Alliance of Critical Educators and Researchers

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 5

Session Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

Allman’s (2001, p.214) Freirean Critical Education shows education slipping into market-led discourses of technicist deliverology with the increasing globalization of capitalism. This slippage is in evidence in five critical doctoral studies from Ireland: Early Childhood Education, Primary Education, Secondary Education, Early School Leavers and Adult Education. While Irish policymakers maintain that neo-liberalism is happening elsewhere, these studies reveal slippages between the reality of educators’ lives and reform policies introduced within austerity economics from 2011 to date. The studies challenge this discourse of ‘exceptionalism’ and reveal how educators are confined to examining themselves and their practices with no affordances for ‘critically reading the world’. This institutionalization of poverty will resonate with others internationally grappling with similar issues.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Paulo Freire, Critical Pedagogy, and Emancipation

Chair

• Geraldine Mooney Simmie, University of Limerick

Papers

• Critical Education Understandings of an Urban Regeneration Partnership in the Republic of Ireland - Martin Galvin, University College Cork

• Purpose of School Leadership: Transformative Praxis or a Neoliberal Turn Toward Constant Comparison - Ciaran Sheehan, Bilboa National School

• Rhetoric-Reality Contradictions: The Discursive Positioning of Early Childhood Education and Care Practitioners in Ireland - Dawn Murphy, Institute of Technology Carlow

• Examining the Policy Enactment of Teacher Portfolios: An Emergence of Critical Consciousness - Kathryn Corbett, Bishop Galvin Primary School

• Critical Interpretive Study of the School Completion Program: Rhetoric-Reality Contradictions in One Case Study School - Declan Mc Kenna, University of Limerick, Ireland

Discussant

• Peter McLaren, Chapman University