critical learning theory in education

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Critical Pedagogy

• Introduction to Critical Pedagogy

About this Guide

What is critical pedagogy, why is critical pedagogy important.

• Types of Critical Pedagogy
• Getting Started with Critical Pedagogy
• Publications in Critical Pedagogy

Critical Pedagogy Research Librarian

This guide gives an overview to critical pedagogy and its vitalness to teaching and education. It is not comprehensive, but is meant to give an introduction to the complex topic of critical pedagogy and impart an understanding of its deeper connection to critical theory and education.

One working definition of critical pedagogy is that it “is an educational theory based on the idea that schools typically serve the interests of those who have power in a society by, usually unintentionally, perpetually unquestioned norms for relationships, expectations, and behaviors” (Billings, 2019). Based on critical theory, it was first theorized in the US in the 70s by the widely-known Brazilian educator Paolo Freire in his canonical book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2018), but has since taken on a life of its own in its application to all facets of teaching and learning. The "pedagogy of the oppressed," or what what we know today to be the basis of critical pedagogy, is described by Freire as:

"...a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade...[It] sis an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization." (p. 48)

Perhaps a more straightforward definition of critical pedagogy is "a radical approach to education that seeks to transform oppressive structures in society using democratic and activist approaches to teaching and learn" (Braa & Callero, 2006).

There are many applications of theory-based pedagogy that privilege minoritarian thought such as antiracist pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, engaged pedagogy, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and social justice, to name a few.

Billings, S. (2019). Critical pedagogy. Salem press encyclopedia. New York: Salem Press.

Braa, D., & Callero, P. (2006, October). Critical pedagogy and classroom praxis. Teaching Sociology, 34 , 357-369.

Freire, P. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Critical Pedagogy is an important framework and tool for teaching and learning because it:

• recognizes systems and patterns of oppression within society at-large and education more specifically, and in doing so, decrease oppression and increase freedom
• empowers students through enabling them to recognize the ways in which "dominant power operates in numerous and often hidden ways
• offers a critique of education that acknowledges its political nature while spotlighting the fact that it is not neutral
• encourages students and instructors to challenge commonly accepted assumptions that reveal hidden power structures, inequities, and injustice

Kincheloe, J. L. (2004). Critical pedagogy primer. P. Lang.

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13 Critical Pedagogy

At the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Identify key elements of social reconstructionism and critical pedagogy
• Explain the major tenets of critical pedagogy and how they can be utilized to support instruction
• Summarize the criticisms of critical pedagogy and educational implications

Scenario: Ms. Barrows woke in the middle of the night to rethink her unit on ratios. Students seemed totally uninterested. She thought back to her own schooling and recalled the teacher who made the difference in her schooling, the one who encouraged the students to consider different points of view on contemporary and historic events and develop critical questions that connected to their own lives. Ms. Barrows recalled how she and her classmates had conducted a role play and hotly debated the issues. The students ultimately wrote letters to their city council about the issues. They felt they were actually doing something about it. It did not feel like school work, and it ultimately drew Ms. Barrows to the teaching profession. Through the years, Ms. Barrows had become the “expert teacher” who mastered her content area with great pride. Her lesson plans had not changed much from year to year, and they were becoming rather tiring, even to her.

Thinking about this special teacher, Ms. Barrows knew her learning activities needed to engage the students with something meaningful, something they would care about. Thinking about the legacy of the institutions that informed the social fabric upon which her students exist, it became clear that provisioning an environment where students could analyze disparities and act on them would provide a relevant topic in which to explore ratios.

After a long night of contemplation and rumination, she began to plan a lesson on income inequality, showing salaries of famous athletes, rappers, politicians, social media celebrities, teachers, construction and restaurant workers. She found some Youtube videos profiling these individuals to draw students in at the start. She built in places for students to express their ideas on the topic and feel the impact on their own lives. She took students through the concepts of ratios and created relevant word problems for students to solve. Depending on the students and the learning experience, Ms. Barrows knew she wanted to create space for students to come up with next steps, not just with math but with this topic of income inequality. She knew she had to see where the learning experience took them, that she had to open herself up to this uncertainty, that her students needed to decide what was important to them and co-create next steps in the learning.

As you read about critical pedagogy, consider how important it is for educators to know what is meaningful to their students, and how this involves getting to know their students. Students are not blank slates. They are full of rich stories and experiences, and effective critical educators seek to engage those stories and experiences.These educators know that  learning must be co-constructed and that they need to engage students in things they care about.

What kind of questions could such a photo elicit? Consider the rich discussion possibilities on the concepts of freedom, fear and love.

Introduction.

What is Social Reconstructionism?

Social reconstructionism was founded as a response to the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust to assuage human cruelty. Social reform in response to helping prepare students to make a better world through instilling liberatory values. Critical pedagogy emerged from the foundation of the early social reconstructionist movement.

What is Critical Pedagogy?

Critical pedagogy is the application of critical theory to education. For critical pedagogues, teaching and learning is inherently a political act and they declare that knowledge and language are not neutral, nor can they be objective. Therefore, issues involving social, environmental, or economic justice cannot be separated from the curriculum. Critical pedagogy’s goal is to emancipate marginalized or oppressed groups by developing, according to Paulo Freire, conscientização, or critical consciousness in students.

Critical pedagogy de-centers the traditional classroom, which positions teachers at the center. The curriculum and classroom with a critical pedagogy stance is student-centered and focuses its content on social critique and political action. Such educators propose a liberatory practice, in which the central purpose of educators is to liberate and to humanize students in today’s schools so that they can reach their full potential. Using power analyses, they seek to undo structural societal inequities through the work of schooling. They emphasize the importance of the relationship between educators and students, as well as the co-creation of knowledge. Education is a way to freedom.

Major influences on the formation of critical pedagogy: John Dewey, W.E.B. Dubois, Carter G. Woodson, Myles Horton, Herbert Kohl, Paulo Freire, Maxine Greene, Henry Giroux, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, Martin Carnoy, Michael Apple, bell hooks, Jean Anyon, Stanley Aronowitz, Peter McLaren, Donaldo Macedo, Michelle Fine

Paulo Freire: 1921-1997

Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in the northeastern city of Recife in Brazil’s poorest region, Pernambuco. Much of Brazil’s citizenry were impoverished and illiterate, and run by a small group of wealthy landowners.  Freire’s family was middle class but experienced hardships, especially during the Great Depression. His father died in 1934 and Paulo struggled to support his family and finish his studies. After completing his studies, Freire went on to work in a state-sponsored literacy campaign. It was here that Freire began to interact with the peasant struggle. Freire was nominated to lead Brazil’s National Commission of Popular Culture in 1963  under the liberal-populist government of João Goulart whose government created many policies to assist the poor such as mass literacy campaigns. As is often the case, these reforms were opposed by the upper classes who eventually supported the military coup which overthrew the government and installed a right-wing dictatorship. Freire was imprisoned for his political leanings and role with literacy reforms. Upon his release from prison, Freire went into exile for a number of years, returning in 1980 to become the secretary of education for the state of  São Paulo.

  Image 13.4

It was during his exile that Freire wrote the book which would make him globally famous.   Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in Portuguese in 1968, and in English in 1970 has had tremendous influence on educators worldwide. As people struggled for civil rights across the globe in the 1970s, Freire’s work had popular appeal. “However, [Freire’s] enduring popularity and influence attests to another, even more intractable context: even as many more people around the world have access to education, schooling everywhere remains intertwined with systems of oppression, including racism and capitalism, and traditional models of top-down education don’t work well for everyone” (Featherstone).

Freire’s critique of education was replicated and perpetuated the classist inequitable society, feeding oppressed workers into the capitalist structure. He wrote that  our educational systems have the potential to liberate or oppress their students, and in the process humanize or dehumanize their students. Freire argues that people live one of two ways: humanized or dehumanized, and that this is the central problem of humankind. Freire argued that people become dehumanized because of unjust systems, systems that provide access to some and not to others.

Freire highlighted the power dynamic between teacher and students and critiqued the power that teachers held with the supposed “truth” of their opinions and curriculum (what should be taught in a particular discipline), as well as their evaluation of students.  Freire critiques the  traditional frame of the teacher as the authority or expert and the students as “empty vessels” or sometimes referred to as “blank slates.”

Freire coined the term “the banking method” for the way in which traditionally teachers deposit information into their students, as if they are empty vessels or receptacles. Students become oppressed through this system of education where they learn to memorize and regurgitate the facts deposited in them by their teachers. Students in these systems, in fact, come to expect such oppression and are in fact upset when their teachers do not take on the expert role. Freire believed that the traditional model creates a kind of ignorance where students are unable to critique knowledge and power, and are in fact dependent on their expert teachers.

In fact, Freire believed this mentality makes students vulnerable to oppression in their lives moving forward: at work, school, and in society at large. Freire believes it is critical for students to participate in this process of learning, to liberate themselves.

“For apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (Freire).

Freire proposes to overthrow the traditional hierarchy in the classroom. Liberation and humanization result from what Freire referred to as “dialogical” interaction between teachers and students and a co-creation of knowledge and learning. He came to understand that true liberation comes about through dialogue between the teacher and student, where they learn from each other.

“The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them” (Freire).  This pedagogy creates an environment of mutual respect, love, and understanding and leads students toward liberation. Freire believed that it is important that oppressed people define the world in their own terms. It is only with this common language (defined by the oppressed) that dialogue can begin. The concept of a superiority or hierarchy  of educators such as a teacher has no place in Freire’s classroom. Dialogue must engage everyone equally.

bell hooks: 1952- 2021

Image 13.5 “to educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. that learning process comes easier to those of us who teach who also believe there is an aspect to our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. to teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.” (hooks).

bell hooks was born with the name Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952 in a segregated town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky to a working-class African American family. She was one of six children. Her mother worked as a maid for a White family and her father was a janitor. Eventually she took on the name of her great-grandmother, to honor her female lineage, spelling it in all lowercase letters to focus attention on her message rather than herself. She has written many books, and initially famous for her work as a Black post modern queer feminist and her first published work Aint I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism in 1981. She taught English and Ethnic Studies for many years at a variety of institutions of higher learning. She wrote books on many topics including multiple forms of oppression, racism, patriarchy, Black men, masculinity, self-help, engaged pedagogy, personal memoirs, sexuality, feminism, and identity.

bell hooks grew up in segregated schools which provided shining examples of what schooling could be. Bell loved her Black teachers and describes school as a place of ecstasy and joy. Her black teachers were committed to nurturing intellect and activism among their Black students. They considered learning especially for Black people in the US, an important political act, a way to counter White racist colonization. These teachers made it their mission to know their parents and communities. Bell describes how these missionary Black teachers saw this important work as uplifting the race and provided a level of caring  for the whole child, in order for that child to survive in a racist society.  Bell’s disillusionment with education began with school integration, when she was bussed across town to White schools, where schooling was about ideas and no longer the whole person. She continued to feel disillusioned when she entered higher education.

hooks describes Paulo Friere as a mentor for he embraced the idea that learning could be liberatory. At a time when hooks had become quite disillusioned with education, Freire gave her hope and the confidence to transgress as an educator. She recalled  “Finding Freire in the midst of that estrangement was crucial to my survival as a student” (p. 17). All the things Freire said about the banking method and traditional education complimented her ideas about what education should and should not be. hooks desired to co-create learning spaces with her students, to do away with the idea of the dictatorial teacher as an all-knowing expert. She passionately believed that learning should be engaging and ‘never boring,’ and without preconceived set agendas. Creating this excitement and engagement was dependent on knowing each other through dialogue in the classroom. The teacher must make every student feel valued and recognize that everyone in the classroom affects the dynamic.

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, was another major influence for hooks particularly regarding health and well-being. Self-actualization can not occur without self-care. Hooks’ holistic concept of engaged pedagogy  centers care and healing in the process of learning. Thich Nhat Hanh was concerned with the whole body, more than just the mind (on which Freire primarily focused) according to bell hooks. This wholeness includes mind, body and spirit and emphasizes well-being, a somewhat radical notion in academia.

Bettina Love: c. 1981-present

“When you understand how hard it is to fight for educational justice, you know that there are no gimmicks; you know this to be true deep down in your soul, which brings both frustration and determination. Educational Justice is going to take people power, driven by the spirit and ideas of the folx who have done the work of anti-racism before: abolitionists…this endless, and habitually thankless, job of radical collective freedom-building is an act of survival, but we who are dark want to do more than survive: we want to thrive. A life of survival is not really living” (Love, p.9).

Bettina Love describes being raised in the 1980s in Rochester, New York. She is an American academic and author, and currently is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she has been instrumental in establishing abolitionist teaching in schools. Love defines abolitionist teaching as restoring humanity to children in schools. Abolitionist schooling is based on intersectional justice, anti-racism, love, healing and joy, that all children matter, and specifically affirming that Black Lives Matter.

“Abolitionist teaching asks educators to acknowledge and accept America and its policies as anti-Black, racist,  discriminatory and unjust and to be in solidarity with dark folx and poor folx fighting for their humanity and fighting to move beyond surviving. To learn the sociopolitical landscape of their students communities through a historical intersectional justice lens” (Love, p. 12)

Love weaves themes of hip hop into her education praxis. She believes the elements of hip hop have everything to do with self-awareness, critical thinking, and social emotional intelligence. She gives particular attention to knowledge of self. In elementary classrooms, she breaks down the elements of  hip hop to work with her students.

Love is known for advocating for the elimination of the billion-dollar industry of standardized testing, opposing English-only policies and the school-to-prison pipeline, and providing a strong critique of how teachers are prepared. She began her teaching career in a “failing” school in Florida serving low-income immigrant children of many educational and language backgrounds. It was here she began to see how “educational reforms” such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Common Core, and Race to the Top created a sense of hopelessness for students, their families, and staff.

Love unapologetically states that some people should not be teaching because they lack understanding of oppression and oppressed groups who may be sitting in their classrooms  (Love, p. 14) and that such teachers should not be teaching Black, Brown, or White children. “Many of these teachers who ‘love all children’ are deeply entrenched in racism, transphobia, classism, rigid ideas of gender, and Islamophobia” (Love, p. 12).

“Teachers must embrace theories such as Critical Race Theory, Settler Colonialism, Black Feminism, dis/ability, critical race studies and other critical theories that have the ability to interrogate anti-Blackness and frame experiences with injustice, focusing the moral compass toward a north star  that is ready for a long and dissenting fight for educational justice” (Love, p. 12).

Love points out that when educators do not understand the meaning behind the statement/the movement “Black Lives Matter,” they should not be teaching because they lack a fundamental understanding of systemic and historic racism and how it has impacted Black communities and Black students. Such educators tend to blame the victim instead of the systems, for example blaming the incarcerated father instead of learning about how the justice system has incarcerated disproportionate numbers of Black men.

Critical Race Theory

So, what is Critical Race Theory anyways? Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been used by all sides of the political spectrum as a marketing tool or divisive instrument. In popular media, there is not much accurate information about it. Educators who use CRT believe it is vital to understand how racism operates at all levels in US society, whether by law or custom. Any educator who cares about effectively working with communities of color must spend some time understanding the tenets of this theory, and it behooves anyone who works in US schools to take the time to learn the theory, and especially if they are critiquing it. This is simply a brief introduction and further study is strongly recommended.

