Critical Pedagogy and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Keeping Communities Together in Times of Crisis

Fatma Mizikaci, Eda Ata, Fatma Mizikaci, Eda Ata

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781350274877
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350274907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Written by leading scholars and activists from Canada, Germany, Malta, Norway, Turkey and the USA, this book offers international perspectives on critical pedagogy during the Covid-19 pandemic. It examines the social and political impact of the pandemic on education, and explores how the creation of digital communities has become indispensable in maintaining connectivity and building networks.

Including contributions from Michael W. Apple, Antonia Darder, Henry A. Giroux, Peter Mayo, Peter McLaren, Wayne Ross and Ira Shor, this volume examines critical issues, controversies of education, and social and political problems that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. The chapters call for constructive critical consciousness and a commitment to social justice, addressing current issues, including Black Lives Matter, racism, poverty, social and gender inequality, women's rights and teachers' isolation during the pandemic. In part I, the authors address these issues through the lenses of neoliberalism, neo-conservatism, rightist ideology and capitalism. Parts II and III of the volume offer inclusive perspectives, personal accounts and regional outlooks on these issues, and assess their influence on society and education during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Part I

NEW CULTURAL AND SOCIAL AGENDAS OF TOTALITARIAN REGIMES AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON EDUCATION IN THE TIME OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Chapter 1

AN INTERVIEW WITH HENRY A. GIROUX: CULTURAL STUDIES AND PANDEMIC PEDAGOGY¹

Henry A. Giroux

Global Thursday Talks (GTT) We are honoured to have Henry A. Giroux today, one of the leading and most influential names in the world. A founding theorist of critical pedagogy, he is best known for his leading work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies and critical theory. Dr Giroux’s work has also been translated into Turkish and we are looking forward to reading his latest book, Race, Politics and Pandemic Pedagogy, which will be out in February 2021. We prepared questions to ask Dr Giroux on critical issues in education.

The reason we are here now is mostly about the ongoing processes in the world. We are in an age of authoritarian populism, where capitalist cultures shape the society and the individuals’ lives, hand in hand with neoliberal policies and now, with the age of [the] Covid-19 crisis. Within this context, how would you define critical pedagogy and its functions. Can it shape the new era of schooling?

Henry A. Giroux I think one of the things you have to recognize is that one of the first casualties of authoritarianism, and in all of its forms, are the minds that would oppose it and it seems to me that what we have to recognize immediately is this is not just a political issue but also an educational issue. It means that questions of consciousness and learning, questions of knowledge and questions about power are quite central to how we understand the times in which we live. John Dewey used to say that you cannot have a democracy without basically having informed citizens. So, when we talk about critical pedagogy in its diverse forms, we are not talking about forms of education linked to both the older culture of positivism into the updated versions of commercialism, finance capital, and its more ruthless and updated versions of neoliberal fascism. Critical pedagogy is not a methodology; nor is it a preordained recipe. It is a moral and political project, whose purpose is to equip students and others with the knowledge, the skills, the values and sense of social responsibility that enables them to be engaged critical agents. Critical pedagogy keeps us aware of the questions that need to be asked about the relationship between knowledge and power, justice and critical agency, and values and the construction of specific forms of agency.

Critical pedagogy is directive and uses its authority in dialogue with students as part of the ongoing and crucial struggle over the acquisition of agency, values and the narratives that allow them to be reflective about themselves, others and the larger society. Talk about pedagogy is always related to how we define visions of the future. It is not only part of an ongoing dialogue about relations of power and knowledge, but also about the conditions necessary for creating informed and critical citizens who can act on the world. So, it seems to me that any talk about critical pedagogy always defines itself as a political and moral and political project. That is, it is taken up as a pedagogical practice that addresses both what it means to be in the world, while providing the meaningful contexts and critical preconditions for students and others to basically be able to intervene in the world. So, we are really talking about the relationship between power and agency as part of a broader pedagogical process. More specifically, critical pedagogy references what it means to understand the world and the conditions that shape our lives so at we have the knowledge, skills and tools to function as agents in the world.

