Critical pedagogy has put forth the notion that classroom practice integrates
particular curriculum content and design, instructional strategies and techniques,
and forms of evaluation. It argues that these specify a particular version about
what knowledge is of most worth, what it means to know something, and how
we might construct a representation of our world and our place within it
(McLaren 1998). From this perspective, the pedagogical is inherently political.
For us a decolonizing pedagogy encompasses both an anticolonial and
decolonizing notion of pedagogy and an anticolonial and decolonizing
pedagogical praxis.
From Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Justice
First, any framework for intercultural education that does not have as its central
and overriding premise a commitment to the establishment and maintenance of
an equitable and just world can be seen as a tool, however well-intentioned, of an
educational colonization in which inequity and injustice are reproduced under
the guise of interculturalism. Secondly, transcending a colonizing intercultural
education requires in educators deep shifts in consciousness rather than the
simple pragmatic or programmatic shifts that too often are described as
intercultural education.
From “Good Intentions Are Not Enough” by Paul Gorski
It takes courage to interrogate yourself. It takes courage to look in the mirror and
see past your reflection to who you really are when you take off the mask, when
you're not performing the same old routines and social roles. It takes courage to
ask how did I become so well-adjusted to injustice?
It takes courage to cut against the grain and become nonconformist. It takes
courage to wake up and stay awake instead of engaging in complacent slumber.
It takes courage to shatter conformity and cowardice.
The courage to love truth is one of the preconditions to thinking critically.
~From Hope on a Tightrope by Cornel West
The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old
patterns, no matter how cleverly arranged to imitate progress, still condemn us
to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt,
hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion.
For we have built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old
structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter
the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools
will never dismantle the master’s house.
As Paolo Friere shows so well...the true focus of revolutionary change is never
merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the
oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the
oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.
~From “Age, Race, Class, Sex” by Audre Lorde
The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be
created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of
possibility. In the field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for
freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and
heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move
beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.
~From Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks