Tricia M. Kress

Inside the ‘thick wrapper’ of critical pedagogy and research

This introduction provides a broad overview of the many ‘whys’ (existential, political, professional, and personal) for embracing critical pedagogy and critical research, which are reflected in this special issue as a whole. Scholar‐practitioners of critical pedagogy and critical research hail from many disciplines and utilize various theories and methods, but all share the common goal of ‘humanizing’ education and research. Individually, the articles illustrate the many ‘ways’ and ‘whys’ of critical pedagogy and critical research. As a collection, the articles are representational of the power of the bricolage for the ‘doing of’ critical pedagogy and critical research.

Stepping out of the academic brew: using critical research to break down hierarchies of knowledge production

Critical theory and critical research are undeniably useful for revealing oppressive social structures and challenging the status quo in the realm of grand theory; yet, they are also useful for creating knowledge structures when academics deploy them on the ground. This article explores how critical theory and critical research can be used to critique hierarchies of knowledge in academia and society in order to create new opportunities for learning and researching dialogically, a process that the author calls, ‘stepping out of the academic brew’. Using the concept of REDO (reveal, examine, dismantle, open) and an example of critical research done with and by urban high school students, the author offers a framework for how critical researchers (with the help of those with whom they work) might begin flattening hierarchical knowledge structures in education, in themselves, and in life.

Teaching/Learning Radical Listening: Joe’s Legacy Among Three Generations of Practitioners

In this chapter, three generations of critical educators who have learned from Joe’s legacy put side-by-side their experiences with coming to, teaching with, and learning from radical listening. In doing so, the authors explore radical listening via their work in graduate, undergraduate, and high school contexts, offering a definition of radical listening as praxis that aims to inspire other practitioners to listen for, and within, difference. The chapter illuminates the ways in which radical listening is a needed resistance to the loquacious contexts in which we teach and research, even—and especially—in critical contexts, in which particular perspectives can be ignored or marginalized. In listening to one another’s radical listening attempts, practices, and failures, the authors highlight how the praxis positions them again and again as learners-teachers. Keywords: radical listening, critical constructivism, praxis

We Saved the Best for You

As standardization and “accountability” have continued to increase in the 21st century, educators and scholars of education have become increasingly frustrated. Yet as frustrated as we are, it is essential that we not send to our students, children and grandchildren the message that the past was better and they “should have been there.” Instead, we must render a clear vision of what can be. Indeed, where would we be without the vision that has freely been given to us from great scholars, philosophers, and artists, as well as our own teachers, friends, neighbors, and family? We are indebted to carry forward the legacy of these torch bearers to present and future educators. This book is a collection of letters to 21st century educators of all age levels and content areas. It has been compiled with the goal of fulfilling our responsibility to share with the next generation of educators our vision of the future, just as our predecessors and role models shared theirs with us. Informed by the past but oriented toward the future, this collection aims to inspire in present and future educators hope, wisdom and imagination for addressing the educational challenges shaped by bureaucratic, economic and cultural forces. Authors such as Nel Noddings, Sonia Nieto, Sandy Grande, Riane Eisler, Mike Rose, William Schubert, William Reynolds, and many more speak directly to their readers, building a relationship with a scholarly backbone, and encouraging: “we saved the best for you” because “the best” is the world you will create.

Mamma Don’t Put That Blue Guitar in a Museum: Greene and Freire’s Duet of Radical Hope in Hopeless Times

Within the current U.S. sociopolitical context of rampant violence, increasing levels of racism and xenophobia in society and the rise of authoritarianism in schools, a new and fresh confluence of Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire’s work revitalizes and expands the concept of radical hope. Their educational philosophies enable us to see beyond “what is” into more democratically just and humane worlds of “what might” be. This article focuses on ways that these two scholar-activists’ key contributions converge to release a much needed melody that exposes exploitation and falsehood while inspiring wide awakeness, personal reflection, and directed action. In these incredibly perilous and uncertain times, we can ill afford to relegate Greene and Freire’s key concepts to museum spaces of displaying past history. In fact, we believe that their ideas and lived experiences have increased in relevance over time. So we begin with a central anchor point in Greene’s work: the blue guitar as a metaphor of imagination. Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man with a Blue Guitar” is about an imaginary conversation the poet has with Picasso’s 1903 painting “The Old Guitarist.” This painting depicts a blind and destitute guitarist bending over a guitar. The plight of those in poverty was quite real to Picasso during this period when he himself was in dire material straights while creating this work. In the painting, the guitar is rendered in stark contrast to the player’s physical condition. Through this juxtaposition, Picasso expresses the power of artistic creation as a means of personal expression and agency in an otherwise desolate context of life. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” responds to that artwork, interpreting it as a means to resist “things as they are” and create new spaces of solidarity. This poem is a significant thread that weaves through Maxine Greene’s philosophy of aesthetic education and aligns with her educational philosophy in profound ways. For both Stevens and Greene, the blue guitar is a metaphor for imagination’s power to awaken resistance to the dehumanization of the status quo while envisioning new landscapes

