the month of June

I am being asked, as part of my prospectus to include a genealogy of both critical pedagogy and cultural studies. In moving toward this goal, I have started to create a timeline of critical pedagogy in order to gain a clear(er) picture of the historical trajectory (a BIG thanks to my friend Shari for her help with all of this).

Here is what I have so far (with the italicized portions being my vague thoughts):

Timeline of Critical Pedagogy

late 19thC./early 20th C: much of American critical pedagogy has its roots in the progressivism of this time period, exemplified in the work of John Dewey and his philosophy of Pragmatism. Dewey’s educational philosophy included an emphasis on student-centered learning and participation in democratic life that is also at the heart of much contemporary critical pedagogy.

1970: Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed — the “go to” text for critical pedagogy

1980s: radical educators in the US speak out about education as “sorting mechanism” (McLaren qtd. in Tate, Rupiper, Schick 94) and as an apparatus of reproduction of the ideology and power of dominant groups; boom in critical pedagogy scholarship during Reagan-Bush years (Tate, Rupiper Schick 95).

1980: Shor’s Critical Teaching and Everyday Life = critique of community college system

1983: Giroux’s Theory and Resistance in Education

1985: Giroux and Aronowitz: Education under Seige

1986: Giroux and McLaren “Teacher Education and the Politics of Engagement: The Case for Democratic Schooling” — argues for school as “democratic public sphere”

Problem is that twenty years later, after working in various classroom spaces with critical pedagogy, the university’s potential as “democratic public sphere” is being infringed upon by corporate interests and a corporate administrative mentality. It is not enough to simply say this space should be democratic, so lets enact that in our classrooms; first we need to carefully make note of the ways in which the space within which our classroom exists (and even that classroom itself) might not be democratic, where and when are the moments in which we do not exercise control or have a voice in our education, our teaching, and so on because of corporate interests.

1987: Shor’s Freire for the Classroom: teachers from varied disciplines contributed essays to this collection illustrating the applicability of Freirean pedagogy in their classrooms

In this text, Shor points out that “it’s a tricky business to organize an untraditional class in a traditional school.”. This difficulty in implementing critical pedagogy when the majority of students are accustomed to receiving some form of traditional, mainstream education is taken up more recently by William Thelin in his works on “blundering”, and is an idea that has also become a part of the debate between Thelin and Russel Durst (Jeff Smith, in his article, “Students’ Goals, Gatemkeeping, and Some Questions of Ethics), seems to be making an argument similar to Durst’s .

1988: Giroux’s Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life — points to “cultural production” as opposed to reproduction b/c Giroux (and Aronowitz) see schools not as merely reproductive apparatuses, but also as sites of resistance (Tate… 96).

The 90s bring in a more cautious approach to critical pedagogy. Hurlbert and Blitz’s collection illustrates educators debating and arguing over all aspects of critical pedagogy (in stark contrast to Shor’s 1987 celebratory collection); Maxine Hairston expresses great concern over a composition instructor’s ability to handle political topics in the classroom, and Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff provide a critique and an alternative (”teach the conflicts”) that they’d still justify as radical or progressive.

1991: Hurlbert and Blitz’s collection Composition and Resistance

1992: Maxine Hairston makes her now famous attack on critical pedagogy, arguing against the idea of the politicized writing classroom

1993: Jennifer Gore’s The Struggle for Pedagogies — she lays out the differences between Shor’s critical pedagogy and Giroux’s critical pedagogy, and in so doing, critiques Giroux’s scholarship.

1995: Gregory Jay and Gerald Graff’s “A Critique of Critical Pedagogy” is included in Michael Berube’s and Cary Nelson’ Higher Education Under Fire — in it they site the ways in which critical pedagogy implemented can fall into the “banking model” Freire warns us against.

1999: Pepi Leistyna Presence of Mind: Education and the Politics of Deception

Russel Durst: Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition

2000: Amy Lee: Composing Critical Pedagogies

William Thelin and John Tassoni, eds: Blundering for a Change: Errors and Expectations in Critical Pedagogy

2001: Joe Hardin: Opening Spaces: critical pedagogy and resistance theory in composition

Andrea Greenbaum: Insurrections: Approaches to Resistance in Composition Studies

2005: William Thelin: “Understanding Problems in Critical Classrooms”

2006: CCC “Interchanges” Durst/Thelin

Robert Yagelski: “‘Radical to Many in the Educational Establishment’: The Writing Process Movement after the Hurricanes”

I know I am probably missing a lot. Any suggestions? Offerings? Addendums? Additions?

Now the goal is to actually turn this into a genealogy with the goal of illustrating silences around or gaps in attention to the situatedness of these pedagogical practices, these critical pedagogy classrooms in the corporate university.