New Frameworks to Dismantle Public Schools and the Need for Critical Pedagogy

• In Event: Reflexive and Engaged Policy Studies: Critical Policy Research With K–12 Teachers and Teacher Educators

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes:
This paper will discuss the historical aspects of curricular control and will provide a present-day framework that highlights how the pandemic and current legislative and policy efforts are intertwined, clarifying the need for teachers to utilize critical pedagogy in the classroom.

Theoretical framework:
In the midst of the pandemic, many districts soon found themselves thrust into the new culture wars in education. As right-wing parents and community groups quickly organized to combat mask mandates and other Covid restrictions in schools, legislators and others who sought to weaken public education found a niche to further attacks on educational policy through the push for anti-CRT legislation, book bans, and additional accountability measures for teachers (Anderson-Nathe, 2020; Asbury & Kim, 2020; Hartney & Finger, 2020; Morgan, 2022). The pandemic became a perfect wedge issue to mobilize right-wing parents and community members. Teachers now faced assaults upon their profession that made it impossible to perform their jobs the way they knew best (Anderson-Nathe, 2020; Ehren et al., 2021; Keown et al., 2021; Nowicki, 2021; Oster et al., 2021; Tan et al., 2021; Varghese & Natsuaki, 2021; Watson et al., 2022).

Mode of Inquiry:
Educators must continue to push back on these sustained attacks.. We turn to critical pedagogy as a restorative tool to disrupt the knowledge wars. Henry Giroux (2006) defined critical pedagogy as “attempts to understand how power works through the production, distribution, and consumption of knowledge within particular institutional contexts and seeks to constitute students as particular subjects and social agents” (p. 31). With a focus on education as a dialectical process to combat hegemonic domination through self-empowerment, critical pedagogy is needed now more than ever.

Substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:
Critical pedagogy can repair the harm of neoliberalism in education by reinforcing our commitment to emancipatory and empowering knowledge as the goal of education for all people. We can counter the claims that teaching the truth about racism, sexism, and gender diversity harms white, cis-gendered males by exploring how knowledge from diverse groups allows for developing critical civic empathy (Mirra, 2018) needed to reckon with our difficult past. Instead of relying on ignorance, fear, and patriotism, to protect the dominant group, we must employ a “pedagogical practice that calls students beyond themselves and embraces the ethical imperative to care for others, dismantle structures of domination and be subjects rather than objects of history, politics and power” (Giroux, 2022, p. 114). A commitment to and belief in the power of critical pedagogy is our best hope to restore the damage wrought by conservative attempts to silence diverse knowledge and prohibit critical thinking.

Significance:
With the renewed cultural war attacking teachers by labeling them as “groomers” and “pedophiles” and accusing them of socialist indoctrination and criminalizing efforts to teach the truth about racism, sexism, and gender, we fear for the sustainability of education as a public good. Teachers must utilize critical pedagogy in order to sustain the public good and empower students to engage in this liberational work.

Authors

• Brianne Kramer, Southern Utah University

• Denisha Jones, Defending the Early Years