As leaders and as educators, we should not perpetuate wrongs of the past, and this happens when we do not examine our past and do not account for things that have had a huge impact on our present lives. We need to recognize historical patterns and understand their impact, such as how the people who had access to housing (especially in certain neighborhoods) built their wealth which has compounded and created the income gap that exists between White and Black families (see Video 13.2), and impacts all aspects of society including education. The US educational system has not adequately educated us on this topic and at the same time has become highly politicized regarding topics such as race or inequality which have been presented as antithetical to notions of meritocracy and patriotism. This dichotomy does not serve us well as it prevents us from evolving and moving forward as a nation. As a result, many educators have been coached or mandated to avoid these topics. Generations of US Americans have internalized these stories, unconsciously or consciously, and hence, do not see the oppression unless they are called to examine it, and this is what Critical Race Theory helps us to do.
What does “White Supremacy” Mean?
White supremacy is a historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and individuals of color by white individuals and nations of the European continent; for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power and privilege .
The main tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) are:
While CRT started in the legal field, it has spread to other disciplines such as education.
When applying CRT to public K-12 education, one must consider:
How do the answers to all these questions help you to think about CRT as it applies to our educational system? If you do not know how race correlates, you probably will not understand CRT. Critical educators would recommend that you deepen your understanding of how race is so embedded in our institutions and our history, and specifically our educational system, which has clear repercussions for how our society is ultimately structured, and who becomes our political, economic, and social leaders. In order to live in a more just society, critical educators want our students to wrestle with these questions, and fight for a more just future. They want the learning to move beyond the classroom and connect with the lives and challenges of our students. Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Bettina Love, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King and many others have said this will be a fight and a struggle that will likely not be realized in your own lifetimes. When you understand this, you can grasp the enormous potential and responsibility of educators on a daily basis in the United States.
Critical Race Theory very recently has become a source of much debate across the country, somewhat to the surprise of people who have been studying these issues for years. “Fox News has mentioned ‘critical race theory’ 1300 times in less than four months. Why? Because critical race theory (CRT) has become a new bogeyman for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present” (Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons, Brookings Institute). NBC News reported that Critical Race Theory is not actually taught in K-12 education but due to the negative attention it is getting, educators are weary of using certain authors, teaching about systemic racism or on a variety of historic and social topics. Most people critiquing CRT do not seem to understand what the theory actually stands for, and have framed it as a divisive framework. Again, it is important for all educators to understand what the theory stands for, and that is not taught in US schools. This debate continues to highlight how divided the country is on race and racism, as is brought into focus through the debate over the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critical-race-theory-teachers-union-honest-history https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teaching-critical-race-theory-isn-t-happening-classrooms-teachers-say-n1272945 |
Image 13.1 “Fist Typography” by GDJ is in the Public Domain, CC0
Image 13.2 “Liberate Minnesota Protest” by Wikipedia Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Image 13.3 “Paulo Freire” by Flickr is in the Public Domain
Image 13.4 “Income Inequality” is in the Public Domain
Image 13.5 “As More People of color Raise their consciousness” by Flickr is in the Public Domain
Image 13.5 “We want to do more than survive” by Bettina Love
Image 13.6 “HipHop Mascot” by vectorportal.com is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Image 13.7 “Nelson Mandela Quote” by j4p4n open clipart is in the Public Domain
Image 13.8 “United States Public School for Eskimos – Frank G. Carpenter collection” by is in the Public Domain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqrhn8khGLM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY2C_ATNFEM
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critical-race-theory-teachers-union-honest-history
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teaching-critical-race-theory-isn-t-happening-classrooms-teachers-say-n1272945
2. Featherstone , Liza https://www.jstor.org/stable/4028864?mag=paulo-freires-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed-at-fifty
3. Freire, Paulo, 1921-1997. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York :Continuum, 2000.
4. Hooks Bell. Teaching to Transgress : Education As the Practice of Freedom , Routledge 1994.
5. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-oneonta-education106/
6. https://newsreel.org/video/RACE-The-House-We-Live-In
7. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers
8. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/books/bell-hooks-dead.html
9. Ladson-Billings, Gloria; Tate, William F, IV. Towards a Critical Race Theory of Education, Teachers College Recor d, Vol. 97, Iss. 1, (Fall 1995): 47.
