The Struggle For Pedagogies

Jennifer M. Gore examines, analyses and offers directions for the debate between critical pedagogy and feminist pedagogy, one of the fiercest within education theory.

Jennifer M. Gore examines, analyses and offers directions for the debate between critical pedagogy and feminist pedagogy, one of the fiercest within education theory.

Schools have been traditionally defined as institutions of instruction, but the authors of this volume challenge that position in order to generate a new set of cultural categories and constructs through which the nature and process of schooling can be more appropriately understood. Giroux and McLaren develop a theory of schooling that takes into account not only the more traditional relationship between teaching and learning, but also the import of wider cultural dynamics such as language, mass culture, popular culture, the state, theories of readership, ethnographic research, and subcultural studies.

Young People and the Struggle for Participation rethinks dominant concepts and meanings of participation by exploring what young people do in public spaces and what these spaces mean to them, individually and collectively. This book discusses how different spaces and places structure and are in turn structured by young peoples’ activities. Drawing on findings from a comparative study in eight European cities, insights into different styles of youth participation emerging from formal, non-formal and informal settings are presented. The book provides a comparative analysis of how transnational discourses, national welfare states and local youth policies affect youth participation. It also investigates how it comes about that young people get involved in different forms of participation in the course of their biographies. This book will appeal to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of youth studies, community studies, sociology of education, political science, social work, psychology and anthropology.

Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy centres around the theoretical effort to construct a feminist pedagogy which will democratize gender relations in the classroom, and practical ways to implement a truly feminist pedagogy.

Conceiving of pedagogy as a form of cultural politics and teachers, therefore, as cultural workers, Simon offers a fresh vision of the notion of pedagogy. Grounded in an ethical and political stance devoted to the advancement of human dignity, Simon reflexively considers the basis on which teachers form their own dispositions and feelings, and urges them to consider not only what they might do as teachers but what social visions are supported by their practices. In this in-depth discussion of the requirements for a pedagogy of possibility, Simon highlights the significance of his theoretical commitment as applied to educational practice. To illustrate the ways that pedagogy is implicated in the construction of a social imaginary, Simon explores how the substance of schooling might be recast in a way that involves the work of teaching in reconstituting a progressive moral project for education that can constitute part of a broadly based social transformation. He subsequently offers a social vision on which a pedagogy of possibility might be founded, and shows how schools, along with other sites of cultural production, may be understood as integral to the struggle to establish such a vision. In addition, he discusses in detail how a practice of pedagogy might be conceptualized that would help establish concrete forms of hopeful practice.

A fresh portrayal of one of the architects of the African American intellectual tradition, whose faith in the subversive power of education will inspire teachers and learners today. Black education was a subversive act from its inception. African Americans pursued education through clandestine means, often in defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence. They developed what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of “fugitive pedagogy”—a theory and practice of Black education in America. The enslaved learned to read in spite of widespread prohibitions; newly emancipated people braved the dangers of integrating all-White schools and the hardships of building Black schools. Teachers developed covert instructional strategies, creative responses to the persistence of White opposition. From slavery through the Jim Crow era, Black people passed down this educational heritage. There is perhaps no better exemplar of this heritage than Carter G. Woodson—groundbreaking historian, founder of Black History Month, and legendary educator under Jim Crow. Givens shows that Woodson succeeded because of the world of Black teachers to which he belonged: Woodson’s first teachers were his formerly enslaved uncles; he himself taught for nearly thirty years; and he spent his life partnering with educators to transform the lives of Black students. Fugitive Pedagogy chronicles Woodson’s efforts to fight against the “mis-education of the Negro” by helping teachers and students to see themselves and their mission as set apart from an anti-Black world. Teachers, students, families, and communities worked together, using Woodson’s materials and methods as they fought for power in schools and continued the work of fugitive pedagogy. Forged in slavery, embodied by Woodson, this tradition of escape remains essential for teachers and students today.