on Critical Pedagogy

When deciding which sources to draw from for this review, it quickly became clear that critical pedagogy, because of its emphasis in reinvention and adaptation, is almost impossible to define as a cohesive group or school of thought. I first discovered these approaches through the work of Paulo Freire, as so many others have, and the influence of his work is palpable on all the texts I have read for this project. For selecting what to include and what to exclude here, however, engagement with Freire’s ideas is not sufficient as a metric. Instead, I draw from Down and Steinberg (2020) , in turn drawing from Kincheloe, to identify certain central ideas that critical pedagogies share:

Quote

… a reasonable starting point might be to share a set of basic concepts identified by Kincheloe in his book Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy. By way of summary, Kincheloe says critical pedagogy is:

1. Grounded on a social and educational vision of justice and equality
2. Constructed on the belief that education is inherently political
3. Dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering
4. 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
5. Enacted through the use of generative themes to read the word and the world and the process of problem posing – generative themes involve the educational use of issues that are central to students’ lives as a grounding for the curriculum
6. Centered on the notion that teachers should be researchers – here teachers learn to produce knowledge and teach students to produce their own knowledges
7. Grounded on the notion that teachers become researchers of their own students – as researchers, teachers study their students, their backgrounds, and the forces that shape them
8. Interested in maintaining a delicate balance between social change and cultivating the intellect – this requires a rigorous pedagogy that accomplishes both goals
9. Concerned with the ‘margins’ of society, the experiences and needs of individuals faced with oppression and subjugation
10. Constructed on the awareness that science can be used as a force to regulate and control
11. Dedicated to understanding the context in which educational activity takes place
12. Committed to resisting the harmful effects of dominant power
13. Attuned to the importance of complexity –understands complexity theory– in constructing a rigorous and transformative education
14. Focused on understanding the profound impact of neo-colonial structures in shaping education and knowledge.
    (Kincheloe, 2008: 10)

- Down and Steinberg (2024) (p. xliii).
Note: I have numbered each point for ease of discussion further on.

Given the purpose of this review, it is of particular interest to analyze each of the concepts Kincheloe proposes as tools in their own right, to begin to unravel how critical pedagogies answer the key questions I identify in my model.

Points 4, 9, 11, and 14 answer questions of Context. They identify key characteristics of good schools and highlight how the environment in which the educational activity takes place is considered and included within a Praxis. Meanwhile, points 1, 2, 3 and 12 are clearly within the realm of Theory. They identify a vision of education that positions it as having a social and political character beyond the mere technical one. They single out justice, equality and the alleviation of human suffering as the central goal of education and the resistance of dominant power as its desired outcome, thus providing educational praxis with a reason for being and a compass for evaluating itself. Together, these eight points provide a solid base for how to approach critical pedagogy: starting from a concern with the particular characteristics of the population being educated, critical pedagogies should observe the particular culture of the community, recognize the impact of oppressive structures upon its members, in particular those most vulnerable and marginalized, and pursue a mission of justice and alleviation of suffering.

Points 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 and 13 answer questions of Methodology. They present heuristics for developing one’s own practice, they connect the mission and goals identified in the tools of Theory and the environmental considerations identified by the tools of Context to the act of education. Points 6 and 7 also provide a link between technologies of Methodology and those of Research, reframing the act of researching one’s students from an abstracted task done by the academic to an active, concrete one carried out by the teacher in real time to inform their practice. Thus, from the most abstract heuristic to the most concrete, Kincheloe highlights these approaches: first, the practice of teachers must recognize and leverage the complexity of the educational activity to reveal how knowledge and science can be used as forces to control, all the while maintaining a balance between social change and intellectual rigor. Second, the teacher should become a researcher of the environment and their students, and use their observations to construct their lessons. Third, a central approach is through the use of generative themes, where the local concerns of students are adapted into tools to explore specific topics and develop skills. These points provide a comprehensive understanding of what the teacher needs to keep in mind when developing their practice, where inspiration and lesson topics should come from, and through which kind of specific tool lessons should be conducted.

Though Kincheloe’s points provide a very solid foundation when discussing tools of Context, Theory and Methodology for critical pedagogies, they do not directly address questions of Lesson, Teaching, and Learning. This is, perhaps, to be expected given his goal of identifying a series of general concepts that might apply across most or all critical pedagogies. Yet, throughout this review I refer back to these general points to address the specific ways in which different authors are engaging with Kincheloe’s tools, in the realms in which they exist, and are developing their own answers to the questions which Kincheloe’s points do not address.

On critical pedagogy and popular education

Throughout my construction of this review, I have struggled with whether to include works by Latin American popular educators working outside of the anglophone world. It is not clear to me that these movements can easily blend into each other. Rocha and Sañudo (2024), for example, identify critical pedagogy as a distinctly anglophone movement, which resonates with Muñoz Gaviria and colleagues’ (2022) genealogy of popular education in Latin America. Though I am deeply committed to incorporating the work of writers carrying out their practice away from the hegemonic spaces of the anglosphere, I have concluded that it would be inappropriate to mix the two traditions without due consideration, which has led me to exclude popular education works from this review. While it is not my purpose to draw a categorical distinction between the two movements here, I have identified some key differences between the two traditions that would make it too complex to easily reconcile them in a single literature review. These distinctions are:

• The centrality of Paulo Freire’s work.
  • In the anglophone tradition Freire is widely acknowledged as the father of the movement, to the extent that many important writers draw not only from his writings but from their personal relationships with him; his ideas are the foundations upon which the pedagogy rests. Meanwhile, within popular education Freire is very important, but not the central figure. During the development of popular education in Latin America he was surrounded by colleagues whose practice has continued to inform the movement, rendering it more diverse in practice and intellectual structure. In this sense, Freire’s work is not a beginning, but a culmination and recollection of ideas that have been gestating since the 19th century (Muñoz Gaviria et al, 2022).
• The influence of Liberation Theology.
  • Within popular education, the continued influence of and dialogue with Liberation Theology, which associates the Christian mission with Marxists readings of the world, cannot be ignored (Torres Millán, 1995). Many popular educators, including Freire and Illich, came to their practice through the practice of their religion. In contrast, Christianity and Liberation Theology are very rarely mentioned in critical pedagogy texts, and Catholic thought does not play as large a role in the lives of teachers and students in the anglophone world.
• The continued association of popular education with Revolutionary Movements.
  • While the praxis of critical pedagogy has been mostly confined to schools, popular education continues to have close links to revolutionary movements in Latin America, including the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Zapatistas in Mexico (Muñoz Gaviria et al, 2022).
• The lack of two way dialogue between the traditions.
  • While anglophone scholars like Henry Giroux, Michael Apple, Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg are widely cited in popular education literature, the same is not true in reverse. Beyond Freire, critical pedagogues only rarely engage with the work of popular educators based in Latin America.

Despite these differences, I hold that it is a continued mistake to consider these traditions in isolation given the enormous influence they have on each other, even if rarely acknowledged from the perspective of critical pedagogy. Though they will not be present in this work, let this acknowledgement of the existence and importance of popular education, and this list of unreconciled differences, be the starting point for a deeper exploration of how these two sister traditions might be brought back together.