Critical Pedagogy With Practical Hope

• In Event: 46.065 - Critical Examining and Reinvigorating Critical Pedagogy Through a Self-Reflexive Symposium of Leading Critical Pedagogues

Abstract

Critical Pedagogy with Practical Hope
Critical Pedagogy with practical hope (Kincheloe, 2008) rings with possibilities and can assist in restoring educators from the dim recesses of disillusionment. That disillusionment can end in immobility and surrender and critical pedagogy can dissolve into just another feel good trendy methodology. Critical practical hope also moves educators to more activist positions despite the risks of visibility and vulnerability. The discourse of practical hope and critical pedagogy in this historical moment of free-market fundamentalism, micro-fascism and right-wing mega church religion must orient itself to the struggles of everydayness in the face of such overwhelming obstacles. “This means recalibrating the discourse so that it ‘speaks’ to the immediate problems of workers and others who struggle under the daily grind of time edicts, low salaries, disrespectful work environments, etc…” (McLaren, 2007, p.75)
The stubborn persistence of critical pedagogy with practical hope operates within a context of radical love. We can only hope for those we love not in a romantic sense, but in the sense that we must as educators entrusted with the welfare of children work as rigorously as we can to make a better world and in doing so provide youth with critical capacities that enable them ask the difficult questions concerning education and the larger society. That rigorous work demonstrates not only radical love but hope. Radical love dwells in hope and likewise hope dwells with the context of radical love. Radical love and hope are about the project to end human suffering through the critical awareness of the businessification, militarization of education and a socially unjust society. The struggles with and for critical pedagogical praxis that speaks to the immediate educational, societal, economic, political, class, race, gender and sexual preference issues we face is the hope we can have for creating a more humane world and in that attempt to alleviate human suffering.

Author

• William M. Reynolds, Georgia Southern University