Critical Pedagogy Project Paulo Freire
Joe L. Kincheloe

In the early twenty-first century it has become clichéd among many educational researchers to describe education as a Janus-faced institution with its two faces looking toward opposite goals and outcomes: in one direction, a democratic, inclusive, socially sensitive objective concerned with multiple sources of knowledge and socio-economic mobility for diverse students from marginalized backgrounds; and in the other, a standardized, exclusive, socially regulatory agenda that serves the interest of dominant power and those students most closely aligned with the social and cultural qualities associated with such power. Thus, in the contemporary era educational scholars in faculties of education and educators in elementary and secondary schools walk through a complex terrain of contradictions in their everyday professional pursuits, as educational researchers tend to find evidence of both progressive and regressive purposes in most educational institutions. In such a context the notion of “becoming a teacher” involves far more complex bodies of knowledge and conceptual insights than is sometimes found in both teacher education and educational research programs.

Emerging from Paulo Freire’s work in poverty-stricken northeastern Brazil in the 1960s, critical pedagogy amalgamated liberation theological ethics with progressive impulses in education. Critical pedagogy gained an international audience with the 1967 publication of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and its 1970 English translation. By the mid-1970s several scholars in faculties of education and other disciplines adapted Freire’s conception of critical pedagogy into a so-called first-world context. Over the next decade, critical pedagogy influenced teacher education, educational scholarship, and pedagogical practice in Canada and the United States. In the last half of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the field is at a conceptual crossroads at researchers contemplate the nature of its movement to the next phase of its evolution. The research proposed here seeks to explore the possibilities of this next phase.

In my work I have explored this second phase of critical pedagogy in relation to the recognition of the previously referenced complexity (Kincheloe, 2004). Attention to this complexity with the multiple forms of knowledge and the diverse research methodologies studies of it demand forces proponents of critical pedagogy to ask revealing questions about the purposes of extant educational practice and the nature of its outcomes. Such questions and the answers scholars provide will help shape the next phase of critical pedagogy. What is the relation between classroom practice and issues of justice? How do schools reflect or subvert democratic practices and the larger culture of democracy? How do schools operate to validate or challenge the power dynamics of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, indigeneous/aboriginal issues, physical ability-related concerns, etc? How do such processes play out in diverse classrooms located in differing social, cultural, and economic domains? How do the knowledges schools and other social institutions choose to transmit replicate political relationships in the larger society and affect the academic performance of students from dissimilar socio-economic and cultural backgrounds? The ability to provide intellectually rigorous answers to such questions that lead to practical educational policy and practice is a key dimension of critical pedagogy.

Because of the previously referenced complexity, advocates of critical pedagogy understand that no simple, universally applicable answers can be provided to these questions. Indeed, each of these questions has to be asked time and again by teachers and other educational professionals operating in different historical times and diverse pedagogical locales. Critical pedagogy understands that no educator who seeks to promote individual intellectual development, socio-political and economic justice, and institutional academic rigor can escape the complex contextual specificity of these challenging questions. The research plan proposed here addresses these realities as it constructs a plan to invigorate the study of such phenomena in the second phase of critical pedagogy in Canada and around the world.

Proponents of critical pedagogy appreciate the fact that all educational spaces are unique and politically contested. Constructed by history and challenged by a wide variety of interest groups, educational practice is an ambiguous phenomenon as it takes place in numerous settings, is molded by numerous and often invisible forces and structures, and can operate under the flag of democracy and justice in oppressive and totalitarian ways. Practitioners of critical pedagogy report that some teacher education students, educational leaders, parents, and members of the general public often have difficulty appreciating the fact that schooling can be hurtful to particular students from specific backgrounds in unique social, cultural, and economic settings—for example, indigenous and aboriginal students. Many individuals often have trouble empathizing with students harmed by such negative educational dynamics because schooling in their experience has played such a positive role in their own lives.

Thus, critical pedagogy is a domain of research and practice that asks much from those who encounter it. Critical pedagogical teacher education and leadership involve more than learning pedagogical techniques and the knowledge required by the mandated curriculum. Teachers and leaders steeped in critical pedagogy in addition to acquiring teaching methods also understand the social, economic, psychological, and political dimensions of the schools, districts, and systems in which they operate. They also possess a wide range of knowledge about the information systems in the larger culture that serve as pedagogical forces in the lives of students and other members of society: television, radio, popular music, movies, the Internet, podcasts, and youth subcultures; alternative bodies of knowledge produced by indigenous, marginalized, or low-status groups; the ways different forms of power operate to construct identities and empower and oppress particular groups; and the modus operandi of the ways socio-cultural regulation operates.

Democracy is a fragile entity, advocates of critical pedagogy maintain, and embedded in educational policy and practice are the very issues that make or break it. Understanding these diverse dimensions and structures that shape schooling and the knowledge it conveys is necessary, critical pedagogues believe, to the very survival of democratic schooling—not to mention the continued existence of democracy itself. The analysis of the ways these complex forces evolve in a globalized, technological, electronic communications-based era marked by grand human migrations is central to study proposed here.

