International Critical Pedagogy Reader

Antonia Darder, Peter Mayo, João Paraskeva, Antonia Darder, Peter Mayo, João Paraskeva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351562539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Carefully curated to highlight research from more than twenty countries, the International Critical Pedagogy Reader introduces the ways the educational phenomenon that is critical pedagogy are being reinvented and reframed around the world. A collection of essays from both historical and contemporary thinkers coupled with original essays, introduce this school of thought and approach it from a wide variety of cultural, social, and political perspectives. Academics from South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and North America describe critical pedagogy's political, ideological, and intellectual foundations, tracing its international evolution and unveiling how key scholars address similar educational challenges in diverse national contexts. Each section links theory to critical classroom practices and includes a list of sources for further reading to expand upon the selections offered in this volume. A robust collection, this reader is a crucial text for teaching and understanding critical pedagogy on a truly international level.

• Winner of the 2016 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award
  
  

Section 1

Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Education

As for their lives as sovereign young men and women tomorrow, I cannot tell my pupils that the only way to revere the law is to obey it. I can only tell them that they should hold mankind’s laws in such esteem as to observe them when they are fair (that is, when they uphold the weak). When they see that they are not fair (that is, when the laws sanction abuse of power by the strong) they should fight to change them.

Don Lorenzo Milani, Letters to the Judges (1965)

Education is part and parcel of the very nature of education…It does not matter where or when it has taken place, whether it is more or less complex, education has always been a political act.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the City (1993)

1

Critical Pedagogy and Postcolonial Education

Ayman Abu-Shomar

King Saud University, Saudi Arabia

A growing body of literature on education explores the potentials of the post-colonial theoretical perspective in myriad domains ranging from global relations to the localities of classroom practices. Post-colonial theoretical tenets have drawn attention to previously under-researched areas and have provided an epistemological challenge to existing theoretical ‘frameworks’ that normally guide educational studies. Post-colonial forms of analysis, for example, are used “to provide an account of the construction of racialised and stereotyped identities through the colonial curriculum and how these were implicated in the maintenance of a colonial world view and ultimately of colonial power itself” (Crossley and Tikly, 2004, p. 149).

More importantly, post-colonialism’s contentions surrounding the relationship between knowledge and power are linked directly to education, both as an institution, where people are inculcated into hegemonic systems of reasoning, and as a site where it is possible to resist dominant discursive practices (Rizvi et al. 2006).

A consistent theme in post-colonial literature in education is its work towards a critical review of relations of power, and its attempts to unfold the bitter insinuations regarding claims of homogeneity, universality as well as the Euro-centricity of canons.¹

Post-colonialism’s major interest in this regard is to offer a reappraisal and exploration of the pervasive impact of colonial power over colonised people in cultural, political, social, economic, educational, and intellectual domains. Currently, the fundamental assumptions of the postcolonial theory are grounded in its interest in the histories of the European colonialist and institutional practices and responses, whether resistant or otherwise, to these practices on the colonised societies. In this vein, three strands of the theory are identified: literal description of formerly colonised societies, description of global relations after the colonisation period, and a description of discourse informed by epistemological orientations (Kumar, 2000).

Post-colonialism has informed research into critical reviews of the taken-for-granted narratives in both global and local educational contexts as well as the relational flow from the ‘centre’ to the ‘margin’. Rizvi (2005) views post-colonialism as a forceful means to question and deconstruct the notion of globalisation as ‘a global context’ and its implications for education. He claims that the hegemonic role it plays in organising a ‘particular way of interpreting the world’ is often unnoticed and accepted as if unproblematic. The basic idea which Rizvi argues against is the seemingly ‘ubiquitous’ notion of ‘the global context’. He points out that the hegemonic nature of the idea of ‘the global context’ becomes obvious when applying the concept to developing countries, since it basically means the global spread of Western ideas. Therefore, when thinking of education as becoming almost universal, ‘the global context’ means the domination of a set of imperial assumptions entrenched on these contexts. Such policies, whether borrowed or imposed on developing countries, misinterpret cultural and political globalisation and tend to steer national policies into the ‘same neo-liberal direction’. Rizvi reasons: “institutional disciplinary definitions and hierarchies, legitimizing publications, and institutional authority reside mostly within the core, with ‘the periphery’ left simply to mimic the core’s dominant discourses and practices” (p. 11).

