Critical Pedsgogy

This chapter discusses efforts to cultivate a critical, arts-based approach, focusing on how students and their teacher experienced a curriculum designed to deconstruct identity, personalize literature, and foster community in a high school English classroom. The structured practices of autoethnographic writing, performance poetry, and intergroup dialogue are merged to engage students in critical dialogue within and across differences in the classroom.

The book this chapter is drawn from, "Constructivist Education in the Age of Accountability (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), contrasts authentic approaches to education with classroom practices based primarily on standards external to the individuals who are supposed to learn. While other books tend to promote either a desperate scramble for meeting standards or determined resistance to neoliberal reforms, this book fills that gap in ways that will inspire practitioners, prospective teachers, and teacher educators. Mandates pay only lip service to constructivist and social constructivist principles while thwarting the value of both students and teachers actively creating understandings. Authors in this book assert the central importance of a range of constructivist approaches to teaching, learning, and thinking, inviting careful reflection on the goals and values of education.

The purpose of this chapter is to situate Deejay’s story and position his experience of being a voice from the margins in music education within past research. Using the theoretical lens of Du Bois’s (1903) theory of double-consciousness, we offer a perspective on how Deejay, as a significantly underrepresented Black male in a significantly overrepresented White-male field, came to understand his legitimacy in music education. Du Bois’s framework of double-consciousness has been used as a lens to understand how Black people in a White dominated society view themselves in relationship to the world they encounter. In conclusion, we will suggest how double-consciousness permeates within music education in order to offer implications for how the theory may be useful in understanding marginalized populations in music teaching and learning.

Race and inequitable education have been a long-standing topic of debate in American education. Much of the recent controversy over race and education in America is reflective of the Brown v Board of Education ruling of 1954 that allowed Black students to attend schools with White students. Then, as now, conversation about what is best for Black students largely focuses on same- race student and teacher classrooms (Anderson, 2015 Boggs & Dunbar, 2015, Coleman 2007, Cottman, 2015, Driessen, 2015, Deck, 2013, Hyland, 2005 & Ladson-Billings, 1995). However, despite the best intentions of those who tried to desegregate schools, classroom composition is still not racially balanced in the U.S. In 2011, White students attended schools that were 9 percent Black, while Black Students attended schools that were 78 percent Black (NAEP, 2015). Many of the Black students who attended predominately Black schools lived in the South (NAEP, 2015). Regardless of location, educational outcomes for Black and White students are not the same. Black students are not performing as well as White students. The discrepancies between White and minority students’ educational outcomes are so severe that Johnson and Kritsonis (2006) consider achievement gaps between Black and White students a national dilemma

In today's market-driven educational culture, universities are coming under increasing pressure to justify funding through the disclosure of measurable outcomes in education and research. One educational objective that receives particular attention is critical thinking, regarded as an essential skill in both academic and work environments. The assessment of critical thinking has become a significant enterprise, with a number of standardised tests available for both individuals and organisations. While these tests are based on well-known taxonomies of critical thinking, this paper argues that institutions should be wary of using them as a means to measure educational outcomes. First, they fail to take into account fundamentally contested issues within conceptions of critical thinking. They also have significant weaknesses in terms of validity and reliability. Finally, and most importantly, they provide only a limited assessment of critical thinking, failing to evaluate the skills exercised in real-life academic tasks. A more effective approach to critical thinking testing would be one implemented at a faculty level, with assessments carried out on coursework integral to the curricula of specific academic disciplines.

The enactive approach to cognition is developed in the context of music and music education. I discuss how this embodied point of view affords a relational and bio-cultural perspective on music that decentres the Western focus on language, symbol and representation as the foundations of cognition and meaning. I then explore how this 'life-based' approach to cognition and meaning-making offers a welcome alternative to standard Western academic approaches to music education. More specifically, I consider how the enactive perspective may aid in developing deeper ecological understandings of the transformative, extended and interpenetrative nature of the embodied musical mind; and thus help (re)connect students and teachers to the lived experience of their own learning and teaching. Following this, I examine related concepts associated with Buddhist psychology in order to develop possibilities for a contemplative music pedagogy. To conclude, I consider how an enactive-contemplative perspective may help students and teachers awaken to the possibilities of music education as ontological education. That is, through a deeper understanding of ‘music as a manifestation of life’ rediscover their primordial nature as autopoietic and world-making creatures and thus engage more deeply with musicality as a means of forming richer and more compassionate relationships with their peers, their communities and the ‘natural’ and cultural worlds they inhabit.

