"What Would Freire Do?" Pursuing Critical Theoretical Scholarship's Radical Possibilities at AERA's 100-Year Mark

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

What would Paulo Freire, or even John Dewey or Maxine Greene, do in today’s post-Civil Rights research environment where empiricism, positivism, and functionalism have achieved renewed levels of domination that harken back to the 1950s? Would they be required to seek external funding and conduct empirical studies to be considered legitimate? Would they be forced to succumb to state-promoted research agendas that dismiss structural interpretations? This panel pushes back against the restoration of a Tayloristic research regime in two ways: 1) it deconstructs empiricism’s current role in reproducing systems of oppression and 2) it shows how critical theory advances various educational subfields by excavating hidden realities that empiricism often avoids, or even actively represses.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 3: Methodologies and Ethics (The Shapes of Curriculum)

Chair

• Michael J. Dumas, University of California - Berkeley

Papers

• The War Against Thinking: Neofunctionalist Empiricism, Normative Research Discourses, and the Fear of Knowing - Ricky Lee Allen, University of New Mexico

• "That Ain't Research": The Empiricist Takeover in Teacher Education - Cheryl E. Matias, University of Colorado - Denver

• How Spanish Became a Foreign Language: The Othering of the Majority in the Rio Grande Valley - Kip Austin Hinton, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

• The Same Old Jim Crow: Race, Education, and the (Patho)logic of White Supremacy - Denise M. Taliaferro Baszile, Miami University

Discussant

• Michael A. Peters, The University of Waikato