New Conversations in Critical Pedagogy: A Review Essay

I wish to present critical pedagogy not as a set of classroom teaching practices but rather position it within a larger political problematic; here critical pedagogy is located as a politically informed disposition and commitment to marginalized Others in the service of justice and freedom.

—Peter McLaren

McLaren’s words capture what I have always loved and hated about critical pedagogy: it ain’t training. The pulse of critical pedagogy is the distance between rhetoric and reality. In the world we inhabit as teachers and scholars, comparing our “politically informed disposition and commitment to marginalized Others” with our everyday realities raises more questions than it answers. Reading the books here under review made me reflect on progress made on three major questions left unasked in critical pedagogy’s most thrilling beginnings. These questions revolve around contradictions and compromises involved when regular people work with real students in real classrooms. Specifically, these books engage questions about whiteness, about the ideology of individual opportunity in liberal capitalism, and about the difficulties of institutional transformation, that have made it difficult for critical educators to align our realities with our rhetorics.

Penelope Herideen’s Policy, Pedagogy, and Social Inequality: Community College Realities in Post-Industrial America ignores questions of whiteness, concentrating instead on the ways that realities of liberal capitalism and institutional inertia can inform a viable critical agenda for community college education. Extending a methodology familiar to researchers in critical pedagogy, Herideen offers a theoretical critique of discourses constructing community colleges and conducts teacher research to expose the “everyday lives and needs of nontraditional students” and extend the ways in which “the community college is an important, unique and enabling public space for nontraditional students” (16). Herideen uses student voices to argue where mainstream discourses tend to underappreciate how policies and pedagogies reinforce structural obstacles to assimilation (lack of access to time, money, transportation, day care, confidence), “critical theory’s shortcoming lies in its inability to provide short-run strategies for individuals trying to better their lives within the sociopolitical system” (116). For Herideen, both groups need to realize that “educating for critical consciousness and upward mobility are not mutually exclusive goals” (111).

The lesson Herideen takes from her students’ comments that they “know about all the injustices . . . . [but] knowing it doesn’t help me where I want to go” (116) is that “acquiring consciousness of one’s life situation does not resolve the everyday struggle . . . . to put food on the table tonight” (116). Addressing this fact head on, Herideen makes more plain a key complexity within critical pedagogy: making the most of critical agency involves valuing the ways people define their goals for their insights and actions. In a liberal democratic society, where schools are seen as the answer to, rather than a prime embodiment, of “contradictions between the values of capitalism and democracy” (1), these hopes and goals revolve, for most individuals, around transforming their own place in the structure of social inequities—getting for themselves more money, more time, more choices, more esteem—rather than transforming those inequities as institutionalized relationships.

As Herideen suggests, critical pedagogy’s failure to directly address the goal of upward mobility serves as an excuse for many to dismiss it entirely. Too often, for students, the public, and educators, recognition that “critical consciousness does not alleviate the life struggle against everyday hardships” (83) trumps recognition that uncritical consciousness not only doesn’t alleviate hardships but mystifies them as well. Rather than defending critique, Herideen productively reframes the issue of improving lives in terms of what ways of seeing and doing education most meaningfully inspire and enable individual people to fulfill their capacities as citizens and human...