identity of the school involved.
One of the concerns voiced by the teacher,
‘Lucía’, was the kind of values that might be
filtering into her early childhood education
class through her own lessons on poverty,
and the extent to which she might inadvert-
ently be contributing to the development of
economistic subjectivities among her pupils.
Despite concerted efforts to teach her pupils
about values of justice and fairness, socio-
economic inequality remains a shaping influ-
ence in the children’s lives. This is especially
true of pupils from more disadvantaged back-
grounds, whose vulnerability has increased
as a consequence of cutbacks in education
which have reduced schools’ ability to pro-
vide for the specific needs of their pupils, and
the simultaneous slicing of social welfare
assistance for families.
705
The research methodology adopted for
this project was a combination of case
study, ethnography and action research, in
which my role was that of radical-critical
facilitator (Somekh, 2005; Elliott, 2007;
Kemmis, 2008; Schostak & Schostak, 2008;
Kincheloe, 2011; Steinberg & Cannella,
2012; Smyth et al., 2014a). The data were
compiled using qualitative research tech-
niques: participative observation; video-
recordings of the tasks proposed during
everyday activities; informal interviews held
with the teacher, pupils and family mem-
bers; and analysis of programmes, projects
and materials (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011).
The project frequently found itself face
to face with situations of domination and
established values, which brought home the
prevalence of power dynamics in everyday
life and their influence on how our relation-
ships are formed and conducted (McLaren &
Farahmandpur, 2005). The objective of the
study was to reappraise and challenge radi-
cally the situations of discrimination of all
kinds witnessed in the classroom; not least
among these, the feelings of inferiority, anx-
iety and insecurity caused to children and
families by their economic circumstances
(Schostak & Schostak, 2008; Sánchez-
Blanco, 2009b; Schostak, 2012; Parnell &
Iorio, 2016).
Classroom assemblies were transformed
into spaces capable of empowering chil-
dren to deal with the injustices they face on
a daily basis, both at home and at school.
The assemblies gave the children the oppor-
tunity to change the class rules and create a
constitution of sorts of their own that set out
the equal rights and duties of all (Yelland,
2005; Brown, 2008; Iorio & Visweswaraiah,
2012; Down, 2016; Sánchez-Blanco, 2016).
Strategies like this act as an antidote to the
sense of hopelessness around attaining social
justice which can become instilled in chil-
dren from early on (Freire, 2014). The dis-
cussions were aimed at encouraging a more
liberating dynamic for the teacher and the
pupils in her class, and among the families
706 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and myself as the facilitator of the project
(Sánchez-Blanco, 1997, 2015). The teacher’s
involvement helped her to achieve a more
critical awareness of the values conveyed
through her teaching practices, and the extent
to which injustice can be imposed involuntar-
ily (Nussbaum, 1997).
SCHOOLING FOR THE POOR
OR POOR SCHOOLING?
When Caritas Europa published its second
monitoring report on the impact of austerity
measures on the countries hit hardest by the
recession in Europe, Spain had the third-
highest child poverty rate in Europe, exceeded
only by Romania and Greece (Leahy et al.,
2015). The economic solutions to national
poverty and inequality should never come in
the form of the kind of colonial directives
criticized by Bhabha (2013), designed merely
to preserve an unequal dual economy that
concentrates wealth in the hands of a few and
purports to alleviate the problems of the
majority even as it excludes them. Analogous
forms of segregation are reproduced in
schools when well-meaning teachers attempt
to tackle pupils’ problems on a case-by-case
basis, instead of adopting a more comprehen-
sive school-wide approach to combating and
eradicating economic racism. Educational
projects of this kind are crucial in today’s
globalized world, in which anyone among us
could be cast off or out at any time, even
disappear without a trace, and never be
missed (Bauman, 2008). Educators should
realize that they, no less than anybody else,
are subject to the same culture of vulnerabil-
ity and disposability.
In times of crisis, when human beings
are reduced to the status of mere goods to be
bought and sold, the rich not only stay rich
but become even richer, buying while prices
are low and fomenting the economic fantasy
that greater wealth for the wealthy minority is
in everybody’s best interests (Stiglitz, 2012).
For many schools, the argument seems to
make sense, with private benefactors supply-
ing the deficiencies and failures of the public
system. What this fiction actually achieves,
however, is to inculcate schools, pupils and
families with the values of White, western,
neoliberal capitalism, to the exclusion and
delegitimization of all others (Kincheloe &
Steinberg, 2004). The 21st century has wit-
nessed the emergence of a new patrimonial
capitalism and the unabashed amassing of
immense personal fortunes under the fiscally
permissive eye of the state (Piketty, 2013). As
far as fiscal justice goes, the wealthy minor-
ity imposes its own rules on the game, using
economic threats and/or conscience-salving
donations to worthy causes to mollify dissent.
According to Sassen (2015), the problem
is not money in itself, but the self-reinforcing
rationale of finance and profit which has
succeeded in penetrating all sectors of the
population and colonized minds to view it
as a natural guiding principle in their lives.
That success is due in no small part to the
standardization of education systems world-
wide as agents of economic indoctrination.
Schools, however, have a duty to resist the
imposition of economistic subjectivities and
promote in their place the principles of social
justice, quality of life and the common good
as the foundations of all human activity (Sen,
2009; Acosta, 2013; Felber, 2015). Education
should act as a counterweight to market
forces, epitomized by consumption and debt,
and the stigmatization and marginalization
they leave in their wake. Conversely, in their
neoliberal zeal, many states actually profit
from the situations of need created by market
capitalism, commodifying ‘welfare manage-
ment’ and outsourcing it to private bidders of
all descriptions.
It seems paradoxical for schools to be
presented as just and fair, when the world
around them is based on a capitalist socio-
economic system so unjust and unfair as to
condemn whole swathes of its own citizens
to a life of poverty and exclusion. In societies
beset by economic misfortune and the social
 POVERTY AND EQUALITY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
problems created by economic inequality, the
kind of equality of opportunity promised by
education is often no more than a conveni-
ent fiction (Dubet, 2009). Government plans
in relation to non-compulsory schooling, as
in the case of early childhood education in
Spain, are announced with a politically cor-
rect veneer of freedom of choice and hon-
est intentions, in an attempt to disguise the
neoliberal instrumentalization of education
behind a much more palatable discourse of
equality (Moss, 2014).
The idea that early learning can eradicate
social inequality by equipping young chil-
dren with the same skills and abilities from
the outset, and creating a level playing field
for all to make of what they may, is a widely
accepted fallacy (Sánchez-Blanco, 2008;
Gimeno Sacristán, 2008). Much repeated by
advocates of skills-based targets and curricula,
this unnuanced theory presupposes that differ-
ences in learning outcomes between pupils are
due to the different skills levels achieved dur-
ing the early and/or compulsory stages of their
education. What it fails to take into account,
however, is the enormous, often insuperable
disadvantage at which the inequalities born of
a child’s sociocultural and/or socio-economic
background can place them. Educators on the
ground need to conceptualize and understand
poverty in all its complexity, and look beyond
the simplistic conclusions offered by educa-
tion authorities and schools which see educa-
tion as both the cause of and the solution to
the problem. ‘Lucía’, for example, was firmly
opposed to the assumption expressed by
many of her colleagues that failure by pupils
to achieve learning outcomes at primary level
was directly linked to underperformance at
the early learning stage.
In order for schools to offer children genu-
ine equality of opportunity, we must first
reconsider what equality actually means
and ask whether teachers are doing enough
to ensure that all pupils are treated in a fair
and equal manner (Dubet, 2009; Smyth et al.,
2014b). Equal treatment and opportunity
means recognizing the diversity of the school
707
population, with children from sociocultural
and minority backgrounds of all kinds, and
families living on limited resources and/or
in situations of poverty. It requires a constant
commitment to establishing a hybrid culture
of debate and exchange based on equality and
the rejection of prejudice in all its forms, in
which all voices are listened to with equal
patience, attention and respect. Genuine
equality of opportunity comes from creat-
ing liberating processes to deconstruct what
Lipovetsky & Serroy (2010) term the ‘culture-
world’: the universalized techno-capitalist
culture that has taken hold of our social lives,
lifestyles and almost every other aspect of our
existence. It is up to schools and other social
institutions to stem this consumerist tide, and
protect society and themselves from commer-
cial domination and the culture of economic
racism it brings with it. The world we live in
is a rich tapestry of people and voices of all
kinds, not the monochrome uniformity imag-
ined by transnational corporations (Davis,
2007). The special way in which young chil-
dren look at the world and the possibilities it
contains is a constant reminder to us of the
value and importance of that diversity.
A TEACHER’S DILEMMAS:
Haves and Have-nots at School
As a consequence of the recession in Spain,
a growing number of schools have found
themselves having to deal with situations of
poverty and economic disadvantage among
their pupils, and coordinate with over-
stretched, under-resourced social services in
an effort to alleviate the strain on families
and children. In the school visited for this
study, some families refused even to acknowl-
edge the dire financial situation in which
they found themselves owing to the stigma
attached to such an admission. While some
children were warned to keep quiet at school
about what was happening at home, other
708 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
families tried to protect their children from
the reality of their circumstances by pretend-
ing there was nothing to worry about
(Sánchez-Blanco, 2000, 2018). Some chil-
dren were actually incapable of sitting still
during the showing and sharing assemblies,
so great was the stress of not talking about
the personal information they had been
warned, on pain of punishment, to keep to
themselves. One child went so far as to put
his fist into his mouth to keep in the secrets
he was not allowed to share. One way of
giving these children back their voices was to
provide them with alternative forms of
expression with which to explain their expe-
rience, such as drawing or physical move-
ment, and inviting them, where possible, to
share with the assembly in that way. The
same sensitivity was required of the families
themselves, who were made aware of the
duty and need to respect the confidentiality
of the stories brought home from school by
their children (Smyth et al., 2010).
From a very young age, children affected
by this kind of economic turmoil are at risk
not only of material deprivation, but also of a
vast spectrum of negative feelings and emo-
tions which can lead to a sense of inferior-
ity and, more dangerously, to the idea that
their rights are somehow innately more lim-
ited than those of their better-off classmates.
The teacher encouraged her pupils to reflect
upon and discuss different types of experi-
ences, in order to help the children to realize
that everybody is entitled to the same rights
and responsibilities. She also attempted to
get them thinking about positive discrimina-
tion and to understand why their classmate
‘Saúl’, for example, was allowed to take off
his shoes in class while the others were not,
because the shoes he gets from the clothes
bank often do not fit him properly. Being
poor and feeling poor do not always go hand
in hand in a social setting like a school. Sen
(2009) defines poverty as the inability to
pursue reasonable life goals, the antidote to
which is to enable people to take back control
over their own lives. Real progress towards a
fair and inclusive education system can only
come about by working with children from
a very young age to find out how they feel
about and are affected by economic depriva-
tion, disadvantage and marginalization, and
examining critically the educational policies
and strategies adopted in response.
Through her participation in the project,
‘Lucía’ found herself increasingly conscious
of the classist values and prejudices inher-
ent in certain aspects of the curriculum and
the elitist behaviours they seem to reinforce:
from the admiring descriptions of the rich and
powerful pharaohs, priests, kings and queens
of Ancient Egypt as part of a class history
project, to story time tales of princes and
princesses, or poor people and their quests for
riches and a happier ever after. In one memo-
rable spiral of reflection, she spoke of the way
in which adults at children’s birthday parties
are treated as servants of the birthday king or
queen, a status underlined by the crown worn
by His or Her Majesty. It was significant as
well to note the hierarchical relationship with
peers, according to which the child with the
birthday makes all the rules while the friends
do as they are told, since he or she is mon-
arch for the day. Children should be exposed
to more stories and biographies of everyday
lives; ordinary people from the past and pre-
sent who overcame poverty and disadvantage
to make a difference for themselves and oth-
ers. Frequently these stories connect closely
with pupils, particularly when they tell of rel-
atives who sought to escape from poverty by
emigrating, for example, and all the hardship
they experienced; real-life heroes and hero-
ines who stood up to prejudice and exclusion
and refused to recognize themselves in labels
like ‘lazy’, ‘stupid’ or ‘incapable of learning’
(Nieto, 2015).
Protecting children from poverty as a right
of childhood means protecting their parents
and families as well, by creating fair and
decent working conditions that allow them
the time and resources to support their chil-
dren’s different care and education needs.
There is a blithe hypocrisy in measures that
 POVERTY AND EQUALITY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
claim to tackle child poverty while turning a
blind eye to the family poverty from which
it stems. Supplying children’s basic needs
while ignoring the need to stimulate an eco-
nomic system capable of providing families
with fair employment opportunities merely
reinforces the neocolonialist relationships of
domination and dependence that determine
how we live as a society. Families should
stand up for the right to give their children a
proper upbringing, and schools should stand
shoulder to shoulder with them, encourag-
ing and supporting their claims. ‘Lucía’ has
worked tirelessly in this regard to establish
a collaborative network with parents to com-
bat injustice at the school and outside of it,
encouraging a culture of cooperation through
critical engagement with school practices
and decision-making (Smyth et al., 2010).
Initiatives such as ‘Lucía’s’ are a vital way of
breaking down walls of scepticism and sus-
picion, so that families can begin to see the
school as a space for them and their children
to act and speak freely, and where minority
and low-income communities are empowered
(Munn & Lloyd, 2005; Kincheloe, 2008).
Efforts to build trust and inclusion are often
frustrated, however, by a spirit of unbridled
capitalism within public sector schools. In the
case of school trips costing more than many
families can afford to pay, as witnessed by
‘Lucía’, the solutions offered by her school,
however well-intentioned, only added to the
social injustice. In some instances, families
or teachers donated the money for children
who could not afford to go, or a system of
instalment payments was agreed with the
parents, with the teacher footing the immedi-
ate cost; as a final option, funding was sought
from an NGO to cover the cost outright.
The events recounted by the teacher led
to a discussion around whether the payment
alternatives offered to parents were actually
legitimating a de facto demand on families
to live beyond their means. Questions were
likewise raised as to the educational value of
such trips in the first place. ‘Paloma’s’ father’s
feelings on the subject were clear: he had no
709
desire to spend money on sending his daugh-
ter to a wildlife park because, in his view, it
created a false sense of what families like
theirs could afford. He was determined that
his daughter should be able not only to under-
stand that fact, but also to talk about their situ-
ation and tell the difference between fair and
unfair. Besides, he added, there was nothing
she could see at the park that she could not
see at home on the television.
The objections raised by this father merely
highlighted the power schools have over
their pupils, creating new needs and wants
that ultimately have less to do with the chil-
dren’s growth and development than with the
grip and influence of capitalism on society
and all its institutions. Certainly, some of
the activities promoted by schools seem far
more geared towards transforming children
into insatiable wanters and the individual-
istic, classist customer base of a powerful
and lucrative new commercial sector, both
here in Spain and across the rest of the world
(McLaren, 1995; Schor, 2005).
Extreme examples of this include outings
to water parks or fashionable farm schools
(with macrobiotic lunch included), ski trips
(with full kit included), expensive horse-riding
courses, and zoo visits with special add-ons,
such as spending a night with the sharks or
sitting in on a dolphin-training session. What
these extracurricular activities reveal is the
same ‘fear of missing out’ that characterizes
and fuels the phenomenon of tourism as a
form of secular pilgrimage (Agamben, 2005).
Public education should be focused on teach-
ing children about social justice, not escapism
or superficial entertainments. There is a vast
range of alternatives for schools to choose
from in this regard, including employment
agencies, community kitchens, real working
farms and allotments, old people’s homes,
special education centres, factory assembly
lines, homeless shelters and food banks, as
well as other spaces in which the children
can encounter people who have been ignored,
discriminated against and pushed to the mar-
gins by neoliberal society.
710 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Market Colonialism
The discourse of children’s rights and the advo-
cacy of supposedly emancipatory practices can,
involuntarily, end up being instrumentalized as
a way of ‘civilizing’ the economic south with
northern values (Grosfoguel, 2011; de Sousa
Santos, 2014), or inculcating poorer people
with the affluent First World ideology of hyper-
consumerism and waste. In this way, the dis-
course of child rights becomes a means of
destroying the very thing it purports to defend.
Constant vigilance is needed to guard against
imperialist ideologies that seek to colonize
opinion and destroy the unique characteristics
and ways of seeing needed to stand up to domi-
nation and exclusion.
The right to play is invoked to justify the
shipment of toys and games from White,
western, welfare state societies to distant
corners of the planet, or to disadvantaged
communities closer to home, such as the
school involved in this study. These osten-
sibly humanitarian campaigns receive mas-
sive media coverage and generally coincide
with festive periods such as Christmas. The
Christmas campaign in particular, however,
nourishes the perverse myth that the number
of toys children get (from Santa or the Kings
in this instance) is based on how well they
have behaved. The dangerous reverse of this,
the idea that bad children get fewer presents,
is most likely to affect children from poorer
families, magnifying even further the eco-
nomic racism against them.
The toys themselves may also be problem-
atic, involving production processes that
contribute to global warming or the exploita-
tion of workers, including children (Sánchez-
Blanco, 2009a, 2013a). Alternatively (or
additionally), they can stifle childhood crea-
tivity and the traditional, local forms of play
that provide children with a link to their past.
It is this knowledge and sense of the lives
and legacy of past generations, the history of
their community and its place in the larger
scheme of history, that enables children to
discuss, analyse, deconstruct and resignify
the present based on their own experience, in
order to continue the narrative of an age-long
quest for social justice. The globalization of
exchange should never represent a threat to
cultural diversity, which, as Mattelart (2005)
argues, should be treated as ‘world heritage
of humanity’ and as vital to sustaining human
life as biodiversity.
There is an urgent need to examine how
identities are manipulated and moulded from
earliest infancy by the economistic logic of
capitalism. Child-culture companies and cor-
porations have forged a multimillion-euro
industry by sowing the seeds of compulsive
mental and physical need for consumer goods
of all kinds among even very young children
(Lipovetsky and Serroy, 2010; Steinberg,
2011). Sophisticated marketing techniques
are used to shape infant consumer behaviour
and expectations, in relation not only to spe-
cific products but also to the larger brand, in
an attempt to lock in and grow brand aware-
ness and loyalty from birth (Klein, 1999;
Sánchez-Blanco, 2013b, 2015).
Children begin to take their lead from
adults from very early on. Barber (2007) dates
to the 1990s the emergence of what he terms
an ‘infantilist ethos’, which has acted as the
catalyst for a new political identity in which
consumer brands represent a more powerful
way of defining who we are than race, reli-
gion or other more established markers of
identity. Even very young children nowadays
habitually nag their parents and other adults
to buy them the latest must-have object to
make them feel like they fit in and are part of
a select group, particularly on special occa-
sions such as birthdays and Christmas, or at
critical times in the parents’ lives. One pupil
named ‘Dani’ told me that his mother was
going to buy him three Hot Wheels cars when
he learnt how to ride a bicycle. When I asked
him if he would still be learning how to cycle
if he was not getting the toys, he replied that
he would, and added that his mum had said
that she would buy them for him because the
Kings had not brought them at Christmas. I
then proposed the following scenario to him:
 POVERTY AND EQUALITY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
‘The thing is, you don’t actually need the Hot
Wheels cars to learn how to cycle, so imagine
that your mum only has enough money for one
thing: if she buys the Hot Wheels, she won’t
be able to afford food for breakfast. Which
would you choose: breakfast or Hot Wheels?’
‘Hot Wheels,’ came the answer, without a
moment’s hesitation. Little Pati, by contrast,
shocked by ‘Dani’s’ impractical response, pro-
tested: ‘But you can’t eat a Hot Wheels!’
Even basic necessities such as food can be
affected by this commercialist scheme of val-
ues. During my time at the school, I have wit-
nessed a child crying inconsolably because
he had never been given an Actimel (yoghurt
drink) in his lunchbox, and secretly drinking the
dregs left by his classmates or rescuing bottles
from the recycling. Others would sweep up the
crumbs from fancy branded biscuits brought by
other children, or squash their own banana and
pretend it had got spoiled by accident, in order
to get a biscuit from their classmate. Schools
must ensure that these kinds of values and
behaviours are intercepted early and eradicated
at source, starting with teaching practices that
create an association between particular prod-
ucts and brands and a sense of belonging within
the school. Not least among these are the lists
of textbooks and school supplies imposed on
families each year, and the unsparing brand cul-
ture these prescriptions can provoke.
One area in which this brand-based system
of exclusion and inclusion is very apparent
is cosplay. Brands have infiltrated cosplay
trends across all age groups, leading to the
creation of urban tribes and elitist children’s
clubs (Peppler, 2017) that many dream of
but only the privileged few actually become
part of. Cosplay, for the most part, magnifies
existing biases, prejudices and inequalities,
particularly in relation to class and gender
(Teasley, 2016). It also robs children of part
of their childhood, denying them the chance
to experience the full wonder of growing
up by forcing milestones upon them before
time. The precociousness and even imperti-
nence of the dualistic, classist, money-driven,
market-designed stereotypes of masculinity
711
and femininity promoted by cosplay are a
case in point: little girls dressed as Barbies,
Hello Kitties and Lolitas; little boys plucked
from Mario Brothers, Marvel and Pokémon;
Hannah Montana lookalikes and her older-
sister incarnations by Calvin Klein and
Benetton. The unifying principle in all cases is
a cultish pursuit of the stereotypically perfect
body, decked out in the latest fashion, as the
sine qua non of social status and recognition
(Dorsey Wanless, 2001). The dichotomous
representation of gender in cosplay is a far
cry from radical, disruptive analyses of the
concept and associated queer theory research
into interpersonal relationships and teaching
practices in early educational spaces (Butler,
2004; Gowlett & Rasmussen, 2014).
Children in assemblies were seen showing
off their toys, brand-name shoes and media
tie-in biscuits, or opening their smocks to
reveal the latest must-have superhero t-shirt
underneath. The fashionably torn jeans
sported by some of the pupils mimic cruelly
the worn-out clothes of poorer classmates.
Some of the children with few or no toys of
their own seized upon the toys and materi-
als provided by the school and tried to hold
onto them or hide them in their clothes. The
children’s fascination with these objects was
so great that it gave rise to tensions in activi-
ties like the assembly, where the pupils found
it incredibly hard to focus on anything other
than their desire to play with the toys.
Serious attention should be devoted by
schools to teaching children about the use and
exchange of objects, as well as the use of physi-
cal force to obtain them (Sánchez-Blanco, 1997,
2000). Learnt behaviours, such as the buying
and selling of favours and privileges, bartering
of items for profit, use of one’s own posses-
sions to provoke and thwart the desires of one’s
peers, or the privatization of communal objects,
simulate and habituate children to marketplace
cultural values from early on. To push against
that influence, schools should work to imbue
pupils with the importance of being rather than
having: responsibility, not waste; inclusion, not
exclusion; reflection, not speculation.
712 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Advertising targets children using false
promises, unrealistic comparisons and myr-
iad other forms of manipulation. Teachers
like ‘Lucía’ should analyse how advertising
affects children’s perceptions and judge-
ments, and equip them with the critical-
thinking skills they need to deal with media
messages (Schor, 2005; Buckingham, 2011).
The best way to help pupils like ‘Saúl’,
‘Miguel’, ‘Braulio’ and ‘Luis’ to overcome
the anxiety caused by not having toys at
home or fashionable snacks in their lunch-
boxes is to analyse the way these products
are advertised and marketed, along with the
packaging, taste, smell and ingredients, to
expose and defuse their many smoke-and-
mirror lies and seductions.
Through her contact with the children,
the teacher realized that her own affluent
First World attitude to the waste and rubbish
from her classroom was very different from
those of her pupils. Where she saw litter, the
­children – often led by the poorest among
them – saw the makings of play, fun and
learning. ‘Saúl’, for example, rescued some
newspaper pages from the recycling bin and
asked for permission to take them home; his
classmates soon followed suit. Likewise, the
Egyptian mummy they had created out of
toilet paper and newspaper provided by the
families was in the process of being disman-
tled and thrown away until a group of pupils
(mainly from poorer families) pointed out
that much of the toilet paper could be reused
in class, while the scraps of newspaper con-
tained interesting stories for the children to
share and discuss in class.
‘Lucía’ took these insights and observa-
tions further. The children the year before had
built a cabin out of milk cartons which by this
time had started to fall apart; she proposed
that the current class use the same milk car-
tons to create something new. She extended
her repurposing project to include lollipop
sticks, bottle tops, corks and used paper, put
the children into teams, and set them the task
of creating an object to solve some real-life
problem. The effect was to foreground and
strengthen the traditionally working-class
values of thrift and economy.
Experiences that teach children the value
of food and taking care of school equipment,
materials and other items should be part of
their everyday education. Schools should
promote an ethics of consumption that high-
lights and celebrates the respect, resource-
fulness and responsibility typically found
in lower-income households, and teachers
should make a conscious effort to nurture and
sustain these counter-values in the face of the
growing commercialization of everyday life.
Neither should schools overlook children’s
inborn ability to attach emotional value to
objects irrespective of their material worth. It
is the emotional connection, not the objects’
newness or novelty value, that they prize the
most. Their example is in stark contrast to that
of market society, which feeds and encour-
ages the faddishness and false desires that are
the lifeblood of extreme consumerism.
The possibility of a more equitable ethics
of consumption was illustrated well by the
incident of a toy squirrel with a broken
leg. One day it occurred to one of the more
underprivileged children to ask if he could
take the toy home. With flawless marketplace
logic, he imagined that none of his better-off
classmates would mind if he took something
that was broken and hence worthless. How
wrong he was! As soon as he expressed
his desire to take the toy home, a chorus of
protest arose requesting to do the same. All
of a sudden, against all commercial odds,
this broken, battered old toy had become the
focus of all of the children’s desires, whether
because they had developed an attachment to
the toy without the teacher’s realizing it, or
because the desires of one child had ‘inflated’
its perceived value among the others. The
teacher decided to focus on the first hypothesis
and encouraged the children to find out more
about the toy and what it might have meant to
different people during its lifetime. When they
discovered that the original owner was the
older brother of one of their classmates, they
asked him to tell them about his memories
 POVERTY AND EQUALITY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
of the toy and playing with it. Finally, the
children agreed to take it in turns to take the
squirrel home with them, so that everybody
got their wish. This ability in children
to invest objects with meaning based on
their emotional associations, not because of
how new, expensive or fashionable they
may be, is a valuable quality that should be
cherished and protected against the waste
and excesses of consumer culture (Kravets &
Maclaran, 2018).
A different incident involving a packet of
biscuits was similarly instructive. ‘Lucía’
was sharing out the biscuits in strictly
mathematical proportion to the number of
children. However, by conceptualizing the
biscuits in purely arithmetical terms, she had
inadvertently obstructed a perfect opportunity
for critical reflection on the idea of equality.
It was a little girl called ‘Carmen’ who drew
her attention to the omission, questioning
the teacher’s apportioning system with the
emancipating argument that the children who
had not had any breakfast and were therefore
hungrier than the others should surely be
entitled to receive a bigger share. ‘Carmen’s’
intervention made ‘Lucía’ aware of how the
circumstances of her own life as someone
with a stable, well-paid job could cause her to
overlook the different needs and experience
of others (Bénard & Tilley-Lubbs, 2016).
CONCLUSION
The construction of the problem of poverty in
schools as one of child behaviour which may
be diagnosed and treated on a case-by-case
basis represents a dangerously simplistic and
short-sighted pathologization of a much more
complex injustice (Simpson et al., 2015).
According to the reductionist view shared by
many educators, the problem comes down to
one of troubled home life and bad behaviour,
which may be solved by a series of behaviour
modification techniques. Low-income fami-
lies are perceived as poor in spirit as well as
713
possibilities: reluctant to work and incapable
of looking for a job and/or managing their
own finances; while their children are por-
trayed as spoilt, neglected and undisciplined.
Our teacher took a stand against the preju-
dices and stereotypes she observed among
staff and management at the school, and was
harshly criticized for doing so. She spoke
out, in particular, against the unfair and
hypocritical targeting of poorer mothers.
Her colleagues’ criticism of these women’s
spending on cigarettes, for example, ignored
not only the causal and/or aggravating
relationship between addiction and socio-­
economic status, but also the fact that many
of the teachers themselves were guilty of
the same poor lifestyle habits and spending
choices. Simplistic arguments such as those
contended by ‘Lucía’s’ colleagues are grist to
the self-justifying mill of neoliberalism. Our
teacher, by contrast, understood that poverty
and the inability of families to provide for
their most basic needs is a much more com-
plex problem. The challenge for schools is
to recognize this reality and act accordingly:
to generate experiences that help children to
throw off the sense of impotence and pas-
sivity that poverty brings, and empower and
inspire them to take their destiny in their
own hands (Apple, 2013). Through her own
work with the pupils and their families, the
teacher succeeded in transforming her class-
room into a space for justice which, in turn,
helped parents to see the school as an ally
in their common struggle to create a better,
fairer world.
Schools must work to promote an image
of the victims of exclusion as active citizens,
fighting to make the world a fairer place,
subvert privilege and claim their rights (Wise
and Case, 2013). Schools must become
sites of civil resistance, transgression and
transformation (Kirylo, 2013), allowing
people in situations of disadvantage to
take social justice into their own hands and
eradicate once and for all the image of the
poor as passive, faint-hearted, lazy, conformist
or undeserving.
714 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
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 62
Critical Tourism Pedagogy:
A Response to Oppressive
Practices
Sandro Carnicelli and Karla Boluk

INTRODUCTION pedagogy (e.g., Belhassen and Caton, 2011;

