Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies

Education: Critical Pedagogy

17 Education Cr it ica l Pedagogy Nor ma n K. Denzin Informed by James Carey’s theories of democracy and his ritual model of communication, I enter a conversation that interrogates the place of critical pedagogy in a free democratic society (Carey 1989, 1997j, 1997l;Rosen 1997).Critical pedagogy is a key component in Carey’s intellectual project. A master teacher, Carey taught us how to think critically, to think and act in ways that linked critical pedagogy with a politics of hope. With Carey I seek a democratic pedagogy crafted for life in America since September 11,2001(Denzin 2007). A genuine democracy requires hope, dissent, and criticism. Critical pedagogy is a strategic means to these political ends. As Carey puts it, “critical pedagogy and democracy are really names for the same thing. . . . In our present predicament all terms of the political equation—democracy, public opinion, public discourse, the press— are up for grabs” (in Rosen 1997, 192, 196). Democracy and Pedagogy The democratic character of critical pedagogy is defined largely through a set of basic assumptions (Giroux and Giroux 2006). These assumptions include the following: (1)Educational and everyday 18 Norman K. Denzin realities “are constructed in and through people’s linguistic, cultural, social and behavioral interactions”; these both shape and are shaped by social, political, economic and cultural forces (Fischman and McLaren 2005,425). (2) It is not enough to understand any given reality. There is a need to “transform it with the goal of radically democratizing educational sites and societies” (ibid.). (3)Critical pedagogy disrupts those cultural practices that instill hegemonic ways of seeing and thinking. As transformative intellectuals, educators actively shape and lead this project. As advocates of critical pedagogy, they are aware of the many ways that popular culture functions as a form of political education (Kincheloe 2004). Finally, (4) pedagogical practices are always moral and political. The political is always performative. The performative is always pedagogical. Critical pedagogy subjects structures of power, knowledge, and practice to critical scrutiny, demanding that they be evaluated “in terms of how they might open up or close down democratic experiences” (Giroux and Giroux 2005,1).Critical pedagogy scholars hold systems of authority accountable by offering critical reading of texts, creating radical educational practices, and promoting critical literacy; in turn, critical pedagogy encourages resistance to the “discourses of privatization, consumerism, the methodologies of standardization and accountability, and the new disciplinary techniques of surveillance” (Giroux and Giroux 2005,3).Critical pedagogy provides the tools for understanding how cultural and educational practices contribute to the construction of neoliberal conceptions of identity, citizenship, and agency. Democratic public life in America is under siege. A culture of fear has spread around the world. The reactionaries and neoliberals have all but overtaken the languages and politics of daily life, locating Americans in a permanent, openended war against faceless, nameless terrorists. A radical democratic imagination enters the spaces of this new public sphere. It serves to redefine the concept of civic participation and public citizenship. This imagination turns the personal into the political. Struggle, resistance, and dialogue are key features of its pedagogy . The rights of democratic citizenship are extended to all segments of public and private life, from the political to the economic, from the cultural to the personal. This pedagogy seeks to regulate market and economic relations in the name of social justice and environmental causes. Hope, Pedagogy, and the Critical Imagination The critical imagination is democratic, pedagogical, and interventionist. Building on Freire (1998, 91),this imagination dialogically inserts itself into the world, provoking conflict, curiosity, criticism, and reflection. Extending Freire, critical Educ at ion 19 pedagogy contributes to conceptions of education and democracy as themselves pedagogies of freedom. As praxis, performance ethnography and indigenous theater constitute dynamic ways of changing the world. In enacting a performancecentered ethic, dialogic performances provide materials for critical reflection on radical democratic educational practices. In so doing, performance ethnography enacts an ethical and moral theory of selfhood and being. The particular type of relationality we call research ought to enhance moral agency, moral discernment , critical consciousness, and a radical politics of resistance (Christians 2002, 409; 2000). In these acts we contribute to a public conversation, to a dialogue that puts into play the very notions of democracy and freedom, of citizen and patriot (Carey 1997l, 208, 216). As an interventionist pedagogy, the critical imagination seeks and promotes an ideology of hope that challenges...