CRT was initially developed by Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman who were frustrated by the slow pace of racial reform in the US. In the 1970s many activists and scholars felt that while the Civil Rights Movement had stalled, the law disregarded people of color and lacked an understanding of racism and how deeply embedded it was in US society. CRT provides an analysis in which power structures in the US are based in historic and systemic White supremacy and White privilege which in turn marginalizes people of color. With CRT, the individual racist is irrelevant because society is set up to give more access to White people over others in all areas of society: education, health care, housing, politics, justice etc. This is what is known as White privilege and it has to do with our collective history of inequities upon whose foundation this nation is built. If you do not know much about this history, plan on building your knowledge base through workshops, classes and other resources such as what is listed below:

As leaders and as educators, we should not perpetuate wrongs of the past, and this happens when we do not examine our past and do not account for things that have had a huge impact on our present lives. We need to recognize historical patterns and understand their impact, such as how the people who had access to housing (especially in certain neighborhoods) built their wealth which has compounded and created the income gap that exists between White and Black families (see Video 13.2), and impacts all aspects of society including education. The US educational system has not adequately educated us on this topic and at the same time has become highly politicized regarding topics such as race or inequality which have been presented as antithetical to notions of meritocracy and patriotism. This dichotomy does not serve us well as it prevents us from evolving and moving forward as a nation. As a result, many educators have been coached or mandated to avoid these topics. Generations of US Americans have internalized these stories, unconsciously or consciously, and hence, do not see the oppression unless they are called to examine it, and this is what Critical Race Theory helps us to do.

What does “White Supremacy” Mean?

White supremacy is a historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and individuals of color by white individuals and nations of the European continent; for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power and privilege .

The main tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) are:

• Racism is deeply embedded in all aspects of US society . The power structure  is based in W hite supremacy and privilege. CRT rejects myths of meritocracy and liberalism because they ignore systemic and historic inequities (for example: meritocracy doesn’t add up when some people have been accumulating generational wealth due to historic racism for many decades. Check out resources above; educate yourself!
• Intersectionality : recognizes a multidimensionality of oppressions including race, sex, class, gender, sexual orientation and how in combination, these play out in a variety of settings. CRT seeks to recognize all oppressions and how they intersect with race.
• Counter narratives challenge the dominant narrative and give voice to those who have been silenced by white supremacy . Their stories are critical to centering the experiences of people of color.
• There is a commitment to Social Justice to end all forms of oppression.

While CRT started in the legal field, it has spread to other disciplines such as education.

When applying CRT to public K-12 education, one must consider:

• Who are our teachers?
• Who are our students?
• What is in our curriculum? Who created it? Who is promoted in the curriculum? Which voices are centered? Which voices are left out? Do they not matter?
• Who gets promoted in our schools?
• Who tests well? Who gets into TAG and honors courses?
• Who sits on our school boards? Who are our educational leaders?
• How are schools funded?
• Whose language is promoted? Whose language is left out and what is the impact of that?
• How is success measured? Grading for what? Whose values? Who decides?
• Who is made to feel that they belong? Who does not belong?
• Who typically gets the best prepared teachers?
• Who gets college degrees, masters degrees, and how recently?
• Does race correlate with any of this? (a fundamental question when using a CRT lens)

How do the answers to all these questions help you to think about CRT as it applies to our educational system? If you do not know how race correlates, you probably will not understand CRT. Critical educators would recommend that you deepen your understanding of how race is so embedded in our institutions and our history, and specifically our educational system, which has clear repercussions for how our society is ultimately structured, and who becomes our political, economic, and social leaders. In order to live in a more just society, critical educators want our students to wrestle with these questions, and fight for a more just future. They want the learning to move beyond the classroom and connect with the lives and challenges of our students. Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Bettina Love, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King and many others have said this will be a fight and a struggle that will likely not be realized in your own lifetimes. When you understand this, you can grasp the enormous potential and responsibility of educators on a daily basis in the United States.

Criticism of CRT

Critical Race Theory very recently has become a source of much debate across the country, somewhat to the surprise of people who have been studying these issues for years. “Fox News has mentioned ‘critical race theory’ 1300 times in less than four months. Why? Because critical race theory (CRT) has become a new bogeyman for people unwilling to acknowledge our country’s racist history and how it impacts the present” (Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons, Brookings Institute). NBC News reported that Critical Race Theory is not actually taught in K-12 education but due to the negative attention it is getting, educators are weary of using certain authors, teaching about systemic racism or on a variety of historic and social topics. Most people critiquing CRT do not seem to understand what the theory actually stands for, and have framed it as a divisive framework. Again, it is important for all educators to understand what the theory stands for, and that is not taught in US schools. This debate continues to highlight how divided the country is on race and racism, as is brought into focus through the debate over the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”

ATTRIBUTIONS

Image 13.1 “Fist Typography” by GDJ  is in the Public Domain, CC0

Image 13.2 “Liberate Minnesota Protest” by Wikipedia Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Image 13.3 “Paulo Freire” by Flickr is in the Public Domain

Image 13.4 “Income Inequality”  is in the Public Domain

Image 13.5 “As More People of color Raise their consciousness” by Flickr is in the Public Domain

Image 13.5 “We want to do more than survive” by Bettina Love  

Image 13.6 “HipHop Mascot” by vectorportal.com is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Image 13.7 “Nelson Mandela Quote” by j4p4n open clipart  is in the Public Domain

Image 13.8 “United States Public School for Eskimos – Frank G. Carpenter collection” by is in the Public Domain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqrhn8khGLM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY2C_ATNFEM

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critical-race-theory-teachers-union-honest-history

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teaching-critical-race-theory-isn-t-happening-classrooms-teachers-say-n1272945

• Darder, Baltodano, Torres, The Critical Pedagogy Reader, 2nd edition, New York, RoutledgeFalmer,  2009

2.         Featherstone , Liza https://www.jstor.org/stable/4028864?mag=paulo-freires-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed-at-fifty

3.     Freire, Paulo, 1921-1997. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York :Continuum, 2000.

4.     Hooks Bell. Teaching to Transgress : Education As the Practice of Freedom , Routledge 1994.

5.    https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-oneonta-education106/

6.         https://newsreel.org/video/RACE-The-House-We-Live-In

7.     https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers

8.    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/books/bell-hooks-dead.html

9.    Ladson-Billings, Gloria; Tate, William F, IV. Towards a Critical Race Theory of Education, Teachers College Recor d, Vol. 97, Iss. 1,  (Fall 1995): 47.

10.   Love, Bettina L. We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston, Massachusetts, Beacon Press, 2019.

11.   McCausland, P. 2021. Teaching critical race theory isn’t happening in classrooms, teachers say in survey. NBC News , July 1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teaching-critical-race-theory-isn-t-happening-classrooms-teachers-say-n1272945

12.   O’Kane, C. 2021. Head of teachers union says critical race theory isn’t taught in schools, vows to defend “honest history”. CBS News , July 8. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critical-race-theory-teachers-union-honest-history/

13.   Ray, R., and A. Gibbons. 2021. Why are states banning critical race theory? The Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/02/why-are-states-banning-critical-race-theory/

14.   Sawchuck, S. 2021. What Is critical race theory, and why is it under attack? Education, Week , May 18. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05?utm_source=nl&utm_medium=eml&utm_campaign=eu&M=62573086&U=1646756&UUID=cc270896d99989f6b27d080283c5630c

15.     Skloot, Rebecca, 1972-. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York :Random House Audio, 2010.  

Educational Learning Theories Copyright © 2023 by Sam May-Varas, Ed.D.; Jennifer Margolis, PhD; and Tanya Mead, MA is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Critical Theory Pedagogies Guide

• Welcome to the Guide

Critical Pedagogy

• Anti-Racist Pedagogy
• Feminist Pedagogy
• Inclusive Pedagogy

Critical Theory

Critical pedagogy is based in critical theory.  Critical pedagogy connects the concepts of critical theory with education.

“Many “critical theories”...have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies. In both the broad and the narrow senses, however, a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms" (Bohman, J., Flynn, J., & Celikates, R., 2019).

Critical Pedagogy Influences

Critical pedagogy originates especially from the work of Paulo Freire, an educator and philosopher whose work Pedagogy of the Oppressed formed the basis for critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy overlaps with pedagogies such as feminist pedagogy, anti-racist pedagogy, and inclusive pedagogy. These three pedagogies strongly pull from key theories introduced by critical pedagogues. 

Education as Political

Critical pedagogy identifies education as being inherently political, and therefore, not neutral (Kincheloe, 2004, p.2). Critical pedagogy encourages students and instructors to challenge commonly accepted assumptions that reveal hidden power structures, inequities, and injustice in society. 

Critical pedagogy acknowledges education is political; education has a history of inequalities, oppression, and domination that need to be recognized (Kincheloe, 2004). Likewise, education can become a way in which students are equipped to engage against systems of oppression when existing structures in education are challenged.

"A central tenet of pedagogy maintains that the classroom, curricular, and school structures teachers enter are not neutral sites waiting to be shaped by educational professionals" (Kincheloe, 2004, p.2). 

Education and Social Justice

Critical pedagogy connects social justice and teaching/learning. Students are seen as active participants in the classroom, and students, alongside teachers, have power.  

Critical pedagogy at its core seeks to recognize systems and patterns of oppression within society and education itself, and in doing so, decrease oppression and increase freedom. As such, social justice is at the core of critical pedagogy. 

"Questions of democracy and justice cannot be separated from the most fundamental features of teaching and learning” (Kincheloe, 2004, p.6). 

Empowering Students

In order to decrease oppression and domination, critical pedagogy seeks to empower students through enabling them to recognize the ways in which "dominant power operates in numerous and often hidden ways" (Kincheloe). Students and instructors alike are empowered through their knowledge of the hidden influences and politics within education and throughout society that lead to oppression and domination.

In this system, teachers become students and students become teachers. Paulo Freire introduced the concept of the "banking model of education" as a criticism of passive learning (Freire, p.72). Critical pedagogy pushes against passive learning, which places the instructor in a position of much higher power than the student. Active learning is one method in which the instructor can become less powerful in the classroom by having students collaborate in creating the content of the course.  Dialogue is also used as a form of education. By allowing many perspectives, students' and instructors' perspectives can be changed and learning takes place. 

“We must expose the hidden politics of what is labeled neutral” (Kincheloe, 2004, p.10).

Putting it into Practice

Encouraging Dialogue

• Focus on providing activities that encourage dialogue among students and instructor.
• Dialogue is an area in which students can offer perspectives and contribute to the instruction as active participants. 
• Incorporate discussion-based activities into instruction. 

Active Learning

Active learning gives students an opportunity to engage in the course using their own knowledge and personal experiences, as well as to learn using multiple methods of engagement. Active learning strategies such as group activities need to have clear expectations and roles, and instructors can check in to make sure students understand the expectations and roles. Brown University provides several examples of active learning strategies outlined below:

Small Discussion

• Entry/Exit Tickets - short prompts that provide instructors with quick information. Entry tickets can help students focus on a particular topic. Exit tickets can help determine students' understanding of the material or allow students to think about what they've learned. 
• Minute Paper/Free Writing: Short, 1-2 minute writing exercises where students can share their thoughts or provide feedback. Can also focus on a particular topic and have students make predictions about a topic.
• A Gallery Walk: Prompts are placed around the room (or in a Google Doc if online) and students can go from station to station and answer the prompts.
• Think-Pair-Share: Students are given a question or problem to consider on their own. Then, students are grouped into pairs to discuss and share their responses before sharing with the group. 
• Jigsaw: Students are grouped into teams to solve a problem or analyze something. The teams can work on separate parts of an assignment before sharing to the whole class, or each student in the team can be assigned with a different part of the assignment. The puzzle pieces come together at the end to share a solution or conclusions. 

Large Groups

• Incorporate pauses: Incorporate pauses into lectures to give students time to take notes or compare notes with peers.
• Clicker Questions  / Polls: Can help increase participation in the class and facilitate active learning methods. Can be incorporated with other activities (e.g. clicker question, discussion with a peer, large discussion). 
• Carousel Brainstorm: Students are separated into small groups, and a piece of paper is passed along from group to group with responses being written down. Students vote on the "best" responses. 
• Role Playing: Role playing can be used to provide a new perspective. Students take on the perspective of historical figures/authors or other characters and interact from that figure's perspective. 
• Sequence of Events: Students can work together to put a process into the correct sequence of events. This can test their understanding of the process. 

Diverse Perspectives

• Activities which allow students to experience alternative perspectives can also help invite dialogue and critical thinking.

Key Figures & Theorists

• Paulo Freire  (1921-1997) - Paulo Freire was a philosopher of education whose work became the foundation of critical pedagogy. Read more about Paulo Freire at the Freire Institute .
• Henry Giroux (1943-Present) - A founding theorist in critical pedagogy, professor, and scholar. Read more about Giroux on Henry Giroux's website .
• bell hooks (1952-Present) - A scholar, feminist, and activist whose work focuses on intersectionality, feminism, and critical pedagogy.
• Peter McLaren  (1948-Present) - A leading scholar in critical pedagogy whose work relates to Marxist theory, critical literacy, and cultural studies. Read more about McLaren at his Chapman University faculty profile.
• Ira Shor  (1945-Present) - A scholar and professor whose research is based in Freire's critical pedagogy. Read more about Shor on his faculty page at City University of New York.  
• Antonia Darder  (1952-Present) - A scholar whose work covers issues of pedagogy, race, and culture. Darder's work is based in Freire's theories. Read more about Darder. 
• Joe Kincheloe   (1950 - 2008) - Joe Kincheloe was a scholar whose work focused on critical pedagogy, cultural studies, and urban studies. 
• Shirley Steinberg  - A scholar, activist, and author whose work focuses on critical pedagogy, cultural studies, and social justice. Read more about Steinberg at her faculty page at the University of Calgary. 

Key Readings

Paulo Freire Key Terms

Key Terms Introduced by Paulo Freire:

Banking Model of Education - On the banking model of education, students are empty receptacles and teachers hold the source of knowledge. Students are treated as passive and as lacking knowledge themselves. "Knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing" (Freire Institute).

Praxis (Action/Reflection) - "It is not enough for people to come together in dialogue in order to gain knowledge of their social reality.  They must act together upon their environment in order critically to reflect upon their reality and so transform it through further action and critical reflection" (Freire Institute).

Dialogue  - "To enter into dialogue presupposes equality amongst participants.  Each must trust the others; there must be mutual respect and love (care and commitment).  Each one must question what he or she knows and realize that through dialogue existing thoughts will change and new knowledge will be created" (Freire Institute).

Conscientization  - "The process of developing a critical awareness of one’s social reality through reflection and action.  Action is fundamental because it is the process of changing the reality.  Paulo Freire says that we all acquire social myths which have a dominant tendency, and so learning is a critical process which depends upon uncovering real problems and actual needs" (Freire Institute).

Additional Readings & Resources

• Foundations of Critical Pedagogy (Stony Brook University) A LibGuide with a collection of readings regarding critical pedagogy.
• Interrupting Bias - PALS Approach (University of Michigan) A PDF handout outlining the PALS method of interrupting bias in dialogue. The purpose of this method is to "introduce a new perspective in a way that others can hear."
• Four Levels of Oppression (University of Michigan) Including 1) individual oppression, 2) interpersonal oppression, 3) structural/institutional/systemic oppression, 4) cultural oppression.

