-
Critical Pedagogy and Marxism: Rethinking Revolutionary Praxis in Education
Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur
"The globalization of capital and its profane partnership with neoliberal politics pose unique and urgent challenges to today's progressive educators. The central questions that were raised by George Counts in the 1930s and by Henry Giroux in the 1980s need to be raised again: Dare schools build a new social order? What purpose do schools serve and in whose interest? … [E]ducators need to unthink their current relation to pedagogical practice as decoupled from the infrastructure of capitalism's deep value system and ruling moral syntax. "
-
Winks, Blinks, Squints and Twitches: Looking for Disability and Culture Through My Son’s Left Eye
Philip M. Ferguson
This chapter focuses on the culture and human experience of having an intellectual disability.
-
Breaking Signifying Chains: A Marxist Position on Postmodernism
Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur
"This chapter attempts to address some fundamental problems with postmodern theory, as it currently informs the field of educational research. Our position is that postmodern theory has overwhelmingly debauched the field of Leftist criticism. However, we have not undertaken an analysis of specific postmodern educationalists (this being achieved by many of the other chapters in this book). Rather, we set forth counterpositions to claims put forth in the literature by postmodern theorists. We give a positive appraisal of postmodern theory in certain instances where we feel it has contributed to the field of Leftist critique. In the main, however, our position remains unwaveringly critical. This is largely a result of our contention that postmodern theorists advocate an expansion of existing bourgeois forms of democratic social life into wider arenas of society, by means of a reformist politics in the tradition of Western liberalism. Such a politics views culture as partially independent of the state. Such a move only makes sense, however, within a larger politics of anticapitalist struggle. Yet postmodemists fail to challenge existing social relations of production and the larger social totality of capitalist social relations. As a result, their work has very little to contribute to the uprooting of the contradictions between capital and labor."
-
Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts
Peter McLaren
"In practice, critical pedagogy is as diverse as its many adherents, yet common themes and constructs run through many of their writings. I have talked about general characteristics in the previous pare. In the part that follows, I will outline in more detail the major categories within chis tradition. A category is simply a concept, question, issue, hypothesis, or idea chat is central to critical theory. These categories are intended to provide a theoretical framework within which you may reread my journal entries and perhaps better understand the theories generated by critical educational research. The categories are useful for the purposes of clarification and illustration, although some critical theorists will undoubtedly argue chat additional concepts should have been included, or that some concepts have not been given the emphasis they deserve."
-
Ethnography
Peter McLaren and Amanda Datnow
"At one time ethnography referred to the field methods of anthropologists in studying "exotic" cultures. It is now used by sociologists, educational researchers, cultural anthropologists, and other social science researchers to study any bounded group of people in virtually any context, urban or rural, global or local."
-
Mentoring Women in Educational Leadership
Ernestine Enomoto, Mary E. Gardiner, and Margaret Grogan
"In this chapter, we examine mentoring as a means by which women leaders can enter and redefine educational management and leadership."
-
Recentering Class: Wither Postmodernism? Towards a Contraband Pedagogy
Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur
"As we lean into the gusty winds of the new millennium, squaring our shoulders and lowering our heads against an icy unknown, we discover much to our surprise that the future has already arrived; that it has silently imploded into the singularity of the present. We are lost in a crevice in the 'wrong side' of history, in a furious calm at the end of a century-old breath, doing solitary confinement in the future anterior. Time has inhaled so hard that it has lodged us in its lungs, compressing us into shadowy, ovaloid spectres out of the horror classic, Nosferatu. Capitalism has authored this moment, synchronizing the heartbeat of the globe with the autocopulatory rhythms of the marketplace; deregulating history; downsizing eternity."
-
Richard Rorty’s Self-Help Liberalism: A Marxist Critique of America’s Most Wanted Ironist
Peter McLaren, Ramin Farahmandpur, and Juha Suoranta
"Enter philosopher Richard Rorty, a staunch defender of neoliberalism and free-market democracy. Despite the abundance of evidence that capitalist democracies, guided by a neoliberal politics, are condemning the world's laboring class to a life sentence of poverty not only for themselves but for generations to follow, Rorty continues to clings to a Malthusian conviction that the forces that foster equality and political freedom within liberal social democracies far outweigh chose that foster inequality and restrict political freedom. True to his staunch and steadfast antiempiricism, Rorty offers no convincing evidence that this is indeed the case."
