I am so ridiculously privileged to have the opportunity to travel around the world speaking, listening, learning, and making friends with so many wonderful people. Shirley and I just got back from Iceland and the UK where we spoke about the bricolage and critical research, critical pedagogy, the Freire Project, and other issues. I am so grateful to the many, many people in these countries who had such profound insights about these topics and their relationship to doing good things in the world and how we can work together internationally to further the causes of transformative research, good teaching, social justice, and a revolution of the heart.

Research in education (see Clar Doyle’s blog and the wonderful responses to it on this site) is going through a fascinating and disturbing period in the contemporary era. As part of a larger effort to recover forms of dominant power, some researchers in education are attempting to “recover” more traditional ways of doing educational research. In this process tired and damaging epistemological and ontological assumptions are being re-inserted into the cauldron of knowledge production and self-appointed gatekeepers are attempting to marginalize critical research in general and attempts such as the bricolage to gain a more complex understanding of educational processes in particular. It is not a good time for researchers concerned with social justice, the machinations of power, and the efforts to construct new ways of seeing a world and an educational status quo in crisis.

It is always fascinating to me to observe the way effective critical pedagogues are positioned in many faculties/colleges of education. Outside of the domain of critical pedagogy when professors are deemed to be very good at what they do, they are called “brilliant student-centered teachers.” In critical pedagogy such virtuoso teaching is very often referred to as building a cult following. As I think of the great critical pedagogues in schools of education around North America over the last three decades, in every case I have heard colleagues and peers around the continent refer to them as cult leaders. There’s profound insight to be gained from the analysis of such comments.

Over the years of doing critical pedagogy I have been tremendously uncomfortable using the term, fascism. I have heard the term invoked by various groups, right and left, progressive and regressive in ways that basically shut down conversation. As the U.S. has moved farther and farther to the right, especially in the regime of George W. Bush, old movements have coalesced with newer ones and various strands of right wing thought and action have emerged in new packages.

I have watched many nasty things happen in higher education over the last forty years. Too often these bad things happen to good people. Obviously, critical pedagogy stands for social justice as well as scholarship and teaching that uncover the insidious machinations of race, class, gender, sexual, religious, colonial, and other power blocs. However, one dimension of critical pedagogy that often goes un-discussed and un-analyzed involves the ways we live our roles as educators in everyday circumstances.