Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy An Introduction EXPLORATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE Volume 1 Series Editors Joe L. Kincheloe, Canada Research Chair of Critical Pedagogy, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Shirley R. Steinberg, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Editorial Board Christine Quail, State University of New York, Oneonta, USA John Willinsky, Stanford University, USA Barrie Barrell, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada Leila Villaverde, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA Rochelle Brock, University of Indiana, Gary, USA Stephen Petrina, University of British Columbia, Canada Nelson Rodriguez, College of New Jersey, USA Series Scope In today’s dominant modes of pedagogy, questions about issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, colonialism, religion, and other social dynamics are rarely ask ed. Questions about the social spaces where pedagogy takes place - in schools, media, and corporate think tanks - are not raised. And the y need to be. The Explorations of Educational Purpose book series can help establish a rene wed interest in such questions and their centrality in the larger study of education and the preparation of teachers and other educational professionals. The editors of this series feel that education matters and that the w orld is in need of a rethinking of education and educational purpose. Coming from a critical pedagogical orientation, Explorations of Educational Purpose aims to have the study of education transcend the trivialization that often degrades it. Rather than be content with the frivolous, scholarly lax forms of teacher education and weak teaching prevailing in the world today, we should work towards education that truly takes the unattained potential of human beings as its starting point. The series will present studies of all dimensions of education and of fer alternatives. The ultimate aim of the series is to create new possibilities for people around the world who suffer under the current design of socio-politic al and educational institutions. For further volumes http://www.springer.com/series/7472 Joe L. Kincheloe Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy An Introduction Joe L. Kincheloe Canada Research Chair of Critical Pedagogy McGill University Montreal, Quebec Canada [email protected] ISBN: 978-1-4020-8223-8 e-ISBN: 978-1-4020-8224-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2008921931 © 2008 Springer Science + Business Media B.V. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocop ying, microf ilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com To Marisa Terrenzio-El-Jaoui, Administrative Officer of the Department of Integrated Studies in the Faculty of Education, McGill University. A brilliant woman, a gifted administrator, and a treasured friend and colleague. v Preface We live in an era of disinformation—self-interested data distrib uted by those with the most power and resources. One need look no f arther than the debate o ver how the U.S. and Great Britain came to initiate the bloody, unnecessary, and geo-politi- cally damaging Iraq War. Every few days a new book is published about the “bad information” that was developed and then circulated by Anglo-American political operatives. From the testimon y of those who were the most pri vy to the construc- tion of this kno wledge of the certain e xistence of weapons of mass destruction, yellowcake uranium, Iraqi complicity in 9/11, secret al-Qaeda-Iraqi connections, ad infinitum, we begin to learn quite amazing lessons about the production, validation, and deployment of knowledge at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first cen- tury. And the lessons are disconcerting and e ven frightening. This book emerges from these types of concerns. I am profoundly interested in analyzing in a w ay that a wide audience can gain access to the multiple and com- plex factors that shape contemporary kno wledge and the concurrent production of ideological consciousness that results. I come from the critical pedagogical tradi- tion that understands that people around the w orld constantly ha ve to deal with modes of oppression emerging from dominant power. This means that those of us who are not part of such oppressi ve power networks have to constantly struggle to develop the skills to cut through the kno wledge jungle created by po wer wielders to perpetuate their own privilege and suppress the possibility of challenges such as the one outlined in this book. I belie ve that a thirst for kno wledge is a central dimension of being alive and active in the world. In the neo-liberal, mark et-domi- nated, corporate media saturated, globalized world of the contemporary era, I have never been so parched for the pure water of transformative information. Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction is a quest for such w ater. The central f igure in the founding of critical pedagogy , Paulo Freire, wrote of the necessity of what he called an epistemological curiosity. This notion lays the foundation for this book. The great Brazilian educator’s notion of an epistemologi- cal curiosity was quite a simple concept that was profoundly complex in its applica- tion in the politics of knowledge and in education both in a media and a schooling context. When we possess such a curiosity we are not content to learn about an object in and of itself. We have to understand how it came to be deemed sufficiently vii viii Preface important to find its way onto the media or to be part of a certif ied school curricu- lum. Whose interest does such information serve? What was the process of its pro- duction? What is it reason for being? One can quickly understand ho w such an epistemological curiosity and the questions it raises changes fore ver our relation- ship to knowledge and the way we think of it in both a media and schooling context. With such a concept in mind we could ne ver again just simply transfer f act A into mind B without appreciating the comple xity of all the f actors that have shaped an information fragment (a factoid) into certified knowledge for public consumption. In this context reporting on or teaching about po verty does not simply in volve providing statistics on how many people in a particular society are poor. In a critical context fueled by Freire’ s epistemological curiosity we w ould study why po verty exists, what it is like to live on a day-to-day basis in poverty, and what can be done to alleviate poverty around the world. Thus, there is a profound difference between a traditional understanding of po verty and a critical understanding of po verty. The same is true of a traditional and a critical understanding of any phenomenon we can imagine. There is f ar more about kno wledge and its production and certif ication than we can presently imagine. This is where we be gin to understand one of the major themes of the book: the notion that our epistemological curiosity mo ves us to search for di verse sources of information. W e don’t just take our data from the elite kno wledge producers who publish in the most prestigious academic jour - nals—we look for kno wledge in a v ariety of places. Man y of these locales in the dominant matrix of po wer are lo w-status places. Indeed, it is in these lo w status places that we often f ind the most transformati ve of insights that change ours and many other people’s lives. Over my 35 years of being a teacher , professor, speaker, cultural w orker, and researcher, I’ve been asked many times: “where did you come up with the perspec- tive on schools or media that you used in your article or speech—I’ ve never heard such a point of view before?” Oftentimes my answer involves telling the inquisitor that I simply listened to people who had been deemed failures by the larger society or by the schools the y attended. Such indi viduals, I ha ve learned o ver the years, often possess some of the most compelling insights into what is actually happening, into how people are seriously harmed by institutions ostensibly constructed to help them improve their lives. Such an emphasis on the power of difference, on gaining new perspectives from individuals who come from a dif ferent locale in the social web of reality is central to my purpose here. This power of difference—or as Paulo Freire (1997) articulated it, “a viable no velty”—is key to an ever-expanding sense of criticality. This evolving criticality is dedicated to a never-ending search for new ways of seeing, for new social and cultural experiences that provide novel concepts that we can use to better understand and change the w orld in a progressive way. Central to this e volving criticality is humility . Here we realize that we do not know, and in our f allibility we w ork with people from di verse socio-economic classes, genders, se xualities, races, and ethnicities both at home and around the world to o vercome our ignorance. In this conte xt our humility is balanced by a confidence that with the help of di verse others we can kno w better what we don’ t now understand. In this process, we can de velop forms of transformati ve, critical Preface ix knowledges that at present do not e xist.