Pedagogy Primer

The Pedagogy Primer raises questions and provides explanations that are central to the study and practice of teaching. Most educational research and policy, and even teaching practice, fails to recognize the complexities of pedagogy. This primer unearths the various histories, structures, and narratives that undergird teaching in U.S. schools. Modern teaching practice is revealed to be an uncritical historical layering of irreconcilable worldviews, intermixed with a craft or guild perspective, and undermined by cultural and political ideologies that promote one perspective at the expense of others. Understanding pedagogy requires sorting out these conflicting worldviews embedded in educational policy, research, and practice. Professionalism requires developing a personal schema for balancing the values of each worldview. This primer investigates the socio-cultural context and aims of teaching, pedagogical content knowledge, uses of disciplinary knowledge, and the epistemology and language of teaching. Aimed at new as well as experienced teachers, and innovative researchers and policymakers, the Pedagogy Primer is essential reading for those who study teaching and learning and those who engage in the profession of teaching.

The second edition of the Critical Pedagogy Primer not only introduces the topic but also provides a vision for the future of the critical pedagogy. Kincheloe's notion of an evolving criticality makes sure that critical pedagogy will continue to be a vibrant and creative force that makes a powerful difference in education and in the world in general. As it prepares readers for the challenges of the future, it focuses on the traditions and individuals who have helped construct the discipline. This attention to the past and the future provides readers with an introduction unlike most initiations into academic disciplines. In a richly textured but direct manner, Kincheloe captures the spirit of critical pedagogy in a language accessible to diverse audiences. Both the uninitiated and those with experience in critical pedagogy can learn from this unique and compelling perspective on the field.

The Critical Pedagogy Primer provides a short, smart, and innovative introduction to this topic. Focusing on the traditions that helped create critical pedagogy, this primer concentrates on what the author calls an «evolving criticality». This refers both to the constantly changing and evolving nature of critical pedagogy, and to the need to keep the field on the cutting edge of scholarly innovation. These concerns are presented in a language that is designed for both uninitiated and sophisticated readers. The Critical Pedagogy Primer includes a glossary and a description of leading figures in the field of critical pedagogy. Anyone learning about critical pedagogy must read this book - it should be an assigned text at every school of education.

In a globalized neo-colonial world an insidious and often debilitating crisis of knowledge not only continues to undermine the quality of research produced by scholars but to also perpetuate a neo-colonial and oppressive socio-cultural, political economic, and educational system. The lack of attention such issues receive in pedagogical institutions around the world undermines the value of education and its role as a force of social justice. In this context these knowledge issues become a central concern of critical pedagogy. As a mode of education that is dedicated to a rigorous form of knowledge work, teachers and students as knowledge producers, anti-oppressive educational and social practices, and diverse perspectives from multiple social locations, critical pedagogy views dominant knowledge policies as a direct assault on its goals. Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction takes scholars through a critical review of the issues facing researchers and educators in the last years of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Refusing to assume the reader’s familiarity with such issues but concurrently rebuffing the tendency to dumb down such complex issues, the book serves as an excellent introduction to one of the most important and complicated issues of our time.

There has been an explosion of Web-based courses in higher education. Aiming at an interdisciplinary audience, the contributors draw upon diverse philosophical and empirical backgrounds to make claims about Web-based pedagogy. Among the points they raise is the concern that education is more easily commodified through Internet technologies, implying that traditional faculty roles in teaching (and research) are at risk. Moreover, current understandings of what it means to be a teacher or a student are undergoing redefinition as a result of these new distance-learning technologies. The contributors note that Web-based pedagogy is associated with sound instruction when particular strategies are adopted. As a corollary, this form of teaching is least effective when attempts are made to directly translate traditional styles of teaching. Political, social, and economic interests are competing to shape the direction that online education will take. The authors argue that opportunities exist for administrators and faculty to define the terms under which Web-based learning will occur in their institutions.

Molefi Kete Asante is the seminal theoretician of Afrocentric infusion into curriculum by virtue of four of his 82 books being directly related to examining and advancing an agency centered ideological position in the realm of education, culture, and science. In Afrocentricity, The Afrocentric Idea, An Afrocentric Manifesto, and The Pyramids of Knowledge. Asante's book are widely read and consulted and have become inspirational for educators in the United States, South Africa, Nigeria, Canada, and Brazil. Born in Valdosta, Georgia, of Yoruba and Nubian DNA heritage, Asante studied communication and history at the University of California, Los Angeles where he received his doctorate at the age of 26. After teaching at Purdue, UCLA, Florida State, Howard University, SUNY-Buffalo, and the Zimbabwe Institute for Mass Communication, he moved to Philadelphia where he founded the first PhD program in African American Studies. Revolutionary Pedagogy is Asante's passionate appeal to teachers to take what George Dei has called a "transgressive" position toward the status quo of education. Since Molefi Kete Asante's first work with school districts in Baltimore, Maryland and Chester, Pennsylvania in the early 1990s he has become one of the most popular experts on teacher development and Afrocentric training of administrators, teachers and community leaders. Having worked for schools from California to New York and many districts in between, Dr. Asante knows the terrain as well as any one. Asante is currently professor and chair of the Department of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University. He holds a Guest Professorship at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou and is Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa. "The book, Revolutionary Pedagogy, is sure to become one of the most important weapons in the battle for the lives and minds of African American children. I believe that all stakeholders, including parents and community leaders, scholars and schoolteachers, will be well served by this provocative book." - George Sefa Dei, University of Toronto

This book simultaneously contributes to the fields of critical pedagogy and educational psychology in new and innovative ways by demonstrating how critical pedagogy, postformal psychology, and Enlightenment science, seemingly separate and distinct disciplines, are actually part of the same larger, contextualized, complex whole from the inner most developmentally-fixed biological context of human faculties to the perpetually shifting, socially and politically constructed context of individual schema and human civilization. The text’s uniqueness stems from its bold attempt to connect the postformal critical constructivist/pedagogy work of Joe Kincheloe and others to Western science through a shared, although previously misunderstood, critique and rejection of crude forms of social control, which the psychologists call behaviorism and Western scientists identify as mechanical philosophy. This book therefore argues that critical pedagogy— which includes, among others, anarchist, Marxist, feminist, Indigenous (globally conceived), Afro-Caribbean/American, and postmodern traditions—and critical/constructivist educational psychology have much to gain by engaging previously rejected work in critical solidarity, that is, without compromising one’s values or democratic commitments. The goal of this book is therefore to contribute to this vision of developing a more transgressive and transformational educational psychology.