Referenced Guides & Sources

• Bohman, J., Flynn, J., & Celikates, R. (2019). Critical Theory. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Concepts Used by Paulo Freire. (n.d.). Freire Institute.
• Kincheloe, J. L. (2004). Critical pedagogy primer. P. Lang.
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• Last Updated: Sep 22, 2023 9:57 AM
• URL: https://guides.library.charlotte.edu/criticaltheory

• About This Book
• Introduction: Why Us? Why Now?
• Chapter 1: What Can Public Librarians Teach?
• Chapter 2: Knowing Your Learners
• Chapter 3: Working Backward to Move Forward: Backward Design in the Public Library
• Chapter 4: How do Children and Teens Learn? Part 1: Traditional Learning Theories
• Chapter 5: How do Children and Teens Learn? Part 2: Critical Learning Theories
• Chapter 6: From Theory to Practice: Instructional Approaches
• Chapter 7: Connected Learning in the Library
• Chapter 8: Differentiation and Universal Design for Learners
• Chapter 9: Collaboration: The Power (and the Price) of Working Together
• Chapter 10: Assessing Learning in the Public Library
• Chapter 11: Professional Development and Growth
• Chapter 12: Advocating for the Instructional Role

By Mara Rosenberg

A group of fourth-graders gathers on the carpet to listen as their teacher reads aloud from George by Alex Gino. The previous week, during the introduction to the novel about a young transgender girl, the reaction from students was varied. Some had background knowledge and opinions on the subject, while others seemed perplexed. Today, as they listen, they hear a character misgender George. The response is no longer disparate.  Across the group, people express empathy for George, sadness that she doesn’t feel safe to share her secret, and frustration about societal gender norms. What accounts for this change? These students had the opportunity to see beyond their own lives and experiences through the text. Opportunities to respond and reflect in partnerships and small groups led to new ways of thinking and feeling. This is a classroom in which students have learned to question, to examine texts with a critical lens.

Critical pedagogy is an approach to education rooted in critical theory, a “philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that considers the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures which produce and constrain it” (Critical theory, n.d.). Developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, critical theory is “concerned in particular with issues of power and justice and the ways that the economy, matters of race, class and gender, ideologies, discourses, education, religion, and other social institutions, and cultural dynamics interact to construct a social system” (Kincheloe, p. 49).

Critical pedagogy traces its roots to Paulo Freire, who applied critical theory to education. Freire’s work focused on improving the lives of poor people in Brazil. He believed that education and literacy were key to disrupt the economics-based power structure. He asserted that the traditional system of education perpetuated disempowerment. In his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire delineated the outcomes of the Brazilian education system:

[T]he teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. … They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. (p. 72)

Freire advocated for a dialogical pedagogy in which students construct knowledge through “conversation and sharing about a particular content object, whether that be a text, an idea, or a situation” (Beatty, 2015, p. 13).

In addition to Friere, modern critical pedagogy frameworks borrow heavily from critical race theory (CRT). In the early 1980s, scholars in the United States began to apply CRT to their study of the American legal system. This theory grew out of an acknowledgement of the role of race and power in the American legal realm. These scholars believed that the U.S. legal system maintains white supremacy through the applications of laws that disproportionately impact people of color. They began to examine ways to dismantle existing structures that perpetuate inequality in the power dynamic based on race.

Before we go further, let’s briefly examine the idea of race (a full explanation of this very complex topic would take its own book; if this information is new to you, consider checking out the online professional development curriculum Project READY, www.ready.web.unc.edu ). Race is not biological. There are not genetic differences between racial groups. The exterior, phenotypical differences we see are the result of adaptations to environmental conditions over centuries. Race, rather, is a social construct created to excuse the subjugation, exploitation, and genocide of whole groups of people. If we look at the economic roots of the United States, racializing Africans and Native peoples allowed Europeans to take land and enslave human beings (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017).

Critical race theory also influenced academics and activists who were interested in identities other than race. Other marginalized groups began to examine the systemic nature of their oppression. Feminist, LGBTQ, religious-minority, Asian-American, Latinx, and indigenous activists situated their work around dismantling the systems that enabled majority groups to hold on to power and privilege.

As awareness grew that people’s multiple identities impact their lives in different ways, academics such as Kimberlé Crenshaw (see sidebar) began to study the intersection of identities within individuals. Intersectionality is a “recognition of the way different identities and forms of oppression, privilege, and/or identity overlap and interact. People are influenced by numerous dimensions of identities that change in different contexts and interact with each other at different times in various ways” (Funk, Kellner, & Share, 2016, p. 29). For example, a white homosexual man has the privilege of race and sex, but his sexual orientation has a history of marginalization and may impact his access to certain protections. “Intersectionality is the idea that identity cannot be fully understood via a single lens such as gender, race, or class alone” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017, p. 175).

Intersectionality

Researcher and author Kimberlé Crenshaw has been writing and speaking about intersectionality since the late 1980s. Watch her TED Talk, titled “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” at https://bit.ly/2wP0TTr .

Academics in disciplines outside of the legal field began to adopt the underlying foundations of CRT and conducted research using the framework of CRT within their own fields. Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate (1995) argued “for a critical race theoretical perspective in education analogous to that of critical race theory in legal scholarship” (p. 47). They contended that the existing multicultural theoretical models did not acknowledge the inequities perpetuated by the intersection of race and property in American society. This work informed Ladson-Billings’ development of culturally responsive pedagogy (see pp. 93-94 for more about culturally responsive pedagogy).

Critical Pedagogy in the Library

“School librarians can be a primary voice in promoting the importance of social equity for all students” (Summers, 2010, p. 10). There are several ways we can foster equity by bringing critical pedagogy to our work as school and youth librarians. The first step we can take is to recognize that we come to our interactions with youth with specific worldviews, based upon our own lived experiences. The youth we serve have necessarily different lived experiences. We cannot make assumptions about them; we must listen and believe when they share their perspectives and experiences. It is vital that we have difficult conversations with colleagues and the learners with whom we work. The impacts of race in America will not go away through benevolent colorblindness, and neither will the impacts of other forms of marginalization go away simply because we choose to ignore them.

Lived experiences, both our learners’ and our own, are heavily influenced by the cultures of home and of community. Teacher educator Randy Bomer (2017) offered a definition of culture as it relates to our work with youth. He views culture as “a group of people’s way of life, all of their patterns of communication, systems of valuing, habits of being, and understandings of expression—a group’s ways of signaling membership and belonging through both minute and large-scale interactions” (p. 11). This delineation requires us to think about culture beyond holidays, food, clothing, and language. “Way of life” and “habits of being” push us to think of culture as including all the socializing influences that impact how learners experience and come to understand the world, including their time in our libraries.

Knowing individual learners and their stories is important, but it is not enough. If you work in a community with a large Hmong population, for example, learn about the Hmong culture, traditions, beliefs, and refugee experience. Educating yourself will put you in a position to check for stereotypes and biases in your collection, as well as informing your work with your learners and their families.

In our role as educators, we have the opportunity, in developmentally appropriate ways, to share the foundations of critical theory. Teaching Tolerance ( https://www.tolerance.org/ ), a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, has a wealth of lesson plans, media, book lists, and teaching tips that can be used in the library setting. The resources are available for preschool through college-age, as well as for professional development of educators and others working with youth. Of particular note are the organization’s social justice standards ( https://bit.ly/2w15sen ), which provide “a road map for anti-bias education” (Teaching Tolerance, 2016, p. 2). The standards are organized by grade ranges and can help librarians develop age-appropriate equity-based learning goals for their learners.

At the heart of critical pedagogies is the habit of taking a questioning stance and engaging in the dialogic Friere promoted. One way that librarians can accomplish this is through posing critical questions about text to our learners. Over time, learners can internalize these questions to become critical consumers of the material they read. Texts in this context are not limited to traditional printed materials. Photographs, songs, and videos all convey meaning and may be critically examined. The following list of questions from Teaching Tolerance (2017) provides a good starting point for educators guiding conversations about text:

• Whose voice is omitted in this text?
• Who has the power?
• What is the author’s agenda?
• How is the information used?
• Who decided the “truth”?
• What assumption is being made?

By engaging with these questions, learners can consider points of view not presented within the text. The disposition to question text reduces the acceptance of text at face value. It develops proficiencies in critical thinking, analysis, and problem-solving skills as enumerated in the Common Core State Standards (2010), the Youth Engagement and Leadership portions of the YALSA Teen Services Competencies (2017), and the AASL Standards Framework for Learners (2017).

Culturally Responsive and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

Culturally responsive or relevant pedagogy (used interchangeably here) and culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) are related models that recognize and honor the diversity of the youth in our libraries. Both approaches allow us to “incorporate teaching practices that respond to the cultures of the students in front of us” (Davis, 2012, p. 8). These practices stand in response to hegemonic curricula and pedagogies that cause harm to learners. “Volumes of research have addressed the cognitive, emotional, and psychological damage that can occur when students’ lives are not validated during the learning process” (Thornton, 2017, p. 73).

Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) introduced culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in opposition to what she identified as a deficit-based approach to educating marginalized students (see sidebar). Ladson-Billings asked teachers to see their students’ home cultures as assets instead of obstacles. She found that in classrooms with teachers who applied CRP, students benefited academically while simultaneously developing cultural and sociopolitical competencies. As her work evolved, she expressed dissatisfaction with the constrained application of CRP in classrooms and a sense that the pedagogy was applied with only a surface understanding of culture. Advocating a “remix,” Ladson-Billings (2014) promoted a shift from CRP to CSP.

Deficit- Versus Asset-Based Approaches

Educators who take a deficit-based approach focus on learners’ shortcomings. These educators blame learners, their families, and their cultures for perceived failures, and may see their role as “fixing” or “saving” learners. Educators who assume an asset-based approach focus on learners’ strengths and view so-called achievement gaps as resulting primarily from inequitable systems rather than individual choices. These educators see their role as helping all learners develop their abilities and reach their potential.

Django Paris (2012) proposed CSP, a framework that “seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, liter-ate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling” (p. 93). He asserted that schools should offer “access to dominant cultural competence” (p. 95) in addition to sustaining, rather than merely acknowledging or even celebrating, the cultures of students’ homes and communities. Unlike traditional education in America—with its goal of acculturation of all students to the white, Christian, English-speaking dominant culture—CSP seeks to give all students the skills and competencies to fully participate in an increasingly multi-cultural, multi-racial American society. CSP focuses on “sustaining and extending the richness of our pluralistic society. Such richness include[s] all of the languages, literacies, and cultural ways of being that our students and communities embody—both those marginalized and dominant” (Paris, 2012, p. 96).

CSP In Practice

What does CSP actually look like on the ground? Listen to Dr. Django Paris’s answer to that question in this ten-minute podcast episode titled “The Look and Feel of Culturally Responsive Instruction,” produced by teacher and blogger Larry Ferlazzo:  https://bit.ly/2sq7DoH

The spotlight box below highlights one example of a public library program in Grand Rapids, Michigan that fulfills many aspects of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy. As you read about this program, think about how it goes beyond acknowledging or celebrating children’s home cultures to actively sustaining those cultures.

Spotlight: Talking about Race in Storytime

Grand Rapids Public Library in Grand Rapids, Michigan is actively engaged in having conversations about race… in storytime. Youth Services Manager, Jessica Anne Bratt, has created a variety of resources to help library staff and caregivers talk with children about race during literacy activities.

Bratt’s outlines for story times include not just a list of songs, fingerplays, and books, but also language for staff to use when engaging both children and adults. These plans offer models of language families may use at home when talking about race with their children and let caregivers know about the importance of having these conversations.

In one preschool plan, staff introduce the book I Got the Rhythm by Connie Schofield-Morrison with “Look at her hair and skin? Is it the same or different than [yours]? We are all born with different shades of skin colors and hair textures. Doesn’t she have awesome afro-puffs?” Staff also share tips with caregivers about sharing their opinions regarding unfairness when reading about racial stereotyping or discrimination. They guide parents to reinforce that “different and weird are not the same thing.” Sample materials from Bratt are available from the Jbrary story time blog at https://bit.ly/2Fq0Xu2 .

Critical Media and Information Literacies

Combining critical pedagogy with cultural literacy studies, critical media literacy (CML) engages students in taking a critical stance with a wide range of media. CML “empowers [teachers and learners] to act as responsible citizens with the skills and social consciousness to challenge injustice” (Funk, Kellner, & Share, 2016, p. 2). As our learners engage with media both inside and outside school, we can create opportunities for them to interrogate the embedded values and points of view contained in the messages they encounter. Lessons and programs that engage learners in CML extend “the critical thinking skills necessary to analyze messages and synthesize information” (Carlson, Share, & Lee, 2013, p. 51).

Mohammed Choudhury and Jeff Share (2012) enumerated the key ideas for critically questioning media messages. The first area is the social construction of messages. What decisions were made by the person or people who created this message? How could different choices affect the message? They recommended examining the language rules of the media. How did the use of elements, such as sounds or visuals, impact the audience? The second concept is that individuals interpret texts differently depending upon their lived experiences and the lenses they bring to the work. By interrogating the biases of the author/producer, learners build an understanding about the illusion of objectivity. The final idea for learners to consider is the purpose for the creation and sharing of the message. Does the author have a particular agenda they are trying to promote? Is the media produced by a company with a profit-making motive? Choudhury and Share emphasized the value of critical literacy for the health of democracy. Teaching critical literacy skills does not detract from content area learning, but rather Choudhury and Share found that the students involved in their research also made substantial academic gains.

In the introduction to their book Information Literacy and Social Justice , Lua Gregory and Shana Higgins (2013) called for critical information literacy as a pedagogical model for librarians. This paradigm moves beyond the goals of locating, using, and analyzing information to consider the “social, political, economic, and corporate systems that have power and influence over information production, dissemination, access, and consumption” (p. 4). Recognizing the evolving nature of the information landscape, the authors advocated for teaching learners about the processes through which information is constructed and disseminated. We don’t need to look far to find examples of the intentional distribution of inaccurate or false information through social media outlets. It is vital that we give learners the opportunities to develop skills and critical consciousness about information and information sources.

Cultural Competence

Foundational to both critical and cultural pedagogical models is the need for educators to be culturally competent. To plan and facilitate lessons and programs within this model, we, as professionals, need to demonstrate skills and dispositions for cross-cultural interactions. What does that look like, and how do we develop those skills? Bonnie Davis, in her book How to Teach Students Who Don’t Look Like You (2012), outlined several questions that can guide educators to examine their own lenses:

• How were you acculturated?
• What is your ethnic culture or ethnicity?
• What is your racial identity?
• What is your nationality?
• How do your ethnicity, racial identity, and nationality differ from you students and colleagues?
• What factors contribute to the lens you wear as you view the world? (p. 9–12).

She continued to identify myriad factors that influence acculturation, including: “family, gender, racial identity, ethnicity, nationality, age, sexual orientation, language, friends, religion, school, geography, income of family or social class, political views, electronic media, social organizations, ableness, [and] others” (p. 12). Julie Stivers and Sandra Hughes-Hassell (2015) wrote that culturally competent librarians create “equitable environments” and approach “youth and their families from an asset-driven perspective” (para. 5).

Collection Development

While collection development is distinct from instruction, it is still related; the resources we collect for our libraries can be used in our instruction (as in story times), and our learners may seek information from library resources to extend learning that began with our instruction. Thus, it is critical that our library collections support equity and inclusion, and that our resources feature positive representations of diverse cultures, races, genders, sexualities, religions, and abilities.

In her landmark essay, “Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Glass Doors,” Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) created a metaphor for the role of literature in the lives of young people. She equates books with glass that allows the reader to see in to other worlds, but when the light hits the glass just right, the glass reflects back. She posits that when we see ourselves reflected in text, we have the opportunity to learn about ourselves and to engage in the identity work that is a hallmark of growing up. Bishop goes on to describe how children of color have fewer opportunities to see themselves in the books they encounter. While there have been efforts in recent years to improve representation, there continues to be an imbalance in the representation of characters from racialized and marginalized communities, as shown in Figure 1, below(Huyck, Dahlen, & Griffen, 2016). For a printable PDF of this graphic, visit https://bit.ly/2cHH6h7 .