The aim of this article is to present Freire's experience in Africa as a process that transformed his teaching and learning method as well as his philosophy of education. His participation in the São Toméan literacy campaign resulted in the abandonment of the category of conscientization that was central to his philosophy. Freire's decision was dictated by the fact that the category's interpretations were threatened by teachers who felt superior to learners. During the São Toméan literacy campaign, Freire came to believe that a necessary condition for the social symmetry in education (and in society in general) was to concentrate on community's practical problems, whose solution is a difficult task both for teachers and students. Thing-centered pedagogy (Hodgson et al., 2017; Biesta, 2010; Latour, 2007)-which seems to be a new paradigm in educational theory-can be derived from Freire's philosophy of education.

And the men without face continued to talk: "This world is another world, the reason and the will of the true men and true women does not govern yet, few we are and forgotten we are, above us walk our dead, despised, we are small and our voice is subdued, it has been a long time that silence inhabits our homes, but now the hour has come for us to talk our heart and other hearts, from the night and from the soil must come our dead, those without faces, those from the mountain, may they dress of warriors so their voice be heard, and may they become silent again and return to the night and to the Earth (Marcos, 1994).

This week in August 2016 marks the 89th anniversary  since the execution of the two most famous class-war prisoners in our history, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, electrocuted in Massachusetts on 23 August 1927 on false murder charges, framed by the state for their anarchist convictions and activism. Since a proclamation by Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1977, the 23rd of August has been recognized as a kind of Sacco and Vanzetti Memorial Day in Massachusetts, the past three years revitalized with a march and rally organized by the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society in Boston, on whose web site (http://saccoandvanzetti.org/) you can learn more about their work.Here their Preamble: http://saccoandvanzetti.org/sn_display1.php?row_ID=8 They seek to connect the memory of Sacco and Vanzetti to struggles for radical change in American and global society today.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This content downloaded from 131.96.12.74 on Tue, ALBERS P1 0f [The artwork] had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on. (Winterson, 1995, p. 3)

Despite the extraordinary amount of attention critical thinking has received in the last few decades, the teaching and fostering of critical thinking in higher education is largely failing, and critical thinking has become an empty buzzword. However, given its importance as an aim of education, it needs to be “refilled”, but that is possible only after identifying the causes of the current failure, i.e. the obstacles to fostering critical thinking. Three such obstacles are identified in this paper, two actual and one hypothetical: (1) the lack of clarity and agreement about what critical thinking is, (2) current teaching practice, and (3) social resistance to (fostering) critical thinking. Based on a critical analysis of these obstacles, this paper suggests to remove or avoid them by refocusing critical thinking “instruction” in higher education on the idea that critical thinking is aiming for truth.

Multiply co-authored book chapter - about Online pedagogy, MOOCs and work with Femtechnet - In C. Bonk, M., M. Lee, T. C. Reeves, T. H. Reynolds (eds.), MOOCs and Open Education Around the World. New York, NY: Routledge.

co-authors: Behrmann, E. M., Gajjala, R., Losh, E., Cowan, T.L., Boyer, P., Rault, J., Wexler, L., Cole, C.L. (2015).

September 11th 2001 is forever cloaked in affective resonances: feelings, emotions, and desires that remain in bodies after that fateful day. However, the memories and events of 9-11 are centered in the creation and reproduction of spaces of terror and death that traverse global boundaries, linked by historical precedents rooted in European colonization. Although 9-11 was a tragic day for the lives lost, this event has signaled a new era in the hegemony of global capitalism, the United States, and the surveillance technologies that have arisen. September 11th now exists in the memory as justification for a host of problematic relationships occurring globally. In this article, the author moves across multiple traditions to rethink 9-11 in the context of space, postcolonialism, the body, and the forging of public memories. He ends by sparking his utopian imaginary, resisting dominant conceptions of that fateful day and rethinking September 11th through alternative narrative understandings.

Actors in institutional educational are expected to take part in manifold activities that are best understood as ritualised practices. This is true for teachers, pupils, and students alike. These practices are inherently linked to areas of social order, norms, values, belief systems. Reflecting on these practices can be a rather difficult task.

