What is Critical Pedagogy?
"The critical question here is whose future,
story, and interests does the school represent. . . Critical pedagogy
argues that school practices need to be informed by a public philosophy
that addresses how to construct ideological and institutional
conditions in which the lived experience of empowerment for the
vast majority of student becomes the defining feature of schooling."
"Critical pedagogy attempts to:
- create new forms of knowledge through its
emphasis on breaking down disciplines and creating interdisciplinary
knowledge.
- raise questions about the relationships between
the margins and centers of power in schools and is concerned
about how to provide a way of reading history as part of a larger
project of reclaiming power and identity, particularly as these
are shaped around the categories of race, gender, class, and
ethnicity.
- reject the distinction between high and popular
culture so as to make curriculum knowledge responsive to the
everyday knowledge that constitutes peoples' lived histories
differently.
- illuminate the primacy of the ethical in defining
the language that teachers and others use to produce particular
cultural practices."
