List of theorists that have some relation to critical pedagogy

feel free to add your own theorist/link/comment/etc. To do so, select this link.

Althusser, Louis. This is the guy that talks about subject positions in his essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (full bib. citation to follow).

The whole deal with him is that he points out the unique position that schools have in training children in the ideology of the status quo. Ok, hold on, its not that threatening. Think about it. Schools get kids for what -- 6 hours a day, five days a week, a little over a third of the year. That's a lot of time. And in that time, they teach kids stuff like reading, math, science, social studies, but underneath it all is an epistemology that is governed by the ruling ideas in society. (for more on this, see studies on textual analysis of textbooks). Anyway, suffice to say that he makes a compelling argument for this. That's why education is an important site to focus on if we're going to change things.

Then, we have the subject position stuff. Here, he talks about the way that ideology acts to "interpellate" people as subjects of that ideology. In other words, ideology acts to call some into a certain subject position. The example he gives is someone walking down the street. An unseen person calls out "hey you" and the person walking knows that it is he/she who is being called to, and not the guy walking next to him/her with the funny hat. The hat isn't the point. The point is that that act of being called, even when its by a voice that we don't recognize, somehow not only finds its target, but also calls the person being "hailed" into the subject position of the person being "hailed." (I've re-read this bit a few times, and I think it makes sense. If you disagree or can come up with a better way to phrase this, please email me.)
another example -- who hasn't dropped something on the street without realizing it, only to have someone else say "hey... you dropped something!" Somehow, we know that it is we, who dropped something, not the people around us.

For Althusser, this is the essence of ideology -- it constitutes subjects as actors (or not-actors) in the world. Very similar to Foucault's ideas on Power. Regardless of whether we agree with his ideas on the totality of the ideology of the state, his ideas on ideology and how it creates people are very relevant to how we teach.

If its true that ideology does to at least some degree create people in a certain way, then our pedagogical style acts on our students to create them in a certain way. What Althusser's essay (or Foucault's stuff on power) suggest for pedagogy is that we need to examine the ideology or maybe more properly the epistemology of our teaching methods to see how it acts on or interacts with our students. (Many people say that Foucault is much more understandable on this subject, but for some reason, he gives me a headache, maybe he'll be more to your liking).

Freire, Paulo. Freire's contribution to the field of critical pedagogy is really too large to get into within this space. So I'll use this space to discuss one of his concepts, and invite others to submit discussions of his other important concepts. Freire developed the concept of conscientização or, "Anglicized," conscientization -- critical consciousness.
Foucault, Michel Too many relevant works to list. See the Pedagogy Bibliography section for a listing of many of his works that have relevance to the field. For me, one of the most important Foucault essays is "What Is Enlightenment?" published in (among other places) The Foucault Reader. edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

For me, this essay gets at the heart of this society's legacy from the Enlightenment. Foucault follows his usual pattern of examining the development of a certain social problem or question, in this case, the question -- what is enlightment/Enlightenment. He traces the nature of the question to a struggle between the ideas of Modernity vs. countermodernity. For Foucault, human development is the increase of productive capabilities, along with and intensification in the matrices of power relations that bind us to this system. His inquiry then is into the nature of these power relations, with an eye toward areas of tension and resistance against these relations. To me, the crucial part of the essay is when he presents the distillation of his inquiry into the form of an open ended question that we somehow have to work toward answering. The question he asks is "what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects. . .[by] seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom" (43-46). Essentially, he asks us to examine the systems of power relations that we are enmeshed in, in order to determine what is necessary for us to be free. back to responses