10. Love, Bettina L. We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston, Massachusetts, Beacon Press, 2019.
11. McCausland, P. 2021. Teaching critical race theory isn’t happening in classrooms, teachers say in survey. NBC News , July 1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teaching-critical-race-theory-isn-t-happening-classrooms-teachers-say-n1272945
12. O’Kane, C. 2021. Head of teachers union says critical race theory isn’t taught in schools, vows to defend “honest history”. CBS News , July 8. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critical-race-theory-teachers-union-honest-history/
13. Ray, R., and A. Gibbons. 2021. Why are states banning critical race theory? The Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/02/why-are-states-banning-critical-race-theory/
14. Sawchuck, S. 2021. What Is critical race theory, and why is it under attack? Education, Week , May 18. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=eml&utm_campaign=eu&M=62573086&U=1646756&UUID=cc270896d99989f6b27d080283c5630c
15. Skloot, Rebecca, 1972-. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York :Random House Audio, 2010.
Educational Learning Theories Copyright © 2023 by Sam May-Varas, Ed.D.; Jennifer Margolis, PhD; and Tanya Mead, MA is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.
Critical pedagogy is based in critical theory. Critical pedagogy connects the concepts of critical theory with education.
“Many “critical theories”...have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies. In both the broad and the narrow senses, however, a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms" (Bohman, J., Flynn, J., & Celikates, R., 2019).
Critical pedagogy originates especially from the work of Paulo Freire, an educator and philosopher whose work Pedagogy of the Oppressed formed the basis for critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy overlaps with pedagogies such as feminist pedagogy, anti-racist pedagogy, and inclusive pedagogy. These three pedagogies strongly pull from key theories introduced by critical pedagogues.
Critical pedagogy identifies education as being inherently political, and therefore, not neutral (Kincheloe, 2004, p.2). Critical pedagogy encourages students and instructors to challenge commonly accepted assumptions that reveal hidden power structures, inequities, and injustice in society.
Critical pedagogy acknowledges education is political; education has a history of inequalities, oppression, and domination that need to be recognized (Kincheloe, 2004). Likewise, education can become a way in which students are equipped to engage against systems of oppression when existing structures in education are challenged.
"A central tenet of pedagogy maintains that the classroom, curricular, and school structures teachers enter are not neutral sites waiting to be shaped by educational professionals" (Kincheloe, 2004, p.2).
Critical pedagogy connects social justice and teaching/learning. Students are seen as active participants in the classroom, and students, alongside teachers, have power.
Critical pedagogy at its core seeks to recognize systems and patterns of oppression within society and education itself, and in doing so, decrease oppression and increase freedom. As such, social justice is at the core of critical pedagogy.
"Questions of democracy and justice cannot be separated from the most fundamental features of teaching and learning” (Kincheloe, 2004, p.6).
In order to decrease oppression and domination, critical pedagogy seeks to empower students through enabling them to recognize the ways in which "dominant power operates in numerous and often hidden ways" (Kincheloe). Students and instructors alike are empowered through their knowledge of the hidden influences and politics within education and throughout society that lead to oppression and domination.
In this system, teachers become students and students become teachers. Paulo Freire introduced the concept of the "banking model of education" as a criticism of passive learning (Freire, p.72). Critical pedagogy pushes against passive learning, which places the instructor in a position of much higher power than the student. Active learning is one method in which the instructor can become less powerful in the classroom by having students collaborate in creating the content of the course. Dialogue is also used as a form of education. By allowing many perspectives, students' and instructors' perspectives can be changed and learning takes place.
“We must expose the hidden politics of what is labeled neutral” (Kincheloe, 2004, p.10).