In the last 30 years many fields have appropri-
ated the concept of critical pedagogy.
Disciplines such as health (Martinson and Elia
2018), criminal law (Menis, 2016), music edu-
cation (Hess, 2017), and sport (Fernández-
Balboa, 2015) are among study areas that have
drawn on critical pedagogy as a way to equip
students with the ability to view the world
with a critical lens. Critical pedagogy is ‘a
means by which the oppressed may begin to
reflect more deeply upon their socio-economic
circumstances and take action to improve the
status quo’ (Johnson and Morris, 2010: 77).
Furthermore, critical pedagogy demands that
knowledge claims, specifically ideologies and
discourses, are evaluated for their truth con-
tent, and simultaneously recognized ‘as part of
systems of belief and action that have aggre-
gate effects within the power structures of
society’ (Huckle, 2017: 72).
Tourism studies only recently started
to emphasize the importance of critical
Boluk and Carnicelli, 2019; Carnicelli and
Boluk, 2017; Fullagar and Wilson, 2012;
Grimwood et al., 2015; Higgins-Desbiolles
and Powys-Whyte, 2013; Mair and Sumner,
2017). Such research has encouraged a deeper
discussion about the introduction of criti-
cal pedagogy in tourism education in order
to foster a critical appreciation of tourism
systems. This chapter will begin by present-
ing a discussion on the practice of tourism
reflecting oppressive tendencies, specifically
towards minority and marginalized groups.
In this way, we will draw attention to tourism
as a tool representing and reinforcing power
relationships and sovereignty of one social
group over another, as well as a system com-
pliant with neo-colonial and neoliberal prac-
tices contributing to injustice.
The reflections in this chapter will pro-
vide the backdrop for a discussion on a more
emancipatory approach to tourism pedagogy,
demonstrating that tourism may be used as a
tool for education as well as development of
718 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
cultural and social awareness, and embrace an
essential part of critical pedagogy praxis. In
exploring current discussions regarding criti-
cal pedagogy in tourism education, we will
highlight how the concept and ideas have been
appropriated in the field. Moreover, we signal
that the notion of critical pedagogy may be
instrumental, and thus needed, in order to pro-
pel the changes required in the practice of tour-
ism, which are highly exploitative in nature and
unsustainable. Therefore, recognizing tourism
as a social force, not just an industry (Higgins-
Desbiolles, 2006). Finally, this chapter will
discuss new approaches to re-thinking tour-
ism as a social force and tourism education as
a means to contest privileges, and, ultimately,
change behaviours and oppressive attitudes.
THE OPPRESSIVE PRACTICE
OF TOURISM
An emphasis on the various social, eco-
nomic, and environmental impacts of tourism
has received plentiful attention in the tourism
scholarship (e.g., Butler, 1980). A focus spe-
cifically on impacts has resulted in the theo-
rization of discourse and language used to
describe tourists, their actions, and behav-
iours, resulting in a tourist/traveller dichot-
omy, the former representing hedonistic
individuals, and the latter representing more
conscious individuals, interested in cultures
and learning. Research later determined that
the dichotomy did not actually exist and they
were pretty much the same people behaving
the same way (Birkett, 2001), causing resent-
ment among host communities. The promi-
nence of human–environment issues has led
to an interest in one’s responsibility leading
to sustainability in tourism. Specifically,
scholars such as Fennell (2009) argue that
considerations will not be successful without
reflecting on one’s actions and behaviours
and situating such decisions in moral theory.
The literature on tourism impacts has also
led to a recognition that tourism may be
regarded as an important economic industry
and a social phenomenon (United Nations
World Tourism Organization [UNWTO],
2018). Tourism is recognized as the third-
largest export industry in the world following
chemicals and fuels (UNWTO, 2018). Given
its size, tourism is recognized as a significant
transformative force, which may bring about
an array of positive and negative impacts. As
a social force tourism may promote intercul-
tural exchange, reconciliation, and global
understanding (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006);
however, damages to peoples, places, and
cultures are a concern of tourism. This section
will detail some of the oppressive practices
recognized in the tourism industry by drawing
on a number of examples; clearly recognizing
the need for criticality in tourism pedagogy.
Exploitative approaches used by the tour-
ism industry fuelled by mass tourism have
generated concerns for local communi-
ties. Krippendorf (1991) noted colonialist
characteristics of tourism such as robbing
local populations of autonomous decision-
making. In this conflicting environment the
local community may resent tourists due to
the economic gaps and because of their con-
stant attempt to impose their own behaviours
(McIntosh et al., 1995), which may oppress
and/or destroy local cultures. Trask’s (1999)
work refers to the notion of ‘cultural prostitu-
tion’ in drawing reference to the exploitative
nature of corporately driven mass tourism
in Hawaii. A focus on the economic impor-
tance of tourism then has created conditions
whereby native peoples can no longer afford
to live in Hawaii, and are thus forced to flee
the islands seeking more affordable states on
the mainland. In this vein, Higgins-Desbiolles
(2006) argues that a reconsideration of how
we understand tourism is necessary because
accepting an ‘industry’ discourse will impact
our ability to recognize tourism as a force for
contributing to social good.
Tourism has been seen as a tool to ‘know’
the world, but also as a strong element in the
oppressive strategy of post-colonial approaches
(McGehee, 2012). A critical contribution on
 CRITICAL TOURISM PEDAGOGY
Indigenous tourism research is recognized
in Nielsen and Wilson’s (2012) work, which
offers a typology of Indigenous peoples’
role in tourism research. Specifically, they
highlight that while Indigenous tourism has
recently become an academic interest, it is
motivated by the priorities of non-Indigenous
peoples. The authors identified four types
of participation roles of Indigenous peoples
in tourism research: invisible, identified,
stakeholder, and Indigenous-driven. Such
research, while shedding light on a margin-
alized population, may continue to reinforce
post-colonial ends.
The notion of invisibility is of particular
relevance to Peters and Higgins-Desbiolles’
(2012) work as they utilize an Indigenous
critical lens in their research highlighting
the absence of Indigenous people as tourists
both actually and potentially. The authors
recognize the prominent role of Indigenous
peoples as a focus for marketing materials
rather than occupying roles of engaged tour-
ists and they offer a number of other areas
needed for further investigation. Some of the
areas that require further research are related
to the social motivations (e.g., income and
time) and notions of disadvantage in accept-
ing Indigenous peoples as legitimate tourists,
investigating the types of travel which may
be of interest to Indigenous peoples, factors
which inhibit engagement in tourism, and
potential ways to overcome barriers (Peters
and Higgins-Desbiolles, 2012: 82–3). The
authors draw attention to the absent voices
recognized in the tourism literature, illustrat-
ing that some voices seem to matter more
than others.
While tourism scholars considered ways
of doing tourism differently, a number of
responsible approaches have been intro-
duced, such as ecotourism, sustainable tour-
ism, and pro-poor tourism. However, critical
analysis of these various types of tourism
offerings determined several shortcomings.
Hutnyk (1996), for example, illustrated how
backpacker travellers constructed themselves
as better travellers given their decisions
719
to participate in charity work in Calcutta.
Similarly, moral justifications exist in the
realm of slum tourism; however, important
questions are overlooked regarding who
benefits and, specifically, the impressions of
local peoples (Frenzel et al., 2015).
McGehee’s research exploring proposition
modelling for volunteer tourism put forth that
‘the signs/signifiers of volunteer tourism,
including images, language, and discourse
of volunteer tourism organizations, reflect
the dominant hegemony, which in turn (re)
produces the social construction and perpetu-
ation of volunteer tourism’ (2012: 97). Those
who promote volunteer tourism often propose
cross-cultural understanding (Raymond and
Hall, 2008), as well as opportunities to learn
about the complex socio-cultural and politi-
cal issues at the heart of inequalities in host
communities, aligned with critical theory.
However, volunteer tourism exists in a com-
modified environment, and thus prioritizes
serving the needs of paying tourists with an
economic advantage and thus perpetuates
inequality (McGehee and Andereck, 2008),
similarly recognized in the slum tourism
literature. McGehee (2012) argues that vol-
unteer tourism operator websites for exam-
ple, influence social constructions regarding
authority, the prioritization of voices, other-
ing, and dependency perpetuating the status
quo. Slum tourism and volunteer tourism
contexts are constructed as places of poverty
and in need of help. This is problematic, and
requires attention, concerning post-colonial
discourse.
According to Tribe (2008), many of the
tourism industry’s oppressive practices are
connected to the ideology of managerialism
focusing mainly on the profitability of busi-
nesses. An example used in Tribe’s (2008)
work is the case of Uluru in Australia, which
was chosen to demonstrate a scenario where
visitor satisfaction could be understood and
managed and at the same time ignoring
discussions regarding place appropriation,
cultural construction, power, and ideologi-
cal conflicts embedded in tourism practice.
720 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
In this sense Tribe (2008) calls for a more
critical approach to tourism practice in gen-
eral, and tourism research in particular, that
will lead the field not only based in manage-
ment and governance but in a more holistic
perception of the issues, taking into consider-
ation multiple stakeholders, businesses, and
tourists. In line with Tribe’s work, Belhassen
and Caton (2011) put forward the social
responsibility of tourism programmes, sug-
gesting that in order for programmes to be
successful, graduates must leave equipped
with technical skills, as well as the aptitude
for navigating morality within occupational
areas.
The issues of native peoples unable to
afford tourism-dominated environments such
as Hawaii, the misappropriation of Uluru, and
the implications of alternative forms of tour-
ism such as slum tourism and volunteer tour-
ism provide a few examples of the oppressive
consequences of tourism illustrating impacts
on minorities and under-represented com-
munities. Sex tourism and its connections
with human trafficking; mass tourism and
its impacts on local communities and local
cultural practices; mega-events tourism and
the segregation of poor communities and
violation of human rights provide additional
examples of how tourism has been used as
a tool to maintain, reinforce, and acceler-
ate oppression and power hierarchies within
societies.
Jeffreys (1999) and Walters and Davis
(2011), to give just two examples, have ana-
lysed the exploitative elements in sex tour-
ism. Indeed, the sex industry has become
‘immensely profitable, providing consider-
able resources, not just to individuals and
networks involved in trafficking women, but
to governments who have come to depend on
sex industry revenue’ (Jeffreys, 1999: 179).
Activities such as prostitution have been
fortified by the development of sex tourism,
resulting in violence and promoting feel-
ings of humiliation, degradation, defilement,
and dirtiness (Giobbe, 1991), represent-
ing another oppressing and de-humanizing
act that should be challenged in tourism
education.
The literature on mega-events and sport
tourism provides further examples of tourism
as an oppressive tool for neoliberal and neo-
colonial practices. Indeed, discussion of issues
such as human-rights violations, community
exclusion, and segregation that have been
caused by mega-events such as the Olympic
Games and the men’s FIFA World Cup is
becoming prolific in tourism and events
research. Authors such as Ivester (2015),
Horne (2018), and Carrington (1998) have dis-
cussed concerns such as the temporary social
and cultural cleansing during the hosting of
mega-events that has been carried out in order
to promote an improved image of destina-
tions to tourists via televised event coverage.
In many cases such oppressive behaviour has
been imposed by both national governments
and international bodies in order to guarantee
the ‘safety’ of the event, as well as the com-
mercial agreements (and legacies) between
sport organization and hosting country.
These examples of exploitative and oppres-
sive practices demonstrate the necessity to
educate society about the implications of the
actions, behaviours, and attitudes connected
to the development and practice of tourism.
To this point, ‘tourism can be both a tool
of the powerful elite to dispossess, oppress
and exploit others; and, paradoxically, it can
also undermine power elites and empower
the marginalized under certain conditions’
(Blanchard and Higgins-Desbiolles, 2013: 6).
The next section will explore critical tourism
educational practices.
TOURISM AS AN EDUCATIONAL
PRACTICE
The oppressive tendencies and capability
of reinforcing post-colonial practices have
been recognized within tourism scholarship.
Such tendencies set up a paradox in preparing
students for an industry that is highly
 CRITICAL TOURISM PEDAGOGY
exploitative. This paradox has served as an
impetus to explore ways to engage students in
a socially transformative way of thinking.
Explicitly identifying the pitfalls of tourism
activity, some scholars have distinguished the
opportunities of the industry as a tool for
learning and emancipation (Pritchard et al.,
2011). Moreover, tourism can be seen as a
‘tool of the powerful elite to dispossess,
oppress, and exploit others and paradoxically
can also undermine power elites and empower
marginalised under certain conditions’
(Blanchard and Higgins-Desbiolles, 2013: 6).
In this identity conflict Higgins-Desbiolles
(2006) prefers to consider tourism as a social
force instead of an industry, mainly because an
emphasis on tourism as an industry may have
a delimiting effect and overemphasize the eco-
nomic discourse and corporatized attributes of
business. Tourism is more than this. Tourism is
also about the well-being of the tourist and
communities, it is about the preservation of
cultures in a globalized and homogenized
world, it is about education regarding eco-­
systems and diversity of environments to be
preserved, and it is about promoting peace and
understanding between people and societies
(Blanchard and Higgins-Desbiolles, 2013:
1–16). Realising the importance of tourism
beyond just appreciating it as an economic
driver and industry is important and likely only
possible by utilizing a critical lens.
Here we focus specifically on tourism as
an essential element in education and learn-
ing. We concur with Blanchard and Higgins-
Desbiolles (2013), who argue that tourism
does indeed matter and it may be used as a
tool for cultural exchange, reconciliation,
and empowerment of marginalized groups.
However, we also believe that tourism can
and should resist the exploitative discourse
recognized in neoliberal agendas of the west-
ernized business sector and, as such, develop
a comprehensive and outreaching tourism
education programme based in a critical ped-
agogy approach.
Despite the recent growth in interest, criti-
cal pedagogy in tourism is still embryonic.
721
Tourism scholars have been encouraging a
deeper discussion about the introduction of
critical pedagogy in tourism studies which
could cultivate a different way of practis-
ing tourism and improve tourist behav-
iour (Boluk and Carnicelli, 2019; Fullagar
and Wilson, 2012; Higgins-Desbiolles and
Powys-Whyte, 2013). In recent years several
tourism-driven networks mutually supporting
and driving critical pedagogy in theory and
practice have been developed. For example,
Building Excellence for Sustainable Tourism
Education Network (BEST EN) was founded
in 1999 as ‘an incubator for a variety of activ-
ities aimed at encouraging the adoption of
sustainable practices’. Operating as an inclu-
sive and collaborative network, it emphasizes
the ‘creation and dissemination of knowledge
to support education and practice in the field
of sustainable tourism’ (BEST EN, 2018).
Critical Tourism Studies (CTS) is an inter-
national network of scholars who are mutually
interested in understanding and promoting
social change in tourism from the perspec-
tives of scholarship, education, and practice.
The CTS bi-annual conference series was
initially launched in 2005 (CTS, 2018) and
has since established continental branches in
North America and Asia-Pacific. It is impor-
tant to note that a few of the founders of CTS
put forth the notion of hopeful tourism, ‘a
values-led humanist approach based on part-
nership, reciprocity and ethics’ aiming to co-
create ‘learning and which recognizes power
of sacred and Indigenous knowledge and
passionate scholarship’ (Pritchard et al., 2011:
949). Hopeful tourism has been critiqued by
scholars, most notably Higgins-Desbiolles
and Powis-Whyte (2013), who identified the
troubling absence of critical theory which is
needed in order to mutually challenge power
and privilege, as well as try and understand
those who are oppressed by tourism systems.
Another initiative emerging is the Tourism
Education Futures Initiative (TEFI). TEFI is
recognized as a social movement comprising
educators, scholars, industry representatives,
and community members who mutually seek
722 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
an alternative type of tourism that is mutu-
ally sustainable and just, and sets the flour-
ishing of communities at its centre (TEFI,
2018). The notion of care is central to TEFI’s
network, in opposition to neoliberal rhetoric
associated with quantitative reporting con-
structs. TEFI has provided a venue for tour-
ism educators to showcase their research and
displays critical pedagogical approaches in
its various conferences and publications.
Earlier work by Jost Krippendorf (1991),
in response to a plethora of alternative
forms of tourism that continue to emerge
in the marketplace, paved the way for con-
siderations regarding how we may progress
sustainable tourism dialogue. Specifically,
Krippendorf noted what is required are ‘not
different ways to travel but different people’
(Krippendorf, 1991: 105). As such, a new
society has the potential for producing new
tourists and stakeholders who are more likely
to assume responsibilities for their actions.
Emergent from Krippendorf’s work, tourism
has since been recognized as a tool for edu-
cation (Pritchard et al., 2011). Specifically,
Pritchard et al. (2011) put forth an intent to
consider tourism as a tool for learning and
emancipation. Belhassen and Caton (2011)
argue that the inclusion of critical pedagogy
in tourism could result in a series of benefits,
including personal awareness of one’s power
in shaping decision-making and outcomes,
contribution to social justice outcomes, and
enhanced productivity.
Tribe’s (2000, 2001, 2002, 2008) work
has analysed the business leanings of tour-
ism curriculum, promoting liberal instead
of vocational training to enhance reflection
in line with critical pedagogy. Accordingly,
Tribe (2000: 21) recommended a scaffold-
ing approach, offering key critical teachings
on critical theory guiding students to evalu-
ate assumptions and ultimately ‘contemplate
ethical issues in tourism’. Tribe’s (2000)
suggestions are aligned with Freire’s (1970)
notion of conscientization, which emphasizes
an in-depth understanding of the world, rec-
ognizing social and political contradictions,
and upon such realisation recognizing one’s
role in responding to oppression. Fullagar
and Wilson (2012) draw attention to the need
for reflexivity within critical pedagogy in
order to bring awareness to our perspectives
and create knowledge in tourism and hospi-
tality studies.
Agency considerations are still largely
missing in much of the contemporary tour-
ism scholarship on critical pedagogy. Albeit
distinct to the above work making a case
for tourism critical pedagogy in the class-
room, Carnicelli and Boluk (2017) provide
a number of extracurricular service learning
examples reflecting transformative critical
pedagogy cultivating student social change
agents. Additionally, Mair and Sumner’s
(2017) work on tourism as public pedagogy
supports the role of critical pedagogy outside
the classroom. To radically transform tour-
ists, host communities, and their relation-
ship, the authors believe that there is a need
to develop a critical tourism pedagogy which
will merge concepts of ‘solidarity and par-
ticipation mixed with the potential for critical
inquiry’ (Mair and Sumner, 2017: 202).
Sheldon et al. (2011) propose a need for
changing the way tourism studies are taught
to respond to the challenges faced by the
industry. Ateljevic et al.’s (2013) call for a
‘critical turn’ in tourism studies has advo-
cated the need for our curriculum to better
respond to contemporary problems as an out-
come of the production and consumption of
the industry. One way to implement a critical
turn in tourism studies may be to consider
the transformative learning approaches put
forth by Mezirow (2000) and Coghlan and
Gooch (2011) that require a radical shift in
consciousness to change how people see
their place in the world. In their work on
volunteer tourism, Coghlan and Gooch
(2011) believe a transformative learning
approach as suggested by Mezirow (2000)
may lead tourists to be conscious of them-
selves as part of a larger political, economic,
socio-cultural, and spiritual environment.
Here the ‘conscientization’ process that is
 CRITICAL TOURISM PEDAGOGY
suggested is similar to what was also advo-
cated by Freire (1970) in Pedagogy of the
Oppressed.
Another option suggested by Pitman et al.
(2011) is a lifelong learning framework for
educational tours that help to develop criti-
cal thinking. Importantly, this draws atten-
tion to Falk et al.’s (2012) point in regard to
the relationship between travel, tourism, and
learning, which has not received much atten-
tion in the tourism literature. Past literature
such as Crompton’s (1979) work suggested
that learning was one of the pull factors for
a meaningful travel experience, while Iso-
Ahola (1982) believed that escape from daily
routine and psychological rewards such as
learning may encompass the main factors
when deciding upon a leisure activity such as
travelling.
In this context of travelling as a learning
opportunity, and following Aristotle’s philo-
sophical approach, Falk et al. (2012) argue
that travelling provides opportunities for
Episteme (theoretical knowledge), Techne
(practical skills), and Phronesis (practical
wisdom). ‘Phronesis extends beyond skills
and technique to include reflexivity. Praxis,
or the practice of phronesis occurs when indi-
viduals live and perform social and ethical
actions which become a part of living a good
and virtuous life’ (Falk et al., 2012: 916).
Phronesis and Praxis have received limited
attention in the tourism scholarship, with the
exception of Tribe (2002), who promotes an
action-oriented tourism curriculum; Jamal
(2004), who specifically advocates a praxis-
oriented curriculum focused on generating
an appreciation for sustainable tourism, and
practice guiding good action and conduct;
and Jamal et al. (2011), who refer to an
academic-community collaboration involv-
ing students, public and private stakeholders,
and rural residents to examine a local cul-
tural heritage concern.
Praxis seems to be the link between tour-
ism, travel, and critical pedagogy, a neglected
research area in tourism scholarship (Falk
et al., 2012). As such, as we have done here,
723
we believe that exposing students and com-
munities to the adverse impacts created by
the tourism industry is important, but a fur-
ther step is introducing critical pedagogy in
order to equip students with the tools nec-
essary to respond to the concerns they wit-
ness. Indeed, critical pedagogy may mutually
facilitate the time and space to reflect on their
role in addressing the adverse impacts of the
tourism industry, thus enacting tourism as a
social force.
RETHINKING TOURISM PRACTICE
AND EDUCATION
As previously discussed, tourism has on the
one hand been used as a tool for oppression,
and on the other has been used as an educa-
tional tool facilitating liberation. Accordingly,
it is timely to swing the activity to expose the
oppressive neoliberal roots, and pave roads
leading to better engagement with critical
pedagogy. Such engagement may lead to a
more responsible and liberating tourism,
encouraging students and teachers alike to
challenge privilege, power relationships, and
economic considerations in light of pro-
gressing sustainability. How is this possible
in an industry that is driven by multinational
corporations inclined to maintain capitalistic
and neoliberal approaches? How may we
shift power relationships, swapping control
and positioning local communities and mar-
ginalized groups in positions of power? The
answer is to empower such groups to gain
control over the tourism activities that
directly affect their cultures and environ-
ments (Higgins-Desbiolles et al., 2019). In
this section we propose a number of ways in
which we may critically rethink tourism edu-
cation. Table 62.1 summarizes our examples
and the potential outcomes, which will be
discussed in more depth below.
We believe that the shift in tourism prac-
tice will only be possible with a new peda-
gogical approach. A critical education of
724 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Table 62.1 A summary of our critical rethinking of tourism education
Example Examples of our critical rethinking
number of tourism education
1 The Youth Together Project (Henze et al.,
1998) educating youth to become activists
to address local racial violence.
2 ‘Educate to travel’ (Higgins-Desbiolles and
Powys-Whyte, 2013) in higher education.
3 Critical tourism education needs to
commence in the early years of
education.
4 Deliver tourism education to young people in Targeting both privileged and deprived young people will
both privileged and deprived communities
considering formal and informal
education.
5 Mobilize instrumental tourism networks and These networks could be enhanced if they collectively
groups such as BEST EN, TEFI, and CTS
in the processes of tourism education
beyond the academy.
agents is required which empowers those
who have been previously neglected in
decision-making and who are oppressed
­
by the system. Recognizing positions of
power and privilege inherent in the act of
researching and/or engaging in tourism that
may generate oppression is needed in for-
mal education. Henze et al. (1998) point out
that programmes and curricula attempting to
build greater student and teacher awareness
regarding privilege and inequalities have the
potential to inform strategies to contribute
to a more equitable society, even if they are
still rare. Henze et al. (1998) cite the exam-
ple of the Youth Together project in Oakland,
California as an example of educating youth
to become activists to address racial violence
in the local area. Here we believe that educat-
ing youth regarding privilege and inequality
may lead to more critical tourists who will
understand the power relationships associ-
ated with their practices and look for alterna-
tives to mitigate negative impacts.
Potential outcomes for and beyond tourism
Educating youth about their privilege and community inequality
could lead to more critical tourists being informed about
power and seeking alternatives to mitigate impacts.
Critical pedagogical practices are important in higher education,
and specifically undergraduate programmes, as our
graduates can become agents of change and take an active
role in influencing change in the tourism system.
Starting critical tourism education earlier could enhance
the recognition that tourism has a positive force to play,
facilitate reflexivity regarding the implications of one’s
actions, and equip citizens with the tools to be responsible
consumers and employees – recognizing implications outside
of tourism.
encourage them to critically assess their privilege and those
who are deprived to recognize the power they possess.
We envision this approach to contribute to the massification
of critical skills.
incorporated critical pedagogical approaches to foster a
conscientization of tourism as a social force and liberation.
In their response to Pritchard et al. (2011),
Higgins-Desbiolles and Powys-Whyte wrote:
Pritchard et al. write of hope in teaching tourism
to tourism students, but these students are largely
in positions of privilege being trained to go out for
the most part to fill positions of privilege in a tour-
ism industry itself that caters to tourists in positions
of privilege […] We argue that people of privilege,
such as tourism academics and tourism higher
degree students, must respond to calls to interro-
gate positions of privilege and embark on projects
where power is handed over. (Higgins-Desbiolles
and Powys-Whyte, 2013: 431)
While we agree with Higgins-Desbiolles and
Powys-Whyte (2013), we also believe that
the necessity to ‘educate to travel’ should
start not at the higher education level, but
much earlier in the educational process.
Starting tourism education earlier could
enhance the recognition of tourism as an
important social force with powers beyond
economics. Furthermore, our proposition has
the potential to impact all citizens who may
 CRITICAL TOURISM PEDAGOGY
engage in tourism-related activities either as
tourists or as those who may inform decision-
making. Engaging in critical tourism peda-
gogy early on has the potential to encourage
people to think through the implications of
their actions, providing them with the tools
to make responsible decisions as consumers
and hopefully as employees; therefore such
education has implications outside of the
realm of tourism.
We believe that tourism education should
go beyond the development of a curriculum
for tourism students in undergraduate degrees.
We advocate that tourism education based on
critical pedagogy and in the understanding
of oppression, privilege, and power relation-
ships should start in the early years of edu-
cation. We believe that the discussion is also
important in undergraduate programmes as
many higher education students will become
the agents who may help to transform prod-
ucts and services offered, as well as develop
an agenda helping to educate tourists and
broader tourism systems. But it is important
to go beyond that and take tourism education
to the younger generations, to both privileged
and deprived communities, to other platforms
of formal and informal education. We believe
in the importance of promoting a ‘massifica-
tion’ of critical skills that will help students to
recognize oppression and power relationships
generated by tourism.
Critical pedagogy in this context of tour-
ism education expansion becomes instru-
mental to the questioning of the process of
cultural invasion (Freire, 1970). Cultural
invasion (that can be inflicted by tour-
ism activities) was identified by Freire
(1970: 152) as an ‘act of violence against
the persons of the invaded culture, who lose
their originality or face the threat of losing
it’. The invaders are the authors and actors,
while those they invade become objectified
and moulded by the demands placed upon
them. In tourism education, the praxis based
on action and reflection developing a criti-
cal understanding of neo-colonial practices
by the industry becomes essential to create
725
narrative and actions to resist cultural inva-
sion. Here, networks and groups previously
mentioned such as BEST EN, TEFI, and
CTS become instrumental in the processes of
tourism education that should go beyond the
walls of academia. These groups with their
own singularities, aims, and objectives can
incorporate critical pedagogical approaches
in order to help develop a conscientization of
tourism as a social force, tourism as a poten-
tial for education and liberation.
The increase and spread of social actions
and activism from scholarly tourism groups is
urgently needed. BEST EN, TEFI, and CTS are
already taking a more sustainable and socially
just approach to their conferences, events, and
activities, including a stronger engagement
with local communities and marginalized
groups in the places where they meet. But still
more needs to be done to apply the ‘knowl-
edge’ created in academia to the groups that
have been oppressed by the tourism industry.
In this way, we recommend that future studies
should follow what we previously proposed in
Boluk and Carnicelli (2019), specifically con-
sidering the development of a tourism curricu-
lum that does not aim to indoctrinate students
about the economic benefits of the industry
but rather helps them to critically understand
their role in shaping and adapting tourism, as
a social force.
CONCLUSION
The recognition of tourism as a complicated
and extremely paradoxical phenomenon is
needed if transformation is to take place. The
problematic aspect of tourism as a drive for
hyper-globalization, cultural invasion and
homogenization, and ethnic cleansing and
oppression of marginalized groups and minor-
ities should be urgently addressed by scholarly
community, governments, and groups such as
UNWTO. Here we claim that one of the alter-
natives to resist the oppressive approach of the
industry is to draw on the educational
726 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
benefits it may generate. Indeed, the sector
has been recording significant forms of alter-
native tourism that could serve as a counter-
narrative to the exploitative neo-colonial and
neoliberal approaches previously discussed.
The work of Higgins-Desbiolles (2013a,
2013b) in Palestine and with aboriginal com-
munities in Australia as well as Blanchard
(2013) in Timor-Leste have demonstrated
that alternatives to mainstream tourism are
feasible and possible. As such, we believe it
is possible to empower communities and
tourists to critically understand their roles
and their relationship with and to each other.
In this chapter, we hope to have opened a
new avenue for tourism as a social force to
resist oppression and neoliberalism. We have
highlighted some of the current discussions in
the tourism literature but also presented some
of the significant steps taken by academic
groups to promote a more socially just form
of tourism. In this sense we see as a natural
step towards the ‘massification’ of tourism
education that has the potential to reach out-
side academic walls and permeate commu-
nity groups, informal educational practices,
and the early stages of formal education. This
will take tourism researchers and educators
out of their comfort zones and will require a
deeper engagement with scholars from other
fields, embracing opportunities for collabora-
tion and interdisciplinary work.
Critical pedagogy will provide the frame-
work necessary to discuss and de-construct
the concepts of privilege, laying the founda-
tions where a more socially just and aware
type of tourist and tourism may flourish. We
believe that some of the critical academic
forums such as BEST EN, TEFI, and CTS
need to play an even more pro-active role in
making tourism more human and less ‘indus-
trialized’. We believe that tourism academ-
ics with the support of critical pedagogy as a
framework can develop processes, dialogues,
and educational platforms which will direct
tourism towards its socially just path. We
believe a liberating tourism education to all
is the way forward.
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Queer(ing) Cisgender Normativity:
Reconsidering Critical Pedagogy
Through a Genderqueer Lens
Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila E. Villaverde
INTRODUCTION
Kincheloe (2012: 148) urged critical peda-
gogues that ‘a vibrant, relevant, effective
critical pedagogy in the contemporary era
must be simultaneously intellectually rigor-
ous and accessible to multiple audiences’,
with much to learn from minoritized people.
His focus was specifically on our failure to
engage ‘subjugated knowledges of the
African, African American, Asian, and
Indigenous peoples’ (2012: 149), and while
we agree that a major problem of critical
pedagogy is that it is a ‘White thing’, we
argue that it is a ‘cisgender thing’. Even as
the visibility of transgender and gender-
queer individuals has increased in both the
media and in research (particularly, gender
studies and queer theory), critical pedagogy
lags far behind in being a body of research
and knowledge that does not center cisgen-
der voices.
While there has been and continues to
be important work stemming from critical
63
pedagogy to eradicate class, race, and gen-
der hierarchies and inequities, there is little
to no work being published within critical
pedagogy on the interrogation of the oppres-
sion created by Westernized binary language
related to cisgender normativity. In particular,
the current language used around the gender
binary (i.e., male and female) ‘is dichoto-
mous thinking [that] encourages oppression
and marginalization of those who do not
conform to the norms or are seen as lesser
in, or outside of, the hierarchy of the gender
binary’ (Stachowiak, 2012). A specific con-
cern lies especially with those who identify
as genderqueer, whose gender ‘identity has
permeable boundaries’ (Adams et al., 2010:
Appendix 10A), and thus, one that necessar-
ily lies outside of the boundaries set by our
societal system of the male/female binary.
An argument in this chapter is that current
rhetoric about gender, as situated in criti-
cal pedagogy, is dominated by very limiting
binary analyses that work to reify the oppres-
sions that it strives to dismantle. Thus, we
730 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
seek to shift toward a more critical paradigm
using genderqueer experience as a critical
(and missing) lens. We begin by examining
the problematics of the binary language of
gender and emancipation within the field of
critical pedagogy, and the address the ways
in which the experiences of genderqueer indi-
viduals can offer the field a more inclusive,
more dynamic lens for countering hegemony.
THE PROMISES AND PITFALLS OF
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
The tenets of critical pedagogy set up a par-
ticular landscape of promise for people who
are marginalized and those who work for
social justice (Darder et al., 2008; Giroux,
2010), but there are also ways in which the
language of critical pedagogy restricts and
oppresses.
Emancipation as a Promise
Critical pedagogy is hinged on a transforma-
tional potential that it promotes, with a frame-
work that values personal experiences and
critical dialogue (Giroux, 2010; Freire, 2003;
Shor, 1999; McLaren, 1994). A hope is that
working through a critical pedagogical stance
will help forge a new consciousness among
both oppressed and oppressors that will create
equity across lines of difference. This ‘con-
scientization’, as Freire (2003) describes,
demands that we seek a critical understanding
of the word and the world, particularly regard-
ing the influence of the social constructs and
hegemonic powers that exist to oppress. As
such, critical pedagogues seek ‘to construct
alternative or counter-hegemonic forms of
knowledge, and therefore power’ (Cho,
2010: 311). It is within this framework of
Freirean praxis that critical pedagogues
advocate for the emancipation of minoritized
people from hegemonic structures as the ulti-
mate goal of critical pedagogy.
With a focus on the emancipation of peo-
ple who are oppressed and marginalized in
some way, the work of critical pedagogy
relies on their experiences in society through
the use of critical reflection, narratives, and
critical dialogue. This is premised on the
notion that people who are oppressed will
‘question the system they live in and the
knowledge being offered to them, to discuss
what type of future they want’ in a manner
that is both empowering and liberating (Shor,
1999: 28). The hope, then, is that this criti-
cal reflection and questioning will invoke the
sharing of personal stories of and dialogue
about oppression and marginalization. It
is an aim of critical pedagogy that through
these means, people who are oppressed will
decenter the current hegemonic discourse in
ways that re-center and redevelop knowledge
that focuses on equity across races, classes,
and genders.
This work of critical pedagogy, then, is
a ‘means [of] bringing the laws of cultural
representation face to face with their found-
ing assumptions, contradictions, and para-
doxes’ (McLaren, 1994: 218). This puts the
hope of critical praxis in the hands of both
the oppressed and the oppressor, as the praxis
of reflection, dialogue, and action requires
transmission across and within hierarchical
laws of society. Critical pedagogy thus ‘pro-
vides the capacities, knowledge, skills, and
social relations through which individuals
recognize themselves as social and political
agents’ of change and emancipation (Giroux,
2010: 480).
Emancipation as a Pitfall: The
Pervasiveness of Binary Thinking
Where the promise of emancipation is hope-
ful in critical pedagogy, the binary language
of critical pedagogy is a significant pitfall.
Pervasive in both Westernized thinking and
critical pedagogy (which Kincheloe (2012)
would argue is a Western-only philosophy),
however, is the reliance on dichotomous
 QUEER(ING) CISGENDER NORMATIVITY
frames of reference regarding gender and
emancipation.
Gender as a binary. People most often
use gender to describe a person’s sex as male
or female, creating a binary that imprisons a
rigid definition of gender. Although Butler
(1994: 3) asserts that ‘gender is produced
through overlapping articulations of power’
that force individuals to acquire and perform
related social norms, our society operates
through a hegemonic and heteronormative
discourse that gender is biologically fixed to
match a person’s biological sex. This gender
binary asserts that a person is either male
or female, but never both, interchanging, or
neither.
This dichotomous thinking encourages
oppression and marginalization of those who
do not conform to the norms or are seen as
lesser in the hierarchy of the gender binary.
Inside this binary are cisgender individuals,
while outside of this binary lie genderqueer
individuals, yet another binary. Cisgender
individuals are those whose gender identity
matches their biological sex, and genderqueer
individuals are those whose gender identity is
more fluid (Stachowiak, 2017).
Although often used interchangeably, gen-
der and sex are not the same thing. ‘Sex is
generally considered biological, and gender
is considered cultural’ (Stryker, 2008: 8–9),
and gender is assigned at birth to parallel
with a person’s sex. Sex is related to one’s
anatomical make-up, and in Western cultures,
this is either male or female. As such, these
two genders identified by feminine and mas-
culine characteristics are expected to coincide
with female and male genitalia, respectively.
Thus, female gender coincides with feminine
characteristics and having a vagina; and male
gender coincides with masculine characteris-
tics and having a penis.
As Stryker (2008: 11) emphasizes, how-
ever, ‘the important things to bear in mind
are that gender is historical (it changes
through time), that it varies from place to
place and culture to culture, and that it is con-
tingent (it depends on) a lot of different and
731
seemingly unrelated things coming together’.
The Western view of two genders creates an
oppressive gender binary of severe inequali-
ties and prohibitive stereotypes (e.g., only
men have short hair, and only women have
long hair). This binary system ‘implicitly
retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gen-
der to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is
otherwise restricted by it’ (Butler, 2006: 6).
Systemically, the gender binary supports
inequality among the two genders and stereo-
types that can be exclusionary.
Gender becomes a much ‘more compli-
cated topic when you start taking it apart and
breaking it down’ (Stryker, 2008: 7). While
complicated and evolving, an understanding
of the complexities of gender can aide in an
understanding of the genderqueer partici-
pants in this study, as well as an understand-
ing of the oppression these individuals face
as a result of the gender binary.
Dismantling the gender binary within criti-
cal pedagogy, then, involves not only recog-
nizing the power of these social practices that
work to keep the binary system in place, but
also recognizing that these same social prac-
tices shape genders that do not fall within the
binary system. Then, instead of looking at
these existing social practices as oppressive
only, we can reclaim the power of the prac-
tices in ways that activate new social rela-
tions, such as those produced by genderqueer
individuals.
The binary language of emancipation.
Binary structures are dangerous because
they essentialize the values of one category
over the other. In the gender binary, for
example, male is elemental, and the mas-
culine characteristics that make a person
male are viewed as the standard. This puts
the female gender and feminine character-
istics as inferior because they are not the
standard by which to live. In other words,
the male is the oppressor, and the female is
the oppressed. The binary of teacher/student
can be viewed in much the same way, with
the teacher’s knowledge as superior to the
student’s knowledge. Freire (2003) counters
732 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
this by offering what he calls ‘problem-
posing education’, where the teacher and
student are seen as co-constructors of knowl-
edge. This is the type of educator that criti-
cal pedagogues envision playing a part in
critical pedagogy. There are still the teacher
and student roles within critical pedagogy,
but instead of those labels, ‘the teacher is
unequivocally [the emancipator] while “the
oppressed” are presented as a distinct group’
needing emancipation (Galloway, 2012:
179). Even though the teacher and students
engage in sharing of narratives and engag-
ing in critical dialogue in critical pedagogy,
there is still the notion that students need
the emancipator-teacher to lead the way to
emancipation. This creates an unnecessary
and prevalent binary that still puts the eman-
cipator-teacher in a superior role.
In conjunction with this binary, Bingham
et al. (2010: 31) also note that ‘although
emancipation is oriented towards equity,
independence and freedom, it actually
installs dependency at the very heart of the
“act” of emancipation’. The emancipation
binary suggests that the students cannot
emancipate themselves without the involve-
ment of the teacher. Thus, in much the same
way that the male/female binary creates a
dependency for females (and gender non-
conforming individuals) on masculine char-
acteristics as the standard by which to live,
the emancipator/emancipated binary creates
a dependency on the characteristics of the
emancipator for the soon-to-be-emanci-
pated (Galloway, 2019). Understanding the
function of dependency within emancipa-
tion to which Bingham et al. speak takes
an interrogation of the literal meaning of
emancipation. It ‘literally means to give
away ownership’ of oneself or of something
(Bingham et al., 2010: 27). In the case of
emancipation in critical pedagogy, then, it
requires a reliance on the already emanci-
pated consciousness of someone else (i.e.,
the teacher) by the oppressed (i.e., the stu-
dent). The language of emancipation does
eliminate the language of the oppressor/
oppressed, and this puts the teacher in a more
positive light: instead of the oppressor, s/he
is the emancipator – there to do good works
for people who are oppressed – who helps
others to the path of being emancipated.
However different this language, though, it
does not negate the fact that the concept of
emancipation sets up a binary system that
fosters hierarchies and dependence.
Because of the binary and dependency
created through the language of emancipa-
tion, Orner (1992: 75) argues that ‘student
voice, as it has been conceptualized in work
which claims to empower, is an oppressive
construct’ because it ‘perpetuates relations
of domination in the name of liberation’.
The emancipator has a level of superior-
ity in the emancipator/emancipated binary
because of the use of critical pedagogy as
a way to lead people who are oppressed
to empowerment and emancipation; this
situates their voice as dominant. They, as
the emancipator, are privy to information
and knowledge to which people who are
oppressed are not yet. The reliance on a
pedagogical method of emancipation ‘pre-
supposes ready-made hierarchical worlds
of sense in which individuals form inten-
tions, make choices, and carry out actions
in the ready-made terms of those worlds’
(Lugones, 2005: 86). If the emancipated are
dependent on the emancipator for learning
how to speak for empowerment, how can
we be sure that the voice of the emancipated
is authentic? How can we be sure that their
individual unconscious subjective relations
to and assumptions of power are being
examined without any influence of the
dominant voice of the emancipator? And,
in turn, how is the emancipator/emanci-
pated relationship different in the least from
the colonizer/colonized relationship that
has repeatedly been named as supporting
a society built on hierarchy and inequity?
And, does the binary nature of the language
of critical pedagogy actually oppress some
individuals in new or different ways than
they are already oppressed?
 QUEER(ING) CISGENDER NORMATIVITY
WHAT QUEER THEORY AND
GENDERQUEER CAN TEACH
CRITICAL PEDAGOGUES
Queer Theory works to queer the society’s
‘rigid normalizing categories’ and our ‘taken-
for-granted assumptions about relationships,
identity, gender, and sexual orientation’ (Meyer,
2007: 15). This critical approach offered by
Queer Theory creates possibilities to dislocate
hegemonic structures, and is more focused on
the actions that occur as a result, not the philoso-
phy. Queer Theory, thus, is presented ‘as a peda-
gogy’ (Britzman, 1995: 153) that is both critical
and encourages the use of everyday narratives in
order to destabilize normalizing constructions.
As critical pedagogues, we need to queer our
current frames of thinking about gender in ways
that challenge and press against hegemonic
structures of analyzing, defining, and evaluating
lived experiences in relation to more than gen-
der alone. We need to move from only acknowl-
edging the social construction of gender (both
inside and outside the binary), to acknowledg-
ing the social process of becoming.
Genderqueer people claim a space, an iden-
tity that does not adhere to norms, but rather to
how their body feels; oftentimes, either the male
or female gender is not a felt aspect for a gen-
derqueer individual. Rather, some genderqueer
individuals claim an in-between; thus, they
dislocate norms as they navigate this claimed
space. While we argue that people of all gender
identities navigate this in-between space at some
point(s) throughout their life, we believe this
space is acknowledged and claimed most often
by gender non-conforming individuals almost
by default. As such, this in-between space is
what makes genderqueer individuals unique and
valuable in the study of critical pedagogy.
Gender as a Felt Sense:
Disidentification and
In-Between Spaces
Genderqueer individuals, as implied by the
very name, queer gender constructs and
733
activate new social relations because the
‘reality’ of their gender as genderqueer is
produced by the fiction of the gender binary.
In this way, genderqueer individuals disiden-
tify, meaning that they ‘neither opt to assimi-
late within [the binary] structure nor strictly
oppose it’ but instead disidentify as ‘a strat-
egy that works on and against dominant ide-
ology’ (Muñoz, 1999: 11). Genderqueer
individuals often both do and don’t do what
society expects or accepts – a person may
have a beard (e.g., he is perceived as male, so
that’s accepted) and wear make-up (e.g., he is
not perceived as female, so that’s not
accepted). Although not everyone chooses to
disidentify, disidentification is not limited to
genderqueer individuals or those who do not
fit within societal norms. Any time a person
goes against dominant ideology in order
to restructure thinking, they disidentify,
creating a space where ‘binaries begin to
falter and fiction becomes the real’ (Muñoz,
1999: 20), thus activating new social claims
and relations and dismantling dichotomous
thinking.
Disidentifying dismantles oppression and
creates agency through the acts of individu-
als seeking to ‘activate their own sense of
self’ (Muñoz, 1999: 5). It is both informed
by and in opposition to dominant ideology,
but should not be used as support that we
completely dismiss the importance of gender
as a social construction. Salamon (2010: 76)
argues that ‘what we feel about our bodies is
just as “constructed” as what we think about
them, and the power of social construction as
a model of understanding embodiment stems
from its insistence that these categories are
not separate but always intertwined’. This is
what Salamon refers to as the ‘felt sense’ of
our body. Some individuals who queer gen-
der choose alternative labels, such as gender-
queer, because they feel as though they do not
fit in their assigned gender.
That said, a genderqueer body shows us
how the deep-seeded nature of gender is, in
fact, fictive, but also that the social construc-
tion of gender offers ‘a way to understand
734 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
how…felt sense arises’ (Salamon, 2010: 76).
This felt sense manifests through our lived
experiences in relation to the social con-
struction of gender and the attributes that
are socially linked to what mediates mascu-
linity, femininity, androgyny, and so forth,
and is ‘highly contextual and personal’
(Stachowiak, 2017: 535). The ways in which
we either identify or disidentify with these
socially constructed ideals are attached to the
multiplicity of our identity. Felt sense of gen-
der essentially translates to a critical embodi-
ment of self, driven by both the corporeal
body and the psyche, and the impact of
social, cultural, and institutional theories of
hegemony on both the body and the psyche.
The felt sense of genderqueerness for
ascribing individuals places them in a liminal
space. It is a space that is ‘a positionality of
divine betweenness’ (Alexander, 2005: 252)
that is more than being caught in between
borders of male and female. It is a state of
being both outside and inside the borders,
continuously, independently and/or simul-
taneously. It is about being in a place where
we recognize that we are free to embrace our
identities in any way imaginable or necessary.
And although this can be a frenzied feeling to
knowingly (and unknowingly) embrace all
of our identities, having a critical conscious-
ness of the freedom, the lack of borders and
binaries, and the potential for selfhood within
this liminal space is powerful (Koshy, 2011;
McMaster, 2005; McLeod, 2000). As such,
this liminal space is an important piece of
genderqueer identity that can work to inform
the ways critical pedagogues approach
knowledge and teaching.
While there are many ideas about and
definitions for the liminal space (e.g., Pötsch,
2010; Turner, 1995), the definition we use in
this work focuses mainly on the in-between-
ness. Typically, queer identified people (i.e.,
either by self or society) are labeled as a mar-
ginalized group in society. We think an under-
lying importance, though, is a move to see
genderqueers as a group that is in between,
to see them in a liminal space, versus in a
space that is ‘on the edge’ or ‘just outside’
of the norm. Similarly, Muñoz’s (1999) writ-
ing on a ‘theory of migracy’ and Lugones’s
(1987) writings on ‘“world”-traveling’ both
suggest that people of a minority status (gen-
derqueers, in this case) spend a lot of time
‘traveling back and forth from different iden-
tity vectors’ (Muñoz, 1999: 32), continu-
ally evaluating and reevaluating experiences
and interactions. While neither a theory of
migracy nor ‘world’-traveling exclusively
cite liminality, this movement indicated
within both theories certainly does invoke
thoughts of the time spent and negotiations
made while in a liminal space as people are
traveling back and forth.
Simultaneously connecting and discon-
necting from the social constructs that define
individuals, moving freely within/out of bor-
ders, empowers genderqueers to judiciously
analyze hegemonic structures, reject hierar-
chical thinking, and claim our own selfhood
and voice. Having this critical conscious-
ness in the liminal space allows individu-
als to ‘see double, first from the perspective
of one culture, then from the perspective
of another’ (Anzaldúa, 2002: 549), and the
information gained from these multiple per-
spectives allows us to see the fabrication
of our hegemonic society and gives us the
liberty to construct our own knowledge. As
such, we can begin to ‘question, refashion,
or mobilize received ideas’ in a way that
empowers us ‘to act as an agent of change’
(McLeod, 2000: 219) in transforming old
knowledge to new, socially just, and equita-
ble knowledge. Thus, we move from being
mostly passive actors in our identity forma-
tion to active participants.
As such, exploring the terrain of gender-
queer individuals’ experiences offers valu-
able insight into the potential of liminality.
The potential here is that the liminal space
allows individuals to challenge and/or dislo-
cate established structures and ‘the key recur-
sive and interrelated social practices through
which meanings are constructed’ (McKay
et al., 2005: 279).
 QUEER(ING) CISGENDER NORMATIVITY
According to Pötsch (2010), a ‘liminal
space is inherently disruptive’, and thus pre-
sents a call to do something about the dis-
ruption of hegemonic structures that seek
to embrace the liminal space – not as limit-
ing, but as dynamic and with interchanging
borders. Liminality offers interwoven sites
of awareness, resistance, and movement in
everyday lived experiences. This attention to
liminality carries privileges of (1) awareness
of the multiplicity of self, (2) resistance to
hegemony and related forms of oppression,
and (3) lateral and connecting (versus hierar-
chical and dichotomous or binary) movement.
Individuals need to be genuinely grounded in
the self in order to stay in ambiguity and to
work as a collective. An awareness of one’s
occupancy in liminal spaces offers a sense of
self and a comfort with ambiguity that sup-
ports collective action and agency against
established structures and power. The collec-
tive that is driven by an awareness of limi-
nality allows for individuals to feel equally
invested in dislocating hegemonic structures,
empowered through autonomy that is only
possible as a collective, and enabled by both
individual and shared voice.
Gender as Rhizomatic:
Intersectionality, Assemblages,
and Becoming
Genderqueer individuals do not fit into the
gender binary sometimes by choice, but also
because this ‘dichotomous model of gender
fail[s] to capture the complexity, diversity,
and fluidity of the [genderqueer] experi-
ence’ (Diamond and Butterworth, 2008:
366), and this leads to a disruption in the
hegemonic structure of the male/female
gender binary. Due to this often contested,
challenged, and oppressed disruption in
binary thinking caused by the emergence of
genderqueer as a gender identity, it is impor-
tant to understand gender ‘in the context of
power relations embedded in social identi-
ties’ (Shields, 2008: 301). Intersectionality
735
helps to disrupt binary thinking, but only for
brief interrogations.
The benefits and limitations of the frame-
work of intersectionality. Intersectionality
was introduced by Crenshaw (1989) and
Collins (1990) as a means to interrogate
places of both privilege and oppression as
a result of social power relations within the
meeting of different identities. Acting as
‘a lens’ (Patrana, 2010: 55) to inform such
analysis, the framework of intersectional-
ity works to magnify the multiple ways in
which pieces of an individual’s identity meet,
or intersect, and examines what happens and
interrogates why at that point of intersection.
The framework leads to the understanding
and naming of new or previously silenced
identities, as well as a closer understanding
of dominant identities, including a space for
the discussion and visibility of genderqueer
identity that has been carved by the frame-
work of intersectionality.
However productive the space created
by the framework of intersectionality, the
term intersection is problematic in that it
implies that only certain factors must align
in order for two or more of our identities to
come together and have significance over
our situations and experiences (Stachowiak,
2017). Because the ‘intersectionality theory
directs us to researching the standpoint of
those identities located at the site of inter-
section’ (Rahman, 2010: 951), it asserts
that the different aspects of our identity
can be turned off, ignored, or simply man-
aged. Intersectionality necessarily privileges
certain identities. For example, if we are
interested in understanding the oppression
experienced by gay genderqueers, the lens of
intersectionality reveals the two intersections
of gay and genderqueer, but neglects to con-
sider the impact that each individual’s race,
ethnicity, or class may also contribute to the
oppressions they experience. Thus, it is safe
to say that ‘the prevailing view of social iden-
tities [becomes] one of uni-dimensionality
and independence, rather than a true inter-
section’ of identities (Bowleg, 2008: 313).
736 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Of course, more constructs can and do meet
at one intersection, but rather than see all of
a person’s social constructs as making them a
whole person, the framework of intersection-
ality privileges a view of just the parts of a
person’s whole being.
As a result of this privileging of certain
social constructs of a person’s identity, the
framework of intersectionality becomes an
additive versus interdependent framework
that ‘conceptualizes people’s experiences
as separate, independent, and summative’
(Bowleg, 2008: 314). Aside from it being
problematic that this additive approach does
not consider an individual as a whole being, it
is also problematic because it eliminates the
possibility of other related and important nar-
ratives, such as those related to being a gay
genderqueer. The leaving out of such narra-
tives when analyzing an individual’s experi-
ences undoubtedly silences significant pieces
of who they are as a human being.
With this, it’s important that we ask, ‘How
do [our] intersections matter?’ (Pastrana, as
cited in Stachowiak, 2017: 535). This ques-
tion is significant because it encourages
us to consider how intersectionality ‘helps
to maintain hegemonic structures of hier-
archy and power by forcing classification
of social constructs’ (Stachowiak, 2017:
535). Hierarchical organization of identi-
ties ‘impact[s] people’s lives in concrete and
devastating ways and justif[ies] a sliding
scale of human worth used to keep human-
kind divided’ (Anzaldúa, 2002: 541). Think,
for instance, of a Muslim American: the
framework of intersectionality coerces the
Muslim American (and others, for that mat-
ter) to decide which part of their identity –
the Muslim or the American part – is most
significant, most advantageous. This causes
the person to hide (if they can) or silence/
deny the Muslim part of their identity when it
is not safe to reveal it in America. Yet again,
we see that a piece (or pieces) of the indi-
vidual’s identity is (are) ‘taken-for-granted’
(Puar, 2007: 206), rendered invisible, and
silenced. A sense of falseness to identity is
also rendered here because choosing either/
or denies a full and truthful sense of self. It
seems as though the framework of intersec-
tionality continuously leads us down a path
of limited understanding of motionless iden-
tities, as well as a broadening of subjugation
and oppressions (Bowleg, 2008; Shields,
2008; Puar, 2007).
As a consequence of the framework of
intersectionality, imaginary lines are cre-
ated between identities, and thus individu-
als are necessarily fenced inside the borders
that the language of the framework creates.
Both Anzaldúa (2007) and Bhabha (1994)
speak to the notion of living in the border-
lands, the in-between spaces that separate,
join, and straddle different cultures. While
the borderlands of identity put an individual
in an advantageous space of ‘both/and’ liv-
ing (e.g., they allow room for one to embrace
their whole being), they also imply a sense of
entrapment; these imaginary borders are sim-
ilar to our physical borders that are difficult
to cross and from which to gain full accept-
ance. Living in the borderlands of different
cultures is thus similar to living in a mind
frame of intersectionality. Like different cul-
tures, our identity is seen as singular and fro-
zen inside the phony lines, only intersecting
with other pieces of our identity on occasion
(Morris, 2002). And, because we are multi-
dimensional beings, these borders only work
to confuse us, and to create contradiction
and ambivalence. Fraught with the choice of
either/or rather than the option both or many,
we ‘undergo a struggle of flesh, a struggle of
borders, an inner war’ (Anzaldúa, 2007: 78)
that leaves us heavily burdened. The borders
created by intersectionality force us to choose
which identity to which we lean and which
identity we contest or ignore. Within this, we
are often stuck, trapped, and, as a result, we
are not truly whole beings.
Genderqueer individuals most certainly
occupy the borderlands of gender identity
because they feel both male and female,
sometimes neither, and sometimes one or
the other. But because of the borders set up
 QUEER(ING) CISGENDER NORMATIVITY
by society, it is often difficult and danger-
ous for genderqueers to slide back and forth
between, as well as through, male and female
identity. In much the same way, because of
a reliance on choosing either/or identity, the
framework of intersectionality supports a
binary system that poses particular issues for
genderqueer individuals. Even while a space
for genderqueer voices to be heard may be
a result of analysis through intersectional-
ity, the fact that the framework continues to
uphold a binary philosophy means that gen-
derqueers face systemic oppression. Since
genderqueers do not fit neatly into the male/
female binary, a dependence on any binary
system poses a threat to the ultimate dismant­
ling of binary thinking.
Considering a framework of assem-
blages. We have argued that genderqueer
individuals carry this privilege in an in-
between space of gender, with benefits of flu-
idity and a critical consciousness of self and
identity. Fluidity within identity requires a
Figure 63.1 Intersectionality versus assemblages
737
paradigm shift of our current thinking around
identity because intersectionality neces-
sarily privileges certain identities. For this,
we argue that we come as a package, as an
assemblage, which is more attuned to inter-
woven forces that merge and dissipate time,
space, and body against linearity, coher-
ency, and permanency (Puar, 2007: 212).
Where intersectionality privileges stability
of socially constructed and accepted parts of
our identity, assemblages embrace the fluid-
ity and uncertainty of all parts of our identity.
Figure 63.1 is a visual to represent this differ-
ence between the two frameworks.
Through this visual, it is obvious how
complicated and messy the framework
of intersectionality can become. Part (a),
Intersectionality – Simple shows a distinct
privileging of two identities that can happen
as a result of intersectionality. It also shows
how borders are created between the two
identities, gay and genderqueer. But more
telling of the confusing and burdensome
738 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
borders that intersectionality establishes is
part (b), Intersectionality – Complex. The
space in between the gay and Christian iden-
tities, for example, is the confusing border-
lands of which Anzaldúa (2007) and Bhabha
(1994) speak; it is clear in the figure where the
border lines are drawn. The visual also makes
it quite evident how only certain experiences
are privileged while others are excluded,
specifically in part (c) Intersectionality –
Exclusionary. There are other even more con-
fusing borders and borderlands. While part (d),
Assemblages looks chaotic and messy, it
clearly shows that ‘assemblages are collec-
tions of multiplicities’ that require a recog-
nition of ‘other contingencies of belonging
(melding, fusing, viscosity, bouncing)’ as a
part of one’s whole being (Puar, 2007: 211).
One can see that assemblages work in ways
that emphasize a deviation from and discord
with hegemonic structures of power.
Figure 63.1 also depicts how a framework
of assemblages embraces an exponential
number of connections throughout different
features of our identity. Simply put, ‘there are
no points or positions [within a framework of
assemblages]; there are only lines’ (Deleuze
and Guattari, as cited in Puar, 2007: 196)
that traverse and re-traverse in multiple and
immeasurable ways. With that, assemblages
necessarily ‘deprivilege binary opposition[s]’
(Puar, 2007: 205), which, as we know, is the
complete opposite of intersectionality, and
this makes a framework of assemblages
an incredibly productive philosophy. This
bodes well for a desire to disband hegemonic
structures and advocate for equity and social
justice. This is especially promising for gen-
derqueer individuals and other minoritized
groups because it assures a prominent and
continual space for voice and agency.
A framework of assemblages reminds us
that all of the pieces that make us up come
with us in every situation, every circum-
stance. I (Dana) am always queer, although
it may be in the forefront of my perfor-
mance in some situations, it sits quietly (but
not invisibly) in the background in others.
Intersectionality implies that pieces of your
identity come together at a certain point
only; assemblages embrace the liminal,
fluid space of identity – that same space
occupied by genderqueer people. While the
liminal space of genderqueer identity is not
the same as assemblages of identity, the two
are certainly interwoven and contingent.
Moving the conversation from intersectional-
ity to assemblages creates a place, a visibil-
ity for genderqueer, as well as all forms of
identification.
One concern with a framework of assem-
blages is the possibility that people will
take advantage of the messy nature of the
philosophy and find it a reason to not take
responsibility for change and transforma-
tion. Puar (2007) reminds us that ‘inter-
sectional identities and assemblages must
remain as interlocutors in tension’ because
‘intersectional identities are the byproducts
of attempts to still and quell the perpetual
motion of assemblages, to capture and
reduce them, to harness their threatening
mobility (2007: 213). As we have already
learned, intersectionality does provide us
with a closer look at experiences, and for
that, we need to continue to keep intersec-
tionality in sight. This will work against
those who seek complicity rather than
transformative actions within a framework
of assemblages. Where intersectionality
seeks to dismiss a step to thinking in terms
of assemblages is where our work to dis-
mantle hegemonic structures is threatened.
A continuously critical conscious mind for
assemblages is needed here.
A move from thinking in terms of inter-
sections to thinking in terms of assemblages
takes work. It requires a critical conscious-
ness that is not readily a privilege to most
people who embrace a comfortable place
among a binary. Because of their outright
rejection of claiming a binary status as either
male or female, genderqueer individuals are
incessantly aware of their occupancy within
the liminal space. This puts genderqueers in
a unique position; they are already ‘gifted
 QUEER(ING) CISGENDER NORMATIVITY
at coping with liminality and could perform
work involving the reconciliation of multi-
ple points of view’ (McMaster, 2005: 105)
and the teaching of the work necessary to
begin dismantling hegemonic structures. The
framework of intersectionality does not allow
for the opportunity to do such work, leav-
ing us with a ‘lack of language to describe’
(Diamond and Butterworth, 2008: 373) our
experiences. A framework of assemblages
allows us opportunities and the language.
Even as the idea of assemblages suggests
disarray that looks similar to life in the
borderlands, the difference of this liminal
space remains salient. Within a framework
of assemblages, we are not forced to choose
either/or/both; we are free to embrace ‘all’.
Because of assemblages, we are thrust into
this liminal space by design.
Intersectionality gives us a false sense
of rooted identity, one that is socially con-
structed and given unchosen rank and status.
Assemblages give us liminality; liminal-
ity gives us a truer sense of selfhood; and
together, assemblages and liminality give
us a space we can choose to call ‘home’
(Anzaldúa, 2002). In his writings on identi-
ties, McLeod (2000), references the work of
Paul Gilroy in relation to what we call home
and how we arrive there. Recognizing the
multiple places and cultures he calls home,
Gilroy struggles to find his roots. Instead, he
speaks of the routes he has taken and con-
tinues to take throughout life. In the end,
he deems the routes as the most important
aspects of his experiences because they have
caused a transformation in his self and his
beliefs. We like to think of intersectional-
ity as roots and assemblages as routes: roots
are meant to fix us, to keep us in one place;
routes are meant to take us places and chal-
lenge us in transformative ways. As we
continue to consider and understand the
inner-workings of assemblages, a hope is
that additional ways in which a framework
of assemblages reifies power and privilege
through social, cultural, and institutional
theories of hegemony will be more clearly
739
exposed. As such, we strove to keep inter-
sectionality, assemblages, and liminality in
tension throughout this study.
Gender as a rhizome. Pairing a frame-
work of assemblages with thinking in terms
of gender as rhizomatic further lessens the
limitations imparted by our current binary
forms of thinking. According to Linstead
and Pullen (2006: 1302), rhizomes are based
on connections; heterogeneity; multiplic-
ity; ruptures, breaks, and discontinuities;
and experimentation. Thus, if we think of
gender as a rhizome, we can read gender as
a state of becoming versus a state of static
being. Connections are being made all the
time based on our lived experiences that
are mediated through the bringing together
of the different social constructions of who
we are and our life stories and/or moments.
As such, a move toward thinking of gender
as a rhizome is inherently a move toward the
recognition of the connectivity of our multi-
plicity and a move away from binaries and
socially constructed labels. Like Salamon
(2010), however, Linstead and Pullen empha-
size the importance of the influence that gen-
der as a social construction has on gender as
a rhizome.
The heterogeneity that comes with reading
gender as rhizomatic pulls together different
levels of connections, and as such, empha-
sizes the individuality of a single moment;
no one rhizome is the same, as each connec-
tion is contextual. Likewise, the multiplic-
ity of rhizomes in this manner of thinking
emphasizes that the knowledge gained from
one moment can and often does collide with
other moments to create the story of our own
gender. Unlike binary thinking, rhizomatic
thinking thus allows for ‘the possibility of the
other and different connections’ through the
intentional or unintentional ruptures, breaks,
or severing of connections (Linstead and
Pullen, 2006: 1302). In this sense, those who
ascribe to the genderqueer identity (or other
non-normative identities) rupture the hegem-
onic notion of gender and create space for
others and different modes of non-normative
740 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
thinking. As people make and sever con-
nections, they are essentially experimenting
with the idea of queering the norms of their
own stories of reality of gender and the
stories of others’ reality of gender.
When we read gender as a rhizome, it
‘offers possibilities of the other, possi-
bilities of change and transformation, and
possibilities for freedom and emancipa-
tion that go beyond the constraints of bio-
logical sex and socially ascribed genders’
(Linstead and Pullen, 2006: 1303). Within
this connectivity of rhizomatic thinking,
we can also see the relationships between
intersectionality, multiplicity, and assem-
blages, and, thus, identify the multiple
liminal spaces which we occupy throughout
our lived experiences. Figure 63.2 depicts
these relationships. Liminal spaces are not
labeled, as they are re/un-fashioned within
the movement created throughout the rhi-
zome. Recognizing the rhizomatic nature of
gender thrusts our thinking into understand-
ing gender as a process.
Figure 63.2 Gender as a rhizome
CONCLUSION
Because the experiences of genderqueer indi-
viduals offer insight into the rhizomatic
nature of identity, this lens can provide criti-
cal pedagogues a new way of considering,
not only the language we use, but also the
experiences we choose to center in our
research and work.
Our argument is that having a critical con-
sciousness of the rhizomatic nature of gen-
der leads to a breakdown of hegemony and
creates a possibility of transformational and
socially just thinking in regards to gender. But
even more astutely, we do not hesitate to take
this one step further, advocating for a criti-
cal consciousness of the rhizomatic nature
of identity as a whole. We define identity
as undoubtedly fluid, not monolithic, most
importantly multidimensional, and always in
the process of becoming (Britzman, 2010). In
this way, we can see how gender becomes a
part of the multiplicitous identities within the
assemblage of our identity, and another part
 QUEER(ING) CISGENDER NORMATIVITY
of our identity can take the helm as a cen-
tral piece we may also negotiate. Thus, the
movement within the rhizome is highlighted,
and even more possibilities of breaking down
hegemonic structures become available, not
just in regards to the social construction of
gender, but also in regards to other social
constructions of reality. It is important to
note a critical consciousness of the rhizom-
atic nature of our identity is not the answer
to ending injustices; rather, it is a tool that
we can use to begin to breakdown injustices.
Keeping this in mind is important in prevent-
ing, not only the reification of norms, but also
the hierarchical categorization of social con-
structs, such as race and class.
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Culturally Responsive Schooling
as a Form of Critical Pedagogies
for Indigenous Youth and
Tribal Nations
Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A. Solyom
and Bryan Brayboy
Culturally responsive schooling (CRS) has
proven useful to enhance academic engage-
ment for Indigenous youth by promoting
culturally relevant programming, linguistic
diversity, culturally conscious service deliv-
ery, and program evaluation. At its most com-
prehensive implementation, CRS addresses
discriminatory attitudes prevalent among
community service providers, teachers,
school administrators, and other students and
promotes asset-based culturally relevant and
respectful pedagogical practices for diverse
students. For Indigenous communities, this
means CRS can facilitate ongoing interac-
tion and cooperation among key stakeholders
including federal government officials, tribal
and community agencies, families, students,
teachers, and school administrators to pro-
mote self-determination for tribal nations.
Many scholars have advocated for simi-
lar approaches in the schooling of histori-
cally underserved racialized youth (see, for
example, Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1994,
1995a, 1995b; Ladson-Billings and Tate,
64
1995; Paris, 2012; Paris and Alim, 2014).
Yet, contrary to what some believe, utilizing
CRS to educate Indigenous students is not
new. Indigenous communities have used cul-
turally relevant and responsive practices to
prepare their youth to be engaged citizens of
their tribe – from early childhood education
through adulthood – since time immemorial
(Romero-Little, 2010). However, academic
discourse of the benefits of CRS in main-
stream, state, and federally controlled schools
began to steadily increase in the 1960s as
research on the benefits of CRS showed posi-
tive outcomes in enhancing educational expe-
riences and achievement for diverse students.
In other words, research has found that when
CRS is engaged, students excel academi-
cally and display enhanced well-being, self-
efficacy, and self-esteem (McCarty, 2009).
The result allows students to develop healthy
identity formation, be more self-directed,
politically active, and have a positive influence
on their tribal communities (Kana‘iaupuni
et al., 2013; Siekmann et al., 2017).
744 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
This Handbook of Critical Pedagogies
illustrates the many overlapping issues and
calls to action that resonate with diverse
lived experiences and communities. The
unique presence of treaties signed between
sovereign Indigenous nations and the
US federal government means CRS for
Indigenous youth must acknowledge the
history and trust responsibility of the US
federal government with tribal nations. It
must also engage the particular regional
and local histories and ties to land that inti-
mately inform educational opportunities for
Indigenous youth.
Although this chapter is mostly focused
on the context of Indigenous education in
the United States, globally many of the
same patterns and calls to action are pre-
sent. A primary argument we advance is
the central role of place in CRS. Thus it
would be contradictory for us to attempt to
generalize our comments to all Indigenous
First Nations peoples across the globe. We
do, of course, hope that our writing holds
some resonance in various and multiple
contexts.
The guiding thesis throughout this
chapter is that truly culturally responsive
schooling for and with Indigenous youth
is a highly complex endeavor that requires
systemic change within and across a num-
ber of levels of schooling. Our work draws
from the work of critical pedagogy schol-
ars who urge us to consider the socially
constructed nature of education and under-
stand that education processes, policies,
and practices are neither accidental nor
natural but, rather, the result of the social,
historical, and political processes that have
shaped them. We argue that an important
way to respond to some of the tensions
and concerns raised by critical pedagogy
is through consistent and ongoing use of
CRS. CRS shares the required complex-
ity of Critical Pedagogy; both involving
much more than shifts in pedagogy and
curriculum. They require consistently high
expectations for students; the facilitation
of meaningful learning, engagement, and
capacity-building; and a curricular and
pedagogical approach that allows students
to deeply analyze power, marginalization,
and resilience within their own and other
communities. Because CRS is an important
aspect of critical pedagogies, it requires us
to reconceptualize success so that commu-
nity-based and traditional knowledges are
valued alongside mainstream academic
knowledges.
Both CRS and Critical Pedagogies share
a commitment to the fact that place and
context matter. Like the community-based
legacies of Critical Pedagogies, CRS has
been advocated by community leaders and
scholars since at least the 1960s, but given
its focus on place and context and particu-
larly on land, language, and shared historic
cultural knowledge, CRS is an educa-
tional approach that has been engaged by
Indigenous communities for much longer.
Key elements of this approach include that
tribal sovereignty and self-determination
are explicitly and consistently addressed
in the teaching and learning process, that
the racism experienced by Indigenous
youth is acknowledged and remediated,
and that Indigenous Knowledge Systems
are deeply embedded into curriculum and
pedagogy. Educators and scholars must
move away from the essentializing identi-
ties, generalizations, and easy anecdotes
referenced in the bulk of extant academic
literature. Instead, educators, administra-
tors, and education advocates must move
toward engaging in genuinely culturally
responsive learning for Indigenous youth.
In other words, if the decolonizing and
anti-racist vision to which critical educa-
tors aspire is to be attained, schooling must
explicitly acknowledge and resist both his-
toric and contemporary efforts to ‘kill the
Indian and save the man’. The next section
presents an expanded overview of CRS,
especially its links to both colonization
and Whiteness in Native schooling policy
and practice.
 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE SCHOOLING AS A FORM OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
THE IMPERATIVE FOR CRS
Considered both a racial group as well as a
political group, American Indians are one of
the most unique groups in the United States.
This dual status is the result of Native peoples
entering into over 371 treaty agreements with
the United States, which resulted in Indigenous
peoples exchanging approximately one billion
acres of land for a series of promises tied to
peaceful interactions between themselves and
the federal government. Over 100 treaties were
signed that explicitly note education as a trust
responsibility of the US federal government.
While the federal government agreed
to provide educational opportunities for
Indigenous students, this exchange was not
without substantial cost to Indigenous com-
munities. The existence of treaty agreements
set the conditions for the creation of reserva-
tions that, in many cases, forcibly displaced
Native peoples from their ancestral home-
lands to defined land masses held in trust by
the federal government. Reservation lands
were expected to remain pastoral lands and
were traded for promises of the health, edu-
cation, and general well-being of Indigenous
peoples. As just one example, Article VI of
the 1868 Navajo-US Treaty stated:
In order to insure the civilization of the Indians
entering into this treaty, the necessity of education
is admitted, especially of such of them as may be
settled on said agricultural parts of this reserva-
tion, and they therefore pledge themselves to
compel their children, male and female, between
the ages of six and sixteen years, to attend school;
and it is hereby made the duty of the agent for
said Indians to see that this stipulation is strictly
complied with and the United States agrees that,
for every thirty children between said ages who
can be induced or compelled to attend school, a
house shall be provided, and a teacher competent
to teach the elementary branches of an English
education shall be furnished, who will reside
among said Indians, and faithfully discharge his or
her duties as a teacher. (Article VI of the 1868
Navajo-US Treaty)
This agreement demonstrates an established
trust relationship between the Diné (Navajo
745
tribe) and the US federal government as it
related to schooling. It also illustrates how
education and political control was siphoned
from local, tribal communities to the federal
government. The promise that ‘the United
States agrees…’ to provide ‘a teacher com-
petent to teach the elementary branches of an
English education…’ meant that education
would now be administered by federal gov-
ernment employees or, when necessary, by
Christian settler missionaries. Unbeknownst
to Indigenous peoples, in an effort to
strengthen the White US nation-state, many
of these treaty agreements resulted in school-
ing that is deeply rooted in federal, state, and
local government’s desire for assimilation
and colonization (Brayboy, 2005a; Deyhle
and Swisher, 1997; Lipka, 2002; Skutnabb-
Kangas and McCarty, 2008; Lomawaima and
McCarty, 2006). The resulting education,
concentrated on Anglo-Saxon Protestant val-
ues and lessons, advanced violent cultural
and epistemological practices that marginal-
ized, silenced, or destroyed the presence of
Indigenous knowledges and practices in edu-
cational environments.
In 1892, US Army Captain Richard
Pratt delivered a now infamous speech
at George Mason University where he
espoused ideas that became the driving
force for the development of the Carlisle
Indian School (founded in 1879) and other
boarding schools across the country. Pratt
argued education should be used to ‘Kill
the Indian, and Save the Man’, meaning its
goal was to ‘civilize’ and ‘Americanize’
the Indian. Pratt ran his schools like a mili-
tary unit, sometimes implementing corpo-
ral punishment for students who expressed
desire for their Indigenous languages,
spiritual practices, families and even their
styles of dress. Under Pratt, schooling
became a tool and weapon to assimilate
Native students beyond their ability to
identify with their tribe or traditional lan-
guages, practices, ways of thinking, and
ways of being. Yet this was not at all what
most Indigenous nations had in mind when
746 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
they entered into treaties and other school-
ing agreements.
Although the federal government no longer
forcibly removes Indigenous students from
their homes to physically and epistemologi-
cally violent boarding schools, the effects of
historic trauma resulting from Pratt’s assimi-
latory and pernicious schooling remain and
may manifest in a deep distrust of federal
and local education systems. Pratt’s ideology
may also influence teacher and administrator
expectations of schooling and may become
manifest in low teacher and administrator
expectations of Indigenous students. Today,
education disparities persist throughout all
age ranges for Native students.
Compared to non-Native peers, American
Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian
students score lower on standardized exams,
have lower college enrollment, and experi-
ence lower graduation rates at the secondary
and postsecondary levels. Native students are
more likely to be mislabeled for special edu-
cation and less likely to graduate high school,
experiencing a 67% graduation rate, the low-
est of any racial/ethnic demographic group
(Kena et al., 2016; Stetser and Stillwell,
2014). They are more likely be referred to
as ‘at-risk’ and framed as dysfunctional and
prone to violence and substance abuse (US
Department of Education, 2008). Such fram-
ing means Native students are more likely
to be referred to discipline officers or expe-
rience premature ‘push out’ from academic
institutions than to be placed on a college-
track. And although there was a 39% increase
in the overall American Indian/Alaska Native
population from 2000 to 2010, college enroll-
ment and degree attainment continues to be at
or below 1%.
The presence of historic trauma faced by
many Native communities and their youth
may negatively influence students’ pre-
sent academic expectations and experiences
(Chan and Bambico, 2016). Native students
are more likely to report elevated feelings of
isolation, confusion, and despair. While some
researchers argue feelings of isolation and
confusion may be connected to loss of cul-
tural identity, particularly for Native men and
boys, what is important to note is that Native
students are more likely to feel unwanted or
like they do not belong in schooling systems
than to report they feel supported, under-
stood, and welcome (Brayboy et al., 2017).
This education context means Native children
continue to fall further and further behind in a
system which, according to McCarty (2009),
leads ‘underperforming’ schools to teach to
the test, remove ‘low-performing’ students
from the testing pool, eliminate or curtail
non-test subjects like art and social studies,
and artificially manipulate test scores and
drop-out rates. All these factors contribute to
a pervasive deficit-oriented mindset of Native
student potential.
There has, of course, been resistance
to efforts to ignore, ‘push-out’, or assimi-
late and colonize Native students. Perhaps
the first officially recognized call for CRS
in the United States came in 1928 with the
publication of the Meriam Report (Meriam
et al., 1928; Prucha, 2000). In the 1960s and
1970s, tribal nations and urban Indian com-
munities increased pressure on the federal
government to facilitate educational change
and greater tribal control over the education
of Indigenous youth. These efforts led to a
number of important pieces of legislation and
federal investigations related to Indigenous
education and, specifically, the role of tribal
languages and cultures in schools serving
Indigenous youth. In 1969, the US Senate
issued a report titled Indian Education: A
National Tragedy – A National Challenge,
which was the beginning of a series of
important events (Special Subcommittee on
Indian Education, 1969). The Havighurst
Report of 1970 offered data on the academic
performance of Indigenous youth and the
lack of curriculum that supported tribal lan-
guages and cultures in schools (Fuchs and
Havighurst, 1973; Havighurst, 1970), the
Indian Education Act of 1972 included oppor-
tunities and funding for creating tribal cul-
ture and language programs for schools and
 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE SCHOOLING AS A FORM OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
support for increasing the number of Native
educators, and the Indian Self-Determination
and Education Assistance Act of 1975 facili-
tated the development of schools and educa-
tional programs that were tribally controlled
(Demmert and Towner, 2003).
In the 1980s, the educational anthropol-
ogy literature exploded with a focus on CRS
(called by a number of names; see, e.g.,
Brown, 1980; Deyhle, 1986; Greenbaum
and Greenbaum, 1983; McLaughlin, 1989).
This scholarship, combined with related
work in the fields of education and mul-
ticultural education, seemed to bring the
discussion of CRS into the mainstream. In
the 1990s, another series of federal legisla-
tion and reports were issued relating spe-
cifically to Indigenous youth in schools.
The Native American Languages Act of
1990/1992 formalized the importance of
the federal government’s role in preserv-
ing, protecting, and promoting the rights
and freedoms of tribal language use and
preservation.
In 1991, the US Department of Education
issued a report titled Indian Nations at
Risk: An Educational Strategy for Action
Final Report (US Indian Nations at Risk
Task Force, 1991), and in 1992, the White
House Conference on Indian Education and
a follow-up report were completed (White
House Conference on Indian Education,
1992). In 1998, then-President Clinton
issued Executive Order 13096 on American
Indian and Alaska Native education, which
included recognition of the ‘special, historic
responsibility for the education of American
Indian and Alaska Native students’, a com-
mitment to ‘improving the academic per-
formance and reducing the dropout rate’
of Indigenous students, and a nationwide
effort among tribal leaders and Indian educa-
tion scholars to develop a ‘research agenda’
guided by the goals of self-determination and
the preservation of tribal cultures and lan-
guages (American Indian and Alaska Native
Education, 1998). This Executive Order
includes the goals of evaluating ‘promising
747
practices used with’ Indigenous students,
evaluating ‘the role of Native language and
culture in the development of educational
strategies’, and assisting ‘tribal governments
in meeting the unique educational needs of
their children, including the need to preserve,
revitalize, and use native languages and cul-
tural traditions’. However, a new Executive
Order (13336) signed into law on April 30,
2004, did not include the final of these three
goals (American Indian and Alaska Native
Education, 2004). Instead, 13336 focused
attention on Indigenous students meet-
ing the goals established in No Child Left
Behind (2002). This is a significant change
and highlights concern that schools are mov-
ing further away from providing an effective,
high-quality, and culturally responsive edu-
cation to Indigenous youth.
This hyper-focus on test scores and other
standardized forms of assessing educa-
tional success is, of course, part of a much
larger trend highlighted throughout this
volume on Critical Pedagogy. Like Critical
Pedagogies in general, CRS forces a reori-
enting of how educators, policy makers,
and other key stakeholders conceptual-
ize success. According to CRS, success is
about both academic school-based learn-
ing and achievement and community-based
and self-determined learning. This defini-
tion includes contributions to one’s family,
community, and tribal nation. This both/
and understanding of success is consistent
with the many calls for CRS by scholars,
tribal communities, and Indigenous edu-
cational leaders (Beaulieu, 2006; Beaulieu
et al., 2005; Demmert, Grissmer et al., 2006;
Demmert, McCardle et al., 2006; Dick et al.,
1994; Klump and McNeir, 2005).
A NOTE OF CAUTION
Although the plethora of writing on CRS
reviewed here is insightful, it has had little
impact on what teachers do because it is too
748 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
easily reduced to essentializations, meaning-
less generalizations, or trivial anecdotes –
none of which result in systemic, institutional,
or lasting changes to schools serving
Indigenous youth. Indeed, the reason CRS is
so often reduced in these ways is because of
the way Whiteness shapes and structures edu-
cation (see, for example, Castagno, 2008;
Gillborn, 2005; Leonardo, 2009; Vaught,
2011; Vaught and Castagno, 2008). Whiteness
refers to the structural arrangements and ide-
ologies of racial dominance within the United
States. Racial power and inequities are at the
core of Whiteness, but all forms of power and
inequity create and perpetuate Whiteness
(Castagno, 2014). In the context of the
schooling of Indigenous youth, Whiteness is
most directly manifest through colonization
and assimilation, as well as race-based ineq-
uities and aggressions. Whiteness, coloniza-
tion, and assimilation collectively attempt to
maintain and legitimate inequitable schooling
and marginalization of Indigenous youth,
knowledge, and sovereignty.
Three topics that are rarely included in
discussions of CRS are racism, sovereignty,
and Indigenous knowledges or epistemolo-
gies. Racism is a pervasive and consist-
ent element in the schooling experiences of
Indigenous youth. Students experience rac-
ism in a number of ways and from a variety
of sources, including paternalism, prejudice,
harmful assumptions, low expectations, ste-
reotypes, violence, and biased curricular
materials (see, e.g., Deyhle, 1995; Hickling-
Hudson and Ahlquist, 2003; Sparks, 2000;
Ward, 1998). Racism also contributes to the
culture of Whiteness that predominates in
most US schools. Whiteness is manifest in
the predominantly White educational faculty,
the social relations, the norms and expecta-
tions, and the inequitable access to resources
and quality education within our school sys-
tem (see, e.g., Castagno, 2014; Lee, 2005;
Sleeter, 1996). These are just a few of the
reasons it is critical that educators attempt-
ing to engage in CRS understand the dynam-
ics of racism and the ways in which racism
and oppression affect efforts at providing a
high-quality CRS to Indigenous youth. The
Critical Race Theory scholarship (see, e.g.,
Bernal, 2002; Delgado and Stefancic, 2001;
Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995; Tate, 1997)
offers a broader discussion of the pervasive-
ness of racism in society, and Brayboy’s
(2005a) work on Tribal Critical Race Theory
along with Grande’s (2004) Red Pedagogy
shed light on the various forms of coloniza-
tion affecting Indigenous students (see also
Castagno, 2005; Castagno and Lee, 2007).
While CRS must engage issues of race, it
must also be driven by the sovereign status
of tribal nations and concomitant political
identity of Native people in the United States.
Tribal nations have inherent rights to deter-
mine the nature of schooling provided to their
youth. For many Indigenous communities,
achievement in education is believed to be
critical for redressing the systemic inequities
impacting Native communities nationally.
Although tribal communities have a strong
sense of the connections between education,
sovereignty, and self-determination, these
connections are rarely recognized among
mainstream educators or educational policy
makers. Educators must therefore work in
agile organizational environments to pro-
mote self-determination for tribal nations.
This means ensuring that teachers are famil-
iar with the political status of Native stu-
dents and aware that Native students may be
engaged academically with a larger goal to
serve their community. Such dedication and
commitment to schooling as a way of serving
their community means education needs to be
relevant to the current context and needs fac-
ing Indigenous communities. CRS programs
may need to influence and personalize cur-
riculum to prepare the student with relevant
knowledge and skills needed to advocate for
his/her community (Bequette, 2016).
Lastly, some understanding of epistemo-
logical and ontological concerns is important
for educators hoping to engage in CRS for
Indigenous youth because an individual’s
epistemology and ontology are fundamental
 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE SCHOOLING AS A FORM OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
to how s/he understands knowledge and
how s/he individual engages the world.
Epistemology refers to ‘ways of knowing’
while ontology is situated as ‘ways of being’
(Castagno and Brayboy, 2008). This does not
mean educators must give up their own epis-
temologies and ontologies and adopt those of
the community in which they teach. Such an
approach to CRS may be neither possible nor
appropriate. Instead, educators must come to
know that multiple epistemologies and ontol-
ogies exist and that their students may come
to school with a very different worldview
than they themselves have grown up with.
Infusing Indigenous knowledges and episte-
mologies into CRS may additionally mean
recognizing important roles or life stages for
members of the community and developing
awareness of cultural expectations or duties
associated with each stage (Bequette, 2016;
Ross, 2016; Siekmann et al., 2017).
Battiste (2002: 2) notes that ‘Indigenous
knowledge comprises the complex set of
technologies developed and sustained by
Indigenous civilizations’ and that these
knowledges are ‘passed on to the next gen-
eration through modeling, practice, and ani-
mation’. Other Indigenous scholars note that
these knowledges serve as threads, which,
once woven together, make up the cultural
cloth of particular communities (Meyer,
2001). There are components of these knowl-
edge systems that include a central focus on
communities (Battiste, 2002; Deloria, 1970),
a sense of relationality (Burkhardt, 2004;
Marker, 2004; Meyer, 2001), notions of
responsibility to self and community (Basso,
1996; Burkhardt, 2004; Deloria, 1970;
Medicine and Jacobs, 2001), a rootedness in
place (Barnhardt and Kawagley, 2004, 2005;
Basso, 1996; Cajete, 2001; Marker, 2004;
Okakok, 1989), and a responsible use of
power (Basso, 1996; Stoffle et al., 2001).
CRS is rooted in Indigenous Knowledge
Systems and the recognition of racism and
the pernicious impact of Whiteness, colo-
nization, and assimilation on tribal nations
and Indigenous peoples. Thus, CRS for and
749
with Native youth must be aimed at increas-
ing and deepening students’ awareness of the
history of oppression both locally and glob-
ally. Here again, we see how CRS intersects
with core principles of Critical Pedagogy.
Both Critical Pedagogy and CRS require
analysis of the ways that power, marginali-
zation, and resistance shape history, beliefs,
policy, law, and knowledge production. But
this learning must not be left in the past;
students must critically examine how these
patterns continue in the present day and col-
lectively consider how they might promote
anti-colonial, anti-racist, and emancipatory
strategies within and across their communi-
ties. When CRS is engaged, students excel
academically, display enhanced well-being,
develop healthy identity formation, are more
self-directed and politically active, and have
a positive influence on their tribal commu-
nities (Kana‘iaupuni et al., 2013; Siekmann
et al., 2017).
CRS IS SITUATED IN PLACE
CRS rests on understanding what David
Wilkins has referred to as the 4 T’s: treaties,
trust, territory, and tribal sovereignty. Treaties
form the basis of a trust relationship with the
United States, making the federal govern-
ment responsible for the health, education,
and general well-being of Native peoples, on
and off reservations. Trust refers to the
unique relationship between the US federal
government, tribal sovereigns, and individual
tribal members. Rooted in treaties and allot-
ment, the Trust relationship entitles tribes
(through tribal governments or individuals)
to traditional rights guaranteed by treaties
(e.g., hunting, fishing, and water rights) and
preserved by the inherent sovereignty of
tribes. As trustee, the federal government is
required to act in the best interest of the ben-
eficiaries: tribal sovereigns and tribal mem-
bers (Deloria and Wilkins, 2010; Wilkins and
Lomawaima, 2001).
750 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
As suggested earlier, efforts to educate
American Indians are and have been primar-
ily funded by the federal government. These
monies are set aside as part of the education
and interior budgets (with supplements com-
ing from agriculture and health and human
services); although, originally, the belief was
that the monies would come from revenues
earned from natural resource extraction
in communities and leases of lands held in
trust. Territory refers to the role of land and
the importance of place to Indigenous peo-
ples. Finally, tribal sovereignty is the inherent
right of tribal nations to direct their futures
and engage the world in ways that are mean-
ingful to them.
CRS draws on other educational
approaches, including culturally relevant ped-
agogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995a,b), culturally
relevant curriculum (Siekmann et al., 2017),
and environmental or place-based education
(Pewewardy and Hammer, 2003). All are
educational approaches that are place-based
and specific to the location and communi-
ties where students reside. These approaches
incorporate aspects of the student’s and com-
munity’s geographic location, language,
identity, and heritage into the curriculum
and pedagogy. Pedagogy encapsulates how
we think about both teaching and learning;
it requires responsibility, respect, and humil-
ity. Fundamentally, a culturally responsive
pedagogy requires that educators and schools
‘invest in the intellectual resources present
in local communities’ (McCarty, 2009: 22).
This means that schooling specific to the
needs and experiences of Native students rec-
ognizes that education and school matter sig-
nificantly in the quality of life of Indigenous
students.
CRS roots approaches to improving stu-
dent success to their communities and cul-
ture and recognizes that education goes
beyond the formal and Westernized notion
of schooling to also include learning within
Indigenous communities. Such learning often
is family-, community-, and environmentally
based, connecting students to their ancestral
homelands and allowing for important cer-
emonies and sacred practices to take place.
As mentioned in the previous section,
while CRS must engage issues of race,
the sovereign status of tribal nations and
the concomitant political identity of
Native people in the United States also
requires the engagement of sovereignty
and self-determination in the schooling
of Indigenous youth. Hundreds of treaties
and thousands of constitutional rulings,
executive orders, and legislative acts have
acknowledged and reaffirmed the sovereign
status of tribal nations, the unique govern-
ment-to-government relationship between
tribal nations and the federal government,
and the trust responsibility of the United
States to tribal nations (Wilkins, 1997,
2002; Wilkins and Lomawaima, 2001). The
ramifications on education for Indigenous
youth are both wide and deep in scope, but
they include – at a minimum – that tribal
nations have inherent rights to determine the
nature of schooling provided to their youth.
This right is more threatened than ever
given the current conditions on schooling
in the United States, high-stakes account-
ability, and standardization (Lomawaima
and McCarty, 2006). Although tribal com-
munities have a strong sense of the con-
nections between education, sovereignty,
and self-determination, these connections
are rarely recognized among mainstream
educators or educational policy mak-
ers. An important exception resides in the
Coolongatta Statement on Indigenous Rights
in Education, which is an international effort
among Indigenous peoples from a number
of countries to reassert their identities as
tribal nations and the status of education as a
human right (King, 2005).
CURRICULAR + SYSTEMIC FOCUS
CRS comes largely out of the cultural differ-
ence literature, and it assumes that
 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE SCHOOLING AS A FORM OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
a firm grounding in the heritage language and
culture indigenous to a particular place is a
fundamental prerequisite for the development
of culturally-healthy students and communities
associated with that place, and thus is an essential
ingredient for identifying the appropriate qualities
and practices associated with culturally-responsive
educators, curriculum, and schools. (Alaska Native
Knowledge Network, 1998)
This educational approach requires a shift
in teaching methods, curricular materials,
teacher dispositions, and school–community
relations. In other words, CRS is complex
and systemic; it must inform all levels of the
educational system. While much of the writ-
ing about cultural responsiveness focuses on
curriculum, curricular materials alone can-
not lead to the sort of systemic change that
is required to truly serve Indigenous youth
effectively. Curriculum must be paired with
policy, teacher professional development,
discipline approaches, relationships with
families and elders, and leadership.
Because curriculum is a critical compo-
nent of CRS, attention to culturally respon-
sive curriculum must be considered. In our
work with teachers and schools in Native
communities, we often hear about the des-
perate need for curricular material that is
culturally responsive. We do not advocate for
a standard set of curricular materials since
this would contradict the fundamental prin-
ciples we’ve outlined regarding the impor-
tance of place and local knowledge. But we
do offer the following principles that can
guide the development of culturally respon-
sive curriculum:
• A culturally-responsive curriculum reinforces the
integrity of the cultural knowledge that students
bring with them.
• A culturally-responsive curriculum recognizes cul-
tural knowledge as part of a living and constantly
adapting system that is grounded in the past, but
continues to grow through the present and into
the future.
• A culturally-responsive curriculum uses the local
language and cultural knowledge as a founda-
tion for the rest of the curriculum.
751
• A culturally-responsive curriculum fosters a
complementary relationship across knowledge
derived from diverse knowledge systems. (Alaska
Native Knowledge Network, 1998)
• A culturally-responsive curriculum situates local
knowledge and actions in a global context.
(Alaska Native Knowledge Network, 1998)
Culturally responsive curriculum must be
connected to students’ lives, represent their
cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and pre-
sent accurate images of both the past and
present (Agbo, 2001; Skinner, 1999). It will
tap into students’ curiosity and engage them
in topics that are interesting to them; it does
this without watering down, but rather by
strengthening the quality of learning materi-
als (Cleary and Peacock, 1998; Sparks,
2000).
RELATIONALLY, CULTURALLY, AND
ACADEMICALLY ACCOUNTABLE
CRS focuses on sustained engagement with
crucial academic subject matter and stand-
ards. Often, CRS efforts that ‘work’ include
an obvious connection to language and cul-
ture. The inclusion and engagement of lan-
guage and culture, however, does not – nor
should it – come at the expense of academic
success. Simultaneously, while the academic,
schooling parts of this are crucial, they must
not completely override the linguistic and
cultural components of CRS. Indeed, when
done well, the schooling should complement
the linguistic and cultural and vice versa.
Parents and tribal leaders do not argue that
academics are unimportant; rather, most have
suggested that schools are responsible for
teaching their children how to read, write, do
math, think critically, and be ready for an
ever-changing world. There is a commitment
to seeing that young people must engage the
world around them; as a result, CRS rejects
deficit-oriented education. Schooling and its
processes must be accountable.
752 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Accountability is not about pointing
out where children or schools have failed;
accountability is about making sure that
schools and the schooling process do what
they say they are doing. This happens, in
part, when schools are able to incorporate
local standards of success in context with
communities. Communities have specific
ideas of what constitutes a successful educa-
tion for their children, and it is never rooted
in deficits. It is critical that teachers and
educational leaders have high standards for
Native children, schools, and communities.
CRS creates opportunities for teachers to
engage as critical thinkers and doers and to
open up the power of students’ minds and
capabilities. Teachers – as culturally respon-
sive and critical pedagogues – facilitate the
process of student learning, engagement, and
capacity-building.
Effective CRS contributes substan-
tively and positively to learners’ personal
well-being and their academic and ethnic
identities. CRS promotes positive relation-
ships. Academics are vitally important, but
attention to the whole child is also vitally
important. As such CRS allows and facili-
tates students’ abilities to be both ‘good
Indians’ and ‘good students’ (Brayboy,
2005b). These identities of being a good
student and a functional participating
member of one’s community are not con-
tradictory. All of this requires that teachers
and educational leaders ‘facilitate learn-
ers’ self-efficacy, their critical capacity,
and their intrinsic motivation as thinkers,
readers, writers, and ethical social agents’
(McCarty, 2009: 22).
CRS requires educators and adminis-
trators to consider how we engage in rela-
tionships. If we are responsible for the
well-being of our students, we are careful,
reflective, and thoughtful. When we are
driven by the well-being of those with whom
we are in relationships, the learning process
is two-way, productive, and modeled in an
arena of respect. And we teach to the pos-
sibilities of excellence, moving away from
teaching to the bottom denominator. It is
clear that teachers and educational leaders
are crucial to this process. Teachers, educa-
tional leaders, and students (and their com-
munities) are all in relation with each other
and with curriculum.
CRS for and with Indigenous youth can
only be accomplished by building rela-
tionships with local tribal education agen-
cies and community members to promote
Indigenous self-determination (Siekmann
et al., 2017). This requires consultation
and review of school policies and student
handbooks to ensure discriminatory poli-
cies and procedures are mitigated. It also
requires engagement with place (localized
and context-specific). Educators must under-
stand and believe that students’ language
and culture are assets, rather than deficits;
and schooling must be viewed as an invest-
ment in the intellectual resources of local
communities. Lastly, CRS requires learning
the history of the local Indigenous people,
including the sacred and historically signifi-
cant places within the community, state, or
region. Listening to the stories that students
share about their families, life experiences,
and histories is important because it allows
us to imagine new possibilities through stu-
dents’ perspectives. The goal should be to
facilitate learners’ self-efficacy and bolster
their critical capacities and intrinsic motiva-
tion as thinkers, readers, writers, and ethical
social agents (McCarty, 2009), since educa-
tion must be relevant to the current struggles
facing youth and must aid in learning about
policies, rights, and status of Indigenous
peoples (and their nation) so they can aid in
nation building.
STRENGTHS-BASED AND
CAPACITY-BUILDING TOWARD
NATION BUILDING
CRS is strengths-based in that it focuses
on the promises and possibilities of people,
 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE SCHOOLING AS A FORM OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
their communities, and their homelands.
For Indigenous students, strengths-based
schooling draws on the collective, with an
eye toward creating a community of inter-
dependent learners to address challenges.
It sees wisdom in intergenerational
exchanges of knowledge that produce cul-
turally and linguistically vibrant communi-
ties. Community-based methods of learning
have increasingly been used to improve
performance within CRS classrooms. For
example, some school programs have uti-
lized monthly talking circles to engage
truant students, provide a space to learn,
and provide feedback for one another (First
Nations Development Institute, 2016). This
approach to education specifically invites
the presence of Native adults who serve as
role models or elders that imbue important
cultural teachings and knowledges. The
inclusion of elders, especially for male stu-
dents, helps to provide mentorship, estab-
lish and reinforce stronger ties to community,
and teach how American Indians see the
role of one another in relation to them-
selves, family, and the community at large.
These teachings contribute to the process in
which student identities are defined, rede-
fined, and decolonized. As Gay (2000: 3)
has noted, ‘culturally responsive education
recognizes, respects, and uses students’
identities and backgrounds as meaningful
sources for creating optimal learning envi-
ronments’. CRS includes cultural practices
in intervention(s), personal and emotional
influences, and other individualized details
regarding educational access, persistence,
and attainment. And it recognizes the
importance of place.
Research on CRS approaches in particu-
lar communities reports elevated levels of
student achievement and student education
satisfaction (Lipka et al., 2008; McCarty
et al., 2010). Practitioners have talked at
regional and national meetings about how
incorporating aspects of their students’
culture and environment has positively
impacted student success and, in some
753
cases, brought elevated professional satis-
faction for the teacher.
CRS requires a focus on practice and
supporting teacher development. CRS rec-
ognizes teachers as change makers and
supports their professionalism. Part of the
importance of CRS as we’ve conceptual-
ized it is that it allows for the preparation
of the next generation of teachers and lead-
ers in Native communities. CRS is gener-
ally talked about in terms of its immediate
impacts on youth, but we want to suggest
that it is also about young people who will
grow to become teachers, principals, and
community leaders – it is, therefore, a capac-
ity-building endeavor that can lead to sys-
temic change away from colonization and
Whiteness and toward self-determination
and tribal nation building.
There are over 560 federally recognized
tribes in the US nation-state, each with their
own history, cultural practices, knowledges,
and, in some cases, languages. With this
diversity comes a diverse way of thinking
about schooling and education. CRS can-
not, therefore, be thought of as a general-
izable or one-size-fits-all ‘magic bullet’
to improve the schooling of Indigenous
youth. The inclination of the general public
has been to ask for details on how to rep-
licate critical pedagogies, including CRS
approaches, that they hear about or see in
other communities. But what works for one
community may not translate and work as
successfully in another because localized
knowledge is just that – localized. When
CRS is engaged in standardized or gener-
alized ways, it cannot possibly happen in
place and it cannot possibly begin to engage
the capacity-building that also happens
in unique ways within communities. Our
articulation of CRS should thus be thought
of as providing principles that can then be
engaged uniquely with particular communi-
ties. Honoring diverse knowledge systems
by locale, context, and protocol is required
for CRS. In short, we are suggesting that
place matters, and context matters.
754 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
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Feminist Critical Pedagogy
INTRODUCTION
The goal of feminist critical pedagogy (FCP)
is to create equal educational opportunities
for boys and girls, women and men. FCP
identifies educational practices that create
gender inequality and seeks to transform
them. FCP initiates multi-dimensional
change in educational institutions involving
subject matter, student–teacher relationships,
instruction methods, school organization,
learning spaces, holidays and public events
and language and texts used in schools. It
addresses both formal and informal educa-
tion and focuses on the roles and status of
women and girls in education and society. It
examines the way traditional women’s roles
ensure that school leaders and teachers are
often women and also looks at the role of
mothers and other important female figures
in the lives of children.
When I attended elementary school, there
were separate craft lessons for boys and girls.
Girls learned embroidery, while boys learned
65
Haggith Gor Ziv
carpentry. Twenty-three years later, Gal
Harmat, a younger FCP colleague, tells of her
memories of learning to cook while the boys
did carpentry. She already knew how to cook,
so asked to join the boys; she was refused and
told ‘girls don’t do carpentry’.
FCP has developed out of the theoretical
and socio-historical insights of the feminist
movement. FCP practices originally emerged
in the context of women’s groups and femi-
nist activism and organizations. Since then,
FCP has become part of the academy, in dia-
logue with other schools of critical pedagogy.
Initially feminist pedagogy was highly criti-
cal of other streams of critical pedagogy, as
it was observed that they seemed to ignore
women’s oppression. As a result of these
critiques critical pedagogy has expanded its
perspective to incorporate a feminist perspec-
tive. Today, the primary differences between
critical pedagogy and feminist pedagogy are
questions of emphasis and which issues are
the primary topics of discussion. FCP repre-
sents the convergence of feminist pedagogy
 FEMINIST CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
and critical pedagogy into one school, which
has occurred gradually as a result of recip-
rocal influence and practical and concep-
tual sharing as a consequence of dialogue
between the two streams.
MY NARRATIVE HISTORY OF FCP
The Feminist Revolution
The feminist revolution was one of the most
significant revolutions of the modern period
and perhaps the only revolution to occur
through education rather than bloodshed.
Women’s lives have been affected by this
transformation and, certainly, in the West, we
believe we have greater freedom than our
grandmothers did.
My father’s mother, my grandmother,
never worked or completed formal stud-
ies even though she believed in equality for
women. She was an educated woman who
read a lot. Her brothers graduated university
with doctorates and managed a factory. She
expressed her intellectual talents at home,
educating her son and grandchildren.
My other grandmother worked her whole
life. She came from a poor family in Poland
and raised my mother alone as a single parent
in Czechoslovakia, where lower-class women
always worked. She made wigs for religious
women and hoped that my mother would
become a hairdresser so that she would never
be dependent on a man. She survived harsh
labor in Auschwitz, with the hope to reu-
nite with my mother. She exercised the right
to vote for the first time, already halfway
through her life, when she came to the State
of Israel, following my mother.
The status of my two grandmothers did
not reflect their talents, nor the social status
of the men with whom they were connected.
They were marginalized. Born when women
did not have voting rights, my two grand-
mothers were independent women who did
not see themselves as feminists, although
759
both were involved in struggle to expand
their possibilities as women in society. Their
struggle for equality along with thousands of
other women of their generation has trans-
formed my life.
The Beginnings of Feminist
Pedagogy
The practices and approach of FCP emerged
from women’s consciousness-raising groups
of the 1960s and 1970s. These groups were
a forum for women to discuss their experi-
ences with one another and to find com-
monalities between them. They became
essential for discussing the division of labor
in the family, women’s role in society,
women’s employment and other issues. The
discussions were both emotional and intel-
lectual, providing both information and sup-
port to the participants. The groups were
premised on the idea that knowledge was
shared by all members of the group and this
became a basis for feminist pedagogy’s
alternative model of learning, which looks
at both teachers and learners as partners in
the creation of knowledge. These groups
were also attentive to the unique ‘ways of
knowing’ amongst women that might be
overlooked in conventional educational
frameworks. While these groups were the
starting point for feminist pedagogy as an
organized set of ideas, there were important
forerunners in the early history of feminism,
in particular, the activism of Jane Addams
and Margaret Sanger.
Jane Addams (1860–1935) founded the
Settlement House movement and the first
Hall House in the slums of Chicago. She
offered women medical treatment, legal aid,
childcare, English language courses and
job training. The house itself was managed
as a cooperative by the immigrant women
it served. This gave women the opportu-
nity to gain experience in public adminis-
tration as well as training in management
positions that were at the time still closed
760 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
to them. John Dewey was amongst the aca-
demics who came to teach at the Settlement
Houses founded by Addams. Dewey was a
philosopher, psychologist and educator who
wrote about the school as a social center for
children and supported the development of
creative thinking as opposed to rote learning.
Dewey credited Jane Addams with many of
his progressive ideas which he had learned
from her.
Another example of early feminist peda-
gogy is found in the activism of Margaret
Sanger (1879–1966). Margaret Sanger
taught poor women about fertility, preg-
nancy and birth control by setting up a
health care center in the slums of New
York. She provided women with contracep-
tives at a time when this was still illegal.
The women who Sanger helped had no
access to birth control, giving birth nearly
every year, at considerable physical, per-
sonal and economic price. The education
which they received from Sanger allowed
them to take control of their lives; however,
Sanger’s activities were considered to be
illegal and immoral. She was hunted by the
police and sentenced to prison. Sanger and
Addams are prime examples of pioneers in
the field of feminist pedagogy, practitioners
of its principles long before the term was
coined. Their work was influential in the
struggle for suffrage and in the battle for
women’s rights.
University Gender Studies and
Feminist Pedagogy
Through the introduction of women’s stud-
ies and later gender studies, feminist subject
matter and research methods have penetrated
academia across all faculties. The integra-
tion of gender studies departments in univer-
sities is significant as it allows feminist
thought to proliferate and to increase its
influence throughout academia. Within aca-
demia, feminists have challenged the truth of
many of the hallowed foundations of Western
thought. Indeed, feminist thought has itself
influenced the culture of academia in many
significant ways.
While feminist thought has infiltrated
and influenced the academy, academic
teaching methods, even within gender
studies departments, have remained largely
traditional in their approach, continu-
ing conventional teaching practices that
are known to be harmful to women and
other marginalized groups. Gender studies
departments have been faced with the seri-
ous task of justifying their existence within
academia and not able to simultaneously
lead a revolutionary change in academic
pedagogy. Therefore, while the ideas and
concepts circulating in gender studies
departments might be radical, teaching and
pedagogy have retained the repressive and
hierarchical ‘banking’ model of education
(Regev, 1997). In this model, hierarchy,
authority and discipline are maintained,
learning is perceived as a linear process,
evaluation encourages competition, and the
teacher has the knowledge while the stu-
dents are more passive.
FCP attempts to use politically aware
teaching methods to replace oppressive pro-
cesses and structures. It seeks to reveal the
divisions of power both within and outside
the classroom and to politicize the observed
reality. Many gender studies departments
do not apply feminist pedagogy and instead
preserve the academic structure intact,
along with its many oppressive aspects.
As a result of the growing influence of
feminists in academia and in gender stud-
ies specifically, certain feminist practices
and principles have been assimilated into
academic culture. For example, feminists
have ensured the acceptance of qualitative
research methods that are based on empow-
ering interviewees, as well as other methods
that advance the interests of the researched
communities. Using these methods, a gen-
eration of activist researchers have sought to
transform injustices (Fine and Weis, 2004;
Reinharz, 1992).
 FEMINIST CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
Women’s Activist and
Consciousness-Raising Groups
in the 1960s and 1970s
Despite significant achievements, educa-
tional frameworks used in university gender
studies departments are sharply different
from those developed in the consciousness-
raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s. These
groups inserted feminist insights directly into
their pedagogy, developing new ways of
learning and generating knowledge, tech-
niques which were demonstrated at a range
of high-profile feminist events and confer-
ences, like the Greenham Common Peace
Camp in Britain, a protest against nuclear
armament. Women who participated in these
events shared their thoughts and gave voice
to personal experiences and developed
accounts of the common threads in their
lived reality. Through story and sharing they
created insights and generalizations that
challenged prevailing views and beliefs about
power relations between women and men.
Feminist criticism of critical
pedagogy
Initially, feminist scholars engaged in peda-
gogy were highly critical of the field of
critical pedagogy, specifically, the writings
of Paulo Freire, as primarily critiques on the
basis of class and examples of the oppres-
sion of White lower-class men by White men
of higher social classes. Over time, feminist
critiques led to an eventual synthesis of
critical and feminist pedagogy. Both
approaches share much common ground,
rooted in progressive education theory,
drawing on the life’s work of Addams and
Dewey. The approaches share a common
commitment that school is life itself and not
a preparation for ‘real’ life that happens
after school. As a result of collaboration and
sharing, feminist pedagogy has synthesized
many of its key insights into the field of
critical pedagogy, making the latter a more
robust and powerful critique of existing
power structures.
761
In her book Teaching to Transgress, bell
hooks writes that while reading Freire’s work
she was constantly aware of his sexist lan-
guage (hooks, 1994). She criticizes Freire
for basing his views on a ‘phallocentric
paradigm’ of liberation, in which freedom is
always understood from a male perspective.
In addition to his use of the word ‘man’ to
refer to all human beings, Freire refers only
to class oppression of men by other men.
Nonetheless, hooks felt a great intellectual
closeness to Freire and wrote about the pow-
erful experience of reading his books.
hooks was impressed by Freire himself,
having met him when he gave a lecture at the
University of Santa Cruz, where she taught.
By the time she learned of his lecture, all the
tickets were ‘sold out’, which she later found
out was a tactic to deliberately keep her from
participating in the event. Undeterred, hooks
managed to get into the lecture hall, where
she attempted to ask a question about Freire’s
refusal to recognize women’s oppression.
The professors and students in the hall tried
to silence her, but Freire would not cooper-
ate. He heard her out and admitted her claims
were just. He suggested that they begin an
ongoing dialogue in which she would help
him to become more aware of and sensitive to
women’s inequality. This demonstrated pow-
erfully the possibility of dialogue in which
both learner and teacher grow together and
create knowledge through this process. In
Freire’s later writings, we do not see a greater
awareness of women’s oppression, although
he does use slightly less patriarchal language
in his later books. Even after this event, it
was still possible for some to note that Freire
didn’t just ignore women in his discussion of
oppression, he simply didn’t mention them
at all. However, Freire delivered a keynote
speech at the American Educational Research
Association in the early 1990s discussing his
use of masculine language, in which he also
noted he had not been as aware of feminist
ways of seeing and offered his apologies.
The work of bell hooks makes a powerful
case for understanding the multiple aspects
762 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of oppression, something which Freire does
not succeed in doing. Her research devel-
ops the idea that we must consider the dif-
ferent identities of women and multiple
sites of oppression that can operate in the
life of the same woman. In Talking Back:
Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, hooks
describes a moment of awareness in her
own life where she understood this con-
nection between the components of multi-
layered oppression:
We were on the freeway, going home from San
Francisco. He was driving, we were arguing. He
had told me repeatedly to shut up. I kept talking.
He took his hand from the steering wheel and
threw it back, hitting my mouth – my open mouth,
blood gushed, and I felt an intense pain. I was no
longer able to say any words, only to make whim-
pering, sobbing sounds. … I called the dentist the
next morning and made an appointment. When
the female voice asked what I needed to see the
doctor about, I told her I had been hit in the
mouth. Conscious of race, sex and class issues, I
wondered how I would be treated in this white
[sic] doctor’s office.
I was hit by my companion at a time in life
when a number of forces in the world outside our
home had already ‘hit’ me, so to speak, made me
painfully aware of my powerlessness, my marginal-
ity. It seemed then that I was confronting being
black [sic] and female and without money in the
worst possible ways. My world was spinning. I had
already lost a sense of grounding and security. The
memory of this experience has stayed with me as I
have grown as a feminist, as I have thought deeply
and read much on male violence against women,
on adult violence against children. (hooks, 1989:
84, 85)
As feminist pedagogues, we must be sensi-
tive to the social and cultural differences that
exist, not only between men and women, but
also between all races, rich and poor, peo-
ple who are able-bodied and people who are
disabled. We must be conscious of intersec-
tionality and the way in which oppression
of individuals and groups operates through
multiple layers.
Kathleen Weiler (1994) argues that in
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire assumes
that in the struggle against oppression, the
oppressed regain the humanity that the
oppressor had attempted to deny them.
However, he does not discuss the various
forms of oppression, in particular, the way
in which the experience of oppression dif-
fers between various marginalized groups.
Freire makes universal claims about libera-
tion and political change, but he does not
investigate or question his own privileges
as a White, middle-class man or address
how liberation can operate in complex and
contradictory ways amongst and between
different groups. This absence of self-
reflection was a failing from a feminist
standpoint.
Feminist scholars such as Elizabeth
Ellsworth (1989) criticized critical peda-
gogues’ patriarchal practices and theories
and stirred intense dispute. While Freire
himself has become the subject of much
debate in the feminist community, feminist
critique has come to greatly influence critical
pedagogy. Critical pedagogy has expanded
its horizons and improved substantially as a
result of input from feminist scholars. Key
academics in the field of critical pedagogy,
including Ira Shor, Peter McLaren, Henry
Giroux, Michael Apple and other White men,
follow developments in feminist theory,
study it and incorporate it in their writings.
Male editors of critical education books give
fair representation to gender issues; exam-
ples can be found in the article collections of
David Gabbard (Gabbard, 2007; Saltman and
Gabbard, 2003).
Nonetheless, hooks’ critique of the phal-
locentric paradigm in critical pedagogy was
and is valid, as is Carmen Luke’s and Jennifer
Gore’s (1992) critique of the undisputed cen-
trality of men in critical pedagogy. Internal
group dynamics between male figures in
the radical education field remain powerful,
despite the field’s many critiques of elitist
groups in other contexts. Inherent biases con-
tinue to contribute to the marginalization of
women as thinkers and writers in the field of
critical pedagogy and White men remain its
undisputed center.
 FEMINIST CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
THE CHARACTERISTICS AND
PRACTICE OF FCP
Implementation of FCP
FCP involves a transformation of the basic
components of teaching practices and repre-
sents a significant change from the conven-
tional modes of study used in most
educational institutions. In FCP, the focus is
placed on the needs of the learners and teach-
ers do not hold all the power in the class-
room, they share ‘power’ with the learners,
allowing them to influence both the learning
process and materials used. Power is not
based on rules and regulations, but on dia-
logue between learners and teacher. The
teacher’s FCP outlook allows an ability to
accept the goals of the learners and to enable
the learners to look into their own lives, ask
questions, analyze their experiences and
derive from them generalizable theoretical
principles (Shrewsbury, 1994: 8–16; Weiler,
1991: 449–74).
In the FCP classroom there is an egalitar-
ian relationship between the learners and the
teacher; learners are encouraged to explore
power relations in society and amongst
the learners in the classroom. Their opinions
are highly valued. The students themselves
are seen as sources of knowledge and the
learning process integrates activism to influ-
ence and improve student’s lives in a specific
socio-political reality. The learning process
encourages learners to advocate for marginal-
ized groups, and in the FCP classroom there
is a sense of struggle towards change. There is
a recognition of the importance of both
theory and practice and both teacher and stu-
dents act against the alienation and distance
that is prevalent in various forms of education
(Welch, 1994). Educational processes con-
nect social theory with the learner’s personal
experience. In FCP, the personal is political.
Some characteristics of FCP include:
group learning, peer teaching and evaluation,
balance between psycho-physical, affective
and cognitive learning, use of the five senses,
763
various alternative methods of learning, use
of arts in learning, music, visual art, materi-
als, engaging in listening, talking, writing,
singing, practicing, manipulating, building
playing, socio-dramatic play, case study,
analysis and synthesis, indoor and outdoor
excursions. Placing high levels of credit,
belief and trust in the learners is essential. Yet
some of these techniques and characteristics
might exist in other forms of good education.
FCP, however, is distinguished by its focus
on raising consciousness regarding the social
structures in learners’ lives and orienting
education towards social justice and equality.
These are the primary features of FCP, which
distinguish it from other kinds of pedagogy.
THE UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS
OF FCP
The Concept of the ‘Self-Evident’;
What is ‘Natural’ and ‘Normal’?
FCP attempts to deconstruct the worldview
that maintains inequality between men and
women as a natural, normal and inevitable
condition. FCP exposes the interests that are
served by this worldview, as well as how
various mechanisms of oppression are main-
tained by our conceptual understanding of
the world. We are educated to believe that
people are unequal in their talents and abili-
ties and that there is a direct connection
between abilities and social and economic
success. This leads to the belief that those
who are talented succeed, and those who do
not have the necessary abilities fail. We adopt
these beliefs as an explanatory framework for
understanding poverty and social inequality,
believing, for example, that economic ine-
quality is a feature of all societies and part of
a natural and proper order of things. This
leads people to feel less responsibility
towards the poor; for example, when we see
a homeless person on the street, while we
feel pity, we do not feel responsible for their
764 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
condition. We have been educated to see
people who are born beautiful, healthy, wise
and rich as successful, and people who have
been born differently abled as having been
dealt a cruel fate, for which we are in no way
responsible. We shake our heads in sorrow
when we encounter a person who is deaf,
blind or disabled in other ways; however, we
believe that their marginalization is not cre-
ated by society. It also seems natural to many
that young girls be dressed in pretty dresses,
even if these clothes prevent them from play-
ing and getting dirty. Many still don’t see this
as an oppressive practice of male domination
that actively constructs the marginalized
place of girls in our society.
FCP tries to identify these practices in
the educational system and change them
from within. FCP sees the ostensibly ‘natu-
ral’ social divisions as evidence of learned
social constructs that disguise patriarchy.
FCP aims to dismantle these social con-
structs and replace them with a sensitivity to
all populations. Breaking down the structures
of oppression is necessary to prevent educa-
tors from further entrenching them within the
educational system by silencing the suffering
of marginalized groups. Education teaches
a certain way of understanding the world,
through the lens of existing culture. FCP
challenges the aspects of existing culture that
harm women and other marginalized popu-
lations. An education for liberation is one
that facilitates the critical assessment of the
silenced stories of marginalized groups. By
creating space for these stories, FCP seeks
to bring about a changed consciousness as
well as activism for social change. If girls are
given cooking lessons and told not to dirty
their dresses and boys are taught carpentry
and given the opportunity to play freely, what
is the chance that as young adults these men
and women will be able to establish egalitar-
ian relationships, where domestic and care
responsibilities are evenly shared?
FCP points out aspects of oppression that
are common to all marginalized groups but
also points out the unique characteristics of
different populations. From an FCP perspec-
tive, the rights of deaf children to study in
sign language, or the rights of an Arab child
to attend a neighborhood preschool despite
its status as Jewish, are regarded as feminist
issues, as are the rights of a girl to study high-
level mathematics in an all-girls school, or of
a young woman to choose to study aeronaut-
ics in a prestigious technical school.
Canonical Knowledge
In FCP, the Western canon of knowledge that
dominates traditional education is replaced
by an understanding of social and cultural
conventions and values. The role of FCP is to
expose for students the processes and mecha-
nisms that help preserve dominant groups
and ensure their control over knowledge.
FCP allows for the voices of women and
other marginal groups to penetrate existing
knowledge and to establish new bodies of
knowledge based on their experiences. FCP
attempts to create a multicultural, egalitarian
and just educational agenda that allows for
various otherwise silenced voices to be heard.
Giving expression to these voices incorpo-
rates the knowledge and experience that
these groups bring (Jackson, 1997).
In the opening class of a subject I teach on
FCP, I play a short art film entitled Pan cre-
ated by Tirtza Even (1995). The film depicts a
group of people strolling on a promenade on
the seashore. The frame is divided into two
panels; one section does not move and the
other, which occupies a third of the screen,
moves slowly from left to right across the
frame. Due to the slow movement of the pan,
the boardwalk disappears for a few seconds
within the line connecting the two panels. For
a few moments the people walking are ‘swal-
lowed up’ in the line between the panels.
After watching it, I ask my students:
‘Which groups are swallowed up in our soci-
ety? Who disappears from the screen of our
awareness?’ We then usually create a long list
of marginalized populations and systems of
 FEMINIST CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
knowledge that fall outside the canonical and
conventional ways of knowing. We discuss
bodies of knowledge that have disappeared
and ask questions like whose history is not
taught, which languages are not respected
and which cultures disappear from discourse.
Schools teach canonical knowledge that
doesn’t leave space for other histories.
Consequently, the history of the feminist
revolution is not taught in schools in Israel,
for example, and the history of the Sephardic
Jewish communities who immigrated to
Israel from Arab countries has only a mar-
ginal place in the curriculum. The history of
various peace agreements and movements for
social change is not taught, while wars and
battles feature prominently.
Catherine Weiler (1991) writes that FCP
challenges canonical knowledge and the
idea that there is only one truth. FCP instead
argues that it is possible for us to redefine
knowledge and learning more generally. bell
hooks (1994) adds that FCP creates cracks
in the conventional systems of learning and
destabilizes the bourgeois educational struc-
ture. She does not see a distinction between
FCP and critical pedagogy more broadly.
Sandra Harding (1986) and Donna Haraway
(1991) criticized the canonized body of sci-
entific knowledge, citing the prevalence of
male prejudice and bias in scientific research.
They challenged the very idea of objectivity
and the ability of researchers to reveal abso-
lute truths. Instead, they tried to promote a
worldview that opposes racism, class oppres-
sion and sexism. Harding pointed out the
need to reconstruct the concept of objectivity
in science and pay attention to the way that
science in Western cultures strengthens some
populations and weakens others, in particu-
lar people in the ‘Third World’, the poor and
women.
Harding claims that through certain
projects, feminist science may be able to
create positive change in many areas such as
addressing militarization, ecological issues
and workers’ rights. An example of this kind
of feminist deployment of science can be
765
seen in the story of the Mayo Plasa mothers’
and grandmothers’ movement which used
genetic testing to reunite mothers and grand-
mothers with the children that had been born
to their kidnapped daughters during the Dirty
War (Guerra Sucia 1976–1982). Genetic test-
ing was used to establish a blood relationship
with the children who had in ensuing years
been given to military families to raise, an
example of how science has aided in feminist
struggles.
Use of Narratives
A feminist perspective of writing and
research maintains that all researchers and
writers operate within their own subjective
worldview that influences what they see and
how they research. From a feminist perspec-
tive, it is appropriate for researchers to
express their perspectives openly when they
write and to acknowledge how it influences
their research in the academic world. Personal
narratives told openly are a good starting
point for this kind of contemplation and
thought. Feminist researchers often write
about the processes that they went through to
arrive at their current stance. They don’t
place themselves outside of the research; on
the contrary, they bring their own experi-
ences to the writing process and create con-
nections between theory and practice,
between their personal histories and their
written ideas. Bernice Fisher (2001), for
example, interweaves her personal narrative
into her theory and history of activism for
social change. Feminists use the concept of
positioning to refer to this exposure of the
human experiences that connect the writer
and the subject that they write about. Indeed,
critical pedagogical writing in narrative for
both genders has become increasingly
acceptable.
Narrative exposes the lack of objectivity
inherent in academic research and avoids
placing the researcher in the position of
disguised objective expert. Positioning also
766 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
integrates both the affective and cognitive
aspects of human experience; it challenges
intellectual discourse that claims to be
detached from emotion and pretends that feel-
ing has no root in reality. Carol Cohn (1987)
writes about this in her research undertaken
amongst male nuclear scientists, whom Cohn
observed using distancing tactics in their
language and speech to avoid addressing the
emotional consequences of their research,
which was connected to the development of
nuclear weapons.
I integrate personal stories that describe
the social processes that shape my personal
history and motivate my FCP practice. My
interests in class stratification and inequal-
ity based on gender, ethnicity and disabil-
ity have been shaped by my own childhood
experiences of injustice in the neighborhood
in which I grew up. My own experiences in
the educational system continue to shape me.
In addition to this, my work experience has
further enriched my understanding of these
issues and placed me in many difficult dilem-
mas where I have had to clarify my principles
and values. Integrating personal voice in FCP
research does not stem from the psychologi-
cal need for self-promotion or exposure, but
rather from an awareness of the connection
between the personal and the political and
my desire to make this clear to the readers of
my writing.
Part of FCP practice is thus to tell the per-
sonal stories of individuals and groups and to
find the common threads within them, always
attentive to the insights they provide on
deeper analysis. Every writer, researcher and
teacher brings interesting views shaped by
their own experiences. Academic writing that
ignores this and claims objectivity covers this
up (Stanford Friedman, 1998). Authors like
Sue Middleton and bell hooks consciously
reveal their starting points and do not pretend
to have knowledge of the ‘absolute truth’.
They integrate their arguments and their
views with their personal histories and their
standpoint, trying to make observations in
alternative ways and to incorporate different
points of view, including the personal. In this
way, they enable a critical examination of
their own writing and invite a critical dialogue
with students in which the learner’s views are
equal in value to the teacher’s views.
FCP gives voice to women and to men
of marginalized groups. It is a pedagogy of
diverse narratives that strives to give expres-
sion to varied identities and to enable them to
find their unique place. Elizabeth Ellsworth
(1993) positions herself in her feminist writ-
ings through the use of the first-person pro-
noun (I) and by eschewing the plural pronoun
(we) that seems to refer to a non-existent
collective that dominates the conversation.
Ellsworth discusses the necessary dialogue
that must take place in a liberation-focused
education, arguing that ignoring identity in
language obscures the existence of identity in
the public sphere. Many women, both those
who identify as feminist, as well as those
who do not, share the experience of having
had a White male speak on their behalf, with-
out first understanding their position, certain
that his generalizations must be correct.
I had one such experience at a conference
in Turkey, where during a presentation about
the exploitation of children in the chocolate
industry, a male lecturer presented a website
that he and his students had created. The illus-
tration accompanying the presentation was a
woman’s lips, with red lipstick, sensuously
sucking a long chocolate bar in a barely veiled
reference to fellatio. These images are com-
mon in chocolate advertisements, but it was a
slightly pornographic image that contributed
to the objectification of women. Speaking
to a mostly female audience, this lecturer
proceeded to mansplain what ‘we’ all know
about the problem, unaware of the distinct
lack of ‘we’ experienced by his audience as a
result of his sexist choice of image. There was
a murmur of dissent about the choice amongst
the women in the room, who resented the
equation of men’s lust to the craving for
chocolate. However, out of respect for the lec-
turer, this dissent found voice only around the
coffee table during the break.
 FEMINIST CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
Gendered Power Relations
in Education
FCP examines the construction of power
relationships between boys and girls in edu-
cation. It doesn’t focus exclusively on the
empowerment of women and girls, but it
does emphasize these issues, study them and
offer various ways to transform the lives of
women and girls. The educational system
does not discriminate against women and
girls on purpose. Rather, it is merely a reflec-
tion of the society in which it is located and
its customs, beliefs and unequal practices,
making it an extremely powerful means of
maintaining the social order. It is simultane-
ously a powerful means of transforming the
social order and inspiring change. As the
educational system is structured and its learn-
ers are ‘captive’ in it for 12 years or more, it
can function to simply recreate unequal
power relations between male and female
students. Yet, with socially aware actions
taken over a long period of time, the educa-
tional system can be used to break down
unequal power structures. There is a great
need to enhance teachers’ social conscious-
ness and to offer them the means and tools to
begin acting differently.
The first step is to create gender aware-
ness, which involves identifying the social-
ization of females and males and how this
directs them into unequal gender roles.
Curricula send both overt and covert mes-
sages to boys and girls about gender roles,
which are transferred directly and indirectly
through books, texts, songs, teaching prac-
tices, interactions of children and teachers,
visual texts, language and non-formal cul-
tural products (Gor, 2005). Starting at a very
young age, children are exposed to unequal
power relations between genders. Textbooks
can still contain gender stereotypes. Boys
occupy most of the schoolyard at recess,
with girls often pushed back to use a limited
space (Karsten, 2003). Sexual harassment
is even considered childish mischief, and
by older ages, girls don’t dare to complain
767
about it, often not having language to name
these disturbing behaviors. Many schools are
still not aware of these issues and teachers
refrain from reacting to these kinds of social
interactions. Studies still show that teachers
address boys more than girls in class, they
compliment boys more than girls, and girls
are disciplined more strictly than boys. These
are just some of the complex mechanisms
that create inequality in schools (Sadker and
Sadker, 1995).
FCP teaches educators how to identify
these phenomena and gives them tools to
bring about change. It offers curricula to
empower girls, teacher training for con-
sciousness-raising and analysis of school
content through the lens of gender. It sets
concrete goals for changing the power struc-
tures between boys and girls and creating
equal opportunities for all.
FCP IN PRACTICE
SNDT University in Mumbai
Mumbai’s SNDT Women’s University was
established in 1916 at a time when women
were not allowed to study in universities. The
goal of the institution was primarily to pro-
vide women who could serve as an educated
companion to their husbands. While today
that sounds rather sexist, in 1916 it was radi-
cal. Today, the goal of the university is to
empower women through education. Fifty
thousand women study each year at the uni-
versity’s different campuses in four lan-
guages: Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and English.
I taught two classes at the Mumbai campus;
it was an educational experience full of
enriching encounters with the learners and I
learned far more than I taught.
I was most thoroughly impressed by the
university’s commitment to initiatives and
community projects for social change. The
university runs programs in poor neighbor-
hoods that are managed by students as a
768 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
requirement of their BA programs. Students
cannot graduate without having participated
in activism for social change.
I visited one of the projects in a poor area
near the university. Here, students and local
women worked together and established nurs-
ery schools for young children. The social sta-
tus of women went up as a result of the new
role created for them in their community. The
change of status that came with the job train-
ing gave the women a new sense of value and
the respect of their communities. The project
also saw increased recognition of the impor-
tance of early childhood education for the suc-
cess of children in later years of school.
SNDT University also has a public health
project in the community, where students are
active in promoting health education and pro-
viding first-response medical treatment. The
university also initiated a project in which
women use their handicraft skills to work in
collectives that create embroidery, bags and
saris that are then sold to provide the women
with a livelihood. The cooperative work takes
place in women’s homes, in small groups,
with children playing around them. It oper-
ates with empathy for and understanding of
the economic and gendered oppression fac-
ing these women and aims to help empower
them economically.
The experience at SNDT inspired me to
start sending my own students to volunteer
in organizations for social change. Later,
along with two colleagues I established the
program of Education for Social Justice,
Environmental Justice and Peace Education
at my college, Seminar HaKibbutzim Teacher
College. Part of the program requirements
involved educational activism. In 2008, the
whole college adopted community service as
a requirement for the Bachelor of Education
program (Gor Ziv, 2012).
Women Physicians in Nepal
Every time I have traveled to Nepal, I have
met with impressive women and activists for
women’s rights. One of them was an organi-
zation of medical doctors who educated
about AIDS prevention in rural areas where
talking about sex is taboo. Discussing the
need to use condoms to prevent AIDS
requires a lot of courage. Organizations of
female physicians became alarmed that AIDS
was spreading in rural areas, as poor families
fell into the trap of sex trafficking, with traf-
fickers telling families that they would send
their girls to get a good job in India. Once the
women returned with the money they earned,
many of them went on to get married and
spread HIV to their husbands and children.
These physicians’ organizations try to edu-
cate the villages while also creating employ-
ment for the young women so their families
are not deceived by the traffickers who prom-
ise good jobs in India. Another organization
I have worked with in Nepal helps women
with childcare while they work by establish-
ing childcare cooperatives. We climbed up a
mountain for half a day to a village with no
mobile phone access to see a childcare center
built from local materials, with handcrafted
toys for the children. Prior to the establish-
ment of the center, women used to tie their
babies to the main pole in the hut, causing
accidents. In the co-op, each woman cares
for the children one day a week, while the
other days she is free to work, knowing her
children are well cared for.
We met a woman in a remote village who
improved her economic situation by purchas-
ing a goat, using a loan she obtained from a
bank. She told us how she returns the money
slowly and how her children don’t have to
suffer hunger anymore. I asked for her opin-
ion regarding the improvement of women’s
conditions and she said decisively that there
is a need to cut down more trees to create rice
paddies. The law forbids this, as the forest
is preserved to protect the ozone layer. This
well-intentioned policy is imposed dispro-
portionately on poor women and prevents
them from meeting their needs.
Another organization of female lawyers
help women to stand up for their rights in
 FEMINIST CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
the legal system. In the past women couldn’t
inherit property, which caused many women
to starve. This organization fought to change
the law so women could inherit their father’s
or husband’s land. However, many women
remain unaware of their new rights and need
to get access to these benefits. This organiza-
tion of women lawyers helps educate women
about their legal rights.
Early Childhood Educators
in Zimbabwe
I gave a training workshop to Zimbabwean
early childhood educators. These were big
women who were not victims of the Western
anorexic perception of beauty, full of self-
confidence and committed to the welfare of
families and children. They work in poor
villages helping women to create early child-
hood centers. With no government support,
many parents have no money to pay the
teachers. They found an unusual solution in
using drama for a play at the training session.
Each parent, on a rotation, cultivates the land
owned by the teacher while she takes care of
the children. This allows the teacher to take
care of the children and derive an income
from the land. The word feminism or critical
feminist pedagogy was not mentioned once
during the training program.
There is one school in Jerusalem that oper-
ates according to the principles of FCP. It
takes marginalized poor children at junior
high school and prepares them to finish high
school and fulfill the requirements for univer-
sity entrance. Certainly, we are beginning to
see more global examples of FCP employed
in communities and schools.
CONCLUSION
FCP is still not widely implemented, either
in theory or practice, as it challenges exist-
ing power structures and is involved in
the struggle for a different reality for
769
marginalized groups. Today, we have seen
tremendous improvement in the conditions
of women and other marginalized groups.
Women have more opportunities than ever
to participate in the workforce and schools
are increasingly recognizing the role of edu-
cation in the production of gender roles and
creating gender-inclusive policies. In many
classrooms, males and females enjoy a
formal equality of opportunity that genera-
tions ago would have been inconceivable.
However, there are serious challenges that
continue to demonstrate the pressing rele-
vance of FCP practice and theory in the
21st-century classroom. We live in a pro-
foundly paradoxical gender reality, where
opportunities seem to be expanding at the
same time as oppression is intensifying. We
see this in the role that the internet now
plays in the lives of young people. While the
internet provides a unique forum for females
and other marginalized groups to find voice
and solidarity, it also provides a platform
where boys and girls from a young age are
exposed to pornography that is often repre-
sentative of the worst atrocities of the sex
industry. Conventional education does not
prepare young people to face these com­
plex gendered realities and conventionally
trained educators lack the tools to provide
meaningful guidance and support. FCP is
uniquely placed to provide educators and
learners with the consciousness and aware-
ness to continue feminism into the next
generation.
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Schooling, Milieu, Racism:
Just Another Brick in
the Wall
Teachers are often among that group most reluc-
tant to acknowledge the extent to which white-
supremacist thinking informs every aspect of our
culture including the way we learn, the content of
what we learn, and the manner in which we are
taught. (hooks, 2003: 25)
Institutional racism in schooling is not a
new concept and continues to live and
breathe well. Minor disruptions caused by
students that do not fit in with this monolith
of schooling do little but identify them-
selves as moving against the grain or
current or other metaphor that depicts dif-
ference and exclusion. Young people that
are traditionally marginalized in society
unfortunately find these same circum-
stances, or worse, within the walls of
schools. People of colour, non-Christians,
non-cisgender or straight, low-socioeco-
nomic status, immigrant or refugee, or any
youth that does not fit a predetermined
identity that mirrors the status quo as estab-
lished through the historic accounts of
schooling find themselves travelling on a
66
Te r e s a A n n e F o w l e r
different pathway. Although this list of dif-
ferences resembles a typical class list in
school, these students are still having to
navigate a system that requires a certain
typology of student in order to continue to
be regarded as successful. Successful
schooling is all but symbolic, a remnant of
the past when patriotism and assimilation
were the goals, and schooling was good at
meeting these outcomes. Many marginal-
ized young people now find themselves in
the school–prison pipeline, dropped/pushed
out of school, everywhere but in the learn-
ing environments that ought to be ‘inclu-
sive’ for all students, instead schooling now
generates educational gaps that are not
based on achievement, but access.
Schooling tries to address these gaps
through imposed initiatives in the name of
inclusion through governmental orders and
curriculum redesigns; however, the gaps
remain because the system of schooling
itself often remains isolated from these ini-
tiatives. Scholars, practitioners, and young
772 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
people have long been living in this space,
this space where schooling and those that
ought to be in school are asked to vacate
and yet schooling continues. Schooling is
successful for those that can fit and causes
suffering for those that do not, or they
must have a psychological diagnosis to
fit. Schooling has become ‘commonsensi-
cal’ (Kumashiro, 2015: 1) in that it still has
relevance in the production of an educated
society and students are being produced;
however, schooling has been reproducing
a status quo that a majority do not identify
with/as.
How then do we intentionally disrupt
schooling in order to reduce gaps (halt
the production of the gaps) and truly edu-
cate all children? How do we engage with
schooling rather than let it remain a quiet
dictator? Working from the outside in only
seems to benefit those that are running for
electoral positions or those that profit off
band-aid solutions that attempt to reduce
the gaps. Canned programmes to improve
results, standardization of curricula and
teaching, armies of psychologists, and
elected officials all have an agenda to fix
the disrupted student, not the system. An
alternative approach shifts to inside the
system, revealing institutional racism to
pre-service teachers with the hope that
they will be reoriented to use their peda-
gogy to better align with the class list in
front of them, not the class list that the
system desires. By revealing how school-
ing perpetuates an ideal outcome, pre-ser-
vice teachers have the opportunity to do
what those on the outside intend on doing
and that is to reduce the gaps and provide
learning environments conducive for all.
Drawing on Freire’s critical pedagogy to
reflect and act as a means to transform
(Freire, 2014), this chapter will explore a
means to disrupt racism in schools through
unpacking schooling, the milieu (Eisner,
1967), and racism and the ways in which
pre-service teachers can remove the bricks
of oppression in schools.
SCHOOLING
Social essence is the set of those social attributes
and attributions produced by the act of institu-
tion as a solemn act of categorization which
tends to produce what it designates. (Bourdieu,
1991: 121)
Schooling exerts power. Schooling, through
acts of performance, prescribes an accepted
identity that is a determinant of success
(Bourdieu, 1991). Boundaries are established
and those that reside on one side, the side of
success, accrue advantages and capital, while
those that are prevented from crossing the
boundary are displaced based on categories
of marginalization. This displacement is
common practice, regarded often as good
practice in the name of individuality in
schools. Divisions, by way of ability group-
ings, are seen as a means to increase success
for the social agents in that space. However,
schooling reproduces a dominant identity,
uses ability groupings as instruments of
domination that not only exclude based on
categories, but reinforce to students who they
ought to be and what identity they need to
take on (Bourdieu, 1991). Students are
divided into knowledge classes through
streaming within ability groupings and this is
justified because society needs people with
various levels of capital to function well.
Professional elites, middle-class desk jock-
eys, and labourers are all required, and
schooling remains the means in which to
produce these individuals.
The complacency, on which schooling
relies, of those working within schooling
allows for these tools of domination to con-
tinue to displace young people, reinforc-
ing their future place in the world. Through
learning experiences in schools, inequalities
persist and what constitutes success domi-
nates based on an unequal distribution of
capital (Shilling, 1992). Schooling presents
credentials to students based on their accrued
capital. Some graduate with a high-school
diploma, others are marginalized towards
expulsion or receive educational outcomes
 SCHOOLING, MILIEU, RACISM: JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
based on where the tools of domination made
them fit. Students that fit the marginal iden-
tity fill these spaces as their bodies and ide-
ologies are not of the same make-up on the
favoured side of the boundary. Idealizations
of a dominant identity are manifested through
schooling as well as other socially structured
systems and the corporate media.
The perpetuation of a dominant discourse
in which one identity is idealized can be seen
through the statistics identifying marginal-
ized people as overrepresented in high-school
non-completion, occupying the justice and
welfare systems, as well as in careers that are
not in positions of power such as executive
positions in corporations. Even in schooling,
positions of power such as principals and
superintendents are often occupied by White
cisgender males. The environment that young
people who are marginalized live within and
embody is modelled by those that also have
been tooled to fit a category of other. In addi-
tion to home environments, young people
are bombarded with images and messages
via social media that also contribute to cat-
egories of others. The Twilight Saga movies
depicted Indigenous people as werewolves
constrained to a reservation, Disney propa-
gates gender stereotypes such as the domina-
tor male and submissive female, professional
sports perform an ideal hyper-masculine
identity of gender and violence, music videos
profit off pornography, and people of colour
are delegated to gangsterist roles including
drug dealers and thieves. Status through these
categorical media insertions into the lives of
young people is also modelled to reinforce
identity; that to be successful, despite cir-
cumstances of place and identity, there can
be a reprieve if a young person takes on the
role of the chiselled football player or the
submissive female. If schooling cannot pro-
vide an escape, then perhaps another role can
be carved out.
Institutional racism thus thrives within
schooling and the ways in which marginal
identities are socialized in young people’s
lives. Tools of domination and forms of
773
symbolic power are left to operate with-
out acknowledgement other than as forms
of good practice (Bourdieu, 1991). The use
of the tools of domination by schooling has
become commonsensical in that profession-
als cannot see that common practice such
as ability groupings are but a means to (dis)
place students on arbitrary sides of the suc-
cess boundary. As young people have embod-
ied a delegated marginal status, schooling as
an institution has embodied racism and repro-
duction of a dominant identity. This form
of reproduction becomes an invisible force
that is not acknowledged for what it does,
as many that continue to propagate its work
were successful products and to question this
becomes an exercise in critical reflexivity
(Bourdieu, 1991). Schooling can no longer
continue to allow institutional racism to be
a dominant discourse, as not only are young
people remaining entrenched in racialized
identities and have little hope, but another
crisis among youth is emerging. Suicide rates
and mental health concerns have been perco-
lating (Statistics Canada, 2012) along with
the continued reinforced marginalization of
young people, and those that are aware of the
complacency of the system need to bring oth-
ers in so that change can take hold.
THE MILIEU
The concept of subjectification tells us that they
are shaped – but that they simultaneously shape
whatever they are shaped by. (Højgaard and
Søndergaard, 2011: 7)
Before beginning work from the inside and
only looking at the outcomes of racialized
schooling, I now turn to Barad (2003: 824)
and ask, ‘Where do the issues of responsibil-
ity and accountability enter in?’. Currently,
students are at fault for failing in schools;
either they do not perform as expected or
they need a deficit label to justify their dis-
performances. The other social agent at play
for the gaps is the teacher. The teacher that
774 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
has been successful with the navigation of
the system now is in a position of power over
those that match the teacher’s identity or the
identity expected by the teacher. There does
not seem to be a need to ask what role
schooling has in this as this is the way things
have always been done and things are going
well. Students that enter the schooling system
in Kindergarten often do finish on time in
Grade 12, but for the ones that do not or the
ones that waver, something must have been
wrong with them or they had a bad teacher
causing them to not meet success on time.
Tools of reproduction have become so invis-
ible, they are not even in the realm of possi-
bilities to be questioned.
If, however, we ask what agency school-
ing has, what role schooling has in allowing
institutional racism to flourish, something
changes and schooling becomes agentic.
Schooling has an accountable role in this
process of reproduction as a ‘non-human
phenomena’ (Højgaard and Søndergaard,
2011: 12). Those in the milieu of school-
ing are now not only in relation with each
other, but the system is also a part of this
process (Højgaard and Søndergaard, 2011).
Schooling joins the process of reproduction
as an active participant, one that is actively
reproducing the dominant identity of the
status quo and what is valued by society. We
can see how this has manifested throughout
schooling’s lifetime. Schooling first was
only offered for White males of the clergy so
that they could read the Bible and share the
gospel with those under them. Reading was
a privilege and needed only by a select few
members of society; the rest did not require
this activity in their lives as they needed to
provide for others through agrarian practices.
Those that were not members of the privi-
leged class had to trust and believe that what
was spoken in service was honest and true.
Schooling then broadened to benefit elite
males as society now needed those that could
read, such as lawyers, doctors, and other
professional roles which extended beyond
the church. As society shifted from agrarian
towards industrial, a more educated citizen
was needed and schooling became accessible
to all members. However, segregation and
gentrification were allowed to keep school-
ing fixated on what identity was valued over
others as schooling moved from an elitist to
a racialized phenomenon. These racialized
processes continue to appear and reappear
to ensure the production of value is main-
tained, producing a gap between those that
perform well and those that do not perform
as prescribed. Ability groupings and stream-
ing in schools each continue to separate what
identity needs to be performed to be success-
ful. As social agents, both human and non-
human, entangle in this space with each other,
one identity often surfaces as more beneficial
to society than the racialized Other. What
represents the dominant identity, what is
valued and given more time and resources
and access to is what schooling values and
this identity ‘seems inescapable’ (Barad,
2003: 806). This shift towards schooling as a
non-human phenomenon with agency opens
up space to disrupt its influence and enact-
ments on the milieu and begins to let the
milieu also influence it to disrupt institutional
racism in schools.
Schooling has enacted racialization and
marginalization using cultural reproduction.
Ahmed (2012: 44) describes institutional
racism as being a ‘collective failure’ to meet
the needs of those that do not identify with
this dominant idealized identity in schools.
Giroux (2010) describes schools as a ‘dead
zone’ (2010: 715) and that schooling has
become ‘subordinated to a corporate social
order’ (2010: 715). Dewey (2008: 26) sug-
gested that a change was/is needed ‘in the
attitude of the school’ and this attitude was
one that privileged ‘schooling to reinforce
dominator values’ (hooks, 2003: 1). This
environment the milieu is expected to exist
in really is but ‘a complicitous educational
system’ (Block, 1997: 2) that fails racial-
ized Others while benefiting those that craft
solutions to bridge gaps, all while leav-
ing the responsibility of schooling out of
 SCHOOLING, MILIEU, RACISM: JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
the conversation. If ‘being is measured by
doing’ (de Certeau, 1988: 137) and schooling
is ‘a doing, a congealing of agency’ (Barad,
2003: 822, emphasis original), then what
measurement is of value when we shift school-
ing to that of an agent in the milieu? Freire
(2014: 71) stated that ‘education is suffer-
ing from narration sickness’, so perhaps it is
time to bring schooling into the conversation
and hold schooling accountable with ending
the collective failure racialized and Othered
students are suffering from.
(UN)DOING SCHOOLING AND
REMOVING THE BRICKS
Agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enact-
ment, not something that someone or something
has. (Barad, 2003: 826–7)
Pre-service teachers have one thing in
common and that is they were successful at
navigating schooling. For many, they have
found success with their performances in
school and now want to reside in a place they
felt comfort. Some like the allure of job secu-
rity in a society where this runs thin as well
as the summers off and high peak vacation
times. Others have not found success in the
greater world so fall on the old saying – those
that can do, and those that can’t teach.
Within this milieu of higher education, cer-
tain factors must have been met to find a
place in this space and this often involves
their common success in secondary educa-
tion. Many thus share the same ideology that
remains valued in schools and may find fault/
blame on those that do not share this identifi-
cation. Courses in pre-service teaching pro-
grammes also often have some commonality
in subject matter such as ethics, law, curricu-
lum (subject matter) studies, psychology,
special education, and so on. Progressive
post-secondary programmes have begun to
combat institutional racism by waking pre-
service teachers up to the ways in which
racism permeates in schools through courses
775
in Indigenous and Diversity education. The
question in these courses becomes how to
waken those that flourished in a racist system
in a manner that calls them to act against
those forces. How do we look at the role
schooling has had in this process?
When pre-service teachers first scan their
course syllabus and see topics such as rac-
ism, sexism, Christian privilege, Indian
Residential Schools, and White supremacy
they often, before they enter the classroom,
have already opened themselves up to resist-
ance against the course. This resistance to
understanding these ideologies comes from
a need to engage in critical reflexivity on
pre-service teachers’ identities and the suc-
cess they experienced with schooling, but
offers a means to examine the ‘deep roots’
(Sensoy and DiAngelo, 2012: xi) the racial-
ized outcomes of schooling has/have. Those
with a critical social justice narrative or those
that have experienced being racialized in
their schooling experience, however, tend
to approach the syllabus differently as these
pre-service teachers tend to feel validated in
that now their identity has value. Engaging in
this dismantling we need to not look directly
into the lives and experiences of pre-service
teachers, as in order to make change from
within, they themselves need to overcome
feelings of resistance as they too have been
dominated by an identity that is valued above
others (Freire, 2013). But they need to be
awakened to the ‘greatest tragedy of modern
man’ (Freire, 2013: 5) if they are to disrupt
schooling and counter institutional racism.
What does it mean to be a teacher?
In order to wake, being woken ought to be
done in a manner that does not reinforce resist-
ance. Where pre-service teachers look forward
to engaging with students, it is important for
them to recognize that they were themselves
once ‘absorbed by the system’ (de Certeau,
1988: 1), subjected to the reproduction under-
taken by schooling. Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie in 2009 spoke about ‘The Danger
of the Single Story’ and this single story,
(Adichie, 2009) the mechanism schooling
776 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
has used to reproduce ideal performances,
offers a starting place in diversity courses.
This identity that she speaks to in her talk is
the identity that permeates from places and
spaces in schools. The banners in the gym
and trophies in the front entry display case
that glorify athleticism, the wall of graduat-
ing classes that line hallways, often depict
homogeneity, in the school office portraits
of past principals (often White males) pen-
etrate the space, and special classrooms for
life skills or social emotional spaces forced to
the back of the buildings all represent which
story is of most worth. Ngozi Adichie warns
us that the conversation is not whole, that
only one side of the story is being expressed
and heard and this is also true with the role of
schooling as schooling has not been actively
held accountable.
Introducing pre-service teachers to their
being absorbed by only one side of the story
reduces the resistance and opens them up
to engage with learning about the role that
schooling has played in their successes.
Their own experiences in schools have often
neglected acts of reflection or critical con-
scious questioning of experiences in schools
(Freire, 2013). The cultural reproduction
through performances of value and physical
posturing in spaces is so commonplace no
one thinks to consider if this is an exercise
of racism. These active practices of the non-
human agency of schooling thrive because
those living within the system are not awak-
ened to the agency of schooling. Schooling
and institutional racism remain success-
ful because of the ‘complicity’ (Bourdieu,
1991: 164) of those that reside in that space
as they are unaware of how ‘they are subject
to it or even that they themselves exercise
it’ (1991: 164). This wakening then must
not only begin an awareness of the role of
schooling in institutional racism, but also
counter how pre-service teachers met suc-
cess within their schooling experiences and
reduce feelings of resistance during their
course work. The measurements of success
for them reinforced their ability to do and be,
despite this causing racialized Others to not
measure up enough.
Schooling as a non-human phenomenon
needs to be considered in order to dismantle
and disrupt institutional racism in schools.
This collective failure that displaces racial-
ized Others while benefiting corporate crea-
tors of quick fixes may be better addressed
when we have a plan for supporting inclusive
strategies that include addressing schooling.
The power of schooling needs to be recog-
nized as the relationship between those ‘who
exercise power and those who submit to it’
(Bourdieu, 1991: 170), including school-
ing as an agent exercising power. As a non-
human phenomenon, it too has a role in this
relationship of reproduction and the permea-
tion of racism. To not engage with schooling
as agential remains ‘anti-dialogical’ (Freire,
2013: 100) and it will continue to emerge and
thrive using its tools and band-aids. Engaging
in critical pedagogy with pre-service teach-
ers works ‘to understand how power works
through’ (Giroux, 2010: 717) the ways in
which knowledge is disseminated in schools
and gives space for pre-service teachers
to become ‘informed subjects and social
agents’ (2010: 717). Critical pedagogy in
the pre-service classroom offers a means to
converse with schooling and the social agents
that reside(ed) in that space while reducing
the resistance to an awakening and disruption
to single stories.
Pre-service teachers must work through
the historicity of how this story has influ-
enced their experiences in schools, and only
then can they recognize how, as teachers,
they will either counter these dominant ide-
ologies or reinforce them. As many teachers
I have worked with identify as non-racial-
ized individuals, starting this conversation
needs to also work through layers, one being
resistance. This gentle disruption starts with
sports. The depiction of Indigenous people
as objects on jerseys not only rallies a deep-
seeded connection to the identity of a team
and illusions of masculinity but, for those
that have not regarded logos as depictions of
 SCHOOLING, MILIEU, RACISM: JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
human beings, immediately reinforces a wall
of resistance. Let us forget about the corpo-
rate and capitalistic desire for sports logos to
be and exist, and instead look at the ways in
which logos dehumanize people and reduce
people into objects (Freire, 2013). This is
problematic for those that have been indoc-
trinated by the system as this indoctrination
has placed logos as more meaningful to the
concept of team and camaraderie than the
human depicted in the logo. More often than
not, these logos portray Indigenous people as
warriors, aggressors, stuck in a time and place
based on adornments of feathers and war-
paint. Add to this depiction how Indigenous
people are modelled in mainstream media
as animal-like characters in movies or as the
savage needed to be saved by the White male
renegade. Working through this resistance by
showing example after example of displaced
depictions of Indigenous people in the media
slowly dismantles the wall of resistance,
although of course no one can agree that
change is needed because of the investment
in jerseys and ball caps that fill closets.
Social constructions of how Indigenous
people and other marginalized people are
viewed is one of the main enactments of
schooling. Understanding this power needs
to include not only the outcome of those
enacting and enacted, but that power exerted
by schooling is also an ‘active factor’ (Barad,
2003: 810) in this social construction.
Another site of resistance for pre-service
teachers falls on sexism. Many pre-service
teachers identify as female and as such they
have first-hand experiences of the ways in
which sexism has impacted and influenced
their lives, but they often do not see the subtle
actions played out in schools in their experi-
ences. Sensoy and Di Angelo (2012) outline
three dimensions to work with pre-service
teachers to better understand how social con-
struction of knowledge, of what is valued, is
enacted in schools. These same dimensions
apply to the ways to waken pre-service teach-
ers and include looking at knowledge as a
universal and objectified truth, engaging in
777
critical self-reflection, and reengaging the
system through acknowledging the role of
the system.
Sexism offers the same space of univer-
sal and objectified truths. One only needs
to look at the gender of most teachers to see
that education is a female-dominated profes-
sion. This domination of female gender in
schools partly leads to a reasoning behind
why the profession is less respected by
society (Myrick, 2015). Within the profes-
sion, many seats of power are occupied by
the male gender including principals, vice-
principals, directors, and superintendents.
Even subjects are gendered – hard sciences
such as physics, chemistry, and maths are
often taught by male teachers, whereas the
soft subjects of the humanities and arts are
taught by female teachers. Elementary teach-
ers that are male often find that their sexual
identity is questioned and those females that
do occupy positions of power or teach a hard
subject must confront racialized notions of
gender in these roles. Physical education
teachers are more often male and the sexist
locker-room banter often extends into these
spaces occupied by male teachers. This is no
surprise to pre-service teachers, of both gen-
ders, and in fact many can find teachers that
confront these stereotypes and often speak to
them as the exception to the norm, such as
female principals or male cisgendered grade
three teachers. However, it is not until we
confront these universal truths that our innate
biases are revealed.
Sexism is deeply ingrained as a non-human
agent, it manifests in ways that may go
unchallenged such as the wall of resistance
surrounding school dress codes. The female
body, objectified in the media through both
historical and popular culture, is a contested
site. Females, Indigenous people, and other
racialized individuals have been stripped of
their agency and made objects that need to
adapt to their environment in order to survive
(Freire, 2013). This adaptation becomes a
part of the dehumanizing of the subject and
they are not then permitted to be in dialogue
778 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
with others. Women’s bodies in schools are a
distraction from learning – distracting boys
from learning; therefore, to better the experi-
ence for boys, female students must adhere to
a dress code fit for learning. Female students
must conform to benefit others in the school
community. Those that craft the dress code,
often male administrators, base such con-
forming decisions on space and place. School
is not the place for bare shoulders, schools
are not the space for short skirts/shorts, and
yet school is the place for school sports uni-
forms to violate the classroom dress code.
Lean bodies, athletic bodies are privileged
and able to be seen as active and valuable,
supporting the socialization of what it means
to be a desirable female. Like masculinity
and athleticism, females are depicted as priv-
ileged and of more value if they contribute
to an ideology that promotes this privileged
form of sexism.
Everybody in schools is exposed to social
construction of knowledge, and schooling is
an active participant. So much so that persons
in that space, each social agent no matter their
level of power, have become so entrenched
that they do not recognize they have been
‘expelled from the orbit of decisions’ (Freire,
2013: 5). However, to live and be in school-
ing that actively reproduces a dominant ide-
alized identity and racializes means that one
must be awakened to use the agent to ben-
efit rather than fail the racialized human in
that space. To do this, pre-service teachers
must now begin a process of self-reflexivity
on how they have benefited by this system
and how they are now ethically bound to
interrupt how the system reproduces racism.
Foucault (1997) states that we are at risk of
perpetuating this domination of others if we
have not taken care of ourselves. To care for
ourselves means we need to critically reflect
on how we have benefited by an agent that
socialized us to perform a specified way and
now pre-service teachers are on the verge of
reinserting themselves into this relationship
with an agent of power. How do they engage
in a dialogue with the system?
As pre-service teachers work through these
ideological moments in their future class-
rooms, they begin to critically self-reflect not
only on how they have benefited, but how
they have used their places of privilege at the
expense of others. These moments that hap-
pen around the dinner table with family over
a large stuffed turkey offer one of the hardest
challenges, but most opportunity for growth.
Now they come to realize not only their own
social construction in schools, but how deep
social construction and cultural reproduction
go when their parents espouse racist ideolo-
gies. As children, many of us have grown
to adopt and adhere to the ideologies of our
parent(s) which they themselves learned
though their conversations with schooling.
The system reproduces and reappears on
many levels in our classrooms, our homes,
and supported by the corporate media. We
are swimming in ideologies that have become
commonly habitual (Ahmed, 2012). When
pre-service teachers enter into these conver-
sations with a critical reflexive perspective,
their relation to themselves and experiences
shift and some can no longer consider enter-
ing their own classrooms without including
schooling as a factor in the racialization of
individuals. How do they begin dialogue with
the system?
ACTION AS PRAXIS
Education is an act of love, and thus an act of
courage. (Freire, 2013: 34)
As pre-service teachers emerge from discov-
ering the active role schooling played in their
successes as well as making a critical reflec-
tion on the universality of some truths,
apprehension sets in. How do they engage in
critical action while trying to find a job in a
system that is actively racializing young
people? Even to discuss love and the role of
love in their practice sets up more debates.
Biases are revealed again when gender
 SCHOOLING, MILIEU, RACISM: JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
differences between student and teacher find
ways to justify not engaging in acts of love in
classrooms. Immediately minds wander to
sexualized forms of love and then onwards to
the repercussions of such violations of the
teacher/student relationship. So much so that
touch, caring, and compassion have become
sexualized and therefore considered to not
have a place in classrooms. When did love
become sexualized and wrong? When gender
prevents a teacher from having a conversa-
tion with a student, schooling uses tools of
domination to call love taboo, gender as a
barrier to human interaction and an obstacle
to building relationships (Bourdieu, 1991).
Acts of love have moved from embraces to
fist pumps and caring is only enacted by soft
female teachers or male teachers that, by
appearance’s sake, do not care. Have we set
up pre-service teachers by awakening them
to the dissonance between a symbolic ideal
of what schooling should be and the genuine
form of schooling that currently lives
(Ahmed, 2012)? How ought reality to play
out within the walls of their classrooms?
By considering the ways in which school-
ing actively racializes the identity of many
students, pre-service teachers need to
engage with activities and pedagogies that
reorientate the enactments of schooling.
Pre-service teachers need to know their cur-
riculum, the mandated subject matter they
need to use as the centre of their practice.
Too often, however, pre-service teachers do
not even know where to find curriculum or
the ways in which they can utilize these out-
comes. Understanding firstly that curriculum
they use in their classrooms needs to move
away from the banking model of knowledge
(Freire, 2014) and not just ‘insert it into the
file cabinet minds of students’ (Kincheloe,
2016: 615). Engaging is this type of pedagogy
opens up space for the deficit model of edu-
cation that identifies students as the problem
through psychological diagnoses and exter-
nalizing acts of defiance that lead to entrance
to the discipline cycle. Instead, pre-service
teachers need to consider their curriculum
779
as learning experiences and opportunities
their students are exposed to in their class-
rooms (Eisner, 1967). Every moment in the
classroom presents a learning opportunity
stemming from the explicit outcomes; there-
fore, if pre-service teachers know these out-
comes they have the ability to connect critical
moments and questions back to these man-
dated files. They can also critically examine
what is left out of the curriculum which leads
to uncovering how social construction is used
as a mechanism for schooling (Kincheloe,
2016). The implicit ways in which curricula
are developed and redesigned, or interven-
tions chosen, need to be examined and class-
rooms offer a clear space to engage in this
reflexive thinking. Classrooms can also be
spaces to confront and challenge the implicit
forms of curriculum such as school dress
codes vs school costumes or why are school
athletes allowed to be absent from school
while the student that is working to support
their family is not?
Another tool pre-service teachers need
to take with them is a means to examine
resources and materials that they find in their
schools. Are the textbooks culturally appro-
priate or do they continue to depict stereo-
types and objectified portrayals of humans as
objects? What great icons of historicity are
being studied? Are they all great White men
or are they icons of the civil rights move-
ment, women’s suffrage, or great Indigenous
chiefs? When does history begin? Within
their praxis, pre-service teachers can move
beyond Cartesian thinking, this dualism that
allows space for there to always be an Other,
a less-than which is a centre pillar of White
supremacy (Barad, 2003; hooks, 2003).
Inclusion is not a practice, but needs to be
a way of doing. Inclusion, as decided by
schooling, currently is framed as access to
spaces and places but what inclusion needs
to do is remove the dualistic us/them and
become ‘both/and thinking’ (hooks, 2003: 39).
Instead of studying one single story as told
by one gender and race, open this up to
reflect the realities of our communities and
780 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
disrupt these universal notions of truth. Pre-
service teachers are less restricted to use text-
books and novels that are so old the pages are
yellow and torn and should be free to bring
in voices that share narratives that induce
both/and thinking. Of course, they need to be
mindful of a potential response by the agen-
tial symbolic school to force them back to the
us/them mentality and that an approved read-
ing list may appear on their desk. However,
this controlling act stemming from fear also
empowers this work to keep moving forward
and to prepare for schooling’s responses to
maintain the status quo.
Pre-service teachers also can begin to
incorporate social justice practices into their
lesson plans and engage with experiential
learning opportunities. Lesson planning that
aligns with curricular outcomes can include
aspects of social justice to better understand
social construction and the mechanisms used
to do this. Lesson planning that engages the
deeper issues to form a more inclusive dia-
logue needs to be done in a manner where
each student has a voice and opportunity to
be heard. This then requires the teacher to be
flexible and available to give students space
to express their thoughts. This practice should
be modelled in post-secondary classrooms as
well to demonstrate how one assessment and
rubric can be utilized for a variety of expres-
sions rather than a standard reflective essay.
I have in the past had students paint a picture
of their learnings in Indigenous education,
create a small art instillation that depicted
the ways that LGBTQ+ youth are excluded
from schooling, and perform a spoken word
piece – all assessed by the same rubric.
Focusing on the process of learning rather
than the outcome becomes a means to not
only unschool pre-service teachers but also
to show them that it is possible to be inclu-
sive with evaluation rather than simply fill-
ing in a scantron. Lessons and assessments
offer pre-service teachers powerful places to
broaden away from the tools of domination
and they then become no longer complicit
members of the system.
Experiential learning moves children to
outside their four walls of confinement and
also may incorporate social justice actions.
Volunteering at a local non-profit while
learning curricular outcomes offers students
and teachers a means to connect with their
local communities and work past boundaries
that have been established on their behalf.
Students that may not fit the athletic iden-
tity may find themselves creatively engag-
ing and discovering themselves in identities
that are valued outside of the influence of
school. When students are able to take part in
both/and thinking rather than us/them think-
ing, they no longer become ‘deviants’ (de
Certeau, 1988: 191), excluded and marginal-
ized by schooling, but instead schooling must
now adjust and make room for them. For as
pre-service teachers have been engaging in
work that acknowledges the power the non-
human body of schooling has had in their
lives, schooling risks reorienting its repro-
ductive racializing power towards a power
that empowers. The surge outside of schools
to value and recognize the diverse enact-
ments and performances of young people can
no longer be displaced within schools by that
of a deficit way of regarding our youth. Pre-
service teachers, with courage to continue
to challenge complicity, need to find like-
minded colleagues and use their own tools to
work against domination.
CONCLUSION
But while traditional arts of historical conscious-
ness attempt to put the past in order, distinguish-
ing the innovative from the retrograde, the
central from the marginal, the relevant from the
irrelevant or merely interesting, the photogra-
pher’s approach – like that of the collector – is
unsystematic, indeed anti-systematic. (Sontag,
1977: 77)
In writing this chapter, I recognize I have
pieced together ideologies and scholars that
may have not otherwise shared a photo
album. In doing this, my intentions are of
 SCHOOLING, MILIEU, RACISM: JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
recognition that schooling is continuing to
act and influence the racialization of our
youth despite the plethora of work to disrupt
it. A movement towards schooling as an
agential being puts responsibility and
accountability on schooling, shifting away
from students and teachers. In current form
schooling responds with intentions ‘to kill
the imagination of both teachers and stu-
dents’ (Giroux, 2015: 3), numbing both into
a slumber of standardization. Policies and
practices put into place to assist schooling
with reproducing the idealized dominant
identity not only reaffirm who deserves an
education, such as clergy and elitist White
males from the past, but force others into
conforming or leaving. Drop-out rates are
soaring, suicide rates for youth are stagger-
ing, male students are being ex-communi-
cated from school while females are fed
conflicting values of appearance, and those
in the middle cannot use the washroom.
These policies and procedures, and the
explicit curriculum in schools, have been
shaping the ways in which pre-service teach-
ers enter into this space.
Schooling has taught us from its historicity
that being human in these spaces requires stu-
dents to adopt a narrative bestowed on them
by another (Mishra Tarc, 2015). If the story
does not fit, then something is wrong with
that student, while for many others who iden-
tify with the ideal notion of identity, school-
ing supports their progression through it.
What those learn then in this space is that one
identity is valued over others, that rewards
for aggression in athletics are a banner or a
trophy and absenteeism from school. What
those learn is that learning cannot be dis-
rupted by clothing worn by female students
but clothing that reveals an athletic body is
permitted. Females and males learn that the
teaching profession is synonymous with
motherhood, therefore not commensurable
with other professional salaries in areas such
as medicine or justice. What is also learnt is
that schooling does not have a role in this pro-
cess of reproduction. That schooling has been
781
left to a clandestine but purposeful practice of
using tools of domination to racialize young
people and teachers and promote a learning
environment that values and rewards what it
wants to produce.
It is time to focus on what this practice
does, not the outcomes (Ahmed, 2012), and
this also must include schooling as one that
we learn from, as ‘we do not obtain knowl-
edge by standing outside of the world; we
know because “we” are of the world’ (Barad,
2003: 829, emphasis original). What school-
ing does, as an agential being, is continue to
reshape and reappear throughout history to
disguise the outcomes of institutional racism.
Each time racism reappears, it may result in
a differing form, but the outcome remains the
same in that racism has become so ‘routine
or ordinary’ (Ahmed, 2012: 21) that it goes
unnoticed. Symbolic schooling has used the
tools of domination to continue to grow insti-
tutionalized racism as an expected outcome.
First schooling privileges specific members
of society overtly, then covertly navigates its
way through socially accepted practices such
as ability grouping, streaming, and ideas of
inclusion by enacting on and reproducing a
dominant identity.
Not only have corporations capitalized
on systems that align with creating dead
zones and students that are regarded merely
as filing cabinets in schools through stand-
ardization of curriculum and assessment
measures, but they also are generating profit
aimed at sustaining educational gaps that pit
privilege against marginalized. What are we
learning of in schools? What type of human
is of worth? One that profits off racializ-
ing others? If the ‘future is radically open
at every turn’ (Barad, 2003: 826) then it is
time to reorient the conversation by includ-
ing the agential enactments of schooling
and disrupt racism from within, not from
those profiting off movements to fix school-
ing. Engaging in critical pedagogic actions
with pre-service teachers in their teacher
education programmes perhaps will be the
reorientation needed.
782 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Pre-service teachers that experience criti-
cal pedagogy modelled in their classes and
engage in self-reflexive thinking on the role
schooling has played in their secondary edu-
cation offer a means for a disruption of rac-
ism in schooling. Schooling will find ways to
allow its habitual practice to reappear; it may
manifest by other means, perhaps through an
evolving banned books list, or lack of fund-
ing for experiential learning, but maybe we
will be ready to recognize the different tools
of domination schooling will pick up.
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An Existentialist Pedagogy
of Humanization: Countering
Existential Oppression of
Teachers and Students in
Neoliberal Educational Spaces
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter, I position existentialism as a
humanizing force of resistance to the dehu-
manizing ideology of standardization and
measurement that underpins 21st-century
neoliberal educational policies and prac-
tices; that is, to situate existential philosophy
as a model of both pedagogical theory and
practice through which reflective, critical,
dialogical, and relational approaches to
teaching and learning are emphasized over
instrumental teaching practices based in
rigid technique and concrete measures of
prescripted information. Fundamentally, I
position existential pedagogy as the ground
upon which to establish and affirm teachers
and students as equal and relational subjects,
the touchstone of a humanizing pedagogy.
Therefore, in the classroom setting, affirm-
ing students as individuals can serve as the
starting point for dismantling the neoliberal
model that objectifies and dehumanizes
67
Sheryl J. Lieb
them by standardizing their abilities, their
interests, and their learning experiences.
In the realm of education, the term ‘neo-
liberal’ is used ubiquitously to denote the
culture of relentless assessment, testing,
and accountability measures that have been
in place for decades. At the same time, it is
important to examine the historical contexts
from which neoliberalism emerged in the
education sector. In the United States, the
advent of neoliberal education can be traced
back to the 1980s. On this theme, Ellison
(2012) correlated the neoliberal infiltration
of American schooling to the era of President
Ronald Reagan’s administration and, even
more specifically, to the commission of a
national report on the state of education
titled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for
Educational Reform (1983).
The rise to prominence of the concept of globali-
zation in the discourse of education reform can
be traced to the rightward shift in American poli-
tics over the past thirty years and the publication
784 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of A Nation at Risk in 1983 (National Commission
on Excellence in Education 1983). Framing educa-
tion policy within the context of crisis and global
economic competition, Risk set the stage for
policy debates over the past 25 + years and intro-
duced the concept of globalization into the lexi-
con of education discourse, and it did so by
constructing an image of public schooling as a
failing institution. (Ellison, 2012: 119–20)
The overall implication of the report was
that American education was failing to pro-
duce competent students, prepared to com-
pete and achieve success as members of the
future workforce in an increasingly con-
nected global marketplace. While, histori-
cally, education and economics have always
been linked in terms of job training and
professional career opportunities for future
employment, the trajectory of neoliberaliz-
ing globalization since the latter part of the
20th century has extended well beyond learn-
ing as preparation for the responsibilities of
adulthood. Instead, the neoliberal turn in edu-
cation has made learning a business project,
and only those learners capable of ‘passing the
test’ will be recognized as capable achievers
(i.e., future profit makers) whose success, as
contributors to the wealth of the nation, will
ultimately be defined by neoliberal standards
of performance and production.
Prior to its eventual demise in 2015, the No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 posi-
tioned the American government as overseer
of mandated assessment, testing, and teacher
accountability programs administered by the
states; in turn, linking the provision of federal
funding for schools to statewide compliance
(Ellison, 2012; Hursh, 2007; Wong, 2015).
On this theme, Hursh (2007: 494) wrote,
‘NCLB, like other recent education policies
promoting standardized testing, account-
ability, competition, school choice, and pri-
vatization, reflects the rise and dominance
of neoliberal and neoconservative policy
discourses over social democratic policy
discourses’. Over time, and due to increas-
ing controversy surrounding the contested
effectiveness of NCLB, the Every Student
Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaced NCLB as
of December 2015. Essentially, the ESSA
narrowed the federal government’s role
by placing more direct control of curricu-
lum standards, accountability procedures,
etc. with individual states (Wong, 2015).
Regardless of where authority and imple-
mentation has shifted since the institution of
ESSA, the neoliberal model continues as the
ongoing driver of public education policies
and practices in the United States.
As a former K-12 public school educa-
tor laboring under the neoliberal umbrella,
I participated in that economized educa-
tional culture, where administrators and their
followers extolled the virtue and practical
sense of preparing future workers for the
21st-century global workforce. However,
based on my own experiences in the system
and the stories gleaned from many other cur-
rent and former educators, neoliberalism has
diminished the creative work of teaching by
fostering an educational culture of oppres-
sion in which both teachers and students
are routinely dehumanized, manipulated, and
controlled by an institutionalized worldview
grounded in production and consumption.
Similarly, neoliberal teaching practices evoke
comparisons with a pedagogical problem to
which Brazilian educator and political activ-
ist Paulo Freire spoke long ago and to which
other critical pedagogues have spoken since;
that is, the ‘banking concept of education’
(Freire, 2000: 72), a process of instruction
that situates the teacher as the depositor of
information into the empty minds of students.
Whether we use Freire’s language or some
other descriptive phrasing to denote the
objectified status of contemporary teachers
and students, systemic practices of dehuman-
ization – resulting in what I term existential
oppression – prevail in the educational realm
today, most especially in public education. In
this environment, personhood, signifying the
individual as an independent thinker capa-
ble of choosing, acting, and exercising per-
sonal agency, is negated or marginalized. The
teacher must teach according to ‘educational
 AN EXISTENTIALIST PEDAGOGY OF HUMANIZATION
industry’ standards and styles, and the stu-
dent must acquire and demonstrate achieve-
ment of the information deemed necessary by
the system – all intended to show compliance
with the neoliberal mission. For the teacher,
there is no sanctioned situation of freedom
in which to critically and creatively facilitate
human learning, especially noticeable with
the relegation of the arts and humanities to
the curricular fringes. Once perceived as a
work of passion and creativity, teaching has
become the work of expedience and compli-
ance within the neoliberal design. For the
student, objectification has resulted in silenc-
ing students’ voices whether to question the
status quo, consider alternative topics and
points of view, or to exercise choices with
regard to assignments and learning activities.
Education has been devalued in terms of the
student’s intellectual and social development.
As a result of K-12 neoliberal education, stu-
dents come to the university indoctrinated
with an instrumental mindset that values
‘getting the right answer’ rather than valuing
the more substantive questions that serve to
underscore human development in its myriad
complexities.
The following sections proceed from this
introduction: (a) Defining the Problem of
Existential Oppression, drawing primarily
from the theories of 20th-century exis-
tential philosophers Martin Heidegger (as
presented by Dybicz, 2010) and Jean-Paul
Sartre; (b) An Existentialist Conception of
Personhood, mainly based on Sartrean the-
ory; and (c) Existential Tenets and Vignettes:
Teaching For and Against Resistance,
excerpts from teaching field notes relative to
a 2013 self-study and related discussions. As
organized, each section builds upon the one
preceding it. In other words, the theoretical
discussion of the ‘problem’ of human objec-
tification and dehumanization (existential
oppression) sets the stage for a philosophical
analysis of personhood from the humanizing
perspective of existentialism. In turn, these
sections lead to a presentation of classroom
vignettes/brief narratives framed around key
785
existential tenets associated with Sartre: indi-
vidual freedom, subjectivity, choice, action,
and responsibility. Specifically, I address
each of the five tenets within the context of
personally documented excerpts of ‘real-
world’ pedagogical scenarios (vignettes) that
occurred in an undergraduate classroom (the
setting for the self-study). Illuminated by
the interplay between instructor (myself) and
students collectively, these vignettes thus
serve as narrative illustrations of both
the selected existential concepts and the
dynamics at hand during the study.
DEFINING THE PROBLEM OF
EXISTENTIAL OPPRESSION
I am concerned with existential oppression as
it impacts both the educator (particularly the
K-12 teacher) and students who are being
schooled within the neoliberal educational
construct. I define educator existential
oppression as the negation of the educator’s
personhood, meaning the denial or negation
of their subjective stance as an independently
thinking individual and, with that, their free-
dom to choose how and what they will teach.
On this view, educators’ freedom to pursue
their projects – personally and professionally –
is compromised, if not outrightly denied. For
many educators, the sense of dehumanization
and objectification is palpable when they find
themselves operating like mindless automa-
tons on an assembly line of standardization,
uniformity, conformity, and acquiescence to
an external network of power and authority.
For other educators, the situation may not
feel so dire, possibly because they have been
schooled this way themselves and do not
presume to critically question the status quo.
There yet could be others who support the
neoliberal agenda because they actually
believe in its policies and practices. Having
personally experienced existential oppres-
sion as an educator, I am committed to the
cause of educator liberation as an inward
786 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
act of self-reclamation and as an expression
of resistance to an untenable educational
culture.
Yet how are we to understand this claim
of existential oppression in a modern, demo-
cratic society such as ours, a society in which
individuals have the option/right to choose
their careers, their life projects? They are
not forced to do this work, and they are not
overtly oppressed in terms of physical and
material freedom. On all these points, I sub-
mit that it is necessary to consider existen-
tial oppression as a phenomenon that is quite
particular to the individual, corresponding
to one’s present reality in relation to his or
her perception of self as a value-creating and
meaning-making subject in the world. Even
while acknowledging the limitations and
constraints on one’s freedom, teachers may
yet go along with the situation at hand. In this
instance, they know inwardly that they are at
odds with the ideological/pedagogical stance
of the neoliberal regime, but they typically
persevere with the work at hand, ultimately
ending up at odds with themselves as well.
This is how existential oppression begins to
take over the soul and psyche of the teacher
who knows who he or she should be (accord-
ing to personal instincts and values) as an
educator, but who has become fragmented
and torn between such philosophical and
pedagogical values and the demands of the
neoliberal workplace. The denial of freedom
from which educator existential oppression
emerges is not an overtly visible or physical
manifestation of power exerted by one party
over another, such that it would be evidenced
by physical constraints on one’s freedom or
denial of shelter and necessary sustenance.
Rather, I suggest that existential oppression is
a condition experienced within the self, and it
is the self that must consciously and actively
choose freedom if it is to be released from this
kind of bondage. Dybicz (2010) specifically
addressed existential oppression in the field
of social work, reinforcing my rationale that
work-based existential oppression is a par-
ticularly individual, internalized experience
of existence. Grounding his argument in
existential philosopher Martin Heidegger’s
(1927) theory of Da-sein in Being and Time,
Dybicz (2010) wrote:
Da-sein refers to one’s uniqueness as an individual –
one’s identity within the context of one’s
constructed world. So oppression occurs when
discursive elements of the dominant discourse –
narratives, or master narratives as labeled by some
(Brubaker and Wright, 2006; Sands and Krumer-
Nevo, 2006) – begin to restrict the possibilities of
Da-sein. In plainer language, master narratives
begin to define the individual in such a way that
one’s essence, or worth, is lessened. (2010: 37)
In other words, Heidegger’s Da-sein can be
understood as individual being (my italics)
embracing the freedom that makes personal
identity-creation possible in a socially con-
structed world. On this account, oppression
looms as a threat when the ‘master narra-
tives’ (Dybicz, 2010: 37) of an authoritative
social order limit or take away an individ-
ual’s freedom. In the case of the educator,
the standardizing discourse and authority of
the neoliberal narrative limits and, in many
cases, disempowers the educator’s access to
both academic and personal freedom in the
workplace, effectively suffocating any claim
to freedom. With the progression of personal
and professional growth stunted, the educa-
tor begins to live the experience of existential
oppression, alienated from the system and
progressively disconnected from the expres-
sion of her ‘true’ self and her intrinsic values
in the work environment.
Sartre’s (1984: 117) concept of ‘being-for-
itself’, as theorized in his famous work Being
and Nothingness, evokes similarities with
Heidegger’s Da-sein as both emphasize indi-
vidual subjectivity. They each underscored
the concept as the counterpart of existential
freedom and its inevitable connection to per-
sonal responsibility. In turn, the individual’s
particularity as a uniquely free and responsi-
ble subject renders existential oppression as a
uniquely lived, personal experience in terms
of affect because it is not based on a socially
constructed category or on a disposition that
 AN EXISTENTIALIST PEDAGOGY OF HUMANIZATION
encompasses all individuals in exactly the
same way. This does not mean that others
are not living through similar experiences
of oppression, but the subjectively embod-
ied individual can only be conscious to her
own particular circumstances in terms of how
she will choose to respond to them. Both
Heidegger and Sartre pointed to the pos-
sibilities inherent to one’s consciousness of
existential freedom. A caveat, though, is that
these possibilities must be chosen by the indi-
vidual, within one’s particular situation of
oppression in order to counteract it or move
beyond it. Thus, in terms of Dybicz’s render-
ing of an oppressive master narrative in the
world of social work, the possibility of free-
dom as Da-sein cannot be realized under ‘the
current horizon of understanding’ (Dybicz,
2010: 37). However, within the context of
Heidegger’s Da-sein or Sartre’s being-for-
itself, the individual can access her freedom
‘in terms of one’s free will, [accessing] the
ability to construct counter-narratives to the
oppressive master narratives, and thus move
Da-sein beyond one’s current horizon of
understanding by constructing a new social
reality or world’ (Dybicz, 2010: 37).
Speaking to the realm of education, the
counter-narrative would more likely con-
stitute a limited change in social reality or
environment as opposed to constituting a
systemic impact on the oppressive neolib-
eral social order. Nonetheless, the individu-
al’s personally crafted counter-narrative to
objectification would represent choices and
actions, regardless of how small or limited,
geared toward resisting an unacceptable sta-
tus quo. Sartre (1984) expressed the same
concept, asserting that the individual who
finally decides that her situation is intoler-
able will then choose to take action to resist
or change it. Essentially, along with the
empowerment of self-awareness, existential
ideals of possibility and personal transcend-
ence can fuel the individual educator’s jour-
ney toward a more humanizing pedagogical
praxis. In other words, one can create a new
existential reality by choosing one’s freedom
787
as a personal counter-narrative of libera-
tion and by constructing a new social reality
within the present classroom or in an alterna-
tive educational setting. Not easy tasks, but
necessary steps toward freeing oneself from
the debilitating state of educator existential
oppression.
AN EXISTENTIALIST CONCEPTION
OF PERSONHOOD
As a philosophical school of thought, exis-
tentialism is concerned with personhood as
constituted by the lived world of human
experiences through which the individual
makes personal meaning. Sartre’s (2007: 20)
famous maxim, ‘existence precedes
essence’, asserts that the individual first
exists and then creates itself as a particular
person, continually informed and impacted
by the experiences and relationships that
emerge during the course of its life –
­physically embodied, subjectively separate
from the other things and subjects of the
world. In Sartrean (1984: 147) terms, the
existent is a being ‘for-itself and projected
toward its own possibles’ amidst the reality
of earthly existence. Moreover, the subjec-
tive nature of human consciousness renders
personhood as uniquely individual and dis-
tinctly singular from other life forms in that
human consciousness can reflect upon its
own thinking. Thus, the individual can con-
sider the self, in situation, as an embodied
self-consciousness; that is, as a being who
can choose to be self-aware, reflective, self-
activating, and responsible.
Following Sartre’s premise that human
existence is the precursor to any notion of
selfhood (essence), we might say that during
the earliest years of existence, the individual
first becomes aware of others and the sur-
rounding physical environment; to eventually
embark on the task of self-creation as one
develops increasing consciousness of self as a
being capable of choosing and acting relative
788 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
to lived experiences and relationships with
others. In claiming that ‘subjectivity must
be our point of departure’ (Sartre, 2007: 20),
Sartre emphasized the significance of the
individual’s ‘project’ (2007: 23) of person-
hood; in effect, a project of living based on
the authenticity of one’s choices and actions
and the acceptance of responsibility for
resulting outcomes. On this view, identity is
continually shaped through the individual’s
capacity to exercise personal agency and con-
struct meaning of one’s project. To illustrate
this point, Sartre (2007: 23) explained: ‘Man
[Woman] is indeed a project that has a subjec-
tive existence, rather unlike that of a patch of
moss, a spreading fungus, or a cauliflower’.
Echoing Sartre, the late existential scholar/
educator Robert C. Solomon (2005) defined
personhood as an attitude that engages the
world by virtue of the individual’s subjective
manifestation of her project. Positioning self-
creation as an outgrowth of consciousness in
action, Solomon (2005: xvii) stated: ‘The self
is an ideal, a chosen course of action and val-
ues, something one creates in the world.’
What about the existence of other sub-
jects, individuals, in the world with whom
we necessarily interact and form relation-
ships? Sartre (1984) maintained that, upon
encountering the ‘look’ (1984: 352) of the
other, the individual becomes a kind of object
for the other’s attention, just as she – the
individual subject in question – encounters
or engages other subjects as objects of her
attention. Still, this subject–other dynamic
emerges as an offshoot of the individual free-
dom and subjectivity that form the bedrock
of an existentialist conception of person-
hood. In particular, existential freedom points
to the integrity of personhood in contrast to
the condition of victimhood associated with
objectification and dehumanization. Freedom
is further understood as the property of indi-
vidual existence that nourishes and affirms
humanity in its fullest possible expression;
thus, countering denial of the self and unjust
practices that dehumanize and diminish
the human condition. While history reminds
us of the existential truth that human free-
dom has been and likely will continue to be
threatened by those seeking power over oth-
ers, the existential need to live in freedom
will continue to motivate and function as
the rational individual’s impetus for choos-
ing self-consciousness and personhood over
self-negation and victimhood, thereby also
valuing human cooperation as opposed to
human conflict.
As a final note on the subject–other
dynamic, existentialism’s primacy of indi-
vidual subjectivity holds that the individual’s
will to choose and act for freedom is not uni-
laterally self-serving. In choosing freedom
for oneself, the individual is responsible for
the consequences of choosing as it affects
their own life and, potentially, the lives of oth-
ers with whom they interact. Simultaneously,
others hold the same responsibility for their
choices and actions. As such, there is an
implicit, existential reciprocity at work for
those individuals who esteem freedom as a
moral value and as the fundamental condi-
tion for living in a shared world. Presuming a
rational state of mind as the default condition
of the ‘individual’, Sartre (2007) reinforced
this point while also deflecting stereotypical
accusations of existential solipsism, the idea
that the individual can only be certain of the
existence of one’s own mind and no other.
Thus, he asserted, ‘choosing to be this or that
is to affirm at the same time the value of what
we choose, because we can never choose evil.
We always choose the good, and nothing can
be good for any of us unless it is good for all’
(Sartre, 2007: 24).
Having established a theoretical premise
for the reality of existential oppression in the
realm of 21st-century neoliberal education,
followed by a discussion of an existentialist
conception of personhood, the next section
brings into focus each of five fundamental ten-
ets of Sartrean existential theory. To reiterate,
these tenets are: individual freedom, subjec-
tivity, choice, action, and responsibility. The
following vignettes, purposed to ‘illustrate’
the tenets, are actual excerpts from research
 AN EXISTENTIALIST PEDAGOGY OF HUMANIZATION
field notes associated with a pedagogical
self-study that I conducted at my university
during the spring of 2013. Aimed at exam-
ining my existentialist approach to teaching
and learning in an undergraduate classroom,
I recorded my observations and perceptions
of self and students immediately after each
class session throughout the semester. These
post-teaching field notes consist of general
observations, direct teacher–student interac-
tions, and reflections on numerous existential
and pedagogical issues, to eventually become
a focal component of a fuller philosophical/
narrative analysis. For this chapter, the aim
is to demonstrate a progression from theory
to practice; that is, from this chapter’s begin-
ning focus on philosophical analysis of exis-
tential theory specific to issues of oppression
and personhood in education to culminating
glimpses into a humanistic narrative of prac-
tice in a real-world university setting.
EXISTENTIAL TENETS AND
VIGNETTES: TEACHING FOR AND
AGAINST RESISTANCE
During the spring semester of the 2012–2013
academic year, I taught a foundations of edu-
cation course predicated on social justice
issues as they impact teaching and learning.
Within this framework, students – primarily
teacher education majors – examined the
intersections between public education in the
United States and the social, cultural, politi-
cal, and economic structures that have framed
(and continue to frame) this society. Set up as
a seminar-style class, the course involved
assigned readings, follow-up seminar discus-
sions, reflective writing activities, and stu-
dents’ choices of mid-semester and
end-of-semester creative projects.
Embracing the relative freedom of this
undergraduate classroom and extolling teach-
ers’ work as a passion and calling, I continued
to position myself as a resistor to the prevail-
ing neoliberal model of standardization and
789
objectification by exposing my students to
critical and philosophical forms of pedagogy
that could be adapted to their own evolv-
ing teaching philosophies. Interestingly, a
paradox emerged with regard to the contrast
between my existential view of education
and the neoliberal view with which these
students, as a whole, had been educated or
trained. From my interactions and discussions
with many of them, I learned that exposure
to a space of freedom in the undergradu-
ate environment can be a disconcerting and
anxiety-producing experience for the unsus-
pecting student who has been conditioned to
the standardizing climate of K-12 education.
Many of them revealed that they were more
at home with the educational ‘norms’ asso-
ciated with assessments, tests, rubrics, and
standardized grading systems. Ironically, the
situation in which I found myself as univer-
sity instructor was this: I was relatively free to
pursue my personally conceived pedagogy of
humanization in the higher education setting.
Yet a new tension set in as I then experienced
my own freedom being resisted by my stu-
dents, positioning me in confrontation with
existential oppression as embodied in many
of them. Quick to criticize their prior K-12
schooling experiences, they yet acknowl-
edged that they had become accustomed
to neoliberal schooling practices. Despite
acknowledging their experiences of objectifi-
cation, many yet demonstrated a resistance to
a more liberating classroom environment in
which their willingness to engage, confront,
and share would be necessary to the teaching/
learning process. In other words, the abstract
nature of freedom loomed as a kind of uncer-
tain, sometimes frightening, specter in their
externally manipulated frames of reference.
By the end of the semester, a number of stu-
dents had demonstrated their willingness to
embrace the opportunities of intellectual and
existential freedom provided to them, while
many others did not.
The following sections represent those
fundamental Sartrean tenets or principles of
existential theory previously noted, illustrated
790 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
by excerpts from extensive post-class field
notes documenting my spring 2013 self-
study research project. Section discussions
correlate the meaning of each tenet to the
selected excerpts. The idea is for the reader
to see more deeply into the thoughts and con-
cerns of one educator’s attempt to pursue a
humanizing pedagogy of personhood while
resisting neoliberal educational ideology.
Individual Freedom
According to Sartre (2007: 48), because the
aim of human freedom is freedom itself, it
stands as the ‘foundation of all values’.
Therefore, individual freedom is the moral
ground upon which the individual must
affirm (through choices and actions) her exis-
tential project or purpose for living, learning,
and working over a lifetime. On this view,
human existence can be understood as an
inherent will to freedom that manifests in the
subjective space of self-awareness through
which the individual initiates and takes
responsibility for creating her life; moreover,
doing so in response to, and potentially in
defiance of, an uncertain and contingent
world. The following scenarios illustrate
both personal musings and actual issues
attached to the concept of individual freedom
in specifically pedagogical contexts.
Excerpt from class field notes – class 3,
January 23, 2013, on experiencing my
own freedom. Now, no longer submerged,
I discover how much I like teaching. I like
students responding to me, as well as seek-
ing me out. I feel like a real individual who
matters for something in this world. Yes, it’s
human connection, but it is also reconnection
with the me that I consider authentic – that
girl who shone in school just by being there,
the girl who made the classroom her psy-
chic home, the girl and woman who feels the
greatest excitement walking around college
campuses, absorbing the feeling of humming
minds within glorious buildings that hold
stores of life stories and human information.
I like ideas. I like to discover ideas and
explore them with others who come alive
with ideas. So, how do I make my students
come alive with ideas? I am trying to build
a community so that they will open up and
talk. I cajole and I perform. I put my gregari-
ous side forward, tell them personal anec-
dotes, and try to bring warmth to the setting.
I forget that I am actually being me, and
not performing falsely. Perhaps this is the
underlying message of today: I am not
performing – I am being me. I am a born
student/educator – I love this kind of human
interaction. I feel a sense of excitement swell
my insides when I make a connection with the
students; when they respond as if I have some-
thing valuable to share with them. I trust that
we will build this community, and that they
will open up. … I want them to emerge …
find that part of them that says, ‘I can resist,
I can speak up, and I can be an individual in
the classroom, in society, in the world’.
Excerpt from class 5 field notes –
Wednesday, January 30, 2013, on the ten-
sion between individual freedom and
students as objects of neoliberal indoctri-
nation. I purposefully invite my students to
engage in meaningful classroom dialogue,
to share opinions, and to be open to diverse
points of view. I think to myself that an educa-
tion course such as this – predicated on criti-
cal pedagogy, contemporary social justice
issues, and philosophy of education – should
naturally provoke passionate ideas and
engaged discourse. With a touch of despera-
tion and a large dose of humor, I announce
to the group, ‘Liberate yourselves!’ In other
words, embrace your freedom to be who you
are, who you are striving to become. They
smile, laugh, and reinforce my hope of inspir-
ing deeper efforts at personal reflection, open
communication, and a realized sense of inner
freedom, as well as connection to this edu-
cational community. Still, I ask myself if this
is too much, too controversial a practice of
socio-cultural critique and self-­examination?
Might I crush the teaching aspirations of
these future educators? I openly voice this
 AN EXISTENTIALIST PEDAGOGY OF HUMANIZATION
fear to my class, further explaining that while
we intend to critique many aspects of the
institution of education, hopes and possibili-
ties for change are available.
Sartre’s (2007) conception of individual
freedom speaks to an absolute kind of free-
dom that, on the one hand, looms as fright-
eningly overwhelming; or, on the other hand,
looms as the open possibility of freedom
with which the subjectively self-conscious
individual can choose to create oneself and
her life path. Thus ‘condemned to be free’
(Sartre, 1984: 567) – without a predeter-
mined plan of how to create an authentic and
meaningful life in this space of freedom – the
individual has the awe-inspiring and some-
times daunting responsibility of crafting their
existence in the face of worldly uncertainty
and contingency. In existentialist terms, this
means that the individual cannot escape the
‘facticity’ (Sartre, 1984: 127) of existence;
that is, the ‘givens’ of mortal existence in
an uncontrollable universe. Therefore, it is
essential to emphasize an understanding of
facticity as an unavoidable feature of human
existence with which individual freedom is
constantly entangled. In the following pas-
sage, Sartre famously expounded on what is
involved in coming to terms with oneself as
a freedom.
We mean that man first exists: he materializes in
the world, encounters himself, and only afterward
defines himself. If man as existentialists conceive of
him cannot be defined, it is because to begin with
he is nothing. He will not be anything until later,
and then he will be what he makes of himself.…
Man is not only that which he conceives himself to
be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since
he conceives of himself only after he exists, just as
he wills himself to be after being thrown into exist-
ence, man is nothing other than what he makes of
himself. This is the first principle of existentialism.
(Sartre, 2007: 22)
The neoliberal institution of education rep-
resents the facticity against which the free-
dom of the individual educator is pitted.
Theoretically speaking, and according to
Sartre, educators must choose how they will
791
confront the facticity of their situations in
order to avoid the self-deception and ration-
alization of ‘bad faith’ (Sartre, 2007: 25); that
is, the submergence of their will to freedom
through compliance and conformism in the
face of a dehumanizing educational model.
In other words, by choosing and acting in
ways inconsistent with their more human-
istic personal and professional ethics, the
oppressed educator exists in bad faith. On
the other hand, the educator who consciously
and intentionally chooses and acts in accord-
ance with values and principles grounded in
humanization and freedom avoids the trap
of bad faith, thus countering the dehuman-
izing effects of existential oppression. By
consciously choosing their liberation (if only
inwardly at first), the concept of freedom
itself moves from an abstract ideal to a poten-
tial reality. ‘The technical and philosophi-
cal concept of freedom … means only the
autonomy of choice … choice, being identi-
cal with acting, supposes a commencement
of realization in order that the choice may be
distinguished from the dream and the wish’
(Sartre, 1984: 622).
What about the students in this classroom,
most of whom were preparing to become
teachers in K-12 public education? Did
they have any sense of a Sartrean concep-
tion of individual freedom? First, I suggest
that it would be the exceptionally self-aware
individual – student or teacher – who could
emerge from the contemporary K-12 culture
of schooling unscathed by its system of dehu-
manization. As products of neoliberal school-
ing themselves, and as students preparing to
work in that same arena as future teachers,
an ironic dynamic emerged in which indi-
vidual freedom expressed by the educator
(me) was frequently met with the facticity of
students’ resistance to the pedagogical expe-
rience of freedom. In effect, evidenced by
their ways of engaging (or not), expressing
themselves (or not), completing their work
(or not), and taking advantage of the freedom
afforded in this classroom (or not), a signifi-
cant number of these students demonstrated
792 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
the internalization of their prior neoliberal
training and the habits of conformity they
acquired in response to the neoliberal agenda.
Subjectivity
As an inherent feature of human existence,
subjectivity is predicated on consciousness
of self as unique in terms of personhood and
the subjective meaning-making processes
that occur in one’s inner world. Therefore,
subjectivity rests on the human capacity to
think about and reflect upon one’s own think-
ing in order to create meaning, aligned with
intentions and purpose, for creating and pur-
suing one’s life projects. In the following
vignette, I link the ironic absence of student
subjectivity in relation to the relative free-
dom provided in the seminar classroom (as
opposed to the anonymity that punctuates the
large lecture hall). If students fear or disdain
a space of freedom in which they are encour-
aged to raise their voices and interact, what
does this attitude say about their state of self-
consciousness? How can they come to know
themselves as freely thinking subjects? How
can they come to know others? How can they
make meaning of their educational journeys
beyond job preparation?
Excerpt from class 2 field notes – January
16, 2013, on teacher subjectivity reaching
out to students’ subjectivities. I then show
a clip from the animated movie Waking Life
[dir: Richard Linklater, 2001], the clip in
which Dr Robert Solomon talks about the
actual exuberance fostered by existentialism
to a young college student. I want this clip
to somehow better define the key existential
concepts to my students than just giving them
rote definitions. I ask for feedback on the clip,
and it is still silent. No one wants to speak
up. So, of course, I fill in the space with my
own chatter, trying to prompt responses from
the students. This is a challenging job for the
teacher – to get people to invest themselves
and speak up for who they are, what they view,
what they perceive, and how they feel about it.
I sense my own prejudice, my personal belief
that kids today don’t embrace the intellect;
that they are so trained to get a job, any job,
and in this case, to be teachers. What does
that actually mean to them? … One student, a
male, said he liked the sense of freedom to be
who you are from the Waking Life clip, but no
one really picked up on that, at least not ver-
bally to extend the conversation. Blank faces,
scared faces, unaware/unconscious under-
neath these blank stares; challenged faces
who are not used to being provided a place of
freedom to reveal themselves to me – to each
other – to themselves.
How does the student’s lack of conscious-
ness of her own freedom implicate a state
of existential oppression that precludes pos-
sibilities for individual engagement and
community-building in the existential class-
room? Can an existential pedagogy of per-
sonhood, as enacted and encouraged by the
individual teacher, break through the silences
of existential oppression in a classroom full
of students? What is my task as existential
educator in this regard? I suggest that I must
help students realize themselves, consciously
and subjectively, so that they might have
their ‘selves’ to contribute to the pedagogical
experience. To implement the task at hand,
I must continue to respond to each student
as a particular person – through our class-
room dialogues, through the personalized
commentary I provide in response to assign-
ments, and during one-to-one conferences.
Ultimately, the aim is to affirm the student as
a subject so that they will recognize their own
stances as individuals and as co-participants
in the world of the classroom community.
‘Without the world there is no selfness, no
person; without selfness, without the person,
there is no world’ (Sartre, 1984: 157).
Choice and Action
Throughout his writings, Sartre ‘explores
the phenomenon of choice as the central fea-
ture of existential freedom’ (Cox, 2008: 40).
 AN EXISTENTIALIST PEDAGOGY OF HUMANIZATION
The capacity to choose involves a level of
self-consciousness that speaks to the indi-
vidual’s propensity to think about options
from a variety of perspectives (e.g., intellec-
tual, rational, emotional) as opposed to the
singularly instinctual or reflexive ‘choices’
exercised by non-human creatures. In turn,
existential choice typically manifests as
intentional action, particularly as choice can
be understood as a decision made in the face
of multiple options for possible action.
Nonetheless, the individual’s inclination to
choose from the well of a critical self-con-
sciousness often depends on her societal
conditioning. Specific to neoliberal school-
ing, conditioning links to schooling practices
that tend to breed a ‘follower’ or conformist
mentality in contrast to that of an independ-
ent thinker. The following excerpt is intended
to illustrate the dilemma of independent
thinking and choosing for students who have
been conditioned as ‘followers’ based on a
telling comment made in a seminar moment:
‘They [students, young people] need some-
one to tell them what to think’. In turn, and
specific to the second excerpt in this section,
I address the ongoing challenge of engaging
students in the ‘complicated conversation’
(Pinar, 2012: 183) or dialogical interactions
that symbolize forms of action within an
existential pedagogical dynamic.
Excerpt from class 15 field notes –
March 6, 2013, on developing as a con-
sciously independent thinker and chooser.
What actually stands out to me is a comment
made by a student last week when we were dis-
cussing issues of race and social class. … how
human beings are the most profoundly intel-
lectually capable of all living creatures, but
on the other hand, the most helpless of living
creatures when first born. So, we talked about
how babies and young children learn about
their very being in the world through relation-
ships with others; how, even the activity of
nursing cannot be understood by the infant as
involving another person; the infant only can
understand – through sensation – that some-
thing physically and emotionally nurturing is
793
happening to her or his body/being. Then, of
course, kids learn through contact with oth-
ers as separate selves and through actual
lived experiences. Then we talked about kids
learning from the cultural standards of fam-
ily, school, etc. … a particular student made
the point that young people don’t know what
to think on their own: ‘They need someone to
tell them what to think’ (as in family, school-
ing, and culture). This one simple comment
speaks volumes about the way students are
programmed in their thinking; how they bring
this programmed mode of thinking to the uni-
versity. Then we have to work to undo this
mindset in order to wake up their minds so
that they might develop the habit of thinking
and choosing for themselves.
Excerpt from class 21 field notes – April 3,
2013, on the challenges of making con-
nections and fostering dialogical inter-
actions as intellectual forms of action in
the existential classroom. I used my pre-
pared prompts to solicit discussion about
the chapter. I consistently had to regroup my
thoughts, my prompts … I ended the class
by trying to bring the final part of the dis-
cussion back to today’s assigned reading
about validating and teaching immigrant
students through art. I pointed out that these
students had to be actively engaged in some
way that would be meaningful to them, that
would validate them as individuals, that
would recognize their unique cultures and
backgrounds, and that would reinforce their
learning processes as intentionally lived
experiences. I compared my attempts to
engage them [my students] through a discus-
sion of their personal interests in the arts,
sports, or both … So, this issue of active
engagement in the classroom conversation
is real, an ongoing challenge for me. … With
a few exceptions, it seems to me that they are
not really interested in resistance; rather,
they have internalized their own existen-
tial oppression to lesser or greater degrees.
They say they hate testing. They claim that
they have not truly learned anything of
great consequence through the methods
794 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
used in neoliberal schooling, but they are
not inspired to change. If they won’t engage
while they have the freedom to be students in
a class that invites intellectual curiosity and
energetic dialogues encompassing alterna-
tive perspectives to the status quo, how are
they going to engage, critically and crea-
tively, their future students in a system that
provides their paychecks, their retirement,
and their summer vacations?
I am very conscious of myself as a per-
son who chooses to educate, as Sartre’s
(1984: 117) ‘being for itself’; that is, as a
self-aware individual intent on pursuing
her life/work project in a space of freedom.
My students are the primary others in my
pedagogical world, and because of them, I
become a ‘being-for-others’ (Sartre, 1984:
299). As such, my choices and actions are
extended toward my students, these other
subjects, whose lives intersect with mine in
the pedagogical space of the classroom. On
this view, the teacher’s self-consciousness is
necessary to establishing consciousness of
others (i.e., students) and, with that, taking
the necessary actions to foster a positive and
productive teaching/learning environment.
Therefore, the situation of the existentially
oppressed educator begs the question, ‘How
can the educator be a consciousness for her
students if she cannot exist as an empowered
consciousness for herself?’ As one of the few
recognized women philosophers among the
existentialists of the 20th century, Simone de
Beauvoir (1976) held that the individual who
does not resist oppression cannot be con-
scious to self as an agentic subject because,
in not choosing freedom, she remains in
denial of her own humanity. On this point,
the contemporary educator must want her
freedom, as her moral grounding and con-
scious choice, more than external approval
and the security of a job at any personal cost.
De Beauvoir (1976) wrote:
Now, I can evade this choice. We have said that it
would be contradictory deliberately to will oneself
not free. But one can choose not to will himself
free. In laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness,
cowardice, impatience, one contests the meaning
of the project at the very moment that one defines
it. The spontaneity of the subject is then merely a
vain living palpitation, its movement toward the
object is a flight, and itself is an absence. To con-
vert the absence into presence, to convert my
flight into will, I must assume my project positively.
(1976: 25–6)
Educators who choose to act toward the goal
of pedagogical freedom, within or beyond the
confines of the neoliberal classroom, may be
still materially oppressed but are no longer
existentially oppressed once having chosen
to reclaim personhood and their projects
of freedom. As long as they are pursuing a
pedagogy of personhood, despite the obsta-
cles, they are not complicit with neoliberal
ideology. Rather, they are embodying their
projects through their actions.
Responsibility
The existential tenet of responsibility
emerges from the premise that the individ-
ual, as an inherently free and subjective
being, chooses and acts with consciousness
of self, others, and the purpose at hand.
Consciousness of self as a chooser and actor
confers upon the individual the responsibil-
ity for the outcomes or consequences of such
choices and actions. Even more fundamen-
tally, and hearkening to his maxim that
‘existence precedes essence’ (2007: 23),
Sartre asserted: ‘Thus, the first effect of exis-
tentialism is to make every man conscious of
what he is, and to make him solely responsi-
ble for his own existence’ (2007: 23). I sug-
gest that for today’s undergraduate student,
the sense of responsibility attendant to valu-
ing one’s own existence as a self-initiating,
committed learner is highly compromised by
21st-century educational technologies that
promote habits of expediency over habits of
independent thinking and doing. The follow-
ing excerpt reflects my concerns about tech-
nology and its influence on students in terms
of taking responsibility for their learning as
 AN EXISTENTIALIST PEDAGOGY OF HUMANIZATION
an existential project grounded in personal
and intellectual freedom.
Excerpt from class 23 field notes –
April 10, 2013, on being responsible for
one’s own thinking and doing. Typically,
I like talking about technology as a semi-
nar topic because I tend to assume that
undergrads will have something to say
about such an integral part of their lives,
especially when that part of their lives
comes under criticism, sometimes under
real attack. What has become most appar-
ent to me is how much technology is woven
into the minute fractions of their time each
day. Even the more assertive, dialogically
active students reveal the taken for granted
nature of having grown up with technology
and technology access. One student men-
tioned that a friend told her about some
guy who created an app that can provide
a summary of any kind of literary or other
academic work, providing quicker and eas-
ier access than traditional short-cuts such
as Cliff notes. What this means is that the
individual learner will be even less respon-
sible for her own thinking – reminds me of
another student’s statement some time ago
this semester: ‘Well, somebody has to tell
us what to think!’ … if ours is a culture
of technology, then education becomes a
culture of technology, as well, aligning its
standards, methods, and policies with the
power interests entrenched in commerciali-
zation, globalization, and the economiza-
tion of society. Therefore, the institution of
education must follow suit in order to mold
the right kinds of workers for the neoliberal
marketplace.
Sartre’s conception of responsibility can
be understood as the partner, often the bur-
den, of existential freedom. ‘We are left
alone and without excuse. This is what I
mean when I say that man is condemned to
be free: condemned, because he did not cre-
ate himself, yet nonetheless free, because
once cast into the world, he is responsible
for everything he does’ (Sartre, 2007: 29).
In turn, responsibility assumes a kind of
795
ethical value in that consequences, some-
time positive and other times negative,
always emerge from the individual’s exer-
cise of her freedom to choose and act. The
ethical dimension lies in the individual’s
consciousness of self as a freedom and the
acceptance of responsibility for how one
uses that freedom. While Sartre empha-
sized the notion of individual responsibil-
ity as it relates to consequences applied to
oneself, he also acknowledged the idea of
responsibility as it extends toward the situa-
tions of others in the world. Responsibility,
therefore, often leads to a sense of ‘anguish’
(Sartre, 2007: 25) because of the many
ways in which acting in freedom and being
responsible for one’s actions affect not
only one’s own life, but the lives of oth-
ers. Clearly, the self-conscious educator
accepts the dual responsibility of engaging
her pedagogical praxis purposefully and
authentically while also fostering students’
internalization of their responsibilities as
equal subjects and learners.
FINAL REFLECTION
A brief compilation of field notes: final
thoughts (spring semester, 2013). When I
am teaching, I am being myself, but I am
also performing. I am in the free action of
my doing. I am dancing my dance of free-
dom, not tied to the puppeteer’s strings
within the dysfunction of a neoliberal,
bureaucratic school system that would make
me one of its herd followers. For some, the
conception of being a follower is more
nicely nuanced as being a team player,
making the ‘following’ sound desirable and
politically correct, but I know better. Once
the dance of freedom is experienced, no
other music, no other dance steps will do.
It’s my music and my dance. I can perform
as I feel it permeate my body, and as my
psyche wishes to reveal itself to those with
whom I am dancing. In the classroom,
796 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
I dance with my students. More often than
not, I lead. But I still try to offer them the
lead, and sometimes someone will take it. I
am right there though, ready to glide into
the next step; ready to assume the lead if
needed, and yet ready to hand it back. It’s a
flow of back and forth, trusting and hoping,
leading and following, but always wanting
them, the students, to experience the free-
dom of leading for themselves.
Ultimately, in positioning the situation
of 21st-century education as a conflict of
existential freedom (educating for humani-
zation) versus existential oppression (edu-
cating for dehumanization), I have proposed
that an existentially oriented pedagogy has
the potential to resist the neoliberal model.
To this end, I have signaled the individual
educator as a primary agent for change in
the school setting because we can neither
expect nor wait for top-down, systemic
modifications in policy to trickle down to
the classroom. Instead, 21st-century educa-
tors who believe in social justice, critical
consciousness, and the affirmation of indi-
vidual personhood must assume the role of
scholar-activists committed to purposefully
re-visioning and implementing humanistic
pedagogical practices. On this view, teach-
ers must consciously decide how they will
teach, potentially discovering or recover-
ing their ‘existential attitude’ (Solomon,
2005: xi) of self-empowerment and integ-
rity through resistance to their own objecti-
fication. By opening to the possibilities of
fulfilling their fundamental projects as edu-
cators in freedom, teachers can extend that
freedom to their students and potentially
ignite an intrinsic curiosity and desire for
learning that moves beyond expedience and
toward enlightenment.
REFERENCES
Beauvoir, S. de (trans. Frechtman, B.) (1976).
The ethics of ambiguity. New York, NY: Cita-
del Press.
Cox, G. (2008). The Sartre dictionary. London:
Continuum.
Dybicz, P. (2010). Confronting oppression not
enhancing functioning: The role of social
workers within postmodern practice. Journal
of Sociology & Social Welfare, 37(1), 23–47.
Ellison, S. (2012). From within the belly of the
beast: Rethinking the concept of the ‘educa-
tional marketplace’ in the popular discourse
of education reform. Educational Studies,
48(2), 119–136.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed
(30th anniversary ed.). New York, NY:
Continuum.
Hursh, D. (2007). Assessing No Child Left
Behind and The Rise of Neoliberal Education
Policies. American Educational Research
Journal, 44(3), 493–518.
Pinar, W. (2012). What is curriculum theory?
(2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Sartre, J.-P. (trans. Barnes, H. E.) (1984). Being
and nothingness: A phenomenological essay
on ontology. New York, NY: Washington
Square Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (trans. Macomber, C.; ed. Kulka, J.)
(2007). Existentialism is a humanism =
(L’Existentialisme est un humanisme); including, a
commentary on The stranger (Explication de
L’Étranger). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Solomon, R. (2005). Existentialism (2nd ed.).
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Wong, A. (2015, December 9). The bloated
rhetoric of No Child Left Behind’s demise:
What replacing the despised law actually
means for America’s schools. The Atlantic.
Retrieved November 25, 2017, from https://
www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/
2015/12/the-bloated-rhetoric-of-no-child-left-
behinds-demise/419688/