-
Red Chalk: On Schooling, Capitalism and Politics
Mike Cole, Dave Hill, Peter McLaren, and Glenn Rikowksi
Marxist theory and critique of post modern, neo-liberal, conservative and Third Way educational theory and policy.
-
Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution
Peter McLaren
Forcefully argued and eloquently written, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution is a clarion call for building a new social order premised on the ideas and philosophy of two of the most important revolutionary figures of this century. It is an indispensable reference point for building transnational alliances between the North American and Latin America.
-
Critical Ethnography for the Study of Immigrants
Enrique (Henry) T. Trueba and Peter McLaren
"We can argue that, in a strictly historical sense, the first critical ethnographies were constructed by the oppressed… In a strict and more technical sense, critical ethnography has deep roots in psychological anthropology, and it was later relined in sociology and philosophy with the seminal work of Paulo Freire. The ideas of early anthropologists to improve the schooling and overall human development of all children were revealed in a conference held at Stanford University on 9- 14 June 1954, organized by George Spindler. Renowned scholars such as Solorn T. Kimball, Alfred L. Kroeber, Dorothy Lee, Margaret Mead, Felix M. Keesing, John Gillin, and Cora DuBois shared their concerns relating to the overall development of all children, the preparation of ethnically diverse children, and the need to pursue pedagogically appropriate methods of teaching (Spindler 1955)."
-
Informant Reports: Conceptual and Research Bases of Interviews with Parents and Teachers
Barbara Rybski Beaver and Randy T. Busse
"In this chapter we briefly expore the historical and theoretical premises of interviewing parents and teachers, followed by an overview of interview methods and formats. We then turn to an analysis of the current state of research on behavioral interviews, and suggestions for future directions toward advancing knowledge and use of behavioral interviews."
-
Introduction to Immigrant Voices: In Search of Pedagogical Reform
Peter McLaren
"If we were to write the real history of the United States, the centerpiece of such a history would be inescapable-it would be the implacably brutal story of violence and the fundamental role that it has played in creating and preserving the "American way of life." Although the immigrants to this country most assuredly would be relegated to minor supporting roles among the cast of world-historical characters and events, theirs would be the real story of the United States, in the epochal shaping of social, cultural, and economic life. Immigration has a varied history, not all of it ending in the Panglossian fable known as the "American Dream." Among the earliest that made their way to these shores were European settlers. "Settlerism" in this case turned out to be little more than a form of decaffeinated imperialism. This is not to mention unspeakable acts of genocide whose haunting memories still cause the earth to groan beneath our feet. Regrettably, the legacy of colonialism lives on today, with wealthy elites-the "minority of the opulent"-still extracting surplus labor from workers, still armed by the weapons of white supremacy and all-consuming self-interest, still bent on reproducing colonialist formations, and still reaping the benefits of belonging to the capitalist class."
-
Space, Violence and Pedagogy
Peter McLaren, Zeus Lombardo, and Ricky Lee Allen
"In recent years, violence in U.S. schools has taken on increasing importance as parents, educators, and students experience unparalleled structures, if not the physical threat, of daily assaults. Gun control in schools has inspired a bunker mentality as urban campuses throughout the country institute weapon checkpoints when students enter their site of learning. Real, physical violence has become a possibility in the daily lives of many students, especially those whose schools represent a symptom of structural inequalities at the local level. However, and without downplaying the painful reality of physical violence, we want to focus on the invidious and infectious consequences of discursive violence, to construct a language of critique that unseams the representation of violence and the violence of representation. That is, we want to explore the ways in which schools propagate violence at the level of the sign and at spaces of struggle over meaning."
-
The Experience of Disability in Families: A Synthesis of Research and Parent Narratives
Philip M. Ferguson, Alan Gartner, and Dorothy K. Lipsky
This chapter focuses on the difficulties parents of those with intellectual disabilities face.