We Need Diverse Books ( https://diversebooks.org/ ) and the #OwnVoices campaign have highlighted the need for increased diversity in books for children and youth. This includes diversity in terms of who is depicted in the text as well as diversity among authors. Perhaps future data will show representation in text that more closely approximates representation within the population.

Best practices in culturally responsive collection development include intentional selection and deselection of materials. Denise Agosto (2017) recommended that librarians use five indicators when evaluating multicultural literature: accuracy, expertise, respect, purpose, and quality. As librarians cannot be experts in all cultures, making evaluations using these criteria can be challenging. Fortunately, there are resources available from groups with the expertise to properly assess accuracy, respect, and purpose (see Resources for Further Reading, next page). A word of caution about relying solely upon reviews from publications such as School Library Journal and Hornbook : Most reviewers for these publications are nondisabled white women who may or may not have the expertise to evaluate the appropriateness of representations of people from marginalized communities. Until there is more diverse representation within these traditional resources, it is advisable to seek additional reviews from sources with appropriate cultural expertise.

Our learners live in an increasingly multi-cultural, multi-racial, and multi-linguistic world. Additionally, they are surrounded by media in school and in their leisure time. Critical literacy and cultural competency will equip them to be engaged citizens who can identify social inequities and work toward creating a more just community.

Resources for Further Reading

• Teaching Tolerance: https://www.tolerance.org/
• Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk: The Danger of a Single Story : https://bit.ly/1kMOnud
• Equity in the Library – Selection Criteria: https://unc.live/2wRVAlY
• Where to Find Diverse Books, from We Need Diverse Books: https://bit.ly/2FdG3Pd

Accardi, M. T., Drabinski, E., & Kumbier, A. (Eds.). (2010 ).   Critical library instruction: Theories and methods . Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press.

Adams, M., Rodriguez, S., & Zimmer, K. (Eds.). (2017).  Culturally relevant teaching . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little.

Agosto, D. E. (2017, January 2). Criteria for Evaluating Multicultural Literature. Retrieved from http://www.pages.drexel.edu/%7Edea22/multicultural.html

Bomer, R. (2017). What would it mean for English language arts to become more culturally responsive and sustaining?   Voices from the Middle,   24 (3), 11–15.

Carlson, P., Share, J., & Lee, C. (2013). Critical media literacy: Pedagogy for the digital age.  Oregon English Journal, 35 (1), 50–55.

Choudhury, M., & Share, J. (2012). Critical media literacy: A pedagogy for new literacies and urban youth.  Voices from the Middle,19 (4), 39–44.

Cooke, N. A., & Hill, R. F. (2017). Considering cultural competence: An annotated resource list.   Knowledge Quest,   45 (3), 54–61.

Cooperative Children’s Book Center. (n.d.).  Publishing statistics on children’s books about people of color and first/Native nations and by people of color and first/Native nations authors and illustrators. Retrieved from http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp

Critical theory. (n.d.). In Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/critical_theory

Davis, B. M. (2012). How to teach students who don’t look like you: Culturally Responsive Teaching Strategies. Thousand Oaks: Corwin.

Funk, S., Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2016). Critical Media Literacy as Transformative Pedagogy. In M. Yildiz & J. Keengwe (Eds.),  Handbook of Research on Media Literacy in the Digital Age (pp. 1–30). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

Gregory, L., & Higgins, S. (2013). Information literacy and social justice: Radical professional practice . Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press.

Hooks, B. (1994).  Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom . New York: Routledge.

Huyck, D., Dahlen, S. P, Griffin, M. B. (2016, September 14). Diversity in Children’s Books 2015 infographic Retrieved from  https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2016/09/14/picture-this-reflecting-diversity-in-childrens-book-publishing/

Kincheloe, J. L. (2008).  Critical Pedagogy Primer . New York: Peter Lang.

Kugler, E. (Ed.). (2012).  Innovative Voices in Education: Engaging Diverse Communities . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.

Ladson-Billings, G., Tate, W.F. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record. 97, 47-68.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a. the remix. Harvard Educational Review,   84 (1), 74–84, 135.

McCarther, S. M., & Davis, D. M. (2017). Culturally relevant pedagogy twenty-plus years later: How an arts approach to teaching and learning can keep the dream alive.   American Educational History Journal,   44 (1), 103–113.

Naidoo, J. (2014, April 5). The importance of diversity in library programs and material collections for children. Retrieved November 26, 2017, from https://www.scoe.org/files/Importance_of_Diversity_in_Library_Programs_and_Material_(1).pdf

Sensoy, O., & DiAngelo, R. (2017).  Is everyone really equal?: An introduction to key concepts in social justice education . New York: Teachers College Press.

Stivers, J., & Hughes-Hassell, S. (2015, March 7). The inclusive library: More than a diverse collection. Retrieved November 26, 2017, from http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/2015/03/07/act4teens-the-inclusive-library-more-than-a-diverse-collection-part-1/

Summers, L. L. (2010). Culturally responsive leadership in school libraries.  Culturally responsive leadership in school libraries, 10-13.

Teaching Tolerance (2017). Challenge the Text. Retrieved from https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-resources/teaching-strategies/close-and-critical-reading/challenge-the-text

Teen Services Competencies for Library Staff. (2017, November 20). Retrieved December 7, 2017, from http://www.ala.org/yalsa/guidelines/yacompetencies

Underwood, J., Kimmel, S., Forest, D., & Dickinson, G. (2015). Culturally relevant booktalking: Using a mixed reality simulation with preservice school librarians. School Libraries Worldwide,   21 (1), 91–107.

Zamudio, M. M., Russell, C., Rios, F. A., & Bridgeman, J. L. (2011).  Critical race theory matters: education and ideology . New York: Routledge.

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Article contents

Critical literacy.

• Vivian Maria Vasquez Vivian Maria Vasquez American University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.20
• Published online: 29 March 2017

Changing student demographics, globalization, and flows of people resulting in classrooms where students have variable linguistic repertoire, in combination with new technologies, has resulted in new definitions of what it means to be literate and how to teach literacy. Today, more than ever, we need frameworks for literacy teaching and learning that can withstand such shifting conditions across time, space, place, and circumstance, and thrive in challenging conditions. Critical literacy is a theoretical and practical framework that can readily take on such challenges creating spaces for literacy work that can contribute to creating a more critically informed and just world. It begins with the roots of critical literacy and the Frankfurt School from the 1920s along with the work of Paulo Freire in the late 1940s (McLaren, 1999; Morrell, 2008) and ends with new directions in the field of critical literacy including finding new ways to engage with multimodalities and new technologies, engaging with spatiality- and place-based pedagogies, and working across the curriculum in the content areas in multilingual settings. Theoretical orientations and critical literacy practices are used around the globe along with models that have been adopted in various state jurisdictions such as Ontario, in Canada, and Queensland, in Australia.

• critical literacy
• critical pedagogy
• social justice
• multiliteracies
• text analysis
• discourse analysis
• everyday politics
• language ideologies

Changing student demographics, globalization, and flows of people resulting in classrooms where students have variable linguistic repertoire, in combination with new technologies, has resulted in new definitions of what it means to be literate and how to teach literacy. Today, more than ever, we need frameworks for literacy teaching and learning that can withstand such shifting conditions across time, space, place, and circumstance, and thrive in challenging conditions. Critical literacy is a theoretical and practical framework that can readily take on such challenges creating spaces for literacy work that can contribute to creating a more critically informed and just world.

Historical Orientation

Luke ( 2014 ) describes critical literacy as “the object of a half-century of theoretical debate and practical innovation in the field of education” (p. 21). Discussion about the roots of critical literacy often begin with principles associated with the Frankfurt School from the 1920s and their focus on Critical Theory. The Frankfurt School was created by intellectuals who carved out a space for developing theories of Marxism within the academy and independently of political parties. While focusing on political and economic philosophy, they emphasized the importance of class struggle in society. More prominently associated with the roots of critical literacy is Paulo Freire, beginning with his work in the late 1940s (McLaren, 1999 ; Morrell, 2008 ), which focused on critical consciousness and critical pedagogy. Freire’s work was centered on key concepts, which included the notion that literacy education should highlight the critical consciousness of learners. In his work in the 1970s Freire wrote that if we consider learning to read and write as acts of knowing, then readers and writers must assume the role of creative subjects who reflect critically on the process of reading and writing itself along with reflecting on the significance of language ( 1972 ). Together with Macedo in the 1980s, Freire popularized the concept that reading is not just about decoding words. In their work, Freire and Macedo ( 1987 ) noted that reading the word is simultaneously about reading the world. This means that our reading of any text is mediated through our day-to-day experience and the places, spaces, and languages that we encounter, use, and occupy. This critical reading can lead to disrupting and “unpacking myths and distortions and building new ways of knowing and acting upon the world” (Luke, 2014 , p. 22). As such this conceptualization of critical literacy disrupts the notion of false consciousness described earlier by Hegel and Marx (Luke, 2014 ).

The Frankfurt School scholars and Freire focused their work on adult education. For instance in the 1960s Freire organized a campaign for hundreds of sugar cane workers in Brazil to participate in a literacy program that centered on critical pedagogy. His work became known as liberatory, whereby he worked to empower oppressed workers. Critiques of Freire have focused primarily on claims that the liberatory pedagogy he espoused was unidirectional because educators liberated students. The binary represented here was also seen as problematic. Nevertheless his grounding work pushed to the fore the importance and effects of critical pedagogy as a way of making visible and examining relations of power to change inequitable ways of being. Work done by the Frankfurt School and Freire were overtly political and inspired the political nature and democratic potential of education as central to critical approaches to pedagogy (Comber, 2016 ) as seen in work done by researchers and educators such as Campano, Ghiso and Sánchez ( 2013 ), Janks ( 2010 ), and Vasquez ( 2004 ).

Luke ( 2014 ) noted antecedents to these approaches including early-twentieth-century exemplars of African-American community education in the United States that were established in many cities (Shannon, 1998 ), Brecht’s experiments with political drama in Europe (Weber & Heinen, 2010 ), and work by Hoggart ( 1957 ) and Williams ( 1977 ) on post-war cultural British studies amongst others.

Theoretical Orientations

Various theoretical paradigms and traditions of scholarship have influenced definitions of critical literacy and its circulation, as well as its practice. These include feminist poststructuralist theories (Davies, 1993 ; Gilbert, 1992 ) post colonialist traditions (Meacham, 2003 ), critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 1999 , 2003 ), critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995 ; Janks, 2010 ), cultural studies (Pahl & Rowsell, 2011 ), critical media literacy (Share, 2009 , 2010 ), queer theory (Vicars, 2013 ), place conscious pedagogy (Comber, 2016 ), and critical sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007 ; Blommaert, 2013 ; McKinney, 2016 ). Theoretical toolkits, or combinations of such theories have resulted in different orientations to critical literacy. As such it is viewed as a concept, a framework, or perspective for teaching and learning, a way of being in the classroom, and a stance or attitude toward literacy work in schools. These different theoretical orientations help shape different views. Regardless, “the project remains understanding the relationship between texts, meaning-making and power to undertake transformative social action that contributes to the achievement of a more equitable social order” (Janks & Vasquez, 2011 , p. 1). As such, regardless of the view one takes, a common understanding is that critical literacy focuses on unequal power relations—and issues of social justice and equity—in support of diverse learners. Diversity of learners includes taking the languages they bring with them to school seriously and understanding the ways in which multilingual children are treated unjustly when their linguistic repertoires are excluded from classrooms.

There are also those who argue that critical literacies are not just orientations to teaching literacy but a way of being, living, learning, and teaching (Vasquez, 2005 , 2014a , 2015 ; Zacher Pandya & Avila, 2014 ). Vasquez ( 2001 , 2010 , 2014b ) describes critical literacy as a perspective and way of being that should be constructed organically, using the inquiry questions of learners, beginning on the first day of school with the youngest learners. From this perspective it follows that such a perspective or way of being cuts across the curriculum. Similarly Zacher Pandya and Avila ( 2014 ) and Vasquez, Tate, and Harste ( 2013 ) note the need for critical literacy to be defined by individuals, within their own contexts, once they have learned about, and experienced, its central ideas. Comber discusses this in terms of teachers’ dispositions, which include their discursive resources and repertoires of practice (Comber, 2006 ). As such critical literacy can be described as “an evolving repertoire of practices of analysis and interrogation which move between the micro features of texts and the macro conditions of institutions, focusing on how relations of power work through these practices” (Comber, 2013 , p. 589). Janks ( 2010 ), Kamler ( 2001 ), and Luke ( 2013 ) have noted more recently the importance of not only analyzing text but also designing and producing it as well. In this regard, equally important is to understand the position(s) from which we analyze text and also the position(s) from which we design and produce texts.

Critical Literacy in Practice around the Globe

Critical literacy has taken root differently in different places around the world but most notably in South Africa (Granville, 1993 ; Janks, 1993a , 2010 ; Janks et al., 2013 ), Australia and New Zealand (Comber, 2001 , 2016 ; Luke, 2000 ; Morgan, 1997 ; O’Brien, 2001 ), and the United States and Canada (Larson & Marsh, 2015 ; Lewison, Leland, & Harste, 2014 ; Pahl & Rowsell, 2011 ; Vasquez, 2001 , 2010 , 2014b ).

For instance, in South Africa, Hilary Janks ( 1993a , 1993b , 2010 , 2014 ) used critical literacy as a tool in the struggle against apartheid. Her work focused primarily on young adults and adolescents “to increase students’ awareness of the way language was used to oppress the black majority, to win elections, to deny education, to construct others, to position readers, to hide the truth, and to legitimate oppression” ( 2010 , p. 12). To this end, she produced Critical Language Awareness (CLA) materials for use with older children in South African schools (Janks et al., 2013 ). In Australia, critical materials were created, in the form of workbooks, to deconstruct literary texts (Mellor, Patterson, & O’Neill, 1987 , 1991 ). Also in Australia, work deriving from postcolonial theory, was produced by Freemantle Press (Martino, 1997 ; Kenworthy & Kenworthy, 1997 ). Some of these materials informed work done in middle school and high school settings by educators and researchers such as Morgan ( 1992 , 1994 ), Gilbert ( 1989 ), and Davies ( 1993 ).

Critical literacy work with younger children began to take place in the 1990s in Australia, where Barbara Comber’s work has been very influential. In particular, her work with Jenny O’Brien on creating spaces for critical literacy in an elementary school classroom, using newspaper and magazine ads, has been highly cited in the literature (O’Brien, 2001 ). In the United States and Canada, Vivian Vasquez’s work with children between ages three to five opened the field for exploration in settings involving very young children by using their inquiries about the world around them to question issues of social justice and equity, using the everyday as text (i.e., food packaging, media ads, popular culture), as well as children’s literature. Although there are growing accounts of critical literacy work in early years classrooms (Sanchez, 2011 ; Vander Zanden, 2016 ; Vander Zanden & Wohlwend, 2011 ), more examples of practice are needed as demonstrations of possibility in school settings with young children.

