Critical Consciousness

Famous for his advocacy of 'critical pedagogy', Paulo Freire was Latin America's foremost educationalist, a thinker and writer whose work and ideas continue to exert enormous influence in education throughout the world today. Education for Critical Consciousness is the main statement of Freire's revolutionary method of education. It takes the life situation of the learner as its starting point and the raising of consciousness and the overcoming of obstacles as its goals. For Freire, man's striving for his own humanity requires the changing of structures which dehumanize both the oppressor and the oppressed. This edition includes a substantial new introduction by Carlos Alberto Torres, Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Paulo Freire Institute, UCLA, USA. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos.

Famous for his advocacy of 'critical pedagogy', Paulo Freire was Latin America's foremost educationalist, a thinker and writer whose work and ideas continue to exert enormous influence in education throughout the world today. Education for Critical Consciousness is the main statement of Freire's revolutionary method of education. It takes the life situation of the learner as its starting point and the raising of consciousness and the overcoming of obstacles as its goals. For Freire, man's striving for his own humanity requires the changing of structures which dehumanize both the oppressor and the oppressed.

Paulo Freire outlines the revolutionary principles behind the educational methods that have made him one of the 20th century's most influential education theorists.

In this politically and democratically urgent collection, George Yancy and contributors argue that more than ever, we are in need of classrooms that function "dangerously"—that is, classrooms where people are not afraid to engage in critical discussions that call into question difficult political times. Collectively they demonstrate the ways activist authors and scholars must be prepared to engage in risk and vulnerability as a defense of our democratic right to practice forms of pedagogical transgression. Ideal for scholars and students of critical pedagogy, philosophy of education, and political theory, this collection delineates the necessity of critical consciousness through education, and provides ways of speaking back against authoritarian control of imaginative and critical capacities.

Schooling for Critical Consciousness addresses how schools can help Black and Latinx youth resist the negative effects of racial injustice and challenge its root causes. Scott Seider and Daren Graves draw on a four-year longitudinal study examining how five different mission-driven urban high schools foster critical consciousness among their students. The book presents vivid portraits of the schools as they implement various programs and practices, and traces the impact of these approaches on the students themselves. The authors make a unique contribution to the existing scholarship on critical consciousness and culturally responsive teaching by comparing the roles of different schooling models in fostering various dimensions of critical consciousness and identifying specific programming and practices that contributed to this work. Through their research with more than 300 hundred students of color, Seider and Graves aim to help educators strengthen their capacity to support young people in learning to analyze, navigate, and challenge racial injustice. Schooling for Critical Consciousness provides school leaders and educators with specific programming and practices they can incorporate into their own school contexts to support the critical consciousness development of the youth they serve.

This collection of essays traces the attempts of one writing teacher to understand theoretically - and to respond pedagogically - to what happens when students from diverse backgrounds learn to use language in college. Bizzell begins from the assumption that democratic education requires us to attempt to educate all students, including those whose social or ethnic backgrounds may have offered them little experience with academic discourse. Over the ten-year period chronicled in these essays, she has seen herself primarily as an advocate for such students, sometimes called “basic writers.” Bizzell’s views on education for “critical consciousness,” widely discussed in the writing field, are represented in most of the essays in this volume. But in the last few chapters, and in the intellectual autobiography written as the introduction to the volume, she calls her previous work into question on the grounds that her self-appointment as an advocate for basic writers may have been presumptous, and her hopes for the politically liberating effects of academic discourse misplaced. She concludes by calling for a theory of discourse that acknowledges the need to argue for values and pedagogy that can assist these arguements to proceed more inclusively than ever before. The essays in this volume constitute the main body of work in which Bizzell developed her influential and often cited ideas. Organized chronologically, they present a picture of how she has grappled with major issues in composition studies over the past decade. In the process, she sketches a trajectory for the development of composition studies as an academic discipline.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Critical Curriculum Studies offers a novel framework for thinking about how curriculum relates to students’ understanding of the world around them. Wayne Au brings together curriculum theory, critical educational studies, and feminist standpoint theory with practical examples of teaching for social justice to argue for a transformative curriculum that challenges existing inequity in social, educational, and economic relations. Making use of the work of important scholars such as Freire, Vygotsky, Hartsock, Harding, and others, Critical Curriculum Studies, argues that we must understand the relationship between the curriculum and the types of consciousness we carry out into the world.

This volume is a study of empowered, resilient, and globally responsible moral consciousness in the historical context of a global transition to a new level of sociohistorical organization in society. This work develops further the Freirean concept of critical consciousness, and describes its lifespan ontogeny, integrating moral psychology, critical theory and cultural critique, education, religion, and social ethics theory with cross-cultural empirical research. What evolves is a new level of understanding of human motivation, and individual and collective human spiritual potential at the turn of the 21st century. Critical consciousness (CC) is analyzed in terms of the harmonious integration of mind and heart, of cognitive, volitional and affective capacities. Its lifespan evolution is described through three levels: Pre-CC, Transitional CC, and mature CC, and the dynamics of each level are explored through in-depth, cross-cultural case studies encompassing the continuum between ordinary people and moral leaders. The paradigmatic limitations of current education and social science from the prespective of the normative construct of critical consciousness are examined, and a foundation is provided for re-thinking contemporary educational vision. This work also explores the emerging spiritual psychology of integration at the turn of the century, as it begins to bridge the split between theory and praxis, to contribute more fully to the global efforts to evolve a civil society, based on justice and unity in diversity.