Research Objectives

1. The provision of support for the study of critical pedagogy in international and indigenous contexts. The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for the Study of Critical Pedagogy (named after the founder of critical pedagogy (Paulo Freire) and his widow (Nita Freire) who has carried on his work since his death in 1997) would promote the study of the history and development of critical pedagogy as well as conduct research and encourage theorizing about the issues the field has traditionally addressed—the interrelationships of power, justice, oppression, and empowerment as they shape educational policy and practice. Theorizing in this context involves the development of interpretive lenses through which to make meaning, to understand the nature of these constellations of power, justice, oppression, and empowerment vis-à-vis education. Such critical pedagogical theorizing, aware of the complexity of educational phenomena, does not seek to provide universal explanations of pedagogical issues but to provide more rigorous analytical tools with which to explore the multiple manifestations of these phenomena in diverse locations and among diverse peoples. Such research will provide intellectually compelling and practical insights for elementary, secondary, and university teachers reaching out to diverse student populations. In this second phase of critical pedagogical research, a worldwide network of critical pedagogy scholars and a critical pedagogy collective of students and professors at McGill University will be established to engage in the work described here.

2. The creation of a repository/archive for the storage, production, analysis, digitization, and electronic distribution of important documents/media on the history and development of critical pedagogy. This McGill Critical Pedagogy Documentation Project (CPDP) in the Project would establish the historical and contemporary vision, scale, and impact of critical pedagogy on education. To facilitate such documentation and research a CFI-funded lab with sufficient resources to document, produce, archive, preserve, and catalog multimedia materials and resources. The project would: (1) provide support for visiting faculty and graduate students to create multimedia archives and documentaries of critical pedagogues and their work, along with virtual visits, supported by local students, helping those abroad to produce such archival materials; (2) continuing allocation of two Faculty of Education GRA's, selected with requisite and complementary skills to support the project’s activities; and (3) sufficient annual funding from Faculty of Education to bring in scholars and practitioners in critical pedagogy to share their expertise and to contribute to the archives. The archive would provide, for example, an open access database to "document" and archive projects, movements, classroom initiatives, papers from seminal figures in critical pedagogy , with historical and contemporary elements, in conjunction with McGill University Library, (or should it be Department of Library and Information Sciences?) ensuring long-term archival-quality preservation. The critical pedagogy archive would welcome and facilitate community-generated translations and critical editions, as well as posting and indexing related papers, dissertations, and conference presentations. All submissions would be vetted by a critical pedagogy collective. In addition the CPDP would include:

A. CPDP Publishing
To enable the publishing of multilingual resources produced by a worldwide critical pedagogy network in the form of online pamphlets, journals, collections, and books (with support from the University of British Columbia’s Public Knowledge Project (PKP) software and technical team).

B. A critical pedagogy virtual network
Run by a critical pedagogy collective, this would include a forum and blog that links critical pedagogical projects and initiatives worldwide (supporting an international critical pedagogy community) and used for identifying and discussing events, incidents, successes, opportunities, and problems.

C. A critical pedagogy WIKI
An ongoing, evolving virtual encyclopedia with community-generated entries on critical pedagogy projects, movements, people, indigenous/aboriginal education, events, student work.

3. The promotion of research, analysis, and the use of subjugated, repressed, and indigenous knowledges in relation to the academy in general, teaching and learning, and epistemological and ontological understandings central to educational policy and practice. Indigenous knowledge has been and continues to be difficult to define. Always aware of the possibility of Western exploitation of particular forms of indigenous knowledge, critical pedagogy views its usage in the domain of respect and reverence for its producers. For the millions of indigenous peoples of Africa, Latin America, Asia, Oceania, and North America, indigenous knowledge is an everyday way of making sense of the world, the self, and the relationship between them that rewards individuals who live in a given locality. In this context indigenous knowledge reflects the dynamic way in which the residents of an area have come to understand themselves in relationship to their natural environment and how they organize their knowledge of flora and fauna, cultural beliefs, history, and teaching and learning to enhance their lives (Dei, 1994; Keith & Keith, 1993; Simonelli, 1994; Semali and Kincheloe, 1999). Paulo Freire—among many other scholars—was committed to the potential transformative power of subjugated and indigenous knowledges and the ways that such information and its accompanying conceptual frameworks could be used to foster empowerment and justice in a variety of cultural contexts—for both indigenous peoples themselves and Western scholars who came to understand indigenous epistemologies and ontologies.

As Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez (1989) wrote, indigenous knowledge is a rich social resource for any justice-related attempt to bring about social change. In this context indigenous ways of knowing become a central resource for the work of academics whether they be professors in the universities or teachers in elementary and secondary schools. Intellectuals, Freire and Faundez conclude, should "soak themselves in this knowledge...assimilate the feelings, the sensitivity" (p. 46) of epistemologies that move in ways unimagined by many Western academic impulses. Thus, a central dimension of the second phase of critical pedagogy involves researching subjugated and indigenous knowledges, incorporating them into the development of the discipline of critical pedagogy, and using them to enhance education in general and indigenous/aboriginal education in particular.

4. The education of scholars in critical pedagogy. With the formation of the Project and the CPDP, the Faculty of Education at McGill will be in a unique and highly visible position to attract high quality Ph.D. applicants to study in the domain. In light of the resources the Project and the CPDP will bring to McGill, the Faculty of Education can become the international hub for the study of critical pedagogy and the graduation of the most highly skilled scholars of critical pedagogy in the world.