What is the Role of Teachers in
Critical Pedagogy?

• "Teachers should construct curricula that draw upon the cultural resources that students bring with them to the school. This suggests not only taking the languages, histories, experiences, and voices of the students seriously, but also integrating what is taught in schools to the dynamics of everyday life."
• ". . . they must be able to critically analyze the ideologies, values, and interests that inform their role as teachers and the cultural politics they promote in the classroom. All of their actions presuppose some notion of what it means to be a citizen and a future society and to the degree that schools are actively engaged in the production of discourses that provide others with a sense of identity, community, and possibility, they must be responsible and reflective about their actions."
• "They must "be able to analyze their relationship with the larger society in order to critically apprehend themselves as social agents capable of recognizing how they might be complicit with forms of oppression and human suffering. But they must also have a language of possibility, one that allows them to think in terms of the not yet, to speak the unrepresentable, to imagine social relations outside of the existing configuration of power."
• " . . . they must be able to understand how power works productively through the poetics of imagination, that is, they must be able to distinguish between reality as a fact and existences a possibility. But such dreams must be forged not in isolation but in solidarity with others."
• "Without hope there is only the politics of cynicism."
• "We must get away from training teachers to be simply efficient technicians and practitioners. We need a new vision of what constitutes educational leadership so that we can educate teachers to think critically, locate themselves in their own histories, and exercise moral and public responsibility in their role as engaged critics and transformative intellectuals."