Vocational Education and
Training in Schools and
‘Really Useful Knowledge’
INTRODUCTION
In chronicling the origins of radical educa-
tion in the United Kingdom between 1790
and 1848, Richard Johnson (1979) invoked
the idea of ‘really useful knowledge’ as a
way of distancing educative or transforma-
tive ideologies from the processes of capital-
ist schooling and related forms of ‘subjection’,
‘servility’, ‘slavery’ and ‘surveillance’ (or
‘useless knowledge’) (1979: 78). He identi-
fied four key aspects of radical education that
are pertinent to this chapter. First, it involved
a critique of all forms of ‘provided’ educa-
tion including both state and religious. In
other words, radical education was strongly
oppositional and revolved around ‘a contes-
tation of orthodoxies’ both in theory and
practice. Second, it sought to develop alter-
native educational goals in which ‘educa-
tional utopias’ could be achieved. Here, the
focus was on developing alternative pedago-
gies and curricula or ‘really useful knowl-
edge’ about everyday life and politics. Third,
68
Barry Down
it attempted to advance education as a politi-
cal strategy or as a means of changing the
world. In short, education was viewed as a
key site of counter-hegemonic activity.
Finally, radical education developed ‘a vigor-
ous and varied educational practice’ which
emphasised ‘mature understandings’ amongst
citizens in order to build ‘a more just social
order’ (1979: 76–7). Johnson argued that
when radicals spoke of ‘really useful knowl-
edge’ they usually embraced either a theory
of economic exploitation, a theory of the
class character of the state and/or a theory of
social and cultural domination (1979: 88).
The dilemma facing radical education, he
argued, centred on the question: ‘So how
was really useful knowledge to be got?’
(1979: 79). Herein lies the starting point for
this chapter.
In this chapter I address the points raised
by Johnson in two interrelated ways by,
first, undertaking a critique of ‘provided’
forms of vocational education and training
in Australian schools and the instrumental
798 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
competency-based training approaches on
which it is built; and, second, envisioning
alternative possibilities or ‘educational uto-
pias’ in which critical pedagogies and curric-
ulum can flourish based on the needs, desires,
dreams and aspirations of young people
themselves. Putting it another way, I endeav-
our to engage in a spirit of both critique and
possibility as it relates to what’s happening
to schools and the people who inhabit them
under the auspice of neoliberalism (Giroux,
2011). At the heart of this work is a desire
to end the bifurcation between academic and
vocational knowledge and the boundaries
of the class system on which it is created.
This means confronting the ways in which
school knowledge is currently constructed
and organised to perpetuate social hierarchies
and inequalities by socialising, screening and
segmenting different classes of students into
different forms of school knowledge based
on one’s class, race and gender.
In short, the intention is to engage in some
disruptive thinking about the ways in which
the social institution of schooling has been
hijacked by powerful economic, political and
institutional interests to produce compliant
worker/citizens to fit the needs of global capi-
tal and the consequences which flow. Against
this backdrop, I identify a set of values and
signposts for a socially just alternative as
part of ‘the practice of freedom’ (as opposed
to ‘the practice of domination’) (Freire,
2000/1970: 80). As Richard Shaull says in
his foreword to Freire’s book Pedagogy of
the Oppressed:
There is no such thing as a neutral educational
process. Education either functions as an instru-
ment that is used to facilitate the integration of
the younger generation into the logic of the pre-
sent system and bring about conformity to it, or, it
becomes ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by
which men and women deal critically and crea-
tively with reality and discover how to participate
in the transformation of their world. (Freire,
2000/1970: 34, original emphasis)
Freire’s (2004) intervention, like Johnson,
provides a rallying point to not only denounce
the ways in which neoliberal corporate needs
have colonised schooling, but also announce
a better world (2004: 105). This involves a
twofold move by, first, resisting those nar-
rowly conceived technical training versions
of education based on the values of human
capital formation and, second, reimagining a
more humanising education founded on the
principles of social and economic justice in a
democratic society.
Whilst vocational and work-oriented pro-
grammes have been a key component of
secondary education over the past century,
recent decades have witnessed a radical shift
to the right in response to high rates of youth
unemployment and the need for a globally
competitive work force. In the Australian
context, for example, there has been ‘a policy
convergence’ around two key elements of
vocationalism in schools (especially pub-
lic high schools in poorer neighbourhoods);
first, VET in Schools programmes, which
refer to any vocational course/subject/mod-
ule or competency provided through schools
that comply with the National Training
Framework; and, second, school-based new
apprenticeships requiring a contract of train-
ing with an employer and attendance at
school on either part-time or full-time basis
(Malley and Keating, 2000: 643).
Critics like Kliebard (1999) argue that
vocationalism is now the central purpose of
schooling as the whole curriculum is orien-
tated toward vocational purposes (1999: xiv).
For Bauman (2005), the exhortation to ‘get
work’ and ‘get people to work’ is an attempt
to ‘put paid simultaneously to personal trou-
bles and shared social [public] ills’ whilst
maintaining ‘individual life, social order and
the survival capacity (“systemic reproduc-
tion”) of society as a whole’ (2005: 16–17).
As a result, young people are told to be
flexible, not too choosy and willing to take
whatever jobs come along without too many
questions (Bauman, 2004: 10). In short,
young people are taught to adapt to the vagar-
ies of the free market and growing precarity
(Standing, 2011).
 VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN SCHOOLS AND ‘REALLY USEFUL KNOWLEDGE’ 799
In the context of these introductory remarks,
I organise the rest of this chapter around two
key questions as a way of generating really
useful knowledge as it relates to the field of
vocational education and training in schools:
• What has to be resisted?
• What kinds of pedagogical conditions need to be
brought into existence?
In addressing these questions, I draw on
insights gleaned from over a decade of ethno-
graphic research into the lives of young people
in Australian high schools located in ‘disadvan-
taged’ suburban communities characterised by
low levels of weekly earnings, high levels of
welfare dependency, high rates of youth unem-
ployment, low levels of parental education and
poor educational participation and retention
rates (Down et al., 2018; Smyth et al., 2010).
WHAT HAS TO BE RESISTED?
Put simply, neoliberalism and the damaging
consequences which flow for education and
young lives, especially those living ‘on the
threatening boundary of the classroom and
disparagingly labelled as “marginal”, “slow
learners” or “remedial” and eventually
“vocational’’’ (Rose, 1989: 8). In this sec-
tion, I pursue this argument by alluding to the
problematic nature of neoliberalism espe-
cially as it relates to the field of vocational
education and training in schools and the
implications for the kind of education young
people receive, or not.
Lipman (2011) provides a helpful way into
this when she defines neoliberalism as ‘an
ensemble of economic and social policies,
forms of governance, and discourses and ide-
ologies that promote individual self-interests,
unrestricted flows of capital, deep reductions
in the cost of labor, and sharp retrenchment of
the public sphere’ (2011: 6). The goal of neolib-
eralism is to weaken the welfare state, destroy
public institutions, cut taxes, deregulate ser-
vices, reduce labour costs and attack workers’
rights and conditions (Harvey, 2007: 3).
Such draconian measures only become pos-
sible because neoliberalism has taken on
an ‘aura of inevitability’ (Saul, 2005: 30)
whereby all aspects of society are absorbed
into a particular economic logic or ‘homo
economicus’ in which ‘all conduct is eco-
nomic conduct; all spheres of existence are
framed and measured by economic terms and
metrics’ (Brown, 2015: 10). Accordingly, the
only questions left, in the words of Saltman
(2008), are ‘how to best enforce knowledge
and curriculum conducive to individual
upward mobility within the economy and
national economic interest … as perceived
from the perspective of business’ (2008: 209).
In the context of this neoliberalising pro-
ject, education has been radically redefined
by a virulent form of what Sahlberg (2011)
describes as GERM (Global Educational
Reform Movement), an apt acronym to
explain a set of narrowly conceived account-
ability practices based on the technical
delivery of officially mandated content as
measured by standardised test scores. As a
consequence, neoliberalism not only cre-
ates ‘a new social imaginary’ or ‘common
sense about how we think about society and
our place in it’ (Lipman, 2011: 6) but also
distorts the kind of education young people
receive based on ‘the god of economic util-
ity’ (Grubb and Lazerson, 2004; Postman,
1996: 30). Little wonder then, that McLaren
and Farahmandpur (2005: 16) describe neo-
liberalism as ‘one of the most dangerous
politics that we face today’.
In the remainder of this section, therefore,
I seek to interrupt two key logics underpin-
ning the current obsession with vocational
education and training in schools and why
they should be resisted.
Human Capital Formation and
Competency-Based Training
The rhetoric of building a skilled workforce
to meet the needs of a modernising economy
800 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
in a globally competitive market came to
prominence following the 1970s recession
and again during the Global Financial Crisis
of 2008. Schools were targeted for their fail-
ure to produce workers with the necessary
skills to compete globally. This translated
most effectively around the crisis of literacy
and numeracy as measured on standardised
test scores and rankings. This led to the intro-
duction of a range of backlash pedagogies,
corporate modes of management and disci-
plinary techniques in order to realign schools
more closely with the interests of global
capitalism. In effect, schools were required
to produce workers with a set of ‘new men-
talities’ (Davies and Bansel, 2007: 248) or
the knowledge, skills, dispositions and iden-
tities that fit into a deeply stratified and
predatory labour market.
Carlson (2008) adopts the imagery of
the ‘curriculum machine’ to describe how
the school curriculum is translated into a
sequential series of behavioural skills to be
‘mastered’ and related discursively to the
functional entry-level needs of the workforce.
He argues that this ‘basic skills machine’ is
‘designed to work and rework the “raw mate-
rial” of labor power (students) in order to
bring out and develop its economic potential,
in this case a potential linked to a low-wage,
service industry job market for high school
graduates’ (2008: 84). As a result, we have
witnessed a renewed emphasis on voca-
tional education, careers counselling, work
experience programmes, links to industry,
competency-based training, curriculum dif-
ferentiation and back-to-basics teaching. The
logic is that schools must work harder, both
literally and rhetorically, to teach students
how to labour (Willis, 1977).
The problem with this kind of reductionist
logic is that it leads to an emaciated view of
education limited to ‘technological practice’
or ‘training’ (Freire, 2007: 4) in which stu-
dents are taught to ‘adapt … to what is inevi-
table, to what cannot be changed [in order to]
survive’ (Freire, 1998: 27). Such fatalism, in
the words of Freire (1998), creates a ‘heavy
dark cloud’ leading to a ‘despotic approach
to education’ by reducing it ‘to mere training
in the employment of dexterity or scientific
knowing’ (1998: 102). As a result, educa-
tion is designed to ‘train’ workers in ways
that deny their humanity and ‘presence in the
world’ (Freire, 1998: 74).
In a similar way, Dewey (1944/1916: 316)
warned about the danger of vocational
education being interpreted as direct ‘trade
education’, and, therefore, limited to
achieving ‘technical efficiency in special-
ized future pursuits’. His central argument
was that ‘to predetermine some future occu-
pation for which education is to be a strict
preparation is to injure the possibilities
of present development and thereby to
reduce the adequacy of preparation for a
future right employment’ (1944/1916: 310).
Like Freire, Dewey was concerned that
education would become an instrument for
perpetuating the existing industrial order of
society, rather than a means of social trans-
formation (1944/1916: 316).
Moreover, vocationalism serves to hide
what Sassen (2014: 1) describes as ‘the
new logics of expulsion’ whereby ‘people,
enterprises and places are expelled from
the core social and economic orders of
our time’. According to Sassen (2014: 5),
these ‘deeper systemic dynamics’ are part
of a newer ‘predatory formation’ which is
responsible for ‘dismember[ing] the social
through extreme concentrations of wealth,
the destruction of much of the middle class
and the expulsion of the poor from land, jobs
and homes’.
In other words, the promise of the knowl-
edge economy to produce more high-skilled,
high-tech jobs is nothing more than a ‘big
lie’ (Macedo, 1993) for growing numbers
of young people whose only hope is to find
employment in part-time, casualised, repeti-
tive and poorly paid jobs in the retail, trade
and service sectors (Anyon, 2005). To put
it bluntly, young people are being put to the
sword by an increasingly callous market fun-
damentalism that objectifies young people,
 VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN SCHOOLS AND ‘REALLY USEFUL KNOWLEDGE’ 801
who are treated as disposable commodi-
ties, which in turn leads to their exploitation
as a reserve army of labour (Freire and de
Oliveira, 2014: 74).
Nonetheless, right-wing think tanks,
industrialists, politicians and educationalists
continue to blame students as well as their
families and teachers for the crisis in the
economy. In an effort to ‘defuse the situa-
tion’, Sarup (1982) believes education sys-
tems typically respond in one of two ways:
first, introducing a ‘hard approach’ which
asserts that young people must simply learn
to live in the real world (e.g., get up on time,
be punctual, develop good habits, learn to
accept discipline, gain work experience)
(1982: 32) and, second, the ‘soft’ approach
which ‘defines the problem in psychologi-
cal terms; the focus being on the personal
troubles of the individual rather than wider
structural and institutional arrangements’
(1982: 32).
In response, successive Australian gov-
ernments have incorporated Competency-
Based Training (CBT) and employability
skills into the school curriculum as one
way of dealing with these kinds of prob-
lems (Down, 2009). The intention is to
instil students with the principles and rules
of the world of work (e.g., Bowles and
Gintis, 1976). Critics like Wheelahan
(2007) believe that CBT in schools serves
no useful purpose and should be discarded
because it leads to ‘a very fragmented,
atomistic and instrumental view of knowl-
edge’ (or useless knowledge) (2007: 647).
The problem, she argues, is that CBT
limits working-class students ‘to specific
content, and not the systems of meaning
in disciplinary knowledge’ (2007: 648).
As a consequence, ‘the meaning of that
content is exhausted by the context’,
thus making it impossible for students to
access knowledge capable of helping them
to ‘transcend the present to imagine the
future’ (2007: 648). In short, working-class
students are being prepared for very low-
level, poorly paid, casualised work.
Academic and Vocational
Streaming
The practice of dividing students into aca-
demic and vocational streams has been a part
of the ‘grammar of schooling’ (Tyack and
Cuban, 1995) for well over a century, thus
making it very difficult to dislodge or imag-
ine otherwise. This deep-rooted tradition is
based on the belief that some students are
smarter and more deserving than others, and
these students will be destined for university
and eventually high-paying and rewarding
careers. The others, because of their well-
known intellectual inferiority, will be con-
signed to the bottom end of the labour market
to ‘work with their hands not their minds’
(Kincheloe, 1999: 139). Kincheloe (1999: 11)
contends that such views are deeply demean-
ing because they not only fail to value the
knowledge of manual workers but also see
vocational students as failures. By contrast,
success in the academic curriculum ‘has
become a symbol not only of prestigious
work but of virtue itself’ (1999: 11). This
leads to the flawed assumption that ‘being
academically schooled’ is somehow the same
thing as being ‘well-educated’ (1999: 11).
Such views have profoundly damaging
consequences for individual students. Rose
describes how this kind of deficit thinking
plays out in classroom life:
If you’re a working-class kid in the vocational
track, … you’ll … be constrained in certain ways:
You’re defined by your school as ‘slow’; you’re
placed in a curriculum that isn’t designed to liber-
ate you but to occupy you, or if you’re lucky, train
you, though the training is for work the society
does not esteem; other students are picking up
the cues from your school and your curriculum
and interacting with you in particular ways. If
you’re a kid like Ted Richards, you turn your back
on all this and let your mind roam where it may.
But youngsters like Ted are rare. What Ken and so
many others do is to protect themselves from
such suffocating madness by taking on with a
vengeance the identity implied in the vocational
track. Reject the confusion and frustration
by openly defining yourself as the Common
Joe. Champion the average. Rely on your own
802 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
good sense. Fuck this bullshit. Bullshit, of course,
is everything you – and the others – fear is beyond
you: books, essays, tests, academic scrambling,
complexity, scientistic reasoning, philosophical
inquiry. (Rose, 1989: 29)
In this extract, Rose vividly explains how the
cultural processes of advantaging and disad-
vantaging operate on different classes of stu-
dents in schools. If you happen to be poor or
from a minority background, then it is more
likely that you will end up in the vocational
track because you have limited potential and
therefore are suited for manual or unskilled
work. Historically, vocational education has
been a form of class-based segregation or
stigmatisation designed to restrict the num-
bers of students climbing the educational lad-
der reserved for the middle and upper classes,
on the grounds that it would ‘lower stand-
ards’, ‘threaten excellence’ or interfere with
the progress of the ‘academic elite’ (Bessant,
1989: 70).
The upshot is that vocational education
functions to reproduce a social hierarchy
based on deep forms of classism, racism
and sexism whilst making this state of
affairs appear to be normal and universally
accepted, and therefore unquestionable.
The assumption is that some students are
judged to be less capable or intelligent than
others, and as a consequence, not suited to
abstract forms of thinking and more valued
futures (Oakes, 1995). As Teese (2000: 3)
argues: ‘It is through the curriculum that
the financial and cultural reserves of edu-
cated families are converted into scholas-
tic power – the ability to differentiate one
group of children from others on a socially
legitimate and authoritative scale of gen-
eral worth’. This kind of power becomes
even more critical as individuals are made
increasingly accountable for their own
‘labour market fates’ (Furlong and Cartmel,
1997: 28).
The question becomes then, how is this
deception maintained? Put simply, it can
only happen because power is made invisible
and those everyday practices which sustain
it take on the appearance of being natural or
common sense (Kumashiro, 2004). In other
words, these processes operate behind our
backs and in ways that are not always of
our own choosing or best interests. Delving
into the history of education, we can see
the legacy of the early eugenics movement
which set out to improve the genetic potenti-
alities of the population by encouraging the
practice of selective breeding. Pivotal to this
wider social experiment was the use of intel-
ligence testing to detect mental deficiency
or the abnormal in the student population.
According to the science of mental testing,
students who were deemed to be less intelli-
gent (‘idiots’, ‘feeble-minded’, ‘morons’ and
‘imbeciles’) should be streamed into special
classes that better reflected their innate abili-
ties (Down, 2010).
Such practices were justified in the
context of the ‘psychological capture’ of
education whereby individual merit and
intelligence became the key to individual
success (McCallum, 1990: 74). The mod-
ern science of psychology effectively pro-
moted the benefits of intelligence testing to
solve all manner of educational problems
including grouping, selection, guidance,
teaching methods and remediation of back-
ward children. These psychometric prac-
tices penetrated all levels of the education
system by linking notions of child develop-
ment, academic excellence, scientific pro-
gress, social efficiency, meritocracy and the
fulfilment of individual potential based on
needs, abilities and interests. In reality, the
pseudo-scientific practice of intelligence
testing was deeply mired in the reproduc-
tion of social and educational inequalities
(Kincheloe et al., 1996). Whilst some of
the language of the early eugenicists may
have been tempered over the decades,
‘there can be little doubt that these devel-
opments continue to have tangible residual
effects today in the way vocational educa-
tion is still thought about as the destination
track for working-class children’ (Down
et al., 2018: 71).
 VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN SCHOOLS AND ‘REALLY USEFUL KNOWLEDGE’ 803
WHAT KINDS OF PEDAGOGICAL
CONDITIONS NEED TO BE BROUGHT
INTO EXISTENCE?
In this section, the focus shifts to the task of
reclaiming vocational education and training
from the destructive effects of neoliberal
ideologies and reimagining a socially just
alternative based on the values of democracy,
critical inquiry, justice, respect and civic activ-
ism. In Johnson’s (1979) terms, the intention
is to pursue ‘really useful knowledge’ as a
means of reframing some different kinds of
conversations amongst policy makers, practi-
tioners and community activists.
Rethinking Class and Deficit
Thinking
Foremost, there has to be a willingness to
confront the historical class-based nature of
vocational education and training and the
deficit thinking on which it is based. It
involves looking afresh at the ways in which
different classes of students and their fami-
lies are treated and with what effects. This
entails asking more probing types of ques-
tions like ‘why things are the way they are,
how they got that way, and what set of condi-
tions are supporting the processes that main-
tain them’ (Simon, 1984: 380). In addressing
these kinds of questions, Kincheloe and
McLaren’s (2005) notion of an ‘evolving
criticality’ is especially helpful because it
enables us ‘to get behind the curtain, to move
beyond assimilated experience, to expose the
way ideology constrains the desire for self-
direction, and to confront the way power
reproduces itself’ (2005: 324).
At the heart of this criticality is an under-
standing of the ways in which social class
operates on the lives of young people. In the
words of Smyth and Wrigley (2013: 196),
class is ‘grounded in relationships of power
linked to the ownership and control of the
economy – a system whereby a tiny minor-
ity own the means of production (factories,
land, technology, and so on) and determine
the employment of most of the world’s
population’. In terms of the argument being
mounted in this chapter, class and poverty
have ‘wide-ranging cultural and psychologi-
cal effects’ which translate most acutely in
the emotions and experiences of ‘shame and
futility’ (2013: 196). As Rose (1989) so ably
described earlier in the chapter, working-
class students deemed ‘unfit’ to study the
‘academics’, will ‘be constrained in certain
ways’ through the disciplinary processes and
relations of schooling (1989: 29).
For example, labelling students as ‘slow’,
‘remedial’, ‘at risk’, ‘troublesome’ or ‘voca-
tional’ is perhaps one of the most insidious
and harmful practices in schools. Maxine
Greene (2001: xvi) argues that labels ‘carry
the messages of power: they demean, they
exclude; they create stereotypes’. The prob-
lem is that they ‘become a part of our lived
experience; they can become a part of one’s
life, one’s identity and hence, difficult to
replace’ (Hudak, 2001: 9). Moreover, labels
blame the victim and their supposed defects –
lazy, lack of aspirations, poor behaviour, low
levels of literacy, dysfunctional families –
rather than the systemic structural forces
shaping the formal school system. As a
consequence, the real causes of injustice
(e.g., poverty, unemployment, health and
housing) are hidden by a ‘public sphere…
dominated by individualising, victim-blaming
discourses [in which] structural perspectives
are absent or marginalised’ (Fraser, 2012: 45;
Valencia, 2010).
Integrating Vocational and
Academic Learning
The practice of dividing students between
academic and vocational in high school is
based on a myth about the inferiority of the
intellect of manual workers. In reality, the
socially constructed division between aca-
demic and practical knowledge serves no
useful purpose other than to maintain a
804 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
distorted social hierarchy that limits the
imagined futures of marginalised students.
Therefore, an important first step in the pro-
cess of a democratising vocational education
is to contest the distinction between ‘hand
work’ and ‘brain work’ and the normative
assumptions underpinning it (Apple, 1998).
According to Rose (2008: 23), this involves
rethinking the notion of intelligence beyond
traditional standard measures of IQ and
rediscovering the human dimensions of
work. Only then, he argues, will it become
possible to accommodate differences in stu-
dent aptitude and interests beyond existing
‘limited categories and simplistic ways of
organising courses, ranking, ordering and
placement’, especially the artificial divide
between ‘low and high level knowledge’
(2008: 31).
Kincheloe (1995) argues that integration
of vocational and academic knowledge pro-
vides a way forward because it allows stu-
dents to use material and conceptual tools in
authentic contexts. As a consequence, they
come to ‘appreciate academic skill in real life
context; at the same time, they understand
the vocational activity at a level that demands
their creativity’ (1995: 254). Kincheloe (1995)
goes on to argue that vocational education
approached in this manner is not only more
respectful of the intellectual and creative
potential of all learners but recognises that
crafts and trades involve higher orders of
intellect. Thus integration, in the words of
Kincheloe (1995: 270), refuses ‘to validate
the common assumption within the culture
of formal education that the theoretical ways
of knowing of the academic disciplines are
innately superior to the practical ways of
knowing of the vocations’.
As well, integration is more likely to
address some of the traditional criticisms of
academic education such as irrelevance, bore-
dom, teacher dominance and student passiv-
ity. This opens up the possibility of learning
in a context that really matters to students
based on their interests and using more par-
ticipatory and cooperative forms of learning
involving conceptual understandings, prob-
lem-solving, application and skills develop-
ment (Kincheloe, 1995: 254–62). Likewise,
Dewey (1944/1916: 38) railed against what
he called a ‘bookish’ and ‘pseudo-intellectual
spirit’ in education rather than the develop-
ment of ‘a social spirit’. Dewey wanted
schools to focus on ‘the kind of intelli-
gence which directs ability to useful ends’
(1944/1916: 39) by giving students ‘a social
sense of their own powers and of the materi-
als and appliances used’ (1944/1916: 40).
Developing Critical Awareness
and Civic Activism
I now turn to the contradiction of helping
students to gain the knowledge and skills
needed to participate in the social relations of
the economy (the way it is) and, at the same
time, developing forms of critical citizenship
(how it might be) (Simon et al., 1991: 6).
Again, Freire (2004: 19) provides some help-
ful guidance when he asserts that a radical
pedagogy must never make concessions ‘to
the trickeries of neoliberal “pragmatism” [by
reducing] educational practice to the techni-
cal-scientific training of learners, training
rather than educating’ (original emphasis). In
other words, if we want to overcome the
crises facing young people today – precarity,
consumerism, individualism, endless uncer-
tainty and disposability (Giroux, 2015) and
the ‘collateral damage’ and ‘wastage’ that
flows (Bauman, 2011) – then we are beholden
to not only speak out against the fatalistic
ideology contained in neoliberal discourses
but to ‘make the concretization of that tomor-
row viable’ (Freire, 2007: 26). As Freire
(2000: 100) declares: ‘Our historical inclina-
tion is not fate, but rather possibility.’
What Freire is alluding to here is the need
for a new social imaginary, one founded
on a commitment to the values of humani-
sation and solidarity on the one hand and
community living on the other (Freire and
de Oliveira, 2014: 79). In short, vocational
 VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN SCHOOLS AND ‘REALLY USEFUL KNOWLEDGE’ 805
education needs to shift the focus from train-
ing students to ‘developing their capacities
for political agency, engaged citizenship,
and critical intervention in the conditions in
which they and others live’ (Goodman and
Saltman, 2002: 154). Of course, this kind of
criticality unsettles the dominant narrative of
neoliberalism and human capital formation
described earlier. Therefore, a critical peda-
gogy of vocational education will inevitably
irritate dominant economic, political and
institutional interests.
This kind of criticality requires a new
generation of what Kincheloe (2009: 388)
describes as ‘warrior intellectuals’ who can
‘transcend the trap of traditional gender,
racial, sexual, and class-based stereotypes
and the harm they can cause in their indi-
vidual lives and in the larger society’. In
the process, they develop an understanding
of critical consciousness and social action
(praxis) as they formulate ‘concrete strat-
egies to improve their own life chances’
(Ginwright and Cammarota, 2007: 707).
This involves helping students to ask more
penetrating questions about workplace issues
in light of broader structural conditions, for
example, personal experiences of work, the
changing nature of work, structural unem-
ployment, trade unions, power relations,
health and safety, child labour, industrial
legislation and wages and conditions (Simon
et al., 1991).
Understanding the Nature of
Good and Bad Work
In the context of the globalisation of capital
and profound technological transformations
there has been an unprecedented disruption
to the modes of production in which more
and more commodities are now produced
with less labour. The tendency of global capi-
tal to destroy jobs faster than they can be
created has resulted in an increasingly com-
petitive and exploitative labour market
(Aronowitz and DiFazio, 2010). Young
people are now immersed in what Best
and Kellner (2003: 75) describe as ‘a
rapidly mutating and crisis-ridden world’ in
which ‘flexibility’ and ‘insecurity’ are the
new norm (Standing, 2011: 24). Giroux
(2013: 136) puts it more bluntly when he
describes ‘a culture of cruelty’ in which
‘debt, joblessness, insecurity, and hopeless-
ness are the defining features of a generation
that has been abandoned by its market-
obsessed, turn-a-quick profit elders’.
Given these perilous economic conditions,
the cultivation of ‘really useful knowledge’
seeks to help young people interrogate the
difference between ‘good’ work and ‘bad’
work. Kincheloe (1999: 64) believes that
there is a sharp distinction between ‘work’
which ‘involves a sense of completion and
fulfilment and a ‘job’ which ‘is simply a
way of making a living’. But, as Kincheloe
(1999: 65) argues, work also brings with it
some important ethical and moral questions
about the nature of ‘good’ work in a demo-
cratic society. At the heart of Kincheloe’s
(1999) argument is the view that ‘good’ work
involves the struggle for ‘worker dignity’
(1999: 65) based on a set of key principles; by
way of summary: the notion of ‘self-direction’;
the workplace as a ‘place of learning’; ‘work
variety’; ‘workmate cooperation’; ‘a contri-
bution to social welfare’; ‘an expression of
the self’; ‘democratic expression’; ‘work-
ers as participants’; ‘play is a virtue’; and
‘better pay between managers and workers’
(1999: 65–8).
In this context, ‘really useful knowledge’
would be attentive to the kinds of politi-
cal strategies required to safeguard more
secure, well-paid and meaningful work. The
emphasis would be on helping young peo-
ple to build a ‘life project’ involving ‘self-
esteem’, ‘self-definition’ and ‘long-term
security’ (Bauman, 2004: 151). One such
approach advocated by Sen (1992) involves
the development of ‘capabilities’ which is
about assisting young people to: (i) identify
the kind of lives they want to lead; (ii) pro-
viding them with the skills and knowledge to
806 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
achieve these goals; and (iii) helping them
to understand and confront the political,
social and economic conditions that enable
or impede them (Smyth et al., 2010: 74;
Walker, 2006).
The goal is to give all young people access
to the kind of knowledge that they will require
for survival as ‘human beings and to their
claims as citizens’ (Appadurai, 2006: 168).
This means providing adequate opportunities
for ‘creative and dignifying work’ supported
by a commitment to ‘occupational citizen-
ship’ based on an ethic of ‘civic friendship
and social solidarity’ (Standing, 2009: 10).
If these goals are to be realised then it will
require the creation of hospitable learning
environments in which all young people are
treated with dignity, trust, care and respect as
the cornerstones of the socially just school
(Smyth et al., 2014).
Reimaging Teachers’ Work
In pursuing this agenda, ‘really useful
knowledge’ would need to address the deep
pessimism and fatalism that clouds the
teaching profession today. Within the domi-
nant GERM there has been a proliferation
of anti-democratic and anti-educative poli-
cies (e.g., privatisation, school choice, cor-
porate managerialism, commodification,
competition and high-stakes testing) that
have not only eroded the idea of ‘schools
as democratic public spaces’ (Giroux,
1997: 218) but reinforced the conception of
the teacher as technician (Ball, 1993: 107).
The starting point for the kind of reclama-
tion being advocated in this chapter has
to begin, therefore, by reimaging teachers’
work in more socially critical ways.
This means moving beyond a passive and
compliant ‘banking’ approach to teaching
and learning (Freire, 2000/1970) and,
instead, rediscovering the critical demo-
cratic potential of ‘teachers as intellectuals’
(Giroux, 1988; Giroux and McLaren, 1986).
As Giroux explains:
[T]eachers as intellectuals will need to reconsider
and, possibly, transform the fundamental nature
of the conditions under which they work. That is,
teachers must be able to shape the ways in which
time, space, activity, and knowledge organize
­everyday life in schools. More specifically, in order
to function as intellectuals, teachers must create
the ideology and structural conditions necessary
for them to write, research, and work with each
other in producing curricula and sharing power. …
As intellectuals, they will combine reflection and
action in the interest of empowering students with
the skills and knowledge needed to address injus-
tices and to be critical actors committed to devel-
oping a world free of oppression and exploitation.
(Giroux, 1988: xxxiv)
Central to Giroux’s (1988) conception of
teachers as intellectuals is a willingness to
challenge some deep-rooted assumptions
and beliefs that underpin conventional cur-
riculum. These teacher scholars develop a
more sophisticated awareness of the ways in
which school knowledge is organised, pro-
duced and disseminated to benefit different
classes of students in different ways. Giroux
(1988) believes teachers begin to illuminate
the relationship between power, knowledge
and ideology in the context of wider eco-
nomic, political, and social interests that dif-
ferent forms of knowledge reflect (1988: 18).
In pursuing this kind of critical intellectual
work, Giroux suggests that teachers interro-
gate questions, such as:
• What counts as knowledge?
• How is this knowledge produced?
• How is such knowledge transmitted in the
classroom?
• What kinds of classroom social relationships
serve to parallel and reproduce the values and
norms embodied in the accepted social relations
of other dominant sites?
• Who has access to legitimate forms of
knowledge?
• Whose interests does this knowledge serve?
• How are social and political contradictions and
tensions mediated through acceptable forms of
classroom knowledge and social relationships?
• How do prevailing methods of evaluation serve
to legitimize existing forms of knowledge?
(1988: 17–18)
 VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING IN SCHOOLS AND ‘REALLY USEFUL KNOWLEDGE’ 807
In addressing these kinds of questions teach-
ers become political actors as they begin to
make everyday assumptions, beliefs and
practices problematic. In short, teachers are
knowledge workers capable of producing
‘really useful knowledge’ for the benefit of
the ‘least advantaged’ (Connell, 1993).
CONCLUSION
In this chapter I have argued that young
people today face an increasingly hostile and
precarious labour market characterised by
growing levels of casual, menial and poorly
paid service sector jobs. Under the influence
of neoliberal ideologies, schools have not
only been blamed for the crisis in the econ-
omy but, ironically, identified as part of the
solution. This has led to a dominant view of
education in which human capital formation
has become normalised as the primary pur-
pose of education. The consequence of this
has been an increasing emphasis on voca-
tional education and training in schools,
particularly in poorer neighbourhoods. The
official rhetoric suggests that schools need to
be more closely aligned to the imperatives of
a globally competitive market in order to
produce ‘job-ready’ workers with the skills,
knowledge and dispositions to fit into a hier-
archical social order. As a consequence,
vocational education and training in schools
has been utilised to justify the segregation of
students from poor and minority backgrounds
into less socially valued forms of school
knowledge and imagined futures. I have
argued that this artificial division between
vocational and academic serves no useful
purpose other than perpetuating myths about
the notion of intelligence and merit based on
deficit views of marginalised young people
around the intersecting axes of class, race
and gender. The discourses surrounding these
practices can be traced back to the early
eugenics movement which still lingers under
various guises as students are selected, sifted
and sorted into different forms of school
knowledge. Despite the strengths of many
vocational programmes to offer an alterna-
tive for disengaged and working-class stu-
dents who typically drop out of school, these
programmes have typically been a ‘dumping’
ground for the least advantaged. Furthermore,
they fail to disrupt the strong correlation
between social advantage and traditional
understandings of academic success.
Finally, this chapter draws on Johnson’s
notion of ‘really useful knowledge’ as a
means of not only critiquing existing assump-
tions, beliefs and practices underpinning the
field of vocational education and training in
schools, but advancing a set of alternative
principles and values to guide practice. These
include rethinking class and deficit thinking,
integrating vocational and academic learning,
developing critical awareness and civic activ-
ism, understanding the nature of good and
bad work and reimagining teachers’ work. I
have argued that this constellation of ideas
offers a starting point with which to engage
teachers in some more complex and difficult
conversations for the purpose of interrupting
taken-for-granted views of socio-political
reality with which most individuals have
become comfortable. At the heart of ‘really
useful knowledge’ is a fundamental belief in
the ‘educability’ of all students, grounded in
the principles and values of respect, dignity,
curiosity, rigour, hope, joy, autonomy and
freedom (Freire, 1998: 100).
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The pedagogy of big lies’, Harvard Educa-
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Malley, J. and Keating, J. (2000) ‘Policy influ-
ences on the implementation of vocational
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McCallum, D. (1990) The Social Production of
Merit: Education, Psychology and Politics in
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McLaren, P. and Farahmandpur, R. (2005)
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New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Oakes, J. (1995) Keeping Track: How Schools
Structure Inequality. New Haven, CT: Yale
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Postman, N. (1996) The End of Education:
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Sahlberg, P. (2011) Finnish Lessons: What Can
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Saltman, K. (2008) ‘Schooling in disaster
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Sen, A. (1992) Inequality Re-examined.
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34(4): 379–388.
810 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
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Smyth, J., Down, B. and McInerney, P. (2010)
‘Hanging in with Kids’ in Tough Times:
Engagement in Contexts of Educational Dis-
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Smyth, J., Down, B. and McInerney, P. (2014)
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Youth to Speak Back. Dordrecht: Springer.
Smyth, J. and Wrigley, T. (2013) Living on the
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Standing, G. (2009) Work after Globalization:
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Teaching and Learning
What kind of teaching and learning is desir-
able in the 21st century? How is teaching and
learning currently being de/re/formed? In
whose interests? What impact are these
reforms having on teachers and students?
What kinds of teaching and learning are
valued/devalued? What knowledge is encour-
aged/discouraged? By whom? Who benefits?
How can teaching and learning better con-
nect to students’ lives? What might a demo-
cratic alternative look like? What resources
are required to do this work?
Of course, questions of this kind are not
readily welcomed or even tolerated in increas-
ingly corporatized and bureaucratized educa-
tion systems including K-12 schools, colleges,
vocational education and training or universi-
ties. Pasi Sahlberg (2011) sheds some light on
the broader context in which education is now
deeply mired. He coins the acronym GERM
(Global Educational Reform Movement), an
apt term to describe a set of global educational
policies and practices based on a particular set
SECTION VII
Barry Down
of assumptions about how to improve educa-
tion systems (2011: 99). He argues a new
educational orthodoxy has been promoted
which imitates management and administra-
tion models based on the operational logic of
private corporations (2011: 103). There are two
underlying assumptions driving these GERM
reforms: firstly, ‘external performance stan-
dards, describing what teachers should teach
and students should do and learn, lead to bet-
ter learning for all’; and secondly, ‘competition
between school, teachers, and students is the
most productive way to raise the quality of edu-
cation’ (2011: 104–5).
Lynch et al. (2015: 4) contend that this new
managerial and neoliberalizing logic creates
‘market-led models of control and regulation
as the new prototype for work organisations’.
In the process, it has effectively ‘redefined
what counts as knowledge, who are the bear-
ers of such knowledge and who is empowered
to act – all within a legitimate framework of
public choice and market accountability’
­
812 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
(2015: 4). As a consequence, teaching and
learning is radically reconstructed through a
range of what Giroux (1988: 124) describes as
‘management pedagogies’, whereby knowl-
edge is ‘broken down into discrete parts, stan-
dardized for easier management and delivery
and measured through predefined forms of
assessment’. In this context, teaching and
learning is emaciated around a set of narrow
neoconservative and neoliberal prescriptions,
among them: back-to-basics instruction, rote
learning, high-stakes testing, standardization,
scripted lessons, privatization, commercializa-
tion, performativity, accountability, deskill-
ing and de-professionalization (Gleeson and
Husbands, 2001; Smyth, 2001; Saltman, 2007;
Gewirtz et al., 2009).
In countering these increasingly anti-­
educative and anti-democratic reforms, Freire
(1998) offers an alternative democratic vision
and practice. In his words:
[T]o know how to teach is to create possibilities for
the construction and production of knowledge
rather than to be engaged simply in a game of
transferring knowledge. When I enter a classroom
I should be someone who is open to new ideas,
open to questions, and open to the curiosities of
the student as well as their inhibitions. In other
words, I ought to be aware of being a critical and
inquiring subject in regard to the task entrusted to
me, the task of teaching and not that of transfer-
ring knowledge. (1998: 49)
Framed in this way, critical democratic teach-
ers understand the complexity of teaching
and learning in terms of the relational and
contextual dynamics at play. As Connell
(1993: 63) reminds us, ‘Being a teacher is
not just a matter of having a body of knowl-
edge and a capacity to control a classroom.
…. Learning is a full-blooded, human social
process, and so is teaching. Teaching involves
emotions as much as it involves pure reason-
ing.’ Significantly, Connell (1997) believes
that the focus on building the relational
dimensions of teaching and learning provides
opportunities to create ‘new practices’ which
attend to different ‘types of social action:
productive capacities used in economic
life; symbolic capacities, used in making
culture; capacities for collective decision-
making, used in politics; and capacities for
emotional response, used in personal life’
(Connell, 1997: 4; Sen, 1992).
In this democratic approach to teaching
and learning, teachers and students become
‘knowledge workers’ who ‘research, inter-
pret, expose embedded values and political
interest, and produce their own knowledge’
(Kincheloe, 2001a: 241). These teacher
scholars, according to Kincheloe (2001b):
• take into account the democratic, moral, ethical
and cognitive context;
• push students to understand where content came
from, the means by which it was produced, and
how it was validated as knowledge worthy of
inclusion in the curriculum;
• induce students to use these contextual under-
standings to reflect, research, and evaluate infor-
mation presented to them;
• cultivate skills that can be used after the confron-
tation with content to enable them to learn new
content in novel situations; and
• prepare students to produce new content in rela-
tion to the context in which they are operating.
(2001b: 22)
Pushing this democratic vision a little further,
Thomas and Schubert (2001) argue that the
kind of teacher identity required in the 21st
century needs to be far more expansive than
is currently prescribed in existing teaching
standards in at least three key ways: firstly,
teachers should be ‘engaged in philosophic
inquiry’, that is, ‘investigating the value
assumptions of their students, their
colleagues, and their own metaphysical,
epistemological, and axiological convictions’
(Thomas and Schubert, 2001: 234); secondly,
teachers need to develop as ‘democratic
connoisseur[s]’ or ‘critical interpreters of
existent curriculums and creators of new
curriculums, novel forms of instruction, and
appropriate methods of assessment’ (2001:
235); and finally, teachers should see
themselves as ‘progressive activist[s]’
committed to ‘democratic practice understood
 TEACHING AND LEARNING
as … public advocacy for social policies that
attempt to redress injustice and public
criticisms of state actions that oppress or
institutionalize inequality’ (2001: 235; see
Down and Sullivan, 2019).
In addressing these attributes the contrib-
uting authors in this section seek to not only
challenge the damaging and demeaning impact
of neoliberal reforms but generate a more par-
ticipatory, engaging, activist and democratic
classroom culture (e.g., Duncan-Andrade and
Morrell, 2008; Abdi and Carr, 2013; Riddle
and Apple, 2019). In these classrooms, we
begin to see that ‘another kind of school
is possible’ based on an understanding of
­problem-posing education, learning commu-
nities, social justice, anti-racism, diversity and
inclusivity (Wrigley, 2006).
REFERENCES
Abdi, A. and Carr, P. (eds.) (2013) Educating for Riddle, S. and Apple, M. (eds.) (2019) Re-
Democratic Consciousness: Counter-­ Imagining Education for Democracy. London
Hegemonic Possibilities. New York: Peter Lang.
Connell, R. (1993) Schools and Social Justice.
Toronto: Our Schools/Our Selves Education
Foundation.
Connell, R. (1997) Schools, Markets, Justice:
Education in a Fractured World. Forum of
Education, 52(1): 1–13.
Down, B. and Sullivan, A. (2019) ‘Classroom
ready teachers’: Gaps, silences and contra-
dictions in the Australian report into teacher
education, in A. Sullivan, B. Johnson and
M. Simons (eds.), Attracting and Keeping the
Best Teachers: Issues and Opportunities.
Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 39–61.
Duncan-Andrade, J. and Morrell, E. (2008) The
Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for
Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban
Schools. New York: Peter Lang.
Freire, P. (1998) Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics,
Democracy, and Civic Courage. New York:
Rowman & Littlefield.
813
Gewirtz, S., Mahony, P., Hextall, I., and Cribb,
A. (2009) Changing Teacher Professionalism:
International Trends, Challenges and Ways
Forward. London: Routledge.
Giroux, H. (1988) Teachers as Intellectuals:
Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning. New
York: Bergin & Garvey.
Gleeson, D. and Husbands, C. (2001) The Per-
forming School: Managing, Teaching, and
Learning in a Performance Culture. London:
RoutledgeFalmer.
Kincheloe, J. (2001a) Getting beyond the Facts:
Teaching Social Studies/Social Sciences in the
Twenty-first Century (2nd ed.). New York:
Peter Lang.
Kincheloe, J. (2001b) Hope in the shadows:
Reconstructing the debate over educational
standards, in J. Kincheloe and D. Weil (eds.),
Standards and Schooling in the United
States, Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
pp. 1–103.
Lynch, K., Grummell, B., and Devine, D. (2015)
New Managerialism in Education: Commer-
cialization, Carelessness and Gender. Basing-
stoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
and New York: Routledge.
Sahlberg, P. (2011) Finnish Lessons: What Can
the World Learn From Educational Change
in Finland? New York: Teachers College
Press.
Saltman, K. (2007) Capitalizing on Disaster:
Taking and Breaking Public Schools. Boulder,
CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Sen, A. (1992) Inequality Re-examined. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Smyth, J. (2001) Critical Politics of Teachers’
Work: An Australian Perspective. New York:
Peter Lang.
Thomas, T. P. and Schubert, H. (2001) Reinter-
preting teacher certification standards: Locat-
ing limitations and possibilities, in J. Kincheloe
and D. Weil (eds.), Standards and Schooling
in the United States, Vol. 1. Santa Barbara,
CA: ABC-CLIO. pp. 229–243.
Wrigley, T. (2006) Another School is Possible.
Stoke-on-Trent, UK: Trentham Books.
This page intentionally left blank

