"Identity politics enabled many formerly silenced and displaced groups to emerge from the margins of power and dominant culture to reassert and reclain suppressed identities and experiences; but in doing so, they often
substituted one master narrative for another, invoked a politics of separa
tism, and suppressed differences within their own ' ( Read more... )

What is called general knowledge is not privileged with respect to other "kinds" of knowledge. It too can be gained only in specific circumstances. And it too much be brought into play in specific circumstances. The generality of any form of knowledge always lies in the power to renegotiate the meaning of the past and future in constructing the ( Read more... )

Hmm. I've been reading a lot about critical theory and critical pedagogy these days- Paulo Friere's Pedagogy of Indignation, Myles Horton/Paulo Freire's We Make the Road by Walking, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, a book about critical theory and marxism ( Read more... )

"Critical theory is, above all else, a way to ask questions about power. Who has it? How did they get it? How do they keep it? What are they doing with it? How do their actions affect the less powerful? How might things be otherwise? " -Patricia Hinchey in Finding Freedom in the Classroom

I'm currently reading the book We Make the Road by Walking which is a dialogue between Paulo Freire and Myles Horton. Paulo Freire developed a program of teaching illiterate peasants in Brazil to transform their world through language. Myles Horton developed a union/activist/civil rights training school called Highlander in Tennessee. He also ( Read more... )

"... real liberation is achieved through popular participation. Participation in turn is realized through an educational practice that itself is both liberatory and participatory, that simultaneously creates a new society and involves the people themselves in their creation of their own knowledge."-We Make the Road by Walking, page xxx.

"... one of the mistakes we can commit in the name of freedom of the students is if I, as a teacher, would paralyze my action and my duty to teach. In the last analysis, I would leave the students by themselves, and it would be to fall into a kind of irresponsibility. At this moment, afraid of assuming authority, I lose authority. Authority is ( Read more... )

"I started experimenting with ways to get my ideas across without putting people down, with trying to get them to think and analyze their own experiences. So I rediscovered what's long been known, that one of the best ways to educate is to ask questions. Nothing new about that. It's just not widely practiced in academic life. I guess ( Read more... )

"Pedagogy that begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression. It is an instrument of dehumanization." -Paulo Freire.

"But in the end, as history has repeatedly shown, it will not be the privileged who liberate the oppressed, but the oppressed who will wrest power away from the privileged."

Crtiical Pedagogy and the Crisis of Imagination, Eric J. Weiner in Critical Pedagogy: Where are we now? pg. 61