Encouraging Dialogue
Active Learning
Active learning gives students an opportunity to engage in the course using their own knowledge and personal experiences, as well as to learn using multiple methods of engagement. Active learning strategies such as group activities need to have clear expectations and roles, and instructors can check in to make sure students understand the expectations and roles. Brown University provides several examples of active learning strategies outlined below:
Small Discussion
Large Groups
Diverse Perspectives
Key Terms Introduced by Paulo Freire:
Banking Model of Education - On the banking model of education, students are empty receptacles and teachers hold the source of knowledge. Students are treated as passive and as lacking knowledge themselves. "Knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing" (Freire Institute).
Praxis (Action/Reflection) - "It is not enough for people to come together in dialogue in order to gain knowledge of their social reality. They must act together upon their environment in order critically to reflect upon their reality and so transform it through further action and critical reflection" (Freire Institute).
Dialogue - "To enter into dialogue presupposes equality amongst participants. Each must trust the others; there must be mutual respect and love (care and commitment). Each one must question what he or she knows and realize that through dialogue existing thoughts will change and new knowledge will be created" (Freire Institute).
Conscientization - "The process of developing a critical awareness of one’s social reality through reflection and action. Action is fundamental because it is the process of changing the reality. Paulo Freire says that we all acquire social myths which have a dominant tendency, and so learning is a critical process which depends upon uncovering real problems and actual needs" (Freire Institute).
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critical theory , Marxist-inspired movement in social and political philosophy originally associated with the work of the Frankfurt School . Drawing particularly on the thought of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud , critical theorists maintain that a primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help overcome the social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed. Believing that science, like other forms of knowledge, has been used as an instrument of oppression, they caution against a blind faith in scientific progress, arguing that scientific knowledge must not be pursued as an end in itself without reference to the goal of human emancipation. Since the 1970s, critical theory has been immensely influential in the study of history , law, literature , and the social sciences.
Critical education and problems of change — special issue call for manuscripts (updated & deadline extension).
CRITICAL EDUCATION AND PROBLEMS OF CHANGE
Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2024 Submission Types: Empirical and theoretical papers; interviews; practitioner field reports, experiential descriptions, or teaching examples Guest Editors: Kevin R. Magill ( [email protected] ) and Arturo Rodriguez
Special issue call: neoliberal capitalism and public education, current issue.
Defending and strengthening public education as a common good toward cross-border advocacy, from germ (global educational reform movement) to nerm (neoliberal educational reform madness), anti-crt attacks, school choice, and the privatization endgame, “data my ass” political rhizomes of power and the symbolic violence of neoliberal governance and privatization, is it a choice examining neoliberal influences in three ontario education reforms, connecting the dots between extreme ideologies, "parent choice" and education privatization in alberta and canada, co-opting equity advancing a neoliberal agenda in manitoba education reforms, resisting the heartbreak of neoliberalism in education advocacy, exposing the spectre resisting neoliberal education reforms in manitoba, unequal benefits: privatization and public education in canada, information.
ISSN 1920-4175 Critical Education
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Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.
The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.
In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.
School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.
This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.
Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.
To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.
One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT , including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.
(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)
The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.
Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)
Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.
Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”
All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.
Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.
Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.
Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.
As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.
An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can’t coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practice s or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.
As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that “white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized”; that “achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness”; and that “the United States was founded on racism.”
Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.
While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.
As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.
The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover.
Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?
It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.
It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.
As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law : “History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.”
The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and “action civics”—an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.
The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.
In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism . The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.
As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing “canon wars” over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called “ebonics” debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.
In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country’s history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other—between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.
A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavement—as well as Black Americans’ contributions to democratic reforms—at the center of American history.
The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.
“It’s because they’re nervous about broad social things, but they’re talking in the language of school and school curriculum,” said one historian of education. “That’s the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.”
The literature on critical race theory is vast. Here are some starting points to learn more about it, culturally relevant teaching, and the conservative backlash to CRT.
