What is critical pedagogy?
Just as community colleges were founded the principles of social justice - providing educational access and democratizing higher education - critical pedagogy seeks to empower students by providing them with a democratic and emancipatory education.
Critical pedagogy encourages "habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional cliches, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse."1
Why critical pedagogy?
Critical pedagogy encourages students to examine and challenge the very academic system in which they are learning, exposing and questioning the hidden social, cultural and political processes that at are a part of knowledge production.
- Critical pedagogy is grounded on a social and educational vision of justice and equality.
- Critical pedagogy is constructed on the belief that education is inherently political.
- Critical pedagogy is dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering.2
- 1Empowering Education, Ira Shor, 1992
- 2Critical Pedagogy Primer, Joe L. Kincheloe, 2005.
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