understanding

critical pedagogy

major concepts

pedagogy and teaching

sample teaching text

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Critical pedagogy presumes that no education is innocent or neutral.  Even a "neutral" education, a canon or traditional body of knowledge, is based on a set of choices and omissions that maintains and perpetuates, for good or ill, the existing social relations and loci of social, political, economic, and cultural power. 

Critical pedagogy challenges students to step back and begin examining the contexts and assumptions that underlie traditional education--to become, as it were, aware of the values and choices that determine what is taught, which voices are heard, and which are silenced. 

The primary method of a critical education is inquiry.  In short, critical pedagogy encourages students to always ask the question, "Why?"

Therefore, before you read further, please read this letter.

Critical pedagogy bases teaching on the theory that students come to the classroom with an entire body of knowledge or expertise of their own, rather than subscribing to the idea that the teacher "deposits" knowledge into the empty minds of students in what Paolo Freire, considered the father of modern critical pedagogy, calls the banking method of education.

Critical pedagogy posits a student-centered classroom in which knowledge is created and discovered as opposed to passed on by an elite figure of authority.  It seeks to empower students not only by providing them with the tools of traditional education, such as literacy, but by giving them a greater awareness of the power relations that govern the society in which they live and of their position in it.  Freire called that awareness conscientizacao, or conscientization.  Ideally, critical pedagogy enables them to challenge those relations and to become active, democratic citizens.

In short, critical pedagogy defines itself as being devoted to teaching participatory democracy and social justice. 

As such, it is also closely tied to language and literacy.  It is also closely tied to feminist, queer, disability, and cultural studies; post-colonialism; theories such as Marxism, post-critical, speech act, and resistance theory.

Other names for critical pedagogy:

etc.

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