Brittany Aronson & Judson Laughter. “The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education: A Synthesis of Research Across Content Areas.” Review of Educational Research March 2016, Vol. 86 No. 1. (2016); Kimberlé Crenshaw, ed. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The New Press. (1996); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” American Educational Research Journal Vol. 32 No. 3. (1995); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol 11. No. 1. (1998); Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez. “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America.” Heritage Foundation. (2020); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York, NY: New York University Press. (2017); Shelly Brown-Jeffy & Jewell E. Cooper, “Toward a Conceptual Framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: An Overview of the Conceptual and Theoretical Literature.” Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2011.
A version of this article appeared in the June 02, 2021 edition of Education Week as What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?
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Over the past three decades, Ethiopia’s higher education system has undergone substantial expansion, marked by an increase in the number of universities from two to more than 100 and a surge in student enrollment from 48 000 to more than 400 000. Despite this growth, there is a paucity of research on the relationship between higher education expansion and economic growth, with the few quantitative studies that have been undertaken yielding inconsistent outcomes. This research study embraced endogenous economic growth theory, employed the Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) bound testing model, and used World Bank data from 1991 to 2021 to explore the relationship between economic growth (measured by GDP per capita) and the expansion of higher education (proxied by gross tertiary enrollment). Contrary to prevailing assumptions, the study uncovered an insignificant association between higher education expansion and economic growth. Unlike other studies, it used qualitative analysis to unearth the potential contributing factors and identified subpar educational quality, limited university autonomy, and constrained academic freedom as critical issues. It is recommended that policymakers in countries undergoing similar higher education expansion should not only focus on increasing the number of students, but also prioritise improving the quality of education, granting greater autonomy to universities, and ensuring academic freedom. These factors are crucial for higher education to effectively contribute to economic growth.
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We propose developing a critical theory of education for democratizing and reconstructing education to meet the challenges of a global and technological society. This involves articulating a metatheory for the philosophy of education and providing a historical genealogy and grounding of key themes of a democratic reconstruction of education which indicates what traditional aspects of education should be overcome and what alternative pedagogies and principles should reconstruct education in the present age. We draw on key ideas of John Dewey, Paolo Freire, and Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt school.
This article was originally published by Douglas Kellner as “Toward a Critical Theory of Education,” Democracy and Nature , Vol. 9, No. 1 (March 2003): 51–64. The article has been updated and revised in collaboration with Dr. Steve Gennaro and the co-authorship of this version of the chapter reflects and acknowledges this collaboration.
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Authors and affiliations.
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Douglas Kellner
Department of Humanities, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Steve Gennaro
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Correspondence to Douglas Kellner .
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Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Ali A. Abdi
Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
Greg William Misiaszek
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© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Kellner, D., Gennaro, S. (2022). Critical Theory and the Transformation of Education in the New Millennium. In: Abdi, A.A., Misiaszek, G.W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on Critical Theories of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86343-2_2
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86343-2_2
Published : 14 September 2022
Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN : 978-3-030-86343-2
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This presentation will discuss the implementation of Family Systems Theory and Critical Race Theory into the progressive disclosure of pediatric HIV. The theoretical foundation for progressive diagnostic disclosure is often outdated and does not consider the role of race and family systems. Our goal is to provide child life specialists with additional theoretical resources for assessing educational needs and delivering family-centered care.
Suggested Domain: Assessment, DEI
LEARNING OBJECTIVE(S):
- Participants will be able to describe the rationale for adding two additional theoretical approaches to their assessment and intervention process when educating children, youth, and families about HIV.
- Participants will be able to recite the details of family systems theory and critical race theory that align with the needs of children, youth, and families during HIV disclosure.
- Participants will be able to recall a case describing the integration of family systems theory and critical race theory into a new model for progressive diagnostic education.
- Participants will be able to list the steps involved in providing progressive diagnostic disclosure to children, youth, and families with HIV.
DISCLAIMERS
(1) This webinar has free registration for ACLP members from July 1st - 30th. Starting August 1, the webinar will be offered to members at standard webinar rates.