Critical Pedagogy, Social Justice
and Contesting Definitions of
Engagement in the Classroom
Engagement is difficult to define operationally, but
we know it when we see it, and we know it when
it is missing. (Newmann, 1986: 242)
The centrality of teaching, the explication of
what good teaching involves and the valuing of
teachers’ knowledges are recurrent themes at
teacher education conferences. Gore et al.
(2001) argue that preparing teachers who can
produce high-quality outcomes for all of their
students requires teacher educators to give
greater importance to what they do and say
about good classroom practices; that is,
pedagogies that are characterized by intellectual
quality, relevance, supportive classroom
environments and recognition of difference. In
short, what teachers do, matters. Such
emphases are a welcome relief from narrow
market-liberal and laissez-faire approaches to
teaching promoted in some quarters that
reposition teaching as learning management
and teachers as learning managers.
The work of teachers in schools and at
other sites is now recognized as a valid
69
David Zyngier
site for research. However, contemporary
‘education systems are not well equipped
to support teachers as they research’ (Gale,
2000). We need to do more to create spaces
that transcend traditional boundaries.
Australian teacher educators and teachers
are become increasingly familiar with the
notion of ‘Productive Pedagogies’, itself the
product of longitudinal research on school
reform recently undertaken in Queensland,
Australia (Lingard et al., 2001a, 2001b).
More generally, government departments of
education have begun to acknowledge the
importance of good pedagogy for successful
teaching, if not its centrality in connecting
relevant curriculum with authentic assess-
ment. To date, one of Productive Pedagogies’
strengths has been its efficacy for teachers to
use as a language to talk about their peda-
gogical work and, hence, a way of reclaim-
ing some of the ground on what constitutes
good teaching. In part, this can be attributed
to the numerous observations of teachers’
816 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
classroom practice that informed the con-
struction of Productive Pedagogies. That is,
many teachers understand its dimensions and
elements as naming what ‘good’ teachers
have always done.
PRODUCTIVE PEDAGOGIES
No arbitrary obstacles should prevent people from
achieving those positions for which their talents fit
them and which their values lead them to seek. Not
birth, nationality, color, religion, sex, nor any other
irrelevant characteristic should determine the oppor-
tunities that are open to a person – only his [or her]
abilities. (Friedman and Friedman, 1980: 163)
There is a view among some teacher educa-
tors and many in-service teachers that the
basic skills form the foundation of all subse-
quent learning; that the way to introduce
beginning teachers to the practice of teaching
is to introduce the basic practical skills first
and then perhaps introduce more theoretical
concepts at a later point (Cambourne and
Kiggins, 2004). The implication here is that
one cannot learn other kinds of knowledges
about teaching prior to the acquisition of the
basics. This is not the view that we took. We
in fact started with the theoretical engage-
ment of the pre-service teachers – at the level
of belief rather than the level of action in
relation to pedagogy.
Productive Pedagogies is derived from
the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal
Study (QSRLS) (Lingard et al., 2001a,
2001b), a three-year intensive observation of
24 representative state primary and secondary
schools undertaken by some of Australia’s
pre-eminent educational thinkers. It repre-
sents the largest and most detailed school
reform study in Australia, containing almost
500 pages of perhaps the most exhaustive and
important education research undertaken.
The study was concerned with how stu-
dent learning, both academic and social,
could be enhanced. The base assumption
of the research was that this enhancement
required quality classroom teaching and
assessment practices. It rejects the emphasis
on a credentialed society which defines qual-
ity student outcomes in terms of results from
limited, standardized testing of basic skills.
The QSRLS instead defines quality student
outcomes in terms of a sustained and disci-
plined inquiry focused on powerful, impor-
tant ideas and concepts which are connected
to students’ experiences and the world in
which they live.
The study’s original contribution to the
school reform debate was to specify which
aspects of teaching require schools’ urgent
attention. The key finding of the QSRLS
should be no surprise to experienced edu-
cators (Lingard et al., 2001a: x–xv); the
higher the level of intellectual demand
expected of students by teachers, the greater
the improved productive performance and,
hence, improved student outcomes.
Quality learning experience is acknowl-
edged as what our best teachers have always
provided for their students – intellectually
challenging material that is relevant and con-
nected to the children’s lives, recognizing
that children learn in different ways and have
different needs within a supportive learn-
ing environment. What the QSRLS report
has termed productive pedagogies is then
crucial to improved student outcomes for
all students, but in particular those ‘at-risk’
(Lingard et al., 2001b: 103–5).
The QSRLS research found that students
most at risk of failure, those from socially,
culturally and economically disadvantaged
conditions, were the least likely to be exposed
to the intellectually challenging and relevant
material.
The Australian Council of Deans of
Education (ACDE) foreshadowed the need for
a new language for pre-service teachers, high-
lighting the work of the Faculty of Education
at Woollongong University which in 1997
supported a proposal to design a research
project which would ‘investigate, as a pilot,
an alternative approach to initial teacher
education’ (Australian Council of Deans of
Education, 2002: 15, italics in original).
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CONTESTING DEFINITIONS OF ENGAGEMENT
Their proposal for a ‘Knowledge Building
Community’ is ‘a teaching model specifically
designed to deal with the issue of contextual-
izing the delivery of instruction’ (Australian
Council of Deans of Education, 2002: 15). The
ACDE states that such a community is founded
on the ‘creation of learning environments that
support the continuous social construction of
knowledge through the constant construction,
de-construction, and reconstruction and sharing
of meanings, so that the community’s knowl-
edge needs are advanced and maintained’
(Australian Council of Deans of Education,
2002: 15, emphasis original). Ailwood and
Follers suggest that developing teacher learn-
ing communities is founded on (among other
issues) the requirement that ‘teachers talk to
each other in a sustained way about the work of
teaching and learning’ (2002: 6).
Luke describes Productive Pedagogies as:
An approach to creating a place, space and
vocabulary for us to get talking about classroom
instruction again. It isn’t a magic formula (e.g.,
just teach this way and it will solve all the kids’
problems), but rather it’s a framework and vocab-
ulary for staffroom, inservice, pre-service training,
for us to describe the various things we can do in
classrooms – the various options in our teaching
‘repertoires’ that we have – and how we can
adjust these, play with these (more narrative, less
exposition; more dialogue, less lecture; more
explicit statements of expectations) to get differ-
ent outcomes. This isn’t a ‘one approach fits all
model of pedagogy’. It has the possibility of pro-
viding a common grounds and dialogue between
teachers, school administrators, teacher educa-
tors, student-teachers and others about these
‘repertoires’ and about which aspects of our
teaching repertoires work best for improved intel-
lectual and social outcomes for distinctive groups
of kids. (Luke, 2002: 4, emphasis added)
Sorin and Klein (2002) suggest that an empha-
sis on the construction of robust intellectual
knowledges and inquiring habits of mind in
schools necessitates the implementation of
innovative, inquiry-based teaching/learning
relationships that have not been experienced
by many pre-service teachers nor teacher edu-
cators. This, they conclude, is achieved
through an inquiry-based culture in a teacher
817
education programme. The author developed
a framework for their pre-service course based
on students experiencing new models of inter-
action in teacher education, where ideas and
experiences were shared and problems solved
cooperatively. By ‘modelling pedagogy’ we
hoped to induct pre-service teachers into ‘new
ways of being a teacher and a lifelong learner,
as they build their own ways of learning and
reflecting’ (Sorin and Klein, 2002).
Productive Pedagogies has gained recogni-
tion nationally in Australia (and internation-
ally) as a framework for teacher professional
development which focuses on classroom
practices while foregrounding persistent
equity concerns in education. Since the publi-
cation of the QSRLS in 2001 there have been
limited but significant contributions to this dis-
cussion focusing on Productive Pedagogies in
the education and training of pre-service teach-
ers (Gore et al., 2001; Sorin and Klein, 2002).
Most notably Lingard et al.’s (2001b) research
results from a pilot study involving final-year
teacher education students attempting to apply
the principles of Productive Pedagogies dur-
ing their internship.
The authors conclude that:
Productive Pedagogy needs to come early in the
teacher education program in order to be more
fully integrated into students’ knowledge base for
teaching. If it is just another framework, just
another theory, just another list, then students are
likely to draw on it as they might any other
approach. Instead, if students are to treat
Productive Pedagogies as foundational to all of
their efforts in teaching, it needs to be: (1) clearly
positioned in that way from the beginning of the
teacher education program; (2) used as a device
to guide all aspects of the teacher education
curriculum; and (3) modelled in the pedagogy of
teacher educators. (Lingard et al., 2001b: 8,
emphasis added)
Researchers acknowledge that definitions of
engagement encompass a wide variety of
constructs that ‘can help explain how chil-
dren behave, feel and think in school’
(Fredricks et al., 2003). This section seeks to
expose the various epistemological views
underpinning these constructs.
818 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
What is clear from their research is that stu-
dents from home backgrounds more closely
resembling the dominant school culture are
most likely to develop the engaging positive
school relationships noted by Finn (1989) and
Fullarton (2002). What is contested in this chap-
ter is that if engagement is to be socially just
then all students should not only have equality
and equity of access to activities, learning at
similar levels, but also have similar opportuni-
ties beyond school related to these activities.
The phrases ‘engagement in school’ or
‘student engagement’ are often cited (Bangert-
Drowns and Pyke, 2001, 2002; Davies,
2002; Dodd, 1995; Finn, 1989; Shernoff
et al., 2003) as an essential component of
programmatic interventions for students ‘at
risk’. However, there have been very few
attempts to define engagement other than
behaviourally or to study it as part of the
learning process (Murray et al., 2004; Smith
et al., 2001). These psychological definitions
are commonly a mix of (i) behavioural aspects
of the student as doing the work, following
the rules, persisting and participating, while
(ii) emotional aspects centre interest, value
and feelings (negative and positive) towards
school, the class and teacher and (iii) cognitive
engagement (psychological investment)
includes motivation, effort and strategy use by
students. These views see student engagement
as something students do and that teachers can
organize for them (Luse, 2002 my emphasis).
For example, Guthrie’s significant contribution
on engagement, motivation and reading
concludes in a ‘chicken and egg’ imbroglio
suggesting that while ‘engagement … increases
the occurrence of … [positive] outcomes …
I also expect that positive outcomes increase
engagement’ (Guthrie, 2001). Too often these
definitions morph from student interest to
student engagement, treating one the same as
the other (Renninger and Wade, 2001). These
three distinctions are critically reviewed in the
next section of the chapter.
Finn (1989) presented a model of student
engagement with two central components,
participation and identification, which has
subsequently dominated the research agenda.
Participation, the behavioural component,
includes basic behaviours such as the stu-
dent’s acquiescence to school and class
rules, arriving at school and class on time,
attending to the teacher and responding to
teacher-­initiated directions and questions.
Non-compliant behaviour, for example, dis-
ruption, inattentiveness, or refusing to com-
plete assigned work, represents a student’s
failure to meet these basic requisites. Other
levels of participation include initiative-­
taking on the part of the student (initiat-
ing questions or dialogue with the teacher,
engaging in help-seeking behaviour) and
participation in the social, extracurricular,
athletic and governance aspects of school
life. Identification, the affective component,
refers to the student’s feelings of belonging
in the school setting and valuing the out-
comes that school will provide, for example,
access to post-school opportunities.
Finn’s (1989) participation/identifica-
tion model – like Guthrie’s framework – is a
behaviouralist-based example of attempts to
combine behavioural, emotional and cogni-
tive research. Finn’s work has been readily
adopted here in Australia (see for example
Fullarton, 2002) and is characterized by
associating lack of engagement with poor
academic performance. This has led to an
essentializing of engagement, portraying
engagement and its concurrent academic suc-
cess as a function of the individual, ignoring
the contribution of gender, socio-cultural,
ethnic and economic status (class) factors.
This typology does not account for the dis-
tinctions in engagement made by Schlechty
(2002); that students may be no more than
passively compliant or even ritualistically
engaged – that is, they are playing the rules of
the game as described by Haberman (1991).
Marks (2000), after Finn (1989), states that
‘[engagement is central] to achievement and
to optimal human development’ and that its
lack of presence ‘initiates a downward spiral
that may lead to dysfunctional school behav-
ior’ (Marks, 2000: 155).
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CONTESTING DEFINITIONS OF ENGAGEMENT
According to these views, as schools
become more effective, students are more
engaged and academic performance is hence
improved. Greater student engagement is
a sign therefore of effective schooling or
school improvement. Such studies seek to
demonstrate a strong relationship between
engagement and performance, such that stu-
dent participation leads to academic success
‘across diverse populations’ and that engage-
ment has a ‘consistent, strong correlation
with academic performance’ and also race/
ethnicity and socio-economic status (Finn,
1989: 118; Finn et al., 2003: 323–4). Marks
concludes that socio-economic status consist-
ently predicts engagement for middle-school
students, reinforcing the conclusion of the
QSRLS (Lingard et al., 2001a) and Schlechty
(2002) that, while middle-class students and
middle-class schools have a higher overall
engagement and academic success, it seems
also that the longer a student stays at school
the lower is their engagement. This view that
there is equivalence and correlation between
student engagement and academic success is
now addressed.
ENGAGEMENT IS NOT A PREDICTOR
OF ACADEMIC SUCCESS – ACADEMIC
ACHIEVEMENT DOES NOT
NECESSARILY EQUAL ENGAGEMENT
Contrary to the view of many researchers
into student engagement, that it is ‘strongly
related to … achievement’ (Guthrie, 2001)
and that ‘there is considerable evidence in
the research literature of the association
between engagement and positive academic
outcomes’ (Fredricks et al., 2003), engage-
ment is not a predictor of academic success
(Willms, 2003) and, while the prevalence of
disengaged students varies between countries
and among schools within countries, this is
not attributable solely to family background,
or to academic achievement. On the contrary,
the OECD research by Willms concludes that
819
‘there is a significant number of students
with a strong [academic] performance who
are nevertheless disaffected from school’
(Willms, 2003: 3), and, while previous litera-
ture suggests that ‘risk factors’ for disen-
gagement and low achievement come to
school with the student, this report does not
infer that low student engagement is the con-
sequence of family-related risk factors like
poverty, low parental education or even low
cognitive ability (Willms, 2003). Willms
found that while the ‘contextual affects’ of
school are important, a high percentage of
minority or low socio-economic status stu-
dents in a school led to higher dropout, but
not necessarily disengagement (Willms,
2003: 11). The report revealed that in
Australia more than 20% of middle years’
students have a low sense of belonging to
school, while almost 20% also have low stu-
dent participation in school activities. Yet
these students still achieve significant aca-
demic results.
Contradicting Finn and others, Willms
concludes that student sense of belonging to
a school is a weak measure of academic per-
formance and is not strongly related to either
participation or ability. Students with a low
sense of belonging fit into a wide range of
socio-economic status groups. It seems from
this that students therefore who reject (for
any reason) the school’s values are labelled
alienated or disengaged. Schlechty (2002)
however recognizes that even such students
who withdraw or retreat from school learn-
ing and activities (according to Schlechty)
are making conscious decisions (therefore
are perhaps counter-engaged) about their
schooling.
Like Schlechty, Bangert-Drowns and Pyke
(2001, 2002), in attempting a taxonomy of
engagement, view student engagement as a
multifaceted and complex concept, acknowl-
edging that engagement can also be problem-
atic, unsystematic or even frustrated as well as
structured, self-regulated, literate and finally
critical. The research of Willms, Schlechty and
Bangert-Drowns and Pyke rejects the notion
820 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
that engagement is an unalterable characteris-
tic, either inherited or experienced from home,
but ‘entails attitudes and behaviors that can be
affected by teachers and parents and shaped
by school policy and practice’ (Willms, 2003:
9). Even though students have the necessary
academic abilities and skills they still may
become disaffected from school. The On Track
data from Victorian schools (Department of
Education and Training, 2004) demonstrates
that educators cannot presume that students
with a satisfactory or high level of academic
achievement are also engaged – many indeed
withdraw from school, or do not continue with
further studies after completing their requisite
12 years (Shor, 1980: 195). Newmann (1981,
1992, 1996) developed increasingly complex
understanding of engagement. His 1992 study
identifies the factors that affect engagement
in academic work as (i) school membership
(clarity of purpose, fairness, personal sup-
port, success and caring) and (ii) authentic
work (extrinsic rewards, intrinsic interests,
sense of ownership, connection to real world
and fun) (Newmann, 1992: 18). More recent
research suggests that addressing this prob-
lem requires a whole system restructure that
emphasizes challenging academic work in a
mainstream (non-tracked) environment that
includes greater real parental involvement
where students are empowered to control their
own learning through an authentic (Schlechty,
2002), productive (Lingard et al., 2001a) or
generative pedagogy (Zyngier, 2003).
Therefore, where engagement is defined
(narrowly) as willingness to become involved
in teacher-initiated tasks and at the same time
is separated from the students’ socio-political
and cultural contexts, we find that if a student
is engaged then the teacher is responsible, but
if the student is disengaged then the problem
is with the student. This correlation between
participation and achievement is interpreted
as causality (Fullarton, 2002).
The reification of student engagement
sanctions the identification and measurement
of those conditions that seem to encourage
or impede engagement. Engagement is more
than doing well on academic exercises or
participation in sport and other extracurricu-
lar activities. I now proceed to argue that it
forms the basis for social, cultural, political
and intellectual participation in life within
and beyond school.
PERSPECTIVES OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
AND ENGAGEMENT – THREE
CONTESTING PERSPECTIVES …
Reflecting on engagement, Newmann (1996)
includes three necessary components: (i) the
construction of knowledge, (ii) disciplined
inquiry and (iii) production of discourse,
products or performances that have value
beyond school success. As early as 1981
Newmann warned against programmes
designed to make students just feel good.
Eliminating alienation is not the same as
eliminating stress or effort. On the contrary it
is ‘arranging conditions so that [students]
expend energy’ (Newmann, 1981: 548).
Even with exciting material, students may
remain apathetic (Haberman, 1991).
Schoolwork that is incongruent with a stu-
dent’s cultural commitments can ‘assault self
esteem’ (Newmann, 1986: 555). Dodd (1995)
suggests that what is needed to engage stu-
dents is not necessarily learning that is fun,
but learning over which they have ownership;
that empowers them to make a difference to
their lives.
Newmann identified three dominant per-
spectives to account for engagement. He
referred to these as the (i) conventional or
professional technological, (ii) the develop-
mental and (iii) the cultural emancipatory
perspective (Newmann, 1986: 559–60). All
may appear in some form in various schools,
in various classes at different times (and even
perhaps within individual teachers’ pedago-
gies). Each school has however a dominant
culture and perspective, which based on
Newmann’s original typology and informed
by Vibert and Shields (2003), I now describe
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CONTESTING DEFINITIONS OF ENGAGEMENT
as (i) instrumentalist or rational technical,
(ii) social constructivist or individualist and
(iii) critical transformative engagement.
Instrumentalist or Rational
Technical
Fullarton’s review of the studies examining
the relationship of participation in extracur-
ricular activities with academic achievement
in school concluded that participation is cor-
related with a number of desirable outcomes,
including higher levels of self-esteem and
feelings of control over one’s life, higher
educational aspirations and higher grades,
especially among males, in school (Fullarton,
2002: 2). Grounded in an objectivist under-
standing this involved counting the numbers
of students on task or completing assigned
work, involved in particular activities and
other extracurricular activities. This view is
manifested through surveys, observations
and test data analysis. There appears little or
no attempt to ‘go beneath the surface’ to
understand the meaning that students make
of the activity or their motivation to partici-
pate. Built on teacher initiation (Guthrie,
2001) or ‘doing for, rather than doing with’,
teachers prepare
activities [that] are common to most schools and
are illustrative of teachers trying, in various ways to
develop both pedagogical and social activities in
which students may be both involved and inter-
ested. (Vibert and Shields, 2003: 227)
These teachers are well intentioned, exhibit-
ing initiative and effort to involve students in
numerous activities. Often reflected in this
deficit view is the attitude that students and
parents were neither competent nor capable
of taking on responsibilities and planning
because of their ‘background’ (Zyngier,
2007). Engagement becomes equated with
compliance with adult-determined rules and
participation in adult-determined and led
activities. Where the (attributed) deficit is
located in the background of the student, then
821
parents too are reduced to being recipients of
school-based programmes rather than being
empowered to be active partners in their chil-
dren’s educational development (Smith et al.,
2001). Fullarton (2002) finds however that it
does matter which school a student attends;
socio-economic status is a persistent influ-
ence on participation, both at the individual
level and at the school level. She concludes
that students with parents who have the
financial resources to allow a wide participa-
tion in extracurricular activities obtain a
benefit from schooling that those students
with less access to financial resources do not.
Social Constructivist or
Individualist Engagement
Student-centred pedagogy envisages engage-
ment as implicit in active learning where
self-motivation, reflective shared goal setting
and student choice are located in the lived
experiences of the students. This certainly
produces more dignified and interesting
classrooms, but does it necessarily raise sub-
stantive (and critical) student inquiry that
questions the acceptance of official knowl-
edge (Apple, 1996) for all students, not just
the middle class? Thus the schools making
the strongest claims for engagement
(Fullarton, 2002) are the middle-class profes-
sional schools (Willms, 2003) where students
learn the efficacy of their own values and
manners in a system that neatly matches their
own cultural background, thereby reinforc-
ing the cultural capital of the dominant
hegemonic group. If the student is left alone
to choose, can they alone interrupt officially
sanctioned discourses ‘where the
“right choices” are powerfully inculcated in
institutional habits, routines … [and] what in
this context might student choice mean’
(Vibert and Shields, 2003: 233), in a system of
schooling where domination is perpetuated?
(Sefa Dei, 2003). Shared decision making
is an illusion for students if they are not
able to question and interrupt their own
822 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
marginalization. A student-centred or social
constructivist engagement defaults to a con-
servative position and ‘may become simply a
more friendly method of encouraging “on-
task [passive-compliant] behavior”’ (Vibert
and Shields, 2003: 233). Too often student-
centred teaching makes connections between
classroom learning and the world outside the
school that remains uncritical and in the realm
of make believe where teachers design activi-
ties that ‘simulate real-world environments …
so that students can carry out authentic tasks
as real workers would’ (Day, 2002: 23).
Sing and Luke (1996) caution that peda-
gogy based on ‘unproblematic notions of
individualism and liberalism which attempt
to recognize and celebrate difference per se’
(in Bernstein, 1996: xiii) can actually conceal
the pedagogical practices that are the cause
of inequality of opportunity and outcomes
for the disadvantaged in schools. Just saying
that teachers need to be sensitive to student
culture, background and experience (Lingard
et al., 2001a) does not necessarily mean that
the curriculum and pedagogy is inclusive and
culturally sensitive (McFadden and Munns,
2002). The ‘romp, stomp and chomp’ or
‘festivals, folklore and food’ supplemen-
tal celebrations of difference still serve to
subsume the other in the dominant culture
(McMahon, 2003).
Through this miscommunication and tension
(grounded in different and differing competing
ideological and theoretical assumptions), some
attempt to claim an epistemological neutrality
about engagement. This claim for neutrality
is itself a politically conservative and techno-
rational position on engagement and education
(Walkerdine, 1983). Locating engagement in
the individual student leads to an essentializa-
tion and reification of engagement; students
(teachers and the community) are therefore
engaged when the school is an engaging place.
Engagement must not be disconnected from
time, place and space and it is not about find-
ing the reproducible programme (Zyngier and
Gale, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2003d) regardless
of social contexts and ideologies.
Critical Transformative
Engagement
While a student-centred pedagogy sees
engagement through the student’s explora-
tion and discovery of individual interests and
experiences, a critically transformative or
generative pedagogy (Zyngier, 2003) per-
ceives student engagement as rethinking
these experiences and interests increasingly
in communal and social terms for the crea-
tion of a more just and democratic commu-
nity and not just the advancement of the
individual. All students should be able to see
themselves as represented in a curriculum
that challenges hierarchical and oppressive
relations that exist between different social
groups. Newmann concludes that all schools
can change their pedagogical practices so
that they ‘deliver [such an] authentic peda-
gogy equally to students regardless of gender,
socio-economic status, race or ethnicity’
(Newmann, 1996). Canadian research (Vibert
and Shields, 2003) found that the schools
where student engagement was conceived
critically were more likely to be located in
low socio-economic status communities,
because these schools had acknowledged
traditional responses as notable failures (for
an Australian perspective see Zyngier and
Gale, 2003a) and hence different approaches
were required.
This perspective acknowledges that the lives
and work of teachers and students (and their
families) are inherently political; the lives of
children and their communities are a curricu-
lum of life (Smith et al., 2001) not just con-
nected to student experience, but also actively
and consciously critiquing that experience.
Not only is their world valued, but stu-
dents are given the opportunity to voice and
discover their own authentic and authori-
tative life in order to retrieve the learn-
ing agenda (Giddens, 1994). Gale and
Densmore explain that this is not achieved
through ‘pedagogic trickery’ (Gale and
Densmore, 2000) or through simply ‘bolt-
ing on’ some aspects of so-called real-life
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CONTESTING DEFINITIONS OF ENGAGEMENT
education experiences into the curriculum.
They explain that what is required in the
classroom is pedagogy where
the very nature of what is learnt is mediated by
the group; the content becomes entwined in
who these students are as people. Moreover, it
reworks the test of isolation that students face
in the classroom that are organized to (re)pro-
duce their disconnectedness. (Gale and
Densmore, 2000: 149)
CONCLUSION
Important work is currently being under-
taken in Australia (and elsewhere) on the
kinds of pedagogies that improve outcomes
for all students (Lingard et al., 2001a,
2001b) but in particular those variously
labelled as ‘at risk’ of early school leaving,
disadvantaged or from low socio-economic
backgrounds.
While many students do not believe their
school experience has much bearing on their
future and don’t feel that they are accepted
by their classmates and teachers (Zyngier,
2007), they gradually feel disaffected and
withdraw from school life. Some become
disruptive and exert a negative influence on
other students (Willms, 2003). As a former
student noted, ‘When you are standing out-
side the classroom all day, it is very difficult
to learn’ (Brown et al., 2001: 105).
What is therefore needed for an engaging
curriculum is CORE Pedagogy that ensures
that teachers and students are:
Connecting – to and engaging with the students’
cultural knowledge
Owning – all students should be able to see them-
selves as represented in the work
Responding – to students’ lived experiences and
actively and consciously critiquing that experience
Empowering – students with a belief that what
they do will make a difference to their lives
and the opportunity to voice and discover their
own authentic and authoritative life. (Zyngier,
2007)
823
Underpinning this are four main educational
objectives:
• To engage young people in issues of social
justice;
• To engage young people with a high level of
authenticity;
• To promote student-led classrooms, thereby chal-
lenging teacher practice; and
• To create real community change. (Westheimer
and Kahne, 2004)
The concept of engaged and facilitated learn-
ing is presented through Roger Hart’s Ladder
of Youth Participation1 as a fluid continuum
as it provides students and teachers with the
following:
• Opportunities for real community engagement
(both within and beyond school grounds);
• Opportunities for engagement with real issues;
• Opportunities for transformative citizenship
going beyond responsible citizenship or thin
democracy to participation in thick democracy
(Carr, 2008; Gandin and Apple, 2002);
• Opportunities for effecting and sustaining change
(so that the change perpetuates); and
• Opportunities for independent learning.
Rather than cynically theorize over what is
wrong in teacher education today, or in urban
schools, or in public schools in general, or
present another case study relating more of
the same, this chapter suggests a realistic
alternative to disengagement and alienation
and school failure for many children, particu-
larly those on the margins, through the crea-
tion of a generative pedagogy based on and
in radical recognitive social justice (Gale and
Densmore, 2000).
For young people ‘at risk’, there is
already too often an assumption that they
are at best poor learners. Through their own
fault, or their parents’, or decisions made by
the school, or blind fate, it is assumed that
these young people are able to exercise only
limited control over their destinies. Many
young people do not (wish to) see it that way
(Zyngier, 2004). The lives of these young
people who have been termed ‘at risk’ are
824 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
buffeted, constrained, blocked and diverted
by social, human, economic, political and
geographical factors. In an uncertain future,
these factors may seem to remove any ele-
ment of choice. Yet these same young people
still assert strongly that they are in control:
‘no-one makes decisions for me’; ‘we don’t
know where we are going, but we’ll get
there’ (Brown et al., 2001: 118–19). In the
end it is about what the students themselves
say and think:
It is the students themselves who will be able to
tell us that they are engaged and who will say
whether their education is working for them in a
culturally sensitive and relevant way. It is the stu-
dents who will be able to tell us whether the offers
that education purports to provide are real or illu-
sionary. It is at the messy point of teachers and
students responding to each other in relation to
classroom discourse and assessment practices
where we are truly going to see whether or not
students feel that school is for them. It is within
this space that education can provide a chance
that is not illusionary, and that it can indeed be
engaging and lead to purposeful, relevant and
productive educational outcomes. (McFadden and
Munns, 2002: 364)
It has been too simplistic to define engage-
ment in terms of deficiencies arising in the
students. Historically the disengaged were
those whose appearance, language, culture,
values, communities and family structures
were in contradiction to the dominant (White,
middle class) culture that schools were
designed to serve and support (Alexander,
2000; Hickson and Tinzman, 1990). The
struggle over the definition of the term
engagement is significant in itself, for it
reveals the on-going ideological and episte-
mological divisions among educators and
policy makers, and the general public.
Research on student disengagement has
shown that an exploration of the questions of
class, gender, race/ethnicity, power, history
and particularly students’ lived experiences
and social reality reveals a complexity of fac-
tors that led marginalized youth to leave
school prematurely. It is therefore crucial that
questions of power, equity, engagement with
difference, that is, recognitive social justice
(Gale and Densmore, 2000), be addressed if
we are to improve (learning) outcomes, not
just for the most marginalized youth, but for
all. The research suggests that the complexity
of issues relating to youth engagement (and
early school leaving) cannot be fitted neatly
into decontextualized accounts of youth
experience, school interaction and socio-
environmental factors that create in the first
instance student disempowerment and disen-
gagement with school (Sefa Dei, 2003: 249).
In order to create a more inclusive and
empowering education system, one that
engages with and responds to marginalized
youth, we need to ensure that all students,
not just the mainstream majority, feel that
they belong and identify. In order to do this
schools
need to tap into the cultural knowledge of par-
ents, guardians and community workers – this
means that we value the different perspectives and
knowledges that all people from all places have
and can bring into the school system. (Sefa Dei,
2003: 250–1)
Critically, if students are to successfully
engage in school and their knowledge sys-
tems, then these systems must connect to and
engage with the students’ cultural knowledge
while also affirming the different strengths
that knowledge forms bring to classroom
pedagogy (Sefa Dei, 2003). This pedagogical
reciprocity is critical if those most at risk are
to find themselves in schools, so that their
knowledges, histories and experiences are
validated and accounted for. Such student
engagement is an empowering one, develop-
ing a sense of entitlement, belonging and
identification. Otherwise students are ‘doing
time, not doing education’ (Sefa Dei, 2003).
For many marginalized students, schools
are seen as the sites not of engagement, but
of disenfranchisement and alienation. This
means that our public education system is
failing these students; failing to provide them
with the necessary equitable environment
required for the delivery of social justice
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CONTESTING DEFINITIONS OF ENGAGEMENT
(Sefa Dei, 2003: 270). If teachers have
low expectations for groups of students it
is easy to assign responsibility for the lack
of achievement to the home or to the stu-
dent rather than to what the teacher and the
school does (Smith et al., 2001). When the
system does not work, there is always plenty
of blame to go around. Schools are told that
the problem lies with disaffected youth, neg-
ligent parents, the (overworked, underpaid)
teacher(s), the school environment, et cetera.
They could equally look for cause(s) in the
many systemic barriers to the educational and
employment achievements of marginalized
young people. Dodd (1995) suggests that the
best advice is to be found in Saint-Exupéry’s
The Little Prince: ‘What is essential is invisible
to the eye’. Instead of adding to this cycle of
blame which inevitably can lead only to more
failure, schools should be looking to make the
education of youth, all youth, but in particular
those from the margins, more critically con-
nected to the social and cultural backgrounds
from which they come, making it a less alienat-
ing and marginalizing experience. There is no
guaranteed panacea. But social justice demands
a rethink of what teachers do in the classroom,
whether it is about schooling – a process where
they socialize children to conform to the domi-
nant cultural paradigm or about education – the
empowerment of individuals and groups to crit-
ically reflect on and remake their society (Sefa
Dei, 2000: 271).
Note
1  The Ladder of Youth Participation is a conceptual
model created and developed by UNICEF soci-
ologist Roger Hart. Based on a study of a youth
involvement in 100 international environmental
organizations, the Ladder first featured in Hart’s
Children’s Participation: from Tokenism to Citizen-
ship (1992). It comprises eight ‘rungs’ or ways
in which organizations involve young people,
from ‘Manipulation’, ‘Decoration’ or ‘Tokenism’
through ‘Assigned but Informed’, ‘Consulted and
Informed’, ‘Adult-Initiated, shared decisions with
young people’ to ‘Young people-initiated and
directed’ and ‘Young people-initiated, shared deci-
sions with adults’. See Holdsworth et al. (2007).
825
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Critical Pedagogy and Anti-Muslim
Racism Education: Insights
from the UK
Khadija Mohammed, Lisa McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz
INTRODUCTION
Basit came home from school and asked his mum
‘Am I a bad person?’ He appeared to be disturbed
and confused and cried out ‘the boys and girls in
the playground shouted “all Muslims are bad
people!”’. His mother was deeply concerned and
phoned the school to try and speak to Basit’s
teacher. The teacher flippantly remarked: ‘It’s
really nothing to worry about, they’re just kids
repeating what they are hearing about Islamist
terrorists and I’m sure it will all just blow over in a
day or so.’ This incident took place a few days
after the terrorist event in Nice, France and Basit
found himself being questioned and held to
account for the attack: ‘What do you think about
the terror attack in France?’. This was clearly not a
question but rather an attempt to vilify and
demonise this young person for being a Muslim.
Basit’s mother knew she had to address this issue.
At a meeting with the head teacher, she explained
that the teacher’s approach did not address Basit’s
concerns and her sheer dismissal had a direct
impact on her son.
Basit’s story is one of many such examples
from the school setting where anti-Muslim
70
racism manifests. Essentially, this highlights
the need for teachers to adopt a pedagogy
that is critical and aims to promote equality
and social justice (Giroux, 2015). Critical
pedagogy consists of approaches that draw
attention to privilege, marginalisation and
oppression, and encourage self-reflection
and appropriate action. Central amongst
these approaches is Freire’s (1970) problem-
posing model which advocates dialogical
exploration of issues and co-production of
knowledge between students and teachers.
The problem highlighted in Basit’s story
is a problem that many experience today.
It is a problem that persists and presents in
many forms, ranging from acts of violence
against Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic
(BAME) people, to overt or covert discrimi-
nation, to microaggressions and colourblind-
ness (Brinson and Smith, 2014). Being a
microcosm of society, schools are affected
by racism in its various forms (Leonardo and
Grubb, 2019). For many years, multicultural
education has tried to address racism and
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM EDUCATION
promote inclusion for all (Banks and McGee
Banks, 2010). However, multicultural educa-
tion has not been very effective in disrupting
the dominant discourses that privilege cer-
tain groups of people and marginalise others
based on the colour of their skin (Jay, 2003;
Koh, 2015). Anti-racism education, a more
critical approach with roots in critical peda-
gogy and Critical Race Theory (CRT), offers
more promise (Dei, 1996, 2014).
This chapter considers the need for anti-
racism education with specific focus on rac-
ism against Muslims. The chapter starts with
a brief overview of CRT tenets that are of par-
ticular relevance to the topic, before it con-
siders racism in the UK, where the authors
live and work. The chapter then zooms in on
anti-Muslim racism in the context of counter-
terrorist British policies aiming to prevent the
radicalisation of young people. Given that
some of these policies are positioned within
schools’ duty to safeguard their students, the
chapter then shifts the focus on the experi-
ences of teachers who come from a similar
background to that of youth who are consid-
ered to be at risk of radicalisation. By way
of answering this question, the chapter shares
insights from Muslim teachers and considers
the role of initial teacher education in sup-
porting Muslim and non-Muslim teachers to
become self-reflective and confident in their
ability to address anti-Muslim racism and to
support students and colleagues affected by
it. Drawing on the principles of critical peda-
gogy, the chapter ends with some suggestions
that can be used to deliver anti-Muslim rac-
ism education.
A note on terminology: writing from a
British perspective, the authors use the term
Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME)
rather than the term ‘people of colour’ which
is currently preferred in the United States.
The authors are aware of debates around
the term BAME (e.g. Sandhu, 2018) and
acknowledge its limitations; however, given
that, at present, it is widely used in the UK,
it seemed an appropriate term to use in this
chapter.
829
CRITICAL RACE THEORY (CRT) AS
A FRAMEWORK TO EXPLORE
ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM
Critical race theorists use the term ‘racism’
to refer to both the obvious acts of race
hatred and the more subtle ways that power
disadvantages minority ethnic groups. In
other words, it is not only acts of violence
against minority ethnic individuals that con-
stitute race hatred, but also subtle, covert acts
of discrimination (Bell, 1980; Crenshaw
et al., 1995; Delgado, 1995; Leonardo, 2002).
Critical race theorists argue that society
views racism as an ordinary fact of daily life
and that the assumptions of White superiority
are so ingrained in political, legal and educa-
tional structures that they fail to recognise
the inequalities (Delgado, 1995). In other
words, racism is entrenched in the fabric of
society and is a structural issue rather than
the result of ignorance and prejudice by
individuals.
Several scholars have used CRT as a
framework to examine racial inequality in
educational settings. Kholi (2014), who used
a CRT framework to explore and analyse
the experiences of Black, Latina and Asian
American women enrolled on a teacher edu-
cation programme in the United States, has
pointed out that
CRT scholars of education have developed the fol-
lowing five tenets to guide research: (a) centrality of
race and racism; (b) challenge to the dominant
perspective; (c) commitment to social justice;
­
(d) value of experiential knowledge; (e) interdiscipli-
nary (Solórzano and Bernal 2001). Collectively, these
tenets offer scholars the historical, legal and social
analytical evidence to foreground race and racism
within educational inequality. (Kholi, 2014: 4)
By placing the experiences of Black, Asian
and Minority Ethnic (BAME) individuals
and groups at the forefront, CRT offers a lens
with which to examine the complexities of
their lives. Whilst CRT intersects with other
aspects such as gender, disability or sexual-
ity, it places the racialised experiences of
830 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
BAME people at the very core of the discus-
sions (Yosso, 2005).
In what follows, CRT is used as a frame-
work to explain how the political, social and
cultural structures in the UK have enabled the
development and promotion of anti-Muslim
racism. Gillborn (2006: 14) warns of the dan-
gers that arise from ‘the absence of a clear
conceptual map of anti-racism’ and states that
a more systematic approach to anti-racism is
required. He further argues that work carried
out in the name of anti-racism is often lip-ser-
vice, ‘a meaningless slogan that is evacuated
from all critical content’ (Gillborn, 2006:
14). Hence, there is a need for critical schol-
arship that will address racialised inequalities
in practice, and it is within this context that
CRT may help to lead the way ahead.
Racism in the UK
As noted, CRT provides a helpful framework
that can be used to examine and expose how
racism operates in society and the role insti-
tutions play in its reproduction and persis-
tence. As this chapter is being written, the
British establishment has made the UK a
hostile environment for refugees, BAME
people, Muslims, Jews and members of
European nations (Booth, 2019). These indi-
viduals and groups have been made to feel
unwelcome in the UK, resulting in some
cases in differential treatment by institutions
in comparison to native residents, where citi-
zenship is revoked and individuals and fami-
lies are removed from the UK and returned to
their heritage country. For example,
Commonwealth migrants of the Windrush
generation have been deported due to not
having documentation to prove their right to
stay in the UK despite having arrived before
1971, when such documentation was not
necessary, and having settled in the UK since
their arrival (BBC, 2018).
The policies and practices that lead to such
events are in many cases underpinned by
what is known as ‘anti-Muslim racism’. This
term refers to prejudice and discrimination
against people who identify as Muslims
(Bakali, 2016). It is closely related to the
term ‘Islamophobia’, which dates back to
the 1910s and 1920s but reached wider audi-
ences in the UK with the 1997 Runnymede
Trust report Islamophobia: A Challenge to
Us All (Runnymede Trust, 1997). The report
defined Islamophobia as ‘unfounded hostil-
ity towards Islam [and] unfair discrimination
against Muslims individually or as part of a
group’. The report contrasted closed views
of Islam which see it as monolithic, static,
barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist with
open views of Islam which see it as diverse,
progressive, interdependent with other faiths
and cultures, and equally worthy of respect.
The report pointed out that a culture of mis-
trust and contempt for Islam was developing
during the 1980s and 1990s which resulted
in discrimination against Muslims in various
social spheres.
In 2017, 20 years after the 1997 report, the
Runnymede Trust published another report
looking at the evolution and current mani-
festations of Islamophobia. The 2017 report
refers to Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism
and defines it as
any distinction, exclusion, or restriction towards, or
preference against, Muslims (or those perceived to
be Muslims) that has the purpose or effect of nul-
lifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or
exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and
fundamental freedoms in the political, economic,
social, cultural or any other field of public life.
(Runnymede Trust, 2017)
The 2017 report points out that it is
everybody’s responsibility to challenge
­
Islamophobia and to promote community
harmony and cohesion.
Building further on the Runnymede Trust
report, and in response to growing concerns
about anti-Muslim racism in the UK, the All-
Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British
Muslims was launched in 2017 to highlight
the aspirations of British Muslims and the
challenges they encounter, to celebrate the
contributions of Muslim communities to
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM EDUCATION
Britain, and to investigate prejudice, discrimi-
nation and hatred against Muslims in the UK.
In its 2018 report, the APPG proposed the
following definition of Islamophobia:
Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of
racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or
perceived Muslimness.
The definition was supported by a range of
guidelines and examples rather than a list of
essential features, which the APPG perceived
as confining a prescriptiveness to its under-
standing to the detriment of contextual and
fluid factors that continue to inform and
shape manifestations of Islamophobia.
Through the use of critical pedagogy, with
its emphasis on raising awareness, addressing
controversial issues and developing critical
consciousness (Kincheloe, 2004), teachers
and schools can be instrumental in combat-
ting anti-Muslim racism. However, before
we consider how this can be done, through
the CRT lens we will look at how policies
and strategies can be used to normalise and
promote anti-Muslim racism at institutional
level, making it an inherent feature of social
spaces, including schools.
COUNTER-TERRORISM POLICIES
AND ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM
Acts of terrorism such as the 11 September
2001 attack in New York, the 7 July 2005
attack in London, the 13 November 2015
attack in Paris or the 22 May 2017 attack in
Manchester have fuelled further an anti-
Muslim sentiment and led to increased intol-
erance and hatred against Muslims (European
Union Agency for Fundamental Rights,
2018). This rise of terrorist atrocities on a
global, national and local level has resulted
in a rise of counter-terrorism policies includ-
ing CONTEST, the British Government’s
counter-terror strategy whose aim is ‘to
reduce the risk to the UK and its interests
overseas from terrorism’ (HM Government,
831
2011: 40). To facilitate implementation,
CONTEST sets out a series of procedures
and tactics organised into four strands:
‘Pursue’, ‘Prevent’, ‘Protect’ and ‘Prepare’.
‘Prevent’ is of particular relevance here as
it places direct legal responsibility on ‘speci-
fied authorities’, including schools and col-
leges, to have ‘due regard’ in order to prevent
individuals from being drawn into extrem-
ism (Heath-Kelly, 2012; Busher et al., 2017).
Within the context of ‘Prevent’ is ‘Channel’,
a programme aiming to identify individuals
deemed to be susceptible to recruitment by
extremist groups (HM Government, 2012).
Channel is a multi-agency programme that
relies upon the vigilance and cooperation of
social workers, youth workers, health work-
ers and teachers in assisting the local police
to identify those ‘at risk of extremism’.
The Prevent strategy argues that ‘ideology
is a central factor in the radicalisation pro-
cess’ (HM Government, 2011: 40). One of
the key objectives of the Prevent strategy is to
‘respond to the ideological challenge of ter-
rorism’ by undertaking ‘counter-ideological
work’ designed to ensure that there should
be ‘no ungoverned spaces in which extrem-
ism is allowed to flourish’ (HM Government,
2011: 9). The British Government has added
the Prevent strategy onto institutional safe-
guarding systems which are already in place.
Specifically, from July 2015, as part of their
safeguarding practices, all schools have
responsibility to ensure that their students do
not become radicalised (HM Government,
2015). Arguably, the purpose of situating
Prevent as ‘safeguarding’ is to dispel prac-
titioners’ apprehensions about the duty and
reassure them that this is a continuation of their
existing professional responsibility to protect
children from harm (Busher et al., 2017).
The purpose of safeguarding policy and
practice is to keep children within the param-
eters of what Coppock and McGovern (2014:
253) refer to as ‘imagined “normal” childhood’.
According to Coppock and McGovern (2014),
where children and young people do not align
with the values and norms assigned to this
832 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
essentialised childhood that denies diversity
for the sake of uniformity and universality, they
are positioned as ‘outside of childhood’ and
deemed to be at risk or a risk. Such structures
have led to extensive monitoring of Muslim stu-
dents in an attempt to allay national and local
anxieties provoked by the Muslim subject who
has come to embody a ‘threat’ (Sian, 2015).
Sian (2015) draws attention to Learning
Together to Be Safe, subtitled A Toolkit to
Help Schools Contribute to the Prevention of
Violent Extremism (Department for Children,
Schools and Families [DCSF], 2008). This is
a handbook for teachers and staff with respon-
sibility to prevent extremism through their
safeguarding framework. The handbook offers
guidance on how to identify students who are
‘vulnerable’ to extremism, how to monitor and
report risks, and how to manage and contain
extremist events if they occur (Mirza, 2010).
The handbook very quickly introduces and
then retains a focus on ‘al-Qaida’ as the main
perpetrator of extremism, side-lining extrem-
ist right-wing groups such as the English
Defence League (Coppock and McGovern,
2014; Sian, 2015), and giving speculative rea-
sons as to why Muslims may become involved
in ‘extremist’ activity (Sian, 2015). The sug-
gested reasons range from a search for identity
and belonging, to excitement and adventure, a
grievance triggered by experiences of racism
and discrimination, an effort to develop self-
esteem and ‘street cred’, and identification
with a charismatic individual (DCSF, 2008).
Practitioners are advised to use their ‘pro-
fessional judgement’ to decide what behav-
iours or actions give cause for concern.
However, as Sian et al. (2013: 63) has pointed
out ‘[t]he ability to make these judgements
seems open to interpretation, speculation and
bias and also appears to take the form of a
witch-hunt’ and to have ‘a voyeuristic ele-
ment in the digging deeper, to try and find
evidence of “extremism”’. Such speculations
are essentialist and reductive, effectively ste-
reotyping Muslim students and their com-
munities through a pathologising discourse
(Alexander, 2000; Brah, 2006).
Sian et al. (2012) argue that, despite the
handbook’s claims to a ‘universal’ approach
to tackling ‘extremism’, the text clearly has
‘a blatant and specific focus on governing
and regulating almost exclusively Muslim
children and their behaviour and practices’
(Sian et al., 2012 cited in Coppock and
McGovern, 2014: 243) and, as such, rein-
forces the anti-Muslim racism discourse and
the construct of the ‘Muslim terrorist’ utilis-
ing a deficit perspective rather than an inter-
sectional approach to identify the social and
structural issues present in society which lead
young people to feel isolated and question
their sense of belonging and identity. What is
even more concerning is the silencing of the
critique of structural inequalities embedded
throughout the schooling system and what
Law and Swann (2011) see as racialised, seg-
regationist and exclusionary practices.
Thomas (2016) highlights the failure to
invest in and trust processes of political and
citizenship education for young people that
directly address the challenge of extremist
ideologies, and re-enforce processes, stand-
ards and embodied values of equal, demo-
cratic citizenship. He draws upon Davies’
(2008) argument that the absence of such
processes leaves the Prevent strategy unbal-
anced and tilting heavily towards a securi-
tised engagement with and surveillance of
Muslim youth that is now being deepened.
Thomas (2016) argues that the Prevent
strategy misappropriates child protection
concepts and exploits moral panics about
supposed Muslim ‘extremist’ influence on
British state schools to increase surveillance
of Muslim students.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE
PROFESSIONAL IDENTITIES
OF TEACHERS
Professionals can find it difficult to challenge
discourses that pathologise and demonise
Muslim communities because they are
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM EDUCATION
pervasive and persistent (Gilligan 2009 cited
in Coppock and McGovern, 2014). Through
policy such as Prevent, these discourses
become legitimised and normalised (Coppock
and McGovern, 2014). The Muslim children
and young people are thus perceived as
belonging to a ‘suspect’ community, and are
positioned as simultaneously being ‘at risk’
of radicalisation and ‘being a risk’. But what
about the professionals who come from the
same ‘suspect’ community as the students
who are being surveyed?
CRT highlights the value of experiential
knowledge in challenging dominant perspec-
tives (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado, 1995),
so Muslim teachers are best placed to answer
the question posed above. Unsurprisingly,
given the current climate of anti-Muslim
racism which is fuelled by policy such as
Prevent, Muslim teachers’ experiential
knowledge indicates that they are also likely
to be perceived as a threat and to be subjected
to hostility, prejudice and discrimination
(Mohammed, 2018).
In March 2018, the largest teaching union in
Scotland, the Educational Institute of Scotland
(EIS) highlighted some of the ways in which
Muslim staff and learners in educational
spaces experience anti-Muslim prejudice:
• Verbal abuse and name calling: ‘terrorist’, ‘Paki
Muslim’, ‘bomber’. Racist comments presented
as ‘jokes’; derogatory comments and loaded
questions, e.g. ‘so, what did you think of the
Brussels event?’. Physical abuse, e.g. young
Muslim girls have their hijabs pulled off.
• Misrecognition – it is common for Sikhs, Hindus
and other South Asian young people to be mistaken
as a Muslim because of their skin colour, hair and
features etc. (also noted in Hopkins et al., 2017).
• Assumptions leading to isolation – if you are a
Muslim, people make assumptions about your
social life and skill set. This is illustrated in the
following statement from a Muslim teacher
quoted in Mohammed (2018): ‘A young learner
shouted at me “You are not a proper, real
teacher!”’.
• Victimisation – when staff and young people
raise any concerns about the prejudice they expe-
rience, they tend to be unfairly treated.
833
• Being overlooked – curriculum content does not
include references to all faiths; policies do not
reflect cultural/religious rulings; there is a lack of
prayer facilities; professional learning opportuni-
ties are limited.
(EIS, 2018)
These instances of anti-Muslim racism are in
line with the findings of a recent study into
the experiences of Scottish Muslim teachers
(Mohammed, 2018). A case in point is the
following quote from Shaista, a principal
teacher for pastoral care, who spoke about
her experience after she decided to wear the
hijab:
I walked in and the place fell silent. I had a big gulp
in my throat …I just sat down and the staff were
shocked and I was asked ‘what’s all this about?’
pointing to my hijab….I could feel the vibes, small
things like when colleagues walked past in the
corridor, before they would stop and say hello and
now, just walked right by me… they look hesitant
to approach me…it’s funny how they see you dif-
ferently. (Shaista in Mohammed, 2018)
Such attitudes reflect the dangers of ‘other-
ing’ and excluding members of staff because
they are Muslim. Kashif, a maths teacher
who participated in the same study, expressed
concern:
What about the [Muslim] children? If that is how
the educated professionals are treated then what
kind of treatment do the [Muslim] children receive
[…]? I think they will be having a terrible time.
(Kashif in Mohammed, 2018)
Some answers to this question are provided
by a recent study of the experiences of
Muslim students in Glasgow schools (Riaz,
2018). The participants said that they per-
ceived themselves to be treated differently
and unfairly from other students in school by
being overlooked, ignored, discriminated
against and offered limited support with
studies and transition out of compulsory edu-
cation. The participating students spoke of
instances of racial and religious discrimina-
tion, and of lack of mutual respect and appre-
ciation of differences. These findings are in
834 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
line with a growing body of research which
shows that such experiences are frequent and
can make Muslim students feel marginalised
and alienated from the school culture (Ali,
2008; Kidd and Jamieson, 2011; Stevenson
et al., 2017).
Taken together, the findings outlined
above highlight the need to raise awareness
about anti-Muslim racism and its impact on
students and staff who identify as Muslim.
Given the opportunity, Muslim teachers can
play an important role in supporting the active
and meaningful participation of students
from minority ethnic backgrounds, including
but not limited to those of Muslim faith, and
in promoting anti-racist education (Ladson-
Billings, 1995, 2005; Shain, 2003; Kholi,
2014). The value and success of practices
which acknowledge and utilise the cultural,
religious and linguistic funds of knowledge
(Moll et al., 1992) that diverse learners bring
to school have led to an emerging consensus
that we need ‘diverse teachers for diverse
learners’ (Conteh et al., 2007; Santoro, 2013;
Egalite and Kisida, 2018). This does not sug-
gest that only Muslim teachers can teach suc-
cessfully Muslim children, but that they can
draw on their cultural and linguistic skills to
benefit the education of all children. The mere
fact that they are visible in school settings
and leading learning could perhaps challenge
the stereotypical representations that are held
by members of the school community (staff,
children and families – see Ladson-Billings,
1995; Cummins, 2000; Santoro and Reid,
2006; Cummins and Early, 2011).
Schools are important sites for young peo-
ple to encounter social justice. They are also
sites for teachers to encounter social justice.
Yet, whilst some Muslim teachers feel con-
fident in utilising their cultural and linguis-
tic skills, others choose to assimilate to the
dominant ‘White’ culture in order to ‘fit in’
(Kholi, 2014), and, in the context of Prevent,
so as to avoid suspicion that they may be
a threat to ‘Britishness’. This potentially
oppresses Muslim teachers’ identity and that
of the young Muslim people they teach.
The presence of Muslim teachers who are
confident in their Muslimness can play a key
part in supporting young people to develop
the critical literacy skills required to challenge
any form of discrimination that is conveyed
through the media and in social spaces includ-
ing schools. Two further quotes from the study
of Scottish Muslim teachers mentioned above
(Mohammed, 2018) help to illustrate how
these teachers’ cultural, religious and linguis-
tic skills can be of benefit to all the children
they teach (Mohammed, 2018).
Safia, a Muslim teacher, speaks of the
importance of not only being visible within
a classroom but also of promoting a positive
representation of her faith through her mere
presence. She cites the importance of build-
ing relationships by forming strong bonds
with the young people:
I am the only Muslim teacher in my school and I
spend a lot of my time breaking down the barri-
ers… I do think that one of the most important
things is to build relationships with the young
people…you get through to them and there is a
connection and for me I had it with an all-white
[sic] class and also with a mixed class – it’s impor-
tant in both cases. (Safia, in Mohammed, 2018)
Kashif, the Muslim maths teacher mentioned
earlier, talks about how he uses critical peda-
gogy tools to stimulate thinking:
I was talking to my Maths class who had just come
from Religious and Moral Education and I asked
them ‘when you think of peace which country do
you think of?’…it was not a trick question and the
class was mainly white [sic] kids. I threw it out
there and they said Buddhist. I said ‘that’s interest-
ing but do you know what is happening in Burma
at the moment?’ I have a close Burmese friend and
I gave them an example and they said ‘why isn’t
that in the news?’ and I said ‘well you think about
that…’ If I get the opportunity, I always throw
things in. (Kashif, in Mohammed, 2018)
These quotes showcase some of the benefits
of having diverse teaching staff who can
encourage young people to think and
challenge the dominant perspective.
­
Unfortunately, the percentage of BAME
teachers in schools, especially in promoted
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM EDUCATION
posts, is very small so the benefits that come
with their skills and experiences are not
widely available.
For many decades, Scotland has seen an
underrepresentation of BAME teachers in
schools. Systematic racism has been iden-
tified as a key factor in this, particularly in
relation to the lack of recruitment, reten-
tion and promotion of BAME teachers into
leadership roles (Arshad and Mitchell, 2007;
CRER, 2018). The lack of diversity within
the Scottish teaching workforce was high-
lighted in the Scottish government commis-
sioned report Addressing Race Inequality
in Scotland: The Way Forward launched in
December 2017 (Lyle, 2017). The number
of teachers from BAME backgrounds across
the whole profession has declined from 1.9%
of the total workforce in 2011 to 1.3% in
2016. Given the benefits associated with a
diverse teaching force, as illustrated above, it
is important to work towards identifying and
removing the barriers that stop BAME peo-
ple, including those who identify as Muslim,
from becoming teachers and then progressing
to promoted posts. Initial Teacher Education
can play an important role in this.
THE ROLE OF INITIAL TEACHER
EDUCATION
Scotland takes great pride in its education
system and within the Scottish Curriculum
for Excellence (Scottish Government, 2004),
opportunities to discuss Islam and Muslims
should form part of inter-disciplinary learn-
ing, where discussions take place across the
curriculum and not just during religious edu-
cation. Indeed, it then becomes necessary to
consider how initial teacher education insti-
tutions prepare student teachers to consider
their evolving professional identities and
their responsibility to promote social justice
through their practice.
Lander (2011) researched White student
teachers who were preparing to teach in a
835
secondary school in a diverse community.
Drawing on CRT, the research provides an
analysis of how the students’ ethnicity influ-
enced their perceptions of issues related to
race. The main findings were that White stu-
dent teachers do not see themselves as racial-
ised and are unaware of the privilege they
hold because of their ethnicity. These find-
ings reinforce the importance of addressing
the question posed by Arshad and Mitchell
(2007): with a homogenous teaching work-
force, are we able to provide appropriate edu-
cational experiences for young people from
diverse cultural backgrounds? Lander (2011:
362) asserts that ‘it is not until we question
the neutral white position promoted by ITE
[initial teacher education] policy and practice
that we will begin to make a real difference to
how student teachers perceive themselves in
relation to their BAME pupils and their posi-
tions as educators in a multiracial society’.
It is important that teacher educators con-
sider how they position themselves and their
student teachers in terms of ethnicity, culture
and religion. This point is further reinforced
by Bartolo and Smyth (2009), who present
two ‘diversity challenges’ for teacher educa-
tors. Firstly, they encourage teacher educators
to acknowledge the cultural, linguistic and
religious skills all student teachers bring with
them and, secondly, they ask teacher educa-
tors to help their student teachers examine
their own attitudes and reflect on their cul-
tural experiences.
Pearce (2014) undertook research focus-
ing on early career teachers’ preparedness
to deal with racist incidents. The findings
showed that although the beginning teach-
ers lacked the ability to conceptualise and
articulate examples of race discrimination,
they did raise questions about the school
processes, which often adopt a colour-blind
approach and fail to deal appropriately with
racist incidents. The findings highlight how
important it is that teacher educators take up
the diversity challenges outlined by Bartolo
and Smyth (2009). By acknowledging the
cultural, linguistic and religious skills all
836 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
student teachers bring with them and by
encouraging them to engage in self-reflection
and examination of their own attitude and
cultural experiences, teacher educators can
help their student teachers become more con-
fident in identifying and dealing with racist
incidents.
Pearce’s (2014) findings also highlight the
inadequacy of school processes that take a
colour-blind approach and do not deal with
racist incidents effectively. This is illustrated
by the incident reported in the Sunday Herald
article that opens the next section.
ADDRESSING ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM
THROUGH CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
The following incident, which is outlined in
a Sunday Herald article entitled ‘Probe after
pupils shout “Allahu Akbar…Boom” in
classroom days after Manchester Arena
bombing’, took place in a secondary school
in Glasgow, Scotland. According to the
report, ‘teacher and pupils imitated a suicide
bomber in a classroom, as Muslim pupils
looked on horrified’. A parent of a Muslim
female student contacted the school to share
her disquiet at what had occurred in the
classroom, which she perceived as an
Islamophobic incident. The response from
the school management and local govern-
ment officials was that ‘while what happened
was not appropriate, there was no evidence
of any Islamophobic behaviour, language or
intent’ (Swindon, 2017).
As with the incident involving Basit,
which was outlined in the introduction, the
response to this incident indicates that there
is an urgent need to develop a more effec-
tive approach to address anti-Muslim rac-
ism in schools. Critical pedagogy can aid
by providing a framework that can be used
to raise awareness in staff and students.
Critical pedagogy emphasises the centrality
of the social and cultural contexts in teaching
and learning, and aims to empower students
and staff to take social action, thus creating
a bridge between the school and the world
(Kincheloe, 2004).
The problem-posing approach that is
favoured by critical pedagogues (Freire,
1970) can be a powerful tool in address-
ing anti-Muslim racism. Incidents such as
the one involving Basit and the imitation of
a suicide bomber can serve as stimulus for
professional dialogue amongst staff and for
continuing professional development (CPD).
Staff can work in groups to analyse the inci-
dents and consider the assumptions on which
they are based, the perceptions of the dif-
ferent actors, and alternative endings. Anti-
Muslim racist incidents can also be used to
stimulate discussion and problem solving
with students. Creative approaches can offer
a range of response options for these discus-
sions (Bell and Roberts, 2010). For exam-
ple, students can be encouraged to respond
through artwork such as drawings, posters, or
graphic strips that retell the incident in visual
form and provide a different, more appropri-
ate ending to what happened.
Forum theatre (Boal, 2008) offers many
possibilities for critical drama-based work.
For example, students can develop scripts
based on their individual or shared experi-
ences. The scripts can then be acted out and
the spectators can intervene to develop angles
and suggest resolutions. Watching the enact-
ment of anti-Muslim racist incidents arising
from students’ own experiences can be very
powerful for the spectators and can help them
consider how to intervene.
Critical literacy is another useful approach
in anti-Muslim racist education. Being
exposed to the racialised experiences of char-
acters in story books and novels can help
students understand the roots and impact
of racism and consider their stance. From
young adult novels such as The Hate U Give
by Thomas (2017) to picture books such as
All Are Welcome by Penfold (2018), race is
covered in a range of books for children and
young adults. Ensuring that such books are
available in the school library for self-study
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND ANTI-MUSLIM RACISM EDUCATION
but also that they are included as resources for
lessons across subject areas can provide teach-
ers with many opportunities to explore race
and racism, including anti-Muslim racism.
Whilst there are many approaches and
resources teachers can use to address anti-
Muslim racism, some may not feel confident
in facilitating discussions on this topic due
to lack of opportunities to develop their own
understanding and stance. This is why it is
important that anti-racist education, includ-
ing specific reference to anti-Muslim rac-
ism, is part of initial teacher education and
CPD for practising teachers. It is in this con-
text that practitioners can explore the issues
and build the confidence required to address
them effectively with their students. Finally,
anti-Muslim racism education should be a
whole school approach. Staff should work to
develop a shared understanding of the issues
and appropriate responses to them so that
they can feel prepared to intervene, proac-
tively and responsibly, as needed.
A whole school approach should include:
• Discussions of complex and sensitive issues around
social justice and equality; some of these can be
initiated in assembly and followed up in class.
• Encouraging and dealing with questions from
young people following any prejudiced media
reporting; these can be addressed as they arise
but followed up in a more systematic manner.
• Curriculum content, resources texts and other
materials that have positive references to Islam
and Muslim achievement or influence.
• Exploring the role of the media in documenting
reports on Islam. Students should be given the
opportunity to consider the different forms of
discrimination that are evident in newspaper
articles which demonise Muslims and can help
young people to understand anti-Muslim preju-
dice.
• Working closely with parents and the wider
community.
• Collaborations with relevant external agencies
such as the local mosque and key speakers.
• Supporting Muslim staff during Ramadhan and
religious festivals and being aware that Muslim
children may need to leave school to attend
Jummah prayers.
837
CONCLUSION
As indicated in this chapter, anti-Muslim
racism is a real problem in the UK. Education
can play a very important role in raising
awareness, encouraging self-reflection and
developing knowledge and skills that can be
used to disrupt anti-Muslim racism and to
support those affected by it. Critical peda-
gogy and Critical Race Theory offer a useful
analytical framework and robust tools that
can help schools to deliver effective anti-­
Muslim racism education.
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Pedagogy of Connectedness:
Cultivating a Community of
Caring, Compassionate Social
Justice Warriors in the Classroom
INTRODUCTION1
To be loved and taken care of are two of our
deepest, most basic needs as human beings.
However, for many of us, living in this world
means living with many contradictions. We
live within the pressures of care and neglect,
hope and despair, connectedness and discon-
nectedness. Our human hunger for meaning,
our desire for wholeness, and our wish for
well-being are often clouded by negative
feelings and emotions we have toward our-
selves and others, traumatic experiences both
past and present, and the social norms/values
that construct our belief systems.
When we do not feel loved and taken care
of, we oftentimes experience disconnected-
ness, which may lead to undesired feelings and
emotions that can further deepen our sense of
disconnectedness. Brown (2010a: 23) argues
that disconnection is rooted in the absence
of love and a sense of belonging, which are
‘essential to the human experience’. She
writes that ‘when those needs are not met,
71
Revital Zilonka
we do not function as we were meant to. We
break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache.
We hurt others. We get sick.’ (2010a: 26).
The absence of love and a sense of belong-
ing, she asserts, ‘will always lead to suffering’
(2010: 26). Brown argues that the ramifica-
tions of disconnection within US American
society are disastrous and evident. She states
that ‘we are the most in debt, obese, addicted,
and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history’
(Brown, 2010b, 15:32). Brown adds that we
use these behaviors to numb bad feelings such
as grief, shame, fear, and disappointment. By
numbing these feelings, we also numb joy,
gratitude, and happiness, thus making us feel
miserable (Brown, 2010b).
Brown’s (2010a, 2010b) scholarly work
helped me to understand what I witnessed
and experienced during my first year as an
international graduate student in the United
States while adjusting to a new culture and
new social norms. I started to pay attention
to the ramifications of disconnectedness
within US American society. Learning about
842 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
students’ accounts of anxiety and depres-
sion was heartbreaking, particularly while I
witnessed the increasing number of people
who experience homelessness, addiction, and
mental illnesses. As an international student
I explored the meaning of those phenomena
and I began to look at all of them through a
prism of dis/connectedness in order to see
the connections between social disconnect-
edness, violence, dehumanization, exploi-
tation, and how they are influenced by US
American norms and values. It occurred to
me that analyzing and understanding social
dis/connectedness might be the missing link
to explaining injustices and inequities in the
United States (as well as around the globe).
For four years I ‘experimented’ with my
pedagogy and curriculum as a Cultural
Foundations in Education course instructor.
I utilized a social dis/connectedness praxis
as an anchor for understanding injustices and
inequities. In this chapter, I explore what it
means to experiment with pedagogy and
curricula that are concerned with social dis/
connectedness and how both supported my
students and myself in restoring connected-
ness in the classroom.
THE WORLD AND THE WORD
The world tends to be a place where we drift
between despair and hope, experiencing
social isolation and alienation while yearning
for human connection (Palmer, 2004) and a
sense of belonging. We live in a world in
which many parts are ruled by cruel, greedy,
and corrupt government officials and corpo-
rations that advance neoliberal ideology and
practices which leave millions of people
defenseless. Many people’s sense of power-
lessness can be attributed to different causes
(e.g., oppressive practices such as discrimi-
nation and legislation that limits people’s
freedom) and manifests itself in diverse ways
(e.g., loneliness, depression, and anxiety).
All these causes and manifestations can lead
people to experience disconnectedness,
which consequently deepens their sense of
powerlessness.
Shor (1987) writes about the powerless-
ness and confusion that people experience
and argues that these experiences can only
be understood through critical thinking.
He admits that ‘most people are alienated
from their own conceptual habits of mind’
(1987: 47), wonders why there are no masses
of people ‘engaged in social reflection’, and
asks ‘what prevents popular awareness of
how the whole system operates and which
alternatives would best serve human needs’
(1987: 47). For that, we need to engage in
developing a new toolkit that includes radical
language, thought, and praxis in order to chal-
lenge the dominant and hegemonic paradigms
within society. Giroux (2011) writes that
educators and other cultural workers need a new
political and pedagogical language for addressing
the changing contexts and issues facing a world in
which capital draws upon an unprecedented con-
vergence of resource – financial, cultural, political,
economic, scientific, military, and technology – to
exercise powerful and diverse forms of hegemony.
(Giroux, 2011: 69)
Critical pedagogy is comprised of the radical
language, thought, and praxis that is needed
to challenge the chaotic reality we live in and
to empower the powerless. Its philosophy
and methods can assist us in reconsidering
our role in the world – as teachers and stu-
dents – to instill hope that this reality is not
permanent and can be changed. The struggle
for humanizing personal and professional
space becomes the struggle for ‘the emanci-
pation of labor, for the overcoming of aliena-
tion […] for the affirmation of men and
women as persons’ (Freire, 2010: 44).
Huerta-Charles (2007) reminds us that
‘within the critical pedagogy perspective
there is a hope that teachers will become
agents of social change’ (2007: 250), employ-
ing critical pedagogy in our classrooms
which can advance a sense of agency. In a
critical classroom, not only can we feel less
 PEDAGOGY OF CONNECTEDNESS
powerless, but we have the opportunity to
reclaim our power. Thus, education becomes
a liberatory, radical act that humanizes people
who find their voice.
Critical pedagogy is hopeful and sees
education ‘as the practice of freedom – as
opposed to education as the practice of
domination’ (Freire, 2010: 81). It is an ‘edu-
cational movement, guided by passion and
principle, to help students develop conscious-
ness of freedom, recognize authoritarian ten-
dencies, and connect knowledge to power
and the ability to take constructive action’
(Giroux, 2010: 15). To become a liberatory
critical pedagogue, one must recognize that
education is rooted in loving relationships
we cultivate with others and with the world.
Freire (1971) writes,
To be a good liberating educator, you need above
all to have faith in human beings. You need to
love. You must be convinced that the fundamental
effort of education is to help with the liberation of
people, never their domestication. You must be
convinced that when people reflect on their domi-
nation they begin a first step in changing their
relationship to the world. (Freire, 1971: 62, as
quoted in Shor, 1993: 25)
Rendón (2009: 142) adds that ‘faculty can
assist students to raise their self-awareness,
find purpose, voice, and self-worth, as well
as develop tolerance and learn to recognize
social inequities and take action against
them’ – much needed traits from which we
can all benefit.
There are four guiding principles of criti-
cal pedagogy: (1) uncovering, analyzing, and
understanding power structures; (2) a com-
mitment to empowerment that contributes
to developing a sense of agency; (3) sustain-
ing dialogue that enhances connectedness
and a sense of belonging; and (4) critiquing
the reality and generating – individually and
collectively – new knowledge(s). These can
be deployed as a means to counteract what
Giroux (2011: 8) describes as ‘a real edu-
cational crisis in North America’ due to the
neoliberal attacks it has been subjected to in
843
the past decades in order to ‘defend public
and higher education as a resource vital to
the democratic and civic life of the nation’
(Giroux, 2011: 77).
While I agree with Giroux, I am also
intrigued by Weiner’s (2007: 65) query.
‘[W]hat if critical pedagogy’s project was nei-
ther the end of capitalism nor the radicaliza-
tion of democracy…but rather the end of the
world as we have learned to know it?’ To his
question, I add the following two questions:
1 What if the critical pedagogy project is about
connectedness?
2 What will it mean to reinvent critical pedagogy
through a dis/connectedness prism?
As educators, we cannot ignore the harsh
reality that many people, including our
students, cope with daily. Students come
from all walks of life and carry past or cur-
rent experiences of hurt, disappointment,
heartbreak, loss, anxiety, and pain. Those
experiences are part of who they are and
many of those experiences are attributed to
socioeconomic structures that advance a
select few while subjecting others to a life
of hardship. In other words, social phe-
nomena such as homelessness, untreated
and undertreated mental illnesses, drug
addiction, and alcohol abuse do not happen
in a vacuum, and neither does discrimina-
tion against people of color or people with
disabilities. When our students come to our
classrooms to learn about justice issues and
how those issues relate to schooling and
education, they do not come as empty ves-
sels. They all bring firsthand knowledge
and experiences of social disconnectedness
and therefore social reflection must begin
with those personal experiences. Applying
critical pedagogy principles in the class-
room in order to challenge dominance and
hegemonic paradigms within society is
important. However, what I suggest is to
hold off on discussions of hegemony and
dominance and begin by focusing on the
students and their stories of connectedness
and disconnectedness.
844 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
CONNECTEDNESS, COMMUNITIES,
AND THE CLASSROOM
Recognizing that ‘the search for meaning and
connection arises from a basic human need to
belong’ (Noddings, 2017: 1), critical peda-
gogues oftentimes strive to create classrooms
that foster a sense of community. Working
together, learning from each other, consider-
ing multiple perspectives, and participating
in a collective act of imagining better possi-
bilities can result in meaningful learning
experiences. Two possible outcomes might
be that students will realize the importance
and benefits of investing in I/Thou relation-
ships (Buber and Smith, 1937) and abundant
communities (Block, 2008).
By their very nature, communities nur-
ture a sense of belonging (Block, 2008)
and affirm practices of love (hooks, 2001)
and care (Held, 2006), as well as enhancing
notions of hope (Miller et al., 2011). Critical
classrooms that engage in collective efforts to
build communities also function as a form of
resistance to neoliberal ideology and individ-
ualism in a market-driven capitalist society.
Attick (2017) reminds us that,
[i]n a neoliberal model, where students’ economic
productivity and market value become the purpose
of schooling, teaching becomes less an act of
developing well-rounded, civic-minded, engaged
human beings, and more focused on developing
the specific skills that students will need to partici-
pate as both producers and consumers in the
market. (Attick, 2017: 41)
Thus, shifting the focus from market-driven
education to a liberatory education that
‘might help students to get meaning from
their academics’ (Noddings, 2017: 4)
becomes an imperative task for critical peda-
gogues who want ‘to prepare students for
effective citizenship in a participatory democ-
racy’ (Gutmann, 1987, as cited in Noddings,
2017: 5). Consequently, cultivating commu-
nities can reduce the culture of consumerism,
loneliness, powerlessness, and anxiety that
are associated with disconnectedness.
Shapiro (2006) argues that nurturing a
sense of belonging to a community should
be ‘our vision for education [that] speaks
strongly to the need for meaning and purpose
in our lives’ (2006: 75). He writes that com-
munity ‘provides the means through which
we may receive the recognition of our pres-
ence, and affirmation of our value’, and that
‘we are “made” for relationship’ (2006: 76) –
two assertions that resonate with the claims
that as human beings we are ‘wired’ to con-
nect (Brown, 2010a) and to live in communi-
ties (Hrdy, 2009). Block (2008) argues that
community is the optimal space to restore
the sense of belonging we have lost, and that
community is where we can act on and value
‘our interdependence and sense of belonging’
(2008: 3). He explains that when we feel we
belong to a community, we ‘act as an inves-
tor, owner, and creator of this place. To be
welcome, even if we are strangers, as if we
came to the right place and are affirmed for
that choice’ (2008: 3). He urges us to foster
communities where everyone has ‘the expe-
rience of being connected to those around
them and knows that their safety and success
are dependent on the success of all others’
(2008: 3).
Community teaches us to take care of one
another, understanding that our well-being
is a reflection of the well-being of others
(Block, 2008). hooks (2001) believes that
community is also essential to learning the
art of loving, and argues that the absence of
a sense of community leads to a scarcity of
opportunities to practice love (2001: 129).
She writes that
love lays the foundation for the constructive build-
ing of community with strangers. The love we
make in community stays with us wherever we go.
With this knowledge as our guide, we make any
place we go a place where we return to love.
(hooks, 2001: 144)
Consciously adding the community element
to critical classrooms fosters the conditions
in which students might experience closeness
and intimacy with classmates they learn to
 PEDAGOGY OF CONNECTEDNESS
care about and trust. Shapiro (2006) believes
that the classroom can become ‘a space
where all children are fully recognized and
their unique presence unconditionally
valued’, and that it can ‘provide care and
support for everyone’ (2006: 77). He writes,
[C]ommunity is both a place that asserts the fun-
damentally equal value of all lives, and, at the
same time, a place that compassionately addresses
us as being with differences that must not be
treated as sources of humiliation or unfair disad-
vantages. (Shapiro, 2006: 77)
Building communities – within the school
system or elsewhere – necessitates collective
efforts. It necessitates going against the grain
of how we were socialized to live, learn, and
love. What is possible is oftentimes hidden
from us or, at the very least, under-discussed
in the education system. Education can bring
people together while opening up spaces for
students and educators to experience what
hooks (2003: xv) defines as a ‘practice of
freedom [that can] enable us to confront feel-
ings of loss and restore our sense of connec-
tion’. Both hooks (2003) and Shapiro (2006)
wish to witness efforts of generating mean-
ingful connections in our education system.
hooks suggests that we should confront what
stands in the way of connectedness (2008: xv),
while Shapiro reminds us that ‘when we say
that something is meaningful we are making
a statement about connections. Something
becomes meaningful to us because it seems to
connect things together in our minds’ (2006:
78). He adds that ‘it seems that we are…
compelled to take the separate and nominally
unrelated fragments we encounter in our
world, and find ways to connect them together
so that they can be understood as whole and
related phenomena’ (2006: 78).
It is hard to deny that many of these
fragments, which ‘leave us disturbed and
troubled’ (Shapiro, 2006: 78), are there by
accident. In other words, governments, cor-
porations, and religious institutions put many
obstacles in our way that impede our ability
to connect, care for, and wholeheartedly love
845
one another. Moreover, values such as indi-
vidualism and meritocracy, driven and deep-
ened by neoliberal forces (which are very
much reflected in legislation, regulations,
and policies), lessen the role of communi-
ties in our lives. Shapiro reminds us that ‘the
more we live, think, and act in individualistic
ways, the more we live in ways that separate
us from others, the more shrunken is our
sense of meaning’ (2006: 79).
Ideally, communities make sure that we
are not alone. Shapiro writes that meaning-
ful community ‘cannot be separated from
social justice’ (2006: 77). Thus, in order to
counteract social alienation, fragmentation,
and loss of meaning, we ought to recognize
what we have lost, and calculate the immense
costs of these losses. In order to accomplish
this, we need to imagine new possibilities
for ourselves and others, as well as to fight
against cultures that are ‘pushing human
beings toward lives of spiritual emptiness
and despair’ (Shapiro, 2006: 79). Thus, the
classroom can become a space for students
to generate meaning and new possibilities, to
combat despair and cultivate hope through
community building, and to practice love
ethic (hooks, 2001) and wrestle with concepts
that are concerned with dis/connectedness.
Students who have taken a course with me
said that sitting in a classroom that combined
discussions about dis/connectedness with
efforts to form a sense of community created
meaningful opportunities for lifelong learn-
ing. The pedagogical strategies that I chose
to facilitate in the course were standard for
many critical pedagogues (e.g., sitting in cir-
cles, emphasis on working in groups, writing
short reflections in notebooks and sharing in
couples, groups, or with the entire class if
they feel comfortable sharing). I also used
games, art activities, taking turns to read
aloud children’s books, a five-minute check
in at the beginning of each class, and making
sure that we all knew each other’s names by
the end of the second week. All of those in-
classroom practices were modeled, explained,
discussed, and analyzed throughout each
846 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
semester. Commitment to empowerment and
sustaining a dialogue were two of the most
important pedagogical models I insisted on in
every interaction with the students.
Most of the students responded well to the
pedagogy. Working in groups, sitting in cir-
cles, expressing emotions, and sharing per-
sonal stories made us evolve from strangers
into caring, compassionate people who got to
know each other and develop close relation-
ships. I am not suggesting that each semes-
ter we co-created a community. However, I
conducted interviews with a dozen students
and based on what they reported in their
papers, there was definitely a sense of com-
munity. Belonging to a group of people who
care about social justice issues and are pas-
sionate about social change and building
communities – while realizing their own
­ discuss race and racism. Specifically, Daria
social responsibility, both personally and
professionally – showed them the building
blocks of how they could construct similar
spaces in their own future classrooms.
Lisa, a student in her mid 20s, felt included
from the very beginning of the semester.
Arranging the desks and chairs into a circle
every class allowed her to make eye contact
with the other students, which she found
helpful to not be distracted by cell phone or
laptop usage. She mentioned that
our circle offered more of a community-feel
because students were much more inclined to pay
attention to whomever was speaking, and in
return, better able to give responses and feed-
back – no one could simply dismiss or tune-out to
what the other was saying – unlike in more typical
classrooms where students all face the front of the
room, in which students are mostly responding
and reacting to the teacher.
The efforts we put in co-creating a sense of
community in the classroom helped us to
discuss controversial and uncomfortable
topics, such as racism. Laying the founda-
tions of love ethic from the very beginning of
the semester helped us to have respectful
conversations about race and racism later in
the semester. Daria, an Asian student in her
early 20s, said that the efforts of forming a
sense of community contributed to experi-
encing the class as a safe space to speak
one’s mind (a reoccurring theme with all the
students in my study). She explained,
[What I loved in the class was] how we were all
able to be so open…and speak our minds and not
be afraid of what we had to say. I just loved how
open you let us be…versus other classes where
there are some things we are not allowed to talk
about and are forbidden. This was a class where
we just come and express ourselves and say
anything.
The ability to express one’s emotions and
opinions in a safe environment from the
beginning of the semester helped the
­students – especially those who came from
marginalized communities – to be able to
felt respected in the class, which directly
influenced her willingness to participate in
those discussions. She said that
when we were all just sitting there respecting each
other…listening to what others had to say…I
remember feeling like ‘oh, wow’, you know, we
can all sit down like adults and have meaningful
conversations and not want to judge anyone. I felt
like as if we started to get more closer…the more
touchy the topic was, when we were able to talk
about it, the more I felt okay, we are a commu-
nity…we were so open with talking to each other
about our personal stories.
The students’ accounts about how the peda-
gogy of the course helped them to feel
included, respected, and safe resonate with
Brown’s (2010a) definition of connection.
She writes that people feel connected ‘when
they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they
can give and receive without judgment; and
when they derive sustenance and strength
from the relationship’ (Brown, 2010a: 19).
Being able to engage in dialogue is essential
to restoring a sense of belonging and cultivat-
ing connectedness in the classroom. When
students are engaged in Freirean dialogue,
‘the uniqueness of each voice is heard’
(hooks, 2010: 57) and they do not feel afraid
that they will be shamed by classmates
 PEDAGOGY OF CONNECTEDNESS
and/or teachers (hooks, 2010). Dialogue
opens up spaces where students feel safe to
share, to make mistakes, and to reclaim their
voice without fear of being judged or mocked.
When we cultivate practices of Freirean dia-
logue, when students experience connected-
ness with their teachers, classmates, and with
the curriculum, students can then progress to
analyzing social justice issues and critiquing
the harshness of reality.
CONNECTEDNESS AND
SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION
In this section I situate dis/connectedness
within Social Justice Education (SJE) schol-
arship. I assert that (1) teaching SJE through
a dis/connectedness prism can strengthen
students’ understanding of current injustices
and inequities, and (2) incorporating dis/­
connectedness discourses into SJE courses
opens up critical spaces to develop new per-
spectives on individualism, meritocracy, and
neoliberalism. Interjecting dis/connectedness
into SJE may pave new ways to continue the
important work of theorizing, praxis, and
broadening SJE scholarship, as well as
making it more inclusive, accessible, rele-
vant, and engaging for students.
SJE draws from multiple perspectives and
simultaneously relies on the guiding princi-
ples of critical pedagogy in order to create the
necessary conditions within the classroom for
transformation to occur. SJE examines forms
of oppression and provides tools to under-
stand social phenomena, such as xenophobia,
homelessness, and rape culture, that are politi-
cally, economically, socially, and historically
contextualized (and can also be analyzed and
understood through the dis/connectedness
prism). It also examines how privilege and
power structures shape social inequities and
impact access to public spaces and services.
Like critical pedagogy, SJE involves criti-
quing and asking epistemological questions,
such as who creates bodies of knowledge,
847
who gets to decide what the truth is, and
whose knowledge is counted as important.
It also asks questions regarding policies and
curriculum decision making, such as whose
knowledge is excluded from the curriculum,
whose history we keep outside of the text-
books, and whose voices are silenced while
others are granted freedom to exercise and to
maintain their privilege. All of these practices
shape and influence the way we, as individu-
als and communities, treat each other. SJE
offers new ways to look at the world around
us and to advance social change. In Hytten’s
(2006) words,
a disposition to ask why we believe what we
believe, and how we have become socialized to
accept certain realities, can help us to ask better
questions about our social condition, challenge
givens and open up alternatives and possibilities.
(2006: 443)
To better tie education to social justice, I go
to Bell’s (1997) work, whose conceptualiza-
tion of social justice as both a process and a
goal resonates with my work, as it is grounded
in understanding how individualism, meri-
tocracy, and neoliberalism inform and impact
manifestations and practices of disconnect-
edness in the United States. According to
Bell (1997: 3), the goal of social justice is
‘full and equal participation of all groups in
a society that is mutually shaped to meet
their needs’. The wish for equality and equity
is linked to fairness within a society, where
‘individuals are both self-determining … and
interdependent’ (1997: 3), so individuals can
gain both a sense of agency and social
responsibility.
Bell (1997: 4) describes social justice
as ‘democratic and participatory, inclusive
and affirming of human agency and human
capacities for working collaboratively to cre-
ate change’. She writes that social change
cannot eradicate domination ‘through coer-
cive tactics’ (1997: 4) in order to achieve
the goal of social justice, that any discus-
sion about social justice requires an analysis
and understanding of oppression and how it
848 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
operates on the individual, cultural, and insti-
tutional levels. Murrell (2006: 81) writes that
social justice involves ‘a disposition toward
recognizing and eradicating all forms of
oppression and differential treatment extant
in the practices and policies of institutions, as
well as a fealty to participatory democracy as
the means of this action’. Both Bell’s (1997)
and Murrell’s (2006) definitions of social jus-
tice speak to dis/connectedness in profound
ways. As an ideal, it recognizes institutional-
ized unfairness and speaks to the despair, loss
of agency, and hope that many experience
due to indoctrination of individualism and the
manner in which neoliberalism functions in
public spheres. Analysis of power, privilege,
and oppression requires that we understand
what it means to live within a society satu-
rated with injustices and inequities, where
participatory democracy is in decline.
Recognizing the ‘devastating human and
environmental costs’ (Hytten, 2006: 441) that
neoliberalism, globalization, and capitalism
have caused over the years, Hytten connects
SJE to democratic education and argues for
teaching ‘the habits, dispositions, attitudes,
and behaviors necessary for democratic
citizenship’ (2006: 441). She explains that
teaching for social justice means ‘to engage
the very real struggles that exist in the world
around us in classrooms and in the broader
life of schools’ (2006: 441), which requires
us to think critically about what is in front
of us, envisioning and ‘imagining alternative
possibilities’ (2006: 442) for the future. Thus,
critical thinking and reflection become nec-
essary components of SJE that seek not only
to raise awareness about what is wrong in our
society, but also to equip people with radical
tools so they can right the many wrongs.
Sensoy and DiAngelo (2010) write that
‘a great deal of scholarship in social justice
studies is focused on the gap between the ide-
als of social justice and the practice of social
justice’ (2010: xviii, emphasis in original).
They prefer to use the term critical social
justice in order to distinguish their ‘stand-
point on social justice from mainstream
standpoints’ (2010: xviii). Those main-
stream standpoints relate to the common
understanding of social justice ‘as the prin-
ciples of “fairness” and “equality” for all
people and respect for their basic human
rights’ (Sensoy and DiAngelo, 2010: xvii).
Sensoy and DiAngelo argue that this com-
mon understanding is insufficient because
it does not engage us in critically think-
ing of what fairness, equality, or human
rights mean. They suggest adopting a criti-
cal approach for SJE, one that ‘recognizes
inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric
of society (i.e., as structural), and actively
seeks to change it’ (2010: xviii). Their criti-
cal SJE principles acknowledge the indi-
viduality of people while understanding
that people are also members of unequally
valued social groups, which determine their
access to resources in society.
The critical component in Sensoy and
DiAngelo’s stance on SJE is also related to
one’s willingness to self-reflect. Those who
participate in social justice work ‘must be
engaged in self-reflection about their own
socialization into [certain social] groups
(their “positionality”) and must strategically
act from that awareness in ways that chal-
lenge social injustice’ (2010: xviii). In other
words, when it comes to the critical SJE
classroom, as educators we must be commit-
ted to continuously sharpening our work by
updating, reinventing, and questioning our
methods and our stances. Going back to the
radical toolkit I mentioned earlier in the chap-
ter, which includes language, thought, and
praxis (Shor, 1987), Hytten (2006) reminds
social justice educators that
[a]s part of the journey toward justice, we need
to use the best tools that we have available to
us now, including the tools of critical thinking
that philosophers so value and the models we
have developed of what a just society looks
like, while also troubling those tools and
remaining reflexive about the ways in which
our social positionalities (and the blindnesses2
that are necessarily part of those positionalities)
limit the potential effectiveness of these tools.
(Hytten, 2006: 445)
 PEDAGOGY OF CONNECTEDNESS
Critical SJE means that the scholarship does
not stagnate or remain theoretical. Social and
political consciousness must be translated
into action. Critical SJE means that, along-
side learning social theories and understand-
ing that inequalities and inequities exist in
our society, we make sure that we also
engage in praxis.
The Critical Social Justice
Classroom
Social Justice Education (SJE) is hopeful.
Even in dark times rife with institutionalized
injustice, dehumanization, hyper-capitalism,
overvaluing individualism, and other harmful
practices (not only to people, but also to ani-
mals in the food industry and to ecosystems),
we can witness a growing number of educa-
tors who advocate for SJE and implement its
discourses and scholarship in all content areas.
Like critical pedagogy, SJE calls for a non-
traditional classroom setting where a student
can be ‘an active participant, not a passive
consumer’ (hooks, 1994: 14), and where
pedagogy and education open up spaces for
students to defeat notions of individualism by
collaborating, investing in relationships, and
restoring a sense of belonging and connect-
edness. A classroom setting that incorporates
critical pedagogy and SJE is a classroom that
values students’ well-being (hooks, 1994: 15)
and expressions (hooks, 1994: 20), where
social justice consciousness can flourish.
Nontraditional classroom settings acknowl-
edge the significance of community building,
relationships, and the importance of genuine
and inclusive dialogue. hooks (1993: 122)
reminds us that ‘[d]ialogue is a powerful ges-
ture of love. Caring talk is a sweet communion
that deepens our bonds’. Thus, investing in
relationships and communities becomes cen-
tral to the work of SJE. Bettez (2011) explains,
Critical communities thus might be defined as inter-
connected, porously bordered, shifting webs of
people who through dialogue, active listening, and
849
critical question posing, assist each other in critically
thinking through issues of power, oppression, and
privilege… Such critical communities…are essential
to sustaining social justice efforts. (2011: 10)
Achieving a sense of connectedness within
critical classrooms is possible. Educators can
strive to create a space where students can
learn about education-related social justice
issues within the context of a broader inves-
tigation of social justice and realize their
personal and professional responsibility to be
part of desired social change. Giroux (2011)
reminds us that
it seems imperative that educators revitalize the
struggle to create conditions in which learning
would be linked to social change in a wide variety
of social sites, and pedagogy would take on the
task of regenerating both a renewed sense of
social and political agency and a critical subversion
of dominant power itself. (2011: 71)
When it comes to classrooms, Hackman
(2005: 103) writes that ‘social justice educa-
tion encourages students to take an active
role in their own education and supports
teachers in creating empowering, democratic,
and critical educational environments’. The
active role that students take happens only in
critical classrooms where the educator recog-
nizes their own role as a part of a transforma-
tive education. Hackman (2005) characterizes
five essential components that social justice
educators need to have: content mastery (fac-
tual information, historical contextualization,
and a macro-to-micro content analysis); tools
for critical analysis (e.g., debating and criti-
quing contents, praxis in order to provide
students pathways for action instead of over-
whelming them with only knowledge and
information); tools for social change (to help
move students from cynicism and despair to
hope and possibility); tools for personal
reflection (self-reflection is critical, specifi-
cally an analysis of power and privilege); and
an awareness of multicultural group dynam-
ics (critiquing the makeup of the class,
including racial relations, diversity of the
students, and social justice issues that are
850 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
concerned with immigration, language, etc.)
(Hackman, 2005: 104–8).
These components can be recognized in the
writing of many SJE scholars (e.g., Darder,
2002; hooks, 1994, 2010; Renner, 2009;
Vacarr, 2001) who have shared their teach-
ing as well as the experiences they have had
with students in their own classrooms. In their
writing, a common theme arises repeatedly:
a sense of hope and possibility embedded in
both critical pedagogy and SJE, as well as
other virtues as enumerated by Freire (1998).
It is fundamental for us to know that without certain
qualities or virtues, such as a generous loving heart,
respect for others, tolerance, humility, a joyful dispo-
sition, love of life, openness to what is new, a disposi-
tion to welcome change, perseverance in the
struggle, a refusal of determinism, a spirit of hope,
and an openness to justice, progressive pedagogical
practice is not possible. (Freire, 1998: 108)
Both critical pedagogy and SJE hold the hope-
ful belief that our future is not yet determined.
Critical pedagogy and SJE provide us with
opportunities to rethink our stances on indi-
vidualism, meritocracy, and neoliberalism.
They open up spaces to deeply understand the
immense costs of disconnectedness and to
begin the important work of restoring connect-
edness. Making the world a better place for
everybody is a lifelong journey that requires
commitment and collective effort from all
involved in this important work: teachers, stu-
dents, school administrators, policy makers,
and so on. The possibilities are only limited by
our inability to imagine. Reinventing peda-
gogical tools and strategies while equipping
educators and students with radical language,
thought, and praxis can revolutionize not only
the school system, but society at large.
PEDAGOGY OF CONNECTEDNESS
The pedagogy I have developed over the past
four years, which I coin Pedagogy of
Connectedness, is grounded in critical-feminist
pedagogy and praxis, while drawing on
interdisciplinary scholarship that is concerned
with interpersonal relationships, community
building, love ethic, and care. Pedagogy of
Connectedness encourages students to first take
a look at their own lives and to examine their
stance on dis/connectedness, their relationships
with themselves, their family, their friends, the
communities they belong to, and the world.
This becomes their entry point into a discussion
about different social justice issues, because
everybody experiences pain, loss, heartbreak,
or disappointment at some point in their lives.
For example, a student who was raised by a
single mother and did not have a good relation-
ship with their father can feel more empathy
toward a teenage immigrant whose undocu-
mented father was deported. Another student
coping with a learning disability can relate to
linguistic oppression which immigrants often-
times are subjected to, and the feeling of pow-
erlessness when dealing with filling out official
forms for accommodations.
Pedagogy of Connectedness speaks to both
minds and hearts. The connections students
make with social justice issues are not merely
intellectual, but also emotional. Pedagogy of
Connectedness asserts that dis/connectedness
is something we can all relate to because of
our lived experiences. Thus, examining these
experiences at the beginning of the semes-
ter allows us to relate to others in profound
ways, especially when it comes to our work
as educators who serve diverse individuals
and groups in the school system. Only after
establishing some understanding of dis/con-
nectedness and the role of community in one’s
life can the collective investigation of social
justice issues begin. In other words, concepts
of dis/connectedness and community have
become our frameworks that we keep return-
ing and referring to time and again.
CURRICULUM OF CONNECTEDNESS
A pedagogy that is concerned with social
disconnectedness while enhancing a sense of
 PEDAGOGY OF CONNECTEDNESS
connectedness, belonging, and hope – three
pillars of the course that assisted students in
learning about social justice issues – must be
supported by a rich, diverse curriculum. In
the Cultural Foundations in Education course
I taught, the curriculum was as important as
the pedagogy – one complemented the other.
While I was experimenting with pedagogical
strategies, I also experimented with the
­ a curriculum for us…each of us embodies
curriculum.
The curriculum includes the readings,
movies, and classroom activities that foster
not only philosophical discussions about dis/
connectedness, community, and social jus-
tice issues, but also create opportunities for
students to invest in relationships with each
other and to co-create a sense of community
in the classroom. As we began each semester
as a group of strangers, the curriculum helped
us to gradually establish meaningful relation-
ships rooted in love, compassion, and care,
while unpacking social justice concepts such
as power structures, oppression, and possi-
bilities for liberation.
The modules of the Cultural Foundations
in Education course were designed in such
a way that, over the semester, students were
introduced to multiple voices from around
the world, representing various social justice
issues (e.g., social class differences, racial
biases, and language barriers among immigrant
students and people of color). The written cur-
riculum components – the syllabus, the lesson
plans, and the occasional h­ andouts – included
poems, music video clips, short stories, docu-
mentary movies, books, and scholarly articles
that demonstrate the richness of our human-
ity and its struggles. The curriculum exposed
students to local and global perspectives of the
ways in which we are disconnected and the
human yearning to restore a sense of connect-
edness, belonging, and hope.
The unwritten curriculum is represented in
the ways we are all living curricula for each
other (Schubert, 1986). The ‘living’ curricu-
lum, carried by the course’s p­ articipants –
the students, the instructor, and the guest
­speakers – was rich and diverse as it brought
851
lived experiences that resonated with the
written curriculum. Schubert (1986: 423)
writes that ‘teachers and students who learn
from each other take with them an attitude
that all life’s encounters have a pedagogic
or curricular quality, [which is] the drive to
encounter increased meaning and growth’.
Schubert believes that everyone we meet ‘is
a complex set of knowledges that interacts
in ever unexpected ways when we encoun-
ter other people who also embody unique
knowledges of their own’ (Harper, 2014: 67).
RESTORING CONNECTEDNESS
IN THE CLASSROOM
The curriculum and pedagogy encompassed
in the sections of the course I taught for
seven semesters provided weekly opportuni-
ties to rethink and reconsider ideas, ideals,
and practices that are embedded in US
American culture, its norms, and its values.
We explored social justice issues alongside
understanding how individualism and meri-
tocracy function in a divided, polarized soci-
ety. Analyzing our reality and critiquing it in
meaningful ways requires a rich, diverse
curriculum that validates and empowers stu-
dents from all walks of life while challenging
their beliefs and assumptions.
Providing multiple voices and perspectives
exposed students to different ways of being,
thinking, and living. This was fundamental
for the process of consciousness growth and
imagining a better future for themselves and
for the communities to which they belong.
The curriculum did not provide ‘absolute
answers’ (Schubert, 2016), but rather opened
up spaces for students to ask more questions
about the society and culture they participate
in. The Curriculum of Connectedness pro-
vided what Walker (1980: 81) calls ‘rich con-
fusion’. The Curriculum of Connectedness’
spirit is critical, feminist, and inclusive, and
it is first and foremost about people’s lived
852 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
experiences. Both the pedagogy and the cur-
riculum bring to life the silenced voices and
forgotten histories and herstories (Carroll,
1976) of those who unnecessarily suffer.
Situating people’s lived experiences in the
center of the course, while focusing on social
justice issues and providing opportunities for
transformation, is what I believe to be a very
valuable way to reinterpret and reinvent Paulo
Freire’s teaching for a 21st-century context.
Notes
1  Parts of this manuscript can be found in the
author’s dissertation, ‘Connectedness in Educa-
tion as a Social Critique of Individualism: Analysis
of a Cultural Foundations Course’ (Zilonka, 2018).
The author would like to thank Casey Casas and
Carmit Erez for providing valuable feedback on
both content and academic writing.
2  It is worth noting that ableist language like the
use of blindness in critical pedagogy and SJE
research is still pervasive. The use of this type of
language creates disconnection for many scholars
and educators with disabilities. One of the mod-
ules of the Cultural Foundations in Education
course focuses on Ableism and ableist language.
Students are challenged to rethink ableist meta-
phors and learn about how ableist language – as
a sub-category of ableist practices – contributes
to social disconnection.
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Counternarratives: Culturally
Responsive Pedagogy and Critical
Caring in One Urban School
Gang Zhu and Zhengmei Peng
INTRODUCTION
Since 2000, the world has witnessed intensified
educational inequality around the globe,
accompanied by reproductive schooling,
social stratification, and the resurgence of
neo-liberalism ideology (Howard, 2015;
Ravitch, 2016; Schmidt et al., 2015). In
Australia, there has been deep and long-
lasting inequality of academic achievement
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
students in the states and territories based on
the most recent version of Australian national
testing (National Assessment Program –
Literacy and Numeracy) in years 3, 5, and 9
since 2008 (Ford, 2013). In China, the
educational disparity between the coastal and
inland provinces – rural and urban regions –
continues to loom large according to the Gini
education coefficients analysis (Qian and
Smyth, 2008). In the United States, educators
have witnessed inequality in schools for
decades, especially the alarming achievement
gap arising from the socio-economic disparity
72
(Kozol, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 2006).
Buchmann and Hannum (2001) systematically
examined research on educational inequality
in developing regions including Africa, Asia,
and Latin America. They focused on empirical
studies in four broad areas: macro-structural
forces shaping education and stratification;
the relationship between family background
and educational outcomes; school effects; and
education’s impact on economic and social
mobility. Buchmann and Hannum’s seminal
review has provided a powerful analytical
framework for interrogating international
educational inequality.
This chapter endeavors to assist an inter-
national audience to gain a nuanced under-
standing about the educational inequality in
one typical urban school in the United States.
Specifically, we focus on how minority teach-
ers redress this deep-rooted conundrum –
achievement gap between White students and
students of color – through multiple ways of
knowing, doing, and being within the multi-
cultural educational landscape. Specifically,
 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY AND CRITICAL CARING IN ONE URBAN SCHOOL
this chapter provides a series of narrative
accounts about one African-American social
studies teacher’s culturally relevant pedagogy
and critical caring. Subsequently, we draw
some implications for international readers
in broader educational contexts.
Throughout the United States, the social
injustice and educational inequality injus-
tice situations are more serious in urban
schools than in their suburban counterparts.
Although urban schools have undergone
numerous urban school reforms, the stu-
dents in these schools continue to receive a
substandard education (Ukpokodu, 2016).
Researchers such as Oakes and Lipton (2007)
have revealed that urban students experience
a lack of rigor in their academic development
and the failure of their schools to challenge
them beyond low-level knowledge mastery.
Other scholars have described a widespread
pedagogy of poverty (Haberman, 2010),
drill and kill (Shor, 1992), coloring curricu-
lum (Schmoker, 2001), and the worksheet
curriculum (Ukpokodu, 2016), symptoms
that plague a multitude of urban schools. All
these phenomena have contributed to the
severity of the academic achievement gap
within urban school settings, especially the
widening disparity between White students
and students of color. Taking ‘pedagogy of
poverty’ as an example, Haberman referred
to this as a practice that is characterized
by low expectations, watered-down cur-
ricula, and low-level teaching engagement
involving ‘giving information, asking low-
level questions, giving directions, making
arrangements, and giving tests’ (Haberman,
2010: 10). This type of impoverished peda-
gogy has undoubtedly exacerbated the cur-
rent achievement gap.
Another justification for this research
comes from the neutrality, color-blindness,
and meritocracy in teacher education (Sleeter,
2012). In recent decades, an increasing num-
ber of teacher education programs have
officially announced their social-justice and
culturally responsive orientations. However,
the majority of the teacher workforce, roughly
855
80% White cohorts of teachers (US Department
of Education, 2016), are still White, middle-
class, and heterosexual. This racial and cul-
tural discrepancy is widespread in numerous
American public schools, especially in inner-
city settings. In this majoritarian storytelling
scenario, which is characterized by neutral-
ity, objectivity, color-blindness, meritocracy,
and ahistoricism (Dixson and Rousseau,
2005), the voices from teachers of color (e.g.,
African-American teachers and Hispanic/
Latino teachers) are usually silenced (Zhu
et al., 2019).
The second strand of negative forces
comes from the neo-liberal educational
reform typified by standardized tests, top-
down accountability, and school choice,
which contributes to the marginalization
of culturally responsive pedagogy (Sleeter,
2012). Sleeter has delineated the status of
the marginalization in three aspects: (a) a
persistence of faulty and simplistic concep-
tions of what culturally responsive peda-
gogy is, (b) too little research connecting its
use with student achievement, and (c) elite
and White fear of losing national and global
hegemony (Sleeter, 2012). From Sleeter’s
perspective, culturally responsive pedagogy
has been marginalized due to the oppressive
external contexts. In this case, it is necessary
to examine how teachers of color perceive,
enact, and reflect on culturally responsive
pedagogy while improving students’ aca-
demic achievement in challenging urban
school settings.
In light of the current deficient dis-
courses around the achievement gap, cultur-
ally responsive pedagogy, and urban school
teachers, this narrative research highlights
the counternarratives (Milner and Howard,
2013; Yosso, 2006) of one African-American
teacher’s culturally responsive teaching and
caring relationship with her students, as
opposed to the majority, which tend toward
traditional majoritarian stories in the under-
served urban school settings. Situated at the
intersections of race, culture, ethics, and
students’ achievement, this chapter probes
856 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Community
cultural wealth
Funds of
knowledge
Figure 72.1 The conceptual backdrop
into one minority teacher’s (i.e., one African-
American female teacher in this study)
endeavors and struggles as manifested in this
research project. Furthermore, this chapter
illuminates the cultivation of critically con-
scious, community-anchored, and authenti-
cally engaging teachers (Valenzuela, 2016).
By contextualizing the participant’s nuanced
experiences of culturally responsive peda-
gogy and the authentic caring relationship
with the students in this study, this chapter
calls for heightened attention to minority
teachers’ culturally responsive and ethnically
based teaching stories within urban educa-
tional settings.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
This chapter synthesizes two interrelated
strands of two theoretical frameworks: com-
munity cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005; Yosso
and García, 2007) and funds of knowledge
(González, Moll, & Amanti, 2006; Rodriguez,
2013). The rationale for drawing upon these
two theoretical constructs is twofold. First,
community cultural wealth and funds of
knowledge have organic associations both
interrogating the mainstream scholarship
characterized by the deficit view on the com-
munity culture and lived experiences that
students of color bring to schools. Second,
these two concepts are consistent with the
fundamental tenets of the methodology in
this chapter – the sociopolitical epistemo-
logical stance on teachers’ roles, caring, and
Conceptual
backdrop
pedagogical practice. Accordingly, these two
constructs collectively function as the con-
ceptual backdrop of this chapter, as illus-
trated in Figure 72.1.
Community Cultural Wealth
Acknowledging the limitations of Bourdieu’s
conception of cultural capital (Bourdieu and
Passeron, 1990), Yosso (2005) posited that
six types of cultural wealth draw upon the
knowledge and dispositions that students of
color already possess and bring with them to
schools from their homes and communities.
According to Yosso (2005), aspirational capi-
tal references
the ability to maintain hopes and dreams for the
future, even in the face of real or perceived barri-
ers. This resilience is evidenced in those who allow
themselves and their children to dream of possibili-
ties beyond their present circumstances, often
without the objective means to attain those goals.
(Yosso, 2005: 78)
Linguistic capital references the ‘intellectual
and social skills attained through communi-
cation experiences in more than one lan-
guage and/or style…and reflects the idea that
Students of Color arrive at school with mul-
tiple language and communication skills’
(Yosso, 2005: 78). Social capital reflects
‘networks of people and community
resources. These peer and other social con-
tacts can provide both instrumental and emo-
tional support to navigate through society’s
institutions’ (2005: 79). Navigational capital
‘refers to skills of maneuvering through
 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY AND CRITICAL CARING IN ONE URBAN SCHOOL
social institutions. Historically this infers the
ability to maneuver through institutions not
created with Communities of Color in mind’
(2005: 80). Resistant capital ‘refers those
knowledges and skills through oppositional
behavior that challenges inequality’ (2005:
80). Lastly, the most salient component of
the conceptual framework utilized in this
chapter is familial capital. Familial capital
reflects a concern for ‘cultural knowledges
nurtured among familia (kin) that carry a
sense of community history, memory, and
cultural intuition’ (2005: 79).
Funds of Knowledge
Drawing on Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural
perspective in teaching (Moll, 2013), Moll
et al. (2006) defined funds of knowledge as
the ‘historically accumulated and culturally
developed bodies of knowledge and skills
essential for household or individual
functioning and well-being’ (2006: 72).
Against the backdrop of the traditional
European-centric dominant curriculum,
‘funds of knowledge’ as posited by Moll
et al. (2006) supplants the long-seated
dichotomy between schools and families/
communities, especially in classroom
teaching. The construct of funds of knowledge
is conceptually rooted in a simple premise:
people are competent and have knowledge,
and their life experiences have given them
that knowledge. Simultaneously, the funds of
knowledge approach facilitates a systematic
and powerful way to represent communities
regarding the resources they possess and how
to utilize them in teaching. The construct of
funds of knowledge also challenges the
widely pervasive deficit perspectives about
families of color whose children fail to find
school success because ‘(a) students enter
school without the normative cultural
knowledge and skills; and (b) parents neither
value nor support their child’s education’
(Yosso, 2005: 75). However, a funds of
knowledge perspective, which informs the
857
work advanced in this chapter, gives a
critique to the assumptions that students of
color possess deficient knowledge from
home as they study in public schools.
LITERATURE REVIEW1
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
To better harness the potential of culture in
education, researchers theoretically or empir-
ically have conceptualized a series of cultur-
ally oriented pedagogies in education such as
culturally appropriate, culturally congruent,
culturally responsive, and culturally compat-
ible (Aronson and Laughter, 2016). Amid the
current discourses, culturally responsive ped-
agogy and culturally relevant pedagogy are
sometimes used interchangeably. The pio-
neer in culturally responsive pedagogy, Gay
(2010), defined it as teaching ‘to and through
[students’] personal and cultural strengths,
their intellectual capabilities, and their prior
accomplishments’ (2010: 26); culturally
responsive pedagogy is premised on ‘close
interactions among ethnic identity, cultural
background, and student achievement’
(2010: 27). Gay further noted, ‘Students of
color come to school having already mas-
tered many cultural skills and ways of know-
ing. To the extent that teaching builds on
these capabilities, academic success will
result’ (2010: 213). Ladson-Billings (1994),
who was among the first scholars to define
the concept, defined culturally relevant peda-
gogy as ‘a pedagogy that empowers students
intellectually, socially, emotionally, and
politically by using cultural referents to
impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes’
(1994: 382). Ladson-Billings (1995) further
contends that there are three criteria for cul-
turally relevant pedagogy: (a) students must
experience academic success; (b) students
must develop and/or maintain cultural com-
petence; and (c) students must develop a
critical consciousness through which they
858 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
challenge the status quo of the current social
order (1995: 160). These three criteria con-
stitute the pillars of culturally relevant
pedagogy.
Since its initial conception, cultur-
ally responsive pedagogy has been widely
acknowledged in academia. As noted in the
research, scholars have utilized culturally rel-
evant pedagogy as a theoretical framework to
analyze the opportunities, tensions, and chal-
lenges inherent in the culturally and linguisti-
cally diverse classrooms (e.g., Castagno and
Brayboy, 2008; Milner, 2011; Nieto, 2010).
Meanwhile, some researchers have advo-
cated integrating culturally relevant peda-
gogy into teacher education programs (e.g.,
Cochran-Smith, 2004; Irvine, 2003; Villegas
and Lucas, 2002a, 2002b). More recently,
to promote critical engagement and rigor
among diverse learners, scholars have linked
culturally responsive pedagogy to brain
research (Hammond, 2015; Maniates, 2016).
Additionally, some academicians (Borrero
and Sanchez, 2017) utilized asset mapping,
a pedagogical tool for students to represent
their cultural assets visually, in enacting cul-
turally relevant pedagogy.
Ethics of Caring in Education
Arguably, teaching is a multifaceted activity
that can be termed a moral and intellectual
practice with a rich tradition (Hansen, 2001).
However, compared with the scientific ana-
lytic approach to teaching, research on the
moral and ethical dimensions of teaching has
received scant attention and is still in a nas-
cent stage. Early research pioneers (e.g.,
Fenstermacher and Soltis, 1986; Goodlad
et al., 1990; Jackson et al., 1993; Strike and
Soltis, 1985) conducted ground-breaking
work on the moral and ethical aspects of
teaching and teacher ethics. However,
research on teacher ethics has not garnered
proper attention until now. Just as Sabbagh
(2009) evaluated, current research on teacher
ethics in education (e.g., deontological,
consequentialist, and virtuist) only provides
over-simplistic frameworks for analyzing
teachers’ ethical judgments and decision
making.
Noddings’s ground-breaking scholarship
(1984, 1988, 1992, 2002) paved the way
for the ethics of caring in education. From
Noddings’s vantage point (1988), good teach-
ing is constructed on caring relationships
and trust. Noddings stipulated that intersub-
jectivity is a prerequisite to achieve the ethic
of care – the dyad of ‘one-caring’ and the
‘cared-for’; care is impossible without ade-
quate recognition from the latter of the care
given. Noddings (1984) further proposed two
practices to achieve care. The first is ‘engross-
ment’, referring to paying full attention to
another person to understand him/her fully.
The second is ‘motivational displacement’,
where the behavior of the one-caring is kept
away from self-interest and moves toward
the needs of the cared-for (te Riele et al.,
2017). Despite its usefulness in framing the
student–teacher relationship in the ethical
lens, Noddings failed to take the sociocultural
context and the embedded racial dynamic
into account (Rolón-Dow, 2005). Moreover,
Noddings did not persuasively explain a mul-
titude of context-dependent factors that con-
tribute to the diverse understanding and acts
of care (Barnes, 2018), which renders the
instructional arrangements to promote car-
ing she proposes insensitive to the inevitable
influence of the sociocultural milieus.
Based on her ethnographic study of
Latina/o youth, Valenzuela (1999) distin-
guished two forms of caring: aesthetic and
authentic. Aesthetic caring solely focuses
on the instructional relationship between the
teacher and students. Valenzuela concluded,
‘Teachers are committed to an institutional
“fetish” that views academics as the exclusive
domain of the school’ (1999: 73). On the con-
trary, authentic caring fosters reciprocal rela-
tionships among teacher and students. The
domain of this caring goes beyond the for-
mal role of education but includes an accept-
ance of the students’ cultural backgrounds
 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY AND CRITICAL CARING IN ONE URBAN SCHOOL
and values encompassed in the relationship.
Valenzuela (1999) further posited that this
form of caring promotes and validates stu-
dents’ cultural values and beliefs. In the con-
text of the multicultural classroom, caring
constitutes culturally responsive pedagogy
and is an ethical act that ‘binds individuals
to their society, to their communities, and to
each other’ (Gay, 2010: 45).
METHODOLOGY
Critical race counter-storytelling is a method
of recounting the experiences and perspectives
of racially and socially marginalized people
(Solórzano and Yosso, 2002). Counter-stories
reflect on the lived experiences of people of
color to raise critical consciousness about
social and racial injustice (Yosso, 2006).
Validating the multiple sources of stories and
voices as valuable data, counter-storytellers
challenge the majoritarian stories that either
omit or distort the histories and realities of
the traditionally oppressed communities and
racially stereotypical portrayals revealed in
majoritarian stories (Yosso, 2006). Framed
by the principles of critical race theory in
education, counter-stories can serve the
following functions in the endeavors for
educational equality: (a) counter-stories can
build community among those at the margins
of society; (b) counter-stories can challenge
the perceived wisdom of those at society’s
center; (c) counter-stories can nurture
community cultural wealth, memory, and
resistance; and (d) counter-stories can
facilitate transformation in education (Yosso,
2006). In other words, counter-stories can be
adopted as a methodology that empowers
people of color cognitively, emotionally, and
politically, which is embodied by one
African-American teacher in this chapter.
According to Yosso (2006), there are at
least three types of counter-stories: auto-
biographical, biographical, and composite.
Composite counternarratives, which draw on
859
multiple forms of data to recount the experi-
ences of people of color[sic] (Yosso, 2006),
contextualize this critical qualitative study.
The researcher created the personal and pro-
fessional counternarratives collaboratively
with the subject of this present study. The first
and most important justification comes from
John Dewey’s classic definition about educa-
tion: ‘[E]ducational process has two sides:
one psychological and one sociological; [and
neither] can be subordinated to the other or
neglected without evil results ­following…’
(Dewey, 1897/1974: 427). Essentially, from
Dewey’s perspective, education is organizing
and re-organizing experiences. Following
this, culturally responsive teaching experi-
ence is intimately connected with narra-
tive inquiry since both of them emphasize
the primacy of experience (Eisner, 1988).
Moreover, human experiences are always
subject to change; thus, the researcher takes
the stance of the fluid inquiry advocated by
Schwab (1960) to learn this ongoing experi-
ence better.
Against the theoretical backdrop, the over-
arching research question guiding this chap-
ter is: how does the urban school teacher (i.e.,
one African-American female teacher) main-
tain culturally responsive and caring teaching
in the culturally and linguistically diverse
classroom?
Participant and Context
Jenny (pseudonym), a female African-
American social studies teacher in a south-
western US urban middle school, was the
subject of this research. Jenny was born and
spent the first half of her youth in Georgia.
Jenny started her education in a private
(Montessori) school for kindergarten and
was educated in public schools from 2nd
through 12th grade. All of Jenny’s public
school education from the time she moved to
Texas in 1994 was in urban areas. In this
scenario, Jenny reflected that she was lucky
to attend school in a district that was
860 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
culturally diverse from 8th grade through
12th grade, thus providing the opportunity to
experience getting to know people from all
around the world. In college, Jenny initially
was a vocal performance/music education
major. Later, she pursued teaching as a pro-
fession because that was what her Mom had
done. Jenny stated, ‘I had no desire to do
anything else…or so I thought.’ When she
finished her first year at a public university in
Texas, Jenny realized that music was not for
her. She also had friends who majored in
music and who could not find jobs. Jenny
said, ‘The only option I had in my head was
to teach.’ Thus, Jenny spent the rest of her
undergraduate education at another state
public university, where she majored in an
interdisciplinary studies program.
Data Collection and Analysis
This chapter adopted a narrative approach to
collecting the stories (Clandinin, Pushor and
Orr, 2007) from three sources. The first source
comprised multiple interviews (n=6) with
Jenny via face-to-face telephone calls and
email correspondences. During the interviews
(each lasting about 30 minutes), Jenny storied
her biographic experiences, years of teaching
experiences in urban settings, and the factors
facilitating or hindering her culturally relevant
pedagogy. The second source of data com-
prised her reflective journals, teaching plans,
professional development files, student assign-
ments, and other related artifacts. These docu-
ments served as powerful tools in tracking,
analyzing, and reflecting the trajectory of
Jenny’s culturally relevant pedagogies and
caring relationship throughout her career.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned sources
allowed triangulation of the interviews with
Jenny. Furthermore, the classroom observation
and the transcriptions from these interviews
with Jenny ensured another layer of inquiry,
and constituted the third research text for
analysis. Typically, as a narrative case study,
the researcher must be cautious about
the generalizability of the research findings;
however, storying and re-storying (Clandinin
and Connelly, 2000) Jenny’s culturally respon-
sive and care-based teaching experiences can
generate a three-dimensional narrative space of
(Connelly and Clandinin, 1990) the dynamics
between the educational context and her com-
mitment to urban education. Jenny’s fine-
grained narrative, epitomized in this chapter,
provides an avenue for audiences to access to
big T truth – how one African-American
teacher organically integrates culturally
responsive teaching and the ethic of caring by
drawing upon students’ funds of knowledge in
daily teaching practice.
Ethics of the Study
Before the formal inception of this project, I
(the first author of this chapter) received the
institutional review board approval from the
university where I pursued my PhD degree.
Simultaneously, I was permitted to observe
the participant’s classroom instruction, which
enabled me to learn the participant’s concerns,
achievements, and challenges in urban educa-
tional settings. Additionally, the participant in
this chapter signed the consent form, which
guarantees the anonymity of the participant.
As the principal investigator in this
research, I must introduce myself to the
reader when I undertook this study. I was
an Asian international student focusing on
curriculum and instruction in an American
public, research-intensive university when I
undertook this project. My personal and pro-
fessional experience will undoubtedly affect
the perspective that I adopted in this research
and the accompanying interpretation of the
data that I collected. To diminish the influ-
ence of prior personal perceptions, espe-
cially involving conscious and unconscious
bias related to the research topic, I adopted
a grounded theory approach in analyzing the
collected data (Corbin and Strauss, 1990). In
this way, I can generate the findings from the
different sources of data that I collected.
 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY AND CRITICAL CARING IN ONE URBAN SCHOOL
FINDINGS
Through an iterative analysis of the multiple
sources of data, I distilled three story frag-
ments that succinctly capture Jenny’s cultur-
ally relevant pedagogy across her various
teaching backgrounds. The following sec-
tions display the three major thematic distil-
lations with corresponding evidences.
Vignette One: ‘I Told Them If I
Could Do It, They Could Do It Too.’
At the beginning of this project, Jenny
detailed an upbringing that was fraught with
myriad challenges:
I was born to a single parent mom in a small town
in Georgia. There were many times growing up
that we moved around repeatedly. It got to the
point where I would just leave my boxes packed
because I knew that there was a possibility that I
would be moving. I never went hungry, but I do
remember many times not having lights on when I
got home from school. I would have to do my
homework by sunlight, and once night came, by
flashlight. There were a few times I remember
coming home and being told I was moving and
would stay up all night to get it finished. It was not
because my mother was not a good mother.
However, working in the field she was in [sic] did
not always help pay the bills.
Despite the long-standing poverty that she
was born into, Jenny did not feel stifled by
the webs of her personal life struggles. On
the contrary, Jenny always harbored opti-
mism and used her experiences to inspire her
students and the people around her. From
Jenny’s firsthand experiences, I observed that
Jenny did not succumb to the culture of pov-
erty (Payne, 2005) or let lower socio-­
economic status influence her life trajectory.
Jenny always spent her life in a positive way
and showed this persistent trait to her
students.
Jenny told of a life-changing experience
later in her life. She told the story that she was
completely primed for an elementary school
career up until she was a teacher’s assistant
861
in an urban Texas high school. Many of the
students in that school were drug dealers,
teenage moms, caretakers for siblings and
parents, and gang members. Consequently,
the teachers in that school had to deal with
a host of issues that plagued the school.
However, when confronted with that tough
situation, Jenny ‘was hooked immediately’
(personal narrative, 2016). In this scenario,
Jenny reflected,
Even though many of them were not that much
younger than I was at the time, they just wanted
an ear, someone who cared, someone who could
help them see past their situation. When I gradu-
ated in 2008, I was able to go back and wear my
cap and gown in front of the classes I interacted
with and proudly tell them that I was officially the
first person in my family to graduate from college.
I was a lower income student, mom on welfare,
single parent home, all the problems that people
said would keep me out of college I didn’t allow. I
told them if I could do it, they could do it too.
By disclosing her personal growing experi-
ence, Jenny showed her vulnerability to the
students and struck a harmonious chord with
the students in her classroom, most of whom
also came from lower socio-economic fami-
lies. Jenny was willing to share her individ-
ual experiences, which were remarkably
similar to the stories of many students in her
class. In this way, Jenny created emotional
connections with her students.
Vignette Two: ‘My Biggest Mission
Has Always Been Reaching the
Unreachable.’
After working as an elementary teacher for
four years, Jenny then transferred to an urban
middle school where she teaches history
today. Regarding the alarming achievement
gap in American public schools, Jenny said
that, in contrast to giving up on students like
many urban school teachers do, she always
encouraged her students and celebrated her
students’ success at every step. Consequently,
Jenny’s students finally became successful
862 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
learners with gained confidence. For this
story fragment, Jenny narrated,
I taught 4th grade for years before I made the leap
to middle school. My biggest mission has always
been reaching the unreachable…. During my first
year of teaching, I had one student called Anthony
[pseudonym]. Anthony has never excelled in school
and came in with a defeatist attitude. He knew
one day that he wasn’t going to pass my class or
pass the test. I just told Anthony to trust me, we
would get him there. Anthony had bumps
throughout the year, but I praised every success he
had. If it was him jumping from 20 to 50, we cel-
ebrated it. If Anthony answers a question right in
small group, we celebrated it. I shared his success
with his Mom. When it came time to take the
standardized test at the end of the year, Anthony
passed the test and exceeded my expectation.
In this successful teaching story, Jenny viv-
idly showed how she transformed a strug-
gling student into a high-achieving one. The
contributing factor underlying this story is
the ‘I-Thou (you)’ relationship that Jenny
constructed with Anthony. In the lens of
Martin Buber’s ethical philosophy (1958), in
the ‘I-it’ relationship, the individual treats the
world and other persons functionally. Yet, in
the ‘I-Thou (you)’ relationship, the individ-
ual deals with the work and the people
around in an authentic and ethical manner.
Buber saw education as being about a caring
and ethical relationship. Relating to her
teaching, Jenny did not consider Anthony as
a stumbling block or ‘a number’. Rather,
Jenny deeply cared about Anthony’s intel-
lectual growth by celebrating his improve-
ments at every step along the way.
Vignette Three: ‘You Matter as a
Whole Person When You Enter
into My Classroom.’
Instead of narrowly focusing on students’
academic achievements, Jenny embraced a
more comprehensive and caring attitude
toward her students. In her narratives, Jenny
frequently mentioned that she always tried to
relate the history subject matter, which she
taught, to her students’ divergent back-
grounds. For instance, Jenny stated that even
her Hispanic students talked about how the
Chinese came to the United States and
worked in railroad construction, which ena-
bled her students to realize that diversity has
always been embedded in America. Another
story arose from the circumstances of the
2016 national election in the United States.
One of Jenny’s students, from Honduras,
begged her not to vote for Donald Trump
because she was being forced to go back to
her country [after the American presidential
election]. Jenny’s student also told her about
unsettling events that were transpiring in her
home country. With these techniques that
compelled interaction, Jenny established
dedicated, affective connections with her
students, which supported her students’
learning, emotionally and politically.
Following Delpit’s construct (1997), Jenny
did not treat the minority students as ‘other
people’s children’ (2006: xiii). On the con-
trary, Jenny validated each student’s freedom
to learn (Rogers and Freiberg, 1994). For this
point, Jenny further shared,
I have one student called Wen Fan [pseudonym]
from China. Wen Fan knows American history well
and came to ask me about the Monroe Doctrine,
something we will cover but have not yet. She is
knowledgeable and the way she tackled history is
amazing. I always try to encourage her in front of
the class so this is an equal field for every student.
I just let them know that I care about them.
As can be seen from the conversation, in lieu
of adopting a deficit view on minority stu-
dents like Wen Fan, Jenny harnessed an
asset-based view; that is, she validated the
different cultural assets inherited by different
ethnic groups in her class (Yosso, 2005).
Jenny valued the multiple perspectives that
the minority students brought to her class-
room. Additionally, Jenny effectively tapped
into her students’ potential in the study of
history and constantly encouraged her stu-
dents to bravely express their authentic
voices. Intriguingly, this kind of caring
 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY AND CRITICAL CARING IN ONE URBAN SCHOOL
relationship is not one-sided but mutual.
Jenny admitted that such relationships ener-
gize her (‘Sometimes they teach me and keep
me going’) and make her teaching more
effective (‘My students perform pretty well. I
do not have a lot of pressure’).
Situated within the context of a complex
web of standardized tests and testing, Jenny
still endeavored to surpass the constraints
of US federal and state accountability poli-
cies and standards. Jenny said that students
should not be merely test takers but should
be critical thinkers and ‘be the best person
they can possibly be’ (interview, 2016). After
realizing the faults in current social studies
instructions, especially the rampant standard-
ized tests throughout the state, Jenny said that
she wants to be ‘a light in the dark for educa-
tion’ (interview, 2016) and that she tries to
revolutionize social studies in the multicul-
tural learning communities (Nieto, 2010).
CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
As Sleeter (2012) argued, there is a clear
need for evidence-based research that docu-
ments the connections between culturally
responsive pedagogy and student outcomes
and that documents outcomes not necessarily
limited to academic achievement. Arising out
of this consideration, this research has linked
culturally responsive pedagogy to students’
academic learning experiences and caring
relationships. From Jenny’s storying and re-
storying fragments, it can be inferred that, as
an African-American history teacher in an
urban middle school, Jenny integrated cultur-
ally responsive pedagogy into her daily
teaching practice, as manifested in this chap-
ter. More specifically, Jenny capitalized on
the community cultural wealth and the funds
of knowledge that her students brought to the
classroom to transform successfully the
struggling students that she teaches.
Alongside her culturally responsive teaching
practices, Jenny showed authentic caring
863
(Valenzuela, 1999) to her students in the
form of reciprocal supportive relationships
between teacher and students. As reported in
the present research, this type of caring rap-
port not only facilitates students’ academic
development but also supports teachers’
career advancement. This research further
shows that caring is an indispensable part of
culturally responsive teaching and confirms
Gay’s earlier research on culturally respon-
sive teaching (2010). Last, this research
shows that culturally responsive teaching is a
pertinent and robust approach to addressing
ethical and care issues in urban education
(Shevalier and McKenzie, 2012).
The use of counternarrative as a research
methodology is particularly useful in high-
lighting the untapped voices of traditionally
marginalized groups in urban educational
settings. Herein, for example, the Black
female teacher Jenny epitomizes the tradi-
tionally silenced voice in public education.
Since the majority of the teacher workforce
in the United States are White, female, and
middle-class, Jenny’s teaching experiences
challenge traditional racially stereotypical
portrayals of Black minorities in US public
schools and, thereby, foster a transformation
of classrooms in urban education. However,
this chapter did not intend to showcase a ‘per-
fect role model’ to a broad audience. As she
shared in her daily teaching practice, Jenny
also encountered a broad array of vexing
challenges in which she was immersed and
with which she had to deal – outdated learn-
ing contents, standardized testing, teacher
accountability policy, and the school climate.
All these factors collectively contribute to
stress that, she felt, limited her effectiveness.
Implications
While this research presents an American
context, this research has theoretical, practi-
cal, and policy implications for urban edu-
cation generally, especially for cultivating
culturally responsive pedagogy and critical
864 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
care within global urban educational set-
tings In the United States today, the major-
ity of K-12 public school teachers are White,
female, middle class, and heterosexual.
However, student enrollments in American
public schools are becoming increasingly
diverse, which causes increases in racial
and cultural mismatches (McGrady and
Reynolds, 2013) between White teachers
and students of color. In reality, some urban
school teachers are still color-blind (Bonilla-
Silva, 2010) and do not recognize the prob-
lems of race and poverty associated with a
racially based achievement gap (Milner,
2015). Confronting this dilemma, one must
examine how teachers perceive and enact
culturally responsive teaching in their own
educational contexts. Meanwhile, as she is a
representative teacher of color, Jenny and
her stories will inspire teachers in urban
public schools to reflect on their profes-
sional identities (Beijaard et al., 2004) and
their repertoires of instruction. For instance,
in revealing how one African-American
teacher draws upon her personal and profes-
sional experiences, especially her profes-
sional vulnerability (Lasky, 2005) in urban
school teaching, this chapter underscores
how the urban school teacher integrates the
ethic of caring into social studies teaching
in diverse classroom settings.
In terms of its global implications for the
development of critical pedagogy scholarship,
this chapter contributes to the embodiment of
the voice from traditionally marginalized and
oppressed communities. Today, the world is
going through the global educational reform
movement (GERM; Sahlberg, 2011, 2016),
which is characterized by standardized tests,
accountability-based performativity, and
value-added teacher evaluation (Hargreaves,
2003). All these collective forces, spurred
mainly by the neo-liberal market ideology
(Ravitch, 2013), disempower or demoralize
teachers’ agency (Tsang, 2018) as imposed by
top-down managerialist educational reforms
and performativity (Ball, 2003). Within this
niche, culturally relevant, responsive pedagogy
can be anchored as praxis in teacher educa-
tion by allowing urban school teachers to shift
their perspectives from deficit-based peda-
gogy to asset-based pedagogy (Jackson and
Boutte, 2018). Teachers who hold the deficit-
based pedagogy perspective consider minor-
ity students incompetent, unmotivated, and
struggling in learning because of inadequate
cultural capital for schooling. However, teach-
ers who embrace asset-based pedagogy view
minority students as opulent potential learners
by virtue of their community cultural wealth
and funds of knowledge. Furthermore, cultur-
ally responsive pedagogy might act as a pow-
erful lens through which urban school teachers
can examine the sociopolitical discourses con-
tributing to the ‘achievement gap’ between
White students and students of color (Ladson-
Billings, 2006). Following this line, teachers
can interrogate their deep-rooted assumptions
that underpin their abiding educational beliefs
and daily practices. Also, teachers can ques-
tion the long-term historical, economic, socio-
political, and moral contexts and balances that
lead to the current achievement gap.
Regarding its methodological implica-
tions, contrary to meta-narrative (or grand-
narrative), the counternarrative adopted in
this chapter contributes to truth-likeness
(Bruner, 1986) associated with the dynamic
intersection of race, culture, and pedagogy,
unlike mega-narratives (or grand-narratives),
which center around ‘a large and loose set of
ideas about how society works, why it goes
wrong and how it can be set right’ (Cohen and
Garet, 1975: 21). Against the backdrop of the
mega-narrative, the rhetoric of educational
reform, which frequently permeates educa-
tional policies, such as urban school reform
(Olson and Craig, 2009), distorts the multiple
truths of narrative accounts. To dismantle the
hegemony of the meta-narrative, this chapter
characterizes counternarrative by questioning
the majoritarian stories and validating ‘narra-
tive resonances’ (Conle, 1996) between one
participating minority teacher and the stu-
dents. Overall, this chapter contributes to the
burgeoning literature on culturally sustaining
 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY AND CRITICAL CARING IN ONE URBAN SCHOOL
pedagogy as a way to push forward Ladson-
Billings’s (2014) original goals of engaging
critically in the cultural landscapes of class-
rooms and teacher education programs.
Future Direction
For the future research direction, it is neces-
sary to explore minority teachers’ racial
identity (Howard, 2016) and resilience (Gu
and Day, 2007) in diverse classroom settings.
Specifically, the future research will include
Hispanic/Latino (e.g., US) and Aboriginal/
First Nation (e.g., Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and Alaska) teachers as research
participants in the study to theorize their
racial and cultural beliefs and discursive
practices in daily teaching practices. Scholars
can examine how these minority teachers
enact their multiple ways of knowing, doing,
and being in diverse classroom settings.
Regarding the methodology, the researcher
aims to adopt longitudinal research methods
to analyze how teachers of color improve
students’ academic achievement by utilizing
students’ community cultural wealth and
funds of knowledge. In this way, we can
identity the interplay between evolving iden-
tity, multiple context, and teachers’ frames of
reference. Another research direction is to
examine the external influence of multiple
educational contexts on teachers’ classroom
practice through the lens of a knowledge
community (Craig, 1995) and narrative
knowing (Craig, 1998, 2004). More in depth,
how urban school teachers construct and
reconstruct their professional identities amid
multiple urban educational contexts will be
examined.
DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING
INTERESTS
The authors declare no conflict of interest in
this study.
865
Note
1  An article related to this research project is to
be published in internationally reviewed journal
Urban Education. The title of the paper is: ‘“You
Have to Educate the Heart before You Educate
the Mind”: The counternarratives of one African-
American female teacher’s asset-, equity- and
justice- oriented pedagogy in one urban school’.
The literature review section of this book chapter
was first published in the Forum paper entitled
‘Extending critical race theory to Chinese educa-
tion: Affordances and constraints’ in the journal
Compare. In this paper, there is a section entitled
‘CRT as a heuristic for understanding educa-
tional inequality: How CRT is conceptualised
in the United States’. The authors of this book
chapter obtained the reproduction permission of
the aforementioned section from the publisher
Taylor & Francis. The full article information is:
Zhu, Z., Peng, Z., Hu, X., & Qiu, S. (2019). Extend-
ing critical race theory to Chinese education:
Affordances and constraints. Compare: A Jour-
nal of Comparative and International Education
DOI: 10.1080/03057925.2019.1602966.
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‘More than an Educator but a
Political Figure’: Leveraging the
Overlapping Intersections of
Disability Studies and Critical
Pedagogy in Teacher Education
What a request we make to teachers! To think
and act critically, and to be metacognitive of
that process based on the context in which
they enact it. As I ponder this idea, and reflect
on the past two years of educating new pre-
service teachers to embark on such a journey,
I am left taken aback by some of the assump-
tions we have as teacher educators. For
example, in teacher education there are two
fundamental ‘camps’ that we might think
about in terms of how to approach the pro-
cess of educating teachers within their stu-
dent teaching learning experiences, and
beyond: one being ‘learning the practice’
first, the other being ‘learning the theory’
first – the theory or practice divide incarnate,
as it were. Wherever you sit on this contin-
uum, suffice it to say that this theory–practice
debate has been long-winded and argued
ad nauseum, to say the least.
Rather than preoccupy the limited space
I have in this chapter with ‘what-ifs’ and
philosophical arguments of ‘idealized post-
whatever’ to try and account for which
73
Phillip Boda
approach may be better suited to increase
the efficacy-models of teacher education
more broadly, I choose to instead address
the realities that over 150 new teachers faced
when trying to make sense of this thing
called education from the 15-plus sections of
courses I’ve taught over the past two years
across disciplinary, state, and political foci.
In doing so, I present to the reader a narrative,
a story, about how my pre-service teachers
learned to navigate teaching and learning
critically, particularly as it relates to the
intersection of Disability Studies and critical
pedagogy.
In this chapter I focus on the realities that
my pre-service teachers have articulated
when attempting to make sense of teaching
and learning given the tools that they draw
on from their personal experiences, as well
as those resources I provided them as the
teacher educator in their courses – their bri-
colage in-the-making developed as a func-
tion of the conscientization process (Freire,
1970), specifically aligned with the scaffolds
870 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
I enacted (Sleeter et al., 2004). As I make this
argument, I hope that readers come with me
on this journey with open eyes and hearts,
particularly because some of the things I may
say they may not like, nor may they agree
with at all.
With that said, the realities that face teach-
ers are just that, realities; therefore, in order
for us as critical pedagogues, critical teacher
educators, and critical researchers to engage
with those realities we must first and foremost
focus on how we have framed our visions of
education, as well as how some narratives
have been excluded within that process –
toward an embrace of the unknown such that
our desire to pursue a more equitable world
is grounded in the realities of those who have
been, or are currently being, excluded from
educational experiences that imbue a critical
eye toward the world. In my experience, these
unquestioned assumptions can drive uncriti-
cal practices as teacher educators and lead to
the inhibition of new teachers’ capabilities to
develop a creative and critical bricolage if not
taken seriously, as well as embody the bank-
ing system of learning in our classrooms if
we are not careful of our own understandings
of teacher education pedagogy. To this end, I
weave a narrative about teacher education that
has been minimal in teacher education praxis
by critical teacher educators – more specifi-
cally, the overlapping intersections and engag-
ing praxis of integrating Disability Studies and
critical pedagogy in teacher education.
SEPARATE BUT EQUAL PART TWO:
DISABILITY AND DIFFERENCE
The reality of teacher education is such that
we must fight on all fronts to emphasize that
the world exists in multiplicities that are of
particular importance to teachers, as well as
stakeholders fighting for social justice more
broadly (Sandoval, 2000). In making a stand
such as the one proposed in this chapter, this
fight then becomes a metaphorical act of
war – not a physical war, per se, but rather a
political one similar to those articulated by
critical scholars over the past decades (Boda,
2017a; Emdin, 2016; Giroux and McLaren,
1986; Peters and Chimedza, 2000). However,
in this chapter I stake the claim that to
encourage criticality in our new teachers
without addressing both the arguments we
construct and the actualized realities that
will mediate their choices in K-12 class-
rooms in relation to (dis)ability is to fall short
of any claim to criticality at all.
To elaborate on a specific ideological com-
mitment that embodies my point, disability
as a socio-cultural construct of deficiency
is focused on in this chapter as a complex
intersectional concept that spans and inter-
acts with ‘Othering’ markers of difference
(i.e., race, class, gender, religion, sexuality,
etc.). More emphatically, disability as one
of many realities necessitates more nuanced
articulations than have been used in the
nature of critical pedagogy as both a philo-
sophical and pragmatic goal. Through this
intersecting narrative of disability studies
and critical pedagogy, critical teacher educa-
tion aligns itself once again to its promise to
work toward a transdisciplinary equity for all
that is emerging as a function of both applied
theory and critical practice (Gutiérrez and
Penuel, 2014; Kincheloe, 2001; Waitoller
and King Thorius, 2016).
(Dis)ability, and the Marking
of Difference
The ideology of ability is embodied though
normative expectations and assumptions that
define who should be valued as citizens, and
what constitutes personhood more broadly in
relation to the construct of a nation-state citi-
zen (Nielsen, 2012; Siebers, 2008). This set of
beliefs about ability constructs ‘normal’ by
validating any thought or action that frames a
person, or set of persons, as capable of effica-
ciously interacting with the socio-political and
economic environment – more specifically
 ‘MORE THAN AN EDUCATOR BUT A POLITICAL FIGURE’
bodies and minds that reify a myopic view of
identity and behavior (Siebers, 2008). This
normalizing and assimilationist model of clas-
sifying citizenship is similar to how Whiteness
operates as a socially normative construct
in ways that engender White racial mores as
capital (Harris, 1993).
The normativity of ability, thus, ties
directly into the social marker of differ-
ence embodied in disability, particularly in
that they have been used in juxtaposition to
emphasize the need for exclusion and ineq-
uity across multiple markers of difference
such as race, class, and gender in historical
and present day American society (Nielsen,
2012). Moreover, disability has also been
shown to be interwoven with this idea of
Whiteness as property vis-à-vis use of ‘smart-
ness’ (Leonardo and Broderick, 2011), sub-
sequently playing out in our school systems
as young as elementary students (Hatt, 2012).
In response, this chapter tells a story of how
the inclusion of disability as a socio-cultural
marker of difference can be used to mediate
new teachers’ approach to, and understand-
ings of, criticality in education – its beliefs and
practices leading to an understanding of, and
action taken toward, critical goals of equity in
education. To organize this proverbial call to
arms, three ideologies rampant in the American
neo-colonial educational imaginary are ana-
lyzed (ignorance, paternalism, and selfishness),
with three re-imagined ideologies being used
to replace these justifications for exclusion
and foster more equitable actions teachers can
take (curiosity, inquiry, and care, respectively).
Herein, this chapter challenges its readers, as
well as critical theorists more broadly, to think
and act in ways that (in my experience) chal-
lenge ableist systems of logic – i.e., the neo-
colonial ethics of power (Dussel, 2013) that,
when not deconstructed, inherently produce
anti-critical teachers under the guise of what
I call ‘Separate but Equal Part Two’. But, for
now, please let me elaborate on my coming-
of-age story that demanded a need to think
about disability studies and critical pedagogy
in teacher education in the pursuit of criticality.
871
Narrative and Bricolage
Throughout the past two years, I have worked
as an adjunct across three different universities
in two different states that span many different
ideological commitments to over 150 teacher-
students. My primary goal for any course
I teach, no matter if the course is disciplinary-
specific, philosophical, or general, is always to
help teachers develop their own sense-making
processes that relate to the nature of a bricoleur,
of developing a sense of the world through the
cognitive, socio-emotional, and epistemic tools
at hand when making any decision (Steinberg
and Kincheloe, 2010). By emphasizing the
nature of embodying a bricoleur, I am bringing
into pragmatic practice a methodological qual-
ity of analyzing social contexts with these
‘tools that you have at your disposal’.
In essence, this is what we ask teachers to
do every day, and which has been reported for
decades as fundamentally what ‘teacher work’
looks like in practice (Freathy et al., 2017;
Parker and McDaniel, 1992; Scribner, 2005).
Therefore, with teaching and learning funda-
mentally tied to the nature of what resources
teachers draw on to make decisions, our work
as critical pedagogues remains to become
more familiar with the realities that our stu-
dents may face in their classroom contexts in
order to stay relevant to the nature of exclu-
sion as an ever-evolving push toward homo-
geneity of personhood, as well as engage our
students with those realities in relation to their
own experiences. The esteemed Joe Kincheloe
eloquently elaborated on this position:
As bricoleurs recognize the limitations of a single
method, the discursive strictures of one disciplinary
approach, what is missed by traditional practices
of validation, the historicity of certified modes of
knowledge production, the inseparability of
knower and known, and the complexity and het-
erogeneity of all human experience, they under-
stand the necessity of new forms of rigor in the
research process. To account for their cognizance
of such complexity bricoleurs seek a rigor that
alerts them to new ontological insights. In this
ontological context, they can no longer accept the
status of an object of inquiry as a thing-in-itself.
(2001: 681–2)
872 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
In this articulation of a bricoleur, and also the
nature of bricolage (i.e., the product of the bri-
coleur’s work), I want to make evident that my
courses required something more than critical
pedagogy to ground my teacher-students’ prag-
matic understandings of ‘the word and the
world’ – they needed an ideological conduit, of
sorts, to bridge these new and foreign critical
concepts to their future practice. With my own
personal experiences also connected to the
nature of (dis)ability and exclusion in schools
from an overlapping intersectional framework
(Boda, 2017a, 2018), I view my own Self
drawn toward how teacher-students could make
sense of difference as an intersectional concept
that includes rather than excludes, which
required me to incorporate disability into the
conversations about how difference plays out in
classrooms.
In these discursive and curricular moves
to emphasize the importance of disability
in order to more critically understand the
way exclusion plays out in schools, I found
myself brushing up against a large disciplinary
focus – special education – that, at its base,
derives from the premise that disability is
inherently biological, and inevitably leads to
a sociological deficiency to be meditated vis-
à-vis something changing only in relation to
the student and not the context of instruction
(Reid and Knight, 2006). As I pushed fur-
ther (just as I believe all critical pedagogues
should do), what I found was a capitalist pre-
occupation with the production of a particu-
lar form of capital (Whiteness) and efficiency
models of education grounded in high-stakes
assessments – those same models that critical
theorists and pedagogues have been pushing
back against for over a hundred years. It is
here where I found a place where my own
bricolage was made, particularly one that
emphasized the need to look more closely
at the overlapping intersections of disability
studies and critical pedagogy in teacher edu-
cation to carve out a space where the logics
of exclusion are interrogated for their influ-
ence on the rhetoric of anti-critical teaching
and the pragmatic goals therein.
DISABILITY AND DIFFERENCE: A
BACKGROUND ON EXCLUSION
Disability, and difference more broadly,
embolden the fundamental nature of diversity
as juxtapositions to (more often than not)
invisible norms; that is, Whiteness, ableism,
masculinity, hetero-normativity, and Christi­
anity, to name a few. With my population of
students – no matter the university context,
mind you – coming from these predominantly
invisible normative demographics (i.e., White,
middle-class, hetero-sexual, able-bodied
students), I was charged as a critical teacher
educator to disrupt their normative Selfs, and
help them unpack these assumptions and
political alignments that they would then
perform onto their students in their future
classrooms. What I found, though, when
I started my first course teaching this
normative-reliant population, was that
interrogations of race, class, and gender – as
well as many other traditional ‘isms’ such as
White supremacy and religiosity – were not
enough when thinking about the nature of
exclusion in the classrooms they would lead
in the future. Much of the ways they had
begun to try and deconstruct their ideological
commitments to social constructs such as
White supremacy lacked any interrogation of
how disability as a social construct separate
from impairment pervasively imbued a
‘catch-all’ for rationales of separating
students from their general education
counterparts, or how disability overlapped
with other markers of difference that they
may have explicitly addressed.
Because of this reality, I aligned myself
with the theoretics that when one helps teach-
ers un-pack their experiences and deconstruct
their biases, there needs to be an inquiry into
the fragmented ideology-in-pieces (Philip,
2011) students bring to the table to help
build new narratives that could be used later
on by these teachers to challenge the deficit
paradigms so actively used in schools against
youth and their cultures. These narratives,
 ‘MORE THAN AN EDUCATOR BUT A POLITICAL FIGURE’
mind you, more often than not mirror simi-
lar negative views of peoples in society more
broadly that become distilled into the nature
of schooling as a social institution. This is
where disability became paramount to help
students engage with the exclusion we co-
create (Boda, 2017b); this is where to be
engaged with critical pedagogy it required
understanding disability.
Disability and Critical Pedagogy:
Where Are We?
We often talk about exclusion and difference
as if they were these predominant logics of
critical pedagogy wherein all markers of dif-
ference are included. However, the reality that
I found searching through the literature is that
even when discussing disability in a critical
way there is a loss of understanding for the
pragmatic realities that formulate and foster
exclusion – some of which I have written
about extensively (Boda, 2018). Indeed, as
many authors have noted (cf. Erevelles, 2000,
2011; Gabel, 2002; Goodley and Runswick-
Cole, 2011), there have been lacking imple-
mentations of the broad theory of critical
pedagogy in relation to more pragmatic reali-
ties for students labeled with disabilities,
which then places a charge on critical research-
ers to go beyond the primarily philosophical
arguments that have been emphasized in a
critical pedagogy frame related to disability in
terms of teacher education. The contribution
of this chapter, thus, aligns well with the inte-
gration of a disability studies perspective
within critical pedagogy that some researchers
have shown to re-focus on the nature of disa-
bility exclusion as something that occurs by
design rather than from emergent interaction
(Smith and Routel, 2009; Ware, 2001; Watts
and Erevelles, 2004), as well as engages criti-
cal pedagogy on how disability is inherently
tied to race and class in systematic ways
(Annamma et al., 2013; Gillborn, 2015).
It was from this more pragmatic bricolage
that I found myself constantly straying away
873
from more abstracting notions of critical ped-
agogy to help teachers make sense of differ-
ence in ways that actively and pragmatically
addressed the fundamental material realities
of exclusion that, in my own personal expe-
rience, have been found to exist in surplus
because of the lacking service paid to the
influence of disability on labels of difference
more broadly, by both teacher educators and
their pre-service students. This exclusion,
performed and fostered by analyses of dif-
ference sans disability, has been used to seg-
regate students in self-contained classrooms
away from the general education students
and curriculum, and concurrently often cre-
ated justifications for students of color by
White teachers, even while these teachers
touted ‘cultural relevance’ and ‘wanting to be
responsive’ to these children’s needs in criti-
cal ways. This seemingly counter-­ intuitive
and pervasive exception to the ‘culturally
relevant/ responsive/sustained’ approach was,
and continues to be, intimately tied to the
nature of disability and the perceived objec-
tive lens used within the medicalized rheto-
ric of lack – the rhetoric of special education
that manifests in exclusive material reali-
ties for students always seen as ‘in need’ of
a savior. Luckily, these asset-based peda-
gogies are not only being used to construct
more intersectional narratives of the need to
understand disability exclusion (Waitoller
and King Thorius, 2016), but their originat-
ing authors are also responding accordingly
in light of such arguments for disability
inclusion within these frames (Alim et al.,
2017), which provides a bridge to confront
nuanced disability-based approaches to
­critical pedagogy.
Disability, Exclusion and Its
Intersection with Race
There has been ample reporting that students
labeled with disabilities are disproportion-
ately youth of color (Artiles et al., 2010; Reid
and Knight, 2006; Patton, 1998). Moreover,
874 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
even though there have been recent analyses
that purport the opposite of such claims made
about disproportionality over the past 30
years (Morgan et al., 2015, 2017), the nature
of exclusion that is produced when students
are labeled are such that this problem cannot
be named and articulated by numbers alone
(Collins et al., 2016). Indeed, utilizing
descriptive statistics (Shifrer et al., 2013) has
provided exemplary analyses of bifurcation
of opportunity related to disability labeling
that void the prior claims of ‘underrepresen-
tation’ in their reductionist attempt to iden-
tify an argument to place more students of
color within special education – that very
same neo-colonial logic and praxis I call
‘Separate but Equal Part Two’.
Moreover, even before being labeled with a
disability, students of color are disproportion-
ately more likely to be placed in lower-tracks
courses (Mickelson, 2015); then, after labeling,
students of color are disproportionately placed
into self-contained classrooms, denying them
interaction with general education students
and content-specialist teachers (Annamma
et al., 2014; Reid and Knight, 2006). Thus,
there is a resounding need to engage with this
overlapping and intersectional logic of oppres-
sion producing educational exclusion based on
the rhetoric of special education ‘needs’ (i.e.,
lack) and the material realities manifesting
from the labeling of students of color with dis­
abilities that align with misguided White savior
complexes over-utilized in urban education
(Emdin, 2016).
To further engage with this rhetoric and
reality, even when placing disproportionality
aside, my own work showcases that the nature
of exclusion based on disability and difference
is not so cut and dry across the mere labeling
of disability onto youth of color. In my own
auto-ethnographic excavations (Boda, 2018),
I illuminate that students of color where
I taught in Brooklyn as a high-school science
teacher were categorized as unable to learn,
or teachers perceived them as being unable
to be taught, based on these youths’ racialized
culture – their perceived ‘streetness’, or to put
it more explicitly, their ‘Hip-Hop-ness’ –
that overlaps and intersects with disability
labels vis-à-vis teachers’ deficit perceptions
of these students’ identities departing from
the normative center of schools (Leonardo
and Broderick, 2011). Indeed, this aversion
to diverse and rhizomatic youth cultures has
also been widely reported across multiple
disciplines (cf. Emdin, 2016; Giroux, 2003;
Ibrahim and Steinberg, 2014; Lesko and
Talburt, 2012). Given this reality, disability,
race, and class intersect in ways that exclude
concertedly and align well with research
goals within critical pedagogy to emphasize
understanding the systematic nature of exclu-
sion in order to seek a dismantling of such
policies and practices through work on-the-
ground right now (Kincheloe, 2008).
Additionally, when these ideologies inter-
sect (racialized youth culture, class-based
constructs of youth, and disability), they
compound onto one another and produce
material conditions of exclusion that by
design force students into subject positions
that they then reify and own as their own Self,
even as these students attempt to produce a
counter-narrative that would label them as
competent (Broderick and Ne’eman, 2008;
Collins, 2013). In essence, what this short
review provides for the reader is a critical-
ist’s material reality narrative of disability
that is fundamentally, first and foremost, tied
to notions of race, class, and neo-colonial
logics we use to justify exclusion in schools.
However, the question remains: why, as
critical pedagogues, are we not focusing
on these intersections when we educate our
pre-service students, and in-service teach-
ers, through purposeful curriculum and
­pedagogical choices?
Moreover, if we are, why are we not pub-
lishing about such models of teacher educa-
tion pedagogy to showcase the importance
of such an approach for other teacher educa-
tors that may or may not be aware of such
an equity-based model? This is where our
story of redemption starts, and where we can
make anew the nature of teacher education
 ‘MORE THAN AN EDUCATOR BUT A POLITICAL FIGURE’
by including disability, and challenging the
narratives of neo-coloniality that produce
exclusion derived from the disability nar-
ratives that buttress justified segregation
across multiple markers of difference. The
next three sections focus on the ideologies
of the neo-colonial educational imaginary
previously posed (ignorance, paternalism,
and selfishness), while integrating my per-
sonal experiences in helping teacher-students
make sense of their learning to teach pro-
cess through emphasizing the intersections
between Disability Studies and critical peda-
gogy in teacher education – working toward
curiosity, inquiry, and care.
IGNORANCE AND CURIOSITY
When I started educating new teachers, I
found myself always emphasizing the need
to understand how to connect with them on a
personal level – much like the way I used to
connect to my students when I taught in K-12
contexts. However, what I found when I
taught adults was that I needed to unpack my
own bricolage – the tools I gained from my
personal experiences – to truly focus on the
needs of these new teacher-students. One
narrative I found once I started to unpack my
own biases was the notion of ignorance that
was so prominent in my own learning experi-
ences as a teacher-student. I found that my
tenure as an undergraduate and graduate
student had ill-prepared me to engage with
narratives of disability, particularly how to
teach and learn about them beyond a deficit
lens. Thus this theme of ignorance emerged,
in both my students and myself, which was at
its base a description of how most teachers
fail their students more broadly because of
the fear that comes from ignorance about
someone you’ve never interacted with on a
personal basis. This meta-narrative of ‘not
knowing the unknown’ – of ignorance –
started my journey to envision teacher educa-
tion at the intersection of disability and
875
critical pedagogy, as well as embodied the
initial steps my teacher-students took when
trying to construct their own bricolage about
teaching and learning from a critical peda-
gogy perspective.
When I engaged with disability as a teacher-
student, the narratives were just as stark as
they are in many courses I’ve seen nowadays,
over a decade later. Specifically, those more
critical notions of teaching and learning were
reserved for the singular pluralistic/urban/cul-
tural politics ‘diversity requirement’ course
to suffice the teacher certification process. In
doing so, disability was explicitly segregated
into the other ‘special education’ course that
was also used solely for certification. When
I look back at my experiences and compare
them to the present-day colleges in which I
teach, I see a similar segregation of disability
as separate, and defined as distinctly differ-
ent, from the ideas that were being focused
on in my ‘more critical’ courses. Why was
this happening? Why was disability placed
into a very real ‘separate-but-equal’ status
of importance that, upon closer inspection,
doesn’t emphasize the principles of critical
pedagogy at all? Instead, these special educa-
tion courses focused on medicalized rhetoric
that disability is something that needs to be
cured and eradicated by any means neces-
sary similar to literature of disability more
broadly (Goering, 2015; Shakespeare, 2013),
or focused on the implicit, i.e., ‘softer,’
eugenic logics that the inherent deficit has
always, and will always, exist within the stu-
dent (Artiles et al., 2016; Brantlinger, 1997).
Indeed, this was problematic.
From this reflection of my personal
experiences, I pushed forward to infuse
counter-narratives of (dis)ability that brought
to bear the nature of exclusion as it exists
in the realities of students of color that are
(mis)placed in special education because
of the racialized culture they embodied on a
daily basis. The response from my teacher-
students was resounding, and quite clear: ‘But
disability is a medical problem…’ ‘you know,
it’s diseases and genes’ so ‘special education
876 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
has the answer for each of the problems on their
individualized education plans (IEPs)’. From
these responses, course after course, cohort
after cohort, I began to see where this theme
from my own experiences came from – it was
ingrained in the neo-colonial imaginary that
disability was deficit, just as race and cultures
beyond Whiteness were ingrained on both
colonizer and colonized to be inherently deficit
and ‘in need’ of a ‘cure’ of their ‘uncivilized
nature’ (Fanon, 1963; Oliver, 2004).
These narratives of ignorance were so
deeply present in every conversation I would
have with my teacher-students that it became
both a personal and professional commit-
ment as a critical pedagogue to not only
engage with them myself, but also to find
ways to help my students engage with them
in an attempt to eventually ameliorate these
exclusionary ideologies they would use in
the future to enforce ableist and racist logics
of oppression. Here, I must say, there was an
increasing need to identify ways to approach
this master narrative of (dis)ability such that
exclusion would be challenged beyond the
traditional markers of difference that I had
seen were siphoned and siloed into required
courses – particularly those that failed to inte-
grate (dis)ability in their discourse.
What I adopted was a critical model of
teacher education that focused on ground-
ing the abstract notions of critical pedagogy
into pragmatic moves that were made by
teachers (and myself, admittedly) to produce
exclusion for students labeled with disabili-
ties. In this shift, I had to break away from
any particular bricolage I had created before
and re-think what a critical teacher educa-
tor’s pedagogy looks like and feels like when
engaging with such ideologies in juxtaposi-
tion to one another and the master narratives
of normality writ large. The model I ended up
with was one of curiosity. Now many might
read this now and say ‘Well, okay, but aren’t
all teachers supposed to be curious?’ What I
provide here is a simple refute to this super-
ficial statement: if teachers are supposed to
be curious about their students, truly curious
that is, would they not also think about their
lived realities and the experiences these stu-
dents face outside of school to help them
make sense of their pedagogy? The answer
is quite facetious but needed: they would, but
they aren’t. Moreover, in the case of students
with disabilities, if teachers perceive these
students as being ‘handled’ by their special
education counterparts, and therein outside
of their purview of students that they are
charged to ‘care for’, these teacher-students
(in my experience) utilize this separate entity
(the special education teacher and/or para-
professional) as justification for not having
to be curious about them – these students
weren’t really theirs.
What we find in this critical model toward
disability in teacher education is the notion
that teacher-students need both explicit and
emergent experiences where they engage
with (dis)ability on similar terms that they
would race, class, gender, and all other mark-
ers of difference. In my own practice, this
meant consistently and purposefully design-
ing periods of discussion that focused on texts
whose authors explored such overlapping
and intersectional identities being negotiated
and exploited, as well as rendering a new nar-
rative about the purpose of schools and their
role as educator – leveraging these intersec-
tions to cogenerate a bricolage that was not
static or hierarchal, but fluid and differential.
Therein, this new model was not just one of
including (dis)ability into the curriculum of
my courses, far from it. It was part of the bri-
coleur’s process by which I re-thought about
my own practices in the undergraduate and
graduate classrooms where students were
asked to analyze these intersections with the
explicit intent to have (dis)ability emerge as a
point of discussion and contention – to design
a teacher education pedagogy to counteract
and combat ignorance in a way that helps
students build their own bricolage. Albeit this
was not so cut and dry in the moment; hind-
sight is always 20/20.
Through these discourses that embodied
inclusion by design (Dukes and Lamar-Dukes,
 ‘MORE THAN AN EDUCATOR BUT A POLITICAL FIGURE’
2009; Jehlen, 2002), my teacher-students
started to more thoughtfully engage with
their own practices and experiences in class-
rooms where (dis)ability was very rarely
discussed, let alone criticized for its exclu-
sionary premises. The ending product that
emerged was curiosity incarnate, a genu-
ine stance of accepted ignorance that was
grounded in the need to come from a place
of wanting to assess for one’s self the validity
used within the narratives imposed onto stu-
dents before my teachers even saw them – to
not assume an IEP, disability label, or special
education placement constituted the extent of
a student’s personhood or possibility.
You know these narratives that exclude, we
all do; the ‘teacher-talk’ when you receive
your roster that jades you against students
that, if you look hard enough, are often jus-
tified through the use of a disability label
to explain students’ inability to learn rather
than a teacher’s ignorance to the realities that
student faces. Within this curiosity stance,
(dis)ability became the pragmatic case of
exclusion through which all other markers
of difference were able to be deconstructed
based on their juxtaposition to normative
narratives, and then reconstructed through
actions that were needed to fulfill this curious
stance pragmatically. This is where the next
theme emerged as a way to place credence
to the philosophical and ideological commit-
ments my teacher-students were wrestling
with in my courses; this is where the need to
move beyond curiosity into practice emerged.
PATERNALISM AND INQUIRY
Teachers are one of, if not the, most important
role models in many students’ lives when
thinking about how much time students spend
in schools and the relationships that can be
built when teachers and students are authentic
with one another in the process of building
relational trust. Given this reality – which
many normative-reliant teacher-students have
877
experienced first-hand, albeit in contexts
where they embodied the idea of ‘normal’ –
new pre-service teachers often come into their
tenure as a teacher with a savior complex
couched in the preoccupation of Whiteness
(Aronson, 2017; Emdin, 2016; Ladson-
Billings, 2009) and the neo-colonial logics
demanded by First-world imposition of cul-
ture (Khoja-Moolji, 2017; Mignolo, 2012).
This White, neo-colonial savior-ism translates
into a very explicit set of beliefs and percep-
tions that these new teachers hold and utilize
to justify exclusion, if not challenged. In my
experience working with over 150 new teach-
ers over the past two years, this manifests as a
need to be seen as a parent – not in terms of
‘caring’ and ‘nurturing’ guide, but as paternal-
istic savior – which complicates the ways they
then react to having a student labeled with a
disability in class.
Throughout my exposure to these new
teachers’ savior complexes, I have consist-
ently heard the same narrative that was
exploited in the 1990s and millennial movies
of teacher-saviors: ‘But their parents just don’t
care’, ‘When are they going to learn about the
proper ways to act’, and ‘When I was their age
all I needed was a little discipline … they need
to learn right from wrong earlier rather than
later’. I want to say now that I am not devoid
of having these exact thoughts justify particu-
lar actions myself, and if as the reader you’re
saying that you have never thought these
things, I would request you do some unpack-
ing yourself – you drank too much of the neo-
liberal, neo-colonial Kool-aid: cut it out. We
all think these things when first encountering
populations different from us, and new teach-
ers need a space to talk about them rather than
being ridiculed. In my experiences, new pre-
service teachers need diverse ways to express
these ideas wherein accountability for these
justifications are not beholden to their own
Self, and rather made into an accountability
discussion for all stakeholders and parties as
group thought.
For example, my students started to
create a more counter-narrative bricolage
878 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
when I was able to express my own expe-
riences of wrestling with these ideas
alongside them. Given that the curriculum
provided the background to these analy-
ses, particularly in relation to disability
and intersectional difference, the need
to break down the ways shoring up per-
sonal pride and obsession with becoming
the authoritarian figure – the embodiment
of paternalism, in ‘knowing what’s right’
for someone – was required. Once my stu-
dents recognized that they did have bias
against people different from the White and
able-bodied normative center of school-
ing (Leonardo and Broderick, 2011), there
needed to be a space opened up about how
to bear witness to a life and reality beyond
their own subject position (Oliver, 2001).
In these moments, disability was integrated
as not only a concept to learn (i.e., mov-
ing beyond ignorance toward curiosity),
but also a methodology from which new
ways to view the purpose of education were
seeded. In other words, the notion of the
paternalistic White savior obsessed with
‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of knowing and
being a subject – a student and citizen –
was challenged by emphasizing the need to
take action in light of the curiosity fostered
by this newfound recognition of ignorance.
It is here where the title of this chapter
emerged.
In my teaching during this point, I utilized
a whiteboarding discussion activity where
students represented their interpretations of
a set of readings in relation to a video clip
presented to them on large dry-erase boards
in any way they desired: oftentimes in lists
and concept maps, but sometimes in comic
strips and drawn scenarios. During one ses-
sion about a year ago, one student responded
to another group’s explanation of their draw-
ing by focusing on the nature of how disabil-
ity made her think about the political nature
of schooling being connected to societal
expectations more broadly. She exposed her-
self to criticism by focusing on this abstract
notion of being ‘more than an educator but a
political figure’, which, in my courses, must
always be brought back down to a pragmatic
level to justify claims.
In doing so, she brought about a discussion
on the material realities of disability, differ-
ence, and exclusion in relation to our obses-
sion with ‘one way’ to ‘do education’ – i.e.,
‘why do we say there is more than one way
to learn but not offer this possibility in our
class structures or pedagogies?’ This led to a
consolidation of my students back into their
groups to define actionable tasks that they
could enact on the ground to inquire about
lived realities beyond their own. In essence,
while this is but one exemplar of this shift
from paternalism to inquiry, after this session
the emphasis to focusing on an action in rela-
tion to curious questions generated in class
was the norm rather than exception. Here,
there then began another layer of approach-
ing their bricolage – their sense-making
skills – due to the justifications used for
actions to be taken by my students. It was at
this point in my courses where critical peda-
gogy required a revisit to the why in how we
approached education; it was at this point
where my students often wrestled between
selfishness and care.
SELFISHNESS AND CARE
In the previous two sections, I presented the
progression of pragmatic teacher pedagogy
examples I used to address the overlapping
and intersectional nature of disability studies
and critical pedagogy in teacher education.
In this third section, the pinnacle theme that
emerged from my experiences, my students
sought out and utilized the abstract notions of
critical pedagogy to approach their curiosity
and subsequent inquiries in ways that shifted
from a position of selfishness to an ethics of
care. This phenomenon has been reported as
pertinent for understanding asset-based ped-
agogy (Hambacher and Bondy, 2016;
Ladson-Billings, 1995), as well as for making
 ‘MORE THAN AN EDUCATOR BUT A POLITICAL FIGURE’
sense of youth of color disproportionality
placed in special education (Banks, 2017;
Patton, 1998) and understanding material
realities of disability in global contexts
(Barile, 2003; Erevelles, 2011). It should not
be surprising that this notion of care that
emerged to help my students create a brico-
lage from which to critique their planned
actions is couched within the fundamental
tenets of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1998a),
and thus was pertinent as an inclusion with
many of my syllabi through Freire’s (1998b)
Letters to Those Who Dare Teach. Here is the
point in my courses where critical pedagogy
as a methodology to make sense of ‘the
world and the word’ became ingrained into
the minds of my students, and provided a
conceptual framework to engage with exclu-
sion critically – beyond selfish tendencies.
While the notion of care in education the-
ory and practice is widely published, and thus
does not need to be elaborated here, there were
examples where my students purposefully
took up the logic of care beyond one’s personal
benefit to challenge other teacher-students
that justified their actions in relation to self-
ish ends. The best exemplar comes from a dis-
cussion, of course, when students were asked
to think about how they may act in ways that
would benefit a child, given a particular sce-
nario – a designed setup from the Paternalism
and Inquiry theme presented above. This took
many forms in different classes and included,
but was not limited to, administering a youth
study project, generating a solution from a
collection of data within their own student
population, and hypothesizing their reactions
to problems they may encounter in relation
to their practice. Given that my students had
already engaged with the notion of being curi-
ous and then inquiring about the social reali-
ties of their students, the final task was to try
to make sense of their inquiries in ways that
would align with, or diverge from, the critical
bricolage they were constructing.
During these whiteboarding discussions,
small-group work, and individual explo-
rations of classrooms as social sites of
879
resistance, what emerged was a need for me
to think about what justifications my students
were providing for the ways they were think-
ing. This extra step for me to inquire about
the undergirding logic placed onto particu-
lar questions and actions brought my classes
full circle to thinking about how the rheto-
ric of schooling that they developed from
their personal experiences may translate
into rationales that sought to exclude based
on selfishness and lead to teaching practices
that excluded even as their intention was to
include. These conversations often relied on
a questioning dialogic between my students
and me, as well as between peers. More often
than not, since this process would take place
toward the end of the course, students would
lead this questioning tactic. Questions such
as ‘who benefits from your plan’, ‘why are
you doing this’, and ‘in what ways is this
focused on your [the teacher-student’s] needs
rather than the student’s needs’ led to expla-
nations related to personal preservation (e.g.,
‘my evaluation requires me to show student
growth’ and ‘edTPA has a place where we
have to analyze videos of our teaching’), but
those were few and far between. Most justifi-
cations, after a couple rounds of inquiry and
dialogue, focused on utilizing ‘how students
interacted outside of class’, fostering ‘more
participation between students to improve
learning and collegiality’, and came from
‘personal conversations with students’ about
the teacher-student’s attempt to implement
critical pedagogy in their service learning.
Through these justifications, what I found
was a genuine situated sense of care related
to students as social beings and my teacher-
students focusing on how they could frame
choices they make couched within that ethic
of care.
While brief, this example focusing on
how to engage new teachers to think about
their justifications to particular actions was
an important step in my own evolution as a
critical teacher educator. In particular, as my
students started to inquire about their stu-
dents labeled with disabilities, who were often
880 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
also youth of color, they found that many of
their students were ‘unique, rather than defi-
cit’ and ‘required more attention’ that would
inevitably ‘benefit both my own practice [the
teacher] and the student’s experiences [in the
classroom]’. This pinnacle analytic approach
to the process that emphasized being a critical
pedagogue on the ground aided in my teacher-
students being able to approach their praxis
both by addressing their normative thoughts
that seeded exclusionary rhetoric, as well as
the practices that would produce exclusion if
they implemented them in ways that only ben-
efited the teacher and not the student.
In this way, my approach to teacher
education in relation to the overlapping
intersections between disability studies and
critical pedagogy modeled the process of
learning to teach as a methodical inquiry,
derived from a genuine sense of curiosity, and
couched within an ethics of care. Through
starting from a site of pragmatic material
realities that produce exclusion, and then
facilitation of a plan to negate such realities,
my students emerged as critical pedagogues
with a bricolage in-the-making – as in flux
and always fluid – rather than fully formed
and static. In essence, each step along this
journey was not part of an either/or theory–
practice divide; rather, it was a dialectic
process that consistently and purposefully
engaged my teacher-students with the notion
of exclusion being both part of a larger
rhetorical, and normative-reliant, narrative
of exclusion, which included the subsequent
material realities that end up producing
exclusion for some and not others through
this preoccupation with this normative center
of schooling.
IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER
EDUCATION, TEACHER EDUCATORS,
AND TEACHERS
So, where do we find ourselves as critical
pedagogues, critical researchers, and critical
theorists, now? In this chapter I presented a
brief background of my own building of a
bricolage as a critical teacher educator,
explained how it became directly connected
with intersectional notions of difference
related to disability and ‘Othering’ markers
of difference, elaborated on the literature that
buttresses the nature of exclusion for Black
and Brown youth, and then provided a sample
of how my teacher-students built their own
bricolage to counteract these exclusionary
realities in relation to disability studies and
critical pedagogy with aid from the peda-
gogical scaffolds I provided. It should be
evident to the reader by now that my use of
(dis)ability and its relationship with markers
of difference such as race and class are cru-
cial to understanding the nature of exclusion
in American schools.
Moreover, if we are to approach critical
pedagogy in ways that embolden this funda-
mental reality within teacher education we
must depart from both neo-colonial logics of
oppression and the medicalized rhetoric that
sustains the pervasively used justification for
excluding poor Black and Brown youth from
general education classrooms whether they are
labeled with disabilities or not. This savior-
ism, this metaphor of students ‘in need’,
maintains that students that embody position-
alities away from a normative-reliant center –
those students that live in the borderlands
(Anzaldúa, 1987), in the margins (hooks,
2000) – will always require a ‘cure’ for what
ails them, their deficit character incarnate in
their Self. We must actively resist this logic, as
well as make changes on the ground right now
to support the students that live in these mate-
rial realities on a daily basis.
This chapter provides but one starting
point from which I view approaching
and leveraging the overlapping and
intersectional nature of disability studies and
critical pedagogy in teacher education. Its
implications are widespread and not isolated
to teacher education alone. However, if you
are a teacher educator, teacher education
researcher, or, hell, just a decent human being
 ‘MORE THAN AN EDUCATOR BUT A POLITICAL FIGURE’
reading this chapter, you must recognize the
need to respond to these realities in ways
that bring about both systemic change in
the long term and localized change right
now. What this chapter illuminates is the
nature of exclusion, not as a theory, per se;
not in a philosophical argument of grandiose
claims to an idealized post-whatever utopia;
no, this chapter illuminates the rhetoric and
realities that our K-12 students face right
now, as well as a call to redemption for
bringing back the criticality in our research
and praxis within post-secondary contexts.
Indeed, we must never forget that the nature
of exclusion is a historical fact that derives
its presence from the material realities faced
by youth of color attempting to gain access
to equitable education that upholds the
rhetorical arguments and humanistic notion
that all students are created equal and deserve
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In
ending on this note, I want to make clear that
this rhetoric will never come to fruition if we
continue to disregard the material realities
that position students of color, specifically
students of color labeled with disabilities,
outside of the purview of this credo by virtue
of them existing as their authentic Self. It
is here where this chapter has the greatest
implication: don’t let the notion of ‘Separate
but Equal Part Two’ persist – the lives of our
youth hang in the balance.
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Critical Pedagogy for Preservice
Teacher Education in the US:
An Agenda for a Plurilingual
Reality of Superdiversity
Guofang Li and Pramod K. Sah
INTRODUCTION
The past few decades have witnessed enor-
mous transnational movements of economic
migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers that
have deeply intensified the diversity of lan-
guage, culture, and knowledge in many of
the receiving countries such as the United
States. In the United States, there are more
than 43.7 million immigrants coming from
countries where English is not the official
language, accounting for 13.5% of the total
US population (Zong et al., 2018). Among
the newcomers’ population, more than 200
languages are represented and among some
ethnic groups, as high as 74% of them have
limited English proficiency (Batalova and
Zong, 2016). This ‘diversification of
diversity’, or what Vertovec (2007) calls
‘superdiversity’, has surpassed traditional
multiculturalism that aimed to address the
marginalization of Indigenous and formerly
enslaved minorities, signifying new com-
plexities and hierarchical social positions
74
and structures, and therefore new patterns of
social justice agenda (Cochran-Smith et al.,
2013). In the United States, this superdiverse
population who ‘speak many languages,
identify with many races and ethnicities, and
have widely varied countries of origin, socio-
economic statuses, levels of education, and
migration histories’ has also profoundly
altered the school’s demographics with an
exponential increase in the number of
migrant-origin children are superdiverse in
their ethnic, cultural, and linguistic back-
grounds (Park et al., 2018: 5). Some urban
schools sometimes have students from more
than 100 language backgrounds. These chil-
dren now constitute one-third of public-
school students in the United States and they
often face multiple challenges of language
acquisition, cultural adjustment, and content
learning in the classroom that may not be
experienced by their mainstream and locally
born minority peers.
To effectively educate these students
requires a set of unique teaching skills and
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOR PRESERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE US
dispositions, not just good teaching for the
general mainstream or locally born minor-
ity students (Li, 2018; Van Roekel, 2008).
However, a body of studies (e.g., Coady et al.,
2016; Gándara et al., 2005; Li, Hinojosa et al.,
2017) on both preservice and in-service teach-
ers for these diverse students has revealed
that teachers lack ‘practical, research-based
information, resources, and strategies needed
to teach, evaluate, and nurture’ these superdi-
verse students (Van Roekel, 2008: 1). Further,
while the student population is increasingly
multilingual and multicultural, the majority
of the teaching force are middle class, White,
and monolingual; 87.5% of them have had
little or no training in teaching linguistically
diverse students; and less than 30% have had
training in designing teaching for racially
diverse groups (Li, Hinojosa et al., 2017).
Not surprisingly, there have been persistent
achievement gaps between these English
learners and their native-speaking peers, and
between minority students and their main-
stream counterparts in every single academic
measure. These achievement gaps also have
long-term impacts on the learners’ wellbe-
ing, with lower high school graduation rates,
higher dropout rates, lower higher education
rate, and lower wage earnings, among other
opportunity gaps.
The need to prepare teachers for the
superdiversity turn requires different kinds
of teacher education curriculum. Since the
achievement gaps ‘systemically’ impede
these students from reaching their potential,
the education of these students entails not
just pedagogical knowledge, but also that of
social justice, which requires teachers to be
both professionals and advocates for these
underachieving students. While teacher edu-
cation programs in the United States have
long been criticized for not producing critical
teachers to successfully address the needs of
racially, economically, and cognitively disad-
vantaged children (Castro, 2010; Cochran-
Smith, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Lazar,
2016), the question arises whether the
American teaching force is prepared to face
885
the challenges posed by superdiversity in a
post-multiculturalist world.
Critical pedagogy, a form of teaching
approach derived from Freire’s (2000) work
to liberate Brazilian illiterate peasants, which
helps learners develop critical conscious-
ness to understand social structures and
beliefs, learn to question and challenge pos-
ited oppression, and combat social injustice
and inequity confronting students, especially
marginalized students, has been considered
essential for teacher education (Ladson-
Billings, 1995; Sleeter, 2008; Zeichner,
1983). However, despite much proliferation
of research on critical approaches to educa-
tion in general and the legitimacy of criti-
cal pedagogy in teacher education, recent
progressive educational (i.e., language)
policies in the United States have resulted
in little transformative effects in practice,
with the monolingual, English-only ideology
remaining hegemonic in US schools (Wiley,
2014). In light of this observed contradiction
between progress and limitation in critical
work to date, Kubota and Miller (2017) chal-
lenge scholars and practitioners to reimagine
praxis (theory-informed practice that leads
to action) with a goal to effect change in the
changing world.
This chapter attempts to reimagine the crit-
ical work in preparing preservice teachers in
order to address the growing linguistic super-
diversity in the United States, using Cochran-
Smith’s (2003) eight-question framework
for multicultural teacher education, which
includes questions related to diversity, ide-
ology, knowledge, teacher learning, teacher
practice, recruitment, outcome, and pro-
gram coherence. This chapter first outlines
the advantages and limitations of single-axis
frameworks of diversity that teacher edu-
cation programs have adopted in prepar-
ing teacher candidates to teach minoritized
students in the past few decades. We argue
that while significant advancement has been
made to traditional categories of diversity
in relation to locally born minority groups,
less emphasis has been placed on linguistic
886 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
diversity brought about through global migra-
tion. We propose an additive, intersectional
lens of incorporating linguistic diversity with
other traditional diversity categories and out-
line the key issues of ideology, knowledge,
teacher learning and practice, recruitment
and retention, outcome evaluation, and pro-
gram coherence to consider when pursuing
such an intersectional agenda.
THE EVOLUTION OF ‘DIVERSITY’
IN CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL
TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE
UNITED STATES
The decade of the 1980s, in the wake of civil
rights and feminist movements from the
1960s to 1970s, is traced as the beginning of
advocating critical pedagogy in teacher edu-
cation. In its early conceptualization, schol-
ars tried to disrupt teacher education as
normatively neutral and argued for placing a
greater emphasis on developing morally
deliberate and civic-minded teacher candi-
dates, not merely technical and instrumental
aspects of the teaching act. A plethora of
proposals for critical teacher education, such
as Zeichner and Teitelbaum’s (1982) inquiry-
based approach, Kirk’s (1986) radical tradi-
tion, and Giroux and McLaren’s (1986)
transformative education to teacher educa-
tion, aimed to help teacher candidates iden-
tify connections between the curriculum and
the wider educational, social, economic, and
political conditions that impinge upon class-
room practice. While these proposals built up
a foundation for the adaptation of critical
pedagogy in teacher education programs,
these early conceptualizations of diversity
and criticality were focused mostly on ethnic
(i.e., African American) and gender differ-
ences, which took the attention away from
other social justice categories (Banks, 1993).
These early conceptualizations also lacked a
practical guide for curriculum change that
teacher education programs could adopt.
As a result, critical pedagogy still held ‘a
marginal status in teacher preparation pro-
grams’ (Zeichner, 1983), with little or no
change in both school education and teacher
education praxis (Gay and Howard, 2000;
Graziano, 2008; May, 1999; Zygmunt and
Clark, 2015), and in some cases resulting in
‘miseducation’ of teachers (King, 1991).
In the 1990s, significant development in
the conceptualization of diversity in criti-
cal pedagogy was made through multicul-
tural education (Banks, 1993) and critical
race pedagogy (King, 1991). Banks’ (1993)
multicultural education, a movement beyond
‘ethnic-­specific or gender-specific’ differ-
ences, brought ‘cultural pluralism’ to the
concept of diversity. In his highly influential
five-­dimensional model of multicultural edu-
cation, Banks (1993) proposed an additive
approach to celebrate cultural elements of dif-
ferent groups and add contents in relation to
ethnic and gender perspectives to the curricu-
lum, raise awareness of the process through
which cultural assumptions, perspectives,
and biases are constructed, reduce prejudice
by developing positive attitudes toward the
plurality of the society, and enhance minor-
itized students’ academic achievement. In
line with Banks’ framework, Bennett, Niggle,
and Stage (1990) proposed an agenda to
incorporate multicultural education for future
teachers that included developing (a) cultural
consciousness, (b) intercultural competence,
(c) eradication of racism, prejudice, and
discrimination, and (d) skills to teach multi-
cultural students.
While multicultural education broadened
the concept of diversity, the definition of
‘multiculturalism’ was considered too lib-
eral or superficial, attributing inequalities in
the schools and society to surface-level cul-
ture differences, neglecting the role of White
privilege and institutional racism. Some
scholars argued that such an essentialist view
of diversity has perpetuated ‘dysconscious
racism’ (uncritical habit of mind toward
educational inequity and cultural diversity)
that reinforces deficit theories that rendered
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOR PRESERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE US
students from non-dominant cultural groups
as genetically and culturally inferior (King,
1991; Nieto, 2000). A review of multicultural
teacher education programs in the United
States revealed that few employed all five
dimensions of Banks’ model; several did not
even consider any dimension, and some con-
sidered integrating multicultural education as
adding units on different cultures (Ladson-
Billings, 1995).
To rectify ‘the limited and distorted under-
standings … about inequality and cultural
diversity that accepts dominant White norms
and privileges’, critical race theory was intro-
duced from legal studies (King, 1991: 132).
King (1991) suggested developing a kind of
teacher education curriculum that challenges
preservice teachers’ ‘internalized ideologies
and subjective identities’ and requires them
to self-examine their racialized ideologies
and the construction of racial idealities and
how they respond to racism against different
groups in the society (1991: 134). While such
an approach to developing critical conscious-
ness and self-reflexive practices has pro-
vided necessary support to racial awareness
in preservice teacher education programs
(Gay and Kirkland, 2003), a large number of
teacher education programs at colleges and
universities across the United States have not
been able to go beyond a mere engagement
in perusing the meaning and significance of
race and ethnicity related to Whiteness as
teacher candidates often describe and ana-
lyze the issues of oppression and disparities
between Blacks and Whites (Stachowiak and
Dell, 2016).
The explicit attention to race and
Whiteness in diversity is inevitably signifi-
cant but it also runs the risk of essential-
izing racism for other forms of inequalities
(Castro, 2010). Research on preservice
teachers has found that under such a sin-
gle-axis framework, preservice teachers
hold unsophisticated notions about diver-
sity and democracy, almost exclusively in
term of racism and ethnicity to the exclu-
sion of class, gender, linguistics, sexual
887
orientation, and disabilities (Scrimgeour
and Ovsienko, 2015). Consequently, many
teacher candidates still conduct a form of
‘guerrilla teaching’, in which they go ‘into
unfamiliar schools, briefly depositing lim-
ited content to children whom they have
never met’ (Zygmunt and Clark, 2015: 3).
All in all, scholars increasingly recognize
that a single-axis framework provides ‘an
inadequate foundation for the deployment
of critical pedagogies capable of con-
fronting the reproduction of educational
inequalities’ (Scrimgeour and Ovsienko,
2015: 35). There is a need for an intersec-
tional approach to critical teacher educa-
tion that allows possibilities to address
different forms of oppression in the age of
superdiversity.
From Diversity to Superdiversity:
An Intersectional Lens for
Critical Teacher Education in
the United States
As noted at the beginning of this chapter,
superdiversity is characterized by ‘a tremen-
dous increase in categories of immigrants,
not only in terms of nationality, ethnicity,
language, and religion, but also in terms of
motives, patterns and itineraries of migra-
tion, processes of insertion into … the host
societies’ (Blommaert and Rampton, 2011:
22). The changing nature of global migration
has led to ‘new social formations spanning
nation-states and the persistently poor socio-
economic standing of immigrant and ethnic
minority groups are among the foremost
developments that seem to render obsolete
the older models of multiculturalism’
(Vertovec, 2010: 83). With such an influx of
foreign-born populations in the United
States, it is not enough to observe diversity
only in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity,
but it must also be considered in terms of
other variables such as linguistic diversities,
immigration statuses, and ‘their concomitant
entitlements and restrictions of rights,
888 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
divergent labor market experiences, discrete
gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial
distribution and mixed local area responses
by service providers and residents’ (Vertovec,
2007: 1025). The complexities brought about
by superdiversity, consequently, produce new
forms of hierarchical social positions and
stratifications, and hence new patterns of
social justice issues that are not fixed but
emergent in nature in different contexts
(Vertovec, 2007).
These new complexities and emergent
patterns of social stratifications require pre-
service teacher education to move from a
single-axis framework to ‘a multiplication
of significant variables that affect where,
how and with whom people live’ (Vertovec,
2007: 1025). As May (2015) argues, think-
ing from single-axis frameworks can only
provide a fragmented view of inequali-
ties as such thinking perpetuates systemic
privilege, obscures the interplay of systems
of inequality, masks within-group differ-
ences, and impedes cross-categorical coa-
litions for social change. In other words,
teacher education curriculum needs to
move toward intersectionality in critical
teacher education that encompasses differ-
ent forms of inequalities. Intersectionality
supports the notion that minoritized stu-
dents are subject to mutually reinforcing
systems of oppression such as linguicism,
racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and
others (Qin and Li, in press). An intersec-
tional lens can motivate teacher candidates
to ‘move beyond a peripheral understanding
of difference toward the discovery of con-
textual cognizance, which has the potential
to inform – and indeed transform – their
teaching and student learning’ (Zygmunt
and Clark, 2015: 5). Teacher candidates
must be provided with opportunities to have
direct contact with communities to learn
about real-life experiences of their prospec-
tive students in order to be able to identify
‘intersectional harm’ or various mutually
constitutive forms of injustices (Qin and
Li, in press) resulting from a convergence
of factors such as traditional diversity clas-
sification in terms of race, ethnicity, and
gender, but also new classifications under
superdiversity such as linguistic diversity,
religion, migration histories, and transna-
tional experiences. As well, they must not
just learn to recognize these social justice
categories or simply develop knowledge
about them through reading textbooks,
discussing research articles, and writing
essays – which is, in fact, practiced in many
programs – rather, they should learn how
to teach these superdiverse children in all
stages of their teacher education programs.
A starting point of an intersectional
approach is to incorporate linguistic diversity
within the paradigm of critical pedagogy. The
US Census Bureau estimates that the num-
ber of linguistic minority students in K-12
schools is more than 14 million and nearly
5 million of these students are classified as
English Language Learners (ELLs) – who
came with diverse linguistic backgrounds but
are struggling to use and understand English
fully under the monolingual policy and prac-
tices in the mainstream schools (International
Center for Leadership in Education, 2011).
Many teachers of ELLs lack sociolinguis-
tic awareness, and, therefore, are unable to
deal with injustices and inequalities related
to language due to a serious preparation gap
in teacher education program curriculum on
how to address the needs of students whose
native language is not English (Coady et al.,
2016; Li, Bian et al., 2018. Therefore, incor-
porating an intersectional lens of linguistic
diversity with other forms of social justice
issues is essential to help teacher candi-
dates develop skills for content-specific and
language-sensitive instruction and engage
in critical discussions around discursive
spaces of educational inequality and inequity
because of language bias in the policy, curric-
ulum, and practices (Cho et al., 2012). In the
following section, we outline key questions
to consider when implementing an intersec-
tional perspective in critical teacher educa-
tion for superdiversity.
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOR PRESERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE US
KEY QUESTIONS IN INCORPORATING
LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY/
INTERSECTIONALITY IN CRITICAL
TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE
UNITED STATES
In this section, we discuss key issues to con-
sider when incorporating linguistic diversity
and intersectionality in critical teacher edu-
cation following Cochran-Smith (2003): the
ideology question with a focus on stewarding
policy making toward superdiversity, the
knowledge question with attention to teach-
ers’ knowledge base in and disposition
toward superdiverse learners, the teacher
learning and the practice questions that
address teacher education curriculum, the
recruitment/retention question that provides
pathways to diversify the teaching force, the
outcome question that discusses the assess-
ment of such preparation, and finally the
coherence question that addresses how these
seven components are connected as a holistic
system internally and externally from policy
to practice for teacher preparation.
The Ideology Question
In the United States, while Title VI of the
US Civil Rights Act of 1964 led to an intro-
duction of the Bilingual Education Act
(1968) for socioeconomically disadvantaged
minority children, the implementation of
bilingual language policy has undergone
several ups and downs due to national politi-
cal (social and economic) agendas. Despite
the increasing linguistic diversity and the
mounting research evidence of the advan-
tages of bilingualism, during the past 40
years, there has been a fierce debate on
bilingual education for its potential impact
on learners’ ability to assimilate and rapidly
acquire English, the dominant language of
the United States. The end result of the
debate is that bilingual education was ‘left
far behind, no longer part of the federal
framework’ for educating English learners,
889
with the passing of the No Child Left
Behind Education Act in 2001 (Goldenberg
and Wagner, 2015: 29). Hence, there has
been a push for ‘English-only’ instruction
and a sharp decrease in federal funding to
help states and local school districts to pro-
vide bilingual support for diverse learners,
presenting additional challenges for teach-
ers to educate these students (Li, in press).
This policy push for ‘English-only’ instruc-
tion strongly influences the way teacher edu-
cation policies and practices are framed. The
dominant monolingual educational practices
have resulted in little attention to incorporat-
ing linguistic issues as a variable of critical
pedagogy in teacher education programs
(Li, 2018; Lucas and Villegas, 2013 Samson
and Collins, 2012). Similarly, state as well
as national requirements for teacher certifi-
cation often focus more on ethnic diversity
issues (though this varies by state) but not
language requirements (Akiba et al., 2010;
Samson and Collins, 2012). Therefore, it is
not surprising that most teachers believe that
they were not sufficiently prepared to teach
English-language learners because of their
lack of opportunities to develop language-
related knowledge through their program of
study (Li, Hinojosa et al., 2017). As Samson
and Collins (2012) argue,
A multisubject elementary school teacher candi-
date, for example, may be required to take courses
in child development, English language arts, math,
science, social studies, art, behavior management,
and assessment, but not in the pedagogy of teach-
ing ELLs. Without specific required coursework
relating to the unique learning needs of ELLs,
teachers will not be able to teach these students
adequately. (2012: 8)
Therefore, there is a need for policy change
at the federal, state, and program level where
issues related to linguistic diversity and other
diversity categories must be made ‘central
not peripheral to the rest of the curriculum,
mandatory rather than optional for all pro-
spective teachers, and infused throughout
courses and fieldwork experiences rather
890 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
than contained in a single course’ (Cochran-
Smith, 2003: 15).
The Knowledge Question
The knowledge question aims to address
what knowledge, interpretive frameworks,
beliefs, and attitudes are necessary to teach
diverse populations effectively. Here, we
highlight two areas of importance for teach-
ing superdiversity: teachers’ knowledge base
in second language learning and their dispo-
sitions toward superdiverse learners.
Knowledge base in second language
learning. Working with superdiverse learn-
ers require teachers to have a multicultural
and multilingual repertoire in order to
understand how language and culture shape
school experiences and inform pedagogy
for learners. Scholars argue that preservice
teachers need ‘specific language-related
preparation’ to teach a superdiverse student
population effectively and teacher educa-
tion programs need to ‘bring the notion of
language from the periphery into the center
of the discussion of teaching’ (Lucas and
Villegas, 2013: 56). As such, teacher edu-
cational curriculum should help preser-
vice teachers of ELLs develop a thorough
understanding of ‘first and second language
acquisition, strong content mastery, cross-
cultural understanding, acknowledgment
of differences, and collaborative skills’
(Waxman et al., 2006: 192).
In terms of linguistic knowledge in first-
and second-language acquisition, Fillmore
and Snow (2000) provide a list of language
points that all teachers should know about
educational linguistics, including compo-
nents of oral language development (e.g.,
phonemes, morphemes, vocabulary, lan-
guage ir/regularities, vernacular and dialects
vs standard English vs academic English),
written language such as spelling conven-
tions, rhetorical structures, grammar, and
text appropriateness (see their article for
recommendations for course design for this
knowledge base). To ensure content mastery,
in addition to disciplinary content knowl-
edge, teachers also need to have disciplinary
linguistic knowledge in how language works
within a specific subject area of study such
as science, social studies, and mathemat-
ics (e.g., Bunch, 2013; Schleppegrell, 2004;
Turkan et al., 2014). Finally, to address cul-
tural differences related to language, teachers
must also gain understandings of students’
mother tongue, prior schooling, and home
lives to identify funds of knowledge learners
bring to the classroom and aid teachers to dif-
ferentiate instruction according to their needs
(Coady et al., 2016).
Teacher beliefs and dispositions. Research
has shown that a large number of teachers
entering teacher education programs have
a shallow knowledge base not only rela-
tive to their own cultural value system but
also of other citizens in the society. Many
White and middle-class preservice teach-
ers of this generation are not aware of the
structural and institutionalized inequalities
of the school and society that are impact-
ing on students’ access to education (Lazar,
2016) and often tend to resist or dismiss the
principles of diversity that teacher education
programs try to teach (Castro, 2010; Cockrell
et al., 1999; Hatch and Groenke, 2009). In
Hatch and Groenke’s (2009) research, for
example, most White teachers resisted the
critical pedagogy approaches teacher educa-
tors strove to utilize and encourage their stu-
dents to use, and lacked enough knowledge
to scaffold critical understandings. Although
some seemed to accept the notions of criti-
cal pedagogy, they often shied away from
discussions on the issues of race, class, and
power. Hatch and Groenke further found
that (a) these students demonstrated ‘wilful
ignorance’ about social inequalities and their
place in perpetuating injustice; (b) students
had difficulty acknowledging patterns of
social injustice, even when confronted with
clear evidence; and (c) they deny oppressions
in the community, resist questioning current
inequalities in education, and seem to operate
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOR PRESERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE US
on a series of stereotypical assumptions, like
‘critical pedagogy is anti-American’. The
resistance suggests that without attending
to preservice teachers’ previous knowledge,
attitudes, and ideologies, it would be difficult
to achieve success with critical teacher edu-
cation (Graziano, 2008; Hatch and Groenke,
2009; Nieto, 2000).
Building on Sleeter (2008), we delin-
eate four fundamental issues to address
White middle-class teachers’ beliefs and
dispositions toward superdiversity: (a) sup-
porting them to recognize the ubiquity of
various forms of inequality with a particular
attention to injustices related to language;
(b) transforming their deficit views toward
and lower expectations of students of diverse
backgrounds, including those with diverse
languages, immigration histories, countries of
origin; (c) challenging their perspective of
color- and language-blindness and denial
of racial and linguistic disparities in prac-
tice; and (d) confronting their lack of sense
of their own cultural beings and linguis-
tic privilege. Li’s (2013, 2017) three-step
intersectional approach to critical teacher
education that moves from (1) examining
the teacher’s own language and cultural
identity and their beliefs about the role lan-
guage, race, social class, culture, and other
identities play in shaping children’s edu-
cational experiences, (2) contrasting these
with their students’ language identities and
sociocultural experiences, and (3) design-
ing and taking actions to tackle systemic
oppressions that may impact their students
is an example of an inclusive framework to
address different forms of cultural, racial,
and linguistic inequalities in teacher educa-
tion. Since prospective teachers often have
limited exploration into critical pedagogy
(therefore, resistance or misunderstanding
of it), courses in teacher education curricu-
lum must also seek to expand their learning
experiences with actual classroom practices
and model effective praxis that addresses
linguistic and other forms of diversity in the
classroom (Conklin, 2008; Graziano, 2008).
891
The Teacher Learning/Practice
Questions
The teacher learning question and practice
questions concerning individual courses as
well as the program as a whole can be
restructured to effectively prepare all teach-
ers to work with superdiverse students. In
line with our intersectional approach and the
need to make superdiversity central to teacher
preparation, it is critically important for
teacher education to go beyond the ‘frag-
mented and superficial treatment of diver-
sity’ (Villegas and Lucas, 2002: 20) to
restructure its various components such as
coursework and field experiences with con-
ceptual coherence around superdiversity.
Currently, while a whole program overhaul is
rare, such program efforts have been devoted
to modifying existing courses to add/infuse
language-related content or creating a stand-
alone course or program (e.g., TESOL
endorsement or TESL certificate programs)
(see Li, 2018 for a comprehensive review of
these efforts).
There are many innovative ways to revise
existing courses, for example, by adding lan-
guage- or culture-related content (Abbate-
Vaughn, 2008), integrating service learning
or community-based learning (Hutchinson,
2011; Tinkler and Tinkler, 2013), or inten-
tionally place teachers in culturally and
linguistically diverse schools, especially in
urban contexts (Bleicher, 2011). All these
revisions help ‘bring the notion of lan-
guage from the periphery into the center
of the discussion of teaching’ (Lucas and
Villegas, 2011: 56). In addition to the infu-
sion approach, adding a course in language
or ELL teaching as a mandatory or elective
course to the existing program is another
useful practice. However, very few states
and institutions have separate courses that
are specifically devoted to these issues.
While these efforts are improvements, it
must be noted that if they are just sprinkling
‘disparate bits of information about diversity
into the established curriculum’ (Villegas and
892 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Lucas, 2002: 21) without changing the status
quo or holistic incorporation of the knowl-
edge base in superdiversity, it is unlikely that
there will be fundamental changes in produc-
ing truly highly qualified teachers.
The Recruitment/Retention
Question
The demographic disparity between increas-
ingly homogeneous teachers and superdi-
verse students contributes to two significant
problems noted above: (a) most prospective
teachers’ fear of teaching diverse students,
including the denial of various ethnic, cul-
tural, and linguistic differences and injus-
tices; and (b) teachers’ resistance to engaging
in diversity issues in teacher preparation and
classroom practices (Gay and Howard,
2000). Therefore, there is a need to diversify
the teaching force. Since teacher educators
play a central role in both selecting and
teaching prospective teachers, recruitment
and selection therefore should attend to pro-
spective teachers and teacher educators.
Recruitment and selection of teacher
candidates. The enrolments of preservice
teachers in the US teacher education pro-
grams are hugely White, middle class, and
female dominant, leading to a demographic
disparity in terms of teacher recruitment in
the school (Nieto, 2000). Given this demo-
graphic situation, enrolment management in
teacher education programs has become crit-
ical and requires close attention. Research
has shown that minority teachers boost
minority students’ academic achievements,
improve graduation rates, and increase
their aspirations for college (Gist, 2015).
However, there has been a huge challenge
for teacher education programs in recruit-
ing a diverse preservice teacher body that
can reflect and resemble the increasing
diverse positions of students in American
K-12 schools. For example, as the survey of
American Association of State Colleges and
Universities (National Center for Educational
Statistics, 2017) reveals, in 2012–13, 73%
of teacher candidates were White, and only
11% were Hispanic or Latino and 10% Black
or African American. The survey further
depicts that some programs try to be strate-
gic in situating themselves into more demo-
graphically heterogeneous communities;
however, with very low success.
These difficulties suggest that recruiting
teachers from these communities requires
systematic, intentional, and sustainable
efforts to address issues related to admission
practice, financial support, and employment
opportunities, as well as induction strategies.
Carver-Thomas (2018) outlines the follow-
ing promising practices for teacher educa-
tion programs for recruiting and retaining
teachers from diverse backgrounds: creat-
ing alternative pathways to fund the cost of
teacher preparation (e.g., service scholarship,
loan forgiveness, joint funding from school
districts, universities, and states), recruit-
ing from non-traditional populations (e.g.,
high-school students, paraprofessionals, and
after-school program staff), providing ongo-
ing mentorship, tutoring, exam stipends, job
placement services, and other supports to
ensure teachers of diverse backgrounds suc-
cessfully complete preparation programs,
reforming state teacher licensure require-
ments to be aligned with their learning, and
creating state data systems that monitor
and reward the racial diversity of enrollees
in teacher preparation programs, as well as
those who complete the programs.
Recruitment and professional development
of teacher educators. Analogous to the lack
of diversity in preservice teachers’ demo-
graphics, teacher education faculty members
also lack diversity in demographics and tend
to deny critical pedagogy approaches (Li,
Bian et al., 2018). As Hatch and Groenke
(2009) revealed, most White middle-class
teacher educators often feel threatened by
anything that smacks of diversity and they
are less likely, or unable, to invest their time
and efforts needed to administer critical ped-
agogical approaches. Similarly, many believe
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOR PRESERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE US
that critical theoretical principles and criti-
cal pedagogical approaches are too complex
for teacher preparation students to handle,
and they believe their students expect to be
trained to teach, not to learn to think criti-
cally. Ladson-Billings (1995) also points out
that many teacher educators who are engaged
in critical pedagogy have not studied the
issues of cultural diversity and social and
educational inequality and injustice. They
have not even reflected upon their own dis-
positions, beliefs, and assumptions regarding
children from poverty and underserved com-
munities. This is evidenced in a recent study
by Li, Bian et al. (2018) on teacher educators’
perspectives on preparing preservice teachers
for cultural and linguistic diversity, where
many of them reported little prior training in
diversity and little time for on-the-job learn-
ing about diversity. As a result, many of them
lacked both an awareness of the need, and the
ability, to include such topics in their courses.
Such ‘dysconscious’ practices reveal the
fact that many teacher educators may lack
the needed preparation to prepare preser-
vice teachers to transform educational and
societal discourses of injustice and inequity.
These challenges are further compounded by
a lack of clarity in the meaning of ‘criticality’
in current teacher education curriculum and
policy. Therefore, there is a need for teacher
education programs to diversify their teacher
education faculty, identify gaps in faculty
expertise, and provide continued professional
development to support them to better engage
preservice teachers in preparation for teach-
ing for superdiversity.
The Outcome Question
In the United States as well as many other
countries, the fundamental objective of edu-
cation is defined in terms of producing a
workforce that has the skills and capabilities
to enter the global economy. With this cor-
porate model of education, teacher educa-
tion in the United States ‘has made a major
893
programmatic shift from inputs and pro-
cesses to outcomes’ (Cochran-Smith et. al.,
2013: 12) in producing highly qualified
‘teachers of record’ with a bachelor’s degree,
state certification, and a pass score on the
state licensing exam (Darling-Hammond,
2017). Consequently, there is increasing
pressure from the federal government to
‘push teacher education towards a “back-to-
basics” version of teacher training’ and
prepare teachers to simply accept and imple-
ment the goals and agendas of neoliberal
America (Down and Smyth, 2012: 3). In this
system, teachers become robotic technicians
with practical-vocational competencies to
serve the interests of global capitalism. This
shift to training technicians, as Leistyna
et al. (2004) contend, ‘comes at the expense
of transdisciplinary thinkers and producers
of social knowledge about the world’ and,
consequently, students in teacher education
programs
are diverted or lured away from critically reading
historical and existing social formations, especially
those that maintain abuses of power, [and] they so
often become the newest wave of exploited labor
power and reproducers, whether they are con-
scious of it or not, of oppressive social practices.
(2004: 8)
Therefore, teacher preparation must assess
not just their abilities in ‘just good teach-
ing’ but also competencies in teaching for
superdiversity. Li (2018) outlines four areas
of competencies that are specific to teaching
linguistic diverse learners but intersect with
general teacher competencies: positive atti-
tudes and dispositions toward linguistically
diverse learners; a multicultural and multi-
lingual repertoire; key instructional strate-
gies specific to teaching diverse learners;
knowledge of federal, state, and school poli-
cies, and contextual factors affecting diverse
learners. However, as noted in the beginning
section of this chapter, the majority of the
preservice and in-service teachers reported
that they were not prepared in these com-
petencies. Similarly, in most state teacher
894 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
licensing exams, these skills and strategies in
teaching for diversity and social justice are
not formally evaluated, for example, in state
exams or Teacher Performance Assessments.
These evaluation gaps in teacher prepara-
tion bring the last question, the coherence
question.
The Coherence Question
By coherence, we mean not just how super-
diversity issues are covered coherently within
teacher education programs at the various
stages of teacher learning processes, includ-
ing teacher preparation, certification, and
evaluation, but also the alignment of federal,
state, and local policies and practices in pre-
paring teachers for superdiversity.
At the institutional level, while some
teacher education programs have oriented
their curriculum toward a social justice
agenda, it is often unclear among teacher
educators and administrators what exactly
‘diversity’ means for them and what compe-
tencies they need to teach (Cochran-Smith,
2003). Similarly, despite the ‘will’ of many
programs to address the issues of cultural
and linguistic diversity alongside race issues,
there is little consensus among key personnel
on what these entail, which complicates the
development of a solid curriculum for critical
pedagogy (Lazar, 2016). This lack of coher-
ence and consensus becomes problematic
because these teacher education programs
are producing ‘teachers with varied levels
of exposure to sociopolitical issues related
to poverty and racism and different con-
ceptions of culturally sustaining pedagogic
approaches’ (Lazar, 2016: 143). Further,
many teacher education programs do not
seem able to pull White students into criti-
cal debates on issues of diversity (Graziano,
2008: 154). On the other hand, preservice
teachers from non-dominant groups ‘are not
explicitly taught to access and utilize their
own cultural and linguistic capital to support
their students’ (Wyatt, 2017: 88). Rather, it
is assumed that because they are minorities
they know how to do this. These inconsisten-
cies suggest that without internal coherence
on the concept of superdiversity and ways to
support teacher learning, teacher education
programs may fail to guarantee that the cur-
rent teacher candidates will fulfil the objec-
tives of critical pedagogy in real practices.
In the United States, educational policies
at the federal and state level often reinforce
the single-axis frameworks toward diversity
(i.e., through teacher certification exams)
(Akiba et al., 2010). The two largest teacher
education organizations in the United
States, the Association of Teacher Educators
and the American Association of Colleges
for Teacher Education, have devoted ‘great
attention to preparing teachers for culturally
diverse students while paying little attention
to teachers who will face language diversity’
(Téllez and Waxman, 2006: 9). Both state
and federal governments are more eager to
gauge quality based on performance out-
comes, often masking other issues of race,
culture, and language, which demotivates
innovative practices in implementing criti-
cal pedagogy in teacher education programs.
Analogously, despite an increase in multilin-
gual citizens due to global migration, there is
little progress in institutionalizing linguistic
diversity as current language policies tend
to favor a monolingual approach to teach-
ing multilingual students (Li and Sah, 2019;
Wiley, 2014).
CONCLUSION
Over the last few decades, there has been
clear achievement in the conceptualization of
what is meant by critical teacher education,
for example with the emergence of ‘radical
teacher education’, ‘multicultural teacher
education’, and ‘critical race pedagogy’,
alongside a greater focus on preservice
teachers’ ‘political and ideological clarity’
(Bartolomé, 2004) and ‘critical cultural/
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOR PRESERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE US
racial consciousness’ (Gay and Kirkland,
2003). In recent years, however, against the
backdrop of superdiversity, there is an urgent
need for teacher education to emphasize the
role of critical reflection on sociolinguistic
social justice for the changing demographics
in school, alongside other forms of inequali-
ties such as gender, race, culture, and
ethnicity.
Building on Cochran-Smith (2003), this
chapter aims to provide an explicit frame-
work for addressing intersectionality of the
different forms of oppressions underpinning
the education of future teachers for superdi-
versity. We argue that addressing each form
of oppression in isolation will run the risk
of compartmentalizing teacher candidates’
consciousness-raising experiences and essen-
tializing differences. Envisioning a critical
pedagogic model that addresses the inter-
sectionality of the systemic oppressions that
shape these disadvantages can help teachers
to fully and sustainably transform the learn-
ing trajectories of minoritized students. In
addition to helping teachers better support
minoritized students as holistic beings, mov-
ing beyond a simplistic categorization of
diverse students can even help teachers and
researchers better understand factors that
may affect the achievement gaps in standard-
ized assessments (Van Roekel, 2008).
While scholars are proposing diverse
approaches to address intersectionality of
inequalities in teacher education programs,
as past developments have indicated, how
to resolve the tension between the ten-
dency to essentialize critical differences
and directly target certain forms of oppres-
sion in the age of superdiversity, be it lingui-
cism, racism, sexism, or classism, remains
a central challenge to theorists, researchers,
and teacher educators in the field. Existing
research clearly shows that there are persis-
tent barriers that prevent teacher education
programs from successfully incorporating
a critical pedagogic approach to the cur-
riculum to prepare future teachers with the
knowledge and skills required to transform
895
the educational experience of minoritized
students. Therefore, instilling critical peda-
gogy into teacher education is an unfinished
project, which yet needs much exploration
and development, especially within the new
context of superdiversity.
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Teaching Social Justice
Good morning class. Today we will start
changing the world and making our society
more pleasant, egalitarian and just. The
classroom, in the eyes of critical pedagogy, is
an arena for social change, led by the teacher
in cooperation with the students and the com-
munity as a whole. Education is a political
act, an act that in its current form maintains
the existing social structure (Freire, 1993). A
structure compounded of a variety of eco-
nomic classes, identities, nationalities and
genders. Changing the existing social struc-
ture requires changing the power relations
between those groups. For education to
become a tool for social change, creating a
more egalitarian society, it must address
changing the power relations in society in
general and in the classroom in particular.
Substantial social change cannot rest on edu-
cation alone, it should also be derived and
driven by social and political activity in the
different communities and society in general.
Therefore, educators are also activists, intel-
lectual transformers, who alongside their
75
Galia Zalmanson Levi
educational work in the education system,
act as activists in social change organizations
(Giroux, 1988).
Critical Pedagogy, as developed from the
theory of Paulo Freire, strives to provide equal
educational opportunities to all populations,
especially for children in the marginalized
strata. Such opportunities enable children
from the margins of society to change their
location in the social order and ensure equal
opportunities for all boys and girls, regardless
of their gender, nationality, origin, economic
status and physical state (Gur Ziv, 2013).
This chapter strives to examine what pos-
sibilities are given and which dilemmas are
faced by a teacher when choosing to imple-
ment the critical pedagogy approach in her
classroom in the public school system. After
presenting the key elements of the teacher’s
position, I will show how, by operating in
three spheres: pedagogical, organizational
and systematic, the teacher leads a signifi-
cant change in the classroom, at school and
in the community. In each sphere, the teacher
900 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
identifies the mechanisms for social preser-
vation and transforms them to mechanisms of
social change.
TEACHING ACCORDING TO THE
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY APPROACH:
SEEING THE CLASSROOM AS A
POLITICAL EDUCATIONAL ARENA
The traditional classroom is inhabited by
students of diverse identities involved in
power relations: females and males, different
races/skin colors, immigrants and native-
born, wealthy and poor, etc. It is furnished
with table and chairs, whose value and condi-
tion depends on the budgetary of the local
authority, and is arranged to suit frontal les-
sons and enable the teacher’s mastery of
discipline. The walls express educational,
and sometimes national, values. In this politi-
cal and educational space most curricula are
determined by a central authority along with
the measurement and testing methods used to
evaluate the knowledge transferred from the
teacher to the students. When facing relative
measurement of their achievements in very
specific domains that do not reflect their
wide abilities and talents, many children find
themselves developing low self-esteem
(Lampert, 2013). The curricula contain overt
and hidden messages that usually conform to
the hegemony and serve its strengthening.
The lack of representation of poets and
authors from minority groups in the literature
curricula in Israel, for example, mirrors the
general power relations in society as they
are reflected in economic and educational gaps
(Svirsky et al., 2013). The classroom includes
more than its inhabitants and its four walls.
The communities the students come from
and the extent of their inclusion in the cur-
ricula, ceremonies and events; the parents;
the active organizations in the community;
the overall educational policy – all take part
in the political educational space in the class-
room (Zalmanson Levi, 2011).
THE TEACHER AS AN INTELLECTUAL
TRANSFORMER
Leading social change must exceed the class-
room walls. Each class is a partial mirror
image of society with its myriad conflicts and
inherent inequality and racism. Some students
live in poverty and others grow unsighted to
their economic advantage over their peers.
Some come from families struggling for sur-
vival and some are used to getting everything
they want. For some the school environment
and curricula induces feelings of belonging
and inclusion while others fail to find an
expression of the lifestyle and culture of their
homes and communities. To deal with this
complex social reality, the teacher studies her
students and their community’s culture and
social structure. Her acquaintance and activity
extend beyond the school to activism in social
change organizations and initiating coopera-
tion with them at the school.
A teacher in an elementary school who
encountered manifestations of racism against
Eritrean refugees and was active in an organi-
zation that aids refugees initiated the visit of
a refugee teenager who came to class and told
the children about his journey and his life. The
children showed interest and asked questions.
It was evident in the conversation following
the visit that the personal acquaintance with
the teenager and his stories had shifted, even
slightly, their prejudice attitudes towards the
refugees. Another teacher used data on the
economic gaps between men and women in
society to solve math problems. As part of
the mathematical activity, she taught her class
to analyze data from governmental reports
regarding social justice and equality issues.
The teacher as an intellectual transformer is
constantly aware of her surroundings and the
opportunities she has to learn and change.
LEADING SOCIAL CHANGE
Leading the social change can be carried out
in three different spheres: the pedagogical
 TEACHING SOCIAL JUSTICE
sphere, addressing the relationship between
the teacher and her students; the organiza-
tional sphere, addressing the organization
of the classroom and the curriculum; and the
systemic sphere, addressing the connection
between the events in class, social structures
and the different communities surrounding
the class. Each sphere offers the teacher ways
to identify the mechanisms that can lead to
social change. Acting in all three can gener-
ate the movement towards change. The
mechanisms presented here are a few exam-
ples of the numerous possibilities available
to her as an intellectual transformer.
THE PEDAGOGICAL SPHERE
The pedagogical sphere is where the relation-
ships, both between teachers and students
and between the students themselves, are
maintained. This is an essential basic ground
for the educational action to take place and
the power relations it holds reflect the power
relations in society as a whole. As any
change in power relations in the classroom,
the changeable mechanisms can be identi-
fied. Economic power relations can serve as
an example. In a society where poverty and
huge economic gaps exist, those will be pre-
sent in the classroom and the difference
between schools (Svirsky et al., 2013). These
gaps can be manifested in the children’s
clothing and equipment, in the amount and
level of support they receive after school,
such as private lessons and various enrich-
ment and reinforcement activities, and in the
level of availability for schoolwork while
facing the difficulties of their everyday life.
Children who have no private space at home,
who have to look after younger siblings, who
are reluctant to ask their parents for things
they know are unaffordable, are children who
can easily become part of the classroom dis-
ruptive culture (creating what is known as
discipline problems) or take part in the quiet
culture, meaning they become transparent for
901
the teacher and school (Shor and Freire,
1990). The teacher does not hold the power
to change these power relations in society,
but she can acknowledge them, recognize
them and create a situation in the classroom
in which all children can meet the financial
expense norms, form a support system for
those who cannot afford it, and most impor-
tantly, reinforce those who need it to under-
mine the place of a child’s economic status in
outlining his self-image and scholastic
achievements (Zalmanson Levi, 2011).
A key mechanism for changing power
relations in the classroom is creating knowl-
edge in the classroom. Knowledge is a
central component in all levels of school
education. Multiple assessment processes
in the education system constantly examine
whether the knowledge has been transferred
from teachers to students. Facing this cen-
tralization arise questions such as: to whom
does knowledge belong? Who decides what
knowledge is to be taught? What knowl-
edge is more important? How is knowledge
formed? Schools apply a great deal of super-
vision on the students’ time, and a major part
of the supervision is conducted through the
curricula and learning processes. The intel-
lectual transformer teacher’s role is creating
a critical and reflective point of view on the
hegemonic knowledge and incorporating it
with additional knowledge of different kinds;
knowledge stemming from the students
themselves, their culture and history, their
communities or other communities whose
unique knowledge is unfamiliar to them.
The process of transferring knowledge
from the teacher to the students in traditional
education was outlined by Freire as the bank-
ing model of education. The teacher deposits
the knowledge with the students, and trans-
fers it from one place to another. Testing is
the procedure of validating the success of the
deposit and the full transfer of the knowl-
edge. In banking education the curriculum
bypasses the teachers, as well as the children,
the parents and the community, as they don’t
take into account the teacher’s knowledge,
902 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
the children’s unique knowledge and the
accumulative knowledge assembled in the
different communities (Freire, 1993).
The process of creating knowledge in the
classroom is the inverse of banking educa-
tion. This process includes sharing personal
narratives, analyzing their meanings and
collaborative learning. Dialogue journals
make creating knowledge in the classroom
possible. These journals contain a written
correspondence between the teacher and the
student as part of the curriculum. The cor-
respondent is free from obeying any writing
rules and it enables a different interpersonal
teacher–student relationship to be built.
Corresponding is reciprocal and learning is
carried out by expanding the writing and by
repeating the teacher’s written corrections to
the mistakes in the text. In correspondence
notebooks, the teacher and the children share
different aspects of daily life and the sub-
jects for writing are decided by the children.
This sets the ground for deep acquaintance
and allows the children to introduce their
world to the teacher–student dialogue (Freire
and Macedo, 1987).
Entering the writing process is not always
easy, as Tigist, a young teacher in the 2nd
grade, describes:
The first thing we did in the classroom after a short
introduction was starting the dialogue journals.
The excitement was immediate and the children
were excited to have their own personal notebook.
At first, they found writing to us a bit weird and
most only drew for us. We elicited writing by shar-
ing stories from our lives, drawing animals and
writing down their names and encouraging them
to describe their drawings. In a few months, we
began to see a change in the class; more and more
students started writing in addition to drawing,
the personal relationships grew stronger as well as
the familiarity with a larger number of students.
The activity with the dialogue journals became the
anchor of our lessons and the students eagerly
anticipated it every time we came. They seem to
like writing.
In some cases, dialogue journals serve as a
kind of a diary in which one can write down
what cannot be said aloud. At a youth-at-risk
school, a teacher started using dialogue jour-
nals with a group of 14-year-old girls who
had already dropped out of several schools
and were poorly motivated to study. The girls
struggled to write more than one paragraph
in tests, but as soon as the second round of
corresponding began, several girls wrote
3–4 pages, telling stories never heard by the
homeroom teacher, stories about the happen-
ings in their lives outside of school, including
sexual harassment incidents and problem-
atic family relationships. It seemed the girls
were waiting for this opportunity. Following
this process, the school staff embarked on a
new process of empowering treatment and
dialogue with the girls, carried out with their
full consent and cooperation. It was the first
time these girls wrote multiple pages of their
own free will. The correspondence proceeded
to additional writing processes relating to
subjects learned in class and incorporating
personal knowledge that was not necessarily
problematic but rather empowering knowl-
edge brought from their families or commu-
nities. A journal enables the acquisition of
reading and writing processes, a significant
improvement in writing, but it mainly fosters
a process of creating knowledge and creating
a meaningful dialogue between the teacher
and her students.
Cooperative learning in heterogeneous
groups is a process based on the assumption
that each and every student has something to
contribute to their peers and that partnership
on its own has a value in learning processes.
Collaborative learning combines formal aca-
demic knowledge with the unique knowledge
of the learners (Hertz Lazarowitz and Fux,
1987). Studies show that collaborative learn-
ing increases the level of achievement of all
participants and contributes to strengthening
tolerance, listening and cooperation (Maze
and Ram, 2006; Sharan and Shai, 1990).
Transitioning from personal learning,
frontal lectures and even working in groups
to collaborative learning in practice – learn-
ing in which students depend on each other
and perform tasks together – is not simple
 TEACHING SOCIAL JUSTICE
at all (Hertz Lazarowitz and Fux, 1987).
When the students join forces to study the
materials, and progress at an uneven pace,
the teacher waives her power position as the
source of knowledge and the central author-
ity in the class. Collaborative learning makes
dealing with a variety of identities, abilities
and difficulties possible as part of the learn-
ing process. On several occasions, I attended
classrooms where the process of dividing the
class into groups alone surfaced all the exist-
ing tensions in the classroom. Popular and
unpopular, quick-learners and slower ones,
those who have a lot of equipment compared
with those who lack it, those who live nearby
and those who commute, etc. The teacher can
choose to ignore issues, or to see them as an
opportunity to deal with the tensions. The
mechanism created by collaborative work
is very different from the competitive one
often practiced in the classroom. Since the
evaluation process is also shared, it involves
mutual responsibility, a sense of partnership
and coping with dilemmas that arise from the
process, such as: if I learn quickly why do
I have to wait for others? I need more time,
why should I get stressed out by those who
do everything fast? Are my knowledge and
my story good or interesting enough? If we
create a space to discuss those issues, the
discourse expands, leading to questions of
equality and inequality, allowing for unheard
stories to be heard, and creating a model of
social solidarity that can replace the competi-
tive one.
The creation of knowledge in the class-
room can take place in the pedagogic sphere
through personal writing in dialogue jour-
nals, through collaborative learning and
many other pedagogical methods based on
the principle that each and every individual
has unique, appropriate and essential knowl-
edge for the class. The pedagogic sphere
can be utilized for implementing any of the
central concepts of critical pedagogy, such
as developing a critical perspective, empow-
erment, or encouraging dialogue, in order to
create the mechanisms for social change.
903
THE ORGANIZATIONAL SPHERE
The organizational sphere includes the class-
room in its physical, content-related and
organizational aspects. Within this sphere,
the pedagogical sphere is carried out. Many
important educational decisions in classroom
management are made even before the teacher
enters the classroom and reflect on the insti-
tutional level. Every act of teaching and
learning requires organization in some way:
the number of lessons, their length, the distri-
bution of content over time, etc. (Carmon,
2006). Organizational aspects have similar
effects to those of the pedagogical approach
itself, and are directly connected. Just by
looking at the chair on which the students sit,
one can learn about the overt and hidden mes-
sages of the system in which they are found.
The teacher’s chair, for example, is different
from the students’ chairs, thus symbolizing
the institutional hierarchy and power rela-
tions. The way the chairs are arranged in the
classroom enables the teacher to either main-
tain her authority in the classroom or create
an atmosphere of sharing. The quality of the
materials from which the chair is made indi-
cates the financial condition of the institution.
The chair has social and political implica-
tions (Shor, 1996). Schools can also be clas-
sified according to their structures and
equipment, and of course according to their
agenda, as they reveal who the students are,
what their social status is, what their origin is,
what their parents do for a living and what
approach is taken by the teacher in regard to
class management (Anyon, 1980).
The curricula, presented to the class in the
form of content, schedules, textbooks and
exams, are also part of the organizational
space. External tests that examine knowledge
without implementation and deep under-
standing, papers on topics that have nothing
to do with student life, and hierarchy created
between the students based solely on the test
scores create a competitive class in which
some children are unseen and worthless even
904 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
before the teacher begins to teach (Lampert,
2013). A study conducted on introducing a
reform of multidisciplinary teaching found
that all the reasons for its failure were organi-
zational: an overly crowded schedule, inap-
propriate teaching and physical planning of a
school that was not adapted to multidiscipli-
nary learning (Wang et al., 2010).
The organizational sphere is presented
through the learning environment. When I
enter a school for the first time with teacher
education students, I ask them to wander
around and observe the structure of the
school – walls, corridors, the courtyard, the
location of the officials’ offices and more –
and see what they can learn about the school
from this observation. In many ways, the
educational environment reflects the edu-
cational approaches, priorities and social
power relations in the school. One of the
main components of the classroom environ-
ment is the walls, which raises the question:
whose wall is it? In many classrooms, the
walls belong mostly to teachers. The mate-
rials on them are materials prepared by the
teacher and are intended to serve the learn-
ing objectives and values worthy of empha-
sis. Some of the contents are dictated by
the school or the Ministry/State Offices of
Education. Often, very few of the materi-
als on the wall express the students’ part in
the learning process. The message the walls
send the children is that only important con-
tent decorates the wall and only the teacher’s
words are important. The higher the grade
level, the more desolate the learning envi-
ronment becomes and the message is that
everything that is important is said by the
teacher or the textbooks. For the teacher who
leads social change, a learning environment
can be a source of empowerment, dialogue
and change in power relations. Allocating
a significant and visible place on the class-
room walls to the learning and writing out-
comes of students can convey the message
that their knowledge is meaningful. Walls
can promote multidisciplinary learning,
for example, a dictionary of human rights
created in the classroom can also be used to
teach linguistic structures, or as a component
of history. The same basic dictionary can be
used throughout the year on various subjects
under the students’ responsibility. Walls that
become significant can reduce class aliena-
tion, and taking part in their construction can
help students build a sense of responsibility
and belonging (Ronen, 2008).
The furniture in the classroom and the
manner in which it is arranged can also
express an educational approach. Classes
are organized in very varied ways. In some
classes I visited, the whole class was organ-
ized in groups, and two individual tables
stood close to the teacher’s table. I imme-
diately recognized the children that the
teacher sees as the most problematic in
terms of discipline. There were times when
I found a single table in the corner of the
classroom, next to the rubbish, so I knew
that for the teacher, this boy had no chance.
Classroom arrangements have taught me
about the teacher’s standings and strate-
gies regarding children who find the system
difficult. A variety of teaching methods is
expressed in different settings of the class-
room furniture: dialogue circles, group
collaborative work, learning centered on
various subjects and the integration of play
and motion during the various classes. This
variety can exist at the low grades, in high
school, in teacher training and in academia.
To allow variety, the classroom should be
very dynamic in terms of furniture posi-
tion, which can vary from lesson to lesson.
Classes in which the furniture is fixed to
one place, and every shift might take the
class out of balance, tells, without words,
what teaching methods are practiced in it
(Christensen, 2010).
The classroom is only part of the school
learning environment. In recent years,
many schools have built learning corners
in the courtyard. These corners are usually
very pleasant and offer a change in scen-
ery and break in the routine. It is yet to be
inquired whether this is a mere relocation
 TEACHING SOCIAL JUSTICE
or an opportunity to learn what is happen-
ing outside the classroom, and perhaps even
outside the school. What learning opportuni-
ties are offered by the neighborhood and the
community? Expanding learning environ-
ments opens up many more opportunities
for transformative social learning. Social
organizations in each community deal with
the reality of inequality, utilization of rights
and improving the life of the community. The
organizations’ activities can be part of the
classroom environment. One can be familiar
with them, explore them, and act within them
(Freire, 1993).
The school yard is an active educational
environment even if it is not defined as
such. The yard is where the students spend
their recesses, which often affect the stu-
dents’ experience in school more than the
lessons themselves. Surprisingly, during
recess, when the environment allows for
multi-game play, free play, social dynam-
ics, creativity and game developing, the
teachers are absent; their presence is rep-
resentative and is related only to supervi-
sion (Avidan et al., 2005). Recess is also
an environment in which group and per-
sonal social problems arise, which may
affect the learning situation more than the
difficulty of the material taught in class.
Considering the play yard during recess as
part of the class’s learning spaces may be
a fascinating social and learning opportu-
nity. The learning environment, therefore,
in its broad sense, exceeding the four walls
of the classroom, should be a significant
mechanism for social change in each of
its components.
The organizational sphere contains many
other mechanisms, such as the curricula with
their overt and hidden messages, the schedul-
ing of the school day, the manner and level
of maintenance and investment in the school
structure and facilities. These mechanisms
usually work to preserve social structures
and power relations; it is up to the teacher
and school staff to change them into ones that
will promote social change.
905
THE SYSTEMIC SPHERE
The systemic sphere is where the overall edu-
cational policy is determined and contains the
organizational sphere and the pedagogic
sphere. The formal ways in which the school
and the class are run include the external
influences of the various communities sur-
rounding it and social policy in general
(Anyon, 2005). This sphere is usually not
presented as part of classroom management
because it occurs partly or mostly outside the
classroom, and sometimes even outside the
school. However, it has a direct impact on the
organizational and pedagogical spheres that
make up the daily life in the classroom.
Testing policy, for example, which changes
over the years as political education leaders
change and according to the results of various
international tests, affects the daily lives of
teachers and students of all ages dramatically.
The involvement of social change organiza-
tions in the process of dropping out from
school and sorting out disciplinary and scho-
lastic problems also has a significant impact.
Leading social change in the systemic sphere
is a complex challenge that requires commit-
ment and willingness to enter occasional
conflicts (Roan et al., 2009).
A fundamental mechanism in this sphere
is the relationship with parents. Observing
the relationship between parents and schools
around the concept of power and helpless-
ness (lack of power) sheds light on what
happens between parents and educators.
Although both parties are motivated to serve
the best interests of the child and agree on
the common goal of supporting children’s
education, there is a dichotomy in which
parents are powerless while educators hold
the power (Todd and Higgins, 1998). The
broad presence of parents in their children’s
lives extends to the lives of their teachers.
The teacher–parent encounter usually takes
place through one identity of each of them.
The use of the word ‘parents’ often ignores
their different identities, their social position
906 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and their symbolic and cultural capital. The
teacher also possesses additional identi-
ties that may be relevant both to the human
encounter and to the educational activity.
This disregard occurs mainly in the relation-
ships between teachers and parents from
disadvantaged groups. Parents from strong
groups do not allow teachers to ignore their
privileged identities when they represent
their children’s interests. Parents in disadvan-
taged groups (periphery, culturally excluded
identity groups, poverty) are perceived by the
education system as the source of the chil-
dren’s problem. These parents often adopt
passive behaviors because they are afraid to
spoil and complicate the situation even more.
They are not always familiar with the social
codes and their language is labeled as infe-
rior. The school interprets this as a lack of
caring for the children. They do not believe
in the system, accept exclusion and internal-
ize oppression (Freire, 1981).
Some schools and classes practice dif-
ferent models of relations with parents,
in accordance with the educational out-
look. In the ‘parents as viewers’ model, the
teacher reports to the parents about the stu-
dents’ achievements and they are called to
school mainly in cases of disciplinary prob-
lems. Another model relates to parents as a
resource of money, cakes and various dona-
tions. Parenting schools and various educa-
tional programs express a model that refers
to parents as learners. The assumption is that
the more they learn, the better parents they
will be. The school and class parents’ com-
mittees express a formal attitude towards the
parents that might lead to struggle in the case
of problems. Different combinations of these
models can be found in every school (Gur
Ziv and Zalmanson Levi, 2005). All models
show a prominent gender aspect. The term
‘parents’ usually does not account for the fact
that mothers are usually those involved in
children’s education and the communication
with the school. The school’s attitude towards
women sometimes reflects the society’s atti-
tude towards women in general. They are
characterized as irrational, refusing to recog-
nize reality as it is, emotional and more. The
woman’s identity as a professional, social
activist and strong woman is neutralized by
the classification of a mother representing
a narrow point of view on the picture the
school sees (Gur Ziv and Zalmanson Levi,
2005). The situation is worse for women
from disadvantaged populations, whose per-
sonal negative experience in the school sys-
tem leads them to low involvement in school,
and leads the school staff to relate to them
as lacking relevant knowledge of the educa-
tional process (Reay, 2005).
The communicative dialogical model is the
one the critical pedagogical teacher will try to
implement in her class. This model strives to
create an equal balance and participation of
parents in educational activity at school. The
implementation of the model is done with rec-
ognition of social aspects of economic classes,
cultural diversity, equality or inequality
between the sexes. In this model, the teacher
can maintain an ‘open door’ policy and an
ongoing process of dialogue, clarification
and joint thinking with the parents. Parents
and teachers can work together for change
by engaging in a discourse based on effective
communication and problem solving (Gordon,
1995). The communicative dialogical model is
based on the assumption that all parents strive
for the best for their children even when the cir-
cumstances of their lives do not always allow
them to do so fully. This model provides a real
opportunity to change the power relations and
meet many identities. Communication with
parents is not limited to events involving the
children. Parents can be partners in policy-
making at both the classroom and school
levels. They can help prepare materials, raise
resources for class and strengthen the curricu-
lum at home (Hornby, 2011).
The professional knowledge and the
accompanying jargon used by the teacher and
the school may be an exclusion mechanism
for those who do not obtain it. Refraining
from using it, or explaining it, creates a sense
of partnership. Recognizing that parents have
 TEACHING SOCIAL JUSTICE
unique and essential knowledge for the suc-
cess of their children is a key point in their
dialogue with the teacher. This knowledge is
very relevant in creating cooperation for con-
flict resolution, creating social and emotional
learning that leads to academic success. Such
cooperation includes the teacher, parents and
students. The teacher and the school can sup-
port the basic needs of the family through
organizations in the community, meeting in
the students’ homes and making decisions
together with the parents (Mart et al., 2011).
In this way, the parents are a source of activ-
ity and success in dealing with the children
and not the source of and reason for the con-
flicts. The teacher recognizes that she and the
school are responsible for educational situa-
tions in the school and does not transfer the
responsibility to the parents. The model may
lead to improvement in student achievements
and to the creation of a community that is not
alienated from school.
Additional mechanisms that can be iden-
tified in the organizational space are related
to policy towards authority and discipline,
sorting and tracking policy within the school,
ceremonies and school events, and more.
Each of these mechanisms can become a
mechanism for social change.
SUMMARY
Managing a class, according to critical peda-
gogy, is leading social change. The teacher
sees the class as a social and political space
in which she knows every child in their vari-
ous identities and their power relations. She
fulfills her role as an intellectual transformer
by implementing the constant learning of the
class, society, and the connections between
them. She creates partnerships in attempts to
make a change and create a just and better
society. Leading the change takes place in
three spheres: pedagogic, organizational and
systemic, though not all of them are found in
her obvious role definition.
907
In each sphere, the teacher identifies
mechanisms she can use for creating change
in favor of the students and social change.
In this chapter, I have demonstrated possi-
bilities for change in each sphere, but every
teacher in each class can identify what is
appropriate and possible in her class, in her
school, in the community in which the school
operates. Managing the class to lead social
change may occasionally put the teacher
in conflict with all the arenas in which she
operates: the teaching staff in the school, the
management, the parents, the supervision,
the professional training bodies, and more.
These conflicts are an unavoidable part of
leading change, but they can be managed and
thought through to reduce their impact on
everyday life in the classroom.
Finding partners for the vision within the
school team may help. Constant rethinking
and risk management with the prospect of
changing or facing the needs of students
can create priorities and make wise use
of the forces and motivation to act. Finally,
the personal connections between the
teacher and the students, the parents, and
other school and community activists are
all a source of strength and encouragement
for the teacher who leads social change in
her class.
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 76
Creating Global
Learning Communities
Ramón Flecha and Silvia Molina