As such, it could be maintained that discourses of globalisation reiterate the former colonial ones that claimed that they were spreading civilisation to people around the world. As Said (1978) reminds us, colonial discourse and the production of ‘knowledge’ about ‘the Orient’ was an ideological accompaniment of colonial power, which aimed to justify the colonisers’ desire to perpetually subjugate colonised societies. He applied the concept of ‘discourse’ to examine how the formal study of the ‘Orient’ in key literary and cultural works to create ‘objective’ knowledge supported by various disciplines, such as philology, history, anthropology, philosophy, archaeology, and literature. Said asserts that these works were accredited by Western academic consensus. Therefore, “the authority of academic institutions and governments” can create

… not only knowledge but the very reality they appear to describe. In time, such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it.

(Said, 1978, p. 94)

Within this understanding, post-colonialism reveals how discourses of former colonialism and the current phenomenon of globalisation intersect with power, language, and knowledge to create an understanding of the world, and embody the values by which one lives, either willingly or by force. Thus, post-colonial repertoires draw attention to how meanings and discourses such as ‘global context’ or ‘international community’ are demystified in a way that blurs the lines between ideological and objective. This is, according to Said, is a ‘political vision of reality’ that incorporates informed assumptions that legitimise its practice over the colonised. In sum, this analysis opens further possibilities to trace connections between the visible and the hidden, ideas and institutions, and the dominant and marginalised in the context of globalised educational contexts. It also shows how power works through language, literature, culture, and the institutions that demonstrate authoritative assumptions about ‘other cultures’.

In addition to offering an alternative understanding of the colonial discourse, post-colonialism provides compelling interventionist approaches to address concrete educational problems. Crowley and Matthews (2006) use post-colonialism to establish reconciliation and anti-racism in the classrooms of South African schools. They deem their ‘pedagogical intervention’ of antiracism, especially when connected to post-colonial thoughts, a workable model for establishing trust between the white inhabitants and indigenous black Africans. Similarly, Smith (1999) explores the issue of representation of Maori students in New Zealand to assist them in their struggle as subaltern subjects to speak for themselves. Adopting Freire’s ‘pedagogy of hope’ and post-colonialism, Lavia (2006, 2007) examines issues of identity, subalternity and representation in the academic settings. She argues that to enable the teachers, as subaltern professionals, there is a need to promote social awareness of teaching as a form of ‘critical professionalism’. However, she insists that “post-colonial aspirations for education require consideration of practice as the convergence of philosophical and methodological endeavours in which the personal, collective and professional can be understood” (p. 328).

Furthermore, post-colonialism adapts miscellaneous theoretical frameworks, such as new historicism, subaltern studies, and feminist theory. The notion of ‘discursive practice’ (see below) is central to post-colonialism where eclecticism as a discursive epistemological position presents the theory, “rather than a coherent project of proposition, [but as a critical stance that] offers a persistent questioning of power, knowledge, culture and identity that de-universalises the project of the Enlightenment and displaces the mythologies and discourses of modernity and development that shaped these practices” (Andreotti, 2006, p. 10). Young (2003) perceives this eclecticism by maintaining that

[p]ost-colonial theory, so called, is not in fact a theory in the scientific sense […] It comprises instead a related set of perspectives, which are juxtaposed against one another, on occasion contradictory. … Above all, post-colonialism seeks to intervene, to force its alternative knowledges into the power structures of the west as well as the way they behave, to produce a more just and equitable relation between the different people of the world.

(p. 6–7)

In a similar vein, the theory expands its theoretical perspectives to affiliate with other similar theories including feminism, subaltern studies and deconstructionism to respond to various social and cultural problems including education. From a feminist-deconstructivist standpoint, Spivak (1985) explores how to recover the voices of those who have been made subjects of colonial representations, particularly women, and read them as potentially disruptive and subversive. She uses the concept of imperialism to emphasise that colonialism is still at work in different forms. Her interest is in examining “not just imperialism in the nineteenth-century sense, but as it was displaced into neo-colonialism and the international division of labour” (Spivak, 1985, p. 7). In her analysis of colonial discourse, she problematises the speech act between the speaker and the listener on the grounds that it is determined by the relational conditions of their interaction. She argues that voices seen as unworthy of circulation (the subaltern) do not exist in isolation from the systems of representation, but are conditioned by them. The listeners are also condition...