Earlier critical literacy work in early childhood and elementary settings focused on critically reading and deconstructing texts as a way to help students question versions of reality in the world around them. For example, in Australia, O’Brien ( 2001 ) explored ways in which Mother’s Day ads worked to position readers of such texts in particular ways. She described this work as “helping her children probe representations of women, and setting them purposeful reading, writing, and talking tasks” (p. 52). At around the same time, researchers such as Ivanič ( 1998 ) and Kamler ( 2001 ) began highlighting critical writing in their work with older children. Janks ( 2010 ) refers to this as an important move that enabled us to think where we might go after critically reading a text. She notes, “because texts are constructed word by word, image by image, they can be deconstructed—unpicked, unmade, the positions produced for the reader laid bare” (Janks, 2010 , p. 18). A space is thus created for us to think about “how texts may be rewritten and how multimodal texts can be redesigned” (Janks, 2010 , p. 19). Such perspectives further informed the work of educators and researchers of critical literacy. Comber and Nixon ( 2014 ), for instance, attended “to the importance of children’s agency through text production and related social action” (p. 81). Examples of this include work done by Vasquez ( 2001 , 2004 , 2010 , 2014b ) in building critical curriculum using her preschool students’ inquiry questions about inequities within their school as a way to disrupt and dismantle such inequity and create new more equitable practices and places in which to engage in such practices. Reading the world as a text that could be deconstructed and reconstructed created a space for Vasquez and her students to disrupt and rewrite problematic school practices. As noted by Janks ( 2010 ), “if repositioning text is tied to an ethic of social justice then redesign can contribute to the kind of identity and social transformation that Freire’s work advocates” (p. 18).

The notion of design and redesign was introduced to the field through the New London Group ( 1996 ) in their paper on multiliteracies. Kress and his colleagues (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006 ; Mavers, 2011 ) extend this work stating the importance of design as “the shaping of available resources into a framework which can act as a blueprint for the production of the object, entity, or event” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006 , p. 50). Janks ( 2003 ) refers to this as “a pedagogy of reconstruction,” while McKinney ( 2016 ) calls this transformative pedagogy. This pedagogy is integral to one of the most notable models to inform critical literacy practice, Janks’ Interdependent Model (Janks, 2010 ).

Critical literacy is also being used in state jurisdictions such as Ontario in Canada and Queensland in Australia, where governments have endorsed its use in school curricula. Its use is also growing in emerging and post colonial contexts (Norton, 2007 ; Lo et al., 2012 ). For instance, in her work in Karachi, Pakistan, Norton ( 2007 ) notes that students made frequent reference to the relationship between literacy, the distribution of resources, and international inequities. In Hong Kong, Lo et al. ( 2012 ) reported on “working with students to understand the social and political framing and consequences of texts” (p. 121). With regards to such work Luke ( 2004 ) has argued for the need to do justice to the lived experiences of physical and material deprivation in diverse communities throughout the globe. As such critical literacy should be adopted and adapted and should continue to emerge across a spectrum of political economies, nation states, and systems from autocratic/theocratic states to postcolonial states not only as an epistemic stance but also as a political and culturally transgressive position that works to create spaces for transformative social actions that can contribute to the achievement of a more equitable social order.

Influential Models

Different orientations to critical literacy have resulted in different models that impact critical pedagogy. Three influential models, in particular will be addressed here: Freebody and Luke’s Four Resources Model, Janks’ Interdependent Model, and Green’s 3D Model of Literacy.

Allan Luke and Peter Freebody have played a central role in making critical literacy accessible across continents. In particular their Four Resources Model (Luke & Freebody, 1999 ) has been widely adapted for use in classrooms from preschool to tertiary education settings. Their model focuses on different literacy practices that readers and writers should learn. These practices are learning to be code-breakers—recognizing, understanding, and using the fundamental features of written text such as the alphabet; learning to be text participants—using their own prior knowledge to interpret and make meaning from and bring meaning to text; understanding how to use different text forms; and becoming critical consumers of those forms—learning to critically analyze text and understand that texts are never neutral. Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel ( 2004 ) challenge Luke and Freebody’s model claiming it does not support literacy practices in a digitized world or for those who are “digitally at home”; those comfortable with and competent in using new technologies. In turn they offer examples of the kind of roles related to literacy practices in a digitized world assumed by authors of digital texts. These roles are as text designer, one who designs and produces multimedia or digital texts; text mediator or broker, one who summarizes or presents aspects of texts for others such as a blogger; text bricoleur, one who constructs or creates text using a range or collection of available things; and text jammer, one who re-presents text it in some way, such as by adding new words or phrases to an image as a way to subvert the original meaning (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004 ).

Larson and Marsh ( 2015 ), however, state that Lankshear and Knobel’s ( 2004 ) model focuses primarily on text production rather than text analysis. In comparison, Hilary Janks ( 2010 , 2014 ) in her model for critical literacy includes both text analysis and text design as integral elements. Janks’ model centers on a set of interdependent elements—namely access, domination/power, diversity, and design/re-design. She argues “different realizations of critical literacy operate with different conceptualizations of the relationship between language and power by foregrounding one or other of these elements” (Janks, 2010 , p. 23). She notes that these complementary and competing positions speak to the complexities of engaging with critical literacies and that they are crucially interdependent.

More recently, Comber reflected, “originally these approaches did not foreground the spatial dimensions of critical literacy”( 2016 , p. 11). Comber argues that insights from theories of space and place and literacy studies can create opportunities for designing and enacting culturally inclusive curriculum to support the needs of diverse learners. As such, in her work, one of the models she draws from is Green’s 3D Model of Literacy. This model is a multidimensional framework which argues that there are always three dimensions of literacy simultaneously at play: the operational, learning how the language works and ways that texts can be structured; the cultural, which involves the uses of literacy and in particular the ways that cultural learning is involved with content learning; and the critical, the ways in which we act and see in the world, along with how literacy can be used to shape lives in ways that better serve the interests of some over others. As such, Green’s model is a useful frame for unpacking links between literacy, place, and culture.

Debate, Controversy, and Critical Literacy

In spite of advances in the field with regards to critical literacy, there is still confusion about the difference between “critical” from the Enlightenment period, which focused on critical thinking and reasoning, and “critical” from Marx as an analysis of power. The debate and controversy around this continues. Definitions for critical literacy are often at the center of such debates, which are likely in response to attempts by some educators and researchers to pin down a specific definition for critical literacy. Theorists and educators including Comber ( 2016 ), Vasquez ( 2010 , 2014b ), and Luke ( 2014 ) maintain that as a framework for engaging in literacy work, it should look, feel, and sound different. As previously discussed, the models used as part of one’s critical literacy toolkit help contribute to the kinds of work one might accomplish from such a perspective. Critical literacy should also be used as a resource for accomplishing different sorts of life work depending on the context in which it is used as a perspective for teaching, learning, and participating with agency in different spaces and places. Vasquez ( 2010 , 2014b ) has referred to this framing as a way of being, where she has argued that critical literacy should not be an add-on but a frame through which to participate in the world in and outside of school. Such a frame does not necessarily involve taking a negative stance; rather, it means looking at an issue or topic in different ways, analyzing it, and being able to suggest possibilities for change and improvement. In this regard critical literacies can be pleasurable and transformational as well as pedagogical and transgressive.

Consequently, there is no such thing as a critical literacy text. Rather there are texts through which we may better be able to create spaces for critical literacies. The world as text, however, can be read from a critical literacy perspective, especially given that what constitutes a text has changed. For instance, a classroom can be read as a text, and water bottles can also be read as text (Janks, 2014 ). What this means is that issues and topics of interest that capture learners’ interests, based on their experiences, or artifacts with which they engage in the material world, as they participate in communities around them, can and should be used as text to build a curriculum that has significance in their lives.

Key Aspects of Critical Literacy

In spite of the fact that critical literacy does not have a set definition or a normative history, the following key aspects have been described in the literature. It should be noted that such key aspects or tenets would likely take different shape depending on one’s orientation to critical literacy.

Critical literacy should not be a topic to be covered or a unit to be studied. Instead it should be looked on as a lens, frame, or perspective for teaching throughout the day, across the curriculum, and perhaps beyond. What this means is that critical literacy involves having a critical perspective or way of being.

While working across the curriculum, in the content areas, diverse students’ cultural knowledge (drawn from inside the classroom and the children’s everyday worlds, homes, and communities), their funds of knowledge (Gonzales, Moll, & Amanti, 2006 ), and multimodal and multilingual practices (Lau, 2012 ) should be used to build curriculum. Because students learn best when what they are learning has importance in their lives, using the topics, issues, and questions that they raise should therefore be an important part of creating the classroom curriculum.

From a critical literacy perspective the world is seen as a socially constructed text that can be read. The earlier students are introduced to this idea, the sooner they are able to understand what it means to be researchers of language, image, spaces, and objects, exploring such issues as what counts as language, whose language counts, and who decides as well as explore ways texts can be revised, rewritten, or reconstructed to shift or reframe the message(s) conveyed. As such, texts are never neutral. What this means is that all texts are created from a particular perspective with the intention of conveying particular messages. As such these texts work to position readers in certain ways. We therefore need to question the perspective of others.

Texts are socially constructed and created or designed from particular perspectives. As such, they work to have us think about and believe certain things in specific ways. Just as texts are never neutral, the ways we read text are also never neutral. Each time we read, write, or create, we draw from our past experiences and understanding about how the world works. We therefore should also analyze our own readings of text and unpack the position(s) from which we engage in literacy work.

Critical literacy involves making sense of the sociopolitical systems through which we live our lives and questioning these systems. This means our work in critical literacy needs to focus on social issues, such as race, class, gender, or disability and the ways in which we use language to shape our understanding of these issues. The discourses we use to take up such issues work to shape how people are able to—or not able to—live their lives in more or less powerful ways as well as determine such ways of being as who is given more or less powerful roles in society.

Critical literacy practices can be transformative and contribute to change inequitable ways of being and problematic social practices. As such, students who engage in critical literacy from a young age are likely going to be better able to contribute to a more equitably and socially just world by being better able to make informed decisions regarding such issues as power and control, practice democratic citizenship, and develop an ability to think and act ethically.

Text design and production are essential to critical literacy work. These practices can provide opportunities for transformation. Text design and production refer to the creation or construction of multimodal texts and the decisions that are part of that process. This includes the notion that it is not sufficient to simply create texts for the sake of “practicing a skill.” If students are to create texts they ought to be able to let those texts do the work intended. For instance, if students are writing surveys or creating petitions, they should be done with real-life intent for the purpose of dealing with a real issue. If students write petitions, they should be able to send them to whomever they were intended.

Finally, critical literacy is about imagining thoughtful ways of thinking about reconstructing and redesigning texts, images, and practices to convey different and more socially just and equitable messages and ways of being that have real-life effects and real-world impact. For instance critically reading a bottle of water as a text to be read could result in examining the practice of drinking bottled water and changing that practice in support of creating a more sustainable world.

New Directions

New directions in the field of critical literacy include finding new ways to engage with multimodalities and new technologies (Comber, 2016 ; Janks & Vasquez, 2010 ; Nixon, 2003 ; Nixon & Comber, 2005 ; Larson & Marsh, 2015 ), engaging with spatiality, time, and space (Dixon, 2004 ), place-based pedagogies (Comber, 2016 ; Comber & Nixon, 2014 ), working across the curriculum in the content areas (Comber & Nixon, 2014 ; Janks, 2014 ; Vasquez, 2017 ), and working with multilingual learners (Lau, 2012 , 2016 ). These new directions for critical literacy, amongst others that may develop, reiterate and remind us of what educators who have been working in the field of critical literacy for some time have maintained (Comber, 2016 ; Janks, 2014 ; Luke, 2014 ; Vasquez, 2014b )—that there is no correct or universal model of critical literacy. Instead “how educators deploy the tools, attitudes, and philosophies is utterly contingent … upon students’ and teachers’ everyday relations of power, their lived problems and struggles” (Luke, 2014 , p. 29) and the ways in which teachers are able to navigate the (P)politics of the places and spaces in which their work unfolds. Janks insists that critical literacy is essential to the ongoing project of education across the curriculum (Janks, 2014 ). She notes,

in a perfect world in which social differences did not determine who gets access to resources and opportunity, we would still need critical literacy to help us read the texts that construct the politics of everyday life. In the actual world—where a 17-year-old boy sells one of his kidneys for an iPad; … where millions of people lack access to drinking water or sanitation—the list is endless—it is even more important that education enables young people to read both the word and the world critically. (Janks, 2010 , p. 349)

as one way to engage learners in powerful and pleasurable literacies that could contribute to creating a more critically informed and just world.