(2) All webinar content and its certificate will expire on 7/15/2027 regardless of when it is purchased, accessed, or completed. At that point, contents will no longer be available in any form, including as an archive or as a PDU certificate. It is the responsibility of the learner to complete the contents and download and save the certificate for their records before 7/15/2027 .
Associate clinical professor, texas woman's university.
Kathryn Cantrell, PhD, CCLS is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Human Development, Family Studies, and Counseling at Texas Woman’s University. Dr. Cantrell worked as a child life specialist for children and families with HIV at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and completed her doctorate in Counseling Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She trained as a pediatric psychologist working primarily with children with medical trauma. Using mixed methods, she researches illness disclosure, online patient communities, and racial disparities in pediatrics. Dr. Cantrell is a former executive editor of The Journal of Child Life and a current Research Fellow with the Association of Child Life Professionals.
Graduate student, tufts university.
Elena is a Certified Child Life Specialist working in the primary care center and infusion center at Boston Children’s Hospital. Throughout her academic career, Elena has had the opportunity to work in various research labs, whose focus ranged from language development to pediatric chronic pain. Her educational background includes an M.A. in Child Studies and Human Development from Tufts University and a B.A. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Minnesota.
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IMAGES
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Critical theory in education addresses the unequal distribution of funds, attention, and educational means amongst students. The goal of critical theory in education is to correct the unfair ...
One working definition of critical pedagogy is that it "is an educational theory based on the idea that schools typically serve the interests of those who have power in a society by, usually unintentionally, perpetually unquestioned norms for relationships, expectations, and behaviors" (Billings, 2019). Based on critical theory, it was ...
This chapter gives an overall introduction to critical theories essential to education, as we lay out the histories, reasoning, needs, and overall structure of the Palgrave Handbook on Critical Theories of Education.We discuss the five groundings that are the conceptual and theoretical thematic constructions of the book as follows: praxis-oriented, fluidity, radical, utopic with countless ...
Critical theory is a powerful analytic frame for understanding educational disparities and injustice as functions of power, domination, and exploitation. Often confused with other perspectives, critical theory centers economic, financial, and labor issues as central animating forces in oppression and domination.
4. Critical Theories Today. Marx defined critical theory as the "self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age" (Marx 1843). The vitality of this approach to critical theory depends on continually taking up this task in new social contexts, as the first generation of the Frankfurt School did.
A critical theory of education could draw on the reconstruction of Marxian, Deweyean, and Freirean critical pedagogies and attempt to develop Illichian tools and communities of conviviality and genuine learning that would promote democracy, social justice, and cultivate conceptions of the good life and society for all.
Paulo Freire is one of the most important critical educators of the twentieth century.[1] Not only is he considered one of the founders of critical pedagogy, but he also played a crucial role in developing a highly successful literacy campaign in Brazil before the onslaught of the junta in 1964. Once the military took over the government ...
"This is a groundbreaking and comprehensive volume with insightful and cutting-edge perspectives in critical theories of education. It is a timely and essential text which, in depth and scope, will be of great value for students and scholars in the full range of the subfields of education." (N'Dri Assié-Lumumba, Professor and Director of the Institute for African Development, Cornell ...
Critical pedagogy is the application of critical theory to education. For critical pedagogues, teaching and learning is inherently a political act and they declare that knowledge and language are not neutral, nor can they be objective. Therefore, issues involving social, environmental, or economic justice cannot be separated from the curriculum.
Paulo Freire (1921-1997) - Paulo Freire was a philosopher of education whose work became the foundation of critical pedagogy.Read more about Paulo Freire at the Freire Institute.; Henry Giroux (1943-Present) - A founding theorist in critical pedagogy, professor, and scholar.Read more about Giroux on Henry Giroux's website.; bell hooks (1952-Present) - A scholar, feminist, and activist whose ...
