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  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."

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  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.

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  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."

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  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.

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  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."

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  Is Resistance Empowerment?

  James R. King, Scot Danforth, Susan Perez, and Norman S. Stahl

  "Current writing in literacy, as well as educational texts in general, suggests that empowerment is a desired state for learners and their teachers. While the construct of empowerment has been treated to several passes of analysis (Clarke, 1990; Ellsworth, 1989; Lewis & Simon, 1986), we have yet to understand how teachers' authority and the rules that are implicit in their classrooms interact with agendas of empowerment that are based on critical approaches to literacy. Giroux (1987) has described Graves' approach to literacy as a critical pedagogy. Yet, its application by adult teachers in their own learning contexts is less well articulated. The following is a case study of implementing a critical literacy perspective (in both course content and course processes) in a masters' level course."

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  Decentering Pedagogy: Critical Literacy, Resistance, and the Politics of Memory

  Peter McLaren and Tomaz Tadeu da Silva

  "This chapter examines the relationship among language, experience, memory, and the development of historical agency. It does so in the context of exploring recent work in the areas of critical literacy and critical pedagogy and rethinking the project of literacy in Western educational contexts. Our discussion takes its bearings from the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, described in a recent interview with Carlos Alberto Torres ( 1990: 12) as ' the prime "animateur" for pedagogical innovation and change in the second half of this century.' In part, this chapter stands as a poststructuralist and postcolonialist rereading of Freire that, while to a certain extent ' reinventing' Freire's work in light of perspectives selectively culled from contemporary strands of critical social theory, attempts to remain faithful to the main contours of the Freirean problematic. More specifically, we shall draw upon some recent feminist and poststructuralist discussions of the relationship among language, experience, and memory to highlight the respects in which the Freirean perspective on literacy can be deepened. In Chapter 3 we examined Freire's work in the context of recent criticisms it has provoked in Brazil. In doing so, we hoped to bring to light some new perspectives for engaging Freire's work as a resource with which educators might enhance their general theoretical store in a way that enables them to situate their pedagogy as a fit converse between critical thought and emancipatory practice."

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  Introduction to Politics of Liberation: Paths from Freire

  Peter McLaren and Colin Lankshear

  ln recent times the theme of oppression and liberation has been associated closely with the theory and practice of Paulo Freire. Ever since Freire's work first 'broke’ in English with the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed readers and commentators, theorists and pedagogues, reflectors and activists, have pondered how far a pedagogy forged in the Latin Third World applies to the everyday routines, relations, and institutions of the First. Despite the 'developed' Western European roots or Latin American colonization, which, notwithstanding five hundred years of subsequent local history, have left an indelible imprint on the face of life in the Latin subcontinent, surely the profound differences between nations and realities of the metropolitan centre and those of the periphery militate against any easy or direct appropriation of Freirean pedagogy across these worlds.

  This remains a legitimate question, and in this volume Carlos Alberto Torres elicits Freire's up-to-the-moment response.

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  Knowledge Under Siege: The Brasilian Debate

  Tomaz Tadeu da Silva and Peter McLaren

  "The recent history of education and, particularly, of pedagogical ideas in Brazil, cannot be understood without reference to political events that have occurred since the early 1960s. In April, 1964, a military dictatorship ousted a democratically elected civil government following a brief period of intense popular agitation and participation demanding reforms. That military ruling lasted until 1985, when a civil president was elected, though still under the rules established by the military. The educational debate that we are going to analyze here must be viewed against this political background."

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  The Promise of Adulthood

  Philip M. Ferguson and Dianne L. Ferguson

  "How do we assure ourselves that [our severely disabled son] Ian is somehow contributing to all the choices that get made about what constitutes a good adult life for him? We have created new options for Ian and others as we have struggled to answer these ques-tions. We have also increased our understanding of what it means for someone who has a variety of severe disabilities to be adult."

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  Radical Pedagogy as Cultural Politics: Beyond the Discourse of Critique and Anti-Utopianism

  Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren

  "Within the last fifteen years a radical theory of education has emerged in the United States. Broadly defined as "the new sociology of education" or "a critical theory of education," a critical pedagogy developed within this discourse attempts to examine schools both in their historical context and as part of the social and political relations that characterize the dominant society. While hardly constituting a unified discourse, critical pedagogy nevertheless has managed to pose an important counterlogic to the positivistic, ahistorical, depoliticized discourse that often informs modes of analysis employed by liberal and conservative critics of schooling, modes all too readily visible in most colleges of education. Taking as one of its fundamental concerns the need to reemphasize the centrality of politics and power in understanding how schools function within the larger society, critical pedagogy has catalyzed a great deal of work on the political economy of schooling, the state and education, the politics of representation, discourse analysis, and the construction of student subjectivity."

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  The Creation of Chronicity: An Institutional Case Study of Social Policy and Severe Retardation in the Progressive Era

  Philip M. Ferguson

  The theme of this volume is emerging issues in disability studies. To the extent that disability studies is a relatively new field, new issues are constantly emerging and the discipline could hardly be characterized as in a state of "normal science," to borrow a phrase from Thomas Kuhn. Too, since the field of disability studies is interdisciplinary, new issues constantly emerge as researchers synthesize concepts and approaches from various more traditional disciplines (e.g., sociology, political science, psychology, law).

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  Reproducing Reproduction: The Politics of Tracking

  Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren

  "Although sixty-five years have passed since Count's study, schools continue to reproduce class, gender, and racial inequality. The problem is most clearly evident in institutionalized tracking."

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  Teacher Education and the Politics of Democratic Reform

  Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren

  "Part of our intention in this chapter is to argue that teacher education institutions need to be reconceived as public spheres… [w]e want to explore how a radicalized teaching force can provide for both empowering teachers and teaching for empowerment."