Why Rethinking Critical Pedagogy (RCP)?
Our journal’s name is RCP as we propose reconsidering Critical Pedagogy (CP) the ways in which to make CP stronger in terms of its theoretical basis and practical aspects. There have been number of problems in CP world that has colonized, in Habermas’ word, our academic lifeworld. CP has already become a set of theories that is largely disconnected from educational practices. Whereas there should be a dialectical relation between theory and practice, which Marx considers as praxis. The perspective that Marx indicates in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach—”Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” should be our main inspiration and point of departure. We are not here to be mere contribution to CP: We long to unpack historical evolvement of CP that has turned CP to opaque and impractical.
First, line of thoughts such as liberalism, neoliberalism, post-colonialism, and critical race theory etc. stripped CP of its revolutionary mission, and then domesticated it. CP has been overshadowed by culture politics and identity politics. Instead of being a language of oppressed in educational context, CP became an instrument for middle and upper middle class educational projects, a speculative intellectual discussions, and some mystic projects.
Secondly, along with Western Marxist tendencies, in pedagogical analysis, domains like ‘identity’, ‘narrative’ and ‘text’ turned to be the dominant concepts; race, ethnicity, and culture became the prime unit of analysis. And class-based identity and discrimination have been largely overlooked. CP researchers often times eschew class-based discrimination in their studies. Having removed class-based discrimination from the list actually makes it difficult to link the other domains of discrimination with one another within a consistent theoretical framework.
Thirdly, there has been a serious disorientation in CP world. CP, instead of establishing dialectical connection between agency of change and dominant system in education, has become, as Freire mentioned, a kind of (pedagogical) therapy. CP researchers seem to have neglected enlightenment-based dialectical approach and instead heavily relied on postmodern references to address to issues of diversity, equity, justice and identity; their studies have mostly focused on superstructure and largely ignored substructure. Therefore they have mostly failed to capture how structural changes in economy impact education.
Fourthly, CP has long ended up in a vicious cycle of being ‘a theory of theory’. Unfortunately, there has been almost no authentic and field-based study that is crucial to keep theory and practice connected. There is almost no classroom-based research study. Although some ethnographic studies exist, they are not comprehensive enough to provide new conceptual insights; instead they either repeat and confirm ideas of known-figures in CP. Therefore, RCP should like to be an open platform for new-authentic studies that captures local and universal context in education. Finally, as Giroux says, CP should be a language of possibilities and it is currently not so. As CP mostly focuses on super-structure, and overlook base-structure of system, it fails to develop a vision oriented towards transformation. In this sense, RCP is to focus on transformative studies in light of 11th thesis.
Due to the current pandemic, global capitalism faces an economic crisis, political legitimacy issue and social depression. This provides us with a great opportunity to reorient CP as to build transformative conscious and agency of change to challenge oppression and exploitation of global capitalism. However, these kinds of transformative educational changes are possible if they are linked to and integrated with a larger society and system. For example, due to school closures, online-distance education became a popular topic of discussions over education. This revealed that there were a great number of students, regardless of their race and ethnic background, who were deprived of Internet access in this age of technology as well as other basic needs; poverty has been and still is the common denominator of the problem (This reminds us the importance of base-structure of a society to understand discrimination and exploitation).
In this sense, CP needs to investigate oppressive and liberating potentials of distance-online education in a larger economic, political and social context. But our analysis fails to establish a dialectical connection between base-stricture and superstructure; between a process of exploitation at workplace/factory and oppressive education in schools, it would be very difficult to detect root causes of oppression and exploitation of the dominant system. Therefore CP should draw on both base and super-structure as to capture discrimination, exploitation and oppression in education and develop theories and practices to challenge them. That is to say, CP should offer practical insights of teaching and learning that educators can apply to their classroom with a revolutionary vision.
CP itself cannot lead to a political revolution; but it would educate people (students) as to be agency of change to make that revolution happen. Revolution necessities a struggle and mobilization at macro level. However revolution is not a matter of capturing political power and redesign the society from top to down. While a student in school is subject to oppressive education, s/he may not simply be a passive object of the system. Students can be agency of change as they have will power. And CP should focus on types of teaching and learning to help students to develop that agency.
The word critical is hijacked by mainstream academic literature; it is crucial to reclaim criticism and its tradition. RCP considers the word ‘critical’ of critical pedagogy as a systematic approach to education draws on ideological-political substantiations rooted in enlightenment tradition rather than a reactionary attitude: it is a dialectic criticism, not just any criticism. Therefore, CP posses a significant power to analyze root causes of oppression and discrimination in relation to a larger socioeconomic and sociopolitical structure. In this sense, CP can offer an educational perspective both in theory and practice to change the world; and that power comes from Marxist methodology and its revolutionary essence that sets a dialectical relation between local and universal, and finds diversity in unity.
RCP does not consider CP as a set of cookbook style suggestions. An educational practice that was proven to be successful in a certain country-region may not be applicable to other places in the world in a mechanical sense. Instead that practice may provide us with a new vision to conceptualize similar issues in different places in the world to establish a coherent connection between local and global. We live in a world colonized by neoliberal hegemony. To be able to produce counter hegemonic educational practices, CP needs to take advantage of ideas of thinkers-educators who have made significant contribution to CP literature. By doing so, CP can develop a consistent standpoint over issues such as tension between nation-states and globalization, poverty, equity-justice, climate changes, environmental issues, advanced technology that comes with a new form of oppression and exploitation. And we can do this all together. Journal RCP aims to be an open platform for that kind of collective sayings, thinking and doings.
Editorial Board
Dr. Bülent Avcı
Prof.Dr. Ulaş Başar Gezgin
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