INTRODUCTION community organizing, claiming their rights

The first learning community in Barcelona
was created in 1978 in an adult school
located in La Verneda-Sant Martí, one of the
poorest and most stigmatized areas in the
city. After the end of Franco’s dictatorship in
1975, a movement in the La Verneda-Sant
Martí neighborhood arose to claim improve-
ments in the area, such as better public trans-
portation and other public infrastructure and
facilities, including a preschool and an adult
school. The dream of a better life through
education mobilized the neighbors to occupy
one of the main buildings in the area, which
had belonged to the Falangist political party
during the dictatorship, and to claim its
public use to develop educational and cul-
tural activities for the people. The fight for
their basic rights led them to start the classes
in the street as part of the vindication, until
the city council allowed them to use the
building in response to the residents’
demands. Within this historical context of
and strengthening democracy, La Verneda
adult school became a space to learn and
access culture based on democratic princi-
ples where everyone could participate, learn
and contribute to the learning of others,
inspired by Freire’s work on popular educa-
tion (Aubert et al., 2016). Since its opening,
this school has given people with low levels
of education, many of whom were illiterate,
the opportunity to learn, to make decisions
regarding their education and to empower
themselves to overcome personal challenges
and engage in collective struggles for the
benefit of the community.
This revolutionary school set up the
grounds of a global educational movement,
schools as learning communities. Inspired by
the democratic and dialogical principles of La
Verneda, other schools across the educational
system recreated its transformative approach
to education and developed this community-
based school model. In the school year
1995–6 the first primary school transformed
910 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
into a learning community. Since then, for the
last 40 years, this movement has expanded
worldwide throughout all levels of education
to help prevent and overcome inequalities in
the education of children, youth, families,
neighborhoods and communities (Morlà,
2015). Today, there are more than 1,000
schools as learning communities throughout
13 countries. These schools include early
childhood education, primary and secondary
education and adult education, and all base
their pedagogical practices on egalitarian
dialogue, high expectations and educational
actions that scientific research has
demonstrated best contribute to enhancing
learning for all and fostering social cohesion.
Many of these schools attend to underserved
students and oppressed communities that
have found through education the means to
improve not only their learning but also their
opportunities in society.
This chapter presents a review of the
existing knowledge on schools as learning
communities, an educational project that
transforms schools and their surrounding
communities by implementing Successful
Educational Actions based on dialogic learn-
ing and community participation. We aim to
contribute a comprehensive overview of the
basis, development and achievements of this
global network of schools that exists today,
based on an extensive review of the scientific
literature that, in the last few decades, has
studied the contributions of this educational
movement. This body of research reports the
improvements brought by the learning com-
munities drawing on both quantitative data
(e.g., test scores) and qualitative data (obser-
vations and personal stories that collect the
experiences of students, teachers, families
and community members) that show that
learning and solidary relationships can be
fostered simultaneously with the commit-
ment of the community in a common dream
(Garcia Yeste et al., 2018). We conduct this
analysis by examining the contributions of
critical pedagogy to the foundation of the
schools as learning communities and, hence,
the achievements of the schools as learning
communities. Ultimately, we aim to show
that the global schools as learning communi-
ties project is an example of the transforma-
tive potential of this theoretical perspective.
For these purposes, our review will cover the
following topics: (a) the central role of dia-
logue for transformative learning and how it
is used in some of the specific educational
actions that are implemented in these schools;
(b) the scientific basis upon which the learn-
ing communities approach was founded,
making possible the combining of science
and utopia to provide high-quality education;
(c) how these schools contribute to educational
justice and democratic education by enhanc-
ing quality and equity in student learning;
(d) the transformative impact that these
schools have in their surrounding communi-
ties; and (e) the global expansion to diverse
contexts and countries.
In this chapter we discuss how schools as
learning communities have become a global
educational response to address educational
challenges shared by multiple communities
worldwide. These learning communities are
an educational movement based on critical
pedagogy, bringing possibilities of radical
transformation to more schools, communities
and educational systems.
DIALOGIC LEARNING:
THE TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL
OF LEARNING THROUGH DIALOGUE
In schools as learning communities, learning
occurs through dialogue among diverse
agents, including children, youth and adult
learners; teachers and other school staff; stu-
dents’ families; and volunteers from the
community. These participants engage in
dialogues that are egalitarian and are based
on the validity of the arguments, not on the
position of power of the participants
(Racionero and Valls, 2007). These two main
features, i.e., the diversity of the participants
 CREATING GLOBAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES
in the dialogues and equality, characterize
dialogic learning, the theoretical approach
toward learning upon which the schools as
learning communities are grounded (Flecha,
2000). Today, the main theoretical contribu-
tions that explain how learning occurs in the
school context identify dialogue, culture and
interaction as key factors. This has led to the
conceptualization of a dialogic turn in the
educational sciences (Racionero and Padrós,
2010) that takes into account contributions of
authors such as Vygotsky, Mead and Bruner
from psychology, Beck, Giddens and
Habermas from sociology, and Freire from
education, all of whom represent this shift in
the understanding of learning.
Freire’s work placed the role of dialogue
for learning at the center of critical pedagogy.
His theory of dialogic action (Freire, 1970)
and his notion of dialogicity (Freire, 1970;
Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000) not only
understood dialogue as a fundamental part
of the learning process but also understood
it as inherent to human beings, to democracy
and to transformation because, for him, the
true word is, at the same time, praxis, and
as such, it transforms the world. In addi-
tion, Freire perceives dialogue as essential
for epistemological curiosity that leads to
the act of knowing whenever it is based on
humility and respect, because, in this way,
it allows for the building of trust with oth-
ers. Therefore, educational interventions that
are based on respectful dialogue, according
to Freire, develop learning, enhance personal
fulfillment and promote social change.
In schools as learning communities, learn-
ing is organized in a coherent way, departing
from the notion that higher levels of learn-
ing and transformation, at both the personal
and collective domains, occur when learners
engage in learning interactions characterized
by the seven principles of dialogic learning:
egalitarian dialogue, cultural intelligence,
transformation, an instrumental dimension,
the creation of meaning, solidarity, and
equality of differences (Flecha, 2000). These
principles, which were first developed for
911
adult education, foster learning in students
of all ages across the educational spectrum
(Racionero and Valls, 2007) and are aligned
with the postulates of critical pedagogy and
Freire’s work.
Four specific educational actions that
exemplify the use of dialogic learning and
egalitarian dialogue in learning communities
are interactive groups, dialogic literary gath-
erings, family and community education, and
community participation in decision mak-
ing. These educational actions indicate that
the presence and use of dialogue in learning
communities reflects Freire’s concept of the
dialogic relationship as a practice inherent to
both human nature and democracy and that
such dialogue is an epistemological require-
ment (Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000; Mello,
2012).
Interactive groups (Valls and Kyriakides,
2013) consist of organizing the classroom
into small, diverse groups of four or five stu-
dents each. Each group of students then works
together with the aim to solve, through dia-
logue, various learning activities. Each stu-
dent is responsible for ensuring that the other
students in the group learn the content being
studied and solve the activity. Accordingly,
the group has to work in solidarity so that
each individual member can benefit and
maximize his/her learning, thus creating sub-
communities of mutual learners (Elboj and
Niemelä, 2010). The principle of solidarity
extends beyond the group because, in each
group, an adult volunteer from the commu-
nity facilitates the dialogic learning-oriented
interactions encouraging students to ask their
peers when they need help, to check if they
solved the activity well, and to help others
who struggle with learning. Furthermore,
the activities proposed are focused primarily
on instrumental knowledge to help students
achieve a high level of academic competency,
helping prevent school failure and subsequent
risk of social exclusion.
A 10-year-old girl student of a learning
community explained in 2011 at the European
Parliament her experience participating in
912 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
interactive groups and the opportunities and
improvements it had brought to her and her
classmates. One of the examples she shared
was the story of a classmate who at age five
left the town and the school to live with his
family in Senegal. There, he did not attend
school but, when he came back in fourth
grade, he was included in the regular class-
room with his same-age peers. Instead of low-
ering the curriculum for him, he participated
in interactive groups and, progressively, was
able to keep up with the pace of his peers,
while they became friends (Flecha, 2015). As
this example shows, interactive groups con-
tribute to the development of learning com-
munities as democratic schools, as defined
by Apple and Beane (1995), because such
groups not only contribute to creating more
meaningful learning contexts for all but also
help underprivileged students acquire the
requisite knowledge and skills of the domi-
nant curriculum, thus opening doors for
socioeconomic improvement.
Research on interactive groups has
reported the ways in which this classroom
organization grounded on solidarity-based
interactions among students and with other
significant adults contributes to both enhance
learning and improve relationships within
the school and within the community (Valls
and Kyriakides, 2013). Family and com-
munity participation in classroom activities
transforms interactions between children
and adults in the schools and in the family
sphere, when they, for instance, dialogue
about the learning activities, a behavior that
has a positive impact on the student’s self-
esteem and motivation (Oliver et al., 2011).
Focusing on mathematics learning, for exam-
ple, it was found that the dialogic talk that
occurred in the interactive groups contrib-
uted to meaningful learning situations and
positively impacted the children’s learning
of mathematics (Díez-Palomar and Cabré,
2015). Research further indicates that incor-
porating interactive groups even in early
childhood education can contribute to pre-
venting school failure by providing children
with high-quality education that fosters both
cognitive and social development in young
children, thus making it possible for them
to be reading at the age of five, whereas
before, many in the same school could not
read at the age of 10 (Aubert et al., 2017).
As an inclusive strategy, interactive groups
also promote the learning and participation
of students with disabilities (García-Carrión,
Molina Roldán et al., 2018). Importantly,
in interactive groups, diversity is celebrated
and understood as a source of learning that
enriches interactions and dialogues. For this
reason, because diversity, including cultural,
linguistic, ability level, etc., is maximized
within each group, all groups of students
exhibit significant progress, while inequali-
ties are reduced. In sum, by transforming the
classroom according to profound human and
egalitarian values, all children and their com-
munities benefit from this democratic learn-
ing environment.
Dialogic literary gatherings (De Botton
et al., 2014) consist of discussing the best
pieces of universal literature that have pre-
viously been agreed upon and read by the
participants. The participants of La Verneda
adult school were the ones who first claimed
to have access to those books that had been
denied to them because, as they said, the
people can understand everything, and if
it is well written, they understand it better
(Soler-Gallart, 2001). In the gatherings, the
participants share their reflections, thoughts,
feelings and questions as provoked by the text
and discuss them with the group based on the
rules of egalitarian dialogue. The context of
dialogic learning that is created enables par-
ticipants to create meaning about the text.
Today, dialogic literary gatherings are being
implemented in a variety of diverse contexts,
such as early childhood schools, secondary
education, adult education and prisons.
By creating the space for the people to
engage in transformative dialogues through
classical literature, dialogic literary gather-
ings have contributed to breaking the stereo-
type that certain literary works belong to the
 CREATING GLOBAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES
cultural elite, thereby democratizing access
to culture and knowledge (Ruiz, 2015). As
such, the gatherings contribute to tear down
elitist walls that have denied the possibil-
ity for the most underserved to access the
greatest literary works. The positive impact
reported on participants’ learning, including
improvements in language skills, vocabu-
lary, reading comprehension and reasoning
has also improved the lives of the students
with disabilities (Molina, 2015). Besides,
this dialogic learning environment increases
students’ prosocial behavior in terms of
solidarity and friendship (Villardón-Gallego
et al., 2018). Accordingly, we argue that
these improvements reflect Freire’s dialogic-
ity in which participants learn by engaging in
dialogue founded upon curiosity and mutual
respect (Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000). In
addition, the reading leads the participants to
engage in discussions about topics that are
universal and timeless, such as love, friend-
ship, courage and injustice, and they bring to
these debates their personal life experiences.
In this way, participants enhance the mean-
ing they give to reading, which, in the case
of children, contributes to their enjoyment of
the reading, and transforms personal relation-
ships and expectations.
This occurred, for instance, in the case of
a 12-year-old Roma girl living in a disad-
vantaged context who had been bullied by
her classmates. Their participation in dia-
logic literary gatherings, where they shared
learning and thoughts, transformed both her
classmates’ perceptions of her and her own
perceptions of her abilities and future aca-
demic expectations (Aubert, 2015). In the
case of adults in prison, their participation
in the gatherings opens new possibilities for
personal and social transformation, even in
such a challenging and dehumanizing context
(Álvarez et al., 2016). In other words, dialogic
literary gatherings are a contribution to criti-
cal pedagogy insofar as they are a practice
of critical literacy and are understood as the
type of literacy that entails ‘words rethinking
the worlds […], connect the political and the
913
personal, the public and the private […] for
rethinking our lives and for promoting jus-
tice in place of inequity’ (Shor, 2009: 282).
In Freire’s words, this type of learning entails
reading the texts critically, reading the world,
and transforming it (Freire, 1994). By pro-
moting connections between the learning
contexts and their realities, these practices
avoid the separation between text and context
and between the object and its purpose, which
Freire criticizes because it blocks the epis-
temological curiosity of the learner (Freire
and Araújo Freire, 2000). By enhancing the
learning of all students, these practices help
to overcome the theories of social reproduc-
tion that critical pedagogy sees as insufficient
(McLaren, 2009).
Family and community education con-
sists of promoting basic education as well
as other educational and cultural activities,
such as dialogic literary gatherings, among
family members and other adults in the com-
munities, by always drawing on their own
demands and the needs participants identify
(Flecha, 2012). When families and commu-
nity members are involved in the school stu-
dents’ motivation, the students’ self-esteem
and engagement benefit from having learning
interactions with their relatives at home, for
instance being supported when doing home-
work. At the same time, families experience
benefits in their own learning process, as they
acquire knowledge and skills that facilitate
their access to employment and improve their
prospects for social inclusion (Flecha, 2015;
Oliver et al., 2011). The dialogic approach
of family and community education in learn-
ing communities is deeply rooted in Freire’s
contribution to adult education, which chal-
lenges the typical relations of traditional cul-
tural and adult education practices (Allman,
2009). Freire perceives teaching and learning
not as roles developed by different persons
but as two internally related processes that
are developed within each person. In other
words, everyone can teach and learn, and
everyone can think critically about the exist-
ing knowledge – both expert and non-expert
914 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
knowledge – to gain a deeper understanding
of reality, to question it and to problematize
it, and ultimately to transform it. Through
dialogic learning, adult education in learning
communities embodies Freire’s approach,
including his ideas of conscientization and
emancipation through education, which made
possible the reversing of the lack of academic
education among adults in the neighborhood
where the first learning community, devel-
oped in the 1970s, helped people become lit-
erate, obtain academic degrees, improve their
labor opportunities and enter institutions
of higher education (Aubert et al., 2016).
Subsequent learning communities working
with children and youth have followed the
path embarked upon by this pioneer school
and have helped to transform and enrich the
environment where children learn and grow.
Hence, it is not necessary to wait until the
younger generation grows to adulthood to
improve the educational and cultural back-
ground of the community (Flecha, 2015).
Community participation in decision
making (Díez et al., 2011), which includes
students’ relatives and other people from
the community, is another example of the
presence of egalitarian dialogue in learning
communities. Assemblies and mixed com-
mittees composed of teachers, students’
family members and other community
members are organized to make decisions
regarding key aspects of school operation.
This entails considering the cultural intel-
ligence of the diverse participants, which
includes not only their academic knowledge
but also their practical and communicative
knowledge. This cultural intelligence, which
everyone possesses, enables people to ana-
lyze and interpret their own reality and is
regarded in the learning communities as a
resource to analyze needs and identify ways
in which to respond to those needs with
greater opportunities to find better solu-
tions for the community (Oliver et al., 2011;
Ramis and Krastina, 2010). For instance, in
one school placed in a very underprivileged
neighborhood and attended mainly by Roma
students, early school leaving was a prob-
lem as, after finishing primary education in
the school, the students had to move to a dif-
ferent neighborhood to continue secondary
education. The community had identified
the need to change school and neighborhood
as a main barrier to their children complet-
ing their compulsory secondary education.
For this reason, when their participation in
decision making was enabled in the school,
they proposed that compulsory secondary
education was taught in the primary school
and convinced the educational administra-
tion. This solution, which would not have
been found without the participation of the
community, considerably reduced the drop-
out rate of youth in the community (García-
Carrión, Molina-Luque et al., 2018). The
dialogic relationship that is built into these
spaces of participation where anyone can
contribute echoes Freire’s concept of unity
in diversity and is an example of the demo-
cratic learning practices and contexts that
can be created based on dialogicity (Freire
and Araújo Freire, 2000).
SCIENTIFIC BASIS AND DREAMS
FOR QUALITY EDUCATION AND
EFFECTIVE TEACHER TRAINING
According to Freire, ‘education requires
technical, scientific, and professional devel-
opment as much as it does dreams and
utopia’ (Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000: 43).
Dreams have been present since the begin-
ning of the transformation process of schools
as learning communities and since the first
school as a learning community was created.
One of the first steps is to dream the school
everybody wants. Thus, teachers, students
and relatives share their dreams and agree on
those that will be prioritized. Periodically,
the dreams are revisited and those that have
been fulfilled are replaced by new dreams
that then guide the school’s development
through the next phase.
 CREATING GLOBAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES
Science, which is also present from the
beginning, combined with egalitarian dia-
logue, is one of the primary tools necessary
to achieve the community’s dreams. Indeed,
guaranteeing the right to educational success
in all dimensions of human development is
at the heart of learning communities. To
achieve this purpose, knowledge regarding
those actions that have been demonstrated to
improve people’s lives is included in the dia-
logue with the communities with which we
conduct research. Between 2006 and 2011,
the research project INCLUD-ED: Strategies
for inclusion and social cohesion in Europe
from education (European Commission,
6th Framework Programme) (Flecha, 2015)
studied successful schools across Europe
and identified educational actions grounded
on dialogue and interaction in which com-
munity participation played an essential role.
When studying the benefits and improve-
ments reported across many diverse contexts
and countries, these were shown to result in
learning improvements and profound trans-
formations when implemented elsewhere.
As such, a series of Successful Educational
Actions (SEAs) were identified and reported
benefits to improve the learning and global
development of culturally diverse students
living under challenging circumstances.
These SEAs shared certain features that
were key to their success, and hence such
evidence has become the scientific founda-
tion of schools as learning communities.
One of these features is to educate diverse
students in a group while including all nec-
essary supports for these heterogeneous
groups and avoiding any separation accord-
ing to their previous levels of attainment, as
the ill effects of ability grouping have been
well documented throughout the decades
(Valls and Kyriakides, 2013). Another key
feature is to maintain high academic stand-
ards for all students and to embrace learning
through dialogue to foster everyone’s learn-
ing (Flecha, 2015). A third key feature is to
make the most of community participation
in all vital endeavors within the school (Gatt
915
et al., 2011). As these features are key to the
overall personal development and growth of
children and youth, all learning communities
base their actions and decisions on these key
features.
Teacher education in learning communi-
ties is also informed by research. Before the
transformation of the schools as learning
communities, the knowledge that has guaran-
teed the right to benefit from the best educa-
tion is included in the dialogue with teachers
and researchers, and teachers are engaged
in joint reflection to achieve transformative
action (García-Carrión et al., 2017). This
dialogue regarding scientific knowledge and
knowledge of the community (Gómez et al.,
2011) allows for the recreating of the avail-
able scientific evidence to respond to the
specific situations the teachers and commu-
nity face in each school. In addition, training
is not exclusively for teachers, but rather is
open to the community, thus maximizing the
possibilities of transformative impact.
This dialogic approach of evidence-based
teacher education in learning communities
entails, as Giroux (1988, 2009) proposed,
going beyond technocratic and instrumental
views of teachers that separate conceptu-
alization, planning and design of curricula
from its implementation to perceiving teach-
ers as transformative intellectuals who are
able to interpret the world by taking into
account political, economic and social fac-
tors and to act accordingly for the benefit of
their students, and especially for those who
are the most disadvantaged and oppressed.
It also entails avoiding the fetishization of
method (Macedo, 2006) that reduces teacher
training to learning tools and techniques
while disregarding the development of criti-
cal consciousness. Further, the dialogic
approach helps to overcome the traditional
false dilemma between theory and practice
that critical pedagogy addresses (Freire,
1970) and entails offering teachers a critical
education that allows them to see beyond ide-
ologies by learning to analyze the objective
components that develop daily life in schools
916 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
while providing them with the critical tools
necessary to act accordingly throughout
the transformation process (Kincheloe and
McLaren, 2007; McLaren, 2003).
Scientific and theoretical teacher training
on the SEAs is also developed as a continu-
ous professional development program. Roca
et al. (2015) explained that teacher partici-
pation in dialogic pedagogical gatherings
involves periodic meetings where in-service
teachers gather to discuss relevant educa-
tional theory and research. They further dem-
onstrated how these gatherings contribute to
the transformation of teachers both person-
ally and professionally. For example, dia-
logues with colleagues on critical theory and
scientific evidence enable teachers to envis-
age new dreams and utopias of social crea-
tion, commit to high-quality education for
all children, engage in transformative educa-
tional movements and foster the creation of
meaning in their profession. In these gather-
ings, teachers act as intellectuals, as Giroux
(1988) proposed, as they interpret the world,
attribute meaning to it and share with others
their understanding of reality, while commit-
ting themselves to question their teaching
efforts, i.e., what and how they teach, and the
objectives they pursue. Furthermore, in these
meetings, they clearly combine the language
of critique with that of possibility as they
introduce changes that create better condi-
tions for their students by transforming their
students’ realities and fulfilling the dreams of
the students and their community.
CONTRIBUTIONS OF SCHOOLS
AS LEARNING COMMUNITIES TO
EDUCATIONAL JUSTICE
AND DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION
IN THE CONTEXT OF DIVERSITY
One of the main features of critical pedagogy
is that the social, cultural and political con-
texts in which education occurs are always
considered in the analyses, and accordingly,
there is a permanent commitment to reduce
the inequality and injustice that are produced
in and explained by these contexts (see
Darder et al., 2009). Schools as learning
communities share the same commitment.
Any school can become a learning commu-
nity and a broad spectrum of schools have
already done so, including private and public,
urban and rural, with much or little diversity.
However, it is in those schools that begin
from a highly complex situation character-
ized by school failure, high levels of diversity
and cultural marginalization that learning
communities have brought the greatest
improvements. Research has shown the
power of interactive groups to address educa-
tional inequalities and enhance the learning
of all students, including those of minority
cultural and ethnic backgrounds (Valls and
Kyriakides, 2013). In this way, interactive
groups reflect the principle of equality of dif-
ferences. This was observed, for instance, in
a school where the percentage of students
who achieved basic competence in reading
comprehension increased from 17% to 85%
over a six-year period, while in the same
period, the percentage of students of migrant
origin in the school increased from 12% to
46% (Flecha, 2015). This is, while the
number of migrant students increased by
almost four times the original amount, the
number of students who performed well in
reading comprehension increased by five
times. Similar improvements are found in
contexts of cultural minority populations. In
the case of a school located in a highly mar-
ginalized area that serves a predominant
Roma population, SEAs achieved in a one-
year period an improvement in student learn-
ing as demonstrated by an increase in the
scores on standardized tests of between one
and two score points (out of five) for diverse
skills, including language skills, math and
English, among others. Student engagement
with school also improved, with absenteeism
declining from 30% to being occasional over
a two-year period. During the same period,
enrollment increased by 28% in the first year
 CREATING GLOBAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES
and an additional 10% in the second year
(Flecha and Soler, 2013).
Importantly, these results were achieved
together with family and community partici-
pation in schools through the implementa-
tion of SEAs, which, in these cases, included
family and community members who were
migrants or who belonged to cultural minori-
ties and exhibited low levels of education.
The participation of family and community
through interactive groups and in decision
making and evaluation processes brings to
the school the context and the culture that
the students are living outside the school.
When this occurs, at least three benefits are
observed. First, diversity within the learn-
ing and decision spaces increases, which,
in turn, increases the knowledge available
to be learned and to be applied when mak-
ing decisions. When the communities par-
ticipate in schools, the curriculum, although
socially constructed and representative of
the hegemonic culture (McLaren, 2003), can
be challenged, discussed and enriched for
the benefit of the non-hegemonic cultures.
Moreover, a culturally relevant pedagogy
can be developed that fulfills three criteria,
namely, contributes to student academic suc-
cess, helps students develop their cultural
competence (knowledge and value of their
own culture), and helps students build a criti-
cal consciousness through which they can
change the status quo of the current social
order (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Second, mis-
conceptions and justifications that explain
school failure based on the school popula-
tion or the school disaffection of particular
cultural communities are dismantled, and it
becomes clear that learning and engagement
in school only depend on the educational
actions that are implemented. Education then
becomes an action associated with languages
of critique and possibility (Giroux, 1988).
Third, marginalized communities become
actors in their own emancipation. Schools
as learning communities, in the words of
Freire (Freire and Araújo Freire 2000), make
it possible to act against what the dominant
917
forces argue as inevitable and detrimental to
the most deprived. Instead, schools as learn-
ing communities entail optimism against the
fatalism that perceives conditioning factors
as determining factors against which nothing
can be done, and they denounce the inequali-
ties while announcing how the inequalities
can be overcome (Freire, 2015).
TRANSFORMATION BEYOND
THE SCHOOLS: WORKING WITH
THE COMMUNITIES TO OVERCOME
SOCIAL EXCLUSION
Critical pedagogy places education in the
center of the struggle of the power relations
(Giroux, 1988) that preserve the inequalities
not only within the schools and the educa-
tional systems but outside as well, in society
as a whole. Schools as learning communities
participate in this struggle by equipping stu-
dents with the knowledge and skills neces-
sary to improve their educational levels and
break the cycle of inequalities that are often
reproduced generation after generation
(Girbés-Peco et al., 2015). Furthermore,
learning communities not only improve the
education and the prospects of social inclu-
sion of the youth so they can transform their
lives in the future, they also transform the
current realities of poverty and marginaliza-
tion that surround the schools and the stu-
dents. As Freire said, education cannot be
neutral; it can either serve to transform the
world to critically include people in it or
allow the permanence of unjust structures
and the adjustment of people to a reality con-
sidered untouchable (Freire, 2015). Schools
as learning communities do not adapt to the
failure of children or to the social exclusion
of the communities. On the contrary, they
work to change both.
The study of schools as learning commu-
nities in highly marginalized contexts has
resulted in the evidence of such transforma-
tions and has determined that community
918 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
participation in decision-making processes
is a primary factor that schools as learning
communities offer as part of the commu-
nity transformation. Decisive participation
begins within the schools and is manifested
in the improvement of the education offered
to students. However, it can surpass the
educational domain when the community
becomes empowered to participate in the
making of decisions that affect the com-
munity as a whole. Padrós et al. (2011) and
García-Carrión (2016) report on the case of
one highly marginalized school that, as a
result of the huge improvements achieved in
the learning community, wanted to continue
the dialogic collaboration established with
researchers to recreate the democratic model
of decision making that they had developed
in the learning community in other domains
beyond education. In the school, children
were not learning, and absenteeism and drop-
out rates were unacceptably high. Violence
against teachers was reported in national
media, and even the police did not dare go
into the neighborhood. The profound change
that the school needed was realized when the
school was transformed into a learning com-
munity. The process entailed engaging and
bringing together teachers, students’ families
and researchers in egalitarian dialogues to
make joint decisions regarding how the suc-
cessful actions, as identified through research,
were going to be implemented in the school
to respond to the students’ needs and achieve
the dream of a quality education, a goal that
was agreed upon by the community. As a
result, to implement the SEAs, the school
opened its doors to the families and the com-
munity. It was not long before the children
were learning more than they ever had before
and high levels of conflict among students,
teachers and families transformed into peace-
ful and fruitful coexisting relationships.
Beyond the school, however, there were
many challenges that this community faced,
among the most important of which were
poverty, unemployment, poor health and
poor housing conditions. The experience
of this school demonstrated that even the
most difficult situations can be transformed,
thus exemplifying the Freirean premise of
untested feasibility (1970), and that commu-
nities can be brought together to recreate the
process throughout the entire neighborhood.
Therefore, the community requested solu-
tions to overcome the situation of oppression
they suffered, and they asked for that evi-
dence provided by research that had shown
to improve other areas of society, so the com-
munity could decide how to reverse their
situation of social exclusion (García-Carrión,
2016). The initiatives launched included
establishing cooperatives as successful
alternatives to capitalism and identifying
the skills and activities already developed
in the community that could promote new
employment possibilities for the people in
the neighborhood.
This case is an example of how schools
as learning communities reflect the Freirean
ideas that education is a guide for change,
that it serves to build a new society and that
it regards all men and women as intellectuals,
regardless of their economic or social role,
because everyone acts as an intellectual
when they interpret the world in which they
live, give meaning to that world and share
their understanding with others (Giroux,
1988). Community members act not only
as intellectuals but also as agents of change.
Apple (2012) confirms the importance of
perceiving schools as places for action.
Learning communities have demonstrated
that when social policies are implemented
following a bottom-up model and when they
take the community agency into account,
exclusionary realities that could not be
overcome by top-down models begin to erode
(Brown et al., 2013). This is the difference
that Freire (Freire and Araújo Freire, 2000)
noted between an assistance-oriented policy
and a policy that takes into account the
importance of social, economic and political
factors related to power relations. It is also
an example of the power of education, as
mentioned by Apple (2012), that can build
 CREATING GLOBAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES
coalitions with social effects based on care,
love and solidarity and that can contribute to
changing the society.
According to Freire (2015), although
change is difficult, it is possible. In learn-
ing communities, these transformations have
been possible when the schools have opened
to the community. Manuel, a family member
of one of these schools, explained at the Final
Conference of the INCLUD-ED project at the
European Parliament,
From here I want to say to all the parents and
children of the world that if we had the misfortune
of being poor and living in difficult areas, we can
also change because we need it. Society can see
how we can get out of poverty. (Flecha, 2015: 18)
LEARNING COMMUNITIES:
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY EXPANDING
ACROSS THE GLOBE
Critical pedagogy has inspired a global net-
work of schools that are making it possible to
achieve educational success and improve
social inclusion in communities where nei-
ther had been previously possible. These
learning communities are an example of the
transformative potential of this theoretical
perspective.
The first learning community, which was
inspired by the work of Freire, was created in
Spain in the 1970s (Sánchez, 1999). Today,
there are more than 200 learning commu-
nities in Spain and more than 500 in Latin
America, namely, in Mexico, Colombia,
Peru, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Ecuador,
and the numbers continue to increase. This
growth reflects the validity of the Freirean
theory and the practices inspired by his the-
ory to respond to current educational chal-
lenges in diverse contexts.
The growth of the improvements achieved
by the schools as learning communities pro-
ject, as a result of the SEAs they implement,
has been the impetus for this expansion. Such
evidence has allowed for the identification of
919
the universal components of SEAs that make
them successfully transferable to different
contexts and that enable them to respond to
the particularities of each context when they
are recreated in each particular community.
In this way, schools as learning communities
overcome contextualist perspectives (Flecha,
2015) that place the causes of marginalization
on the social, cultural and political character-
istics of those particular contexts or popula-
tions and that understand that no effective
solutions can be transferred, thus reflecting
a form of charitable racism (Macedo, 2006)
that perpetuates inequalities.
Beyond the context, schools as learning
communities represent a way to use science
to fulfill the dreams of a quality education
and the social inclusion of communities, and
in this way, they are responding to the main
aim of the critical pedagogy, i.e., to over-
come obstacles to democratic education that
hinder the student’s right to learn (Darder
et al., 2009). They do it with the understand-
ing that learning is a social process insepara-
ble from social change, justice and equality
(Freire and Macedo, 1987; Kincheloe, 2005).
Furthermore, learning communities show that
both learning and social change are collec-
tive endeavors that cannot be fully developed
alone by teachers, by scholars, by students’
families, or by communities. Rather, it is
when they all agree on a shared purpose and
act collaboratively that the most exclusionary
realities can be transformed and bring new
opportunities for enhanced learning and a
better life.
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Communities and Activism
Knowledge is both a public good and a loca-
tion of power, and educators work at the
nexus of these tensions. The birth of public
education is entangled with the emergence of
the nation state and its interest in creating an
educated citizenry. The priorities of a nation
could not be left in the hands of private edu-
cation whether that was expensive secular
academies, religious schooling, or family
education. Free (or mostly free) education, a
system of government tax funded schools,
and teacher training was developed as a sup-
portive framework for this system. The focus
of the school system, as it was a product of
the Enlightenment, was the development of
the individual student released from, as
Immanuel Kant put it, ‘his self-incurred tute-
lage’. Enlightenment as individual freedom
developed as a kind of necessary subjectivity
for the development of the triad of liberal
democracy, capitalism, and public education.
This triad is of course, modernity.
SECTION VIII
Michael B. MacDonald
As Immanuel Wallerstein (1983) and many
others (Harvey, 2005) have explained, moder-
nity developed Atlantic trading routes, racist
systems of exploitation and slavery – what Paul
Gilroy called ‘The Black Atlantic’ (1993) –
the colonization of Indigenous people of
North and South America, and a global sys-
tem of cultural and economic colonization still
unfolding in the present (Berardi, 2009, 2011).
Enlightenment, freedom, and wealth collection
was reserved for European states and after the
second world war was re-centered in America.
In this unfolding system of modernity only
these subjectivities mattered. The ‘barbarians’
outside of modernity had no subjectivity worth
recognizing; only the control of their bodies fit-
ted to capitalist exploitation mattered. Walter
Mignolo (2000, 2011) has recognized that ‘the
expansion of Western capitalism implied the
expansion of Western epistemology in all its
ramifications’ (2002: 59), no modernity with-
out its darker side, coloniality.
924 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Mignolo argues that modernity/coloniality
are the two pillars of Western Civilization and
are supported by a matrix of knowledge that
includes Christian theology as well as secular
science, economics, and philosophy that pro-
duce knowledge self-justifying simultaneously
of knowledge production: ‘colonial matrix
of power’. The struggle against this system,
what he calls ‘decoloniality’, means to delink
(to detach) in order to engage in epistemic
reconstitution. It is here that I understand
Paulo Freire’s contribution (1970, 2001, 2010),
the foundation for critical pedagogy, and the
framework of critical community praxis.
The founding situation Freire provides in
Education for a Critical Consciousness (2010)
is useful for thinking about critical pedagogy
as a work of decoloniality, not postcolonialism
or decolonization, for instance. Decoloniality
works towards reconstitution/reemergence,
resurgence of epistemological systems marked
as ‘outside’ and therefore ‘less than’ Euro-
American ways of doing/being. This inequal-
ity is the colonial difference. Freire was tasked
with teaching non-­literate Brazilians to read
and write Portuguese as part of a national pro-
gram of modernization. He recognized that
nonliteracy from the perspective of the state
(illiteracy) would exclude nonliterate com-
munities from the world economy, but he
simultaneously recognized that the pedagogi-
cal practices of modernity/coloniality enacted
epistemic violence that would do further
social damage to the communities in which
he taught. The solution he developed was to
teach literacy as a technology, a particular sort
of tool that can be used for particular ends
and enacted within already existing commu-
nity epistemic frameworks. The first goal was
anthropological, to understand how a commu-
nity learns and then work within this system
to teach literacy. The political consequence, he
theorized, was to activate what might be now
called decoloniality. The context of coloniza-
tion must be recognized by the teacher. The
community does not have to be taught what
this means, they have lived its horrors. What
has to occur is the transformation of learning
into a system that empowers a resurgence in
community-based ways of learning/being.
Freire’s was an early attempt that did
not have the benefit of the elaboration of
modernity/coloniality or of decoloniality as
it has been developed, and therefore is not
a roadmap or a fixed method so much as it
is a starting place. While Freire outlined a
method in the particular and then later more
general macro-sociological models of educa-
tion, there is little in his work that theorizes
the operations of epistemic violence, or the
capture of subjectivity. It is necessary to look
further for this in two directions, I think. The
first is to look further into critical theory that
had developed since the structuralist frame-
work he utilized. There is much in Michel
Foucault’s theories of power and his later
aesthetics of the self that might provide a use-
ful starting point for theorizing the practice
of subjective capture within modernity/colo-
niality. And because modernity/coloniality is
not a fixed historical period but an unfolding,
the philosophical analysis that Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari called Integrated World
Capitalism can prove useful in understanding
the operation of capitalism on the deterritori-
alization of subjectivities from what they call
‘the full body of the earth’. More recently
Rosi Braidotti and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
have, each in their own ways, undertaken a
critical analysis of the humanist-capitalist
project illustrating the ways human auton-
omy is becoming automated by technological
processes of subjective enunciation. These
processes are the automation of modernity/
coloniality that results in the speeding up of
social life/subjective capture.
The second area of development is to build
the critical pedagogical project in partner-
ship or allyship with projects of decolonial-
ity. While there is much in Freire’s work that
can be critiqued (see bell hooks, 1994, 2003,
2010), there is nonetheless a starting point for
the restructuring of educational projects in
line with the needs of communities. Critical
community praxis contributes to this part of
the project. While the critique of modernity/
 COMMUNITIES AND ACTIVISM
coloniality is a necessary component for
understanding the broader context, practices
of decoloniality must happen at the local level,
in and with communities. While modernity/
coloniality worked to reshape (destroy) the
particularities of community so that they fall
in line with the universals of humanism, deco-
loniality works towards epistemic reconstitu-
tion. These reconstitutive projects will take
many forms, and will likely engage in many
more forms of educational experiments. It
would be naïve for us to imagine that decolo-
niality emerges simply from the observation of
its practices; instead the real work, the praxis,
is the emergence of alternative subjectivities;
alternative, that is, from the subjectivities pro-
duced by modernity/coloniality.
Writing from Canada during a period of
Indigenous resurgence, I am witness to the
projects undertaken by Indigenous activists
and community leaders. The educational pro-
grams that are being developed in many parts
of Canada are helping Indigenous youth find
an Indigenous voice. But at the same time,
I am witness to a Canadian federal govern-
ment claiming to recognize historic treaty
obligations while simultaneously supporting
energy policies that will negatively impact
the traditional homelands Indigenous leaders
are working to develop for their communi-
ties. This is only one example of Indigenous
resurgence happening around the world. The
case studies found in this section explore the
complex political contexts where educators
dedicated to critical community praxis find
themselves. Perhaps the most difficult part of
decoloniality is the necessity for local devel-
opment of methods. Sharing experiments so
that others may be able to build upon parts
that make sense is an aim of this section, but
inspiration may also be the most important
take away from these chapters. As we know,
praxis is the application of theory to practice,
925
and it is our hope that the reader will find
clues in this section for how to undertake
educational projects for the good of their
home communities.
REFRENCES
Berardi, F. ‘Bifo’. 2009. The Soul at Work: From
Alienation to Autonomy. South Pasadena,
CA: Semiotext(e).
Berardi, F. ‘Bifo’. 2011. After the Future. Edin-
burgh, Scotland: AK Press.
Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum.
Freire, P. 2001. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics,
Democracy, and Civic Courage. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Freire, P. 2010. Education for a Critical Con-
sciousness. New York: Continuum.
Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberal-
ism. New York: Oxford University Press.
hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Educa-
tion as the Practice of Freedom. New York:
Routledge.
hooks, b. 2003. Teaching Community: A Peda-
gogy of Hope. New York: Routledge.
hooks, b. 2010. Teaching Critical Thinking:
Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge.
Mignolo, W. D. 2000. Local Histories/Global
Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges,
and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Mignolo, W. D. 2002. ‘The Geopolitics of
Knowledge and the Colonial Difference’. The
South Atlantic Quarterly, 101: 1, Winter:
57–96.
Mignolo, W. D. 2011. The Darker Side of West-
ern Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial
Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wallerstein, I. 1983/2011. Historical Capitalism.
New York: Verso.
This page intentionally left blank

Moving from Individual
Consciousness Raising to Critical
Community Building Praxis
Silvia Cristina Bettez and
Cristina Maria Dominguez
INTRODUCTION
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (2000:
169) writes that no one can ‘unveil the world
for another’. He asserts that while ‘one
Subject may initiate the unveiling’, all
involved ‘must also become Subjects of this
act’ (Freire, 2000: 169). Critical pedagogy is
understood then as ‘co-intentional educa-
tion’, where teachers and learners are sub-
jects ‘not only in the task of unveiling’ the
social world and their place in it and ‘coming
to know it critically’, but also ‘in the task of
re-creating that knowledge’ (Freire, 2000:
69), in efforts towards liberation for all. At
the heart of the struggle for liberation through
education for critical consciousness then is
this dynamic where people come and become
together as ‘co-subjects’ (Freire, 2000: 169).
But what does this ‘authentic praxis’ (Freire,
2000: 169) in which people are ‘co-subjects’
(2000: 169) in and through critical con-
sciousness raising and engagement and, more
generally, critical pedagogy, look, feel, and
77
move like? How do we create and sustain this
with our students?
While we agree that critical pedagogy is not
about ‘an a priori method that simply can be
applied regardless of context’ (Giroux, 2011:
4), we believe that the individually focused
philosophical orientations and practical
approaches present in the existing literature
severely limit us in pursuing its aim. Believing
that ‘the struggle for liberation is a common
task’ (Freire, 2000: 176), we are called to, as
hooks (2010: 43) says, ‘break with the notion
that our experience of gaining knowledge is
private, individualistic and competitive’ and
thus offer critical community building as a
praxis orientation for critical pedagogy.
In the first half of the chapter we define
critical pedagogy and critical consciousness.
We then explore the exigent literature on
critical pedagogy and the way in which the
emphasis on students as individuals, and crit-
ical consciousness as an individual endeavor,
unintentionally limits the efforts of critical
educators to foster and sustain critically and
928 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
collectively conscious liberatory educational
spaces. We then briefly note the work of other
scholars who have made similar critiques,
adding to them our assertion that a critical
community building praxis orientation to
critical pedagogy is practicing a prefigurative
politic1 as it not only provides the conditions
for those involved to re-imagine and re-write
the world but also, through the praxis orienta-
tion itself, allows those involved to begin to
bring such a world to life.
In the second half of the chapter we dis-
cuss what a critical community building
praxis orientation can offer critical pedagogy.
In this section we define and discuss criti-
cal community building praxis and share the
work by which it is informed. We also offer
four critical community building practices:
(a) configuring the space for maximum
interaction among community members, (b)
engaging in intentional welcoming/connect-
ing/being present with each other’s practices,
(c) creating community commitments, and
(d) promoting mind, body, spirit connection
in relationships through collective arts-based
activities and story sharing. Lastly, within the
discussion of each practice, we share practi-
cal examples from our teaching experiences.
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AIMS
Extending critical theory’s concern with
‘matters of distribution of power and princi-
ples of social control’ (Davis et al., 2015:
146), critical pedagogy engages teachers and
students in co-creating learning spaces
‘where the complexity of knowledge, cul-
ture, values and social issues can be explored
in open and critical dialogue’ (Giroux, 2011:
14). In educational spaces where critical
pedagogy is at work, teachers and students
‘uncover what is usually allowed to be tacit
or implicit, such as forgotten histories, con-
cealed power structures, unstated purposes,
hidden ideological leanings, and no-longer-
defensible beliefs’ (Davis et al., 2015: 163).
But, as Giroux explains, critical pedagogy
‘does more than emphasize the importance of
critical analysis and moral judgements’
(Giroux, 2011: 3); it moves beyond critique
of the ways in which socio-cultural, eco-
nomic and political power is inequitably
distributed via society’s social systems and
structures, calling teachers and students to
forge ‘strong connections between knowl-
edge and the ability to take constructive
action’ (2011: 165).
Critical pedagogy involves exploring and
implementing tools, strategies, and ways
of being/moving in the world with others
that ‘unsettle common sense assumptions,
theorize matters of self and social agency’
(Giroux, 2011: 3) and ‘engage the world
as an object of both critical analysis and
hopeful transformation’ (Giroux, 2011: 14).
According to Freire (2000), who most view
as the father of critical pedagogy, it is this
development of critical consciousness that
creates the capacity for learners ‘to inter-
vene, to recreate, to transform’ the world
(2000: 66). Thus, the primary aim of critical
pedagogy is to raise a critical consciousness,
through liberatory praxis, to increase social
justice for all.
CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
According to Freire, one of the gravest obsta-
cles ‘to the achievement of liberation’ is the
way in which ‘oppressive reality absorbs
those within it’ and ‘thereby acts to submerge
human beings’ consciousness’ (2001: 51).
For Freire, raising critical consciousness ena-
bles people to ‘confront reality critically’,
and is therefore a key component of the
reflection portion of the ‘reflection and
action’ liberatory praxis needed to transform
the world (2000: 52, 51).
Viewing reflection and action as interde-
pendent processes tethered together as a praxis,
Freire understood raising critical conscious-
ness as an ongoing process of developing and
MOVING FROM INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING TO CRITICAL COMMUNITY BUILDING PRAXIS
sustaining the capacity ‘to perceive social,
political, and economic contradictions, and
take action against the oppressive elements of
reality’ (2000: 35, n.1). Critical consciousness
is therefore not merely an ‘intellectual’ prac-
tice, it necessarily involves ‘action’ (Freire,
2000: 65) that is interdependently related to
theory and is therefore ‘not merely an occu-
pation but also preoccupation’ (Freire, 2000:
53). Through raising and engaging critical
consciousness, people come to unveil and
confront oppressive reality critically, in order
to simultaneously examine and act upon it
(Freire, 2000: 52).
Challenging the Limiting
Emphasis on Individual Critical
Consciousness Raising
Freire tells us that ‘political action on the side
of the oppressed must be pedagogical action
in the authentic sense of the word, and, there-
fore action with the oppressed’ (2000: 66,
emphasis in original). He emphasizes that,
‘while no one liberates himself by his own
efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others’
(2000: 66). Further, Freire (2000: 85) con-
tends that the struggle for liberation, ‘the
pursuit of full humanity… cannot be carried
out in isolation or individualism, but only in
fellowship and solidarity’. According to
Freire (2000: 85–6), if we attempt ‘to be
more human, individualistically’ we are
engaging ‘egotistically’ which is, in and of
itself, ‘a form of dehumanization’.
In these lines and in many others written by
Freire (2000) and those who have continued
and expanded his work, scholars acknowl-
edge that engaging critical consciousness is
a relational, even a collective, endeavor, one
with solidarity and community at its core.
However, in our view, what is limiting is that,
despite this recognition, there continues to be
an overwhelming emphasis present in the lit-
erature on critical pedagogical praxis on the
individual and individual critical conscious-
ness raising. For example, Aronowitz (2001),
929
in his introduction to Freire’s Pedagogy of
Freedom, states that the critical educational
project that Freire has called us to points
us towards ‘collective solutions’ and ‘indi-
vidual responsibility for intervening’ (2001:
17). In the foreword to Critical Pedagogy in
Uncertain Times, he writes that Freire’s criti-
cal literacy, ‘the ability to read and write, and
to examine texts as well as the circumstances
of one’s life’, is about preparing students ‘for
a self-managed life’ (Aronowitz, 2009: ix).
According to Aronowitz (2001), in critical
literacy, students engage in ‘self-reflection’
and through this way of knowing thyself, he
argues, they ‘become aware of the forces that
have hitherto ruled their lives and especially
shaped their consciousness’ (2009: ix). Even
when he acknowledges that critical pedagogy
involves ‘students in the process of learning’,
his emphasis remains on students as individu-
als, describing the critical pedagogical class-
room as a place of promise for ‘a process of
self-emancipation’ (Aronowitz, 2009: x).
We see a similar approach to the criti-
cal pedagogical project in Giroux’s (2011)
work. While there is an acknowledgement
of the ‘individual’ as ‘social’, critical peda-
gogy and critical pedagogical educational
spaces, particularly those that take up ‘civic
education’, are viewed primarily as public
spaces that make it possible for ‘individu-
als to meet, address public interests, engage
pressing social issues, and participate collec-
tively in shaping public policy’ (2011: 143).
Like Aronowitz (2009), Giroux (2011) views
critical pedagogy as ‘a responsible and self-
reflective practice’ (2011: 6). As such, educa-
tors of critical pedagogy are charged with the
central task of providing a space where ‘con-
ditions that expand the capacities of students
to think critically’ are present so that they can
learn to ‘take risks, act in socially responsible
ways, and connect private issues with larger
public considerations’ (Giroux, 2011: 6). In
short, in Giroux’s (2011) perspective critical
pedagogy involves foregrounding ‘a struggle
over identities, modes of agency, and those
maps of meaning’ in such a way that enables
930 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
students to ‘define who they are and how
they relate to others’ (2011: 6). Individual
consciousness raising and engagement is
therefore at the crux of the Girouxian critical
pedagogical project.
McLaren (2016), more than Giroux (2011),
recognizes and emphasizes an understanding
of people as beings who are always in social
relations, beings always situated in relation
to others and with others with/in structures.
This is not only present in his understanding
of power dynamics, societal structures and
the workings of the social–cultural–political
world, but also in his approach to and visions
of critical pedagogical praxis. For example,
he asserts that, as critical educators, we must
see ourselves as having responsibility ‘not
only for how we act individually in society
but also for the system in which we partici-
pate and within which our subjectivities are
fashioned in conditions not of our own mak-
ing’ (McLaren, 2016: 127). He even chal-
lenges Aronowitz’s (1987) understanding of
empowerment as ‘the process of appreciating
and loving oneself’ (1987: 17–18, as cited in
McLaren, 2016: 149), arguing that ‘empow-
erment means more than self-confirmation’
(McLaren, 2016: 149). However, in other
moments in Life In Schools, McLaren (2016)
stresses the individual, stating that the criti-
cal pedagogical project should be an educa-
tional project that helps ‘create the conditions
for student self-determination in the larger
society’ (2016: 147). Individual agency is
emphasized. In short, while critical peda-
gogical scholars Aronowitz (2009), Giroux
(2011) and McLaren (2016) acknowledge
social responsibility, public considerations
and the social and structural embeddedness
of ‘individuals’, the understanding of criti-
cal pedagogical praxis put forth by them is
one through which students come to think,
act and connect as individuals, socially con-
nected individuals but individuals nonethe-
less. Said another way, the aim of critical
pedagogy, if we follow these scholars, is to
raise and engage the consciousness of a col-
lection of individual ‘critical agents’ (Giroux,
2011: 6), who, through conscientization, may
come to be ‘responsive to moral and politi-
cal problems of their time and recognize the
importance of organized collective struggles’
(Giroux, 2011: 6).
In reviewing this literature, we are called
to question this emphasis on the individual.
Are the capacities, responsibilities, determi-
nations and reflexivities these scholars speak
of truly individual and self-oriented? Should
these aspects of being, living and moving in
the world be conceived of and approached as
individual in our pursuit of collective libera-
tion? More specifically, in the work of critical
pedagogy, should we be thinking of our-
selves and experiencing ourselves and oth-
ers as ‘individuals meeting’? Should we be
viewing and taking up collective struggle as
individual critical agents or critical commu-
nity members? This might seem like seman-
tics but as critical pedagogues we know that
language is power (Macedo, 2006) and that
there is a difference in these ways of think-
ing about and taking up the work of critical
pedagogy.
Many may be reading this thinking, ‘don’t
we have individual responsibilities and take
individual actions?’ We recognize that many
of us, especially those of us living and work-
ing in the US and Western European context,
and especially those of us more dominantly
positioned2, may have come to see and even
experience ourselves as individuals, and as
a result may think of responsibilities and
actions as taken up individually. But we wish
to challenge this way of seeing, being and
moving in the world, particularly as it relates
to critical pedagogical praxis. We believe that
we constrain ourselves and our students when
we emphasize and privilege, or at the very
least stress, the view of people as individual
actors/agents/citizens in the work of critical
pedagogy. When we view ourselves as sepa-
rate beings who come into and out of social
relations in this work, we limit connections
with other human beings, particularly across
lines of difference. And as such, the raising
and engaging of critical consciousness, when
MOVING FROM INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING TO CRITICAL COMMUNITY BUILDING PRAXIS
taken up as an individual endeavor, while
potentially increasing freedom and liberation
for that individual, may (unintentionally)
inhibit liberation for others. We can increase
the breadth and depth of our work if we move
towards seeing and treating ourselves and
others as relational. We assert that a critical
community building praxis orientation to
critical pedagogical work may be more likely
to increase transformation for social justice.
Therefore, we argue that just as our work
in critical pedagogy involves ‘people and not
things’ (Freire, 2001: 128), our work in criti-
cal pedagogy ‘is with people’ (2001: 127) not
persons; it is with relationships and commu-
nities, interdependent community members
not independent individuals.
Our work builds with that of other schol-
ars (Ellsworth, 1989; Summers-Effler, 2002)
who challenge the individualistic focus in
critical pedagogy to raise critical conscious-
ness. We believe that this individualistic
focus on critical consciousness is mislead-
ing as ‘individual and organizational critical
consciousness is not attainable through indi-
vidual self-reflection; it requires sharing and
exploring experiences with others, through
conversations, and what Mercer (2000) calls
‘“interthinking” (thinking together)’ (Evans
et al., 2014: 6). We agree with Carmen et al.
(2015) who assert that much critical con-
sciousness work ‘reproduces individualistic
and cognitive approaches … focusing on the
lone subject’s development as an individ-
ual, agential, civic actor’ (2015: 828). Such
frameworks not only ‘ignore the historic
and sustained colonial power dynamics and
historicity that act in and through communi-
ties in collective, dialectical ways’ (Carmen
et al., 2015: 828), but also stunt what is made
possible through critical pedagogical work,
particularly within and through relations that
cross lines of power difference.
Thus, rather than take up a view of partici-
pants in the critical pedagogical classroom as
agents, a word and role that has solo connota-
tions at best and rugged individualistic under-
tones at worst, we think it best to work with
931
the people of the critical pedagogical class-
room as critical community members. As
critical community members, people engage
consciousness together, seeing themselves as
always in relation with others (both in and
outside the classroom), and therefore collec-
tively responsible for the moral and political
problems ‘of their time’ (Giroux, 2011: 7).
Understanding students and teachers alike
in the critical pedagogical classroom as mem-
bers of a critical community, raising and
engaging collective critical consciousness in
the pursuit of social justice increases possi-
bilities for collective healing, a ‘tending to the
wounds, injuries and traumas of historic and
recent colonial projects’ and the co-creation
and sustaining of a space where critical com-
munity members together ‘imagine how to
rewrite and reconstitute those (racial, gender,
sexuality, dis/ability) surrounding, asymmet-
ric power dynamics’ (Carmen et al., 2015:
841–2). What’s more, as we will explore in
the sections below, critical community build-
ing practices embody a prefigurative politic
in that critical community members, through
their building and sustaining of community,
not only imagine, rewrite and reconstitute
power relations, but bring to life those rela-
tions through the process of critical commu-
nity building, furthering a movement towards
building and sustaining a beloved community
and thus creating the world we want to live in.
EMPHASIZING COMMUNITY
BUILDING IN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
As evidenced in the previous sections, we see
that discussions of community are often
absent in literature on critical pedagogy. When
community is mentioned, it is often cursory,
with little to no mention on how to engage in/
as community. Here are some patterns we
noticed when community is invoked in the
critical pedagogy literature. First, the focus is
most often on the relationship, the sense of
community, developed between the teacher
932 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and (one) student or between the teacher and
the students, rather than between all in the
classroom (Freire, 2000; Giroux, 2011;
McLaren, 2016). Second, often an emphasis is
put on the ‘dialogue’, (Freire, 2000; Giroux,
2011; McLaren, 2016) and although dialogue
is extremely important for learning in a com-
munity, creating community (and understand-
ing barriers to community) goes beyond
dialogue to include non-verbal communica-
tion, the structure of a space, the emotions
present and the emphasis (or lack thereof) on
the well-being of the whole.
Thus, in this chapter, we build upon the
work of the few foundational scholars (Freire,
2011; Kincheloe, 2007) writing about com-
munity as it relates to critical pedagogy,
incorporating and building upon the work of
feminist and/or scholars of color (Anzaldúa,
2002, 2012; Boler, 1999, 2004; Brock, 2005;
hooks, 1994, 2003, 2010; Rendón, 2009) and
scholars writing about community (Block,
2008; Renner, 2009; Summers-Effler, 2002)
to implore critical pedagogues to central-
ize critical community building in critical
pedagogy praxis. For the remainder of this
chapter we will (a) define critical community
building and (b) articulate critical commu-
nity building practices, based upon our work
as reflexive educators and incorporating the
work of queer, feminist and/or scholars of
color that may not always be recognized as
operating explicitly within the discipline of
‘critical pedagogy’.
Definition of Critical Community
Building
Critical community building developed out
of my (Silvia’s) work in social justice peda-
gogy (Bettez, 2011a, 2011b; Bettez and
Hytten, 2013). In that work I argue that criti-
cal community building is an essential com-
ponent of social justice activist teaching. Due
to the often emotionally taxing nature of
engaging in education for social justice
(Boler, 2004; hooks, 1994; Kumashiro,
2004), students and faculty need support net-
works to sustain them (Darder, 2002: 145)
in their efforts to think and act upon the
world for transformation (Freire, 2001).
Furthermore, as mentioned previously, criti-
cal pedagogy work is with interdependent
members of communities, not independent
individuals.
The concept of critical community build-
ing combines various scholars’ conceptions
of community (Block, 2008; Fendler, 2006;
Hall, 2007; Pharr, 2010) with critical theo-
rists’ (Hinchey, 1998; Kincheloe, 2007) defi-
nitions of ‘critical’. Critical communities are
‘interconnected, porously bordered, shifting
webs of people who through dialogue, active
listening, and critical question posing, assist
each other in critically thinking through
issues of power, oppression, and privilege’
(Bettez, 2011b: 10).
What Critical Community
Pedagogical Practices Can Offer
We believe a critical community orientation
to critical pedagogy work can enhance the
possibilities of creating transformation for
liberation of all people. Wallin-Ruschman
(2018) in her work on the relational dimen-
sions of critical consciousness (CC) develop-
ment explains that feminists have critiqued
the critical consciousness literature, which
‘has been shaped by a masculinist overem-
phasis on rationality and individuality’
(2018: 3). She states:
One area of bias centers on the tendency to privi-
lege cognitive over emotional processes and to
position the two aspects of mental life in opposi-
tion to one another, with emotion framed as not
only feminine but also problematic. The SPCHC
[socio-political-cultural historical consciousness]
model seeks to integrate emotions and relational-
ity as both component parts of CC and as factors
driving CC development. (2018: 3)
We agree with this critique. Our critical com-
munity building pedagogy orientation is in
alignment with the SPCHC model as we seek
MOVING FROM INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING TO CRITICAL COMMUNITY BUILDING PRAXIS
to ‘integrate emotions and relationality as
both component parts of CC and as factors
driving CC development’ (Wallin-Ruschman,
2018: 3). Her work builds upon the work of
Summers-Effler (2002), who argues that
emotional energy and hope are needed to
enact social change and that there is an inter-
twined interaction between the two that
occurs within and supports community.
She emphasizes the importance of working
in solidarity, stating that
in weighing opportunities for maximizing emo-
tional energy against risks to emotional energy,
the experience of group solidarity can create
enough emotional energy to inspire people to will-
ingly take risks for the purpose of creating change.
Consciousness and the willingness to take risks for
change happen in groups of two or more with
access to enough emotional energy to create
hope. (Summers-Effler, 2002: 55)
Summers-Effler notes here that group soli-
darity inspires hope, thereby increasing the
possibilities for risk-taking in service of
social justice. We appreciate and build upon
the arguments of Wallin-Ruschman (2018)
and Summers-Effler (2002) for community-
and solidarity-oriented work explicating how
community building practices can be imple-
mented and experienced in critical pedagogy
classrooms.
CRITICAL COMMUNITY BUILDING
PRAXIS
Although more recent literature on critical
pedagogy, critical consciousness and socio-
political-cultural historical consciousness
(Carmen et al., 2015; Summers-Effler, 2002;
Wallin-Ruschman, 2018) speaks to the
importance of a community orientation, there
is limited detail in that work about how to
engage and create community. Thus, here we
provide details about potential critical com-
munity building pedagogical practices that
we believe could enhance the work of critical
pedagogues. These practices come from
933
(a) our lived experience (Collins, 1999;
Delgado-Bernal, 2002) as educators and
learners and (b) the work of scholars of color,
mostly feminist, and White, feminist, queer
scholars who are not necessarily situated in
the field of critical pedagogy.
Positionality Influences
We are both educators actively engaged in
critically reflexive practice. As such, our
positionalities – ‘the combination of social
status groups to which one belongs (such as
race, class, gender, and sexuality) and one’s
personal experience (understanding that
experience is always individually interpreted,
and it is the interpretation that gives an expe-
rience meaning)’ (Bettez, 2015: 934) – matter.
We provide brief overviews of the aspects of
our positionalities that we feel most influ-
ence our pedagogical praxis.
Author 1: I teach in a cultural foundations
graduate program and previously taught under-
graduate students. Before attending graduate
school, I was trained as a community educa-
tor by mentors and learned through doing.
My undergraduate degree is in sociology and
women’s studies, contributing to a feminist,
group-relations foundational perspective that
carries into my pedagogical work. One of
my primary graduate school instructors was
a Black woman scholar/artist (Hanley, 2017)
who advocated for teaching social justice
through a critical multicultural, arts and aes-
thetic, women-of-color-focused perspective.
As a queer, cisgender, light-skinned, mixed,
bicultural, bilingual Latina who often did well
in school, but also had significant academic
struggles, learning (and teaching) has always
been an embodied, visceral, not-just-cognitive
experience. Central to all my work is a focus
on increasing intercultural understanding and
promoting social justice.
Author 2: I teach Women’s Studies
courses at a historically Black women’s
college and previously taught Women’s
Studies at state universities and community
934 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
colleges. Beginning in my undergraduate
years and continuing on in a master’s pro-
gram in Women’s Studies, I was introduced
to and subsequently shaped by the work of
women of color, anti-racist, anti-capitalist,
anti-imperialist, queer and trans*3 feminists
committed to intersectional, interdiscipli-
nary, transnational liberation work. As a
White anti-racist, queer feminist scholar and
educator, my work as a pedagogue is done to
honor these ancestors and elders as well as
those beside me, behind me and those yet to
come. Answering the call of Chicana femi-
nist Lara (2002) in her piece ‘Healing Sueños
for Academia’, through my teaching I work
to co-create and hold space for a collective
healing of the fragmentalization of the mind,
body and spirit and the individual from the
community to make possible communal con-
sciousness raising and engagement to further
our collective learning, relating and living for
social justice in the pursuit of collective lib-
eration for all.
Our social identities, embodied experi-
ences as educators, lived knowledge and
formal and informal educational training
impact our critical community building ori-
entation. Having both taught and been trained
in women’s studies, we know that feminist,
women-of-color scholars influence our val-
ues and philosophy of community building. It
was not until attending graduate school, and
sometimes only during practice of teaching
itself, that connections to particular theoreti-
cal/pedagogical orientations from the litera-
ture became apparent to us, and sometimes
those links – although literature/theoretical
influences are present – are not clear. Our
internalized lived experience meshes with
the writings we love – Gloria Anzaldúa,
Laura Rendón, bell hooks, Audre Lorde,
Chandra Mohanty, Adrienne Rich, Minnie
Bruce Pratt, Mab Segrest – influencing how
we make sense of the world and engage in
our pedagogical praxis. Furthermore, as we
work together to articulate our critical com-
munity building praxis, our ideas intertwine
and grow through our collaborative writing
process. It is from this messy, iterative, fluid,
multi-interpreted experience that we offer
the following critical community building
practices.
Critical Community Building
Practices
We offer details of four critical community
building practices: (a) configuring the space
for maximum interaction among community
members, (b) engaging in intentional wel-
coming/connecting/being present practices,
(c) creating community commitments, and
(d) promoting mind, body, spirit connection
in relationships through collective arts-based
activities and story sharing. These practices
decenter the traditional teacher as knowledge
producer/student as learner hierarchy and
instead value what each community member
has to offer as educators and learners. The
examples we give are situated within higher
education; however, many of these can be
and have been (by our colleagues and stu-
dents) translated into K-12 and other non-
traditional education spaces.
Configuring the physical space. Although,
as educators, we may not always have much
control over the physical space in which we
engage in critical pedagogy, the physical
space impacts the potential for community
building. Traditional classroom configura-
tions with a teacher (desk) at the head of the
classroom and student desks in rows facing
the teacher inhibit community building. We
have found that configuration of desks with
chairs, and space between people, matters. If
confined to a traditional classroom, at a mini-
mum, we suggest putting desks and chairs
in a circle with the teacher as a part of that
circle. If access to technology is needed, a
U-shape works well too. In situations where
desks cannot be moved, students can be
asked to stand up and create circles, or turn
around in chairs; of course, attention to and
accommodations for possible mobility issues
must always be kept in mind.
MOVING FROM INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING TO CRITICAL COMMUNITY BUILDING PRAXIS
For highly charged issues, or interactions
in which heightened active listening is help-
ful, we have found that removing desks (or
any other objects between people) aids in
increasing the intimacy between commu-
nity members. We have moved desks to the
periphery of the room and created circles
of just chairs, with chairs practically touch-
ing (often this is all the actual space allows).
If the energy in the room is heavy, creating
two rows of chairs facing each other with a
desk in between and having people switch
dialogue partners every 2–4 minutes, with
engaging question prompts, can decrease
anxiety about sharing and raise the energy
among the group.
We have both, at times, taken our classes
outside. Doing this automatically removes
desks and encourages new seating configu-
rations between community members. With
adult students, smaller class sizes and enough
advance notice, arrangements can be made to
meet in new, distinct spaces, such as coffee
shops, museum conference rooms, libraries,
public parks, even a (i.e. the teacher’s) home.
Intentional welcoming. To facilitate com-
munity building, educators need to be inten-
tional in welcoming everyone. Gestures,
rituals and activities can be put in place to set
a tone of welcoming, not only by the educa-
tor to the students, but also between students.
Creating a welcoming, open space can also
be modeled by the educator through personal-
story sharing. Here we include a few actions
we take related to beginning of semester, and
everyday, welcoming gestures.
Critical pedagogy researchers often remark
on the importance of building relationships
and demonstrating care for students. On the
first day of class, we share personal informa-
tion about who we are and why we teach what
we teach and invite students to share about
themselves and why they choose to learn in
our classes. We also have students write on
index cards on the first day, ‘Anything that
would be helpful for me to know in working
with you’. We have received comments like,
‘i have 3 small children; i have a very sick
935
mom; i commute 1.5 hours; it’s my first year
of grad school; i have a disability; i’m often
on call and may need to answer my phone;
i’m very shy’. This mere act demonstrates a
desire to know each community member and
respond to their needs. Also, as they intro-
duce themselves on the first day, students are
invited to share anything they wish with the
community as a whole that would be helpful
in working with each other.
Although these first-day practices are
important, so is continuing the welcoming,
working-together, intention-setting behavior.
A few practices we have found useful include
asking ‘how are you?’, sharing music, and
meditation. At the beginning of class, stu-
dents can be encouraged to turn to someone
next to them and ask, ‘how are you?’ (Wah,
2014). After creating space for students to
share one-on-one, we often ask, ‘is there
anything anyone wants to share with the
class that you would like us to know and/or
would help us to best work with you today?’
Rarely do people share in large groups, but
sometimes people share good news, creating
a sense of celebration with community. Other
times people will say things like, ‘I just want
you to know, if I seem distant or uninterested,
it’s because I’m having a really hard day (or,
‘I’m not feeling well’, or ‘I have a sick kid’,
etc.), it’s not you’. This reminds us all that
we bring our whole selves into the classroom;
bodies and emotions matter.
One practice that I (Silvia) have imple-
mented in the past few years is to have stu-
dents share music at the beginning of class.
On the first day students are told about it,
invited to sign up on a google document,
and either I or one other person (I contacted
in advance) share a song to model how it is
done. Students can share any music that is
meaningful to them for a maximum of four
minutes and can share anything they want to
about the song and why it matters to them for
a maximum of four minutes. This takes only
eight minutes of time; on evaluations students
frequently comment about how much they
like this sharing to build community. We both
936 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
have also used meditation to begin classes.
Silvia uses it at particularly hectic times in
the semester or when she knows someone is
struggling with personal issues, or she is her-
self and needs to center for class; Cristina has
used it at the beginning of each class. These
can be silent or guided (see, for example,
Sharon Salzberg, breathing meditation). For
students who have never meditated before,
it is helpful to begin with guided meditation.
This reminds us of the mind, body, spirit con-
nection as it relates to the learning process.
These are a few of our strategies for inten-
tionally welcoming each other into the class-
room learning space. The particular actions
may not matter as much as the intentional-
ity, effort and encouragement for everyone to
welcome everyone, to demonstrate care and
a desire to learn about, with and from each
other in community.
Creating community commitments. Often
in classroom spaces no discussion is had about
how people will work together. In K-12,
typically teachers set ‘classroom rules’ that
students are expected to follow. In higher
education, most often assumptions are made
about classroom norms, and passed along
through the hidden curriculum (Anyon,
1980). Sometimes, collective ‘ground rules’
are created. In a classroom centered on
critical community building, it is helpful
to engage in creating collective community
commitments. In my (Silvia’s) work as an
educator, I have shifted from facilitating
ground rules, to agreements, to community
commitments. I (Cristina) have also made
this shift, in part because of the experiences
I had as a student community member in
Silvia’s classes. With community commit-
ments, rather than emphasizing what should
or shouldn’t be done, community members
instead consider simultaneously what is
most helpful to them personally as learners
and what is best for the well-being of the
whole community of learners.
As educators facilitating this, we first
ask students to reflect and write about what
they feel they need in order to have the best
experience in a learning environment. All
comments are welcome and written for all to
see, without censorship. We then invite peo-
ple to dialogue about them, which suit them,
which overlap, which would not be helpful.
These are then discussed, added to, modi-
fied, and some removed until a full final list
remains. As members of the community, we
share our own thoughts as well. When com-
plete, we ask everyone to raise their hands if
they can agree to the list. If anyone does not
raise their hand, discussion continues until all
feel they can voluntarily commit.
We find that co-creating community com-
mitments sets the tone from day one of think-
ing of ourselves as existing in a community of
learners who can strive to work together for
the well-being of the whole. This approach
shifts ‘the more individualistic nature of criti-
cal pedagogy’ and ‘urges collective action
grounded in cultural understandings, expe-
riences, and ways of knowing the world’
(Brock, 2005: 97, emphasis in original).
Mind, body, spirit connections. As men-
tioned earlier, often critical pedagogues cen-
tralize critical consciousness development in
ways that overemphasize the mind, ration-
ality and individuality (Wallin-Ruschman,
2018). Shifting to a critical community
building orientation in teaching and learning
requires promoting mind, body, spirit con-
nections. Although not predominant in much
of the critical pedagogy literature, such orien-
tations can be found in the writings of schol-
ars grounded in combinations of feminist
pedagogy (Boler, 1999; hooks, 1989, 1994,
2003, 2010), culturally responsive peda-
gogy (Ladson-Billings, 1992) and wholeness
pedagogy (Brock, 2005, Rendón, 2009). We
encourage critical pedagogues to consider
how they/we might promote mind, body,
spirit connections in teaching and learning
practices. As educators, we have found two
approaches particularly helpful: (a) collective
arts-based activities, and (b) story sharing.
In doing this work, we must recognize
‘emotions as central to the domains of cogni-
tion and morality [which] need not preclude
MOVING FROM INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING TO CRITICAL COMMUNITY BUILDING PRAXIS
intellectual rigor or critical inquiry’ (Boler,
1999: 110). Rather than dismiss, omit, or
discourage emotions, we can view them as
‘a starting point for critical inquiry’ (Boler,
1999: 119). We simultaneously heed the
warnings of Mohanty (1989, as cited in Boler,
1999: 129–30), to not allow invocations of
emotions, particularly based on personal
experience, to obscure historical and politi-
cal contexts. Community members can be
encouraged to share stories that require criti-
cal reflection and ‘historicized ethics’ (Boler,
1999: 183) while other community members
engage in active witnessing; ‘as a witness we
undertake our historical responsibilities and
co-implication’ (Boler, 1999: 186). This pro-
cess can enhance critical consciousness as
community members are encouraged ‘to rec-
ognize what it is one doesn’t want to know,
and how one has developed emotional invest-
ments to protect oneself from this knowing’
(Boler, 1999: 200).
Collective arts-based activities can also
encourage mind, body, spirit connections
within and between community members.
As learners we have found such activities to
be especially impactful to our growth, and
as educators we incorporate them often. We
have used variations of Boal’s ‘theater of the
oppressed’ techniques (Boal, 1985, 2002;
Green, 2001), Rendón’s (2009) cajitas, and
our own (and students’ own) individually
designed creations that incorporate drawing,
painting, multimedia, playwriting and perfor-
mance (including reader’s theater, emceeing,
role acting and dance).
To give an example, I (Cristina) have usu-
ally paired music sharing (discussed above)
with mindful coloring when local/global
events are being felt intensely by the class-
room community. When bringing this activ-
ity into the classroom, I often adopt a social
justice organizing practice I have participated
in in grass-roots community groups where
people are invited by a facilitator to think of
and/or, if they feel moved to, share out the
name of those they are carrying with them in
the face of what is happening who they wish
937
to, in spirit, invite into the space with them.
Through coloring and holding space for our-
selves, each other and others while listening
to music shared by each community member,
we, as whole and complex beings in whole
and complex relations, build community in
nonverbal, holistic and artistic ways.
We encourage critical pedagogues to con-
sider and/or share how to promote mind,
body, spirit connections in the classroom.
Our students have commented that the mod-
eling of this matters; we must be willing, as
educators, to be vulnerable and make such
connections ourselves. We can share stories
about our challenges and engage in the arts-
based activities with students. We acknowl-
edge that writings about arts-based activities
exist (Hanley et al., 2013), and encourage
critical pedagogues to incorporate them,
considering intentionally how such practices
might enhance community building.
Overview. These critical community build-
ing strategies we include are by no means
exhaustive. We offer here merely some pos-
sibilities in hopes that educators can see the
benefits of a ‘community member’ centered,
rather than ‘individual’ orientation to, criti-
cal pedagogy and will intentionally promote
critical community building praxis in their
teaching.
Limits
We recognize that critical community building
praxis has limits and comes with challenges.
Educators promoting community must be
willing to share power while still maintaining
the role of facilitation; sometimes the lines get
blurry and the work is messy. Similarly, all
students (each community member) must be
willing to engage with others in community,
to be accountable to the group. In an
increasingly neoliberal climate, not everyone
is willing to think and operate as more than
individuals. We have found that in classes
where not all students have a commitment to
social justice, promoting community building
938 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
can be challenging. Most damaging, perhaps,
are previous negative experiences between
community members (such as feeling unfairly
treated, not being listened to, being put down,
being dismissed, etc.). We recognize and have
experienced limits and challenges to critical
community building praxis, yet we feel
intentionally striving for critical community
building is worth the work.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter we assert that a critical com-
munity building praxis orientation can offer
new possibilities for working towards the
overall critical pedagogy aim of increased
social justice. We suggest a shift in orientation
from raising the critical consciousness of indi-
viduals to inspire action for social change to
emphasizing how consciousness raising and
social justice action happens with and through
community. If we intentionally speak about
our classrooms as communities, and students
and teacher(s) within them as community
members, then we are always foregrounding
relationships and interdependence. If we
believe Audre Lorde’s (2007: 132–3) adage ‘I
am not free when any woman [or person] is
unfree, even when her [their] shackles are
very different from my own’, then we are
called to consider how our lives are inter-
twined and to focus on being a member of a
community rather than an independent indi-
vidual. This kind of community-enmeshed
and accountable reflection and action, we
believe, could increase our chances of achiev-
ing justice for the larger human collective,
rather than merely for some. Although this
work should ideally occur in all aspects of our
lives; it can begin, for educators and students,
in our classrooms. In this chapter, we offer
suggestions for critical community practices.
We hope our work inspires dialogues about
and actions related to critical community
building within the field of critical pedagogy.
Notes
1  We understand practicing prefigurative politics as
‘removing the temporal distinction between the
struggle in the present and a goal in the future;
instead, the struggle and the goal, the real and
the ideal, become one in the present’ (Maeckel-
bergh, 2011: 4).
2  As Wagner and Shahjahan (2015) assert in their
article, many of us who are more dominantly
positioned may find ourselves more comfortable
in traditional classrooms where teachers engage
learners as individuals and rely on mind-supremacist
ways of teaching and learning, privileging ‘verbal
interaction’, for instance, as ‘a useful means of
processing information’ (2015: 249).
3  I use trans* to indicate that I am employing a
expansive definition of transgender that encom-
passes trans identities in addition to transgender
(Steinmetz, 2018), including but not limited to
agender, bigender, gender nonbinary, gender-
fluid and gendernonconforming identities.
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Arab Spring as Critical Pedagogy:
Activism in the Face of Death
It’s the same kind of humiliation that takes place
every day in many parts of the world – the relentless
tyranny of governments that deny their citizens
dignity. Only this time something different hap-
pened. After local officials refused to hear his com-
plaints, this young man [Mohammed Bouazizzi],
who had never been particularly active in politics,
went to the headquarters of the provincial govern-
ment, doused himself in fuel, and lit himself on fire.
Barack Obama (as cited in Wright, 2015: n.p.)
Freedom… begins with the recognition of a
system of oppressive relations, and one’s own
place in that system. The task of Critical Pedagogy
is to bring members of an oppressed group to a
critical consciousness of their situation as a begin-
ning point of their liberatory praxis. Change in
consciousness and concrete action are linked…;
the greatest single barrier against the prospect of
liberation is an ingrained, fatalistic belief in the
inevitability and necessity of an unjust status quo.
Burbules and Berk (1999: 47, original emphasis)
‘In order for music to free itself,’ writes
Deleuze (1993: 104), ‘it will have to pass
over to the other side.’ The other side ‘where
territories tremble, where the structures col-
lapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where
78
Awad Ibrahim
a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the
great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it
carries away and makes return’. Nowhere are
these boundaries collapsed, borders pushed
to their limits, citizenship totally revamped
and redefined, and the ‘powerful song of the
earth unleashed’ than in the Global Hip-Hop
Nation (GHHN) (Alim et al., 2009; Ibrahim,
2012, 2016). This is a semiotic, boundary-
less and arts-based Nation that has its own
‘language’ and ways of speaking, including
the spoken word, the body, the dance, the
gesture, the music, graffiti and all forms of
linguistic and extra-linguistic expressions.
These complex semiological languages, as
Roland Barthes (1983) would have called
them, allow the French to speak to the
Americans, the Venezuelans to the Finnish,
and the Japanese to the Brazilians in ways
that we are yet to fully understand; hence this
chapter. Taking two examples from the Arab
Spring – a rapper and a graffiti artist – I am
calling for a way of conceiving Arab Spring
as critical pedagogy, as a praxis of criticality
942 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
where the language of critique goes hand in
hand with the language of possibility, as
activism even in the face of death.
THE HIP-HOP THAT IGNITED
THE ARAB SPRING REVOLUTION
As we are watching a revolution-in-the-
making in Sudan (Beaumont and Salih,
2019) and witnessing the burning of Syria,
one cannot help but think that the flames of
protest that started on March 15, 20111 were
sparked by three preceding events: first,
Cairo’s Tahrir Square Revolution (started on
January 25, 2011),2 second, the Tunisian
Jasmine Revolution (as it was/is known in
Tunisia and assumed to have started on
December 17, 2010 with the act of self-
immolation of Mohammed Bouazizzi, the
26-year-old street vendor whose harassment
and humiliation reached its peak when the
police confiscated his only possession: his
fruit and vegetable vending cart).3 However,
the third event, for which I have attempted to
create a genealogy elsewhere (see Ibrahim,
2016), is what concerns me in this chapter. It
is a hip-hop song, and thanks to it, as we
shall see, we can say: The Revolution Will Be
Televised (contrary to Gil Scott-Heron’s pro-
phetic song).4
Asen (2011) titled his hiphopdiplomacy
article on the same topic: The Rap that
Sparked a Revolution: El General (Tunisia).
Asen uses ‘spark’ and I use ‘ignite’. For this
chapter, I am using the two terms interchange-
ably and purposefully. Hip-hop, as we know,
is not a political party, it is an artistic, cultural
and musical expression and movement. Born
to a large extent within the African American
history and tradition, however, this artistic
and musical expression and movement is
deeply marinated in the political history of
oppression, marginalization, and struggle
(see especially Alim, 2011; Chang, 2005;
Hudson et al., 2019; Perry, 2004; Rose, 1994,
for the impact of the Latino and Caribbean
influence on hip-hop style and message). In
this sense, hip-hop revolutionizes and makes
people think and hence ‘ignite’ and ‘spark’
their desire for change. The hip-hopper in
question, El Général, did exactly that. In early
December 2010, just before Mohammed
Bouazizzi’s self-immolation act, then a rela-
tively unknown hip-hopper whose songs were
strictly underground, quietly released a track,
‘Rais Lebled’ or ‘Mr. President’, along with a
simple video on his Facebook site. No bling,
no special production but a raw and angry
track addressed directly to then President Zine
al-Abidine Ben Ali. Within days, it had gone
viral and was on the lips of people as they defi-
antly went on the streets in the face of death
(Asen, 2011).
It was one man, one mic, and a revolution-
ary message: ‘Mr President … people have
become like animals… We are living like
dogs.’ A caveat and an explanation are in
order here. As an event that is produced within
a sociality, history, time and space, hip-hop
does not just speak its name. Hip-hop is a tes-
timony, an account and a witness to the his-
torical moment in which it is born. As such,
El Général’s ‘one mic’ does not just belong to
him. That is to say, this couplet of one man/
one mic has to be read within a genealogy of
sociality, history, time and space, where his
voice and message belong as much to him as
they do to other oppressed, marginalized and
struggling communities (both in Tunisia and
globally). ‘[T]oday,’ El Général raps, ‘I am
speaking in the name of myself and all the
people who are suffering in 2011.’
Clearly, El Général understood this ethics
of witnessing, of speaking up and of telling,
hence the song and the video, which were bold
products that landed him in jail and detention
for days. He was not released until he was
forced to sign a statement to no longer make
any political songs. As with all dictators, they
bring it on themselves. Before his release, the
video was picked up by a number of human
rights organizations and the Global hip-hop
community. It was then reposted all over the
Internet.5 In imprisoning El Général, not only
 ARAB SPRING AS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
did he become well known to all in Tunisia
and internationally, but ‘Rais Lebled’ became
the anthem of the ‘Jasmine Revolution’, as it
is/was known in Tunisia (Wright, 2011). El
Général was only 21 years old.
So, when Mohammed Bouazizzi set him-
self on fire on December 17, 2010, it was
‘Rais Lebled’ that was on people’s lips.
Mr. President, today I am speaking in the name of
myself and of all the people
who are suffering in 2011, there are still people
dying of hunger
who want to work to survive, but their voice was
not heard
get off into the street and see, people have
become like animals…
You know these are words that make your eyes
weep
as a father does not want to hurt his children
then this is a message from one of your children
who is telling of his suffering
we are living like dogs
half of the people living in filth
and drank from a cup of suffering6
The beauty is all over this text: first, in its
locality (i.e. how it speaks to and in the pro-
cess politicizes local social issues); second,
in its deeply rooted hip-hop aesthetic, espe-
cially in being a voice for the voiceless; third,
à la Public Enemy and in a typical hip-hop
style, in speaking truth to power (especially
in its appellation and interpellation to ‘Mr.
President’); fourth and finally, in its collec-
tive voice, where one becomes a witness to
the suffering of others and hence feeling the
need to speak up even if it means being
thrown in jail or sentenced to death (Ibrahim
and Alfano, 2016).
When Bouazizzi stood in front of the
municipal building and set himself on fire,
943
that act caught on, literally, and spread
across the country and the region, into
Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain,
Libya, Syria and now Sudan. Interestingly,
Asen (2011) explains, when Egypt’s revolu-
tion erupted in Tahrir Square a month after
Tunisia on January 25, 2011, what was
heard was not the usual Koran recitation,
national anthem and ‘traditional’ poetry, but
El Général’s ‘Rais Lebled’. It was now an
infamous phrase: ‘People want the régime
to fall’. It was the image of Bouazizzi’s self-
immolation that was burned in people’s imag-
ination and it was El Général’s hip-hop song
‘Rais Lebled’ that was on people’s tongues
first in Egypt, then Yemen, then Bahrain,
then Libya, then Syria (Wright, 2015, 2011)
and now Sudan (Beaumont and Salih, 2019).
Around the same time, Ghosh (2011) of Time
Magazine tells a very interesting story about
how ‘Rais Lebled’ was taken up in Bahrain:
At 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 15 [2011], as thousands of
people gathered to protest against their ruler at a
busy intersection in Manama, the capital of the
small island nation of Bahrain, you could just
about hear over the general hubbub the anthem
of the young people who have shaken regimes
from North Africa to the Arabian Gulf… A reedy
female voice shouted out, several times, the first
line of ‘Rais Lebled,’ a song written by the Tunisian
rapper known as El Général. ‘Mr. President, your
people are dying,’ the woman sang. Then others
joined in. ‘Mr. President, your people are dying/
People are eating rubbish/ Look at what is happening/
Miseries everywhere, Mr. President/ I talk with no
fear/ Although I know I will get only trouble/ I see
injustice everywhere. (Ghosh, 2011: n.p.)
Interestingly, Ghosh explains,
Bahrain, as it happens, doesn’t have a President;
it’s ruled by a King, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. No
matter. The protesters in Bahrain knew that ‘Rais
Lebled’ was the battle hymn of the Jasmine
Revolution that brought down Tunisia’s dictator,
Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and that it was then
adopted by the demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir
Square who toppled Hosni Mubarak. Now it had
come to Bahrain, as rage against poverty and
oppression swept the Arab world from west to
east. It isn’t just songs that are being copied.
(2011: n.p.)
944 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Ghosh explains further,
in a nod to the Egyptians, organizers in several
countries have dubbed their demonstrations Days
of Rage, and the popular Tunisian chant, ‘The
people want the regime to fall,’ has been taken up
by protesters from Algeria to Yemen. (2011: n.p.)
A hip-hop song, it seems, can spark and ignite
a revolution and El Général’s ‘Rais Lebled’ is
a case in point. A hip-hop song, it is also
worth noting, can be a perfect illustration of
how the global is creolized, where the local
and the global can and do co-exist. In doing
so, it does away with boundaries; the question
of the nation and its boundaries in a time of
hyper-media and hyper-communication is no
longer relevant. Boundaries are certainly rele-
vant for politicians; one only needs to listen to
US politicians talking about ‘the wall’ between
the United States and Mexico. Yet not for hip-
hoppers, whose poetic intervention is making
hip-hop belong as much to the Tunisian
Jasmine Revolution, Cairo’s Tahrir Square
and the current Syrian struggle for human
dignity as it does to African Americans,
Aboriginals, Latino/as and other marginalized
communities in North America and across the
globe (Hudson et al., 2019).
AN INTERMISSION: WHAT’S ALL THIS
GOT TO DO WITH CRITICAL PEDAGOGY?
If critical pedagogy is, in sum, the practice of
freedom (Kincheloe, 2008), then El Général
and the Arab Spring in general are examples
and illustrations of critical pedagogy par
excellence. Critical pedagogy requires ‘criti-
cality’, where one is ‘moved to do some-
thing, whether that something be seeking
reasons or seeking social justice’ (Burbules
and Berk, 1999: 47). But to reason, interpret
and reflect is not enough for critical peda-
gogy; one has to be willing to act as well.
Indeed, the very idea of separating thinking
and acting is a false and unnecessary dichot-
omy. Naming the world – especially naming
the world differently so that a better future
can be brought into existence – is an inter-
vention in the world. Thought and practice,
for critical pedagogy, are two faces of the
same coin. Paulo Freire (1970) refers to this
radical space where an ‘authentic union’
between reflection and action, thought and
practice happen as praxis (1970: 48). Clearly,
the result of this authentic union is not
always predictable and, as in the case of
Mohammed Bouazizzi, the desire for praxis
may even lead to death.
Praxis leaves no rock unturned. It deals
with changing the habits and thoughts of the
individual as much as it does with institutions,
histories and structures. To reach this level
of radical praxis, one has to be extremely
literate on the psychology of the individual
and exceptionally informed on the nature of
ideologies, structures and technologies that
control the individual and how they think and
act. We see this radical praxis in the next sec-
tion with Nour Hatem Zahra: the 23-year-old
Syrian graffiti artist who was well known as
‘the spray man’.7
GRAFFITI, ARAB SPRING AND
THE SYRIAN TURN
If El Général has the power of the word, the
story of Zahra is about the power of graffiti –
or arts overall, especially in a revolutionary
context like Syria, a country that is struggling
against tyranny and for human rights and
human dignity. Zahra was a young man who
understood that the alternative to not living
authentically was death. So his short life was
a test to what it means to put criticality and
praxis into practice, how to think deeply and
act passionately.
Zahra started protesting in the spring of
2011 (which is no different than what we
are seeing now in Sudan – see Beaumont
and Salih, 2019). Back then, the opposition
thought it would only take a few months to
get rid of the president, as it had in Tunisia
 ARAB SPRING AS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
and Egypt. To the horror of everyone, then
Syrian forces started killing protesters,
detaining them, torturing them; and the
people started fighting back. But in face of
torture, not to say death, there was Zahra
and his friends – organizing protests, hiding
activists from the dreaded security forces,
distributing medical supplies to those who
were injured but terrified to go to a govern-
ment hospital.
Beside being an anti-government activist
and community organizer, Zahra was also a
graffiti artist. He and his friends spray-painted
slogans against President Bashar Assad around
the suburbs of Damascus. Then, around
December 2011, Zahra got caught. Apparently
one of his graffiti artist friends, who was under
torture, had given up his name to his torturer.
Zahra, we are told, later forgave the friend.8
Nonetheless, Zahra was jailed for 56 days.
As soon as he got out of jail, he started spray-
painting again. He and his friends went around
spraying the suburbs of Damascus with slo-
gans against the Syrian president. Slogans
such as: ‘Down with the traitor.’ ‘To the trash
heap of history.’ Pictures of the president with
the word ‘pig’ scrawled underneath.
Being tech-savvy, Zahra then spearheaded a
Facebook initiative between April 14 and 21,
2012, which came to be known as ‘Freedom
Graffiti Week’. Zahra and his friends declared
this a week filled with arts performance, intel-
lectual conversations and gatherings, civil
disobedience and peaceful expression – thus
putting the praxis of critical pedagogy into
practice. A week later, on April 29, 2012,
Zahra was at it again, jumping from one car
to the next and going from one neighborhood
to the next with his spray paint. His final act,
according to National Public Radio (NPR),
was that he sped through one of the check-
points fearing for his life and avoiding secret
security. As he did that, he was shot in the
leg. Bleeding to death, Zahra’s body was stiff
when it was found and his eyes were still open.
According to the YouTube videos, the
mourners came by the hundreds to the funeral.
Most of them were young men who wore the
945
latest fly gears, but primarily baseball hats
and skinny jeans. Like groomsmen, they car-
ried Zahra’s janazah (coffin) on palm fronds
and danced around the ones who held his body
aloft. Singing prayers for Zahra and his fam-
ily, they clapped and chanted over and over
again: Um elshaheed nihna eyalik [‘Mother
of the martyr, we are your children’].
Then, like so many of the amateur vid-
eos coming out of Syria, YouTube footage
of Zahra’s funeral just stops. The next day
there is another one: another funeral, another
boy covered in flowers, another video. All of
these videos begin with a hand that is holding
an 8½ in x 11 in (A4) paper that describes
and documents the event, the date and the
place. Then, they all just end. We are left to
our own imagination of what’s next.
ARAB SPRING AND/AS CRITICAL
PEDAGOGY: LESSONS LEARNED
Combining the life story of Zahra and the
story of El Général’s song ‘Rais Lebled’,
there are four broad lessons learned from
Arab Spring in general and these two stories
in particular when read through the lens of
critical pedagogy. The first major lesson is
the practice of freedom. Here, it is never
enough simply to focus on reforming peo-
ple’s ideas and habits, however necessary,
but more important to focus on challenging
and transforming the institutions, histories,
ideologies, structures and relations that
engender distorted and oppressed situations
and thinking in the first place (Giroux, 2011,
2016; McLaren and Kincheloe, 2007; Wink,
2011). Both Zahra and El Général spoke and
correctly named the ills and habits of people
that need to change, but they did not stop
there. Most likely neither Zahra nor El Général
(or Bouazizzi for that matter) ever heard about
critical pedagogy. Nonetheless, they put it into
practice because, as part of their practice of
freedom, not only did they use their criticality
to name what they saw as injustice but
946 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
they actioned it, they did something about
this injustice. They were able to see beyond
and see otherwise.
Second, which is a logical sequel from the
first lesson, one cannot name injustice and do
something about it unless one has reached a
higher level of social, historical and politi-
cal ‘literacy’, which Freire (1970) refers to
as conscientização or consciousness. To be
socially, historically and politically literate,
for Freire, is to challenge the self-contempt
and sense of powerlessness against injustice,
poverty, oppression, and nihilism. As we saw
with Zahra and El Général, both were effective
in developing and practicing a sense of con-
fidence and efficacy, a collective thought and
action, and a desire to change, not only one’s
self, but the oppressive circumstances of one’s
social group. Here, the cultural action (rapping
in the case of El Général and graffiti in the case
of Zahra) is a perfect performative moment of
what Freire (1970: 47) calls ‘cultural action
for freedom’, which ‘is characterized by dia-
logue’, a dialogue whose ‘preeminent purpose
is to conscientize the people’.
Third, in this dialogic practice of critical
pedagogy, the question of border crossing
(Giroux, 2005, 2016) and working against
a nationalist notion of border becomes a
preeminent question, especially when it
comes to global solidarity against poverty,
oppression and the continuing coloniza-
tion of Indigenous peoples and the so-called
developing countries. The question of border
is at the heart of the Global Hip-Hop Nation –
this semiotic, arts-based and border-less
Nation. Let me explain. The Arab Spring is
phenomenologically a transnational move-
ment, criss-crossing from the Atlantic Ocean
to the Arabian Gulf (Ibrahim, 2017). In this
transnational movement (some may even say
‘revolution’ (Ben Jelloun, 2011)), two of hip-
hop’s elements emerge as cornerstones that
help form and perform this movement. It was
rapping in the case of El Général and graf-
fiti in the case of Zahra. Both Zahra and El
Général understood and learned, in turn, four
lessons in relation to the dialogic practice
of border crossing: first, that ‘[i]f you wish
peace [somewhere], [you have to] care for
justice [everywhere]’ (Bauman, 2007: 5)
and, second, one way to conscientize people
to care for justice nationally and transna-
tionally is to make them stare at and name
injustice in a way that makes them see and
imagine a just world. Third, in this process
of conscientização, representations matter.
The two artists in question were able to show
people the national and transnational nature
of injustice and called for global solidarity
and human dignity. That is, for Zahra and El
Général, ‘justice is… a planetary issue, meas-
ured and assessed by planetary comparisons’
(Bauman, 2007: 5). Injustice somewhere is
injustice everywhere; and the oppression that
is inflicted on people in Egypt and Tunisia is
no different than the continuing marginaliza-
tion of people in Bahrain. Here, fourth and
finally,
The human misery of distant places and remote
ways of life, as well as the human profligacy of
other distant places and remote ways of life, are
displayed by electronic images and brought home
as vividly and harrowingly, shamingly or humiliat-
ingly, as is the distress or ostentatious prodigality of
the human beings close to home during daily strolls
through the town’s streets. (Bauman, 2007: 5)
Put otherwise, in a time of globalization,
migration and constant movement, especially
post-Internet, ‘[n]othing is truly, or can remain
for long, indifferent to anything else… [n]o
well-being of one place is innocent of the
misery of another’ (Bauman, 2007: 6). The
Iraq war was a spectacle we had watched on
TV – ironically comfortably as we were
dining or having a soft drink. We watched
Syria burning, Afghanistan destroying, and
Yemen starving. We feel helpless. There is a
compression of time and space and what is
happening elsewhere, in distant lands, is now
sitting right in our living rooms thanks to glo-
balized meaning-making machines (media,
Internet, popular culture, TV, etc.). ‘There is
nowhere one can escape to’ (2007: 6)
and however indifferent one might be, the
 ARAB SPRING AS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
horrific nature of the images we watch can
only give us nightmares. Be warned, this is a
nightmare ready to happen. Critical pedagogy
would ask: why do such situations happen in
the first place and what can be done about
them socially, politically, nationally and
internationally?
The fourth and final lesson is this: if death
makes it stupid, the bigger ethical and criti-
cal pedagogy question is, how do we go
on? How do we go on living after witness-
ing trauma? Is there a language that helps
us understand what we have just witnessed?
Better yet, what is language in the face of
trauma if it is not another moment where lan-
guage cheats us, another moment of stupifi-
cation? Language, one may argue (see also
Freire, 1970), cheats us, we are almost able to
express what we want to say, but right at the
moment, something is left over, something is
there, something is purely emotional and it
escapes language. This is the critical peda-
gogy of the leftover. For me, this is the only
pedagogy that might help us at least start to
conceptualize what is happening in Syria and
what happened in Tunisia, a conceptualiza-
tion which will become clear next.
Generally speaking, the leftover is made
absent. It takes a visionary to bring it to
light, it takes strong poets to articulate it.
For Richard Rorty (1989), strong poets do
not simply write verses or simply teach.
The ‘poet’ here is a broad, generic term
used to refer to someone who not only has
the language but also the vision to tell us
something new, or invent the known in an
unknown language. The strong poets, Rorty
(1989) explains, are horrified at simply being
‘a copy or a replica’; s/he has the courage
and audacity to engage, look for and think
through the ‘blind impresses’, the gaps and
the blind spots of thoughts, ideas and prac-
tices (1989: 43). The blind impresses are the
difficult knowledges – problems, if you like –
that society prefers not to face, be it racism,
violence, oppression, sexism, xenophobia,
ethno-supremacy or homophobia. In the face
of formidable pressure, the strong poets will
947
choose to walk through these ‘problems’, so
to speak, and deal with them at the individ-
ual, national, and global level. Strong poets
dare to speak and teach in the face of cyni-
cism, budget cuts, and hopelessness.
Clearly, both Zahra ‘the spray man’ and El
Général ‘the rapper’ are strong poets. They
had the vision, the language, and the audac-
ity to walk through death. They are teaching
us about the courage it takes to stand up for
what we believe in. This courage, interest-
ingly enough, is coming back to the metrop-
olis of the West. The courage of Zahra and
El Général is teaching us here in the West a
different notion of citizenship. This is a radi-
cal notion of citizenship, a global one that is
yet to be fully understood. In times like these,
with vulgar and predatory capitalism and neo-
liberalism, on the one hand, and social media
where all is available at a click of a mouse
(of course, if you can afford a computer and
Internet), on the other, one can only begin to
question the three ‘kinds of citizens’ that Joel
Westheimer and Joseph Kahne (2004) talked
about: personally responsible, participatory,
and social justice oriented. I think there is a
different kind of citizenship that is develop-
ing by young, exceptionally tech-savvy, and
politically committed citizens. And I do think
we need to pay very close attention to these
young people and pedagogically learn from
how they do what they do, how they flip the
script (as we say in hip-hop) and, in the pro-
cess, unearth and envision a different and a
better future (Ibrahim and Steinberg, 2014).
For critical pedagogy, the example of
the Arab Spring, particularly Zahra and El
Général, is a testimony to William Pinar’s
(2012) argument that the world has become
a site of teaching; and I think it has always
been. In most cases, McLaren and Kincheloe
(2007) contend, radical pedagogy is expelled
from schools. Seeing Arab Spring as a per-
formative moment of this radical pedagogy, it
is clear that critical pedagogy has gone pub-
lic. For Pinar (2012), critical pedagogy has
gone ‘into the streets, onto television, into
the movies, on the Internet, through music,
948 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
poetry and the visual arts, in museums, on
bodies, and at the zoo’ (2012: xv). The new
frontiers for critical pedagogy therefore, it
seems to me, are to decipher these public
spaces of the leftover and what they teach us.
If studied carefully, they seem to be calling
for a different type of curriculum, one where
activism, thinking and acting are a necessary
triangle for what it means to become fully
human. However, what is being called for,
the potential, as Giorgio Agamben (2000) put
it, has the impotential embedded in it.
That is to say, in conclusion, in times like
these, where similacrum and visual rep-
resentations reign strong, El Général and
Zahra are challenging us to think about what
might be called ‘Strong Poetry Curriculum’.
This is a critical pedagogy of contingency,
where the challenge is not to see revolution
in its ultimate and final result, but to look at
the cracks, the small mutations and the thou-
sands of small acts that give it its final shape.
Put otherwise, to conclude, it is the power of
the strong poets that will carry us through
pain; it is the word of the strong poet that
will make us rewrite what we know differ-
ently. After all, novelty will almost strictly
happen in and through contingency, in and
through the cracks. After all, we are talk-
ing about Arab Spring as critical pedagogy
thanks to El Général’s hip-hop song and to
Zahra’s graffiti.
Notes
1  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-
26116868. A version of this section was pub-
lished in Ibrahim, 2017.
2  http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/
2011/01/201112515334871490.html.
3  Warning: this is a graphic video of the self-
immolation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
vDjHw_auqod6Y.
4  https://www.youtube.com/watch?vDqGao
XAwl9kw.
5  See this as an example: https://www.youtube.
com/watch?vDIeGlJ7OouR0.
6  This is a hybrid English lyric translation drawn
from different sources including YouTube, Time
Magazine, Newanthem blog (Jones, 2011), and
Kimball (2014) in Hiphopdiplomacy blog (see ref-
erence section; see also Ibrahim, 2016). These lyr-
ics were cited in Ibrahim, 2017.
7  I consolidated my information on Zahra from
many YouTube videos (see for example the
many hundreds of mourners who came to his
funeral: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzn_
bp4hoawandfeature=related) and from the
Freedom Graffiti Week – Syria: https://www.face-
book.com/MAD.GRAFFiTi.Week.SYRiaa/. Here is
a taste of Zahra’s work: https://www.fatcap.com/
graffiti/175640-hatem-zahra-idlib.html.
8  https://www.npr.org/2012/05/02/151852095/
a-syrian-graffiti-artist-defiant-until-death
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 79
Schools as Learning
Communities
Maria Padrós and Sandra Girbés-Peco

