“I Wanna Be a SHIT-Head!” Accepted and Radical Pedagogy (original) (raw)
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Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 2013
Through a militant co-research project with a class in an anarchistic free school, we explore how dispositions from so-called ‘normal’ education infiltrate activities of aspirationally ‘radical’ pedagogy. Grappling with these tensions as a kind of ‘playful work,’ we focus on four themes: the geo- and body-political situatedness of knowledge, space-time, a/effective relationships, and pedagogy and study. Across these themes, we take up and trouble assumptions of modernity/coloniality, as sources of obstacles we experienced in our class and, more broadly, in projects of movement-embedded study. Subscribing to these assumptions both happens through and serves to legitimate the institutions of education, or the processes of making people ‘ready’ for adulthood, work, and governance. As a counter-force, we offer tactics for de-linking from these imaginal trajectories and composing pedagogies of decolonial, communal futures.
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Curriculum Inquiry, 2002
One of the scholarly debates of the last decade has been about the discourses of pedagogy and pedagogy's function in society. As a result, pedagogy has been critically theorized, conceptualized, and analyzed, resulting in a body of work that adheres to the importance of understanding the human subject in pedagogy. Liberatory pedagogies, particularly critical pedagogies, are concerned with students who traditionally have been marginalized in school. Using a blend of autobiography and criticism, this article examines the case of an often marginalized group, disabled students, and asks whether they are present in the texts of critical pedagogies. The article concludes with a discussion of the tensions between inclusive theory and inclusive practice and, finally, suggests the constraints under which inclusive practices operate.
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Universities, as well as other educational institutions, are currently facing economic instability, debt and an uncertain future. The squeeze on Higher Education is, like the crisis of capital, global. But so too is the emergent resistance. People around the world are challenging the neoliberal model of the university, which produces ‘skilled’ workers to be put to use for the (re)production of capital. The ‘double crisis’ of the economy and the university has made campuses once again sites of resistance, and the “new student movement can be seen as the main organized response to the global financial crisis”. These struggles have not only formed spaces for opposition – to budget cuts, the increasing precarity of labor, rising education costs – but have also featured calls for new models for education to “transform the campus into a base for alternative knowledge production that is accessible to those outside its ‘walls.’” In this chapter we will investigate recent attempts to create alternative spaces for radical pedagogy and knowledge commons inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy, exploring several spaces of pedagogical praxis and to reflect on the potential for radical pedagogy and knowledge production.
Critical Pedagogy and Its Complicities: A Praxis of Stuck Places
Educational Theory, 1998
is not a critical operation, critique is its ohject; deconstruction always bears, at one moment or another, on the confidence in critical or critical-theoretical authority, that is to say in an authority that decides and in the ultimate possibility of decidability; deconstruction is deconstruction of dogmatic critique.' When I taught women's studies in Minnesota, my students once termed me a "neon-Marxist." This had much to do, I think, with my fashion sense. But it was also about paradigmatic proliferations and, particularly, the weight put on students to declare themselves as "this or that" amidst constantly shifting theoretic vocabularies. In my own student days, some fifteen years ago, feminism and the neo-Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, and Louis Althusser were the "hot tickets" in terms of positioning oneself against disciplinary conventions, just as phenomenology had served that purpose for those a decade aheadof me. For graduate students over the last ten years or so, the discourses of the "posties" have been the latest contender for allegiance. This parade of "successor regimes" has shaped critical pedagogy. Originally grounded in a combination of Frankfurt School, Gramsci, and Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy emerged in the 1980s as a sort of "big tent" for those in education who were invested in doing academic work toward social justice. As an ensemble of practices and discourses with competing claims of truth, typicality, and credibility, tensions with feminist pedagogy were always there.2These erupted into visibility in Elizabeth Ellsworth's 1989 piece and, particularly, the commentary that ensued. While I agree with Dennis Carlson's "enough is enough" in regards to "Lather's critique of Giroux's critique of Ellsworth's critique of Giroux," my point in revisiting all of this is that the interchange produced the truth of critical pedagogy as a "boy thing'' whereas the "girl thing" was to use poststructuralism to deconstruct pedagogy, often one's own." Now almost ten years later, the two essays featured in this special issue about critical pedagogy in the contemporary moment reinscribe critical pedagogy as 1. Jacques Derrida, quoted in Suzanne Gearhart, "The Remnants of Philosophy: Philosophy After Glas," in Hegel After Dcrrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1988),235. This, of course, is situated within a counter-claim that deconstruction is also always already of the order of the critical. 2. Given the stormy history of Marxism and feminism, this was to be expected. For thc classic essay, see
A Critical Pedagogy of the Mainstream
The essay links adult literacy learning within 'mainstream' programs to a personal philosophy of self-actualization, a scaffolding pedagogy, and the quest for inclusion into the main fabric of American economic, cultural and social life. These, in turn, are interpreted as important components undergirding John Dewey's concept of growth in its application to adult literacy, the philosophical premise which frames this essay. They are viewed less as a limiting factor than as a doorway that meets important needs, interests, and aspirations of students. The essay builds on the developmental social theory of Myron C. Tuman which shares close affinities with John Dewey's concept of growth. Not change itself but the spirit of renewal and reform, so important for literacy, guarantees the continuation of freedom of democratic institutions—the liberating power of literacy comes only in the recognition of the contingent nature of social institutions, not in their necessary abolition (Tuman, 1987, p. 164).
Revolutionary critical pedagogy
InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2010
Since the mid-1990s, the focus of my work has shifted discernibly, if not dramatically, from a preoccupation with poststructuralist analyses of popular culture, in which I attempted to deploy contrapuntally critical pedagogy, neo-Marxist critique and cultural analysis, to a revolutionary Marxist humanist perspective. My focus shifted away from the politics of representation and its affiliative liaison with identity production and turned towards the role of finance capital and the social relations of production. Against a utopian theory of ...
The development of education in the globalisation context poses a lot of questions, being quite a challenge for scholars. The analysis of such new trends as integration processes in education accompanied by the formation of a common educational space, the growth of educational migration, the involvement of international organisations and NGOs, who follow the postulates of the liberal market ideology, and the education policy of national states leads to referring to the seemingly established concepts of particular features of education as society's living environment. One of such actual topics that are in demand again is the question of the functions of education in the globalising society. The conceptualisation of the social functions of education belongs to the key issues of the theoretical sociology of education. At the current stage, it is the representatives of the Neo-Marxist approach who are interested in this topic most of all: Neo-Marxism is a trend of the modern sociology of education that has been asserting itself most actively. At the same time, the particular re-interpretation model for the functions of education, which has been suggested by the leaders of the Neo-Marxist trend, shows clearly the theoretical and methodological troubles that the sociology of education is suffering all over the world. The present article is dedicated to the analysis of the Neo-Marxist interpretation of the social functions of education. 1