Further Reading

• Comber, B. (2013). Critical literacy in the early years: Emergence and sustenance in an age of accountability. In J. Larson & J. Marsh (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy (pp. 587–601). London: SAGE.
• Comber, B. (2016). Literacy, place, and pedagogies of possibility . New York: Routledge.
• Dixon, K. (2010). Literacy, power, and the schooled body: Learning in time and space . New York: Routledge.
• Janks, H. (2010). Literacy and power . New York: Routledge.
• Share, J. (2009). Young children and critical media literacy. In D. Kellner & R. Hammer (Eds.), Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches (pp. 126–151). New York: Peter Lang Publishers.
• Kamler, B. (2001). Relocating the personal: A critical writing pedagogy . New York: State University of New York Press.
• Lewison, M. , Leland, C. , & Harste, J. C. (2014). Creating critical classrooms: Reading and writing with an edge (2d ed.). New York: Routledge.
• Luke, Allan (2013). Regrounding critical literacy: Representation, facts and reality. In M. Hawkins (Ed.), Framing languages and literacies: Socially situated views and perspectives (pp. 136–148). Routledge: New York.
• Pahl, K. , & Rowsell, J. (2011). Artifactual critical literacy: A new perspective for literacy education. Berkeley Review of Education , 2 (2), 129–151.
• Vasquez, V. (2014). Negotiating critical literacies with young children: 10th anniversary edition . New York: Routledge-LEA.
• Zacher Pandya, J. , & Ávila, J. (Eds.). (2014). Moving critical literacies forward: A new look at praxis across contexts . New York: Routledge.
• Blommaert, J. (2013). Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes chronicles of complexity . Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters.
• Campano, G. , Ghiso, M. P. , & Sánchez, L. (2013). “Nobody one knows the … amount of a person”: Elementary students critiquing dehumanization through organic critical literacies. Research in the Teaching of English , 48 (1), 97–124.
• Comber, B. (2001). Negotiating critical literacies . School Talk , 6 (3), 1–3.
• Comber, B. (2006). Pedagogy as work: Educating the next generation of literacy teachers. Pedagogies , 1 (1), 59–67.
• Comber, B. , & Nixon, H. (2014). Critical literacy across the curriculum: learning to read, question, and rewrite designs. In J. Zacher Pandya & J. Avila (Eds.), Moving critical literacies forward: A new look at praxis across contexts (pp. 83–97). New York: Routledge.
• Davies, B. (1993). Shards of glass: Children reading and writing beyond gendered identity . Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin.
• Dixon, K. (2004). Literacy: Diverse spaces, diverse bodies. English in Australia , February (139), 50–55.
• Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis . London: Longman.
• Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed . New York: Herder and Herder.
• Freire, P. , & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world . New York: Routledge.
• Gilbert, P. (1989). Personally (and passively) yours: Girls, literacy and education. Oxford Review of Education , 15 (3), 257–265.
• Gilbert, P. (1992). Gender and literacy: Key issues for the nineties . Paper prepared for the Victorian Ministry of Education.
• Gonzales, N. , Moll, C. , & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2006). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities and classrooms . New York: Routledge.
• Granville, S. (1993). Language, advertising, and power. Critical Language Awareness Series. Johannesburg: Hodder and Stoughton and Wits University Press.
• Hoggart, R. (1957). The uses of literacy . Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.
• Ivanič, R. (1998). Writing and identity . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Janks, H. (1993a). Language, identity, and power. Critical Language Awareness Series . Johannesburg: Hodder and Stoughton and Wits University Press.
• Janks, H. (1993b). Language and position. Critical Language Awareness Series . Johannesburg: Hodder and Stoughton and Wits University Press.
• Janks, H. (2003). Seeding change in South Africa: New literacies, new subjectivities, new futures. In B. Doecke , D. Homer , & H. Nixon (Eds.), English Teachers at Work (pp. 183–205). Kent Town, Australia: Wakefield Press in Association with the Australian Association for the Teaching of English.
• Janks, H. (2014). Critical literacy’s ongoing importance for education. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy , 57 (5), 349–356. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
• Janks, H. , & Vasquez, V. (Eds.). (2011). Critical literacy revisited. A special issue of Teaching Practice and Critique . New Zealand: Waikato U. Press.
• Janks, H. , et al. (2013). Doing critical literacy: Texts and activities for students and teachers . New York: Routledge.
• Kenworthy, C. , & Kenworthy, S. (1997). First Australians, new Australians: Part II changing places . Freemantle, Australia: Freemantle Arts Council Press.
• Kress, G. , & Van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design . London: Routledge.
• Ladson-Billings, G. (1999). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? In L. Parker , D. Deyhle , & S. Villenas (Eds.), Race is … race isn’t: Critical race theory and qualitative studies in education (pp. 7–30). New York: Westview Press.
• Ladson-Billings, G. (2003). Foreword. In S. Greene & D. Abt-Perkins (Eds.), Making race visible: Literacy research for cultural understanding (pp. vii–xi). New York: Teachers College Press.
• Lankshear, C. , & Knobel, M. (2004). Planning pedagogy for i-mode: From flogging to blogging via wi-fi. Published jointly in English in Australia , 139(February)/ Literacy Learning in the Middle Years , 12 (1), 78–102.
• Larson, J. , & Marsh, J. (2015 [2005]). Making literacy real: Theories and practices for learning and teaching . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
• Lau, S. M. C. (2012). Reconceptualizing critical literacy teaching in ESL classrooms. The Reading Teacher , 65 (5), 325–329.
• Lau, S. M. C. (2016). Language, identity, and emotionality: Exploring the potential of language portraits in preparing teachers for diverse learners. The New Educator , 12 (2), 147–170.
• Lo, M. M. , et al. (2012). Promoting New Literacies in Hong Kong Schools Project Report . Hong Kong: Quality Education Fund.
• Luke, A. (2000). Critical literacy in Australia: A matter of context and standpoint. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43 (5), 448–461.
• Luke, A. (2004). Two takes on the critical. In B. Norton & K. Toohey (Eds.), Critical pedagogies and language learning (pp. 21–29). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Luke, A. (2013). Regrounding critical literacy: Representation, facts and reality. In M. Hawkins (Ed.), Framing languages and literacies: Socially situated views and perspectives . New York: Routledge.
• Luke, A. (2014). Defining critical literacy. In J. Zacher Pandya & J. Avila (Eds.), Moving critical literacies forward: A new look at praxis across contexts (pp. 19–31). New York & London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
• Luke, A. , & Freebody, P. (1999). Further notes in the four resource model. Practically Primary , 4 (2), 5–8.
• Makoni, S. , & Pennycook, A. (Eds.). (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages . Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters.
• Martino, W. (1997). New Australians, old Australians. Part I: From the margins . Freemantle, Australia: Freemantle Arts Council Press.
• Mavers, D. (2011). Image in the multimodal ensemble: children’s drawing. In C. Jewitt (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis (pp. 263–271). London: Routledge.
• McKinney, C. (2016). Language and power in post-colonial schooling: Ideologies in practice . New York: Routledge.
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Critical Pedagogy

Amanda Di Battista

Amanda Di Battista is the project coordinator at the Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems and Director of Programming, Education, and Communications for the UNESCO Chair on Food, Biodiversity, and Sustainability Studies. She co-produces and hosts the research podcast, Handpicked: Stories from the Field and works closely with food systems researchers on effective knowledge mobilization. She has co-edited several publications including Sustainable Food System Assessment: Lessons from Global Practice and Food Studies: Matter, Movement & Meaning .

“Where learning communities can flourish”: Mapping critical pedagogy onto classroom learning

Critical pedagogy is an approach to education that sees teachers and students as whole, unique individuals who live, work, and learn within complex systems of power. These systems—which include capitalism , white supremacy , patriarchy, and heteronormativity , among other systems of oppression—exert themselves in unequal ways with profound social consequences. Critical pedagogy aims to engage students in meaningful and transformative learning so that they can better understand, resist, and change oppressive systems of power. Ideally, critical pedagogy brings educational theory and practice together in praxis, the ongoing and reciprocal relationship between thinking (theory) and doing (practice) (Freire, 2000, p. 65–66).

In this podcast , Amanda talks about her experiences as a university student in two very different courses—one that set the stage for transformative learning, and the other, not so much. She looks at how these postsecondary educators’ different approaches to student engagement, the space of the classroom, and the delivery of course content help to illustrate the impacts of critical pedagogy on learning. Paying particular attention to the work of bell hooks’ (1994), including her ideas of engaged pedagogy , self-actualization, mutual responsibility, and the creation of learning communities, Amanda describes how both classroom experiences became turning points in her educational career.

Listen to the podcast:

Podcast Transcription

[Sound of finger tapping on microphone]

Is this thing on? Hello, hello…

[Soft intro music fades in]

My name is Amanda Di Battista, and this is “Where Learning Communities can Flourish,” a podcast that maps critical pedagogy onto classroom learning.

[intro music fades out]

I went into university sure that I was going to be a scientist. I started first year as a biology major and though most of my classes were challenging, the excitement of the professors was contagious. Organic Chemistry though was different. The class was Friday morning at 10am in a modern building full of bright light. In our classroom, there were two hundred of those plastic chairs with, you know, those tiny desks attached to the arms, all facing a projector screen that stood at the front of the room.

My memory of the professor is super vague—he wore beige slacks and rumpled dress shirts, but I can’t recall his face. Each class he walked briskly [sound of walking] up the aisle without making eye contact with anyone [sound of bag thumping down onto a desk], power up the computer and projector [sound of computer mouse clicking and computer powering on], and bring up his PowerPoint slides. Then, when he was ready [computer beeping], he’d look up from his notes, scan the room absentmindedly, and launch right into his presentation. He used a red laser pointer to call attention to the most important bits on the screen.

Leaning low into my desk, I would write frantically, trying to copy down all of the information on the dozens of slides whizzing past [sound of notebook pages turning], catching almost none of the teacher’s words as I wrote [sound of frantic writing with pen on paper]. My notes were a mess—a blur of blue, punctuated by angry red circles [sound of pen being dropped on table]. As the sun shifted in the sky outside the windows behind me, the slides became harder to read and the smallest text faded into the white of the screen.

[clock ticking, fade in musical break]

I think that we’ve all probably had a similar classroom experience. Critical pedagogue Paolo Freire describes this as the banking model of education—where the teacher is the ultimate authority on knowledge and dispenses that knowledge to in the minds of their students for withdrawl sometime in the future. My chemistry professor dispenses that knowledge into the form of a complicated slide every 90 seconds. It was torture.

bell hooks, a student of Freire, critiques the banking model of education too. Instead, she call for engaged pedagogy—an approach to education that values and teachers and students as whole people, who are mutually responsible for coming together as a community of learners.

My organic chemistry professor created a classroom space where no such community could flourish. He didn’t see students as whole people with potentially valuable perspectives on the course material. In his class, the teacher was the only person worth listening to.

[musical break]

A few years ago, I took an intensive graduate level writing course. The professor, Cate, was a brilliant scholar—I’d been in her class before and found it exceptionally challenging, but also fascinating and exciting. There were three parts to the course—intensive theory, discussion groups, and field writing. The reading list was long and difficult, and I rarely got through it all. But when Cate delivered her lectures, she teased out the important threads with expert precision, moving her hands to the rhythm of her words to give life to theoretical concepts. The class was small, and we built an easy rapport with each other centred on a shared sense of possibility and respect. While I struggled to find my voice—um, I’ve always been a little bit shy about speaking up in a group, and unsure that what I had to say was worthwhile— my ideas were always valued.

We spent two days each week in the classroom and one day writing in the field [sound of birds in field]. When I was writing, my senses came to life. Closing my eyes to pay attention to the sounds around me opened up an entirely new world. I could hear the rhythm of the wind in the trees [sound of wind rustling leaves and birds chirping], I could smell the heat on the pavement [sound of passing car on road], I could feel the water evaporating off the grass beneath me [sound of soft water drops].

This shift in my awareness extended beyond the class—sitting on the streetcar [sound of streetcar driving on tracks and dinging bell], I’d become hyperaware of the scratchy seat fabric on the backs of my bare legs [sound of scratching]; I’d get caught up in imagining the life history of the person sitting next to me [ambient streetcar noises and chatter]. Sometimes I’d feel overwhelmed by it all. Sometimes I was dazzled.

I think bell hooks’ would describe Cate as engaged pedagogue: she came to the classroom full of passion and brought her personal experiences to bear on theoretical concepts. She was eager to learn from her students, empathetic, and fully aware of her position of power as the professor. Instead of using her authority to bolster her own ego, she used it to bolster our voices and encourage our learning. bell hooks would call this kind of teacher a self-actualized educator—aware of her positionality and politics, full of care for her students, and engaged in the ongoing process of enlightenment herself.

This was also a master class in how to create the conditions for a learning community to flourish. A sense of mutual responsibility is crucial for learning communities, and bell hooks says that the best way to teach mutual responsibility is to model it. Cate modelled deep respect for the personal knowledge of her students so that we learned by example how to engage in dialogue with each other. We were expected to bring our best selves to each class, to actively participate, and to take responsibility for the creation of our learning community. Because we knew that our voices were valued, we brought our personal experience into the classroom and connected it directly to the course material. We begin to critique—as bell hooks does—the split between mind and body, between theory and practice, between personal and political that characterizes so much of postsecondary education.

[fade in soft music with clock ticking in background]

bell hooks says that, “to teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.”

In the end, I finished my first-year organic chemistry class with a fine grade, but I can’t tell you what I learned. The things I learned in Cate’s writing course though—especially the embodied practice of writing as a way of knowing—that will stick with me forever.

[music fades out]

Discussion Questions

• What is the banking concept of education ? Have you experienced a classroom that used the banking concept of education? What did that classroom look like? How did it feel to be a student in that classroom?
• In the podcast, how did the two educators’ different teaching approaches encourage or discourage the formation of learning communities ? How did the presence or absence of a learning community have an impact on the speaker’s experience?
• Why is mutual responsibility such a key component in bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy? How are the requirements of mutual responsibility different for educators and students? How are they similar?
• Do you think that classroom education has a role to play in uncovering and changing structures of oppression? Explain.

In five minutes, describe a time where you were fully engaged in classroom learning. Think about the classroom space, the teacher, how you interacted with your peers, what you learned, how you felt during the class, and how you feel about the experience now. Include any details and personal reflections that you think are relevant.

In five minutes, describe a negative classroom experience or a time when you felt disengaged from learning. Think about the classroom space, the teacher, how you interacted with your peers, the content you were learning, how you felt during the class and how you feel about the experience now. Include any details and personal reflections you think are relevant.

With a partner, compare your classroom experiences. Are there similarities? What are the differences? What made your positive experiences so positive? What made your negative experiences so negative? How did your experiences shape the way you think about the classroom?

On a piece of chart paper or a shared document, brainstorm/map the components of a “transformative learning community.” Build on your own classroom experiences and the information presented in the podcast. Be prepared to share with the class.

Additional Resources

Crenshaw, K. (Host). (2018–present). Intersectionality Matters! [Audio podcast]. Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/intersectionality-matters/id1441348908

Pippin, T., & Hulsether, L. (Hosts). (2017–present). Nothing Never Happens: A Radical Pedagogy Podcast . [Audio podcast]. https://nothingneverhappens.org/

The New School. (2014, October 8). Teaching to Transgress Today: Theory and Practice In and Outside the Classroom. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_9OgVs19UE&list=PL70gEjyI5-60vNARBaoIb_R1Ylwm1qjG-

The New School. (2016, September 7). bell hooks + Jill Soloway – Ending Domination: The Personal is Political | The New School. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw6Fd87PhjU

University of Washington. (2020, March 23). A Conversation with bell hooks . [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqSVcnanjM8

hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom . Routledge.

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). Continuum.

Showing Theory to Know Theory Copyright © 2022 by Amanda Di Battista is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.22215/stkt/da67

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Critical Theory in Education: Analyzing the Intersection of Power and Knowledge

Critical Theory in Education, Education is a powerful tool that shapes the future of society. Through education, individuals acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate the world and participate in social, cultural, and economic life. However, education is not a neutral endeavor. It is deeply rooted in power dynamics, and these dynamics are often shaped by broader social, cultural, and political structures. Critical theory provides a lens through which to analyze the intersection of power and knowledge in education. In this article, we will explore the concept of critical theory in education and its applications.

Table of Contents

• 1 What is Critical Theory?
• 2 Critical Theory in Education
• 3 Applications of Critical Theory in Education
• 4 Importance of Critical Theory in Education
• 5 Advantages and Disadvantages of Critical Theory in Education
• 6 Types of Critical Theory
• 7 Critical Theory in Education Examples
• 8 Critical Theory in Education Essay
• 9 Critical Theory in Education PDF
• 10 Critical Theory in Education PPT
• 11 Critical Theory in Education Slideshare

What is Critical Theory?

Critical theory is a philosophical approach that seeks to challenge existing social, cultural, and political structures. It emerged in the mid-20th century in response to the rise of totalitarianism and fascism in Europe . The founders of critical theory were a group of scholars associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers, sociologists, and cultural critics based at the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany.

Critical theory is based on the idea that power relations are embedded in all aspects of society, including culture, politics, and economics. These power relations are not natural or inevitable, but rather the result of historical and social processes. Critical theory aims to uncover the underlying power dynamics that shape social relations and to expose the ways in which dominant groups maintain their power and privilege.

Critical Theory in Education

Critical theory has been applied to many fields, including education. In education, critical theory provides a framework for analyzing the relationship between power and knowledge. It examines the ways in which education systems reproduce existing power structures and how these structures are reinforced through curricula, teaching methods, and assessment.

Critical theory in education seeks to challenge the dominant culture of education and to promote a more equitable and inclusive education system. It does this by examining the power dynamics that shape education and by exploring alternative approaches that prioritize social justice and equity.

Applications of Critical Theory in Education

There are many applications of critical theory in education. One example is the critical pedagogy movement, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Critical pedagogy emphasizes the role of education in promoting social justice and equity. It encourages teachers to challenge traditional teaching methods and to create a more democratic and participatory learning environment.

Another example of the application of critical theory in education is the concept of cultural capital. Cultural capital refers to the cultural knowledge and resources that are valued in society. Critical theorists argue that education systems often prioritize the cultural capital of dominant groups, such as white, middle-class, and male students. This can create a bias in education that disadvantages students from marginalized groups. Critical theory in education seeks to address this bias by promoting the inclusion of diverse cultural perspectives and knowledge systems in education.