This chapter is devoted to the educational
approach that more than 3,300 schools are
currently developing worldwide, which is
Schools as Learning Communities. The
Learning Communities project consists of a
whole-school intervention to improve both
children learning and social cohesion,
through the dialogic participation of all the
community and the implementation of suc-
cessful educational actions (Gatt et al., 2011).
Schools as Learning Communities have
empowered traditionally excluded communi-
ties as in the case of immigrant, native Roma
and Indigenous communities, not only ena-
bling students to meet the official standards
and widening their opportunities, but also
empowering them to lead radical changes in
their schools, communities and lives. We will
show how Learning Communities connect
with the thinking and acting of critical peda-
gogy (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1997;
McLaren and Kincheloe, 2007).
The authors of the chapter are members of
the Community of Research on Excellence
for All (CREA), which is an international,
interdisciplinary, diverse network formed
by more than 80 researchers from various
universities. Within this community, both
authors have been committed to the develop-
ment of schools as Learning Communities
for 20 and 10 years respectively. We have
participated in the process of many schools
rethinking themselves and changing their
organization to work not for the families
but with the families; we have collaborated
as volunteers in some of them; and we have
witnessed how relationships between teach-
ers and parents in those schools have evolved
from conflict or mutual distance to real trust,
and many times friendship. We have also
participated in international and national
research on the implementation, challenges
and outcomes of the project in very diverse
contexts. This research has always used a
communicative methodology approach that
questions the traditional hierarchies between
researchers and the researched and focuses
on the transformative dimensions to generate
 SCHOOLS AS LEARNING COMMUNITIES
real improvements in people’s lives (Gómez
et al., 2011; Soler-Gallart, 2017). The chap-
ter is grounded in our knowledge acquired by
this direct engagement and research with the
Learning Communities; a knowledge that is
filled with admiration for the daily work of
teachers, families and students that against
many odds create spaces of resistance and
hope. As Apple (2013) suggests, we are act-
ing as critical ‘secretaries’ to those who are
challenging persistent educational inequali-
ties, not as neutral outsiders but as research-
ers committed to the scientific rigor and
the ethical purpose of putting science at the
service of the public good (Burawoy, 2005;
Soler-Gallart, 2017).
The chapter is organized into three sec-
tions. The first section introduces the
Learning Communities project and its his-
torical development since the first experi-
ence in the 1970s. In the second section,
we discuss the theoretical framework of
dialogic learning in which daily practices of
these schools are grounded. With the case of
Dialogic Literary Gatherings, we exemplify
how this perspective recreates a model of
liberating education (Freire, 1970), promot-
ing excellent and critical education for all
children. In the third section, we explain the
ways of promoting democratic participation
in schools as Learning Communities, which
challenge the traditional power relationships
within schools and generate radical solidar-
ity. Our final remarks are devoted to the chal-
lenges and the possibilities for continuing
the project.
TRANSFORMING DIFFICULTIES
INTO POSSIBILITIES: SCHOOLS
AS LEARNING COMMUNITIES
The first Learning Community was founded
in Spain by Ramon Flecha, who had already
been involved in clandestine adult education
and social movements during Franco’s dicta-
torship, together with neighbors and other
951
educators. As a grassroots movement in La
Verneda neighborhood (Barcelona), they
occupied a building formerly used for the
Francoist ‘female section of the National
Movement’ and there created a cultural
center with an adult school (Tellado et al.,
2013) as a space for responding to the high
rates of illiteracy and lack of services in that
working-class area. La Verneda-Sant Martí
School was from the very beginning an
assembly-based organization, in which learn-
ers were considered participants, and the
main decisions were taken by those with no
academic degree (Sánchez, 1999). Therefore,
starting from literacy and basic education,
the school gave voice to hundreds of people
and became a driver of mobilization, in line
with other well-known transformative initia-
tives in the field of popular adult education
(Horton and Freire, 1990).
During the first years of the Spanish
democracy, many education initiatives that
started as popular and critical projects rap-
idly adapted themselves to bureaucratic
mainstream schooling. La Verneda-Sant
Martí School stood out from others by main-
taining its core features such as gratuity for
all its activities, or participants’ right to
decide. Nowadays, La Verneda-Sant Martí
is still a unique center that opens seven days
per week from 9am to 9pm offering a vast
range of free activities, including Spanish
for migrants, driving lessons, financial
literacy, robotics and university entrance
preparation. It has over 2,000 participants
and, along with educators, there are more
than 100 volunteers – ranging from house-
wives and migrants to university profes-
sors, and many of them also learners at the
school (Aubert et al., 2016). As Tellado
(2017) shows, besides providing learning
opportunities the school bridges individuals
to communities and enhances community
activism for the common good through social
engagement – for instance, it has been very
active in solidarity towards migrants and
refugees, strongly positioned against gender
violence, and it had a key role in the protests
952 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
to demand the metro and other services in
the neighborhood.
In the 1990s, some primary schools
decided to recreate the dialogic approach of
La Verneda-Sant Martí in the formal educa-
tion system as a means to reverse the per-
sistence of segregation, educational failure,
early school leaving and conflicts in margin-
alized areas. CREA, founded in 1991, played
the role of bringing theoretical and scientific
evidence to be discussed with teachers and
communities in the interested schools, as
a basis for the development of the project.
Those schools were pioneers in inviting fam-
ily members with little formal education to
volunteer regularly in classrooms, acknowl-
edging their experience as valuable resources
rather than deficits (García-Carrión, 2012).
They had the courage of starting a project
when in Spain the hegemonic discourse was
focused on the adaptation to differences and
rejection of the struggle for equality. The
schools and researchers involved in those
first Learning Communities faced, on the
one hand, a deficit thinking model associated
with conservative discourses and explicit rac-
ism; and on the other, they dealt with some
of the most important obstacles such as the
structuralist and postmodern approaches
from which any transformative project was
considered naïve, since schools were under-
stood as mere reproducers of the structural
conditions of oppression (Flecha et al., 2003;
Aubert et al., 2004). Teachers involved in
those first schools as Learning Communities
demonstrated courage in resisting the post-
modern wave that would lead to immobilism,
and they kept being critically hopeful (Freire,
1994a), thus making possible real improve-
ments in the lives of children and their fami-
lies, and inspiring other schools to follow
their steps. CREA and Learning Communities
were also fundamental for shifting the public
discourse and promoting critical perspec-
tives, for instance with the Conference on
Critical Education for the New Information
Age (Giroux et al., 1999) and other confer-
ences called ‘Educational Change’, in which
Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg also par-
ticipated (Flecha and Gómez, 2016).
More than 10 years later, CREA coor-
dinated the research project INCLUD-ED,
funded by the European Commission’s
Framework Programme for Research. As
the result of an extensive study of success-
ful schools around Europe, INCLUD-ED
provided a list of successful educational
actions that have been shown to promote
excellent results – in terms of improving
educational achievement, coexistence and
social cohesion – regardless of students’
characteristics or the contextual features of
the school (Flecha, 2014). At the same time,
INCLUD-ED also provided evidence on
the educational improvements generated by
Learning Communities in very diverse set-
tings. These results contributed to a dramatic
increase in schools starting their own transfor-
mation in Learning Communities, not only in
Europe but also in Latin America, including
schools in remote areas like the Rural Centers
for Alternate Education (CRFA) in Peru
(Racionero-Plaza and Puig, 2017). In 2019
there are more than 3,300 schools as Learning
Communities distributed throughout several
European countries (Spain, UK, Portugal,
Cyprus, Italy, Malta, Czech Republic) and
in Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico,
Peru, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador). Besides,
the results of INCLUD-ED also influenced
educational policies to scale up the imple-
mentation of successful educational actions
worldwide (García-Carrión et al., 2017).
In this context of growth of the project,
more critical educators have the possibility
to reinforce and improve the work done over
the last decades. However, clashing interests
may also arise, such as the willingness of
individual prominence – or even funding – of
some researchers who present themselves as
‘experts’ in Learning Communities, or the
fears of other researchers and educators who
may feel threatened by this success. Thus, a
new challenge is to ensure that the project
remains at the service of the right to educa-
tion for all, maintaining the key features that
 SCHOOLS AS LEARNING COMMUNITIES
define the Learning Communities as a real
utopia (Wright, 2010: 91–2). Two of these
features are dialogic learning and democratic
organization. We describe them in the follow-
ing sections.
THE LIBERATING CONCEPTION
OF DIALOGIC LEARNING
As in the Freirean conception of liberating
education (Freire, 1970, 1998), dialogue is at
the heart of the Learning Communities and it
is probably what best defines the essence of
the project. Dialogue is the most important
tool for bridging individuals and communi-
ties and creating new realities. It is what
enables the different participants in the
project – teachers, families, students and
volunteers – to learn together, work together,
transform together.
The relevance of dialogue for teaching and
learning processes that was so profoundly
understood in Vygotsky’s sociocultural the-
ory (1978) has been increasingly recognized,
and current theories see intersubjectivity and
culture as key factors in learning processes
(Cole, 1996; Gutiérrez and Rogoff, 2003;
Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wells, 1999) to the
extent of implying a ‘dialogic turn’ in the
learning sciences (Racionero and Padrós,
2010). Flecha (2000) developed the con-
ceptualization of dialogic learning, taking
into account contributions from psychology
(Vygotsky, 1978), Freire’s dialogic action
(Ramis, 2018), the theory of communica-
tive action (Habermas, 1984) and sym-
bolic interactionism from sociology (Mead,
1934), among others. Grounded in this inter-
disciplinary theoretical base, dialogic learn-
ing is defined (Flecha, 2000) through seven
principles: (1) egalitarian dialogue as based
on the validity of the arguments rather than
on the power positions of those involved,
(2) cultural intelligence, which means that
knowledge and abilities of the participants
are valued, (3) transformation instead of
953
adaptation to the environment or traditional
expectations, (4) an instrumental dimension
so that dialogue is used to increase learning,
(5) solidarity as both the base and effect of
the dialogue, (6) creation of meaning for
the individuals and the group through dia-
logue, and (7) equality of differences as the
equal opportunity for all students to partici-
pate and succeed in learning, regardless of
their cultural background and other personal
features.
Starting from these principles, schools
as Learning Communities make all neces-
sary efforts to ensure that their students get
instruction of the highest quality. The empha-
sis on the change of the learning environ-
ment, rather than adapting students’ learning
to it, is especially important in regard to pop-
ulations that have been systematically under-
served (Flecha and Soler, 2013). Against
the assumption that they do not ‘need’, are
not interested in, or will not use a high-level
learning program, the Learning Communities
aim to ensure that these students get instruc-
tion at the highest level. They do not limit
the difficulties nor make a ‘functional’ cur-
riculum. On the contrary, they strengthen the
STEM and academic language proficiency
(Cummins, 2000), and guarantee students’
access to the best cultural goods through,
for instance, Dialogic Literary Gatherings
(DLGs).
Indeed, DLGs (De Botton et al., 2014;
López de Aguileta, 2019) are one of the suc-
cessful educational actions based in dialogic
learning that are implemented in Schools as
Learning Communities. In essence, they
consist of a dialogic space for the exchange
of interpretations of the books of classical
literature. Among many other books (usu-
ally adapted for their age) that students
read and discuss are Don Quixote, Romeo
and Juliet, One Thousand and One Nights,
Around the World in 80 Days, Frankenstein,
The Mahabharata, Oliver Twist, Crime and
Punishment…
In this way these schools do not deny the
right of all children to enjoy classic literature,
954 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and do not reduce school culture to products
subject to the laws of the market (Eco, 2000).
Instead, they familiarize children with the
best works and are confident of their capac-
ity for appreciating them. As Umberto Eco
(2000) argues, those who question the inter-
est or pleasure of certain social groups in this
kind of literature reflect, in the end, a disdain
for ‘the mass’ and nostalgia of times past, in
which cultural goods were a class privilege.
In addition, DLGs do not rely solely on
reading classic literature but also facilitate
the exchange of interpretations between
participants through an egalitarian dialogue,
breaking with the banking conceptions of
education (Freire, 1970), and promoting dia-
logic inquiry (Wells, 1999). In DLGs, chil-
dren read at home the part of the book that
they have decided (for instance, two chap-
ters) and select excerpts that they want to
share with their mates. At class, they sit in a
circle and discuss one by one all the selected
excerpts, so that for every excerpt there is
an extended utterance, deepening the mean-
ing, diverse interpretations and relationships
with other ideas. As some of the studies about
DLGs have shown (Hargreaves and García-
Carrión, 2016), DLGs reverse the traditional
teacher monopoly of talk in classrooms,
meaning that over 75% of the learners join
in the dialogue, contributing to over 80% of
the talk.
The case of Aisha1, a 10-year-old
Moroccan immigrant girl, shows how DLGs
provide a space for learners to recreate the
dynamic and mutual movement from word
to world in the act of reading (Freire and
Macedo, 2005). Aisha is a student in one
of the Learning Communities that we have
researched, located in a deprived area in
northeast Spain where nearly half of the
inhabitants are non-European immigrants,
most of whom come from Morocco. Two
years prior to our observation, Aisha moved
to the neighborhood with her mother and
three sisters, while her father had immigrated
alone four years earlier to work as a brick-
layer in Spain. She participates in the weekly
DLGs in her school. In one of our observa-
tions, Aisha was most of the time listening
carefully to her classmates. At one point in
the DLG, Aisha asked for the floor to read the
excerpt she had chosen: Ulysses is alone and
with the boat destroyed. He gets to Ogigia
Island where the nymph Calypso lives, who
retains him with her for seven years. But
Ulysses never forgets his home. Nevertheless,
he always misses his wife Penelope and his
son Telemachus. Then, she explained to her
classmates that the long return to Ulysses’
home reminded her of the trip her father
made when he immigrated alone to Spain
and of the trip she made years later to meet
him. And she added: ‘These days I’ve seen
on TV that many people from Syria had to
leave their country, because of the war. It’s
winter and they’re cold, and nobody wants
to give them a house. Like Ulysses, they face
a lot of problems on their way. I think all
children must have a house. When we came,
there were people who helped us, and others
didn’t. I think that now we all should help
them.’ Aisha’s intervention enabled her class-
mates, most of whom had undergone migra-
tion processes, to share their experiences and
their thoughts about the humanitarian refugee
crisis in Europe, intensified since 2016. They
reflected on the difficulties their parents had
faced for giving them a better future, and the
worse situation of those escaping from Syria.
These kinds of vivid conversations connect
the topics in the book with the issues that
concern them and have a strong relationship
to their coexistence, such as friendship and
family, in a way that prevents learners from
experiencing disaffection towards the school
institution (Willis, 1977). At the same time,
learners engage themselves in profound
reflections on diasporas as historical and
political phenomena, cultural relationships,
social injustices and human rights. They
integrate others’ words in their own words,
in Bakthinian terms (Bakthin, 1982), and
therefore these dialogues will be part of their
voices when entering new dialogues in other
spaces.
 SCHOOLS AS LEARNING COMMUNITIES
DEMOCRATIZING PARTICIPATION
IN LEARNING COMMUNITIES
The Learning Communities project assumes
a democratic school organization by involv-
ing traditionally excluded community mem-
bers in central areas of school life to ensure
the right to quality education for all students.
To this end, Learning Communities are
opened to the neighborhood and school staff
actively work to reduce those structural,
organizational and cultural barriers that, in
many cases, impede community participation
in schools (Carreón et al., 2005). Thus, the
project promotes forms of participation that
have been identified as leading to the devel-
opment of the potential of the community –
regardless of the background or the
socio-educational level of the participants.
Among the different typologies of participa-
tion promoted, educative participation and
decisive participation stand out (Díez, Gatt
and Rancionero, 2011).
Educative participation means the involve-
ment of both family and community mem-
bers in educative programs and in different
learning contexts in the school. It implies
family and community inclusion in curricular
activities performed in the students’ class-
rooms and in after-school programs aimed
at providing more learning time and contexts
to students who need it. Interactive groups
(IGs) are an example of this kind of educative
participation (Aubert et al., 2017; Valls and
Kyriakides, 2013). IG is an inclusive form
of classroom organization aimed at students
learning through multiplied interactions.
Students are organized into small heteroge-
neous groups (mixing gender, cultural back-
ground, educational achievement, etc.) and
each group has an adult volunteer who does
not need to have any specialized knowledge;
indeed, many of the adults are family or com-
munity members volunteering with no previ-
ous experience in teaching and, many times
in deprived areas, with low academic degree
or literacy skills. Each group of students
955
engages in a different activity and after a
given time (usually around 20 minutes) they
change the activity and the volunteer, intensi-
fying interactions that they engage in during
the lesson.
Importantly, volunteers do not substitute
the teacher but rather ensure that students
interact with each other and contribute to
creating an atmosphere that enhances instru-
mental learning (Díez-Palomar and Cabré,
2015; Valls and Kyriakides, 2013). The lack
of academic degrees or specific training of
the volunteers, far from being a problem,
becomes an advantage for being an actual
facilitator, as they may not know how to solve
the tasks. Moreover, they bring a diversifica-
tion of cultural role models in schools with
racially diverse students but racially homoge-
neous teachers (Van den Bergh et al., 2010).
One of the case studies within the afore-
mentioned INCLUD-ED project is a school
located in one of the poorest districts of
Spain, a neighborhood with a high concen-
tration of Roma people that has been badly
hit by unemployment (the neighborhood’s
unemployment rate is four times higher than
the town average), illiteracy (77.4% of peo-
ple have not completed basic education),
drug trafficking and crime (García-Carrión,
Molina-Luque and Molina, 2017). When
that school decided to become a Learning
Community to overcome educational fail-
ure, absenteeism and constant confrontations
between teachers and families, the teaching
staff proposed José to participate as a volun-
teer at school.
José was born in the neighborhood, had a
difficult childhood, leaving school at the age
of nine, and had just been given a conditional
release after serving a prison sentence. While
in most schools a parent like José could only
be seen as a hardship, the unusual invitation
to be part of the transformation of the school
was based on the recognition of cultural intel-
ligence that all parents have. José returned to
his neighborhood and started participating in
the school of his two children as a volunteer
in IGs. It was not an easy step to do, but he
956 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
quickly got on very well with the children,
the teachers and other volunteers, so that he
could get over his initial discomfort. José’s
participation was very important for his lit-
tle son, and enhanced the sense of solidarity
into real practices and not only as part of a
discourse but a real action.
Educative participation also means the
extension of the educational opportunities
to the whole community. In that sense, many
Learning Communities offer educational
activities – e.g., literacy, languages, job skills
or ICT – that share the common feature of
responding to the requests of relatives and
other community members (De Botton et al.,
2014). Some months into his volunteering,
José decided to enroll in literacy courses
developed at the school to be able to provide
more support to his children and to other
school students.
The self-esteem and self-concept of José
and other parents involved in the school
improved definitively when they began to
perceive the effects that their participation in
the school was generating: one year after the
transformation into a Learning Community,
the school increased the scores of nine-year-
old students in all subjects in standardized
tests. Furthermore, the school absenteeism
rate was reduced from 30% to 10% and then
to only occasionally (Girbés et al., 2015).
In this way, the strong tendency of student
loss that had been experienced in the school
in previous years was reversed.
Besides educative participation, Learning
Communities enhance the decisive partici-
pation of community and family members
through their involvement in decision-making
spaces. In addition to maintaining traditional
school decision-making bodies – e.g., fami-
lies’ associations or school councils – these
centers are organized in a way that families
are not mere beneficiaries of the decisions
of staff, but they share a dialogic leadership
(Padrós and Flecha, 2014). One of the specific
measures for doing this horizontal work are
the mixed committees – formed by students,
family and community members, teachers
and volunteers – which have the aim of mov-
ing towards collective priorities that have
emerged from extended debates. Instead of
telling parents to ‘hold on’ when they have a
demand, mixed committees provide a flexible,
bottom-up structure that breaks with bureau-
cratization and technocratic approaches that
often paralyze processes of change in schools
(Illich, 1973). They are alive and flexible
structures that change at the pace of changes
of school life and act as democratizing struc-
tures (Freire, 1994b).
Encouraged by the positive experience
in IGs and educative programs, José joined
other Roma residents and extended his partic-
ipation to the school decision-making struc-
tures, through assemblies and one specific
mixed committee dealing with the request
for secondary education in the school. This
demand was based on the harsh reality that
most of their children abandoned education
at the age of 12 when they finished elemen-
tary school and were supposed to leave the
neighborhood to attend high school. Without
a dialogue, this school drop-out would usu-
ally be blamed on lack of interest, or insuffi-
cient efforts, of the families. In an egalitarian
dialogue, following Habermas’ (1984) con-
ception, the arguments provided by its par-
ticipants are not considered according to the
speakers’ status, expertise or power (claims
of power), but rather based on the validity of
their arguments (claims of validity) regard-
less of their culture, gender, language, origin,
socio-educational level or professional posi-
tion. Parents and school staff worked together
until the educational administration acceded
to their requests, and the center started to
offer secondary education at the same build-
ing. From no former student having achieved
completion of compulsory secondary educa-
tion, it grew into dozens of students obtaining
the degree in the following years (García-
Carrión, Molina-Luque and Molina, 2017).
And this was just one among many other
improvements resulting from the transfor-
mation of the school, not only impacting the
students and their families but becoming a
 SCHOOLS AS LEARNING COMMUNITIES
springboard for the transformation of the
neighborhood.
FINAL REMARKS, CRITICAL
CHALLENGES AND CRITICAL
POSSIBILITIES
In this chapter, we have tried to convey a
real project that embodies the essential ele-
ments of critical pedagogy. One is the trust
in dialogue, in its fullest sense, that impreg-
nates every facet of school daily life.
Another is the transformative purpose and
transformative nature of the project, as it
starts with transforming conditions in the
community and ends by transforming the
expectations, the outcomes and the tradi-
tional power relationships. Yes, it is a real
project: Aisha and José are only two of thou-
sands of students and parents who are part
of this transformation in very diverse set-
tings. They do not only learn from teachers,
they learn together with teachers as trans-
formative intellectuals (Giroux, 1988) to
challenge the daily situations of oppression
with both hope and rigor.
We are asked many times about the odds,
the difficulties, the problems. Of course they
exist, despite us focusing on the victories.
One of the main handicaps are the attacks
that we – researchers, teachers, even fam-
ily members participating in the project –
receive. As we have pointed out above, many
of these attacks come from people who
should be pleased with the existence of the
Learning Communities, as they speak about
how to improve education. Thus, they do not
base their words on any school transforma-
tion, nor on the dialogues with the disadvan-
taged, they react against a project that goes
beyond an ‘expert discourse’, trying to dis-
credit the project or the results. This is not
new – jealousy is an old passion. In addition,
as critical researchers committed to the strug-
gle against gender violence, we have experi-
enced those attacks in specific personal, cruel
957
ways (Flecha, 2008), as second-order harass-
ment (Vidu et al., 2017). Another challenge
that we point out, especially when Learning
Communities may be quite tantalizing, is
to protect the unique aim of the Learning
Communities, which is improving the edu-
cation and the lives of all children, from
other interests. And in the same vein, those
involved in the Learning Communities have
preserved an admirable struggle for main-
taining the plurality of the project, prevent-
ing political parties or specific groups taking
ownership of the project.
We focus on celebrating the victories
because of the need of all communities to
know that it is possible to work with those
parents who have been traditionally blamed
for the failure of their children in school, to
accomplish their dreams. Despite the diffi-
culties, challenging pessimism, overcoming
deficit thinking, avoiding market logics in
education, more than 3,300 schools are doing
it in many corners of the world.
Note
1  The names used in this chapter are fictitious.
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Love Unconditionally: Educating
People in the Midst of a
Social Crisis
INTRODUCTION
As I sit here, I am lost in a daydream – a
daydream that features a place where people
are safe, acknowledged, accepted, honored,
valued, and loved. Like many dreams,
daydreams enable us to escape our current
state of existence, retreat into our thoughts,
and live temporarily unbothered. In addition,
daydreaming is a performance that occurs
with attentiveness and opened eyes. However,
this performance gives off a false sense of
consciousness and, like many dreams,
daydreams require us to awaken and work
towards making a whimsical fantasy a reality.
Living in a world where people are loved
unconditionally is a reoccurring daydream of
mine. As I work to make this a reality, I am
challenged by the reoccurrence of violent
behaviors, hate, prejudice, and inequitable
practices in 21st-century schools. As a
professional school counselor, I am charged
with the task of subverting the status quo and
transforming our schools into educational
80
Elbert J. Hawkins III
spaces that not only implement traditional
counseling practices but implement practices
that work to preserve my students’ family
and community in which they live. In
addition, I am charged with disaggregating
data that brings attention to marginalized
student populations, educating teachers on
the importance of holistic education, and
leading professional development seminars
and workshops that promote equitable school
practices.
Bridgeland and Bruce (2011), in the
National Survey of School Counselors:
Counseling at a crossroads, report that more
than half of the nation’s counselors believe
that the US educational system needs a sig-
nificant transformation and overhaul, espe-
cially in urban public schools identified as
minority schools with high socioeconomic
disparities (2011: 18). Therefore, as a profes-
sional school counselor, I address and work
towards transforming school issues such as
student growth and achievement, disparity
gaps, graduation and school dropout rates,
962 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
defunct tracking systems, inequitable class-
room practices, and the social and emotional
needs of my students. Presumably, these
social crises warrant immediate attention if
educators hope to transform schools into cul-
turally relevant, responsive, and sustaining
spaces that honor and value all students. To
combat many of these crises, I argue that love
is needed within our spaces of learning. We
need the kind of love that is unconditional;
however, I question: is this the kind of love
educators are willing to give?
Recently, I observed a social studies
teacher at Excellence High School engage
her students in culturally relevant ways. I will
call this teacher EH. Her class makeup was 18
African American young men, 15–18 years of
age, who were a part of the Successful Team
Aimed at Reaching Student Success Honors
Academy (STARSS Honors Academy). The
design of the honors academy empowered
these young men – giving them a sense of
self-worth, honor, and value. The setting in
the classroom was warm and inviting and the
culture EH and the young men created was
filled with a sense of camaraderie and soli-
darity. During the informal observation, EH
implemented a lesson that allowed them to
engage in critical conversation that focused
on social issues such as race, class, police
brutality, inequitable school practices, and
their concern with African American young
men implicitly labeled as ‘America’s prob-
lem’. While engaged in the lesson, they dis-
cussed the impact of power, privilege, and
difference and how it related to their lives,
their community, and their social well-being
at Excellence High School. EH and her stu-
dents created a space where their conversa-
tion was honest, critical, and reflective of a
world that is constantly evolving.
On a separate occasion, I informally
observed EH’s class again while a guest lec-
turer was present. While I was there, one of
her students asked the question, ‘Can people
of color be racist, specifically Black people?’
The lecturer that day addressed the young
man’s question, first, by explaining race as
a social construct created to support a social
order that reinforced superior and inferior
ideologies based on a person’s physical traits,
genetic makeup, ancestry, etc. Second, he
addressed individual biases that are not nec-
essarily associated with one specific group
but are shared by all, and, third, he addressed
the possession of power and dominance,
which is race and gender specific, tradition-
ally favoring Whiteness and White masculin-
ity, reinforcing a system of racism and racist
behavior. However, he failed to mention and
explain the ideological power and belief
behind the concept of race that keeps people
divided in spaces of learning, like our schools
and classrooms. Again, EH was strategic in
her use of critical pedagogy and engaging her
students in conscious discourse that enabled
them to experience a sense of liberation in the
classroom.
In addition to EH, I informally observed a
10th-grade English teacher who was teaching
a lesson on social justice. I will call this teacher
AM. Her English class was a standard col-
lege prep course (meaning there is no honors
weight assigned to the course), multicultural,
and coed. As a part of the lesson, AM required
her students to research topics that stretched
their thinking about the world in which they
live. From child-soldiering, to addressing the
achievement gap, to food deserts, to human
trafficking, AM’s students chose topics that
taught them a valuable lesson about privilege,
collectivism, and the social, economic, and
political disparities that people face in their
community and other parts of the world. AM
also taught a lesson that introduced the idea
of civil disobedience to her students. However,
instead of having them research specific top-
ics, she had them analyze the work of promi-
nent figures throughout US history. AM’s
students analyzed speeches and the life stories
of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and Malcolm X. To assist with this lesson, I
observed and helped to facilitate group discus-
sions on violent acts, nonviolent protests, and
the idea of peace, forgiveness, and reconcilia-
tion. The assignment enabled her students to
 EDUCATING PEOPLE IN THE MIDST OF A SOCIAL CRISIS
give reverence to the past, which also enabled
them to compare present-day struggles with
struggles of the past. Using culturally relevant
materials to engage her students, she taught
them a valuable lesson on social justice, affir-
mation of self, and civil disobedience through
the lenses of three prominent figures who were
reflections of their culture.
Observing these two teachers heightened
my curiosity about the idea of love being
positioned in our schools and in classroom
spaces. I questioned its existence, its rel-
evance to school and classroom culture, and
wondered during the observations – is EH
and AM’s style of pedagogy a performance
of love? In this chapter, I discuss the idea
of loving unconditionally in the midst of a
social crisis. Using our schools as a frame of
reference, I hypothesize that, when educa-
tors infuse love into spaces of learning (i.e.
schools and classroom spaces), they will
subvert the status quo and empower students
to accept who they are, and educators will
righteously advocate for marginalized and
dehumanized students, giving them space to
develop a sense of agency. In addition, I dis-
cuss the problem in theory and its significance
to education, the theoretical perspective, and
the way it transforms school and classroom
spaces. In the literature review, I discuss
the following themes that emerged from the
informal classroom observations: a culture of
love, radical love in theory and in practice,
and, lastly, disrupting a culture of hate. In this
chapter, I add to the conversation of radical
love and encourage educators to infuse the
idea of radical love into their schools and
classroom spaces unconditionally with hopes
to transform the heart and soul of people in
a world that constantly evolves (Douglas &
Nganga, 2013).
THE PROBLEM IN THEORY
With a pervasive influence from popular cul-
ture, television, news sources, and social
963
media, many people have become desensi-
tized to our basic needs. Resulting in an
educational system that keeps us divided
based on our differences and a lack of under-
standing for the other, which I find problem-
atic. Xiangjun and Xin (2007: 489) define
difference as a relationship among beings – a
central belief in Confucianism. Meaning,
human differences are embedded in people to
bring us closer together as a collective and
not to separate us from the collective.
However, the idea of difference, well at least
for me, remains complex for several reasons.
First, it disrupts our belief and value system,
meaning it challenges people to be open and
accepting to human characteristics such as
language, religious affiliation, and cultural
practices that are different from our own.
Second, the idea of difference typically
leaves us, specifically educators and stu-
dents, with more questions than answers of
one another, and, third, the idea of difference
challenges educators to accept their students
holistically rather than to simply tolerate
them in the classroom. Johnson (2006: 13)
suggests, ‘The real illusion connected to dif-
ference is the popular assumption that people
are naturally afraid of what they don’t know
or understand’. He states that this assumption
is far from the truth and a cultural myth –
people are not afraid of what they do not
know, but are afraid of what they do know
(2006: 13). In other words, many people are
conscious of each other’s human existence
and they realize that as humans we all bleed
the same.
However, society’s creation of social con-
structs such as race, class, and gender enables
certain groups to perpetuate divisive systems
that divide us, manipulating us into thinking
that we should be afraid of one another on
the basis that we do not look, act, and situ-
ate ourselves as being the same. Many people
are afraid of what they do know as it relates
to race, class, and gender, which is realizing
these are divisive constructs that carry little
to no meaning. However, people who remain
oblivious to this reality deny equal and
964 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
equitable access to people who wish to live in
a democratic society. I am reminded of James
Baldwin, an African American novelist and
activist who questions the existence of race,
which is used to marginalize and dehumanize
people in the United States. Baldwin (as cited
in Essence, 1984: 2) stated, ‘America became
white – the people who, as they claimed “set-
tled” the country became white – because
of the necessity to denying the Black pres-
ence and justifying the Black subjugation’.
Baldwin goes on to say that this approach is
cowardly and,
By deciding that they were white [sic]. By opting
for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves
that a Black child’s life meant nothing compared
with a white child’s life. By abandoning their chil-
dren to the things white men could buy. By
informing their children that Black women, Black
men, and Black children had no human integrity
that those who call themselves white were bound
to respect. And in this debasement and definition
of Black people, they debased and defined them-
selves. (Baldwin, 1984: 3)
In other words, race categorized as a ‘differ-
ence’ is not an important value in the scheme
of human development until we begin to
recognize and elevate its meaning to either
include or exclude people from social cate-
gories based on the hue of their skin.
Ironically, race in the United States is one of
the most valued characteristics that is used to
privilege or oppress other people.
Another factor that makes the current
educational system problematic is how we
have attempted to define effective classroom
spaces. The ideas of effective classrooms
were in response to school improvement
plans, which primarily focused on measuring
classroom practices that would improve aca-
demic achievement. Effective classrooms are
instructional environments that are managed
well, relevant to student goals, and cater to
marketplace values such as competition and
individualism (Cheng and Mok, 2008: 371).
From the practice of knowledge delivery,
which emerged in the 1980s, where teachers
deposited knowledge into the minds of their
students, to using education and learning as
a provisional service to please stakeholders
in the 1990s, to using education for the sole
purpose of strengthening our global markets
at the turn of the 21st century, educational
practices such as these have taken precedence
over culturally relevant and responsive edu-
cation and attempts to educate and under-
stand the whole child.
Effective classroom practices also align
with Effectiveness Theory and how class-
room effectiveness is measured. Creemers and
Reezigt (1999: 33) explain that Effectiveness
Theory is measured when, ‘The quality of
instruction at the classroom level is deter-
mined by three components: the curriculum,
the grouping procedures which are applied,
and the behavior of the teacher’. Garrison and
Liston (2004) define classroom effectiveness
in terms of instructional qualities, time, and
opportunities for learning (2004: 380). Other
practices that define effective classrooms
consist of high expectations, open communi-
cation, a balanced curriculum, well-prepared
teachers, detailed and positive feedback, etc.
However, educators fail to define effective
classrooms in terms of love, which is also a
vital aspect to student success in the class-
room. Yet the goal of many schools is to create
an environment that is equitable, conducive to
student learning, and accepts students’ differ-
ences. Therefore, our current system of educa-
tion needs our immediate attention if we are
to transform and develop healthy relationships
with educators and their students.
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE
It is my experience that to incorporate or to
mention love as a viable educational practice
in schools and classroom spaces is taboo. I
speculate this is due to the popular use and
practice of love or Eros in its most celebrated
state, meaning people typically embody love
through performances of desire, passion, and
romanticism. Often, people fail to recognize
 EDUCATING PEOPLE IN THE MIDST OF A SOCIAL CRISIS
and understand other forms of love that shape
and center us as humans, such as agape love,
the love that centers and sustains us spiritu-
ally, and philia love, the love that enables us to
love our sisters and brothers unapologetically.
These three forms of love embedded in our
psyche help to define our sense of humanness
and, in many ways, affect the way we choose
to live. The performance of love is complex,
which often leaves us confused and emotion-
ally distraught in many public spaces, includ-
ing our schools and classroom spaces.
Therefore, I question, if love is a practice and
a human need, a performance that ends wars,
calms and retrains our enemies, and sustains
us like a bridge over troubled water – then
why do people regulate this performance to
just their churches, temples, synagogues,
homes, and relationships? Why are people
fearful of sharing, experiencing, or practicing
love outside of the realm of desire, passion,
romanticism, and religion?
As a professional school counselor, I
argue the practice of love in our schools and
classroom spaces is an effective and viable
practice. However, this practice will be con-
tingent on the way in which educators choose
to position and incorporate love into the
classroom. To fill this void, I purpose the use
of radical love. Kennedy and Grinter (2015:
44) define radical love ‘as the empathetic,
active, and passionate impulse to transform
social relationships in ways that seek justice
and freedom’. In addition, the idea of equal-
ity verses equity is an important concept to
critically think through as they position and
incorporate radical love into our spaces of
learning (Colonna and Nix-Stevenson, 2015:
10). Teachers who practice radical love rec-
ognize and understand the importance of
holistic learning and purposefully work to
incorporate culturally relevant material into
the classroom that acknowledges, accepts,
and sustains a sense of wholeness for their
students. The use of radical love in the class-
room compels educators to think critically
and justly as they prepare lessons that engage
their students holistically.
965
After observing EH and AM, I argue the
attention they give to their students and their
need and desire to sustain a learning environ-
ment that honors, values, and accepts their
students was a radical performance of love.
Like Paulo Freire, EH and AM disrupt an edu-
cational system that traditionally embraces a
banking system of learning and classroom
practices that marginalizes many students.
EH and AM’s use of culturally relevant and
responsive pedagogy enabled them to insert
their students’ family, community, language,
and positionality into a style of discourse that
disrupted the status quo and transformed the
dominant narrative. To understand the con-
cept of radical love in 21st-century schools,
I use the literature to explore and affirm my
curiosities as they pertain to a culture of love,
radical love in theory and in practice, and the
act of disrupting a culture of hate; and, lastly,
I reflect on my positionality.
LITERATURE REVIEW
A Culture of Love
To understand the concept of radical love, I
give my attention to one of the three tenets of
love, which is agape love. Like radical love,
agape love is a practice that requires action,
commitment, shared knowledge, and a desire
for self-transformation. The practice of agape
love is unconditional, revolutionary, and gives
people a sense of renewal as they work to
honor, value, and accept other people for who
they truly are. Used primarily as a Christian
principle, agape love is revolutionary, an
unconditional and a supernatural kind of love,
and the highest guiding principle that connects
people to a holistic experience with God.
Gregory Marshall (2002: 16) states, ‘Agape is
the New Testament, a Greek word for the
steadfast love God has for human beings, as
well as for the neighborly-love humans are to
have for one another’. In addition, he charac-
terizes agape as being an unconditional
966 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
commitment to the good of others, having
equal regard for the well-being of others, and
a passionate service open to self-sacrifice for
the sake of others (2002: 16). This kind of love
goes beyond the notion of loving people in the
natural, which often enables us to place
parameters around the people we choose to
love. Sean Chabot (2008: 816) defines agape
as revolutionary: ‘It encourages us to confront
oppressive circumstances and painful experi-
ences directly, as long as we translate poten-
tially destructive emotions into constructive
dispositions and behavior’. In other words, the
practice of agape love helps to free us from
oppressive and destructive situations – giving
us a sense of peace.
I am reminded of the work of Martin
Luther King, Jr., a civil rights activist, spir-
itual leader, and novelist, who turns to the
premise of agape love to resist his oppres-
sors and to transform the external (physical)
and the internal (spirit) effects of violence.
Martin Luther King, Jr. explains,
Agape means understanding, redeeming good will
for all men. It is an overflowing love which is purely
spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and crea-
tive. It is not set in motion by quality or function of
its object…Agape is disinterested love. It is a love
in which the individual seeks not to his own good,
but the good of his neighbor. Agape does not
begin by discriminating between worthy and
unworthy people, or any qualities people possess.
It begins by loving others for their sakes. (as cited
in Popova, 2015)
Contrary to the other tenets of love, Eros and
philia, the ego is absent from agape love.
Meaning, agape love is not self-gratifying,
idolized, or confined to a specific social
group. Based on my experience with and
understanding of agape love, it is bigger than
I or me. It is rational, balanced, and goes
beyond religious thoughts and practices that
separate us from the collective and the com-
munion of others. Nygren (1953: 77) men-
tions, ‘It is only when all thought of the
worthiness of the object is abandoned that we
can understand what Agape is’. In other
words, when people eliminate the act of
idolizing and placing people in superficial
positions based on cultural and social
supremacy, only then will they begin to
understand agape love.
Like Eros and philia, agape is a love of
choice, a principle that cannot be forced
upon or demanded. Therefore, when people
choose to practice this principle, it requires
commitment, a sense of responsibility, and
solidarity for other people. Juxtaposed to
Eros and philia, agape love does not fade,
it is consistent, and it is not embedded in
reciprocity or reciprocal performances as a
way for people to coexist peacefully in an
evolving world. Garrison and Liston (2004:
22) assert, ‘Reciprocity and equality do not
characterize the love that seeks the welfare
of young children’. Meaning, people who
practice agape love understand its concept
and they do not expect anything in return for
their unconditional love for others. However,
being a person who understands spiritual-
ity and embraces the daily communion with
God, I question the feasibility of living this
practice daily and incorporating this practice
into social spaces such as our schools and
classroom spaces. The practice of agape love
is supernatural – then how do we, as humans,
position ourselves to love without conditions
placed on other people? Therefore, as peo-
ple who honor and value humanness, do we
abandon the practice of agape love for prac-
tices grounded in spirituality?
Not to confuse spirituality with religion,
which is a practice of traditional norms that
typically keeps people bound to social and
cultural biases. Bruce and Novinson (1999)
define spirituality as,
a ‘search for meaning and values, which includes
some sense of the transcendent.’ That is, some
force or life energy beyond ourselves that is often
identified with religions, but which may be simply
a sense of interconnectedness with others and a
desire to make meaning and live out one’s own
values about good and wrong. (1999: 163)
It is my experience that people who are spir-
itual see themselves and understand them-
selves to be tenets of love. However, people
 EDUCATING PEOPLE IN THE MIDST OF A SOCIAL CRISIS
who are spiritual place conditions around
their love and, depending on their position,
they look forward to some form of reciproc-
ity. As a professional school counselor, I look
forward to shared experiences and the act of
producing knowledge and creating new
meaning with students I encounter. Bruce
and Novinson (1999: 164) assert, ‘Spiritual
persons recognize that “facts” are tempered
by perceptions, biases, and world views.
Spiritual persons have the courage to speak
from their own deeply held values and to
listen to and respect the values of others,
even when they are in conflict’. In other
words, spirituality centers us and enables us
to escape from the traditional strongholds of
religion and biased doctrine. Lastly, people
who are spiritual offer a sense of hope to situ-
ations that appear to be hopeless.
The ideas of agape love and spirituality are
complex in theory and in practice; however, if
educators are to honor, value, and accept our
students amidst social crisis – embodying some
of the characteristics of agape love and spiritu-
ality is perhaps necessary to produce knowl-
edge, to create new meaning, and to transform
our spaces and the mindset of people. However,
to ensure this kind of transformation through
these tenets, educators will need to be well
versed in the idea of Knowing Thyself and will
need to divest from dogmatic and positivistic
doctrine that idolizes systems of oppression.
Radical Love in Theory and
in Practice
Currently, in many schools marginalized stu-
dents are more likely to lose interest in school,
which often results in a loss of interest in
healthy relationships with family and a loss of
interest in their community. Thus far, in this
chapter, I argue for educators to incorporate
love into their schools and classroom spaces
to combat educational practices that leave
certain students feeling disconnected from the
collective. Given the choice, I would choose
radical love to combat negative educational
967
practices that leave many students in a state of
hopelessness. In theory and in practice, radical
love honors, values, respects, and compels
students to think consciously and critically
about the world in which they live. The prac-
tice of radical love helps to create discourse
among educators and students – enabling
them to dissect political, social, and economic
myths that separate and secure their biases in
the collective. Nussbaum (2013: 379) states,
‘We can hardly solve social problems without
understanding both the resources on which we
may draw and the problems that lie in our
way’. Meaning, to resolve educational prac-
tices deemed problematic we need to under-
stand the cause if we are to give our undivided
attention to the effects.
Previously, I mentioned the work of EH
and AM with the STARSS Honors Academy
and their efforts to subvert the status quo and
dismantle negative school and classroom
practices at Excellence High School. From
course content to classroom instruction, EH
and AM’s educational approach with each
student was intentional, which gave them
the attention and the respect they needed
and deserved. Nussbaum (2013: 381) states,
‘First, our hunch was confirmed that good
proposals for the cultivation of public emo-
tion must be attentive to their place, their
time, and the specific cultures of the vari-
ety of citizens who are their intended audi-
ence’. Meaning, radical love in theory and in
practice requires educators to meet students
where they are and to engage them in school
and classroom practices that cultivate the
whole child. The literature does not explic-
itly place culture or culturally relevant peda-
gogy into the same paradigm as radical love.
However, by design, by definition, and in
practice, I argue culturally relevant pedagogy
is a radical approach. In its practice, cultur-
ally relevant pedagogy enables teachers to
affirm their students’ cultural identity, while
encouraging them to question the political,
social, and economic inequities and dispari-
ties in their institutions (Ladson-Billings,
1995: 469).
968 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
As a professional school counselor, I
promote culturally relevant material and
programs that embrace my students holisti-
cally. This performance of love affirms my
students’ positionality and gives them an
opportunity to claim a sense of agency in
classroom spaces traditionally constructed
on standards of Whiteness. Nussbaum (2013:
382) states: ‘The loves that prompt good
behaviors are likely to have some common
features: a concern for the beloved as an end
rather than a mere instrument; respect for the
human dignity of the beloved; a willingness
to limit one’s own greedy desires in favor of
the beloved’. In practice, radical love incor-
porates these features, which gives educators
and students an opportunity to develop a rela-
tionship that culturally sustains their learning
experiences. Like EH and AM, Christopher
Emdin, an associate professor in mathemat-
ics, science, and technology at Teacher’s
College, Columbia University, uses cultur-
ally relevant pedagogy and culturally respon-
sive pedagogy to deliver course content in his
classroom.
With an eagerness to transform the status
quo in his classroom, Emdin delivers course
content and assigns work that does not com-
modify or isolate his students but gives them
an opportunity to bridge the gap between edu-
cation and the world in which they live. Once,
he structured an assignment like a cypher, a
lyrical rap battle commonly used among
Hip-Hop artists to enlighten, to explore the
complexities of various spaces, and to create
safe zones for a coterie. The assignment had
a slight competitive edge to it that connected
his students to one another and the assign-
ment – enabling them to explore, research,
and critically think through concepts that
challenged their traditional ways of learning
information. Emdin states (2016: chapter 8,
para. 6), ‘Bringing the battle into the class-
room helps neoIndigenous youth heal from
traditional teaching and concurrently helps
teachers to approach competition in the class-
room differently’. Emdin embraces his stu-
dents’ culture and sense of style to enhance
their worldviews, which gave them an oppor-
tunity to take part in a style of discourse that
bridged their home, community, and school
norms together to produce knowledge and to
create new meaning.
Educators like EH, AM, and Emdin work
tirelessly to engage and connect marginal-
ized, dehumanized, and disconnected stu-
dents to education and to learning. Their
efforts to love and advocate for students
is admirable and warrants the collective’s
attention if we hope to transform the state
of education in the United States. Currently,
in many schools, radical love in theory and
in practice gives educators and students an
opportunity to think consciously and criti-
cally as it pertains to topical issues and our
place in the world. In theory and in practice,
radical love enables teachers to meet students
where they are, and it gives students a sense
of purpose and a sense of belonging as they
learn from educators who honor and value
their presence.
Disrupting a Culture of Hate
Good and evil, yin and yang, light and dark-
ness, love and hate – the dichotomy in these
terms suggests that we cannot live in this
world without having one or the other. As I
recall, the most recent mass shooting took
place in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where a
lone gunman murdered 26 people and
wounded 20 people aged 1–77, as his vic-
tims attended a church service. I am con-
vinced people cannot live without
experiencing positive and negative energy
in the world. In many ways, positive and
negative energy sustain each other, which
keeps order and maintains a sense of bal-
ance in the world. However, the premise of
death that spawns from hate due to a per-
son’s race, ethnicity, religion, or gender,
convinces me in a way that often leaves me
angry, afraid, and motionless. Like love,
hate is a choice and is persistent, but where
love sustains us holistically, hate diminishes
 EDUCATING PEOPLE IN THE MIDST OF A SOCIAL CRISIS
the spirit and kills the soul. Through social
justice education and learning, and the idea
of activism, I examine ways educators and
students can preserve our sense of humane-
ness, our freedoms, and our ability to stand
in and with the collective to disrupt the idea
of hate and to stand in love.
I begin with James Baldwin, an activ-
ist, novelist, and humanist who confronts a
nation that fails to acknowledge its bigotry,
violent behavior, and hate towards a group
of people who are the epitome of resilience,
strength, and love. I Am Not Your Negro, a
documentary that is narrated by Samuel L.
Jackson, tells the story of Baldwin’s activ-
ism and his commitment to humanity and
love through the assassinations of three
prominent civil rights leaders, Medgar Evers,
Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. As
he reflects on their deaths, Baldwin reflects
on a nation that prides itself on being a home
of the free and the brave. However, Baldwin
questions the ‘stars and stripes’ that sym-
bolize freedom and bravery – he argues the
fight and the struggle people endured for
the United States was unmistaken, but ques-
tions the freedom and liberation of its peo-
ple, particularly African Americans. Baldwin
states, ‘In America I was free only in battle
never free to rest. He who finds nowhere to
rest cannot survive the battle’ (I Am Not Your
Negro, Peck, 2017). I read into this quote
figuratively as Baldwin explicitly refers to
the plight of African Americans during an
era where being ‘woke’ or conscious was
more than just a catchphrase, but a means for
survival. Presently, the social injustices and
inequitable practices continue to haunt the
psyche of many African Americans, leaving
them to question almost every aspect of their
human existence.
Living through the deaths of his spiritual
brothers, Baldwin embraced the pen to ‘write
and to get it out!’. Meaning, he no longer slum-
bered, and his tongue was no longer bridled –
he returned from his excursions overseas, and
lived his life through the words and through
the work of Evers, King, and Malcolm. Living
969
in the words of King (1981), Baldwin knew
the eye-for-an-eye philosophy would leave
people blind and he did not subscribe to the
concept of fighting evil with evil – Baldwin
responded with aggressive love (1981: 42); the
kind of love that cures the blind, transforms
the language of the oppressor, and reconciles
its differences through knowledge production
and the creation of new meaning. Throughout
the documentary, Baldwin affirms his posi-
tion and claims a sense of agency in a way
that preserves the heart and spirit of the col-
lective. Baldwin asserts, ‘I cannot be a pes-
simist because I am alive’ (as cited in I Am
Not Your Negro, Peck, 2017). In other words,
people cannot succumb to the negative pitfalls
the world offers. He reminds us that our past
is not our history, but our present is, as we
wear and carry our history daily not to relive it
shamefully or angrily, but to live it as a symbol
of resilience and as a shared history. Baldwin
also reminds us that Black history and black-
ness is American history. Lastly, Baldwin
brings his spiritual brothers’ death full cir-
cle, and he questions, ‘Why is it necessary to
have a nigger in the first place…I am not your
nigger…I am Man’ (as cited in I Am Not Your
Negro, Peck, 2017).
Another activist who is transforming a cul-
ture of hate is Warsan Shire, a 21st-century
writer, poet, and humanist. Born to Somali
parents in Kenya, Shire is transforming the
world through her poetry and raising our level
of consciousness for refugees and people
exiled from their country due to war, politi-
cal unrest, or religious persecution. One of
my students at Excellence High School intro-
duced me to Shire’s work by way of her senior
project. The teacher, one of my colleagues,
designed the senior project to spark her stu-
dents’ interest in the works of traditional and
contemporary poets and poetry. The student’s
presentation of her senior project height-
ened my curiosity and ignited my fascination
with Shire’s work as the words in her poetry
brought me into her world. The amount of
love and attention given to her people speaks
volumes to Warsan’s sense of criticalness, her
970 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

love for family, community, and humanity. To made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
conclude this section, I focus on the content
you have to understand,
in two of Shire’s poems, ‘Home’ and ‘What
We Have’. I attempt to articulate a message of that no one puts their children in a boat
love by honoring and finding a sense of soli-
darity in her work. Like Baldwin, she captures unless the water is safer than the land
the attention of many as she brings attention
no one burns their palms
to marginalized, dehumanized, and desensi-
tized people finding love and a sense of peace under trains
through heartache and struggle.
beneath carriages
‘Home’
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of
a truck
no one leaves home unless
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
home is the mouth of a shark
means something more than journey.
you only run for the border
no one crawls under fences
when you see the whole city running as well
no one wants to be beaten
your neighbors running faster than you
pitied
breath bloody in their throats
no one chooses refugee camps
the boy you went to school with
or strip searches where your
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
body is left aching
is holding a gun bigger than his body
or prison,
you only leave home
because prison is safer
when home won’t let you stay.
than a city of fire
no one leaves home unless home chases you
and one prison guard
fire under feet
in the night
hot blood in your belly
is better than a truckload
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
of men who look like your father
until the blade burnt threats into
no one could take it
your neck
no one could stomach it
and even then you carried the anthem under
no one skin would be tough enough
your breath
the
only tearing up your passport in an airport
toilets go home blacks

sobbing as each mouthful of paper refugees

 EDUCATING PEOPLE IN THE MIDST OF A SOCIAL CRISIS 971

dirty immigrants leave your clothes behind

asylum seekers crawl through the desert

sucking our country dry wade through the oceans

niggers with their hands out drown

they smell strange save

savage be hunger

messed up their country and now they want beg

to mess ours up forget pride

how do the words your survival is more important

the dirty looks no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice
in your ear
roll off your backs
saying –
maybe because the blow is softer
leave,
than a limb torn off
run away from me now
or the words are more tender
i dont know what i’ve become
than fourteen men between
but i know that anywhere
your legs
is safer than here (as cited in http://headspace-
or the insults are easier press.com/home-by-warsan-shire/)

to swallow ‘What We Have’

than rubble Our men do not belong to us. Even my own father,
left one afternoon, is not mine. My brother is in
than bone prison, is not mine. My uncles, they go back home
and they are shot in the head, are not mine. My
than your child body cousins, stabbed in the street for being too – or
not – enough, are not mine.
in pieces.
Then the men we try to love, say we carry too much
i want to go home, loss, wear too much black, are too heavy to be
around, much too sad to love. Then they leave and
but home is the mouth of a shark we mourn them too. Is that what we’re here for? To
sit at kitchen tables, counting on our fingers the
home is the barrel of the gun ones who died, those who left and the others who
were taken by the police, or by drugs, or by illness
and no one would leave home or by other women. It makes no sense. Look at your
skin, her mouth, these lips, those eyes, my God,
unless home chased you to the shore listen to that laugh. The only darkness we should
allow into our lives is the night, and even then, we
unless home told you have the moon. (as cited in http://www.poetryinter-
nationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/22838/auto/0/0/
to quicken your legs Warsan-Shire/WHAT-WE-HAVE)
972 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Shire’s work is captivating and in both poems
her acknowledgement and attention to the
human condition reflects the human condi-
tion Baldwin speaks of a century ago. While
Shire does not explicitly say she cannot be a
pessimist like Baldwin, she positions herself
in the seams of hope. Both poems give hope
to a collective voice and to her attempts to
reconcile with the banality of evil while find-
ing strength in the power of love.
Positionality
As a professional school counselor, my interest
and curiosity in the concept of radical love
became apparent after paying attention to the
human condition. From marginalized students
experiencing childhood trauma, bigotry, vio-
lence, and hate, to students with an I/me com-
plex, I choose to give and receive love in my
educational space. Being in education, I under-
stand the importance of creating an educational
ethos that includes the practice of radical love.
In practice and in theory, radical love sustains
me, and with radical love I am charged with the
responsibility to educate and to sustain other
people, especially my students. As an African
American man, I am also responsible for teach-
ing other people, specifically students of color,
to radically stand in their truth and embrace
greatness despite opposition from the dominant
culture. In addition, as an educator, I invest in
the system of education for the sole purpose of
transforming not only the spaces in which we
learn, but also our family, community, and the
world in which we live. Therefore, to sustain
our system of education, it is critical for me to
accept, value, honor, and love people for who
they are as we evolve and claim a sense of
agency in our world.
CONCLUSION
I daydream to find inner peace and to tempo-
rarily escape the harshness of the world.
Juxtaposed to this temporary act, I am ‘woke’
and to be woke is to live in a world where
you acknowledge people for who they are,
accept and not tolerate, include and not iso-
late, and love unconditionally and not hate.
Incorporating the concept of love in theory
and in practice into our schools is possible –
if educators take the transformation of our
schools and classroom spaces and them-
selves seriously. Realizing that many of our
schools and classroom spaces are micro-
cosms of the world in which we live, educa-
tors will need to take the lead in constructing
an educational system that cultivates a system
of critical, conscious, and righteous learning.
Love as a viable educational practice can
subvert the status quo and enable educators
to acknowledge and accept the human condi-
tion and educate our students holistically.
Educating from a position of love is educat-
ing from a position of wholeness, which
enables educators to break from biased social
and cultural norms that keep us divided
within the collective. The practice of love is
complex and conditioning people to accept
love in the form of acceptance, social justice
learning and education, equitable school
practices, and critical thought will be chal-
lenging. However, when used as a radical
practice, to love in practice enables us to
create meaningful and critical discourse,
which gives us an opportunity to question the
political, social, and economic structures that
dilute many public and private institutions.
In this chapter, I argue for educators to
create space for love as a viable educational
practice. Focusing on radical love, I argue
radical love will give educators an opportu-
nity to break through social barriers that mar-
ginalize, dehumanize, and desensitize many
of our students within our spaces of learning.
Using our schools and classrooms spaces as
a catalyst for love, I argue educators will sub-
vert the status quo that traditionally leaves our
students socially and culturally unconscious.
With love as a classroom practice, educators
not only acknowledge and accept the social
and emotional aspect of our students, but
 EDUCATING PEOPLE IN THE MIDST OF A SOCIAL CRISIS
they acknowledge, accept, and understand
the importance of their family and commu-
nity. Incorporating these tenets into course
content and classroom instruction, students
can become engaged and make critical con-
nections to education and the world in which
they live. The use of love as an educational
practice values and honors people who are in
sync with and a part of the collective.
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delphia: First Fortress Press.
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‘We Do It All the Time’:
Afrocentric Pedagogies for Raising
Consciousness and Collective
Responsibility
S h u n t a y Z . Ta r v e r a n d M e l a n i e M . A c o s t a
Afrocentric pedagogies are not new to educa-
tional discourse. Asante (1991) asserts that
early conceptualization of Afrocentricity
within education dates back to Carter G.
Woodson’s (1933) seminal text Mis-education
of the Negro. At its core, Afrocentric peda-
gogy is characterized as ‘an alternative, non-
exclusionary, and nonhegemonic system of
knowledge informed by African peoples’ his-
tories and experiences’ (Sefa Dei, 1994). This
chapter presents the embodiment of two
Afrocentric Pedagogies, Village Pedagogy
and Critical Studyin’, within the field of edu-
cation and human services. Each of these
pedagogies are effective for raising the critical
consciousness and collective responsibility of
emerging professionals entering Eurocentric
social systems to serve youth and families of
color. We assert that centering the cultural
aspect of pedagogical strategies is critical for
deconstructing how all students have been
institutionally socialized to dehumanize stu-
dents of color. Consequently, Afrocentric
approaches, such as Village Pedagogy and
81
Critical Studyin’, are critical tools for acceler-
ating the educational success of students of
color. Critical Studyin’ offers a morally
engaged pedagogy hinged on a cultural cri-
tique of the ideological foundations of knowl-
edge that guide societal maneuverings (King,
2008). Such an approach has potential to
move students from passive onlookers to
active change agents committed to justice.
Similarly, Village Pedagogy empowers activ-
ists to challenge inequalities by raising their
social consciousness regarding systemic poli-
cies and practices that perpetuate inequality
(McCoy and Packer, 2017). This approach
fosters a sense of collective responsibility in
recognizing and dismantling systemic mar-
ginalization. Collectively we use these
Afrocentric pedagogies to recover and re-
center the historical connections of social
systems and how they have and continue to
marginalize people of color. In addition, we
illustrate how these approaches offer unique
insight for resisting systemic marginalization.
Through professional examples of these
 ‘WE DO IT ALL THE TIME’
pedagogies, we unveil how African American
scholars reconceptualize marginalization and
embody resilience through pedagogical strate-
gies, thus empowering the next generation of
educators and practitioners to create institu-
tional change.
RECOVERING AND RE-CENTERING
AFROCENTRIC PEDAGOGIES
In the 21st century we have found that what
educators think, believe, and do (or don’t do)
in the classroom has an invaluable influence
on the quality of life and educational outcomes
for people of color. While education in the
United States continues to be crucial to com-
munity and societal health and well-being,
particularly for African American and Latina/o
populations, orchestrating schooling environ-
ments that train emerging professionals to
become culturally competent and culturally
relevant has grown more complex. The major-
ity of these complexities converge around
issues of justice and providing equitable edu-
cation and human services to all children, and
these issues are connected to particular racial,
economic, gender, cultural, and ability ideolo-
gies that intersect in multiple ways. To advance
this notion, this chapter explores the role of
educators who train professionals within the
field of human services and teacher education.
This novel approach underscores the impor-
tance of educators from two distinct fields to
embody pedagogical practices that intention-
ally raise the critical consciousness of future
professionals in ways that will translate to
better educational and quality of life outcomes
for African Americans.
It is critically important for human services
educators and teacher educators to intention-
ally engage in Afrocentric pedagogies. Such
engagement is vital to improving the qual-
ity of life and educational outcomes of all
students, specifically African American stu-
dents. Human services practitioners serve the
most marginalized populations of our society
975
within various contexts such as probation
and parole, educational systems, and family
systems (Neukrug, 2017). Given the social
constructions of race, and how it is associ-
ated with disproportionate outcomes across
various contexts, human services profes-
sionals often find themselves serving a large
number of African American clients when
addressing issues of homelessness, domestic
violence, and grief intervention. As a result,
unexamined biases may inadvertently impede
on practitioners’ ability to create equita-
ble access to resources such as education,
employment, and housing. Consequently,
educators training human services profes-
sionals have an increased responsibility to
train practitioners to engage clients in cultur-
ally relevant ways (National Organization for
Human Services, 2015; Tarver and Herring,
2019). Similarly, it is critically important that
teacher educators recognize their responsibil-
ity to engage in culturally relevant pedagogy
when preparing teachers. For example, some
teachers carry negative perceptions of African
American students as intellectually inferior
and behaviorally challenging, and these per-
ceptions manifest in low academic and behav-
ior expectations, which translate into few
opportunities for students to engage in aca-
demically rigorous learning experiences and
increased use of excessive discipline tactics.
Consequently, both human services educa-
tors and teacher educators must be intentional
about their pedagogical approaches, and
ensure that such approaches are effective for
raising the critical consciousness of profes-
sionals in ways that will positively impact the
lives of people of color. Such consciousness
is critical to practitioners’ ability to intention-
ally evaluate how their own beliefs, values,
and personal biases may impact the lives of
African American clients (Ricks, 2014). Such
pedagogy also requires educators to challenge
students to go beyond relying simply on good
intentions and politically correct conversa-
tions, by creating a context where students
are encouraged and challenged to analyze
how their practice influences professional
976 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
interactions (Neukrug, 2017). As a result, we
posit that utilizing Afrocentric approaches for
training human services practitioners such as
probation and parole officers, social services
case managers, community educators, and
teacher educators is critical. Thus, Village
Pedagogy and Critical Studyin’ are essential
pedagogies for preparing professionals to
work with marginalized populations.
THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS
OF VILLAGE PEDAGOGY AND
CRITICAL STUDYIN’
Village Pedagogy as Tool for
Training Practitioners to be
Critically Conscious
Village Pedagogy is a dynamic Afrocentric
approach to teaching and learning that is often
utilized by faculty at Historically Black
Colleges and Universities (HBCU; Harris,
2012). However, despite the frequency with
which it is utilized at HBCUs, McCoy and
Packer (2017: 246) assert that it ‘may be
employed by any educators with a passion and
commitment to actively counteracting the
marginalization and systemic oppression of
African Americans, while simultaneously
empowering students to do the same’. Thus,
Village Pedagogy may even be embodied by
educators within majority institutions. One
essential aspect of Village Pedagogy is that it
creates an atmosphere where ‘African
Americans are able to advance through educa-
tion and not have to acquiesce to alienation,
instructional subordination, and systemic mar-
ginalization’ (Harris, 2012: 336).
Village Pedagogy emerges from both
Afrocentric pedagogy and critical race theory.
Whereas Afrocentric pedagogy focuses on
the teaching and learning practices that need
to be revised in order to achieve educational
equity for African American people, critical
race theory deconstructs systemic barriers to
equity that are perpetuated from the origins
of systemic establishment within the United
States. Collectively, Village Pedagogy merges
these two perspectives to embody the instruc-
tional practices of teaching and learning that
move practitioners to activism in ways that
will enhance the quality of life for all people of
color. The foundational propositions of Village
Pedagogy are (1) deconstructing systemically
racist policies and practices; (2) fostering
critical consciousness; and (3) developing a
collective responsibility. The following sec-
tion outlines the emergence and expansion
of Village Pedagogy within the context of
Afrocentric pedagogy and critical race theory.
Within Afrocentric pedagogy, two theoreti-
cal propositions articulated by Asante (1991)
are also foundational to Village Pedagogy:
1 Education is fundamentally a social phenom-
enon whose ultimate purpose is to socialize the
learner; to send a child to school is to prepare
that child to become part of a social group.
2 Schools are reflective of the societies that develop
them (i.e., a White supremacist-dominated soci-
ety will develop a White supremacist educational
system). (1991: 170)
From this framework Village Pedagogy posits
that, despite the fact that institutional sociali-
zation has been touted as education, authentic
education is a powerful tool for raising critical
consciousness. As a result, a foundational
principle of Village Pedagogy asserts that
critical consciousness regarding how individ-
uals and institutions inadvertently engage in
the creation and perpetuation of dispropor-
tionately adverse outcomes for marginalized
populations is essential for working to enhanc-
ing the quality of life for people of color.
Village Pedagogy espouses a critical race
theory framework to address the Afrocentric
notion that schools perpetuate White suprem-
acist ideology, by critiquing the larger soci-
etal tendency to maintain such inequalities
across social systems. According to critical
race theory, racism is endemic to all social
institutions within the United States (Bell,
1992; Crenshaw et al., 1996). Thus, the
notion of White supremacy can be evident
 ‘WE DO IT ALL THE TIME’
beyond systems of education; including law
enforcement, health care systems, and social
service systems. Village Pedagogy utilizes
critical race theory to emphasize that within
an inherently racist society all social systems
have been established to perpetuate racist
policies and practices that are institutionally
perpetuated and are thus creating and main-
taining the disproportionate outcomes they
were designed to perpetuate. Consequently,
Village Pedagogy is essential for training
emerging human services practitioners to
develop critical consciousness that chal-
lenges and resists racist policies and practices
embedded within various social systems.
Critical race theory also mandates that edu-
cators and practitioners engage in social justice
activities (Dixson and Rousseau, 2006). Such
action must resist ‘solely relying on traditional
methods of transformation such as the incre-
mental process of disseminating empirical
scholarship; [but] rather [incorporate] meth-
ods that result in more immediate change such
as engaging in Village Pedagogy’ (DeCuir
and Dixson, 2004; McCoy and Packer, 2017).
Consequently, Village Pedagogy works to
foster collective responsibility that mandates
active advocacy for systemic change through
individual action that results in institutional
changes toward equity. It works to disman-
tle biased practices and policies that exist
as a result of power dynamics within exist-
ing client–­practitioner interactions. Through
Village Pedagogy, practitioners are able to
engage in critical self-reflection to unveil how
well-intentioned practices can mask institu-
tional inequities. Village Pedagogy challenges
emerging practitioners to re-examine when
institutional ‘best practices’ contradict cultur-
ally competent strategies.
Critical Studyin’ as the
Praxis of the Black Studies
Intellectual Tradition
In the field of education, Afrocentric peda-
gogies in the college classroom are essential
977
to helping prospective educators and admin-
istrators develop an informed cultural stand-
point from which to translate powerful
classroom teaching practices. This is so
because these pedagogical approaches have
the potential to disrupt not only racially
unjust practices, but more importantly, the
logic that creates and holds these practices as
universal truths in our system of public
schooling. Moreover, Afrocentric pedago-
gies offer humanizing, liberatory alternatives
in terms of teaching, learning, and achieve-
ment that maintain cultural and community
well-being. Critical Studyin’ achieves this
goal through an interdisciplinary, multi-
modal critical approach to studying the com-
plexities involved in schooling and education
as well as approaches to cultivating educa-
tional excellence. Critical Studyin’ repre-
sents a morally engaged pedagogical
approach with roots in antiracist teaching
(King, 2008).
Critical Studyin’ is an approach inspired
by the Black Studies intellectual tradi-
tion. Black Studies as an intellectual tradi-
tion targets the belief structure of racism
in ideologically biased knowledge. Black
Studies intellectual theorizing draws
together contemporary works in anthro-
pology, sociology, and education, as well
as historical works in psychology and his-
tory. Theoretically, Black Studies theoriz-
ing is situated from an ideological purview
of democracy as juxtaposed to the ideo-
logical position of racism that often
guides thinking and movement in teach-
ing and teacher education. It focuses on
the belief structure of race in ideologically
based knowledge used in public schools
and academia and on knowledge systems
and traditions of Indigenous cultural
groups. Examples of Black Studies theo-
rizing are located in Clyde Woods’ analy-
sis of the makings of the Mississippi Delta
(Woods, 1998), Katherine McKittrick’s
extrapolation of Black women geog-
raphies (McKittrick, 2006) and Joyce
King’s examination of critical, qualitative
978 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
research in teacher education (King, 2008).
Evidenced in the tradition of Black Studies
Intellectualism is a commitment to racial
social justice as a democratic outcome of
human freedom. There is also a commit-
ment to centering the lives, experiences,
and wisdoms of Indigenous peoples and
using this lived, experiential knowledge
as the basis for theories of change, justice,
and education.
The Black Studies intellectual tradi-
tion of Critical Studyin’ is not predicated
on the study of the symptoms or outcomes
of a racist educational system – but is the
intentional probing of the illness or deficien-
cies within our existing system of logic or
reasoning that create such inhumanities. It
seeks to repair the severed historical knowl-
edge that prevents teachers from being able
to consider current and existing problems
of racial injustice including poverty, school
performance, and police brutality. It awak-
ens teachers to the systemic and continued
patterns of racial social injustice – it moves
them away from considerations of racism as
a historical occurrence and always linked
to enslavement. In other words, Critical
Studyin’ does not get us sidetracked and
bogged down in race – but maintains a con-
certed attention on the ideology of racism
which is at the heart of racial inequity. King
(2008) conceptualizes Critical Studyin’ as
a productive way to engage educators in
­studying racism and culture and the practical
implications for teaching and learning. She
writes, ‘By deciphering the implications of
ideological conceptions of “Blackness” (and
socially constructed “Whiteness”), Critical
Studyin’ offers a pedagogical alternative
to alienating knowledge that rationalizes
injustice, corrupts scientific reasoning, and
obstructs critical moral agency’ (King, 2008:
338). Collectively, both Village Pedagogy
and Critical Studyin’ are constructive, seek-
ing both to dismantle the knowledge system
and social structure of race and to develop
new interpretive frameworks, theories, and
methodologies.
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF
AFROCENTRIC PEDAGOGIES IN
TEACHER EDUCATION AND
HUMAN SERVICES
Critical Studyin’ as Pedagogy
in Teacher Education
There are three conceptual tools that charac-
terize Critical Studyin’ and offer a method of
teaching through culture that cultivates critical
consciousness of individuals with full regard
for race and culture. The first is Diaspora
Literacy and refers to the ability to understand
reality and literature from an informed,
Indigenous perspective. As King (2008) sum-
marizes, it means naming and categorizing
concrete situations of injustice and alienation
in the everyday lives of Black people. It also
means noticing and naming perspectives and
practices that increase positive outcomes for
individuals and communities from an emic
perspective. In other words, it includes engag-
ing in study and discourse around African
American excellence in teaching and learning
from an African American perspective.
Cultivating Diaspora Literacy supports the
development of Heritage Knowledge, the
second tool the author reveals. Heritage
Knowledge liberates individuals from the ties
of bondage levied by racist, hegemonic belief
systems and permits them to develop an
awareness and pride in themselves. Heritage
Knowledge represents a group’s memory of
their collective history which facilities the
cultivation of positive relationships with
others. Third, African American pedagogical
excellence refers to engagement in teaching
with full regard for the social, cultural, and
historical implications of teaching and learn-
ing from an African American perspective. It
draws on the cultural and racialized episte-
mologies of people of African descent and
links this knowledge with teaching practices
that promote academic excellence, cultural
competence, and sociopolitical consciousness
for children. Using these three concepts,
 ‘WE DO IT ALL THE TIME’
Critical Studyin’ engages individuals in practice-
to-theory theorizing. Briefly, practice-to-the-
ory involves recovery and (re)remembering
historical events, personal and group experi-
ences, consciousness, identity, and culture
related to African descent people. Teachers
examine the lived reality and experiences of
African Americans as a heuristic to consider
the racial reasoning, theories, and codifica-
tions that shape such experiences.
Pedagogical Embodiment
of Village Pedagogy
There are several ways that educators embody
Village Pedagogy. Among these strategies
are personal connections through instruc-
tional practices, systemic navigation, and
experiential learning. Each of these tools are
embodied within the classroom in ways that
will train human services practitioners to be
culturally competent in relation to all mar-
ginalized clients. This is particularly impor-
tant given the current ideology of America as
‘post-racial’, which underscores the need for
human services educators to engage in peda-
gogy that develops a critical consciousness
within emerging practitioners (Ricks, 2014).
Thus, the pedagogical embodiment of Village
Pedagogy offers tools that create a learning
environment that deconstructs systemically
racist policies and practices; fosters students’
critical consciousness; and develops collec-
tive responsibility for enhancing the quality
of life for African Americans.
Personal connection. One aspect of
Village Pedagogy is personal connection
through instructional practices. This con-
nection is inclusive of both the connection
between the instructor and the students, as
well as between the students in the class-
room. Personal connection problematizes an
understanding of diversity from the perspec-
tive of gazing at others who are different, to
encourage culturally competent strategies
such as respect, responsiveness, and reciproc-
ity (Barrera and Corso, 2002). It is essential
979
that instructors learn and understand the
perspectives of the students within the class-
room. This will allow instructors to identify
the various identities represented within the
learning environment. For example, getting
to know students will reveal to the instructor
which students have experienced economic
privilege or racial oppression in their lived
experiences. This knowledge is essential for
fostering a critical understanding of perspec-
tives that challenges emerging practitioners
beyond their personal experiences. In addi-
tion, the connection between students is also
critical for humanizing personal experiences
that are distinct from one’s lived experi-
ences. Thus, creating a learning environment
that amplifies the voices of divergent per-
spectives fosters personal connection cross-
culturally among students. Then, students
are trained to assess the ways they can utilize
privileged spaces to advocate for their cli-
ents as opposed to assuming advocacy needs
based on personal biases. This also enhances
the collective responsibility of students to
work beyond their own lived experiences
to enhance the quality of life for oppressed
populations. As aforementioned, ‘Village
Pedagogy is the art of instructing in, from,
and through a communal environment. [It]
occurs in teaching and learning in commu-
nity that enhances campus living and class-
room learning’ (Harris, 2012). Collectively,
this communal environment creates personal
connections where educators get to know
their students including their positionality,
biases, privilege, and oppressions. This type
of knowledge requires the educator to teach
from where students are. Thus, privilege is no
longer an abstract term, but rather something
that the educator makes visible to the stu-
dents regarding various ways it may operate
within their personal lives, and ways in which
they can utilize their privilege to alleviate the
oppression of others.
Systemic navigation. Village Pedagogy
serves as a tool for educating students and
future practitioners about the existing barri-
ers. Because of systemically racist policies
980 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
and practices that exist, there are innumer-
able barriers for African Americans when
navigating those systems. Consequently,
Village Pedagogy fosters a critical conscious-
ness for how to navigate, advocate, and resist
existing barriers. For example, Harris (2012:
334) recalled that within the context of his
HBCU, he ‘sensed cultural and pedagogical
connections at the HBCU that helped prepare
[him] to better adjust to other cultural set-
tings, such as predominantly White corporate
settings and predominately White graduate
schools’. Thus, it should be noted that sys-
temic navigation is not institutional socializa-
tion that favors cultural assimilation; rather it
is education that is culturally centered from
the perspective of African Americans, that
unveils and deconstructs the cultural nuances
and practices of mainstream settings in a way
that allows one to effectively navigate major-
ity systems without sacrificing themselves.
This includes a culturally competent systemic
understanding of issues of power, privilege,
and oppression (Tarver and Herring, 2019).
Thus, to successfully navigate mainstream
systems does not require one to embody and
embrace mainstream values and believes; but
rather Village Pedagogy provides an under-
standing of systemic navigation of power,
privilege, and oppression in ways that honor,
respect, and value cultural variations. It also
teaches those positioned with more societal
power and privilege how to challenge, resist,
and alleviate systemic barriers.
Experiential learning. Village Pedagogy
requires curriculum and instructional prac-
tices that connect to the lived experiences
of African Americans. ‘Village Pedagogy
requires social justice action that transforms
classrooms into villages by collectively resist-
ing systemic marginalization and oppres-
sion’ (McCoy and Packer, 2017). Within the
classroom this transformation takes place
by centering African American experiences
within the curriculum and instructional tech-
niques. Harris (2012: 334) articulated that
this includes ‘the mutual sharing of language,
music, styles of dress, stories, and other ways
of being’. Thus, Village Pedagogy reflects
culturally centered curriculums that incor-
porate various genres of text, multimedia
content delivery, and various cultural milieus
beyond Eurocentric expressions that connect
to the lived experiences of African Americans
and other people of color.
AFROCENTRIC PEDAGOGIES IN
PRACTICE IN TEACHER EDUCATION
AND HUMAN SERVICES
Village Pedagogy and Critical Studyin’ both
offer important strategies that can be utilized
within courses designed to train emerging
human services practitioners and teacher
educators. The following sections provide an
illustration of both pedagogies. We offer both
specific classroom strategies and subsequent
student feedback on the effectiveness of
these approaches from a personal and empiri-
cal perspective. These illustrations offer tools
for educators who seek to engage in practices
that will improve the quality of life and edu-
cational outcomes for African Americans in
culturally competent and culturally respon-
sive ways.
Village Pedagogy within
a Diversity of Human
Services Course
As an assistant professor within a research-
intensive university in a southeastern US
state, I, the first author of this chapter,
embody Village Pedagogy in all of my
courses. The following is one illustration of
how I did so within a Diversity of Human
Services course. Offered as one of the core
courses within the undergraduate curriculum
of a human services bachelor program,
the course had an enrolment capacity of
25 students. This included both traditional
students as well as non-traditional and
 ‘WE DO IT ALL THE TIME’
military-affiliated students. The course is an
upper-level course, designed for students to
1 Have greater self-awareness about one’s per-
sonal cultural identity, values, beliefs, and cus-
toms, and how these factors may impact the
helping relationship;
2 Have increased awareness about racism, preju-
dice, oppression, and privilege, and the effects
of these factors on themselves and their clients;
3 Have increased knowledge about the eight major
social identities which every person possesses
(race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation,
physical abilities, age, and religion/spirituality)
and the impact of these identities on the helping
process and relationship; and
4 Have learned skills and techniques for ethically and
effectively meeting the needs of diverse clients.
In order to translate these goals into course
strategies within Village Pedagogy, the fol-
lowing assignments and curricular activities
were utilized throughout the course:
• Critical Dialogue and Case Studies. Critical
dialogue and culturally centered case studies are
utilized throughout the course to foster personal
connection of students with the instructor and
between students. The critical dialogue ensues as
a result of activities that make students’ respec-
tive positionalities, such as race, gender, socio-
economic status, age, etc., salient. Specifically,
all students participated in an exercise called
dimensions of difference where they stratified
according to gender, race, geographic identity,
and socioeconomic status growing up. They then
discussed how their experiences privileged and or
marginalized them during their upbringing. Next,
students were led to discuss how this was similar
or dissimilar to their peers and the implications
their experiences may have on interactions with
individuals and groups who are different from
themselves. Another critical dialogue occurred
after participating in multiple class activities such
as the Privilege Walk and playing Monopoly with
modified rules that highlight economic privilege.
Through such activities, students begin to develop
a consciousness regarding how privilege for some
equates to oppression for others. The peer inter-
action humanizes experiences that are divergent
from their lived experiences, and creates empathy
981
and compassion for marginalized populations.
The student–teacher connection is utilized to
assist students with translating their knowledge
of their privileged spaces into areas for collec-
tive responsibility for advocacy. The cultural case
studies were then introduced and students were
challenged by their instructor to interpret various
scenarios from multiple cultural perspectives. This
allowed students to develop a strengths-based
understanding instead of a pathological deficit
lens for understanding experiences different from
their own.
• Integrative Writing Assignment. Collins’
(2014) theoretical assumption that social loca-
tions such as race, gender, socioeconomic status,
ability status, and other diversity factors simul-
taneously privilege and marginalize individuals
within society was the basis of the Integrated
Writing Assignment. It was designed to theoreti-
cally advance the process of cultural competence
by allowing students to examine how they were
socialized regarding various aspects of identity
such as race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The
Integrated Writing Assignment required students
to implement Collins’ (2014) theory by critically
self-reflecting, in written and oral formats, on the
areas where they are simultaneously marginal-
ized and privileged. The written format provided
students a professional scenario as an emerg-
ing human services professional seeking a new
certification criterion. In this role, students were
required to write a four-page written assess-
ment to the Council for Standards in Human
Services that discussed three salient aspects of
their identity; their socialization around each of
their salient identities; and a plan for enhancing
their culturally competent practice within their
professional career. The oral part of the assign-
ment required students to present a creative
five-minute autobiographical demonstration of
their self-reflection during class. Students were
instructed that successful presentations should
engage their respective diversity, thus be cultur-
ally centered based on how they identified. They
were permitted to include, but were not limited
to, poems, spoken word/rap, artwork, multimedia,
songs, video, crafts, food, etc. As a result, the
culture of each student was valued and brought
into the course curriculum.
• Cultural Immersion Assignment. The Cultural
Immersion Assignment was a four-part assign-
ment where students were required to choose a
982 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
population they did NOT identify with; engage
in an immersion activity that was culturally cen-
tered on that population; conduct an interview
with someone who identified with their chosen
population; and write a four-page paper that
described their experience. Each student was
instructed to choose a non-dominant cultural
group they did not belong to. This assignment
embodied Village Pedagogy through experiential
learning and system navigation.
• Diversity Workshop Assignment. For the
Diversity Workshop Assignment, students were
assigned to small diverse groups, and charged to
select a cultural/ethnic group of which they were
not a part. As a group, students were assigned the
task of conducting a one-hour workshop about
their approved group to the rest of the class. Each
student group had to research and study the
chosen cultural group and present: (1) variations
in the group’s cultural characteristics, (2) critical
historical or current experiences that contributed
to the group’s identity/experience in society, (3)
existing issues that the group may perceive as
relevant, and (4) culturally centered strategies
for working with members of the cultural/ethnic
group. Half of the workshop had to include
a diverse panel of individuals who identified
within the cultural group being investigated.
Figure 81.1 Course activities within a Diversity of Human Services course that illustrates
Village Pedagogy
Thus, students were required to conduct research
and to collaborate with community members to
compose their respective panels. This assignment
embodied Village Pedagogy through experiential
learning and systemic navigation.
Figure 81.1 captures how each of the course
activities and assignments aligned with the
pedagogical embodiment of Village
Pedagogy.
A qualitative pilot study examining stu-
dents’ perceptions of the process of becoming
culturally competent human services practi-
tioners was conducted to examine the most
impactful aspects of the course (Tarver and
Herring, 2019). Below, I discuss the experi-
ences of three students to highlight the influ-
ence of the course assignments as they relate
to the Village Pedagogy strategies of personal
connection, systemic navigation, and experi-
ential learning.
Personal connection. Sarah1 reflected on
her classroom experiences by stating, ‘It was
truly amazing to sit in class and to listen to
other individuals’ experiences that I could
either relate to or just empathize for what
 ‘WE DO IT ALL THE TIME’
they did go through that I couldn’t relate to. It
created a level of respect for my classmates’
(Tarver and Herring, 2019). Such respect is
the foundation for humanizing experiences
in ways that offer a critical consciousness for
diverse perspectives. Sarah’s example sug-
gests the personal connections with peers
were key to her development of critical con-
sciousness. Such enhanced empathy is also
critical for building a foundation of collective
responsibility that pushes human services
professionals to be more justice-minded in
ways that will enhance their ability to engage
in advocacy in culturally relevant ways.
Systemic navigation. When reflecting on
the Cultural Immersion Assignment, Alex
stated, ‘I have never really thought about
my diversity and everything that plays into
diversity, marginalization, and privilege,
until this assignment’ (Tarver and Herring,
2019). His experience offered him the
opportunity to get to grips with his personal
privilege as well as how it may interact with
the oppression of others. The experiential
aspect of the Cultural Immersion Assignment
proved to be impactful for Alex’s ability
to understand how systemic interactions
need to be considered and addressed within
professional–client relationships. In his
experience, Village Pedagogy offered
insight into the nuanced cultural factors that
influence system navigation.
Experiential learning. Experiential learn-
ing encourages students to reflect on their
own biases. For example, Sable described,
‘I formed opinions about certain others and
categorized them as arrogant. But after the
project I understood that they have experi-
enced marginalization before and it made me
connect to them more’ (Tarver and Herring,
2019). This is a critical realization for human
services practitioners, given the roles that
they play when working with marginalized
populations. Being able to deconstruct and
address personal biases is an essential aspect
of improving the quality of life of marginal-
ized populations (Tarver and Herring, 2019).
Such understanding yields a more authentic
983
understanding of populations that human ser-
vices practitioners will go on to serve.
Collectively, these findings reveal that
human services educators who espouse a per-
sonal commitment to the collective uplift and
improvement of the quality of life for all African
Americans are well positioned to engage in
Village Pedagogy (McCoy and Packer, 2017).
In this manner Village Pedagogy ‘translates
into a pedagogy that supersedes traditional
implementation of teaching strategies that
focus primarily on covering predetermined
course curriculum solely for degree matricula-
tion’ (McCoy and Packer, 2017: 242). Rather,
it fosters collective responsibility to enhance
the quality of life for marginalized populations.
For human services educators, this begins with
engaging in pedagogy that equips students
with a critical consciousness ‘to analyze and
critique institutional practices that contribute
to the institutional marginalization of African
Americans, and empowering [students] to
become social justice advocates’ (McCoy
and Packer, 2017: 248). This approach is both
timely and essential for addressing existing
systemic inequalities.
Critical Studyin’ in a Literacy
Methods Course for Preservice
Teachers
The description and data samples presented
below are drawn from a larger research pro-
ject studying the influence of Black Studies
on the professional perspectives and enact-
ments of preservice reading teachers. This
project is connected to my work, the second
author, as a teacher educator at a large
research-intensive public university in the US
South. In this example I present Critical
Studyin’ in an undergraduate literacy meth-
ods course, the second in a series of four lit-
eracy methods courses preservice teachers
take to meet state licensure and graduation
requirements. This course focuses on literacy
instruction for children in grades 2nd through
6th. The group met for 16 three-hour sessions.
984 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
The conceptual focus of the course is multi-
focused to
1 Stimulate an ideological disruptive learning envi-
ronment through which preservice teachers begin
to engage in identity work, notice and name
socially toxic and socially just phenomena, and
forge professional identities aligned with justice;
2 Encourage preservice teachers to consider their
roles and responsibilities in increasing the positive
literacy outcomes for culturally diverse students
through engagement, achievement motivation,
and community building in the classroom; and
3 Invite preservice teachers to begin to construct a
vision and practice of effective elementary liter-
acy teaching with full regard for the cultural lives
and experiences of students and communities.
In order to engage in the practice-to-theory
analysis indicative of Critical Studyin’ and as
a way to model the practice of developing
instruction from an asset-based perspective,
preservice teacher participants were engaged
in the following activities:
• Book club discussions. Discussions were scaf-
folded around student participation in a book
club using the novel The Jacket (a children’s
novel based on the experiences of one European
American boy’s struggle to confront and under-
stand his own privilege and prejudice after an
incident with a young African American boy).
• Ethnographic research (portfolio project).
Preservice teachers used ethnographic methods
(observations, interviews, open-ended surveys,
etc.) to collect data related to schools, class-
rooms, and communities. Students were given
approximately three weeks to collect data in the
field, after which students and professor engaged
in a collective analysis of their data in ways
that encouraged students to wrestle with racial,
geographic, and socioeconomic differences in
the kinds of literacy instruction children receive.
Students also wrote reflective responses in which
they posed lingering questions about the data and
our analysis that they wanted to explore further.
• Community-based teaching experience in which
they worked in grade-level teams (2nd–5th grade)
to prepare and implement a modified Readers’
Workshop model driven by culturally relevant prin-
ciples and practices at a local elementary school
serving African American and Latino children. After
one week of observation (preservice teachers
watched the professor model a lesson with 3rd
graders), preservice teachers worked in six-person
teams to provide whole-group instruction with an
emphasis on building and maintaining commu-
nity through morning meeting, reading fluency,
and phonics for 30 minutes. They then worked in
partner within their same grade level to provide
reading comprehension and vocabulary instruc-
tion to five elementary students for 30 minutes.
Preservice teachers engaged in this community-
based experience one day per week for nine
weeks out of the semester.
• Community literacy carnival. In partnership
with a local community-based organization and
an elementary school, preservice teachers and I
designed and carried out a Literacy Carnival for
children and families in the school community.
Preservice teachers developed literacy-based
carnival-type games and set up booths around the
campus. Preservice teachers engaged with chil-
dren and families as they facilitated the games.
Students were responsible for preparation, setup,
and clean up of games. After the carnival, we
debriefed and reflected on the activity.
Figure 81.2 captures how each major activity
is aligned with the pedagogical tools of
Critical Studyin’.
In the section below, I present data from
three preservice teachers’ end of course anal-
ysis and reflections on their experiences and
learning to highlight the potential of Critical
Studyin’ in preparing conscious and compe-
tent classroom teachers.
Lauren, White, female in her early twenties.
Lauren was sincere in her in class participa-
tion and often shared her ideas in class. In
her in-class interactions with classmates,
she served as the facilitator and momentum-
keeper as she kept everyone on task and moti-
vated to address each task presented to them.
I feel I have changed not only as a teacher but as
a person through this experience. When our
semester began Dr Acosta challenged us to draw
what we think a ‘good reader’ is. I didn’t consider
the race or gender I used, the setting, any of it.
Most of us drew White, females, reading alone or
with one other person, this may have been how
most of us grew up, but the children at Carver2
don’t look how we depicted good readers, they are
 ‘WE DO IT ALL THE TIME’
Figure 81.2 Preservice teacher learning activities from a literacy methods course framed
around the Black Studies Critical Studyin’ pedagogical framework
almost the opposite. This activity showed me that
we have to be careful of how we perceive a ‘good’
student or reader alike, because at Carver I saw a
completely different picture of what great readers
looked like, and it was nothing as I had first
depicted… My assumptions about Carver’s after
school program was that it was only students who
were either struggling greatly or unable to read at
all were a part of it, little did I know that over the
course of this class my assumption would be greatly
altered after seeing such potential in my second
grade students. At this point I realized how wrong
my original preconceived thoughts were. My
assumptions that I had made turned out to be false.
The students proved me wrong time after time and
were flying through the lessons. My feelings at this
point grew to be more personal as I was able to put
names with faces and interact with the students.
Fatima, African American female in her
early twenties. Fatima was very thoughtful in
her responses and in class interactions and
expressed an interest in teaching in predomi-
nantly African American, low-income school
settings upon graduation.
These weeks of teaching really helped me to let go
of some biases that Latino students were slow with
reading. One student shocked me and made me
elevate my expectations because she was a great
reader. This is why getting to know your students is
a major key of teaching. Compared to my concerns
985
at the beginning about not being accepted by the
students, or not being able to enact change, by the
end I had a different concern. My final concern was
after all of these weeks planning, and coming every
Wednesday, who would work within the students’
after school program now, would they really be
receiving valid help? Would they enjoy their time? I
was concerned for them as learners, because I had
seen so much growth in such a short time already.
However, I do believe we made a positive impact on
the students because during morning meeting, one
student in particular said that he first felt shy to
read and voice his opinions because he was scared
of what other people would think but towards the
end he did not feel shy anymore and he was com-
fortable with opening up about anything with us. I
personally think this was a better response than a
student saying that they now enjoyed reading. This
also resonated with me because over the past years
a lot of times I have been silent in certain situations
whether they have been uncomfortable or if I was
just to voice my opinion. I was scared of what
others might say, but now I know it is very impor-
tant to express yourself. Confidence and self-
esteem are a major component that a lot of
students lack in school and being able to gain
confidence and feel comfortable talking to us as
student teachers really meant a lot to me.
Allison, White, female in her early twenties.
Allison was always eager to participate in
class discussions and ask critical questions,
whether she was well-informed on the subject
986 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
or not. Allison often engaged me in extended
conversations before and after class.
My feelings changed and I learned that while this
was an opportunity for me to practice my teaching
style this was more about those who were learning –
the students. I realized that this was not just a fun
activity that was to be done weekly. During the
middle of this journey it fully clicked within me;
this is not for me specifically, moreover it is about
them. On October 19th I saw my teaching and
planning advance and become more developed.
On this day we learned about the creation of the
airplane, the myths, and made paper airplanes. On
this day I saw myself have more fun with what I
was teaching and have more confidence and con-
trol over the area that I was monitoring. From the
morning meeting and the introduction of concrete
poems to the paper airplane race I not only saw
the kids having fun but I also saw them engaged
and learning without the dreaded commands, ‘pay
attention’ and ‘be quiet’. By the end of the semes-
ter, I was deeply immersed and invested in the
students. I felt like they were mine.
The power and potential of the tools and
learning activities encapsulated within Critical
Studyin’ is nested around three important
aspects that align with research on educator
preparation for diversity, including: critical
inquiry as stance (Cochran-Smith and Lytle,
1999), normalization of disruptive learning
spaces (Chapman, 2011; Ladson-Billings,
2000), and school-based teacher learning
(Darling-Hammond, 2016). Taken together,
Critical Studyin’ offers prospective educators
with opportunities to learn how to read the
word and the world in ways that offer possi-
bilities for the development of dispositions
and practices necessary for effective teaching
such as sociopolitical clarity, cultural compe-
tence, responsibility, and agency.
DISCUSSION OF LESSONS LEARNED
AND IMPLICATIONS FOR HUMAN
SERVICES AND TEACHER EDUCATORS
Although Afrocentric pedagogies may be
perceived as controversial, particularly
among those who do not understand or value
culturally centered approaches, the utiliza-
tion of such pedagogies is timely and critical
to improving the conditions of African
Americans (Acosta, 2017, 2018). The limited
effectiveness of Eurocentric approaches
within human services and teacher education
further underscores the need for the cultur-
ally centered approaches of Village Pedagogy
and Critical Studyin’ for preparing practi-
tioners and teacher educators to work with
people of color. Each of these approaches are
designed to enhance the quality of life and
educational access specifically for African
Americans. However, Asante (1991: 173)
further describes that, ‘Afrocentric education
is…against the marginalization of African
American, Hispanic American, Asian
American, Native American, and other non-
White children’. As a result, any educator
seeking to educate and improve the quality of
life of marginalized populations should con-
sider engaging in these pedagogical
approaches when training emerging teachers
and practitioners.
The embodiment of the Afrocentric peda-
gogies of Village Pedagogy and Critical
Studyin’ have yielded valuable lessons that
have implications for educators who are
interested in engaging in culture-centered
approaches. One important lesson learned
from engaging in Village Pedagogy is that
human services educators must be intentional
about engaging in Afrocentric pedagogies,
such as Village Pedagogy, to prepare future
human services professionals to enhance the
quality of life of African American clients.
The limited focus on the systemic influences
that create barriers for African Americans has
perpetuated disproportionate outcomes for
African Americans across various systems,
such as health care, probation and parole, and
education. Failure to train future profession-
als in culturally centered ways will inevita-
bly contribute to existing inequalities (Tarver
and Herring, 2019). Alternatively, Village
Pedagogy offers an ideal approach that students
perceive as very impactful for their professional
development. Although additional research is
 ‘WE DO IT ALL THE TIME’
needed to understand the impact of Village
Pedagogy within the field of human services,
the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings
highlight the significant potential it has for
improving the lives of marginalized popula-
tions. Thus, human services educators who
are justice-oriented should utilize Village
Pedagogy to intentionally develop culturally
competent instructional practices that can
help them translate their social justice objec-
tives and ideas into practical application for
students that will enhance future outcomes
for African Americans.
Three important lessons emerged from
the utilization of Critical Studyin’. First is
that enactment of Afrocentric pedagogies
must begin inward and radiate outward.
Thus, an authentic passion and commitment
for improving the educational experiences
of African American students is essential
for engagement in Critical Studyin’. More
importantly, teacher educators must engage
in their own individual identity work and
give serious attention to their perspectives,
ideologies, and existing teaching practices,
and this must be a continual practice. As
Closson et al. (2014) posit, African American
professors’ successful enactment of anti-
racist pedagogies such as Critical Studyin’
depends on their own negotiations of self and
others. Second, praxis, or experimentation
and inquiry, are important in ‘becoming’ an
Afrocentric pedagogue. Therefore, teacher
educators must situate their own enactments
of Critical Studyin’ and Village Pedagogy
as tools for self-reflection toward the devel-
opment of a racial-social justice personal,
pedagogical, and political stance. Finally,
classroom context matters in terms of cre-
ating the conditions necessary to engage in
Critical Studyin’ in ways that are healthy
and productive. Teacher educators must be
deliberate in creating spaces that foster risk,
authentic engagement, and the normalization
of cognitive violence, and they must be pre-
pared to manage the interpersonal demands
and dilemmas that will certainly arise under
these conditions.
987
Collectively, Village Pedagogy and Critical
Studyin’ are exemplary approaches for embod-
ying Afrocentric pedagogies. It is essential to
understand that these and other Afrocentric
pedagogies are not ‘anti-White; it is however,
pro-human’ (Asante, 1991). While the empiri-
cal examples of pedagogical embodiment
were provided in this chapter by two African
American women, they may be utilized by any
educator who has a passion and commitment
to improving the quality of life and educational
outcomes for African Americans.
Notes
1  Pseudonym used to protect participant confiden-
tiality.
2  Pseudonym used to protect participant confiden-
tiality.
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Critical Pedagogy, Democratic
Praxis, and Adultism
To b y R o l l o , J . C y n t h i a M c D e r m o t t ,
Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel
EDUCATION AND ADULTISM
The task of critical pedagogy is to cultivate the
skills and sensibilities required to challenge
relations of domination. To that end, the role
of the teacher is to foster a more equal and
democratic society by promoting self-directed
and collective learning opportunities. To trust
children – that is, to treat them with equal
respect and encourage their participation in
decision-making – is to prefigure the agency
they will exercise as active critical citizens
who are empowered to transform society
rather than simply reproduce its norms and
institutions. From this perspective, educational
practices that privilege the teacher’s interests
and deny or subordinate the agency of children
constitute a form of domination sometimes
referred to as adultism (Flasher, 1978; Tate
and Copas, 2003), childism (Pierce and Allen,
1975; Young-Bruehl, 2011), aetonormativity
(Nikolajeva, 2010), or misopedy (Rollo,
2016b). Education is adultist when teachers
alone determine subjects, curricula, and
82
assessment, thus encouraging obedience and
passivity in students and, accordingly, propa-
gating the anti-democratic pathologies of civic
conformity and apathy. Adultist pedagogy
tends to focus on conventional practices of
‘voting, volunteering, or joining a civic group’
(Broom, 2017: 3) which is an arbitrary restric-
tion from the perspective of the child, falling
short of empowerment and failing to demon-
strate genuine trust or equal respect for chil-
dren who are capable of creating their own
democratic practices and institutions.
The idea that democracy is the purview of
adults with ‘mature capacities’ permeates the
earliest defenses of democratic education.
Adultist assumption and priorities are present
from the opening of John Dewey’s classic
Democracy and Education (1916), in which
he asserts that children must be ‘initiated into
the interests, purposes, information, skill, and
practices of the mature members’ (Dewey,
1916: 3). George Counts’ Dare the School
Build a New Social Order? (1932) is even
more intentional with respect to socializing
990 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
children into existing democratic institutions
than Dewey, though both Counts and Dewey
heavily influenced the work of Myles Horton,
who would discard many of the adultist pre-
cepts. Standard curricula in civics classes
tend to limit the child’s participation to those
democratic ideals and institutions prioritized
by adults, and in this respect they constitute a
kind of adultist ‘hidden curriculum’ (Giroux
and Penna, 1979). For theorists of educa-
tion and democracy, this hidden curriculum
was celebrated as a source of democratic
socialization, but questions remained as to
the democratic legitimacy of an educational
framework that is largely predetermined.
A more critical assessment of child learn-
ing and habituation emerged during the
latter half of the 20th century, where the cata-
strophic collapse of European democratic
politics into fascism prompted interest in the
education and socialization of children. The
United Nations formulated a new Declaration
on the Rights of the Child (UN General
Assembly, 1959), which was modeled on the
1924 Geneva Declaration that child-advocate
Janusz Korczak had prophetically criticized
as an inert and merely aspirational document.
From this point onward, democratic peda-
gogy would be informed by both an emerging
global cognizance of children’s unique vulner-
abilities and rights as well as a deep critique of
power and ideology that cast its light beyond
formal political institutions to the psychology
of citizens and mass society. New fusions of
Marxist critique and psychoanalysis found
expression in the democratic and free school
movements, epitomized in the formation of
A. S. Neill’s Summerhill School. Indeed, the
foreword for Neill’s Summerhill (Neill, 1960)
was penned by critical psychoanalyst Erich
Fromm (Fromm, 1960). By the mid 20th cen-
tury, educational theorists seemed to be con-
verging on a single problem: if the established
political ideals and institutions venerated by
adults were so easily turned upside-down,
perhaps something more robustly democratic
could be established by and for children.
Questions of this sort heavily informed some
classic works in critical pedagogy and child
participation, such as Freire’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed (1970) and Illich’s Deschooling
Society (1970), works that revealed how
power structures in the classroom reproduce
power structures in society generally.
Yet, elements of adultism persisted in
these new critical paradigms of education and
socialization, for it was generally assumed
that children could and should participate like
adults. In the American context, a child lib-
erationist movement developed to challenge
inequality and the exclusion of children in
everything from education to the workplace
and electoral politics (Holt, 1974). But calls
for greater inclusion of children always pre-
supposed the child’s integration into exist-
ing adult economic and political institutions.
Likewise, seeking to elaborate on the pre-
vious two declarations, the UN passed the
Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989),
which laid out children’s rights to participa-
tion insofar as they conformed to the agency
of adults. Article 12 of the Convention reads:
States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable
of forming his or her own views the right to express
those views freely in all matters affecting the child,
the views of the child being given due weight in
accordance with the age and maturity of the child.
Contemporary educational reformists rely on
these and other resources to promote citizen
preparation and participation, yet, as we see in
the idea of a ‘ladder participation’ (Arnstein,
1969; Hart, 1992), the particular modality and
scope of engagement is often vague and
seems inevitably to presuppose that children
will emulate the adult prioritizing of voice,
speech, or expression.
There are problems with the focus on chil-
dren’s voices, of course, centering mostly on
the way educational contexts shape and con-
strain what a child can talk about and how
the child’s speech gets interpreted by adults.
Adults will often craft an interpretation of the
child’s voice so as to make it more cognizable
to an adult audience (Spyrou, 2011; I’Anson,
2013). Adults are also prone to interpreting
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, DEMOCRATIC PRAXIS, AND ADULTISM
what children say through a neoliberal indi-
vidualist lens (Murris, 2016). Likewise, the
focus on voice can romantically assume a
standard of authenticity in the child’s speech
that is not applied to adults, that there is some-
thing that can be appropriately labelled ‘the
child’s view’. The prevailing ideal, however,
is that educational systems can be increas-
ingly democratized to allow for greater stu-
dent control and this will serve as a corrective
to the interventions of adults. The privileg-
ing of voice as the definitive form of political
agency is apparent in the fact that the con-
cepts of voice, power, and participation are
interchangeable in most of the educational
literature. It is suggested without hesitation
that children’s views should be heard, yet it is
rarely supposed that a child’s agency can be
enacted without adult mediation.
As a field, critical pedagogy has taken
up the ideal of democratic engagement to
address adultism in education along with the
view that education exists to prepare children
for pre-established roles and responsibilities
(see Rehfeld, 2011). Critics are beginning
to understand that children may demand a
voice, and adults aspire to give them a voice,
only because the hegemonic understanding
of agency has restricted the field of choice to
voice and voice alone. Theorists and practi-
tioners are therefore seeking to revolutionize
pedagogy in ways that move beyond voice, as
reflected in the most recent UN Committee
on the Rights of the Child (2009) interpreta-
tion of Article 12, which stipulates
recognition of, and respect for, non-verbal forms
of communication including play, body language,
facial expressions, and drawing and painting,
through which very young children demonstrate
understanding, choices and preferences. (2009: 9)
It is increasingly acknowledged that the focus
on voice in education can stifle participation
and active citizen engagement. Citizens who
find themselves unable or unwilling to articu-
late their interests or justify their beliefs in
political for a are often incentivized to act in
ways that are less public, leaving their
991
potential contributions neglected (Rollo,
2016a). There is also a risk in privileging
voice that those who do excel at public dia-
logue will find their energies diverted into
talk at the expense of action. This relates to
what is called the attitude–behavior or value–
action gap, which refers to the ways that citi-
zens’ expressed political views often do not
correlate with their actions (Kollmuss and
Agyeman, 2002). In these examples, among
others, the privileging of voice seems to
undermine democratic community and effec-
tive governance, leading to the more general
problem of political disillusionment and
apathy.
There are additional dangers to the adultist
privileging of voice in education aside from
general issues of disillusionment and apa-
thy. One such risk relates to the inherent
developmentalism in the idea of voice-based
agency and its role in exacerbating issues of
ableism and colonialism. Building political
systems around adult capacities tends to reify
the developmentalism that subordinates not
only children but also people with disabilities
(Erevelles, 2000). Insofar as the privileging of
voice assumes a natural human telos from the
voiceless agency of childhood toward mature
faculties of speech and reason, those who do
not achieve adult capacities are considered
incomplete or defective (Vorhaus, 2005).
Adultism in education promotes the idea
that, without intervention from fully devel-
oped adults, those with profound cognitive
or communicative disabilities cannot fully
contribute to the establishment, contestation,
or modification of societal norms. Similarly,
insofar as the veneration of speech and lit-
eracy tends to position non-literate people
or cultures who privilege ceremony or action
over public deliberation at a lesser stage of
social evolution, the adultist reduction of
agency to speech and reason has colonial
implications (Nandy, 1984). These devel-
opmental forms of exclusion are resisted by
critical pedagogy through its focus on the
inclusion of practical, embodied, and other
non-verbal forms of educational praxis.
992 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
It is important to observe that problems
of apathy and exclusion are not inherent in
speech but, rather, inherent in the reductive
and adultist association between speech and
agency. Thus, the issue is not that children
are always unable to speak for themselves
but, rather, that adults posit speech as the
practical and normative threshold of agency,
inclusion, and equality. A genuinely demo-
cratic education would prepare children for
the world of the adult while also permitting
children the space to create the world anew.
A fully child-centered pedagogy resists see-
ing the democracy that has been constructed
by adults as the final stage of civilizational
evolution into which children must be social-
ized or assimilated. To that end, the latest
incarnations of critical pedagogy take up the
insights of figures like Dewey without adopt-
ing their programmatic emulation of adult
political institutions. They also seek to cap-
ture Freire’s revolutionary edge without fall-
ing into the idea that critical consciousness
can only be cultivated through literacy and
dialogue.
The critical emancipatory promise of
education is realized when children are per-
mitted to choose which modality of agency
they prefer in a given situation (e.g. voice,
action, silence). To that end, critical peda-
gogy is gradually implementing a more
robust attunement to embodied aspects of
learning (McLaren, 1988), offering a correc-
tive to the arbitrary restrictions of adultism.
In turn, children continue to demonstrate to
adults that there is perhaps nothing inherent
to critical engagement with the world that
requires speech or literacy. Norms are estab-
lished, affirmed, contested, and modified in
both the speech and deeds of citizens. We see
early manifestations of such attunement in
the work of Jane Addams (1902), who under-
stood that democracy requires practices of
embodied care. In contemporary democratic
theory, we see it in the focus on empathy
(Morrell, 2010). Full respect for the child as
an agent is found in Indigenous land-based
educational practices (Simpson, 2014), such
as the Dechinta Bush University (Ballantyne,
2014), which reject the developmentalist
model as applied to either the individual or to
social evolution. And we find a similar bal-
ance between voice and other forms of demo-
cratic agency in the Foxfire and Highlander
programs and Youth Participatory Action
Research.
FOXFIRE AND HIGHLANDER
Choosing to abandon an adultist model of
classroom processes can be achieved in col-
laboration with students, teachers, and admin-
istrators who recognize the failures of the
existing system. Such choice often occurs in
haphazard ways as participants grapple with
shedding old models so thoroughly ingrained
in the status quo. The oft-cited adage that
teachers teach the way they were taught rather
than the way they were taught to teach is only
partially true. When do educators experience a
non-adultist learning environment that can
create alternative sets of practices and more
importantly attitudes that lead to opportunities
for youth to experience their rights on a daily
basis? Where do educators learn about a pro-
cess that respects children? As Warren (1972:
169) so aptly stated, ‘There are neither rights
nor freedoms in any meaningful sense unless
they can be enjoyed but all’.
More than collaboration is necessary,
however, to erase the colonialism of adultist
practices. Even Hart’s (1992) Ladder of
Participation model falls short of seeing chil-
dren as rightful catalysts for their learning.
Interactions with children must recognize
that their ideas and concerns and questions
must be center stage. The oppressive, but
well-meaning, classroom that is character-
ized by teacher-determined practices simply
reiterates the abuse that so many children
experience. Although many children have
no understanding of their rights or support
from their communities to learn, it does
appear that there are increasing examples
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, DEMOCRATIC PRAXIS, AND ADULTISM
across the world that demonstrate that chil-
dren are increasingly being included and, in
fact, are taking on significant responsibilities
(Fletcher, 2013). Evidence of international
civic action projects created and designed
by youth are reported by the Inter-Agency
Working Group on Children’s Participation
(2008). This work is supported to increase
children’s citizenship and civil rights. In the
United States, educators can look to exam-
ples that are challenging the adultist mental-
ity and are consistent with the point of view
of embodied care.
Highlander
The first example is the Highlander Research
and Education Center in Tennessee begun in
1932 by Myles Horton, Don West, and James
Dombrowski as a place where collective
action could occur. Horton, the key person in
its development, understood at a deep per-
sonal level that if change was to occur in the
community, it had to come from the local
participants, utilizing their skills, ideas, and
actions. His upbringing taught him about ser-
vice to others and, as he finished his college
education, his beliefs that people have the
ability to pose and solve their own problems
were affirmed (McDermott and Hoffman-
Kipp, 2009). As he clearly stated, ‘you don’t
have to know the answers. The answers come
from the people and when they don’t have
any answers then you have another role and
you find resources’ (Horton et al., 1998: 23).
At the Highlander Center in the rolling
hills of Appalachia, Horton used dialogue as
a means for a community of people to make
decisions. Rocking chairs line the conference
room, inviting participants to listen with their
hearts and think critically about their ideas
and those of others. The idea for this kind of
dialogical process is to provide multiple ideas
that can be tried even if they may fail. Within
the community there are always options to
make the road better if everyone participates.
Although no process from Highlander has
been named per se, this attempt to resolve
993
local challenges is usually referred to as
Popular Education.
The extensive and historical results from
this perspective created untold changes, con-
testing the oppression and inherited ideology
that preyed on the members of the commu-
nity. They saw themselves as voiceless and
unable to enact their agency to create change.
It certainly was not easy and took a powerful
and robust commitment to undercut the years
of chronic devaluing that described the day-
to-day existence of the workers. For example,
miners who had no rights and had lives full of
occupational danger and poverty came to see
themselves as able-bodied individuals work-
ing collectively to forge forward with union
organizing and demands for decent lives.
Horton, however, was not the organizer. He
did not take the role of ‘teacher’ to lead the
uneducated to the promised land. No, it was
quite the opposite. He stated of his role that
I don’t know what to do, and if I did know what
to do I wouldn’t tell you, because if I had to tell
you today then I’d have to tell you tomorrow, and
when I’m gone you’d have to get somebody else
to tell you. (Horton et al., 1998: 126)
Today the center continues these same pro-
cesses, and their mission states:
Highlander serves as a catalyst for grassroots
organizing and movement building in Appalachia
and the U.S. South. Through popular education,
participatory research, and cultural work, we help
to create spaces – at Highlander and in local com-
munities – where people gain knowledge, hope
and courage, expanding their ideas of what is pos-
sible. (Highlander Center, 2017: http://highlander-
center.org/about-us/)
In 1987, Paulo Freire and Horton met at
Highlander to create the book We Make the
Road by Walking (Horton et al., 1990). Freire
and Horton were practitioners who believed that
people had the answers to the questions they
posed. Horton (Horton et al., 1990) wrote that
[t]he teacher is, of course an artist, but being an
artist does not mean that he or she can make the
profile, can shape the students. What the educator
does in teaching is to make it possible for the stu-
dents to become themselves. (1990: 181)
994 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
This faith and trust allows that taking risks in
the company of others provides solutions to
everyday challenges. They did not see them-
selves as the ‘experts’ but rather the catalysts
that provided the environment that could
create the changes necessary. Their work
encourages creativity and critical analysis and
is a liberatory approach essential in working
out the day-to-day mistakes that often lead to
disagreements and failure around practices of
equity and diversity. Solutions to the most
vexing problems reside within the community
if only the time and process is allowed to hear
the ‘other’ through democratic dialogue.
Freire and Horton are not provocative in the
sense that their ideas are political. What is
perhaps provocative is their sense that people
can be trusted. In defining the foundational
concept of this trusting relationship, Horton
stated that, ‘I think if I had to put a finger on
what I consider a good education, a good radi-
cal education, it wouldn’t be anything about
methods or techniques. It would be loving
people first’ (Horton et al., 1990: 177).
Both Horton and Freire believed that dia-
logue was a necessary practice that could cre-
ate opportunities for problem solving even if
the ideas ‘failed’ along the way. Paulo Freire
coined the expression ‘Banking education’,
which emphasizes that the teacher’s role as
the active one in the teacher–learner relation-
ship is an anti-dialogical approach. It serves
the oppressor by denying the learner an active
role in the learning. Dialogic action has two
basic dimensions, reflection and action.
Foxfire
A second model of an anti-adultism process
was created with students in rural Georgia in
1966. Brooks Eliot Wigginton (Wig) was
rather unsuccessfully teaching high-school
English and began to ask the students what
could be done to make it successful. Wig’s
account of what began to happen is central to
understanding the oppression and colonial-
ism that occurs in schools. After he posed the
question as to what they could do together,
he states,
The class was silent. For long minutes we simply
stared at each other. And then slowly, quietly, the
talk came. Nothing of real consequence got
resolved that day in terms of specific classroom
activities that they might enjoy more than what I
had imposed on them (I realized later how helpless
many of them are to come up with brilliant sug-
gestions when, because of the way they’ve been
taught for so many years, they can’t even imagine
what the options would be; and how wrong
teachers are who say ‘Well, I asked them for their
ideas and they couldn’t come up with any good
ones so we just went on with the text’). But at
least we began the dialogue and we began to look
at each other in a different light. (Wigginton,
1985: 32)
More than 50 years later that dialogue sup-
porting students to wrestle with who they are
and what is important still continues. The
Foxfire Approach is alive and well and still
challenging the neoliberal approach of cur-
rent classroom ‘reform’.
Foxfire is an alternative to the traditional
classroom, and as Wig and his students pro-
ceeded, they developed the series of Foxfire
Magazines and established the beginning of
cultural journalism, using the real world as
the source of learning, consistent with the
field of experiential learning (Knapp, 1993).
This approach uses the students’ whole
environment as a source of knowledge. The
community, rather than the classroom, is
the context for learning, where real experi-
ences can occur. Experiential learning the-
ory defines learning as the process whereby
knowledge is created through the transforma-
tion of experience. Knowledge results from
the combination of grasping and transform-
ing experience (Kolb, 1984).
In the Foxfire process, students are assisted
in learning how to interview, to ask ques-
tions, and to create dialogue with their neigh-
bors, relatives, and local ‘experts’. As the
interviews took shape, students wrote their
findings and published them in the Foxfire
Magazine. An unlimited number of topics
were, and still are, being investigated, ranging
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, DEMOCRATIC PRAXIS, AND ADULTISM
from quilting, to hog dressing, to ways to
manufacture stills, and to serving as governor.
What is significant about Foxfire is the trans-
formation that it allows. Wig describes the
pecking order that exists for many students in
school. Wigginton (1998) stated that
certain students get to do everything and other
students get to do very little. And one of the magi-
cal aspects of this whole endeavor is that virtually
anybody can play a part and make a contribution
and it doesn’t have anything to do with strength
or looks or popularity or money or whether or not
you have a car or any of those other trappings of
adolescent prestige. Those fall by the wayside in a
situation like this. (Wigginton, 1998: 209)
As the process developed and more teachers
came to understand the revolutionary aspect
of it, the Core Practices (listed at the end of
this chapter section) organically emerged as
outcomes of those experiences. An ever-
evolving living document, there have been
many changes with input from students,
teachers, and the community. Since Foxfire
is considered an approach rather than a pro-
cess or a standard curriculum, any commu-
nity or content or age is relevant. As a
completely student-centered process, the
Core Practices reinforce the role of the
teacher as helper and facilitator when needed.
The work of the classroom belongs to the
students and centers them as the problem
posers and solvers. The act is political with-
out being named as such.
Turning the curriculum, or the projects,
over to young people requires a sincere trust
in them. What was it about folks like Horton
and Wigginton that allowed them to give up
control? Wig, for example, had no more trust
in students than any other teacher initially.
But as he watched their growth and respon-
sibility and that they craved the trust, it pro-
vided the fuel to allow the work to continue
(McDermott & Smith, 2016).
As international educators confront the
neoliberal standardization and privatization
of education, it serves society well to decon-
struct attitudes and behaviors toward children
995
which prevent children from engaging in
their rights. Partnering with young people
has many advantages and can be a powerful
political ally in the struggles for equity and
democracy. But what stands in the way?
A report from the Inter-Agency Working
Group on Children’s Participation (2008) as
well as the work of Lansdown (2003) pro-
vide a clear analysis of the factors and myths
that prevent adults from trusting children
and respecting their skills. Just as Wig’s stu-
dents had no easy solutions, so too do educa-
tors follow their age-old model of top-down
oppression believing these myths.
Assumptions abound regarding the par-
ticipation of children. Some assumptions
include the misbelief that children lack the
experience to participate, they do not accept
responsibility so cannot be granted their
rights until they do, participation is not part
of the culture, giving children too much to
do robs them of their childhood, participa-
tion will create a lack of respect for adults,
those who participate are not representa-
tive of all the children, some become ‘pro-
fessional activists’, and it is difficult to
sustain their participation. These assump-
tions repeat the colonializing language of any
oppressor, making excuses about behavior
that is not based on dialogue or a desire to
increase engagement in a democratic society.
Lansdown’s (2003) work continues to argue
that participation creates risks for children,
including manipulation by adults and put-
ting children at risk if they are too outspo-
ken or visible. As essential as it is to protect
children, without knowledge of their rights
and demonstration of what they would look
like, young people are denied the opportunity
to fully function in a society that they will
fully manage in their adulthood. Examining
these myths with young people can move
the dialogue of rights to center stage. When
children encounter other perspectives – when
they discuss, argue, and compare ideas – they
are building understanding and making pub-
lic that which has been private (Krechevsky
et al., 2016).
996 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Foxfire Core Practices
The Core Practices were tested and refined
by hundreds of teachers working mostly in
isolated and diverse classrooms around the
country. When implemented, the Core
Practices define an active, learner-centered,
community-focused approach to teaching
and learning.
Regardless of a teacher’s experience, the
school context, subject matter, or popula-
tion served, the Approach can be adapted in
meaningful and substantial ways, creating
learning environments that are the same but
different – environments that grow out of a
clearly articulated set of beliefs and, at the
same time, are designed to fit the contour of
the landscape in which they are grown.
Considered separately, the Core Practices
include 11 tenets of effective teaching and
learning. Verified as successful through years
of independent study, teachers begin their
work through any number of entry points
or activities. The choices they make about
where to begin and where to go next are
influenced by individual school and commu-
nity contexts, teachers’ interests and skills,
and learners’ developmental levels.
As teachers and learners become more
skilled and confident, the Core Practices pro-
vide a decision-making framework which
allows teachers to tightly weave fragmented
pieces of classroom life into an integrated
whole. When they are applied as a way
of thinking rather than a way of doing, the
complexities of teaching decisions become
manageable, and one activity or new under-
standing leads naturally to many others.
If teachers choose the Approach to guide their
teaching decisions, it is not important where
they start, only that they start. The adaptability
and room for growth in skill and understanding
make the Core Practices a highly effective, life-
long tool for self-reflection, assessment, and
ongoing professional development.
The Work Teachers and Learners Do Together Is
Infused from the Beginning with Learner Choice,
Design, and Revision
The central focus of the work grows out of
learners’ interests and concerns. Most prob-
lems that arise during classroom activity are
solved in collaboration with learners, and
learners are supported in the development of
their ability to solve problems and accept
responsibility.
The Academic Integrity of the Work Teachers and
Learners Do Together Is Clear
Mandated skills and learning expectations
are identified to the class. Through collabora-
tive planning and implementation, students
engage and accomplish the mandates. In
addition, activities assist learners in discover-
ing the value and potential of the curriculum
and its connections to other disciplines.
The Role of the Teacher Is That of Facilitator and
Collaborator
Teachers are responsible for assessing and
attending to learners’ developmental needs,
providing guidance, identifying academic
givens, monitoring each learner’s academic
and social growth, and leading each into new
areas of understanding and competence.
The Work Is Characterized by Active Learning
Learners are thoughtfully engaged in the
learning process, posing and solving prob-
lems, making meaning, producing products,
and building understandings. Because learn-
ers engaged in these kinds of activities are
risk takers operating on the edge of their
competence, the classroom environment pro-
vides an atmosphere of trust where the con-
sequence of a mistake is the opportunity for
further learning.
Peer Teaching, Small Group Work, and Teamwork
Are All Consistent Features of Classroom Activities
Every learner is not only included, but
needed, and, in the end, each can identify her
or his specific stamp upon the effort.
There Is an Audience beyond the Teacher for
Learner Work
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, DEMOCRATIC PRAXIS, AND ADULTISM
It may be another individual, or a small
group, or the community, but it is an audi-
ence the learners want to serve or engage.
The audience, in turn, affirms the work is
important, needed, and worth doing.
New Activities Spiral Gracefully out of the Old,
Incorpo­rating Lessons Learned from Past
Experiences, Building on Skills and Understandings
That Can Now Be Amplified
Rather than completion of a study being
regarded as the conclusion of a series of
activities, it is regarded as the starting point
for a new series.
Reflection Is an Essential Activity That Takes Place
at Key Points Throughout the Work
Teachers and learners engage in conscious
and thoughtful consideration of the work and
the process. It is this reflective activity that
evokes insight and gives rise to revisions and
refinements.
Connections between the Classroom Work, the
Surrounding Communities, and the World beyond
the Community Are Clear
Course content is connected to the community
in which the learners live. Learners’ work will
‘bring home’ larger issues by identifying atti-
tudes about and illustrations and implications
of those issues in their home communities.
Imagination and Creativity Are Encouraged in the
Completion of Learning Activities
It is the learner’s freedom to express and
explore, to observe, investigate, and discover
activities that are the basis for aesthetic expe-
riences. These experiences provide a sense of
enjoyment and satisfaction and lead to deeper
understanding and an internal thirst for
knowledge.
The Work Teachers and Learners Do Together
Includes Rigorous, Ongoing Assessment and
Evaluation
Teachers and learners employ a variety of
strategies to demonstrate their mastery of
997
teaching and learning objectives (Smith,
2016: xv–xvii).
YOUTH PARTICIPATORY ACTION
RESEARCH AS ANTI-ADULTIST
EDUCATIONAL PRAXIS
As expressed in the opening section of this
chapter, for all the ways in which the critical
pedagogical tradition – inclusive of Highlander
and its Foxfire offshoot – provides a possible
educational foundation for a transformative
critique of adultist ideology and structure, as a
counter-form enclosed within the adultist
social order, critical pedagogy can still also
reproduce the political problem of defining
democratic agency primarily qua voice.
However, it is important to recognize the dia-
lectical and historical nature of critical peda-
gogy and so, even when forms of adultism
may be implicated as a hidden curriculum
within it, there is nothing essential to the
theory or practices of critical pedagogy as such
that demand it. The issue for this tradition
remains, then, as to how non-adultist forms of
education such as implied by theories of
empathic care (for example) can be respected
democratically as social partners by adultist
civic institutions (such as the government,
academia, and the education system gener-
ally). Critical pedagogy suggests that the very
imaginary (Lewis and Kahn, 2010) of such
respect is itself bounded by forces of oppres-
sion that lead us to characterize non-adultist
education as dialogical or as speaking back to
power (or for itself). The paradox of research
for non-adultist critical pedagogical praxis,
then, is that until the adultist social order has
achieved radical reconstruction of education
along very different political lines, critical
practitioners are compelled to speak about
non-adultist democratic educational practices
in the hope of raising their profile (i.e. their
voice) within the discourse of what constitutes
legitimate social learning and community-
based knowledge or authority. As such, much
998 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
of the description of these anti-adultist forms
of will itself re-implicate and re-inscribe
adultist ideology under present conditions. Yet,
again, for critical pedagogy this reproduction
of adultism is not necessary per se but rather a
meaningful symbol/symptom of the hegem-
onic norms that subjugated and oppositional
groups must navigate as agents who, by
embodying social alternatives, then potentially
produce new paradigmatic space for future
social action along more liberatory lines.
The tradition of critical pedagogy has thus
long recognized that it is an ontologically
complex research project that seeks to work
alternatively from and for the grassroots-as-
political subject(s) rather than from a class of
privileged experts whose work often objectifies
knowledge (and others) on behalf of univer-
sal standards of truth that disenfranchise/dis-
empower many (Kincheloe et al., 2011). In this
way, critical pedagogy is participatory action
research (PAR) that attempts to create inclusive
local communities of research in which knowl-
edge and power are democratically obtained
and distributed across community participants
in order to serve the community’s own desires
and demands as part of an active movement
for greater communal self-determination and
social empowerment (Hall, 1992; Park, 1992;
Udas, 1998; Ozer et al., 2010). Increasingly,
over the last two decades, critical pedagogical
researchers have overtly recognized the need
to challenge adultist methods, ideas, values,
and outcomes that can be involved in partici-
patory action research (Mirra et al., 2016) and
there has been a turn toward the research para-
digm of youth participatory action research
(YPAR) that ‘pushes PAR to include age as
an identifier that should not serve to deny the
legitimacy…for young people…to envision
the world as they desire it, and then to take
action to make these visions a reality’ (London,
2007: 407). As with community-based pro-
jects such as Foxfire, YPAR practitioners rou-
tinely find that youth can benefit through such
research by gaining skills such as civic and
institutional leadership, teamwork abilities,
academic literacies, political advocacy, and
community resolution/transformative peace-
building (Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, 2008;
Cammarota and Fine, 2010). In turn, it has been
found that these skills can help youth realize
greater self-respect, efficacy and confidence,
improved social networks, and intergenera-
tional community, as well as a more thorough-
going knowledge of structural inequalities
and responsibility for a wide variety of social
issues and the demand for their political action.
Moreover, traditionally adultist organizations
and communities have been shown to benefit
from YPAR too, as it can lead to stronger inter-
nal and external relationships (i.e. outreach),
forms of distributed leadership typical of learn-
ing communities, relevant curricula and types
of organizational culture, improved data gath-
ering and analysis on youth issues, and greater
actionability on the findings of youth-oriented
research (London et al., 2003). Indeed, for all
these reasons, it can be declared that YPAR now
constitutes a primary methodology for the un-
educational project of teaching and learning for
socio-ecological sustainability (Bellino, 2016;
Strong et al., 2016; Bellino and Adams, 2017).
Still, the anti-adultist implications of YPAR
continue to pose significant challenges for its
emancipatory realization within the prevail-
ing adultist culture and as a relatively nascent
educational paradigm YPAR maintains limi-
tations and can often generate contradictions
that remain the possible future foci of critical
action, even as it contributes to self-­realization
for young people. As an example of its limited
nature, to our earlier point, YPAR theorists
often continue to imagine that such practices
justly raise the silenced ‘voices’ of youth as a
community disenfranchised in/by adult insti-
tutions of civic power (Fox and Fine, 2013;
Wernick et al., 2014) and it is not uncommon to
read that YPAR generates ‘counter-­narratives’
or ‘counter-stories’ and testimonios by/of
youth to oppose the hegemonic imaginary of
them (especially those youth who may be fur-
ther targeted for oppression based on identities
related to, e.g. race, class, gender, sexual orien-
tation or ability) as either ‘at-risk’ or as a form
of ‘cultural deficit’ (Yang, 2009; Kirshner and
 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, DEMOCRATIC PRAXIS, AND ADULTISM
Pozzoboni, 2011; Tuck, 2012). In this man-
ner, even as it undeniably mobilizes youth to
enact social change, accounts of YPAR may
re-inscribe adultist conceptions of agency as
speech-centric. Another issue YPAR faces is
that because it is often conducted within the
educational system, community-based civic
organizations, and/or with academic partners,
it is absolutely rare that it occurs without the
centrally facilitative role of adult allies who
can help young people gain access to network
resources, advocate on their behalf to adultist
institutions, and even help catalyze youth into
organized research communities through ongo-
ing roles as critical facilitators. While such
allies certainly can empathically and carefully
bridge to the embodied experiences and lives
of non-adult research partners in methodologi-
cal ways, the nuanced and complex pressures
upon such allies (along with their central role)
can easily lead to privileging adultist norms and
aims in YPAR projects. In this vein, the litera-
ture on YPAR is replete with stories of the chal-
lenges of such work, by which it is generally
meant that youth conducting it have been per-
ceived as alternatively unmotivated, inconsist-
ent, undisciplined, cavalierly playful, or some
other negative characteristic suggesting that
they blocked a more thorough and serious criti-
cal pedagogical study. Indeed, this deficit view
of youth behavior and capabilities is one reason
that the focus of such work is often on youth
and not younger children still, who are more
rarely considered to be meaningful participa-
tory research partners (Langhout and Thomas,
2010). But we might ask: meaningful on whose
terms? And the answer is almost always the
adult ally’s own expectations and needs, or at
least the organization(s) to which they are con-
nected and to which they are subject. Therefore,
since YPAR works for change within adultist
spaces, it should be noted that this raises seri-
ous ethical issues for its practice – for while the
engagement and self-­ determinative participa-
tion of youth is promoted as an empowerment
in this way, it is also possible that such partici-
pation can greatly subject youth to surveillance,
exploitation, further subordination, and other
999
forms of increased vulnerability. Therefore,
great care must be taken by those who would
progressively seek to include children and
youth as democratic equals for educational and
civic change, for the very desire to include them
may itself serve adultist means and ends and in
fact further exclude the real lives and truths of
non-adults from being understood respectively.
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Presence and Resilience as
Resistance
Trying to change the world is dull, probably
futile work. Still, it could be something in
our human blueprint that drives us to do work
that makes things better. I teach graduate-
school preservice teachers: emergent educa-
tors, I call them. Every new term they appear,
so sure and certain they can make things
better. I have found it to be a source of opti-
mism that I try not to take for it granted, but
I forget not everyone has this to tap into,
especially when things seem even more grim
and upside down than ever before.
Here is what I tell them: you are on the
front lines, but better than that, because you
are not a pawn. You are integral to the struggle
for equity to reinvent itself; for the struggle
of the moral universe to arch towards justice.
You are the difference, in fact. And we need
you to go on to have long, flourishing careers.
Telling them this is meant to build them up
to endure the countless, stupid frustrations of
graduate school; and later to endure the inevi-
table heartbreak of teaching.
83
Ta n y a B r o w n M e r r i m a n
But, also, it’s true. The research bears
it out. This brings us to critical pedagogy.
Critical pedagogy is an approach to practice
that builds on a learner’s awareness of ineq-
uity and builds upon the individual and social
accountability to fix it. Critical pedagogy
connects classroom learning with context:
with lived experiences, histories and capital
that every student brings to the learning envi-
ronment. Worthwhile learning is that which
empowers students to transform their worlds.
Social reconstruction pushes critical peda-
gogy further by locating the struggle for
equity firmly in schools, with teachers and
learners at the front lines. Critical pedagogy
elevates the role of the teacher and pushes
against formulaic, teacher-proofed, boxed
curriculum. This presents two possibilities:
either teachers rise to the challenge and cre-
ate classrooms that empower students, their
families and their communities; or they con-
tinue to uphold the hegemonic systems of
belief and actions. And, either way, teachers
1004 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
are making a choice. There is no neutrality,
or just teaching your subject. The way to be
certain we are teaching for transformation is
through a theoretically informed practice that
builds on students’ assets and is continually
renewed through critical reflection and rein-
vention. In a critical pedagogy, the role of the
teacher is significantly different, because the
typical school structure isn’t built for this and
because a learning program based on question-
ing, thinking and challenging is not easy and it
requires considerably more time, attention and
thoughtfulness to implement and assess.
Much of the work in critical pedagogy
centers on African American children and
the impact of systemic racism in schools.
The work of universalizing this theoreti-
cal reserve is left to the recipients to figure
out. This is problematic for a number of rea-
sons; least of which is that presuming the
experience of one group can be swapped or
replaced by another is essentialist and, in its
own way, discriminatory. There is no sense
in doing the work of social justice education
if we are going to stop short of details that
really matter.
In the book Paulo Freire: A Critical
Encounter, Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo
warn against the ‘the problem of overgeneral-
izing oppression and liberation’ (Freire and
Macedo, 1993: 170).
Macedo invites Freire to explore this
dilemma in his own work, positing that
[t]he criticism leveled against your work, particu-
larly your position considering gender in Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, raises the issue that you univer-
salize oppression without appreciating the multi-
plicity of oppressive experiences that characterize
the live histories of individuals along race, gender,
ethnic, and religious lines. For this reason a critical
pedagogy must address the specificities of oppres-
sion so as to create the necessary structures for
liberation. (1993: 170)
Instead, I want to push beyond my own per-
sonal context as an African American mother,
teacher and woman, and position all of the
language of critical pedagogy (Critical
Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Culturally
Responsive Teaching, Social Reconstruction,
Social Justice Teaching, Multiculturalism)
under one umbrella of anti- oppression
teaching. I am relying on a definition of
oppression that focuses on resources, that
constructs oppression as
a situation in which one or more identifiable seg-
ments of the population in a social system system-
atically and successfully act over a prolonged
period of time to prevent another identifiable
segment, or segments, of the population from
attaining access to the scarce and valued resources
of that system. (Davis, 2002: 2)
This works because so much of the conversa-
tion about education is a conversation about
resources, and because the focus is on the
cause not the recipient, which ties in nicely
with the other claims in this essay. In this
model, Whiteness is general: a position of
power formed and protected through coloni-
alism, slavery, segregation and distribution of
resources, violence against marginalized
bodies, the criminal justice system and more;
and it is particular: the actual individuals that
are the public-school teachers in our
country.
In their discussion, Freire’s response to
Macedo is layered. He says that yes, it’s dif-
ficult to avoid a particular focus, but at the
same time ‘readers have some responsibil-
ity to place my work within its historical
and cultural context’. He also goes on to say
that the ‘specificities do not alter the analysis
of oppression and its relations’ (Freire and
Macedo, 1993: 170). We need only honor
this responsibility and do the work of making
the connections to apply the returns of one
inquiry to inform our work on another.
THE WORK OF FIXING RACISM
The work of fixing racism is not something we, as
people of color, have to do. We aren’t the problem.
We’re good.
Roxane Gay, in MariNaomi, 2015, Speak Up!:
A Graphic Account of Roxane Gay and Erica
Jong’s Uncomfortable Conversation
 PRESENCE AND RESILIENCE AS RESISTANCE
Black people can’t talk to white [sic] people about
race anymore. There’s really nothing left to say.
There are libraries full of books, interviews, essays,
lectures, and symposia. If people want to learn
about their own country and its history, it is not
incumbent on black [sic] people to talk to them
about it. It is not our responsibility to educate
them about it. Plus whenever white people want
to talk about race, they never want to talk about
themselves. There needs to be discussion among
people who think of themselves as white. They
need to unpack that language, that history, that
social position and see what it really offers them,
and what it takes away from them.
Steve Locke, 2011, ‘Why I Don’t
Want to Talk About Race’
That racism (or any -ism) is the domain of
the dominant culture, so undoing racism (or
the other -isms) is the work of the dominant
culture – an idea that should be writ large
across our history as a country. Yet, some-
how, this is a strangely unpopular and unex-
pected opinion. So much so, that finding
research and perspectives to support and
expand upon this idea is difficult. Over the
years I have found a number of strong voices
but from miscellaneous places that don’t
have much else to do with critical pedagogy,
or even schools.
People of color, of any marginalized group
for that matter, sit at the table day after day,
year after year, and strategize as to how we
can fix racism in our world. At some point, it
has to be the entire rest of the population that
accepts the work as their own, otherwise, it
will be just us at the table. At what point are
the oppressed just sitting around the table try-
ing to solve the same problems?
In order for things to actually change it
would be the dominant culture that has to
change. People of the dominant culture must
recognize the roles they play in this dynamic
and seek to undo it. Not just as an ally, which
still positions the struggle as ours, but as cen-
tral to the problem. This means acceptance
of the prison of hate they are locked in and
a genuine investment in their own liberation
from the role of the oppressor.
When there is a benefit to the rest of
the population, or what the Critical Race
1005
Theorists call a convergence of interests, then
the rest of the population will do the work
of learning, and changing their own personal
perspectives as well as dismantling the sys-
temic forces (which are ultimately populated
by people) that create and recreate racism
every day. Or, as Roxane Gay says, until then:
we’re good.
The first time I heard this stated in a definite
and exact way was in the 1994 documentary,
The Color of Fear.
The Color of Fear is the document of
eight men and the director, Lee Mun Wah,
over the course of a weekend in Ukiah,
California. These men, each representing four
of the major ethnic and racial groups from the
United States, tell their stories and explore
their own worldview when it comes to rac-
ism, ethnicity, family history and prejudices.
In a particularly uncomfortable, powerful
point in the movie, one of the players, Victor,
says: ‘The problem of racism is not POC’s
problem; we are the recipient of the problem’
(Lee et al., 2000).
And, that’s just it. As the recipient of the
problem, there are hard limits to what we can
do. Much of which, actually, we have already
done. Robert Jensen (2005) suggests that we
invert the race line equation of W. E. B. Du
Bois by turning the question around. ‘That
question should have been turned on to the
white people of his world. He should have
been asking them. White supremacy comes
out of their community, out of their world.
White people created a white supremacist
society, therefore, by definition, white people
are the root of the problem’.
This isn’t theoretical, it’s mathematical.
And yet I see little evidence that the national
conversation around race is framed this way.
At best, people from the dominant culture are
situated as allies. In war, allies are friends. They
stand alongside the enlisted. This is great, but
doesn’t create actual transformation. White
people should be the enlisted.
One of the most matter-of-fact, yet unex-
pected explanations of this reality comes
from a mom who is discussing integration
1006 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
in her community, Anytown America, in the
1950s in a documentary called Racism in
America. When questioned about the Myers
family integrating into their neighborhood,
and the resulting resistance:
‘Do you think the Myers family will affect property
values?’ asks the interviewer.
‘I don’t think the Myerses have anything to do
with property values decreasing or increasing. I
think this is purely a white [sic] problem, not a
negro problem. It is the feelings of the majority
group which will influence property values, not the
minority group’. (History News Network, 1950)
A small example, no doubt, but it’s also a
powerful bit of ethnography.
From here we get to move from the ordi-
nary to the really extraordinary: we can look
at the antiracist work of Albert Einstein to
categorically drive the point home. From
a noted friendship with Paul Robeson and
W. E. B. Du Bois, to speaking out against
the conviction of the Scottsboro Boys (nine
African American teenagers accused in
Alabama of raping two White American
women on a train in 1931) and becoming
a member of the NAACP, Einstein’s advo-
cacy is unapologetic and comprehensive. In
a 1946 commencement speech at Lincoln
University he issues accountability in no
uncertain terms:
There is separation of colored people from white
[sic] people in the United States. That separation is
not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of
white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.
(Einstein cited in Kincheloe et al., 1999: 140)
TAKING THE CURE
So, how do you get an entire nation who, as
described by Einstein in the 1946 Statement
on Racism and Civil Rights: ‘The Negro
Question’, suffers from a ‘fatal misconcep-
tion. [Whose] ancestors dragged these black
people from their homes by force; and in the
…quest for wealth and an easy life have been
ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded
into slavery’ (Einstein, 1946) to work towards
dismantling a system on which their lives
have been built? A system that forces them to
collude and maintain a legacy established by
generations before them?
First, diversity benefits everyone, and in
many respects, especially, the dominant cul-
ture. And this is especially true in schools. In
recent research the federal government found
something profound: ‘White student achieve-
ment in schools with the highest Black
student density did not differ from White stu-
dent achievement in schools with the lowest
density’ (Kamenetz, 2015).
Furthermore, ‘What the work tells us is
that when you have people from the social
majority in a diverse environment they
work harder and focus on the task more’. It
is explained that they think about problems
more broadly’ (Kamenetz, 2015); they are
more likely to back up their own opinions
and consider alternative points of view, rather
than assuming everyone thinks as they do.
This is, coincidentally, the heart of common
core. In fact it is aimed directly at the anchor
standards. For example, the Comprehension
and Collaboration Anchor Standard reads as
follows:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.SL.1
Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of
conversations and collaborations with diverse part-
ners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their
own clearly and persuasively. (Common Core State
Standards Initiative, 2018)
The benefits aren’t exclusively qualitative.
Buffalo, NY, after thoughtfully rebranding its
entire district as a response to the mandatory
busing regulations in the early 1980s, to
include ‘schools reflecting virtually every
philosophy in education, from the progres-
sive to the traditional’ (Winerip, 1985: 1),
saw a significant rise in test scores after the
schools were integrated. ‘Test scores are up.
While in 1976 the average Buffalo third
grader scored at the 45th percentile in
 PRESENCE AND RESILIENCE AS RESISTANCE
mathematics on the state pupil evaluation
test, the average score five years later was at
the 69th percentile’ (Winerip, 1985). Buffalo
is one example of many districts that made
these gains after deciding to see mandatory
busing as an opportunity, and integration as
an asset. Judge John T. Curtin of Federal
District Court, who was instrumental in
making some of these changes, said, ‘I’m
distressed by people who make statements
nationally that integration doesn’t work. It
does work. It’s plain wrong to say it won’t.
It’s worked in Buffalo’ (Winerip, 1985).
The practical benefits are compelling, but
there are reasons even more upright. The
extension of the premise that the work of
fixing racism falls to the dominant culture is
that they are equally bound to the contract.
Nelson Mandela argues this beautifully in
The Long Walk to Freedom:
The oppressor must be liberated just as surely as
the oppressed. A man who takes away another
man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked
behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-
mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away
someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not
free when my freedom is taken from me. The
oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of
their humanity. (Mandela, 1995: 535)
Indeed. Taking into consideration the com-
monly asked question, ‘How can I be respon-
sible for something that happened before I
was born, or for something that has nothing
to do with me?’, the answer can be that the
peculiar institution and the resulting peculiar
inequity that resulted are in many ways sys-
tems that no one asked to be a part of and that
limit all of us.
In 1959, journalist John Howard Griffin,
‘convinced that we were making little pro-
gress in resolving the terrible tragedy of
racism in America – a tragedy for the white
racist as well as for the Negro (and other)
victim groups’ (Wallechinsky, 1995: 316),
took on the perhaps extreme project of medi-
cally altering his skin tone to pass as Black
and make his way through the segregated
deep South. This bizarre act of surveillance
1007
resulted in his book Black Like Me (1996).
He stresses the dehumanization of all partici-
pants: ‘We led strange, hidden lives. We were
advocating only one thing: that this country
rid itself of the racism that prevented some
citizens from living as fully functioning men
and as a result dehumanized all men’ (Griffin,
1996: 171).
And, truly, I want to believe, and have
abundant evidence to show, that many White
people are also anxious to move on from
Whiteness. Especially the artificial position
that Whiteness has nothing to do with culture
and everything to do with social position. It
is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and
exists for no reason other than to preserve
it. If the motivation is the weariness of the
warden, the hope for changing the world, or
simply for the practical benefits, let’s get on
with our work of teaching and even restoring
humanity.
SCHOOLS AS THE LOCATION
OF POSSIBILITY
Amanda Lewis explains that
[r]ace is at play all the time inside and outside
of schools. It is part of what is happening in
our many daily interpersonal interactions. It is
one lens through which people read the world
around them and make decisions on how to
act, react and interact. The nature of the deci-
sions made in schools heightens this dynamic.
(2003: 300)
To the extent this is true for the other inter-
sections of identity – gender, religion, socio-
economic status – will depend on the context
that Paulo Frieire describe in his discussion
with Donaldo Macedo.
Lewis goes on to explain that ‘although
clearly not the only social institution
concerned, schools are involved in fram-
ing ideas about race and are at the center
of many struggles around racial equity’
(2003: 284).
1008 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Leila Villaverde (2004) draws possibilities
for a Critical Pedagogy Practice in her chap-
ter ‘Developing a Curriculum and Critical
Pedagogy’, pointing out the power in ‘seeing
learning everywhere’ (2004: 133). She adds
that ‘questioning is the core of a critical peda-
gogy’ (2004: 133) and that ‘teachers should
want students to be independent learners with
the skills for inquiry and autonomy’ (2004:
132). In fact, a critical pedagogy is born of a
critical pedagogy. The reflection and explo-
ration required to reinvent dominant culture
can only be fostered in a critical pedagogy
that can ‘analyze and expose the dominant
value systems that undergird the way knowl-
edge is defined and curricula are constructed
and tested’ (2004: 133). Establishing what she
describes as ‘individuality in a collective space’
(2004:133) is the optimal, rightful progression
of the same reflection and exploration.
Teachers are in an ideal position to play
this role, to attempt to get all the issues on the
table in order to initiate true dialogue.
Central to the definition of critical peda-
gogy is the tenet that there is no neutrality,
or, as Ira Shor states, ‘Education can either
develop or stifle their [students’] inclination
to ask what and to learn. A curriculum that
avoids questioning school and society is not,
as is commonly supposed, politically neutral.
It cuts off the students’ development as criti-
cal thinkers about their world’ (Shor, 1992:
12). Even math and science pedagogies, those
that are thought to be linear and objective, are
in fact context dependent and fraught. This
idea may require a more complex and layered
analysis, which is completely worthwhile,
since all students can afford more nuanced
support in these subjects, and these subjects
need to reflect the different perspectives and
impetuses that our students will bring to the
disciplines.
Angela Calabrese Barton (2003) explains
that ‘science ought to be about the transforma-
tion of one’s world or circumstances’ (2003:
32). Science classes that begin and build on
ways to use the science as a tool for explor-
ing and solving problems, higher incidences
of particular health issues in certain commu-
nities, for example, are spot-on examples of
critical pedagogy and transformative educa-
tion. School is not just a place to observe and
analyze these issues, but is, instead, at the
center of any possibility for change.
Joe Kincheloe and Peter McLaren (2000)
tell us
schools, as venues of hope, could become sites of
resistance and democratic possibility through con-
certed efforts among teachers and students to
work within a liberatory pedagogical framework.
Giroux (1988), in particular, maintained that
schools can become institutions where forms of
knowledge, values, and social relations are taught
for the purpose of educating young people for
critical empowerment rather than subjugation.
(2000: 281)
In Black Curriculum Orientation (1993), Bill
Watkins explains a Social Reconstruction
curriculum. Built around the missives of think-
ers like George Counts, Manning Marable and
W. E. B Du Bois and, later, tangential to criti-
cal pedagogy, Social Reconstruction views the
curriculum as a ‘tool to challenge and eventu-
ally change unjust economic, political and
social arrangements’ (Watkins, 1993: 332).
The notion that schools are the front lines of
change is not new, but it suggests a different
context, a different urgency and a different set
of possibilities for each generation of students
and teachers.
TEACHERS
All of this amounts to an urgent tension in
schools. Simply, the racial disposition of the
US teaching workforce in no way matches
the students that are being taught. Upwards
of 85% of the teachers in the United States
are White, while the 50% of students identi-
fied as White in 2012 is forecast to be closer
to 45% by the year 2024. What this means is
that, contrary to Malcom X’s fear that ‘only
a fool would let his enemy teach his children’
(O’Shea, 2012: 185), the education of
 PRESENCE AND RESILIENCE AS RESISTANCE
children of color is primarily in the hands of
White teachers.
What is the likelihood that this existing
teacher workforce can ensure what the Black
Panther Program described as ‘an educa-
tional system that will give to our people a
knowledge of the self’ (Newton and Seale,
1997: 249)? True contention with the reali-
ties and challenges of implementing a criti-
cal pedagogy must be wrestled with: ‘If you
do not have knowledge of yourself and your
position in the society and in the world, then
you will have little chance to know anything
else’ (Newton and Seale, 1997: 249).
And, once more, we should note the very
important role of the teacher. Schools are the
sites of resistance or subjugation, and teachers
are smack in the middle of the action. Hiding
behind the ignorance or apathy of just want-
ing to teach your subject is an act of subjuga-
tion, reinforcing, even bolstering the role of
schools as the primary creator and maintainer
of the belief systems, the prison, the disease.
So, who are our teachers and what is impor-
tant to them? Behind the numbers that would
tell us that the average teacher is a politically
conservative, middle-aged White woman, there
will be stories and exceptions. I remain opti-
mistic: for every student that I’ve had insist
that race was something they never noticed or
talked about, I have had several more students
that have not only contributed to but seriously
advanced and transformed our classes’ per-
spective on difference and activism, challenged
the corridors of power, and courageously
fought for equity for themselves and for others.
I can remember each time a student cried
in one of my classes, which hasn’t been that
many times. Given the sometimes difficult
and fraught nature of my subject, it could be
much worse. My students are generally of a
sturdy stock and one of the sturdiest, a young,
matter-of-fact preservice teacher, one day
had the realization that if she really wanted
to change minds and hearts when it comes to
race, maybe she should use her considerable
skills as a teacher and leader to talk with her
fellow White families and communities about
1009
not being racist. My response to her was,
absolutely; her reach would extend much
further if she worked in White schools and
her ability to influence and change minds
would be better optimized in a White school.
My sturdier student understood my response,
but another student, a young woman who had
recently made a career change to enroll in
graduate school and eventually teach, did not
understand my response, and she cried.
What were her goals? To save Black chil-
dren? To dismantle oppressive systems? How
much of her identity was caught up in this
undecided outcome? When asked, the major-
ity of teachers indicate that they believe much
of what’s happening in schools to be ineffec-
tive, and also name having the opportunity to
shape students’ academic and social lives and
‘working with students who face economic or
social disadvantages’ as their primary reasons
for going into and staying in the profession
(TNTP, 2013). This suggests that, overall, the
White women who make up the profession
are not adverse to openly taking on this role,
but the extent to which these goals are inter-
secting and this abstraction becomes a reality
remains to be seen. I want to be clear: I’m
not in any way suggesting that White women
don’t belong in our classrooms. I am person-
ally unsure of the usefulness or practicality
of the idea that they don’t. Investing in the
skills, space and time for these teachers to sit-
uate and analyze themselves as racial beings,
confront their own biases, critically reflect
upon and reinvent their practice is a more
realistic and sustainable solution that doesn’t
require marginalized families to opt out of
the compulsory education they are entitled to.
To be sure of due diligence, let’s review
some of the ways in which schools function
to maintain, uphold and replicate systems of
oppression:
• At the base of schooling was a set of concerns
which embodied a conservative ideology: we
must preserve our communities by teaching
the immigrants our values and adjusting them
to existing economic roles. In some historical
1010 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
instances, such as the Carlisle Indian School,
whose informal motto was Kill the Indian: Save
the Man, this ideology was taken to disturbing
extremes. Native children were given new names,
new language and were brutally punished should
they demonstrate any of the traditional Indian
ways. Children were taken to the boarding
schools under duress and if they were to become
sick and die from disease, which they frequently
did, the parents were not notified (Official Report
of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities
and Correction, 1892).
• Rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance encour-
age unquestioning nationalism: Bellamy’s pledge
advanced the goal of assimilation – written to, in
his words, ‘mobilize the masses to support pri-
mary American doctrines’ by warding off internal
enemies hostile to ‘true Americanism’ (Petrella,
2017: 1). The creation and proliferation of the
pledge, in part, served as a way to consolidate
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant American values
that the White mainstream perceived as under
siege. And, even if we agree to have our students
recite the pledge in our classrooms, what is not
acceptable is punishing or ostracizing a student
who chooses not to participate.
• Children of color, especially Black children, are
subject to higher suspension rates, police pres-
ence and zero-tolerance discipline policies (US
Government Accountability Office, 2018).
• A handful of publishers dominate the educational
resource and assessment industry. Curricular
programs furnished by the major publishing com-
panies are written to satisfy the mandates of the
religious right, particularly the Texan, conserva-
tive, religious right, which has heavy influence
and tricky and dubious ways of exercising control
over the nation’s curricular storyline. Certainly,
this sounds conspiratorial, but it isn’t. The Texas
textbook plot is well documented and every bit
as disturbing. Furthermore, the same resource
publishers are constantly being cited for issues
from odd linguistic choices to blatant mistakes
in their teaching and assessment materials that
readily play a large part in sustaining discrimina-
tory ideologies (Collins, 2012).
Generally, the question what can be done? is
in proximity to the question: how am I respon-
sible? I might find myself an outlier by con-
senting to do the work of trying to answer
these questions, but I am a teacher after all.
Doing so will require connection: ’Learning
surges from understanding the interrelated
nature of what we are studying and experienc-
ing what we know and what we don’t’
(Villaverde, 2004: 133). There is no instruc-
tion book, but, either way, the work of fixing
racism moves between the personal and the
systemic, starting with looking inward and
facing our own bias and worldview. After this
happens, much of the work will unfold on its
own. Contending with ourselves first is not a
guarantee that we can fight systemic inequity,
but that fight can’t happen until we do our
work first. This should be a foundation any
teaching practice and always in good faith:
‘… the teacher has the option to put a distinct
spin on content. The teacher’s passion, likes,
dislikes knowledge and experience come
through and the content is never neutral’
(Villaverde, 2004: 132).
Resist simple approaches that focus on
behaviors and seem to offer easy answers.
Resist the shortcut of expecting people of
color or other marginalized groups to help
you construct an analysis. First of all, no
one is born with a sophisticated study of
these questions. We have to do just as much
work as anyone. Beyond this, you have to
hold faith that most of the work happens in
process. This process is the basis of critical
reflection.
Critical reflection involves thinking and
problem solving. It is a process in which
capable individuals attempt to make sense of
a challenging situation by identifying areas of
potential growth. Next, goals for improvement
and actions to accomplish them are identified,
ideally in an exchange with the teaching com-
munity and with application of theory and
existing research on similar situations.
I had a chance to communicate with Victor
from The Color of Fear, and he reiterated
the importance of this process, adding that
the questioning is what leads to the perspec-
tives being made explicit: ‘What is the role
of Black agency? What is liberation? What
will it look like when achieved? What do we
do with “the oppressor”? What is the role of
 PRESENCE AND RESILIENCE AS RESISTANCE
“the oppressor” in liberation? What is the role
of solidarity? What is the new story? When
liberation is achieved, then what?’ Even the
most abstract or superlative line of questions
can help to sharpen our viewpoints and sur-
face the biases we might not know we hold
(Lee Lewis, 2017).
We have to reject traditional ideas of
meritocracy, deficit model approaches and
a color-blind view of race. In fact, we have
to reject approaches that erase or silence
any individual’s or group’s identity. And, if
we aren’t there yet, we have to build empa-
thy and make the space to consider different
perspectives as we build a reflective practice.
And with no reflection comes no growth.
Vital to this reflection being conducive
to growth and transformed practice, we also
need to be willing to get uncomfortable.
Inevitably, in dialogue with students, a story
of an attempted line of inquiry being inter-
rupted and derailed by a personal rejection
or hurt feelings will be shared with convic-
tion as a reason for turning back or stopping
altogether. Recently, a student of mine, a
White man who was doing his student teach-
ing in a high school with a large population
of Black students, wrote that he, too, was the
object of marginalization because a student
who didn’t know him told him that he proba-
bly voted for the Republican candidate in the
presidential race. He felt his frustration with
this situation justified his negative percep-
tion of the students he was responsible for.
In response to him I wrote that while he was
right to name the feelings of being judged or
even stereotyped, his feelings do not equal
a history of state-sanctioned systemic pow-
erlessness. In fact, were he able to distance
himself from his feelings, he may have been
able to see that this feeling of being judged
based on race and outward appearance was
likely mutual and could be used as a point
of connection and empathy with his student.
When I hear people describe how their hurt
feelings about being silenced, questioned or
scrutinized were a signpost for them to turn
around and even legitimize their bias, I want
1011
to shout that, for one as a person of color, I
can usually count on that being the default
emotional atmosphere and yet, every day, I
have to work through that and move forward.
In fact, there wasn’t any competing option.
Connecting again to the words of Victor Lee
Lewis, reflection and transformation requires
a kind of subjugation: ‘I’m not gonna trust
you until you’re willing to be changed and
affected and transformed by my experiences
as I am by yours every day’ (Lee et al., 2000).
Critical pedagogy requires authentic care.
The concept of authentic care interrogates the
idea of care in the classroom: who cares? What
is the nature of this care? Angela Valenzuela
(1999) defines authentic caring as a ‘reformu-
lation’ in which ‘school functionaries are to
embark on a search for connection where trust-
ing relationships constitute the cornerstone for
all learning’ (Valenzuela, 1999: 82). Aesthetic
caring focuses on institutional priorities: rules,
policies, procedures, and accountability and
compliance. The concerns of aesthetic caring
may be a reality; yet, when schools privilege
aesthetic caring over authentic caring, sub-
tractive schooling is the outcome (Valenzuela,
1999). When our schools are experienced as
adversarial, or even abusive, by the students
they are meant to serve, then the formalities of
the daily operations cease to matter.
Central to this exploration of care is the
understanding that ‘what looks to teachers
and administrators like opposition and lack
of caring, feels to students like powerless-
ness and alienation’ (Valenzuela, 1999: 94).
Not caring is a survival mechanism and ‘a
form of resistance, not to education, but
to the irrelevant, uncaring and controlling
aspects of schooling (Valenzuela, 1999: 94).
In fact, these students may come from fami-
lies and communities that have been failed by
schools for generations and, unlike the typi-
cal teacher, do not view school as a means
to advancement or enjoyment, but instead
a location of potential ‘cultural genocide’
in which success means ‘consenting to the
school’s project of cultural disparagement
and de-identification’ (Valenzuela, 1999: 94).
1012 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
It isn’t that these students and families don’t
care, in fact, much the opposite. They don’t
care about a system that defines them as the
problem while consistently disparaging and
disappointing them.
Valenzuela found significant difference
in how students and teachers perceived car-
ing. Teachers expected students to care about
school, including ideas and practices that
lead to compliance, while students expected
teachers to care about them. Having the space
and freedom to build these relationships is
another facet of a learning program that is
built around inquiry, empowerment and trans-
formation. While the cognitive demands of a
practice that can’t be downloaded, photocop-
ied or assessed through multiple choice are
tremendous, the affective demands are proba-
bly even more so. Changing and evolving our
perceptions, our values and responses entan-
gles an entirely different part of our souls.
This may be asking a lot, but it is integral
to being an excellent teacher because all
together ‘you have to like people of color –
you have to authentically like dark colors,
you have to love brown [people]’ (Bartolomé
and Trueba, 2000). bell hooks pushes this
further, arguing that ‘collectively, Black peo-
ple and our allies in struggle are empowered
when we practice self-love as a revolution-
ary intervention that undermines practices of
domination’ (hooks, 1995: 111).
And, truthfully, what most of us know is
that, ultimately, some things can’t be taught.
The most successful teacher training programs
can expose preservice teachers to every theory,
method and trick in the world of education, but
they still can’t study for authenticity and love.
Recognize and embrace that transformative
teaching is about both content and approach.
Leila Villaverde explains that ‘the teacher’s
passion, likes, dislikes, knowledge and
experience come through and content is never
neutral. Understanding this reality is part of
practicing a critical pedagogy’ (2004: 133).
From the moment you turn on your classroom
lights in the morning to the moment you drive
away from your school at the end of the day
you are making the choice to interrupt or to
maintain equity. We make the substantial
effort to curate content that is reflective of
our students or that can be filtered through
their perspective and lived experience. So, if
we are obligated to teach American History,
for example, we teach it through the lens of
their context and history. Intentionality is
everything, and as much as possible, we teach
for connection and synthesis, not coverage.
This connectivity is crucial for tapping into
student interest, and is, coincidentally, the
foundation of scaffolding and cognitive
development. We start with the skills and
concepts that the students hold as a point of
reference, of departure, and move from there.
Transforming content is as much about
what is included as what is left out. I recently
shared a Juneteenth activity with a group of
Social Studies preservice teachers. Not one
student in the entire group even knew about
Juneteenth and its historical significance.
This group is brilliant, motivated and capable,
and in every way, not to be faulted for what
was completely excluded from their own
educational narrative. If this is the case with
a group of highly aware and capable emer-
gent educators, then it is likely it is the same
for everyone. In fact, assuming that there are
significant holes in any written curriculum
should be our default. I am always realizing
and being made aware of new concepts, new
information and new strategies and, as teach-
ers, we should all be constantly reinventing
and rebuilding our material. This is central to
a reflective practice. It can be comforting to
realize that this is a common and shared space
[t]his self-examination is a lifelong process. We all
have areas of limited vision, particularly where we
are members of the dominant group. If we can
model open-ness to ongoing learning, our stu-
dents will benefit and we can be less judgmental
and more self-accepting when we make mistakes
or uncover new areas of ignorance or lack of
awareness, and not retreat from this difficult but
important work. (Bell et al., 1997: 302)
Critical pedagogy also requires that we prior-
itize the affective domain of learning as
 PRESENCE AND RESILIENCE AS RESISTANCE
much as the cognitive domain. While there is
considerable effort spent (even if superficially)
to build cognitive thinking in a typical school
academic program, the affective domain of
learning is generally overlooked. Concerned
with the awareness and growth in attitudes,
emotion and values, the affective domain is
often dismissed as the feeling domain. While
this is partly true, I think it’s a mistake to
neglect these skills. In fact, I would go farther
to say that we should prioritize these skills for
their intellectual impact on learning. When
attitudes are not connected then very little
beyond memorization will take place.
Paulo Freire explained the banking con-
cept of teaching as the ‘act of depositing, in
which the students are the depositories and
the teacher is the depositor’ (Freire, 2000: 72).
At the same time, he described the problem-
posing method of education. The problem-
posing education rejects the ‘vertical patterns
characteristic of banking education’ (2000:
80). Consciousness is spoken to directly in
the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives,
and is, in fact, described as a ‘major vari-
able’. The resource emphasizes the extent to
which it shapes our learning: ‘There is a high
level of consciousness in cognitive activity
at all stages’ (Krathwohl et al., 1956: 100).
Ultimately, the end is internalization of the
new perceptions. Freire, too, often speaks
directly to consciousness:
Those truly committed to liberation must reject the
banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a
concept of women and men as conscious beings,
and consciousness as consciousness intent upon
the world. They must abandon the educational
goal of deposit-making and replace it with the
posing of the problems of human beings in their
relations with the world. (Freire, 2000: 80)
Lastly, we have to contend with context, with
the reality that the racial, gender, religious,
ethnic and linguistic identities of the students
will shape how we convey a transformative
curriculum. This should go without saying,
yet the belief that culturally responsive peda-
gogy is only relevant for schools that serve a
predominantly minority population is so
1013
flawed and problematic, so oddly ingrained
and yet so much a part of the larger problem,
that it has to be spoken and, hopefully,
demolished. In 1969, Nathan Hare, the Chair
of San Francisco State’s pioneering Black
Studies Department, imagined a Black Power
Education Reform. This program, he
explained, should be offered to all students:
A racist society cannot be healed merely by solving
the problems of its black [sic] victims alone. The
black condition does not exist in a vacuum;
we cannot solve the problems of the black race
without solving the problems of the society which
produced and sustained the predicament of blacks.
At the same time we transform the black
community…white [sic] students may operate to
transform the white community and thus a racist
American society. (Hare, 1997: 164)
He goes on to explain that White scholars
would be needed to transform the White com-
munity because they ‘would be more attuned
to the white community and better able to
arrange the relevant field work experiences
there for white students’ (Hare, 1997: 164).
Lonnie Bunch is the founding director of
the Smithsonian National Museum of African
American History and Culture in Washington
DC. When undertaking the monumental task
of building this museum from the ground
up, he wanted to bring many different points
of view into contact and to tell the African
American Story, not as adjacent to the
American story, but instead as the American
story, in all of its complexity and brilliance.
In his words:
The defining experience of African-American life has
been the necessity of making a way out of no way,
of mustering the nimbleness, ingenuity and persever-
ance to establish a place in this society. That effort,
over the centuries, has shaped this nation’s history so
profoundly that, in many ways, African-American
history is the quintessential American history … If
you’re interested in American notions of freedom,
if you’re interested in the broadening of fairness,
opportunity and citizenship, then regardless of who
you are, this is your story, too. (Bunch, 2016: 1)
The African American experience, he says, ‘is
the lens through which we understand what it
is to be an American’ (Bunch, 2016:1).
1014 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
One of the most significant exhibits in the
museum is the casket of Emmett Till, who,
as a 14-year-old child, was brutally murdered
by a gang of men in Mississippi, because the
wife of one of the men untruthfully accused
Till of whistling at her.
Somehow, his mother, Mamie Till, was
astonishingly strong, and in the midst of her
greatest pain she had the foresight to think
about bearing witness to the world. She said,
leave the casket open; let the world see what
they did to my baby. Every major publica-
tion in the country printed the picture of his
tortured, broken body. This became a trigger
for the Civil Rights movement and, in fact,
when Rosa Parks was asked to relinquish her
seat on a bus sometime later, she thought of
Emmett and said no.
God told me, ‘I have taken one from you, but I will
give you thousands.’ This fight became her new
child. Everyone’s child. (Mosni, 2011)
In an oral history, Simeon Wright, one of the
cousins that Emmett was visiting that
summer, had this to say:
But it’s getting better. As each generation comes on
the scene, they see the injustices that have taken
place and they hear about Emmett, hopefully,
because a lot of the states are trying to bury that.
They don’t want that and the school system don’t
want it known to their children. They’re trying to
bury it. But, once they found out what happened
to Emmett Till in 1955, they are horrified. And they
promise and they make it their life legacy to bring
about a change. (Mosni, 2011)
With each new generation, Emmett’s death
takes on new meaning and calls us to new
action. As an educator, as a mother, this
story is so moving and important to me
because it reminds me that every day we
have to renew, bear witness and take
action. Our children, each child, deserve to
be more than metaphors and mechanisms
of change, though. And, ultimately, our
children need to leave school with the tools
to empower and transform so that they can
fix all of the many things that we have
broken in this world.
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African American Mothers
Theorizing Practice
The impact of cultural domination and ideo-
logical management from the devastation of
chattel slavery in the United States is still felt
in the lives of African Americans in the 21st
century. Schools remain polarizing and chal-
lenging places for Black and Brown students
because of the destructive nature of main-
stream education and the lasting effects of
racism on racialized populations (Darder
et al., 2017; Du Bois, 1903; Woodson, 1933).
To combat the oppressive forces of education
and the world in order to create lasting
change and educational equity, African
American mothers must propose alternate
ways of seeing both education and the world
in order to create lasting change and educa-
tional equity.
Critical pedagogy recognizes that ‘love is
the basis of an education that seeks justice,
equality, and genius’ (Kincheloe, 2008: 3);
thus, it is needed to visualize and actualize an
educational system in the United States that
seeks to recognizes the humanity of all stu-
dents and understands ‘how power shapes and
84
A p r i l Ya i s a R u f f i n - A d a m s
misshapes the pedagogical acts’ (Kincheloe,
2008: 4). Indeed, critical pedagogy ‘aspires
to link practices of schooling to democratic
principles of society and transformative
social action in the interest of oppressed com-
munities’ (Darder et al., 2017: 2).
African American mothers involved in their
children’s education enter schools reflect-
ing their space in society. African American
women throughout societal discourse are seen
as lazy, uneducated, hyper-sexed, illogical,
loud, and chaotic. These negative images of
African American women infiltrate schools,
influencing relationships between minority
mothers and educators. Educators often view
Black mothers as unruly and disruptive and
devalue their knowledge in favor of oppres-
sive educational policies and a curriculum
designed to ensure the marginal position of
African Americans in this country.
This chapter will highlight the ways
African American mothers theorize their
participation in their children’s education,
drawing on the voices and experiences of
 AFRICAN AMERICAN MOTHERS THEORIZING PRACTICE
African American mothers whose children
receive special education services to under-
stand how they struggle against oppression
and challenge negative beliefs about African
American families in schools. Drawing on
a theoretical framework that strives to dis-
mantle the power structures associated with
schools in the United States, the chapter will
disrupt notions of inhumanity that pervade
the education system based on cultural domi-
nation and ideology to overcome the politics
of containment.
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND AFRICAN
AMERICAN MOTHERS
Critical pedagogy is an emancipatory and
radical way of examining education. Indeed,
it encourages scholars to question how ‘his-
torical power makes particular practices
seem natural, as if they could be no other
way’ (Kincheloe, 2008: 2). The questioning
evoked by this type of reflection leads schol-
ars and activists to analyze the merits of
neutrality with suspicion. Therefore, critical
pedagogy ‘offers people who experience
subordination through an imposed assimila-
tion policy, a path to understand cultural
voice’ (Macedo in Freire, 2004: 12). Macedo
(2004) further states critical pedagogy is
rooted in lived experience, examines class to
understand oppression, and moves beyond
understanding race as monolithic.
For students of United States history,
critical pedagogy is a useful tool to compli-
cate the country’s educational system. For
instance, cultural domination was one of
the central reasons for the creation of the
United States’ public-school system in the
19th century (Spring, 2005). In fact, the cur-
riculum was intended to exclude and destroy
the cultures of Native American, immigrant,
and African American people. Schools were
used as sites of ideological management,
which refers to ‘the effect of political and
economic forces on the ideas disseminated
1017
to society’ (Spring, 2005: 4). The need for a
curriculum that asserts cultural domination
and ideological management exists because
racism is a central issue in United States his-
tory. From a critical pedagogical perspec-
tive, the censorship that took place and still
occurs in American schools is sophisticated
in nature and happens by omission or the
selective selection of acceptable bodies of
knowledge (Spring, 2005). According to
Kincheloe (2008), critical pedagogy suggests
and demands the radical Anglo-Americans
must be willing to learn from non-Anglo
people. This radical phenomenon occurs by
asking questions such as: ‘how does a world
that is unjust, by design, shape the classroom
and the relationship between the teacher and
the student’?
For African American women who are
a historically marginalized and oppressed
group, critical consciousness is gained by
theorizing. By critiquing power relationships
in schools, African American women begin
to restore humanity to how the lives of Black
families are viewed in academic literature.
As an African American woman, mother, and
scholar it is important for me to understand
my role as an ‘agent of knowledge’ (Collins,
1990). I see it as my job to challenge deficit-
based views of African American moth-
ers and children through my work in order
to ‘counter notions of normal spaces that
serve to subjugate African American women
and reinforce racism, classism, and sexism’
(Story, 2014). Thus, through my scholarship
mothering becomes a political act focused on
survival, power, and identity (Collins, 1990).
THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS
Black Feminist Theory
Black feminist theory is an epistemological
framework that accepts that Black women’s
distinct voice and viewpoint can be used to
explain their lived experience. According to
1018 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Brock (2017: 335), ‘Black feminist theory
understands the nexus of race, class, and
gender as controlling forces in Black women’s
struggles’. By placing the self-defined view-
point of African American women at the center
of analysis, Black feminist scholars recognize
the long-term and widely shared resistance among
African American women can only have been sus-
tained by an enduring and shared standpoint
among black [sic] women about the meaning of
oppression…like other subordinated groups,
African American women not only have developed
distinctive interpretations of black women’s
oppression, but have done so by using alternative
ways of producing and validating knowledge itself.
(Collins, 1990: 183)
Therefore, Black feminist theory emerges as
a catalyst for fundamental shifts in how we
understand oppression and injustice in the
United States (Villaverde, 2008). African
American mothers’ theorizing practice relies
on Black feminist theory to provide a lan-
guage of critique and a space for voice with
a self-defined Black women’s standpoint
(Collins, 1990; Brock, 2017).
Critical Race Theory (CRT)
in Education
CRT in education expands on the established
themes of CRT in the law by applying these
themes to analysis of education. According
to Lynn and Parker (2006):
Unlike previous studies of race and education that
were merely descriptive of racist acts, policies, cur-
riculum or teachers and administrators, they
(Ladson-Billings and Tate) helped to explain how a
critical analysis of racism in education could lead to
the development of new ways to think about the
failure of schools to properly educate minority
populations. (2006: 266–7)
Overall, CRT provides a needed perspective
for understanding the socio-historical signifi-
cance of race in the evaluation of educational
practices. CRT in education has three central
propositions: ‘(1) race is a significant factor of
the inequity in the United States, (2) American
society is based on property rights rather than
human rights, and (3) the intersection of race
and property can be used as a tool to under-
stand inequity’ (Ladson-Billings and Tate,
1995: 48).
Power
Foucault (1980) viewed power as one mecha-
nism used to objectify human beings and
bring order through their interactions with
each other. He states:
Power must be analyzed as something which circu-
lates, or rather as something which only functions in
the form of a chain. It is never localized here or
there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated
as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is
employed and exercised through a net-like organi-
zation. And not only do individuals circulate between
its threads; they are always in the position of simul-
taneously undergoing and exercising this power. In
other words, individuals are the vehicles of power,
not its points of application. (Foucault, 1980: 98)
Disciplinary power and surveillance in special
education are the mechanisms of control used
to perpetuate the politics of containment for
African American women and their children
and norms defined by White, middle-class,
cultural standards. Thus, special education
highlights the already entrenched notion of
‘otherness’ African American families feel
when they encounter many educational lead-
ers and teachers.
UNDERSTANDING THE POLITICS
OF CONTAINMENT
Building on Black feminist principles and
theorizing, Patricia Hill Collins (1998) the
new politics of containment theory describes
the intersection of racism and sexism from a
socio-historical perspective in the lives of
African American women and their children.
The politics of containment questions how the
‘changing patterns of the global economy, the
 AFRICAN AMERICAN MOTHERS THEORIZING PRACTICE
wholesale denial of deeply entrenched racial
practices in the United States, and the emer-
gence of a rhetoric of color blindness arguing
that institutionalized racism has disappeared’
undercuts claims from African American
women that racial and sexual discrimination
persist (Collins, 1998: 30–1). The emergence
of the rhetoric of colorblindness obscures the
workings of institutional power and chal-
lenges the notions of Black disadvantage due
to racial barriers. The imperceptible nature of
the new politics of containment makes its
exclusionary practices more detrimental to
African American mothers navigating the
special education decision-making process.
Strategies of containment are embedded
in American life and therefore are often dif-
ficult to identify and analyze. Delineation
of these strategies provides greater insight
into the ways African American women,
such as the African American mothers who
strive to advocate for their children in spe-
cial education, experience the complicated
and imperceptible racism, marginalization,
and disenfranchisement in the new color-
blind society. There are two key strategies of
control in the system of containment: racial
segregation and surveillance (Collins, 1998).
Racial segregation leads to ‘the division
of racial groups into physical and symbolic
spaces based on the belief that proximity
to the group deemed inferior will harm the
allegedly superior group’ (Collins, 1998:
280). According to Collins, although social
arrangements are different, social indica-
tors of African American women’s disad-
vantage remain remarkably unchanged in
contemporary American society. In spite of
the advancements of the women’s rights and
civil rights movements, African American
women have remained excluded from good
jobs, schools, and neighborhoods. Indeed, the
practice of de facto racial segregation is one
strategy of control illustrating the politics of
containment in contemporary society where
laws abolish such tactics. For instance, for-
mal desegregation in schools gave African
American women access to educational
1019
attainment; however, possessing the right to
be in a public space, such as schools, did not
necessarily translate into the right of equal
treatment in those public spaces (Collins,
1998). Further, special education and the sub-
sequent isolation inherent in it becomes an
issue of access, limited access to useful infor-
mation, knowledge, and curriculum for both
African American mothers and their children.
The second strategy of control, borrowed
from Foucault, refers to disciplinary power
techniques used to monitor, classify, and con-
trol individuals to render them easily super-
visable, efficient, and productive (Foucault,
1980; Jardine, 2010). In the new politics of
containment, Collins (1998: 281) describes
surveillance as the process ‘whereby people’s
words and actions are constantly watched and
recorded’. For example, low-income African
American women often experience blatant
forms of surveillance based on their involve-
ment in social welfare agencies. According
to Collins (1998), these agencies assume that
African American women are unable to func-
tion as adults, and the agencies impose a form
of social control to infantilize the partici-
pants. Involvement with social welfare agen-
cies makes it difficult for many poor African
American women to exercise substantive
citizenship rights because the participants are
already deeply involved in social institutions
designed to monitor their behavior, critique
their parenting, and further suppress their
knowledge. In education, surveillance can be
seen in the widespread use of standardized
testing (monitoring through examination); in
the use of grading to classify students and rank
students; and in the ways learning is broken
down into simple segments in order to control
what is learned and when it is learned. Foucault
(1980) described disciplinary power as per-
formed through surveillance; here he explains:
But in thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am
thinking of its capillary form of existence, the point
where power reaches into the very grain of individu-
als, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their
actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning
processes and everyday lives. (1980: 38–9)
1020 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Likewise, the special education decision-
making process can be described as yet
another form of disciplinary power used to
exploit the lives of African American women
and their children.
AFRICAN AMERICAN MOTHERS’
THEORIZING PRACTICE
The complex issues confronting African
American mothers’ special education decision-
making process are a result of a history of
dehumanization, marginalization, and isola-
tion in the United States that extends beyond
the educational system (Hilliard, 1992; Patton,
1998). Legally sanctioned social policies have
justified the exclusion of African American
people from educational access, and therefore
substantive citizenship rights (Collins, 1998;
Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995). Research on
African American mothers should combine an
awareness of institutionalized practices and
personal experiences with racism that contrib-
ute to their low participation in the special
education decision-making process. In addi-
tion, because of the dual minority status of
African American women, it is necessary to
combine theoretical frameworks to gain
deeper insight into their involvement in the
special education decision-making process.
Taken together, the theories presented here
merge to provide a comprehensive perspective
of African American women in educational
and community contexts. Further, the theories
address how the politics of containment works
to exclude the participants from the special
education decision-making process. The con-
ceptual framework of this research study
draws on Foucault’s (1980) theory of power,
critical race theory (Crenshaw, Gotanda,
Peller, and Thomas, 1995; Ladson-Billings
and Tate, 1995), and Black feminist theories
(Collins, 1990; hooks, 1984) to discuss how
the politics of containment impacts African
American mothers’ special education
­decision-making process. It is my assertion
that the merger of these theories sheds light on
the historical and contemporary issues con-
fronting African American mothers and their
children, thus is an essential element in the
historical, theoretical, and empirical goals of
this dissertation. Educators can use this frame-
work to improve school–family partnerships
to provide more equitable and just educational
opportunities for African American students.
I have identified four theoretical links to the
politics of containment and African American
mothers’ special education decision-making
process: voice and revisionist history, property
and citizenship, the politics of desegregation,
and surveillance and interest convergence.
These themes are central to understanding how
African American mothers theorize practice.
Voice and Revisionist History
The use of voice, storytelling, and revisionist
history to assist those with subjugated or sup-
pressed knowledge in naming, describing, and
defining their own reality is an important com-
ponent of the theoretical framework. Voice
takes on different functions in each theoretical
perspective, yet the central purpose is to allow
marginalized voices to address the oppression
and to share insights about social inequalities
(Collins, 1998; Dixson and Rousseau, 2005;
Few, 2007; Foucault, 1980). Foucault believed
that listening to the truths of people who are
marginalized would help bring freedom to
thoughts and actions. In his discussion of sub-
jugated knowledge, he explains:
They are a whole set of knowledges that have been
disqualified as inadequate to the task or insuffi-
ciently elaborated naïve languages, located low
down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level
of cognition or scientificity. I also believe that it is
through the re-emergence of these low-ranking
knowledges, of these local popular knowledges,
these disqualified knowledges, that criticism per-
forms its work. (Foucault, 1980: 82)
In order for criticism to do its work, it is the
duty of researchers to demand specific
descriptions of the actual, not the intended,
 AFRICAN AMERICAN MOTHERS THEORIZING PRACTICE
effects of power from those who experience
it. In order to get descriptions for his work
Foucault interviewed prisoners (jails), the
psychiatric patients (asylums), and delin-
quents (schools).
CRT combines the use of voice with coun-
terstory. Voice is used as evidential support of
the impact of legally supported racism on the
lives of people of color (DeCuir and Dixson,
2004). As Dixson and Rousseau (2005: 10)
explain, voice is ‘the assertion and acknowl-
edgement of the importance of the personal
and community experiences of people of
color as sources of knowledge’. The valu-
able knowledge gained from the experiences
of people of color is used to create counter-
stories. Matsuda gives meaning to the need
for counterstories in social science research,
using Black poverty as an example. She states:
The technique of imagining oneself black [sic] and
poor in some hypothetical world is less effective
than studying the actual experience of black pov-
erty and listening to those who have done so.
When notions of right and wrong, justice and
injustice, are examined not from an abstract posi-
tion of groups who have suffered through history,
moral relativism recedes and identifiable normative
priorities emerge. (Matsuda et al., 1993: 63)
Thus, critical race theorists combine voice
and counterstory to place marginalized
people of color at the center of scholarship to
shift commonly held and often incorrect
assumptions maintained in dominant dis-
course (Dixson and Rousseau, 2018).
Black feminist thought, from which the
politics of containment derives, uses voice
to describe the meaning of lives lived within
a culture of domination and oppression.
Collins (1990) writes:
Placing U.S. Black women’s experiences in the
center of analysis without privileging those experi-
ences shows how intersectional paradigms can be
especially important for rethinking the particular
matrix of domination that characterizes U.S. soci-
ety. Claims that systems of race, social class, gender,
and sexuality form mutually constructing features of
social organization foster a basic rethinking of U.S.
social institutions. (1990: 228)
1021
The use of voice places the decision-making
of African American mothers in context
because it gives the mothers the opportunity
to explain how their lives are impacted daily
by an educational system that views them as
undeserving and unworthy of participating in
their children’s educational decisions and
prefers they remain invisible in schools.
Power in Property and Citizenship
Central to Collins’s new politics of contain-
ment and CRT are the concepts of property
and citizenship. For African American
women, there is an intricate and historical
linkage between property rights and citizen-
ship. Female slaves were idealized as property
and producers of property (Collins, 1998),
once-emancipated African American women
became ‘property transformed to citizen’
(Ladson-Billings, 1999: 19). Unfortunately,
emancipation did not translate into substan-
tive (full) citizenship (Collins, 1998; Delgado
and Stefancic, 2017; Lynn, 2006). Despite
having been granted formal citizenship rights,
African Americans were not able to receive
the intangible benefits that Whiteness offers in
American society. Harris’s (1993) description
of ‘Whiteness a property’ exemplifies an
essential function of Whiteness as the absolute
right to exclude. Today through their involve-
ment in special education, African American
mothers and their children are excluded from
the general education setting, which in effect
often denies them many of the intrinsic privi-
leges of citizenship in the United States.
The relationship between property and
school funding exacerbates African American
mothers’ exclusion. Indeed, property own-
ership and school funding illustrates the
intersection of CRT and the politics of con-
tainment. An example of this is how educa-
tional funding, which is based on property
tax, is used to exclude and marginalize poor,
African American mothers. Because poor,
African American mothers often do not own
property and therefore do not pay property
1022 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
taxes, policymakers justify dilapidated build-
ings and lack of educational resources avail-
able in schools for the participants and their
children based on lack of funding, making
inequities representative of class not race.
Moreover, mothers involved in the special edu-
cation seldom possess the benefits bestowed
on property owners which provide them with
an authoritative voice in their children’s edu-
cational decisions (Rao, 2000). The decisions
African American mothers make on behalf of
their children will influence their children’s
ability to obtain substantive citizenship rights.
Consequently, special education is viewed as
a containment strategy that excludes African
American women and children from gaining
the knowledge and skills needed to participate
in a capitalist society.
Politics of Desegregation
Closely related to the property and citizenship
constructs is the issue of desegregation. African
American women and their children are rele-
gated to the position of outsiders through
sophisticated forms of racial segregation.
Social advancements after the civil rights era
produced a colorblind rhetoric and the denial
of entrenched racial discriminatory practices.
The overturning of de jure segregation, or
legally mandated segregation, which granted
African American women formal citizenship
rights for the first time in the country’s history,
created a new system of racial segregation that
works within formal American citizenship
laws and practices. Thus, current forms of
institutionalized racism are demonstrated in
the reality that many social institutions are still
segregated; despite this contradiction many
Whites believe racism and discrimination no
longer exist (Collins, 1998). CRT critiques
desegregation from the legal, political, and
historical perspective with particular emphasis
on the Brown v. Board of Education case of
1954 (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017; Dixson
and Rousseau, 2018; Ladson-Billings and
Tate, 1995; Lynn and Parker, 2006). CRT in
education scholars often revisit the prominent
case and examine the subsequent forms of de
facto segregation, socially occurring segrega-
tion, that have become institutionalized in
public schools through the existence of educa-
tional policy. Special education has been linked
to these new sophisticated forms of segrega-
tion (Artiles, 1998; Blanchett, 2006; Harry and
Klingner, 2006; Hilliard, 1992; Patton, 1998).
Racially biased assessments, reliance on a
medical model, and racially coded academic
discourse are used to substantiate the place-
ment of African American students, especially
African American males, in special education
(Collins, 1998; Harry and Klingner, 2006;
Ladson-Billings, 1999). The failure of African
American students to succeed in general edu-
cation classes reflects a failure to learn within
the identified racially neutral curriculum and
instruction (Ladson-Billings, 1999). The com-
monly held belief that curriculum assessments
are race neutral and objective, justifies the
classification of students who perform poorly
on tests. Therefore, performance on assess-
ments becomes a tool to substantiate the segre-
gation of African American students from
general education settings because scores are
seen as inevitable and scientifically based
(Collins, 1998; Delgado and Stefancic, 2017).
Surveillance and Interest
Convergence
As lower-income African American mothers
who are involved in the social welfare agen-
cies also enroll their children in public schools
they become ensconced in another institution
where they will be subjected to surveillance.
Black feminist notions of surveillance provide
a context for the meaning of the special educa-
tion decision-making process in the lives of
African American families: special education
places these families under scrutiny in schools.
Special education becomes a means of moni-
toring and evaluating African American moth-
ers’ parenting skills and becomes a method of
perpetuating deficit-based myths of Black
 AFRICAN AMERICAN MOTHERS THEORIZING PRACTICE
mothers in schools (Collins, 1998). Moreover,
special education serves as a means to track
African American children’s academic pro-
gress and illustrates the purpose of surveil-
lance in Western society and its effect as a
disciplinary act of power (Foucault, 1980).
The purpose of special education is to
improve the educational outcomes for stu-
dents; however, this often is not the case for
African American students in special educa-
tion. These students are disproportionately
represented in high-incidence categories of
learning disabled, mildly mentally retarded,
and emotionally and behaviorally disturbed.
The achievement gaps between students in
special education widen over time, making
special education ineffective and detrimental
to many African American students’ long-term
educational outcomes (Hilliard, 1992; Losen
and Orfield, 2002; Patton, 1998). Conversely,
special education provides White students
with access to opportunities and privileges not
available in the general education classroom
settings. Special education for these students
provides advantages that support their own-
ership of intellectual property. According to
Bell (2004), interest convergence covenants
‘are decisions in which black rights are rec-
ognized and protected when and only so long
as policymakers perceive that such advances
will further interests that are their [Whites’]
primary concern’ (2004: 49). Interest conver-
gence explains the historical role of special
education legislation that maintains the advan-
tage of White students while serving to further
disadvantage African American students. In
addition, by combining the constructs of inter-
est convergence and surveillance, we see how
special education suspends African American
women and their children in a place of travel-
ling while staying in place (Collins, 1998).
CONCLUSION
When African American mothers who are
struggling with their children’s educational
1023
choices recognize their knowledge, and the
power in their knowledge to be transformative,
they will tell their story. Indeed, it is imperative
for educators to understand that African
American women, and mothers in particular,
have the power to ‘perceive critically the way
they exist in the world in which they find them-
selves’ (Macedo, 2004). Hopefully, by sharing
their story African American mothers can
become the agents of change needed to disrupt
the oppressive system of education that exists,
and push education towards becoming a prac-
tice of freedom (Freire, 2004; hooks, 1994).
However, this is not the end of the story, as
Alice Walker proclaimed in her innovative
work, ‘In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens’:
But this is not the end of the story, for all the
young women – our mothers and grandmothers,
ourselves – have not perished in the wilderness.
And if we ask ourselves why, and search for and
find the answer, we will know beyond all efforts to
erase our minds, just exactly who, and what, we
Black American women are. (Walker, 1983: 403)
Though motherhood remains locked within a
reductive and imaginary prism of White suprem-
acy, hetero-normativity, and sexism (Story,
2014: 1), and images of Black women – mammy
and matriarch – are pervasive in the media, by
using a theoretical framework that provides a
revisioning and re-centering perspective of
African American women a new and brighter
understanding of Black families will emerge.
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Blanchett, Wanda J. “Disproportionate Representation
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2006, pp. 24–28.
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Deploying Critical Bricolage
as Activism
As ‘the beyond of qualitative work’ (Lather,
2016: 129) folds into the present, alternative
ways of understanding the relationships
between power, discourse, context, identity,
practice and performance emerge. Nascent
forms of qualitative research push and prod at
the boundaries of what counts as social science
research and what does not. These emergent
designs work to blur the delineations between
ontology and epistemology by destabilizing
traditional notions of the researcher as rational,
reasonable, reliable and emotionally discon-
nected from the object of inquiry. Spawning a
new breed of researcher, comfortable with
being uncomfortable, this form of research is
inextricably linked to the political forces, fluxes
and flows shifting and shaping communities.
Such dynamic and contingent understandings
of what counts as research allow for a complex-
ity of thinking that draws from feminist, critical
and socio-cultural schools of thought as well as
poststructural and postmodern ones – some-
times all at once. In this ‘plurality of fissions
and margins’ (Lather, 2016: 129), speech acts,
practices, micro-politics, gender performances,
85
Sherilyn Lennon
identities, feelings, discourses, experiences and
encounters all present as fair game for those
intent on knowing differently who we are, what
we do and who we are always becoming. In
this chapter I add to the growing corpus of new
empirical work by proposing a cycle of inquiry
for those wanting to do activist research from
inside their communities. Drawing from and
extending Kincheloe and Berry’s (2004) notion
of critical bricolage, this cycle works to con-
ceptualize community activism as research and
research as community activism. In the final
section of the chapter I demonstrate how the
cycle of inquiry might be used by applying it to
my own experiences of conducting insider
activist research around issues of gender in an
isolated rural Australian community.
WHAT IS CRITICAL BRICOLAGE?
The term critical bricolage describes an
essentially qualitative research approach that
strategically and creatively harnesses an
1026 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
array of methodological tools and theoretical
lenses in order to deepen understandings of
the world and promote the will to act
(Kincheloe and Berry, 2004; Kincheloe et al.,
2012). Kincheloe and McLaren (2005) hint
at the unsettling potential of critical bricolage
when they posit that
[b]ricoleurs attempt to remove knowledge produc-
tion and its benefits from the control of elite
groups. Such control consistently operates to rein-
force elite privilege while pushing marginalised
groups farther away from the centre of dominant
power. (2005: 318)
Grounded in social theory, critical theory and
philosophy (Steinberg, 2012), critical brico-
lage supports highly political research by
encouraging those who embrace it to do
more than identify and pontificate over prob-
lems from the ivory tower of academia.
Bricoleurs are prepared to get down and dirty
in communities where they situate them-
selves as provocateurs with the intention of
initiating responses from others in order to
allow deeper and deeper cultural understand-
ings to foment. This process has the capacity
for deepening self knowledge while also
working to challenge and disrupt practices
and performances that have become natural-
ized and/or taken-for-granted. Kincheloe and
McLaren (2005: 318) assert that a basic con-
cept of bricolage is ‘confrontation with dif-
ference’. Lather and Smithies (1997) and
Kincheloe (2002) have made potent use of this
multi-paradigmatic and multi-methodological
approach as evidenced in their highly
acclaimed publications documenting the
insidious ways that power works to include
some while excluding others. Troubling the
angels (Lather and Smithies, 1997) incorpo-
rates the moving stories of American women
infected with HIV and dying of AIDS, while
The Sign of the burger (Kincheloe, 2002)
examines the impact on others of the global
monopoly that is the McDonalds phenome-
non. Bricoleurs begin by positioning them-
selves through the telling of their own story
(Steinberg, 2012) before moving on to
trouble the status quo, seek out injustices and
make them transparent. Joyce and Tutela
(2006) espouse the benefits of bricolage for
researchers wanting to delve deeply into
‘complex splintered pieces of information’
(2006: 79). Kincheloe and McLaren (2005:
318) call bricoleurs ‘detectives of subjugated
insight’, while Kincheloe and Berry (2004)
cite the advantages of bricolage as a frame-
work for researchers who are looking for ‘a
practical way to construct a critical science
of complexity’ (2004: x).
Critical bricolage is founded in the prin-
ciples of ‘relationality, multiplicity, com-
plexity and, most importantly, criticality for
social action and justice’ (Berry, 2006: 113).
This means that practicing bricoleurs need to
demonstrate
[m]ultiple ways to collect, describe, construct, ana-
lyse and interpret the object of the research study;
and, finally, multiple ways to narrate (tell the story
about) the relationships, struggles, conflicts, and
complex world of the study that maintains the
integrity and reality of the subjects. (Berry, 2006: 90)
While the eclecticism embraced by bricolage
can falsely give the impression that the
research – perhaps even the researcher – is
superficial, ill disciplined and uninformed,
this is not the case. The job of the critical
bricoleur is to make sense of the complex
ways that power operates in specific contexts
to shape lives. The multiplicity of conceptual
and methodological tools that bricolage
makes available are purposefully and strate-
gically selected so that they might be put to
use excavating, making transparent, and irri-
tating power asymmetries. The researcher’s
actions are aimed at making visible and criti-
quing social inequities and the ideologies
embedded in them, thus reducing their capac-
ity to continue unchecked.
Berry (2006) cites as many as five research
models used by bricoleurs in attempting to
do this – theoretical bricolage, methodologi-
cal bricolage, interpretative bricolage, narra-
tive bricolage and political bricolage – but
warns against adopting hard and fast linear
 DEPLOYING CRITICAL BRICOLAGE AS ACTIVISM
approaches to research, claiming that this
can impede the interconnectivity and poten-
tial richness of the design. Instead, bricolage
operates as a counter to positivist and ration-
alist approaches that attempt to explain social
and cultural phenomena with objectivity and
from a distance. Bricoleurs need to pick an
eclectic but strategic path through a diversity
of theoretical and methodological approaches,
visiting and re-visiting them when necessary.
In this way they are able to transcend reduc-
tionist research designs that can be blinded
by monological lenses, pre-determined end
points and the sterility that often accompanies
more traditional research designs.
THE REFLEXIVE BRICOLEUR
An important feature of critical bricolage is
its use of researcher reflexivity. It is vital that
researchers be continually ‘reflecting criti-
cally on the self as researcher, the human as
instrument’ (Guba and Lincoln, 2005: 210)
as a means of forever and always coming-to-
know through the research process. This
might mean constantly checking for personal
biases: do I belong to a privileged or domi-
nant group? Do I need to rethink, reconstruct,
or re-negotiate my identity or interpretation
of the known world? Have I excluded voices
which need to be heard (Berry, 2006)? How
is my research affecting my life or the lives
of others (Lather, 1991; Lennon, 2016;
2017)? Researchers need to accept that they
cannot know how or where their research
will unfold, only that all those involved will
be affected in ways that cannot be predicted.
The role of the critical bricoleur is to iden-
tify, problematize and co-construct ‘percep-
tions of the world anew … in a manner that
undermines what appears natural, that opens
to question what appears obvious’ (Kincheloe
and McLaren, 2005: 321). This constant
questioning and unsettling creates research
that is, by nature, never-ending. Each new
find offers a fresh and varying interpretation
1027
of a particular lived experience which can
be critiqued, re-thought and re-shaped. The
evolving nature, constant digging, shifting
evidence, re-questioning and re-positioning
can make this research appear haphazard.
Lather (1991) defends the inherent messi-
ness of this type of research, claiming that,
‘while we need conceptual frames for pur-
poses of understanding, classifying research
and researchers into neatly segregated “para-
digms” or “traditions” does not reflect the
untidy realities of real scholars’ (1991: 11).
Steinberg (2012) argues that if a researcher
is looking for answers then bricolage is prob-
ably not a good choice. This is an intuitive
method rather than a positivist one. The
frustration of bricolage is that it often asks
more questions than it answers and it is
never truly finished. It has the capacity to
illuminate, problematize and make trans-
parent the cultural norms, ideologies, dis-
courses and practices being produced and
reproduced in communities, but it can leave
the researcher with a sense of incompletion
and a feeling that there is always more to do
(Steinberg, 2006). Serious challenges faced
by bricoleurs include how to avoid distort-
ing or exploiting others’ lives through the
re-telling of their stories or the questioning
of their belief systems (Lather, 1988, 1991;
Lennon, 2017); how to remain permanently
flexible, elastic and open at all times to alter-
native viewpoints, re-presentations and data-
gathering opportunities (Kincheloe and Berry,
2004) – despite being openly biased and pas-
sionately connected to the research; and how
to avoid replacing old inequities with new
ones (Lather, 1988; Lennon, 2017). Steinberg
(2006) captures the paradoxical nature of crit-
ical bricolage when she describes it as a ‘com-
plex collage’ (2006: 120) ‘which transcends
any one field’ (2006: 117). There is a certain
irony to critical bricolage in that it embraces
paradigmatic complexity as a means of under-
standing human complexity. Despite this, it
provides a very useful frame for uncovering
and transforming asymmetries of power that
reside – often invisibly – within communities,
1028 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
their social structures and their institutions.
However, Lather (1988) does issue a warn-
ing to researchers pursuing cultural transfor-
mations. She stresses the importance of not
supplanting old and harmful ideologies with
their own reifications. Instead she encour-
ages researchers to consider that they too
are ‘permanently partial’ (1988: 577) and
that these biases must be acknowledged by
the research. Like Freire (1971, 2000) and
Giroux (2001, 2003), she encourages a form
of researcher reflexivity that adopts a cycle of
self-sustaining critical reflection and analysis
when pursuing liberatory agendas.
EXTENDING KINCHELOE AND
BERRY’S INQUIRY PROCESS TO
EMBRACE COMMUNITY ACTIVISM
The research practices of the bricoleur are
deeply rooted in the tenets of poststructural-
ism, which argue that meaning – and all life
performances – are never natural or static but
continuously being inscribed and re-inscribed
by the cultural contexts in which they are
situated (Steinberg, 2006). While responsible
for driving the research act, bricoleurs may,
at times, need to distance themselves from it,
rising above the action to ask: how am I
influencing the lives of others? How is my
life being influenced by this research? What
am I learning about myself/the community/
the world? (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004).
Bricoleurs seek to understand, critique and
transform ‘the historical and social ways that
power operates to shape meaning and its
lived consequences’ (Kincheloe and Berry,
2004: 208). Researchers employing this
approach must become agile and adept con-
ceptual and methodological negotiators, cre-
atively and reflexively engaged in seeking
further clarification and new ways of know-
ing, critiquing and re-presenting their worlds
(Kincheloe and Berry, 2004).
The versions of reality that are col-
lected (sometimes provoked), analyzed and
syncretized from the community under
study build a text created by a passionate
scholar who is capable of eliciting passion-
ate responses from others: an individual who
is emotionally connected to – and empathetic
towards – the community s/he is seeking to
know and understand more deeply and the
cultural beliefs and practices s/he is commit-
ted to unsettling and transforming (Steinberg,
2006: 127; Lennon, 2015).
When seeking to understand complex
social issues and power structures, Kincheloe
and McLaren (2008) suggest that researchers
start by asking Who am I? before using this
to inform the What is? which in turn can be
used to inform the What should be? I would
like to extend this cycle of inquiry to incor-
porate activist research by adding What can
I do about it? and How do others see me as
a result of what I’ve done? before returning
again to the original question of Who am I
(now)? The addition of these three further
questions extends Kincheloe and McLaren’s
original inquiry questions to create a feed-
back loop that is potentially never ending.
The final three questions of the extended
cycle (What can I do about it? How do oth-
ers see me as a result of what I’ve done? and
Who am I [now]?) promote researcher inter-
vention and reflexivity while acknowledging
the multiple and shifting positionalities of
the researcher throughout the course of the
research cycle. These extra questions encour-
age political and/or public acts of disruption
and by doing so extend critical bricolage
beyond phenomenological and hermeneuti-
cal understandings to garner emancipatory
ones. Figure 85.1 captures this evolving cycle
of ongoing questioning and its capacity for
deepening understandings, interrupting the
status quo, realigning power asymmetries
and extending personal learnings.
The six questions making up the extended
feedback loop which create the cycle of
inquiry show how a merger of four theo-
retical paradigms – incorporating poststruc-
turalist, feminist, critical and socio-cultural
understandings – can work to guide an
 DEPLOYING CRITICAL BRICOLAGE AS ACTIVISM
Figure 85.1 The cycle of inquiry extending the bricolage to incorporate community activism
ongoing cycle of inquiry, intervention and
self-­
discovery. Using this cycle to guide
the research process acknowledges that the
researcher is forever being inscribed and re-
inscribed through the research process and
through others. The cycle of inquiry allows
the researcher to conceptually blend and blur,
focus and re-focus, question and re-question,
discover and re-discover. The result is research
that is self-generating, organic and never end-
ing. It is living research, deeply rooted in, and
influenced by, its shifting cultural context and
the ongoing actions of those within it. It has the
capacity to continue unfolding long after the
research proper has ended.
APPLYING THE CYCLE OF INQUIRY
TO CONTEXT: MY STORY OF
COMMUNITY ACTIVISM
In this section I demonstrate how the cycle of
inquiry introduced in the previous section
might be understood as a framework for com-
munity activism. In doing so I align it with my
1029
own journey of insider activist research within
an isolated rural community in Western
Queensland (see Lennon, 2015).
Who Am I and What Is?
The community in which I conducted my activ-
ist research was located 400 kilometres west of
the State’s capital city. Here it was surrounded
by some of the most fertile and sought-after
agricultural land in Australia. It had been my
first and only teaching position, the place
where I had met and married my partner – a
local farmer – raised my three children and
worked as an English Head of Department at
the local high school for over a quarter of a
century. My extended period of time in this
community had allowed me to develop many
personal and professional relationships with
others including other parents, work colleagues,
farm workers and my husband’s extended
family – many of whom had been living in the
district for five generations. I had a deep knowl-
edge of how things were and how things were
meant to be. I understood my position as a
1030 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
White woman of relative privilege but a woman
nonetheless. Normalized for me was the enact-
ment of White male control of the public
sphere, finances and property ownership. In
contrast, I understood females as performing
roles that incorporated domestic servitude,
primary care giving and cultural gatekeeping.
Over my many years of teaching at the
local high school I had also come to under-
stand that it was normal for boys to perform
poorly at school and that their life successes
would come later. Research that I conducted
as part of my doctoral study flagged that a
divergence in many boys’ and girls’ academic
performances began at the age of eight and
continued to widen throughout their school-
ing lives. While girls as a statistical cohort
consistently performed better at school, this
all changed once school finished. Upon grad-
uating, many of the boys would obtain local
apprenticeships with considerable future
earning potential. Of the girls who remained
in the community, most were relegated to
lower-status – and less well-paid – trainee-
ships. These findings unsettled me and led
me to look beyond the school gates to inves-
tigate further. More troubling still was evi-
dence that I started to collect from articles in
the local newspaper, semi-structured inter-
views and incidental encounters with com-
munity members. These data sources began
to illuminate the toxic ways in which hegem-
onic masculinity was manifesting in my com-
munity. I found evidence of practices steeped
in misogyny and homophobia manifesting as
physical violence, sexual assault, intimida-
tion, harassment, financial and civic control,
high risk behavior, exclusionary practices,
packing, predation and a sense of White male
entitlement (Lennon, 2015, 2017). In one
memorable interview a woman told me of her
experience of being sexually assaulted one
night after two members of the local rugby
club broke into her home. After the assault
she felt that she was not in a position to press
charges because her attacker was from ‘such
a well-to-do family in town’. In another
interview a young female teacher recounted
her story of the night a group of intoxicated
Year 12 boys stood outside her teachers’
accommodation demanding that she come
outside because ‘we want to fuck you’. In
yet another interview a local health worker
told me of a group of high-school boys who
had filmed, and then circulated, footage of
an explicit sexual encounter between them-
selves and a 16-year-old girl. In the aftermath
of the incident, when parents and authori-
ties had become involved, the parents alleg-
edly excused their sons’ behaviour with the
defence, ‘Well what do you expect? Boys
will be boys … and she was a female from,
well, not the most desirable social class …
therefore it really didn’t matter’.
One of the things that I found most trou-
bling about stories such as these was how
complicit many of us who lived in the com-
munity were in unwittingly sanctioning hier-
archical gender regimes and practices that
led to the subjugation of females – or the
feminine – while endorsing a sense of White
male entitlement. This complicity took many
forms including excusing male harassment
as harmless or a joke, normalizing the pre-
dation and/or objectifying of females and
conflating biological sex with gender (‘Boys
will be boys’). Cultural myopia had allowed
hypermasculine beliefs and practices to seed
and take root to such an extent that they were
now largely invisible. The consequences of
this invisibility were limiting for all of us who
lived here. With this burgeoning knowledge
came an unsettling feeling accompanied by
a different way of being in and seeing my
community. These increased understandings
worked to reposition both my research and
me. What began as an interpretivist study had
gradually morphed into an activist one fueled
by a researcher on an emancipatory quest.
What Could or Should Be and
What Can I Do About It?
The capacity to make visible what has been
invisible for the purposes of transformative
 DEPLOYING CRITICAL BRICOLAGE AS ACTIVISM
Figure 85.2 A particularly troubling and well-known local image
thinking, social action and self-transcendence
is a central principle of critical pedagogy.
Critical pedagogy is most commonly associ-
ated with educational settings where it seeks
to challenge the status quo by promoting
educators as transformative, classrooms as
political and students as agentic (see Freire,
2000; Giroux, 1983, 2007, 2015; Kincheloe,
2007). It advocates for classroom spaces that
are democratic but uncomfortable, produc-
tive but unpredictable, and supportive but
risky. In these spaces ‘pedagogy goes beyond
providing the conditions for the simple acts
of knowing and understanding and includes
the cultivation of the very power of self-­
definition and critical agency’ (Giroux, 2007:
3). Giroux (2015) encourages educators using
critical pedagogy approaches to heighten
students’ engagement in their learning by
connecting it to their lifeworlds:
Any viable approach to critical pedagogy suggests
taking seriously those maps of meaning, affective
investments and sedimented desires that enable
students to connect their own lives and everyday
experiences to what they learn. (Giroux, 2015: 19)
I wanted to take these understandings and see
if I could use them to ignite a shift in thinking
and practices across an entire community.
This desire led me to act in ways that were
1031
deliberately disruptive of local gender beliefs
and practices that I believed to be limiting
community members’ lives – including my
own. In my emancipatory quest for social
justice, I turned to the platform provided by
the local newspaper. Here I wrote and pub-
lished a letter to the editor problematizing,
what I considered to be, a particularly toxic
gender message being broadcast to local
youth in the form of a logo (as displayed in
Figure 85.2) marketing an annual social event.
My umbrage at the implicit gender messages
in the logo suggesting how male and female
roles and relationships were to be enacted on
the night compelled me to act. In re-positioning
myself as a community activist, my researcher
identity and conceptual framing had signifi-
cantly shifted.
How Do Others See Me as a
Result of What I’ve Done?
My public critique of the logo (Figure 85.3)
generated many responses. These included –
but were not limited to – my mailbox being
defaced with stickers of the logo, messages of
support and complaint being left on my
answering machine, admonishing emails from
community leaders, the creation of a public
1032 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Figure 85.3 My public critique of the logo
blog devoted to the topic of the appropriate-
ness or otherwise of the image, whispered
conversations supporting my stance and
complete silence on the matter from some.
Over a six-month period, my propitious act
resulted in me being publicly branded a
‘nihilist’, ‘alarmist’, ‘absurd’, ‘confronting’,
‘old fashioned’, ‘a bit slow in my uptake’,
‘politically correct’, ‘humourless’, ‘out of
control’ and ‘ridiculous in the extreme’. In
that same period of time I was also con-
structed as ‘brave’, ‘empathetic’, ‘respect-
ful’, ‘responsible’, ‘so right’ and informed
that ‘this district needs more women like
you’. I received comments such as, ‘To be
honest I’d never noticed it until Sherilyn
pointed it out’ and ‘Your article was the first
time I had been made to notice the logo’.
These words and comments stuck to me and
became embodied in my own and others’
feelings and actions. Ahmed (2004: 88)
writes of words as objects that have a ‘sticki-
ness’ about them. In this way they can stick
to bodies where they work to re/preconfigure
our actions, practices, feelings and futures.
Over days, weeks and months more and more
words were produced and got stuck. They
came in the form of multiple letters to the
editor, full-page articles in two different
newspapers, an editorial, a communal blog, a
series of opinion pieces, vociferous debates
and incidental discussions in bars and coffee
shops and on street corners. Some words
were used to condemn my stance; others to
support it. I had set out to make an invisible
artefact of power and culture visible
(Kincheloe and Berry, 2004) and comments
like these confirmed that I was indeed having
an effect – not least of all upon myself.
Despite the unsettling caused by my public
critiquing of the logo, I found succour in the
knowledge that there were many in the com-
munity who now saw the logo differently.
Dialogic spaces questioning gender norms
had opened up within and across the com-
munity. These took the form of public let-
ters to the editor, newspaper articles devoted
to the topic, community blogs, dinner party
debates, whispered conversations and,
occasionally, acts of emancipation. In one
instance a public offer of $500 was made by
a local farming family to anyone who would
 DEPLOYING CRITICAL BRICOLAGE AS ACTIVISM
design a new logo. In another a sponsor
informed me that she had withdrawn funding
from a local organization because it was using
sexist humour to promote its brand. She went
on to explain that my actions had also given
her the strength to act. This confirmed for me
that the disruption process I had begun was
indeed harnessing collective agency within
and across the community. It is impossible
to document or be certain of every instance
of unsettling, rethinking, or transformative
action that occurred – or will occur – as a con-
sequence of my unsettling but, suffice to say,
it has and will continue. While still in use at
time of writing, the logo and its phallocentric
message of White male entitlement no longer
reposes innocently and invisibly within the
cultural landscape. Tom, a local business-
man whom I interviewed in the course of my
research, articulates why it is vital for com-
munities’ futures that they have people who
are willing to challenge toxic constructs and
their manifestations into practice:
I think it’s great that we raise these issues in a com-
munity. A community needs to think about these
sorts of issues and unless you’ve got people brave
enough to raise them then it’s never part of the
debate. I think sometimes we need to reflect on
our values and the things that we do in a com-
munity and for that reason I think it’s important
that these various issues are raised.
Who Am I (Now)?
About two years into my study I found myself
so completely entangled in the human politics
of the research site that it became an ethical
dilemma for me to pretend that I was some-
how always in control, always rational and
disaffected from the feelings I was feeling or
the encounters I was having. I turned to the
keeping of a journal as a way of capturing and
writing through my experiences. This became
my way of documenting and critically reflect-
ing on the shift in researcher positionality that
was occurring as a consequence of my activ-
ism. The following entry gives a window into/
warning of the consequences for those who
1033
would challenge the dominant social order
from the inside.
I have come to the crossroads. My study is all but
over and it is time to start making life decisions.
With what can I live and with what can I not live? If
I were to leave, where would I go? If I stay, will I
ever be able to truly reconnect with this commu-
nity? In learning about myself I have learned that I
don’t necessarily fit where – or how – I thought I
did. I know that it is impossible to go back – to
unlearn – and I know that I would not want to, but
can I find – or make – a space in this community
where I feel comfortable again? Where I do fit?
Where I want to be? Or is it too late? Do I know too
much?…. I find I am making more and more trips
to the city: finding reasons to leave my community
– my home – more and more often…. My husband
tells me my study has changed me. He is right. I
have grown. Become more politically literate, more
intense, more attuned to seeing and exposing injus-
tices, demanding change…. And I am not alone.
Some of my female friends are also feeling it.
Making comments. Have I infected them with my
malcontent? Complicated their lives as well? Turned
them into outsiders in their own community? I
know I am responsible for starting a ripple of dis-
satisfaction; a desire for change. Have I betrayed my
community, or enriched it? There is a bittersweet
irony in knowing that I began my research journey
because of my unwavering passion for, and com-
mitment to, this community and its students, and
here I am ending it by wondering whether I even
belong here anymore. For the first time in my life I
am considering alternatives; imagining different
futures in other places…. I am a different person to
that which I was at the beginning of this study.
THE RISKS AND REWARDS OF
COMMUNITY ACTIVISM
It is apparent from this entry that the doing of
the research has resulted in a profound shift
in my knowing and being in the world. This
mind/body rupture can be witnessed in the
continual questioning of who I am, what I have
learned, where I now fit and how my research
has impacted on others’ lives. The entry reveals
the potential price to be paid for pursuing com-
munity activism; a price that includes both
cultural exile and social displacement. Bettez
(2015: 936) claims that emerging forms of
1034 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
qualitative research are capable of being
‘simultaneously chaotic, gut-wrenching, per-
plexing, revealing, and exhilarating’, while
Ahmed wisely counsels that, ‘[I]n order to
move away from attachments that are hurtful,
we must first bring them into the realm of
political action….the past lives in the very
wounds that remain open in the present’
(2004: 33).
While I cannot seal my wounds by undo-
ing my actions or my words – nor would I
want to – it is patently clear that insider
activist work is not easy or risk free. Unlike
the cold, neutral and rational research con-
ducted by a dispassionate scholar, it is hot-
blooded research that has the potential to be
socially transformative but also unsettling
and uncomfortable for many – including the
researcher. Community activism is informed
by a fundamental belief that there are more
risks involved in idly waiting for the shift-
ing forces of culture, history and economy to
more equitably re-align power asymmetries
than there are in seeking intervention oneself.
In setting out to excavate and unsettle social
injustices and the power asymmetries inher-
ent to them, it is inevitable that there will be
prickly moments. Despite this, Kincheloe and
McLaren (2008) encourage such approaches,
claiming that it is necessary for the ‘revi-
talisation and revivification’ (2008: 417)
of communities. While unpredictable and
risky, making transparent and disrupting how
power works within and across communities
is important work that has the potential to
enrich the lives of all it touches.
By using a cycle of inquiry to extend
Kincheloe and Berry’s concept of critical
bricolage, this chapter has been able to
reconceptualize community activism as
research via research as community activism.
The strength of the approach I suggest
lies not in its ability to be replicated and
re-administered to other communities. All
contexts and communities are complex and
idiosyncratic and standardizing research that
seeks to perform social transformations is
simply not possible. It is one of the reasons why
‘learning the bricolage is a lifelong process’
(Kincheloe and Berry, 2004: 31–2). Different
researchers in different contexts will need to
consider different theoretical compositions,
different disruption processes, different tools
of inquiry and/or different entry points than
those outlined in this chapter. Instead, on
offer here is a way of conceptualizing and
thinking through a process for performing
research with transformative intent. As with
bricolage, the proposed process purposefully
and strategically draws from an array of
conceptual tools, tenets and techniques to
support a never-ending cycle of inquiry
for understanding and challenging life-
limiting beliefs and practices from inside
communities. While community activism
might be complex and fraught with risk, what
journeys of (self)discovery are not.
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New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Critical Community Education:
The Case of Love Stings
Annette Cobur n and David Wallace
INTRODUCTION
Community Education is a discrete profes-
sional discipline that reaches beyond tradi-
tional forms of schooling and college
education in order to facilitate the generation
of knowledge and action for change among
communities that are impacted by inequality
and injustice. The Scottish Standards Council
for this professional practice, which is also
known as Community Learning and
Development, identifies our aim as being to
‘support social change and social justice [by]
challenging discrimination and its conse-
quences and working with individuals and
communities to shape learning and develop-
ment activities that enhance quality of life and
sphere of influence’ (Community Learning
and Development Standards Council, 2017).
Critical community educators work with,
not for, communities so that they can learn
together in purposefully developing educa-
tional praxis that challenges, changes and
eradicates barriers to a socially just and good
86
life for all (Wallace and Coburn, 2018). Our
analysis of community education as critical
is grounded in characteristics for pedagogy
that engages learners as actors in their social
or political contexts, where learning is col-
laborative, dialogical, informal and problem-
posing (Coburn and Gormally, 2017; Coburn
and Wallace, 2011; Martin, 2008; Wallace
and Coburn, 2018). Critical community edu-
cation is aligned with Freirean pedagogy in
its aspirations for practice that seeks to estab-
lish ‘a critical relationship between pedagogy
and politics, highlighting the political aspects
of the pedagogical and drawing attention to
the implicit and explicit domain of the peda-
gogical inscribed in the political’ (McLaren,
2005: xxxvii).
Organised through practice domains of adult
education, community development and youth
work, Community Education and its incarna-
tion as Community Learning and Development
is enacted in communities across Scotland,
where ‘the focus of the work is always a value
laden, social and moral activity’ (Coburn and
 CRITICAL COMMUNITY EDUCATION: THE CASE OF LOVE STINGS
Gormally, 2017: 15). Community Education
across the world (Brennan and Curtis, 2015;
Burke, 2004; Wischmann, 2015) is charac-
terised by this social and democratic pur-
pose (Wallace, 2017). Developing critical
consciousness in the context of collaborative
activity in communities helps to create new
knowledge and understanding of the world,
underpinning praxis and community devel-
opment (Wallace, 2017). In this way, critical
community education serves its purpose most
effectively when challenging contemporary
orthodoxies (cultural hegemony) that lead to
alternative readings and understandings of
how things are so that they might be changed
(counter hegemony).
It is these principles that underpin our
analysis of a public health education project
for young people called Love Stings (Coburn
and Wallace, 2009). Drawing on empirical
research, involving 66 young participants
who were identified as ‘vulnerable to exclu-
sion’, our evaluation of a community-based
youth health initiative considered how youth
work, practised as critical pedagogy, created
possibilities for boundary crossing and inter-
professional practices (Coburn and Wallace,
2011). This amplified claims in the National
Youth Work Strategy, which suggested youth
services ‘play a vital role in improving the
life chances of young people…working col-
laboratively…[to]…ensure that Scotland
continues to be at the forefront globally of
innovative work with young people’ (Scottish
Government, 2014: 18). This strategy empha-
sised that, working across professional
disciplines, youth workers offer joined-up
services that enable young people to make
informed health choices and to enhance their
capacity to flourish. Findings suggested that,
where young people had experienced nega-
tive relationships in school, family and medi-
cal environments, youth work was effective
in challenging problematic health behaviours
and in contributing to the shifting from naive
consciousness among participants and mov-
ing to more critical awareness and action
(Freire, 1996).
1037
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
The capability of young people to be free and
to live a good life is impacted by dominant
social and cultural discourses and political ide-
ologies (Giroux, 2011). Young people, particu-
larly in impoverished, Black and working-class
communities, have been subjected to multiple
discrimination and prejudice. A negative dis-
course reinforced by powerful media interests
routinely constructs their behaviour as anti-
social, contributing to a process of exclusion or
marginalisation from mainstream society.
Youth work practices seek to subvert these
pathologies about young people in the interest
of social justice since they impinge on the
rights and limit the capabilities of young people
to grow as active citizens in their own right.
Freire (1996) suggests the concept of margin-
alisation as ‘paternalistic … apparatus …
[where]…the oppressed are regarded as the
pathology of the healthy society’ (1996: 55),
noting that no one is marginal or outside of
society and in need of integration into the
healthy mainstream. People are always inside
and part of society but have become ‘“beings
for others”…[and so]…the solution is not to
“integrate” them into the structure of oppres-
sion, but to transform that structure, so that they
can become “beings for themselves”’ (Freire,
1996: 55). Over time, in response to successive
moral panics, there have been a series of what
could be regarded as experiments in social
engineering (Popper, 1961) that seek to control
and socialise young people into a neoliberal
capitalist job market, proposed as the only way
of structuring society and making a good life.
The persistence of crises about young people
suggests that such experiments in social control
are not working!
The chapter is developed in three sections.
First, it outlines the research design and con-
text in which Love Stings was developed.
Next, it examines findings that, according to
the young people, helped improve their physi-
cal and emotional position, in ways that were
different to their earlier involvement in school
or mainstream health interventions. Finally,
1038 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
we argue that an alternative discourse of criti-
cal community education, incorporating youth
work, can contribute to improving young peo-
ple’s sexual health and subjective well-being.
RESEARCH DESIGN
This qualitative case study incorporated rapid
response ethnography (Finlay et al., 2013).
Working with participants in six half-day ses-
sions over a two-year period, data were gener-
ated through group discussion, decoding of
collages and individual interview. Participants
provided individual data but also contributed
to collective discussion about the programme.
The researchers were present during these
discussions and made detailed field notes.
Secondary-level data were gathered through
content analysis of documentation provided
by the project and a review of contemporary
literature, strategic plans for sexual health
improvement and policy contexts.
Responses were analysed through simple
inductive coding (Boyatzis, 1998), mean-
ing that themes were generated from the data
provided, rather than from existing theoretical
ideas. As such, findings are descriptive of the
young people’s experiences of practices in one
case setting. Although not replicable to other
projects, findings offer an indication of the
extent to which learning and action in this set-
ting may be adapted for use in similar contexts.
Collage and Interview Sessions
The collection of visual data (Prosser, 1998)
has been used in qualitative research investi-
gations. Collage making is an extension of
this method, utilised by researchers in
situations where participant evaluation and
reflection on experience are called for (Finlay
et al, 2013; Gormally and Coburn, 2014).
Collage provides an opportunity for partici-
pants to portray their own experiences and
perceptions through metaphor. Using maga-
zines, leaflets and other printed matter,
participants were invited to cut out images or
text that represent ideas, emotions or reac-
tions about their experience of Love Stings.
The materials were assembled together into
one collage as a visual artwork that helped
participants to offer a story of Past, Present
and Future experiences of the Love Stings
programme (Figures 86.1 and 86.2).
These images exemplify the kind of
collage-art as data. Gauntlett (2007: 96)
refers to activity where participants are
given something to do and are observed in
the process of doing it as ‘activity-based
ethnography’ and ‘ethnographic action
research’. Moss suggests this process as
a means of making ‘implicit knowledge
explicit’ (Moss, 1993: 179). Like Gauntlet
(2007: 102), we made observation notes,
recorded participants explaining their
collages and obtained a digital photograph of
each for further analysis. Recorded data were
transcribed and used to develop a thematic
analysis in which content was drawn together
and categorised to identify recurring themes.
Collage Work as Focus Group
The making of collages, although an individ-
ual activity, was undertaken in a group setting,
as shown in Figures 86.3 and 86.4. Groups
ranged from three to five young people,
involving a total of 19, selected through con-
venience sampling, from an overall observed
cohort of 66 participants. Sharing collage
resources and drawing on collective reflec-
tions provided both a degree of dialogue and a
collaborative element to the data-gathering
process that is akin to a focus-group process
(Forrest-Keenan and Van Teijlingen, 2004).
Experiences were shared, recounted and com-
pared in an iterative dialogical process of
meaning making that was clarified and
extended through participant use of visual and
verbal prompts. Johnson (1996) argues that
focus groups raise consciousness and help to
empower participants in, for example, collec-
tive resistance to being led by the researcher.
 CRITICAL COMMUNITY EDUCATION: THE CASE OF LOVE STINGS 1039

