Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education described by Henry Giroux as an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action."[1]
Based in Marxist theory, critical pedagogy draws on radical democracy, anarchism, feminism, and other movements that strive for what they describe as social justice. Critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as:
"Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse." (Empowering Education, 129)
Critical pedagogy includes relationships between teaching and learning. Its proponents claim that it is a continuous process of what they call "unlearning," "learning," and "relearning," "reflection," "evaluation," and the impact that these actions have on the students, in particular students whom they believe have been historically and continue to be disenfranchised by what they call "traditional schooling."
Philosopher John Searle[2] suggests that, despite the "opaque prose" and lofty claims of Giroux, he interprets the goal of Giroux's form of critical pedagogy "to create political radicals", thus highlighting the contestable and antagonistic moral and political grounds of the ideals of citizenship and "public wisdom"; these varying moral perspectives of what is "right" are to be found in what John Dewey [3] has referred to as the tensions between traditional and progressive education.
Examples in the Classroom
As mentioned briefly in the background information, Ira Shor, a professor at the City University of New York, provides for an example of how critical pedagogy is used in the classroom. Shor develops these themes in looking at the use of Freirean teaching methods in the context of everyday life of classrooms, in particular, institutional settings. Shor suggests that the whole curriculum of the classroom must be re-examined and reconstructed. He favors a change of role of the student from object to active, critical subject. In doing so, Shor suggests that students undergo a struggle for ownership of themselves. Shor states that students have previously been lulled into a sense of complacency by the circumstances of everyday life and through the processes of the classroom, they can begin to envision and strive for something different for themselves.
Of course achieving such a goal isn't automatic nor easy, as Shor suggests that the role of the teacher is critical to this process. Students need to be helped by teachers to separate themselves from unconditional acceptance of the conditions of their own existence and once this separation is achieved, then students may be prepared for critical re-entry into an examination of everyday life. In a classroom environment that achieves such liberating intent, one of the potential outcomes is that the students themselves assume more responsibility for the class. Power is thus distributed amongst the group and the role of the teacher becomes much more mobile, not to mention more challenging. This encourages growth of each student’s intellectual character rather than a mere “mimicry of the professorial style.
