Pedagogy of Debt Versus Debtor Pedagogy: The Neoliberalism and Commodity in Education

• In Event: Education for Democracy in the Age of Neoliberalism

Abstract

The pedagogy of debt frames teaching and learning relationships that take place outside of formal schooling, fulfilling the goals of neoliberalism and making visible their predatory practices that asphyxiates identity and agency, jeopardizing democracy, critical thinking and fostering inequality. The notion of debtor pedagogy is non-homogenous reaction to the pedagogy of debt portrayed by educators, community leaders activists and public intellectuals to the impact of response to the predatory practices of neoliberalism and builds on a framework of resistance. This paper provides a materialist interpretation for dialectically viewing and critiquing the development of neoliberal capitalism’s chief weapon of predatory debt, it also provides a language that public intellectuals might employ to challenge and pose alternative possibilities.

Authors

• Sheila L. Macrine, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• João Menelau Paraskeva, University of Massachusetts