We are talking about a political and civic project that highlights and addresses fundamental questions such as: ‘What is the relationship between democracy and informed citizens?’ ‘How do you have one without the other?’ ‘How do you talk about schools as sites of struggle over power, agency, and assigned meanings?’ ‘What does it mean to basically talk about education as not just simply the production of ideas and knowledge, but a democratic public sphere that make critical education possible?’ ‘How do you talk about power with relation to teachers who clearly should have control over the conditions of their own labour?’ ‘How do you talk about education outside critical pedagogy outside of schooling?’ ‘How do you talk about it in the larger culture in the manner of Raymond Williams and his notion of permanent education?’ In the manner of Althusser? In the manner of Gramsci? In the manner of Paulo Freire? In the manner of Stuart Hall? People who are vastly concerned, who are vastly concerned with the educative nature of critical pedagogy as the educative and fundamental nature and organizing principle of politics itself.

GTT Thank you. I want to emphasize a point you mentioned. It is critical pedagogy outside the classroom or outside schooling. Maybe, there are some areas that we can move or mobilize our students; maybe we can mobilize thinking outside the school. I remember in one of your writings that you took your students to movies and then how learning happened there. This experience, for example, can be a model for us and also there is art outside the school. Unfortunately, ‘outside’ or ‘left out’ at school and it is important, and it is not only school or only classroom, but also outside and critical pedagogy functions may well function outside school – maybe in these days, during pandemic and in isolation days. We may need this thinking more than any time.

Henry A. Giroux I would like to thank you for the question. It is really a very important question and I am very pleased to have the opportunity to answer it. One of the things that I have been thinking about for a long time is how the role of culture functions as a pedagogical force and, clearly, I am not the first, but it seems to me that regardless of the origins of the question, again whether we’re going back to Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser or Pierre Bourdieu, it is fundamental to recognize two things. The first one is that the pedagogical dimensions of learning are not limited to schools and that ‘cultural apparatuses’ that C. Wright Mills once talked about are really very powerful educational forces and I would argue in some ways more powerful today than probably schools – particularly when it comes to shaping the perceptions, values, modes of agency and forms of identification that take place in a society that is utterly committed to the regressive processes of commodification, privatization and the rise of a social media that has become an accelerant for the rise of right-wing extremism emerging across the globe, especially in the midst of a pandemic. I am not just talking about these cultural apparatuses as modes of entertainment; I am strongly identifying them as powerful and capacious modes of education.

The second issue is that these new cultural formations that extend from the digital media to the mainstream press are not just simply sites of domination; they are also sites of struggle. It seems to me for young people that’s a particularly important issue because, unlike my generation, his generation is enormously savvy when it comes to these new social media technologies and I think that as educators we have a responsibility not only to educate them both as cultural producers and to be able to critically analyse the political dimensions of these apparatuses and the role they they play pedagogically in shaping the collective consciousness of the larger public on a global scal. Put differently, it is crucial to teach students to be more than critics but also cultural producers. They have got to learn how to produce plays, radio programmes, social media narratives, films and other modes of cultural intervention.

Of course, these new technologicsal formations and the pedagogical spheres they create have to be addressed within the massive degree of inequality that shapes different levels of access and accessibility for many groups operating within different and often grotesque levels of deprivation and privilege. Who has access? Who has the privilege of working from home and who does not? Inequality is central to a fascist politics because the latter thrives on resentment, the loss of dignity, community and the language of hope. Inequality is the main driver of a new fascist politics. Its division of groups into friends and enemies accentuates racial and class divides. Moreover, its call for racial purity and the logic of disposability reinforces its legitimation of what is nationalism. Neoliberal capitalism pushes more and more people into the abyss of poverty while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of relatively few people. What emerges amid this mix of inequality, poverty and a politics of disposability is the brutal face of racial capitalism, which is an updated version of fascist politics.