A third example of the application of critical theory in education is the concept of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a political and economic ideology that emphasizes free-market capitalism and individualism. Critical theorists argue that neoliberalism has had a profound impact on education, leading to the privatization and commercialization of education and the erosion of public education systems. Critical theory in education seeks to challenge the neoliberalization of education and to promote the importance of public education in a democratic society.

One of the main criticisms of critical theory in education is that it can lead to a focus on the negative aspects of society, and can create a sense of hopelessness among students. Some argue that this approach does not adequately address the complexity of societal problems, and may even hinder progress towards positive change. Additionally, some critics argue that critical theory can be overly ideological, and may prioritize political agendas over the actual needs and experiences of students. Despite these criticisms, critical theory in education remains a valuable tool for educators and scholars to challenge power structures and work towards creating more equitable and just educational systems.

Importance of Critical Theory in Education

Critical theory in education is important because it provides a framework for understanding the ways in which power structures and social hierarchies impact educational systems and outcomes. By critically examining these structures and challenging dominant narratives, educators and scholars can work towards creating more equitable and just educational systems. Additionally, critical theory in education can help to promote critical thinking and reflexivity among students, encouraging them to question existing power structures and to engage with societal issues in a more informed and nuanced way.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Critical Theory in Education

Like any theoretical approach, critical theory in education has both advantages and disadvantages. Some advantages include its ability to challenge power structures and promote social justice, its emphasis on critical thinking and reflexivity, and its potential to create more equitable educational systems. However, some disadvantages include the potential for ideological bias and the focus on negative aspects of society, which can create a sense of hopelessness among students. Additionally, some critics argue that critical theory in education does not adequately address the complexity of societal problems.

Types of Critical Theory

There are several types of critical theory, each with its own focus and approach. Some of the most commonly cited types of critical theory include critical race theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and queer theory. Each of these theories seeks to understand how power structures and social hierarchies impact different groups of people, and to challenge dominant narratives and structures in order to promote social justice and equity in society. By understanding the different types of critical theory, educators and scholars can better apply these.

Critical Theory in Education Examples

Examples of critical theory in education can be found in a variety of settings and practices. One example is the use of critical pedagogy in the classroom, which encourages students to critically examine power structures and societal norms in order to promote social justice. Another example is the application of critical race theory in education, which seeks to understand the ways in which race and racism impact educational systems and outcomes. By examining these and other examples, educators and scholars can better understand how critical theory can be applied in practice.

Critical Theory in Education Essay

Essays are a common medium for discussing critical theory in education, allowing for a more detailed and in-depth exploration of theoretical concepts. By writing essays on critical theory, students and scholars can engage with the ideas in a more nuanced way, and can provide detailed analysis and critique of existing educational practices. Essays can also facilitate dialogue and collaboration among educators and scholars, and can help to promote critical thinking and reflexivity in educational practices.

Critical Theory in Education PDF

The availability of critical theory in education in a PDF format is a valuable resource for educators and students. PDFs allow for easy access and distribution of theoretical ideas, making it easier for individuals to engage with critical theory and apply it in their educational practices. Additionally, the ability to download and share PDFs enables a wider dissemination of critical theory and can promote collaboration and dialogue among educators.

Critical Theory in Education PPT

PowerPoint presentations can be a useful tool for presenting critical theory in education. By using visuals and concise language, PowerPoint presentations can effectively convey complex theoretical ideas to students and educators. Additionally, PPTs can be easily shared and modified, making them a flexible and accessible resource for educators seeking to incorporate critical theory into their teaching practices.

Critical Theory in Education Slideshare

Slideshare is an online platform that allows users to share PowerPoint presentations and other media. Critical theory in education slideshares can be a useful tool for educators and students to access and share theoretical ideas, and to engage with critical theory in a visual and accessible way. Slideshare presentations can also promote collaboration and dialogue among educators, and can provide a platform for educators to share their own experiences and insights.

Critical theory provides a powerful framework for analyzing the intersection of power and knowledge in education. By examining the power dynamics that shape education , critical theory in education promotes a more equitable and inclusive education system. It challenges the dominant culture of education and promotes alternative approaches that prioritize social justice and equity. Critical theory in education is a valuable tool for educators, researchers, and policymakers who are committed to creating a more just and democratic society.

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The State of Critical Race Theory in Education

• Posted February 23, 2022
• By Jill Anderson
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Moral, Civic, and Ethical Education

When Gloria Ladson-Billings set out in the 1990s to adapt critical race theory from law to education, she couldn’t have predicted that it would become the focus of heated school debates today.

Over the past couple years, the scrutiny of critical race theory — a theory she pioneered to help explain racial inequities in education — has become heavily politicized in school communities and by legislators. Along the way, it has also been grossly misunderstood and used as a lump term about many things that are not actually critical race theory, Ladson-Billings says. 

“It's like if I hate it, it must be critical race theory,” Ladson-Billings says. “You know, that could be anything from any discussions about diversity or equity. And now it's spread into LGBTQA things. Talk about gender, then that's critical race theory. Social-emotional learning has now gotten lumped into it. And so it is fascinating to me how the term has been literally sucked of all of its meaning and has now become 'anything I don't like.'”

In this week’s Harvard EdCast, Ladson-Billings discusses how she pioneered critical race theory, the current politicization and tension around teaching about race in the classroom, and offers a path forward for educators eager to engage in work that deals with the truth about America’s history. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Jill Anderson:   I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

Gloria Ladson-Billings never imagined a day when the words critical race theory would make the daily news, be argued over at school board meetings, or targeted by legislators. She pioneered an adaptation of critical race theory from law to education back in the 1990s. She's an educational researcher focused on theory and pedagogy who at the time was looking for a better way to explain racial disparities in education.

Today the theory is widely misunderstood and being used as an umbrella term for anything tied to race and education. I wondered what Gloria sees as a path forward from here. First, I wanted to know what she was thinking in this moment of increased tension and politicization around critical race theory and education.

Well, if I go back and look at the strategy that's been employed to attack critical race theory, it actually is pretty brilliant from a strategic point of view. The first time that I think that general public really hears this is in September of '20 when then president and candidate Donald Trump, who incidentally is behind in the polls, says that we're not going to have it because it's going to destroy democracy. It's going to tear the country apart. I'm not going to fund any training that even mentions critical race theory.

And what's interesting, he says, "And anti-racism." Now he's now paired two things together that were not really paired together in the literature and in practice. But if you dig a little deeper, you will find on the Twitter feed of Christopher Rufo, who is from the Manhattan Institute, two really I think powerful tweets. One in which he says, "We're going to render this brand toxic." Essentially what we're going to do is make you think, whenever you hear anything negative, you will think critical race theory. And it will destroy all of the, quote, cultural insanities. I think that's his term that Americans despise. There's a lot to be unpacked there, which Americans? Who is he talking about? What are these cultural insanities? And then there's another tweet in which he says, "We have effectively frozen the brand." So anytime you think of anything crazy, you think critical race theory. So he's done this very effective job of rendering the term, in some ways without meaning. It's like if I hate it, it must be critical race theory.

You know, that could be anything from any discussions about diversity or equity. And now it's spread into LGBTQA things. Talk about gender, then that's critical race theory. Social emotional learning has now got lumped into it. And so it is fascinating to me how the term has been literally sucked of all of its meaning and has now become anything I don't like.

Jill Anderson:  Can you break it down? What is critical race theory? What isn't it?

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Let me be pretty elemental here. Critical race theory is a theoretical tool that began in legal studies, in law schools, in an attempt to explain racial inequity. It serves the same function in education. How do you explain the inequity of achievement, the racial inequity of achievement in our schools?

Now let's be clear. The nation has always had an explanation for inequity. Since 1619, it's always had a explanation. And indeed from 1619 to the mid 20th century, that explanation was biogenetic. Those people are just not smart enough. Those people are just not worthy enough. Those people are not moral enough.

In fact across the country, we had on college and university campuses, programs and departments in eugenics. If you went to the World's Fair or the World Expositions back in the turn of the 20th century, you could see exhibits with, quote, groups of people from the best group who was always white and typically blonde and blue eyed, to the worst group, which is typically a group of Africans, generally pygmies. So the idea is you can rank people. So we've always had an explanation for why we thought inequity exists.

Somewhere around the mid 20th century, 1950s, you'll get a switch that says, well, no, it's really not genetic it's that some groups haven't had an equal opportunity. That was a powerful explanation. So one of the things that you begin to see around mid 1950s is legislation and court decisions, Brown versus Board of Education. You start to see the Voters Rights Act. You see the Civil Rights Act. You see affirmative action going into the 1960s. And yeah, I think that's a pretty good, powerful explanatory model.

Except they all get rolled back. 1954, Brown v. Board of Education . How many of our kids are still in segregated schools in 2022? So that didn't hold. Affirmative action. The court's about to hear that, right? Because of actually the case that's coming out of Harvard. Voters rights. How many of our states have rolled back voters rights? You can't give a person a bottle of water who was waiting in line in Georgia. We're shrinking the window for when people can vote.

So all of the things that were a part of the equality of opportunity explanation have rolled away. Critical race theory's explanation for racial inequality is that it is baked into the way we have organized the society. It is not aberrant. It's not one of those things that we all clutch our pearls and say, "Oh my God, I can't believe that happened." It happens on a regular basis all the time. And so that's really one of the tenets that people are uncomfortable hearing. That it's not abnormal behavior in our society for people to react in racist ways.

Jill Anderson: My understanding is that critical race theory is not something that is taught in schools. This is an older, like graduate school level, understanding and learning in education, not something for K–12 kids, not something my kid's going to learn in elementary school.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: You're exactly right. It is not. First of all, kids in K12 don't need theory. They need some very practical hands-on experiences. So no, it's not taught in K12 schools. I never even taught it as a professor at the University of Wisconsin. I didn't even teach it to my undergraduates. They had no use for it. My undergraduates were going to be teachers. So what would they do with it? I only taught it in graduate courses. And I have students who will tell you, "I talked with Professor Ladson-billings about using critical race theory for my research," and she looked at what I was doing and said, "It doesn't apply. Don't use it."

So I haven't been this sort of proselytizer. I've said to students, if what you're looking at needs an explanation for the inequality, you have a lot of theories that you can choose from. You can choose from feminist theory. That often looks at inequality across gender. You could look at Marx's theory. That looks at inequality across class. There are lots of theories to explain inequality. Critical race theory is trying to explain it across race and its intersections.

Jill Anderson:  We're seeing this lump definition falling under critical race theory, where it could be anything. It could be anti-racism, diversity and equity, multicultural education, anti-racism, cultural [inaudible 00:09:15]. All of it's being lumped together. It's not all the same thing.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Well, and in some ways it's proving the point of the critical race theorists, right? That it's kind normal. It's going to keep coming up because that's the way you see the world. I mean, here's an interesting lumping together that I think people have just bought whole cloth. That somehow Nikole Hannah-Jones' 1619 is critical race theory. No, it's not.

No. It. Is. Not. It is a journalist's attempt to pull together strands of a date that we tend to gloss over and say, here are all the things were happening and how the things that happened at this time influenced who we became. It's really interesting that people have jumped on that. And there is another book that came out, and it also came out of a newspaper special from the Hartford Courant years ago called Complicity. That book is set in New England and it talks about how the North essentially kept slavery going.

And when it was published by the Hartford Courant, Connecticut, and particularly Hartford said, we want a copy of this in every one of our middle and high schools to look out at what our role has been. Because the way we typically tell you our history is to say, the noble and good North and then the backward and racist South. Well, no, the entire country was engaged in the slave trade. And it benefited folks across the nation.

That particular special issue, which got turned into a book hasn't raised an eyebrow. But here comes Nikole Hannah-Jones. And initially, of course, she won a Pulitzer for it and people were celebrating her. But it's gotten lumped into this discussion that essentially says you cannot have a conversation about race.

What I find the most egregious about this situation is we are taking books out of classrooms, which is very anti-democratic. It is not, quote, the American way. And so you're saying that kids can't read the story of Ruby Bridges. It's okay for Ruby Bridges at six years old to have to have been escorted by federal marshals and have racial epithets spewed at her. It's just not okay for a six year old today to know that happened to her. I mean, one of the rationales for not talking about race, I don't even say critical race theory, but not talking about race in the classroom is we don't want white children to feel bad.

My response is, well great, but what were you guys in the 1950s and sixties when I was in school. Because I had to sit there in a mostly white classroom in Philadelphia and read Huckleberry Finn , with Mark Twain with a very liberal use of the n-word. And most of my classmates just snickering. I'd take it. I'd read it. It didn't make me feel good. I had to read Robinson Crusoe . I had to read Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind . I had to read Heart Of Darkness .

All of these books which we have canonized, are books of their time. And they often make us feel a particular kind way about who we are in this society. But all of a sudden one group is protected. We can't let white children feel bad about what they read.

Jill Anderson: I was reading your most recent book, Critical Race Theory in Education, a Scholars Journey , and I was struck by when you started to do this work and this research, and adapt it from law back in the early 1990s. You talked about presenting this for the first time, or one of the first times. And there was obviously a group excited by it, a group annoyed by it. I look at what's happening now and I see parents and educators. Some are excited by a movement to teach children more openly and honestly about race. And then there's going to be those who are annoyed by it. You've been navigating these two sides your whole life, your whole career. So what do you tell educators who are eager, and open, and want to do this work, but they're afraid of the opposition?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  Well, I think there's a difference between essentially forcing one's ideas and agenda on students, and having kids develop the criticality that they will need to participate in democracy. And whenever we have pitched battles, we've been talking about race, but we've had the same kind of conversation around the environment, right? That you cannot be in coal country telling people that coal is bad, because people are making their living off of that coal. So we've been down this road before.

What I suggest to teachers is, number one, they have to have good relationships with the parents and community that they are serving, and they need to be transparent. I've taught US History for eighth graders and 11th graders before going into academe, and we've had to deal with hard questions. But there's a degree to which the community has always trusted that I had their students' best interests at heart, that I want them to be successful, that I want them to be able to make good decisions as citizens.

That's the bigger mission, I think, of education. That we are not just preparing people to go into the workplace. We are preparing people to go into voting booths, and to participate in healthy debate. The problem I'm having with critical race theory is I'm having a debate with people who don't know what we're debating. You know, I told one interview, I said, "It's like debating a toddler over bedtime. That's not a good debate." You can't win that debate. The toddler doesn't understand the concept. It's just that I don't want to do it.

I will say following the news coverage that I don't believe that all of these people out there are parents. I believe that there is a large number of operatives whose job it is to gin up sentiment against any forward movement and progress around racial equality, and equity, and diversity.

You know, to me, what should be incensing people was what they saw in Charlottesville, with those people, with those Tiki torches. What should be incensing people is what they saw January 6th. People lost their lives in both of those incidents. Nobody's lost their lives in a critical race theory discussion. You know?

I'm someone who believes that debate is healthy. And in fact debate is the only thing that you can have in a true democracy. The minute you start shutting off debate, the minute you say that's not even discussable, then you're moving towards totalitarianism. You know? That's what happened in the former Soviet Union and probably now in Russia. That's what has happened in regimes that say, no other idea is permitted, is discussable. And that's not a road that I think we should be walking here.

Jill Anderson: I feel like we're getting lost in the terminology, which we've talked about. And for school leaders, I wonder if the conversation needs to start with local districts in their communities debunking, or demystifying, or telling the truth about what critical race theory is, that kids aren't learning it in the schools. That that's not what it's about. Does it not even matter at this point because people are always going to be resistant to the things that you just even mentioned?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  I'm a bit of a sports junkie, so I'll use a sports metaphor here. I'm just someone who would rather play offense than defense. I think if you get into this debate, you are on the defensive from the start. For me, I want to be on the offense. I want to say, as a school district, here are our core values. Here's what we stand for. Many, many years ago when I began my academic career, I started it at Santa Clara University, which is a private Catholic Jesuit university. And students would sometimes bristle at the discussions we would have about race and ethnicity, and diversity and equality.

