Critical Pedagogy

Read over the criteria for Assignment 1. Take a look at the possible scholars and/or concepts/topics.  Then, choose either a scholar or a topic/concept and begin to explore them/it. You might find a quote or an article that piques your interest. In your blog post, practice creating a short summary of what you have found. Then, finish up your blog post by outlining some next steps and possible directions for your first assignment. For reference: You should spend about two paragraphs summarizing what you’ve discovered, and one short paragraph outlining your next steps.

Before I began my research, I studied the topic list and narrowed the list down to possible topics I would like to write about.  I narrowed the list down to four possible topics: race and the curriculum, reconciliation and the curriculum, decolonization and the curriculum, and critical pedagogy.  After narrowing down the topic list, I needed to find relevant authors who have written about my possible topics.  After compiling a list of authors that had published work on the four topics I selected, I decided on critical pedagogy as my topic for assignment 1.  Henry Giroux, Michael Apple, Francyne Huckaby, and Wayne Au are some of the people I found that have written on critical pedagogy.  The next step in the process was to learn about critical pedagogy.  Besides a quick google search I performed after reading the topic list, I really had no idea as to what critical pedagogy was.

A quote by Dr. Jeremy Koay sums up critical pedagogy nicely.  “Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education that views teaching as a political act. This philosophy focuses on issues of inequality such as social class, race or gender. At the heart of critical pedagogy is the idea that individuals can, in their own ways, transform the world into a better place” (Edumaxi, 2020)  This is the quote that made me want to focus in on critical pedagogy.  It seems like the entire University of Regina Education program is in some way related to this idea of critical pedagogy, and with that in mind, I think the Saskatchewan education system has a bright future as a result.  I then looked at some of the work published by the authors I previously listed.  I started with Henry Giroux, and I found his work to be the most interesting.  Henry argues that this “neoliberal” world we are currently living in now is attacking the education system in order to turn “these systems into disimagination factories” (Mclean, 2015).  I look forward to exploring Giroux’s ideas on education and neoliberalism more in my assignment. 

The next step I need to take is to find three relevant articles related to critical pedagogy to be used in my summary.  I have found some great pieces written by Henry Giroux, and now I just need to decide which of these pieces I would like to summarize.  After that, I need to find two more pieces written by two different authors.  I have briefly looked into Michael Apple’s work, and this is another author who has some ideas I would really like to explore.  After I have the three articles I want to write about, I need to put together the rough draft of my paper. 

References

Jeremy, K. (30AD). What is critical pedagogy? EduMaxi. https://www.edumaxi.com/what-is-critical-pedagogy/.

McLean, H. (2015). Heather McLean Interview with Henry A. Giroux. Education and the Crisis of Public Values. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4539-1557-8/24