1 Pedagogy of non-domination: Neo-republican political theory and critical education, Itay Snir, Yuval Eylon, Policy Futures in Education 2016, Vol. 14(6) 759-774, DOI: 10.1177/ 1478210316650603. This article was inadvertently published early in a regular issue. It was intended for publication in the Special Issue 'Critical Pedagogy and ...
Abstract. In education, the areas of critical policy studies, critical cultural studies, and critical curriculum studies all owe a good deal to a number of people. Among them are Paulo Freire, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein, and Antonio Gramsci. Yet no such listing would be complete without the inclusion of Stuart Hall.
Critical theory, Marxist-inspired movement in social and political philosophy originally associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. Critical theorists maintain that a primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help overcome the social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed.
Critical Theory (capitalized) is a school of thought practiced by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, ... Critical theorists have widely credited Paulo Freire for the first applications of critical theory to education/pedagogy, ...
Freire is widely considered the grandfather of Critical Education Theory. Freire died of heart failure on 2 May 1997, in São Paulo. Pedagogy. There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and ...
The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. The Frankfurt School, known more appropriately as Critical Theory, is a philosophical and sociological movement spread across many universities around the world. It was originally located at the Institute for Social Research ( Institut für Sozialforschung ), an attached institute at the Goethe ...
Critical education. Field dependency. Transferability. Teaching criticality. Becoming an excellent critical thinker takes hard work, and hard work needs motivation. The job of the critical thinking teacher might usefully be seen as similar to the job of the coach.
CRITICAL EDUCATION AND PROBLEMS OF CHANGE. Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2024 Submission Types: Empirical and theoretical papers; interviews; practitioner field reports, experiential descriptions, or teaching examples Guest Editors: Kevin R. Magill ([email protected]) and Arturo Rodriguez Read More Read more about Critical Education and Problems of Change — Special issue call for ...
Critical Theory. J.J. Ryoo, P. McLaren, in International Encyclopedia of Education (Third Edition), 2010 This article defines critical theory within its historical context and describes how the legacy of Western and European philosophical traditions - through the Frankfurt School - has led to the creation of multiple and diverse critical theories around the world.
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or ...
Critical education policy research is a paramount endeavor, calling for scholars to engage with and employ critical theories, such as abolitionist frameworks and Black imaginaries (Daramola, 2024). These theoretical lenses can help guide scholarly inquiries and steer study implications toward equitable policy solutions.
Over the past three decades, Ethiopia's higher education system has undergone substantial expansion, marked by an increase in the number of universities from two to more than 100 and a surge in student enrollment from 48 000 to more than 400 000. Despite this growth, there is a paucity of research on the relationship between higher education expansion and economic growth, with the few ...
This study describes the experiences of fourteen Black male principals or heads of school navigating racialized spaces, including the politics of race, and experienced racism in educational settings as well as in school leadership. Data analysis utilized a critical race theory (CRT) and culturally sensitive methodological and interpretive ...
A critical theory of education with a critical intersectional approach could draw on the reconstruction of neo-Marxian, Deweyean, Freirean, and intersectional critical pedagogies of race, gender, and class to attempt to develop Illichian tools and communities of conviviality and genuine learning that would promote democracy, social justice, and ...
The Oklahoma State Board of Education voted unanimously to suspend Summer Boismier's teaching license Thursday, but did not revoke it, the latest move in a two-year fight between the former Norman High School teacher and state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters.. The board voted for the license suspension even though an assistant attorney general, during a hearing last June about the issue ...
Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, ... But one of their biggest priorities, a bill to ban "prohibited concepts" like critical race theory, failed to pass on the final day of the 2024 ...
W.E.B. DuBois's contributions to critical race studies in education: Sociology of education, classical critical race theory, and proto-critical pedagogy. In Lynn M., Dixson A. D. (Eds.), Handbook of critical race theory in education (pp. 69-87).
- Participants will be able to recall a case describing the integration of family systems theory and critical race theory into a new model for progressive diagnostic education. - Participants will be able to list the steps involved in providing progressive diagnostic disclosure to children, youth, and families with HIV. DISCLAIMERS