In "Negotiating Legitimacy - Ritual and Reflection in School" a comprehensive overview is provided about ritual analysis as a tool to approach educational practice.

The book is based on a research project on reflection processes of primary school teachers on rituals and ritualisations. Teachers from Irish primary schools, German mainstream schools and German free alternative schools took part in it. The free alternative schools offered a field where the social order is based on a radical democracy without formal hierarchies. Here children are not subjected to a set curriculum, they are supposed to be free to decide what, when, where, and with whom they want to do. A general sketch of the free alternative schools is included in the book. The three different school settings account for three different ritual cultures, and there is information available on this issue in the book, too.

As the research project dealt with reflection processes of teachers it was necessary to employ a concept of reflection. Processual scale, functional and orientational character are common models for a classification of reflection processes. However there are limitations in these models. In "Negotiating Legitimacy - Ritual and Reflection in School" it is suggested to enhance the figures of thought applied to concepts of reflection. The character of reflection as a social act is systematically taken into account. In the book extensive coverage is given to concrete reflection processes of teachers on their ritual practices.

Institutional education is deeply permeated by numerous ritual practices. Within any social setting changes in ritual practices happen constantly via mimetic processes. That is also true for educational institutions. Strategic interventions in negotiations of power relations in form of ritualisation, avoiding explicit speech and narrative, are ongoing at all times. They can be moved on by pupils and teachers alike, sometimes by parents, by principals, simply by anyone who is physically in the field. Any of those moves brings about changes.

But alternatives can and should be more than changes happening in lieu of explicit logical speculation. Critically thinking about rituals in school will inevitably lead into thinking about the institutional character of school, its historic roots and trajectories, its current position in society. The question of critical reflection is taken up in a separate chapter within the book also.

Teachers find themselves in a pivotal position in the institution. Their practice is essential to making school real. Accepting critical questions about their acting in ritualised practices in schools and searching for answers will open the route for changes that are consciously enacted. "Negotiating Legitimacy - Ritual and Reflection in School" can help to develop such critical questions.

Co-editors Hickman and Porfilio propel, within The New Politics of the Textbook: Problematizing the Portrayal of Marginalized Groups in Textbooks, a disciplined conversation regarding content presented in textbooks at all levels of schooling in the United States. The anatomy of textbooks is studied alongside critical curriculum inquiry.
As Stanton (in Hickman and Porfilio) explains, “The end goals of critical curriculum inquiry include an expanded knowledge base, increased accuracy, promotion of innovation and critical thinking, and—most importantly—the advancement of social justice,” (175). The work of evaluating text is contextualized when Hickman and Porfilio state, “The purpose of this edited text is to highlight the urgent need for educators to recognize how corporate and political powerbrokers’ desire to commodify social life and control youths’ subjectivities is leading to the regulating of knowledge production in k-16 classrooms through textbooks” (xx).

This chapter discusses efforts to cultivate a critical, arts-based approach, focusing on how students and their teacher experienced a curriculum designed to deconstruct identity, personalize literature, and foster community in a high school English classroom. The structured practices of autoethnographic writing, performance poetry, and intergroup dialogue are merged to engage students in critical dialogue within and across differences in the classroom.

Critical pedagogy, even as inflected by certain poststructuralisms, tends to reinforce rather than subvert deep-seated humanist assumptions about humans and nature by taking for granted the borders that define nature as the devalued Other. These assumptions are called into question by discussion of how relationships between language, communication, and meaningful experience are conceptualized outside the field of critical pedagogy. We deal constructively with some anthropocentric blind spots within critical pedagogy generally and within poststructuralist approaches to critical pedagogy in particular. We hope to illuminate places where these streams of thought and practice move in directions compatible with critical environmental education. La pédagogie critique, même celle de quelques poststructuralismes, a tendance à renforcer plutôt que de mettre en doute certains postulats humanistes selon lesquels la nature est, pour les êtres humains, l'Autre dévalué. Ces postulats sont remis en question dans les analyses portant sur le mode de conceptualisation, en dehors du champ de la pédagogie critique, des relations entre le langage, la communication et l'expérience signifiante. Les auteures traitent de quelques présupposés anthro-pocentriques de la pédagogie critique, en particulier dans ses approches post-structuralistes. Elles espèrent ainsi éclairer des courants théoriques et pratiques compatibles entre la pédagogie critique et le respect de l'environnement.