Maxine Greene and the pedagogy of social imagination: An intellectual genealogy

During this centennial year of Maxine Greene’s birth (1917–2017), we recognize the importance of celebrating and reflecting on her life and work in terms of her intellectual genealogy within the context of her most valuable contributions to public life and free thought. As guest editors of this issue of Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, we address the idea that Greene would have wanted to be remembered as part of an unfinished conversation with John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Paulo Freire, and a host of others who have informed and been informed by her work. Greene was a prolific scholar who dialogued with philosophers, social theorists, community activists, writers, musicians, and artists. She was a much sought-after speaker for educators and academics alike. In a time when the arts, even canonical fiction texts, are being reduced or eliminated in public schools, Greene’s work reminds us that social imagination is stunted without the arts. Artistic ways of knowing allow for people to see beyond their own worlds and beyond “what is” into other worlds of “what was” and “what might” be some day. Never simply about art for art’s sake, Greene’s work connects people’s lived lives with politics and education as she shares with her readers her intellectual encounters with artistic texts, sociopolitical currents, and the education of generations yet to come. The resultant “pedagogy of social imagination”—itself an artistic rendering of how these various domains of social life intermingle and inform each other—helps readers to understand that democracy and freedom are fragile and always must be worked in and on in an ever-long project of community building that requires an active re-visioning of the past and present for a new future. In the contemporary moment that is increasingly characterized by what she called “the passive gaze that is the hallmark of our time” (Greene 2001, 13), Greene’s pedagogy of social imagination needs to be echoed, enlarged, and acted upon. We take up this charge in response to the emergence of an authoritative and violent political and educational climate that undermines imaginative thinking productive for the flourishing of people and the planet. One need only tune into the spectacle of the Trump presidential candidacy in the United States. Indeed, as Henry Giroux (2015) notes in the essay “Donald Trump and the Ghosts of Totalitarianism”:

Doing critical educational research: a conversation with the research of John Smyth

As neoliberalism marches forward further pitching the global landscape in the economic and political favor of corporations and wealthy elite, communities of colonized, minoritized, and impoverished...

Teaching towards Democracy with Postmodern and Popular Culture Texts

Traditional and accountability-era expectations for students at both K-12 and university levels have included prescribed and template approaches to writing as well as narrow text analysis governed by New Criticism and more recent calls for “close reading.” This chapter explores incorporating text adaptations as a guiding set of units for honoring student choice in their writing, reading, and text analysis, what Johns (2008) calls “genre awareness.” After exploring the need to shift paradigms away from prescriptive literacy to critical literacy and the paradox of choice, the chapter offers a sample adaptation unit grounded in zombie narratives, anchored by Max Brooks’s World War Z. Across the US, children are apt to read, or be required to read, a reasonably common curriculum of writing from a loose cannon of literature, among that experience is likely to include Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” as a chilling example of the power of fictional short stories. However, when Jackson’s story first appeared in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, letters swamped the magazine’s office: [Jackson] said that of all the letters that came in that summer – they eventually numbered more than three hundred, by her count – only thirteen were kind, “and they were mostly from friends.” The rest, she wrote with mordant humor, were dominated by three main themes: “bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse.” Readers wanted to know where such lotteries were held, and whether they could go and watch; they threatened to cancel their New Yorker subscriptions; they declared the story a piece of trash. (Franklin, 2013, n.p.) A number of readers, it seems, believed the story to be non-fiction: “The fact that so many readers accepted ‘The Lottery’ as truthful is less astonishing than it now seems, since at the time The New Yorker did not designate its stories as fact or fiction” (Franklin, n.p.). Fast-forward to Oprah Winfrey selecting James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, her book club prompting the work to be a best-seller and Frey, a well-known writer. However, this fame and celebrity would be short-lived since a controversy

“Clankers,” “Darwinists,” and Criticality

This chapter explores the critical literacy potential of the steampunk literature genre by examining Leviathan, the young adult steampunk novel written by Scott Westerfeld. Often subsumed under the genres of science or speculative fiction, steampunk is a genre all its own that takes as its point of departure the Victorian era when steam technology ruled. By reinterpreting history, steampunk literature demonstrates that what we think, what we do, and how we act, right now in the present as in the past, matters and contributes to the creation of an unforeseen future.

Reclaiming the Sane Society

Erich Fromm’s body of work, written more than 50 years ago, was prophetic of the contemporary moment: Increasingly, global society is threatened by the many-headed monster of corporate greed, neo-liberalism, nihilism, extreme fundamentalist beliefs, and their resulting effects on the natural world and the lived lives of people. Fromm clearly warned us of the peril of the misuse of technology and the destructive nature of man’s perverse desire to possess, control and/or destroy. Through his theories of having vs. being, the importance of hope as active resistance, and his notion of freedom as the capacity to love self, and others, Fromm encouraged his readers to cultivate biophilic ways of being in the world that will counter and heal the impending necrophilic plunder of man’s hubris. This multi-authored volume sheds new light on Fromm’s forgotten role in the formation of contemporary thought through an engaging variety of reflexive and historical narratives from fields of sociology, clinical psychology, political science, critical theory of religion and education. Key concepts from his body of work are interpreted and expressed in ways that offer hopeful and humane alternatives to the present global conditions of despair, greed and depersonalization.