Keeping Critical Pedagogy Relevant

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

Abstract

Keeping Critical Pedagogy Relevant

This paper argues that in order to keep critical pedagogy relevant in the present, we need to focus on the following theoretical and practical priorities: 1) We should expose the relationship between neoliberal educational processes and broader global trends. Even now, “neoliberalism” is too often used as shorthand for particular policies (e.g. school choice, standardized testing), rather than as properly naming a broader political-economic and ideological project within contemporary global capitalism. It is crucial for researchers and educators to study the underlying logic that makes, for instance, the assault on Southern Europe by global financial institutions continuous with attacks on public schools by business and policy elites in the U.S. 2) In addition, it is important to expose the inextricability of economy and culture, of race and capital, of subjectivity and materiality. Research in education and the social sciences generally compartmentalizes these concerns, such that researchers are identified as, for instance, scholars of race or “critical theorists.” Given the way that racisms globally are built on and through capitalism and neoliberalism, the intellectual and disciplinary separation of these problems makes little sense. Furthermore, we are encircled simultaneously as subjects and societies, which is why a broad struggle against the carceralization of schools and society needs to be united with an attention to the enclosure of the understanding and imagination. 3) We need to translate Harvey’s (2008) “right to the city” in the educational sphere as a movement that insists on a democratic “right to the school.” The procedures of accountability, the flattening of curriculum, the gutting of infrastructure, and the ethos of punishment all express the proprietary claim of elites on the meaning and possibilities of school. These are expressed not as proposals to the public, but rather as already given and required answers, pre-constituted symbolic systems. In this context, we need a radical departure from the neoliberal imagination which is at the same time a radical (and concrete) claim on the space of school itself.

Author

• Noah De Lissovoy, The University of Texas - Austin