Figure 86.1 Pat’s collage

Figure 86.2 Sam’s collage

1040 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Figure 86.3 Creative conversations at the collage table

Figure 86.4 Collaborative dialogue at the collage table

 CRITICAL COMMUNITY EDUCATION: THE CASE OF LOVE STINGS
Individual Interviews
Individual interviews involved participants
offering an explanation of the story told
through their collage, and comprised 15 of
the original 19 participants. Interviews were
recorded for transcription and thematic anal-
ysis, to explore the detail and identify emerg-
ing themes (Hart, 2007). The selection
criteria involved individual participants,
‘whose main credential is…[was]…experi-
ential relevance’ (Rudestam and Newton,
2001: 93), which meant they had direct expe-
rience of participating in the Love Stings
programme. In this instance ‘experiential
relevance’ also meant the sample was largely
self-selecting and opportunistic in terms of
who was available or inclined to take part.
Ethical Considerations
We approached this research, adopting the
notion of ethical symmetry (Christensen and
Prout, 2002), from a position that views young
people not as objects of research from a posi-
tion that views young people not as objects of
research but as co-participants in the research
process, stressing their competency and
agency (Sime, 2006). Ethical procedures were
followed to ensure they did not come to harm
as a consequence of engaging in the research
process and all names were changed and
details omitted during reporting, to protect
anonymity. All participants gave informed
consent and were advised on how to withdraw
this consent at any stage. One participant
declined to have their collage photographed.
All remaining participants gave full consent
for all data, including the collage-art recorded
interviews, to be used to generate findings.
THE CONTEXT FOR LOVE STINGS
The underpinning context for Love Stings
recognises that structural inequality,
1041
discrimination and exclusion impacts on
young people’s aspirations for social justice,
active citizenship and well-being. Located in
an established youth project, with a credible
track record in working with young people
experiencing poverty and exclusion in inner
city areas, the Tackling Sexual Health
Inequalities programme (named by partici-
pants as ‘Love Stings’) sought to mitigate the
impacts of inequality and exclusion by
improving young people’s health and well-
being to
• help young people become capable of taking
responsibility for their sexual health and to be
confident and interested in accessing main-
stream health providers;
• provide opportunities for young people to under-
stand the issues (and make positive, informed
choices) around contraception, relationships,
pregnancy and parenthood; and
• use informal education as means of engaging
young people and offering intensive support to
reduce their participation in risky sexual health
behaviours.
Developed through outdoor and youth work
education, the programme intended to build
young people’s confidence as a pre-cursor to
making a positive contribution to society. A
programme of activities was designed in col-
laboration with young people to equip them
with knowledge that informed behaviour
choices and assisted in building confidence
that helped them to articulate their reasons
for making particular choices to a potential
sex partner. Incorporating problem-posing
education, groupwork and fun activities,
Love Stings was participative, collaborative
and experiential. It included a residential
experience, facilitated by experienced youth
workers and regular group sessions involving
health professionals. Over a two-year period,
66 young people participated in Love Stings,
with 57 of them successfully completing the
whole programme. Of those who engaged in
the programme, 38 remained involved in the
wider youth work setting for at least a year
after completion.
1042 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
The Challenge of Showing How
Learning Is Developed: Youth
Work as Critical Community
Education
Dewey (1859–1952) argued that learning
must be active and suggested that education
for young people went beyond schooling.
Real, guided experiences fostered their
capacity to contribute to society and to be
active community members. However, for
such a contribution to be meaningful, an
approach to education that goes beyond an
instrumental process of learning as training is
required. Further, this approach is not
bounded by the confines or power imbal-
ances manifest in institutional learning
(Wallace, 2017). Fostering participation and
engagement as educative processes in this
way represents aspirations for a particular
type of society, one in which democratic and
empowering education is nurtured and culti-
vated. Drawing on Dewey (1938), Apple and
Beane (1995) and Giroux (2001), this pro-
cess can be connected to empowering prac-
tices such as those observed in Love Stings.
Further, in providing a catalyst for reflection
and building on mutual experiences, the pro-
cess of active learning at Love Stings aims to
promote societal improvement in the inter-
ests of all (Rosales, 2012). The work at Love
Stings appears therefore to be a corollary of
such Deweyan sentiment for critically par-
ticipative and experiential education:
To say that the welfare of others, like our own,
consists in a widening and deepening of the
perceptions that give activity its meaning, in an
educative growth, is to set forth a proposition of
political import.
Dewey (1922) as cited in Boydston (2008:202)
Ord (2009) has emphasised the importance
of Dewey’s ideas in thinking about experien-
tial learning in youth work. Dewey saw the
construction of knowledge as a two-way
transaction, involving the learner and the envi-
ronment in which they are located, at a par-
ticular time and place. Activating participation,
learning is located with the lives and interests
of young participants and is explicitly
intended therefore to be responsive to their
cultural milieu rather than a dominant and
imposed narrative (Wallace and Coburn,
2018). It is this social and experiential
engagement that is a cornerstone of critical
youth work practice and it is this that appears
to connect to what Dewey described as pro-
cesses of trying and undergoing (Dewey,
1916). The core impulse in practice is one in
which participation in activities explicitly
builds from and extends experience. The
legitimacy of such reflexive experience – the
trying and undergoing – provides a means of
developing really useful knowledge (Tett,
2010) articulating identity and agency as
contestation of official and hegemonic con-
straints. Thus, by engaging in activity and
interacting with the environment, education
becomes an act of continuity, where
experiential education locates lived social
experience at the heart of the educational process
and cannot be subsumed as an abstraction solely
of the psychological or cognitive. For Dewey,
experience involves a dual process of understanding
and influencing the world around us as well as
being influenced and changed ourselves by that
experience.
Wallace (2017: 41)
Thus, learning in youth work is suggested as
part of a continuum. Drawing on experiences
from wider contexts, learning about sexual
health in youth work, as in schooling, involves
young people in interaction with the environ-
ment in which learning happens. Learning is
developed by decoding specific experiences
and considering what these might mean in a
wider context. Yet the extent to which learn-
ing may be claimed as a direct result of a
particular set of experiences, in a specific set-
ting, is difficult to evidence. This is because
learning is a cumulative process that builds on
learners’ existing knowledge and understand-
ing of the world and is derived from a variety
of sources, settings and experiences (Dewey,
1938; Illeris, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978).
 CRITICAL COMMUNITY EDUCATION: THE CASE OF LOVE STINGS
The health education practices and princi-
ples underpinning Love Stings were notably
consistent with the empowering philosophy
of education set out by Dewey (1938). Taking
a social and informal approach to ‘new learn-
ing’ (Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Freire,
1996; Sommerlad, 2003) contrasted starkly
with participants’ views about their experi-
ences of school learning (their main source
of sexual health education prior to participa-
tion in Love Stings). Their reaction to more
formal settings and instructional approaches
was characterised by non-participation and
non-learning:
John: in school like teachers just telling you …
don’t really want to listen to what teachers
say …Love Stings workers give you choices,
choice to be there, a choice to say what you
want and how you feel, not like school, I
always come here I never miss it.
Claire: Love Stings treats you more like an adult.
A lot better (than school) not like a daft wee
wean (foolish small child)…not looking down
on you…so I listen more and pick a lot up,
whereas, at school I didn’t listen!
These extracts show that having choices and
the freedom to act in a particular way was
important and that not feeling patronised was
central to their learning (listening more and
picking up a lot). The young people suggested
that the youth work environment facilitated
learning in ways that were different to their
experiences of schooling education. In this
sense, youth work could be positioned as a
boundary-crossing pedagogy. Working across
formal and informal boundaries, with young
people who were on the edges of formal
health services and mainstream education
(some were already excluded from school and
were disengaged from health services).
Utilising a critical pedagogy, youth work-
ers engaged with young people in critical
conversations about their lifestyles and life
choices. This shifts practice from a formu-
laic response that offers instructional classes
on safe sex, towards a more critical social
praxis. According to Coburn and Wallace
(2011: 13), functional youth work is defined
1043
by its ‘explicit socialising of young peo-
ple to meet preconceived norms’, where
young people are perceived as deficient and
involved in ‘risky’ behaviours. Alternatively,
a more critical pedagogy for youth work
takes problem-posing as the starting point for
learning where power shifts towards young
people as capable social actors, as ‘young
people are encouraged to learn by probing
common-sense views of the world, to facili-
tate understanding of the justice and injus-
tice, power and oppression, and…to promote
social transformation’ (2011: 15). Love
Stings exemplified this more critical praxis
in its use of conversational and experiential
methods to engage young people in learning
about themselves and the steps they could
take, to enhance their well-being.
Jane’s Story – a Typical Example
of the Love Stings Process
Collages provided data on the changing nature
of participants’ lives. While there was diver-
sity in specific experiences, the young peo-
ple’s lives were typically impacted by multiple
and complex issues and they were either sexu-
ally active or vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
The typical nature of the young people’s lives
is exemplified in Jane’s collage (Figure 86.5).
Past
Jane used her collage to explain her perspec-
tives on sex and sexual health. Images
included a wine bottle that she selected to
represent her consumption of alcohol, and an
image of a pregnancy testing kit to signify
tests she’d taken when she thought she was
pregnant. These images characterised her life
prior to participation in Love Stings:
When I was younger, I didn’t really bother about
sex when I was going out with people… it didn’t
really bother them too much…now that I’m get-
ting older and boys are wantin’ sex…it’s just a bit
harder to deal with relationships…if you’re not
havin’ sex with them…’cause it [the relationship]
wouldn’t survive that long would it?
1044 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Figure 86.5 Jane’s collage
In the past I thought I knew hunners [hun-
dreds, meaning ‘a lot’] of stuff and before I came
on the sexual health…I thought I knew every-
thing…
I was running about doin’ everything…doin’ it
[‘it’, meaning ‘having intercourse’] without using
protection…I didn’t know I could cause myself a
lot of bother through it…I wasn’t very confident
before I came on the course… but I was confident
enough to run about thinking I knew everything…
I’m confident around boys ‘cause I’ve got two wee
brothers…
I used to run about getting drunk and having
unprotected sex which wisnae [was not] too
bright, ‘cause it could’ve turned into a pregnancy,
disease or anything.
In this final comment, Jane’s thinking was
consistent with the health belief model (Janz
and Becker, 1984), whereby people who
believe there is a problem or risk to them-
selves (such as pregnancy or Sexually
Transmitted Infections (STIs), as distinct
from more communal or societal concerns,
are more likely to take preventative action.
Jane’s comment is a reflection on her past, in
light of what she now knows about sexual
health, following participation in Love
Stings, where she was capable of informed
reflection on past behaviours and her com-
ments were consistent with evidence of
changing health behaviours in terms of the
age at which people engage in intercourse for
the first time (Wellings et al., 2001).
Present
Some images on Jane’s collage depicted her
life now. She said that she put ‘me’ at the
centre because of her increased confidence
and self-respect:
I wisnae [was not] dead confident in front of
people…like when I was out with people that I
didn’t know…when I came to Love Stings I wisnae
[was not] too confident around people…I was like,
that shy one that sat back all the time and didn’t
say anything. But then I…came on the sexual
health course and started to learn about myself
and I started to get confident and felt a bit good
about myself.
When I was doin’ sexual health in school…the
teachers don’t approach it in a good way, because
they just tell you that…they tell you all the wrong
 CRITICAL COMMUNITY EDUCATION: THE CASE OF LOVE STINGS
things or the consequences but they also tell you
that it’s wrong to do it at your age..[so] I didn’t
want to talk about things like….em..with people
lookin’ doon [down] on me like I’ve got no respect
for myself and that I’m just a wee slut, that does
anything wi’ anybody.
Coming here [for Love Stings]..telling the truth
about myself and speaking up about myself and
not being ashamed of everything else ‘cause no
one else was ashamed…so why should I be
ashamed…That was the best part, ‘cause when
everyone was speaking I was thinking…and we
were all…telling everybody about ourselves and
our lives…[I think]…that’s good, I could tell some-
body about what I do, without them looking down
on me, and me thinking that it’s not right for some-
one at my age. That’s the best bit about coming.
Jane’s lack of confidence was consistent with
findings on the impact of national identity on
sexual health statistics in New Zealand
(Braun, 2008). Braun found a characteristic
lack of capacity and inclination to communi-
cate about difficult or sensitive issues, making
it difficult to communicate about sex, particu-
larly during complex communications with a
sexual partner. Jane’s comments typified a
view that informal conversational methods
enabled participants to feel more confident
about how they might discuss sex with a part-
ner. Increasing confidence and self-efficacy
were explicit programme aims and were con-
sistent with policies for youth work and
sexual health but, importantly, they also
underpinned development of knowledge,
skills and attributes that could enable the
young people to flourish beyond the project.
Future
Looking to the future, Jane chose images of
vibrant people, looking fit and healthy, full of
energy and fun:
That’s me now…[woman in pink dress]…dead
[very] confident and happier than everybody…and
I know what I want in life…even if I’m still young,
I have got plans of where I want to go soon…
’cause I’m goin’ to college soon to train to be a
hairdresser…so I want to get far on in life.
Jane’s selection included the image of a
woman in a traditional wedding dress, a
1045
young baby and an older couple. She sug-
gested this as her future vision, beyond col-
lege, when she would like to meet a partner
and have a family but not just now. This was
interpreted as showing how participation in
Love Stings assisted young people in renew-
ing and reclaiming a coherent life-vision:
I’ll look out for myself in future…and think about
me…not everyone else. Obviously, I’ll think about
people around me and have respect, but I’ll think
about me and care for myself, have more respect
for myself…Love Stings has…like when you imag-
ine if I didn’t go on that course… I could’ve ended
up with a wee baby that I didn’t know how to look
after, that I didn’t want…it could’ve ruined my
life…it could’ve stopped my life right there…cause
that’s what happens when you don’t use a
condom… you’ve got responsibilities….and you
can get infections.
Like other participants, Jane connected her
future aspirations to finding work in a chosen
field and settling down with a family.
Contrary to negative hegemonic pathologis-
ing of young people, Jane projected a happy
family unit in which there was stability of
income and employment, a productive and
stable relationship and a sense of content-
ment and well-being. Jane connected the
lessons she learned in Love Stings with
working to achieve this vision.
FINDINGS ABOUT LEARNING,
AGENCY AND FLOURISHING
1 Raising awareness and increasing knowledge
and understanding
Research in public health policy and practice
has persistently focussed on teenage preg-
nancy as a social problem associated with
high levels of unwanted pregnancy, excessive
alcohol consumption, poverty, social exclu-
sion and poor physical health through
Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs)
(Arai, 2009; Cense and Ganzevoort, 2019;
Monasterio et al., 2007). It is further reported
that experiences of sexual relations among
1046 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
young people are linked to alcohol consump-
tion, which increases the likelihood of engag-
ing in unsafe sex (Braun, 2008). Noting the
dominance of a stigmatising discourse, Arai
(2009) argues for an alternative policy direc-
tion to offer more supportive responses to
young mothers, while Cense and Ganzevoort
(2019) call for further research into the use
and development of peer education methods
for improving sexual health. Love Stings
sought to offer a more positive than stigma-
tising response to participants and engaged
young people in critical and reflective con-
versations with their peers. This included
consideration of their experiences of a sug-
gested link between sex and alcohol con-
sumption, and the impact of alcohol on
feelings of confidence or in the loss of inhibi-
tion as part of wider conversations about
making a good life.
Despite the sensitive nature of this topic,
discussion was facilitated by using creative
youth work methods such as ‘beer goggles’,
whereby participants are asked to wear a set of
spectacles that distort vision (as a simulation
of drunkenness). Participants then accomplish
tasks such as checking, opening and apply-
ing a condom to a banana. Young people spe-
cifically highlighted this exercise as having a
‘sobering effect’ on realising how little they
could accomplish of the safe-sex tasks:
And then what did you do? Why did you have
them on (Booze Goggles)?
They passed us a condom which was still in the
paper, still in the wrapper, so we had to like check
the wrapper to see if it was pierced or anything
and then we had to check the date, which I never
knew they had. So then I checked the date and the
date was out [of date]. So then I said, I can’t use
that one so they gave me another one, I had to
check it and see if it had any holes or anything, it
looked ok, but it wasn’t really…I opened it and
then we had to fill it with water and my condom
started leaking.
Jack
So how did the course help you to get to the stage
where you could talk about it with confidence,
because you obviously do?
It made us learn more about one subject, sexually
transmitted diseases also known as STIs…erm…
they went over things with every one of us and
told us the symptoms, told us how you can get rid
of them…it like raised me [my knowledge] up a
bar so that I knew what I was talking about.
Davy
In this way, Love Stings facilitated partici-
pant learning. The young people offered
informed responses when asked about what
they had learned, which included detailed
knowledge about sexual health, sexually
transmitted infections and the availability
and increased use of wider support services
for sexual health improvement. Participants
routinely commented on increased confi-
dence as beneficial in short-term practical
outcomes but also in promoting deeper-level
thinking that would inform future decisions:
They taught you to get checked out…before you
do anything or if you catch anything, even if you
have a wee [small] cut…then an STI can be passed
on to you and you can pass it to other people.
Jim
They showed us pictures so that if anything hap-
pens to any of us, we would know exactly what it
looks like…so we can go and get it checked out…I
found out that condoms have expiry dates…I
never knew that!
John
It made me think about things…not just the sex
stuff…it makes me think about things before I do
them. It makes me think a lot more about doing
stuff and just keeping me out of trouble.
Eric
The above comments show that Love Stings
worked on both a physical and emotional
level in that young people’s learning about
STIs and avoiding a specific physical health
condition also led to them thinking about the
feelings of others and to consider the conse-
quences of their wider actions in terms of
personal feelings, beyond ‘the sex stuff’ and
staying ‘out of trouble’. In this sense, critical
dialogue was aligned to the content of their
learning but also offered a process for per-
sonal transformation, in beginning to think
 CRITICAL COMMUNITY EDUCATION: THE CASE OF LOVE STINGS
about the person they were becoming, and
the kind of life they wanted to live.
In committing to working with young peo-
ple and focussing on aspirations that chal-
lenged orthodoxies on their existing ways of
being in the world, Love Stings presented a
critical community education model for sex-
ual health education that was in keeping with
the kind of supportive response that was advo-
cated by Arai (2009) and challenged dominant
narratives around young people in some con-
temporary societies (Coburn and Gormally,
2017; Wallace and Coburn, 2018; Finlay et al.,
2013; Giroux, 2011). Love Stings met out-
comes related to aims, and called into ques-
tion taken-for-granted perspectives on how
to engage young people in making informed
decisions now and in future. Participants
believed that learning through critical con-
versation had a more lasting effect than their
experiences of sex education in schools.
Love Stings exemplified responsive prac-
tices in which positive working relationships
and trust were central to success. As Milburn
et al. (2003: 10) argue:
Youth work is required to be responsive to those
young people who are alienated, excluded and in
some cases rejected by other adults and public
services. It has to start ‘where they are’, not with
unreasonable expectations of conformity to struc-
tures and unreal demands for results. The creation
of varied youth work opportunities is an enormous
challenge, made more demanding yet supremely
unique by the fact that young people come for-
ward voluntarily to participate. Youth work is not
compulsory. (Milburn et al., 2003: 10)
This was consistent with the views of young
people at Love Stings who routinely noted
the relevance of the process, the willingness
of staff to speak in their own terms and share
their experiences. The young people high-
lighted another advantage in claiming that
this programme was empowering in assisting
their future decisions.
2 Self-efficacy – choosing to do the right thing
Love Stings participants engaged in various
activities connected to aspects of sexual
1047
health. This enhanced their capacity to think
critically about other aspects of their lives,
beyond the immediate concerns for sexual
health improvement. Young people reflected
on learning discussions and activities within
the group to inform future decisions beyond
sexual health matters.
(Love Stings) gives you the facts and how we could
help ourselves. Advice that stays for life…it could
change your whole life…
Sharon
When I’m older I’d like to settle down….meet a
woman and have a family…get a job.
John
Love Stings is not just about sexually transmitted
diseases, it’s about things we do that concern our
health …[get into]…fighting and that…Love
Stings made me think…get a clear vision…I don’t
want to be doing these things when I’m older…
Jack
Participants used the skills and knowledge
learned to reflect on their lives and to take
responsibility for decision making that was
consistent with a theory of empowerment as
‘capacity to make effective choices…and
then transform those choices into desired
actions and outcomes’ (Alsop et al., 2006: 10).
Alsop et al. (2006) suggest that the capacity
for decision making and action relies on both
agency and opportunity, where agency is
linked to the ability to make choices, and
opportunity is tied to the structural contexts
in which the social actor, or social group,
lives. This was consistent with core elements
of practice at Love Stings, where young
people were able to develop confidence and
use their power to choose a course of action
that would allow them to envision their
futures as different to their current contexts.
Engaging in dialogical processes helped
facilitate learning, confidence building and
self-efficacy in a personal capability
(Bandura, 1997; Carr, 2011). In turn, this
enabled them to commit to change, in order
to make a better life for themselves and also
for the wider group of young people involved
in the project.
1048 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
These ideas on self-efficacy and agency
resonate with a critical community educa-
tion that does not ‘give answers or solu-
tions’ to empower people, but rather uses
problem-posing methods to raise questions
and promote critical dialogue through which
people recognise their power and use it to
develop their knowledge and understanding
of the world, and how it might be changed.
Participants were able to take responsibility
for their own affairs and this continued into
their home and community lives. This sug-
gested that young people involved in the
Love Stings project took decisions about
their health behaviours which facilitated their
development of alternative life trajectories.
3 Building relationships and the importance of
place and conversation
Location and context were identified as
influential in determining learning and teach-
ing conversations. In particular, the Love
Stings residential was highlighted as a posi-
tive learning environment, where much of the
learning was built around a day of physical
outdoor activity whereby ‘the daily routine
gives staff close proximity…[in]…present-
ing a rich array of openings for conversation
and dialogue’ (Jeffs, 2017: 71). Conversations
that began on a hill, or in preparing a meal,
were returned to or extended in the evenings
and according to participants this enhanced
their relationships with youth workers:
They were open about like their experiences as
well, they didn’t just want us to talk about our
experiences. They shared their experiences with us
as well, if you know what I mean?
Millie
As youth workers gave something of them-
selves and their own experiences, this contrib-
uted to the development of relationships that
helped young people to understand things more
than their in-school learning experiences:
Was there a difference between coming here and
a sexual health talk in school? Were they different
or the same?
Aye. They [youth workers] helped you remember
‘cause if you didn’t understand they talked to you
like individual. And then they helped you to under-
stand…more than school would.
Karen
In a study of how youth workers defined the
work they do, participants were strongly sup-
portive of process-based relationships, rather
than product-orientated outcomes, where
‘the process of youth work was generally
seen to be contingent on the quality of rela-
tionship between a young person and a youth
worker’ (Harland and Morgan, 2006: 10).
The importance of this relationship was also
exemplified by participant comments that
youth workers were open to talking on young
people’s terms and ensuring that no one was
singled out because of either limited knowl-
edge or extensive experience.
According to the young people in this
study, the importance of place was another
core aspect in their experiences. School was
viewed as a place where sex education was
explained in science terms and did not con-
sider relationships or sexual good health:
In school you didn’t get told a lot…I didn’t think
science was a thing for sexual health…it was just
about flowers and plants and then…it turns into a
baby inside you… and you were like…aye right…I
don’t even know what’s going on here…you didn’t
get told about all the things that could happen, all
the diseases you could get and the consequences
that could come…
Lynne
At Love Stings, they felt comfortable in
asking or talking about anything. The conver-
sational basis for this educational youth work
signified the construction of relationships as
a priority in working with young people
which required a level of skill among youth
workers, in order to maximise these learning
opportunities (Batsleer, 2008).
4 Building positive relationships in critical commu-
nity education
Our observations of youth workers interact-
ing with young people during collage making
and other routine activity at Love Stings
 CRITICAL COMMUNITY EDUCATION: THE CASE OF LOVE STINGS
confirmed the importance of positive rela-
tionships in creating an environment for criti-
cal community education. Young people
were challenged to think about sexual health
problems or respectful relationships and to
discuss the consequences of their actions by
workers who took time to explain the why
and how of such problems, rather than simply
issue statements of fact, instruction or
judgement.
Smith (1988, 2003) has identified charac-
teristics for youth work that suggest a commit-
ment to association and positive relationships
with others, development of friendliness,
taking an informal approach and a concern
for well-being. Participants identified fam-
ily members, teachers and friends, who had
‘been there’ during especially difficult times
in their lives, as important associations. They
also suggested that having fun, choosing to
participate and learning something were
positive features of their involvement. This
is consistent with Smith’s additional charac-
teristics of voluntary participation and educa-
tional progression.
This use of humour helped maintain an
ethos that encouraged the normalising of
taboo conversation topics. The importance
of informal and educational methods to over-
coming barriers to participation suggested
youth work as a potentially important and
largely unexplored method of developing
sexual health education. Love Stings was
consistently inventive in the use of music,
arts, technology and outdoor education. This
facilitated engagement in critical and mean-
ingful learning.
Yet, while these activities are the means,
they are not the ends of youth work. Arguably,
the gains in confidence and knowledge evi-
denced in participants’ responses cannot be
readily quantified or evaluated and in any
case may not be systematically judged until
some future point. However, a range of soft
indicators suggest that the youth work para-
digm provides an effective engagement strat-
egy based on the overwhelmingly positive
reaction of participants to the programme.
1049
In this sense the value of input costs (staff
time, transport, funding) may be judged
against the value of the outputs Love Stings
delivered, to 66 young people who had been
involved in, and rejected, ‘interventionist’
programmes despite being identified as hav-
ing multiple and complex life circumstances.
For example, the cohort included young peo-
ple who were single parents living in hostel
accommodation or involved with police and
social work ‘interventions’ which isolated
or excluded them from forming lasting posi-
tive relationships. Yet they reported a positive
impact on knowledge and learning among
peers at Love Stings.
CONCLUSION
Building on our earlier assessment of youth
work as critical pedagogy (Coburn and
Wallace, 2011) which facilitates young peo-
ple’s agency through creation of a positive
and creative discourse, this chapter discusses
research findings from an evaluation of ‘Love
Stings’, a youth work programme that
engaged young people in education and per-
sonal development related to their sexual
health and well-being. Over 12 weeks, Love
Stings offered a positive and proactive
response to health inequalities, improving
young people’s capacity to flourish and to
take action towards developing a good life
(Sen, 1999). The findings enhance under-
standing of youth work as critical community
education that offers a counter hegemony to
mechanisms of compliance and conformity.
This alternative paradigm prioritises young
people’s voices as equal to those of people
who currently seek to direct their lives. In this
case study, young people’s capacity to take
control of their lives was extended by their
engagement in critical dialogical processes
that helped them to construct new knowledge
and understanding about their lives.
Rather than take a deficits view of young
people, critical community educators see
1050 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
young people as assets in their communi-
ties. In seeking to develop and sustain a use-
ful level of criticality, we assert that learning
should be constructed through dialogical,
rather than deficiency-driven, processes.
Love Stings ticked boxes in terms of ‘fix-
ing’ problematic sexual health behaviours.
Yet, by taking a critical focus that utilised
dialogue and problem-posing methodologies,
outcomes could not simply be measured in
terms of behaviour change. Instead the find-
ings suggested that collaborative and purpose-
ful conversations between youth workers,
health workers and young people appeared to
enhance learning for the longer term.
However, findings also raised deeper
questions aligned to a wider hegemonic and
patriarchal discourse on sex education. For
example, learning was aligned with ideas
from gay awareness training (Kitzinger and
Peel, 2005), whereby young people at Love
Stings were challenged to consider defini-
tions of coercion, control and homophobia.
However, outside of the facilitated sessions,
there was limited evidence that homopho-
bic comments were challenged, nor were
dominant heterosexual perspectives. This
suggested room for deeper consideration
and understanding of how sex education
is developed in a patriarchal society rather
than reducing it to hegemonic and formulaic
learning (Beggan and Coburn, 2018).
Further, while the need for safe sexual
health practices for ALL young people was
advocated across the programme, the needs
of LGBTQI+ young people were under-
played, and all participants openly identi-
fied as heterosexual within what appeared
as a heteronormative space. There was also
no evidence of engagement with Black and
Minority Ethnic young people (BME as rou-
tinely used to denote people of colour and
range of minority ethnic people). Although
there is a limited literature or data about
sexual well-being of BME young people in
Scotland (Simkhada et al., 2006), the latest
census figures (2011) show that 12% of the
total population in the city that hosted Love
Stings identified as BME. Thus, it would also
have been expected that the sexual health
needs of BME young people would have
been included via development of a more
culturally sensitive programme. This again
suggested heteronormative focus, and lack
of recognition of specific LGBTQI+ and
BME young people’s needs offers a chal-
lenge for anyone involved in developing
such programmes to find ways of subverting
contemporary orthodoxies in order to ensure
that important conversations are not missed
in terms of understanding the intersectional
nature of sex education.
Despite the above challenges, this study
has shown that youth work does offer an
alternative and challenging discourse through
engaging young people in learning that
enhances their capacity to make educated,
informed choices, to act as agents for them-
selves or in collaboration with others to shape
alternative futures. While more critical ques-
tioning of the patriarchal tensions inherent in
development in sex education would assist in
a deeper analysis of power, Love Stings did
offer a critical community education that was
discrete from mainstream schooling or for-
malised social work and police interventions.
Youth work creates possibilities for trans-
formational education. As part of a wider
continuum of education, critical community
education sees salutogenic potential (Beggan
and Coburn, 2018; Coburn and Gormally,
2019) rather than pathological problems in
meeting the aspirations of young people and
communities for making a good life.
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 The SAGE Handbook of
Critical Pedagogies
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Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne

 The SAGE Handbook of
Critical Pedagogies

Volume 3

Edited by
Shirley R. Steinberg
and Barry Down
Assistant Editor
Janean Robinson
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Introduction © Barry Down and Shirley R.
Steinberg, 2020
Editorial arrangement © Shirley R. Steinberg
and Barry Down, 2020
Section 1 Introduction © Shirley R. Steinberg,
2020
Chapter 1 © SAGE Publications, 1983
Chapter 2 © Lilia I. Bartolomé, 2020
Chapter 3 © John Willinsky, 2020
Chapter 4 © Deborah P. Britzman, 2020
Chapter 5 © Ramón Flecha, 2020
Chapter 6 © William H. Schubert, 2020
Chapter 7 © David Geoffrey Smith, 2020
Chapter 8 © Hermán S. García, 2020
Chapter 9 © Marcella Runell Hall, 2020
Chapter 10 © Arlo Kempf, 2020
Chapter 11 © Paul L. Thomas, 2020
Chapter 12 © Christine E. Sleeter, 2020
Chapter 13 © William Ayers, 2020
Chapter 14 © Luis Huerta-Charles, 2020
Chapter 15 © D’Arcy Martin, 2020
Section 2 Introduction © Paul R. Carr and Gina
Thésée, 2020
Chapter 16 © Joe L. Kincheloe, 2020
Chapter 17 © Benjamin Frymer, 2020
Chapter 18 © Soudeh Oladi, 2020
Chapter 19 © Philip M. Anderson, 2020
Chapter 20 © Rodney Handelsman, 2020
Chapter 21 © Antonio Garcia, 2020
Chapter 22 © Nathan Snaza, 2020
Chapter 23 © Cathryn Teasley and Alana
Butler, 2020
Chapter 24 © Marlon Simmons, 2020
Chapter 25 © Peter Pericles Trifonas, 2020
Chapter 26 © Marc Spooner, 2020
Chapter 27 © Jane McLean, 2020
Chapter 28 © Michalinos Zembylas, 2020
Section 3 Introduction © Gregory Martin, 2020
Chapter 29 © James D. Kirylo, 2020
Chapter 30 © Robert F. Carley, 2020
Chapter 31 © Stephanie Troutman, 2020
Chapter 32 © Samuel D. Rocha and Martha
Sañudo, 2020
Chapter 33 © Robert Hattam, 2020
Chapter 34 © Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs, 2020
Chapter 35 © Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa
Sordé Martí, 2020
Chapter 36 © Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid
McAuliffe, 2020
Chapter 37 © Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter
McLaren, 2020
Chapter 38 © Shirley R. Steinberg, 2020
Section 4 Introduction © Cathryn Teasley, 2020
Chapter 39 © Domenica Maviglia, 2020
Chapter 40 © Colin Chasi and Ylva Rodny-
Gumede, 2020
Chapter 41 © Juan Ríos Vega, 2020
Chapter 42 © Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina
Stefanidou and Constantine Skordoulis, 2020
Chapter 43 © Madhulika Sagaram, 2020
Chapter 44 © Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner,
Michaela P. Stone and Marco Montalbetti
Viñuela, 2020
Chapter 45 © Brian Dotts, 2020
Chapter 46 © Kathalene A. Razzano, 2020
Chapter 47 © Jaime Usma, Oscar A. Peláez,
Yuliana Palacio and Catalina Jaramillo, 2020
Chapter 48 © Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo
Bui, 2020
Chapter 49 © Henry A. Giroux, 2020
Section 5 Introduction © Four Arrows and R.
Michael Fisher, 2020
Chapter 50 © R. Michael Fisher and Four
Arrows, 2020
Chapter 51 © Ann Milne, 2020
Chapter 52 © Jeremy Garcia, 2020
Chapter 53 © Shashi Shergill and David
Scott, 2020
Chapter 54 © Jennifer M. Markides, 2020
Chapter 55 © Adrienne Sansom, 2020
Chapter 56 © Renee Desmarchelier, 2020
Chapter 57 © Perry R. James, 2020
Chapter 58 © Rose Marsters, 2020
Section 6 Introduction © Robert Hattam, 2020
Chapter 59 © John Smyth, 2020
Chapter 60 © Tricia M. Kress, 2020
Chapter 61 © Concepción Sánchez-Blanco, 2020
Chapter 62 © Sandro Carnicelli and Karla
Boluk, 2020
Chapter 63 © Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila
E. Villaverde, 2020
Chapter 64 © Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A.
Solyom and Bryan Brayboy, 2020
Chapter 65 © Haggith Gor Ziv, 2020
Chapter 66 © Teresa Anne Fowler, 2020
Chapter 67 © Sheryl J. Lieb, 2020
Chapter 68 © Barry Down, 2020
Section 7 Introduction © Barry Down, 2020
Chapter 69 © David Zyngier, 2020
Chapter 70 © Khadija Mohammed, Lisa
McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz, 2020
Chapter 71 © Revital Zilonka, 2020
Chapter 72 © Gang Zhu and Zhengmei
Peng, 2020
Chapter 73 © Phillip Boda, 2020
Chapter 74 © Guofang Li and Pramod K.
Sah, 2020
Chapter 75 © Galia Zalmanson Levi, 2020
Chapter 76 © Ramón Flecha and Silvia
Molina, 2020
Section 8 Introduction © Michael B.
MacDonald, 2020
Chapter 77 © Silvia Cristina Bettez and
Cristina Maria Dominguez, 2020
Chapter 78 © Awad Ibrahim, 2020
Chapter 79 © Maria Padrós and Sandra
Girbés-Peco, 2020
Chapter 80 © Elbert J. Hawkins III, 2020
Chapter 81 © Shuntay Z. Tarver and Melanie
M. Acosta, 2020
Chapter 82 © Toby Rollo, J. Cynthia McDermott,
Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel, 2020
Chapter 83 © Tanya Brown Merriman, 2020
Chapter 84 © April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams, 2020
Chapter 85 © Sherilyn Lennon, 2020
Chapter 86 © Annette Coburn and David
Wallace, 2020
Section 9 Introduction © Michael Hoechsmann,
2020
Chapter 87 © Jeff Share, 2020
Chapter 88 © Michael Hoechsmann and
Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín, 2020
Chapter 89 © Sabrina Boyer, 2020
Chapter 90 © Brian C. Johnson, 2020
Chapter 91 © Tony Kashani, 2020
Chapter 92 © Juha Suoranta, 2020
Chapter 93 © Cherie Ann Turpin, 2020
Chapter 94 © Ki Wight, 2020
Chapter 95 © SAGE Publications, 2011
Chapter 96 © Gerald Walton, 2020
Section 10 Introduction © Leila E. Villaverde
and Roymieco A. Carter, 2020
Chapter 97 © Gregory Martin, 2020
Chapter 98 © Leila E. Villaverde & Roymieco
A. Carter, 2020
Chapter 99 © Judith Dunkerly-Bean and
Kristine Sunday, 2020
Chapter 100 © I. Malik Saafir, 2020
Chapter 101 © Michael B. MacDonald, 2020
Chapter 102 © Claire Robson and Dennis
Sumara, 2020
Chapter 103 © Peter R. Wright, 2020
Chapter 104 © Mary Drinkwater, 2020
Chapter 105 © Lalenja Harrington, 2020
Chapter 106 © Christopher Lee Kennedy, 2020
Section 11 Introduction © Shirley R. Steinberg,
2020
Chapter 107 © Douglas Kellner and Roslyn M.
Satchel, 2020
Chapter 108 © Andrew Hickey, 2020
Chapter 109 © Priya Parmar, 2020
Chapter 110 © Dawn N. Hicks Tafari and
Veronica A. Newton, 2020
Chapter 111 © Tony Edwards and Kerry J.
Renwick, 2020
Chapter 112 © Paul L. Thomas, 2020
Chapter 113 © Nwachi Pressley-Tafari, 2020
Chapter 114 © Mark Helmsing, 2020
Chapter 115 © Teresa J. Rishel, 2020
Chapter 116 © Jo Lampert and Kerry Mallan, 2020
Section 12 Introduction © Renee
Desmarchelier, 2020
Chapter 117 © Stephanie L. Hudson, 2020
Chapter 118 © Joseph Carroll-Miranda, 2020
Chapter 119 © Sarah E. Colonna, 2020
Chapter 120 © Edmund Adjapong, 2020
Chapter 121 © Jennifer D. Adams, Atasi Das
and Eun-Ji Amy Kim, 2020
Chapter 122 © Shawn Arango Ricks, 2020
Chapter 123 © Constance Russell, 2020
Chapter 124 © Marissa Bellino, 2020
Chapter 125 © Jodi Latremouille, 2020
 We dedicate this set of books to the notion of social justice in education…to making a
difference, to causing a fracture, to reading between the lines…to criticalizing the work we
do as educators. And to the memory of Paulo Freire, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Jesús Pato
Gómez, who paved the way…leaving us far too early.
Shirley and Barry
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Dedication v
List of Figures xvii
List of Tablesxix
Notes on the Editors and Contributorsxx
Acknowledgementsxxxix
Introduction to the Handbookxl
Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg

VOLUME 1

SECTION I READING PAULO FREIRE 1

Shirley R. Steinberg

1 The Importance of the Act of Reading 3

Paulo Freire; translated by Loretta Slover

2 Linking My World to the Word 9

Lilia I. Bartolomé

3 Freire Contra Freire: An Interplay in Three Acts 13

John Willinsky

4 A Note on Free Association as Transference to Reading 17

Deborah P. Britzman

5 Dialogic and Liberating Actions 20

Ramón Flecha

6 In the Spirit of Freire 22

William H. Schubert

7 Fake News and Other Conundrums in ‘Reading the World’ at Empire’s End 29
David Geoffrey Smith

8 Freire’s ‘Act of Reading’: Inspiring and Emboldening 38

Hermán S. García

9 In Gratitude to Freire 40
Marcella Runell Hall

10 Of Word, World, and Being (Online) 42

Arlo Kempf
viii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

11 The Critical Redneck Experience 46

Paul L. Thomas

12 On Learning to Claim Text 48

Christine E. Sleeter

13 ‘I Am a Revolutionary!’ 51
William Ayers

14 The Importance of Paulo Freire in the ‘Act of Reading’ 59

Luis Huerta-Charles

15 Share and Sustain: Two Steps to Paulo 62

D’Arcy Martin

SECTION II SOCIAL THEORIES 67

Paul R. Carr and Gina Thésée

16 Critical Pedagogy and the Knowledge Wars of the 21st Century 75

Joe L. Kincheloe

17 The Frankfurt School and Education 94

Benjamin Frymer

18 The Nomad, The Hybrid: Deconstructing the Notion of Subjectivity

Through Freire and Rumi 104
Soudeh Oladi

19 The Reader, the Text, the Restraints: A Cultural History of the Art(s)
of Reading 118
Philip M. Anderson

20 Deleuzeguattarian Concepts for a Becoming Critical Pedagogy 135

Rodney Handelsman

21 Specters of Critical Pedagogy: Must We Die in Order to Survive? 157

Antonio Garcia

22 Critical Pedagogy Beyond the Human 173

Nathan Snaza

23 Intersecting Critical Pedagogies to Counter Coloniality 186

Cathryn Teasley and Alana Butler

24 Locating Black Life within Colonial Modernity: Decolonial Notes 205

Marlon Simmons
 Contents ix

25 Critical Pedagogy and Difference 218

Peter Pericles Trifonas

26 Critical Pedagogy Imperiled as Neoliberalism, Marketization, and

Audit Culture Become the Academy 225
Marc Spooner

27 Critical Pedagogy: Negotiating the Nuances of Implementation 236

Jane McLean

28 Critical Pedagogies of Compassion 254

Michalinos Zembylas

SECTION III KEY FIGURES IN CRITICAL PEDAGOGY 269

Gregory Martin

29 Meeting the Critical Pedagogues: A North America Context

(Paulo Freire and Beyond) 273
James D. Kirylo

30 Gramscian Critical Pedagogy: A Holistic and Social Genre Approach 289

Robert F. Carley

31 Still Teaching to Transgress: Reflecting on Critical Pedagogy with bell hooks 302
Stephanie Troutman

32 Ivan Illich and Liberation Theology 310

Samuel D. Rocha and Martha Sañudo

33 From South African Black Theology and Freire to ‘Teaching for

Resistance’: The Work of Basil Moore 320
Robert Hattam

34 Coming to Critical Pedagogy in Spain Through Life and Literature:

Jurjo Torres Santomé and Ramón Flecha 334
Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs

35 Interviews with Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí 346

Marta Soler-Gallart and Teresa Sordé Martí

36 Interview with Henry A. Giroux 352

Graham Jeffery and Diarmuid McAuliffe

37 Interviews with Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren 368

Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren

38 Influenced by Critical Pedagogy: Interviews with Critical Friends 380

Shirley R. Steinberg
x THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

SECTION IV GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES 401

Cathryn Teasley

39 From Theory to Practice: The Identikit and Purpose of Critical Pedagogy 405
Domenica Maviglia

40 Reimagining the University as a Transit Place and Space:

A Contribution to the Decolonisation Debate 416
Colin Chasi and Ylva Rodny-Gumede

41 When I Open My Alas: Developing a Transnational Mariposa Consciousness 428

Juan Ríos Vega

42 Critical Pedagogy and the Acceptance of Refugees in Greece 439

Aristotelis Gkiolmas, Constantina Stefanidou and Constantine Skordoulis

43 Indigenous Critical Pedagogy in Underserved Environments in India 453

Madhulika Sagaram

44 (Dis)Ruptive Glocality Through Teacher Exchange: Realizing Pedagogical

Love in the Chilean Context 469
Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner, Michaela P. Stone, and Marco Montalbetti Viñuela

45 The Sun Never Sets on the Privatization Movement: A Return to

the Heart of Darkness in a Neoliberal and Neoimperialist World 480
Brian Dotts

46 Teaching Global Affairs: Problem-posing Pedagogy and the Violence

of Indifference 496
Kathalene A. Razzano

47 Promoting Critical Consciousness in the Preparation of Teachers in Colombia 505

Jaime A. Usma, Oscar A. Peláez, Yuliana Palacio, and Catalina Jaramillo

48 Vietnamese Students and the Emerging Model Minority Myth in Germany 518
Nicholas D. Hartlep and Pipo Bui

49 Revisiting Hurricane Katrina: Racist Violence and the Biopolitics of

Disposability537
Henry A. Giroux

VOLUME 2

SECTION V INDIGENOUS WAYS OF KNOWING 547

Four Arrows and R. Michael Fisher

50 Indigenizing Conscientization and Critical Pedagogy: Integrating Nature,

Spirit and Fearlessness as Foundational Concepts 551
R. Michael Fisher and Four Arrows
 Contents xi

51 A Critical, Culturally Sustaining, Pedagogy of Whānau 561

Ann Milne

52 Critical Indigenous Pedagogies of Resistance: The Call for

Critical Indigenous Educators 574
Jeremy Garcia

53 Ethical Relationality as a Pathway for Non-Indigenous Educators to

Decolonize Curriculum and Instruction 587
Shashi Shergill and David Scott

54 Flooded, between Two Worlds: Holding the Memory of What Used to

Be Against the Reality of What Exists Now 604
Jennifer M. Markides

55 Dance and Children’s Cultural Identity: A Critical Perspective of the

Embodiment of Place 630
Adrienne Sansom

56 Indigenous Knowledges and Science Education: Complexities,

Considerations and Praxis 642
Renee Desmarchelier

57 Navajo Sweat House Leadership: Acquiring Traditional Navajo

Leadership for Restoring Identity in Our Forgotten World 658
Perry R. James

58 The Navigator’s Path: Journey Through Story and Ngākau

Pedagogy664
Rose Marsters

SECTION VI EDUCATION AND PRAXIS 677

Robert Hattam

59 A Critical Pedagogy of Working Class Schooling: A Call to

Activist Theory and Practice 681
John Smyth

60 Critical Pedagogy as Research 694

Tricia M. Kress

61 Poverty and Equality in Early Childhood Education 704

Concepción Sánchez-Blanco

62 Critical Tourism Pedagogy: A Response to Oppressive Practices 717

Sandro Carnicelli and Karla Boluk
xii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

63 Queer(ing) Cisgender Normativity: Reconsidering Critical Pedagogy

Through a Genderqueer Lens 729
Dana M. Stachowiak and Leila E. Villaverde

64 Culturally Responsive Schooling as a Form of Critical Pedagogies for

Indigenous Youth and Tribal Nations 743
Angelina E. Castagno, Jessica A. Solyom and Bryan Brayboy

65 Feminist Critical Pedagogy 758

Haggith Gor Ziv

66 Schooling, Milieu, Racism: Just Another Brick in the Wall 771

Teresa Anne Fowler

67 An Existentialist Pedagogy of Humanization: Countering Existential

Oppression of Teachers and Students in Neoliberal Educational Spaces 783
Sheryl J. Lieb

68 Vocational Education and Training in Schools and ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ 797
Barry Down

SECTION VII TEACHING AND LEARNING 811

Barry Down

69 Critical Pedagogy, Social Justice and Contesting Definitions of

Engagement in the Classroom 815
David Zyngier

70 Critical Pedagogy and Anti-Muslim Racism Education: Insights from the UK 828
Khadija Mohammed, Lisa McAuliffe and Nighet Riaz

71 Pedagogy of Connectedness: Cultivating a Community of Caring,

Compassionate Social Justice Warriors in the Classroom 841
Revital Zilonka

72 Counternarratives: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Critical Caring

in One Urban School 854
Gang Zhu and Zhengmei Peng

73 ‘More than an Educator but a Political Figure’: Leveraging the Overlapping

Intersections of Disability Studies and Critical Pedagogy in Teacher Education 869
Phillip Boda

74 Critical Pedagogy for Preservice Teacher Education in the US:

An Agenda for a Plurilingual Reality of Superdiversity 884
Guofang Li and Pramod K. Sah
 Contents xiii

75 Teaching Social Justice 899

Galia Zalmanson Levi

76 Creating Global Learning Communities 909

Ramón Flecha and Silvia Molina

SECTION VIII COMMUNITIES AND ACTIVISM 923

Michael B. MacDonald

77 Moving from Individual Consciousness Raising to Critical

Community Building Praxis 927
Silvia Cristina Bettez and Cristina Maria Dominguez

78 Arab Spring as Critical Pedagogy: Activism in the Face of Death 941

Awad Ibrahim

79 Schools as Learning Communities 950

Maria Padrós and Sandra Girbés-Peco

80 Love Unconditionally: Educating People in the Midst of a Social Crisis 961

Elbert J. Hawkins III

81 ‘We Do It All the Time’: Afrocentric Pedagogies for Raising

Consciousness and Collective Responsibility 974
Shuntay Z. Tarver and Melanie M. Acosta

82 Critical Pedagogy, Democratic Praxis, and Adultism 989

Toby Rollo, J. Cynthia McDermott, Richard Kahn and Fred Chapel

83 Presence and Resilience as Resistance 1003

Tanya Brown Merriman

84 African American Mothers Theorizing Practice 1016

April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams

85 Deploying Critical Bricolage as Activism 1025

Sherilyn Lennon

86 Critical Community Education: The Case of Love Stings 1036

Annette Coburn and David Wallace

VOLUME 3

SECTION IX COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA 1055

Michael Hoechsmann

87 Mediating the Curriculum with Critical Media Literacy 1059

Jeff Share
xiv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

88 Empowerment and Participation in Media Education: A Critical Review 1074

Michael Hoechsmann and Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín

89 Dangerous Citizenship: Comics and Critical Pedagogy 1083

Sabrina Boyer

90 It’s ‘Reel’ Critical: Media Literacy and Film-based Pedagogy 1097

Brian C. Johnson

91 Critical Media Literacy 1115

Tony Kashani

92 Critical Pedagogy and Wikilearning 1126

Juha Suoranta

93 Diversity in Digital Humanities 1139

Cherie Ann Turpin

94 Missing Beats: Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in Post-secondary

Media Production Programs 1146
Ki Wight

95 A Shock to Thought: Curatorial Judgment and the Public Exhibition of

‘Difficult Knowledge’ 1157
Roger I. Simon

96 In a Rape Culture, Can Boys Actually Be Boys? 1175

Gerald Walton

SECTION X ARTS AND AESTHETICS 1187

Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter

97 Critical Public Pedagogies of DIY 1191

Gregory Martin

98 OASIS – (Re)conceptualizing Galleries as Intentionally Pedagogical 1206

Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter

99 Critical Pedagogy and the Visual Arts: Examining Perceptions of

Poverty and Social Justice in Early Childhood Research with Children 1220
Judith Dunkerly-Bean and Kristine Sunday

100 Performance Pedagogy Using the Theater of Justice 1233

I. Malik Saafir

101 Thanks for Being Local: CineMusicking as a Critical Pedagogy of

Popular Music 1242
Michael B. MacDonald
 Contents xv

102 Critical Life Writing for Social Change 1255

Claire Robson and Dennis Sumara

103 Towards a Critical Arts Practice 1269

Peter R. Wright

104 Theorizing a New Pedagogical Model: Transformative Arts and

Cultural Praxis Circle 1279
Mary Drinkwater

105 Through a Rhizomatic Lens: Synergies between A/r/tography,

Community Engaged Research, and Critical Pedagogy with Students
with Intellectual Disabilities 1294
Lalenja Harrington

106 The Pedagogical Afterthought: Situating Socially Engaged Art as

Critical Public Pedagogy 1313
Christopher Lee Kennedy

SECTION XI CRITICAL YOUTH STUDIES 1327

Shirley R. Steinberg

107 Resisting Youth: From Occupy Through Black Lives Matter to

the Trump Resistance 1329
Douglas Kellner and Roslyn M. Satchel

108 Where Does Critical Pedagogy Happen? Young People, ‘Relational

Pedagogy’ and the Interstitial Spaces of School 1343
Andrew Hickey

109 Lyrical Minded: Unveiling the Hidden Literacies of Youth Through

Performance Pedagogy 1358
Priya Parmar

110 ‘They Laugh ’Cause They Assume I’m in Prison’: HipHop Feminism as
Critical Pedagogy 1365
Dawn N. Hicks Tafari and Veronica A. Newton

111 Young People, Agency and the Paradox of Trust 1374

Tony Edwards and Kerry J. Renwick

112 Excavating Intimacy, Privacy, and Consent as Youth in a Hostile World:

A Critical Journey 1386
Paul L. Thomas

113 Art and Erotic Exploration as Critical Pedagogy with Youth 1400
Nwachi Pressley-Tafari
xvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

114 Youth, Becoming-American, and Learning the Vietnam War 1411

Mark Helmsing

115 The Bully, the Bullied, and the Boss: The Power Triangle of Youth Suicide 1421
Teresa J. Rishel

116 Pedagogies of Trauma, Fear and Hope in Texts about 9/11 for Young
People: From a Perspective of Distance 1439
Jo Lampert and Kerry Mallan

SECTION XII SCIENCE, ECOLOGY AND WELLBEING 1451

Renee Desmarchelier

117 Critical Body Pedagogies in Technoscience 1455

Stephanie L. Hudson

118 Computer Science Education and the Role of Critical Pedagogy in a

Digital World 1464
Joseph Carroll-Miranda

119 Where the Fantastic Liberates the Mundane: Feminist Science Fiction
and the Imagination 1476
Sarah E. Colonna

120 Conceptualizing Hip-Hop as a Conduit toward Developing Science Geniuses 1486

Edmund Adjapong

121 The Crit-Trans Heuristic for Transforming STEM Education: Youth and
Educators as Participants in the World 1497
Jennifer D. Adams, Atasi Das and Eun-Ji Amy Kim

122 Who Hears My Cry? The Impact of Activism on the Mental Health of
African American Women 1508
Shawn Arango Ricks

123 Fat Pedagogy and the Disruption of Weight-based Oppression: Toward

the Flourishing of All Bodies 1516
Constance Russell

124 Forwarding a Critical Urban Environmental Pedagogy 1532

Marissa Bellino

125 An Ecological Pedagogy of Joy 1543

Jodi Latremouille

Index 1559
 List of Figures

43.1 The progression of association of ideas and continuity of experience in

Indigenous pedagogy across India 455
43.2 The approach used to accelerate children at a rapid pace in Hyderabad, India 458
53.1 A cyclic perspective on the historical relationship of Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal people in Canada 594
54.1 Highwood River 605
54.2 Water at the level of the train bridge 606
54.3 Mud tracked out 609
54.4 Waiting for a bin 609
54.5 Trapped moisture 610
54.6 Farewell to art 1 610
54.7 Farewell to art 2 611
54.8 Three bins in three days – throwing it all away 611
54.9 Jacked up 612
54.10 Rotting on the inside, right next door 614
54.11 Sporting goods store – facade 615
54.12 New pub and hardware store – fronts615
54.13 Delivery in 30 minutes or … never616
54.14 Dentist office, now launderette 616
54.15 Posters to mask the empty insides 617
54.16 Mmm ... noodles 617
54.17 Antiques or roadhouse? 617
54.18 Hardware – not fixing anything 618
54.19 Real art gallery, ‘not fake’ 618
54.20 Fake bake shop, (really) for lease 618
54.21 ‘WE ARE STiLL CLEANG UP PLEASE DON’T TOUCH OUR
SUPPLYs AND FURNiTURE’ 620
54.22 Diner – a permanent fixture 621
54.23 Little Big Bear Gifts – a facade on a facade 621
54.24 Going nowhere 624
54.25 No news 625
54.26 Filming today 625
54.27 From hardware, to workwear – false advertising, no sales to be had 626
54.28 Roadhouse/Antiques/Roadhouse – rotating facades 626
54.29 Diner, rear view – a facade on all fronts (Markides, June 2018) 627
54.30 Low and slow 627
63.1 Intersectionality versus assemblages 737
63.2 Gender as a rhizome 740
72.1 The conceptual backdrop 856
81.1 Course activities within a Diversity of Human Services course that illustrates
Village Pedagogy 982
xviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

81.2 Preservice teacher learning activities from a literacy methods course

framed around the Black Studies Critical Studyin’ pedagogical framework 985
85.1 The cycle of inquiry extending the bricolage to incorporate community
activism1029
85.2 A particularly troubling and well-known local image 1031
85.3 My public critique of the logo 1032
86.1 Pat’s collage 1039
86.2 Sam’s collage 1039
86.3 Creative conversations at the collage table 1040
86.4 Collaborative dialogue at the collage table 1040
86.5 Jane’s collage 1044
96.1 The tweet of Nathaniel Prince 1179
S10.1 The interplay between art, aesthetics and critical pedagogy 1188
99.1 Money machine 1226
99.2 Pedagogy of a new childhood redesign cycle 1229
104.1 Transformative Arts and Cultural Praxis Circle (TACPC) 1282
108.1 The Bike Build workshop space 1346
108.2 Teasing-out where next to proceed 1349
108.3 A scene from a typical discussion 1349

 List of Tables

56.1 The impact of the construction of the neoliberal subject on classroom

implementation of curricula inclusive of Indigenous knowledges 651
62.1 A summary of our critical rethinking of tourism education 724
87.1 Conceptual understandings and corresponding questions 1062
111.1 Purpose statements from state and national curriculum documents 1378
120.1 Students’ science-themed raps 1494
121.1 Crit-Trans heuristic1506
 Notes on the Editors
and Contributors

THE EDITORS

Shirley R. Steinberg considers herself somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd generation of
critical pedagogy. Originally an American, she discovered critical pedagogy in Alberta, Canada
as a student of David G. Smith and Julia Ellis. Her high school teaching career took a radical
left turn after only a year and she determined to complete a doctorate based on the criticalizing
of media using bricolage, a philosophical research methodology she refined with
Joe L. Kincheloe (2nd generation). Expanding her idea of pedagogy into cultural studies, her
work blended the critical with the pedagogical and cultural. The author and editor of many
books and articles, her research interests have generated (often with Kincheloe) Critical
Multiculturalism, Christotainment, Kinderculture, Critical Bricolage, and Postformal thinking.
As Research Professor of Critical Youth Studies at the University of Calgary, she engages local,
national, and global community work with and for youth, refugees, immigrants, and other
disenfranchised groups.