-
Racism and Multicultural Education : Rethinking 'Race' and 'Whiteness' in Late Capitalism
Peter McLaren and Rodolfo Torres
"There has been a remarkable tendency in current appraisals of multiculturalism to neglect or ignore profound changes in the structural dynamics and modes of capital accumulation worldwide. This is most evident in the commentaries of multiculturalist scholars whose theoretical orientations could be described as "postmodernist' or 'post-Marxist'. The emergence of the post-Fordist socio-economic landscape and the reconfiguration of racialized social relations in cities such as Los Angeles, where we live, in our mind mandates a re-examination of contemporary perspectives on multicultural education in the United States. At this precipitous historical juncture, when an analysis of and challenge to capitalism is so urgently needed, perhaps more than in previous decades, many leftist social theorists have largely conceptualized the very idea of capitalism out of existence. In addition to promoting the strange disappearance of capitalism in the education literature on multiculturalism, contemporary responses to recent structural changes in the United States' political economy have made the issues of 'race' and racism much more complex than ever before."
-
The Politics of Multicultural Research
Peter McLaren
"As educational researchers we can no longer count on the future and past to provide us with the necessary perspective to help guide our activity as social agents. We are even made to wonder whether history has ever taken place - anywhere. We are continually being displaced from our historical location and relocated into a subjectivized world without history or possible landscapes - we are, in other words, being reinvented by the retroaction of history for a world of instantaneity, of interminable repetition."
-
Preface to Pedagogy and the Politics of the Body: A Critical Praxis
Peter McLaren
"The field of education needs impertinent and irreverent scholars like Sherry Shapiro. Her act of scholarship is both a reflective practice of resistance and a tactical engagement in transformation."
-
Whiteness is…The Struggle for Postcolonial Hybridity
Peter McLaren
"The educational Left has failed to address the issue of whiteness and the insecurities that young Whites harbor regarding their future during times of diminishing economic expectations. With their "racially coded and divisive rhetoric, neoconscrvatives may be able to enjoy tremendous success in helping insecure young white populations develop white identity along racist lines."
-
Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture
Peter McLaren
This chapter deals with youth, schooling, taboos, apathy, postmodernism, and what pedagogy can do in this predatory age. Some of the key elements of predatory culture are pursuit of naked power, crisis mentality, stalkers and victims, social divisiveness, and dominance of capital and its concerns over democracy. Media culture pictures a mean and scary world, thanks to fearmongering in our media presentations. Any new world order must first involve parents and educators in creating a new moral order in school and at home. A new critical pedagogy is needed to counterbalance the New Right as well as to create schools, schooling, and school systems which can respond adequately to postmodern challenges, including overcoming youth's apathy.
-
Paulo Freire, Postmodernism and the Utopian Imagination: A Blochian Reading
Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren
"This essay is a critical reading of the work of the radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Highlighted in this reading is a discussion of Freire’s concept of utopia as a crucial - yet generally overlooked - aspect of his pedagogy of liberation. We have been impressed by how much Freire’s explicit and implicit indebtedness to a concept of utopia resembles the more nuanced and formally developed philosophy of utopia developed by Ernst Bloch. We think the comparison is both significant and instructive. We also believe that Freire’s project of liberation can be more fully appreciated and deepened by rereading his work through a conceptual framework more directly linked to Bloch's monumental work on the utopian politics of hope. Our purpose here is fundamentally pedagogical. We have discerned in the work of these two dialecticians of the concrete a complimentary project of liberation that offers an unusually rich ground for self and social transformation. We also believe there are significant cultural, political, and theoretical aspects of postmodern social theory which can extend and deepen the emancipatory aspects of hope in the work of Freire and Bloch."
-
Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium
Peter McLaren
One of the central themes of this volume is the relationship between the political and the pedagogical for educators, activists, artists, and other cultural workers. McLaren argues that the central project ahead in the struggle for social justice is not so much the politics of diversity as the global decentering and dismantling of whiteness.
-
Indoctrination
Peter McLaren and Marc Pruyn
"Indoctrination is now largely seen by philosophers and other educators as a negative and coercive process in which students are taught what to think as distinct from how to think."
-
Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Era
Peter McLaren
This book is a principled, accessible and highly stimulating discussion of a politics of resistance for today. Ranging widely over issues of identity, representation, culture and schooling, it will be required reading for students of radical pedagogy, sociology and political science.
-
Developing Student Voice through Writing Workshop and Class Meetings
Suzanne SooHoo and Brenda Brown
"[W]e wanted to encourage students to build a democratic community. We believed we could develop a classroom in which students could actively participate in shaping classroom conditions, share power with the teacher, and have voice."
Below you may find selected books and book chapters from faculty in the Attallah College of Educational Studies.
Printing is not supported at the primary Gallery Thumbnail page. Please first navigate to a specific Image before printing.