Definition
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Critical pedagogy takes as a central concern the issue of power in
the teaching and learning context. It focuses on how and in whose
interests knowledge is produced and 'passed on' and view the ideal
aims of education as emancipatory.
[Critical] pedagogy . . . signals how
questions of audience, voice, power, and evaluation actively work
to construct particular relations between teachers and students,
institutions and society, and classrooms and communities. . . .
Pedagogy in the critical sense illuminates the relationship among
knowledge, authority, and power. (Giroux, 1994: 30)
Giroux, H. A. (1994). Disturbing pleasures: Learning
popular culture. New York: Routledge.
Giroux, H. A., & McLaren, P. (Eds.). (1994).
Between borders: Pedagogy and the politics of cultural studies.
New York: Routledge.
The Critical Pedagogy tradition begins
from a very different starting point. It regards specific belief
claims, not primarily as propositions to be assessed for their truth
content, but as parts of systems of belief and action that have
aggregate effects within the power structures of society. It asks
first about these systems of belief and action, who benefits? The
primary preoccupation of Critical Pedagogy is with social injustice
and how to transform inequitable, undemocratic, or oppressive institutions
and social relations. ... Indeed, a crucial dimension of this approach
is that certain claims, even if they might be "true" or
substantiated within particular confines and assumptions, might
nevertheless be partisan in their effects. Assertions that African-Americans
score lower on IQ tests, for example, even if it is a "fact"
that this particular population does on average score lower on this
particular set of tests, leaves significant larger questions unaddressed,
not the least of which is what effect such assertions have on a
general population that is not aware of the important limits of
these tests or the tenuous relation, at best, between "what
IQ tests measure" and "intelligence." Other important
questions, from this standpoint, include: Who is making these assertions?
Why are they being made at this point in time? Who funds such research?
Who promulgates these "findings"? Are they being raised
to question African-American intelligence or to demonstrate the
bias of IQ tests? Such questions, from the Critical Pedagogy perspective,
are not external to, or separable from, the import of also weighing
the evidentiary base for such claims.
Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy: Relations,
Differences, and Limits ***Forthcoming in Critical Theory in Educational
Discourse, Thomas S. Popkewitz and Philip Higgs, eds. (Butterworth's,
1997).
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/facstaff/burbules/
ncb/papers/critical.html
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