Barry Down is Professor of Education at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. In

2003 he was appointed the City of Rockingham Chair in Education (2004-2013) at Murdoch
University, the first such position funded by a local government in Australia. In this period, he
worked on a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Projects investigating
issues of student engagement, school-to-work transitions and early career teacher resilience.
He has co-authored seven books (with long time collaborators John Smyth and Peter
McInerney) including Critically Engaged Learning: Connecting to Young Lives (2008);
‘Hanging in with Kids’ in Tough Times: Engagement in Contexts of Educational Disadvantage
in the Relational School (2012); and The Socially Just School; Making Space for Youth to speak
Back (2014). His most recent book is entitled Rethinking School-to-Work Transitions: Young
People have Something to Say (with John Smyth and Janean Robinson). His research interests
focus on young people’s lives in the context of shifts in the global economy, poverty, class,
school-to-work transitions and student dis/re/engagement.

THE SECTION EDITORS

Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa) (aka Don Trent Jacobs) is Professor, School of Leadership Studies
at Fielding Graduate University and the author of numerous publications on ‘Indigenous world-
view’, including Unlearning the Language of Conquest, Teaching Truly and Point of Departure.

Paul R. Carr is a Full Professor in the Department of Education at the Université du Québec
en Outaouais, Canada, and is also the Chair-holder of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy,
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxi

Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT)(uqo.ca/DCMT/). His latest book,

with Gina Thésée, is “It’s Not Education that Scares Me, it’s the Educators…”: Is There Still
Hope for Democracy in Education, and Education for Democracy?.

Roymieco A. Carter is Director of the Visual Arts Program and University Galleries at North
Carolina A&T State University. He teaches courses on graphic design, digital media, visual
literacy and theory, and social criticism. He is a graphic designer of print, web, and motion-
based media. He has written articles on graphic design education, art education, critical peda-
gogy, Black studies, gaming, human computer interaction and graphics computer animation.

Renee Desmarchelier is the Associate Dean Learning, Teaching and Student Success for the
Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts at the University of Southern Queensland. Her
scholarly interests include Indigenous knowledges, critical pedagogy and participatory and
Indigenous research methodologies. Her research has centered on how teachers negotiate
Indigenous knowledges in their classroom praxis and the cultural interface between Indigenous
and non-Indigenous ways of knowing.

R. Michael Fisher, a member of the Adjunct Faculty, Werklund School of Education,

University of Calgary, is an educator, artist and fearologist who has been at the forefront of fear
studies curriculum development for 30 years. He has published five books, including World’s
Fearlessness Teachings, an original resource for leaders.

Robert Hattam is the Professor for Educational Justice in the School of Education, University
of South Australia and he leads the Pedagogy for Justice Research Group. His research has
focused on teachers’ work, critical and reconciliation pedagogies, refugees, and socially just
school reform. He has published numerous books on critical pedagogy and educational ine-
quality in vulnerable communities.

Michael Hoechsmann is an Associate Professor and the Program Chair in the Faculty of
Education at Lakehead University, Orillia. His research focuses on digital and media literacies,
cultural studies and education in formal and non-formal settings. He is a co-Investigator on two
SSHRC (Canada) funded research grants, a board member of Media Smarts: Canada’s Centre
for Digital and Media Literacy, and the co-chair of UNESCO GAPMIL North America.

Michael B. MacDonald is an Associate Professor of music at the MacEwan University Faculty

of Fine Arts and Communications in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His research areas include
popular music scenes, screen production research, ethnographic film theory, ciné-ethnomusi-
cology, and audiovisual ethnomusicology. Michael is the founding program chair of the
MusCan Film Series held annually at the Canadian University Music Society conference and
serves on the editorial board of the journal Intersections.

Gregory Martin is an Associate Professor in the School of International Studies and Education
at the University of Technology Sydney. His work is transdisplinary with a focus on critical
pedagogies, spatial politics and participatory methodologies, including the power of storytell-
ing to promote learning and change.

Cathryn Teasley is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of A Coruña.

Her research on anti-racism, socio-cultural justice, nonviolence and gender equity in teacher
xxii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

education is informed by critical pedagogies, decolonial studies, peace studies, queer theory
and feminisms. Her latest contribution is to the Handbook of Theory and Research in Cultural
Studies and Education.

Gina Thésée is Full Professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Faculty of Education,
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and is also Co-Chair of the UNESCO Chair in
Democracy, Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (DCMÉT) (uqo.ca/DCMT/).
Her latest book, with Paul R. Carr, is entitled “It’s not Education that Scares Me, it’s the
Educators…”: Is There Still Hope for Democracy in Education, and Education for Democracy?

Leila E. Villaverde is a Professor in Cultural Foundations at the Department of Educational

Leadership and Cultural Foundations, Dean Fellow in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UNCG
and Senior Editor of The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. She teaches courses on
curriculum studies, history of education and critical pedagogy, gender studies, visual literacy
and aesthetics, and critical inquiry.

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Melanie M. Acosta is an Assistant Professor in the department of Curriculum, Culture, &

Educational Inquiry at Florida Atlantic University. Her scholarship is focused on critical issues
in teacher learning and preparation to support African American educational excellence. Dr.
Acosta began teaching as an elementary school teacher and a community organizer for a grass-
roots parent empowerment group.

Jennifer D. Adams is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor at The
University of Calgary holding a dual appointment in the Department of Chemistry and
Werklund School of Education. She researches creativity and science, teacher identity, and
informal science education and environmental education. Her work centers critical, decolonial
and sociocultural approaches.

Edmund Adjapong is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Studies Department at Seton

Hall University. He is also a Faculty Fellow at The Institute for Urban and Multicultural
Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and the author of #HipHopEd: The
Compilation on Hip-Hop Education (Volume 1 & Volume 2).

Philip M. Anderson is Professor Emeritus of Education at Queens College and the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. He has published extensively on reader response,
the literature curriculum, censorship and cultural aesthetics in education and society.

William Ayers is a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the
University of Illinois at Chicago (retired) has written extensively about social justice and
democracy. His books include A Kind and Just Parent; Teaching toward Freedom; Fugitive
Days: A Memoir; Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; To Teach: The
Journey, in Comics; and Demand the Impossible!

Lilia I. Bartolomé is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts

at Boston. Her research interests include the preparation of effective teachers of linguistic
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxiii

minority students and the exploration of teacher beliefs about minoritised students.
Dr Bartolomé’s publications are extensive and include notable books such as Ideologies in
Education: Unmasking the Trap of Teacher Neutrality and Dancing with Bigotry: The
Poisoning of Cultural Identities (with Donaldo Macedo).

Marissa Bellino is an Assistant Professor of Education at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ),
where she teaches social foundations and science methods to preservice teachers. Her teaching
interests include environmental sustainability and science education through a critical lens.
Marissa’s research interests explore youth experiences in urban environments, environmental
education and participatory research.

Silvia Cristina Bettez is a Professor in the Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations
(ELC) Department at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she teaches about
issues of social justice in a graduate program. Her scholarship centralizes social justice with a
focus on fostering critical community building, teaching for social justice, and promoting
equity through intercultural communication and engagement.

Phillip Boda is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University. He holds a PhD in

Science Education and an EdM in Teacher Education from Teachers College at Columbia
University. Phillip’s work investigates the overlapping intersections of cultural studies/disability
studies, urban teacher education and STEM education. He is the editor of the book Essays on
Exclusion: Our Critical, Collective Journey Toward Equity in Education.

Karla Boluk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies at
the University of Waterloo. Karla’s scholarship examines how to bring criticality and creative
pedagogy to the classroom in order to enhance sustainable tourism education.

Sabrina Boyer is an Associate Professor at Guilford Technical Community College in English

and Humanities. Her research interests include queer theory, LGBTQ2+ studies, Feminist
theory, LatinX studies, critical pedagogy and media studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational
Leadership and Cultural Foundations and a Post-Baccalaureate in Women’s, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies from The University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Bryan Brayboy is President’s Professor, Special Assistant to the President for American
Indian Affairs, and Director of the Center for Indian Education at Arizona State University. His
research focuses on the experiences of Indigenous students, staff, and faculty in institutions of
higher education.

Deborah P. Britzman teaches at York University in Toronto. She is Distinguished Research

Professor, holds the York University Chair of Pedagogy and Psycho-social Transformations
and is a psychoanalyst. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the author of
numerous books and articles, with her main contribution being to the field of psychoanalysis
with education.

Pipo Bui holds a PhD in European ethnology from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She
holds a Bachelor of Arts in communication from Stanford University. Pipo currently works as
Director for Corporate and Foundation Relations at EarthCorps, a nonprofit organisation that
cultivates emerging environmental leaders from more than 90 countries.
xxiv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Alana Butler is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University in

Canada. She has taught in a range of settings that include preschool, English as a Second
Language, adult literacy, and university undergraduate. Her research interests include the aca-
demic achievement of low-socio economic students, race and schooling, equity and inclusion,
immigration and settlement studies, and multicultural education.

Robert F. Carley is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University. He

is the author of Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and The Politics of Practice and Autonomy,
Refusal, and The Black Bloc: Positioning Class in Critical and Radical Theory.

Fred Chapel is a member of the faculty of the Education Department at Antioch University,
Los Angeles. He was a middle school science teacher for 25 years and brings a wealth of expe-
rience in inquiry-based pedagogy to his teaching.

Sandro Carnicelli is a Senior Lecturer in Events and Tourism at the University of the West of
Scotland. Sandro has been developing research in the fields of tourism in Brazil, New Zealand
and Scotland for over ten years. His main research interests are adventure tourism, tourism
education and outdoor learning.

Joseph Carroll-Miranda is an Auxiliary Professor at the Graduate Studies Department of the

College of Education of the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras Campus. He is a strong
advocate of both Computer Science and STEM education as issues of social justice. His
research interest include youth culture, teknoculture, hacker culture, critical pedagogy and
transforming traditional classrooms as spaces of creation and innovation.

Angelina E. Castagno is a Professor of Educational Leadership and Foundations, and the

Director of the Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators at Northern Arizona University. Her
teaching and research centers on equity and diversity in US schools, and particularly issues of
Whiteness and Indigenous education.

Colin Chasi is Professor in Communication Studies and the Head of the Department of
Communication Studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa. His latest research
is focused on the transformation of higher education, in view of the contemporary decoloniza-
tion debate. He is rated as a nationally recognised researcher by the National Research
Foundation of South Africa.

Annette Coburn is Senior Lecturer and Programme Lead in Community Education at the
University of the West of Scotland (UWS). Following 23 years as a community education and
youth work practitioner, Annette began teaching in Higher Education in 2003. Her on-going
youth and community research has examined aspects of border pedagogy, equality, social jus-
tice and well-being.

Sarah E. Colonna is Associate Program Chair of Grogan College at The University North
Carolina, Greensboro and Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests
include feminist thought and pedagogy, equity and diversity, leadership and young adult literature.

Atasi Das is an educator activist and doctoral candidate of Urban Education at The Graduate
Center, City University of New York. Her research focuses on critical numeracy − a framework
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxv

examining numbers as social and political activity. She collaborates with Spark Teacher
Education Institute on advancing a liberatory praxis − learning and doing to collectively create
an equitable society.

Cristina Maria Dominguez is a doctoral student in Educational Studies with a concentration

in Cultural Studies at The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and serves as a graduate
assistant in the department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations. Dominguez’s
current research interests include: critical pedagogy, social justice education, and everyday
relational social justice teaching, learning and action work.

Brian Dotts is an Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of

Georgia. He is the author of Educational Foundations: Philosophical and Historical
Perspectives and The Political Education of Democratus: Negotiating Civic Virtue during the
Early Republic.

Mary Drinkwater is a Lecturer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto,
Canada. Her research focuses on issues of arts and cultural practices for democratic and trans-
formative education. She was lead editor and chapter author for Transnational Perspectives on
Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights and Peace Education.

Judith Dunkerly-Bean is an Associate Professor of Literacy, Language and Culture and

Co-Director of the Literacy Research and Development Center at Old Dominion University.
Judith’s research is situated at the intersection of critical literacy, social justice and human
rights.

Tony Edwards has been a teacher educator in Australia and more recently Canada. He has
contributed to the learning and professional development of preservice teachers in a range of
contexts. His research is primarily focused on the possible impacts upon an individual student’s
habitus as they are presented with support to explore possible futures.

Kenneth J. Fasching-Varner is Associate Professor of Literacy at the University of Nevada,

Las Vegas. The author of over 70 publications, Varner’s expertise centers on race and critical
international engagement.

Ramón Flecha is Doctor Honoris Causa of the West University of Timişoara and Professor of
Sociology at the University of Barcelona. He is a researcher of the projects WORKALÓ (FP5),
INCLUD-ED (FP6) and IMPACT-EV (FP7). He has published in Nature, PLOS ONE,
Cambridge Journal of Education, Harvard Educational Review, Qualitative Inquiry, Current
Sociology and Journal of Mixed Methods Research.

Teresa Anne Fowler is a doctoral candidate at Werklund School of Education, University

of Calgary. Teresa’s research interests lie with Whiteness, masculinities, anti-racist peda-
gogy and critical pedagogy. Her doctoral dissertation explores how Whiteness reproduces
in schools and how this leads to a radicalisation of White boys and manifestations of
violence.

Benjamin Frymer is Professor in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State
University, and previously taught at Columbia University’s Teachers College, UCLA, and
xxvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Trinity College. He writes in the areas of education, self and society, and cultural studies focus-
ing on the study of film education, contemporary alienation, violence, and ideology.

Antonio Garcia is an independent researcher, founder and organizer of the International Žižek
Studies Conference (est. 2012), executive director of the Žižekian Institute for Research,
Inquiry, and Pedagogy, and co-editor with Rex Butler for the Žižek Studies Book Series. In
addition to being a Žižek scholar, he has focused on developing his own original theoretical
work called constellar theory.

Hermán S. García was a faculty member at Eastern Washington University, Texas Tech
University, Texas A&M University and New Mexico State University. He is currently Regents
Professor/Distinguished Professor Emeritus at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces.

Jeremy Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Education and is Co-Director of the

Indigenous Teacher Education Project at the University of Arizona. He is a member of the
Hopi/Tewa Tribes of Arizona. His research focuses on decolonisation, critical Indigenous cur-
riculum and pedagogy, Indigenous teacher education, and critical and culturally sustaining
family and community engagement within Indigenous education.

Sandra Girbés-Peco is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Department of Teaching and

Learning and Educational Organisation at the University of Barcelona. She is also a researcher
at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA), where she develops work on
gender studies, community involvement and educational actions to overcome poverty.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public
Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished
Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. The author of hundreds of articles and books, including The
Terror of the Unforseen and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism. He is a
columnist for Truthout.

Aristotelis Gkiolmas has a BSc in Physics and a Masters and PhD in Science Education. He
is member of the Laboratory Teaching Staff of the Department of Primary Education,
University of Athens. He has participated in numerous international conferences on critical
pedagogy and is a member of the editorial board of the journals The International Journal of
Critical Media Literacy and Green Theory and Praxis.

Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín is a Full Professor of Education at the University of Valladolid.

(Spain). His interests are in media literacy, digital competence and teacher training. He has
been involved in different European projects related to media education and he was the lead
organizer of the first and third International Conferences of Media Education and Digital
Competence in 2011 and 2017.

Rodney Handelsman is a founding teacher of a public alternative high school in Canada. He

has taught K-12 and worked in the field as a researcher, teacher educator (McGill, OISE,
UKZN), pedagogical consultant and curriculum writer.

Lalenja Harrington received her PhD in Educational Studies and Cultural Foundations from
The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she is currently Academic Director for
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxvii

the Integrative Community Studies certificate. She is most interested in exploring the intersec-
tions between art, community-engaged research and pedagogical approaches with the potential
for engaging marginalised folk as scholars and researchers.

Nicholas D. Hartlep holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in Urban
Education (Social Foundations of Education). He is currently the Robert Charles Billings
Endowed Chair in Education and Chair of the Education Studies Department at Berea College.
You can follow his work on Twitter at @nhartlep or at his website, www.nicholashartlep.com.

Elbert J. Hawkins, III is a native of North Carolina who resides in Jamestown. Currently, he
is a doctoral candidate, a professional high-school counsellor, nationally certified through the
National Board for Certified Counselors (National Board Certified Teacher–School Counseling/
Early Childhood through Young Adulthood).

Mark Helmsing is Assistant Professor of Education and an affiliated faculty member in the
Department of History and Art History and the Folklore Studies Program at George Mason
University. Mark’s work uses critical theories of affect and emotion to explore how people feel
about the past and how the past makes people feel.

Andrew Hickey is Associate Professor in Communications at the University of Southern

Queensland. Andrew publishes in the areas of critical pedagogy, public pedagogies and eman-
cipatory social practice and has undertaken large-scale projects with departments of education,
schools and community groups internationally.

Stephanie L. Hudson is a Doctoral Student in educational studies, concentrating on cultural stud-

ies and women’s and gender studies, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Stephanie
is a Teaching Associate in the Cultural Foundations Program. She teaches, researches and writes
across disciplines in biology, cultural foundations of education and feminist studies. Stephanie’s
research interests include curriculum studies, feminist theories and pedagogies, teaching and
learning in virtual spaces, feminist cultural studies of technoscience and critical body studies.

Luis Huerta-Charles is an Associate Professor of Multicultural Education at New Mexico

State University. He is a Nepantlero border-crosser that aims to prepare teachers as social activ-
ists in order to transform our unjust and unequal society into a more just one.

Awad Ibrahim is an award-winning author and a Professor at the Faculty of Education,

University of Ottawa. He is a curriculum theorist with special interest in critical pedagogy, hip-
hop studies and Black popular culture, cultural studies, applied linguistics, social justice,
diasporic and continental African identities and ethnography.

Perry R. James is an educator who lives and works in the Navajo Nation. A fluent speaker of
his language, he was brought up with the traditional ways of the Ni’hokaa’ Diyin Dine’é.
Currently a doctoral candidate at Fielding Graduate University, his research uses Indigenous
Interpretative Autoethnography to prepare Navajo leaders.

Catalina Jaramillo is a teacher educator at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Colombia

and an EFL teacher in a public school. She has served as a research assistant at Grupo de
Investigación Acción y Evaluación en Lenguas Extranjeras (GIAE) in the line of language and
education policies at Universidad de Antioquia.
xxviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Graham Jeffery is Reader in Arts and Media at the University of the West of Scotland. His
work spans participatory and community arts practices, creative pedagogies, cultural policy,
urban studies and community development. He has led numerous action research projects with
diverse communities in different places around the world.

Brian C. Johnson earned his PhD in Communications Media and Instructional Technology
from Indiana University of PA. An avid film fanatic and scholar, his book Reel Diversity: A
Teacher’s Sourcebook was recognised by the National Association for Multicultural Education’s
2009 Chinn Book Award.

Richard Kahn is an anarcist educator at Antioch University, Los Angeles,whose primary inter-
ests are in researching social movements as pedagogically generative forces in society and in
critically challenging the role dominant institutions play in blocking the realization of greater
planetary freedom, peace, and happiness.

Tony Kashani is an American author, educator, philosopher of technology, and a cultural critic.
He holds a PhD degree in Humanities with emphasis on culture studies from California
Institute of Integral Studies. He is the author of five books including Movies Change Lives: A
Pedagogy of Humanistic Transformation. His interests are interdisciplinary scholarship and
pedagogy on humanities in the digital age and social justice.

Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA and is
author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture. He is the author of The
American Horror Show: Election 2016 and the Ascendency of Donald J. Trump, and American
Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism, and the Collected
Papers of Herman Marcuse.

Arlo Kempf is an Assistant Professor of Equity and Education in the Department of

Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the
University of Toronto. Arlo’s research interests include teachers’ work, anti-racism and
anti-colonialism in education, and critical perspectives on educational standardisation and
neoliberalism.

Christopher Lee Kennedy is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York, who creates
site-specific projects that examine conventional notions of ‘Nature’, interspecies agency and
biocultural collaboration. Kennedy is currently Assistant Director of the Urban Systems Lab at
The New School University.

Eun-Ji Amy Kim is Lecturer at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia in the School
of Education and Professional Studies, her area is social diversity and Indigenous education.
Her research interests are Indigenous science education, ReconciliACTION through
relationship-based and land-based teaching

Joe L. Kincheloe was the Canada Research Chair of Critical Pedagogy at McGill University
in Montreal, and the founder of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical
Pedagogy. Born in the mountains of Tennessee, he was raised to recognize inequities within
society and became the humble champion for the oppressed. The author of 60 books and
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxix

hundreds of articles, he is to be remembered as a rock n’ roll musician, father, partner, and

friend to many.

James D. Kirylo is Professor of Education at the University of South Carolina. Among other
books, he is the author of Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife, Paulo Freire: His Faith,
Spirituality, and Theology (with Drick Boyd) and Teaching with Purpose: An Inquiry in the
Who, Why, and How We Teach.

Tricia M. Kress is an Associate Professor in the Educational Leadership for Diverse Learning
Communities EdD programme at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, NewYork. Her research
uses critical pedagogy, cultural sociology and autoethnography to rethink teaching, learning
and research in urban schools. She details this approach in her book Critical Praxis Research:
Breathing New Life into Research Methods for Teachers.

Jo Lampert is a Professor of Education at La Trobe University in Melbourne. While she also

researches in the area of children’s literature, most of her daily work is in teacher education for
high-poverty schools.

Jodi Latremouille completed her doctorate in Educational Research at the Werklund School
of Education, University of Calgary. She is a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Education at
Thompson Rivers University. She also taught high school French Immersion and Social
Studies. Her research interests include hermeneutics, ecological and feminist pedagogy, social
and environmental justice, life writing and poetic inquiry.

Sherilyn Lennon is a Senior Lecturer in the Education and Professional Studies faculty at
Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Her research interests include literacy, gender,
rurality and emerging qualitative and post-qualitative research paradigms. She is the author of
numerous publications including the monograph, Unsettling Research, published in 2015 as
part of the Critical Qualitative Research series.

Galia Zalmanson Levi is a critical pedagogy and feminist teacher educator in seminar
Hakibbutzim College and in Ben Gurion University in Israel. She was co-founder of the teacher
education program for social justice and peace education. Galia combines activism and leading
social change in the public education system with academic research.

Guofang Li is a Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Transnational/Global Perspectives

of Language and Literacy Education of Children and Youth in the Faculty of Education, University
of British Columbia. Her research interests are longitudinal studies of immigrant children’s bi-
literacy development, diversity and equity issues and teacher education for diverse learners.

Sheryl J. Lieb is Adjunct Professor at Grogan Residential College and Humanities Lecturer in
the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies programme at The University of North Carolina,
Greensboro. Her areas of specialisation and research interests include philosophy of education,
critical pedagogy, ethics and intellectual virtue development, existentialism (as philosophy and
pedagogical practice) and cultural studies.

Kerry Mallan is Professor Emeritus at Queensland University of Technology. Her work is

cross-disciplinary, with a focus on children’s literature, youth and popular culture and digital
xxx THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

media texts and practices. Kerry was the founding director of the Children and Youth Research
Centre at QUT.

Jennifer M. Markides is a Métis doctoral candidate in the Werklund School of Education at

the University of Calgary. Her graduate research examines the stories told by youth who have
transitioned from life-in-schools to life-out-of-school within the same year as experiencing a
natural disaster. She is also an educator, researcher, and author in the area of Indigenous educa-
tion, and the editor of three books on Indigenous ways of knowing and research.

Rose Marsters is of Cook Island descent and is a Ngākauologist, a practitioner who is profi-
cient and drives a movement in Ngākau (heart) pedagogy and intelligence. She serves both the
Pasifika and Māori communities including her employed tertiary role, at the Waikato Institute
of Technology, Wintec. Her interest is on enhancing capabilities of practitioners in appropriate
culturally responsive practice.

Teresa Sordé Martí is a Serra Húnter Associate Professor of Sociology at the Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona. Her work focuses on the Roma ethnic minority in Europe looking at
social mobilization, women’s rights, education, and health. She has worked on projects with
the European Commission and is a member of CREA.

D’Arcy Martin is a veteran labour movement educator, having created, administered and
facilitated courses within unions across Canada and internationally for over four decades.
D’Arcy has extended his popular education practice to community, policy, academic and other
activist settings, and has written widely, including the book Thinking Union: Activism and
Education in Canada’s Labour Movement.

Domenica Maviglia is Doctor of Philosophy in Intercultural Pedagogy at the Department of

Cognitive Science, Psychological, Educational, and Cultural Studies of the University of
Messina. Her work focuses mainly on critical pedagogy and the theoretical and historical
research in the field of pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of education,
the history of pedagogy and the history of education.

Diarmuid McAuliffe is the academic lead for Art-in-Education at the School of Education and
Social Sciences, University of the West of Scotland. His research includes developing critical
school art pedagogies and runs a series of public seminars in this area, most recently for the
Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.

Lisa McAuliffe is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Inclusive Education in the
School of Education and Social Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland. Her main
research focus is the interface between inclusive education policy and practice. Lisa is particu-
larly interested in the role of teacher education in promoting inclusion and social justice.

J. Cynthia McDermott is a Professor of education and the Regional Director of two Antioch
university campuses in California and is a two-time Fulbright recipient. She has been a class-
room teacher K-12.

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies,

Chapman University, where he co-directs the Paulo Freire Democratic Project, he is Fellow of
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxi

the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce (London, UK). He is the author and editor of over 50
books including Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of
Education, now in the 6th edition.

Jane McLean. Currently an Academic Instructor at the University of New Brunswick,

Dr McLean is a retired educator with 35 years’ experience teaching English Language Arts. In
2001, she developed and implemented a critical feminist course for Grade 12 students called
Women, Media, and Culture, now taught in high schools throughout New Brunswick, Canada.

Tanya Brown Merriman has taught in public, parochial and charter schools; she has taught
nearly every grade level from Pre-K to doctoral students; and she has served as an administra-
tor and designer of new schools and curricular programmes. She teaches at the University of
Southern California, she is the author of Those Who Can: A Handbook for Social Reconstruction
and Teaching.

Ann Milne is a White educator who led the Kia Aroha College community’s almost 30-year
journey to resist and reject school environments which alienate Indigenous Māori and Pasifika
learners, to develop a critical, culturally sustaining learning approach centered on students’
cultural identities and to develop their critical consciousness, which she discusses in her book,
Coloring in the White Spaces.

Khadija Mohammed is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Social Sciences, at the
University of the West of Scotland. She is Programme Leader for Early Years and is also a
Teacher Educator. Her doctoral work centers around race equality, exploring the experiences of
Black and Minority Ethnic Teachers in Scotland. Khadija supports educators to become confi-
dent and empowered to promote equality, preventing and dealing with racism. She is also the
co-founder and Chair of the Scottish Association of Minority Ethnic Educators.

Silvia Molina is Associate Professor at the Department of Pedagogy at the Rovira i Virgili
University and a Researcher at the Community of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA).
She has published in journals such as Qualitative Inquiry, Frontiers in Psychology and Higher
Education Research & Development.

Veronica A. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Race in the Department of Sociology at

Georgia State University. Her research focuses on how Black undergraduate women experience
gendered racism at White universities. Her research interests include Black feminist thought,
critical race feminism, trap feminism, hip-hop feminism and hip-hop.

Soudeh Oladi is a Postdoctoral Fellow and SSHRC Project Manager at the Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Dr Oladi’s foundational research focuses on
interdisciplinary scholarship and is deeply rooted in critical pedagogy, philosophy of educa-
tion, social justice education and Eastern and Western educational philosophies and spiritual
traditions.

Maria Padrós is an Associate Professor at the Department of Teaching and Learning and
Educational Organization at the University of Barcelona and a Researcher at the Community
of Researchers on Excellence for All (CREA). She has published in journals such as Teachers
College Record, European Journal of Education and Qualitative Inquiry.
xxxii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Yuliana Palacio is a Foreign Language Teacher from the School of Languages, Universidad de
Antioquia in Colombia. She completed her graduate studies in Educational Leadership and
Policy Studies at Boston University. She is a member of the Grupo de Investigación Acción y
Evaluación en Lenguas Extranjeras (GIAE) research group in the line of language and educa-
tion policies.

Priya Parmar is an Associate Professor of Secondary Education at Brooklyn College-CUNY.

Her scholarly publications and books center on critical literacies, youth and hip hop culture and
other contemporary issues in the field of cultural studies in which economic, political and
social justice issues are addressed. She is the author of Knowledge Reigns Supreme: The
Critical Pedagogy of Hip Hop Artist KRS-One.

Oscar A. Peláez is a teacher educator and researcher. He coordinates the research field in the
ELT programme at the School of Education, Universidad Católica Luis Amigó in Colombia.
He is also an academic adviser to the university’s undergraduate and graduate students in the
area of education language policy.

Zhengmei Peng is a Professor of Comparative Education and the Director of the Institute of
International and Comparative Education at East China Normal University. His expertise
includes comparative education, German pedagogy, Western educational philosophy, theory of
knowledge and curriculum studies.

Kathalene A. Razzano holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. She
currently teaches in the Global Affairs Program at George Mason University, and the Media &
Communication Studies Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She spe-
cializes in cultural studies, feminist social theory, political economy, critical pedagogy, critical
legal studies, and media studies.

Kerry J. Renwick is a teacher educator with experience working with preservice teachers in
both Australia and Canada. Her research interests focus on social justice experienced and
developed at the personal level and in the context of the family.

Nighet Riaz is an early career researcher and associate lecturer at the School of Education and
Social Sciences in the University of the West of Scotland. Nighet’s research explores moral
panics and the perceived disaffection of young people, with a particular focus on Black and
Minority Ethnic and Muslim communities and youth.

Shawn Arango Ricks is the Assistant Vice President for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and
an Associate Professor of Race and Ethnicity Studies at Salem Academy and College in
Winston-Salem, NC. She is an intuitive healer, licensed mental health and addictions counsel-
lor, and life coach in private practice focused on helping Women of Color on their healing
journeys.

Teresa J. Rishel researches child and adolescent suicide in exploring sociocultural relation-
ships, student alienation, bullying, diverse students, hidden curriculum and leadership roles in
schools. She focuses on critical theory and pedagogy, curriculum theory, and social justice. She
works with organizations interested in sharing experiences or difficulties of suicide-related
school issues.
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxiii

Claire Robson’s federally funded postdoctoral research at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver)
investigated the potential of arts-engaged community practices. A widely published writer of
fiction, memoir, and poetry, Claire’s book, Writing for Change, shows how collective memoir
writing can effect social change.

Samuel D. Rocha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the

University of British Columbia.

Ylva Rodny-Gumede is the Head of the International Office and Professor in the School of
Communication at the University of Johannesburg. Ylva is a former journalist with experience
from both print and broadcast media. Her current research focus is on transformation and inno-
vation in higher education. Ylva is rated as a nationally recognised researcher by the National
Research Foundation of South Africa.

Toby Rollo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lakehead University.

April Yaisa Ruffin-Adams is an instructor in the African American and African Diaspora
Studies program at The University of North Carolina,Greensboro. Her research interests focus
on African American mothers, educational equity, and social justice.

Marcella Runell Hall is the Vice President for Student Life/Dean of Students and Lecturer in
Religion at Mount Holyoke College. She was the founding Co-Director for the Of Many
Institute for Multifaith Leadership and program advisor/founder for the minor in multifaith and
spiritual leadership at New York University. Marcella has written for Scholastic Books, the
New York Times Learning Network, VIBE, and various academic journals, including Equity
and Excellence in Education.

Constance Russell is a Professor in the Faculty of Education, Lakehead University in Thunder

Bay, Canada. She co-edited the award-winning book The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging
Weight-Based Oppression through Critical Education, edited the Canadian Journal of
Environmental Education from 2004–16 and currently co-edits a book series, (Re)thinking
Environmental Education.

I. Malik Saafir is President and CEO of The Southern Renaissance in Little Rock, Arkansas.
He trains education, business, government and nonprofit leaders how to end poverty in the
African diaspora. Previously, he was Visiting Lecturer of African/African American Studies at
the University of Central Arkansas.

Madhulika Sagaram is the founder and President of Adhya Educational Society, a nonprofit
engaged in improving the quality of education in underserved government and private schools.
She is also the founder of Ajahn Books and the Ajahn Center for Pedagogy. She has a vision
to develop research, engaging with the theory, practice and outreach of pedagogical perspec-
tives in education across socio-cultural diversity in India and the world.

Pramod K. Sah is a PhD candidate and Killam doctoral scholar in the Department of Language
and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia. His research work is driven by the
core values of social justice with a focus on class and ethnicity and English-medium instruction
(EMI) policy in multilingual Nepal.
xxxiv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Concepción Sánchez-Blanco has been Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer of Curriculum,

Instruction and School Organization at the University of A Coruña since 1995 (Faculty of
Educational Sciences). Her research focus is on the pursuit of justice and equity in early child-
hood education through ethnography, action research, case study, critical pedagogy, anti-bias
teacher education, social inclusion and anti-violence.

Adrienne Sansom is a Senior Lecturer in Dance and Drama at the University of Auckland. Her
academic interests include social democracy, social justice and social change through the arts,
and her research and writing focus on the body and embodied knowing in education, critical
pedagogy and cultural studies.

Martha Sañudo is Full Professor of Philosophy at Tecnológico de Monterrey at Centro de

Investigación en Humanidades.

Roslyn M. Satchel is the Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Communication at Pepperdine

University and is an affiliate faculty in Seaver College’s Social Action and Justice Colloquium
and at Pepperdine’s School of Law. Her research focuses on social justice, intersectional com-
munity organizing among marginalized groups, and critical cultural/race/media literacies —
especially, as relates to law, religion, and media.

William H. Schubert is Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of

Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he held professorial and administrative positions from 1975
to his retirement in 2011. At UIC, he received numerous awards for scholarship, teaching, and
mentoring. Schubert has published 18 books, over 250 articles and book chapters, and has
made approximately 300 scholarly presentations.

David Scott is an Assistant Professor in the Werklund School of Education, University of

Calgary. His scholarly work involves investigations into how educators interpret and peda-
gogically respond to new educational curricular mandates including calls to engage with
Indigenous histories, experiences, and philosophies.

Jeff Share is a Faculty Advisor in the Teacher Education Program at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research and practice focus on transformative education;
preparing K-12 educators to teach critical media literacy for social and environmental justice.
His published work includes Media Literacy is Elementary: Teaching Youth to Critically Read
and Create Media.

Shashi Shergill is an Assistant Principal at Connect Charter School in Calgary, Alberta,

Canada. Shashi was a 2015 recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Excellence in
Teaching History. Shashi is currently undertaking her doctorate in education at the University
of Calgary exploring ethical and cultural relationality in forming partnerships between
Indigenous and non – Indigenous schools.

Roger I. Simon was Professor of Sociology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in
Toronto, Ontario and founder of the Association of Critical Pedagogy in Canada. Over his forty
years of teaching and writing, he influenced generations of professors and public educators in
Canada. Simon authored numerous articles and seven books, the last, A Pedagogy of Witnessing:
Curatorial practice and the pursuit of social justice.
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxv

Marlon Simmons is an Associate Professor at the Werklund School of Education, University

of Calgary. His scholarly work is grounded within the diaspora, decolonial thought and com-
municative network practices of youth. Marlon’s research interests include schooling and
society, governance of the self in educational settings and the sociology of education.

Constantine Skordoulis is Professor of Epistemology and Didactical Methodology of Physics

at the University of Athens and Academic Director of the postgraduate programme ‘Secondary
Science Teachers Education’ of the Hellenic Open University. He has published extensively on
issues of history of science, science education and socio-scientific issues with a critical per-
spective.

Christine E. Sleeter is Professor Emerita in the College of Education at California State

University Monterey Bay, where she was a founding faculty member. Her research, published
in over 150 articles and 23 books, focuses on anti-racist multicultural education, ethnic studies
and teacher education.

David Geoffrey Smith is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.
His teaching and research have focussed on interculturality in curriculum through critical glo-
balization studies. His books include: Pedagon: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Human
Sciences, Pedagogy and Culture; Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth: Globalization,
Empire and the Crises of Pedgogy; Teaching as the Practice of Wisdom; and CONFLUENCES:
Intercultural Journeying in Research and Teaching: From Hermeneutics to a Changing World
Order.

John Smyth is Visiting Professor of Education and Social Justice, University of Huddersfield,
Emeritus Research Professor Federation University Australia, Emeritus Professor of Education
Flinders University of South Australia, Elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences
in Australia, a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar and the author of 35 books.

Nathan Snaza teaches English literature, gender studies and educational foundations at the
University of Richmond. He is the author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the
Politics of Humanism and the co-editor of Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and
Curriculum Studies and Posthumanism and Educational Research.

Marta Soler-Gallart is Full Professor of Sociology at University of Barcelona and director of

CREA. She is President of the European Sociological Association and has served on the
Governing Boards of the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities, the
ORCID Board of Directors, and as the Expert Evaluator for the EU Framework Programme of
Research.

Jessica A. Solyom is an Assistant Research Professor at Arizona State University in the Center
for Indian Education. Her recent publications have explored postsecondary education for
American Indian and Alaska Native students, critical research methodologies, and American
Indian college student activism for education rights.

Marc Spooner is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. His
research interests include homelessness and poverty, audit culture and the effects of neoliber-
alisation and corporatisation on higher education, social justice, activism and participatory
xxxvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

democracy. He is co-editor, with James McNinch, of the award-winning book Dissident

Knowledge in Higher Education.

Dana M. Stachowiak is the Director of the Gender Studies and Research Center and an
Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
Her research interests are in transgender studies, equity education, and literacy curriculum.

Constantina Stefanidou was born in 1976 in Athens. She is a physicist who obtained her PhD
in 2013 in History and Philosophy of Natural Sciences in Science Teaching. After 12 years in
secondary education, she is currently Faculty Member at the Department of Education of the
University of Athens as Teaching and Laboratory Staff. Her research interests are in science
education, historical and philosophical perspectives of science and didactics of science.

Michaela P. Stone is Assistant Professor of Early Childhood at the University of Northern

Vermont. Her scholarly interests includes mathematics, critical disability studies and the role
of differentiation and engagement in cross-cultural contexts.

Dennis Sumara is Professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary, Alberta,
Canada. His areas of research include curriculum theory, teacher education and literacy educa-
tion, as oriented by conceptual interests in hermeneutic phenomenology, literary response
theory and complexity science.

Kristine Sunday is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and Learning at Old Dominion

University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early childhood education.
She holds a PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in Art Education. Kristine draws from
post-structural theories and qualitative research methods to pose questions about children,
learning, and the visual arts in early childhood classrooms.

Juha Suoranta is Professor of Adult Education at Tampere University. He has published exten-
sively on critical pedagogy and public sociology. His latest books are C. Wright Mills’
Sociological Life and Paulo Freire: A Pedagogue of the Oppressed.

Dawn N. Hicks Tafari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at Winston-

Salem State University. Her research interests include Black boys in public schools, Black
feminist thought, Black male elementary school teachers, hiphop culture’s influence on social
and individual identity development, hiphop feminism, critical race theory, composite counter
storytelling and narrative research.

Nwachi Pressley-Tafari, a native New Yorker, has been a developmental educator for over
20 years and is now Adjunct Professor of Diversity, the Humanities, and College Success for
ECPI University. He holds a certification in life coaching and is a licensed New Life Story
coach.

Shuntay Z. Tarver is an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University in the Department of

Counselling and Human Services. He is committed to social justice with a particular focus on
the experiences of African Americans within various ecological systems (i.e. schools, justice
systems, and families).
 Notes on the Editors and Contributors xxxvii

Paul. L. Thomas, is Professor of Education at Furman University. He taught high-school

English for 18 years in South Carolina before moving to teacher education and teaching first-
year writing. He is the author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays
Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means. Follow him at http://radicalscholarship.wordpress.
com/ and @plthomasEdD.

Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs is Associate Professor, Social Foundations, Virginia Polytechnic

Institute and the author of Re-Assembly Required: Critical Autoethnography and Spiritual
Discovery. Her research in Spain for a critical autoethnography examines life under Franco’s
dictatorship following the Spanish Civil War. She is also investigating critical pedagogy in
teacher education with colleagues in Spain and Mexico.

Peter Pericles Trifonas is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University
of Toronto. His areas of interest include ethics, philosophy of education, cultural studies, and
technology. His books include: Deconstructing the Machine (with Jacques Derrida);
International Handbook of Semiotics; Roland Barthes and the Empire of Signs; and Umberto
Eco & Football.

Stephanie Troutman is a Black feminist scholar, mother and first-generation college student.
She is the Associate Professor of Emerging Literacies in the English Department at the
University of Arizona. She serves as affiliate faculty in Gender & Women’s Studies, Teaching,
Learning & Sociocultural Studies, Africana Studies and the LGBT Institute.

Cherie Ann Turpin is an Associate Professor in the English Program at University of DC. Her
publications include the book How Three Black Women Writers Combined Spiritual and
Sensual Love, as well as articles in various journals and anthologies. She is completing
Afrofuturism and African spiritual traditions, as well as Digital Humanities and Diversity.

Jaime Usma is a Teacher Educator and Researcher at the School of Languages, Universidad
de Antioquia in Colombia. In his recent publications and studies, he examines language and
education policies being adopted in Colombia and their social, economic and political implica-
tions for different educational actors, ethnic groups and communities.

Juan Ríos Vega is an Assistant Professor at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, Department
of Teacher Education, where he teaches courses on English as a second language (ESL) and
diversity in education. His research interests include K-12 Latinx students in education, queers
of color critique, and LGBTIQ+ populations in Panama.

Marco Montalbetti Viñuela is an independent scholar and photojournalist with over 20 years
of experience, five of which were spent documenting the teaching-exchange programmes
described in his article in this Handbook.

David Wallace is lecturer in community education at the University of the West of Scotland.
For the better part of 40 years he has been a passionate advocate for social justice through
informal, collaborative and community-based education. His research and teaching interests
have mirrored an engagement with distinctively Scottish practices in community education and
with an overarching concern for social justice.
xxxviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Gerald Walton is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University in Canada.

His research focuses on school-based bullying as othering and he speaks and writes on
Whiteness, free speech, masculinity, gender expression and identity, sexuality, and rape culture,
among other topics. He edited the 2014 collection, The Gay Agenda: Claiming Space, Identity,
and Justice, published by Peter Lang Press.

Ki Wight is an instructor at Capilano University in Vancouver in the Communication Studies,

Women’s and Gender Studies and Motion Picture Arts programmes. Her doctoral work, at
Simon Fraser University’s Equity Studies in Education Program, looks at the relationship
between media education and systems of oppression.

John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, as well as

Professor of Publishing Studies at Simon Fraser University. He directs the Public Knowledge
Project, which conducts research and develops open source scholarly publishing software in
support of greater access to knowledge. His most recent book is The Intellectual Properties of
Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke.

Peter R. Wright is an Associate Professor of Arts Education at Murdoch University, Perth,

Western Australia. He works across the arts with a commitment to personal, social and cultural
inquiry, agency, education and expression, health and wellbeing, and Creative Youth
Development. His interest is in teacher development in the Arts, Teaching Artist pedagogy,
ArtsHealth, socio-aesthetic pedagogy, and social justice.

Michalinos Zembylas is a Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the

Open University of Cyprus, and Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University in the Chair
for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation. He has written extensively on emotion
and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human
rights education and citizenship education.

Gang Zhu is currently an Associate Professor at the Institute of International and Comparative
Education, East China Normal University. His expertise encompasses teacher education, com-
parative education and urban education. His publications, in both English and Chinese, have
appeared in Compare, Journal of Education for Teaching, The Asia-Pacific Educational
Researcher and Computer-Assisted Language Learning.

Revital Zilonka is currently a 4th-grade teacher at the Neve Hof elementary school in Rishon
Le’Zion, Israel. She received her PhD in Cultural Foundations from The University of North
Carolina, Greensboro.

Haggith Gor Ziv is a Senior Lecturer Seminar Hakibutzim Teachers College of Education in
the Early Childhood department Special Education Program, Tel Aviv. She teaches courses in
critical feminist pedagogy, disability studies and inclusion. She has facilitated Jewish and Arab
dialogue groups, and published Critical Feminist Pedagogy and Education for Culture of Peace.

David Zyngier is Associate Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia. A former teacher
and school principal, he has written extensively on student engagement, social justice, democracy
and education and pedagogies that enhance achievement for all students but in particular those
from communities of disadvantage. He established the Public Education Network in Australia.
 Acknowledgements

When we first proposed the idea of a Handbook on critical pedagogies, our global friends and
colleagues displayed remarkable passion, inspiration and commitment that allowed the book to
evolve. They generously created space in their busy lives to share something about the emotional
and intellectual labor involved in doing critical pedagogy in diverse and challenging contexts. We
invited over 160 colleagues from 6 continents to contribute to our project, these scholars, educa-
tors and community activists all shared a deep understanding of the radical possibilities inspired
by Paulo Freire. Their stories open us up to multiple ways of knowing, interpreting and acting in
the world based on context with diverse theoretical, methodological and practical approaches.
We thank them for their exceptional contribution, patience and solidarity. Individually and col-
lectively these are some of the most outstanding scholars in the field. We appreciate their willing-
ness to support this project from conception to completion. Their contribution is a powerful
illustration of the kind of solidarity that lies at the heart of critical pedagogy.
Our Section Editors provided guidance and expertise in their chosen fields often at short
notice. Paul R. Carr, Gina Thésée, Greg Martin, Cathryn Teasley, Four Arrows, R. Michael
Fisher, Rob Hattam, Michael MacDonald, Michael Hoechsmann, Leila E. Villaverde, Roymieco
A. Carter, and Renee Desmarchelier responded to our requests, assisted with reviews, collabo-
rated and assisted our authors, often at short notice or tight deadlines…we cannot quantify how
invaluable their participation was, and continues to be. Members of the editorial board have our
gratitude; not an easy task, editing such diverse articles…some academic, some storied, some
autobiographic, some historic: all critical pedagogies. Acknowledgment to Dara Nix-Stevenson
for her early contribution to our venture.
We acknowledge with reverence and respect, our dear friends and colleagues both past and
present who have played a crucial role in advancing the development of critical pedagogy. Their
influence has been profoundly important in shaping the lives of so many contributors to this col-
lection. We will hear a great deal from and about them in the chapters to follow. Paulo Freire’s
ground-breaking work provides our foundation, his work permeates the thoughts and actions
shaping this collection. The seeds for this collection of work was sown by Joe L. Kincheloe,
whose vision of tentative critical pedagogies and unique radical love paved the way for that
fateful day when James Clark from Sage Publishers showed interest and faith in our massive
volume proposal. There aren’t enough synonyms to thank James: his authenticity and conscien-
tiousness in dealing with a Yank, an Aussie, and scores of global critical pedagogues for three
years deserves a shout-out.
We wish to offer our deep appreciation to Janean Robinson, our Assistant Editor. Janean
somehow managed to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the editors, the various technologies and
tracking systems, thousands of emails, hundreds of reviews and all sorts of crises but always
with good humour and grace. Thank you Janean, you are loved, you are respected, you are
appreciated and acknowledged.
Without our families, life partners – David and Jenny, children and friends closest to us…
over the past three years, without you, none of this would be possible. This has been a complex
and challenging project that could not have happened without your love, care and support.
Barry wishes to thank his institution, Murdoch University for providing him with the space and
resources to undertake this important work.

Barry Down and Shirley R. Steinberg
THE LEGACY OF PAULO FREIRE
In 1970, the first English-language edition of
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo
Freire, was published. For a half a century,
the book has been translated into scores of
languages, championing a call for radical
change in schooling and a humane, social
shift to contextual education. Henry Giroux
claims that the book changed his life, and,
indeed, it certainly changed his career.
Giroux’s paradigm-shattering book Theory
and Resistance in Education, published in
1983, named Freire’s revolutionary philoso-
phy as critical pedagogy. Throughout the
1980s and early 1990s, critical pedagogy
became the counter-narrative to traditional
‘banking’ approaches to education. The book
challenged the epistemological foundations
of transmission models of teaching and learn-
ing and the institutional structures and social
practices which hold it in place.
In the past 50 years, critical scholars
have re-formed education through sustained
Introduction
critical pedagogical analyses and discourse.
Indeed, some publishing houses have cen-
tered their entire education lists around this
intervention. Many outstanding books have
been published on critical pedagogy, build-
ing upon Freire’s work and expanding it to
include analyses of contemporary socio-
cultural shifts and global transformations
(e.g., Britzman, 2003 Leistyna et al., 1999;
Darder et al., 2003; McLaren and Kincheloe,
2007; Duncan and Morrell, 2008; Kincheloe,
2008; Apple et al., 2009; Giroux, 2011;
Malott and Porfilio, 2011; Smyth, 2011; and
Emdin, 2017).
This book assembles over 160 scholar
activists from 39 countries who are deeply
engaged with advancing Freire’s transfor-
mational project for the purpose of creat-
ing a more humane and socially just world.
In communion with Freire’s writing (e.g.,
1970/2000, 1998, 2000, 2007, 2014), they
share a commitment to the values of criti-
cal curiosity, democracy, dialogue, respect,
dignity, humility, hope, justice, solidarity,
 INTRODUCTION
commitment and compassion as the corner-
stones of a new social imaginary beyond the
‘mutating’ value system of global capitalism
(McMurtry, 1999).
The task of critical pedagogy becomes
even more urgent in these dark times
(Arendt, 1973). The rise of populist authori-
tarianism, fascism, war, violence, poverty,
hunger, slavery, genocide, Islamophobia,
environmental degradation, child labour,
post-truth, forced migration and cruelty have
provided a point of existential crisis in the
world. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by
the historical, economic and social defects
of the world driven by the destructive forces
of global capitalism and neoliberal ideolo-
gies, including privatization, commodifica-
tion, commercialization, consumerism and
individualism (Harvey, 2007). It can lead to
a sense of fatalism and determinism as there
appears to be no alternative to the way things
are (Bourdieu, 1998: 29). The absurd, irra-
tional and cruel are normalized in an era of
relentless social-media propaganda promot-
ing a range of neoconservative and neoliberal
ideologies perpetuated by what Henry Giroux
(2014: 9) describes as the ‘disimagination
machine’, which perpetuates antidemocratic
and authoritarian forces by ‘distracting,
miseducating, and deterring the public from
acting in its own interests’.
In this context, Freire (2004: 105) pro-
vides us with a language of both critique
and possibility which involves a dialectic
between ‘denouncing’ the dehumanizing
conditions under which we are living as well
as ‘announcing’ that another world is pos-
sible. Critical pedagogy is central to this
broader political project because it helps
us to question common-sense assumptions,
beliefs, values, rituals and practices that
serve to mask hierarchical power relations.
It provides a way of interrupting the seduc-
tive power of corporate/popular culture and
the effects of what Donaldo Macedo (1993)
describes as ‘literacy for stupidification’.
Over 70 years ago, Adorno and Horkheimer
(1944/2000: 15) warned about the illusionary
xli
and deceptive impact of the culture industry,
which encouraged people to ‘forget suffer-
ing’ and ‘the last remaining thought of resist-
ance’. Indeed, these ‘interferences to critical
thought’ (Shor, 1980: 49) only serve to depo-
liticize and distract people from the real task
of becoming more fully human through crea-
tive practice. It is the process of reclamation
of the critical, self-reflective, moral and dem-
ocratic purposes of education that lies at the
heart of Freire’s legacy.
In response, this collection brings together
an impressive global network of scholars,
educators and community activists commit-
ted to the moral vision and practice of criti-
cal pedagogy to alleviate human suffering.
To this end, the book attempts to provide a
coherent and purposeful international conver-
sation by moving from a singular or universal
critical pedagogy to multiple pedagogies and
perspectives. Freire was concerned that his
work not be turned into a dogma, a paradigm
or a singular methodology, hence our desire
to promote a plurality of approaches and per-
spectives held together by the radical love of
Paulo Freire.
In the Foreword to Freire’s Pedagogy
of the Heart, Martin Carnoy explains how
Freire addresses progressives everywhere,
urging them to remain ‘active, authentic,
democratic, non-sectarian, and unifying’
(Freire, 2000: 8). In the Freirean tradition, he
argues that
progressives must continuously examine their
underlying strategies. New conditions demand
new answers to some of the same old difficult
questions: What is the role of progressive politics
in the world system, now a new global-informa-
tion economy? What is the role of progressive
intellectuals? And what is the role of democratic
education, again now in the information age?
(Freire, 2000: 8)
Addressing these kinds of questions is what
animates the individual and collective work
of the authors in these volumes.
For this reason, we begin with a set of per-
sonal reflections from friends and colleagues
xlii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
who have worked with or been profoundly
influenced by Freire’s ideas (Volume 1, Part I).
We invited them to respond to a formative
piece of Freire’s (1983) writing entitled The
Importance of the Act of Reading. Here, Freire
reflects on his own childhood in the neigh-
bourhood of Recife, Brazil to explain how
the ‘act of reading the word and the world’
are inseparable: one infers the other. For him,
the act of reading cannot be separated from
context or lived experience and is, therefore,
‘laden with the meaning of the people’s exis-
tential experience’ (Freire, 1983: 10). Pivotal
to Freire’s work is the understanding that
reading is foremost a political act, never neu-
tral nor objective, but capable of generating
‘difficult knowledge’ (Britzman, 1998) for
the purpose of resisting all forms of oppres-
sion and creating a better world.
In pursing these aspirations, Freire
(1974/2007: 12) believes that critical or
problem-posing education places people ‘in
consciously critical confrontation with their
problems, to make them the agents of their
own recuperation’. What Freire is advocating
is the responsibility or duty to fight against
fatalistic discourses that may not always be in
our own best interests. In Daring to Dream:
Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished, Freire
(2007: 4–5) explains how we are called ‘to
transform and re-form the world, not to adapt
to it. As human beings, there is no doubt that
our main responsibility consist of intervening
in reality and keeping up our hope’.
To this end, Freire (2007: 25) speaks about
dreams and utopia as a fundamental neces-
sity for human beings. For him, ‘There is
no tomorrow without a project, without a
dream, without utopia, without hope, without
creative work, and work toward the devel-
opment of possibilities, which can make
the concretization of that tomorrow viable’
(Freire, 2007: 26). In short, Freire (2000:
100) believes that ‘Our historical inclination
is not fate, but rather possibility’. Herein lies
the rationale for our work and those who have
contributed to it through their own unique
stories, circumstances and experiences.
Our authors bring their own particular his-
tories, experiences, languages, cultures and
perspectives to the struggle for social justice.
Their work (as well as that of many others
not included here) is intimately grounded in
the critical pedagogies which have emerged
in particular social, political and cultural
contexts. In reading these accounts we gain
a sense of how each of the authors take up
Freire’s challenge to not only ‘speak about
the limits of education’ but to engage with
what can be accomplished ‘where’, ‘how’,
‘with whom’ and ‘when’ (Freire, 2007: 64),
and in the process we see how our work as
educators ‘is not individual, but social, and
that it takes place within the social practice
he or she is a part of’ (Freire, 2007: 64–5).
Finally, we are interdisciplinary scholars,
educators and community activists who do
not seek to create a unilateral doctrine; that
would be antithetical to Freire’s intention.
Instead, we seek to learn from traditional crit-
ical pedagogical paradigms and from those
working between these paradigms, working
in the tentative, the elastic, the ever-changing
margins of revolutionary and scholarly peda-
gogy articulated so clearly and passionately
by Freire.
WHAT IS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY?
Drawing on the legacy of Freire and the tra-
dition of democratic education (Dewey,
1916/1944) we bring together scholars and
practitioners committed to the realization of
Freire’s vision and practice of critical peda-
gogy. What emerges in the three volumes is
the understanding that critical pedagogy is
not something easily defined in terms of a
particular theory, curriculum or method,
which would be anathema to Freire’s prob-
lem-posing approach to education
(1970/2000: 79–86). As Gregory Martin
points out in his Introduction to Part III of
Volume 1, critical pedagogy is ‘an umbrella
term which captures a broad range of
 INTRODUCTION
approaches and standpoints that have
emerged in response to unjust laws, policies,
issues and practice’.
Like our dear friend and mentor Joe
Kincheloe (2008: 8), we find it difficult to
define critical pedagogy in a brief and com-
pelling manner because it asks so much of
the educators and students who embrace
it. Given the complexity and breadth of the
body of work in this handbook it is apparent
that there is a lot to comprehend in terms of
knowledge, pedagogy, politics and culture.
Therefore, a reasonable starting point might
be to share a set of basic concepts identi-
fied by Kincheloe in his book Knowledge
and Critical Pedagogy. By way of summary,
Kincheloe says critical pedagogy is:
• Grounded on a social and educational vision of
justice and equality
• Constructed on the belief that education is inher-
ently political
• Dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering
• Concerned that schools don’t hurt students –
good schools don’t blame students for their
failures or strip students of the knowledges they
bring to the classroom
• Enacted through the use of generative themes
to read the word and the world and the pro-
cess of problem posing – generative themes
involve the educational use of issues that are
central to students’ lives as a grounding for the
curriculum
• Centered on the notion that teachers should be
researchers – here teachers learn to produce
knowledge and teach students to produce their
own knowledges
• Grounded on the notion that teachers become
researchers of their own students – as research-
ers, teachers study their students, their back-
grounds, and the forces that shape them
• Interested in maintaining a delicate balance
between social change and cultivating the intel-
lect – this requires a rigorous pedagogy that
accomplishes both goals
• Concerned with the ‘margins’ of society, the
experiences and needs of individuals faced with
oppression and subjugation
• Constructed on the awareness that science can
be used as a force to regulate and control
xliii
• Dedicated to understanding the context in which
educational activity takes place
• Committed to resisting the harmful effects of
dominant power
• Attuned to the importance of complexity –
understands complexity theory–in constructing a
rigorous and transformative education
• Focused on understanding the profound impact
of neo-colonial structures in shaping education
and knowledge.
(Kincheloe, 2008: 10)
Thus, a fundamental feature of critical peda-
gogy is the preparedness to interrupt com-
mon-sense ways of seeing the world with
which people have grown so comfortable
(Kumashiro, 2004). At the root of critical
pedagogy, then, is the willingness to confront
injustices and relations of power which hold
them in place. This requires a fundamental
transformation in the ways in which knowl-
edge is produced and legitimated and by
whom. This critical intellectual work requires
a shift, or ‘repositioning’, whereby we ‘see
the world through the eyes of the disposed
and act against ideological and institutional
processes and forms that reproduce oppres-
sive conditions’ (Apple et al., 2009: 3). The
task of rethinking requires a new language
and set of theoretical tools capable of helping
us to ‘think anew, to think otherwise … away
from convention and cant’ (Burbules and
Berk, 1999: 60). As Arendt (1958/1998: 5)
argued in her effort to comprehend the evils
of totalitarianism, what the modern world
requires is a ‘matter of thought’ that opposes
the kind of ‘thoughtlessness’ which leads to
‘the heedless recklessness or hopeless con-
fusion or complacent repetition of “truths”
which have become trivial and empty’ and
remain one of ‘the outstanding characteristics
of our time’.
In this context, we find Kincheloe and
McLaren’s (2005) notion of ‘evolving criti-
cality’ especially useful. For them, critical
pedagogy ‘is always evolving, changing in
light of both new theoretical insights and new
problems and circumstances’ (Kincheloe
and McLaren, 2005: 306). This spirit of
xliv THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
criticality seeks to comprehend diverse forms
of oppression including class, race, gender,
sexual, cultural, religious, colonial and abil-
ity-related concerns. Roger Simon sums it
up pretty well when he states that criticality
involves figuring out:
why things are the way they are, how they got that
way, and what set of conditions are supporting the
processes that maintain them. Further … we must
be able to evaluate the potential for action that [is]
embedded in actual relationships. To think these
tasks through requires concepts that can carry a
critique of existing practice.
(Simon, 1998: 380)
Of course, criticality can be sometimes ‘vio-
lent and destructive’ because it endeavors to
disrupt some deeply entrenched ‘truths’ and
taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs,
values and practices (Ball, 2006: 1). The
contributors to this handbook do exactly this.
They draw on a range of critical theories to
help them challenge existing injustices and
oppressive institutional arrangements as they
attempt to transform inequitable, undemo-
cratic or oppressive policies and practices.
Thus, critical pedagogy involves a twofold
move: first, to develop a critical sensibility
about the way things are and, second, a will-
ingness to take action to change the status
quo. It is this desire to engage in forms of
social criticism as well as activism that are
the hallmarks of critical pedagogy.
Delving into each of the chapters we gain a
greater appreciation of the complexity of this
work. Each of the authors, in their own unique
way, draw on a range of critical theories to
guide their thinking and action. While these
critical theories have their own intellectual
histories, points of emphasis and explanatory
power, together they highlight both the com-
monalities identified by Kincheloe (2008)
and the differences within the tradition of
critical pedagogy. It is beyond the scope of
this introduction to rehearse these theories in
any detail, although a cursory overview does
provide a sense of the rich multiplicity of the-
oretical influences deployed by our authors.
Most notably, the Frankfurt School of Critical
Theory (Giroux, 2003); progressive educa-
tion (Dewey, 1916/1944; Kozol, 1967, 2005;
Postman and Weingartner, 1969); schooling
and the political economy (Bowles and Gintis,
1976; Harris, 1979; Apple, 1982; Carnoy and
Levin, 1985); feminism (hooks, 1981/2014;
Gore, 1993); anti-racism (Gillborn, 1995),
critical race theory (Ladson-Billings and
Tate, 1995; Leonardo, 2005); Indigenous
knowledges (Smith, 1999); critical media
and literacy (Macedo and Steinberg, 2007);
critical youth studies (Ibrahim and Steinberg,
2014); critical multiculturalism (Sleeter and
McLaren, 1995; McLaren, 1997); libera-
tion theology (Gutiérrez, 1971/1988; Freire,
1985: 121–42); and critical ecopedagogy
(Kahn, 2010), to name a few.
While Freire provides a set of founda-
tional, and even necessary values (moral,
ethical, political and pedagogical), critical
pedagogy itself is far more expansive than
his work alone. As Freire (1970/2000: 90)
himself insists, critical education is a process
which endeavors to continually ‘make and
remake, to create and re-create’ the world
in a spirit of epistemological curiosity, dia-
logue, humility, solidarity and love. Herein
lies the major strength of critical pedagogy: it
is never static, formulaic or complete but per-
petually in motion, or, in the words of Horton
and Freire (1990: 11), ‘a permanent process
of searching’. This collection seeks to add,
no matter how modestly, to a rich archive of
critical pedagogy inspired by Paulo Freire
around the world. We are mindful that our
work builds on the spirit of generosity and
hard labour of thousands of scholars, teach-
ers and activists who engage in the struggle
for social justice daily.
HOW IS THIS BOOK ORGANIZED?
This Handbook consists of three volumes
divided into 12 sections, four per volume. In
total there are 125 chapters. The book is
 INTRODUCTION
intended to be a central resource for multiple
audiences, including academics, pre-service
and in-service teachers, postgraduate stu-
dents, educators, social workers, artists,
activists and community workers. For this
reason, the book offers multiple points of
entry depending on one’s interests. From the
seminal writing and influence of Paulo Freire
and social theories to the enactment of peda-
gogical insights and practices in universities,
colleges, schools, classrooms, communities
and non-formal spaces, readers are encour-
aged to engage with the ideas, debates and
practices in critical pedagogy. We now pro-
vide an overview of each volume and some
context for each of themes that will be
extended through a series of provocations by
the section editors.
Volume 1
In Section I: Reading Paulo Freire, we begin
with a set of 14 short personal responses to
Paulo Freire’s (1983) piece The Importance
of the Act of Reading. We deliberately chose
this article because it provides a starting
point for the conversations to follow. The
notion of ‘reading the word and the world’
seems to be a pivotal moment in compre-
hending the power and significance of
Freire’s work. Indeed, as we read these per-
sonal responses from a range of eminent
scholars and activists we gain a much deeper
insight into the ways in which Freire’s ideas
have profoundly influenced their lives. From
the moment we invited our colleagues to
share something about their encounters with
the writing of Freire, there was an immense
sense of excitement, passion, joy, generosity
and love as each of the contributors reflected
on their own personal intellectual and peda-
gogical journey. What they describe in their
own particular ways is the power of ideas,
commitment, dialogue, justice and action to
create a more humane and socially just
world. We believe these kinds of stories
reveal a great deal about two fundamental
xlv
questions which preoccupied Freire’s work –
namely, what does it mean to be more fully
human and what does it mean to be edu-
cated? We are sure readers will find these
encounters interesting and informative on
many levels.
In Section II: Social Theories, we provide
an opportunity for the authors to open up a
range of social theories that have shaped
their thinking and practice. The intention is
not to provide some kind of definitive shop-
ping list of social theories but to indicate the
ways in which the authors use different criti-
cal theories to illuminate their understanding
of injustice and what might be done about
it. In this sense, we begin to see how theory
and practice (praxis) interface to generate
new insights with which to address persistent
problems, questions and concerns in multiple
contexts. Importantly, it opens up opportu-
nities to engage with a range of theoretical
orientations and to appreciate how different
authors respond to the challenges posed by
Freire’s desire for dialogue and his acknowl-
edgment of the ‘incompleteness’ of the
human condition.
In Section III: Seminal Figures in Critical
Pedagogy, we examine the contribution of a
number of influential thinkers in the field.
For obvious reasons, this section of the
Handbook presented a number of dilemmas.
We are mindful of not eulogizing particu-
lar individuals over others; this would be a
fraught task, as Gregory Martin points out in
his introduction. Rather, we wanted the con-
tributing authors to provide a sense of how
a range of critical thinkers have influenced
their own work. As such, this is by no means
an encyclopedia of ‘key figures’ in critical
pedagogy: it offers a number of provoca-
tions to engage with some important writers
and ideas. We endeavor to extend this con-
versation through four additional chapters of
interviews (Chapters 34–7) to provide some
personal insights into the ways in which peo-
ple who have worked in critical pedagogy
understand the intellectual, emotional and
political nature of their work, which may not
xlvi THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
always be accessible through normal publish-
ing outlets.
In Section IV: Global Perspectives, the
focus shifts to the global context of critical
pedagogy. With the emergence of ‘global
capital and the new imperialism’ (McLaren
and Farahmandpur, 2005), critical peda-
gogy takes on new and important work as
it seeks to comprehend the seismic shifts in
the global economy and the implications for
nation states, the economy, education, teach-
ers’ work and students. The contributors in
this section draw attention to the fallout from
what Sasson describes as the ‘new logics of
expulsion’, which is a way of not only cap-
turing the growing levels of inequality but
‘the pathologies of today’s global capitalism’
especially its ‘brutality’ and ‘savage sorting’.
Each of the contributors in this section under-
takes a critical analysis of how these forces
play out for marginalized communities,
groups and individuals, and in the light of
these experiences they identify the kinds of
pedagogical responses required to alleviate
suffering.
Volume 2
In Section V: Indigenous Ways of Knowing,
the editors, Four Arrows (aka Don Jacobs)
and Michael Fisher, explain the synergies
between the aspirations of critical pedagogy
and Indigenous peoples around decolonizing
and Indigenizing movements in education. In
this section, Indigenous knowledge and
knowing are used as a form of resistance
against oppressive colonial policies and prac-
tices which have for far too long subjugated
Indigenous voices and ways of knowing. As
Linda Smith explains so lucidly, Indigenous
peoples around the world have had ‘to chal-
lenge, understand, and have a shared lan-
guage for talking about the history, the
sociology, the psychology and the politics of
imperialism and colonialism as an epic story
telling of huge devastation, painful struggle
and persistent survival’ (1999: 19). As part of
this ongoing struggle, the authors describe a
range of critical pedagogies grounded in
deep listening, storytelling, integration with
nature, spirituality, justice, human rights and
a spirit of ‘fearlessness’.
In Section VI: Education and Praxis, sec-
tion editor Rob Hattam frames the discus-
sion by reminding us of the temporal nature
of critical pedagogy, which is ‘an unfinished
project’ on three levels: first, ‘taking up pow-
erful diagnoses of the times’; second, ‘taking
up readings of the places we live in’; and,
finally, ‘responding to philosophical investi-
gations’. Drilling down into this framework,
the contributors examine the implications for
understanding praxis, including the classed,
racial and gendered dimensions of education.
Each of them brings their own unique take
on the diagnosis of the problem under inves-
tigation, its particular context and alternative
strategies and tactics. What ties these takes
together is an unwavering belief in the eman-
cipatory potential of education to address
unjust policies and practices, which serve to
demean and denigrate the most marginalized
in society.
In Section VII: Teaching and Learning,
the emphasis shifts to the terrain of teaching
and learning in schools and communities. In
the context of unprecedented levels of inter-
ference from ‘right wing’ ideologues and
their prescriptions (standardization, back-to-
basics, scripted lessons, high-stakes testing,
accountability, competition, commodifica-
tion and privatization) to fix the so-called
educational crisis, teachers, schools, commu-
nities and students are under assault. These
‘backlash pedagogies’ (Gutiérrez et al.,
2002: 335) blame teachers, progressive ideas
and linguistically and culturally diverse and
poor children for the perceived problems of
education and society. According to Giroux,
this ‘pedagogy of stupidity’ is focused on
‘memorization, conformity, passivity and
high stakes testing’ (2013a: 2) rather than
the ‘practice of freedom’ (Freire, 1970/2000:
80). In response, the authors provide exam-
ples of alternative pedagogies based on a
 INTRODUCTION
more hopeful and optimistic vision of edu-
cation that draws on notions of inclusivity,
engagement, social justice, connectedness,
learning communities and culturally respon-
sive pedagogies.
In Section VIII: Communities and
Activism, there is a fundamental recognition
that the work of critical pedagogy occurs in
multiple sites beyond formal institutions like
schools, colleges and universities. Indeed,
Freire’s (1970/2000) book Pedagogy of the
Oppressed advanced the view that educa-
tion can be a radical tool for social change
if linked to the needs, desires and aspira-
tions of local communities and their ‘funds
of knowledge’ (Gonzalez et al., 2004). In
this context, the work of community activ-
ists like Saul Alinsky (1989) reinforces the
pivotal role of community organization,
Indigenous leadership and collective action
in the fight for social justice. Each of the
contributors to this section recognizes the
necessity of building local knowledges, net-
works, capabilities and power through the
development of critical awareness and activ-
ism, both locally and in association with
wider social movements.
Volume 3
In Section IX: Communication and Media,
the focus is on the proliferation of mass com-
munication and media in shaping the iden-
tity, needs and desires of young lives, for
better or worse (Rosa and Rosa, 2011). Doug
Kellner and Jeff Share (2007) explain how
experience and everyday life for young
people in the 21st century is vastly different
from that of our own childhood. They argue
that today’s world is ‘media saturated, tech-
nologically dependent and globally con-
nected’ in ways previously unimagined
(Kellner and Share, 2007: 3). Therefore, it
would be irresponsible not to equip students
with media literacy skills and critical aware-
ness of how ‘media construct meanings,
influence and educate audiences, and impose
xlvii
their messages and values’ (2007: 4). Critical
media literacy is a significant pedagogy not
only in countering the pervasive influence of
corporate/popular culture in producing con-
sumer-citizens but in ‘deepening and extend-
ing the possibilities for critical agency, racial
justice, and economic and political democ-
racy’ (Giroux, 2000: 171). These critical lit-
eracy strategies are brought to life by the
contributors, who draw on critical literacy
theories to investigate a variety of media
including film, comics, public exhibitions
and Wikilearning and analyse the implica-
tions for critical citizenship and democracy.
In Section X: Arts and Aesthetics, there
is a turn to affect (emotions, feelings, rela-
tionships and love) to understand the revo-
lutionary potential of artistic endeavor and
aesthetics in creating a more participatory,
connected, sensual, creative and humane
world. There is an appreciation of what it
means to be alive through creative practice.
In an interview with Donaldo Macedo in
1985, Freire spoke about the things he likes
to do. His response reveals a great deal about
the profound importance of affect in people’s
lives: “I love to eat; I love music; I love to
read; I love sports; I love the sea, the beaches;
I love to receive letters; I love children; I love
simple things, common, everyday places;
I love Elza; I love to write” (Freire, 1985:
197–8). In this short exchange, Freire man-
ages to not only capture the essence of being
human but also identify the dynamic rela-
tionship between the emotional and intel-
lectual dimensions of knowledge production.
In this section, our authors, activists, artists,
educators, describe how they use arts-based
processes to raise critical awareness and
commitment to social justice (Beyerbach and
Davis, 2011). They identify spaces and places
where they can connect to young people’s
lives, harness their creativity and imagination
and change context. These artists/educators
appreciate that there are multiple ways of
knowing and interpreting reality (e.g., imagi-
native, creative, intuitive, empathetic, kinaes-
thetic and aesthetic) beyond the limitations of
xlviii THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
Western scientific rationality and objectivity
(Kincheloe, 2008: 224–6).
In Section XI: Critical Youth Studies, the
contributing authors address two interrelated
questions: first, how are young lives being con-
structed and consumed under global capital-
ism. Second, what kinds of counter-narratives
are possible? There can be no doubt that young
people today are the casualties of a period of
unbridled free-market individualism and com-
petitiveness, with devasting effects captured
in the stark language of ‘collateral damage’
(Bauman, 2011), ‘cruelty’ (Giroux, 2013b) and
‘disposability’ (Giroux, 2009). In this ‘rapidly
mutating and crisis-ridden world’ (Best and
Kellner, 2003: 75), the authors provide a set of
counter-narratives to illustrate the emancipa-
tory potential of critical pedagogy. At the heart
of this pedagogical work is a commitment to
working with young people as co-researchers/
participants capable of producing knowledge
relevant to their own lives and circumstances
(Cammarota and Fine, 2008). These ‘warrior
intellectuals’, as Kincheloe describes them,
develop the ability to think critically and ana-
lytically and in the process ‘use their imagina-
tion to transcend the trap of traditional gender,
racial, sexual, and class-based stereotypes and
the harm they cause’ (2009: 388).
In Section XII: Science, Ecology
and Wellbeing, section editor Renee
Desmarchelier sets the scene by calling out
the challenges facing the planet, human soci-
eties, the natural environment and individu-
als. She goes on to argue that what is required
is a fundamental shift away from dominant
ways of knowing in the Western scientific
tradition of positivist epistemologies and
cultural imperialism and towards cultivating
the different ways of knowing found in mar-
ginalized and subjugated knowledges of the
oppressed. The authors in this section take
up the challenge by providing a critique of
the dominant approaches to science educa-
tion. They use the lens of feminist readings
as well as developing alternative approaches
to an ecological pedagogy of joy, health and
well-being.
IN READING THESE VOLUMES
As editors and authors, we do not endeavor
to name, define nor place critical pedagogy.
Rather, we have attempted to collect the
works, stories and research of those who
engage within the tentative notion of critical-
izing education both in and out of schools.
We hope for a fluidity of thought within our
work and honour Freire’s intent to create an
ongoing dialogue which we continue to
revise, augment, argue with, contemplate and
celebrate. Critical pedagogy did not evolve
to become orthodox; indeed, we embrace the
unorthodox and hope to add to these pedago-
gies as they continue to evolve and develop.
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Communication and Media
Making sense of the intersections between
critical pedagogy, communication and media
opens up broad sweeping vistas that go
beyond what can be achieved in this intro-
duction and even this set of chapters. What
we can do instead is to provide a few concep-
tual frames to mark some boundaries. Most
importantly, problem-posing discussion on
communication and media in/and critical
pedagogy must deal with the most urgent
questions of the day regarding the socio-­
cultural conditions of civic and political par-
ticipation, consent (Herman and Chomsky,
1988) and resistance, while also invoking the
possibility of critical pedagogy to make a
­difference. Thus it needs to interrogate the
prevailing ideas and knowledge that make up
dominant, common sense worldviews; the
hierarchical relations of access to the means
of communication; and the contemporary
acts of meaning making and transmission
that actively involve the end user in the pro-
duction and circulation of media. In an age of
SECTION IX
Michael Hoechsmann
24/7 media saturation, mobile media, media
convergence, social media, curated identity
mediation, participatory cacophony and
algorithmic echo chambers, it is not easy to
identify a tiny sub-spectrum of the communi-
cation and media universe to focus on.
Nonetheless, following the lead of Paul du
Gay et al. (1997) in one of cultural studies’
finest case studies on the Sony Walkman, the
smartphone today would make an evocative
point of departure, a mobile technology
which is never far from hand and is the pri-
mary portal through which people experience
reality in contemporary times. The role of the
media educator today (and yesterday), which
is taken up in many of the chapters that
follow, involves an appreciation of the role of
the dialogic negotiation with learners to
identify which media texts, technologies
­
and behaviours to pay attention to. And in
this manner, we find our way back to popu-
lar culture where people make history
within conditions not of their choosing, and
1056 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
messages and meanings adhere to the con-
stantly shifting sands of common sense
understandings.
Broadly construed, the media is the pre-
eminent site of struggle over meaning in
our global polyculture. Ideas go to school
on broadcast screens and depending if one
attends to Fox News, Democracy Now or a
political thriller, popular views of the world
are shaped and moulded through an always-
on, ideological apparatus. The accelerant that
marks a difference between Paulo’s era and
the present day is the role of the influencer
which may be a celebrity, an author, a friend
or a family member. Of the many impacts
of social media 2.0, the way we re-circulate
information/knowledge has had an impact
­ are seeing the return of the repressed. Web
on its consumption. Once mediated by the
­influence of a friend’s share, it is more likely
that I will trust and identify with a viewpoint
more. What remains constant over the past
half century, however, is the power imbal-
ance structured into the media where power-
ful mediators hold the purse strings of much
of the world’s media, so that the curriculum
presented is heavily skewed in favour of
moneyed interests. The potency of the media
machine today has reached its zenith with a
sitting President of the United States, a bil-
lionaire and former reality TV actor, who has
cast away all of his office’s filters, relying on
TV newscasts in lieu of political briefings and
preferring to communicate over social media
to press releases. And, if to prove that history
repeats itself as both tragedy and farce, pigs
do fly these days (at Roger Waters concerts
where said President is heartily mocked).
Flying pigs and simulated presidents aside,
this era is blessed and cursed by an extraor-
dinary two-way media 2.0 that is, at best, an
empowerment, dialogism and critical con-
sciousness machine. The potential today to
present oppositional views, to share autoch-
thonous knowledges, to uncover forgotten
perspectives and to stimulate dialogue from
almost any nodal point on the world’s geo­
graphy is unprecedented. Yes, we contend
with dramatic digital divides that exclude
many people and peoples from participa-
tion, but most of the world’s cultural and
social groups have at least some representa-
tives present in the online arena. While the
chattering classes worry about the decline of
­reporting and the prevalence of fake news and
alternative facts, those who have only known
fake news, such as the world’s Indigenous
people, have extraordinary access today to
the story telling and disseminating apparatus.
Further, new opinion leaders – such as 2018
heroes Greta Thunberg, Jacinda Ardren and
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – are coming to
the world stage, buoyed by a culture of social
media sharing and circulation. Unfortunately,
alongside of the rise of the oppressed, we
2.0 allows for unfiltered voices including
those with hate agendas such as x­ enophobes,
­homophobes and misogynists who use the
online habitat to spread prejudice and lies, or
to taunt, harass and stalk women in particu-
lar, but also anyone who draws their a­ ttention
and wrath. Thus, it turns out that the partici-
patory Web 2.0 is a macrocosm where both
liberatory and hate agendas can circulate,
usually in the isolation of echo chambers
where participants only see and hear messag-
es they agree with. The war of position that
takes place online is fluid, but some reports –
and the Trump and Brexit votes – indicate
that this newly contested terrain is increas-
ingly being won over by conservative views
(Schradie, 2019).
Meanwhile, outraged citizens and flying
pigs of the Global North distract us from
disastrous political and economic policies
­
heralded by a global oligarchy, their corporate
ghost ships and complicit petro-states. The
postcolonial turn is sinking under its ballast,
economic imperialism continues unabated
and if the callous disregard for the welfare of
over more than half of the world’s population
was not enough, the global oligarchy is now
presiding over the destruction of the planet.
Meanwhile, the site of the ideological strug-
gle has shifted in an algorithmically driven
media 3.0 environment where messaging
 COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA
is parsed and circulated to audiences based
on the big data of their previous clicks and
likes. Algorithms determine what people see
and do not see which dramatically limits the
conditions of dialogue. While there is some
complexity to the coding of an algorithm, it
is important to deconstruct the core elements
of its composition (O’Neil, 2016). Subtle dis-
tinctions such as the tendency by conserva-
tives to use nouns (Cichoka et al., 2016) or
by liberals to express feelings (Sylwester and
Purver, 2015) can easily yield distinctions
that can be picked up by an algorithm.
The suffocating feeling of seeing demo­
cracy eroded at every turn is not new to critical
pedagogy. As it is well known, Paulo Freire
wrote his most celebrated texts, Pedagogy
of the Oppressed (1970) and Education for
Critical Consciousness (1973) as an exile
from Brazil in Chile during the time a half
century ago when the Southern Cone region
of South America descended in to a period
of violent, military rule (the 1964 military
coup that caused Freire to flee Brazil was fol-
lowed by others including the 1973 coup in
Chile). During those years in the early 1960s
and 1970s, a dominant mass media held a
monopoly over television screens and other
media forms around the world. In Chile of
those years, there was a robust debate about
cultural imperialism and the role of the media
as an ideological foreign influence that cul-
minated in the 1972 publication of Dorfman
and Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that in the Latin
American tradition of educomunicación,
Paulo Freire is known as a theorist and practi-
tioner of Communication. Critical pedagogy
offers a praxis oriented, dialogic orientation
not only to pedagogy, teaching and learning,
but to the broader domain of communication.
The chapters in this section take up Paulo’s
work in relation to Communication and
Media, each teasing out aspects of Freire’s
thought and work in relation to these multi-
sited phenomena. The topics they raise, and
1057
the treatments they give, rest on their own
cases, such that this is a diverse yet related set
of studies that take up aspects of the broader
section theme, rather than a sequential series
of scaffolding texts. In general, there is a pre-
dominance of discussions on how communi-
cation and media are taken up in education,
and also how these broad domains are edu-
cational, all cast within a critical pedagogy
framework where interactions are dialogical
and outcomes are sought through the aspira-
tional horizons of critical consciousness.
REFERENCES
Cichoka, A., Bilewicz, M., Jost, J., Marrouch, N. &
Witkowska, M. (2016). ‘On the Grammar
of Politics – or Why Conservatives Prefer
Nouns’. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/
abs/10.1111/pops.12327
Dorfman, A. & Mattelart, A. (1972). Para Leer
el Pato Donald: Comunicación de masas y
colonialismo. Valparaiso: Ediciones Universi-
tarias de Valparaiso.
Du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H. &
Negus, K. (1997). Doing Cultural Studies:
The Story of the Sony Walkman. Milton
Keynes: Open University.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
New York: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1973). Education for Critical Con-
sciousness. New York: Seabury Press.
Herman, E.S. & Chomsky, N. (1988) Manufac-
turing Consent: The Political Economy of the
Mass Media. New York: Pantheon.
O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of Math Destruc-
tion: How Big Data Increases Inequality and
Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown.
Schradie, J. (2019). The Revolution That Wasn’t:
New Digital Activism Favours Conservatives.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sylwester, K. & Purver, M. (2015). ‘Twitter
­Language Use Reflects Psychological Differ-
ences between Democrats and Republicans’.
PLoS ONE 10(9): e0137422. https://doi.org/
10.1371/journal.pone.0137422
This page intentionally left blank

Mediating the Curriculum with
Critical Media Literacy
As neoliberal ideologies promote oppressive
teaching practices that focus more on con-
formity and memorization than critical think-
ing and empowerment, we need a progressive
educational approach to challenge these
harmful pedagogies and provide a positive
alternative to humanize education. The cur-
rent obsession with standardization and
accountability prioritizes false notions of
success and equity at the expense of stu-
dents’ and society’s social and environmental
needs. Democracy, social justice, and the fate
of our planet require an educational system
that prepares all students to work in solidar-
ity to create a more humane, sustainable, and
compassionate world. Educators should
guide students to challenge status quo prac-
tices and dominant ideologies that support
racism, sexism, classism, consumerism, and
all forms of oppression and exploitation.
While pressures to privatize and standard-
ize education are building, the convergence of
media corporations and new media platforms,
along with technology’s exponential growth,
87
Jeff Share
are changing society and students to be more
mediated and networked than ever (Jenkins,
2006; McChesney, 2015; Prensky, 2010).
Digital reading and writing require many of
the same skills as print-based literacy, yet
when reading and writing are digital and net-
worked, important dimensions change. Digital
texts gain new potential to be multimodal
(combining different formats), hyperlinked
(connecting with other media and building
new relationships), and interactive (allow-
ing for sharing, remixing, and participation)
(Beach, 2009). Digital reading and writing do
not occur in isolation; they are embedded in
mediated environments and networked pub-
lics that have unique qualities, especially in
relation to notions of persistence, visibility,
spreadability, and searchability (boyd, 2014).
As digital and networked texts bring wonder-
ful opportunities, they also come with their
own limitations and new concerns, since they
are neither neutral nor transparent.
Digital technology is opening up oppor-
tunities for individual participation and
1060 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
alternative points of view, while at the same
time a handful of enormous media corpora-
tions have become the dominant storytellers,
often repeating the same story, at the expense
of countless different perspectives and crea-
tive ways of thinking. Many of these storytell-
ers are actually story-sellers, more interested
in peddling ideas and products, than inform-
ing, enlightening, inspiring, or challenging.
While children are using more media, they
are also being used more by media compa-
nies. These giant transnational media and
technology corporations are targeting youth
as one of the most valuable markets to build
brand loyalty and to sell to advertisers.
Researchers found that 8–18-year-olds in
the United States spent well over 10 hours a
day interacting with various forms of media,
such as music, computers, video games,
television, film, and print (Rideout et al.,
2011). Another investigation discovered
that 92% of American 13–17-year-olds go
online daily, ‘including 24% who say they go
online “almost constantly”’ (Lenhart, 2015).
Not only is the amount of time with media
increasing, but the quality of that engagement
is also changing, becoming more commercial
and rarely critical.
RETHINKING DIGITAL NATIVES
In the midst of the information communica-
tion technology (ICT) revolution, many are
labeling today’s youth digital natives, with
the assumption that they know more about
maneuvering this new terrain than the older
digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001). However,
researchers are questioning these assump-
tions and asserting that our youth now, more
than ever, need the skills to critically ques-
tion the vast array of new media they are
engaging with daily (Carr, 2011; Neufeld and
Maté, 2006; Stanford History Education
Group, 2016; Turkle, 2011, 2015).
According to a study of 7,804 students
across the United States by researchers at
Stanford University (2016), ‘young people’s
ability to reason about the information on
the Internet can be summed up in one word:
bleak’ (4). These researchers found that stu-
dents are ‘easily duped’ and unprepared to
distinguish between news and advertising
or to judge the reliability of a website. They
write, ‘Never have we had so much informa-
tion at our fingertips. Whether this bounty
will make us smarter and better informed
or more ignorant and narrow-minded will
depend on our awareness of this problem
and our educational response to it’ (Stanford
History Education Group, 2016: 5). The vast
amount of information we encounter every
day, the ubiquity of social media and online
connectivity, our dependence on cell phones
and digital technology, the commercial struc-
ture of the information highway, and the con-
vergence of information, communication,
and entertainment are creating the need for
an educational approach that will support
students to skeptically analyze and critically
engage with this dynamic terrain.
Media and technology continue to assert
evermore influence in shaping culture, dis-
seminating ideas, and determining public
discourse. The synergy between entertain-
ment and politics is profound and can be seen
in examples such as Barack Obama’s 2008
presidential campaign winning the top prizes
at the Cannes Lions International Advertising
Awards. These changes are contributing to
the need for everyone to develop the skills
and dispositions to question the information
they are hearing, seeing, reading, creating,
sharing, and using.
MAKING SENSE OF NEWS AND
INFORMATION
Since the 2016 election, the discourse about
‘fake news’ has encouraged many people to
recognize the need for critical readers and
writers. However, some have suggested that
we simply need better skills to determine
 MEDIATING THE CURRICULUM WITH CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY
truth from lies. If only it were that simple.
Making sense of information is far more
complicated than this reductionist idea of
simply finding the truth. Rather than judging
information as either true or false, students
should be learning to search for multiple
sources, different perspectives, and various
types of evidence to triangulate findings in
order to best evaluate the information.
We must avoid relativistic suggestions that
everything is equal, and we are in a post-truth
era because real events occur that affect peo-
ple and all life on the planet. Joe Kincheloe
(2007) reminds us that ‘all knowledge is an
interpretation’ (113) and therefore, interpret-
ing the meaning of a message is a complex
process that requires skills to probe empirical
evidence, evaluate subjective biases, analyze
the medium and construction of the text, and
explore the social contexts. Simply labeling
a text as real or fake is overly simplistic and
does little to help understand reality or make
information useful. This is especially prob-
lematic when trying to make sense of news.
Journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel
(2011) assert that changes in technology and
journalism have shifted our relationship with
news, from a ‘trust me’ era of the journalist
being given the authority to tell us what we
need to know, to the current ‘show me’ era
that places the onus of judging the news more
on us as the audience. Kovach and Rosenstiel
(2011) write, ‘That reflects the power shift
in the digital age from the journalist as gate-
keeper to the consumer or citizen as his or
her own editor. With that shift the consumer
has now acquired a greater responsibility to
adopt and perfect a skeptical way of know-
ing’ (33). While we can question if it was a
good idea to have given so much power to
journalists in the first place, perhaps the new
challenges of the digital age will move us
to become more responsible and skeptical
meaning makers.
Now more than ever, teachers should
encourage students to be reading, viewing,
listening to, interacting with, and creating a
multitude of texts, from digital podcasts to
1061
multimedia productions. This is an opportu-
nity for educators to guide students to think
critically with and about the technology and
media that surround them. These changes in
media, technology, and society require criti-
cal media literacy that can support teachers
and students to question and create with
and about the very tools that can empower
or oppress, entertain or distract, inform or
mislead, and buy or sell everything from life-
styles to politicians.
OVERVIEW OF CRITICAL MEDIA
LITERACY
Evolving from the multidisciplinary field of
cultural studies, critical media literacy aims
to expand our understanding of literacy to
include reading and writing all types of texts,
as well as deepen analysis to more critical
levels that question the relationships between
media and audiences, information and power
(Kellner and Share, 2007). Critical media
literacy is defined less as a specific body of
knowledge or set of skills, and more as a
framework of conceptual understandings
(Buckingham, 2003). Based on the work of
many scholars and organizations around the
world, Table 87.1 is a framework with six
critical media literacy conceptual under-
standings and corresponding questions
(Kellner and Share, 2019).
These conceptual understandings and
questions are intended to guide educators
and students down a critical path of inquiry
to interrogate any text, medium, and the con-
text that surround it. Kovach and Rosenstiel
(2011) assert, ‘Asking questions begins the
process of deconstructing the media content
we see in front of us. Critical thinking is not
a formula – it is a journey’ (210).
Much of the theory behind critical media
literacy has evolved from cultural studies, a
field of critical inquiry that began in the 20th
century in Europe and continues to grow with
new critiques of media and society. From the
1062 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Table 87.1 Conceptual understandings and corresponding questions

Conceptual understandings Questions

1. Social constructivism WHO are all the possible people who

All information is co-constructed by individuals and/or groups of people who made choices that helped create this
make choices within social contexts. text?
2. Languages/semiotics HOW was this text constructed and
Each medium has its own language with specific grammar and semantics. delivered/accessed?
3. Audience/positionality HOW could this text be understood
Individuals and groups understand media messages similarly and/or differently differently?
depending on multiple contextual factors.
4. Politics of representation WHAT values, points of view, and
Media messages and the medium through which they travel always have a ideologies are represented or missing
bias and support and/or challenge dominant hierarchies of power, privilege, from this text or influenced by the
and pleasure. medium?
5. Production/institutions WHY was this text created and/or
All media texts have a purpose (often commercial or governmental) that is shared?
shaped by the creators and/or systems within which they operate.
6. Social and environmental justice WHOM does this text advantage and/or
Media culture is a terrain of struggle that perpetuates or challenges positive disadvantage?
and/or negative ideas about people, groups, and issues; it is never neutral.

1930s through the 1960s, researchers at the
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research used
critical social theory to analyze how media
culture and the new tools of communication
technology induce ideology and social con-
trol. In the 1960s, researchers at the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the
University of Birmingham added to the earlier
concerns of ideology with a more sophisti-
cated understanding of the audience as active
constructors of reality, not simply mirrors of
an external reality. Douglas Kellner (1995)
explains that cultural studies has continued to
grow and incorporate concepts of semiotics,
feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodern-
ism. Incorporating a dialectical understand-
ing of political economy, textual analysis,
and audience theory, cultural studies cri-
tiques media culture as dynamic discourses
that reproduce dominant ideologies as well as
entertain, educate, and offer the possibilities
for counterhegemonic alternatives.
The conceptual understandings of critical
media literacy are most relevant to progres-
sive education when taught through a demo-
cratic approach with critical pedagogy that
follows ideas of transformative educators like
John Dewey and Paulo Freire. Without a criti-
cal frame, the core concepts can become tools
for instrumental progressivism (Robins and
Webster, 2001) and lose their transformative
potential (Ferguson, 2001). As media educa-
tion continues to evolve, it is essential that
critical pedagogy be a central component.
THE PEDAGOGICAL EVOLUTION OF
CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY
Dewey
A significant philosopher of education who
contributed greatly to current understand-
ings about progressive education is John
Dewey. Antonia Darder, Marta Baltodano,
and Rodolfo Torres (2003) write about the
history of critical pedagogy and pay homage
to Dewey as having ‘had a significant influ-
ence on progressive educators concerned
with advancing democratic ideals in educa-
tion’ (3). Dewey appreciated the power of
the environment and considered understand-
ing and connecting with the environment
 MEDIATING THE CURRICULUM WITH CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY
essential to education. He explains, ‘the
environment consists of those conditions
that promote or hinder, stimulate or inhibit,
the characteristic activities of a living being’
(Dewey, 1916/1997: 11). It is through acting
upon the environment that Dewey asserts
life becomes ‘a self-renewing process’ (2).
For most students in the United States today,
a major part of their environment is media,
and critical media literacy provides a direct
path and framework to critically engage
with it.
Dewey’s progressive goals of democracy
become practical through his pragmatic
approach to teaching based upon experience.
He insists, ‘Every experience is a moving
force. Its value can be judged only on the
ground of what it moves toward and into’
(1938/1963: 38). Dewey envisions progres-
sive education as a continual spiral where the
teacher creates curiosity through structuring
experiences for students to engage, explore,
and experiment. As they actively challenge
new experiences, their inquiry continues to
spiral out into more questions and connec-
tions with more experiences. He explains:
Unless a given experience leads out into a field
previously unfamiliar no problems arise, while
problems are the stimulus to thinking. That the
conditions found in present experience should be
used as sources of problems is a characteristic
which differentiates education based upon experi-
ence from traditional education. (1938/1963: 79)
Dewey makes a distinction between experi-
ential progressive education and traditional
education that is concerned with social con-
formity and transmission of facts. In line
with his goals of democracy, Dewey places
great emphasis on the need for active learn-
ing, experimentation, and problem solving.
He asserts that education will be interesting
to students when they perceive a meaningful
connection between themselves and the
material. Dewey’s pragmatic approach con-
nects theory with practice and requires stu-
dents to similarly connect reflection with
action. He writes, ‘Numbers are not objects
1063
of study just because they are numbers
already constituting a branch of learning
called mathematics, but because they repre-
sent qualities and relations of the world in
which our action goes on, because they are
factors upon which the accomplishments of
our purposes depends’ (1916/1997: 134). For
media education to be transformative, it must
be taught through a critical pedagogy that
recognizes:
Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it
is about human products in the past, but because
of what it does in liberating human intelligence
and human sympathy. Any subject matter which
accomplishes this result is humane, and any sub-
ject matter which does not accomplish it is not
even educational. (Dewey, 1916/1997: 230)
Transformative education requires a critical
pedagogy of solidarity in which empathy and
compassion help students understand the
ways people are interconnected through sys-
tems of dominance and subordination.
Through combining media production with
critical analysis, critical media literacy offers
the potential to create liberatory pedagogy.
Freire
Another key figure in the development of
progressive education and critical pedagogy
is Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Darder
and colleagues (2003) state, ‘Freire is con-
sidered by many to be the most influential
educational philosopher in the development
of critical pedagogical thought and practice’
(5). Both, Dewey and Freire were critical of
the established educational systems, propo-
nents of progressive social change, and
believers in the need to unite theory with
practice. However, Dewey’s liberal reform is
less radical than Freire’s revolutionary peda-
gogy based on liberation from oppression.
The two men saw humans as being in the
process of evolving and education as an
important tool to assist people in becoming
more humane and complete. While Dewey
1064 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
opposed dualism, Freire’s dialectical per-
spective defined freedom as the opposite of
oppression. Freire (2010) asserts, ‘Concern
for humanization leads at once to the recog-
nition of dehumanization, not only as an
ontological possibility but as an historical
reality’ (27).
Freire’s critical pedagogy is radically polit-
ical in its call for conscientização, a revolu-
tionary critical consciousness that involves
perception as well as action against oppres-
sion. He proposes problem-posing pedagogy
as a liberating alternative to the dehumaniz-
ing banking education that can still be found
today in most schools around the world.
Freire describes banking education as an
alienating system that deposits fragments of
information into passive students like money
into a bank. He explains that the real teaching
accomplished by banking education is a hid-
den curriculum that indoctrinates and paci-
fies, ‘for the more the oppressed can be led
to adapt to that situation, the more easily they
can be dominated’ (60).
The problem-posing alternative that Freire
supports requires dialogical communica-
tion between students and teachers, where
both are learning and teaching each other.
He states, ‘One must seek to live with oth-
ers in solidarity. One cannot impose oneself,
nor even merely co-exist with one’s students.
Solidarity requires true communication’ (63).
This is a revolutionary act that necessitates
praxis, critical reflection together with action
to transform society. Freire writes, ‘In dialec-
tical thought, world and action are intimately
interdependent’ (38). The concept of praxis is
an important reason that critical media liter-
acy teaches students how to create media and
critically participate in media culture as well
as analyze media messages. Henry Jenkins
(2006) asserts, ‘We need to rethink the goals
of media education so that young people can
come to think of themselves as cultural pro-
ducers and participants and not simply as
consumers, critical or otherwise’ (259).
An aspect of Freire’s philosophy that can
be quite useful for critical media literacy is
his description of antidialogical mythicizing.
He explains that in order for the dominant
minority to oppress the majority, they need
to increase the alienation and passivity of
the oppressed. This is achieved through the
hegemonic myths that are taught in schools,
repeated in the media, and naturalized
through the dominant society’s worldview.
Freire explains that the oppressive myths
‘are presented to them by well-organized
propaganda and slogans, via the mass “com-
munications” media – as if such alienation
constituted real communication’ (136). This
understanding of the role media play in main-
taining hegemony and oppression led Freire
to suggest that problem-posing education
needs to present these myths to students as
problems to be unveiled through dialogue. He
asserts, ‘It is not the media themselves which
I criticize, but the way they are used’ (136).
Critical media literacy can help students
deconstruct the myths and take action to cre-
ate counterhegemonic media whereby stu-
dents become subjects, as opposed to objects,
and name their world. Through denatural-
izing media representations, students can
expose the workings of ideology. However,
it is not enough to just identify sexist, rac-
ist, classist, or homophobic messages or their
origins; students should be encouraged to
question how these oppressive ideologies are
‘normalized’ and sustained, and then create
alternative messages that expose and chal-
lenge the ideological structures.
IDEOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF
REPRESENTATION
Critical media literacy is more difficult to
teach than most mainstream approaches to
media education because of the complexity
and invisibility of how ideology functions.
Robert Ferguson (1998) states, ‘“Ideology”
is not directly visible, but can only be experi-
enced and/or comprehended. What is visible
is a range of social and representational
 MEDIATING THE CURRICULUM WITH CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY
manifestations which are rooted in relation-
ships of power and subordination’ (43).
Through the process of naturalizing (making
ideas seem ‘natural’ or ‘normal’) power rela-
tions, ideology removes from view their
social and historical construction. What one
does not see, one rarely questions. Therefore,
progressive educators should guide students
to ask critical questions that will help reveal
the structures, history, and social contexts
that are too often obscured from view by
ideological hegemony.
Ideology functions through ‘common
sense’ assumptions about what is consid-
ered ‘normal’ as compared with all else that
becomes the ‘other’ (Hall, 2003). The ideo-
logical discourse of ‘normality’ is constructed
through ‘othering’ all that is not the ‘norm’.
Ferguson states, ‘The invocation of normality
and the establishment of culturally and politi-
cally acceptable behavioural patterns often
form the keystone for ideological arguments
made at the expense of individuals, groups, or
nations deemed to be “other”’ (154).
Stuart Hall (2003) explains, ‘Ideologies
tend to disappear from view into the taken-
for-granted “naturalised” world of common
sense. Since (like gender) race appears to be
“given” by Nature, racism is one of the most
profoundly “naturalised” of existing ideolo-
gies’ (90). Ferguson (1998) suggests that one
reason race is such an important issue for
media educators is
Because most of the information about ‘others’
and ‘race’ is available only through the mass
media, the international or global dimension of
representing ‘race’ is even more problematic than
that which is concerned with local or regional
affairs. Images of issues of ‘race’ are likely to be
multiple, fragmented and transitory. (253)
Multicultural educator James Banks (2000)
asserts, ‘The representation of people and
groups in the media is a cogent factor that
influences children’s perceptions, attitudes,
and values’ (xiii). This influence of media on
children has created a ‘media multicultural
curriculum’ that, according to Carlos Cortés
(2000), denies educators ‘the power to decide
1065
if multicultural education will occur. It will…
through the media, even if not in schools’
(xvi). Cortés promotes a brand of media lit-
eracy that prioritizes multiculturalism to help
students distinguish between generalizations
and stereotypes. He writes that the mass
media multicultural curriculum does not
cause racism, but it does contribute ‘signifi-
cantly to the corpus of American thinking,
feeling, and acting in the realm of diversity’
(69). Cortés suggests that the power of media
to influence children’s notions of ‘the other’
comes from the ‘frequency and variety’ of
representations (154). According to Ferguson
(1998), the most common representations of
race tend to concentrate on individual figures
more than social formations, thereby soften-
ing the ‘systematic processes of historical
racism’ (218). Ferguson suggests that a his-
torical perspective is important because it
helps to see race not as natural or arbitrary,
but rather as an ideological construction.
INTERSECTIONALITY
Because of the multifaceted nature of media,
technology, and popular culture, critical
media literacy educators need to use a variety
of theories and perspectives to engage mean-
ingfully in the politics of representation. A
multiperspectival approach supports critical
inquiry to examine the ways media texts rep-
resent identity and perpetuate discrimination
(Kellner, 1995). The concept of intersection-
ality provides a powerful lens to uncover the
intersections of oppression and domination
across lines of class, race, gender, and other
forms of oppression (Crenshaw, 1991). This
concept suggests that forms of oppression
intersect and work together. Cultural theo-
rists use intersectionality to explore how
representations of various identity markers
such as race, class, and gender, intersect and
create multiple sources of disempowerment.
Critical cultural studies are also concerned
with exploring representations that counter
1066 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
forms of oppression through depictions of
struggle and emancipation in the contested
terrain of contemporary media culture.
Patricia Hill Collins (2000) asserts, ‘An
increasingly important dimension of why
hegemonic ideologies concerning race,
class, gender, sexuality, and nation remain so
deeply entrenched lies, in part, in the grow-
ing sophistication of mass media in regu-
lating intersecting oppressions’ (284). She
states that dominant representations of Black
women in the media are controlling images
that objectify and subordinate. Collins
writes, ‘Portraying African-American
women as stereotypical mammies, matri-
archs, welfare recipients, and hot mommas
helps justify U.S. Black women’s oppres-
sion’ (69). Even though the specific images
and stereotypes may change, Collins insists,
‘the overall ideology of domination itself
seems to be an enduring feature of intersect-
ing oppressions’ (88).
STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLGIES
From studying the ideological structures of
patriarchy, many feminist theorists like
Collins developed feminist standpoint episte-
mologies (Harding, 2004) that can be useful
for critical media literacy. Privileges and
dominance create blind spots making it more
difficult for those benefiting from oppression
to see the structures and ideologies that
oppress others. At the same time, people with
less privileges who have lived and experi-
enced the effects of racism, sexism, classism,
and other systemic forms of oppression are
more likely to recognize the problems and be
able to see the harmful structures. Standpoint
theory is about studying up, beginning
inquiry from marginalized positions in order
to increase the likelihood of seeing the larger
social structures that often become obscured
by hegemonic ideologies. While people who
experience oppression have greater potential
for recognizing the structures of oppression,
critical consciousness is not automatic.
Feminist standpoint theorists assert, ‘the
vision available to the oppressed group must
be struggled for’ (Hartsock, 1997: 153).
Since most research and media reports
start their inquiries from dominant positions
(like TV war coverage that first interview
military officials before talking with civil-
ian casualties), standpoint theorists argue
for the need to reverse the starting place
and begin with the people most affected
by the oppressive structures and systems.
Changing the location of where one begins
their research increases the odds of access-
ing experiences and insights that are often
missing from the dominant discourse. It
also tends to reduce the blind spots and
smoke screens of ideologies that ‘natural-
ize’ and ‘normalize’ social constructions as
‘common sense’.
Critical media literacy that combines
critical pedagogy with standpoint episte-
mologies can offer an approach to help all
students see the structures of oppression,
analyze the role of ideology in shrouding
those structures, and find agency in the act
of becoming subjects who can express their
voices to challenge racism, sexism, clas-
sism, and all forms of oppression. Creating
alternative media and coming to voice is
especially important for people who have
seldom been allowed to speak for them-
selves, but without critical analysis, it is
not enough. Critical inquiry that explores
and exposes the structures of oppression is
essential because merely coming to voice is
something any marginalized racist or sexist
group of people can also claim. Spaces must
be opened up and opportunities created so
that people in marginalized positions have
the opportunity to collectively struggle
against oppression to voice their concerns
and create their own alternative representa-
tions. This process can also help students
in dominant positions recognize their blind
spots and become more sensitive to the sys-
tems of oppression in which they are ben-
efiting. By changing the starting point of
 MEDIATING THE CURRICULUM WITH CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY
inquiry, from top down to bottom up, the
potential is greater for everyone to build a
critical consciousness that can empathize
with the oppressed and pierce through the
ideological hegemony to see the institutions
and systems that dominate.
QUESTIONING POWER
Through group discussions, critical analysis,
and political struggle, classrooms can be
transformed into spaces of liberatory peda-
gogy and not simply social reproduction.
Marginalized voices and alternative perspec-
tives offer great potential to challenge domi-
nant discourse by exposing the myth that
information and knowledge can be objective
and separate from power. Michel Foucault
(1995) writes ‘that there is no power relation
without the correlative constitution of a field
of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does
not presuppose and constitute at the same
time power relations’ (27). Since people with
desires, fears, and prejudices construct ideas
within social and historical contexts, there is
no information or knowledge that is ever
objective or neutral. Sandra Harding (2004)
explains, ‘The more value-neutral a concep-
tual framework appears, the more likely it is
to advance the hegemonous interests of domi-
nant groups, and less likely it is to be able to
detect important actualities of social rela-
tions’ (6). A strategy for counteracting
hegemony is exposing its construction and
unveiling the biases inherent in all
communication.
Freire’s problem-posing education that
encourages students to collectively engage
with problems and then wrestle with solving
them can fit well with standpoint theory and
critical media literacy. He reports, ‘coopera-
tion leads dialogical Subjects to focus their
attention on the reality which mediates them
and which – posed as a problem – challenges
them. The response to that challenge is the
action of dialogical Subjects upon reality in
1067
order to transform it’ (2010/1970: 168). Jane
Flax (1997) suggests that with successful
feminism, ‘“reality” will appear even more
unstable, complex, and disorderly than it
does now’ (178). It is through problematizing
reality that knowledge and stories from mar-
ginalized positions can have much greater
potential to demystify hegemony and offer
alternative epistemologies. When aiming for
social transformation, students should begin
inquiry from marginal positions and then
study up as part of the process of collective
political struggle. While this may sound too
radical for public education, it is actually in
line with the basic principles of democracy
and the US Bill of Rights. Democracy and
liberty require a type of literacy that goes far
beyond the mere ability to read and write.
Henry Giroux (1987) states, ‘To be literate is
not to be free, it is to be present and active in
the struggle for reclaiming one’s voice, his-
tory, and future’ (11).
If students learn to deconstruct and recon-
struct media with a critical media literacy
framework and through a standpoint method-
ology, they are far more likely to recognize
hegemonic myths, understand the oppres-
sion they cause, and want to act in solidar-
ity with those struggling for their rights.
The first conceptual understanding of criti-
cal media literacy asserts, ‘all information is
co-constructed by individuals and/or groups
of people who make choices within social
contexts’. Harding (1998) uses the term
co-constructivism:
to emphasize how systematic knowledge-seeking
is always just one element in any culture, society,
or social formation in its local environment, shift-
ing and transforming other elements – education
systems, legal systems, economic relations, reli-
gious beliefs and practices, state projects (such as
war-making), gender relations – as it, in turn, is
transformed by them. (1998: 4)
This description of co-constructivism can be
useful to demythologize the social construc-
tion process and at the same time expose the
interconnectedness of people, ideas, and
society. Harding explains, ‘We can retain
1068 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
the best of both realist and constructivist
understandings of the relations between our
social worlds, our representations, and the
realities our representations are intended to
represent by thinking of co-evolving, or co-
constructing, cultures and their knowledge
projects’ (20).
Understanding these interconnections and
interdependence is necessary, according to
Ferguson (2001), to create critical solidarity.
He suggests that our relationships with media
are not autonomous, but rather they depend
on taking positions related to social contexts.
Since we are always taking sides, Ferguson
(2001) calls for critical solidarity as ‘a means
by which we acknowledge the social dimen-
sions of our thinking and analysis. It is also
a means through which we may develop our
skills of analysis and relative autonomy’
(42). Critical solidarity means teaching stu-
dents to interpret information and communi-
cation within humanistic, social, historical,
political, and economic contexts for them to
understand the interrelationships and conse-
quences of their actions and lifestyles. It also
means joining in solidarity with the disem-
powered in a collective struggle for a more
just world.
At this point, when ideas about media
education are beginning to take hold across
the continent, it is imperative that critical
pedagogy be a central component. Critical
media literacy should be built upon a solid
foundation that applies ideas from John
Dewey’s experiential education and Paulo
Freire’s problem-posing pedagogy. These
educational theories require learning to begin
with what students already know, building on
their experiences, confronting the problems
they encounter in their daily lives, and help-
ing them to express their ideas and concerns
to audiences beyond the classroom. Student-
centered education should spiral out into
new areas of learning as students explore
and search for meanings. When the goal of
critical solidarity guides media education,
students can work together to unveil and
demythologize their media.
PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE
This theoretical base provides a powerful
framework and road map for educators to
design their practice to be developmentally
appropriate and culturally responsive to their
students. While it is more common for media
education to be taught in the upper grades
and in English courses, we now know that
children any age can and should engage with
these ideas as early as possible. Vivian
Vasquez (2014) demonstrated the potential
for teaching preschoolers to think critically
about their media and challenge the problems
with podcasts, petitions, and protests. I have
seen successful elementary school teachers
incorporate critical media literacy lessons
into the primary grades at some of the most
high-impacted inner-city schools in Los
Angeles (Share, 2015a). At UCLA, all our
pre-service K12 teachers take a critical media
literacy course to prepare them with the theo-
retical framework and pedagogical skills to
teach their students to think critically about
media, technology, and popular culture
(Share, Mamikonyan, and Lopez, 2019).
There are many ways for educators to inte-
grate critical media literacy in any subject area
they teach. Elementary students can compare
and contrast different versions of fables and
fairytales (found in books, cartoons, movies,
websites, songs, or video games). Then they
can collaboratively create media with alter-
native perspectives or different endings of the
same story (taking the form of comic strips,
memes, podcasts, digital stories, or photo-
graphs). Older students can analyze movies
to learn about production techniques as well
as questioning the way characters, concepts,
and places are developed and represented.
Then they can create their own text (as adver-
tisements, blogs, animation, zines, movie
trailers, books, or social media) to retell or
repurpose the story from different perspec-
tives. The possibilities for creating various
types of texts open the potential for students
to be more creative, expressive, and critical
than is likely when they are just working
 MEDIATING THE CURRICULUM WITH CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY
with print. These lessons involve many of
the basic skills required in the Common Core
State Standards (2015) from kindergarten on
up, and by comparing different versions of
the same story, students may begin to under-
stand the constructed nature of information.
As very young children learn to read
visual images, watch and listen to stories,
and interpret sounds, they can start apply-
ing critical media literacy skills to question-
ing the purpose, audience, and construction
of information and entertainment. They
should be encouraged to ask critical ques-
tions in ways where the words are adapted
to their level of understanding and cultural
experiences. While we should not expect
kindergartners to know high-level academic
vocabulary, we should expect them to wres-
tle with the differences between right and
wrong in the texts they are using. In a kin-
dergarten classroom in South Los Angeles,
five-year-old students learned to empathize
with nature and then decided to create their
own posters to educate other students at their
school about taking care of the environment
(Túchez-Ortega, 2017). Literacy is a power-
ful tool, and when students use it to com-
1069
skills and enhance their media-making abili-
ties. Students can create visual posters of
themselves and their peers and wanted post-
ers of subject matter and characters from lit-
erature. This requires students to think
visually (about lighting, composition, angle
of view, symbolism) and consider the lan-
guage of typography (font, color, size), pho-
tography, illustration, mapping, graphing,
and design.
Photography is a wonderful medium to
explore many concepts of visual literacy as
well as a powerful pedagogical tool for the
classroom (Share, 2015b). Students can use
cell phones or tablets to create photographs
that illustrate vocabulary words. They can
take two photographs of each other; in one
they try to make their peer look like the
protagonist of a story and in the other they
represent the same student as the antagonist.
This can help students think about literary
character development while additionally
learning visual literacy. Students can also use
cameras to study their environment outside
the classroom and consider the details and
aesthetics for place-based writing and the
relation