And I'd always pull out the university's mission statement. And I'd say, "You see these words right here around social justice? That's where I am with this work. I don't know what they're doing at the business school on social justice, but I can tell you that the university has essentially made a commitment it to this particular issue. Now we can debate whether or not you agree with me, but I haven't pulled this out of thin air."

So if I'm a school superintendent, I want to say, "Here are core values that we have." I'm reminded of many years ago. I was supervising a student teacher. It was a second grade. And she had a little boy in a classroom and they were doing something for Martin Luther King. It might have been just coloring in a picture of him with some iconic statement. And this one little boy put a big X on it. And she said, "Why did you do that?" And his response was, "We don't believe in Martin Luther King in my house." So she said, "Wow, okay, well, why not?" And he really couldn't articulate. She says, "Well, tell me, who's your friend in this classroom?" And one of the first names out of his mouth was a little Black boy.

And she said, "Do you know that he's a lot like Martin Luther King? You know, he's a little boy. He's Black." She was worried about where this was headed and didn't know what to do as a student teacher, because she's not officially licensed to teach at this point. And I shared with her our strategy. I said, "Why don't you talk with your cooperating teacher about what happens and see what she says. If she doesn't seem to want to do anything, casually mention, don't go marching to the principal's office. But when you have a chance to interact with the principal, you might say something I had the strangest encounter the other day and then share it." Well, she did that.

The principal called the parents in and said, "Your child is not in trouble, but here's what you need to know about who we are and what we stand for."

Jill Anderson:  Wow.

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  You know? And so again, it wasn't like let's have a big school board meeting. Let's string up somebody for saying something. It wasn't tearing this child down. But it was reiterating, here are our core values. I think schools can stand on this. They can say, "This is what we stand for. This is who we are." They don't ever have to mention the word critical race theory.

The retrenchment we are seeing in some states, I think it was a textbook that they were going to use in Texas that essentially described enslaved people as workers. That's just wrong. That's absolutely wrong. And I can tell you that if we don't teach our children the truth, what happens when they show up in classes at the college level and they are exposed to the truth, they are incensed. They are angry and they cannot understand, why are we telling these lies?

We don't have to make up lies about the American story. It is a story of both triumph and defeat. It is a story of both valor and, some cases, shame. Slavery actually happened. We trafficked with human beings, and there's a consequence to that. But it doesn't mean we didn't get past it. It doesn't mean we didn't fight a war over it, and decide that's not who we want to be.

Jill Anderson:  What's the path forward? What can we do to make sure that students are supported and learning about their own history so that they are prepared to go out into a diverse global society?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  I'm perhaps an unrepentant optimist, because I think that these young people are not fooled by this. You know, when they started, quote, passing bans and saying, "We can't have this and we won't have this," I said, "Nobody who's doing this understands anything about child and adolescent development." Because how do you get kids to do something? You tell them they can't do.

So I have had more outreach from young people asking me, tell me about this. What is this? These young people are burning up Google looking for what is this they're trying to keep from us? So I have a lot of faith in our youth that they are not going to allow us to censor that. Everything you tell them, they can't read, those are the books they go look for. You know, I have not seen a spate in reading like this in a very long time.

So I think it's interesting that people don't even understand something as basic as child development and adolescent development. But I do think that the engagement of young people, which we literally saw in the midst of the pandemic and the post George Floyd, the incredible access to information that young people have will save us. You know, it's almost like people feel like this is their last bastion and they're not going to let people take whatever privilege they see themselves having away from them. It's not sustainable. Young people will not stand for it.

Jill Anderson:  Well, I love that. And it's such a great note to end on because it feels good to think that there is a path forward, because right now things are looking very scary. Thank you so much.

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  Well, you're quite welcome. And I will tell you, again sports metaphor, I'm an, again, unrepentant 76ers fan. I realize you're in Massachusetts with those Celtics. But trust me, the 76ers. Okay? One of my favorite former 76ers is Allen Iverson and he has a wonderful line, I believe when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He said, "My haters have made me great."

Well, I will tell you that I had conceived of that book on critical race theory well before Donald Trump made his statement in September of 2020. And I thought, "Okay, here's another book which will sell a modest number of copies to academics." The book is flying off the shelves. Y'all keep talking about it. You're just making me great.

Jill Anderson:  Maybe it will start the revolution that we need.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Well, thank you so much.

Jill Anderson:  Thank you. Gloria Ladson-billings is a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of many books, including the recent Critical Race Theory in Education, a Scholar's Journey . I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.

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Critical Theory as Metatheory of Education

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How These Teachers Build Curriculum ‘Beyond Black History’

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A pilot to infuse Black history and culture in social studies curriculum is gaining ground in the nation’s largest school district, offering a potential model to overcome widespread political debates over how to teach race in public schools.

In a symposium on the project at the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference last week, M.C. Brown II, the executive director at the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, called New York City’s $3.25 million Black studies curriculum “a nationally historic moment.”

The curriculum “acknowledges the history and the contributions of Black Americans predating slavery, which is where much of American social studies begins,” Brown said, “and provides a paradigm for professional learning that can support effective implementation, not just in New York City, but around the world.”

The project comes amid vicious political fights over critical race theory , which holds that race is a social construct, and racism can be embedded in policies and laws (such as enrollment policies that tend to segregate schools), not just personal prejudice. The legal concept is separate from but often conflated with culturally responsive teaching , which holds that students learn more effectively when teachers use their customs, experiences, and identities as tools in the classroom.

The New York curriculum, developed in collaboration between local educators and the Black Education Research Center at Columbia University Teachers College, includes pre-K-12 lessons aligned with the state’s language arts and social studies standards, designed to be used throughout the year. If it proves successful in an ongoing evaluation, the collaborative plans to roll it out to more schools in New York and other states.

Dawn Brooks DeCosta, the deputy superintendent of the 6,500-student Harlem Community School District 5, said its 23 schools piloted units of the curriculum this year across different grades.

Harlem District 5 recruited elementary and secondary teachers with backgrounds and interests in Black studies. They met biweekly with researchers from the Black Education Research Center at neighboring Teachers College, Columbia University to design curricular standards and units, as well as professional development needed for teachers.

“As teachers were contributing and helping to refine and design the lesson, … they didn’t understand what it means to co-design,” said Rodney Hopson, acting education co-dean and professor at American University, who is leading an evaluation of the curriculum. “It wasn’t just like, ‘Here’s a [curriculum] package, run with it,’ ... we were actually trying to collaboratively build this thing together.”

For example, Samantha Chung, a Teachers College doctoral researcher, helped design a unit for 5th grade in which students read and listen to Black poets and discuss the literary form’s use in advocacy.

“Black studies started out with a pedagogical mission, not just content,” said Joyce King, the chair for Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership and an education policy professor at Georgia State University, during the discussion at AERA. “… That includes inspiring people to learn deeply and critically about the African diaspora histories and contemporary social formation, to recognize and affirm our peoplehood—that we are a people across many different cultures.”

In New York, that’s particularly important, according to Linda Tillman, chairman of BERC’s advisory board. Tillman said teachers and researchers worked to incorporate Dominican, Puerto Rican, and other Black students’ cultures into the curriculum “to combat misconceptions about the history of African Americans and Black people throughout the global diaspora.”

For example, in one of the earliest units, kindergarten students explore the meanings and origins of their names, and talk about the importance of pronouncing names correctly. Studies find name mispronunciations are often one of the earliest and most common alienating experiences, particularly for children of color.

Beyond ‘Critical Race Theory’ debates

The curriculum offers a holistic way for teachers to discuss the role of culture and race in American and world history at a time when many educators face restrictions on how they can approach the subject. As of 2023, at least 18 states have passed bans or limits on how teachers can discuss race or gender in class, and the research firm RAND Corp. found half of K-12 teachers nationwide said they face state and/or local restrictions on teaching about race.

Yet in a nationally representative survey this fall, more than 8 in 10 registered voters told the Black Education Research Center that public school students should learn both about the history of racism and slavery in the United States and how it affects students and communities today.

“Students should gain skills in biology and chemistry, physics, business, et cetera, and then use their Black studies knowledge, the curriculum, to gain an understanding of the significance of a role of those subject areas in the development of the Black community,” said Kofi Lomotey, the chancellor and professor of educational leadership at Western Carolina University.

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Narratives about critical race theory and Americans’ beliefs about public schools

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, ariell bertrand , ariell bertrand research assistant - michigan state university @ariellrbertrand melissa arnold lyon , and melissa arnold lyon assistant professor, rockefeller college of public affairs and policy - university at albany @mimiarnoldlyon rebecca jacobsen rebecca jacobsen professor - college of education, michigan state university.

April 18, 2024

• More exposure to anti-CRT narratives is associated with more support for CRT bans among members of all political parties, but especially for Republicans.
• Exposure to anti-CRT narratives is also associated with less trust in teachers and schools.
• CRT bans, paired with new restrictions on how teachers can discuss gender and sexuality, could further undermine trust in public schools.

Just like a good book can make you laugh or cry, a powerful policy narrative can stir the emotions of the public, sometimes sparking controversy along the way. In the summer of 2021, education leaders found themselves on the receiving end of this phenomenon. Across the country, angry parents and community members turned normally mundane school board meetings into chaos after hearing stories of a supposed new threat in schools: critical race theory (CRT).

To education leaders, this was shocking. CRT is a legal and academic theory that scholars have used for nearly 40 years to examine how institutions and legal systems continue to perpetuate racial inequality today. However, conservative activists and politicians had a different story to tell about CRT. Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is viewed as introducing the CRT narrative to the public. Rufo warned that CRT would teach children to “hate each other and hate their country” and that they are “defined by their race, not as individuals.” This produced heated debates about whether CRT should be taught in school—even as the CRT that conservatives described bore little resemblance to the theory used in academic research.

But was that outrage confined to a small-but-vocal group of people, or was the impact more far reaching than that? Could a story—a partisan reframing of a decades-old academic theory—have the power to shape policy opinions, and ultimately, policies?

Anti-CRT narratives and public support for a CRT ban

To examine some of these questions, we identified 11 policy narratives that Republican legislatures and governors used to justify CRT bans during the first wave of bans in 2021. Examples of these narratives are that “CRT indoctrinates children,” “CRT teaches children to be racist,” and “CRT teaches children to feel bad.” We then surveyed 1,500 Michigan adults through the Institute for Public Policy and Social Science Research (IPPSR) State of the State Survey, asking how often they heard these narratives. The survey was completed during September and October 2021, just as the Michigan legislature was debating two bills that would have banned CRT in the classroom.

In our study, we found that these narratives were widespread. On average, respondents reported hearing half of these narratives (with 22% hearing all 11 of them). And hearing these narratives was positively related to support for a CRT ban; the more narratives people heard, the more they expressed support for the legislative ban. Specifically, for every additional narrative that an individual reported hearing, they were six percentage points more likely to support a ban on CRT in schools.

Whether exposure to the narratives caused these differences in attitudes is hard to say. Perhaps people who were predisposed to support an anti-CRT ban (given their strong partisan affiliations) were also more likely be exposed to more anti-CRT narratives (given differences in media consumption habits). Notably, though, we find that all respondent groups’ likelihood of supporting a CRT ban increased with exposure to more anti-CRT narratives.

Figure 1 shows how, across political groups, more exposure to anti-CRT narratives (x-axis) is associated with more support for CRT bans (y-axis). It also shows some differences across parties. If respondents reported hearing none of the CRT narratives, the probability of supporting a CRT ban was not terribly different between strong Democrats (10%) and strong Republicans (24%). However, as respondents reported hearing more narratives, large partisan divides appeared. A strong Democrat who reported hearing all the narratives had a 44% probability of supporting a CRT ban. A strong Republican who heard all the narratives had an 88% probability of supporting a CRT ban.

Anti-CRT narratives and trust in schools

While we might expect a policy narrative to shape opinions of closely related policies, especially on an issue as unfamiliar to the public as CRT, exposure to emotionally charged policy narratives might also shape how we view our schools and teachers more generally. The public has traditionally held high levels of trust in their local schools even while rating the nation’s schools unfavorably. We examined the relationship between exposure to anti-CRT narratives and the public’s perceptions of schools, schooling, and teachers.

For every additional ban-CRT narrative that people reported hearing, they were about two to three percentage points less likely to report trusting their local teachers and schools to discuss race and racism with their students. The relationships weren’t just limited to teaching about race and racism. For example, every additional narrative heard was associated with a four-percentage-point decrease in trust in teachers to supplement their curriculum with additional materials.

As mentioned above, the causal relationships between these factors are unclear. However, our findings are consistent with the possibility that emotionally charged policy narratives could undermine long-held beliefs about schools.

What does this mean for public education?

Although debates about CRT in the classroom may not be as prevalent today as they were in 2021, many school districts are still navigating the fallout from those debates. The proliferation of these narratives has led to at least 18 states and at least 150 school districts adopting CRT bans—bans that limit what schools can teach about race and racism and what resources kids can access about those topics in schools. These new laws have facilitated a wave of efforts to ban books that focus on race and racism while also placing additional stress on teachers at a time when teacher job satisfaction has dipped to historically low levels .

Notably, too, the anti-CRT narratives were quickly followed by narratives attacking how gender and sexuality is discussed in schools. In addition to CRT bans, new regulations at the district and state level are restricting how teachers can discuss gender and sexuality . Together, they have the potential to further undermine trust between the public and local schools. Declining trust poses a serious threat to the education system if, for example, it materializes in less support for public education funding.

However, as much as narratives can undermine long-held beliefs about schools, counternarratives may be able to rebuild and strengthen trust in public schools. Already, we have seen countermobilization at the local level, resisting book bans and flipping back board seats previously held by Moms for Liberty -supported candidates. Public education advocates have an opportunity to instill a reinvigorated sense of pride in U.S. public schools. To do so, advocates would do well to remember the impact that powerful narratives can have in shaping public opinion.

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6 Common Leadership Styles — and How to Decide Which to Use When

• Rebecca Knight

Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances call for different approaches.

Research suggests that the most effective leaders adapt their style to different circumstances — be it a change in setting, a shift in organizational dynamics, or a turn in the business cycle. But what if you feel like you’re not equipped to take on a new and different leadership style — let alone more than one? In this article, the author outlines the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman first introduced in his 2000 HBR article, “Leadership That Gets Results,” and explains when to use each one. The good news is that personality is not destiny. Even if you’re naturally introverted or you tend to be driven by data and analysis rather than emotion, you can still learn how to adapt different leadership styles to organize, motivate, and direct your team.

Much has been written about common leadership styles and how to identify the right style for you, whether it’s transactional or transformational, bureaucratic or laissez-faire. But according to Daniel Goleman, a psychologist best known for his work on emotional intelligence, “Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances may call for different approaches.”

• RK Rebecca Knight is a journalist who writes about all things related to the changing nature of careers and the workplace. Her essays and reported stories have been featured in The Boston Globe, Business Insider, The New York Times, BBC, and The Christian Science Monitor. She was shortlisted as a Reuters Institute Fellow at Oxford University in 2023. Earlier in her career, she spent a decade as an editor and reporter at the Financial Times in New York, London, and Boston.

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