Pedagogy is one register for making visible power along with the micro-expressions and slow violence of racism. What is important here is to educate students in order to make them realize that pedagogy really counts as a tool of politics and resistance. In addition, it is crucial for students to understand that education exists outside of the parameters of schooling in a variety of cultural spheres. Education is now used to produce a cultural war, a war over the critical thought, rationality and equality. This is a war over civic possibility. This is a war over resistance, and this is also a space where young people can organize to challenge a screen and digital culture that in a dominant culture wants to isolate and privatize them. They can reach out, they can talk about sharing publications; they can talk about organizing direct forms of action; they can talk about what it means to make authority accountable but, most importantly, they can learn how to make power visible and to challenge it individually and collectively. So, it seems to me that pedagogical interventions with respect to the cultural sphere is enormously crucial.

GTT As educators, we want to see something concrete here. As a consequence, I can summarize what you are saying. As educators we have the power – not to be confined, not to be limited with the distance education or what we are offered through distance education. This is a very, you know, common term these days and education is limited and restricted to distance education, but we should have our own agenda, our own curriculum out of this ‘distance education’ or the ‘screen culture’.

And our next question is again about children and youth. You have so many influential ideas on how youth and children are being reshaped by some neoliberal ideologies and some different tools. Especially in this pandemic crisis, do you think this influence of neoliberal policies will be more influential or what direction can it go on children and youth?

Henry A. Giroux Let us make something fundamentally clear about what it means to talk about youth in the neoliberal age. First of all, youth are a long-term investment in a democracy. The fundamental question that any democratic society has to ask is how you organize resources in a fundamental way to make sure that young people have a future that doesn’t imitate the oppressive elements of the past or the present while providing the conditions for them for a life of dignity, fulfilment and justice. One in which the capacities necessary for them to be knowledgeable, to be literate, to be critical agents, are basically provided for them. Under neoliberalism, youth are viewed as a short-term investment, which means capitalist society does not make long-term investments in young people because they’re viewed as a liability. I think that one of the ways in which we increasingly begin to understand a certain kind of dynamic between neoliberalism and what I call the ‘social welfare state’, is through its increasing criminalization and commodification of young people. As neoliberalism ascends and the welfare state is diminished, more and more social problems are criminalized. Hence, young people, particularly black and brown youth in schools, become a particularly vicious object of this kind of analysis – meaning that schools increasingly come to resemble prisons. You have police in schools, you have resources being taken away from the schools, you have schools that in many ways are punishing students with zero tolerance policies but, most importantly, you have the criminalization of social issues. A student will, for instance, doodle on a desk and, without warning, the police charge into the classroom and arrest that student for a trivial infraction. This marks the beginning of the student’s entry into the criminal justice system. This horrifying practice is particularly true for black and brown students because this is not just simply about poor white students, this is mostly about the logic of racism in the United States and its impact on black and brown students.

Not too long ago, a film was released on the national news, in which an 8-year-old student in Florida was handcuffed because he had hit a teacher. The student is an 8t-year-old. They put his hands behind his back, but they couldn’t put the cuffs on him because his wrists were too small. They then took him to court and charged him with a felony and it was only when that video became public that there was a massive uproar, and the charges were dismissed. This case is symbolic of something larger. There are four wars being waged against young people. The first one is the war of commodification. It’s a war that says that young people should define themselves simply by the commodities that they buy and the commodities that they advertise. The second war is the criminal justice war. That is a war in which the forces of repression bear down on young people, particularly disproportionately, young people of color – poor young people of colour. That means that the punishing apparatuses bear down on students almost every day. Consequently, more and more students of colour are put in jail, more students are suspended from schools, more students are punished for trivial infractions, more students are basically suspended and more students are charged with criminal acts.

Add to this reign of terror directed against young people, is a war of surveillance. Moreover, with the addition of new sophisticated technologies, young people are being monitored in their schools, on the streets, through their cell phones, and in almost every other public space they inhabit. In the midst of the pandemic crisis, states are retooling the war of surveillance and expanding its reach. There is also the war of privatization which is part of an ongoing effort to individualize social problems for young people so that they cannot imagine wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Constructing Communities of Critical Pedagogy in Times of Crisis: GLobal Thursday Talks
• Part I
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Part II
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Part III
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Index
• Copyright